DDR: Twelfth Night by William Shake-speare: An Oxfordian Edition

 

I bought this in September 2022 and started reading it immediately...but then something shiny caught my eye and I didn't go back...though of course I kept meaning to. But this morning I finished reading a doctoral thesis by my friend (Dr.) David Wright--which was about Hamlet--and it started the Shakespeare fire in my brain. So I went searching for this book. Astonishingly enough, I found it within minutes. 

(And that's just the living room books. There are four times that many in the basement, two and a half bookshelves in my bedroom, and a shelf in the dining room. Not to mention the kids' books....)

ANYway...liii + 183 = 236 pages, but I'm betting it won't take me a week+ to finish this one off.

Day 1 (DDRD 2,871), September 10, 2025

Read to page liii. And this wasn't even supposed to be Day 1. But that Willie S. is hard to resist.

Didn't get past the first page of the Introduction before this

caught my eye. Could this be the same Asimov's I've been reading continuously for the past six years (currently on my 45th of his books)?

Yep. Well...that was nice.

Speaking of nice, here is an article strongly suggesting that Polonius is a stand-in for William Cecil. Very interesting....

The Introduction was a rush through the play identifying some Oxfordian clues, but I didn't find anything particularly persuasive there. In fact, some of it seemed more than a little bit Out There 🛸, which does a disservice to The Cause, but we'll see how it goes with the textual notes. Which I WILL NOT start until tomorrow.

Day 2 (DDRD 2,872), September 11, 2025

Read to page 31.

Having the notes on the left page and the text on the right is efficient,  but kind of irritating,  as you have to keep bouncing back and forth between pages. Many of the notes are for stupid people who can't read Shake-speare, but some are illuminating,  and a few (too few) provide Oxfordian insights. At this point I'm not very impressed with the Oxfordian gloss, but I am enjoying the play. So there's that. 

Word of the day:

📰 to me.

Day 3 (DDRD 2,873), September 12, 2025

Read to page 61.

Would've read more today, but Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama had me by the throat, and I read 100 pages or so of that.

Day 4 (DDRD 2,874), September 13, 2025

Read to page 133. Amazing how much more DDR I can get done when I'm not hip deep in a great science fiction novel.

Here's a terribly misogynistic bit:

"There is no woman's sides 

Can bide the beating of so strong a passion, 

As love doth give my heart; no 

     woman's heart 

So big to hold so much. They 

     lack retention. 

Alas, their love may be call'd appetite,

No motion of the liver, but the 

     palate, 

That suffer surfeit, cloyment, 

     and revolt...." (II. iv. 90-96)

I have to admit that there is the ring of truth in this in my experience, though.

I'm enjoying the play, but I was expecting more from the notes. There are some interesting bits, but most of them are conjecture which doesn't seem very compelling to me. Maybe this wasn't the best play to use for Oxfordian annotations. 

Ah, there's nothing quite like a Shake-spearean insult:

"For 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." (III. ii. 50-52)

And about that Fourth Wall:

"If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction." (III. iv. 110-111)

In a footnote there's a reference to a miniature portrait entitled "Man Clasping a Hand from a Cloud" by Nicholas Hilliard. England, and Delahoyde suggests that it might be of Edward de Vere, but oddly he does not give us a picture of it. So here ya go:

Public Domain

Looks pretty Edward de Vere-y to me.

I just peeked ahead at the Further Reading at the end of this book, and according to it there are four more Oxfordian Shake-speares Out There: Anthony and Cleopatra, Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth. I'm most familiar with the last two, so that might have to be next up.

"None can be call'd deformed but the unkind." (III. iv. 329)

Fuckin' A, Bubba.

Day 5 (DDRD 2,875), September 14, 2025

Read to page 183, The End. 

According to a footnote (actually a sidenote) on page 144, "God buy you" is a form of "God be with you. (The phrase evolved into "Good-bye.")

Finished this while in church with 1 hour and 11 minutes to go before the service begins. Fortunately...

Fake News on MSNBC

I just checked in on MSNBC a moment ago. Reverend Al Sharpton was talking with Illinois's Attorney General, Kwame Raoul, about Trump's threat to put National Guard troops into Chicago. I was shocked to hear the AG refer to a Truth Social post by Trump in which he had portrayed himself wearing a Confederate hat. A picture of the post was then shown:

Reverend Al responded by saying something along the lines of, "We can't be sure that Trump was wearing a Confederate hat."

Well...that's not true, and I am pretty sure that Al Sharpton knew that, which means he was lying.

Now, without resorting to a deluge of vulgarity, I cannot even begin to tell you how much I dislike Trump. I regard him not only as the worst President in our nation's history, but as a criminal who is destroying our nation. 

But I don't think that that excuses lying about him. 

