tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-56903576127332872822024-03-05T18:13:06.618-08:00shakespeare in fiction and fact: grace tiffanyRiveting fiction and Shakespeare chat for lovers of the English RenaissanceGrace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.comBlogger117125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-8805925903911848262022-05-23T10:23:00.012-07:002022-05-24T08:40:02.859-07:00REALLY Minor Characters in Shakespeare<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM7B7cg7rgANOHGPTXyjT76CVm7lpxuBww7dt7K_scvOjZRHO0k_QbVZf1dT3pY6WjF7eOa5Y9uLATzLLw752kAHeG4y3WkRRqHvSL_ak5EJUO5qVe5zqpardcECNPha-2724t31o_EBd5aYaAvBibdZluFLCgCxgNlfAgEzG-iSwLil0JXCEpi_nItw/s870/Cornelius.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="521" data-original-width="870" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM7B7cg7rgANOHGPTXyjT76CVm7lpxuBww7dt7K_scvOjZRHO0k_QbVZf1dT3pY6WjF7eOa5Y9uLATzLLw752kAHeG4y3WkRRqHvSL_ak5EJUO5qVe5zqpardcECNPha-2724t31o_EBd5aYaAvBibdZluFLCgCxgNlfAgEzG-iSwLil0JXCEpi_nItw/s320/Cornelius.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />Let's talk about the minor characters in Shakespeare. I mean the <i>really </i>minor characters, those whose parts are so small, some of them don't even have names. Not that namelessness is necessarily equivalent to minor character status. <i>Hamlet'</i>'s Gravedigger has one scene, but he's not a small character. <i>Henry V</i>'s "Boy" is not a minor character, nor is the Porter in <i>Macbeth</i>. And then we have the named characters whom we rarely think of when we refer to the plays, but who nevertheless are crucial to the action. <i>As You Like It</i>’s Silvius, <i>Henry
IV</i>'s Bardolph, and <i>A Midsummer Night's Dream</i>'s Peter Quince are major characters. <i>Macbeth</i>'s Ross is a secondary character, but one so significant that in Joel Coen's recent adaptation of the play, he takes over the whole script (being outplayed only by Banquo's eyebrows).<p></p><p></p><p>So, what characters am I talking about? Ones most people don't even know exist, so microscopic is their presence in the play. Yet, like many trace elements, these characters are catalysts for the action, or for the illumination of some larger character or theme.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Adrian (<i>The Tempest</i>): Okay, Adrian is an exception to all that. He's been called, and is, the most boring character in Shakespeare. This servant of King Alonso exists only to be made fun of by snide Antonio (the hero Prospero's villainous<span></span></p><a name='more'></a> brother) and his sidekick Sebastian in the first scene of act two. That's a purpose, sure, but Antonio and Sebastian already have enough food for mockery in good old Gonzalo, the main butt of their humor in this scene. Adrian is the young "cock'rel," in contrast to Gonzalo, the "old cock," and what he does is say a couple of lines admiring the island landscape and then fall asleep. I include him here only because the degree to which he is a nonentity is remarkable. Perhaps Shakespeare promised somebody a part.<p></p><o:p></o:p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Seyton (<i>Macbeth</i>): Now, Seyton is interesting. Why? Because his name is pronounced "Sa-TAN!" (Picture Dana Carvey saying this as a shrieking Church Lady.) Seyton is Macbeth's servant, but, interestingly, he doesn't show up til act 5, wherein he plays an important role. "<i>Enter </i>Seyton," in response to Macbeth's call: "Sa-TAN!" (OK, he usually doesn't say it like that. But I did once hear an unusually comic Macbeth in Chicago do it this way.) Macbeth calls him right after he has resigned himself to the loss of all the things a good king has -- "honor, love, obedience, troops of friends" -- because he's not a good king. Then he calls out, "Seyton!," and asks for his armor so he can go out and kill more people. In a subsequent scene, Seyton is the one who plunges Macbeth further into despair -- or dark resignation -- by reporting the death of his wife. And then, having done his devilish job, he disappears. Coen gave Seyton's lines to Ross. But they belong to Seyton.</p><p class="MsoNormal">Emilia (<i>The Winter’s
Tale</i>): No, not that Emilia. Not Desdemona's waiting-woman in <i>Othello</i>. That one's a major character. This one is so minor you may never have noticed her. Who is she? A loyal servant of maligned, jailed Queen Hermione; a minor lady who facilitates the more famous and heroic Paulina's errand of mercy to the queen and her newborn daughter. Shakespeare's late plays, among them <i>The Winter's Tale</i>, revisit his tragic plots and change them, making sympathetic characters more powerful, as well as altering the plays' timing so that wounds heal, or tragic actions fail of their effect. In this play, written some six years after <i>Othello, </i>Shakespeare allows this Emilia a power he denied his first one. This one escapes manipulation by a devious husband, outspokenly defends her mistress against the false charge of adultery, and doesn't die in the process.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Cornelius and Voltemand (<i>Hamlet</i>): How strange, that when we already had Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, we also needed Cornelius and Voltemand. Who are they, except for pale reflections of the already sad R & G? Like the more famous pair, these Danish courtiers go everywhere together. (Since a famous modern Cornelius is the ape from <i>Planet of the Apes, </i>it would be interesting and enjoyable to have them played as twin apes.) Voltemand gets all the dialogue. Claudius asks him, "Say, Voltemand, what from our brother Norway?," and gets a 16-line answer: Norway's fine, he's controlling Fortinbras. What is Cornelius for? Why does he even have to be there? He's like the shadow of a shadow of a shadow. And then they're both gone. It seems that there need to be two of everyone in this play. Old Hamlet and Old Fortinbras, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two gravediggers, etc. It's like a hall of mirrors. Speaking of character pairs, notice how we start with castle guards Barnardo and Francisco, but then Francisco gets kicked out of the action to be replaced by Marcellus, and from then on Marcellus, Horatio, and Hamlet are the "in" group who gets information about the Ghost. Why don't they trust Francisco? Why does he have a Spanish name? All of this is to say -- sometimes Shakespeare just seems to be messing with us.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The Clown (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Othello</i>): Did you know there was a Clown in <i>Othello</i>? There is, he's just not funny at all. In a very weird scene, he shows up to dismiss some musicians whom the depressed and demoted ex-lieutenant Cassio has for some reason hired to play outside the citadel where Desdemona lodges. The Clown puts a stop to it right quick, with a few lewd jokes and insults toward the musicians, whereupon Cassio says, oh, all right, no music. And that's it. The musicians and the Clown exit. <i>Why? </i>I don't even know why I'm including this Clown in this list, except that he has always stuck in my mind ever since I read a very famous Shakespeare scholar's observation about him: "The Clown has no discernible function, and yet the play is not quite the same without him." Someday I'll do a post on the most meaningless comments ever made in Shakespeare criticism.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Old Man (<i>King Lear</i>): Every once in a while you spot an Old Man wandering around a tragedy. There's one in <i>Macbeth. </i>It's good to pay attention to them; they're usually pretty wise. The Old Man in <i>King Lear </i>is not only wise, but kind and helpful, and he's important because he stands for a world of simple good people in the play who might otherwise be obscured by the spectacle of depraved aristocrats. Old Man is kind of like First Servant, who has no name but sacrifices his life in an attempt to keep another old man (Gloucester) from being tortured. Old Man appears in the very next scene to describe himself to now-blind Gloucester as "your tenant, and your father's tenant, / These fourscore years." Like First Servant, Old Man does his best to try to help and solace the wounded Gloucester, and delivers him into caring hands. The world of <i>King Lear </i>is bleak, but not without humanity.</p><p class="MsoNormal">Mouldy (<i>Henry
IV, part 2</i>): Some of these micro-characters are great because of the opportunities their dialogue gives the actor. They may not get much to say, but sometimes one line, properly delivered, is worth a thousand, in its ability to express an idea of growing power in the entire play, or in this case, trilogy. Mouldy is one of the poor country yokels impressed by Falstaff to march off to the king's wars. In the first part of <i>Henry IV, </i>Falstaff has callously described these men as "food for powder, food for powder." Here, we see close up the human beings he regards so unfeelingly, collecting only as many "scarecrows" as will fill his muster. Drafting the men, Falstaff makes a joke about this one's name: "Mouldy, it is time you were spent." Mouldy gets a one-word reply: "Spent?" The actor playing him in <i>The Hollow Crown, </i>the recent TV adaptation of the history plays, delivered the syllable magnificently. His disgust and contempt for the proceedings were evident on his face, and he hissed out the word: "<i>Spent?!?</i>" So, that's what a human life is for? To be <i>spent </i>for the power-disputes of our social betters? He even brought a little shamefacedness to the shameless Falstaff (for a moment).</p><p class="MsoNormal">Barnardine (<i>Measure
for Measure</i>): Barnardine is a paradox. He's a character who's so funny, he messes up the comedy. In this play's complicated plot, a rather inept disguised duke is trying to manipulate the action so that the heroine Isabella thinks her brother has been executed, but then it will turn out, Surprise, that's not <i>his</i> decapitated head, it belongs to that of the notorious death-sentenced murderer Barnardine! OK, hilarious, but the problem is, Barnardine doesn't feel like getting executed today. "I have been drinking hard all night." He's got a hangover; he's not in the mood. And everyone -- the Duke, the jailer, the judge -- just shrugs his shoulders and goes looking for a pirate or some other lowlife whose head they can chop off instead, which delays the comic action about two scenes. But they do get their head by act five. So funny! Barnardine is instrumental in underscoring how very screwed-up this Venetian culture is, and darkening a comedy to the point of bizarreness. Who said Ionesco invented Absurdism?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Servant Boy (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Taming of
the Shrew</i>): This famous comedy is a play within a play, performed for a drunk who's been pranked into thinking he's watching it with his "wife." His "wife" is a servant youth who's been asked to dress up as a woman for his master's (the prankster's) entertainment. This boy's entire part consists of evading the drunkard's amorous advances and telling him to pay attention to the play. But his role provides an interesting metatheatrical introduction to the fact that all the "women" in the play proper, including, most importantly, Kate the "shrew," are not women at all, but boys dressed up to play women. The marital taming plot emerges finally as a kind of fantasy, largely thanks to this transvestite boy.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">William (<i>The Merry Wives of Windsor</i>): This William is the son of one of the play's two heroines, and he plays a very minor role in the action, but we should take note of him because of his name. William Shakespeare never met a pun he didn't like, and one of his favorite puns was the word "will," which could mean all kinds of things, including bawdy things, but in this case seems to mean, "childhood version of myself who struggled with Latin." The first scene of the fourth act of this play "pauses" the action for a sustained dialogue in which young William is quizzed in Latin, and every one of his answers, right or wrong, is an occasion for a dirty joke. This, it seems, is how schoolboy Shakespeare and his friends got through their Latin lessons. Some schoolboys never entirely grow up.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">'Til next time.</p>Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-65923572656958493632022-02-01T05:54:00.004-08:002022-02-01T19:43:17.525-08:00More on Othello and Blackface<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjrMdBEJ_Cpe6g3JNOOnyrfAHbstFxeXPR-KHjnCy7T-tZCOeEoaUhf_JepIjOEniluJIl4euW-k7mBLfF413bnZ6H0TWn7MuTp-STwSS-ad2PSVrS5fU8LEzEShPIOjfPtwX05LN86R4ujba0FRuKES3nUNcHQR30yzMav6BMP6GekSpqiCzeQ4Z35DA=s1072" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1072" height="215" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjrMdBEJ_Cpe6g3JNOOnyrfAHbstFxeXPR-KHjnCy7T-tZCOeEoaUhf_JepIjOEniluJIl4euW-k7mBLfF413bnZ6H0TWn7MuTp-STwSS-ad2PSVrS5fU8LEzEShPIOjfPtwX05LN86R4ujba0FRuKES3nUNcHQR30yzMav6BMP6GekSpqiCzeQ4Z35DA=s320" width="320" /></a></div>L</span><span style="text-align: left;">ast month I wrote on the unfortunate choice of a University of Michigan professor to show his class a film version of </span><i style="text-align: left;">Othello </i><span style="text-align: left;">in which the protagonist was played by a white man (Laurence Olivier) in blackface. The professor fell afoul of students, and subsequently of administrators, not so much for showing the film as for failing (as his critics saw it) to contextualize the production: to say something about the tradition of white men using blackface to play this famed Shakespearean character. Even had the professor done so, he might not have realized that the part of Othello was actually created -- that is, it was scripted -- for a man in blackface.</span></div><p></p><p>This is not just to acknowledge that in 1604, all Shakespeare's characters, and those of his rivals, were played by male whites, except for the characters in elaborate masques written and staged in private palaces for the aristocracy, in which women sometimes took part. (The women were also white, of course. Ben Jonson's <i>Masque of Blackness </i>is an interesting example of a play written to be performed by women in blackface.) It's a given that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical world was not a racially diverse milieux, although it's not impossible that of the hundred or so black Londoners of the early seventeenth century, one or<span></span></p><a name='more'></a> two found their way onto the stage. When we consider <i>Othello</i>, a play about a Venetian general of Moorish descent, we grant that in Shakespeare's time, his part was played by the white Englishman Richard Burbage, the King's Men's chief tragic actor. But when I say <i>Othello </i>was scripted for a man in blackface, I don't just mean Shakespeare knew Burbage was going to play the role. I mean he wrote lines within the play that specifically refer, metatheatrically, to the fact that Othello's part is being played by a man in blackface.<p></p><p>Blackface was a two-century-old tradition in the English theater by the time Shakespeare came along. Readers may be dismayed but not surprised to hear that the custom was initially employed for the representation of devils in Christian morality plays. In a chapter called "Folly as Proto-Racism" in his <i>The English Clown Tradition, </i>Shakespeare scholar Robert Hornback describes the early English tradition of blackening stage-devils' skin in plays like the medieval <i>Fall of Lucifer </i>so as to present them as both demonic (smeared with soot from Hell) and foolish. Unhappily, the Renaissance stage extended the blackface-devil connection to Africans when, in its secular plays, it began to stage plays about Christians and Moors (like Shakespeare's <i>Titus Andronicus, </i>pictured above), using similar stage-paint techniques -- soot mixed with water or oil -- to represent the latter.</p><p><i>Othello </i>is a particularly interesting play in that its dialogue <i>acknowledges </i>that the hero's blackness is makeup. Or, at least, it contains numerous reminders of the fact that coaldust, pitch, soot, soil, or grime discolors (colors?) white faces, which is much the same thing. Words that refer to artificially blackening agents are used throughout the play to describe various sorts of darkening. Othello says at one point that "passion" has his "best judgment collied" (darkened with coaldust). Iago claims he'll turn Desdemona's spotless virtue "into pitch." Othello calls his face "begrimed." (Imagine Burbage saying the words, or Olivier. They were literally correct.) Emilia later compares Othello's ignorance about Desdemona to "dirt."</p><p>Of course, <i>Othello </i>isn't the only Shakespeare play that uses many terms to describe blackness. But it's the only Shakespeare play that uses <i>this </i>way -- references to the ingredients of blackface stage makeup -- to describe darkness. Compare, for example, <i>Macbeth, </i>a play awash in references to the dark. The air in <i>Macbeth </i>is filled with "fog," and Lady Macbeth calls for a "blanket" of darkness to hide her murderous purposes. On a starless night, Banquo says heaven's "candles are all out." The bat is "cloistered" by the dark, and the night, hiding things from view is "seeling," which means sealing the eyelids of a falcon shut. Darkness is light that "thickens," and the wood is "rooky": filled with dark birds. Evil deeds are "secret" and "dismal" like the shadows of hell. In <i>Macbeth,</i> atmospheric images like fog and murk and "thick" light are the ones most often used to signify the dark moral netherworld in which the Macbeths move.</p><p>Not so with <i>Othello. </i>Even though, as in <i>Macbeth</i>, <i>Othello</i>'s "darkness" metaphors are often employed to describe mental confusion or evil intent, those metaphors are drawn from a different source: the actor's fraudulent blackface kit.</p><p>I don't know why, in his play about a black man, Shakespeare chose to undermine the authenticity of his white actor's character by calling attention, in dialogue, to the fact that the blackness was a stage-trick. Perhaps it was a way of being more truthful by calling attention to the lie. "The truest poetry is the most feigning," says Touchstone in <i>As You Like It</i>. That is, art that signals its own illusions is more honest than art that presents fantasy as truth.</p><p>Context matters!</p>Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-82420378747000700212022-01-01T06:35:00.005-08:002022-01-02T09:18:17.343-08:00"Speak of me as I am": Shakespeare and the New Orthodoxy<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgnM8lDnzBYUE3PVBsp1zeYBAYL47utGBe_gC-XISNAk8j-h3zTvd_hZxgtrBFaJ9C5kIISLXQZYsZ7HPmgx5pVeGaFpc5rP8Ia6peFM-A-CgDLVXoSZW_-A8oJ4-FZQCgygq4JoiMLSbo2VzkDshMnmH0UQ2txpWhZOeFeEE71-kUiIoQapM6_kxMX3g=s1200" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1200" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgnM8lDnzBYUE3PVBsp1zeYBAYL47utGBe_gC-XISNAk8j-h3zTvd_hZxgtrBFaJ9C5kIISLXQZYsZ7HPmgx5pVeGaFpc5rP8Ia6peFM-A-CgDLVXoSZW_-A8oJ4-FZQCgygq4JoiMLSbo2VzkDshMnmH0UQ2txpWhZOeFeEE71-kUiIoQapM6_kxMX3g=s320" width="320" /></a></div>In the fall of 2021, distinguished Chinese-American composer Bright Sheng committed what should have been regarded as a simple academic <i>faux pas. </i>In an introductory music class at the University of Michigan, where he teaches, he showed the famous 1965 film of <i>Othello </i>starring Sir Laurence Olivier in the title role. Sheng's purpose was to introduce his students to the play as groundwork for discussion of Verdi's operatic adaptation of the tragedy. However, they never got to Verdi. His freshmen may not have recognized <i>Othello </i>or Olivier, but they knew a white man in blackface when they saw one. Sheng hadn't provided any contextual discussion of this facet of the film (or none the students noticed). After class, a group of them expressed their shock, horror, and pain, not to Sheng, but to the higher authorities of the music department. The "safety" they had expected to find in their college classrooms had been compromised by their instructor's gross display of racial insensitivity. The end result was an official apology to the students on the part of the school of performing arts and the removal of Sheng -- by "voluntary" agreement between him and the dean -- from his role as instructor of the class.<p></p><p>Well . . . maybe that wasn't the "end" result. Since this incident was first reported in a university newspaper article entirely sympathetic with the aggrieved students' viewpoint, over 700 Michigan faculty and students have written in protest against <span></span></p><a name='more'></a>the college's overreaction, and have demanded that Sheng be given an official apology. (He hasn't been.) It's hard to know what Sheng's private views of the incident are, corralled as he is by contemporary university protocols, which are mostly unwritten but no less real, and which strictly curtail what can and can't be said and shown regarding race. But part of the public record is Sheng's own formal apology for not having considered the hot-button effect (not his words) that any revelation of or reference to historic blackface has in contemporary American society.<p></p><p>Why could this <i>faux pas </i>not have been handled in the classroom, between Sheng and his students, without the university taking the radical step of shaming this world-famous composer, depriving his students of the benefit of his teaching, and fomenting an embarrassing scandal that was reported on by <i>The Washington Post </i>and <i>The New York Times</i>? Why, indeed? Sheng lived through China's Cultural Revolution, a period of ideological repression during which many students accused their professors of failures to live up to Communist ideals, precipitating severe professional humiliations and career- (and sometimes life-) ending punishments for the "guilty." Perhaps Sheng expected something different from an American university. Good luck with that, in 2021. </p><p>Sheng didn't improve his situation with his apology, because to it, to demonstrate that he was no racist, he added the information that he had cast performers of color in leading roles in past musical productions. This irritated the offended students. Why? Because, in the circular logic of what linguist John McWhorter calls "woke racism," if you are white (or Asian, or, in any case, not black), claiming not to be racist means you are racist and don't know it. Prevailing academic orthodoxy holds that only two kinds of non-black people exist in America: those who admit their racism and those who don't. Where does the racism come from? Being white. Against whom is the racism unchangeably and incessantly directed? People of color. So much for Martin Luther King's longed-for future when children would be judged "not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."</p><p>In today's university, race is the overriding topic of discussion in humanities classes and faculty colloquia, but the things that are allowable to say are carefully delimited. A typical "racial sensitivity" training instrument at a large university -- a compulsory on-line course for faculty -- describes a range of fraught situations, requiring the course-taking faculty member to choose from among a set of possible responses to each one. If he or she doesn't choose the "right" interpretation, the program will not let him or her proceed to the next question. Here's a fictional example that closely resembles the real ones: "A colleague reveals to you that he is teaching a Shakespeare play which contains several racially offensive epithets. He's concerned that these will embarrass the students of color in his class. You should: a.) suggest your colleague choose a different play, b.) suggest your colleague condemn the racial epithets and use them as an occasion to focus on early-modern racist stereotypes and their continuing presence in our culture, c.) suggest your colleague not draw attention to the lines, since, on their own, the students probably won't notice them, or d.) say nothing and let your colleague figure it out." Obviously, intelligent people can hold different opinions on these options, and can even suggest many additional options. But intelligence and dialogue are not called for here. The answer is "b." If the course-taker chooses a different answer, he or she gets a message reading, "Reconsider the options," and the command is repeated until the course-taker adjusts the answer to "b" in order to escape to the next screen, with its new slate of false "options."