text:
My Afterlife
Shakespeare took a few shots at depicting a hellish afterlife.
The most extended, if I remember correctly, belongs to Claudio in Measure for Measure. "To die, and go we know not where;/ To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;/ This sensible warm motion to become/ A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit/ To bathe in fiery floods,/ Or to reside in thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;/ To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,/ And blown with restless violence round about/ The pendent world; or to be worse than worst/ Of those that lawless and incertain thought/ Imagine howling: tis too horrible." It's a damned scary vision, and mostly easy to understand, though it helps to be reminded that sensible= having sense, "delighted" = darkened, "thrilling"= piercing, "viewless" = blind, and that "lawless and incertain thought" refers to non-Christian speculation. Shakespeare gives Claudio a number of choices for eternal suffering, each one worse than the other.
When Othello realizes that Desdemona was innocent after all, he foresees a one-dimensional hot hell, one in which devils will "Blow me about in winds, roast me in sulfur/ Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire." Clear enough, painful enough.
And finally, Lear imagines himself "Bound upon a wheel of fire,/ That mine own tears to scald like molten lead."
I think the whole afterlife thing is a fraud, but if there were a hell, here's what mine would be like.
I'm on a commercial flight, steerage class, cramped into a seat too narrow and lacking adequate leg room. A middle seat. On my left is a very large gentleman whose massive shoulders and thighs encroach upon my territory. He stinks of tobacco. He drinks too much alcohol and tries to engage me in conversation. On my right is a similarly-proportioned lady who reeks of cheap perfume and who glares at me whenever my bony elbow makes contact with her fat forearm. I'm hungry and all there is to eat are some horrid plastic pretzels in a bag that only a safecracker could open. A scruffy fourteen-year-old boy sits behind me. Rap "music" leaks from his earbuds and he kicks the back of my seat at irregular intervals. My only reading matter is a airline magazine that advertises expensive gimcrack novelties that no sensible human would ever dream of buying. My bladder is distended and painful but the seat-belt sign is perpetually lit. This plane never lands. Sometimes it threatens to do so, but at the last moment it's diverted to another airport.
This continues throughout all eternity.
And it is much worse than vats of liquid fire. Far worse than anything that Shakespeare could possibly have imagined.
February 15, 2018 in Autobiography, Religion, Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (2)
Shakespeare Gets Going
Setting aside the suspicion that The First Part of Henry the Sixth is a collaborative work or perhaps even a "prequel" to Parts Two and Three, the play can be read as if its first few lines were the earliest example of Shakespeare's playwriting. If so, then, what can be learned, right there at the very beginning, by looking closely at Act one, scene one, line one?
Here's the first considerable speech in the play -- just about the very moment, let us imagine, in which Mr. W. S.'s "rough and all-unable" goose quill touched paper. Thirty-seven or thirty-eight astonishing plays lie in the future.
The adventure begins as Gloucester eulogizes the recently-deceased Henry V. The speech is not brilliant, not accomplished; in fact, it's just plain vanilla ordinary. But it's a seed, a kernel.
Gloucester: England ne'er had a king until his time.
Virtue he had, deserving to command:
His brandish'd sword did blind men with his beams:
His arms spread wider that a dragon's wings;
His sparking eyes, replete with wrathful fire
More dazzled and drove back his enemies
Than mid-day sun fierce bent against their faces.
What should I say? his deeds exceed all speech:
He ne'er lift up his hand but conquered.
A reader or playgoer would have to be superbly insightful to predict that this Shakespeare would become the Shakespeare. This opening speech is a a mighty flat piece of rhetoric.
It's formulaic -- simply a litany or list. First comes an item, a noun (virtue, sword, arms, eyes, deeds) which is then amplified by a hyperbolic qualifier (beams, wings, fire, sun). It's open-ended; it could go on indefinitely. But because it's so much a formula, there's no surprise--there's no mystery or excitement about where Gloucester is heading.
Moreover, for each element in the list, there's a congruence between the unit of thought and the unit of verse. The sentiment of each of the first four items on the list is exactly contained in a five-beat, ten-syllable line of verse--a pedestrian procedure which Shakespeare would soon transcend. And finally, there's an excess of old-fashioned, traditional alliteration: "His Brandish'd sward did Blind me with his Beams" "affects the letter" and browbeats the brain with the letter B. It goes almost without saying that there's nothing in this speech that is particular (Elizabethans would say peculiar) to either Gloucester or Henry. This is Anyduke reciting sentences about Anyking.
But then something truly amazing occurs. Although it looks as though Gloucester is gathering his strength and his breath for a speech that might go on for forty lines and which would celebrate many more of the late kings's amazing attributes, he suddenly changes plans and truncates his intention: "What should I say? his deeds exceed all speech."
Gloucester seems to have run out of rhetorical gas. He is frustrated because he simply doesn't have the words. He throws in the rhetorical towel, so to speak. He surrenders. And he's right to do so, because at this early moment neither he nor Shakespeare has the power to generate a language that is equal to Henry's deeds. Better to stop speaking if you are utterly unable to say what you want to say.
Yet what is the task of such a playwright as Shakespeare?
It is not to do exactly what Gloucester admits that he cannot do? -- to find the words that are commensurate with the deed -- as Shakespeare certainly will when he returns to Henry in the 1598 play which concludes and climaxes this sequence of eight history plays. In a decade, Shakespeare will move from the pathos of "What shall I say?" to an rich eloquence that is up to the task.
"What shall I say?" is therefore an important question -- the most important question of all, in fact -- and the playwright asks it right here at the outset. Readers can watch and learn as Shakespeare little by little, in play after play, gradually invents a rhetorical style in which speech not only equals but eventually comes to exceed all deeds.
November 21, 2017 in Poetry, Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (0)
All You Need to Know about Antres
"Antres" is among the rarest of rare words. Shakespeare's Othello speaks of "antres vast and deserts idle" in the magnificent oration in which he takes issue with the Venetian bigotry that claimed that he was only able to win white Desdemona by employing drugs and witchcraft. No, it wasn't because he was a sorcerer; it was because he was accomplished, heroic, romantic. "Antres" is one of the exotic words that defines the great African general as a non-Venetian -- an outlander, an "erring barbarian," an "extravagant and wheeling stranger."
Shakespeare coined "antres" just for the occasion, deriving it from Latin antrum, a cave. He never used "antres" again, nor did anyone else until Keats fleetingly revived the word two centuries afterward. "Antres" never domesticated into English and remains curious and remote, eternally in need of an explanatory footnote. It is unlikely that Shakespeare expected that a popular or even a courtly audience would grasp "antres" at first hearing. It's a risky word, but Shakespeare didn't become Shakespeare without taking risks.
The playwright coupled the neologism "antres" to another shiny new Latinism to produce "antres vast," a phrase which translates into the language of 2017 as "really big caves." Yet no translation can do justice to the spacious resonance of "antres vast." The caverns to which Othello refers are monstrously huge -- grown grander and even more inaccessible because Shakespeare ingeniously placed the modifier after rather than before the noun. "Antres vast" are a hundredfold more mysterious -- darker, more echoic, more glinty with stalactites and stalagmites -- than "vast antres."
"Antres vast" occurs in tandem with a second and equally remarkable noun-adjective combination: "deserts idle." Othello reports that before he came to Venice, he had not only traversed "rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven" but had also dwelt among "antres vast and deserts idle." Strictly speaking, deserts cannot be "idle," but they can be vacant or useless. "Deserts idle" reinforces and augments "antres vast." Taken together, the two phrases are infinitely more evocative than either alone.
As a structure of sound, "antres vast and deserts idle" pivots on the "d" of "and" and the "d" of "deserts" and it positions "antres" and "idle" in symmetrical opposition. The two key words are dissimilar yet cleverly interlinked, each comprised of an open vowel (Antres, Idle), a dental (anTres, iDle), and a liquid (antRes, idLe). It is not by accident that "antres vast and deserts idle" is such a euphonious and mouth-filling phrase.
Shakespeare not only invented "antres" for Othello's oration but also took care to surround it with other linguistic novelties. For example: Othello claims to have encountered "cannibals that each other eat/ The anthropophagi." "Cannibal" is now a commonplace noun, but in 1604 it was a newcomer to the language. "Cannibal" derives from "Carib," the name of a recently-encountered people--reputed to be man-eaters --who gave their appellation to the sea in which they lived. "Cannibal" was sufficiently strange--it had only made harbor in England (arriving by way of Spain) in the 1550s--that Shakespeare felt a need to define it, which he did once in English ("that each other eat") and once in Greek ("anthropophagi"). "Anthropophagi," a word that had originated with Herodotus, was as new to English--and as seldom employed--as "cannibal."
"Antres vast," "deserts idle," "cannibals" and "anthropophagi" play crucial parts in Othello's stirring autobiographical fragment.
I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth scapes i'th'imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery; of my redemption thence,
And portance in my travel's history:
Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven,
It was my hint to speak -- such was the process.
And of the cannibals that each other eat,
The anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.
It's an astonishing story, each element more incredible than the one that precedes it. Hair-breadth escapes? Every hero can boast of them. Redemption from slavery? A bit less likely. Hills whose heads touch heaven? A pardonable hyperbole. Cannibals? Surely, less believable still. The Othello landscape then crosses the border from exotic to fabulous when it adduces "men whose heads/ Do grow beneath their shoulders." These headless men are the blemmyae -- Nubian or sometimes Ethiopian -- who were a feature of pseudo-anthropological folklore from Pliny to Sir Walter Raleigh. The skepticism that these monstrous creatures ought to provoke is diluted because the road to the blemmyes passes through "antres vast and deserts idle." If audiences had not been lulled and seduced by "antres," they might dismiss Othello as a mere braggart soldier--rather than admire him for the near-magician that he becomes in his self-dramatization.
Shakespeare had yet another purpose for "antres vast." In the sentence that treads on the heels of the "men whose heads/ Do grow beneath their shoulders," Othello abruptly turned his attention to Desdemona. His language dulls. "This (i.e. his exotic narrative) to hear would Desdemona seriously incline,/ But still the house affairs would draw her hence." Shakespeare strategically contrasts Othello's vocabulary to Desdemona's when he juxtaposes "antres vast" to "house affairs." Only the tinnest of ears can fail to be struck by the difference between the two phrases. Antres vast--house affairs; house affairs--antres vast. The gap between these two most pregnant phrases is small enough to allow the electric impulses of sex and romance to spark, but is too wide to allow genuine understanding or empathy to shoot the gap. The tragedy of Desdemona and Othello arises out of the unbridgeable space between "antres vast" and "house affairs."
Shakespeare therefore knew exactly what he was about when he invented the word "antres."
If he had been in a more antic mood, less determined to characterize Othello's massive dignity, he might have coined a word from another Latin word for cave, e.g. spelunca. But "spelunkies vast" -- or even "spelunkies splendid" -- could not possibly do the work of "antres vast."
