So...I've taken on some pretty big reading challenges in my time...and especially in the last few years since I retired. Such as all of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (still the title as far as I'm concerned). Finnegans Wake. Every book that E. L. Doctorow wrote. Almost every book that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote. (Still working on him, but only 6 1/3 to go, and he wrote about 90.) The first nine volumes of Frederick Copleston's A History of Philosophy. (Still working on that one, too, but the end is nigh.) All of Kurt Vonnegut's non-posthumous books. (And all but one of the posthumous ones...and I'll get to that one sooner or later. It's just not very good, y'know?) And lots and lots of other stuff.
But I've only read a handful of Shake-speare's plays...and most of the ones I've read were ones that I taught. So I just decided that 2019 I was going to start The Shake-speare Project. I am going to try to read one play per week...which means that I should be able to finish his Complete Works well before the end of 2019. Like September-ish.
Now, I know better than to believe that anybody actually knows what order these plays were written in, but I always have liked the idea of reading my favorite writers in chronological order, so I'm going to suspend my disbelief and belly up to the Conventional Wisdom Bar for this project, so
1580 - 1590
1 The Taming of the Shrew
1590 - 1600
2 Henry VI Part II
3 Henry VI Part III
4 The Two Gentlemen of Verona
5 Titus Andronicus
6 Henry VI Part I
7 Richard III
8 The Comedy of Errors
9 Love's Labour's Lost
10 A Midsummer Night's Dream *****
11 Romeo and Juliet
12 Richard II
13 King John
14 The Merchant of Venice
15 Henry IV Part I
16 Henry IV Part II *****
17 Much Ado About Nothing
18 Henry V
19 As You Like It
20 Julius Caesar *****
1600 - 1610
21 Hamlet *****
22 The Merry Wives of Windsor
23 Twelfth Night
24 Troilus and Cressida
25 Othello *****
26 Measure for Measure
27 All's Well That Ends Well
28 Timon of Athens
29 King Lear
30 Macbeth *****
31 Antony and Cleopatra
32 Coriolanus *****
33 Pericles
34 Cymbeline
After 1610
35 The Winter's Tale
36 The Tempest
37 Henry VIII
38 The Two Noble Kinsmen
[7/4/19: I thought that that was that, but when I was checking on some Shakespeare information on Wikipedia I saw that they attributed 39 plays to him, so I process of eliminationed it and found that Edward III was a disputed play which many scholars had nodded into the cannon. So I shall acquiesce:
39 Edward III]
is going to be my reading order...except for where it gets stupid, like obviously I'd read Henry VI Part I before parts II and III.
Mmm-hmm.
Hey, this is kind of exciting.
You come, too?
TOMORROW: The Taming of the1 Shrew
Speaking of...if you like to listen as you read, which makes sense with a play, for sure, there are various free audiobooks available. The first one I hit upon was on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ikBIJoA_WM. I haven't started listening yet, but I did let the introduction play through, and it looks like it should kind of sort of work. You know how it goes with LibriVox, right?
And the whole play clocks in at less than 2 1/2 hours, so spread out over a week that's only 22 minutes a day. Piece of fuckin' cake, man.
1 or is it a? 2
2 Just a little Shakespeare inside joke there.
The Taming of the Shrew
1/1/19 to 1/2/19
1/1/19
First off, I decided to go with a pocket-sized Shake-speare so that I would be able to carry it around with me without pain. I have a box set full of little volumes...
First off...there's a framing story, and that's just not normal Shake-speare. In fact, I did a little poking about later and found out that this is the only Shake-speare play with a framing story. So there's that. Also, right from the get-go we have a nobleman deciding to fuck around with a peasant for no reason whatsoever...except that it amuses him to do so. Hmm, there's wormwood. Back to that later on, though. Once the frame is established, there is a play within the play, and this "play" is the (no doubt familiar) story of The Shrew and How She Was Tamed.
Second off...there's a lot of familiar stuff right off the bat. You have the good old rich people treating poor people like shit just for the hell of it thing. You have the disparity between appearance and reality thing...in spades. A guy who is convinced that he's another guy is watching a play in which a guy pretends to be another guy, etc. Yeah, Shake-speare is really pre-occupied with this whole Hidden Identity thing for SOME reason.
Third off, Shake-speare is throwing Latin around for no discernible reason. Like going WAY out of his way to do it. I wonder why? Interesting that he's accused of having "little Latin," yet he goes out of his way to include it in his plays.
Fourth off, there's the whole Set in Italy thing...as are 1/3 of Shake-speare's plays. Why is that, then?
Fifth off, there are erudite allusions. References to Ovid, for instance.
Sixth off, it's really hard to believe that this is the first "published" work by a playwright. I mean...this thing hums and soars.
Seventh off, there are the Dirty Jokes. Like this bit from PETRUCHIO to KATHARINA: What, with my tongue in your tail? That's not very nice, is it?
And courtesy of Amazon Prime, I was able to watch The Taming of the Shrew (1980) with John Cleese...looking much younger than his 41 years...as Petruchio. It was a BBC production, thus not the greatest of sets, but the actors were all pretty good...although I thought that they overdid the Psycho Bitch Cam on Sarah Badel as Kate. Instead of watching the movie straight through, I watched it in Act increments after I finished reading each Act. I thought that would help me to get a better handle on the characters and plot as I read, as they are not (I am chagrined to say) the aspects of reading which I am most likely to get hold of on a first reading of anything. (No one knows how hard I had to work to teach literature in high school.) There were some differences between the written word and the movie, of course...though I'd guess that the BBC stuck closer to the play than any other production. But, for instance, they did away with the Induction, which I thought was a bit uppity of them. I mean, shit...Shake-speare thought it was good enough, and his opinion should carry some weight. But I suppose that aside from aiming for greater clarity, they were also looking to keep the time down. Even with that excision the filmed version ran a bit over two hours, after all.
1/2/19
Y'know, the portrayal of common people as idiots and as fair game for picking on...which includes physically assaulting them...is quite relentless in this play. In fact, a couple of the servants are so stupid that at first I thought they were just fucking with their masters, but it seems contextually clear that no, they're just REALLY stupid. It's almost like this Shake-speare fellow didn't know common folk very well...and as if he really didn't like them or want to know them, as well.
Today I finished up the play without really thinking about it. There were a few spots wherein I wished that I had a footnote or some commentary...neither of which my itty bitty volume offers...but only because I wanted to delve deeper, not because I had any trouble following what was being said.
Such as a reference to "a Kate" ("For dainties are all Kates"), which seemed interesting to me. So I looked it up, and found this:
cate: a choice food;delicacy; dainty. 1425–75; back formation from late Middle English cates, aphetic variant of Middle English acates things bought, plural of acat buying < Old North French, derivative of acater to buy < Vulgar Latin *accaptāre, equivalent to Latin ac- ac- + captāre to seek out; see catch
So that's kind of interesting. And derogatory.
There was also this bit: Hortensio, who is disguised as a music teacher, tells Bianca, with whom he is smitten, "one clef, two notes have I." Well. I looked it up just to be sure, and found this
Such as a reference to "a Kate" ("For dainties are all Kates"), which seemed interesting to me. So I looked it up, and found this:
cate: a choice food;delicacy; dainty. 1425–75; back formation from late Middle English cates, aphetic variant of Middle English acates things bought, plural of acat buying < Old North French, derivative of acater to buy < Vulgar Latin *accaptāre, equivalent to Latin ac- ac- + captāre to seek out; see catch
So that's kind of interesting. And derogatory.
There was also this bit: Hortensio, who is disguised as a music teacher, tells Bianca, with whom he is smitten, "one clef, two notes have I." Well. I looked it up just to be sure, and found this
in Music in Shakespeare: A Dictionary by Christopher R. Wilson and Michela Calore. I am pretty sure that they missed the point (pun intended) on this one. I mean...look at the fuckin' picture, guys. It's a dick joke. Well, more properly it's a dick and balls joke. Ahem.
You know, something else occurs to me. The unrelenting misoygny of this play really displeased me mightily, but it also suggests that Shake-speare did not know women very well. Of course, this is not only a play, but a comedy (so to speak), and even more than that, it's a play within the play, so obviously we can't take it too seriously...or at least, not too sincerely...but even with all that, I'd have to conclude that the writer of this play either didn't know women or didn't like women. Or both.
Again, wormwood.
But for now...it's on to the next play.
You know, something else occurs to me. The unrelenting misoygny of this play really displeased me mightily, but it also suggests that Shake-speare did not know women very well. Of course, this is not only a play, but a comedy (so to speak), and even more than that, it's a play within the play, so obviously we can't take it too seriously...or at least, not too sincerely...but even with all that, I'd have to conclude that the writer of this play either didn't know women or didn't like women. Or both.
Again, wormwood.
But for now...it's on to the next play.
Henry VI Part I
1/6/19 to 1/11/19
Started this one whilst waiting for church to begin. And as I got there a bit early, I was able to put away a few pages. One thing that immediately struck me was how much bigger this play was than The Taming of the Shrew. I mean, this play has got quite a large cast...and lots of noblemen. And lots of battle stuff going on. Hell, it even has Joan of Arc. I have to admit that I didn't know that Shake-speare had ever used her. And the writing seems much more poised, much more sincere. Obviously you could attribute that to the fact that this is a historie rather than a comedie...but it feels like more than that to me. It feels like this is the work of a mature, confident, writer. A man who knows sincerely knows his shite.
Right off the bat I ran into a phrase which caught my eye. A messenger arrives and is giving a report on the fighting of "valiant Talbot":
...valiant Talbot above human thought
Enacted wonders with his sword and lance:
Hundreds he sent to hell, and none durst stand him;
Here, there, and every where, enraged he flew....
The phrase that caught my eye and ear was, of course, "Here, there, and every where." So I did a little Google work on it. I wasn't very successful, though. I did find a question and answer thing online which identified the phrase as appearing in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), but clearly it originated a bit earlier than that. If I were a betting man, I'd bet that the appearance of the phrase here was its first use. Shake-speare was cool like that, you know.
Also, I think Shake-speare might have invented the idea of robots in this play. When talking about the enemy soldiers, Reinier says, "I think, by some odd gimmors or device / Their arms are set like clocks, stiff to strike on...." Men with mechanical arms. I am seriously doubting that anybody else came up with that before 1600. (The oldest reference I have found so far is to E.T.A. Hoffman's 1816 story, "The Sandman." Feel free to correct me if you know more about this.)
I didn't do any more reading until 1/8, but when I did, I decided that I was not going to constrain myself to the tiny print and note-less, commentary-less, little book version I had been using. (Though I'll still use those as my travel copies.) No, it was time to break out the big guns.
Oh, yeah. I don't know when I got this baby, but it was a long, long time ago, for sure. The copyright date is 1978, so it's possible that it's 40 years old. I know that it has seen good service through a class I took on Shake-speare during my tenure as an English Major and through 23 years as a high school English teacher. And yes, it does have notes. Lots of notes. Comments. Pictures. It's so beautiful.
Anyway...some other things hit me when I switched over to The Big Red Book. Check this bit out from Joan of Arc introductory speech:
Heaven and our Lady gracious hath it pleased
To shine on my contemptible estate:
Lo, whilst I waited on my tender lambs,
And to sun's parching heat display'd my cheeks,
God's mother deigned to appear to me
And in a vision full of majesty
Will'd me to leave my base vocation
And free my country from calamity:
Umm...wasn't it forbidden to portray Catholicism onstage 1590 to 1600-ish? I'm pretty sure that Joan qualifies as a serious Catholic...and she is clearly a hero here. Speaking of which...there's a pretty humorous scene wherein King Charles tells Joan to prove she's telling the truth by throwing down with him, and as she is kicking his ass there are two advisers standing out in the hallway talking about how the King's conversation with Joan is taking so long that surely he must have her down to her underwear by now. Heh heh, that Shake-speare is quite a wag.
Okay. Going to go read some more now. To be continued.
Hey. Act II, Scene iii, Talbot says,
Nor other satisfaction do I crave,
But only, with your patience, that we may
Taste of your wine and see what cates you have....
So clearly Shake-speare had a thing for cates.
Anyway, as I was finishing up this play I kept thinking, "There is no way they could have staged this play in the late 16th or early 17th century. There's just too much action, for one thing. Not just battles fought, but loads of characters, quick scene changes, walls scaled, and wounds inflicted. Speaking of, in one scene a guy loses half of his face. That's a bit advanced for the time period, isn't it? All of which made me wonder about how they got around call of this on the modern stage, so I found a BBC version (from the library, of course). And...even though it's filmed in the "from the stage" mode, they have to cheat in a number of ways. There are at least two cameras, for instance. There are special effects (an explosion, timber falling) and make-up (the aforementioned half his face blown off). And although the sets are skeletal, they are rather elaborate...
...and don't look like they'd be quickly portable. Also, in a very bizarre move, they have a couple of actors who are supposed to be mounted on horses in costumes with horse front attached to them, and they kind of skip around and jiggle a lot while they shout at each other. Very strange.
I thought this would be a pretty short "movie," since the play clocks in at 50 - 90 pages, depending on which version you choose, but the running time was actually over three hours. They talk slow and do a lot of jiggling while they fight.
It was also interesting to see that the actors spend a fair amount of time tapping on the fourth wall...which is not the impression I got from reading the play, but what the hell, I always like that stuff.
All in all, it was a better than fair-to-middling Shake-speare experience. Hard to believe that this was one of his earliest plays, as it is so expansive and written with such confidence. Besides, who the hell comes out of the chute with a trilogy that runs 9 hours? I'd say that's not within the realm of possibility.
As for the wormwood, this is mostly a play about nobles, so we don't get much in the way of demeaning the common folk...but there's still a bit of it. And the fact that most of the characters are very high up nobles say something in itself, doesn't it? As for women, Joan certainly does fit within the strong woman concept, but even there we have some slippage. After she duels with King Charles (to establish her cred), he says he has the hots for her and wants to get married. She responds, wait until after the battle, then we'll see. As if being the instrument of God and the ultimate warrior isn't enough for a women...she needs a MAN to be complete. For fuck's sake.
All in all, though, I'd have to say that this play adds evidence for the ideas that (1) Shake-speare has contempt for common folks, (2) Shake-speare is a misogynist, (3) Shake-speare knows a lot about the upper echelons of society but not much about the life of common folk, and (4) Shakespeare either was a Catholic or knew a lot about it. He also (5-ish) seems to have been very well educated, as he can't see to prevent himself from making literary allusions and using foreign languages, even when there's not really any reason to do so.
Well. That doesn't go with the biography, does it? Which is why I've applied to term wormwood to all of this. In Romeo and Juliet, Nurse makes reference to how when it was time to wean Juliet, she applied wormwood to her nipple. This bitter herb caused the baby...well, let's just quote Nurse:
When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple
Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool,
To see it tetchy and fall out with the dug!
So far as I can discern, this is a seriously bad idea, as wormwood is poisonous, and is a key ingredient in absinthe. So not what you want to give to your baby.
ANYway...to me, the idea that William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon is the author of the plays of Shake-speare is ridiculous. For one thing, he wasn't William Shakespeare. In the six signatures attributed to him, he signs his name Willm Shakp, William Shaksper, Wm Shakspe, William Shakspere, Willm Shakspere, and William Shakspeare. Not a Shakespeare to be found. There are lots of other things, of course, but that's not what I'm here for, so moving on.... To me, the idea that Shaksper of Stratford-on-Avon was the author is akin to a baby suckling at his mother's teat: it is received wisdom. When the evidence from the play is considered, it is like applying wormwood to the nipple. Like that. Fall out with the dug.
ADDENDUM TO THE TAMING OF THE SHREW:
Finally got around to watching The Taming of the Shrew 1967 with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. And?
Well.
It was a Franco Zeffirelli production, which means there were great costumes, authentic-looking (and maybe even authentic) scenery, and really bad music--both in the la-la-la-la-la in movie sense as well as in the soundtrack sense.
It was cool to see Michael York introduced to the silver screen at the ripe old age of 25.
And I was interested to see how Very Catholic some aspects of the movie were, such as the first wedding, wherein they used all the trappings--signs of the cross, fingers dipped in holy water, etc. Clearly Zeffirelli and Company saw this as a pro-Catholic play, and he / they should know a little something about that.
And of course it was very pleasant to see Elizabeth Taylor's superb breasts--and they were featured in just about every scene ET appeared in. (And my my what a tiny waist she had!) Even as I delighted in the view, I couldn't help but thinking, "How does a 35 year old woman who has been acting for 25 years feel about being reduced to her mammaries? I would think it would be a bit dissettling, but maybe not.
For a moment I thought that they were going to bypass the whole starving and sleep-depriving Kate into submission, but I was just being hopeful and impatient--80 minutes into the two hour movie they started hitting it. And maybe it was even worse, as there were two scenes wherein after being abused--first locked into a room and second awakened in the middle of the night--Kate gave a little smile, suggesting that she was okay with it, after all. In fact, overall the movie still suggests that if you ignore what a woman says she wants and just bear down on her, she'll not only fall into line, she'll actually enjoy it.
So all in all, it remains a vile piece of work whose subject matter is the subjugation of women. And Richard Burton kind of put a new case on it for me, as his performance really showed me what a horrible person this Petruchio character was: an alcoholic who was physically and psychologically abusive to women and servants, a person who demanded that it was whatever time he said it was, that old men were young women, that the sun was the moon, etc.
And the very worse part of it all was that clearly Shake-speare knew better. He has Kate utter this line:
I see a woman may be made a fool,
If she had not a spirit to resist.
I have found this same contradiction in several works by WS. It baffles and angers me every time. It's like Thomas Jefferson owning slaves. WTF?
Henry VI Part II
1/13/19 to 1/16/19
Started reading this in church, and made a pretty good dent in it. Since I was using my little book version I had no notes to consider, but still noticed some pretty interesting stuff.