</p><p>What's the obvious result of this kind of intellectual coercion, so antithetical to the "critical thinking" most colleges profess to encourage? This: a bunch of faculty rotely choosing the "correct" answer (usually not too hard to figure out) so they can complete the assignment and be "in compliance," while inwardly seething, even if they agree with most of the "correct" answers, because they've figured out that they aren't being given any actual liberty of choice. Answers are mandated, and opinions policed. This general problem manifests itself in different ways at different places. In 2020, members of the law faculty at Northwestern University met ritually to stand, one by one, and confess and repent of their heretofore unconscious racist tendencies. A group of Princeton faculty proposed a committee to "oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication" on the part of other faculty. Broad "guidelines" defining illicit "behaviors" and "research" would be developed by this committee, which would arrogate unto itself the defining of "racist." Such practices foster fear, not debate.</p><p>And, saddest of all, this sort of conversation-quelling fear is often found in the classroom. What the administration does to faculty, and what faculty do to themselves, many faculty do to students. We claim we are opening up conversations about difficult topics, like racial concerns in speech, behavior, and politics, but instead, we teach "correct" attitudes, and shut conversations down before they begin. Virtue signaling is as easy as it is boring. Reasoned debate is harder, for a lot of reasons.</p><p>Take Shakespeare's <i>Othello. </i>I've seen the looks of dread on the faces of my white students when I broach the topic of race in the play. Lively, talkative young people clam up, worried that they will <i>say the wrong thing</i> and offend a student of color. I've also seen the discomfort in students of color who, five minutes previously, were talking about restrictive fathers or Machiavellian frenemies or religious warfare or complex poetry or any one of a dozen things that struck them as interesting in the first act of this tragedy, but who now suddenly realize they have become, without them or me willing it, designated representatives of The Black Perspective.</p><p>I have found that the thing to do is to go on. Usually, if I keep asking questions, the ice gets broken, tongues loosen up, awkwardness subsides, and people again become themselves, not some race-based caricature of how they think others see them. Optimally, the class turns into an intellectual community, a group of students to whom color is part but not all of each person's self, with everyone investigating the same 400-year-old text, and often including in our study some discussion of an archaic, centuries-old, and, yes, racist theatrical tradition by which white men played Othello in blackface. I show pictures of Olivier in his stage paint ("What is <i>that</i>?"), and a clip of Anthony Hopkins in weird brown makeup, playing the role in 1981 ("Hannibal Lecter! No way!"). I tell them about Patrick Stewart's 1990 "photo negative" <i>Othello, </i>in which all characters <i>except </i>Othello and Bianca were played by actors of color ("Why?" "Good question!"). And I talk about Ira Aldridge, the first known black American actor to play Othello (and other Shakespearean roles),<i> </i>who in the 1830s was criticized in American and English newspapers for not matching white reviewers' ideas of how a black man should act. We also talk about Protestant early-modern English views of Islam; and the Christian ideal of wifely obedience that distorts, and is distorted in, the play's two marital relationships; and the strange way the play seems to operate in two separate time-frames; and magic; and Desdemona's maidservant's bitter denuciation of the double standard in marriage; and Shakespeare's comments on alcohol; and the nature of jealousy; and the challenge and riddle posed by the hero's final speech, which begins, "Speak of me as I am." <i>Othello </i>is about a lot of things.</p><p>No doubt that's what Bright Sheng thought, too. Mostly, he planned to teach his students about the challenges and triumphs of setting this famous tragedy to music. But he fell from grace, and never got there.</p><p>I thought of contacting Professor Sheng to ask for a comment on these events, but almost immediately thought better of it. As Macbeth might put it, he is "cabin'd, cribbed, confined, bound in" by an illiberal academic structure in which faculty utterances are closely watched, and breaches of acceptable discourse swiftly punished. A genuine conversation would be difficult under these circumstances.</p><p>But maybe I'm being pessimistic. Seven hundred faculty and students wrote to protest Bright Sheng's removal from the classroom. Maybe we haven't completely lost our courage, and our minds.</p>Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-69118916033997153112021-12-01T05:13:00.002-08:002021-12-01T05:25:04.187-08:00Duping Facebook with Shakespeare<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3bROh8XoF40XNzr3fmlHZIUFINH1wmUMRcZR51l_s3gkiMQ5ukn3NujsTE8uqNtEAXAQOztqu0v0rQzeL1m4SrtKdz6toSFDpUEs1G5i4-GA55YF4i0SAVfxBU7WvFDjHOPO_Pv-AP7rB/s262/shakespearewords3.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="262" data-original-width="252" height="262" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3bROh8XoF40XNzr3fmlHZIUFINH1wmUMRcZR51l_s3gkiMQ5ukn3NujsTE8uqNtEAXAQOztqu0v0rQzeL1m4SrtKdz6toSFDpUEs1G5i4-GA55YF4i0SAVfxBU7WvFDjHOPO_Pv-AP7rB/s0/shakespearewords3.jpg" width="252" /></a></div> <br />Last week, when I asked my students why, during a discussion
of <i>Macbeth, </i>they were using the
awkward non-verb “to un-alive” to describe the action of regicide, they
informed me that Facebook had trained them to it, with its flagging of the word
“to kill.” “People,” I said. “This is Shakespeare seminar. We can do better
than that.” Shakespeare offers us myriad terms to describe deading a person. Here are just a few: to “murther,” to cause to “dwell in
solemn shades of endless night,” to send to the “undiscovered country from
whose bourn no traveler returns,” to “unseam,” to render a “tongue . . . a
stringless instrument,” to make one’s antagonist “food for worms.” The
list goes on.<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Later I went to Google to inquire about other Facebook-flagged
words. A post from last year on HVMA Social Media warns advertisers that
Facebook seeks “generally uplifting, growth-oriented content!,” and cautions that “using ad copy which directly speaks on weight, health, beauty,
anxiety, loss, failure, underachieving, or other such negative self-implicating
topics are almost always negated from the platform.” This type of thing poses
communicative challenges which Shakespeare can help overcome.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>References to weight</i>:
Here the <i>Henry IV </i>plays are useful.
Shakespeare does not <span></span></p><a name='more'></a>scruple to point out Sir John Falstaff’s excessive adipose
tissue and to criticize his health regimen (or lack thereof). He is a “huge
hill of flesh,” a “bed-presser,” a “surfeit-swelled” glutton. “Leave
gormandizing,” Prince Hal advises him. This is generally good advice,
though I’m not sure it would sell weight-loss products.<o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Health: </i>Apparently,
both good and bad health are “trigger” topics. How to get around this? For bad
health, Falstaff is again a source. He is “blasted with antiquity” and debilitated
by “consumption.” His also-ailing not-friend King Henry IV is a “fangless lion whose “eye is hollow.” King Lear, too, “usurp[s] his life” after being
“stretch[ed]” on “the rack of this tough world,” and as for the French King in <i>All’s Well that Ends Well, </i>his “flame
lacks oil,” and he needs help even to get off stage. Kings are the unhealthiest
people in Shakespeare. In fact, Shakespeare is generally more interested in describing
sickness than in praising health, but he does give us some instances of
miraculous curing. What you need is a magic virgin (see Helena in <i>All’s Well that Ends Well</i>), a “golden
stamp” administered by Edward the Confessor (see <i>Macbeth </i>act four, scene three), or a drug that, though it makes you
appear to be dwelling in solemn shades of endless night, has only a temporary effect,
and lets you wake refreshed, though then immediately horrified by the discovery
that you have been sleeping next to a dead (or un-alived) body (see <i>Romeo and Juliet </i>and <i>Cymbeline</i>).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Beauty</i>: Apparently
use of this word makes some people feel bad. For promising ad copy, here are a
couple of Shakespearean substitutes: “Teach the torches to burn bright!” Or,
for Retinol: “Age cannot wither you!” <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Anxiety</i>:
Shakespeare would never use this word, but gives us plenty of the thing. Any of
Hamlet’s soliloquies, or Richard III’s final one, would serve as a good promotional
copy for anti-anxiety medication. For stress-related insomnia? Hamlet: “Sir, in
my heart there was a kind of fighting / That would not let me sleep.” (The “Sir” adds tone.) Or, from <i>Macbeth</i>: “Sleep
no more. [Insert name] shall sleep no more.” Not without Melatonin, he won’t!
Othello could also use a prescription, but then again, he might best be left
out of the equation, since not “all the drowsy syrups of the world / Shall ever
medicine [him] to that sweet sleep / Which [he] owned yesterday.” Of course, Ambien
and Lunesta come in capsule form.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Loss</i>: Type of unmentionable loss is not specified by
HVMA Social Media. In Shakespeare there’s loss of a handkerchief, loss of
virginity, loss of a loved one, and loss of reputation. Whatever your loss, the
best advice comes from <i>Othello:</i> “Let
it go, all.” The phrase isn’t “generally uplifting,” but it is “growth-oriented.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Failure</i>: This word
is easily circumvented, by using one of Shakespeare’s direct descriptions of
the emotional experience. Do you feel “shame, and eternal shame”? Are “all things
cheerless, dark, and deadly”? “Let it go, all,” and then, rally, with “Once more unto the
breach, dear friends!”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Underachieving</i>: Do your “enterprises, though of great pitch
and moment, . . . their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action”? Do
your activities “hold a wing / Quite from the flight of all thy ancestors”? In
other words, are you not fulfilling your family’s expectations? While Facebook
believes this condition may be remedied by avoiding all reference to the issue,
Shakespeare lets you have it right in the face. He gets results, too. Check out
the last acts of <i>Hamlet </i>and <i>Henry IV, part one.</i><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>Other such negative,
self-implicating topics: </i>I could offer instances from Shakespeare scenes in
which characters cleverly avoid responsibility for their misery (e.g., Laertes:
“The king! The king’s to blame!”). But why? Those scenes mostly demonstrate
that such tactics don't work.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><p>Last week I saw a production of <i>Othello </i>in which the director had inexplicably inserted a romantic speech, written
(by him or her?) in contemporary English, which Othello delivered to Desdemona
on their wedding night. It was cringe-y. It would perhaps have passed
muster at a contemporary wedding (“though not one attended by English majors,”
one student assured me). But in the context of a Shakespeare play, competing with
Shakespeare’s original language, all it did was baffle the audience. Why has Othello, the masterful storyteller of act one, suddenly lost all
his speaking skills? Fortunately, he regained them a few lines later, when he
returned to the original script. In that script, Shakespeare does not avoid “negative,
self-implicating topics.” He raises them in order to take you somewhere
important and bigger, and to direct your attention to somebody other than yourself. Katharsis! We will not
get there on Facebook.</p>Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-17821952348510074752021-11-01T05:00:00.010-07:002021-11-01T16:11:50.277-07:00Huck's Shakespearean Soliloquy<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyYqhzmMu0OPkXZoR9SPcHxnUka7V5DllT2JKdgDyFXoyCkZ-2G36y9B0dj7wd1hzRv6yGGQmp0vStabAmxVEO8UfphXimHHO2zM7cGyDt4j_9dJar_1mT-JvEx7Xo6JtYy8V6Q5NbK2Tj/s544/HuckandJim.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="544" data-original-width="350" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyYqhzmMu0OPkXZoR9SPcHxnUka7V5DllT2JKdgDyFXoyCkZ-2G36y9B0dj7wd1hzRv6yGGQmp0vStabAmxVEO8UfphXimHHO2zM7cGyDt4j_9dJar_1mT-JvEx7Xo6JtYy8V6Q5NbK2Tj/s320/HuckandJim.jpg" width="206" /></a></div><br /> As is well known, Mark Twain's <i>Huckleberry Finn </i>chronicles the peripatetic journey of the boy Huck and his friend, the runaway slave Jim, as they make their way mostly by raft down the Mississippi River. At one point in the tale, Huck, brought up according to a white supremacist ideology that sanctions slavery as part of the natural order, must decide whether to betray Jim to his former owner, as his conscience bids him, or to continue assisting Jim's pursuit of freedom, as some deeper, contrary instinct tells him to do. Corrupted by church and Southern culture's belief that to assist a slave's escape is thievery, and that anyone who does so "goes to everlasting fire," Huck tries to pray "to quit being the kind of boy that I was" -- that low-down type who would help a slave escape -- "and be better."<p></p><p> "So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn't come. Why wouldn't they? It warn't no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from <i>me, </i>neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn't come. It was because my heart warn't right; it was because I warn't<span></span></p><a name='more'></a> square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting <i>on </i>to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth <i>say </i>I would do the right thing and the clean thing . . . but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie -- and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie -- I found that out."<p></p><p>Huck tries to "wash" himself "clean of sin" by writing a letter to Jim's former slave-mistress, informing her of Jim's whereabouts, but finally decides he can't do it. His bond with his fleeing companion has a stronger grip on his soul than his church-taught morality, even though he thinks honoring that bond will lead to his own damnation. His spiritual struggle ends with his emphatic decision <i>not </i>to turn Jim in, expressed in this agonized thought: "All right, then, I'll <i>go </i>to hell." Whatever his culture has taught him about right and wrong, a more powerful interior voice compels him to risk not only death, but eternal hellfire, rather than betray his friend. He knows what's right, but doesn't know that he knows it.</p><p>The account of Huck's struggle and final resolution, rich with irony and weighted with moral meaning, is considered by many the greatest passage in American literature. In fewer than two pages, through the vernacular Missouri English of the inimitable Huck, Twain eloquently summarizes America's original sin, as well as the hope for its purgation. Thus conscience -- real conscience, not Huck's Southern Sunday school conscience -- can make heroes of us all.</p><p>This is the most American of novels, and Huck the most American of characters. Maybe that's why I had read and heard this passage many times before I recognized how very Shakespearean this two-page "soliloquy" is. It derives, in fact, from a private, conscience-smitten, abortive prayer uttered in the middle of Shakespeare's <i>Hamlet.</i></p><p>Huck's struggle with his conscience is not the first echo of <i>Hamlet </i>in the novel. The passage detailing Huck's agony follows Twain's more humorous account of the escapades of "The Duke" and "The Dauphin," the pair of rascally con artists who force Huck and Jim to assist them in moneymaking schemes which include the performance of a "Shakespearean" speech that hilariously intermingles Hamlet's most famous soliloquy with lines from elsewhere in that play and from <i>Macbeth</i>:</p><p>To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin</p><p>That makes calamity of so long life;</p><p>For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane</p><p>But that the fear of something after death</p><p>Murders the innocent sleep .... </p><p>And so on. The Duke's butchered rendition of this speech is as comic as Huck's later meditations are tragic, but both derive (mostly) from <i>Hamlet</i>. When, some chapters later, we come to the articulation of Huck's "fear of something after death," we find that Twain has moved from Hamlet's soliloquy to that of his uncle Claudius. King Claudius' speech, delivered in his private chapel, expresses, like Huck's meditations, inner torment over his inability to repent his own wrongdoing. "Pray can I not," the king says, "Though inclination be as sharp as will, / My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent, / And like a man to double business bound, / I stand in pause . . . ./ May one be pardoned and retain the offense?" Like Huck will do in a book penned centuries later, Claudius longs to be "wash[ed]" clean of sin, but recognizes that he can't, because he's not really sorry -- not sorry for having killed the former king, stolen his crown, and married his widow. "Oh, wretched state, o, bosom black as death!," he groans. "Bow, stubborn knees," he adds, attempting to force himself to pray, thinking, temporarily, as does Huck, that "All may be well." But he can't pray. "My words fly up, my thoughts remain below," he concludes, rising. "Words without thoughts never to heaven go." Like Huck, Claudius "knowed very well" why the prayer wouldn't come: because his "heart warn't right"; he was "playing double."</p><p>The great irony, of course, is that Claudius' sin is real, while Huck's is totally imaginary. Claudius is a brother-killer, usurper, and probable adulterer, while Huck -- one of the purest souls in literature -- is only falsely, pathetically convinced that he's mired in sin. Huck's genuinely good nature, which he considers evil, wins out over his "conscience," a superficial and corrupt product of the white slave-owning culture to which he nominally belongs. Twain's genius in this famous passage is to compound the irony, not only inverting Huck's own conclusions about his fallen morality, but turning Claudius' soliloquy upside down. "Double business" -- "playing double" -- indeed.</p><p>So wildly different are Huckleberry's nineteenth-century American situation and idiom from those of Claudius, medieval, blank-verse speaking Danish king, that Twain's Shakespearean source is well shrouded. Yet -- as Shakespeare himself knew, when he mined the twelfth century Danish saga of Amlothi for the story of Hamlet -- a writer can tap into another work's power without overtly signaling its influence. The Claudius soliloquy embedded in Huck's agony constitutes another proof that literary masterworks aren't separate plants, but branches of an ever-growing tree, continually adapted to new times, languages, places, and circumstances, and saying, in every year, what it's most important to say.</p>Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-38831371101377157232021-10-01T05:45:00.006-07:002021-10-02T12:29:56.678-07:00MACBETH Time<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6otjY9Zo9yFj8IT3twkYccA80m4Lo66w7iJPxwS1Cr9KGsFVft7ZwOcyQcn3tvkFe_e5woQ5gvW4WyDtqvS7SkquJQUmhPmQF9dqSAxUJKwauAdMejQFyNCAruRJxRJDBJRcqspz64ZTq/s600/diademuertosmacbeth.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="600" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6otjY9Zo9yFj8IT3twkYccA80m4Lo66w7iJPxwS1Cr9KGsFVft7ZwOcyQcn3tvkFe_e5woQ5gvW4WyDtqvS7SkquJQUmhPmQF9dqSAxUJKwauAdMejQFyNCAruRJxRJDBJRcqspz64ZTq/w200-h200/diademuertosmacbeth.png" width="200" /></a></div>It's October again. In Michigan it still feels like August, but even global warming can't change the earth's tilt and orbit, so the days are shortening and October light is falling on leaves that still start their change, from green to yellow and red, though it's 80 degrees. So, Halloween is on its way, and, of course, <i>Macbeth </i>is showing up on the Shakespeare prof's syllabus.<p></p><p>There is really only one appropriate season to teach <i>Macbeth. </i>Ideally, discussions and, if possible, expeditions to see this play should fall between mid-October and the end of the first week in November, because, of course, not only Halloween but All Souls' Day (November 2) and Guy Fawkes Day (November 5) are at stake. All these holidays -- as we find in Mexico's <i>Dia de Muertos </i>-- share <i>Macbeth</i>'s grisly but humorous tone and atmosphere. Borges thought the play cast an unrelievedly nightmarish pall over the playgoer's senses, but, with due respect to that great Argentine author and Shakespearean, <i>Macbeth</i>'s nightmare is not totally dark. The play is in fact punctuated by the humor of the gallows. The phrase is apt.<i> Macbeth </i>contains references to the Gunpowder<span></span></p><a name='more'></a> Plot to kill James I, for which twelve conspirators were hanged in 1606. On Guy Fawkes Day the English still celebrate these culprits' capture with fireworks, merriment, and ghoulish effigies of one of the ringleaders. The one conventionally comic scene in <i>Macbeth, </i>that of the drunken Porter, contains not-so-subtle joking references to the Jesuit priest who was tried and executed along with the plotters: he "committed treason enough for God's sake yet could not equivocate to heaven." Grim humor indeed, and perhaps hilarious to Protestant playgoers lucky enough not to have Catholic relatives undergoing interrogation. Jacobeans -- English citizens during the rule of James I -- could be callous in their laughter. But in fact, though the Porter is "comic," his jokes about various types of folks who are bound for Hell are not really all that funny. So where in the dialogue <i>does </i>the humor reside?<p></p><p>The answer may surprise some. Most of the humor in this play comes from the dialogue of Macbeth.</p><p>"Gallows" humor in tragedy was not a new thing for Shakespeare in 1606. He'd introduced the Gravedigger scene in <i>Hamlet</i>, and the language of Hamlet himself, which is overflowing with barbed jokes. Hamlet, however, is always <i>trying </i>to be funny. Either he's impressing Horatio with his wit, or, for more obscure reasons, flaunting his "antic disposition." Macbeth's dark humor is unpremeditated. It emerges uncontrollably in his impatience with servants, and erupts from him spontaneously in moments of shock. Macbeth's humor isn't part of a deliberate show. It has, at times, the character of soliloquy, as though he's speaking to himself though in the midst of conversation with others. He's forgotten they're there.</p><p>While hiring two unfortunate wretches to kill his perceived rival Banquo, Macbeth responds to one's claim, "We are men," with, "Ay, in the catalogue you go for men." In the list of various types of humans, you barely pass muster, he implies. The line is particularly funny to modern audiences, who picture a Cabelas-type brochure listing various grades of men for sale. Later in the scene, he cuts off this same man's hollow, flattering profession of subservience with the blunt "Your spirits shine through you." No more talk. The hired killers have shown what they are by accepting the bloody commission. Macbeth's in a hurry.