To Strive, To Seek, To Find

(This post comes courtesy of our very own Cat, today’s student writer.)

Okay, so let’s say that your grandma makes the best strawberry freezer jam in the world. Her strawberry freezer jam is so good that all of the relatives argue over who gets to take a couple of jars with them after the holidays, and they bring it home and serve it to their New Years guests and pretend that they made it themselves. You cannot imagine living without this strawberry freezer jam. It is literally the height of culinary excellence in your freezer.

And then one day your grandma dies, and her strawberry freezer jam recipe dies with her. Nobody in your family knows how she made it, and so as you mourn the loss of your beloved matriarch, your taste buds shrink in horror as they contemplate the torment that is a life full of Smuckers.

The months pass, and your toast becomes accustomed to the loneliness of butter and honey and orange marmalade, and you continue about the business of eating dull breakfasts because that is all you can do. Carry on, brave soldier.

When the time comes to sort through your grandmother’s possessions, your mother and your aunts head down to the old family homestead (probably somewhere in Iowa), and begin sifting through remnants of their dead mother’s belongings. Among the cabinets full of plastic bread sacks, piles of empty margarine containers and drawers full of mismatched buttons, the women make a startling discovery: Written on the back of a TV Guide crossword puzzle from 1973 is your grandmother’s secret recipe for strawberry freezer jam!

Turns out it’s just strawberries, sugar and gelatin, but as word spreads through the family, your collective spirits (and hungers) soar with the hope of one day tasting that sweet, homemade goodness once more. It is a miracle straight from heaven above. Your children ask why you are crying and you reply, “The future is so bright!” and then they drop their coloring books and run to hide under their beds because they think mom and dad have been drinking again, but you don’t mind because you are JUST! SO! HAPPY!

I can assure you that this is exactly how literature professor Sir Brian Vickers, from the University of London, feels right now. According to Time.com, Vickers has spent more than forty years studying Shakespeare, and now he believes he has proven that a previously unattributed play from the 1500s was co-written by William Shakespeare.

Two years ago, Vickers began using an anti-plagiarism software program called Pl@gerism (which is commonly used by college professors to check the originality of student work) to settle the question of authorship of the play Edward III. He entered hundreds of lines of text from the play including common Shakespearian phrases such as “author of my blood,” and “thou art thyself,” and was able to conclude that this play was probably a collaboration between the Bard himself and one of his contemporaries, Thomas Kyd.

A new Shakespeare play? It’s like strawberry freezer jam for literature geeks! Go check it out for yourself and tell us what you think! And by the way, I’m sorry about your grandma.

Tags: fun

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