For one thing, The Duchess of Gloucester, Eleanor, is very Lady Macbeth-y. She has a dream about seizing power (she is currently the #2 woman in the realm, and isn't happy about that position) and in order to see what she can do about making it come true, she hires a witch. Speaking of, the witch appears on stage a bit later and does a bit of spell-casting. I didn't think you were allowed to portray witchcraft onstage during the Elizabethan Age. Well, I'll try to loo into that...but really, Shake-speare seems to regularly get away with doing things onstage that you aren't allowed to do, so it might be a moot point.
For another thing, the Catholicism is very much in evidence once again.
For one thing, The Duchess of Gloucester, Eleanor, is very Lady Macbeth-y. She has a dream about seizing power (she is currently the #2 woman in the realm, and isn't happy about that position) and in order to see what she can do about making it come true, she hires a witch. Speaking of, the witch appears on stage a bit later and does a bit of spell-casting. I didn't think you were allowed to portray witchcraft onstage during the Elizabethan Age. Well, I'll try to loo into that...but really, Shake-speare seems to regularly get away with doing things onstage that you aren't allowed to do, so it might be a moot point.
For another thing, the Catholicism is very much in evidence once again.
Queen Margaret mentions not only that she gets "at her beads," but also that King Henry is so super-de-dooper Catholic that
...all his mind is bent to holiness,
To number Ave-Maries on his beads;
His champions are the prophets and apostles,
His weapons holy saws of sacred writ,
His study is his tilt-yard, and his loves
Are brazen images of canonized saints.
and that
I would the college of the cardinals
Would choose him pope, and carry him to Rome....
Yowza. You'd think you'd want to play that down a little bit rather than bring attention to it, given the anti-Catholic sentiment of the Elizabethan Age. But you know Shake-speare: he does whatever the hell he wants to do, whenever the hell he wants to do it. It's like he thought he was beyond the reach of both the law and the court of popular opinion. But you'd have to be really powerful to be able to attain and sustain that attitude, wouldn't you? Mmm-hmm. You guessed it: wormwood.
So get this. After I started reading Henry VI, Part Two, I looked around to see if a movie was available. Netflix? Nope. Amazon? Only if you have a BroadwayHD subscription or want to buy it--so nope and nope for moi. So good old LFPL, then. But what is this? There's a new thing on the Home Page...KANOPY streaming video. Oh! Be still, my beating heart. I take a quick look around, and it is VERY impressive. Lots of good stuff. Like Criterion movies, for instance. Mmm-hmm.
And then I have a look to see what kind of Shake-speare they're packing. And? Oh. Oh! OH! What a fe-ee-ling. (Lou Reed allusion, in case you missed it.) I think they have EVERYthing. Several versiins kf some. And they most certainly do have Henry VI, Part 2. So I sign up and watch until I catch up to where I am in the play. It's by the same folks who did Part 1, of course, and I'm not overly fond of any of the actors...and especially not of the titular King, who is just way too much of a pussy, but still...it is quite a production. Huge cast. On-stage battles. Even live dogs on stage. Pretty elaborate costumes. Even a real, live, ring of fire in one scene...which actually looked a little dangerous.
I sure as hell wouldn't volunteer for that part.
ANYway...back to the book.
Into Act II and now the stupid commoner stuff is flying thick and steady. Commoners are drunkards, liars, traitors to the crown, and con men. Quite a resume. Something else intersting: there are quite a few references to falconry. And WS goes way out of his way to make them. For example, the Duchess of Gloucester is being marched through the streets in a walk of shame (caught consorting with a witch), wearing a white sheet and holding a burning taper in her hand. Inference also suggests that she has insulting signs pasted to her sheet. (Still better than being marched naked, a la Game of Thrones, I'd say.) And she tells her husband, who has come to meet her,
Methinks I should not thus be led along
Mail'd up in shame, with papers on my back....
And since I've been reading at home in my BFSBB *, I have an annotation which says this about that:
Mail'd up. Wrapped up - a term in falconry.
So in order to describe a woman in a sheet, WS p her as a hooded hawk. Well. That's not the first metaphor that would have occurred to me. (Of course I, sir, am no Will Shake-speare.) And hawking was the sport of the nobility, so why would low-born WS go there? Well...wormwood, mi amigo.
Funny, too, that as soon as *that woman*, who I previously compared to Lady Macbeth, is off the stage, Queen Margaret takes over that role, urging King Henry to strike at Gloucester...and even using Lady Macbeth language:
Who cannot steal a shape that means deceit?
(Lady Macbeth exhorts her husband to "Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.")
It also hit me (as of Act III, Scene i, ll. 89-90) how obsessed WS is with the image of a flower--especially a rose--being damaged by pestilence. I haven't been keeping track of occurrences, but I know I've already seen it several times...and I'm only 2 1/2 plays into this thing. Something to keep an eyeball on, maybe.
Very strange ending to this play. Not only is nothing resolved,but the bad guy (the Earl of Warwick) seems to be ascendant. I know there's a Part III, but even so (1) you'd think tbere would be a sense that this was a complete story and (2) that you would still see the Morality Play plot resolution. The only wat that this makes sense to ne would be if the whole 3 part play were conceived of as one piece...and performed that way, too...like The Ring Cycle.
* Big Fat Shake-speare Book.
Henry VI Part III
1/20/19 to 1/26/19
I want to come back to this, but for now...
Check this out:
Snow on stage, man. That's a first for me.
Well, hell. I had a whole lot of shit to say about Henry IV, Part 3, and on the whole cycle as well...wrote down a couple of pages of notes, even...but now I feel like talking about
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
1/26/19 to 2/1/19
so ahmo do that instead. Though I did want to throw up a picture of The Earl of Oxford from HIVIII, so here's that:
(Surely I'll remember to come back to this, right? Riiiiiight.)
So, T2GoV. At first I wasn't feeling too great about this one. It seemed awkward and stupid. It had the usual commoners are complete idiots stuff flying fast and thick, and it just didn't seem to be working for me. But then the whole thing started to slide into Romeo and Juliet. For instance:
When Proteus talks about his New Love, Silvia, he compares her to his Old Love, Julia, by saying
And Silvia--witness Heaven, that made her fair!--
Shows Julia but a swarthy Ethiope.
Well, that sounds familiar, doesn't it?
When Romeo first spots Juliet, he says
O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear....
Racism aside, that is a pretty interesting juxtaposition, ennit?
Still there is more. Such as...Valentine bitching about being banished, he says,
And Silvia is myself: banish'd from her
Is self from self: a deadly banishment!
What light is light, if Silvia be not seen?
What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by?
And when Romeo is banished?
Ha, banishment! be merciful, say 'death;'
For exile hath more terror in his look,
Much more than death: do not say 'banishment.'
...There is no world without Verona walls,
But purgatory, torture, hell itself.
Hence-banished is banish'd from the world,
And world's exile is death: then banished,
Is death mis-term'd: calling death banishment....
Speaking of...both plays are set in Verona. Both plays are centered on the idea of the fickle nature of love. And in both plays the father is seriously abusive towards his daughter. And someone is banished to Mantua. And there's a Friar Laurence / Lawrence.
Mmm-hmm.
ANYway...I ended up enjoying The Two Gentlemen of Verona. It made for a nice palate cleanser after the heaviness of the Henry IV cycle...though I guess it might have been cool to just lay into the whole History thing, too. If I have the energy, maybe I'll come back and do that in another, non-chronological reading round. It's not like you can just read Shake-speare plays once and leave them be, after all.
But meanwhile...it's on to Titus Andronicus. I don't think I've ever read it before, but I know it well enough that (1) it doesn't surprise me that there was a rumor a few years back that Quentin Tarantino was directing his own version of it and (2) I can't say that I'm looking forward to it. I mean...rape, mutilation, and cannibalism...pretty much prime time tv nowadays, but still a bit too much for my timid sensibilities. Sigh. I can take it.
Titus Andronicus
2/2/19 to 2/10/19
Actually started a day early, but this was a hard one for me, so I didn't really bear down on it. In fact...
...Saturday afternoon and I'm only 34 pages in on Titus. 64 pages to go. Which is totally doable...but still not easy. Two guys just dragged a woman off to rape her...with their mother's blessing. And as they dragged her off, the mother referred to the girl as a trull, which I've just learned is yet another word for a prostitute. (She also makes reference to "deflowering" this girl...with no sense of the contradictory nature of her declamation.)
AND? I finished it around 10 pm, so still on point. This was such an awful play, though, that I'd have to recommend skipping it. There was enough Shakespeare-y stuff there to let you know that he was present...no lime twigs that I can remember, but Tarquin and a crazy dude and an Is This Real? motif and some other stuff. But it occurred to me that this must surely be his first play. For one thing, because there's just no sense of reality to a lot of the interactions. For instance, when her uncle first finds out that Lavinia has been raped, both hands cut off, and her tongue cut out, he goes off into a lyrical monologue which is completely inappropriate for the moment. And the villain is so mustache twirly, no depth at all that he is unlike any other Shake-speare villain I've yet encountered. Which made me think...Shake-speare is at his best when he is getting Real. And, in fact, I've had to say that you could probably make a good case for him inventing realism. (Note to self: ask Harold Bloom about this one.) Which made me wonder if you could maybe accurately order his plays by the degree to which they cohere to a realistic schema. And a part of that mix would be the degree to which his plays are performable. In this play, for instance, not only do we have three hands and a tongue chopped off, but we also have several characters fall into a pit onstage. It's hard to imagine any of that being performed well on an Elizabethan stage. Anyway...I'm glad I'm done with this one. I got a dvd of the play from the library, but I don't know if I'm going to bother with it.
Aside: did watch the second and third episodes of The Hollow Crown, though. Joe has gotten into this series, so we've watched all of them together now. They are most excellent, of course, and it is super cool to see the Big Names they have in the major roles.
And now...
Richard III
2/10/19 to 2/18/19
Have to confess that I have no spent much time on Shake-speare this week. No reason is particular that I know of...but here it is Saturday 6 pm, and I'm only halfway through Richard III. But I'm getting ready to tuck into it now, so all should be well and all should be well and all should be exceedingly well. Did run across one little bit (whilst reading waiting for Joe's basketball game at the Elizabethtown tournament to begin) which caught my eye. It goes like this:
PRINCE EDWARD I do not like the Tower, of any place.
Did Julius Caesar build that place, my lord?
BUCKINGHAM He did, my gracious lord, begin that place;
Which, since, succeeding ages have re-edified.
PRINCE EDWARD Is it upon record, or else reported
Successively from age to age, he built it?
BUCKINGHAM Upon record, my gracious lord.
PRINCE EDWARD But say, my lord, it were not register'd,
Methinks the truth should live from age to age,
As 'twere retail'd to all posterity,
Even to the general all-ending day.
This set off my Edward De Vere alarm big time. For one thing, it seems like such a strange little exchange. Prince Edward goes from expressing his dislike of The Tower...since (1) it's a scary place and (2) it's where he's going to die. But why does 12 year old Edward immediately non-sequitur to "Did Julius Caesar build that place...?" It doesn't make any story sense. It interrupts the flow of the dialogue and plot, and to no apparent effect. And then on top of that, there's the insertion of the idea that even if a truth is not recorded, Edward believes that it will still live on...apparently through word of mouth. To my Oxfordian ears, though, this little interjection makes a lot of sense. Edward de Vere cannot record his authorship of these plays, but he believes that the truth of his authorship will live on. I guess that sounds like a stretch, but I like it.
Anyway....
Well, I missed my deadline by a bit. Just finished Richard III this morning. And it was a good play...maybe even the best so far...so I'm not sure why I wasn't compelled to finish it off earlier. It was a bit longer...145 pages in my mini-book version, whereas the previous plays have been about 100 pages...but I don't think that was it. Maybe a part of it was that Richard was just such a vile motherfucker. I do have a hard time with that kind of shit. But it's done now. Only thing I care to note before moving on is that in these "early" plays I've noticed that Shake-speare often rhymes a word with itself...and that that still happened in Richard III, but not as much as in previous plays. Wondering if that's a measure that could be used to place the plays in order...surely someone has thought of that before me, though. I mean, they've had 400 years to think about this shit.
Oh, and also a line that I found intriguing. Richard refers to the womb of the woman he intends to marry (Queen Elizabeth ((not THAT Elizabeth)) / Lady Grey's daughter Elizabeth ((still not THAT Elizabeth)) ) as a "nest of spicery." That's very strange. I get the impression that Shake-speare doesn't like women very much.
Onward to
The Comedy of Errors
2/18/19 to 2/24/19
Speaking of my tiny Shake-speare library, it looketh like this:
For one reason or another I decided to watch the 1983 movie version (thanks, Kanopy) of the play before I started reading it, and within a few minutes had a nice little surprise: a 39 (but looking ten or fifteen years younger) year old Roger Daltrey as Dromio, the stupid servant.
Had a few delays along the way this week...including a 1:30 am Friday trip to the ER and a subsequent hospital stay that lasted until Saturday morning. Believe it or not, I took my little Shake-speare book with The Comedy of Errors with me and even did a little bit of reading on it, but there wasn't a whole lot of alone and conscious time, so I didn't finish until Sunday morning.
Love's Labour's Lost
3/2/19 to 3/3/19
Well...sorry to say that I didn't even start this week's Shake-speare play until Saturday, and as of this writing it's 11:15 and I'm just about at the halfway point, so it doesn't look likely that I'm going to make it before the bell tolls...but ahmo give it a try, so instead of writing more shit here, it's off to bed with my book. Wish me luck, I'm going to need it, chile.
And...I didn't make it. Got to the end of Act IV, but Act V was really long...like 40% of the play, which is pretty unheard of. This is also the play with The Long Word which Baconians use to "prove" that Francis Bacon wrote this and the other plays.
Speaking of authorship controversies, I found some interesting things that I think could go in the For De Vere Camp, aka My Camp.
1. Costard--the character who uses the word honorificabilitudinitatibus, the aforementioned longest word used in any of Shakespeare's works--says to the Princess of France, "truth is truth." Which evokes De Vere's family motto, "Vero nihil verius"
(Nothing truer than truth). I know that sounds thin, but stick with me, that's just one point in a threesome.
2. Just a few lines later, another character, Boyet, says to the Princess of France, "More fairer than fair, beautiful / than beauteous, truer than truth itself, have / commiseration on thy heroical vassal!"
3. At the very end of the play, Adriano de Armado, who seems to be a stand-in for Don Quixote, invites a bit of a play to be performed, and commands,
This side is Hiems, Winter, this Ver, the Spring;
the one maintained by the owl, the other by the
cuckoo. Ver, begin.
Ver? That's a curious name. And while I can't say that this is the only time that name appears in a Shake-speare play, I can say that (1) I haven't found another instance of it as of yet, and I have looked, and (2) on a webpage which purports to list "every Shakespeare name that stars with letter v" I found this:
Ventidius - [ven-TIJ-yus] Timon of Athens
Verges - [VER-jiss] Much Ado About Nothing
So...how about that. The name Ver and one or two references to the De Vere family motto. Wonder what's up with that?
In other news...
Here's one of the weirdest lines I've ever encountered in a Shake-speare play:
"I must tell thee, it will please his
grace, by the world, sometime to lean upon my poor
shoulder, and with his royal finger, thus, dally
with my excrement, with my mustachio...."
Um...that isn't very nice. I looked around online for some illumination on this subject...no, I'm not trying to pun here, but I'm sure that everything I say is going to sound like I'm trying to do just that...and didn't find much. In my Big Beautiful Rowse Shake-speare there's a side note which says, "excrement. Here refers to the mustache." Well, that is some serious bullshit, isn't it? This same explanation is proffered in The Plays of William Shakespeare by Johnson and Steevens (aka The Plays of William Shakspeare In twenty one Volumes With the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators. To Which are Added, Notes, by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens. Revised and Augmented by Isaac Reed, With A Glossorial Index >gasp<.)
So I guess everybody is just avoiding the issue, huh?
Well. Here's a little more weird shit from LLL:
At the end of the play (with the play being performed in the play), the actor portraying Mars--Adriano De Armado, the Don Quixote guy--says this line and a half: "The armipotent Mars, of lances the almighty, / Gave Hector a gift,--"
And is interrupted by this exchange:
DUMAIN: A gilt nutmeg.
BIRON: A lemon.
LONGAVILLE: Stuck with cloves.
DUMAIN: No, cloven.
I don't know what to make of all that...but it most certainly is weird. Shake-speare just seems to jump the track every once in awhile, know what I mean?
I like that in a man.
All in all...a strange play. It has almost no plot at all. In fact, here's a complete plot summary: some guys swear to have nothing to do with women for three years, then women arrive and they all go nuts and try to seduce the women. The women put them off and say if you're serious, come back in a year. Then they put on a play, somebody's father dies, and the play within the play ends the play.
Seriously.
Is that fucked up or what?
I may have to watch this thing just for the sheer hell of it.
Oh, and here's a line I really liked a lot, and which I thought would make a most excellent title: "Behold the window of my heart, mine eye...." I probably won't ever get around to using it, so if you like it, it's yours.
Okay, so I only finished fifteen hours past my deadline. I'm going to get completely back on track this week, though. In fact, I already started reading--
A Midsummer Night's Dream
3/3/19 to 3/7/19
Now, this is a play that I know pretty well. I've read it several times, have seen at least two different movie versions of it, and have taught it a time or two. So this should be smooth sailing, right?
RIIIIIIGHT.
Wednesday, 3/6/19...well, good intentions, but I didn't get started until today. On the other hand, I took out 40% of it without effort. In fact...I have to admit that I was feeling a little "Me oh" about this play, mostly because I have read it so many times, but after the first eight pages I was totally in it. In fact, I thought that it was pretty clear from the get-go that this play was the work of a much more mature writer than the previous nine plays. For one thing, I think that you could argue that Bottom is Shakespeare's first really well-developed character. He reveals himself very quickly after he's introduced, and as a reader I simultaneously liked him and knew that he was completely full of shit. That takes some serious writing skills.