</p><p>Blunt and sardonic: this is Macbeth's ironic style, and it's so much a part of him that it leaps forth even in passionate moments. Overcome by fear at the appearance of Banquo's Ghost, he laments that in the good old days, dead bodies stayed <i>down. </i>"The time has been / That when the brains were out, the man would die, / And there an end." What's wrong with this modern world? None of the assembled thanes besides Macbeth can see the Ghost, so his behavior seems to them crazed, and makes ludicrous Lady Macbeth's attempt to excuse it: "Sit, worthy friends. My lord is often thus." He's often screaming at invisible guests at formal dinner parties? What kind of king have they elected?</p><p>Clearly this fiendish pair can amuse us even when things are going radically wrong for them. But Macbeth's darkly comic irony is strongest at moments when he's exerting mastery (as he thinks), even when confronting frightening spectacles. In the Witches' cavern (or wherever they are) in act four, Macbeth jokes around with the apparition of the "Bloody Child" who tells him that "none of woman born shall harm Macbeth." "Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth!," the child begins. Macbeth cuts the Child off much as he interrupted the First Murderer. "Had I three ears, I'd hear thee." I.e., wouldn't one "Macbeth!" have been sufficient?</p><p>Macbeth's grim humor is at its height at the moment of greatest pressure, when all forces are closing in on him in the play's fifth act. I pity the poor servant boy who arrives, trembling, to inform King Macbeth that an English and Scottish army is marching toward Dunsinane, but I can't help but laugh at the terms with which Macbeth reviles him. He greets the pale, quaking youth with what may be the most imaginative insult in the Shakespearean canon: "The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon! Where got'st thou that goose look?" Macbeth's picture-laden imagination -- of how King Duncan would look dead, of a crown dropping on his own head -- has driven him into trouble in the first place. Here, even when he's about to lose that crown, his vivid thoughts still take hold of him, as the conceit of boy as white goose extends itself to an image of geese everywhere.</p><p>SERVANT: There is ten thousand --</p><p>MACBETH:<span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> Geese, villain?</span></p><p>And then Macbeth's mind and tongue go full-out crazily imaginative on the boy's pale face, calling for him to man up in terms of color, suggesting that he's a jester ("patch") without his motley, and why is he so white, white, white? "Go prick thy face and over-red thy fear, / Thou lily-livered boy. What soldiers, patch? / Death of thy soul! Those linen cheeks of thine / Are counselors to fear. What soldiers, whey-face?" "Whey-face"! It's almost as good "cream-faced loon." Macbeth's a twisted Petruchio.</p><p>As he marches out to be conquered, Macbeth scorns the notion that, like an honorable man of antiquity, he might kill himself rather than be captured. <i>That's </i>lame. "Why should I play the Roman fool, and die / On my own sword? Whiles I see lives, the gashes / Do better on them." He knows he's defeated, but is still capable of jokingly extending the play's persistent "clothing" metaphor (Macbeth as king is "dressed ... in borrowed robes"). Here Macbeth jests that sword cuts will look much more becoming on his enemies than on himself.</p><p>I have often heard audiences greeting such lines in <i>Macbeth </i>with a kind of surprised laughter. This is a tragedy! Why are we laughing? Does the actor have it right? The answer is, yes, he does. This, the grimly humorous, blunt, impossibly poetic murderer, <i>is </i>Macbeth. He's got a way with words (say "How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags!"), and a lot of those words are deeply, darkly amusing. A recent headline promoting Joel Coen's new film <i>Macbeth </i>notes that star Denzel Washington "makes Shakespeare scary," as though making <i>Macbeth </i>a scary play were some novel achievement. I haven't seen the film yet, but my judgment of it will also involve the question of whether Denzel allows Macbeth to be not only scary but --- now and then -- ghoulishly funny, just like our cherished holidays of the macabre. </p><p><br /></p>Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-11833044115217204682021-07-05T13:04:00.003-07:002021-11-18T11:51:44.428-08:00Shakespeare, Live Performance, and Regendering Roles<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiFFH0rqEuWFZMVvPd-nsruFUCaTtG-rkg0iseBOlbvbO5GYcd2fzZhcuWRAU7tQH0G_HbK-CjHol38lTPhjMwH7OVU6Av0PtTTOpljCg3lBM4ndchmEwi-mKrlKhUe6CplTLJiiewovYO/s275/timonkathrynhunter.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiFFH0rqEuWFZMVvPd-nsruFUCaTtG-rkg0iseBOlbvbO5GYcd2fzZhcuWRAU7tQH0G_HbK-CjHol38lTPhjMwH7OVU6Av0PtTTOpljCg3lBM4ndchmEwi-mKrlKhUe6CplTLJiiewovYO/s0/timonkathrynhunter.jpg" /></a></div><br />Yesterday I heard part of a discussion on NPR, concerning the current reopening of theaters as well as other ticketed events in the wake of Covid. (I wish we were in the wake of Covid; I'm speaking hopefully.) Although most of this discussion was related to the ways people are being ripped off by scalpers, the program host began by posing a different question to the radio audience: what was the last live performance you saw before Covid shut us all down?<p></p><p>It's interesting how easy it is to answer a question like that. It's like -- on a more or at least differently tragic scale -- the question of where you were when you heard President Kennedy had been shot. If you were five or over, you remember. (I was five, and I remember.) You remember what you were doing before a completely unexpected thing descended and instantaneously changed your world in a way you did not like. Quite likely you were doing something you enjoyed, but that kind of enjoyment was going to depart for a while. (Yes, in November 1963, this was true even for kindergartners, because we lived in families which contained adults who understood things better than we did.) But this is too grim! I didn't mean to go there. I just want to say that I <i>do </i>remember the last live performance I saw before Covid hit, as do the people with whom I attended it, and we all looked back on it with a kind of appreciation that we had taken the trouble to go to it, since we weren't going to be able to see anything else like it for a very long time. Of course, this being a Shakespeare-ish blog, it will not surprise readers to know that the performance was a production of a Shakespeare play.</p><p>The work was <i>Timon of Athens</i>, a weird and melancholy play caught somewhere between the genres of tragedy and satire, like several others Shakespeare wrote in the first decade of the seventeenth century (e.g., <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>). It was directed by Simon Godwin of the Shakespeare Theatre of Washington, D.C., where I grew up (in the D.C. area, not inside the theater) and which I was visiting. Despite this theater's annoying habit of spelling "theater" with its "e" on the end as though we weren't Americans (Chicago Shakespeare Theater doesn't do that, by the way), I have never seen a play performed by the group that wasn't made spectacular by their acting. As a teenager whose mom held season tickets, I was lucky enough to see, not once but many times, luminaries such as the magnificent comic actor Floyd King (an unforgettable Don Armado), Franchelle Dorn (hilarious as Mistress Page in <i>Merry Wives</i>), and Edward Gero (in so many roles, but most recently as the tortured ailing monarch Henry IV in the second part of that play).</p><p>But this time, in March of 2020 -- truly right before it all shut down -- my friends and I were watching, in the lead role of this lesser-known Shakespeare play, a British import, Kathryn Hunter of the Royal Shakespeare Company. She was the main reason I'd wanted to go. Ever since I saw, on film, her extraordinary rendition of Puck in Julie Taymor's 2014 version of <i>A Midsummer Night's Dream </i>at the Theatre for a New Audience (oh, that final "e"), I had wished to see her again, in something! As Puck, the diminutive Hunter, though already in her 60s, exhibited the flexibility and gymnastic skills of an Olympic gymnast. She performed in a Charlie Chaplinish "Little Tramp" type outfit, and her <i>voice, </i>strange and gravelly, added to her boyish androgyny, as she crouched like a frog and scuttled like a crab across the stage, or allowed herself to be lowered head down from the rafters by means of her expanding elastic pants. (That Julie Taymor!) Still, I wouldn't have guessed the next Shakespeare role I'd see her in would also be a male one. Yet so it was.</p><p>Puck, like <i>The Tempest</i>'s Ariel, is often played by women. As spirits, both seem somehow genderless. Timon, the savage, misogynistic, and very human hero of <i>Timon of Athens</i>, is different, which, I assume, is why Simon Godwin (if it was he; Hunter first starred as Timon with the RSC) simply made the character female -- a wealthy lady of ancient Athens, rather than a lord, however historically unrealistic that choice may have been. (It certainly isn't the only historically weird thing about the play, as is usual in Shakespeare. For example, Timon, an Athenian who lives centuries before Christ, spouts some terminology proper to the Christian religion, in references to church "canons" and "cherubim.") In general I'm a traditionalist who is skeptical about the contemporary craze for women playing male Shakespeare roles, but in particular cases I usually forget such distinctions immediately when the acting is good, and . . . this was Kathryn Hunter. Spectacularly, she rode the roller coaster from the first three acts of the play, where the spendthrift Timon feasts his friends on credit, to the final two acts, wherein Timon, after being rebuffed when he visits those same friends to beg loans, retires to the wilderness as a misanthrope, to curse thankless mankind. Hunter was clad in a gold gown and headdress for the first three acts, serving her friends in a gold-draped dining room on plates and platters of gold, which, when confronted with the evidence of their ingratitude, she throws at them (in one of my favorite scenes in Shakespeare). This tiny Timon went berserk! And her throwing arm was magnificent. But in the final acts, crouching half-wild in rags to deliver her great maledictions against mankind, Hunter outdid herself, preaching a savage indictment of money and those who lie, cheat, steal, and kill to possess it. "Gold" is a "yellow slave" that will "knit and break religions," "place thieves and give them title"; it's "the common whore of mankind." Delivering these lines, Hunter, mud-besmirched and crouching, simian-like, close to the earth, seemed a demonic version of the Puck she'd once played -- or perhaps a harbinger of Caliban, whom I'd love to see her enact one day.</p><p>For its excellence, her performance would have burned itself into my brain no matter when I'd seen it. But there was something particularly memorable about the timing, with the play opening in Washington a few weeks before the coming of Covid, which of course cut the run short, and in the year of the U.S. presidential election, which so bitterly divided and continues to divide our nation. "The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends," Timon is told. In his person, he demonstrates the failure to find Aristotle's moderate mean of human behavior, choosing extravagance and then misanthropy, never achieving simple generosity. In the midst of our extremism and identity politics, in our world of victims and perpetrators, it was worthwhile to go into the sad season with a memory of this representation of human folly. Shakespeare's deluded protagonist first thinks everyone is noble, and then, when he gets disappointed, concludes people are all monsters. He never finds the middle, the place Jesse Jackson used to call "common ground." Humor, humility, acceptance of human imperfection, and the ability to listen -- Timon has none of it, though his play contains no lack of characters to point out what's missing. In the early months of 2020, I'm glad I was there to hear it.</p>Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-21195558504372571782021-06-01T05:59:00.001-07:002021-06-01T06:05:42.989-07:00Consider These Lines<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaXV2XfdGlA_HOpHYXSaC6DBpCgUyVyTbgGqxll-V19lEKtu43xBqQDxrHLShpVn__rvX5vN6ggYfmeErlxncshu1Rph9FWI6AUNmkx9e5X_rICXdMUR4ssN5bkSwRJ9_HhzMmTLSSAG60/s400/ShakespeareFaces.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="394" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaXV2XfdGlA_HOpHYXSaC6DBpCgUyVyTbgGqxll-V19lEKtu43xBqQDxrHLShpVn__rvX5vN6ggYfmeErlxncshu1Rph9FWI6AUNmkx9e5X_rICXdMUR4ssN5bkSwRJ9_HhzMmTLSSAG60/s320/ShakespeareFaces.jpg" /></a></div><br />People who don't read or see a lot of Shakespeare -- in other words, most people -- naturally don't understand why they should. What's in Shakespeare for them? They may well ask, since Shakespeare is far more often pointed to -- "Look! Greatest English writer!" -- than discussed in a way which might cast light on <i>why</i> he is known as the greatest English writer. (Unless, like me, you're a Shakespeare nerd who speaks with other Shakespeare nerds. But we're a small slice of the global population.)<p></p><p>Going to a really well performed Shakespeare play provides its own answer to the "why" question. As a playgoer, you don't have to have read any Shakespeare before, to be struck by the beauty and insightfulness of Shakespeare's dialogue. You may not understand all of it. But you'll understand a lot of it, and the part you understand will be unlike anything you've heard before. Shakespeare takes on all subjects, all fundamental human experiences, sees them from the inside out, and articulates them with bone-chilling precision. What is that worth? If a central purpose of literature -- including dramatic dialogue -- is to hold a mirror up to human nature, to show us who we are (as Hamlet says), then Shakespeare succeeds. And if one purpose of that action is to make us feel recognized and known, he gives us that, too.</p><p>Because I have nothing better to write about today, I will offer two examples, from speeches which, set against each other, express diametrically opposed but universally recognizable human experiences. The person who wrote these speeches knew what he was describing, and he knew how to describe it.</p><p>First: apathy, listlessness, depression. Anybody feel that way these days? Has anyone felt these things over the past year? Hamlet is your spokesperson. In acts one and two, he's depressed, and he's depressed about the fact that he's depressed. ("Melancholy" would be his word.) What interests him? Nothing. What used to interest him? Everything. We think of Hamlet's goal as finding and punishing his father's murderer. It is, but his underlying goal is recovering the self he has lost. Ophelia, too, wonders where he's gone: "O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!" But Hamlet wondered first. Here are lines from his first soliloquy:</p><p><span> O, that this too too sullied flesh would melt, </span></p><p><span> Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!</span></p><p><span> Or that the Everlasting had not fixed his canon</span></p><p><span> 'Gainst self-slaughter!</span></p><p>This is definitely suicidal thought. But the lines communicate the widely recognizable, garden-variety suicidal thinking of one who is finding relief in fantasizing about suicide because he lacks the energy to off himself, even though he finds life worse than a drag. Like Keats (doubtless inspired by this speech), who wished, in "To a Nightingale," "to cease upon the midnight with no pain," Hamlet doesn't want to take the initiative for such a choice. He just wants to melt into a goodbye (an "adieu." He's still got enough energy for a smattering of wordplay). He next claims that all that's stopping him is God's edict against "self-slaughter," with another little pun on the "fixed canon," which is both a rigid restrictive rule and a weapon aimed at that rule's violation. But Hamlet is full of reasons not to do things. This is his first. He's apathetic, listless, and unhappy, and nothing delights him. He says it best: "How weary, stale, flat, and uprofitable / Seem to me all the uses [customs] of this world!" No spark of interest resides in anything. It's all stale. Flat. Weary. Useless. He wasn't always like this; he doesn't know why he's like this now. He later tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, "I have of late -- but wherefore I know not -- lost all my mirth . . . and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory." Surprisingly, these sour lines are the lead-in to the famous exclamation, "What a piece of work is a man!," which, extracted from context, sounds exalted and appreciative. It isn't. Hamlet follows that line with, "And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me." It's all not only dust, it's absolute, concentrated dust. </p><p>Yes, he's depressed, and he knows how to say so. In other words, Shakespeare understood depression -- the most enervated version of melancholy -- and knew how to remember and describe it.</p><p>But Shakespeare also understood joy.</p><p>Many excellent expressions of joy exist in Shakespeare, but one of the best is found in <i>The Merchant of Venice, </i>in lines spoken by young Bassanio, once it is confirmed that he has won the fairytale-like "casket test" which gives him the right to marry Portia, whom (maybe) he loves. He says he is too joyful to speak, although, of course, being a Shakespeare character, he still can, and in blank verse, too. He compares his (alleged) confused inarticulateness to the competing voices of a happy crowd which, "blent together / Turns to a wild of nothing save of joy / Expressed and not expressed." A wild of nothing, save of joy. All words unintelligible, canceling each other out, but the sound of happiness still audible. This is the paradox of joy unspoken, but still, somehow, spoken. So, whereas Hamlet has no joy, and many words ("Words, words, words" he drones), Bassanio has no words, and transcendent joy.</p><p>Countless shades of human experience reside between these two extremes. I would bet that many of them are inchoate, sensed but not clearly seen, until precisely described. Most people, even the wordiest, lack that level of precision. Where Shakespeare found it, what supplied him with that talent, is a mystery of the ages . . . .</p>Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-60230104987536744932021-05-01T05:27:00.005-07:002021-05-01T15:27:31.789-07:00Horrid Speech Shakespeare Would Never Use<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj839NowDEyjDoe6ZJRolY8yvFp-47KcQklVFYNax1GCx7XsMtCv_bIEt2rzqwGfr5CRHUn9GOce44NtxHhsUWdIalSAD1LNI2S0sqWQwBxt5ajcfRGSWfX0sVbkdtyjFrSk1DgOcgSLkl3/s283/4shblog.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="283" data-original-width="178" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj839NowDEyjDoe6ZJRolY8yvFp-47KcQklVFYNax1GCx7XsMtCv_bIEt2rzqwGfr5CRHUn9GOce44NtxHhsUWdIalSAD1LNI2S0sqWQwBxt5ajcfRGSWfX0sVbkdtyjFrSk1DgOcgSLkl3/w126-h200/4shblog.jpg" width="126" /></a></div><br /> It's May, and time for my latest list of horrible non-Shakespearean journalistic or advertising or other sorts of contemporary sayings, along with suggested Shakespearean substitutes. Here are ten.<p></p><p>1. Headlines like this: <b>"Benedict Cumberbatch's Sweet Valentine's Day Wedding: Everything You Need To Know."</b> Here's what I need to know about Benedict Cumberbatch's sweet Valentine's Day wedding: Nothing. NO THING. Benedict Cumberbatch is an actor. I like seeing him on the screen. I don't give a flying fig about his personal life. What would Shakespeare say about this headline? He'd have Ophelia sing, "Tomorrow is Saint Valentine's day," and then thank Bonafide Cummerbund for helping keep Hamlet alive on stage (at least until act five, scene two) four hundred years after Shakespeare himself departed for the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler may return.</p><p>2. <b>"Bespoke" </b>and <b>"hand-crafted." </b>These are disgusting terms that should be eliminated from the English vocabulary. There's no space to list the ways in which<span></span></p><a name='more'></a> they nauseate readers and hearers, and no time to fashion substitutes. Nevertheless, I have some Shakespearean alternatives. Instead of buying a "bespoke" suit, why not do as <i>The Taming of the Shrew</i>'s Petruchio does, and have a tailor come to thy house "to deck thy body with his ruffling treasure"? As for "hand-crafted," let's concede that this term was never meant to apply to beer or any other kind of food, and then we can also say with Petruchio that one has taken "pains" to "dress [the] meat [one]self." Or the crackers, or the pickles, or whatever kind of mundane food we're being overcharged for.<p></p><p>3. <b>"To grow the economy.</b>" Hey, economist talking heads! We "grow" things that end up being "grown." That is, they reach a completion point, after which they rot. (Unfortunately, this also applies to ourselves.) Unless we want the economy, or the business, or whatever, to reach maturity and then immediately start disintegrating, let's stop "growing" it. What can we do with it instead? We could "nurture" it. "Nurture" goes with the natural "growth" metaphor. How many people know Shakespeare invented the paired terms "nature" and "nurture"? Fourteen (me, plus my Shakespeare seminar students of fall, 2019). In <i>The Tempest</i>, Prospero calls Caliban "a born devil, on whose nature, nurture can never stick." </p><p>4. <b>"I've been <i>threa</i>-ened by what was <i>wri</i>-en, and that's im<i>por</i>-ant." </b>Leaving consonants out of the middles of words is a youthful habit I first noted in my stepson's speech over twenty years ago. As seen last fall in the example of Rudy Giuliani's disastrous "voting fraud" witness, Melissa Carone -- whose star-turn was parodied so perfectly by SNL's Cecily Strong -- the habit persists. It's annoying! Consonants are parts of words; say them! Shakespeare would probably not have been as critical of such omissions as I am, since by most accounts he was a kindly soul, but he certainly noticed them. He was especially amused by Welsh folks who, according to his observation, left "w"s off the beginnings of words, a fact of particular importance to a "William." Hence Evans in <i>The Merry Wives of Windsor </i>-- or "The Merry 'ives of 'indsor" -- keeps talking about an old "'oman" he knows. Amazingly, once Evans is given some blank-verse poetry to recite, his diction becomes perfect. This may be the solution. Young people, recite Shakespeare!</p><p>5. <b>"At the end of the day." </b>How long is this day? Is it ever going to end? Or are we always at the end of the day, even if it's noon? Some phrases are instantly tiresome, and some only become so when repeated over and over. This is the latter kind. It's slightly more musical on my favorite Spanish language radio program, whose host loves to say, "Al fin del día." Still, <i>bastante</i>. What to say instead? "All told" is a Shakespearean substitute, which makes the situation a story instead of a day. But if we must have a sunset metaphor, we could adapt a line from Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 and say, "In the twilight of such a day ..." for a little variation.</p><p>6. <b>Stop. Using. Periods. For. Emphasis. </b>Such a behavior bespeaks a true failure of imagination. We have words, words, words, which we can use instead. We could say, "O!," like Hamlet (or "O, o, o, o," if we like the dying "O-groans" of the infamous Folio passage). There's a place in rhetoric for repetition. Many Shakespeare characters can teach us, but we can't find a better one than <i>Measure for Measure's </i>Isabella, who knows how to make her point without fake punctuation. She presents her "true complaint" to her judge and demands "justice, justice, justice, justice, justice!" Commas, not periods, and then an exclamation point.