Because I Think Him So

Oh, Argh

2008-11-12T03:09:00.000-08:00

Falstaff ain't dead! I hate that fat bastard!

To refresh, in case you've forgotten: Falstaff (Sir Fat Bastard) appears in both parts of Henry IV. He was a close friend of the prince, who goes on to be Henry V. At the end of Henry IV part 2, Shakespeare promises Falstaff will be in the next one, too, but he isn't. Just somebody comes on stage and announces that he died.

Now, suddenly, he is alive again and central to the plot of Merry Wives of Windsor. This one is about a bunch of rich, self-involved couples who have nothing better to do with their time than wonder whether they'd all be faithful to one another if they were tempted to be otherwise, and Sir Fat Bastard is more than happy to be the temptor. He winds up dressing in ladies' clothing, hiding in a laundry hamper, dressing as a tree sprite of some sort, and finally getting his ass kicked but good in the wilderness (well, technically, he gets his ass pinched, but I gather that was really humiliating for him). He ends this play all come-upped, exactly as I wished he would have all along.

I wasn't sure when this play was supposed to have been set. I'm trying to read the histories in order (except for one mistake I made with, I think, one of the Richards), but the comedies and tragedies I'm just plowing through as I grab 'em. I didn't realize Sir FB was going to be in this one, so I didn't know I probably shoudl have read it before he up and died. So I looked it up.

Turns out nobody's really sure. Did he write it in the middle of the Henrys or after or before? Is it set at the time of them, and if so, why doesn't he mention any of the goings-on? For that matter, why isn't he going with the goings-on? Etcetera.

Well, you know what? I got all the above information from the wikipedia page about it, so I really have no idea what I'm talking about, but here's what I think happened:

For some reason, those Elizabethan audiences really loved the Fat Bastard. That's why Shakespeare made sure to mention at the end of Henry IV part 2 that he'd be appearing in Henry V. But then he just didn't have room for him in Henry V, what with all the other derring-do that had to be there (and what with the Prince's new character and everything), so he left him out -- with just that nod to his death to remind us who Henry V used to be, and to let the audience know he hadn't plain forgotten.

Now, I bet the audiences were pissed. They liked him, they'd been promised him, and he wasn't there. I bet Shakespeare just knew he could make a load of cabbage if he wrote a whole new play featuring him, and so he did. And it's kind of like "The West Wing" -- it exists in a parallel contemporary universe, in which no true events have any bearing on the story.

Ta da! Problem solved.

Any other lingering quanndaries anyone want to run by me?

I'll Take the Fail

2008-11-08T05:14:00.000-08:00

I read Henry the Sixth, Part III. Finished it weeks ago. Well, two weeks, at least. But I just can't think of anything to say about it. Lots of dead people, lots of turncoating, lots of typical royal bullshit. I've been simmering it, thinking I'll coe up with something, but I haven't, and tomorrow, if all goes well, I will finish reading the next play on my list. So I've decided:

Not always, but in lots of college classes that I took, you would get one free pass. One lab report you were allowed to fuck royally up on, one paper that you were allowed to hand in late, one weekly quiz you were allowed to skip completely. It was like an acknowledgement of the fact of human foible, and an act of forgiveness for it.

So I choose this one. Maybe because there are just too many plays about dead kings, I've gotten bored. Maybe because I don't know enough about English history to put it into context (although, from what I've read, these stories aren't always so much accurate themselves). Or maybe just because I'm coming down the home stretch and I'm getting lazy. But whatver the reason is that I can't do this one, I can't, and so I'm taking a pass.

Or a fail.

Whatever.

Five Study Questions on The Merchant of Venice

2008-10-16T16:44:00.000-07:00

1. Did Shylock make a dishonest loan? Or is the whole thing Antonio's fault because should have known there was a possibility his ships would sink and he wouldn't be able to pay it back? Discuss.

2. Didn't two random guys have a big conversation on page one about how ships sink all the time? Isn't foreshadowing your key to quality entertainment? Or am I thinking of thinly-disguised metaphor? Discuss.