For a second thing, I thought this play seemed more complex structurally. There are three different groups of characters to set up, and then they all have to be set on a collision course. And for a third thing, there are super-cool little details in the writing, like when reference is made to the frightened fairies creeping into acorn cups yo hide. Which makes me think of a fourthly: there seems to be a huge backstory to this play--several of them, actually. There's the whole Theseus / Hippolyta thang, there's the whole Oberon / Titania thang, there's the interactions with mythology, e.g. Cupid's stray arrow creating a plant which serves as a love potion...and so on.
And that more complex character development applies to Oberon, too. When we first meet him he seems like an ass (no pun intended). He's quarreling with his wife over a boy in her care that he wants to serve him, and he is pretty mean to her. But a few minutes later, when he sees Helena pursuing Demetrius and being rebuffed by him, he is obviously moved by her plight, and he quickly resolves to help her out--even though there is absolutely nothing in it for him.
But we still have those good old Shake-speare quirks: the women are treated in a really demeaning way (low point: when Helena tells Demetrius that she wants to be his dog), for instance. And the minute that the commoners come onto the stage, they show how foolish they are. The first malapropism appears within just a few lines of the start of the scene. Also, this might be seen as a commentary on actors. These common folk are the actors, and clearly they have very little actual skill, and it seems that they might also be illiterate. Just sayin'.
Oh, also, there's a canker on rose reference in Act 2, scene 2, line 3, but since I have forgotten to keep track of them here, I suppose that doesn't make any sense, does it? Well...coming soon to a blog post near you: Canker and 🌹. Wait for it.
Oh, and check out this bit:
Those lines by Theseus...those are written by a man who knows what it like to be kowtowed to. In fact, more than that, those are lines written by a man who has been kowtowed to so much that he's kind of sick of it. And jut in case the implication is not strong enough, those lines were not written by a man who was born a commoner. Not...at all.
And hey...mission accomplished: I finished this one two and one half days ahead of schedule. Woot!
Next up: 11 Romeo and Juliet Now there's a play I've read more than a few times. I'd guess two-dozen times, at least, since I taught it every year I had Freshman English, and I had Freshman English just about every year I taught for 23 years.
Romeo and Juliet
3/10/19 to 3/16/19
Well...I've read it many, many times. But it's still fun. And I don't even need notes to get the dirty jokes at this point, which is always a bonus. Back to the history stuff.
Richard II
3/17/19 to 3/23/19
"I do defy him, and I spit at him.
Call him a slanderous coward and a villain...."
Yep. Nuff said.
Here are two nicer ones:
"My dancing soul doth celebrate."
and
"Truth hath a quiet breast."
And this one is just beautiful (and thus gets the deluxe treatment):
And at the halfway point...
One of the things I find striking about Richard II is the detailed knowledge of the king's court which Shake-speare displays. For instance, he describes in intimate detail the courtly exchanges which occur prior to the duel between the two noblemen. I suppose it could be a fabrication, but it has the ring of authenticity. (I wonder if there is a way to find out?) If it is authentic language, then I have to wonder how William Shakespeare of Stratford-Upon-Avon could have come upon this type of knowledge. It's not like he could regularly discourse with people who would be in such a situation. De Vere, on the other hand, would have been quite familiar with this sort of thing. Wormwood....
3/22
So check this shit from Act III, Scene 2 out:
Now...how in the living 🔥🔥HELL🔥🔥 does that make any sense for a stage direction for a play being performed in 1595 (first recorded performance of the play = December 9, 1595)? Unless a character is saying this line...which he isn't...it makes no sense at all. Is it possible that Shake-speare thought so highly of his work that he was looking ahead to a time when it would be read independent of a performance? At a time when the idea of publishing plays was considered absurd? (Check out the reactions to Ben Jonson's first folio.)
This also makes me think back to those three Henry VI plays...how they seemed to demand sets which would have been impossible to produce at that time period.
Also, a line which I want to remember: "O, call back yesterday, bid time return...."
3/24/19: Finished up the last bit WELL before midnight this time. (This is why I need deadlines.) There was some most excellent stuff in this last stretch, such as:
and...
"... Learn, good soul,
To think our former state a happy dream;
From which awake'd the truth, the truth of what we are
Shows us but this."
...which I thought would make a good chapter heading quote for ...Then There Is No Mountain....
There was also this bit...
...which made me stop to wonder. The invocation of Oxford (albeit as a place, but walk with me) plus the commentary upon jousting and saucy behavior with respect to that enterprise...sure made ME think of Edward de Vere, champion jouster, known as The Spear Shaker because of his habit of shaking his lance at his fallen opponent. Y'knowwhatimsayin'?
Anyway...good play. I think the Quotable Quotes ratio is beginning to rise...and I don't remember seeing any same word end rhymes, which seemed to be so prevalent in some of the "earlier" works.
King John
3/24/19 to 3/30/19
3/28 Finally got a bit of a start into this play...which, 1/4th of the way through, has not really captivated me. In fact, I have to say that this seems more like one of the "Early" plays. But we'll see how the rest goes down.
One interesting thing:
I know it's a simile, but it's pretty hard not to see this as a breaking of the fourth wall, too...which, if there's anything to The Wikipedia Chronology, would be the first instance of this in a work by Shake-speare. I think.
3/30: Trying to power through the rest of this so-called King John...and will probably make it, as there are 4:45 hours left in the day and I only have 16 pages to go...but it is just fuckin' PAINful. This play is so bad...there's just no way that it isn't one of Shake-speare's earliest works. The end rhyme with the same word is back in force, and the lack of understanding of how the stage works is way beyond the "maybe this will be read someday" explanation. Case in point: there's a scene where a character jumps off the top of a castle wall, then hits the ground and dies. On stage. Mmm-hmmm. Speaking of which...it's a child, and that's not even the beginning and end of the cruelty to children thing. There's a long scene wherein a character says he's going to put the same kid's eyes out with a hot poker. And it goes on and on. Doesn't end up happening, but still. For fuck's sake, y'know? Have some decency, Shakey.
Sigh.
Going to try to finish it up now. Not very happy about it, though.
Our survey says...finished. With four hours to spare. One little bit towards the end which I liked...and will probably use as a chapter quote for ...Then There Is No Mountain.... if I ever decide to get back to writing it:
"I am a scribbled form, drawn with a pen
Upon a parchment, and against this fire
Do I shrink up."
But other than that...not much to recommend this play at all. It is mos def one of my least favorites. So if you only read one Shake-speare play...don't make it this one, for sure.
And now next up is The Merchant of Venice...a play so vile that the last time I read it it actually made me feel physically ill. Sigh.
The Merchant of Venice
3/31/19 to
3/31: Just got a little start, but had two bits that caught my eye and ear this morning:
"...let my liver rather heat with wine
Than my heart cool with mortifiying groans."
Which I thought was some good advice to remember next time I feel like having a drink.
And this:
"As who should say 'I am Sir Oracle,
And when I ope my lips let no dog bark!'"
Which I just thought was funny.
Oh, and this bit: "Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing, more than any man in all Venice. His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff—you shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them they are not worth the search." I've known a few folks who fit that description, for sure.
4/6: Read a pretty good chuck yesterday, but, as usual, it came down to the wire before I finished this play up. So once again I see (for me, at least) the necessity of having a deadline.
Anyway. Here's some stuff I thought was cool.
"All things that are,
Are with more spirit chased then enjoy'd."
Not cool, however, is the unrelenting racism and anti-Semitism. As for the racism, get this: Portia tells a black guy who has come to try for her hand that she has no problem with his being black, but after he loses at the cask game and leaves, she says, "A gentle riddance. Draw the curtains: go. Let all of his complexion choose me so." What the fucking fuck is THAT about? I mean, racism is bad enough, but hypocrisy on top of it...fuck. And let's keep in mind that this Portia is often called up as evidence of Shake-speare's Strong Women. Mmm-hmmm. For some reason, hypocrisy and racism don't rank very high calculations of people of Good Character.
Anyway. Ironic, too, in that we have this beautiful bit not far removed from the above:
"The world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil? In religion,
What damned error, but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?
There is no vice so simple but assumes
Some mark of virtue on his outward parts:
How many cowards, whose hearts are all as false
As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins
The beards of Hercules and frowning Mars;
Who, inward search'd, have livers white as milk;
And these assume but valour's excrement
To render them redoubted!"
You'd think that a guy who could write those lines would puke when he wrote Portia's bullshit, but maybe WS was more of an All White People Are Equal kind of guy. I would hope not, but fuck...I hate racism. And anti-Semitism. And misogyny. And...well, etc.
Okay. Ten more pages, so I'm going to finish this thing up, and then there is one thing you can be sure of: I will never read The Merchant of Venice again in this lifetime, and if given the opportunity in another life, I will most assuredly say, "I prefer not to."
Henry IV Part I
4/7/19 to 4/13/19
Finished at 10:30 pm on Saturday, 4/13...so a whole 90 minutes early. Thus proving my absolute dependency on deadlines.
There were some good moments in this play, for sure...most of them courtesy of Sir John Falstaff, who is (as Harold Bloom said) one of Shake-speare's two greatest characters. (Hmm? Oh, Hamlet, of course.) There were also a lot of fat jokes. Which I got kind of tired of, actually, but I'm kind of averse to cruelty these days, so maybe it's me.
Henry IV Part II
4/14/19 to 4/20/19
Got a good start in church this morning...read all of Act I. Strange opening. Shake-speare really seems to like these strange introductory set-ups. We'll see if he remembers to come back to it at the end. (Remembering The Taming of the / a Shrew.)
A bit I liked a lot: "They bring smooth comforts false, worse than true wrongs." Don't know if that's entirely true, but I like to think that it could be true, at least. (I like to think I'm a red pill kind of guy.)
4/18: Got another act in. Found some amusing stuff. Also, I read part in Barnes and Noble using a No Fear Shakespeare version, and found some extra amusement there. To wit, here's a line from Act II, Scene iv:
Which is good enough in and of itself, but even better is the No Fear translation and commentary:
This breach in the wall and bent pike...that's just a MILitary metaphor, see? For fuck's sake, man.
And just to show you that The Song Remains The Same, there's this bit:
Mmm-hmm.
April 20: Yes, but get this...its not even 6 pm. Woo hoo!
And by the way...this was a superb play. That last scene when Falstaff goes rushing to see the newly crowned Henry V...just fuckin' DEADly. This is my favorite play so far by a long way.
Much Ado About Nothing
4/21/19 to 4/27/19
Well...I think I did have something to say about this play, but I didn't get around to it, so all I can say at this point is that it was okay. Dogberry was a good character, and reading about him made me remember Michael Keaton's most excellent portrayal of that character way back when...but this was not one of my favorites, for sure.
Henry V
4/28/19 to 5/4/19
Got a little start on this one before Deadline Day, but not much. I wasn't feeling too good about it, actually. The tennis balls bit was cool, but beyond that I just didn't feel like I was sinking into it. But today--Saturday / Deadline Day--I just got down to business, and I found a lot of stuff that I liked. For instance,
In the Prologue to Act IV, the Chorus makes reference to "A little touch of Harry in the night," which (1) sounds very modern, doesn't it? and (2) I thought would be a great song title. Reference the latter, I think I'll sit down and write it and then send it to Harry Connick, Jr. Worth a shot, right?
Second, there's this bit:
And it occurs to me (not for the first time, and I realize that this isn't exactly a blazing original or startling observation) that this Shake-speare fellow just canNOT stay away from the idea of concealed identity. People are constantly dressing up as other people--often of the opposite sex--or pretending to be other people or being mistaken for other people. It's almost as if the writer felt a deep kinship with imposters.
Also, as long as I'm here on this "in a lot of the plays" thing, I also couldn't help but notice that once again we have a King who bitches about how hard he has it compared to the "Lucky" common people who don't have any worries or cares and can sleep soundly at night. Shake-speare is the Elizabethan Roger Waters oft times. And only a person who had no real experience of being a commoner couldn't possibly think that commoners have it better than noblemen. So there's that.
And in another installment of Shake-speare Was One Weird Mother Fucker, check out this line: "...you may as well go about to
turn the sun to ice with fanning in his face with a
peacock's feather." Mmm-hmm.
And in the You So Funny, William Shake-speare Department, this exchange really gave me a go. I'll preface it by noting that the Fluellen character has some kind of speech impediment (or possibly an affectation), and pronounces all of his bs as ps.
FLUELLEN: Ay, he was porn at Monmouth, Captain Gower. What call you the town's name where Alexander the Pig was born!
GOWER: Alexander the Great.
FLUELLEN: Why, I pray you, is not pig great? the pig, or the
great, or the mighty, or the huge, or the magnanimous, are all one reckonings, save the phrase is a little variations.
Is it just me, or is Alexander the Big just fuckin' hilarious?
Anyway...this ended well. Good job, Will.
Oh, and by the way...there's an awful lot of French in this play. Funny, as there is pretty much NO WAY that William Shaxper could have learned / known French...but "While living at the Cecil House, [Edward] de Vere's daily studies consisted of dancing instruction, French, Latin, cosmography, writing exercises, drawing, and common prayers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_de_Vere,_17th_Earl_of_Oxford) So there's that.
As You Like It
HALFWAY POINT!
5/5/19 to
Here's a thing:
Specifically, this:
I mean...those words were written by a guy who had been seriously ripped up. I would bet a pretty good hunk of money that there was a woman involved in the ripping, too. A man will kill you, for sure, but a woman will make sure you suffer and not die.
Mmm-hmmm.
And after that...a few interesting things, such as a Big Quote
and the 7 Ages of Man "poem," as well. And that line that the Marlowe as Shake-speare folks love so much--
But as the action proceeded, this play got really tedious. Lots of really stupid word play, that kind of thing. I would have thought this was one of his early efforts, actually. But what do I know.
Oh...also yet another play in which there is disguise / mistaken identity. This time around a woman (Rosalind) pretends to be a man who then pretends to be Rosalind, an extra twist which is kind of kinky, too.
Julius Caesar
5/12/19 to 5/18/19
Read most of this on The Last Day (5/18/19), but that was kind of good, as I really felt the power of the play. And this is a most magnificent work, for sure. My favorite aspect of it is the way that Shake-speare shows how fickle the public is: Yeah Pomey! Yeah Caesar! Yeah Brutus! Yeah Marc Antony! They are such fucking idiots.
Hamlet
5/19/19 to 5/26/19
Hot damn! My favorite (or possibly second favorite, after Waiting for Godot) play EVer. I am hot for this play, man...even though I've already read it about twenty times. For reals.
So...I thought I'd take a different tack on this one. So I went to LFPL and found something called Hamlet: Shakespeare Appreciated (Unabridged, Dramatised, Commentary Options), narrated by Joan Walker. I almost didn't make it through the introduction (3:54), which consists of a monologue from Shakespeare's point of view...as he visits the graves of his father and his son, Hamnet. Oh, my aching balls. But I'd decided to listen whilst walking, so despite my disgust, I let the band play on. It got worse. It even talked about Ur-Hamlet, which, to me, is the very epitome of ridiculousness in literary criticism. (There's evidence that Hamlet was being performed years before we think Shakespeare could have written it, so even though we have no evidence whatsoever, we have decided that we will call that play Ur-Hamlet, and, um, we're not sure who wrote it. But not Shakespeare, for sure. Maybe Thomas Kyd. Yeah, that's right. It was unDOUBTedly Thomas Kyd. And...well, the play is pretty much exactly the same as Shakespeare's Hamlet. But not as good, of course. Which is why Shakespeare decided to rewrite it. Even though it had just been on-stage. Which would be kind of like Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and Robert Lopez deciding to stage a re-do of The Phantom of the Opera for nest season. But hey, it could happen, right?) But I had a long walk ahead of me, so I let it play. It got a little more interesting. They have a cast who performs the play unabridged, but the narrator interrupts frequently to made comments and to bring up information. It's all filtered through a Stratfordian perspective, of course, and I don't think she utters a word that I haven't either read elsewhere or thought myself, but I have to admit that I started to get interested as it went on. For instance, she has a little discussion about whether or not Hamlet was fat. I have asked that question myself in the past...there's something later in the play that makes that a reasonable conclusion. Come to think of it, I think either Hamlet himself or maybe his mom says he is fat and scant of breath. Let's see...yep. It's just a bit into Hamlet's sword fight with Laertes. Check this out:
KING CLAUDIUS Our son shall win.
QUEEN GERTRUDE He's fat, and scant of breath.
And Joan added that there was one production of the play which was sub-titled "The Story of a Fat Prince" or some such nonsense. Which is something I had not heard of previously, so at least there's that. And by the way, FUCK YOU, Laurence Olivier, you skinny assed motherfucker! I never liked your Hamlet anyway...and now I like it even less.
So. I walked for about an hour...but Hamlet hasn't even met up with Ghost Dad yet, which gives you some idea about the pace of this thing. But I might could stick with it.
News as it happens.
5/23/19: As it happens...I'm almost finished with the audio version of Hamlet, and I am enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would...even though it continues to have annoying elements. For instance, the narrator will often interject describe how characters react to what is happening--"she turned pale"--when no such thing is described in the play itself. Seems just a tad presumptuous to me. Especially so as I often disagree with the "interpretations." But 90% of it is fun and affirms insights I thought were my own unique province.
But I decided that I might could go ahead and read the play again, too. For one thing, I found this cute little thing--
which came all the way from
courtesy of one of my students. I wish I could remember which one. It's a bit more substantial than my Barnes and Noble books...in fact, it has twice as many pages as the Hamlet which appears therein...and is well made, from the leather cover to the
Yes, the binding is sewn. Alas, whoever set the type needed a better proofreader, as it didn't take long to come upon a rather glaring error:
But I guess that's just life in the 21st Century...aka the What The Fuck Do I Care? century.
5/24/19: Finished listening to play and commentary. Quite liked it, but now I feel like reading the play. Don't know if that will happen before midnight Saturday, but it might could. Let's see.
And...didn't quite make it, but I did get caught up enough that I went ahead and finished it Sunday (5/26/19) night. And for the two dozenth or so time, this play blew me away. Too many things to even consider going into, but just one:
In Act II of Waiting for Godot wherein Pozzo says, "“They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.” Pretty fuckin' intense, right? And it just seems to sum it all up...the sense of futility and meaninglessness and emptiness. Well...WS was there 350 years (-ish) ahead of Samuel Beckett. Check this out:
HAMLET It will be short: the interim is mine;
And a man's life's no more than to say 'One.'