</p><p>7. <b>"Violent seize of the Capitol," "Capitol was sieged." </b>I hate even occasionally to agree with our last president about the "failing <i>New York Times</i>." But I do agree that <i>The New York Times </i>is failing to perform reasonable editing. Unbelievable! I don't even know what to say about the above. I get that the writer didn't want to suggest that the Capitol building had a seizure, but were there no other options? How about "violent seizing of the Capitol"? The second monstrosity, "Capitol was sieged," actually came from <i>The Washington Post. </i>It leaves me aghast. <i>These</i> writers are getting jobs working for the nation's top newspapers? How about a little basic grammar? "Besieged," if you please. Of this, Shakespeare would say what Sir Toby Belch says about Sir Andrew Aguecheek's writing: "Excellently ignorant."</p><p>8. <b>"Amazon is Booting Parler off of Its Web Hosting Service."</b><i style="font-weight: bold;"> </i>I'm not sorry to hear that, but why the second preposition? This is not as bad as my students' insistence that some things are "based off of" other things, but it's still not good. Be sparing with prepositions. Know what they mean. Here's a good example, from Rosalind's and Celia's dialogue in <i>As You Like It</i>:</p><p>ROSALIND: <span> </span>Not true in love?</p><p>CELIA: Yes, when he is <i>in</i>, but I think he is not <i>in</i>.</p><p><span>Rosalind doesn't say Orlando is "not true in of love," or "off of love," and Celia doesn't say, "Yes, when he is in on." They know a little preposition goes a long way.</span></p><p>9. <b>"This teaches well." </b>This one's for "educators" (whom I like to call teachers). No. <i>Hamlet </i>(for instance) may be an easy play to teach, but it does not "teach well." On your own, you can read it. In a theater, you can see it. But it doesn't stand up in front of a classroom and teach itself. I watched. It did nothing. I had to open the text and ask questions about it. <i>The Merchant of Venice</i>'s Portia has a lot to say about teaching. She (disingenuously) describes herself as an "unlessoned girl," "unschooled," "not bred so dull but she can learn." She's obviously much smarter than the person to whom she says this (Bassanio), and she later takes an opportunity to scold him for his bad "teaching": "You taught me first to beg, and now, methinks, you teach me how a beggar should be answered." What's my point? Pronouns. Portia's phrases and sentences include references to actual people who are either in need of learning, or are doing the teaching, even if they're doing it badly.</p><p>10. <b>"Trump has been vocal about his disinterest in preserving any semblance of decency toward the man who will succeed him.</b>" This -- from CNN -- is a terrible sentence in a whole lot of ways, but I will only mention one of them. "Disinterest" means fair-mindedness. It's therefore particularly inapplicable to the situation described. "Uninterest" is the word the writer wanted. "Lack of interest" would also have worked. I have a feeling that "disinterest" wasn't even a word in Shakespeare's day, but I'm too lazy to go to the <i>Oxford English Dictionary </i>and look it up. As for "interest," it usually meant rates of usury, as in <i>The Merchant of Venice. </i>But<i> </i>I can supply a Shakespearean sentence which eloquently expresses a complete lack of interest in someone. Readers may apply it as they wish. It's from <i>Julius Caesar</i>: "Away, slight man!"</p><p>Until next month.</p>Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-25918695063655154692021-04-02T18:28:00.005-07:002021-04-03T12:16:02.839-07:00Shakespeare's Spaniards<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8D6ISrIag_A3E9b3N3QkJmnOxJNZwBEzzMEYvTiQOqSudmFVpdMNbQ_EafoMTnlBsBdqFV8V-bT6aIfcmxf2jdSpwEjZ916h8ezLEl3U36VESzcJif96KueeFFDWGLFGoe0PSbgsHYIto/s574/DonArmado.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="574" data-original-width="468" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8D6ISrIag_A3E9b3N3QkJmnOxJNZwBEzzMEYvTiQOqSudmFVpdMNbQ_EafoMTnlBsBdqFV8V-bT6aIfcmxf2jdSpwEjZ916h8ezLEl3U36VESzcJif96KueeFFDWGLFGoe0PSbgsHYIto/s320/DonArmado.jpg" /></a></div> <br />Often people make much of the fact that many of Shakespeare's comedies are set in Italy, a convention of early-modern English comedies which derives largely from Tudor playwrights' important models, the works of the first-century Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence. In plays like <i>The Two Gentlemen of Verona</i>, <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, or <i>The Taming of the Shrew</i>, you won't find much evidence that Shakespeare knew many actual Italians, or, much less, had ever visited Italy, despite all his Hortensios and Petruccios and Benvolios. Usually his "Italian" characters seem like English folk (though this is not always the case: in England, Italians had a r<span></span>eputation <span></span>for <span><a name='more'></a></span>Machiavellian deviousness which Shakespeare occasionally exploits, as in the character Jachimo in the late play <i>Cymbeline</i>, who attributes his villainy to his "Italian brain"). Early modern English plays were more commonly set in Italy than in any other location. Italian character names were thus so commonplace that we even find them in Hamlet's <i>Denmark. </i>Along with the Germanic Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, we inexplicably get that good old Dane "Horatio," as well as the Danish castle guard "Bernardo." Like other English playwrights, Shakespeare liked names that ended in vowels.<p></p><p>But what of the Spanish? The only historical Spaniard Shakespeare presents on stage is <i>Henry VIII</i>'s Queen Katherine, a character whose Spanish-ness is, ironically, suppressed by the dialogue. Shakespeare makes her Henry's true English queen, even having her forcefully defend the English language when Cardinal Wolsey tries, during her divorce trial, to address her in Latin: "O, good my lord, no Latin! / I am not such a truant since my coming / As not to know the language I have lived in. / A strange tongue makes my cause more strange, suspicious; / Pray, speak in English" (3.1.42-46). Katherine comes across as more English than Wolsey.</p><p>But when Shakespeare invented a Spaniard, he made him Spanish with a capital "S." Shakespeare's imaginary Spaniards give us a glimpse into the early-modern English idea of who Spaniards were. The images of the Spaniard in three plays suggest that an English audience was primed sometimes to find the Spanish amusing, but not particularly admirable -- and sometimes frightening.</p><p>Why would this be so? An answer lies in military, political, and religious history. Spain was England's great enemy around the turn of the sixteenth century. In 1588, the Spanish Armada swept upsea to threaten England with invasion, and was only turned back by storms. At stake in their war was not just England's sovereignty but its national religion. Under Spain's King Philip II, Reformed Protestant England would certainly have been returned to its Old Religion, Catholicism, which would have pleased many oppressed English Catholics, but outraged far more of the population, who, a half-century after Henry VIII's death, were solidly Protestant. Thus Spain represented a huge cultural threat. Why not, then, channel defensive nationalism into on-stage mockery of the Spanish in the crowded theaters?</p><p>Thus we have the 1592 <i>Love's Labor's Lost</i>'s Don Armado, a laugh-inducing Spanish nobleman whose very name evokes the recent failed naval invasion (Armado/Armada). Armado is hilarious, and not wholly unsympathetic, but he's very silly. What are his follies? This "refined traveler of Spain" is ridiculously proud of his sword-fighting moves -- a reference to the supple Spanish swords, as well as Spanish sword-fighting schools, gaining popularity in early-modern London -- and of his fashionable appearance and ornate speech. The biggest joke against him is, this proud lord has fallen in love "with a base wench," the peasant Jacquenetta. Such a come-down for a Spanish hidalgo!</p><p>Pridefulness, indeed -- aristocratic hauteur -- formed an important part of the reputation of Spanish noblemen to English writers, who saw the hidalgos, the Spanish nobility ("hijos de algo," or "sons of someone") as insufferably elitist. Thus a second Spaniard, the Prince of Aragon in <i>The Merchant of Venice</i>, fails in the contest for heiress Portia's hand because he "will not jump with common spirits." Well, actually, he loses because he chooses the wrong mystery box, and misses the one that holds Portia's portrait, but his erroneous choice is marked by a wordy rejection of another wrong box because he dislikes its label: "Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire." For Aragon, joining "many men" is unthinkable. He's a prince. He's above the "barbarous multitudes." The box he finally chooses is made of silver, which fact may also signal Shakespeare's knowledge that the wealth of many sixteenth-century noble Spanish families originated in South American silver mines, where Indian slaves were worked to death. In any case, it's the wrong box. Aragorn's a loser.</p><p>But he's still pretty funny, unlike a third Shakespearean Spaniard, who hides a darker and more disturbing early-modern truth. During the sixteenth century, many Spaniards who left their country for others, including England, did so because of religious persecution. They were Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. In other realms, as well, they kept their religious identities secret, but were often known as Jews (or suspected to be such) because of their Spanish surnames. The scholar Peter Berek has interestingly argued that Iago, the villain of <i>Othello</i>, would have been recognizable to audiences as just such a displaced and secretive Spanish <i>converso</i>. Iago claims to be of Venice, but he has a Spanish name. ("Jachimo," as in <i>Cymbeline</i>, would be the Italian equivalent.) He speaks of his "tribe." He makes jokes about forced conversion (of which we see a real impending example in Act 4 of <i>The Merchant of Venice</i>). Was Shakespeare an anti-semite, constructing one of his most evil characters as a Jew in hiding among Christians?</p><p>This could be. But I think what most interested Shakespeare, in creating Iago, was the idea of Santiago, or the patron saint of Spain, St. James. The myths persisted in Spain not only that the Apostle James was buried there (the cathedral at Compostela holds his shrine), but that St. James would appear on horseback during late-medieval battles between Christian Goths and Islamic Moors, to champion the Christian armies. Thus James became, in myth, Santiago Matamoros, the Moor-slayer. A chilling joke, then, is embedded in the name of Iago, who "hate[s] the Moor" Othello, and knows not why.</p><p>Xenophobia takes many forms. Some are funny. Some are tragic. Some are ingenious. And some, like Shakespeare, are a little bit complicated. In presenting Islamophobic, treacherous, and elitist "Spanish" characters, Shakespeare was relying on the Hispanophobia and even, possibly, the anti-semitism of Elizabethan audiences.</p><p>Which leads to the question, does Shakespeare ever make fun of the English? </p><p>Well, yes, but only for dressing and talking as though they come from other countries. See Rosalind's takedown of traveler Jaques in <i>As You Like It</i>, and Portia's criticism of Faulconbridge, the "young baron of England" in <i>The Merchant of Venice</i>: "I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behavior everywhere." Have some integrity, Faulconbridge, Shakespeare (through Portia) suggests. Be English! In 1595, that meant not acting French, Italian, or German -- and certainly not Spanish. What was it "to be" English? It was convincingly "not to be" from anywhere else.</p>Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-30751673890743815832021-03-01T06:37:00.003-08:002021-03-01T06:44:12.145-08:00Shakespeare, Jonson, Plague<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3knt6l7Vg-cprto52h8wHpaGL47THn7tDuARyN458Qcjqv2CNZVz5JjupTKCXTxaGHLCm1F5Ghd6vPBaPLp0yeT94cfmXH8V_xMh5bIVCzvtLad-G8mIq-IEPrbnMkZz3F7nKEllRp7Ju/s284/JonsonShakespeare.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="177" data-original-width="284" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3knt6l7Vg-cprto52h8wHpaGL47THn7tDuARyN458Qcjqv2CNZVz5JjupTKCXTxaGHLCm1F5Ghd6vPBaPLp0yeT94cfmXH8V_xMh5bIVCzvtLad-G8mIq-IEPrbnMkZz3F7nKEllRp7Ju/s0/JonsonShakespeare.jpg" /></a></div><br /> Last year at this time, I wouldn't have dreamt we'd be walking around with masks on our faces in March of 2021. I remember trying to buy some dust masks at the hardware store back then, thinking they might be useful over the next few weeks. (They were already sold out.) A month after that, when I wrote this post, I would have been equally surprised to hear that it would still be relevant, or even understandable, in 2021. But it is. So I'm posting it again: a look back to how things seemed, Shakespeare-wise, Ben Jonson-wise, and Covid-wise, a year ago.<p></p><p>I hope I'm not posting this a third time in 2022. </p><p><i>April, 2020. </i>This month, in our time of modern-day plague, I shall not write yet one more claim that Shakespeare wrote <i>King Lear </i>or <i>Macbeth </i>while quarantined for the "pest," as they called it. (He did not.) Instead, I am offering my parody of a poem by Shakespeare's greatest rival, his brilliant contemporary, the playwright and poet Ben Jonson (pictured left of Will), who inhabited the early modern theater world alongside Shakespeare and enjoyed insulting him from his bully pulpit of the stage. All evidence suggests that Jonson and Shakespeare were friends, though they</p><a name='more'></a>varied greatly in their temperaments and in their ideas of how to write comedy. In fact, plays by each written during the "Theater Wars" of 1598-1601 hilariously satirize not just each other's ideas, but each other. Shakespeare's melancholy Jaques in the 1599 <i>As You Like It</i>, with his penchant for useless social commentary, lampoons Jonson, while Jonson's Sogliardo -- a social climber from the country with a new-bought gentleman's crest, in his 1598 <i>Every Man Out of His Humour </i>-- is a parodic figure of Shakespeare. It's hard to know how tense Jonson's and Shakespeare's relations sometimes were, or whether the mutual mockery was all in good fun. We can only guess it was good for business. We also can't know whether Shakespeare was ever a guest at one of Jonson's famous poet-gatherings at London taverns, attended by aspiring writers who called themselves the "Sons of Ben" (Robert Herrick was one). At eight years Jonson's senior, Shakespeare is not likely to have considered himself one of Ben's "sons," and whether his spirit lent itself to the kind of convivial festivity we see among Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Feste, Fabian, and Sir Toby Belch in <i>Twelfth Night</i> is part of the mystery surrounding Shakespeare's private life. Still, I like to think the pair hung out together on occasion, and such possible tavern episodes are the basis of scenes in two of my novels about Shakespeare, <i>Will </i>and <i>Gunpowder Percy. </i><br /><br />Jonson's famous poem "Inviting a Friend to Supper" shows his enthusiasm for hosting such gatherings: parties marked not just by good food and wine, but by the exchange of interesting ideas, as well as by the threat that someone might read a poem. "Inviting a Friend" is a fascinating poem, in that it mingles mouth-watering descriptions of savory dishes with the caveat that the host, Jonson, may not be able actually to obtain any of their ingredients -- he may have to steal the wine -- and also because its reassurance that the guest will not have to fear being spied on, with his perhaps renegade political views reported to the authorities, seems designed to make the invitee more nervous than he might have been without that reassurance. What things were to be feared? In 1616, quite a few. Jonson was, for a time, a covert Catholic (which was not precisely illegal, but a cause for suspicion in early seventeenth-century England). He was also jailed several times for mocking the new Scottish king, James I, on the stage, and he barely escaped trouble for killing a fellow actor in a duel. Shakespeare tended to be less religiously suspicious and more circumspect in his political satire, but he and his fellow players also ran into legal difficulties around the turn of the seventeenth century for unseasonably staging <i>Richard II</i>, a play whose deposition scene was seen by some as an invitation to unseat the then-reigning monarch, Elizabeth. So Jonson's fellow poets would have understood a caution against spies and informers. In any case, I like to imagine Shakespeare being the hoped-for guest to whom Jonson's poem is addressed, and to wonder whether Will showed up for one last hurrah before he passed into eternity.<br /><br />We'll never know, and must continue to imagine. But what we can also do, and what I asked some of my students to do in this fraught time of distance-learning and twenty-first century plague, is to enter insofar as we could into the minds of such Renaissance authors by writing "imitations." We reworked versions of Jonson's poem or other Renaissance poems, framed to our own circumstances. I myself wrote this Jonson parody. If you're up for a poem or two, I'd suggest reading Jonson's poem first (click here) <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50672/inviting-a-friend-to-supper">https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50672/inviting-a-friend-to-supper</a>. Mine, below, is called:<br /><br /><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">INVITING A FRIEND TO SUPPER IN KALAMAZOO, MICHIGAN, APRIL, 2020<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><br /></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Tonight, my friends, my dusty house and I<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Do equally desire your company,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Though ’tis illegal now to hold a party,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Since dread as deep as Holmes’ of Moriarty<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Governs assemblies, and chills family meetings,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Casts doubt on friendships, and stills jovial greetings.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Despite that, bearing fresh dust masks and spray,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">We’ll plan a banned, illicit holiday.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">But where to get the beer? Oberon’s lacking.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">A trip to Bell’s might get the township tracking<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">My vehicle, and strict town sheriff crying,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">“Is amber lager worth the risk of dying?”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">For carry-out, there’s Saffron, for to pick a<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Fine chutney, though they’re out of chicken tikka.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Some wine I’ll serve, actual, though now potential,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">If I can make that errand seem essential.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">We’ll fear no plague at our convivial feast,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">We’ll sit, aye, six feet distant, at the least.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">My man will scrub the tarts (if we can get ’em)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">And not doff plastic gloves. We will not not let ’im.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Fear not that I’ll read poetry. All verses<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">On paper, whether elegies or curses,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Are now stored in the bathrooms, behind locks,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Placed there to reinforce our dwindling stocks.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">No civic spies, no tell-tales, we’ll allow<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">At table, to inform good townsmen how<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">We broke the rules of quarantine, all sitting<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">At board together, social talk permitting.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">How would they know? They cower in their dens,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Consuming Netflix, eating M&Ms.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Yet we’ll stay safe, some garbed in haz-mat suits,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Sneezing in elbows, disinfecting fruits,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Hands sanitized, waving across the room,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Thinking, perchance, we should have met on Zoom.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">All things must pass. Tonight we’ll drink to that:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">To Lysol, latex, and a curve that’s flat.<o:p></o:p></span><br /><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;"><br /></span><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">-- Grace Tiffany</span></div>Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-5832959464272378482021-02-01T05:54:00.003-08:002021-02-01T07:31:28.964-08:00Shakespeare in Winter<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2X3Wpm03iHEMZRx6kaOGXnq-v0ypdw9EsDu-o0UB-3xrHSTE3WxdgUbZcaqDTUYnFDAuJUJmlF4wGijOelxw6xmi-hMN8Wr85ax7xsHVtbwB769662Sno3cwVsRN12EKl5hBKklJLCgZD/s1656/shakespearesnow.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1656" data-original-width="1600" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2X3Wpm03iHEMZRx6kaOGXnq-v0ypdw9EsDu-o0UB-3xrHSTE3WxdgUbZcaqDTUYnFDAuJUJmlF4wGijOelxw6xmi-hMN8Wr85ax7xsHVtbwB769662Sno3cwVsRN12EKl5hBKklJLCgZD/w193-h200/shakespearesnow.jpg" width="193" /></a></div> <br />It's gray and cold and snowy in Michigan, and whatever the Groundhog does tomorrow, it's likely to stay this way til at least the middle of March. The weather puts me in mind of Shakespeare's descriptions of winter.<p></p><p>Seasonal change is a fundamental metaphor in Shakespeare's poetry. He is fond of the coming of spring. Who isn't? "From you I have been absent in the spring," the poet laments in one sonnet. <i>The Winter's Tale, </i>despite its title, is popping with references to budding flowers and greenery, and its longest scene features a springtime sheep-shearing festival. <i>Twelfth Night </i>takes its title from the Eve of Epiphany, in the first week of January, but its characters, too, spend much time frolicking outside, presumably in mild climes and a gentler time of year. Where, then -- outside of a couple of titles -- is winter in Shakespeare?</p><p>We can find it here and there. Here's a verse from the song that concludes <i>Love's<span></span></i></p><a name='more'></a><i> Labors Lost</i>: "<i>When icicles hang by the wall, / And Dick the shepherd blows his nail, / And Tom bears logs into the hall, / And milk comes home frozen in pail, / When blood is nipped, and ways be foul / Then nightly sings the staring owl: / Tu-whit, tu-whoo! A merry note, / While greasy Joan doth keel the pot." </i>Those lines would make me shiver if I weren't shivering already.<p></p><p>A pastoral comedy, <i>As You Like It</i>, takes place in the greenwood, but contains lines that acknowledge there is such a thing as winter. Duke Senior, exiled in the forest, speaks of the <i>"churlish chiding of the winter's wind, / Which when it bites and blows upon my body / Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say / 'This is no flattery ....'" </i>The duke is a stoic. He puts mind over matter. He's apparently been out there in the woods a long time. This play is an instance of what we might call "hard pastoral." It's not all little lambs and daisies. The world contains mud and sheep-shit and, it appears, cold weather, against which we must brace ourselves.</p><p>What about <i>Hamlet</i>? Part of the problem in this play is that it's really cold out. In fact, that's how the play begins. Francisco, the sentry at Elsinore, says, "'Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart." Then Francisco leaves the stage, and we never see him again. We never know why he is sick at heart. We must conclude it's because it's so friggin' cold.