If you recognize the picture that Trump (or more probably one of his minions) has manipulated--which isn't difficult, as it is hardly an obscure reference--you'll know that it is from Apocalypse Now. The hat bears the insignia of the U.S. Cavalry...in this specific case, the Air Cavalry.

It is not a Confederate symbol.

So why lie about it? This is the kind of bullshit that gives MAGAists ammunition to dismiss what "liberals" say about Trump. And Reverend Al and MSNBC know better.

Stop it, Reverend Al. Stop it, MSNBC. You're fucking with our nation's future.

DDR: The Substance of Reality: Moral Perfectionism in Shakespeare's Hamlet by Dr. David Wright

Well...I thought I was going back to Jesus for my next DDR, but one of my dearest friends (20+ years) just sent me a copy of his hot off the press Ph. D. dissertation, and it's not going to read itself, so....

It's viii + 202 = 210 pages, so I'm thinking a week at most, probably less. 

Day 1 (DDRD 2,867), September 6, 2025

Read to page 21.

Dr. Wright refers to "...the desire to perceive the substance of reality through the deceptive veil of appearances." (vi)

I'm all in on the assumption that Plato got it right--that there is a fuller, "realer" world beyond this one. To be honest, I'm not seeing how that relates to Hamlet (or Hamlet), in that I see the Sweet Prince as moving in the opposite direction, from the Reality of the eternal world to the world of appearances, but we'll see what the next 209 pages has to say about that.

David is a solid Stratfordian, while I am a fervent Oxfordian. That has to result in differing interpretations of Hamlet...and there's probably no point in listing every one of them, but as of page 11 there have been three major ones, so I'm going to address those.

1. There are several references to historical evidence of Shakespeare's rigorous schooling, attendance at church, etc. In truth, all of this is assumption and stands under the banner, " Surely he MUST have...." In truth, there is very little historical evidence of anything relating to William Shakespeare's life. The majority of the existing evidence has to do with lawsuits and grain sales--nothing about education or a literary life. That is just a fact.

2. As is often the case, there is a reference to being unable to see the man behind the work. Even Virginia Woolf succumbed to this idea. However, if one is an Oxfordian, there is an abundance of Edward de Vere's life present in the works of Shakespeare--down to fine details of his biography.

3. David refers to Ben Jonson's famous line that Shakespeare had "little Latin and less Greek" as a litote.

Let's just say that I see no reason to categorize Jonson's statement in this way. From my perspective, Jonson was indicating that there was a man named William Shakespeare who was essentially uneducated, and that he was not the author of the great plays. Jonson was constrained from being overt about this, however, so he couched his criticism in this line, which implies that there is another man behind the plays--since obviously the plays reflect great learning and a knowledge of both Greek and Latin.

Day 2 (DDRD 2,868), September 7, 2025

Read to page 67.

Here's an interesting thought:

Seeing Horatio as incomplete... as, essentially, a failure...goes against my vision of the character completely. I'd previously read this line as indicating that Horatio was uncomfortable in the environment of Elsinore, which us, essentially, a Medieval city, and longed for the companionship of Hamlet, who, like himself, was a Renaissance man. In other words, there was no lack in himself, but in the stifling environment he had been dragged back into. Taking Dr. Wright's perspective adds an interesting twust, though. Instead if seeing the play as the progressive dissolution of Hamlet (moving from Renaissance man to Medieval warrior), it suggests that Horatio represents the (or at least a) failure of the intellect. I don't agree, but I will have to track this idea and see where it goes. incomplete

On the other hand, Horatio does not initially believe in the existence of Hamlet Sr.'s ghost, which I would think indicates a lack of belief in a spiritual dimension outside the realm of physical reality. That would indeed be a "failure," a "lack of completeness" in my understanding of The World & All There Is That's In It. And Hamlet would obviously agree, as in his famous statement that "There are more things in heaven and earth...than are dreamt of in your philosophy."  So maybe I don't disagree with the vision of Horatio as essentially incomplete.

...especially since there's no doubt that he was WRONG. There's no denying that there actually IS a ghost in this scene, after all. Can this be seen as a degeneration in Horatio, too (as in my vision of the play as Hamlet's degeneration)? Perhaps.  The Horatio who existed in Wittenberg clearly did not believe in the existence of ghosts. It's almost as if Elsinore exists in a another realm--a realm in which medieval values and beliefs prevail — even though that is not true in the modern Renaissance world. Coming back to Elsinore destroys the rationality of the mind, forces it to devolve.

Hmmm. About, my brains!

P.S. Yesterday I was talking to a pretty, twenty-something girl about the the limitations of the rational mind*, and said something like, "I think my intuition is smarter than my brain." She agreed with that perspective. Here's a bit of what I read today in Dr. Wright's thesis paper:

How do you like them 🍎🍎🍎🍎🍏?