Act V, Scene ii, lines 78 - 79
I mean...SERiously, is there any thought Shake-speare DIDn't think? I think not.
On the disappointing end, I found at least three more typos in this edition:
You'd think that the Stratford-Upon-Avon folks would be just a little bit more meticulous with a three and a half centuries old work, wouldn't you? WS deserves better treatment than this, fo show.
The Merry Wives of Windsor
5/27/19 to 6/2/19 (4 a.m.)
Missed it by that much. But the real story here is that this play really, really, really, REALly sucked. As in it was hard to believe that this was a Shakespearian play most of the time. The plot was very thin: Falstaff wants to fuck two married women, they decide to fuck with his head, and he gets his comeuppance. That is the whole enchilada. No sub-plots, no character development. And even THAT was only a minor part of the play. The majority of it consisted of really stupid word play. I felt like I was reading something written by a sophomore in high school. For instance...
SIR HUGH EVANS If there is one, I shall make two in the company.
DOCTOR CAIUS If dere be one or two, I shall make-a the turd.
I mean...really. That's a long way to go to make a "turd" joke. (Though I was impressed to learn that "turd" is such an old word. In fact, I checked up on that and found out that it can be traced back to the mid-13th century, and that John Wycliffe used it in his translation of the Bible. Holy shit!) Also, while it was nice to see Kamandi's canine friend again, I couldn't figure out why he was talking with that stupid accent. I think the answer is that it gave "Shakespeare" many opportunities to make stupid word plays.
So I wasn't all that keen on reading it, and didn't really start bearing down until Saturday evening...and then fell asleep reading it with about a turd of the play to go. Woke up from a vile dream, though, and finished it off, so more or less on schedule.
There were a few things about TMWoW which actually were interesting, though.
(1) PISTOL Why then, the world's mine oyster, Which I with sword will open.
So there's another one that we owe WS. This was news to me, but not surprising news, of course.
(2) Weirdness reared its big head again; to wit, Falstaff says, "Well, if I be served such another trick, I'll have my brains ta'en out and buttered, and give them to a dog for a new year's gift."
That is some seriously fucked up shit.
(3) After becoming convinced that there was NFW that Shake-speare wrote this doggerel after Hamlet, I went online to see why people thought this play was written 1597 to 1602 (instead of in the 1580s...or earlier). There seem to be three primary reasons. First, it was initially registered for publication in 1602. Which means exactly nothing, of course, but since there is so little to go by, it's natural for literary historians to grasp as those kinds of straws. Second, there's "internal evidence" that they play was written post 1597. Wikipedia puts it succinctly: "In the Fairy pageant in Act 5 Scene 5 (lines 54-75), Mistress Quickly, as the Queen of the Fairies, gives a long speech giving an elaborate description of the Order of the Garter. The play also alludes to a German duke, who is generally thought to be Frederick I, Duke of Württemberg, who had visited England in 1592 and was elected to the Order of the Garter in 1597 (but was eventually only installed in Stuttgart on 6 November 1603). These facts led commentators starting with Edmond Malone in 1790 to suggest that the play was written and performed for the Order of the Garter festival. William Green suggests that the play was drawn up when George Carey, 2nd Baron Hunsdon, as Lord Chamberlain and patron of Shakespeare's company, was elected Order of the Garter in April 1597. If this is so, it was probably performed when Elizabeth I attended Garter Feast on 23 April." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merry_Wives_of_Windsor) Which is fine, but keep in mind that this is based on a description of something relating to an order established in 1348...and the fact that a character speaks in a German accent. It's not exactly a neon light pointing to Frederick I, y'know? Third, the play is seen as a sequel (of sorts) to Henry IV, Part 2, primarily because in the epilogue to H4P2 promises to continue the story of Falstaff:
"If you be not too
much cloyed with fat meat, our humble author will
continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make
you merry with fair Katharine of France: where, for
any thing I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat,
unless already a' be killed with your hard
opinions; for Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is
not the man."
That reference to Oldcastle is interesting. Apparently Shake-speare originally had identified the Falstaff character as "John Oldcastle," and changed the name to "John Falstaff" after one of Oldcastle's descendants complained. Hmm...that sounds interesting, doesn't it? And due to the wonders of the 21st Century, a few minutes of clickety clacketing have led me to the full text of "Shakespeare and the Cobham Controversy: the Oldcastle/Falstaff and Brooke / Broome Revisions" by James M. Gibson, which I am now going to stop to read. Smoke 'em if you've got 'em.
But there's no reason to suppose that this play was written after Henry IV, Part 2. As previously implied, there's no plot element which suggests a continuation of the story. In fact, this could just as easily...perhaps even more easily...be a precursor to Falstaff's appearances in the two Henry IV plays. Nothing in this play reflects a continuation of the character from those plays...and there's nothing to suggest that this is a grand finale for the character. Au contraire.
Also interesting...if, as is supposed, the name of the character was changed from Oldcastle to Falstaff (and the disclaimer in the Epilogue added) because of political pressure exerted by this Cobham character, then why didn't Shakespeare get into any trouble? In fact, why was he allowed to make the change rather than just have the play be suppressed or destroyed? That's what happened to Ben Jonson when he fucked around with satirizing the powerful in Isle of Dogs. In fact, not only was the play destroyed, but Jonson and two other actors were put in prison. What is even more interesting about this is that there is evidence that the person raising the hue and cry against the play and the playwright was none other than...wait for it...Henry Brooke, 11th Baron Cobham. So why was WS spared? Well...I have a little theory. Evidence suggests that Baron Cobham complained to Richard Topcliffe, investigator and torturer for Elizabeth I, who then informed Robert Cecil about the offense, and he then brought the matter to the Privy Council, afterwords suppression and jail time ensued. Well. Robert Cecil was Edward de Vere's guardian...and later his father-
in-law. And Edward de Vere was rejected for membership in The Privy Council...but the fact that he was able to apply for a spot there certainly says something, doesn't it? (Not to mention that he was the Lord Great Chamberlain of England, which Wikipedia tells us it "is the sixth of the Great Officers of State (not to be confused with the Great Offices of State), ranking beneath the Lord Privy Seal and above the Lord High Constable. The Lord Great Chamberlain has charge over the Palace of Westminster...." It might also be worth remembering that Edward de Vere was to 17th Earl of Oxford, and the 18th successive de Vere to hold this office.) Put that together and you get a reasonable explanation: Edward de Vere wrote a play making fun of one of his peers. That peer complained, and de Vere's father-in-law told him, "You've gone too far this time!" De Vere laughed and said, "Okay, lighten up. I'll give him a new name." And the beat goes on. Given the circumstances, that seems to be the only reasonable explanation that I can see.
I wonder if anybody has ever written about this stuff? You'd think certainly that MUST have happened...but I think I'll take a look around and see. I might could be interested in writing that kind of thing myself. Hmpf. That's the first time in a long time that I've had the thought, "I'd like to write that."
Put it all together and it does not spell M*O*T*H*E*R* so far as I'm concerned. As with the dating / ordering of all of the plays, conjecture is based upon some pretty precarious logic...and no alternatives are considered.
(4) The Authorship Question rears its head. I was surprised by this initially, as I saw no reason to look at the play in this way. But when I was poking about to check on the dating of the play, I happened upon an Oxfordian Perspective...and I was at least a little impressed by it.
FALSTAFF I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass.
FORD Ay, and an ox too; both the proofs are extant.
In terms of composition...
most of the play is not written in iambic pentameter
characters are static
stupid jokes and world play seem to be the main purpose
seems to obey Aristotle's "unities"
I need to come back to this after I read that James M. Gibson essay.
Meanwhile....
Twelfth Night
6/2/19 to 6/6/19
That's right: I finished this one EARLy. Two days early. Not because it was so great...though it was at least good...but just because.
Here are some of the things I found particularly noteworthy:
DUKE ORSINO: If music be the food of love, play on,
Didn't realize that was from Mr. Speare...but, then again, isn't just about EVERYthing from him?
And of course there was a little bawdy humor. Here's Sir Andrew worrying about his wig, and getting some assurance from Sir Toby:
SIR ANDREW: But it becomes me well enough, does't not?
SIR TOBY: Excellent; it hangs like flax on a distaff; and I hope to see a houswife take thee between her legs and spin it off.
And another I Didn't Realize That Was Mr. Speare:
MALVOLIO: Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.
And a little thing from the Man, Shake-speare Was One Strange Mother--SHUT YOUR MOUTH Department:
SIR TOBY: ...Andrew, if he were opened and you find so much blood in his liver as will clog the foot of a flea, I'll eat the rest of the anatomy.
And as for the fourth wall?
FABIAN: If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.
And remember that improbably scene wherein Hamlet boards a pirate ship? Well...here you come again, looking better than a body has a right to:
FIRST OFFICER:
Orsino, this is that Antonio
That took the Phoenix and her fraught from Candy:
And this is he that did the Tiger board
When your young nephew Titus lost his leg....
And by the way, a ship named the Tiger is also mentioned in Macbeth. So that would be scanned. I wonder if there's any record of the name of the pirate ship that captured Edward de Vere in the English Channel? I took a quick look and didn't find anything. But I'd bet good money that it was The Tiger!
Troilus and Cressida
6/9/19 to 6/17/19
But as long as I'm here (6/6/19)...I have to say that I'm pretty excited to read this play. Mostly because of this bit:
A NEVER WRITER
TO AN EVER READER:
NEWS.
Eternal reader, you have here a new play, never staled
with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of
the vulgar, and yet passing full of the palm comical; for it
is a birth of your brain that never undertook anything
comical vainly. And were but the vain names of comedies
changed for the titles of commodities, or of plays for
pleas, you should see all those grand censors, that now
style them such vanities, flock to them for the main grace
of their gravities, especially this author's comedies, that
are so framed to the life that they serve for the most com-
mon commentaries of all the actions of our lives, show-
ing such a dexterity and power of wit that the most
displeased with plays are pleased with his comedies. And
all such dull and heavy-witted worldlings as were never
capable of the wit of a comedy, coming by report of
them to his representations, have found that wit there
that they never found in themselves and have parted bet-
ter witted than they came, feeling and edge of wit set
upon them more than ever they dreamed they had brain
to grind it on. So much and such savored salt of wit is in
his comedies that they seem, for their height of pleasure,
to be born in that sea that brought forth Venus.
Amongst all there is none more witty than this, and had
I time I would comment upon it, though I know it needs
not, for so much as will make you think your testern well
bestowed, but for so much worth as even poor I know to
be stuffed in it. It deserves such a labor as well as the best
comedy in Terence or Plautus. And believe this, that
when he is gone and his comedies out of sale, you will
scramble for them and set up a new English Inquisition.
Take this for a warning, and at the peril of your pleasure's
loss, and judgment's, refuse not, nor like this the less for
not being sullied with the smoky breath of the multi-
tude, but thank fortune for the scape it hath made
amongst you, since by the grand possessors' wills I be-
lieve you should have prayed for them rather than been
prayed. And so I leave all such to be prayed for, for the
state of their wits' healths, that will not praise it. Vale.
This "advertisement" appears in a quarto edition of the play printed in 1609...but there seem to be at least two versions of what went on here.
One version has it this way:
"The Historie of Troylus and Cressida finally appeared in quarto six years later, in 1609. Midway through its printing, however, the cover page was altered; and also, the book now contained a sharp, angry warning that other yet-unpublished Shakespeare works were in danger of being suppressed by “the grand possessors” of them."
That's from Oxforidan Hank Whittmore's Shakespeare Blog (https://hankwhittemore.com/2013/01/17/a-never-writer-to-an-ever-reader-news-no-63-of-100-reasons-why-edward-de-vere-earl-of-oxford-was-shakespeare/). And that makes sense to me. But I don't want to skew things to my own perspective, so I'll also present the other version.
The other version has it this way:
"Publication in quarto and folio
"Troilus and Cressida appeared in three editions (the first of which survives in two states) before 1642.
Quarto a, 1609. Apparently printed either from an authorial manuscript or a transcript from such a manuscript. The title-page names the play as ‘The historie of Troylus and Cresseida’ and states ‘As it was acted by the Kings Maiesties seruants at the Globe’.
Quarto b, 1609. Differs from quarto a only in the titlepage and the addition of a single leaf. The title-page names the play as ‘The famous historie of Troylus and Cresseid’ with no mention of any performances. The additional leaf follows the title-page and is headed ‘A neuer writer, to an euer reader. Newes’. It offers ‘a new play, neuer stal’d with the Stage’."
That version is from The British Library's Shakespeare in Quarto page (https://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/troilus.html). And just in case you're wondering, the "third" edition" alluded to was the play's appearance in the 1623 Folio. I cut that bit off because it was irrelevant.
Here's the thing, though: the explanation for why the BL names these quartos as a and b...implying that a was published first...just sounds like bullshit. Internal logic would actually dictate that b was published first, wouldn't it? It doesn't list any performances, while a does. And since the "extra" page doesn't appear in the folio version of the play...or any other printing of the play for the next four hundred years...it seems only logical to conclude that it was part of the first printing, someone didn't like it, and it was removed.
And I'll admit that that is what I want to have happened. Because it's a pretty clear message, right? From an E. Ver(e) writer to an E. Ver(e) reader. Nudge nudge, wink wink.
Okay. More on this if I come up with it. Meanwhile, on with the play.
6/12/19: After that (∆) I watched a few minutes of the play on Kanopy, got bored, and then didn't get back to the play itself until today. Meanwhile, though, I read a few pages of Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare because a friend (a very intelligent one--PhD in literature and everything) told me that book has convinced him that the authorship controversy was phony baloney. But after a dozen or so pages I couldn't take the bullshit anymore (so many "must have," "could have," "surely," "most certainly," etc. stuffs) and had to bail out. But I was still kind of in the mood for some Shakespeare love, so I checked out the audiobook of Bill Bryson's Shakespeare: The World as Stage and listened to all of it. It was better than Greenblatt's book, but only marginally. (Started off promisingly, with acknowledgement of how scanty the record was regarding Mr. Shakespeare, but then dropped right back into the whole "SUREly" shit. Sigh.) And that left me unsatisfied, so, thinking, "What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?" I started listening to some Shakespeare lectures by Harold Bloom. And that was some very good shit. No doubt about the Stratfordian perspective, of course, but at least Bloom mostly knows when he's making shit up and tells you so.
And then I sat down and read the first act of Troilus and Cressida. I've long known that The Fall of Troy was one of Shake-speare's most alluded to bits, but I have to confess that I didn't know that he'd actually written a play about it. So it is interesting on that count. Still a long way to go...each act is about 25 pages long in my Little Itty Bitty Shake-speare Book...so I might go ahead and try to put a few more pages away before the week gets away from me. One line which I wanted to preserve because it's so Trumpy:
Other than that...interesting enough...apt enough...but not exactly stirring my soup.
So...ironically, even with my big head start I ended up being a full day late on the deadline this time around. Not sure why. It wasn't a bad play by any means. In fact, I found it interesting to see Shake-speare go into the story of the fall of Troy, since that does pop up so often in his other works. I guess it just didn't feel all that Shake-speary, though. I would have to say that this seemed like an early work to me...but, of course, that won't do, will it?
Although it is interesting that this was one of the first plays--maybe even the first, though I have to look into this a bit more to see if I can find out what month it and Pericles, which also came out in 1609, was published--to appear in a quarto edition after Edward de Vere's death. You know how it goes: rock star dies, record company starts releasing all the shit that's in the archives. Mmm-hmmm.
Othello
6/17/19
Back in the day...sometime between 1980 and 1982, I believe...I went a Louisville Ballet performance of Othello. I wasn't all that impressed with it, but either I or my mom (with whom I went) brought a T-shirt to commemorate the occasion. I no longer have it, alas, but I remember that it was green with orange lettering (OTHELLO) and had a few silhouetted figures, also in orange. Well, maybe just one figure. It's been awhile. ANYway...I wore the T-shirt to work one day. At the time, I was working at a small wire harness factory in Lyndon, Kentucky. Working my way through a B.A. in English at Bellarmine College. (It was still College back that, btw.) And at the end of the day, one of my co-workers came up to me and said, "I've been looking at your T-shirt all day, and I just can't figure it out. What it O. T. Hello?"
So that's always the first thing I think of when I see or hear the word, Othello.
Speaking of Othello, that audiobook of Harold Bloom's lectures on Shakespeare devoted three lectures to O.T. I know the play well enough to be able to follow what he had to say, but not nearly as well as I know Hamlet, Macbeth, or Romeo and Juliet. Not even as well as I know Julius Caesar (which I only taught a time or two). But the lectures were good, and I'm pretty anxious to get down with it. Going to try to get back on my schedule with this one, which means I'd better get started pretty soon, since it's a little on the long side. (125 pages in my Itsy Bitsy Teensy Weensy Bunny Nutshell Library Shakespeare version.
6/18: Enjoyed the first act of Othello quite a bit. Onward. But first, two things.
(1) yet another popular phrase that Shake-speare coined:
(2) a cool inversion of Hamlet's "unweeded garden" courtesy of Iago:
"Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners. So that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many—either to have it sterile with idleness, or manured with industry—why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills."
Iago to Roderigo, Othello I, iii
6/21: Got home from the Friday rounds (drop Joe off to work, drop Jacqueline off to her CLS worker, go for a walk in the park, pick Joe up from work, go to The Great Escape with Joe, go home and have a late lunch) and was so tired I decided to just lay on the sofa for a bit. Then decided there was enough life in me to read a little Othello, so that I wouldn't have to face the (A) read 3/4ths of the play Saturday or (B) miss my deadline thang. So I started reading. Dozed off for a few minutes. Woke up and read some more. Dozed off. Read some more. Thought that this--
--was a nice ...then there is no mountain... kind of line, so took it down. Read some more. Realized I was almost finished. So I finished it. Woo-hoo! A day early, man.
