How Shakespearean are you?

not at all

venice,
a beautiful palace,
where beauty over flows,
and perfumes is what all blows.

where the sun is extra yellow,
and everybody’s your fellow,
you never feel alone,
as beauty flows all along.

it’s heaven for boys,
which run after girls,
where music is the noise,
and vine is what whirls.

no doubt i never did belong,
to a place so beautiful,
but i did wondered along,
whenever i saw something peaceful.

and for this i got 97 percent =)

100 %………. yoooohooo!!!!
Here’s my text:
“Do you really believe whatever you see? There are few things in the world which are worth learning. Feel it.”

i saw a girl all alone in the crowded room crying deep in her heart and i said to myself will she be loved?
and my heart heart replied yes! she will be loved.
and now she is my girl!

and i got 100% =pPp

Bakwas,
I pasted below words wit some special characters.
It showed 95%.
and It said I am William Shakespeare.

My words are as below

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back agfdg thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Hdgdfg ere hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how of(-) gdg t. Where be your gibes now?

I got 90% for a long (sometimes abusive rant) on my ex, which is extremely weird, considering I’m Indian, and some of those abuses weren’t even in English!

81% with this: I am a creator and a maker and a chipper sort of chap. The jolly disposition of my demeanor is indubitable.

I was trying hard

The following text was rated at 89%:
I read some Shakespeare at school such as the Merchant of Venice and some other plays. The English language has changed since the baird’s days. Possibly less lyrical with shorter sentences due to the use of text messaging and writing email notes. I rarely write letters although I do send postcards when on holiday!

100% for dis
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now?

Nothing to be feared in life,it is only to be understood

If you write a few general words over and over again (I pasted “love kill rose man tempest beauty” over and over), it’s easy to get 100%. Obviously, it in no way indicates the quality of your writing or your vocab for that matter, unless maybe you put in some of your everyday writing. If you put in poetry, it probably just means you have to be careful of being cliche.

But it is a very cute tool. I posted a blog entry in and got a 90% XD Now I can go brag about how Shakespearean my entry on the economy and education was.

Copied a selection from New Testament, Revelations,by John, discovered that Shakespeare probably (95%) wrote that, too. Who knew?

This is pointless.

I pasted in the first paragraph of the Constitution. 96% Shakespearean…

95% for a random excerpt from my post
Then I began to reflect on torture. Here I am, whining about my pain when so many others experience a greater degree, for longer periods, and repeatedly over many years. Who am I to feel my pain is of any real significance compared to the world-wide view. My heart goes out to those who must endure torture. It’s quite easy to break a persons soul, leaving only a hollow shell of a person. I can only begin to imagine the hardships of a broken soul.

Wow! I are Shakespeare.

I’m 93% for quoting lyrics from Don’t Fear the Reaper so I guess Blue Oyster Cult is 93% Shakespearean!

“Yesterday” (The Beatles) was 94% Shakespearean! … ??

I hope you all don’t mind if I offer a few thoughts. I’m sort of inspired by the device and the responses, both.

This is a useful, but perhaps not fully-developed tool; it seems to trace the contours of an utterance, rather the same way a beginner’s book on drawing uses six or seven basic shapes to show an underlying structure in more nuanced images. I don’t think this a very strong analogy, but I hope you take my point. The up side of the picture we get is that it reveals the elements of a kind of beauty, the lineaments of elegance; the downside is that it tells us what we already know – or think we know. It’s become axiomatic to say that Shakespeare “invented half the English language,” or something along this line. This is like saying Mozart invented most of modern music. Neither is true. Mozart managed quintuple invertible counterpoints; he pushed the limits of practice and understanding. Shakespeare’s Hamlet meditated on suicide more eloquently and searchingly than anyone had, perhaps; his Fools fooled and punned in infectious ways; like his Glouchester, Shakespeare saw feelingly, and we still feel his touch. He didn’t fashion the body of our language like a Frankenstein; he infected it. Shakespearean language is viral. If I may be perverse, I’d say the danger of a device like this is a kind of inoculation. It seems unlikely to make people actually more Shakespearean; instead, it gives the illusion that a healthy language is one that hasn’t changed very much. As our languages goes, so go we. Trite language and hackneyed phrases are symptomatic of a habit of mind. Shakespeare was anything but trite; but, the evidence of this, ironically, is that he didn’t talk (or write) like those that went before him. When he searched the annals of history and language, he altered and invented; he moved on. Will this innovative device – or any – help us do that? Maybe that’s an unfair question. I hope you don’t mind me asking. It’s the questions prompted by what I read below that, for me, is the pleasure the thing.

I wonder if there is any way to carry the insights this device offers forward a bit more. For example, can the basic Shakespearean unit, if you will, be a phrase, rather than just a word. It’s a vexing, and still inherent problem: language is protean and lithe; computer programs are stiff and rigid. The values are pre-programmed in a . . . a program, while the values of a living word are determined by an almost infinite array of variables. I’m sure the computer programming in this tool, as it is, is already quite complex; and threading a finer digital net to catch the fleeting phrase is, perhaps, too much to ask. I don’t know. What do more sophisticated software writers say? I haven’t got a clue about the sort of programs that can do what this one does. In any case, I find the results interesting, but rather repetitive after a while. I’d be as interested in seeing LOW % examples as I am in seeing an endless list of examples in the 90% percentile. Indeed, I would think that an innovator like Shakespeare himself would be drawn to . . . what do I call it? the fringes of the linguistic field? the abandoned lots of language? I’ll risk sounding cute and say that an intrepid tongue like Willy’s was wont to wag in the verbal dark. Is there a tool to teach us that?

I find I have more questions than conclusions about this tool – which is a good thing! Indeed, I’m thrilled by what’s come up in people’s minds so far. The ideas and observations show a segment of the looking & listening population is engaged. That’s cool, even if the sample is highly self-seleting. Last, I wonder what this program actually does. Does it really show a Shakespearean influence; or is it something else that emerges from the comparison – if that’s even the best way to describe what the Bard-o-meter does. It almost seems to merely measure a kind of linguistic residuum – though I don’t think that’s quite right, either. Language is a living thing. But just as we learn from genetics that most life, and certainly human life, shares a huge amount of genetic material, so to speak, so this tool (metric?) shows us the strong strains of Shakespeare’s speech threading through the double-helix of our contemporary linguistic codes. Anyhow, thank you, O.E.D., for yet another wonderfully thought-provoking way to ransack the English word hoard!

and we like we went to the mall
but there were like too many people
so we like left… yea

put put put pop pip pom pan pas pak pal pam pan par paf paq pal pin pit pir pif pim pin pic pil pif pig pih poh pol pop pom por pos

This gave me 33%!