How Everybody Dies in Shakespeare's Tragedies

Throughout his successful career as a playwright, Shakespeare wrote 17 comedies, 10 tragedies, and 10 histories - all that along numerous sonnets of the amount of 154. It goes without saying that tragedies imply killing the main character, or, as it is in case of Shakespeare, multiple characters. And sometimes, it is not the matter of who, but how. Stabbed? Poisoned? Drowned? Strangled? The world of inventive murder is very diverse, so making a proper catalogue is quite a necessary thing - that's exactly what Caitlin S Griffin did. According to her list, Shakespeare usually kills his characters by having them stabbed. Second popular would be poisoning followed by being hanged or beheaded. But it doesn't stop there: sometimes heroes die from a broken heart, lack of sleep, and even grief and shame. And also from eating hot coal (wtf, Portia??).

Some deaths are ridiculous and very inventive. Check them out yourself!

*Timon of Athens, the 10th tragedy of Shakespeare, is not included here

Reading Good Literature Makes You A Better Person

Theory of Mind (or ToM) is a basic principle of the human mind. It requires an ability to feel empathy, which is believed to have kickstarted the evolutionary development of the human intellect. In this light, good literary fiction can greatly enhance ToM as it serves as some kind of a training device where people can perfect their empathetic skills. According to the research, carried out by David Kidd and Emanuele Castano from the New School for Social Research in New York (now known as simply the New School), reading challenging, high-quality fiction enhances a set of skills and thought processes that are fundamental to complex social relationships, i.e. the functional societies.

The main hypothesis that Kidd and Castano based their experiments on was that characters in high-quality literature are of a very complex and diverse nature - it is, therefore, not easy to decipher their motifs, understand what stands behind their choices, feelings, actions, etc. In order to do it, the reader needs to apply certain psychological skills that would allow to get into that character's shoes. Meanwhile, the schematic nature of characters from second-rate literature does not offer this possibility. Therefore, reading good books develops the important skill of empathy, which is that that cultivates humanity and brings us to a higher level of evolution (not labour, as we all thought - sorry, Engels).

In order to prove this hypothesis, Kidd and Castano performed five tests to measure the effect of reading literature fiction on participants' ToM. 

Initially, the participants had to undergo Author Recognition Test that allowed to evaluate their level of erudition regarding literature. Then every participant received one of six texts chosen for the experiment. Three of those were high-quality literary texts (excerpts from prize-winning books or celebrated stories of world-renown authors (e.g., A Chameleon by Checkov)), while the rest were those of non-fiction, sci-fi, second-rate romance novels, etc. Then, after participants completed the reading part, their ToM capabilities were tested, using several well-established measures. One of those measures, for example, was the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test, which asked participants to look at black-and-white photographs of actors' eyes and indicate the emotion expressed by that actor. Across experiements, it was found that participats who were assigned to read literary fiction performed significantly better on all of the five ToM tests.

The tests' results on understanding others' mentals states after reading different texts. Literary ficion = hight-quality literature, popular fiction = bestsellers, no reading = no texts (participants from control group). RMET - Reading the Mind in the Eyes, DANVA - Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (identified emotions from photographs). 

The results indicated that high-quality literature was favoured less than excerpts from popular fiction. Nevertheless, at the same time participants recognized it as more 'artistic' and generally better in literary light. Also, it appeared that participants had a higher level of emotional involvement when reading high-quality texts. Most importantly, however, the study showed that not just any fiction was effective in fostering ToM, rather the literary quality was the determining factor. 

Such research suggests that the reason for literary fiction's impact on ToM is a direct result of the ways in which it involves the reader. Unlike popular fiction, literary fiction requires intellectual engagement and creative thought from its readers. "Features of the modern literary novel set it apart from most bestselling thrillers and romances. Through the use of [...] stylistic devices, literary fiction defamiliarizes its readers," wrote Kidd and Castano. "Just as in real life, the worlds life literary fiction are replete with complicated indiviaduals whose inner lives are rarely easily discerned but warrant exploration."

Reading good literature develops the ability to understand, empathize and better co-exist in functional community, and therefore makes you a better person. Not a bad thing.

Shortest Short Stories

I've been a bit busy lately writing my bachelor thesis. It is going horirble, and the deadline is approaching at a terribly fast pace.
Quite well-timed, I found this little article [in Russian] on the shortest literary masterpieces, and wanted to share it here. These stories amuse me and make a bit sad at the same time: I wish I could be as concise in expressing my thoughts and ideas in my own writing. So far I feel like a parody on Tolstoy. Ah! damn thesis!

Anyways...

1) Once Hemingway bet ten dollars that he could write a moving story of only six words. He wrote it on a napkin: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." He won the bet, naturally.

2) Frederic Brown composed the shortest sci-fi story: "The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door..." Pretty scary!

3) O. Henry won an american competition on the shortest short story, writing one that has all the necessary elements: drawstrings, climax and denouement: "The drived lit a cigarette and leaned over the gas tank to see how many of the remaining gasoline. The deceased was twenty-three years."

4) The Brisith also made the same contest. Its main condition was covering the following themes: the Queen, God, sex, mystery. The result was very entertaining: "Oh God, - exclaimed the queen - I'm pregnant. I wonder who is the father."

5) Some elderly Frenchwoman won another literary contest - on the shortest autobiography. This is how she described her life: "I used to have a smooth face and wrinkled skirt, and now - on the contrary."

The Circle of Literary Influences

Everybody knows that a good book is full of allusions to another good book. One of the most obvious examples would be my favourite John Fowles, who used to refer to Shakespeare in nearly all of his works. Of course, Fowles took his obsession over Shakespeare to an extreme - my college professor even used to say that Fowles was a Shakespeare-wanker (which is an extreme on its own, too). Nevertheless, it is true that literary history is ample with evidences of great poetic influences: Virgil, the father of Roman cultural heritage, set Homer as an example for imitation and modeled his 'Aeneid' on Homer epics. Virgil himself, in turn, was a literary 'father' to Dante, Dante to Chaucer, Chaucer to Spenser, Spenser to Milton, Blake and Wordsworth...This all only supports the fact that literary influences is a thing that should be taken into a strong consideration when reading a novel, as knowing where 'that' comes from, helps to undesrand what 'this' means.

Getting familiarized with the circle of literary influences is beneficial not only for mere readers and connoisseurs of art, but also for writers themselves. Nearly a century ago, T. S. Eliot, in his essay 'Tradition and Individual Talent', declared that a poet must 'develop or procure' an understanding of writers'predecessors, to whom we, moderns, own absolutely everything and without whom we would never exist. Which, if you think about it, is completely true.

However, the genealogical tree of literary influences is not entirely marked with solely blue-blooded signs. It is, on the opposite, a kneaded texture of allusions and borrowings from every possible form of human imagination, beyond literature: chemistry, physics, mathematics, music, cinema, philosophy, et cetera, et cetera. This one huge genealogy is a reflection of the whole heritage of artistic conceptions and perspectives on life.

The illustration presented below (source: BrainPickings) does not portray the chronological order of first and last things but is still immensely interesting as it helps to comprehend how all the forms employed by the human imagination are all puzzle pieces of the complete vision of the world, enfolded in a single circle - the circle of influences.