</p><p>I get it.</p><p>It's clear that in Shakespeare -- as among humans generally -- winter is sad. It's something whose departure is to be celebrated, though you, the celebrant, might be a twisted and murderous villain. "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York," sneers ambitious Richard of Gloucester. On second thought, maybe Richard actually <i>misses</i> the winter of our discontent. He was more comfortable during the time of civil war symbolized by his "winter." But this, after all, is what's wrong with Richard. He's a cold-blooded creature of violence.</p><p>In Shakespeare we will look in vain for jolly Dickensian scenes of winter, of Mr. Pickwick skating merrily across a pond, or Bob Cratchit carrying Tiny Tim home from church on his shoulders, to the welcome of a blazing hearth. Were Shakespeare alive today, he'd be living in Florida. His characters tend to party outdoors, and they're not skating, sledding, skiing, or throwing snowballs. They're mostly just sitting around talking, in attitudes that make plain the weather is not a problem. I've mentioned <i>Twelfth Night</i>'s mismatch of winter-festivity title and springtime-festivity action. <i>A Midsummer Night's Dream </i>takes place on and about May Day, another strange discrepancy, but in that play <i>both</i> the title and the time in which the play is set suggest warm weather. Titania and her retinue revel in the forest, and Peter Quince and his crew rehearse on the fringes of the woods. Why? Because it's nice out. When wintry climes pop up in these plays, it's usually in metaphor, to describe an undesirable situation. <i>Twelfth Night</i>'s Sir Toby warns Sir Andrew he is in the "north" of Olivia's opinion, and will hang there "like ice on a Dutchman's beard" if he doesn't fix matters. "Some run from breaks of ice," says <i>Measure for Measure's </i>Escalus. I would, too (both say that, and run from them). As for winter sports, when people go sledding in Shakespeare, it's to wage war, like <i>Hamlet'</i>s "ambitious Norway," who "smote the sledded Polacks on the ice." Winter is also humbling. "Three winters cold / Have from the forests shook three summers' pride," the poet complains in Sonnet 104. "A sad tale's best for winter," Mamillius says in <i>The Winter's Tale. </i>And winter's best for a sad tale.</p><p>In fact, the most cheery picture of winter we get in Shakespeare is indeed the final song of <i>Love's Labor's Lost</i>, whose last verse features "birds" who "sit brooding in the snow," while "Marian's nose looks red and raw" and "roasted crabs hiss in the bowl." Marian needs a Kleenex, but at least she has roasted crab-apples in a bowl. And the birds are cold, but they're "brooding": keeping the new life warm in the eggs in their nests. Shakespeare has indeed grasped what winter is: Sad. Humbling. A biting, bone-chilling time of discontent. And also a red-nosed season to eat something sweet and wait for spring to be born, so we can all go outside.</p><p>Six more weeks.</p>Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-63139142819424477632021-01-01T20:31:00.011-08:002021-01-07T19:57:08.968-08:00Ten Things Shakespeare Wouldn't Say if He Were Alive in 2021<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXUfnnTX1VuHcyGXXGw51Rf4eOdZb04YPxsg_1Tfgtz24ZfJ0wZGjbrnV2my5_hygDpO_opVxynb0UWCq-FATq3AD16VkCAQdxOqrkP1lnZKYcWvLOJRkHylsW0DPqbnei0WlPHXXb82WH/s310/Shakespearewords2.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="163" data-original-width="310" height="105" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXUfnnTX1VuHcyGXXGw51Rf4eOdZb04YPxsg_1Tfgtz24ZfJ0wZGjbrnV2my5_hygDpO_opVxynb0UWCq-FATq3AD16VkCAQdxOqrkP1lnZKYcWvLOJRkHylsW0DPqbnei0WlPHXXb82WH/w200-h105/Shakespearewords2.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><br /> I've got ten new things people say that I want them to stop saying. The people I have in mind are advertisers, news commentators, politicians, and university administrators. They are not like you and me. They speak their own language, one I know Shakespeare would have disdained, and there are certain current terms on the hearing of which I know he is spinning in his never-to-be-violated grave. Therefore, Shakespeare and I mutually request that these folks find substitutes. Drawing on Shakespeare's own rich vocabulary, I will recommend some, following this list of <b>Terms Which I Request Be Left Behind with the Rest of the Miserable Year 2020</b>.<p></p><p>1. <b>"Gift" instead of "give," </b>as in, "Gift one, get one free." Yes, I know Shakespeare liked to turn nouns into verbs. Who can forget "Uncle me no uncles,"<span></span></p><a name='more'></a>from the Duke of York in <i>Richard II</i>, or my personal favorite, "I'll ... elf all my hair in knots," said by Edgar in <i>King Lear </i>as he elfs all his hair in knots? However, Shakespeare would never have used "gift" as a noun because, why should he? The word "give" already existed, is almost exactly like "gift," and is already a verb.<p></p><p></p><p>2. <b>"Modality."</b> If you're a teacher, like me, you're especially sick of this one. You're tired of having to "choose a modality" in which to teach, and then, after you've chosen, being told that you have to teach on-line no matter what, because of Covid. What would Shakespeare have said instead of "modality"? Method. "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't," says Polonius of Hamlet's babble. Of on-line teaching, we could say, "Though this be method, yet there is madness in it."</p><p>3. <b>"Pivot."</b> This one is like "modality." We have to choose a modality in which to teach, but no matter what we choose, we must be ready to "pivot" to on-line teaching, because of Covid. Picture thousands of academics abruptly turning 90 degrees to the left, dropping all their grade books and Norton Shakespeares and protective masks and hand sanitizer, and activating their computers to address dozens of 2-D images of muted students, some of them driving, some of them stopping by Wendy's for a burger at the Drive-Thru, some of them, let's face it, not actually there, and attempting to teach this way. What Would Shakespeare Say to describe the situation? He would probably use a nautical term, such as "About!" He would describe us teachers as skilled sailors, and allow us a metaphorical boat in which to carry all our stuff. "About, my brains!," says Hamlet. That's what we need (boats, and brains).</p><p>4. <b>"Myself,"</b> as in, "The plaintiffs in this cockamamie lawsuit are the president, one wacky Texan, and myself." The "myself" here is self-important as well as ungrammatical, imparting to the speaker two syllables instead of the measly solitary one found in the correct pronoun, which is "I." No Shakespearean speaker ever self-importantly and ungrammatically invoked "myself," not even Dogberry, who "hath two gowns and everything handsome about him," and would be the likeliest character to do so.</p><p>5. <b>"Socialize" </b>to mean "communicate." Let's be clear: "words" that end with "ize" are second-rate words in the first place. It's even worse when you use "ize" words in place of better words. What do you think of this sentence: "Let me socialize this recommendation with the others and then get back to you." I guess our regular socializing has been so constricted this past year that we are reduced to "socializing" recommendations, which, now, that I think of it, sounds like it means, trying to influence the recommendations to become socialists. At least this locution is not as bad as another one I once encountered: "I'll be funeralizing my great-grandmother on that date." Wow! I hope that involved honoring her with the customary obsequies, all ceremonies befitting her august personage, charitable prayers, funeral rites, and carved hatchments o'er her tomb. Surely it did.</p><p>6. <b>"Both/and." </b>How about this interchange? Q. "Should we prioritize [ugh] teaching excellence or gender diversity?" A. "It's not 'either/or.' It's 'both/and'." I doubt I have to point out the problem here, but I will anyway. Just "both" would have done. It means "the two," as when <i>A Midsummer Night's Dream</i>'s Helena tells how she and Hermia sewed "both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion, / Both warbling of one song, both in one key, / As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds / Had been incorporate." </p><p>7. <b>"Grim milestone."</b> Last night, America passed a grim milestone. Tuning in to NBC nightly news, it was forced to hear the ten thousandth utterance of the phrase "grim milestone" from the lips of newscaster Lester Holt. Oh, and the number of Covid cases passed some supposedly significant marker rendered insignificant by the number of times Covid's passing of the previous marker was called a "grim milestone." I can't say for sure Shakespeare would never have used the phrase "grim milestone." In fact, it does sound like the sort of thing he would have a character say ... once. </p><p>8. The verb <b>"tease"</b> used, but not in relation to a person. For decades I have winced at the phrase "tease out" in academic writing, as in, "We may tease out a subversive discourse of gender from Dogberry's dialogue." Now, I have to hear repeatedly that the current president wants to "tease a 2024 run" for a second term. As horrible as that prospect is, it is only slightly more appalling than the phrase used to describe it. I know what it's supposed to mean: that the president is teasing the public with the ghastly suggestion that he may run for office again one day. So, say that. Say whom he's teasing, or rather, torturing, with this suggestion. WWSS? Shakespeare would not only say that this president "mocked us," but that he "mocked at" us (see the last act of <i>Henry V</i>), or that he jeered, or fleered, or sported with us, or made mouths at us, or that he tendered us fools, or that he "words" us (see Cleopatra of Caesar: "He words me, girls. He words me"). He would certainly make clear who was being insulted.</p><p>9. <b>"Positioned."</b> Apparently we not only need to pivot to the on-line teaching modality, we need to be positioned to do so. Everywhere, people are positioned, frozen in static attitudes of horrified expectation. They are positioned to distribute vaccines, to open or shut their restaurants, to strut about with bullet cartridges on display when a brash demonstration of fury and historical ignorance is suddenly called for. Why is "positioned" bad? Because I don't like it. Shakespeare is positioned to propose an alternative: "ready." What's wrong with "ready"? Shakespeare uses it, as in <i>The Taming of the Shrew </i>(in a command crack lawyer Rudy Giuliani is positioned to adapt): "Someone be ready with a costly suit."</p><p>10. <b>"Worrying" as an adjective,</b> as in, "New South African Strain of Coronavirus is Worrying." Now, "worrying" is just plain not an adjective. It's a gerund verb. I seriously doubt that the new strain of the coronavirus is worrying about anything. It's just invading. It's we who are worrying. We could take advantage of the fact that "worrying" can also mean either literally or metaphorically "gnawing at," and say, "Coronavirus is worrying us." That would be correct. But why not just say "worrisome"? People have forgotten "worrisome" exists. Shakespeare hasn't, because he never knew it. The word didn't exist in his time, nor did he invent it. But he had other words to use, like "fretful," "troublesome," and "ominous." Those are better. Any one of them is good. </p><p>In conclusion: newscasters, politicians, and administrators, in 2021, enrich your vocabulary, as well as your insight. Read some Shakespeare! Do it now!</p>Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-57147844934842946722020-12-01T06:14:00.006-08:002020-12-06T10:36:57.048-08:00Shakespeare and Christmas<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmF2WIRpQVEqbLopVxBGMXdxR3j0oJBtT33HHym9KygMZvk-13iicjH2hBi3JrOUsUoHM8wTZWhCgxv7SON7UFJ9HQoWLgaHNzMcHyRMbDRqpFXHNF8uFKsYpe0DueSh8UdKwS9a20zpas/s604/christmas-shakespeare.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="604" data-original-width="434" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmF2WIRpQVEqbLopVxBGMXdxR3j0oJBtT33HHym9KygMZvk-13iicjH2hBi3JrOUsUoHM8wTZWhCgxv7SON7UFJ9HQoWLgaHNzMcHyRMbDRqpFXHNF8uFKsYpe0DueSh8UdKwS9a20zpas/s200/christmas-shakespeare.jpg" /></a></div>Dickens and Christmas we know about, but what about Shakespeare and Christmas? How did he celebrate? How do his characters celebrate?
Alas, we know little about Shakespeare's life, so we cannot fully answer the first question. We know Yuletide was a festive occasion in Elizabethan and Jacobean London (becoming less so as the seventeenth century wore on and those Biblically-minded Puritans began waging their war on Christmas). Through the 1590s and most of the first decade of the seventeenth century, when Shakespeare was active as an actor and playwright in London, Christmas would have been a busy time for him and his company, who were called upon to stage entertainments for Queen Elizabeth and, later, King James during the Christmas season. The apogee of festivity (of festiveness?) fell on Twelfth Night, the eve of January sixth, the Feast of the Epiphany, a holiday I've discussed in an earlier post. (Shakespeare's play <i>Twelfth Night</i> was most likely named for the holiday during which it was initially presented.) Unlike us, who begin celebrating Christmas immediately after Halloween and are done with it by 1 p.m. on December 25th, Christmas celebrations during Shakespeare's time actually began on Christmas Day, and continued for the eleven days thereafter. The season was celebrated with feasting, dancing, revelry, and all kinds of enjoyable pagan behaviors, including the staging of masques and plays filled with mythological references and characters. It was a frantic time indeed for theater folk, but a lucrative one. <div><br /></div><div>We can assume Shakespeare took part in the hard work, as well, we hope, as some of the revelry. But our knowledge of his holiday habits is largely speculative. We can speak with a bit more authority about Christmas as it appears in his plays.
Unlike Dickens, Shakespeare never wrote a work centered on Christmas, but he did write one play set during the Christmas season. Some may be surprised to learn<span><a name='more'></a></span> that the play was <i>Hamlet</i>. Not much about that tragedy seems Christmasy, but Shakespeare made a point, in the play's first scene, to stress the coldness of the weather and the fact that the spooky Ghost (a perhaps redundant phrase) is making his appearance(s) during Christmastime. After Horatio suspiciously observes that the just-vanished Ghost "started like a guilty thing surprised" when the cock crew, a fact that seems to mark the Ghost as an "erring" or malicious, evil spirit, the guard Marcellus counters, "Some say that ever gainst that season comes / Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated, / This bird of dawning [the cock] singeth all night long, / And then they say no spirit dare stir abroad, / The nights are wholesome then, no planets strike, / No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, / So hallowed and so gracious is that time" (1.1.157-64). These beautiful lines imply that Horatio is wrong about the Ghost's unwholesomeness. It must be a decent Ghost, because the holy nature of Christmas keeps bad spirits from "stir[ring] abroad." If this isn't what Marcellus means, why did he even bring Christmas up? As for the rooster singing all night long, while there is a bit of confusion about whether this particular cock crow sounded at an irregular time -- Marcellus's lines are immediately followed by a reference to the rising sun -- we must note that fewer than ten minutes before, with no ensuing break in the scene, the clock struck one (see line 46). This is inexplicable, but maybe it's one of the miracles of a Shakespearean Christmas season. Shakespeare can do funny things with time. For example, <i>A Midsummer Night's Dream </i>suggests the short nights of summer, but the night represented in that play lasts about 72 hours, because when the lovers escape into the woods there are three more days until May Day, and when they wake up after one night there, it's May Day (and May Day isn't summer, either). Perhaps in Shakespeare-land, some sort of seasonal craziness happens, and December nights are short.</div><div><br /></div><div>In any case, we know it's "bitter cold," because that's one of the first observations made in the play. So, let's all henceforth imagine <i>Hamlet</i> taking place during the dead of winter, with Hamlet soliloquizing next to a blazing Yule log in the palace lobby. This -- the snowy weather -- is one thing Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film adaptation of the play got right. (Casting Jack Lemmon as Marcellus is not.) Tim Burton's film <i>The Nightmare Before Christmas</i> also incorporated this spooky Hamlet Christmas vibe in an early scene where its melancholy protagonist, Jack Skellington, briefly removed his head and spoke to it, like Hamlet to Yorick's skull, singing a reference to Shakespearean quotations. And, come to think of it, Dickens also succeeded in honoring Yuletide <i>Hamlet</i> in <i>A Christmas Carol</i>, by having Marley's Ghost visit Scrooge on Christmas Eve, rattling his chains and speaking in a very Old Hamlet-ish way about the secrets of his purgatorial prison house. Fellow artists often intuit what commentators don't.</div><div><br /></div><div>Where else does Christmas pop up in Shakespeare? His allusions to the holiday are subtle, but can be found in places even less likely than <i>Hamlet</i>. <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i> is set in the century before Christ's birth, but it's clear that this famous couple's moment in history put Shakespeare in mind of the impending event that would change the world and begin the holiday of Christmas. Veiled allusions to the first Christmas appear in the dialogue of Cleopatra's servants, one of whom seems to refer to the Virgin Mary's cousin Elizabeth's story when she jokingly expresses the hope to "have a child at fifty, to whom Herod of Jewry may do homage." (So far from revering John the Baptist, Herod asked for his head, which makes this a grim joke indeed.) Later, the death-bound Cleopatra is called the "Eastern Star." She's a setting star, but the reference reminds us of the star that will soon shine over Bethlehem, and, for the Western world, will displace the ancient gods of Egypt, Greece, and Rome.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here Shakespeare is making a covert historical suggestion as well as a religious one. But it is typical of him to refer only indirectly to the Christmas holiday, as he did when he gave the title <i>Twelfth Night</i> to a play whose action seems to take place in the springtime. Perhaps there, as well as elsewhere, Shakespeare refers to Christ's birth as a way to emphasize the joy of the present moment: the birth of new joy taking place on stage. One of the best examples is found in one of Shakespeare's earliest plays. <i>The Comedy of Errors</i> stages the reunion of family members long separated by shipwreck and wanderings, as well as the start of a new marriage and the renewal of two existing ones. Throughout the play, the dialogue doesn't clarify the month or the season, but the final, joyful line of one of the reunited spouses makes us think of Christmas. "After so long grief," she exults, "such nativity!"</div><div><br /></div><div>Life has been hard for many of us this year, and grievous for some. Better times are coming. I look forward to the recession of our global plague and the start of a new year with this same Shakespearean thought: "After so long grief, such nativity!"
Merry Christmas!</div>Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-61479628390225208402020-11-01T05:53:00.012-08:002020-11-01T19:11:37.877-08:00Banishing Trump-staff<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ8GQsZX6dsj09HdMPv9Ru5ClkmmpCUy9Qs4CYW5Aq8I9WjxmFIH6yZS80wxoc95pYvDzTGaEIy1UgGGi1IZ00GtcdRR-vmhwVSW2Ojgo8UgCPZzniqw5prZN4DMZ-a6tAMMf1TC4eSoB9/s282/Trumpstaff.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="200" data-original-height="179" data-original-width="282" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ8GQsZX6dsj09HdMPv9Ru5ClkmmpCUy9Qs4CYW5Aq8I9WjxmFIH6yZS80wxoc95pYvDzTGaEIy1UgGGi1IZ00GtcdRR-vmhwVSW2Ojgo8UgCPZzniqw5prZN4DMZ-a6tAMMf1TC4eSoB9/s200/Trumpstaff.jpg"/></a></div>The past four years have confronted Shakespeare scholars with endless obvious comparisons between our president and Shakespeare's most villainous tragic heroes. We've compared him to Macbeth, Claudius, and Richard III, along with the more morally ambiguous Richard II, King Lear, and Julius Caesar. We all agree that Trump shares almost every vice of these characters and none of their redeeming features, like eloquence, courage, or wit. He's a would-be hero, just as he's a would-be strong man. As Sacha Baron Cohen recently put it, Trump, like Cohen, is a professional phony.
That being the case, it may be best to close (I hope) this horrid Trump chapter in American life by drawing attention to the resemblances, not between Trump and a character of tragic stature, but between Trump and the most bloated and shameless Shakespearean phony. That would be Falstaff. It goes without saying that Trump shares this character's vices, but not his talents: his ingenuity, his articulateness, and his teeming imagination. In "Henry IV, part 2," Falstaff says he is not only "witty in [him]self, but the cause that wit is in other men." For Trump, only the second half of that statement is true. However, the past year has shown his remarkable likeness to Falstaff in other, unfunny ways: his chilling indifference to the value of human life, his colossal vanity, his insistence on calling himself the winner of contests he's obviously lost, his contempt for honor, his obesity, his ill health, his steadily decreasing appeal, his pretense of youthfulness, and his need -- or the need with which he presents us -- to banish him from the stage, finally, for good. His scene is done.
Shakespeare developed the initially highly entertaining figure of Falstaff over two plays, "Henry IV, part 1," and "Henry IV, part 2," but implanted within him a kind of built-in obsolescence. Falstaff needed to be fun enough to justify young Prince Hal's attraction to him and to keep the audience laughing through one play, but to fade in his attractions for both Hal and the audience in part two, so that his dismissal -- his ultimate banishment, when Hal ascended to the throne of England -- could be applauded. At the beginning, Falstaff's reckoning himself one of the kingdom's "youth" (he's sixty), and his habit of talking his way out of trouble by changing the subject, prompt laughter in both Hal and the playgoers (or readers, as the case may be). But by the end of his first play, Falstaff's charm is already waning. It's hard to maintain warm feelings for him after a long speech in which he brags that he is capitalizing on the misery of the kingdom's unfortunates, "younger sons to younger brothers" and "ostlers tradefallen," by impressing them for military service and marching them off to be sacrificed in the king's wars. "Food for [gun]powder," he tells the prince. "They'll fill a pit." Falstaff has enriched himself by allowing luckier, wealthier men to buy their way out of military service, fulfilling his commission by drafting those whose means allow them no choice but to serve. Almost all of them die in the Battle of Shrewsbury; those who remain are maimed. Falstaff doesn't care, as long as he can escape with his money and his life. It's hard for audiences, then, to feel sympathy for him when he shows up in the next play ill with gout, and making jokes which aren't as funny as they used to be, but still trying every trick he can think of to cash in (literally) on his connections to the prince. When the crowned Hal finally publicly repudiates him, calling him "old man" and telling him, "fall to thy prayers," Falstaff doesn't know it's really time for him to go. He tells his followers he will be sent for "at night." But it's different for us. Like Prince Hal, we know this clown's moment is over.
