Cross Post - Shakespeare and DNA, part II

Hadrian's wall. Although Roman, it has about as much to do with Julius Caesar as it does with either Shakespeare, or genome assembly.

Another cross-post to point you over to the Occam's Typewriter Irregulars blog, where I try to explain "genome assembly" the process of putting many fragments of DNA sequence together to make an entire genome sequence. All of this aided by using bits of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

The post is right here: Genome Assembly - a primer for the Shakespeare fan

Epilogue

Now that I've (finally) finished reading the article referred to in this post about Shakespeare, I thought it was worth mentioning the authors's final remark:

There are perhaps other questions in history or the humanities that may benefit from proctologic examination.

I leave it open to suggestion as to what these questions might be.

Willy Shakespeare's Naughty Bottom Bits

Generally speaking, I don't like to duplicate post content between different blogs that I contribute to, but this was just too good to leave languishing at Life Science Tools of the Trade. So here you go, fortunate readers.

Some of you may know that I spend my days in a research lab (ok, in an office adjacent to a research lab, if you must split hairs) and, as a sideline, yammer on in various science-related discussion groups. Recently, in researching (and I use the term in its modern sense, roughly translating as "looking on the internet for approximately three minutes") in order to find something to contribute to a discussion about inappropriate scientific article titles, I came across this absolute gem of a paper:

All's Well That Ends Well: Shakespeare's treatment of anal fistula, by B.C. Cosman, published (appropriately enough) in the glamourous journal, Diseases of the Colon and Rectum.

I had no idea. With morbid fascination, I read the abstract:

Textual and contextual evidence suggests that the French king's fistula, a central plot device in Shakespeare's play All's Well That Ends Well, is a fistula-in-ano.

Really? I'm fairly certain I've seen this play performed, at least in a television adaptation. It was a long time ago, and certainly long before I began to do research on gastrointestinal disorders, but I would have thought that I would remember references to the French king's backside. And I've already learned something else: I don't think I've ever come across the term 'fistula-in-ano' before.

Reading on:

Anal fistula was known to the lay public in Shakespeare's time.

I suppose that makes sense. I hadn't really thought about it.

In addition, Shakespeare may have known of the anal fistula treatise of John Arderne, an ancestor on Shakespeare's mother's side. Shakespeare's use of anal fistula differs from all previous versions of the story, which first appeared in Boccaccio's Decameron and from its possible historical antecedent, the fistula of Charles V of France.

Ok, now the author's getting serious. Or the article's getting silly. If you've read Bill Bryson's excellent biography of Shakespeare, you'll recall that precious little is actually known about the Bard. I'm willing to give Cosman the benefit of the doubt, and presume that the venerable John Arderne really was a relative. He certainly did write a treatise on the indelicate topic of anal fistulae, which you can even read online. Go on, you know you want to. All the rest of that, about Boccaccio and Charles the Fifth, I really can't be bothered researching.


Onward:

This difference makes sense given the conventions of Elizabethan comedy, which included anal humor.

Again, I hadn't thought about it - but no surprise there, really.

It is also understandable when one looks at what wounds in different locations mean in European legend. In this light, it is not surprising that subsequent expurgations treat Boccaccio's and Shakespeare's fistulas differently, censoring only Shakespeare's.

Well, ok - they removed the reference to the King's bum. I'm not really surprised. Other 'wounds' were much more socially acceptable, I suppose. After all, we're talking about a culture that endorsed public beheadings.

Cosman's abstract ends with this screechingly funny statement:

This reading has implications for the staging of All's Well That Ends Well, and for our view of the place of anal fistulas in cultural history.

Indeed it does. I know that I shall never view the cultural history of anal fistulas in the same way again. Or perhaps at all. And I'm certainly going to be paying closer attention the next time I see All's Well That Ends Well performed. Paying closer attention, but ready to run for the door if the King's nether ailments are about to be revealed in glorious and personal detail.

It's a good thing there are curated literature search engines, like PubMed. Otherwise, how would I ever learn about these things?

Could you please just phone me instead?

Today, I have spent, in aggregate, almost six (6) hours reading, sorting and deleting email messages.

Old email messages, new email messages, email messages that are neither old nor new, but somewhere in between. Ones that are important, ones that were important at the time and may be again in the future, and ones that caused me to (figuratively) scratch my head and say, "what the *$#!? was that about?"

I thought that I was getting buried under RSS feeds, and I am, but that problem is small compared to the unruly tangle of email mess hiding in my Outlook Express (stop laughing, you lot!) mailboxes. I guess it had really been getting out of hand, since:

- I deleted almost four and a half thousand messages from my trash folder;
- I finally beat my Sent Items folder down to one message, which I confess I have no idea what to do with; I either filed or deleted the other multi-hundreds;
- I created at least a dozen new folders for filing things in, on top of all of the ones I already had;
- and after all that, I still have about 600 unsorted, unfiled messages in my Inbox. It's late and I've given up for tonight, especially when faced with a couple of hundred from the same person.

This, my friends, is just a little over a year's worth, and let's not even talk about my two Yahoo accounts. Not that anyone ever emails the Ricardipus one, oh no [muffled sobbing].

I just hate to think how much time was consumed reading these things... to be conservative, let's say, oh, six thousand messages. At a (very, very conservative) estimate of 100 words each, that's 600,000 words of text. The equivalent of twenty good-sized Shakespeare plays, if the internet is to be believed. And that's not including the attachments. One email I received recently contained no less than 261 pages of background reading for this trip, and that's not counting the documents that were duplicated as French translations.

I can't help but think that I might be happier, and feel a little more educated, had I read Hamlet (again) and Othello and all the rest of them, instead of six thousand emails. Unfortunately, I would probably also have lost my job by now, so maybe great literature isn't the answer to everything after all.

I think I need to take a deep breath, get some fresh air, and not be sitting in front of a computer any longer, at least not tonight. Unfortunately, it's already long past dark and I really should be in bed, so here's a surrogate calming picture instead. I'm off to bed - don't email me until morning, please.