November 12, 2017 in Language, Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (0)
"Enough is as Good as a Feast" or Possibly Better
"Enough is as good as a feast" has become my favorite proverb. Obviously, it's a warning against consumerism, materialism, the excesses of capitalist acquisitiveness. Water in a jelly glass, it says, is as good as wine in crystal. As they used to gloss the proverb, no "avaricious scraping together that knows no bounds."
But for a fully "mature" guy like me, the proverb carries not only a figurative but a literal warning, i.e., don't eat too much. Enough is as good as a feast if a feast makes your stomach hurt, makes you heavy-lidded and passive, and if you feel a heck of a lot better when you stop eating before you reach satiety.
I can remember, as an adolescent, eating three large, overstuffed hamburgers, the roll overflowing with tomatoes, onions, relish, ketchup, etc. Along with a bottomless bowl of fries. And craving more. Then as a young man, a good portion was two hamburgers. Nowadays, I take a half or split one with a friend. Hold the fries.
When my grandmother prepared those glorious blintzes of my youth, eight was my number. Now my number is -- one. And I feel the better for it.
Digestion is slower and, I suppose, less efficient. And then there's the embarrassing fact that hamburgers and blintzes and everything else goes right to the enlarged belly, the "front porch."
So here's a proverb for this latter age: "enough is better than a feast." Much.
By the way, I first encountered the proverb, believe it or not, as the title to William Wager's 1581 morality play of the same name. And then in Latin in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, where, Sir Nathaniel and the pedant Holofernes come on stage having just completed, ahem, dinner. "Holofernes: 'Satis quod sufficit.'" Perhaps Holofernes paraphrases and simplifies Horace:
Multa petentibus
Desunt multa.
Bene est, cui deus obtulit
Parca, quod satis est manu.
(Those who seek for much are left in want of much. Happy is he to whom God has given, with sparing hand, as much as is enough.)
May 11, 2017 in Autobiography, Food and Drink, Language, Shakespeare, Wisdom | Permalink | Comments (0)
And Now He's Come out of his Coffin to Advise Trump!!
I wrote the following long ago, republished it once. Here it is, relevant again.
What Doesn't Dick Cheney Commit Suicide?
Why doesn't Dick Cheney put a bullet in his brain? It would do him (and his reputation) a world of good. What could possibly stand in his way? Once he sprinkles the ratsbane on his porridge -- and, of course, leaves behind a detailed and humble letter of apology -- he will begin to free his soul of sin and to enjoy some peace of mind. When he has fallen on his sword, his lackeys and toadies will be able to claim that although he was a black-hearted knave, at least he wasn't a shameless black-hearted knave. They can try to persuade us that although he was egregiously and dangerously wrong, he was, like another suicide, Othello, "great of heart." But if Cheney continues in his surly, obstinate, unapologetic lip-curling silence -- why then, he'll go down in the books as an unrepentant demi-devil like Iago ("From this time forth I never will speak word").
Cheney has brought disgrace upon our beloved nation and upon himself. Using faked spy data, he suckered the ignorant, feckless Decider and almost the entire Congress into invading Iraq. His war has been a monumental disaster. "Full of scorpions [should be] his brain." At this moment of writing, Cheney is guilty of killing 3260 American soldiers and maiming (by official count -- who can possibly guess at the truth?) 24,314 others. If Cheney has even the most rudimentary of consciences, on it lies the heavy burden of 60,000 to 100,000 Iraqi souls. The Dickster has cost America $414 billion dollars, loss of prestige and the squandering of oceans of good will. Like Anthony, he "has lived in such dishonor/That the gods detest [his] baseness." But Antony took the proper course. When Cheney dispatches himself -- "after the high Roman fashion," let's hope -- he'll have taken the first step toward rehabilitating himself and the nation. For him not to do the deed would be ignoble.
Dick: I know that you're hunkering in your bomb-proof shelter. I know that you're up late at night, sleepless with guilt. You're cruising the internet, perchance googling "Cheney + suicide," and you're wavering in your purpose. Dick -- take my considered advice. I'm thinking of your place in history. At this point, "you have no friend,/ But resolution and the briefest end." You'll immediately feel better. It's a no-brainer. Go for it.
April 10. Spike Schapiro comments: "Dr. M. -- I've read your exhortation to suicide. You are, as usual, falsely optimistic. Cheney can't off himself because a) he's shameless and b) he's a total coward, and c) he has no self-knowledge and d) he can't point a shotgun. You cite the precedents of Othello and Anthony but they're both great spirits and therefore irrelevant. Cheney is a slug. Moreover, Cheney can't be "great of heart" -- he has no heart of his own --it's either a transplant or some mechanical contraption."
April 4, 2014 Why is this man still alive? Allowed to give interviews? Is there no justice in our sublunary world?
December 22, 2016 Only a silver stake in his heart is going to do it. Mirrors, garlic. Too late for prayers.
December 22, 2016 in Current Affairs, Shakespeare, Wisdom | Permalink | Comments (1)
I'm marvelously fond of the Italian word "fango," which translates into English as "mud." "Fango" is expressive of the matter which it describes. To my ear, the word fango sounds slimy and disreputable, perhaps even repulsive, while its English counterpart "mud" is bland and lacks character. And "fangoso" is so much more dramatic than "muddy." But why fango? How did fango infiltrate the Italian language? The Latin word for mud is "lutum," which would naturally yield Italian "luto", which, as it happens, is a word that does exist, but, so far, one that I've encountered only in dictionaries. Fango it is, and gladly. Let us revel in fango.
Fango, according to my bank of etymological resources, appears to be of Germanic origin and a distant cousin to the English word "fen," "a low land covered in whole or part by water." Lots of fango in that there fen, obviously. There's also a rare (my dictionary says 'poetical') French word "fange," for mud, but the more common word is boue. Boue is one of a handful of French words (other than toponyms) that are of Gaulish origin. So that when it came to mud, both the Italian and French languages adopted indigenous rather than Latin words. And for good reason: if there's any substance that is common rather than learned, it's mud.
"Fango" bears no relation to English "fang." Fang is an oversized tooth, but not in its earliest appearances. Old English fang denoted plunder or booty, "a seizing or taking." The root meaning of grasp or capture is present in the name of Good Master Fang, an ineffectual officer of the law in Shakespeare's The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth. Yet fang as unquestionably tooth or toothy in Duke Senior's metaphor in As You Like it, where "the icy fang/ And churlish chiding of the winter's wind,... bites and blows upon my body."
December 18, 2016 in Language, Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (0)
"Orts" is a rare but tasty word. Orts are the bits of bones, gristle, stems, skins, pits and other inedibles that are left on the plate after one finishes eating -- the stuff that is scraped directly into the garbage can. Orts are to be distinguished from "leftovers" which are the uneaten remains of the meal that are carefully sequestered for tomorrow's breakfast. Leftovers good, orts bad.
Shakespeare uses "orts" twice in the plays, both times metaphorically. The first instance is in Julius Caesar, when Anthony tells Octavius how little he values his colleague Lepidus. According to Anthony, Lepidus is "A barren-spirited fellow; one that feeds/ On abjects, orts and imitations." In this instance, orts seems to be prompted by the word "feed." A second appearance of orts is in Troilus and Cressida. Troilus has discovered that his beloved Cressida has been playing at fast and loose with Diomedes: "The bonds of heaven are slipp'd, dissolved, and loosed/ And with another knot, five-finger-tied,/ The fractions of her faith, orts of her love,/ The fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics/ Of her o'er-eaten faith, are bound to Diomed." It's a strong speech and "orts of her love" is a powerful phrase, though rather obscure nowadays to audiences for whom the "ort" is a mystery, which is certainly all audiences.
Whether Shakespeare's first audiences would have required a footnote for orts I do not know. It was never a frequently used word, though the OED attests its presence in the language from 1440 to 1880. I don't know of any recent usages, but once, when I was at lunch with a group of professional Shakespeareans, I asked at the close of the meal, "What do we do with the orts" and everyone at the table knew exactly what I meant. Rather a specialized audience, however.
Orts should not be confused with Oorts. The Oort cloud is the presumed boundary of the solar system, way out there, ten times further than Neptune, where the comets are thought to reside until they are dislodged from their proper home and come hurtling toward the inner planets. Orts and Oorts are both leftovers, in the sense that they are the remains of an original creation, in the one case chicken pot pie and in the other the universe. Orts are much smaller but more palpable than Oorts. Makes a guy wonder what could possibly be denoted by ooorts. Or oooorts.
Lola on Romeo and Juliet
The granddaughter, Lola, age 6 and a bit, has been reading to me -- a child's version of Romeo and Juliet. The feud between the Montagues and the Capulets distresses her. "Why do they have to fight. Why can't they just talk about it? Why don't they use their words?"
May 18, 2016 in Poetry, Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (0)
When I was a boy, a boob was simpleton, a nimcompoop, what Shakespeare calls a mooncalf and what in an earlier life I might have called a schmuck or a schmendrick. "Boobs" was an everyday expression; so common and pervasive that The Three Stooges might just as easily have been called the The Three Boobs. There were other related uses of the word; "booby hatch" -- a semi-humorous appellation for what used to be called an insane asylum, and also the "boob-tube"-- though whether the boob in that doublet denoted the machine itself or the schmendricks who stare at it was never clear to me. But at some point in my linguistic career the word "boob" re-emerged with a new primary signification. It now seems to have become the most common word for the female breast.
I do not like it when a breast is called a boob. It is disrespectful. A breast is soft and nurturing but also erotic and enticing. A boob is neither; it is a denatured object, stripped of its warm associations and joined instead to foolishness and boobery. "Boob" is a deliberately unsexual and undignified term. It is also, as Shakespeare says in a different context, "base, vulgar and popular."
And available. If a person should happen to google the word "boob," perhaps searching for information of an etymological kind, the first, second, third and perhaps hundredth entries that he or she will encounter are for "boob selfies." A "boob selfie," for readers equally as naïve as me, is a photograph which a woman takes of her boobs and posts on the internet. Jane Austen did not do this. Neither did George Eliot. I can't demonstrate that the word "boob' is responsible for such a decadent display of immodesty, but I do note that "breast selfies" or "bosom selfies" are both inconceivable.
Nor did suicidal Cleopatra say, when bringing the venomous asp to her breast, say "Peace, peace/ Dost thou not see my baby at my boob/ That sucks the nurse asleep."
October 22, 2015 in Autobiography, Language, Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (0)
My daughter's nephew-in-law, Zach Appelman, is a talented actor setting out on what might very well turn out to be a terrific career. (His ascent would be more rapid if he would take his aunt-in-law's father's advice and change his stage name to Zach Barrymore or Zach Zellweger, but the young man has too much integrity to comply with aged opportunistic wisdom).