And what a play. This really kicked big fat ass. I think I need to watch one of the movies of it just to cap off the week. Come to think of it, though I am pretty sure I read the play once before (during my Shakespeare class), I don't think I've ever seen a movie or any other kind of performance. So I'm due that, I'd say. Isn't there one with Laurence Fishburne? I would like to see that one if possible.
Also, there's a line from late in the play which really struck me:
OTHELLO
Are there no stones in heaven
But what serve for the thunder?
I'm not sure why, but I wanted to note it down. So I did.
BTW: I found several references which state that the source material for this play was an Italian story “Un Capitano Moro” by Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio. If this is true, there appear to be two problems here: (1) apparently it was pretty obscure, and (2) it had not been translated into English, so Shake-speare must have known Italian. (I found one reference somewhere...I've lost track of it...which said that he really wouldn't have had to know that much Italian to translate the story. Stratfordians are always trying to make Shake-speare stupider than he obviously was so that they can justify their theory. Ironic, ennit?)
Measure for Measure
6/23/19 to 6/29/19
This is my 26th Shake-speare play, which means I'm 25/38ths of the way finished this PROJECT...almost 66%. Speaking of, when I was messaging back and forth with my great good friend David about My Shake-speare Project, he responded by saying that I was his hero. Which is sweet. It's also the second time he's said that to me. The first was when he found out that I had married my second wife, who was 25 years younger than me. Since that marriage only lasted five years, I guess I lose credit for that one. But four and a half of those years were pretty fuckin' great, so maybe not a total loss.
ANYway...isn't Measure for Measure a play about marriage? Pretty sure this is the one where The Bed Trick comes into play. Details as they happen.
6/25/19: Here's a funny exchange:
MISTRESS OVERDONE Well; what has he done?
POMPEY A woman.
MISTRESS OVERDONE But what’s his offence?
POMPEY Groping for trouts in a peculiar river.
No Fear Shakespeare apparently feared that last line, as they "translated" it thusly: "Fishing in the “private part” of a river." What pussies.
Also:
And how about this: "Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win, By fearing to attempt."
And this:
Also, once again there seems to be a reference to Edward de Vere's family motto ("Vero Nihil Verius" = "Nothing is Truer Than Truth"):
...for truth is truth
To the end of reckoning."
Measure for Measure
Act 5, scene 1, lines 45-46
Mmm-hmmm.
And speaking of Edward de Vere...that Bed Trick thing? I found out that the same thing appears in three other Shake-speare plays...and that though it did become a somewhat popular motif later on, it's not been found in literature before Shake-speare, which suggests that he invented it. And we all know that Edward de Vere actually was a victim of The Bed Trick in his personal life.
That would be scanned.
All's Well That Ends Well
6/30/19 to
BTW...26 down, 12 to go. Pretty exciting.
And also BTW...just started watching the Kanopy provided movie of this play (6/30), and wondered if there were movies for all of my remaining Shake-speare plays. So let's go:
27 All's Well That Ends Well √
28 Timon of Athens √ library
29 King Lear √
30 Macbeth √
31 Antony and Cleopatra √
32 Coriolanus √
33 Pericles √
34 Cymbeline √
35 The Winter's Tale √
36 The Tempest √
37 Henry VIII √
38 The Two Noble Kinsmen √ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOKL_iX_wTQ
And the answer is...yes! With just one reservation. 10 of the 12 are available to stream via Kanopy, which is muy convenient, and one of the other two is available at the public library. The other one, Two Noble Kinsmen, does not appear on Kanopy, is not in the library, and is not available through Netflix or Amazon Video...which I thought was kind of amazing, but maybe it's a shit play? Time will tell. Anyway, I did find a video of the full play on the You Tub, though, so there's that, at least. It's a college presentation, so I'm hoping that what it lakes in professionalism it will make up for with hot girls.
ANYway...subject to change, of course, but right now I have a hankering to watch as well as read Shake-speare, and I'm kind of wishing that I had kept that up throughout my whole Project. Maybe I'll go back and start over again and do an all video version of the run through. That could be fun...and I'm pretty sure that I won't have had enough of Shake-speare even after I've finished reading all of the works. So might could happen.
7/2/19: Speaking of exciting...I have been itching to read about (and work by) Ben Jonson for some time, and I finally cracked open Marchette Gaylord Chute's Ben Jonson of Westminster t'other day. And not only is it interesting and well-written, it also sheds quite a bit of light on Mr. William Shake-speare. For instance....
Chute describes how the theaters of the Elizabethan era needed lots of plays...because they put on new shows constantly. Like a new play every day kind of constantly. "This meant that the playwrights had to be kept working at high speed...." Chute also mentions that because of this, a kind of factory system was often employed, wherein one writer might come up with the story, then five other writers would get to work on the play itself...each writer doing one act. And so far as remuneration...Chute mentions one of these writers being paid eleven shillings for his work. Isn't it strange, then, how none of this applies to William Shake-speare? We're told that he wrote 39 (-ish) plays in 20 (-ish) years...a pretty leisurely place by Elizabethan standards. And we're told that he only did a little bit of collaboration, and that most of the plays...and all of the good ones...are his work alone. Lastly, we're told that he became wealthy because of his work...though that, of course, is tempered by the fact that he managed to do three full-time jobs simultaneously as writer, actor, and theater owner. Doesn't sound very likely when you put it like that, does it?
Furthermore...we're told how hard it was for young writers to get patrons...which they desperately needed. And we're specifically told how the young Earl of Southampton was besieged by writers seeking his patronage. How on earth did a humble writer from Stratford-on-Avon elbow his way to the front of that line? And that's not even the most surprising aspect of this bit. Here are Chute's own words on this bit: "The case of William Shakespeare, who succeeded in getting this particular earl for his patron and then abandoned the relationship, is so exceptional as to stand alone in the history of Elizabethan letters." Well, I'll be darned. It's almost as if this Shakespeare fellow didn't even need a patron, ennit?
And how about this: "No playwright in English history ever had more liberty than Shakespeare...." This is said specifically in relationship to Shakespeare choosing his subject matter seemingly at his own whim rather than settling down to write tried and true formulas...or to capitalizing on his own successes, for that matter. (What, no Macbeth 2? etc.) The pile of "only Shakespeares" keeps getting higher, and to think that that's just chance is stupidity. There's a reason the man was an exception over and over again, and that reason is not simply genius. Genius without opportunity is called Underemployment. Every time.
Chute also talks about how "odd" it is that Shakespeare continued to act in plays even after he had achieved success as his writer. She says, "...it might seem to a modern reader that the creator of Falstaff, Shylock, Puck and Mercutio should have been freed from the obligation of portraying other men's characters upon the stage." Well...yeah, now that you mention it. But we don't examine that incongruity or attempt to find a reasonable explanation for this anomaly. No, we just chalk it up to, "Well, that's weird, but Shakespeare was a weird guy." Right? Amazing. Not in a good way.
7/3/19: Do you quarrel, sir? Apparently so. In fact, Chute says that Jonson quarreled with just about everybody...including the boys who acted at the Globe Theater, against whom he had some very specific beefs...but never with Shakespeare. Shakespeare just keeps on being The Only Guy, doesn't he? Curious, you'd think.
As for this Ben Jonson...I found this beautiful set of his Complete Works--
--for a mere $755.61 (or Best Offer) +$100.74 shipping on eBay. Got to admit that if I were a rich man (deedle deedle deedle dee) I'd throw down hundred dollar bills. I also found a shitty 1875 nine volume set for a mere $34.99 + $17.31, but it seriously looks like it wouldn't survive the trip. And besides, even that's out of my price range right now. On the other hand, you get get just about all of the same stuff in a Kindle version for $2.51. I'm going to read the three plays I have first, though, and see if I really need more. I know how I am.
Hmmm. Still haven't started All's Well That Ends Well. Guess I'd better shut off the Jonson for a little while.
And...
"....he's a most notable coward, an infinite and
endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker, the owner
of no one good quality...."
And oh look...
...it's Edward de Vere's motto again.
7/6/19: Just finished...3 hours before deadline. And it was okay. Kind of. But hey...aNOTHer bed trick? Curious, eh?
Timon of Athens
7/7/19 yo 7/11/19
7/11/19: Did a little nibbling at this before today, but I took a fall last night and hurt my ankle, knees, and probably broke a toe, so that gave me the chance to lay on my back and bear down on it. Not quite finished, but there were a couple of things I wanted to note.
First, this is a very bad play. I've read that scholars think it is a collaboration with Thomas Middleton, but that's just more Stratfordian bullshit. Why on earth would a great playwright wait until the end of his career to collaborate with lesser writers? My guess is that this is one of the earliest Shake-speare plays, which would explain why it is so clunky, and that if Shake-speare collaborated with Middleton, it was because it was so early on that he was still learning his way.
ANYway, here are three lines which I found noteworthy for one reason or another:
"Paint till a horse may mire upon your face. A pox of wrinkles!"
I tried to look this line up online to make sure that I was getting it right, but the best I could find was "Keep whoring around, with that thick makeup hiding all your wrinkles!" and I'm pretty sure that that is bullshit. My guess is that it goes like this: "Put on your make-up until a horse can shit on your face"...and then I'm not sure about the rest. It might be, "and then the hell with wrinkles!" Or it could be, "then you'll be cursed with wrinkles"--so the real wrinkles are covered up with make-up, and then the horse shit on the whore's face makes more wrinkles. Any way you look at it, it's pretty freakin' gross.
"Were I like thee, I’d throw away myself." I just thought that was a pretty great insult.
"Thou’dst courtier be again, Wert thou not beggar." This is a play set in ancient Athens, so the use of a 13th century word and concept seems a bit out of place, doesn't it? Indeed. Also interesting that Edward de Vere was a courtier, but that he sold off his lands (as Timon either proposes to do or actually does, I was unclear on this...but it is very clear that he goes broke) and lost his money, standing, and reputation...which is why there are history books that refer to him as a spendthrift, complete loser, etc. So that's something, ennit?
7/12/19: Finished the play late last night...maybe this morning. It was not the best dramatic experience. So much so that I started in on King Lear right away and read the first couple of acts. I think this is the first time since I started MS-PP that I've been ahead of my schedule. We'll see how that holds up, eh?
King Lear
7/12/19 to 7/20/19
But right off the bat I do have to say one thing: from the get-go it is very obvious that this play, which is supposed to be contemporaneous with Timon of Athens, is far, far ahead of the former. It is written with assurance, wisdom, and art. There is no way that Shake-speare wrote them back to back. They are separated by at least twenty-five years in my mind.
7/20/19: 6:33pm, so once again hitting up against that wire. But this play is rough, man. For one thing, it's cruel as hell. For another, it's great at times, but it's just fucking ridiculous, too. I mean, seriously...I'm supposed to buy a guy pretending to be someone else as he leads his blind dad around? Gimme a fuckin' break, man.
Meanwhile, don't think of Trump and William Barr:
But do think of The Beatles:
Macbeth
7/21/19 to 7/27/19
This is another play I am way familiar with...having taught it just about every year for 23 years in high school (and having read it through anew every time), having seen a dozen or so different movie versions of it, and having seen it onstage at least a couple of times (once in a kabuki inspired version which used bursts of Metal Machine Music to accentuate each death). So I didn't really get down to business until Thursday, and then only a little bit, but easily finished between Friday and late Saturday, finishing a full 3 1/2 hours ahead of deadline. And? Oh, it's a magnificent play. I have to confess that I'd forgotten how magnificent.
Here are a few of my favorite things:
SECOND MURDERER We shall, my lord,
Perform what you command us.
FIRST MURDERER Though our lives—
MACBETH
Your spirits shine through you.
It's that dash. Macbeth interrupts, which clearly shows that he does not give even a one gram shit about this murderer's pledge of fealty.
MACBETH
Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,
Till thou applaud the deed.—Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day
And with thy bloody and invisible hand
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
Which keeps me pale.
I thought this was interesting because I'm thinking that Adam Smith might have gotten the "invisible hand" phrase from WS. Check this out: "The phrase invisible hand was introduced by Adam Smith in his book 'The Wealth of Nations'." That's from The Economic Times. (https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/definition/invisible-hand) One problem with that: The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776. Mmm-hmmm. Just sayin', sir.
Lady Macduff
I am in this earthly world, where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly. Why then, alas,
Do I put up that womanly defense
To say I have done no harm?
Well...that's just fuckin' heartbreakingly true, isn't it?
Malcolm
Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.
Macduff
Did heaven look on
And would not take their part?
If you've never asked this question, you're definitely not woke.
Lady Macbeth
What need we fear
who knows it, when none can call our power to
account?
Trump is a nutshell.
Antony and Cleopatra
7/28 to 8/3/19
Somewhere along the line, somebody...I'm guessing one of my students...gave me this lovely little edition of Antony and Cleopatra:
No publication date to be found, but with the publisher information I was able to discover that it was 1910-1920...and that it was a part of this groovy little set:
https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=15962082359&cm_mmc=ggl-_-COM_Shopp_Rare-_-naa-_-naa&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI0rq9wbPW4wIVn__jBx2nBwvAEAQYAyABEgII1PD_BwE#&gid=1&pid=1
That set, by the way, goes for $500. Yowza.
My copy of AandC is a little bleary and worse for wear and tear, but ahmo give it a try and see how it goes.
Starting tomorrow.
Or not.
8/1/19: Didn't get much of a start on AandC, in part because it didn't pull me in, and in part because the pages of my little Knickerbocker Edition were so yellowed that it was hard to read. Well, I guess that happens after 110 years.
So with great reluctance I switched over to my bigger mini-version and got busy with it. While Joe was working at River Valley Club, I was sitting by the Ohio River reading my Shake-speare.
And after awhile I took a walk across the Big Four Bridge. My heart didn't like that a whole hell of a lot, so I had to take a pause halfway across...
...but after a few minutes things calmed down and I finished it off, and then did some reading on the other side of the river.
And there was some good stuff, indeed. Of course. Such as...
(1) This most excellent description of Trump:
(2) This interesting take on societal karma...and on Trump:
(3) The revelation that Shake-speare invented the phrase "said days":
(4) Shake-speare's anticipation of Brian (or perhaps Roger) Eno:
(5) And this bit of advice for the 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidates:
I was surprised to find that this is a really long play...134 pages, whereas most of them weigh in around 100. With that in mind, I read to page 60 today, and figure on reading at least 40 tomorrow, which will make it manageable. I also got the Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra movie from the library, and plan on watching that as soon as I finish the play. Mmmmmm. Elizabeth Taylor.
8/2/19: Try not to think of Trump and the G.O.P. on this one:
8/3/19: Finished at 9:00 pm. Oh, and this--
--where Shake-speare clearly invents Superman. And I found this bit
quite interesting, too, in a My Thesis On Waiting For Godot and the Four Elements way. It implies that the base (mortal) life is earth and water, while air and fire are of the higher (immortal) realm. Food for thought, for sure.
Coriolanus
8/4/19 to 8/9/19
8/4/19: Got a little (20 page) start on Coriolanus today before church...since Jacqueline likes to get to St. James an hour early. It starts off strong. Saw a couple of interesting things already. This bit, for instance:
First Citizen
Care for us! True, indeed! They ne'er cared for us
yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses
crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to
support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act
established against the rich, and provide more
piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain
the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and
there's all the love they bear us.
That could be ripped from today's headlines, couldn't it?
Also, this bit:
Now, William Harvey published Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals) in 1628--although an English version didn't appear until 1653. Coriolanus is thought to have been written 1605 and 1608--though it was not published until the First Folio appeared in 1623. Either way, though, it looks like WS beat Harvey to the punch by at least a few years. Especially as he was dead by 1616 if he was Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon, and 1604 "if" he was Edward de Vere.
My research (by which I mean two minutes's worth of Googling about) does indicate that there were some much earlier folks--Galen, 157 AD; Michael Servitus, 1550-ish AD; Realdo Columbo, also 1550-ish AD) who were hip to the blood circulation thang, but if I remember my Buckle correctly (and I do), then I'm doubtful that those earlier fellows made much a dent in public knowledge, at the least, since Buckle told stories about how William Harvey was laughed out of his profession when he claimed that blood circulated through the body.
So as far as I can see, any way that you cut it ( 🥁🥁🥁), WS was way ahead of the curve on this 🩸 thang.
8/5/19: A superb insult: "To keep talking with you would infect my brain...."
8/9/19: I've been keeping it real with the 20 pages per day--first time I've done a Shake-speare play this way. And you know, it goes by pretty quickly, so even though it's kind of a drag to have another every day commitment (in addition to my ten pages of Buckle per day), it works quite well. Or the other hand, I do like just sinking into a play, and my more typical pattern of having 80 or 90 pages to go on Saturday does push me to that.
Anyway. While I was reading today I thought, not for the first time, that I show would like to re-watch the Gerald Butler / Ralph Fiennes movie version. Looked for it at the LFPL...nope. Looked for it on Kanopy...nope. Don't currently have Netflix. Looked for in on DIRECTV Now...nope. Looked for it on Amazon...yep, but $3.99 to rent. And totally worth it, but...well, y'know. I'm old, poor, in ailing health, and easily distracted. So I put it on the back shelf. But when I thought about it again today, I went for a Google-is look, and lo and behold, you can watch the whole damned movie for free on You Tube. Oh, You Tube. How I do love thee. Watching it right now. There are commercial interruptions, but hey, that's no stop to me. And btw, this has got to be Ralph Fiennes best acting EVer. (And while checking on his other roles, I happened upon an entry for How Proust Can Change Your Life (TV Movie) in which he plays Marcel Proust. So I'll be looking for that right now.
Next time I'll lay down my rap on the Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra movie.
Maybe the next next time. But first:
And btw, I already finished the Fiennes Coriolanus, and it was magnifique!
8/9/19: And here's a real change of pace: I finished a day and four hours early. The breaking it down into 20 pages a day helped, as did watching the most excellent movie version. Not to mention that this was a truly excellent play. In fact, one of the best, I'd have to say. Also quite a twist, in that the ending is just dire...and no stand-in God to make things all better. Have to admit that despite my lack of faith in the "chronology," this does seem like a play that had to have been written near the end of WS's career. But hey, a stopped clock is right twice a day, too.
