The World Must Be Peopled

I was going to title this post "Shakespeare's Cuckolds," but that would have been misleading, since Shakespeare didn't create many actual cuckolds. (By the way, my students don't usually know what "cuckold" means, but when they find out, they become very interested.) What do I mean by saying, "Shakespeare didn't create many actual cuckolds"? This. For every bona fide Shakespeare character whose wife is truly sleeping with another man, there exist five who only think their women are cheating. Have I done the actual math? Hell, no. But I know I'm right in spirit. The fact is, Shakespeare is way more interested in masculine jealousy than in feminine sexual treachery. To be sure, his plays (not to mention his sonnets, about which, read the whole story in Paint!) do contain a few loose or, to

Great Shakespeare Adaptations

What are the best adaptations of Shakespeare to fiction, film, poem, opera, or what you will? If you're reading this post, you'll have to settle for my largely arbitrary and probably temporary favorites. The usual thing in these lists is to pick the ten best. But my list is better, because I've chosen eleven. That's right, this goes to eleven. Look, read, watch, listen, and tell me what you think.

Best Greenish Painting Based on a Shakespeare Play: John Everett Millais' Ophelia, painted in 1852.

Justly famous, and often pictured in editions of the play, Millais' painting translates Gertrude's suspiciously detailed description of Ophelia's suicidal plunge and drift into an image as peaceful as the queen's speech. Ophelia captures Ophelia's haplessness and her helplessness, as well as Gertrude's dreamy beautification of the last moments before she drowns. Millais realized in a visual medium the queen's curious suggestion that self-slaughter can be pretty. The painting's hanging in the Tate.

In case you're sick of Hamlet, here's more Hamlet.

Scrooge Is Falstaff

It’s January 1^st, and still Christmas if you celebrate the holiday from December 25^th to January 6^th, like Shakespeare, instead of from Halloween through December 24^th, like Wal-Mart. So I’ve got a Christmas question. Of what Shakespeare character was Charles Dickens thinking when he created Scrooge for A Christmas Carol?

The answer is: Falstaff.

What!?, you say. Falstaff? Jolly, festive Falstaff, the decadent, witty, frolicsome knight of Shakespeare's history plays? Falstaff as the miserly Scrooge? Impossible! (you say). Does Falstaff not have more in common with Scrooge’s kindly old employer Fezziwig, who spends his money on a Christmas party for his employees, and makes merry?

No. He does not.

Indeed, Falstaff is fat and festive, but he’s also a sinner and a skinflint, and the last person in any of Shakespeare’s plays who'd pay out of his own pocket to throw a Christmas party for his employees. He's worse than Scrooge, because he would never buy a friend a turkey. The redeemed Scrooge at least does that. Falstaff wouldn't even know what a turkey was, staggering around in London in 1403, leeching cash. Throughout his three-play career (the two Henry IV plays and The Merry Wives of Windsor; four plays, if we count his reported death scene in Henry V), Falstaff's main occupation is to steal others’ money to pad his own purse. In fact, in Merry Wives, his “apprentices” (no Bob Cratchits they) abandon him because he won’t give them a raise. Their income is entirely derived from theft, and Falstaff keeps the split uneven.

But let me back up. Why compare Dickens’s characters to Shakespeare’s, anyway?

How Not To Write Historical Fiction

I remember how piqued I was when a Publishers Weekly reviewer criticized my first novel, My Father Had a Daughter. She didn't like the book -- a fiction based on the life of Shakespeare's youngest child, Judith -- because it didn't end with the girl's death, like the sad fantasy about Shakespeare's sister spun by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own. Woolf's protagonist was also named Judith, and Woolf's Judith killed herself. The critic thought mine should have, too. Yet it wasn't this puzzling critique that sparked my ire. What got to me was this critic's disparagement of my novel's

Saint Shakespeare

On All Saints Day, not only may you buy a secular "Saint Shakespeare" candle (http://gonereading.com/product/william-shakespeares-secular-saint-candle), you may also ask: what saints did Shakespeare like? He wrote plays in a militantly Protestant England that had severely demoted saints during its Reformation some sixty years before. The famous shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury had been dismantled (and looted). No one was going on merry pilgrimage there, or to St. Mary at Walsingham, and it was forbidden to pray to St. Cuthbert of Durham, which is one of the reasons you've never heard of him. English saints were not marching in, but roving, sad, invisible and homeless, across the land. Yet they weren't forgotten. They were still enshrined in the calendar (St. Swithin's Day, St. Lucy's Day -- who are these people?). Even though the church nearest Shakespeare's Globe had its name changed from "St. Mary's" to "St. Savior's" during the Elizabethan period, many churches, not to mention towns, retained their traditional saints' names. And saints still throve in the popular imagination. So it shouldn't surprise us that references to this saint or that pop up all over the place in Shakespeare. Here, in honor of the day, are five notable Shakespeare saints.

Elizabethan Paint Jobs

 I've long been fascinated by the horrible things late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Englishwomen of means did to their faces, in order to conform to a standard of beauty that was largely prescribed by literature. What standard? Eyes like suns or stars, skin like snow (except for the cheeks, wherein red and white roses were to be mingled), lips like cherries, teeth like polished alabaster. (Somehow that reminds me of George Washington.) Many people know Shakespeare's famous poetic critique of this (when you think about it) bizarre visual ideal, Sonnet 130, which begins, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun," and includes the line "coral is far more red than her lips' red." Not so many folks are familiar with the kind of poetry Will was reacting to, so here's a sample, from his contemporary Thomas Campion: "There is a garden in her face / Where roses and white lilies grow; / A heav'nly paradise is that place / Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow." Now, let's stop right there.  The woman may have a fungal skin disease, and on top of that, the fruits in her face are flowing, like, maybe, applesauce. Yet there's more. "Those cherries [the lips] fairly do enclose / Of orient pearl a double row [her choppers] / Which when her lovely laughter shows, / They look like rose-buds fill'd with snow."
     This is hardly grammatical. Campion clearly stuck the word "They" in the last line

Lights Under Bushels: Renaissance Folk in Hiding

I recently talked with a friend of mine, Chuck Bentley, at the Starbucks in our local Barnes & Noble where he and his wife Donna hang out. Chuck is hands down the finest Michigan Shakespearean actor I have ever seen perform, and his skill is worthy of the major theaters of New York and Chicago, which I have visited more times than I can count. He might have gone to the big city, but he chooses to write and perform here, in Kalamazoo, participating in or organizing local productions, all the while happily championing