3. I'm still not clear on how Portia winds up getting to play the judge? Discuss?

4. Shouldn't Shylock have taken the money from all the other folks who offered it? But then again, they were all really mean to him, weren't they? But if he wanted to kill Antonio, why didn't he just hire some old grunt to do it, like every royal person always does? Shylock is definitely the bad guy here, even if he's right to be pissed off at being called a Dirty Jew, right? But that means the good guy is the rich guy? How's that possible? Hasn't Shakespeare ever read a fairy tale in his life? Discuss.

5. Either way, don't you think taking all the stuff away from the person who makes the bad loan, giving half of it to his debtors and half to the government is a really good idea? Don't you think we ought to have more cross-dressing, unqualified judges on the court? Discuss!

Who's In Charge Here, Anyway?

2008-10-06T04:34:00.000-07:00

When Johnny and I went to Istanbul a couple years ago, we went to the Topkapi Palace and I laughed at the stories of the Sultans. They couldn't stay in power for more than a couple years before somebody killed them and took their place -- sometimes they couldn't stay alive long enough to get to power, because people would kill them just to take their place in line. And usually it was the mothers orchestrating all of this, because for a woman there was no greater honor in the land than being the Queen Mum, so to speak. So a potential Sultan Mama would off her nephew or brother or whatever just to give her own son a leg up. We read about one guy who was crowned (or whatever you call it) at the age of thirty-something having spent his entire life to that point in a cage -- literally in a cage -- to protect him. Once he because Sultan they had to let him out, though, and somebody snuffed him out within the year.

I may have some or all of those details wrong, but my point is this: Henry VI sure has a lot of parts! Seriously, I just finished II and it isn't over yet. I don't know how there's going to be anybody left to act in # III, though, seeing as how they're offing one another right and left.

I am no scholar of history. The parts I remember are all from high school, and have to do with important milestones like the Norman invasion, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and The Curse (regarding which Mr. Trocchio lied -- he said if we were ever in doubt we could use it as the answer to a question, but when I did, he wrote "Nice try, Ellia," and marked it wrong. The bastard). So although it's stupid, it should not be surprising that I really was under the impression that all these English kings and queens with all these numbers after their names were succeeding one another honestly according to generation. This is just not so.

I must interrupt myself here to vent about a common Miss Manners rule violation that really bugs me, and I don't know when I'll ever have the opportunity to point it out again, so here we go: Kings and queens are the only ones allowed to have numbers after their names larger than, say, IV. The rest of us are only as many as there are alive. If you were a III and your father and grandfather are both dead, then you are now Sr. and your son is Jr. That's just how it works. It doesn't matter if your family's been passing the name down since they came over on the Mayflower. They should have stayed in England if they wanted the opportunity to be an XVI.

And apparently they would have got it, too, because according to this book, just about everyone can trace their lineage to royalty somehow. And if you can keep your head on your shoulders, it just might wind up underneath a crown.

Or course, if you can't, it might wind up on the queen's lap having its hair brushed like a beauty salon doll.

It's Really Quite Atrocious

2008-09-27T15:31:00.000-07:00

Love's Labour's Lost is an extraordinarily apt title for an extraordinarily odd play.

It starts out with three friends (it doesn't even really matter that one of them's a king, except that it means he gets to tell his friends what to do, and isn't there one of those in every gang?) deciding to swear off women for a while. They have all these high-falutin reasons, but they don't matter. What matters is that they last about as long as Kramer did in the "Master of Your Domain" episode of "Seinfeld." One falls, but he has a good excuse and no way out of it, and so the other two decide to fall as well.

Now, the ladies are interested in the boys as well, but because it's Shakespeare, they cannot go gently. So there's this whole interior plot about the boys dressing up as Russians, and the ladies dressing up as one another, so everybody can whisper sweet nothings into the wrong ear and then say mean things about each other to their face. It's a hoot, I'm telling you.