Zach recently played Hamlet at the Hartford Stage in Connecticut (Hartford Courant: "a career-propelling performance that at times takes your breath away"). I spoke with Zach at the recent family Thanksgiving and he told me that the director of this Hamlet, Darko Tresnjak, made an effort to emphasize the play's comic passages. It was a good idea, I think, because Hamlet is both in reading and performance an intermittently hilarious piece of dramatic art. But, added Zach, sometimes the audience laughed at moments that he did not anticipate. He cited an example in the so-called "bedroom scene," where Hamlet assails Gertrude for marrying Claudius. Hamlet's rebuke of his mother is harsh and dislocating. About her marriage to Claudius, he says
You cannot call it love; for at your age
The hectic in the blood is tame, it's humble
It waits upon the judgment.
These lines apparently caused quite a commotion among the seniors in the audience. It is not hard to imagine why. Hamlet, for all his sparkling intelligence, is callow. He has youth's ignorance about middle-age sexuality -- as the silver-threads-among-the-gold demographic must certainly have recognized. How could Hamlet (or perhaps even young Shakespeare, a mere thirty-five when he wrote the play), know that desire and passion increase in middle-age as impetuous adolescent oestrus and fumblings are superseded by mature appreciation and achievement.
I doubt that Shakespeare meant Hamlet's lines to be funny -- there's no room for humor in the rhapsody of words that the prince directs at his mommy. Nevertheless, a modern sophisticated and wrinkle-deep-in-time audience cannot help but titter at Hamlet's grotesque misjudgment.
These observations on sex in youth and age were still percolating in my waiting-for-wisdom brain while I re-read, for, what? the fourth or fifth or sixth time, Anthony Trollope's excellent 1857 novel, Barchester Towers. My attention was caught, this time through, by one of Trollope's digressions, very pertinent to the topic of autumnal love, and which I now transcribe in a slightly reduced version and which I think is well worthy intense study, especially by my readers of certain late-hectic ages.
"It is, we believe, [says Trollope] common with young men of five and twenty to look on their seniors -- on men of, say, double their own age -- as so many stocks and stones -- stocks and stones, that is, in regard to feminine beauty."
(Let me interject that for "young men of five and twenty", think "Hamlet." And when Trollope talks of "feminine beauty," let us recognize that the phrase is a euphemistic Victorian surrogate for issues of human desire and sexuality that conventional taboos made it impossible for Trollope to address forthrightly.)
"There never was a greater mistake [continues Trollope]. Men of fifty don't dance mazurkas, being generally too fat and wheezy; nor do they sit for hours together on river banks at their mistresses' feet, being somewhat afraid of rheumatism. But for real true love, love at first sight, love to devotion, love that robs a man of his sleep, love [and here Trollope begins to quote from the famous passage in Love's Labor's Lost] 'that will gaze an eagle blind, love that will hear the lowest sound when the suspicious head of theft is stopped, love that is like a Hercules still climbing trees in the Hesperides we believe that this best age is from forty-five to seventy."
Forty-five to seventy, ladies and gentleman. Just the age of the men and women in the Hartford playhouse who snickered at Hamlet junior's incomprehension of his mother's passions.
And then Trollope brings his excursus to conclusion with a great sentence in which he both disses and dismisses immature youthful ardor:
"Up to that age [i.e. forty-five] men are generally given to mere flirting."
As perhaps Hamlet flirts with Ophelia.
It's intriguing that Trollope recognizes that men of seventy summers may still be ardent lovers and appreciaters of the flesh. If he had been a little older and more experienced, he would have increased his estimate to seventy-five, perhaps even eighty. After all, eighty is the new seventy, is it not? Or he might even have acknowledged that it ain't over until it's over.
Trollope was only forty-two when he wrote Barchester Towers, so perhaps he knew that he was only capable of mere flirtation with Rose Heseltine. But he was 67 when he proposed, in the nasty dystopia The Fixed Period, that 68 was the age at which all men should be required to give up the ghost. The Fixed Period is a novel which, at least to this septuagenarian, provokes not titters but guffaws. Poor Anthony T. had become so terribly sour, so unlike the Trollope of Barchester.
December 08, 2014 in Shakespeare, Wisdom | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: Appelman, Hamlet, Trollope
There's a brief sentence in The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth that continues to move me no matter how frequently I return to it. I's a passage that resonates in my latter-day soul.
Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet (whose name, obviously, indicates her profession) are old acquaintances and old rivals who are evermore at odds. "They never meet but they fall to discord." They seem to delight in exchanging insults. To Doll, Falstaff is a "muddy conger," "a huge full hogshead," "a poor ape," and even, when she is more affectionate, "a whoreson little tidy Bartholemew boar-pig". Falstaff is equally abusive. But at one point in the play, there is a magical moment when Shakespeare allows Doll to propose a truce.
"Come," she says, "I'll be friends with thee, Jack, thou art going to the wars, and whether I shall ever see thee again or no there is nobody cares."
I think that what electrifies me is the last phrase, "there is nobody cares. " A less imaginative, less empathetic writer than Shakespeare would have ended the sentence more predictably: he would have written, "nobody knows" and would have therefore repeated the commonplace that the future is unknowable. But Shakespeare raises the ante -- as he so often does. "Nobody cares" is demotic shorthand for "nobody else but we two care"-- which I take to suggest that Doll reflects not that the universe is dicey but rather that we are each of us isolated and unimportant except as we are valued by our nearest friends and the people with whom we have gone through life.
The sentence is nostalgic in the best sense. It is not sentimental; Doll does not romanticize hers or Falstaff's past. Instead she faces the aleatory universe bravely. You are at risk, it could turn out badly, let's be friends now, all that matters is the moment. The sentence is valedictory and at the same time extremely warm.
Perhaps I'm projecting my own feelings onto Doll Tearsheet. I'm at the point in my life in which I value (perhaps even treasure) the people whom I've worked with, or argued with, liked or loved. (I have even come to value some whom I've not loved.) They're all part of the fabric of my life and they are all disappearing, one by one -- going to the wars, we might say. And nobody cares. Except us.
October 22, 2014 in Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
A New Machiavel
I tried the first three installments -- a netflix diskful of episodes -- of House of Cards. I plan to watch a few more, but I'm deep into negative enthusiasm, not at all sure that I'm going to continue. Cards certainly grabs you, and it's startling and theatrical, but it's also far too cynical and depraved for my rose-colored tastes. I just don't believe in it. I know that it's all the rage to assume that politicians are horrid and power-obsessed -- but every one of them, all the time, without a moment of relaxation or redemption? And so I'm skeptical of every character, every twist in the plot, every nasty turn of phrase. And because I'm skeptical, I just can't, as they say, "get into it." Or at least, not all the way in. (Full disclosure: during episode three I fell into a 'deep rest,' sometimes denominated a minor nap.)
The character who dominates House of Cards is Kevin Spacey's Frank Underbelly -- I mean Underwood -- who is fascinating but not credible. Or rather, he is not designed to be credible, because he regularly violates the fourth wall and converses intimately with viewers. Underwood is ruthless, implacable, ambitious, vengeful, depraved, vicious, malignant, and amusing. He turns his audience into his co-conspirators.
And where have we seen this curious concatenation of traits before? Think back, fit audience though few, to your college class in the History of English Drama. There you encountered the vice and his crossbred friend, the machiavel,who were ubiquitous in medieval drama. Shakespeare brought this semi-supernatural hybrid to perfection two separate times -- once in the person of Richard of Gloucester in Richard III and then again as Iago in Othello.
Richard of Gloucester winks to his audience that he "can smile, and murder whiles I smile,/And cry 'Content' to that which grieves my heart, /And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,/ And frame my face to all occasions." Now if that isn't Frank Underhill to a T, first spotted killing a puppy and a few scenes later baldly and straightfacedly lying to his President. Richard can "set the murderous Machiavel to school" in order to gain a crown; our unFrank friend Frank once wanted to be secretary of state, but now he just wants revenge. Richard and Iago are capable not only of falsity but even of murder to get what they want. Both of them kill their own wives. "I'll have her, but I wlll not keep her long," says Richard of Queen Anne.
And therefore If I were to offer advice to Zoe Barnes, the reckless young reporter for the Washington Herald, I would suggest that she steer mighty clear of Frank Underwood. I would tell her to read Othello post-post-haste and take careful note of what happens to Desdemona's lady-in-waiting Emilia. Hint: "Fie, your knife upon a woman."
Zoe, please, please, get out of there while the going is good!
In Shakespeare's plays, Richard and Iago both overreach and come to grief. Richard is left to die on the battlefield and Iago is subjected to the rigors of Venetian justice ("Torture will ope his lips.") And that's what is supposed to happen to machiavels.
I'm curious as to what will happen to Frank Underhill. By rights he should be publicly humiliated and die a ghastly death. But inasmuch as we live in an exceedingly cynical age, we can guess that Frank will only die when Kevin Spacey is offered better work, or when ratings plunge, or when the series jumps its inherent shark.
February 23, 2014 in Books, Shakespeare, Television | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
I'm enchanted by a sentence in Othello that is spoken by Desdemona's lady-in-waiting, Emilia. She's helping Desdemona to undress and the two women are engaged in informal chat. Desdemona, perhaps wondering why she had the misfortune to fall in love with exotic Othello, allows her mind to wander. It comes to rest on a countryman of hers, a good-looking man named Ludovico. And then her interlocutor Emilia praises handsome Ludovico in words that should compel every sentient being to gasp in astonishment and admiration.
About Ludovico, Emilia makes a remarkable claim: "I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip."
All that needs to be said is, wow! But let me try to explain why the sentence so transfixes me.
It's hyperbole, but not the ordinary hyperbole of largest or smallest or coolest or most awesome. It's a hyperbole beyond hyperbole. A lesser writer might have said, "I know a lady who would have walked a long way to make love to him." Not Shakespeare. For "a long way," Shakespeare give us "barefoot to Palestine"; for "make love" he offers "a touch of his nether lip." It's extravagant and wheeling.
A hike, shod, to the holy land, would have been a long and exacting journey. Barefoot, beyond belief. The evocative word "Palestine" infuses religion and sanctity into a sentence about sex and desire -- and therefore generates a love-longing that is as powerful, as silly, and as ill-planned as a crusade. And for what aim? Not even, for this mythical lady hiker, a big, zonking, mouth-filling kiss; simply for the merest contact of lips. No, not even lips, just one lip -- the lower one. It's an hyperbole of minimalism.
In the poetry that Shakespeare knew from his childhood, it was men who would make the vows and undergo the trials to court their beautiful ladies. But this lovely sentence reverses the convention. It is, so to speak, Sadie Hawkins day in Venice.
Emilia elsewhere asserts that women have desires as strong as lovers of the other sex; here she demonstrates that women's love-longing can be as ridiculous (and as powerful) as men's.
And everyone who knows Othello will hear in the word "Palestine" an intimation of the violent act that once, many years ago, shook Aleppo.