And so it is for Trump. The comic value of his shamelessness, like that of Falstaff's, has worn thin. Falstaff will go to any absurd length to justify his behavior and his lies, like Trump, who, when challenged regarding his statement that Covid would simply disappear, said, "I'll be right eventually." (So is a stopped clock. And the earth will disappear eventually.) Like Falstaff, who doesn't care how many bodies fill a pit as long as he gets his commission, Trump and his son declare 230,000 American deaths "almost nothing." They're nothing to the Trumps. With less success than Falstaff first enjoys, Trump plays the comedian -- for incredibly, as he leers and grimaces at crowds at his rallies and says whatever comes into his head, he appears to think he is funny. The cascade of crude insults which delight his followers are a far cry from Falstaff's clever pin-pointing of his opponents' deficiencies ("elfskin" and "dried neat's tongue," meaning the prince, are terms which show some imagination; the same cannot be said for "Little Marco," "Sleepy Joe," etc.). But the dwindling, tired taunts with which Falstaff mocks his unfortunate draftees' names in "Henry IV, part 2," begin to put him in Trump's low-wit category. ("Moldy ... 'tis time you were used," he tells one such poor soul.)
Like Falstaff, Trump claimed, at the time he got Covid, to have survived because he was "very young," and for months Trump has been mocking Joseph Biden for his age-related gaffes without seeming to understand that he is almost Biden's age himself, and has shown at least as many eyebrow-raising "senior moments" as his political foe in the last four years -- and even less physical stamina. Like Falstaff the fat, Trump lumbers around like a gouty water buffalo, not even able to stand upright behind a podium without leaning on it, spray-tanning himself so as not to show his natural ghastly pallor, dyeing and combing-over his sparse grey hair, and surrounding himself with women more than twenty years younger than himself, with whose energy he can clearly not keep up. Towards the end of his stage-time, Falstaff laments, at last, "I am old." Was Trump experiencing such a Falstaff moment when, in his bizarre TV pitch to seniors some weeks ago, he actually admitted that he was one? Does he know he's going to die?
I doubt it. Very likely he was only desperately trolling for votes. But to me, it seems his act is finished. "Fall to thy prayers," Falstaff is told by the newly crowned king. In other words, "Repent, but do it elsewhere." I hope that this month, we invite our orange fool to do the same.
And, by the way, Falstaff's next stop, after that dismissal, is prison, for his thievery. Just a thought.Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-70502258227438146182020-09-30T22:00:00.009-07:002020-10-01T15:26:59.152-07:00Friendship or Fear<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjV9_SaIBOo3ZdTHyDuBXu7_M9RiS-Wyq639rsq184NVTTTF92MikXaDInZbwR_ZRFugFY22zFWw_Ub8eT3SqFwRdGKjRFD-ziwBzr-_XpiSBy45os49UaU0iAYrLcU-3UpXhtXv2-3qSP4/s1300/u.s.englandflags.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="866" data-original-width="1300" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjV9_SaIBOo3ZdTHyDuBXu7_M9RiS-Wyq639rsq184NVTTTF92MikXaDInZbwR_ZRFugFY22zFWw_Ub8eT3SqFwRdGKjRFD-ziwBzr-_XpiSBy45os49UaU0iAYrLcU-3UpXhtXv2-3qSP4/w200-h133/u.s.englandflags.jpg" width="200" /></a>Shakespeare's history plays offer us case studies contrasting different kinds of leaders. Mostly these leaders are medieval monarchs, whose modes of governance and levels of power differ hugely from those of contemporary heads of state (or would-be heads of state). But we wouldn't still be staging, watching, and reading Shakespeare if we didn't see ourselves in his characters, and our culture in his culture, as in a distant mirror (to adapt the famous phrase of the medievalist historian Barbara Tuchman).<p></p><p>And so, as I prepare to teach Shakespeare's <i>Richard III </i>to a group of undergraduates for perhaps the thirtieth time, I newly notice aspects of the play that speak to, and seem to speak of, the politicians among us, vying for power in this third decade of our twenty-first century. What I'm noticing this time is the two very different speeches given by two rival leaders in the fifth act of Shakespeare's play.</p><p>The first speaker is Henry, Earl of Richmond, soon to be crowned Henry VII, the first Tudor king. The second is Richard III, the Yorkist usurper who is defending his throne. In Shakespeare's play, Richard is the villain and Henry is the hero, in two-dimensional characterizations that ignore much of actual history. Shakespeare<span></span></p><a name='more'></a> suppressed all record of Henry's weak claim and various character flaws and exaggerated Richard's villainy. But hey, this was theater, and, moreover, theater under the rule of Henry's granddaughter, Elizabeth I, who cared deeply how her ancestors were represented. In embroidering and, to a certain extent, falsifying history, Shakespeare not only stayed on Elizabeth's good side, he achieved a paradoxical truth. Departing from the complex particularities of these two fourteenth-century political rivals, he gave his audiences -- then and now -- universal portraits that depict a leader who is not worth following, and one who is. <p></p><p>Richard isn't. Everyone knows that. But it's the way he isn't that repays study. It's not that he isn't a good speaker or a valiant warrior. It isn't even that he lacks royal blood (the play makes plain that he has more of that than Henry Richmond). The malignant quality of his generalship is that, fearful himself, he gains support by frightening others. He attracts such followers as he does attract by appealing to their fear and stoking their hatred.</p><p>Fear of what, and hatred of what? Well, like every other tyrant in history, Richard urges his people to hate and fear "outsiders." He creates images of barbaric interlopers who are not "true" countrymen, and are coming to wreak havoc and destruction on "our" towns and villages. Bad <i>hommes</i>. Listen to King Richard on Bosworth Field:</p><p> <i>Remember whom you are to cope withal,</i><br /></p><p><i><span> A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways,</span><br /></i></p><p><i><span><span> A scum of Bretons and base lackey peasants,</span><br /></span></i></p><p><i><span><span><span> Whom their o'ercloyed country vomits forth</span><br /></span></span></i></p><p><i><span><span><span><span> To desperate adventures and assured destruction.</span><br /></span></span></span></i></p><p><i><span><span><span><span><span> You sleeping safe, they bring you to unrest;</span><br /></span></span></span></span></i></p><p><i><span><span><span><span><span><span> You having lands and blessed with beauteous wives,</span><br /></span></span></span></span></span></i></p><p><i><span><span><span><span><span><span><span> They would restrain the one, distain the other ....</span><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span></i></p><p><i><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span> Let's whip these stragglers o'er the seas again,</span><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></i></p><p><i><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span> Lash hence these overweening rags of France ....</span><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></i></p><p><i><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span> Shall these enjoy our lands, lie with our wives,</span><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></i></p><p><i><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span><span> Ravish our daughters?</span><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></i></p><p>This sort of leader gains followers by presenting his hearers with the narrowest sense of what it is to be loyal to one's country. It is to hold on to what they own and refuse to share. In this doubtful enterprise, they should follow <i>him</i>, rather than his compatriot Henry (whose Englishness Richard disclaims on the grounds of his French exile, and whose thousands of British followers Richard mischaracterizes as aliens). If "we" don't beat Henry back, you know what's in store -- rape, pillaging, chaos, and the destruction of our homeland. Be afraid, hate, and fight.</p><p>Richard does fight. But Richard loses. Henry's mode of leadership proves more powerful. He appeals not to fear but to friendship and unity, and to a collective national revulsion, not from outsiders, but from one man's tyranny. He calls his men "<i>Fellows in arms, and my most loving friends," </i>and acknowledges their suffering under Richard's governance. Together, they are "<i>Bruised underneath the yoke of tyranny.</i>" Henry looks past the "bloody trial of war" to a "harvest of perpetual peace." He does not villify entire classes of people. Instead, he observes that the problem is one single man, "<i>A base foul stone, made precious by the foil / Of England's chair, where he is falsely set.</i>" He offers hope rather than terror, once the witch is dead. He urges them to think of themselves as a folk with a future; to work for the benefit of "<i>your children's children.</i>" Don't be afraid of each other, he says. Just get rid of that toad, who "<i>hath no friends but what are friends for fear.</i>"</p><p>To adapt Richard's opening line, what shall I say more than I have implied? In reality, Henry might not have been a better king than Richard. Neither of these speeches were actually given on the battlefield. Shakespeare made them up out of whole cloth. Shakespeare knew he took liberties with history, and that he trafficked in ideals. He did it as an artist, for the benefit of the children's children, foreseeing future leaders or failed leaders who might arise past time's horizon. He thought it was worth teaching the children's children, and their children's children, that friendship is better than hate, and hope always trumps fear.</p><p><i><span> </span><br /></i></p><p><br /></p>Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-4364464357050345842020-09-01T06:33:00.002-07:002020-09-25T17:52:15.242-07:00Best Unfamous Shakespeare Lines, Subjectively Chosen<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="144" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMYBEqYL-n5rxOmupcS4CXM5NZAQrjxu-7NpYfzY69B5-OVEYG12COnbRoHMP-DwpwyCV-B_zWI8VShg_h4KOzHrkgbb82wATrEkj2TQWg2YwCP_aqEuQyCgi2lQ34clA7_UhnrP556L1S/s0/shakespearequiz2.jpg" /></div><br /><i>"Shakespeare gets me; I can say the things I'm trying to say with him. He says it in that funky way or whatever, but what he shows people is what I'm tryng to say. I can take some words from Shakespeare and I can be like, yeah, this is how I feel, I might not have been able to put it into words myself for a long time and he's like there, there's the words you need."</i><div> -- Roger, prison inmate, participant in Shakespeare program</div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i> </i>Whenever you can't say what you mean about life, you can always just quote Shakespeare. He's like the Grateful Dead (though somewhat better), who have a song for every occasion. Shakespeare not only has a line for every occasion, he invents new occasions with his lines. Or maybe it's better to say that he brings our occasions into focus. <p></p><p>So, on this September day, rather than get into whom Shakespeare would have voted for in the upcoming election (Biden), or which tragic Shakespearean tyrant Trump is most like (none of them, because they're all smart and articulate), or what sort of car Shakespeare would have driven (a Subaru), I'm simply going to list some<span></span></p><a name='more'></a> of my favorite relatively unfamous lines from Shakespeare, which are among my favorites because when they are spoken, or when I read them, I think, "Yes! That's it!" I will offer a little contextual commentary, but no analysis. Or, hardly any. These lines speak for themselves, and are useful for many occasions.<p></p><p>1. Othello, speaking of his wife's alleged dishonesty: <b>"She was false as water." </b>(Okay, a little commentary. Ever been swimming in the ocean or a lake and you think you're not in over your head and you put your foot down and there is <i>nothing </i>there but water, and you have no firm ground to stand on?)</p><p>2. Othello, when he realizes he's killed an innocent woman, been wrong about everything that matters, and ruined his life: <b>"Let it go, all."</b></p><p>3. Iago, plotting to get his enemies drunk: "Now 'mongst this <b>flock of drunkards</b> / Am I to put our Cassio in some action / That may offend the isle."</p><p>4. Hero, of Beatrice: "<b>Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes, / Misprising what they look on."</b></p><p>4. Don Pedro to Benedick: "<b>You have a February face, / ... full of frost, of storm, of cloudiness</b>."</p><p>5. Sir Toby to Sir Andrew: "<b>Let me see thee caper. Ha, higher! Ha, ha, excellent!</b>" (Good for parties.)</p><p>6. Patroclus to Thersites: <b>"Why, thou damnable box of envy!"</b></p><p>7. Henry VI to Suffolk: "<b>Hide not thy poison with such sugar'd words."</b></p><p>8. Jack Cade: <b>"Up Fish Street! Down Saint Magnus' Corner! Kill and knock down! Throw them into Thames!" </b>(Good for riots.)</p><p>9. Prince Hal to Falstaff: <b>"Why, thou globe of sinful continents </b>...." (A little commentary here, as well. Shakespeare likes to make references to his theater, the Globe, and Prince Hal likes to call attention to Falstaff's rotundity. With sinful "continents," there's a play on "continence," of which Falstaff has none, and is therefore sinful. So, this is an insult crammed with meaning.)</p><p>10. Hamlet (dying) to Horatio: <b>"And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story."</b></p><p>11. Kent to Cornwall: <b>"I have seen better faces in my time / Than stands on any shoulder that I see / Before me at this instant."</b></p><p>12. Macbeth to Lennox: <b>"'Twas a rough night."</b></p><p>13. Macduff: "<b>Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight / With a new Gorgon."</b></p><p>14. Cleopatra, on Caesar: <b>"He words me, girls, he words me."</b></p><p>15. Timon of Athens, on seeing people approaching: "<b>More man? Plague, plague!" </b>(A timely phrase.)</p><p>I could go on, and on, and on! But fifteen makes a good starter Shakespeare kit. Go forth not with a February but with a September face, and read Shakespeare when your vocabulary flags.</p></div>Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-55555552226840856462020-08-01T05:55:00.000-07:002020-08-01T05:55:43.084-07:00Shakespeare's Doctors<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHFVCkxyyIT6ycwqzQiPtHMLfourBSUa5yw0XGHfvWa9rhO2NF3705OErIuG7Q6-5qBlxsoRatjc6YoXbxgkikYpnHd6-XticH3BnMU9RJNzPB_EjXCwYXdsb_jaQd5pOoCNI4xh6kxRcP/s1600/Renaissancedoctors.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="618" data-original-width="1100" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHFVCkxyyIT6ycwqzQiPtHMLfourBSUa5yw0XGHfvWa9rhO2NF3705OErIuG7Q6-5qBlxsoRatjc6YoXbxgkikYpnHd6-XticH3BnMU9RJNzPB_EjXCwYXdsb_jaQd5pOoCNI4xh6kxRcP/s320/Renaissancedoctors.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Who were the Doctors Fauci and Birx of Shakespeare's time? And how does Shakespeare represent physicians in his plays? These are two very different questions.<br />
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There was no public health administration as such in Elizabethan or Jacobean England. Civic authorities tended to function as health administrators during times of plague, placing obstacles in the way of large assemblies and closing many gathering places when death tolls were high, much as U.S. governors are doing during the coronavirus months (we hope months) today. Doctors -- called variously apothecaries, surgeons, and "chirurgeons" -- did a thriving business, but they did business on their own. Most were quacks, though many were sincere quacks, though that's very likely a contradiction in terms. The word "quack," used in relation to medical fraud, is almost as old as Shakespeare, though in its earliest use it was a verb. A 1628 text speaks of dishonest doctors "quacking for patients." But<br />
<a name='more'></a> even the honest doctors were just plain wrong about a lot of important things. So strong and universal was the belief that bleeding a patient helped stabilize his or her bodily humors, that they doubtless killed more people than they saved. Herbalists -- country "cunning men" and "cunning women" -- abounded, and it's likely that they did less harm than the surgeons; also, midwives knew a thing or two, as did doctors who assisted at childbirths. But even among these, a shocking ignorance of the importance of clean hands and fresh air frequently led to infections that killed the mothers. All in all, the Renaissance wasn't a good time to need medical care.<br />
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Queen Elizabeth and her successor King James had their private doctors, of course. These seem not to have been as corrupt and/or crazy as Trump's hired sages, who publicly report him to be the healthiest person ever to have lived. Trump's docs could get fired if they said otherwise -- you can't safely tell the truth to or around this president -- but life for Renaissance court surgeons was even more dangerous. Inigo Lopes, Elizabeth's Portuguese-born personal physician, was executed in 1598 for plotting to poison the queen, a charge of which he was almost certainly innocent. His Jewish origin was likely a factor in the suspicion in which he was held. He was a converso, or convert to Catholicism, but no Englishman really trusted those conversos. On the scaffold, still pleading his innocence, he declared that he loved the queen "as much as he loved Jesus Christ," and everybody laughed. Then they decapitated him.<br />
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All of this is grimly interesting. Yet Shakespeare was not very interested in any of these doctors (that is, real ones, with cures, whether those cures were helpful, quackery, or ignorant malpractice). Regular doctors do appear, or are at least referred to, in some of his plays, but they never play important roles (or, if they do, those roles have little to do with doctoring). Doctor Caius in <i>The Merry Wives of Windsor </i>is only incidentally a doctor. He's there not to prescribe, but to be laughed at for his French accent and to be a comic <i>senex</i>, a ridiculously old and inappropriate suitor to the young Anne Page. The doctor who tends the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth in <i>Macbeth </i>comes on stage only to confess his inability to cure her, since her malady is spiritual. "This disease is beyond my practice." If Shakespeare's plays are any guide -- and they are the only guide we have -- he was skeptical of professional doctors. None of his can cure anything. In <i>All's Well that Ends Well</i>, the sick king (he has something like terminal hemhorroids) "hath abandoned his physicians . . . under whose practices he hath persecuted time with hope, and finds no other advantage in the process but only the losing of hope by time." Doctor Pinch in <i>The Comedy of Errors</i>, like <i>Twelfth Night</i>'s Sir Topas the Curate (the fool Feste, disguised as a priest), are both quacks.<br />
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But Shakespeare has faith, if not in doctors, in healers. At least, his plays do. These healers appear sometimes in his plays to save lives where surgeons can't. They are more like priests than doctors. They minister to the spirit. It's not entirely clear how they heal, but they are in league with all the virtues of the earth, of minerals and plants, and somehow they channel these virtues into the regeneration of their patients. They are like country herbalists, but with a strange access to the supernatural as well as to mere nature. They are good witches.<br />
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Such is "Doctor She," Helena, who arrives at <i>As You Like It</i>'s French court to cure the king (offstage, for which we're grateful) in some strange way that's never described, but seems to have to do with her virgin purity. Cerimon of <i>Pericles </i>is, similarly, a natural healer with the magical ability to bring the cold corpse of Thaisa, dead in childbirth, back to life. "Death may usurp on nature many hours, / And yet the fire of life kindle again / The o'er pressed spirits," Cerimon says, claiming he knows of instances from the mysterious Egyptians. How does he wake Thaisa? With music -- which is also the medium used by Paula to bring a statue to life in <i>The Winter's Tale</i>. Clearly something more than ordinary medicine is going on here.<br />
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What does this mean? Here's what I think. Shakespeare thought doctors were clowns -- at worst, quacks; at best, failures. But he had faith in the healing powers of art, and of virtue itself. He was skeptical of human attempts to master medicine as a science. He was more hopeful that supernatural powers permeated the natural world, and could bring about what looked like miracles.<br />
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At least, he wanted to believe that. His plays show it. And who's to say he was wrong?Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-3856928993641132582020-07-01T07:19:00.000-07:002020-07-08T08:41:05.523-07:00"True ornaments to know a holy man": Holy-Book-Waving in Shakespeare and Washington<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgormdNgt2A2l903bozue4TXhhgdx6Kp1qwuKVN2qtcYTGzDjSAA9BjSvnIXZcb3tssu5_T_xpoRMp3dmhvqDjeB3XUVm1P2Uk6-I8mZ1LVrUi74sbWqjGCu4r4-6wQLv39iPeDmotUk-12/s1600/trumpbible.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgormdNgt2A2l903bozue4TXhhgdx6Kp1qwuKVN2qtcYTGzDjSAA9BjSvnIXZcb3tssu5_T_xpoRMp3dmhvqDjeB3XUVm1P2Uk6-I8mZ1LVrUi74sbWqjGCu4r4-6wQLv39iPeDmotUk-12/s320/trumpbible.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
A stereotypical sign of moral hypocrisy is the waving of a Bible. The phrase "Bible thumper" refers not to a genuinely inspired Christian zealot, but to a Pharisee more intent on cramming Biblical dicta into others' heads than on repenting for his own sins (who will not remove the mote in his own eye, in that same Bible's words). While "Bible thumper" goes back only a century or so, these scripture-waving types are as old as the Pharisees Christ chastises in that very book. They've always abounded in life, and representations of them in literature precede Shakespeare. (Think of Chaucer's licentious fire-and-brimstone preacher, the Pardoner.) So when the puffed-up libertine Donald Trump appeared waving a Bible in front of a Washington D.C. church last month, using that book as a prop to help him condemn the folks in that city who were protesting police violence against black citizens, he was a familiar trope. (A Trump trope.) He was the real-life embodiment of a humorous literary and dramatic cliche. He didn't know that, of course, because he doesn't read books. But the fact was evident to others.<br />
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The joke was especially rich for Shakespeareans, who saw the resemblance of the ridiculous scene to the comic moment in <i>Richard III</i> when wicked Richard, Duke of Gloucester, stage-manages his own appearance in front of a crowd of London citizenry. He stands between two clergymen, holding a prayer book and claiming he is "earnest in the service of my God." He's suborned the mayor and his henchman Buckingham to urge him to leave his prayerful contemplation and ascend to the English throne -- a position to which he is not, in fact, entitled, but which he is determined to occupy. In Richard Loncraine's filmed adaptation of the play, Richard (Ian McKellen) and his sinister cronies wear Nazi-ish uniforms as they plot the scene.<br />
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Richard is certainly more comfortable with his religious prop than Trump was with that there Bible book of which he'd heard, and from which, when once challenged to do so, he could quote not a syllable. Richard holds his prayer book gracefully, looking as though he's actually been reading it. Trump, as seen above, holds the Bible up for the television audience as though it's an exotic object, which, for him, it is. <i>I don't know what's in this thing, but I think it's about making money, like my second-favorite book, '"The Art of the Deal"! Ivanka said I could get re-elected by waving it around. But how do you hold a book?</i> Also unlike Trump, Richard is a versatile actor skilled in pious oratory. "God be thanked, there is no need of me!," he says, to prompt the scripted denials and entreaties of his followers. Trump just stands and stares belligerently like a Bible-toting orangutan.<br />
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Still, despite the evident discrepancy between Trump's and Richard's levels of education, intelligence, and skill, these two scenes of religous hypocrisy, as witnessed by the theater or television viewer, are hilariously similar. Both Richard and Trump appear flanked by "supporters" meant to shore up their public legitimacy. Trump drags the uniformed head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, White House Spokesbimbo Kayleigh McEnany, Attorney General William Barr, and several other statesfolk into his photo op. Richard appears between two robed priests, and requires London's Lord Mayor and the Duke of Buckingham to "voice-over" the scene, to ensure that its moral point is not lost: "See where his Grace stands, 'tween two clergymen!" These "right reverend fathers" are "two props of virtue for a Christian prince" -- props, indeed! -- "To stay him from the fall of vanity; / And see, a book of prayer in his hand, / True ornaments to know a holy man." Shakespeare's scene might have served as an instruction manual for Trump's awkward enactment of Christian leadership. But we know the apparent connection between the scenes is a mere coincidence. The idea of Trump digesting even a tenth of a Shakespeare play is laughable.<br />