Anyway, after much ado, it all gets straightened out. The No Ma'am pact gets tossed by the wayside, everybody figures out who everybody is, and they are all officially In Love with the proper partners. And then, for no reason that I can figure, they just suddenly drop the ball and run away.

One of the ladies decides the best next step to take is to send her boy to live in isolation for a year, and if he still loves her when he returns, well then happy days. He, naturally, thinks this idea is cracker. The other two couples follow suit and then this fourth couple -- who've only been incidental to the story -- decide to go for three years, just to be safe. And that's the end.

Love's labor's lost, indeed.

He even says right on the last page (well, okay, it's like the third-to-last page in my book, but whatever):

Berowne: Our wooing doth not end like an old play;

Jack hath not Jill; these ladies' courtesy

Might well have made our sport a comedy

King: Come sir, it wants a twelvemonth and a day,

And then 'twill end

Berowne: That's too long for a play.

You bet your boop it is. So why bother? What a bizarre turn of events. All the hysterical dress-up stuff, odd circumstances, guys with funny accents, jokes in Latin, and even, in the middle, a "great feast of languages" including the word honorificabilitudinitatibus -- and all for naught!

Ah, I see. Wikipedia says there was a sequel written, that has since been lost to the ages. It was called, of all things, Love's Labour's Won, and in it, supposedly, the whole gang gets back together and has another bunch of wacky misadventures.

A Very Bardy Christmas, if you will.

Eli Manning Is a Witch and a Slut and a Liar and a Whore

2008-09-14T09:08:00.000-07:00

I've been reading some about Henry VI Part I, because it didn't seem to me to be about Henry VI at all, and I wanted to make sure I was understanding it correctly. What I've learned is #1. Yes, the Sir John Fastolfe in this play is indeed supposed to be the same Sir John Falstaff who, um, died in Henry V. #2. This is either the first play Shakespeare ever wrote, before he had any idea what he was doing, or else he didn't really write the thing at all, and #3. He seems to have gotten most of the facts regarding Joan of Arc 100% wrong.

#3 is actually cited sometimes as evidence of #2. He presents St. Joan as a witch and a slut and a liar and a whore, and people say someone as educated and as worldly as the Bard couldn't possibly have misunderstood her so completely. But I say bunkum. I say he didn't misunderstand the girl at all. I say he was merely an Englishman writing about a French national hero -- a French national hero, by the way, who played an instrumental role in the English having had their asses handed to them in the Hundred Years War -- and he his natural inclination was to present her in the worst possible light.

I, of course, and above such petty foolishness. I am four hundred years more evolved, four hundred years better educated, and -- thanks to air travel -- significantly more worldly than Shakespeare ever was. I, myself, would never stoop to such lowly and unfounded character assassination.

Never.

Quickie Twofer

2008-09-07T04:17:00.000-07:00

I have no time this morning, but it's been like a month since I've been home on Sunday, and I've read two plays, so I've got to say something about them both before I explode.
1. Henry V is a waste of time. He spends the whole play fighting a war (and Shakespeare has a special narrator come on and explain about the fighting -- "Please imagine lots of blood and horses in this next scene" kind of thing) that, in the end, is nullified when he suddenly just up and marries the Princess of the Country he was fighting, so he automatically becomees th King of That. Which was France, by the way.

2. I guess I was confused about King Lear. I have a bit of an obsession with it that I can't explain, but I simply cannot seem to leave it on a shelf. Not in a new-book store, but in the Goodwill or a yard sale or whatever, I buy King Lear every time I see it. Don't know why. Up until 2002 or so, I'd never even read it. Then I did, and now I have again, and let me tell you: I guess I was confused. First of all, I thought the blind madman who hurled himself off a cliff was King Lear, but it totally wasn't. Second, what happened to the chests of gold and silver and whatever? I guess that must have been a different play. This one, it turns out, is all about how if parents don't trust their instincts about their kids, they're going to get shafted for it in the end. By which I mean: if they act good and you think they're good, then they probably are good, no matter what anybody whispers in your ear.

The End

Ooh!