Pericles
8/11/19 to 8/16/19
Really, really, really bad. As in rape jokes bad. How on earth can this be from the same guy who wrote Hamlet? It's either a really early work or not WS's work at all, I figure...even though that's not what scholarship says.
Cymbeline
8/18/19 to
8/22/19: Well...I read about one third of this play whilst trying to get to sleep in College Point, Queens, New York City...as a group of Chinese guys partied hardy across the street from the Air BandB I was staying in...but I didn't get much out of it, and when I went to try to find my place I couldn't do it, so I just thought what the hell and started over. I was thinking that this was a short (90-page-ish) play, but lo and behold, turns out it's 140 pages plus, but I think it'll be okay. ANYway, today I started out with a little Shake-speare in the Park...
...but that quickly became a little
Shake-speare in the Car in the Rain in the Park.
But a mere 30 pages or so in and I found two interesting things.
Thing 1:
Yesterday in my Daily Devotional reading of Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works of Henry Thomas Buckle Volume II I ran across this interesting bit about Edward de Vere:
And today in Cymbeline, I ran across this:
So...So Edward de Vere introduces perfume to England in ____, and Shake-speare mentions perfume in one of his plays _____ years later. Interesting. (Alas, I can't fill in those blanks at this moment, but ahmo get to work on the first one. The second one, alas, it pure conjecture, but let's put it this way: the gap between the two blanks cannot be more than a few years, and that is a very curious thing.
Work on the first one: looks like it would have been late 1575, when de Vere was issued permission to travel to Italy. The first recorded performance of Cymbeline was April 1611...but, of course, that doesn't mean that that was when it was written. Hmmm. 36 years is a bigger stretch of time than I was anticipating. It might be interesting to see if other writers were mentioning perfume, though. I mean...it must have taken at least a little while to move from Elizabeth's inner circle into the world at large, right? To be continued.
Thing 2:
Shake-speare being dirty.
Pretty funny.
HOLD THE PRESSES!
After fishing the internet for a bit, I remembered that I still had this lovely bit of work--
--and I looked up "perfume" therein. Speaking of which...can you imagine assembling something like this before the age of the computer? (It was first published in 1902.) Just unbelievable.
But as for this so-called "perfume," this bit--
--reminded me that the word appeared in other works by WS, and lookee there...one of those other works was Venus and Adonis, and despite all of the dating problems with the works of Shake-speare, with this one we have
So there's a horse of a ruddier hue, eh? This puts Shake-speare's mention of perfume to within 18 years of Edward de Vere bringing it to England. Still not overwhelmingly persuasive, but it is interesting, isn't it? The real test would be to see if other writers were mentioning perfume in their works, though, and I don't really know how to go about finding that out without spending the next ten years reading every shitty Elizabethan Era play I can find.
HOWEVER...Googling about did lead me to something called The Cosmopolitan, Volume 16, and an article entitled "Perfume Worship in All Ages" by Esther Singleton, which contained this bit of information:
https://books.google.com/books?id=ZHo4AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA479&lpg=PA479&dq=is+there+any+mention+of+perfume+in+elizabethan+plays?&source=bl&ots=nKZqXBlaBf&sig=ACfU3U0iEnAcGxkIdE0s7yJ-PlbRllNzew&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwih4JO3opfkAhXtmOAKHTtGBGUQ6AEwCXoECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q=Oxford&f=false
Which is kind of interesting...and serves to back-up the claim made in the Buckle book. (As if I would doubt Mr. Buckle.)
8/23/19: I'm still thinking about perfume. So here are a few more things.
from Essence and Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume by Mandy Aftel:
from The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England by Holly Dugan:
from Fragrance: The Story of Perfume from Cleopatra to Chanel by Edwin T. Morris:
from The Chemistry of Fragrances edited by D.H. Pybus and C.S. Sell:
8/24/19: Had to do a pretty big push to finish before my deadline, but made it (by slightly less than three hours)...despite a double header softball championship today. And? Well...it was not a very good play, but I think I could call it pretty good. It seemed a bit more sophisticated than some of the other early plays--and yes, I am 100% sure that this was an early play, despite what the experts say. It (1) had bad rhymes, (2) was viciously misogynistic at times, and (3) had things that would be either very hard or impossible to do on stage...like Zeus descending on an eagle...which seem to imply that the writer was not really aware of what could be done onstage...or that he was writing more for his own amusement than with an eye toward what could be done on a stage. Oh, also (4) there were some serious violations of verisimilitude which I don't think happens in Shakespeare's best plays.
I've also been thinking about this whole How Could Experts Have Fucked Up The Dating So Thoroughly thing, and here's my current theory: When Edward de Vere died in 1604, there were quite a few plays which were either not yet published because they were journeyman efforts or because the were unfinished. Kind of like the way when a writer or musician dies today and the publisher then releases every scrap they can find, you know? Hell, if Jimi Hendrix farted in a recording studio somebody would mix it into a "New" song. And I would guess that some of the unfinished plays were finished by other people, hence the other hands which scholars have identified. And since those aforesaid scholars decided to divvy out the plays between 1590 and 1612 at the rate of two per year (more or less), they had to put some of those weak ass plays in as his final works. Which makes no sense at all, of course. (1) Why would a writer begin with some slightly faltery works, develop over the years into a brilliant writer, and then return to writing faltery works? Also, why would a writer begin by writing solo, write great works, and then return to writing with a collaborator? That's just not the way it works...unless there's some serious illness--probably mental--involved. So, I put Cymbeline as an early work.
The Winter's Tale
8/25/19
8/25/19: I was thinking about watching a movie version of this play before I got started reading it, but couldn't find a free one available on Amazon or Kanopy...and I'm currently Netflixless, though I doubt that they would have one, either. But I did find that there was
an episode of the BBC's Shakespeare Uncovered series on The Winter's Tale, so I watched that.
It confidently began with the assertion that Shakespeare wrote the play five years before his death.
Well.
This does jibe with the records of its performance history--1611--though the play did not appear in print until the First Folio appeared in 1623. And that's not anomalous with respect to Shakespeare's plays, of course,but still it is curious, isn't it? If I live long enough, I'd like to find out more about the publication of Shakespeare's quartos. Surely there are tons of research about this...but I wonder how much of it has been used in the context of authorship studies.
ANYway...the show was pretty good, and gave a decent overview of the play. Enough so that I realized I had read this before...though I'm not sure when. My guess would be when I took my Shakespeare course at U of L. I guess I'll know when I crack open my Big Shakespeare book.
8/31: Only 4 1/2 hours from deadline, and even though I've done quite a bit of reading today, I hadn't done much before today, and I still have Acts IV and V to go. So it might be close. But I still had to stop for a moment, because when I read this bit--
--
especially the last four words of the boxed bit of that bit--I realized that I had traveled to the world famous Josephine Sculpture Park to see a friend (hi, Christophe) perform in this play. In fact, the last four words of the boxed bit of the bit stuck with me, and I wrote a song based on them. Hmm? Why, of course, I'd be happy to put that up. Here you go:
Yep, it's a Shake-speare Punk Rock Thang.
Okay. Back to TWT.
Again, 8/31: Well, I made it. And here are a few more thoughts.
o
That bit about how you can tell she has noble blood just by looking at her? That is the kind of snooty ass shit that high muckety mucks think. I don't think it's the kind of thing that normal folks think. Nudge nudge, wink wink.
There's a 16 year leap between acts III and IV. That is doing some serious 🚣.
This play has a narrator 🐳. I'd normally associate that with Shake-speare's early works. But despite my first impressions of the play--that is was so misogynistic that it must be an early piece--by the end of it I'd changed my mind, because there is some sophistication to be found here. Not to mention a SIXTEEN YEARS LEAP FORWARD BETWEEN ACTS III AND IV! So I'm going to postulate that this is the last of the early plays, heading into Shake-speare the mature writer. Speaking of which, there are about a half-dozen Hamlet touchstones in this play, which I found interesting.
Ummm...and there are dildos!
Servant:
He hath songs for man or woman, of all sizes; no
milliner can so fit his customers with gloves: he
has the prettiest love-songs for maids; so without
bawdry, which is strange; with such delicate
burthens of dildos and fadings, 'jump her and thump
her;' and where some stretch-mouthed rascal would,
as it were, mean mischief and break a foul gap into
the matter, he makes the maid to answer 'Whoop, do me
no harm, good man;' puts him off, slights him, with
'Whoop, do me no harm, good man.'
Sparknotes (https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/winterstale/page_168/) translates this as
SERVANT
He has songs for all men and women. He fits them to his customers closer than gloves. He has pretty love songs for the maid, without any lewdness, which is unusual, and with delicate refrains full of dildos and orgasms, like “jump her and thump her.” And if an obscene rascal would try to make mischief and interrupt the song, the peddler makes the maid answer, “Hey, do me no harm, good man,” and puts him off that way.
Well. That was a bit much, wasn't it?
All in all, I have to say that though this play didn't rank up there with WS's best, it turned out to be pretty good.
The Tempest
9/1 to
9/1: Yes, I actually started reading this one on Sunday. I am hoping that I learned my lesson about letting a play sit until Friday, because even though it turned out alright with A Winter's Tale, it was still more of a push than I wanted to make.
Right off the back I was struck by this line from Gonzalo:
I’ll warrant him for drowning though the ship were no stronger than a nutshell and as leaky as an unstanched wench.
I wasn't completely sure that I understood the reference, but I had my suspicions. So I checked with my friends at Sparknotes (https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/tempest/page_6/), and sure enough:
Yes, I guarantee he won’t drown—even if this ship were as fragile as an eggshell and as leaky as a menstruating woman.
ANYway...this play is short, and I've read it AND seen it before, so I'm thinking I can probably knock it out pretty quickly. We'll see how that plan goes, though.
9/3: And I have been true to my word (so far)--just passed the halfway point on The Tempest. And I might could read a little bit more on it today. I am also in the mood to watch a movie version of it, and I just lately happened upon the one with Russell Brand (sitting there on one of my bookshelves, waiting for this moment to arise), so that will happen in the near future.
Here are a couple of things I liked so far:
"Hell is empty, and all the devils are here." Which I think would make a most excellent title for a novel.
And this bit of Shake-speare being weird...which I always like in a man:
And I must just say that I am really enjoying this play...much more than any of the other latter day plays I've read in the past month. I mark this play with a gold star. So to speak.
9/4: As a matter of fact, I enjoyed reading it so much that I just finished it...85 hours before my deadline. And it was quite good.
Along the way, I watched the Making Of documentary for the 2010 Julie Taymor The Tempest, which was most excellent and certainly did whet my appetite to watch the movie...which I'll be doing later today, I think. Speaking of, this movie not only features Russell Brand, but also Helen Mirren, Tom Conti, Chris Cooper, Felicity Jones, and Alfred Molina. That is a whole lot of love. The documentary really impressed me with how much thought, care, and effort went into the making of the movie. Which doesn't necessarily mean that it will be any good, of course, but here's hoping. Pictures at Eleven. I took a little peek to see how it did at the Box Office, and was dismayed...though not really surprised...to see that it did not do well at all.
But do many of the movies I love dearly were bombs, so I'll reserve judgment until The Viewing.
I also happened upon another curious set of lines in the play:
Thou art very Trinculo indeed! How camest thou to be the siege of this mooncalf? Can he vent Trinculos?
I was pretty sure that I knew what "vent" meant in this context, but checked with Sparknotes to be sure, and...
what do you know, you are Trinculo! How did you end up as this monster’s dung? Does he crap Trinculos?
Yep. That WS-p.
I also did a little looking around to see what there was to see about the history of this play, and bumped into my old friend Roger Stritmatter, who wrote On the Date, Sources and Design of Shakespeare's The Tempest with Lynne Kositsky, and as much as I would like to avoid buying more books at this stage in my life, I might have to go for this one. (Which is not available at the public library or via U of L, alas.) I was surprised to see that it can be had for a mere $10 in Kindle version via Amazon. The bigger question, though, is if I have world enough and time to actually read it. So many books, so little time left to read them in, you know?
At any rate...time for Enery th' ayf, then, ennit?
Henry VIII
9/8* to 9/13/19
* Well...since I finished The Tempest SO early, I was thinking about starting Henry VIII a bit early, but how can I pass up the opportunity to start it on the 8th? It just wouldn't be right to let that one slide, would it?
WHILE WAITING...I watched the 2014 Cymbeline movie. And? It was really, really good. The story is rendered as a modern day thing with a biker gang fighting the police. Ed Harris did a superb job of being the bad ass leader of the biker gang, Ethan Hawke was really good as nasty boy Iachimo, and Dakota Johnson actually almost pulled off her role as Imogen. She did justice to the Beautiful Princess aspect...which kind of surprised me, as I never though of her as particularly attractive...but when the story shifted to her pretending to be a boy it was pretty fucking obvious that she was a girl with short hair. So I guess she's more attractive than I thought, right? It was also cool to see Vondie Curtis-Hall doing the part of police chief Caius Lucius...looking very much the same way that he looked as Chief Prince in Romeo + Juliet way back in 1996. Further proof that black don't crack.
I got my copy of Cymbeline from the library, but I've just found out that it is available for free on Tubi, so go out and get yourself some a that. Speaking of Tubi, they have a few other Shake-speare movies worth seeing...including a documentary on Edward de Vere and the most excellent 1994 version of Richard III...which recasts that play as a WWII thing. That's for me in the near near.
9/11/19: Been reading a bit each day, trying to hit around 20 pages per so I could finish on time with no strain. It hasn't been particularly compelling, but there have been a few moments. It does seem like the play of a very young Shake-speare, though: bad rhymes, gawky syntax, nothing starting in medias res, prologue, allathat.
One thing that caught my eye today (day 4, around page 80) was this bit:
CARDINAL WOLSEY says,
"And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer,
Never to hope again."
Sound familiar? If not, check out this line from the Les Miserables (music by Claude-Michel Schönberg, original French lyrics by Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel, English-language libretto by Herbert Kretzmer) song "Stars" (sung by Javert):
"And if they fall
As Lucifer fell
The flames
The sword!"
So I guess maybe somebody else did read Henry VIII. Hmpf. I thought I might be the only one.
There's also a filmed version of H8 on Kanopy. I started watching it, but it's typical BBC stuff...kind of stodgy and not all that interesting. Might could watch the rest of it. Might not.
9/13/19: Probably not. Finished the play (a full day early) and it was just not interesting enough for me to want to go through it again so soon. It really didn't feel like a Shake-speare play at all...even with the big ass kiss to Elizabeth superstructure here.
And since I was in Bowling Green for a Special Olympics softball state championship with nothing else to read, I started in on The Two Noble Kinsmen (courtesy of a free online text). So...
The Two Noble Kinsmen
913/19 to
And I knew it was going to be painful from the get-go, since (1) it looked like a pre-tread of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and (2) it started with a Prologue, which is almost (?) always a bad idea.
That said, I only got to the first page of Act I, Scene i before I had to stop and catch my breath. Check this out:
Clearly this is just a coincidence and has nothing to do with the fact that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, is the best candidate for the authorship of the Shake-speare plays, right?
Anyway.
9/14/19: The To Noble Kinsmen wasn't accepted as by Shake-speare when the little Shake-speare box set was put together, so I'm through with the box until I get to the poetry (in a couple of weeks). I decided that I wanted a real book copy of this play, though, and was lucky to find that the LFPL had one waiting for me when I got back to Louisville:
Please note that this is a Folger Library production, which certainly says something about how this play has moved from the shadows and onto the stage. The copyright date on this is 2010, which is probably a good indication of when it became accepted into the official canon. I might could read the full introduction to see what it has to say about that.
9/15/19: Speaking of...I didn't read all of the introductory material, but I did dip in and out, and found one kind of surprising bit of information:
If Oxford Shakespeare was accepting TTNK as the work of Shake-speare, then I guess it's been pretty canon for longer than I thought. 1989 seems recent to me, but hell, that was 30 years ago, wasn't it? Come to think of it, that's before I had any children...before I had started my teaching career...when I was still married to my first wife with no hint of storm clouds on the horizon. Yep, a different lifetime, for sure.
The Folger edition of TTNK is pretty nice in several ways: the pages are not too crowded (and you don't have to strain your eyes to see the print, the way I have been doing in my mini-Shake-speare volumes); the notes are separated from the text but are conveniently located on the facing page most of the time (except when there are so many notes that they spill over onto the next page); there are lots of notes; there are pictures; there are indications when the text has been fiddled with in one way or another. All most excellent things. My only complaint about this edition (at least at this point) is not really a fair one, but "Who sez ahm feer?" *) is that it is written from an unadulterated, no questions asked, Stratfordian perspective, and I think the Folger folks know better than that. Hell, I bought one of my first Edward de Verse as Shake-speare books from the gift shop of the Folger Museum, man. This also reignites my desire to have an (Earl of) Oxfordian Shake-speare set. Wouldn't it be awesome to be able to see the connections between the work and Edward de Vere as you were perusing the plays and poems? If I were young and much better educated, I'd have a go at putting it together, but I can't see me being able to pull that off at this point. Sigh.
* See the Arnold Schwarzenegger Hamlet performance in The Last Action Hero...which is, by the way, one of my favorite Hamlet performances EVer.
9/18: Been nibbling on this play now and then...probably close to or at the halfway point. And it's not that bad, really. It's based on Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale," so of course it has an absolutely absurd plot line, but that said, there have been some moments here and there...and it's clear that Shake-speare (or whoever) is trying to mitigate some of the stupidities of said plot.
Two things I thought were of particular note:
1. I notice (not for the first time) how much Shake-speare likes to play with his name in the plays. Here we come pretty close to shake...spear in that we have "shake...javelins...." I have the feeling that if you complied a contextualized list of all the times the word "shake" appears in the plays, you'd be on to something. Another for my to do list, maybe.
2. Once again I am doubting the accuracy of the explanatory note:
...although I looked in a couple of other online resources, and they all gave similar explanations. But isn't it pretty obvious that this is a fart joke? (That would be fitting for a Chaucer-based piece of writing, too, wouldn't it?)