August 30, 2013 in Books, Directional Disabilities, Dr. Metablog's Greatest Hits, Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (2)
A New Much Ado (2012)
The new Much Ado is a charming, understated success. The actors are not trained Shakespeareans; they're tv series folk, and they say the lines conversationally and casually, paying scant attention to the verse or to the mannered prose rhythms. It works, on the whole, although some of the great lines are delivered so unemphatically that they're swallowed and lost. Whoever would imagine that Benedick's "the world must be peopled' could slip by an audience without e'en a giggle. The text is judiciously pruned -- the only major omission the nighttime ceremony for presumably dead Hero -- but that's a scene that has always made me uncomfortable so I wasn't sorry to see it go. The Dogberry-Verges sequence is a brilliant deadpan triumph. There's very little added business, thank you, but what there is. is choice. The actress who plays Beatrice (Amy Acker) has borrowed so much from Emma Thompson's delivery (in the last filmed Much Ado) that if you were to close your eyes, you'd think that you'd time-traveled back to 1993.The director, whom I had never heard of but is apparently famous, is Joss Whedon. Thanks, Joss.
I've seen many many modern films in which hero and heroine don't get on at first but little-by-little find themselves in love and in marriage. But Shakespeare was there first. Beatrice and Benedick are the mom and pop of a half-a-zillion subsequent comedies. It's good to see them as alive and thriving as they are in this realization.
July 04, 2013 in Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
"Colloquial Conversation" in Othello
There is an ocean of difference between colloquial conversation in real life and the dialogue that appears in Shakespeare's works, even when his plays are at their least artificial and most mimetic.
In its most ordinary use, the word "conversation" means nothing more that the talk in which real men and women engage in the greater part of their social lives. These conversations might include formal or semi-formal events such as oration, debate, interview, negotiation, interrogation, official inquiry, ceremony , arbitration, sermon, lecture etc. -- all of them linguistic interactions that are governed by specific although for the most part unarticulated rules. "Colloquial" conversation, on the other hand, refers specifically to the wave of informal, unplanned, unregulated and unrehearsed exchanges that occur over dinner, on the street, by the water-cooler, at the tavern. Such conversations, although not incapable of eloquence, are on the whole disorderly, sprawling and haphazard. They are brimful of uncompleted or suspended thoughts (or thoughts introduced by one interlocutor and then either completed or re-directed by another), with syntactic collapse and improvisation , with references to shared experience that may seem to be grand leaps of logic to an eavesdropper but that are perfectly intelligible to the participants, with mumbles and grunts, extended pauses (some meaningless, some momentous), with apparently inexplicable ellipses, with overlaps in which a number of participants speak simultaneously, with unmediated zigzags from the profound to the trivial, with repetitions and backtracks, with mis-speakings, mis-hearings, clarifications, false starts, fragments, non-verbal but sometimes significant ecphoneses or "response crises" (ooh-ooh), and with a flotilla of other very ordinary and very natural curiosities. Real colloquial conversation is spontaneous; it is the activity of two or more intelligences working together to shape meaning. Real talk is essentially untranscribable, and students of conversation who have made an effort to set such interactions down on paper have had perforce to resort to elaborate and imperfect diagrams and codes.
In strong contrast, dialogue in Shakespeare's plays very seldom attempts to approximate colloquial conversation. And with good reason: Elizabethan dramas seldom stoop to represent the casual situations in which conversation is likely to occur. Instead, the circumstances upon which the plays dwell are typically formal or ceremonial, and the dialogue in which they are enacted consists for the most part of speeches that delineate an emotion or moral response to a conflict, of debates over the proper course of action, of reports on past or distant events, as well as judicial or ritualistic confrontation, soliloquy, meditation, prayer, boast, threat and counter-threat and various other kinds of regulated discourse in which the artless and random quality of ordinary talk would be entirely inappropriate. The dialogue in comedies, though in a different register, is equally artificial, consisting as it does, of wit-combats, jests, and the conceits that clownage keeps in pay. Shakespeare's most colloquial exchanges, unlike real-life conversation, are on the whole orderly, sequential, composed in intelligible syntax and in complete thoughts. It goes without saying that dramatic dialogue is, with the exception of the rare improvisational moment, not spontaneous at all but the studied product of a single controlling intelligence.
During the first years of his career as a playwright, Shakespeare experimented with a variety of revolutionary ways to compose dialogue (not generally, but on propitious occasions) that, although not in any real sense congruent to actual spoken conversation, nevertheless managed to create the illusion of a natural and colloquial sound. The employment of dialogue that might pass for real utterance was not an inheritance from earlier dramatists but was a craft that Shakespeare had to develop on his own. The fabrication of such dialogue is an unobtrusive art that does not call attention to itself -- in point of fact, colloquial conversation is most successful when it is least noticeable. While the great leviathan examples of Shakespeare's rhetorical mastery have been subjected to exhaustive analysis, colloquial conversation is so small and so inconspicuous a fish that it has managed for hundreds of years to slip the nets of critical analysis.
There is a finely-crafted instance of seemingly-natural colloquial conversation in Othello.
As Emilia helps Desdemona prepare herself for bed, the two women gingerly feel their way toward an issue of great sensitivity -- the domination of women by men. It is a relaxed and intimate conference, all the more obviously so because it follows in the wake of an anguished and highly-wrought -- and rhetorically elevated -- scene in which Desdemona has been slandered as an adulterer and as a daughter of the game.
What techniques does Shakespeare employ to make the exchange between Desdemona and Emilia appear quite so marvelously natural?
Attempting to console her sorrowful mistress, Emilia offers the opinion that it would have been better if Desdemona had never known Othello. Desdemona contradicts her serving-woman:
Des. So would not I: my love dost so approve him,
That even his stubbornness, his checks, his frowns
(Prithee unpin me) have grace and favor.
"Prithee unpin me" comes as a genuine surprise because it is syntactically discontinuous from the sentence in which it is embedded. It's a separate topic. Dialogue in Elizabethan drama ordinarily deals with issues sequentially rather than simultaneously, but dialogue begins to sound a bit like conversation when the interlocutors engage more than one subject at at time. That the two themes of the discourse are located on different rhetorical levels (the rather formal series of nouns in parallel -- stubbornness, checks, frowns-- in contraste to the offhand parenthetical instruction), suggests that something interesting and different is about to occur.
The progress toward real or realistic-sounding conversation, initiated with "unpin me here," continues when Emilia's response engages neither Othello's mysterious anger or Desdemona's unpinning, but introduces a third subject: "I have laid those sheets you bade me on the bed." With this sentence Emilia does more than simply resume a discussion of so ordinary a matter as bedclothes, she also replicates a common feature of colloquial conversation -- its practice of referring without overt signal to a past mutual experience -- i.e. "you bade me."
Now Desdemona drifts off in a direction of her own.
All's one: good faith, how foolish are our minds?
If I do die before, prithee shroud me
In one of these same sheets.
"All[s one" -- with its variant "all's one for that" is a common Elizabethan demotic catch phrase: here it serves a meaningless filler. Desdemona's meander from death to shrouds to sheets is designed to reflect her own private, internal non-volitional synaptic leaps. Her apology - "how foolish are our minds" - reflects both Desdemona's and Shakespeare's knowledge that the sentences violate the habit of dramatic dialogue in that they are ordered not by logic but by association.
Emilia's mild but polite rebuke ("Come, come, you talk") is followed by a sentence in which Desdemona introduces the fourth separate and distinct subject of this unfolding conversation.
My mother had a maid called Barbary.
She was in love, and he she loved proved mad,
And did forsake her.
Desdemona has fallen into a reverie in which she re-lives an experience of the childhood that Shakespeare has newly and spontaneously invented for her. In these two-and-a-half lines, Shakespeare audaciously allows Desdemona to introduce three new but extremely pertinent characters: Desdemona's mother, hitherto unknown to the audience, her mother's forsaken maid Barbary, and the maid's lunatic and inconstant lover. The effect of Desdemona's brief but poignant recollection is to reinforce the illusion that she is an autonomous speaker, giving shape to her sentences as they precipitate out of her battered and not-entirely-disciplined consciousness. An astute audience (or readership) will certainly notice that Desdemona projects her own plight onto these imaginary meta-beings, and although the psychological ramifications of their creation are rich indeed, Shakespeare's use of these improvised beings to mimic the habits of real talk is as fully wonderful.
Desdemona continues:
She (.e. Barbary) had song of willow.
An old thing 'twas, but it expressed her fortune.
And she died singing it. That song tonight,
Will not go from my mind. I have much to do
But to go hang my head all at one side
And sing it like poor Barbary.. Prithee dispatch.
To enforce the quotidian quality of the dialogue, Shakespeare invokes a phenomenon familiar to every reader or hearer: the tune that seems to repeat of its own accord in one's mind. The result: Desdemona has been provided with a memory, and her memory holds a song, and that song is now apparently going to sing itself independent of the character's own will. But what occurs is not only the illusion that Desdemona reveals an inner experience; it is also that these reflections are cast in such courageously monosyllabic language. And just to assure us that the characters not not float from their dock in the material universe, Desdemona's instruction to Emilia --"Prithee dispatch" - sustains the exact colloquial mode initiated by "Prithee unpin me" and anchors both women in the real present.
Both song and reverie are now shunted aside as the conversation comes to a small climax. The two ladies contineu to imitate the randomness of real talk:
Emelia. Shall I go fetch your nightgown?
Desdemona. No, unpin me here.
This Ludovico is a proper man.
Emilia. A very handsome man.
Desdemona: He speaks well.
Emilia: I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip.
Desdemona and Emilia drift from topic to topic: nightgowns leads by some unarticulated but easy-to-imagine route to Ludovico and his masculine allure, thence to Ludovico's habits of speech and at last to the very vivid and memorable 'lady in Venice" -- a colorful personage who springs from Emilia's fabricated pre-history, and who flashes across the stage in a hyperbole of brilliant but unstressed beauty (and whose inexplicable passion asserts that women can prosecute love-longing fully as irrationally as men). And then, just when it seems as if the maid Barbary has been left in the lurch and forgotten, the conversation turns back upon itself and Desdemona breaks into the song of the poor soul who sat sighing by a sycamore tree. To reinforce the apparent spontaneity of the moment, Shakespare makes Desdemona repeatedly interrupt (and even amend) her own singing : "Lay by these"... "Prithee high thee; he'll come anon"... "Nay that's not next. Hark who is't that knockes." This broken series of syntactically independent units, periodically intruded into the song, are invented for the sole purpose of giving emphasis to the naturalness and immediacy of the moment.
Shakespeare has therefore created the appearance of spontaeous conversation by forsaking the straight path of normative dramatic dialoge. Desdemona and Emilia intertwine present and past, real and fanciful, public and private, high language and low, song and speech, understatment and exaggeration, syntactic coherence and syntactic collapse, all within a context of shared knowledge and almost sisterly intimacy.