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The citizens' reactions to Richard III's hypocritical tour-de-force are also applicable to this shameful (yet funny) Trumpian episode. Several (not all) members of Trump's photo-op group wore horrified "Help Me!" expressions as Trump herded them in for the shot. Like the English commoners when told of Richard's claim to the throne, "[T]hey spake not a word / But, like dumb statues or breathing stones, / Stared each on other and looked deadly pale."<br />
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But they did it. They walked with him to the church, and they stood with him and aided his hypocrisy. Barr, a well-educated Catholic and supposedly a Christian, knew, even if Trump didn't, that inside the book Trump was holding up were exhortations to behave not like these white House Pharisees, but like the peaceful citizens standing up for love of one's neighbor whom their attack force had just tear-gassed out of Lafayette Square. Still, as have "good Christian" senators Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and many others, they stood with the hypocrite. And this is the problem.<br />
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Let's give full credit to General Mark Milley for publicly regretting that bad choice, and also to Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who, on the same day as the infamous photo-op, sponsored the painting of defiant words signifying human brotherhood on the road that leads to the White House. Her spine is clearly stiffer than <i>Richard III</i>'s Lord Mayor's. But let us notice as well the religious hypocrites, the ones who know their leader's moral hollowness and help to puff him up, who speak "not a word" against his betrayal of Christian teaching and abuse of Christian symbols -- along with his many other moral abuses. The Duke of Buckingham got his head cut off, in the end: a victim of King Richard's punitive (and Trumpian) treatment of defectors. Richard himself died of a hundred hurts at Bosworth Field. I'd be happy if Trump and Barr were just kicked out of office.Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-44351811902800390662020-06-01T07:29:00.000-07:002020-06-02T06:55:49.580-07:00Shakespeare and Angry Mobs<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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What did Shakespeare think of angry mobs? To answer is not so easy. For four hundred years, Shakespeare readers have mistakenly extricated this or that phrase, said by this or that character, from this or that play, and proclaimed that it expressed Shakespeare's opinion on the given subject. "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers," says s follower of the rebel Jack Cade (a real historical character) in <i>Henry VI, part 2. </i>Cade agrees. This is said to mean Shakespeare hated lawyers. Really, what it means is that the rebel and mob-inciter Jack Cade hates lawyers. But Jack Cade also wants to kill anyone who can read and write. Does that sound like something that would interest Shakespeare?<br />
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This is not to say that we can't discern Shakespeare's attitude on some subjects. It is only to say that doing so is a complex, lengthy, and painstaking effort that requires, paradoxically, not trying to discern Shakespeare's attitude. Instead, we learn Shakespeare's mind as a secondary result of getting to know his plays. If you immerse yourself in Shakespeare's work the way you would surrender yourself to a conversation, not pursuing an agenda but simply hearing what is said, you eventually get to know, from a thousand repeated explicit or subtle suggestions, how Shakespeare viewed certain issues, or, at least, to which views he inclined. You may notice, for example, that every man in Shakespeare who is prone to soliloquy rather than to conversation falls prey to unfounded jealousy of his wife or lover, and this may lead you to suspect that Shakespeare thought isolation bred tormenting delusions. Or you may come to recognize a sympathy for woodlands in the very quantity and variety of sylvan plants that spring up in Shakespeare's dialogue, whether these plants are directly described as part of the imaginary landscape, or whether, as happens more often, they function metaphorically to describe some human experience. In <i>The Winter's Tale</i>, Perdita speaks of "pale primroses, / That die unmarried ere they can behold / Bright Phoebus in his strength -- a malady / Most incident to maids."<br />
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So, we may ask, in this day of angry crowds demonstrating and, sometimes, looting in cities across America, in the wake of the latest police murder of a black man -- <br />
<a name='more'></a>What Would Shakespeare Think? And to begin to answer that question, we need to look carefully, not at one idiot like Jack Cade, but at the complex situations which give rise to demonstrations in Shakespeare, and the various ways those mob actions are performed.<br />
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Probably the most famous riot, and the least attractive depiction of a mob action, is that in <i>Julius Caesar</i>, where a violent and bloodthirsty band murders the innocent Cinna even after being made to understand he is not the guilty party whom they seek. Bent on punishing Caesar's assassins, one of whom shares a name with this Cinna, the angry mob won't hear Cinna's complaint that he is not that Cinna but "Cinna the poet." "Tear him for his bad verses!," they cry, and they do. Not Shakespeare's most appealing joke. This is the general Roman population, easily swayed by Brutus's arguments for Caesar's assassination, and then as easily turned against the assassins -- indeed, turned into assassins themselves -- by Mark Antony. Their depiction would seem to suggest Shakespeare held a low opinion of common citizens' ability logically to weigh arguments, restrain themselves from passionate action, and think for themselves.<br />
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But wait! These are Italians. Or rather, these are an Elizabethan Protestant Englishman's representation of Italians for his English Protestant audience. Are English crowds presented differently?<br />
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Well -- not necessarily. To address this question we look, again, at Jack Cade and his followers in <i>Henry VI, Part 2. </i>Here Shakespeare, himself from a working-class glover's son, lampoons Cade's "leather-apron" (tradesman) followers for being as excited about violence as his Roman citizenry would be when he put them on stage a few years later. The English crowd criticizes book-learning, champions illiteracy, and declares that only laborers should rule. As suggested above, their talk is full of nonsense, and their choice of Cade as a leader shows their inability to discriminate between reason and folly.<br />
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If we stopped here, we might need to assume that Shakespeare was a self-hating tradesman who saw only danger in gatherings of men of his class: that he saw commoners' assemblies as natural prey to the demagoguery of some manipulative leader, and easily tipped into violence. Certainly these plays show that Shakespeare was aware of this danger. Yet a broader look at his work reveals that the tendency toward unreasoning collective violence is, at least, not limited in Shakespeare to the lower classes. In <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, the fine families of Verona are straw awaiting a spark, barely containable in their ardor for prideful duelling. The Montagues and the Capulets are gentry, but they're as hot-headed as Jack Cade. And in <i>Henry V</i>, the king makes plain that all the soldiers he leads into France, highborn and low, given license to kill, will lay waste to everything in their path. Maybe it was human nature -- or the nature of men -- that Shakespeare suspected.<br />
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Still, all this might simply mean that Shakespeare was not, finally, classist in his presentation of the destructiveness and unreasoning nature of mobs. What we want to know is whether Shakespeare ever presents assemblies of citizens in a more positive, reasoning light.<br />
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In fact, he does. In <i>Richard III</i>, crowds of Londoners repeatedly resist wicked Gloucester's attempts to manipulate them in the way Mark Antony easily manipulates the Romans. They express their staunch opposition to wicked Richard in private conversation with each other and with the audience. Richard's henchman Buckingham returns from Parliament complaining that he had to hire some people to cheer for their plot to overthrow of the legitimate monarch, since the rest "spake not a word," and only stared incredulously at their would-be rabble-rouser.<br />
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We also see a thinking crowd -- as opposed to an unreasoning mob -- in another play set, in all places, in Italy. Indeed, Shakespeare makes this Italian "mob" contrast markedly and positively with the insulting description of it given by the play's protagonist. The play is the late tragedy <i>Coriolanus</i>, set in the time of the pre-Imperial Roman republic. For all his admirable qualities, Caius Marcius Coriolanus, warrior and patrician, is marred by his incurable antipathy for the gathered people of Rome. Like <i>Julius Caesar</i>'s snobbish patrician Marullus, who calls the Roman tradesmen "blocks, ... stones, ... worse than senseless things," Marcius insults the plebeians because they aren't soldiers, but, instead, folk who contribute to the welfare of the city in "contemptible" ways: they raise food, they make clothes, they build houses. To their faces, he calls them "curs" and "geese" and "dogs." It disgusts him that, having fought battles in Rome's name, he must then ask the non-combatants to approve his election to consul. He despises "popular man" and resents the custom that requires him to appear among a crowd and solicit their voices.<br />
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But this crowd, though despised, isn't despicable. They are reasoning and judicious enough to see the contempt would-be consul Marcius has for them, and to doubt his concern for their welfare. "Certainly, he flouted us downright," says one offended citizen. It is not their tribunes, who hate Marcius, but their own deliberations which lead them to withdraw their support for this arrogant Roman champion.<br />
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Further, while these angry citizens demonstrate -- for corn, at the outset of the play, and for Marcius's recall, in the play's middle -- they aren't violent and they don't loot. Who does? The only class of Romans Marcius pretends to respect: the soldiers. They follow Marcius to wage war on the Volscians, but -- also ironically -- earn their leader's contempt by pausing to enrich themselves (as soldiers have always done) with the property of those they've terrorized. "This will I carry to Rome!," says one, emerging on stage "<i>with spoils</i>." "And I this," says another. "A murrain on't! I took this for silver," says a third. Coriolanus finds his followers beneath contempt because they stopped letting blood to carry off "cushions" and "leaden spoons."<br />
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If the late play <i>Coriolanus</i> tells us anything about Shakespeare's attitude toward mobs and looting, it is that the subject was complex for him from the beginning. The proudly illiterate rebel leader Jack Cade of <i>Henry VI, part 2</i>, sprung from Shakespeare's pen before he was 30, but he wrote <i>Richard III </i>only about a year later. <i>Julius Caesar</i> came when he was 35. <i>Coriolanus </i>came nearly a decade later, close to the time of his retirement from the London theater world. For whatever reason, at varous times in his life Shakespeare was able to present a "commonalty" who were less passionate in their judgments, and more rational, than the governors who looked down on them. By the character of Coriolanus and his ill fortunes, especially, we see expressed a profound skepticism for aristocratic hauteur, and even less admiration for war than we find in the ambiguous war-play <i>Henry V</i> (written around the same time as <i>Julius Caesar</i>). And while <i>Coriolanus</i> may invite us to share Marcius's contempt for looting -- for using some high-purposed action for personal gain -- the play also leads us to sympathize for the sneered-at common citizens who constitute the greater but most neglected part of any polity. The citizens of this play are more dignified than their patrician rulers allow, and their impromptu assemblies are not riots, but deliberate calls for justice.Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-427595259896659572020-05-01T07:35:00.001-07:002020-11-06T09:56:20.549-08:00Plague in Shakespeare's Time<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when Shakespeare was writing his plays and living, for the most part, in London, plague was an occasional but expected social evil. At various times from the middle ages through the seventeenth century, the bubonic plague moved from country to country via flea-bearing vermin on ships, and so entered port cities, London being one, and spread from there. Those who could afford it, or had rich friends who owned country manors, fled the town. Those less fortunate "sheltered in place," or didn't, in London, and many caught the "pest." The proportion of fatalities was astronomically higher than any nation is experiencing from Covid-19. In the 1592-93 outbreak, ten percent of the London population died. By comparison, in New York City at the time of this writing, fewer than two-tenths of one percent of the population have died of Covid-19. Not as many people recovered from the plague as now get over Covid, though a lot did, especially as its strain apparently mutated and grew less virulent. People could hope.<br />
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There was a second outbreak of plague in London while Shakespeare was there, in 1603, and a milder one in 1605. During none of these plague years did civic authorities outlaw church services, and they rarely interfered with people's shopping, but they did outlaw morally sketchier gatherings in which people pressed<br />
<a name='more'></a>close to one another. Playhouses and "leaping houses" -- brothels -- were torn down. With their livelihoods at stake at these times, playing companies frequently hit the road, performing in town halls and market squares throughout England. In 1593, Shakespeare might well have done a stint as a traveling player, though by 1603, he was wealthy enough not to have had to.<br />
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England crowned a new monarch, James I, in 1603, but because of the plague, he refused to come down to London to reign until 1604. Queen Elizabeth had died (not of plague) in the spring of 1603, but her successor, Scottish James, would do no more than dip his toe into England until the plague numbers had gone down. He had himself crowned at York, just south of the border. Not until after his triumphal entry into London would Shakespeare's company perform as the King's Men, with James as their official patron.<br />
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Many London poets contributed to the celebration of James's post-plague arrival with songs and recitations. We have no record of any contribution by Shakespeare, but among those first in line to flatter the new king was Ben Jonson, mentioned in my last post. Records of the triumphant procession refer to encomia presented to the king at Fenchurch Street, poetic speeches written by Ben Jonson, who, like Shakespeare, would be a favored artist at James's court. We can wonder if, while writing these, the career-minded Jonson was struck by any guilt over the fact that he had left town the year before, for the home of a wealthy patron, leaving his own family to try their luck in London. His young son died of plague in 1603, with his father absent. The lad posthumously received a poem for his pains (Jonson's short, sad "On My First Son").<br />
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Shakespeare too had by then lost a young son, the eleven-year-old Hamnet, though Hamnet lived not in London but in the Midlands town of Stratford, and we don't know how he died. Loss of children to disease was common. Shakespeare himself might easily have been taken by plague as a child, and we never have heard of him. Two of his siblings died of it, in the late middle of the sixteenth century. Will was apparently plague proof. As a child, and in London in 1592, 1593, 1603, and 1605, he proved immune. Or anyway, he didn't get it. He lived to write thirty-seven plays and one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, none of which seem much concerned with plague at all. There are stray references to "takings" (away of life) and to a "plague-sore" in <i>King Lear</i>, to houses in which plague victims were locked in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, to a "planetary plague" in <i>Timon of Athens. </i>Nearly all these references are metaphorical. They show an author less interested in the plague itself than in the emotional experiences for which it can be made to stand. "Plague-sore" is just another insult Lear hurls at his daughter (along with "carbuncle"). As far as diseases go, Shakespeare was much more interested in the sexually transmitted ones. The lewder characters in his history plays and in some of the darker comedies (like <i>Measure for Measure </i>and <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>) are always complaining about the pox.<br />
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Shakespeare lived to be 52. We don't know how he died, but to us it seems he died young. And, in fact, he did. Despite what many people think, there were, in Shakespeare's time, men and women who lived into their eighties and nineties. (His own daughter, Judith, lived to be 77.) But such long-livers were not the norm. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, too many diseases lay in wait for you, and folks lacked anything like vaccinations, let alone antibiotics. If you managed to get born alive, and made it out of infancy and childhood, you might still be laid low, by plague, or by a sweating sickness or a consumption, by the bloody flux, by spotted fever or "surfeit" (pox). If you were female, you could die in childbirth. One seventeenth-century month's register attributes 954 deaths to "teeth."<br />
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Maybe this -- the prevalence, variety, and proximity of threats to life -- is why the plays Shakespeare and other playwrights wrote during the plague years are not overly interested in plague. Those playwrights weren't like us. In 2020, none of us can talk about anything else but Covid-19. That's because, as a friend of mine said recently, "Vaccinations have made us complacent." When that complacency is disrupted by a novel disease, all hell breaks loose.<br />
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But in early modern England, folks were used to the various deadly afflictions that smote them and their loved ones from all quarters. Plague was part of the background. To poets, it was far from the most compelling subject. True, Thomas Nashe wrote a short "Litany in Time of Plague," sounding the grim refrain: "I am sick, I must die, Lord have mercy on us." And another of Shakespeare's contemporaries, John Donne, evoked the bell signaling another plague-death to exhort his readers to a sense of brotherhood in suffering: "Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." But in this play-mad city, no plays were written that focused centrally on the actual (and not metaphorical) bubonic plague, even during the seasons when it raged. Ben Jonson's 1610 <i>The Alchemist</i>, a comedy featuring a wily London con artist, uses plague as a brief plot device to get a rich man out of town so the con-man and his humorous associates can use the lord's fine London home as a base for their criminal antics.<i> </i>The play is about their antics. John Donne could complain, in a poem, to a busybody acquaintance that his activities didn't "add one more to the plaguey bill," a casual way of saying, "I'm not hurting anyone." Plague was a known bane. It was a recurrent distemper, a pest, another of fortune's slings and arrows. All in all, it was just one of the myriad ills attendant on being human.<br />
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Lord, have mercy on us.Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-57617830352065057432020-04-01T06:40:00.001-07:002021-02-28T10:16:53.365-08:00Shakespeare, Jonson, and Social Distance<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This month, in our time of modern-day plague, I shall not write yet one more claim that Shakespeare wrote <i>King Lear </i>or <i>Macbeth </i>while quarantined for the "pest," as they called it. (He did not.) Instead, I am offering my parody of a poem by Shakespeare's greatest rival, his brilliant contemporary, the playwright and poet Ben Jonson (pictured left of Will), who inhabited the early modern theater world alongside Shakespeare and enjoyed insulting him from his bully pulpit of the stage. All evidence suggests that Jonson and Shakespeare were friends, though they<br />
<a name='more'></a>varied greatly in their temperaments and in their ideas of how to write comedy. In fact, plays by each written during the "Theater Wars" of 1598-1601 hilariously satirize not just each other's ideas, but each other. Shakespeare's melancholy Jaques in the 1599 <i>As You Like It</i>, with his penchant for useless social commentary, lampoons Jonson, while Jonson's Sogliardo -- a social climber from the country with a new-bought gentleman's crest, in his 1598 <i>Every Man Out of His Humour </i>-- is a parodic figure of Shakespeare. It's hard to know how tense Jonson's and Shakespeare's relations sometimes were, or whether the mutual mockery was all in good fun. We can only guess it was good for business. We also can't know whether Shakespeare was ever a guest at one of Jonson's famous poet-gatherings at London taverns, attended by aspiring writers who called themselves the "Sons of Ben" (Robert Herrick was one). At eight years Jonson's senior, Shakespeare is not likely to have considered himself one of Ben's "sons," and whether his spirit lent itself to the kind of convivial festivity we see among Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Feste, Fabian, and Sir Toby Belch in <i>Twelfth Night</i> is part of the mystery surrounding Shakespeare's private life. Still, I like to think the pair hung out together on occasion, and such possible tavern episodes are the basis of scenes in two of my novels about Shakespeare, <i>Will </i>and <i>Gunpowder Percy. </i><br />
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Jonson's famous poem "Inviting a Friend to Supper" shows his enthusiasm for hosting such gatherings: parties marked not just by good food and wine, but by the exchange of interesting ideas, as well as by the threat that someone might read a poem. "Inviting a Friend" is a fascinating poem, in that it mingles mouth-watering descriptions of savory dishes with the caveat that the host, Jonson, may not be able actually to obtain any of their ingredients -- he may have to steal the wine -- and also because its reassurance that the guest will not have to fear being spied on, with his perhaps renegade political views reported to the authorities, seems designed to make the invitee more nervous than he might have been without that reassurance. What things were to be feared? In 1616, quite a few. Jonson was, for a time, a covert Catholic (which was not precisely illegal, but a cause for suspicion in early seventeenth-century England). He was also jailed several times for mocking the new Scottish king, James I, on the stage, and he barely escaped trouble for killing a fellow actor in a duel. Shakespeare tended to be less religiously suspicious and more circumspect in his political satire, but he and his fellow players also ran into legal difficulties around the turn of the seventeenth century for unseasonably staging <i>Richard II</i>, a play whose deposition scene was seen by some as an invitation to unseat the then-reigning monarch, Elizabeth. So Jonson's fellow poets would have understood a caution against spies and informers. In any case, I like to imagine Shakespeare being the hoped-for guest to whom Jonson's poem is addressed, and to wonder whether Will showed up for one last hurrah before he passed into eternity.<br />
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We'll never know, and must continue to imagine. But what we can also do, and what I asked some of my students to do in this fraught time of distance-learning and twenty-first century plague, is to enter insofar as we could into the minds of such Renaissance authors by writing "imitations." We reworked versions of Jonson's poem or other Renaissance poems, framed to our own circumstances. I myself wrote this Jonson parody. If you're up for a poem or two, I'd suggest reading Jonson's poem first (click here) <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50672/inviting-a-friend-to-supper">https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50672/inviting-a-friend-to-supper</a>. Mine, below, is called:<br />