Oh...maybe 3 things.
3. This line...
...which Steinbeck sho nuff liked...also appears in Macbeth.
Later 9/18/19: Finished. Over 72 hours early, no less. And while I can't say that it was a good play, it did hold my interest. I think reading it in Real Book form made a difference, too. For one thing, it wasn't a challenge to read tiny words on a tiny page. For another, explanatory notes were close at hand, which made things go smoother. In fact, I felt that I understood this play in a much more complete way than most of the previous plays. That could be because it was a simpler play, or because I am familiar with the source material, but I think that it was mostly due to the way this Folger edition was laid out. It actually made me want to read all of the plays in Folger editions. Which might happen one day, who knows.
Anyway, I also did a little research. Found this, which I thought was interesting:
And a couple of articles on Edward de Vere and this play, which I am now completely convinced was Shake-speare's first play. Might have to spend the next few days reading some things about allathat before I start Edward III...which is, btw, the last of the "accepted" plays--at least to date.
9/24/19: Wasn't all that anxious to get going on Edward III. For one thing, because it's hard not to expect it to suck, and when I read the first three or four pages it certainly seemed to indicate that there was great suckiness ahead. For another, I have a hard time ending relationships, and this play does, indeed, mark the end of my relationship with the first time reading of all of Shake-speare's "accepted" plays.
But I did a bit of reading today, and even though I gathered lots more evidence that this was going to suck, I did see a few interesting things as well. For instance, there was a line about playing music in hell, and I knew that had to be a classical allusion, so I checked, and found not only that it was...to Orpheus playing his harp in hell, to be specific...but that this was more specifically a reference to Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. And we all know who really did that translation, right? Oh. Well, it was pretty clearly Edward de Vere, then. And this translation of Metamorphoses just so happens to be one of Shake-speare's favorite books to allude to...right up there with the Geneva translation of The Bible. Mmm-hmm.
And a bit later there was this:
Which doesn't exACTly say that his mistress's eyes are kind of like the sun, but it does come pretty damned close, doesn't it? (My mistress's eyes are something like the sun reflected in glass.)
And check this out:
An unreputed mote, flying in the Sun,
Presents a greater substance than it is:
The freshest summer’s day doth soonest taint
The loathed carrion that it seems to kiss....
Sound familiar? Well, if you Google that last line, the first five hits will be
So...what do you think about them 🍎🍎🍎🍎?
As for the suckiness of the play...it's just so straight up, you know? No subtlety of expression, every line ending on a completed thought, horrid rhymes, lots of repeated words used to rhyme.... But, to be honest, I've seen quite a bit of that is some of the other lesser...and what I would call earlier, even though that doesn't match up with the accepted chronology...plays.
Yeah, I really would like to do an Oxfordian Edition of The Annotated Plays. Wish I weren't so fucking old.
9/25/19: Got kind of caught up in Edward III last night and am now within 50 short (half page of text, half page of notes) pages of finishing it off. It's still a pretty sucky play, for sure. But little bits that interest me keep cropping up. Check these out:
So many Hamlet-y thing in a short space: the reference to the Netherlanders...which is within spitting distance of Denmark...as a nation of drunkards; the speaker's frustration with the idea of a nation of drunkards; the reference to the warlike Dane which shoah nuff sounds like the description of Hamlet, Sr. as appearing in his "warlike form"; and the reference to "Polonian"--and there are numerous references to "the Polack" in Hamlet. Not proof of anything, of course, but it sure does fit into my experience of seeing how writers often come back to the same images, words, and expressions in their writing.
Also--
--cates again! For awhile there it seemed like Shake-speare couldn't get through a play without mentioning cates.
[Funny. I tried to find Volume I of my Shakespeare Lexicon so I could see just how many times Shake-speare DID mention cates, and as I was searching someone on CNN--which is playing as I write--kept saying "Kate." Welcome to my world of strange and useless coincidences. Oh, and I never did find a listing of Shake-speare's "cates." I guess I'm going to have to find that book. News as it happens. Unless I get distracted and forget about it, in which case...well, sorry about that, chief.]
Okay. So there's a character named Edward. And his dad is giving him a spear...which he returns with later, and it's been broken...and dad says use this spear like a pen.
Mmm-hmmm.
Here's Edward de Vere's coat of arms:
Admittedly his dad was named John, but Edward was nicknamed Spear Shaker at court because he would delight in shaking his shattered lance after emerging victorious from a jousting match. And as for the pen bit...well. You know.
And as for this bit...well, it just doesn't sound like Shake-speare. He has a much more sophisticated understanding of war, and I find it hard to believe that he would talk about a siege in such a simple, straightforward manner. To me, this would be like a character saying, "I'm going to go to the grocery store. That is where one gathers up food and drink, pays for it with cash or a credit card, and then brings the food and drink back to his home for later use." It's just a bit simplistic and unnecessary, you know?
Another Shake-speare obsession which I need to do a thorough tracking job on...if I live long enough to do it. It is amazing how many times he makes reference to trapped birds...especially birds trapped in lime. Whatever the hell that means.
And this was just a line that I thought was kind of profound. It is also the only time (thus far) that I've thought, "That was kind of profound!" whilst reading this play.
So...maybe it really was (at least in part) written by Shake-speare. But it must've been a VERY early play, IMHO.
a few hours later on 9/25/19:
Some more things:
That's more than a little Julius Caesar-y, isn't it?
And check out that last line:
Not exact, of course, but I can't help but think of Macbeth's “Life ... is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” Can you?
And speaking of Macbeth, this
has more than a little bit of a parallel in this:
So at the end of it all...I'd have to say that Shake-speare did indeed have a hand in this play. And since The Arden Shakespeare people thought so, too...
...well, that just leads me to this bit:
Meanwhile, back in Apocrypha...
I was fondling the copy of Edward III that I got from the library...which was produced as part of The Arden Shakespeare series...and was more than a little surprised when I examined the list of Shake-speare plays they published on the inside front cover:
I mean...if The Arden Shakespeare is okay with including Double Falsehood and Sir Thomas More (in addition to Edward III), then maybe I DO need to get onto this Apocrypha Train right quick.
So I went back to look at the ToC of those Kindle editions of Apocryphal plays.
The Complete Works and Apocrypha of William Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and More (52 plays, 154 sonnets and More) Kindle Edition https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Works-Apocrypha-William-Shakespeare-ebook/dp/B00EOZGCTK/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=shakespeare+apocrypha&qid=1568974795&s=digital-text&sr=1-1
includes:
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare - All 213 Plays, Poems, Sonnets, Apocryphas & The Biography: Including Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, A ... Dream, Macbeth, The Tempest & Othello Kindle Edition https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Works-William-Shakespeare-Apocryphas-ebook/dp/B078DZJLNV/ref=sr_1_6?keywords=shakespeare+apocrypha&qid=1568974795&s=digital-text&sr=1-6
includes:
So I don't know where that leaves me. I have "officially" finished all of the Shake-speare plays...except for the Other Shake-speare plays, two of which are accepted by some very smart people who have dedicated at least a large portion of their lives to the study of William Shake-speare and his works.
Well...it's Wednesday. On Sunday I'm going to start reading the poems...which might be a week's job, might be a couple or so. And while I'm at that, I'll mull over this apocrypha thing.
I did pick up this little beauty from the library today, though:
And let me just emphasize...
So that might could (probably will) happen. And if it does...can Sir Thomas More be far behind? (Oddly enough, neither that nor Edward III is included in this.)
Poetry I
9/29/2019 to 10/5/19
I still haven't decided how I'm going to handle to so-called Apocryphal Plays, so I decided to stick to traditional canon for another week...maybe two...and read the poems next. I'd originally thought that I could knock them all out in a week, but they're actually as long as two plays, so I'm going to break them up. This week I'm aiming to read "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece" at a minimum...and perhaps get a bit of a way into the sonnets as well.
As for this "Venus and Adonis"--which I've never read before--I put away a pretty good chunk of it whilst waiting for church to begin this morning. Here's what I noticed:
Shake-speare's first trapped bird. There will be many more to follow.
This is the same argument the speaker in the Sonnets uses. Suggests (1) Wrothsley is being addressed there and (2) that Venus is a mask for WS.
(1) Dirt-y! (2) Fountain? Sounds penicular.
Thine eyes flash fire.
Gabriel Harvey’s Latin address to the earl during Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Cambridge University in July of 1578: "Thine eyes flash fire, thy countenance shakes spears."
Gender confusion--which might lend more credence to Venus being a mask for WS.
Boar on De Vere's crest.
All of which has convinced me to temporarily abandon my Oxfordian Annotation of The Taming of the Shrew and start in on an Oxfordian Annotation of Venus and Adonis.
9/30/19: read a bit more...now 4/5ths of the way there, and might finish it up later tonight. It's not all that great...mostly just about Venus trying to fuck an unwilling Adonis, which gets old after awhile...but it also doesn't seem like a first work. A little bit more polished than some of the godawful plays I read by the man. Nothing more in the Oxfordian category...though I did start to read an article on "Venus and Adonis" and Edward de Vere by Roger Strittmatter which looks promising...and also read a bit about the Titian painting of Venus and Adonis which was quite interesting. (Short form: at several spots in the poem the writer seems to be describing one of the variations of the Titian painting...one which was unique...and which at the time of the poem's writing could only be seen in Titian's home in Venice. And guess who lived in Venice at that time? Mmm-hmmm.
Also, Shake-speare's other favorite image popped up:
He does like his cankered flowers...especially roses. Hmmm.
10/1/19: Finished "Venus and Adonis" (in a bowling alley, no less) and am not sorry to be done with it. It could easily have been 1/4th the length and not missed any story details...because there was hardly a story here. One thing of interest:
Am I reading this correctly: Venus is saying that if she'd had long teeth she might have killed Adonis whilst giving him a blow job?
Onward to "The Rape of Lucrece." Got to admit I'm not too excited about reading a poem about rape, though.
10/2/19: Didn't get too far today, but did happen upon a few things which were striking...especially in that they so aptly sum up much of our currently political situation.
To wit,
Well, in our context that certainly qualifies as a rhetorical question.
And speaking of Trump, here's a longer bit:
"Hiding base sin in plaits of majesty;
That nothing in him seem'd inordinate,
Save something too much wonder of his eye,
Which, having all, all could not satisfy;
But, poorly rich, so wanteth in his store,
That, cloy'd with much, he pineth still for more."
There's also some time spent on Shake-speare's favorite theme: there is a vast disparity between the appearance and the reality. Simply put...
As for the poem in a larger sense...it's pretty vile. And I have to say that it really does churn and churn, not nearly as narrowly narrative as I would like. But nobody asked me, so never mind.
10/3/19: Picked up a book at the library today, Shakespeare's Sonnets and Poems: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan F. S. Post, meaning just to whittle a few minutes from my life, but when I turned to the section on "Venus and Adonis," I almost immediately found things of interest. Such as:
The phrase "manuscript circulation" was new to me. But apparently it was a thing. Writers who thought they were above the common herd and didn't want to sully their hands by actually publishing works would simply circulate them amongst their peers. Hmmmm.
The first quarto version of Hamlet was published in 1603. Seems to me that this bit implies that it was around by 1598...and possibly earlier than that. This is kind of a big deal, since the accepted chronology of the plays plays a big part in denying the possibility that De Vere was the author. Hmmmm.
And this assertion seems very unlikely to me. Much more likely would be that The Winter's Tale was written shortly after "Venus and Adonis." That would also make a lot more sense because The Winter's Tale is a clumsy piece of work...certainly not worthy of Shake-speare's last years. Unless he had a cerebral hemorrhage or something.
Also, there was a reference to Portrait of a Woman inspired by Lucretia is a c.1533 oil on canvas portrait by Lorenzo Lotto. Mr. Post notes that the central concerns of "The Rape of Lucrece" are seen in Lotto's painting, but adds that "Shakespeare wouldn't have known this portrait...." He doesn't say why, but my "research" (fifteen Google Minutes) implies that that's because the painting was privately owned and its existence not publicly acknowledged until the 18th century. But there's a catch: Lotto spent most of his life in Venice. As in where the Titian painting of Venus and Adonis which was clearly alluded to in Shake-speare's first poem was kept. As in where Edward de Vere lived. So that's kind of interesting, isn't it? Shake-speare's first (well, you know) two works are linked to paintings which could only have been seen by a wealthy aristocrat with an intense interest in the arts who was living in Venice sometime between 1550 and 1595. De Vere, a wealthy aristocrat with an intense interest in the arts was living in Venice in 1575. Mmm-hmmm.
10/6/19: Well...I could have finished "The Rape of Lucrece" last night. And I thought about it. But I decided to drink a bottle of wine instead. Sometimes it just be like that. Anyway, I'm still going to call this week
Poetry II
10/6/19 to
And speaking of "Lucrece," there's this bit:
which I thought was an interesting variation on the whole cankered rose thing. Pretty sexual here, too...which is particularly gross in that the speaker is Lucrece and she is referring to her rape by Tarquin.
Speaking of cankered roses...the scientific name for that is Coniothyrium spp, and it is caused by a fungi. So either the worm is metaphorical...or we're talking about a different form of rose disease...or the science of Shake-speare's time thought that it was caused by a worm. Or maybe this line doesn't refer to a cankered rose at all, but to another bad thing that can happen to roses.
Sounds like a cankered rose to me, though.
10/7/19: I took a deep breath and got through to the end of "The Rape of Lucrece." It wasn't easy. But I think WS showed much more sensitivity to this story than pretty much anybody else of his age could have done...and probably more than most men could even today. He showed how Tarquin justified the rape in his own mind...pretty much a variation on "she was asking for it"...while simultaneously showing that he was completely at fault. And he showed how the rape affected Lucrece...how she felt that it was her fault...while simultaneously showing that it was not in any way her fault. And WS showed how Lucrece could not let go of the violation of her self, and how she was driven to destroy herself. He also showed the effects of Lucrece's rape and suicide on both her husband and her father. I was a little puzzled by the ending of the poem, though. For one thing, it seemed very abrupt. For another, so far as I could tell the only punish for Tarquin was that he was banished from Rome...which seems like a pretty small price to pay for destroying (at least) three lives. Also, I don't know what happened to the group of men who had sworn to kill Tarquin. They seemed pretty committed to that...and then the poem was over before they could get up off their knees (after swearing to seek revenge).
Along the way:
First, there's this bit. Two stanzas which pretty much sum up the current situation for a friend of a friend who amassed a huge fortune, had a stroke, and now is watching as his son GrubHubs and PlayStations that fortune away:
The aged man that coffers up his gold
Is plagued with cramps, and gouts, and painful fits;
And scarce hath eyes his treasure to behold,
But like still-pining Tantalus he sits,
And useless barns the harvest of his wits;
Having no other pleasure of his gain
But torment that it cannot cure his pain.
So then he hath it when he cannot use it,
And leaves it to be master'd by his young;
Who in their pride do presently abuse it:
Their father was too weak, and they too strong,
To hold their cursed-blessed fortune long.
The sweets we wish for turn to loathed sours,
Even in the moment that we call them ours.
Which is just a more extreme version of everyone's life, I guess. I have often thought about how the comic books that I have bought over the the past fifty years...there are probably 10,000 of them now...are worth quite a bit of money, but if I don't do something with them before I die, they could very well end up in a landfill.
Sigh.
Second, I am reminded that Shake-speare is often obsessed with
...the Fall of Troy...the death of Priam. Again and again. I'm thinking that if you put all of his touchstones together, it adds up to something.
So...Troy...whores...cankered roses...Italy...identity confusion...gender confusion...a loss of status...contempt for common people...misogyny.... Yep. Sounds like the opposite of an up and coming young man from a small town.
Third, I found this line striking...and a bit puzzling:
The best I can make of this is that he is hyperventilating.
And fourth, this:
"...let the traitor die; For sparing justice feeds iniquity."
Which pretty much sums up my thoughts about the Trump administration.
Okay. And now, on to The Sonnets.
10/12/19: Well, I've been reading a bit, but I don't know if I'm going to finish these (plus the other short poems) off by tonight. I'm on Sonnet XXI, and have 72 little pages to go. Possible, but it's a busy day today with visits from Jimmy and Jessica and Nicholas and Linda Lou, so we'll see. And the sonnets are hard to read. You really have to concentrate, and I usually want to pause and think or even go back and re-read.
One thing's for sure: they don't seem like the work of a newly minted writer. There's an assured attitude, a swagger, that doesn't correspond with the Stratfordian chronology. Also, since WS of S-u-A was only 26 in 1590, you have to wonder why he's so preoccupied with death, misfortune, and disgrace. Not to mention homosexuality. (On the other hand, 40 year old Edward de Vere would seem to be right there.)
ANYway, here were a few things I found interesting:
Sonnet II begins, "When forty winters shall besiege they brow, And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field...."
The sonnets are supposed to have been written somewhere around 1590. In 1590, William Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon was 26 years old. Edward de Vere was 40.
Shake-speare sure does like the word "niggard." That might be worth looking into.
Sonnet XI contains the line, "Let those whom Nature hath not made for store, / Harsh, featureless and rude, barrenly perrish...." This is in the context of an older man trying to convince a beautiful young man (nudge nudge, wink wink...not that there's anything WRONG with that) that he should marry and have babies. But it sure is a rude perspective, isn't it? It's hard to imagine a common fellow even having this thought.
More:
Lots of rose cankers pop up in the sonnets. Although I haven't done a thorough search, I'm sure that Shake-speare refers to cankered roses at least three dozen times in the course of his works. What's the obsession with this?
Again, the writer talks about himself as old...and about the beautiful man he's writing to as young. I'm also wondering about the second underlined line: it's hard for me not to read this as a pun, saying, "for you, I am Will. But I'm not really Will."
And here's a very strong "I am disgraced" statement. Again, I have to ask why a young man just setting out to conquer the world of the theatre would be feeling this way. He is on the ascendant. Why does he constantly bemoan what he has lost, then? I don't think it makes sense.
Again, canker vision.