* Yes, really. That's how old I am. Sorry, boys.

P.S. Read to page 81.

Day 3 (DDRD 2,869), September 8, 2025

Read to page 111.

"Thus conscience does make cowards...." No "of us all," because the quotation is taken from the so-called "good" quarto rather than from the First Folio version.

Day 4 (DDRD 2,870), September 9, 2025

Read to page 156.

Dr. Wright suggests that The Arts provide Hamlet (and, presumably, us) "...with a great deal of hope and joy, a respite from fear and anxiety, a means of escape, humor, and a restoration of sanity — but ultimately, a way to the truth, a way to the substance of reality." (114)

Is that some hot shit or what? 

I occasionally pause in my horse bolting across the prairie style of reading and ask myself, "Do book markers REALLY measure what we've lost?"* Next time that happens, I'm going to remind myself of this (👆) line. Thanks for the dance, Dr. D!**

* "The Dangling Conversation " by Paul Fuckin' Simon

** "Dancing with Mr. D." by Mick Jagger & Keith Richards

P.S. Does this sound familiar?

Day 5 (DDRD 2,871), September 10, 2025

Read to page 202, The End.  One of the bits of new information (for me, at least) was that Aristotle defended poetry (whereas Plato offended it). Go, Aristotle.

This was an interesting work, and it's got me thinking so much about Shaje-speare that I'm thinkers by I need to take that exit on the DDR highway. Y'know, there are several books on the bard that I've been meaning to read for some time....

I ❤️ Mary B. Campbell

Funny. Yesterday I had no idea who Mary B. Campbell was. Today, I'm sending one of her poems ("Impressionism") to several different friends because it has filled my soul to the bursting point, and if I don't let some of it out I might explode. And P.S., I ❤️ her.

This book of poems, which I was lucky enough to find at my local library...and which you can find online for about $6...(unless I beat you to it, as I've decided I need to own this book) is just packed with words that twitch like severed electric cables. 

Usually...well, ALways except for Bukowski...I don't get much in a first reading of a poem. I slip slide across its frozen surface and end up on my ass, wondering what happened. And I lose my desire to continue reading after three or four of these pratfalls. Sometimes I go back for another look and find rewards, but I have to admit that a lot of the time I just put those poems aside and then slowly allow myself to forget about them.

With Mary B. Campbell's book, I started in the middle, liked what I read, and worked my way up to the front / first page. And then wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, I began to re-read the poems in the proper order. And they pulled me straight through the middle of the book and then beyond my starting point. 

In fact, even before I'd finished the book I was searching for more Mary B. Campbell. It was a hard search. 

There's The Business of Being Alive: Selected Poems...which you can find online at Internet Archive. There are also some hard copies you can buy (ebay, Abebooks), but they list for around 30 bucks, which is pretty pricey for an 81 page book. (That doesn't mean I won't go for it, though, so caveat emptor.)

And there's Trouble (Carnegie Mellon Poetry) which can be had from Amazon and Alibris.

But that seems to be it so far as poetry is concerned.

Bummer...because I really, really love these poems.

These poems are filled with lines that grab onto my mind like burrs...like this from "The Poetry of Empire":

...which I think perfectly sums up President Donald J. Trump.

But enough for now. I want to finish off this book now.

Henry Fuseli’s 1794 painting, “Milton Dictating to His Daughter”
Public Domain

P.S. Oddly enough (since it was so recent), I can't remember how I ran across Mary B. Campbell. I've gone through my search history looking for clues, but have come up empty. I'd been searching for poetry by L.R. Berger, and I suspect that that search brought Mary B. into my field of vision...let's see...AH!

Mystery solved. When I read that blurb and saw the title The World, the Flesh, and Angels, I felt compelled to scurry down that path. 

Dominoes.

Another Reason to Love Absolute Martian Manhunter

Issue #6 (whoa-oh, we're halfway there!), page 10, panel 1...or maybe it's 2?:

Ring any bells? If not, here's page 1 of Thomas Pynchon"s Gravity's Rainbow:

Hey, man, this Deniz Camp guy is better than okay. And I love this book so much that I'm going to buy it again once it's collected...assuming it lasts long enough to be collected.

Addendum: I guess I meant to say TWO more reasons to love Absolute Martian Manhunter.  Here's #2:

The penultimate page of issue #6 looks like this:

But if you fold back the rest of the pages and hold this page up to the light, you get this:

And I'm going to have to look back at the previous five issues, because I think that this was done earlier on and I didn't catch it.

Addendum 2: I meant 3 reasons, of course. As I was flipping my copy of this comic book around to get that (👆) picture, I realized that all of the ads in this issue had been placed after the story, just like Image Comics has been doing. This is the way to print comic books. Nobody wants to see a death of Superman story interrupted by a Twinkies ad.