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">INVITING A FRIEND TO SUPPER IN KALAMAZOO, MICHIGAN, APRIL, 2020<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Tonight, my friends, my dusty house and I<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Do equally desire your company,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Though ’tis illegal now to hold a party,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Since dread as deep as Holmes’ of Moriarty<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Governs assemblies, and chills family
meetings,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Casts doubt on friendships, and stills
jovial greetings.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Despite that, bearing fresh dust masks and
spray,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">We’ll plan a banned, illicit holiday.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">But where to get the beer? Oberon’s
lacking.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">A trip to Bell’s might get the township
tracking<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">My vehicle, and strict town sheriff crying,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">“Is amber lager worth the risk of dying?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">For carry-out, there’s Saffron, for to pick
a<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Fine chutney, though they’re out of chicken
tikka.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Some wine I’ll serve, actual, though now
potential,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">If I can make that errand seem essential.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">We’ll fear no plague at our convivial
feast,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">We’ll sit, aye, six feet distant, at the
least.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">My man will scrub the tarts (if we can get
’em)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">And not doff plastic gloves. We will not not
let ’im.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Fear not that I’ll read poetry. All verses<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">On paper, whether elegies or curses,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Are now stored in the bathrooms, behind
locks,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Placed there to reinforce our dwindling
stocks.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">No civic spies, no tell-tales, we’ll allow<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">At table, to inform good townsmen how<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">We broke the rules of quarantine, all
sitting<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">At board together, social talk permitting.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">How would they know? They cower in their
dens,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Consuming Netflix, eating M&Ms. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Yet we’ll stay safe, some garbed in haz-mat
suits,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Sneezing in elbows, disinfecting fruits,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Hands sanitized, waving across the room,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;"><span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">Thinking, perchance, we should have met
on Zoom.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">All things must pass. Tonight we’ll drink
to that:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">To Lysol, latex, and a curve that’s flat.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;"><br /></span>
<span face=""lucida sans unicode" , sans-serif" style="color: #494c4e; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.15pt;">-- Grace Tiffany</span></div>
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'Til next month!<br />
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Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-27468850191595323792020-03-01T08:22:00.000-08:002020-03-01T08:22:45.660-08:00Shakespeare and Socialism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBvn9Uk4t1aJR7fGBNSMiTi0aJiKWWoxfTnQNmbGjZM0b6WXw8zqL0sSanlGbWGQRYM2qpn0Q0K76LiogQmq59aeWqYLVVj8tR-ND3V1vEdi69Nup5J3LrNAWQuWrsI8OFdj8gkQycDUDx/s1600/leargloucestermckellen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="388" data-original-width="620" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBvn9Uk4t1aJR7fGBNSMiTi0aJiKWWoxfTnQNmbGjZM0b6WXw8zqL0sSanlGbWGQRYM2qpn0Q0K76LiogQmq59aeWqYLVVj8tR-ND3V1vEdi69Nup5J3LrNAWQuWrsI8OFdj8gkQycDUDx/s320/leargloucestermckellen.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Shakespeare wasn't a socialist. He was a businessman. He wrote for money, and invested, and got rich. There is no biographical evidence that he was interested in sharing his wealth, or doing anything but acquiring more of it. He was like everybody else.<br />
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Indeed, English Renaissance writers tended only to fantasize about what we would call socialism. In his 1513 <i>Utopia, </i>Thomas More envisions a society in which all property is equally shared, but in real life, he lived in a manor, and expended no effort, in his influential role as Lord Chancellor, to urge laws that might redistribute royal wealth, or the wealth of privileged men like himself. In <i>The Tempest</i>, written nearly a century later, Shakespeare's kindly old nobleman Gonzalo imagines a "commonwealth" where there will be neither riches nor poverty, no commerce or forced labor, and no "sovereignty," but places himself as "king on't," as though "the latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning." Renaissance literature is full of ideas about equalizing wealth and eliminating poverty, but the ideas are always<br />
<a name='more'></a> humorously or wistfully framed. They are exhortations to kings to be saintly reformers who exercise extreme charity, or they are expressed by unrealistic would-be social reformers (like Gonzalo), or by dreamers who, if more logical than Gonzalo, lack all power to bring their proposals to pass.<br />
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But the idea -- or the ideal -- is still there. Here are a few Shakespeare passages where it's articulated.<br />
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"Why, I have often wish'd myself poorer, that I might come nearer to you. We are born to do benefits; and what better or properer can we call our own than the riches of our friends? O, what a precious comfort 'tis to have so many like brothers commanding one another's fortunes!"<br />
<i> </i>Timon, <i>Timon of Athens</i><br />
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"There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny .... All the realm shall be in common .... There shall be no money."<br />
Jack Cade, <i>Henry VI, part 2</i><br />
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"They say he is already in the Forest of Arden, and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England. They say many young men flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world."<br />
Charles the Wrestler describes Duke Senior's money-free wilderness court, <i>As You Like It</i><br />
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"If [this bill] pass against us, / We lose the better half of our possession; / For all the temporal lands, which men devout / By testament have given to the Church, / Would [Parliament] strip from us [for] / relief of lepers, and weak age / Of indigent faint souls past corporal toil .... "<br />
The Archbishop of Canterbury, <i>Henry V</i><br />
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"He hath left you all his walks, / His private arbors and new-planted orchards, / On this side Tiber; he hath left them you, / And to your heirs forever -- common pleasures, / To walk abroad and recreate yourselves."<br />
Mark Antony, <i>Julius Caesar</i><br />
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And finally, two from that most socialist of plays, <i>King Lear</i>:<br />
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"Poor, naked wretches, whereso'er you are, / That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, / How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, / Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you / From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en / Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp, / Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, / That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, / And show the heavens more just."<br />
King Lear, <i>King Lear</i><br />
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And more succinctly:<br />
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"So distribution should undo excess, / And each man have enough."<br />
Gloucester, <i>King Lear</i><br />
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And each woman, too, we might add. For centuries poets like Shakespeare have imagined economic equality, the "shaking" down of the "superflux" or "undoing" of "excess." But who will begin it?Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-63197258529229134582020-02-01T07:35:00.000-08:002020-05-23T09:00:32.538-07:00Shakespeare in India, India in Shakespeare<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A post-colonially-minded colleague of mine once asked to visit my Shakespeare class, and I said, sure! He told my students that the reason Shakespeare was a requirement for their degree was that in the prior century in India, the British Raj had determined that requiring the study of Shakespeare in schools was an effective instrument of cultural indoctrination and control. Cricket was the English national game, and Shakespeare was the English national poet.</div>
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All this was true. But it wasn't the whole truth. India was the first geographical locale to require Shakespeare for formal study in English, since Shakespeare was seen as a conduit to the appreciation of what was most admirably English. However, as most people who have read any Shakespeare know, Englishness and Raj aside, Shakespeare is an excellent writer with a lot of fascinating ideas, so requiring him to be studied in any English class, east or west, is not such a bad idea for a whole slew of reasons. In a Shakespeare class, there are more fruitful ways of discussing his poems and plays than by showcasing their dubious history as tools of cultural indoctrination. </div>
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India didn't throw out cricket when they threw out the British, and they didn't throw out Shakespeare. He was too popular. As in other countries, Shakespeare has been used and enjoyed in India in all kinds of interesting ways, suspicious and otherwise. Knowledge of Shakespeare in English served as "cultural capital" for the "upper-class, elite Indians" of nineteenth-century Calcutta, to quote scholar Jyotsna Singh. But Shakespeare has also been translated into numerous Indian languages;<br />
<a name='more'></a>he fits "Bengali playwrights' sense of tragic tradition," again quoting Singh; he's been played by Indian actors wearing tribal masks; he was received enthusiastically in remote Indian villages in the 1950s during tours by the "Shakespeare Wallah" actor-manager father of Felicity Kendal, as she charmingly recounts in a documentary about her peripatetic Indian childhood.</div>
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There's plenty of Shakespeare in India, and there's even a little India in Shakespeare. References to India in the plays are few and far between and, of course, complicated by the fact that to Shakespeare, "India" was vague and remote, a place of fantasy and storied riches, a source of spices, jewels, and religious faiths that he understood either barely or not at all. In <i>All's Well that Ends Well</i>, Helena compares her beloved Bertram to the sun, and says that she herself, his worshipper, is "Indian-like, religious in mine error." Men in Shakespeare frequently compare women to jewels, and that comparison brings India to their minds. Troilus involves India in his erotic fantasies about Cressida: "Her bed is India; there she lies, a pearl." Precious metals, as opposed to jewels, derive from that other India, the one that wasn't really India, on the other side of the Atlantic: John Donne (also thinking erotically) compares his lover to "both the Indias, of spice and mine." It's the West Indies of which Shakespeare is thinking when, in <i>The Tempest</i>, he has Trinculo scoff that Europeans won't give money for charity but will pay big to see a "dead Indian," a New World oddity. But Shakespeare clearly has the Old World India in mind in his most sustained references to India, which occur in <i>A Midsummer Night's Dream. </i>There the fairy king and queen Oberon and Titania quarrel about an "Indian boy," a lovely servant whom each of them wishes to keep as page. Oberon's desire for the boy is a bit sketchier than Titania's. Titania had a special friendship with the boy's mother, who was her waiting-woman when pregnant with him, and Titania feels obligated "for her sake" to protect him -- perhaps from Oberon.</div>
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Spices, jewels, sex -- in general, Shakespeare has treated India with less intellectual respect than India has treated Shakespeare. But it's complicated. In <i>The Merchant of Venice</i>, Portia's suitor Bassanio brings India into his list of dangerously deceptive things. A gilded box with deadly contents is like "the guiled shore to a most dangerous sea" and also like "the beauteous scarf veiling an Indian beauty." The line always seemed vaguely racist to me, suggesting that the scarf was the lovely and valuable thing and that underneath it lay -- horrors! -- a dark-skinned face. But then I noticed that the scarf was not "veiling" an "Indian devil" or even the more neutral "Indian woman," but an "Indian beauty." It wasn't a case of something speciously good hiding something really bad. Both the scarf and the Indian woman are beautiful. But the Indian woman's beauty, to the European Bassanio, is an unknown quantity. It's mysterious, fathomless, possibly treacherous in its unfamiliarity, like the sea. It's exotic, dangerous, and profound. To Shakespeare, this, the veiled Indian beauty, was the realm of far-off India, for him an alluring fantasy-land he could visit only in imagination.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhykF8GqMAnC3tGQ3dztrFuHzycoKbItEWPv1nWB1JA2nUnbpKRlDPGErCEpFz2hsRNagVczlxso_noB3dRj6iotbMgmXD_o4aQyPTH7IXvcLVC5Wm_4AfLTUHAkpa9x1lLmcGMNjhd3a1V/s1600/India39.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhykF8GqMAnC3tGQ3dztrFuHzycoKbItEWPv1nWB1JA2nUnbpKRlDPGErCEpFz2hsRNagVczlxso_noB3dRj6iotbMgmXD_o4aQyPTH7IXvcLVC5Wm_4AfLTUHAkpa9x1lLmcGMNjhd3a1V/s200/India39.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
I was in like case until last December, when I finally visited India. Among the many things I found there was, somewhat unexpectedly, Shakespeare. In Delhi, I came across the Shakespeare Cafe; the Shakespeare School of Language specialized for NEUTRAL ACCENT, BRITISH ACCENT, AMERICAN, AND AUSTRALIAN; a poster advertising the Fourteenth Annual Bharat Rang Mahotsau Theater Festival featuring 93 productions in 27 languages, among which would be a Kannada-language version of <i>Hamlet </i>(from Karnataka in southwest India), a Mizoran <i>A Midsummer Night's Dream</i> (from northeast tribal areas), and a Bengali <i>Lear</i>; a Bach and Shakespeare Club of Delhi meetup with 1,152 members; a newspaper note on a Hindi <i>Hamlet</i>; and an advertisement for a Shakespeare comedy fest at Siri Fort. And I came across a Shakespeare-ism in the newspaper: "Method in Madness: Exploiting Batsmen Run Between Wickets." Shakespeare and cricket in one!</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb04s3mc3k3t2iXmfaSQoqFQaG3GywdWaBURjkWEM43IJe2qxZxTM0dpqkVAcwihGQ_95l5IQ2XoB0veOw32PckzZdrvB42Tbxl0ofjihkBtuRnObhvBPmskqdknWetrhOclOb6ULt7f7j/s1600/IndiaTom8.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb04s3mc3k3t2iXmfaSQoqFQaG3GywdWaBURjkWEM43IJe2qxZxTM0dpqkVAcwihGQ_95l5IQ2XoB0veOw32PckzZdrvB42Tbxl0ofjihkBtuRnObhvBPmskqdknWetrhOclOb6ULt7f7j/s320/IndiaTom8.JPG" width="320" /></a>But my best Shakespeare experience was a visit with Professor Rupin Desai, retired Shakespearean of Delhi University, editor of the long-running journal <i>Hamlet Studies</i>, author of the book <i>Yeats's Shakespeare</i>, and editor of the essay collection <i>Shakespeare the Man. </i>On our third day in India we met with Rupin and his wife Jyoti, also a professor of English literature (see Rupin and Jyoti with me above right, and with other colleagues, incuding the soon-to-be-described Vikram Chopra, way up top on left). That night this intrepid pair took me, my husband, and my son on a fantastic journey through the wild streets of Delhi. (My favorite of Rupin's utterances during this adventure: "I'm going the wrong way down a one-way street! I might get caught! I'll turn my lights off.") They drove us to the International Club, where they not only treated us to an array of delicious Indian dishes but introduced us to a bevy of kind, eloquent Indian intellectuals, many of whom were Shakespeare scholars.We met Rajiva Verma, another emeritus Delhi University professor as well as President of the Shakespeare Society of India and author of <i>Myth and Ritual in Shakespeare</i>; and the Desais' niece, Ruth Vanita, a professor of cultural studies at the University of Montana who'd returned with her lovely partner Mona to her native India for a spell. And we met the above-mentioned Dr. Vikram Chopra (top picture on right), a diminutive man overflowing with Shakespearean goodwill, and equipped with a Shakespeare quotation for every subject, including "I shower welcome on ye, welcome all!," an action he had committed to a paper, full of "profound Shakespearean sentiments," which he bestowed on me. Here's a picture of it:<br />
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Vikram is an editor of something called "The Shakespeare Data Bank," and the document with which he welcomed me was headed with an appropriately Shakespearean prayer from Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo: "Let thyself drive in the breath of God and be as a leaf in the tempest." (You have to do this to survive Delhi traffic.)<br />
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We were overwhelmed with our hosts' graciousness, and barely able to respond coherently with the requested speeches in answer to the question, "What are your impressions of India?"</div>
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So now, here's my more considered answer, in terms drawn from <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>. India's "bounty is as boundless as the sea," its "love as deep," for "both are infinite."<br />
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Thank you, Indian Shakespeare friends. <i>Namaste!</i><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu_M4mfVYGaFrWh6dYoThUYotxpdmEwDnIsmHI0ElOqRSwyOlWdpWZ7t9WGQW9SzBfDUOl6yhiPNJxR4kyLzERwzivzpP_0KvKQ_MHSfwunkF1D56dLotTXKEqNhgHgko1WWFRaVgD3Uj4/s1600/hands.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1300" data-original-width="1299" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu_M4mfVYGaFrWh6dYoThUYotxpdmEwDnIsmHI0ElOqRSwyOlWdpWZ7t9WGQW9SzBfDUOl6yhiPNJxR4kyLzERwzivzpP_0KvKQ_MHSfwunkF1D56dLotTXKEqNhgHgko1WWFRaVgD3Uj4/s200/hands.jpg" width="199" /></a><br />
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Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5690357612733287282.post-26422697271169844992020-01-06T04:09:00.000-08:002020-01-08T05:48:33.450-08:00Happy Twelfth Night!<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMdxPeOJV6GJvBJu07WjKnceC4ZPxPy7PLO45b3gp5QWuBcpcSLZK-qMrcg42bV8LpYMwnE1Mrb5efinOhntGQMS_v_O0eqSFd4ESOyExkGPPSINlbTjK_r1l9S3iyqi85qEfjexPVJYTf/s1600/TobyBelch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="619" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMdxPeOJV6GJvBJu07WjKnceC4ZPxPy7PLO45b3gp5QWuBcpcSLZK-qMrcg42bV8LpYMwnE1Mrb5efinOhntGQMS_v_O0eqSFd4ESOyExkGPPSINlbTjK_r1l9S3iyqi85qEfjexPVJYTf/s320/TobyBelch.jpg" width="257" /></a>I usually post on the first of the month, but this month I held off for the Feast of the Epiphany. I had no idea what "epiphany" meant growing up, and learned it as a literary term having to do with James Joyce before I ever knew what a liturgical calendar was (we were "low" Protestants) and before I lived in New Orleans and found out about Kings' Day (on January 6th, the celebration of the arrival of the three kings to visit the baby Jesus). This revelation was the Epiphany. In later years I discovered from the Oxford English Dictionary that my own last name, "Tiffany," originated in slang for "Epiphany," which in England was sometimes called "the Tiffany" (God knows why). And before that, I had learned what was meant by Twelfth Night.<br />
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In Shakespeare's England, Twelfth Night was the last night of the Christmas holiday, and (despite Puritan reformers' dismay) was still celebrated in many of the lordlier households and by many of the rowdier London youth in a Mardi Gras like atmosphere of mayhem and misrule. Twelfth Night is the fifth of January, or the eve of the Epiphany. In Shakespeare terms, <i>Twelfth Night </i>is of course the title of one of his most famous plays, although, true to Shakespeare's occasional habit of <br />
<a name='more'></a>bestowing mysterious titles on comedies, he never refers directly to Twelfth Night in the play, and the action doesn't seem to take place during the Christmas season. Readers and playgoers are left to infer the connection. The Twelfth Night celebration tradtionally involved a Lord of Misrule and much imaginative disguising. <i>Twelfth Night</i>'s plot offers us the disguised Viola and masked jester Feste, and a Lord of Misrule in the person of Sir Toby Belch, a jolly drunk who invents practical jokes and asks his enemy, the puritanical Malvolio, "Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?" More subtly, <i>Twelfth Night</i> jestingly reproduces the Twelfth Night holiday's precursorship (if that's a word) to a secular revelation that parodies the Epiphany. The play ends right on the cusp of the cross-dressed Viola's self-revelation as the female she truly is (or, perhaps, as the boy the actor who plays her truly is, depending on how it all turns out). The play leaves us waiting for Malvolio to return her feminine garb, which will show her to be a woman, and only "when that is known, and golden time convents," will "a solemn combination . . . be made" of the "dear souls" of Viola and her beloved Orsino. (They'll get married.)<br />
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So, Shakespeare is having lots of fun with "Twelfth Night" parallels. But it may be that the play was also named <i>Twelfth Night </i>for a simpler reason. It was performed as part of Twelfth Night<i> </i>festivities at court. Certainly it was famously performed at the Middle Temple of the <i>Inns</i> of Court, where law students lodged, on Candlemas (February 2nd, known to Americans as Ground Hog Day) in 1602. The law students honored the play with their customary bad behavior, drinking and shouting and flinging furniture about. In the 1920s, F. A. Keay wrote a history of the Inns of Court which stressed the likeness of London law students to Sir Toby Belch and his cronies:<br />
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"At one time John Davyes came into dinner and beat Richard
Martyn about the head. Twice the Company was exhorted 'to
leave knocking on the pots and making noise in the Hall and not
to inquiet Mr. Reader in the vacaccion of his study.' In 1476 Burgoyne gave Forcett a slap with his hand for
which he was put out.
In 1505 a number of Lincoln's Inn were expelled for watching with swords and clubs and having strife with Grey's Inn [another law school residence].
Parker was fined for throwing 'wyspis' (rushes) in the
Hall during the grammar school.
Others were put out for 'excesse crying and showtyng.' Sometimes the kitchen was raided by the students. Three students
were amerced for 'brekying of the kechyn and takyngawey of
fagottes'--and one memorable night the window of the buttry
was broken and the wine let out and spilled."<br />
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Those law students! Shades of Kavanagh and Squee. Things weren't much different a century later, when <i>Twelfth Night </i>was performed, despite the efforts of Malvolio-like hall marshals to keep things in order. Perhaps Shakespeare enjoyed having behavior within his comedies match the behavior of the playgoers watching (or not watching). As Hamlet says, the "purpose of playing" is to "hold the mirror up to nature." Actually, what Hamlet says is "to hold, <i>as 'twere</i>, the mirror up to nature," because Hamlet is wordy. As Jaques more succinctly says in <i>As You Like It</i>, "All the world's a stage."<br />
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Happy Twelfth Night!</div>
Grace Tiffanyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02961901479720040395noreply@blogger.com0