The colloquial moment is fleeting, for even before the scene comes to a close, Shakespeare returns to a more traditional dramatic idiom. Nevertheless, the episode has done important work: Emilia's great feminist manifesto ("Let husbands know,/ Their wives have sense like them") which will follow immediately after this exchange, has been so effectively grounded in a real, earthy, and contemporary context that it must stir every sensitive intelligence with its grand appeal to equity.
It has long been acknowledged that the exotic Moor speaks in a highly particularized, elaborate, and picturesque idiolect of his own - the music that sweeps in with the icy currents of the Pontic sea and allows the Moor's great dignity to find its expression. Desdemona and Emilia sing a far calmer but more original song, and their impromptu domestic duet is surely no less and perhaps even a greater artistic achievement than Othello's stupendous arias.
More on Othello: here, here, and here.
June 29, 2013 in Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Othello/ Otello
I prefer my opera to be aural rather than visual. Opera is a form that is made for listening, not watching -- at least in my view. The music, Mozart or Verdi, is frequently transcendent and most satisfying. But on those occasions when I venture to the opera house and I have to deal with the cultic, cachectic audience and the grand-opera worshippers as well as the ridiculous plots, the unhandsome singers, the interminable intermissions, the staginess and artifice and the general all-around silliness -- as well as pay through the nose for the privilege of doing so, well then, I'm not always a happy fellow.
I know the sound of Verdi's Otello moderately well, having played the Placido Domingo version often enough for the laser to have bored holes into the cd. Moreover, as it happens, I'm moderately familiar with Shakespeare's play). But I had never seen a performance of Otello until this past Saturday when we betook ourselves and our bagels and our Granny Smiths to the Century Theatre to watch the Metropolitan Opera's Live in HD performance. It was, frankly, glorious -- Renee Fleming in the electronic flesh, moving us to tears with the willow song (along with Verdi's bonus, dubious Ave Maria).
She was superb; so were the orchestra, the costumes, the sets, even the overacting, villainous Iago, who would have twirled his mustachios, if he had had them, and the non-acting, expressionless Othello.
Our "guide," a robust, comfortable mezzo whose name I should know but didn't catch, made the claim that Verdi's Otello improved upon Shakespeare's Othello. A highly dubious claim, I think, but then, I don't know how to measure the value of the grand "Othello music," that Shakespeareans so much admire, against the cellos and the bassoons. Whether for better or worse, however, there's a heck of a lot in Shakespeare's play that didn't make it across the centuries and genres and into Verdi's opera. More than can be said in a paragraph or a blaguepost.
For starters, Shakespeare created a multi-layered society, not just elaborate sets. His city of Venice has a sense of itself as a successful, orderly, civilized, and advanced community. Into this world strides Othello, not only an outlander but an African and a erotic exotic. Although Venice needs his soldiership, he's still a black man in a racist world who marries a willful patrician lady who prefers him to the "wealthy curled darlings of the nation." It's an unlikely, perilous match: he's "declined into the vale of years" while she's very very young. He's a soldier who's been around the world; she's the secluded mistress of the house affairs. He's commanding; she's naive.
Verdi must have loved Othello, although not necessarily for the right reasons. How could a play that ends on a bed, with a climactic murder-suicide, not have excited the instincts of the composer of Aida. Nothing more appropriate for grand opera than Othello and Desdemona -- and yet o so simple a representation compared with Shakespeare's rich figures and complex society.
Imagine a Merchant of Venice in which Shylock is not Jewish, or a King Lear in which Lear is a troubled forty-something and you're well on your way to grasping an Othello in which melanin is replaced with melodrama.
As a result, even when Verdi brought tears to my eyes, it was because I was seeing through the opera to the play that lies beneath it.
And sometimes I was crying because I so desperately missed the beauties and the profundity that Verdi had not seen fit to include.
October 30, 2012 in Music, Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
A Note on the Oxymoron
The oxymoron, a figure of speech in which there is a sharp contradiction between modifier and noun, has become a favorite of humorists: "business ethics," "military intelligence," "pretty ugly," "jumbo shrimp," "Christian Science," "Utah Jazz." But it's a figure that has a serious side as well.
The oxymoron has an long pedigree. It may go as far back as to a classical trope called the adynaton, or collection of impossibilities. There is a treasure-trove of oxymora in Alain of Lisle's thirteenth-century poem (or, more exactly, prosimetron) De Planctu Naturae in which "amor" is described as "pax odio, fraudique fides, spes juncta timor... mistus cum ratione furor,/ Naufragium dulce, pondus leve (peace in hatred, faith in fraud, hope joined to fear, madness mixed with reason, sweet shipwreck, light heaviness); there is a similar passage, from the same century, in Guillaime de Lorris extremely popular Romaunt of the Rose that begins "Love is a hateful peace and loving hate."
The oxymoron was given new life and vitality by Petrarch, whose sufferings for young Laura famously caused him to freeze in summer and burn in winter. Many sonneteers, continental and English, were indebted to Petrarch, among them Thomas Watson, a poet who flourished in the years of Shakespeare's adolescence. One of Watson's poems, which contained the lines "Love is sour delight, a sugared grief/ A living death, and everdying life" lay behind young Romeo's modish and easily parodied oxymoron-rich rhetoric: "O brawling love, o loving hate,/ O heavy lightness, serious vanity,/ Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,/ Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health... " Romeo was so besotted by modish poetry that Juliet couldn't resist a joke at his expense: "You kiss by the book."
Shakespeare knew that Romeo indulged too much of a good thing. Half a decade later, in All's Well That Ends Well, Helena imagines her perjured lover Bertram at the French court dancing attendance on the ladies in a series of oxymora: "his humble ambition, proud humility,/ His jarring concord, and his discord dulcet,/ His faith, his sweet disaster." With these lines, Shakespeare put an end to Petrarchan love-longing. But he was not done with the oxymoron.
Oxymora function best when they take the reader by surprise: "Parting is such sweet sorrow/ That I would say goodbye, til it be morrow." Or when they are there, but submerged rather than emphasized, as when, according to Edgar in King Lear, Gloucester is at last released from his suffering: "his flaw'd heart.../ 'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,/ Burst smilingly." Shakespeare had learned a great deal about poetry in the decade between Romeo and Lear. Where he might once have employed a simple oxymoron such as "grievous joy" or "joyous grief," he could now conceive the far more wonderful formulation, "burst smilingly."
March 27, 2012 in Language, Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
De Sternuente, or, Of Sneezing
I enjoy fighting off a sneeze. It takes practice and concentration. When the sneeze urge emerges, without warning, the battle is joined. On the side of the sneeze -- dust or some other foreign particles passing through the nasal hairs, reaching the nasal mucosa, releasing a flood of histamines which irritate the nerve cells and signal the brain to stimulate the trigeminal network and activate the pharyngeal and tracheal muscles, producing a noisy, 100-mile-an-hour blast of microbes and snot. On the side of restraint -- nothing but enormous personal discipline and the desire not to surrender to animal nature. There are some, who are less committed to mind-over-body, who employ the fingertips to pinch the end of the nose, or, alternatively, who press a knuckle against the philtrum, the infranasal depression which Shakespeare, curiously, called "the valley" -- but frankly, when it comes to resisting sternutation, digital success is only half a loaf. It's far more rewarding to think one's way to a rare victory in the lifelong sneezomachia. Not to sneeze is a triumph of the will.
Which is not to assert that a good sneeze gives no pleasure, if a person would give oneself over to it. It's simply that the sneeze, especially one of the window-rattling variety, is so entirely anarchic and inartistic, which might be why there is so slight a sneeze literature. Although hard to believe, it's a fact that Puck is the only character in all of Shakespeare's plays who deigns to mention the sneeze, and even he weakens its disruptive force by employing the archaism "neeze." The best-known literary sneeze (or, at least, the only one that comes to my mind) occurs in Pope's Rape of the Lock, when Belinda, ravished by Sir Plume's "glittering forfex," throws snuff in the baron's nose. Immediately "with starting tears each eye o'erflows,/ And the high dome re-echoes to his nose." Snuff artificially stimulates sneezing, which may or may not be be why Michael, Tsar of all the Russians, proposed amputating the noses of snuffers. Michael's contemporary, Pope Urban VIII, merely threatened excommunication. Some say that the practice of saying "God bless you" to sneezers originated with Pope Gregory the Great, and has to do with the superstition that the soul leaves the sneezing body, perhaps nasally.
Why is it that no one every says "God bless you" to farters, who are as much in need of divine intervention as sneezers. Society demands that farting, though shameful (and belching, though comic), should be controlled; sneezing is, except for the most determined, uncontrollable.
February 24, 2012 in Autobiography, Science, Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Shakespeare's Breasts
There's an event in Shakespeare's Cymbeline that both intrigues and baffles me -- perhaps because I have so pedestrian an imagination. Iachimo wagers that he can seduce Imogen, but he's forcibly rebuffed by the young princess. Unwilling to lose his bet, he resorts to a nasty subterfuge and smuggles himself into Imogen's bedroom while she's asleep. Iachimo's plan is to memorize some "natural notes about her body" so that he can claim to have "pick'd the lock and ta'en/The treasure of her Honour." Scoundrel that he is, he lifts up her blanket and peeps under her nightclothes. There he discovers "on her left Brest/ A mole, Cinque-spotted: Like the Crimson drops/ I'th' bottome of a Cowslippe." Armed with this intimacy, he prepares to confront Imogen's beloved Posthumus Leonatus and win the wager. It's a troublesome bit of business, and performers must decide whether to present the scene chastely, or erotically, or pruriently.
But there's also a problem of credibility that most moderns might overlook, but which troubles me. The first Imogen, the Imogen of 1610, was not a young woman but a pre-adolescent male actor. When Iachimo studied him/her closely enough to see the five-spotted mole, he saw no female breast at all. He pretended that he saw it and persuaded the audience that he had done so. Talk about efferontery. Talk about "suspension of disbelief."
How was the scene played? How did Shakespeare convince the playgoers that the absence of a breast equals the presence of a breast? And how did he do so without causing some of the cruder members of the audience to ruin the scene by guffawing or tittering.
It would seem that the playwright would try to hide or disguise the fact that his female characters were not female and that Imogen was a beardless, breastless boy. But in this scene, Shakespeare is anything but apologetic. In fact, he thrusts theatrical trickery right in the face of the audience. "I can make you believe anything," he seems to say. And why, indeed, should we boggle at a boy with breasts, when in the same scene, Imogen sleeps, even though she's not really sleeping. And Iachimo soliloquizes aloud and everyone in the audience conspires to pretend that Imogen doesn't know that he's there and wouldn't be awakened by his voice. So why not also agree to suspend our disbelief in the boy's female traits.