Shake-speare invents quantum physics.
Cankers, cankers, everywhere.
Another line that can be read as a pun: Your Will is a true fool in love with you.
The underlined bits here seem like puzzle clues to me. I have no idea what they could refer to, but there's something about the specificity of 500 courses of the sun. Also, as for this "character" done for the speaker.... Well, there's no reason that young Will Shakespeare (younger than 26, since it refers to the character being done in the past) would have his portrait done. Maybe in later years...though there's no evidence that that ever actually happened, and some reason to believe that it didn't.
Shake-speare also likes to refer to "true" and "truth," which always reminds me of his "Vero Nihil Verius" motto. And another reference to the writer's age.
Of course, you could argue that Shakespeare is writing these sonnets from a fictitious point of view. And that could well be true. But I think there's ample reason to believe that that is not the case. First off, it's clear that he never intended for these poems to be printed. When a few of them came out in 1599 (in The Passionate Pilgrim octavo), it wasn't entered in the Stationers' Register...and as I recall (but have not yet found substantiation of), it was quickly withdrawn from publication. The same thing happened when the sonnets were published in 1609. So it seems pretty clear that these weren't meant to be published. Second off, the fact that the young man being addressed is thought to be Henry Wriothesley...even by Stratfordians...
10/13/19: Well, I pooped out on the sonnet commentary there. Also pooped out on the sonnets and didn't finish them last night. Going to try to do that today, but I don't think I'm ready for the Apocrypha at this point, so since I won't be moving on to another Shake-speare work, the urgency really isn't there. We'll see how it goes.
One thing I do want to get down, though. In Sonnet LXXVI there's this line:
It seems to me that there are only two possible interpretations of this odd line:
1. The writer is alluding to the idea that his identity can be discerned by reading his works.
2. The writer is suggesting that the words "every word" are almost the same as his name.
One complication for the first interpretation is that there is the suggestion that the writer's name is something other than the name that is attached to the work. Also, it seems kind of silly to say that every word almost tells his name, since that would include pronouns, indefinite articles, etc. So I think we'd have to reject the first interpretation as essentially useless.
As for the second. Well. That is interesting. Especially in that if you just do a little rearranging...
10/15/19: Finished The Sonnets, "A Lover's Complaint," "Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music," "The Phoenix and the Turtle," and about to get down, get down with "The Passionate Pilgrim"--which is a mere 8 pages in my teeny tiny Shake-speare version, so I have no doubts about finishing it up tonight...probably during the commercials while the Democratic Presidential Debate takes a breather.
And? Some interesting stuff. For instance, in the last sonnets I noticed these things:
Google that phrase, and you know what you get?
אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה, that's what you get.
And you'll get it from Exodus 3:14...where God tells Moses His name.
So how does Shake-speare have the balls to use this phrase to refer to himself? Dunno. He was a ballsy guy. I've read (but not verified...because, after all, how could I?) that there was only one other writer who had the balls to refer to himself as אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה...and that was in a private letter, so maybe not as ballsy at putting it into a sonnet. (Unless, of course, as I suspect, Shake-speare never meant for these sonnets to be published, in which case it's about the same deal, ennit?) Hmmm? Oh, the other writer? A nobleman by the name of Edward de Vere. Mmm-hmmm.
Here's another thing:
This seems to refer to the speaker being one of the people who bore the canopy in the funeral of Queen Elizabeth. Needless to say, that's not the kind of gig a commoner gets...end of story. Did Edward de Vere have the quali for the job? Well...in "The Case for Oxford," which appeared in the October, 1991 issue of The Atlantic, Tom Bethell writes: "We know that Oxford was one of those entitled to bear the canopy over the monarch, and according to Oxford's biographer, a contemporary ballad tells us that in a thanksgiving procession after the defeat of the Armada, 'the noble Earl of Oxford then High Chamberlain of England / Rode right before Her Majesty his bonnet in his hand.'"
So I'm going to take that as a yes. And factor in the known fact that Edward de Vere was one of Elizabeth's favorites at court.
I thought this was interesting. And it's not the only example of it. There were about a half-dozen times over the course of at least two, maybe more, sonnets in which the writer started punning on the name Will. I guess you could take that as evidence that his name was Will and that this therefore confirms that William Shakespeare was that writer. But...well...I can see it as indicating the opposite, too. "I'm your Will" could be saying "but we known that I'm not really Will." Seems to me.
That's from Sonnet CXL...and I put the oranges in because I thought that this was a perfect pair of lines for the Age of Trump.
For me, it was a hard right and straight downhill after The Sonnets. "A Lover's Complaint" had one line that I thought was kind of interesting--
Also, two things from "Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music IV":
1. "A woman's nay a doth stand for naught."
--which is just fucking reprehensible, and if Shake-speare really wrote that line, then it must have been when he was really young and not yet human.
2. "Were kisses all the joys in bed,
One woman would another wed."
--which is kind of funny, but a clear indication that the writer does not quite understand homosexual eroticism. Or at least not lesbian eroticism.
Okay. Got to get to The Debate. And The Commercials.
"The Passionate Pilgrim"
Well...there are 14 sections. But online there's a version with 20 sections. Whassup with that? And just to make things worse, The Complete Works and Apocrypha of William Shakespeare that I bought from Amazon--just in case I feel compelled to follow the Apocrypha Rabbit down the hole--has a version of "The Passionate Pilgrim" which has 15 sections...but the same content that my teeny tiny Shake-speare has. They just split the last section into two parts. Hmmpf.
And to make things even worse than worse...here's a note which precedes the 20 section version I found online:
"The Passionate Pilgrim is a collection of 20 poems, published in 1599 by William Jaggard and initially attributed to William Shakespeare. However, academics now agree that only five of the 20 poems are actually authentically Shakespearean.
"Of the five poems considered authentic, two are sonnets – published in the 1609 Shakespeare Sonnet’s collection as sonnet 138 and sonnet 144. The other three are poems and sonnets taken from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost. In the full collection of The Passionate Pilgrim below, poems I, II, III, IV and XVI are attributed to Shakespeare."
https://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/shakespeares-poems/the-passionate-pilgrim/
Curiouser and curiouser.
Well. Finally hit a commercial. And I've figured out what was going on with the "different versions" thing. The online version's sections 15 through 20 were the six poems labeled as "Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music IV" in my teeny tiny Shake-speare. So we're back to 14 sections.
HOWEVER....
As noted in my quotation from the note preceding the online version of the poem, sections I and II are sonnets (138 and 144 respectively), and section III is taken from Love's Labour's Lost. Strangely enough, though, the note is wrong about section IV: it does not come from LLL. Maybe it's just a typo and there's another section that IS, but it's not IV. As for XVI...well, yeah...but that's already been eliminated from the 14 section text of the poem, so fuck it.
Okay.
IV is, on the other hand, a super-condensed form of "Venus and Adonis"...and even uses the word "froward," which appears twice in VaA. Interesting.
Oh...when they wrote section IV it was a typo. Section V is from LLL.
So..."The Passionate Pilgrim" is really only a ten section poem. And the whole shebang is a mere 1297 words long.
And more than a couple of those ten sections are centered on the Venus and Adonis story. Some of them are actually better than the long poem in my mind. They have a sense of humor, for one thing, which is sorely lacking in the long poem. This bit from IV, for instance--
"Then fell she on her back, fair queen, and toward:
He rose and ran away; ah, fool too froward!"
--which evokes Nurse's (or, more accurately, her husband's) joke on baby Juliet.
Or in VI, wherein Venus spots a naked Adonis, and when he dives into the water to hide his junk, she says, “O Jove...why was not I a flood?”
Or in IX, when Venus shows the wound she has in her thigh, and we're told that Adonis "saw more wounds than one." That's pretty fuckin' funny.
And...that's it. All in all, I'd have to say that parts of "The Passionate Pilgrim" were much more enjoyable than any of the other poems outside of The Sonnets. Those parts being the Venus and Adonis bits. And yet...apparently none of those have been accepted as By William Shake-speare.
Sure seemed Shake-spearean to me. A lot more than some of the accepted as Shake-peare stuff, actually.
Just sayin', sir.
And with that...have I finished My Shake-speare Project? I don't feel like I am.
So...I'm thinking that at the very least, The Arden Shakespeare people thought that Double Falsehood should be included in the complete works...and I think I can finish that this week, which would make up for me taking an extra three days to finish off the poetry...so...yeah. That's what I'm going to do.
So let's go.
Of course, you could argue that Shakespeare is writing these sonnets from a fictitious point of view. And that could well be true. But I think there's ample reason to believe that that is not the case. First off, it's clear that he never intended for these poems to be printed. When a few of them came out in 1599 (in The Passionate Pilgrim octavo), it wasn't entered in the Stationers' Register...and as I recall (but have not yet found substantiation of), it was quickly withdrawn from publication. The same thing happened when the sonnets were published in 1609. So it seems pretty clear that these weren't meant to be published. Second off, the fact that the young man being addressed is thought to be Henry Wriothesley...even by Stratfordians...
10/13/19: Well, I pooped out on the sonnet commentary there. Also pooped out on the sonnets and didn't finish them last night. Going to try to do that today, but I don't think I'm ready for the Apocrypha at this point, so since I won't be moving on to another Shake-speare work, the urgency really isn't there. We'll see how it goes.
One thing I do want to get down, though. In Sonnet LXXVI there's this line:
It seems to me that there are only two possible interpretations of this odd line:
1. The writer is alluding to the idea that his identity can be discerned by reading his works.
2. The writer is suggesting that the words "every word" are almost the same as his name.
One complication for the first interpretation is that there is the suggestion that the writer's name is something other than the name that is attached to the work. Also, it seems kind of silly to say that every word almost tells his name, since that would include pronouns, indefinite articles, etc. So I think we'd have to reject the first interpretation as essentially useless.
As for the second. Well. That is interesting. Especially in that if you just do a little rearranging...
every word
e very word
e word very
eword very
e word very
I know it's not quite there...but it is almost there, isn't it?
d a e
edward vere
Mmm-hmm.
10/15/19: Finished The Sonnets, "A Lover's Complaint," "Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music," "The Phoenix and the Turtle," and about to get down, get down with "The Passionate Pilgrim"--which is a mere 8 pages in my teeny tiny Shake-speare version, so I have no doubts about finishing it up tonight...probably during the commercials while the Democratic Presidential Debate takes a breather.
And? Some interesting stuff. For instance, in the last sonnets I noticed these things:
Google that phrase, and you know what you get?
אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה, that's what you get.
And you'll get it from Exodus 3:14...where God tells Moses His name.
So how does Shake-speare have the balls to use this phrase to refer to himself? Dunno. He was a ballsy guy. I've read (but not verified...because, after all, how could I?) that there was only one other writer who had the balls to refer to himself as אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה...and that was in a private letter, so maybe not as ballsy at putting it into a sonnet. (Unless, of course, as I suspect, Shake-speare never meant for these sonnets to be published, in which case it's about the same deal, ennit?) Hmmm? Oh, the other writer? A nobleman by the name of Edward de Vere. Mmm-hmmm.
Here's another thing:
This seems to refer to the speaker being one of the people who bore the canopy in the funeral of Queen Elizabeth. Needless to say, that's not the kind of gig a commoner gets...end of story. Did Edward de Vere have the quali for the job? Well...in "The Case for Oxford," which appeared in the October, 1991 issue of The Atlantic, Tom Bethell writes: "We know that Oxford was one of those entitled to bear the canopy over the monarch, and according to Oxford's biographer, a contemporary ballad tells us that in a thanksgiving procession after the defeat of the Armada, 'the noble Earl of Oxford then High Chamberlain of England / Rode right before Her Majesty his bonnet in his hand.'"
So I'm going to take that as a yes. And factor in the known fact that Edward de Vere was one of Elizabeth's favorites at court.
I thought this was interesting. And it's not the only example of it. There were about a half-dozen times over the course of at least two, maybe more, sonnets in which the writer started punning on the name Will. I guess you could take that as evidence that his name was Will and that this therefore confirms that William Shakespeare was that writer. But...well...I can see it as indicating the opposite, too. "I'm your Will" could be saying "but we known that I'm not really Will." Seems to me.
That's from Sonnet CXL...and I put the oranges in because I thought that this was a perfect pair of lines for the Age of Trump.
For me, it was a hard right and straight downhill after The Sonnets. "A Lover's Complaint" had one line that I thought was kind of interesting--
--although not like extra extra profound.
But the poem itself seemed kind of shit to me. And "Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music" and "The Phoenix and the Turtle" were just not it for me. One thing that particularly puzzled me: one of the entries in the "Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music" was Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love." WTF is up with that 💩?
Also, two things from "Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music IV":
1. "A woman's nay a doth stand for naught."
--which is just fucking reprehensible, and if Shake-speare really wrote that line, then it must have been when he was really young and not yet human.
2. "Were kisses all the joys in bed,
One woman would another wed."
--which is kind of funny, but a clear indication that the writer does not quite understand homosexual eroticism. Or at least not lesbian eroticism.
Okay. Got to get to The Debate. And The Commercials.
"The Passionate Pilgrim"
Well...there are 14 sections. But online there's a version with 20 sections. Whassup with that? And just to make things worse, The Complete Works and Apocrypha of William Shakespeare that I bought from Amazon--just in case I feel compelled to follow the Apocrypha Rabbit down the hole--has a version of "The Passionate Pilgrim" which has 15 sections...but the same content that my teeny tiny Shake-speare has. They just split the last section into two parts. Hmmpf.
And to make things even worse than worse...here's a note which precedes the 20 section version I found online:
"The Passionate Pilgrim is a collection of 20 poems, published in 1599 by William Jaggard and initially attributed to William Shakespeare. However, academics now agree that only five of the 20 poems are actually authentically Shakespearean.
"Of the five poems considered authentic, two are sonnets – published in the 1609 Shakespeare Sonnet’s collection as sonnet 138 and sonnet 144. The other three are poems and sonnets taken from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost. In the full collection of The Passionate Pilgrim below, poems I, II, III, IV and XVI are attributed to Shakespeare."
https://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/shakespeares-poems/the-passionate-pilgrim/
Curiouser and curiouser.
Well. Finally hit a commercial. And I've figured out what was going on with the "different versions" thing. The online version's sections 15 through 20 were the six poems labeled as "Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music IV" in my teeny tiny Shake-speare. So we're back to 14 sections.
HOWEVER....
As noted in my quotation from the note preceding the online version of the poem, sections I and II are sonnets (138 and 144 respectively), and section III is taken from Love's Labour's Lost. Strangely enough, though, the note is wrong about section IV: it does not come from LLL. Maybe it's just a typo and there's another section that IS, but it's not IV. As for XVI...well, yeah...but that's already been eliminated from the 14 section text of the poem, so fuck it.
Okay.
IV is, on the other hand, a super-condensed form of "Venus and Adonis"...and even uses the word "froward," which appears twice in VaA. Interesting.
Oh...when they wrote section IV it was a typo. Section V is from LLL.
So..."The Passionate Pilgrim" is really only a ten section poem. And the whole shebang is a mere 1297 words long.
And more than a couple of those ten sections are centered on the Venus and Adonis story. Some of them are actually better than the long poem in my mind. They have a sense of humor, for one thing, which is sorely lacking in the long poem. This bit from IV, for instance--
"Then fell she on her back, fair queen, and toward:
He rose and ran away; ah, fool too froward!"
--which evokes Nurse's (or, more accurately, her husband's) joke on baby Juliet.
Or in VI, wherein Venus spots a naked Adonis, and when he dives into the water to hide his junk, she says, “O Jove...why was not I a flood?”
Or in IX, when Venus shows the wound she has in her thigh, and we're told that Adonis "saw more wounds than one." That's pretty fuckin' funny.
And...that's it. All in all, I'd have to say that parts of "The Passionate Pilgrim" were much more enjoyable than any of the other poems outside of The Sonnets. Those parts being the Venus and Adonis bits. And yet...apparently none of those have been accepted as By William Shake-speare.
Sure seemed Shake-spearean to me. A lot more than some of the accepted as Shake-peare stuff, actually.
Just sayin', sir.
And with that...have I finished My Shake-speare Project? I don't feel like I am.
So...I'm thinking that at the very least, The Arden Shakespeare people thought that Double Falsehood should be included in the complete works...and I think I can finish that this week, which would make up for me taking an extra three days to finish off the poetry...so...yeah. That's what I'm going to do.
So let's go.
Double Falsehood
10/15/19 to 10/19/19
10/19: And...made it. Read most of it this morning, actually, since I woke up at 4:00 am with nothing better to do. Didn't strike me as even close to a work by Shake-speare until past the mid-point, and then there were a couple of things that made me think "Maybe." One curious bit was when Violante said,
--which evokes the Gabriel Harvey address to Edward de Vere...“Thine eyes flash fire, thy countenance shakes a spear...." Which proves nothing, of course...it's just interesting. Harvey made his statement in 1578, too, which would be a nice date for this play, because if it is a work by Shake-speare, it most certainly is an early one.
Another line from the play which I found striking was this one:
Violante: All good People
Are fain asleep forever. None are left,
That have the Sense, and Touch of Tenderness
For virtue's sake....
Hard not to feel that way sometimes, ennit?
This was not a good play, though. In fact, it was downright reprehensible. The central plot event is Violante's rape by a guy who basically says it wasn't his fault, because she didn't object strongly...and then at the end of the play she marries him. And I said no, no, no.
This play wasn't a part of the Collected Works thing I bought on Amazon, and I didn't want to throw down more money on it, since it was pretty short (about 50 pages)...and I didn't feel like going back to the library for the Arden Complete Works which included it...so I found a copy online, copied it, then turned it into a pdf for easier reading. It's available at
https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~cardenio/doublefalsehood.html
if you want to check it out.
As for me...well, I have to admit that while reading this wasn't really a pleasant experience, it still did make me want to read some more, so I'm still not sure if this Shake-speare Project is over and done with. I'm going to think on it for a day or two and then see how I feel about it. (But I do have that Kindle Complete Works with a dozen plays I haven't read yet--
--so we'll see.)
News as it happens.
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