Perhaps it's my own downright mid-Westerm positivism, but the breastedness of the boy seems to me to present a different order of illusion than the belief in say, a highly-conventionalized device like the soliloquy. But Shakespeare does not compromise. Iachimo stares at an empty space, and says, that's a breast right there. And he looks at it not fleetingly or glancingly, but with great particularity. Look, there's a mole. There are five spots on it. Trust me.
The breasts, it must be conceded, are literary rather than real. Those crimson drops and the attendant cowslip are out of pastoral poetry, not out of observation. It would be tempting to claim that Cymbeline was written for the page rather than the stage If we didn't know better. Simon Forman, mountebank and astrologer, attended a performance of Cymbeline at the Globe in 1611 and reported that Iachimo "vewed her [i.e.Imogen] in her bed and the markes of her body." He saw "her"; he did not see a boy pretending to be "her" and he didn't make any fuss about her bosom. Case closed, perhaps.
Imogen's are not Shakespeare's only imaginary breasts. Lady Macbeth's breasts, though psychologically crucial, are less problematical because they are alluded to rather than unveiled. They're functional. "I have given Sucke, and know/ How tender 'tis to loue the Babe that milkes me,/ I would, while it was smyling in my Face,/ Haue pluckt my Nipple from his Bonelesse Gummes,/ And dasht the Braines out, had I so sworne." For me, it's easier to believe that the actor that played vicious Lady M. is a boy than to believe that the character ever either bore or loved an infant (there's no other mention of her manchild in the play). Nevertheless, Shakespeare had no compunctions about calling attention to the boy actor's absent nipples and even more so, his unlikely lactatory prowess. Lady Macbeth's breasts must be the least welcoming in literature, but they're not incredible.
An even more remarkable instance of nursing brings Cleopatra to her end. Cleopatra kills herself when she applies the asp to his/her non-existent breast. "Peace, peace:/ Dost thou not see my Baby at my breast/ That suckes the Nurse asleepe?" Cleopatra's quintessential mothering engenders a dimension of feminity that she has denied until the moment of death. In this case, the intensity of Cleopatra's language overwhelms any possible skepticism about her womanliness. Cleopatra's breasts are credible. More than credible -- unquestionable and undeniable.
They are a Shakespearean miracle.
February 03, 2012 in Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (0)
Cymbeline at the Barrow Street Theatre
I have a sour relationship with "the stage" -- and especially with staged Shakespeare plays. The theatre and I just don't get along. I think it's because my expectations are too grand. When I go to the theatre, I want to be ravished, but more often I'm bored, or worse than bored, embarrassed. I long to laugh, to cry, to be transported --but instead, I find myself to be entirely too conscious of the efforts and the contrivances of directors and designers and actors. Moreover, how am I supposed to achieve ecstasy when the guy in the next seat is snuffling and fidgeting and making inappropriate sounds at the wrong moments. And besides, I probably know more about the Shakespeare play that I'm watching than my comrades in the audience and I have opinions about what the play is supposed to mean and how it should be performed, and so I become intolerant and over-critical. And when one is busy criticizing, and one misses one's inexplicably-deleted favorite lines, one has strayed from the path that leads to rapture. When I sit still and concentrate on the book, I can achieve moments of private transcendence. When I'm at the theatre, the theatre gets in my way.
Despite all, I went to see ("hear," Elizabethans would say) Cymbeline at the Barrrow Street Theatre and, I joyfully confess, had a good time. Cymbeline isn't performed much and I had never seen it done (except for the pedestrian BBC-TV version, which doesn't count). I was in doubt whether such a long, complex, plot-heavy play could be performed. But the young Barrow Street people were earnest and enthusiastic and pretty and well-rehearsed. Their Cymbeline was swiftly-paced and offered some delightful moments. I was genuinely impressed.
But I was not satisfied. I was not transported.
Was it a problem with the delivery, or was it the fault of the listeners, that when Imogen learns that her husband/lover Posthumus Leonatus is at Milford Haven, and cries out, "O for a horse with wings," the audience laughed. Oh, please, audience, don't laugh, and please, actors, don't play it for laughs. Imogen's imaginative expression is designed to capture her frustrated yearning for the mate from whom she has been forcibly separated and to express all the sexual longing of vibrant youth. She's head over heels in love and she's not making a joke of it. A "horse with wings" is not a piece of grotesquerie, as the audience and the actors seemed to assume -- it's simply the fastest means of transport that anyone could imagine until 200 years after Cymbeline was written, when engineers started to play with the idea of a steam-driven engine. I so much wanted last night's Imogen to express, with that line, the kind of emotion that brings me to tears in my study. But alas.
And similarly, when Imogen and Posthumus are reconciled at last, and they embrace (an act that the the audience has been anticipating for hours), Posthumus is given the most poetically resonant line in the play. "Hang there," he says, "like fruit, my soul,/ Til the tree die." The line, compact of images, is just outside our easy comprehension, but we know at a minimum that trees take a very long time to die and that Posthumus and Imogen are now linked into one soul and that Imogen is like "fruit" in the sense of sweetness and juiciness and fertility -- indeed the ramifying plot has found its way to fruition. And so has the chain of imagery that began in the first moments of the play, when Imogen told us that her father, "like the tyrannous breathing of the north/ Shakes all our buds from growing." It took five acts, but those blighted buds finally ripened. I'm sorry to say that in the Barrow Street version, this touchstone of poetry was not emphasized but swallowed; if you weren't waiting for the line, you would have missed it entirely. Another moment of potential ecstasy surrendered.
But in all honesty, I must admit that if the players had paused to underline the sentence, I would probably be complaining that they treated the poetry too "poetically" and too portentously. Shakespeare is hard to play, and I'm hard to please.
But I'm not principally concerned that the Barrow boys and girls misread or neglected a line here or there. I'm concerned about their big compromise.
While enjoying the first four acts, I could not help but wonder how six performers on a rudimentary stage were going to deal with the theophany in the fifth act, when Jupiter himself descends from above on the back of an eagle and tells the audience not to worry, that everything is going to work out just fine. The scene is the most important in the play and it's what distinguishes Cymbeline from Shakespeare's earlier and easier and more-easily-performed comedies. But the theophany is hard, and hard to explain, and also, I'm sure, expensive. In my view, Barrow Street should have pulled the goalie and thrown a hail Mary downfield; lay it all out there. But instead, they took an intentional pass. O my gosh! they took a razor to the entire business. No Jupiter, no eagle, no wondrous, mystical, symbolic appearance of Posthumus's lost family, no soothsayer, no riddle, and therefore, I'm sorry to say, no enchantment and no miracle. No miracle, no Cymbeline, at least no Cymbeline as it is known and loved by such as I.
Here's what I think happens in Cymbeline. For four and a half acts, human beings make a mess of things. The king is blinded by uxoriousness, the queen is a machiavellia, Posthumus is vain, Cloten is simply stupid. The characters tie themselves into plot knots and everyone is deceived in part or in whole (although Shakespeare witholds nothing from the audience). Cymbeline thinks his sons are lost, Posthumus thinks Imogen is dead, Lucius Brutus thinks Imogen is a boy, Imogen thinks that Posthumus has been beheaded, and so on. Everyone is wrong; no one knows the whole truth.
And then comes the miracle. Jupiter descends, and 20, or 21, or 22 (depending on who's counting) mistakings are unravelled in five amazing, astounding minutes. Cymbeline is a tragedy for four and half acts and a comedy at the end. And should be played so. Take away Jupiter and take away the miracle. A play about human folly and divine intervention becomes nothing more than Twelfth Night or As You Like It. which is not a bad thing to be, but not what Shakespeare was doing in 1610. It's like scissoring Marina's magical virginity out of Pericles, or Hermione's rebirth out of The Winter's Tale, or Prospero's magic out of The Tempest. It's not right. It undervalues a most thrilling, most remarkable piece of writing. Even those of us who don't believe in miracles want to believe in Shakespeare's miracles.
But -- the Barrow Street guys and gals inspired me to re-read Cymbeline, and, all alone, just me and my Kindle, I once again indulged my ecstasy. So thank you.
January 19, 2012 in Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
"Paradise" in Measure for Measure
The word to watch in a most riveting speech in Measure for Measure is "paradise."
Young Claudio. whose head is scheduled to be lopped off tomorrow morning, is the speaker. He panics -- and why shouldn't he? After all, his only slip is that he has impregnated his ladylove Juliet. A venial sin, yet in newly-puritanical Vienna, the act of love has led directly to the executioner with his ax and his big black block. Although everyone, certainly including Shakespeare himself, knew that there were many things far worse than to depart this vale of trouble and tears, Claudio is so terrified by his imminent execution that he goes off the philosophical rails. He argues the extreme position (and here comes the speech and the crucial word) that "The weariest and most loathed worldly life/ That age, ache, penury and imprisonment/ Can lay on nature is a paradise/ To what we fear of death." A "paradise?" Goodness gracious!
Although everyone can sympathize, no one should agree with Claudio. Neverthless, the three-and-a-half lines of verse that contain the climactic word "paradise" (and indeed the long speech in which these lines reside) are so brilliant and colorful that they almost persuade us to do so. One of the reasons the sentence is so wonderful is because Shakespeare brings to bear one of his favorite and most useful figures of speech. To depict Claudio's hysteria, Shakespeare employs a full-throttle hyperbole.
The most transparently hyperbolical words are the grammatical superlatives "weariest" and "most loathed." The hyperbole that resides in the word "paradise" is less obvious but more potent. "Paradise" is the climax -- the word that any good actor or reader must hit hard when he recites or reads the passage. An hyperbolist less gifted than Shakespeare might have written "The weariest and most loathed life is pretty darn good compared to dying," but our author pulls out all the rhetorical stops. To lie in poverty, in pain, in prison is, Claudio asserts, compared to death, a "paradise."
If, dear attentive and intelligent reader, you will now return to quotation, and read Claudio's lines again, you will feel the hyperbolical power of "paradise." Try it, please. And when you recite the sentence, you will also notice that the initial "p" in climactic "paradise" is prepared for by the plosives in the words that precede it -- "penury" and "imprisonment."
And if you are following instructions and reading aloud, you should be aware that in Shakespeare's time, "ache" was pronounced "aitch" -- a pronunciation that produces a strong and ingenious contrast between the affricates (age, aitch) and the plosives (penury, imprisonment, paradise).
Claudio's hyperbolical lines bring to conclusion a speech which is querulous at the start and panicky at the end. Here they are in context.
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where.
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod, and the delighted spirit
To bath in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling. 'Tis too horrible.
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
("Cold obstruction" means that the body no longer moves -- as opposed to "sensible" (i.e capable of sensation or feeling) "warm motion". A "kneaded clod" is what a "warm motion" is compressed or compressible into by death. A "delighted spirit" is generally glossed as "formerly capable of delight" but is better understood as "darkened" -- that is, de-lighted. "Viewless" means simply "invisible.")
Shakespeare does not feel obliged to distinguish or judge between these painful visions of an afterlife; instead, he prefers simply to heap together naturalistic, Christian, pagan and "lawless" ideas.
Students of hyperbole will take note of the inventive phrase "worse than worst," where, it seems, "worst" is insufficiently superlative. Here Shakespeare pushes against the limits of grammar. Bad, worse, worst suffices for most writers, but Shakespeare invents a new adjectival category -- a comparative superlative.
Shakespeare's interest in the worstness of things will reappear in King Lear when Edgar, encountering his blinded father, realizes that he has not yet touched bottom: "O Gods. Who is't can say "I am at the worst?'/ I am worse than e'er I was." And then an worser insight comes to him: "And worse I may be yet: the worst is not/ So long as we can say 'This is the worst.'" For Edgar, of course, death, that so frightens Claudio, is understood to be a relief and a liberation. Edgar's father dies "smilingly."
November 14, 2011 in Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Why We Love Macbeth: Two More Reasons
Pound for pound, Macbeth is of all Shakespeare's plays the most unrelenting and horrifying.
One of its greatest moments occurs when Macbeth, seeking additional guidance, pays a second call on the witches. "How now," he demands, "you secret, black, and midnight hags!/ What is't you do?" The witches' response to his question, though exceedingly laconic, is far scarier than anything the most computer-aided-pixelbending horror movie could produce. They simply say: "A deed without a name." Every member of the audience, and every reader, knows that the witches are up to no good, but do they know how bad it is? No. The audience now learns that what the witches are doing is so loathsome that there's not even a word for it in the English language (and Shakespeare, of all people, had English to spare). What could they possibly mean by "a deed without a name?" Such a deed must be superlatively evil, worse than anything that the most depraved reader or listener could possibly guess. The immensely suggestive phrase "A deed without a name" pushes the limits both of imagination and language.
Another magnificent moment comes when Macbeth imagines that Banquo, whom he knows to have been murdered, has taken a seat at his feast. Macbeth is startled and frightened, but he is also indignant -- so indignant that his outrage becomes almost comic. He lapses into a reverie.
Blood hath been shed ere now, i' the olden time,
Ere human statute purged the gentle weal;
Ay, and since too, murders have been perform'd
Too terrible for the ear: the times has been,
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end; but now they rise again,
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,
And push us from our stools: this is more strange
Than such a murder is.
Macbeth asserts that it used to be the case, both in olden times, before Scotland became civilized, and even into recent days, that there was a natural order to things. If you killed a man ("when the brains were out"), that person had the decency to stay dead ("the man would die/ And there an end"). But now, in these degenerate times, murdered men return and "push us from our stools." Macbeth, who is under the spell of demons and who has committed atrocity after atrocity, claims to be more "natural" than the spectre of Banquo, who is "unnatural." In his eyes, killing people is the new normal, and it goes against the grain when you kill a guy and he doesn't stay killed. It's odd and lovely that Macbeth believes that he has a sincere grievance with the world, especially when he's the one who has thrown things completely out of whack. His exasperated complaint shapes itself into a weird, ironic, perverse nostalgia for better days. We almost -- but not quite -- feel for him.
Brain Chemistry, Macbeth, Nihilism
Our understanding of the human brain is mighty slim. As a consequence our therapies for insanity, for head injuries, and for dementia are primitive.
When John Donne was dying in 1633, his physicians tied pigeons to his feet. Present-day medicine offers remedies for Alzheimer's sufferers that are no more effective than pigeon tying. Brainwise, we linger in the dark ages (which, by the way, has now been rebranded as "late antiquity"). Or the early medieval period.
Not to say that nothing is known about the brain. There have been advances.
To bring myself up-to-date, I read The Tell-Tale Brain by V. S. Ramachandran, a book which has been making a stir in pop-science circles. Ramachandran's sensible thesis is that there are structures in the human brain that are either undeveloped or that simply don't exist in the brains of apes. To posit so is simply common sense. Human beings do things that apes don't: they study themselves in the mirror, they compose and play piano sonatas, and they think about their place in the universe.
Ramachandran is an ingenious experimenter but he gets beyond his depth when he waxes philosophical -- which he does far too often. Here's an example of the kind of thinking that rubs me wrong.
"I get chills," says Ramachandran, "whenever I hear Macbeth's immortal soliloquy 'Out out, brief candle!/Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/ And then is heard no more. It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.'" He says that "these words are one of the most profound and deeply moving remarks about life that anyone has ever made!"
I don't question Ramachandran's chills, which are his own business, but I'm bothered by his unthinking Bardolatry ("immortal solilquy"; "profound"; "that anyone has ever made"). Poor Will doesn't need any more reverent cliches to be shoveled upon him. He's already buried under heaps of them.
Bardolatry such as Ramachandran's obstructs thinking. What does it mean to say that Macbeth's soliloquy is "profound... about life?" Let's go to the tape.
When Macbeth says these words, he's under the spell of the witches, who are "instruments of darkness." At their suggestion, he's murdered his king, murdered his closest friend Banquo and Banquo's son Fleance, and he's "savagely slaughtered" Macduff's wife and children ("All my pretty ones... All my pretty chickens and their dam/ At one fell swoop"). Moreover, he's committed uncatalogued atrocities innumerable: "Each new morn/ New widows howl, new orphans cry." His brain is "filled with scorpions" and just before he utters the soliloquy that gives Ramachandran the goosebumps, he learns that his wife, burdened with guilt, has done herself in. Macbeth is not in a good way.
Macbeth is not a role-model and his philosophical ruminations are neither insightful or profound. Quite the opposite. Though Macbeth is undeniably eloquent, he's become a shallow nihilist. Life, in fact, is not "a tale told by an idiot" and in Shakespeare's late-medieval religious universe, only someone in the throes of the deepest despair, and certain that he is damned for all eternity, would think so. Macbeth has learned exactly the wrong lesson. So, apparently, has Ramachandran.
Gosh, great literature can sometimes be dangerous, can't it?
It's no secret that the universe with its billions and billions of galaxies will go on very well without us. Shakespeare, like everyone else, knew that when looked at from the strictly scientific point of view, human beings are no more than "many a thousand grains/ That issue out of dust." But just because we're tiny and it's enormous, we're not compelled to admire the despairing and empty philosphy to which Macbeth subscribes.
Not while there are red wheelbarrows, winter love in dark corners, and "little nameless, unremembered acts/ Of kindness and of love."
June 10, 2011 in Science, Shakespeare, Wisdom | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
My Swiss Cheese Brain
As a youth, I could memorize poetry with great ease. Nowadays, with a toe into the water of my eighth decade, what was once a snap has become a frustration. But inasmuch as the authorities continually remind us geezers that we need to keep the intelligence well-lubricated, I persist. Yet it now takes two or three hard weeks to memorize a speech in one of Shakespeare's plays that, fifty years ago, I might have learned in less than an hour.
I've been trying to commit to the old brain Othello's magnificent speech about wooing Desdemona -- the one with "antres vast and deserts idle" -- about which I reported last week. Instead of memorizing fluently and quickly, my swiss cheese brain continually generates gaps, fissures and holes. For example, take this passage.
This to hear would Desdemona seriously incline
But still the house affairs would draw her thence
Which ever as she could with haste dispatch
She'd come again, and with a greedy ear
Devour up my discourse.
There's no reason why this sentence shouldn't be easy enough. I read and study it, but when I shut the book and try to recite, it comes up this way:
She'd come again and with a greedy [empty space]
The word "ear" has evaporated, or rather fallen into the black hole of memory, or gotten stuck in the synaptic link between two nerve cells.
I peer into the book once again and take a second crack.
She'd come again and with a greedy ear
Devour up my [empty space].
Ear appears, discourse disappears. And so on through the thirty-two line passages. Nouns sink beneath the waves and then bob to the surface. And these lacunae occur again and again. And again.
It is fascinating to me that I retain the rhythm of the pentameter line and that I always know that I am missing a two-syllable noun. Nevertheless, the precise word will not emerge -- at least at the moment that I need it. But it's there, coated with polysaccharides, lurking in an obscure empty space behind a neuron. It's astonishing that the words that disappear are almost always nouns. I have very little trouble with other parts of speech. But then noun-loss is a recognized characteristic of your "mature" brain.
Because it has taken so long to memorize, I have become extremely well-acquainted with the speech. Slow motion has its advantages. Othello tells us that Desdemona would come "with greedy ear [to] devour up [his] discourse." It wasn't until I had gone over that sentence a hundred times that I realized that Shakespeare used "devour" to connect with the "cannibals that do each other eat" in the earlier part of the speech. It's a purposeful comparison: while wandering and errant Othello encountered anthropophagi, domestic Desdemona, confined to house affairs, was only able to eat words.
Clever fellow, that Will S.
December 03, 2010 in Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Antres, Antrees, Antars
One of my loyal readers (see "Comments" to previous post) wants to know how the word "antres" was pronounced. It's a reasonable inquiry but like many questions about Shakespeare, its answer is not easy.
I myself pronounce "antres" just as I would "antlers," but without the "l". If I were to guess at an Elizabethan pronounciation (and it would be a guess, even though I've stumbled through the volumes on Shakespearean pronounciation by Kokeritz and Cercignani), I would say the word with a more open initial vowel: "ahnters." But can we ever be certain how words were pronounced four hundred years ago? Especially nonce-words like antres?
Moreover, Shakespeare did not spell antres, "antres.' Antres is a brilliant editorial intervention that made its initial appearance in Lewis Theobald's The Works of Shakespeare in 1733.
The first time that Othello saw print, in the 1622 quarto, antres was "Antrees." The second time, in the first Folio of 1623, antres was "Antars." Are either one of these spellings, each of which yields a different pronounciation, authoritative? It is impossible to know. With some plays, it's clear that F was set from Q, and that therefore any divergences are likely to be errors. But in the case of Othello, Q and F descend independently from a lost original (and it's likely that Q reveals evidence of the interpolations and misunderstandings of actors). Neither "Anteers" or "Antars" is definitive. Either pronounciation can therefore be justified.
Perhaps Shakespeare changed his mind. Perhaps a scribe or a typesetter, struggling with a unique and unfamiliar work, took a guess. The rest is silence.
November 19, 2010 in Language, Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
All About Antres
November 14, 2010 in Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (2)
In Which the Blogger Loses his Cool
The Takacs Quartet graces us with six superb concerts a year. It's true that they sometimes hanker after strange new composers -- Psathos, Part etc. -- whose compositions set my teeth on edge like the vile squealings of the wry-necked fife or like a brazen canstick turned or like the gratings of a dry wheel on an axletree -- but mostly they play what distinguished Quartets are ordained to play, that is, the great central European tradition from Haydn to Brahms. But last night, the Takacs, eek and alas, ventured into new and grim territory. Horribile dictu, they offered an original, commissioned Drama that purported to be Serious and Illuminating. It warn't. It was a interminable playlet about Beethoven's last years founded on the composer's letters and conversation books. It was barren. It was predictable, uninsightful, reductive, shallow, witless, dull, and pretentious. I started to squirm (boredom feeding on embarrassment and embarrassment on boredom) after a couple of minutes, then broke into a sweat, but after a few minutes resigned myself to my middle-of-the-row captivity and I did what I always do in such situations -- recited to myself long-ago-memorized poetry. When the Drama mercifully ended, I was consoled to hear the woman in front of me (a member of the music faculty) say to her companion, "Do you think they know how bad that was?"
Do they? I hope so. I hope that the playwright, a tyro named ------ Morse, recognizes that he's not Tom Stoppard or even Tom Stoppard diluted to a 1% tincture, and that he takes up a profession that inflicts less pain on innocent bystanders.
I left dispirited, especially for the actors, who tried to force a marriage of Shakespearean style of performance to prosaic vocabulary and sentence structures. I do not use the word "Shakespearean" in a good way: I refer to that highly artificial, unnatural way of speaking and moving that, inherited and debased from an ancient tradition, has stupefied and narcotized dutiful culture-hungry audiences at summer festivals all over America. Shakespeare himself was clear that he did not want his actors to strut and bellow, but strut and bellow was what they did last night. If the actors did not split the ears of all the groundlings, they certainly split mine. Why do they speak in that ridiculous manner when their aim should be "to hold the mirror up to nature." It's wrong of me to say so, but I felt that I could look into the soul of the actor who played Beethoven and see a man who imagined that he was playing Lear at the Old Vic, when he was in fact performing in a play that might, just might, satisfy the requirements for an M.A. in creative writing at some off-brand college ("he's worked very hard on this so we might as well pass him"), and that he was going to show "them" how it's done, but instead he offered us sufferers a copy of a copy of a pale copy.
Egads, I'm breaking into a sweat again just thinking about it.
I pay good money to hear the Takacs -- and concert after concert, I get my money's worth, and much more. I want Schubert. I want Mozart. If I wanted amateur theatricals, I would the local dinner theater. Or the high school around the corner.
November 02, 2010 in Music, Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Who Is Violenta? What Is She?
Here's a puzzle about a character's name that will interest detectives or dedicated Shakespeareans -- and perhaps only the most dedicated of Shakespearean detectives.
As everyone knows, the "heroine" and dominant figure in Twelfth Night is an audacious, sensitive, and intelligent young lady to whom Shakespeare gave the name Viola. It is Viola who, shipwrecked on the Illyrian shores, disguises herself as a man, enlists herself as a servant to Duke (or Count) Orsino, whom she rapidly comes to admire, and is then dispatched by Orsino to woo in proxy his beloved, Lady Olivia the recalcitrant. Viola has the misfortune, while in mannish guise, to provoke Olivia's romantic interest. The complications that arise from these mistakings take five amusing acts to resolve. But it's Viola's play, from first to last, and there is no question about her identity or her name.
Viola first comes on stage in the second scene of the play. The stage direction in the 1623 Folio is unambiguous. Enter Viola, a Captaine, and Saylors. In the speech headings throughout the play, Viola regularly appears as Vio., just as Maria is Mar., Clown is Clo., and Malvolio is Mal. There is but one exception to this practice -- and here begins the mystery. In the middle of Act 2, scene 5, Viola comes as ambassador to Olivia but the stage direction reads, inexplicably, Enter Violenta. Who is Violenta, what is she? Inasmuch as Viola's name has been and will continue to be Viola, how did it happen that just this one time she comes to be called by a similar but very different name? The most likely explanation is that it's a mere slip -- either an error of the compositor who set the Folio line, or an error of the scribe who made a fair copy of Shakespeare's manuscript, or of W. S. himself, nodding over his quill and inkhorn.
But for Shakespeareans, "Violenta" is most interesting name. While the playwright created no characters named Violenta, there was one time when he came very close to doing so. The near-Violenta almost appears in All's Well That Ends Well, the play that is printed in the Folio just before Twelfth Night. In All's Well, Helen, who is obsessed with Bertram, pursues her absconded and disloyal husband to Florence. There she discovers that Bertram has been wooing a woman called Diana. But Diana was not originally conceived as Diana. She had a momentary and evanescent pre-existence as Violenta. Enter old Widdow of Florence, her daughter, Violenta and Mariana, with other Citizens." So says the stage direction, but in the scene that the s.d. introduces, there is no Violenta. No person of that name says a word. In her stead there appears a Diana (or Dia.), whose entrance onto the stage is unannounced. Diana appears where Violenta was heralded. Clearly Shakespeare changed his mind.
It is therefore clear that the Folio compositors were working with a holograph that preserved Shakespeare's first thoughts. Diana, the o-so-pure maid whom Bertram cannot conquer, was orignally intended to be Violenta, who, it is reasonable to infer from her name, would have repelled the young seducer's advances not with virtue but with shrewishness. Later, when Shakespeare altered his conception, Violenta turned into the mirage or ghost who both is and is not present in All's Well.
The Violenta of All's Well can therefore be understood as a first pass at Diana. But what possible explanation is there for the substitution of Violenta for Viola in Twelfth Night? It's a hard question, and the not-entirely-satisfactory but best answer is that the typesetter who worked on both of these plays (Compositor B, so-called) carried the name from one play to the other. Let us suppose that he had just set "Enter... Violenta" in All's Well when he resumed work on Twelfth Night. There he encountered the abbreviation "VIo." and, the longer name still reverberating in his mind, expanded Vio. to Violenta.
That's the end of the story. But there's a fascinating postscript. When, in All's Well, Bertram makes his move on Diana, there's this exchange (including the introductory stage direction):
Enter Bertram, and the Maide called Diana.
Ber. They told me that your name was Fontybell.
Dia. No, my good Lord, Diana.
Fontybell? Beautiful fountain? It would seem that Diana/Violenta once had still another name. Or that Shakespeare wants us to think so.
"They told me that your name was Fontybell" is a pure, lovely, and haunting line of poetry, but it's unrelated to anything else in the play. It's a free-standing mystery, utterly without explanation.
More Real Shakespeare Mysteries can be found here, here, here.
Prostituting that Past-Cure Malady
i''ve read All's Well that Ends Well many times (thrice just in the last week), always with puzzlement and dissatisfaction. It's a confused and confusing play. My best guess is that Shakespeare got going on some appealing but intractable material and struggled with it for many years but was never able to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion.
Until this last reading, I had never paid much attention to the King of France who is, I think, more of a plot mechanism than a rounded character. Shakespeare never even bothered to give him a first name -- he's "King" but whether Charles or Louis or Lothair we're never told. He plays a crucial part in the fable, because, dying of a "fistula," he is cured by our heroine Helen and in exchange grants her the husband of her choice (her obsession, actually) -- the handsome soldier and lout Bertram. Later in the play, after Bertram has fled from the marriage, the King again intervenes to restore him (against his will) to Helen. The King is short-tempered and highly conscious of his regal status -- as Kings are in literature -- but he is not particularly eloquent or interesting.
But in my most recent reading, I was struck by some lines that I had not registered in my salad days. Helen urges the King to allow her to try her "receipts" (i.e. prescriptions or drugs) on him. He resists, of course, simply so that Helen may overcome another contrived obstacle. But the King's sentences, fable apart, are very pertinent, most particularly to those of us who have staggered to life's endgame:
We thank you, maiden,
But may not be so credulous of cure,
When our most learned doctors leave us and
The congregated college have concluded
That laboring art can never ransom nature
From her inaidable estate. I say we must not
So stain our judgment, or corrupt our hope,
To prostitute our past-cure malady
To empirics, or to dissever so
Our great self and our credit to esteem
A senseless help, when help past sense we deem.
"Empiric" is Shakespearean for "phonies." The King will not compromise his rationality or his dignity by indulging himself with the sixteenth-century version of faith-healers, herbalists, reiki masters, homeopaths, naturists or any other of the enormous plague of quack-quacks who litter our anti-rational landscape.
Good for him, I say, even though, as it turns out, he's wrong and the maiden successfully works her receipts. Shakespeare keeps us out of the sickroom, so we don't know exactly what she prescribes (just as well), but we do learn that the credulous bystanders attribute the cure not to science but to divine intervention. As the very orthodox and conventional Lafeu puts it, "They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons to make modern (i.e. routine, everyday) and familiar, things [that are] supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear (i.e. fear of the unknown)" -- an interpretation that might made sense in Shakespeare's scientifically-ignorant late medieval world, but which is no longer applicable.
Nevertheless, I trust that when my time comes, I will follow the King's good example and come to terms with reality rather than succumb to irrationality and "esteem a senseless hope."
October 24, 2010 in Science, Shakespeare | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
We Are All Frail/ Brooks Conrad
Even moderately serious baseball-watchers know that we've just experienced a disaster of the Mickey Owens-Willie Davis-Bill Buckner variety. Poor Brooks Conrad, a journeyman infielder, playing for the Atlanta Braves in an important playoff game, committed three horrible errors. He bobbled a ball, dropped a popup, and then, with the game on the line, let a routine grounder go right through his legs. He was nutmegged, as they say in soccer. Game over, Atlanta eliminated. The hi-def TV camera focussed on him, allowing millions of Americans to lipread the poor guy's puzzled, exasperated, embarrassed, "What the fuck." Interviewed after the game, Conrad was more decorous but no less defeated: "I wanted to dig a hole and go to sleep in it."
Sleep won't do it, because Conrad's errors will be re-played forever and ever and ever.
The play that lost the game was one that Brooks Conrad has made time and time again -- at Arizona State, during his ten years in the minors, and during his three-year (229 at bats, 53 hits) and now completed major league career. He wouldn't have been in the game -- as a substitute for the injured Martin Prado -- if he didn't have the ability to put a glove on a pop fly or handle a ground ball. One of the announcers called it accurately: "they say you make errors with the glove but in this case the problem is right between his ears." Brooks Conrad somehow lost the ability to do things that should have been entirely routine -- which is why I feel so sorry for him, and why I identify so strongly with him. It could happen to anybody, anytime. I remember once driving along on a big four-lane and for a second I forgot which foot operated the accelerator and which the clutch. I panicked, momentarily, but I recovered, and no one every knew. I didn't have millions of people watching me and clucking.
I'm glad to say that the next day, when Brooks took the field during warmups (he was mercifully held out of the game), Atlanta fans gave him a big cheer. "We are all frail," as Angelo says, and it's not wrong for us to be reminded of it once in a while. But poor Brooks, condemned to a lifetime of waking up in the middle of the night, Buster Posey's grounder skidding past his glove and through his legs, runners endlessly, one after another, in an infinitely loop, crossing home plate to the deafening roar of the crowd.
October 14, 2010 in Shakespeare, Sports | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

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