2008-08-24T04:41:00.000-07:00

I read Henry V, but I'm not going to be writing this week because I'm in a tent somewhere in the wild woods with chocolate-flavored marshmallows. And now that I think about it, I'm going to be away next weekend, too. So I'll write Hank V whenever I can possibly find time to squeeze it in, but I just decided what I'm going to read when I finish the last Shakespeare play (and all the sonnets, and all the poems, and -- fine -- the Yale biography. Maybe.):

Butler's The Lives of the Saints.

I hear it's gory and sexy and scary and generally bizarre. Stigmata and piercings with arrows and burnings at stakes and decapitations and all that good saintly martyr type of stuff.

Ooh, I'm so excited!

Both Of 'Em Dead in the Very Same Bed

2008-08-17T12:11:00.000-07:00

Lady Macbeth got a bad rap.

All you hear about is how the big murder was her idea entirely, how Mr. Macbeth freaked out when the deed was done so she had to do all the afterwork, and how she pays for her perfidy with permanent nutsy-bloodstains on her hands and, by the end of the play, her very life.

All true.

But it's also true, however, that she only thought of the plan in the first place after she got a letter from her husband that said, in essence, “I could be king tomorrow if only that blasted Duncan would hurry up and die!” And it's true that, after the initial murder and his initial squeamishness, Mr. Macbeth goes on to be either directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of at least four more grown men, plus one attempted, plus a woman and her brood of young (and, needless to say, perfectly innocent) children.

This is all not to mention that at least Lady Macbeth has the decency to feel terrible about the things she’s done – and she hasn’t even done that much, considering. She is consumed by guilt, commences to sleepwalking and confessing same, and then – offstage, so nobody has to watch – carries out her own corporal punishment. All this while her husband is parsing prophecy with a bunch of ghosts and witches so as to maintain his illegitimately obtained toehold on the throne.

Pig.

It just so happens that the last time I read the Bible with my Lady, we came across this verse (it’s Matthew 21:28-31, in case you’re curious):

[Jesus says] But what think you? A certain man had two sons; and he came to the first, and said, Son, go to work today in my vineyard. He answered and said, I will not: but afterward he repented, and went. And he came to the second, and said likewise. And he answered and said, I go sir: and went not. Whether of them twain did the will of his father?

[The apostles answer] The first.

Jesus saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, that the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of heaven before you.

See? If there’s a heaven, Lady Macbeth will be there. Or, well, she would have been. If only she could have kept her bloodstained hands off her own throat.

And if she weren’t, you know, make-believe.

I Can Make Up Shakespearean Insults, Too!

2008-08-10T11:31:00.000-07:00

I read Henry IV Part Two, I did. But I can't think of a single pithy thing to say about it. I had tucked one bookmark in it somewhere -- which is what I do when I'm reading and something pithish occurs to me, so I can turn back to it later and try to remember what the pithitude might have possibly been -- but the bookmark fluttered to the floor when I turned the final page, so now it's lost. Unless I'm going to read the whole damn thing again. Which I am not.

I do know this: Falstaff is a pig. Falstaff is Lampwick and the Artful Dodger and Dick Cheney and that Better-Get-A-Bucket guy from Money Python all rolled into one. Every time he opens his mouth, I want to run him over with a car. He's a lazy, no-good, filthy, thieving, uncouth, bold-faced liar, and I hope he and any fictional spawn he may someday produce, all burn in Pretend Hell for all eternity.

Because he will, apparently, be back. On the last page of the play (after Hank IV croaks it and the Prince is made Hank V) the narrator promises that Hank V's story will be told, and when it is, Sir John will be in it.

"Sir John." Because this crap-packet, it turns out, is a knight.

They say he's supposed to be a comic figure, and I imagine that the narrator promised his reappearance because audiences liked him. I don't know. I think maybe I've met too many of them to find anything in him to laugh about. Screwing people on money he owes them, letting other people die for him in battle, lying to his most, best friend, and throwing other friends under the bus to do it. Big comedy that, what? I'm a little worried how I'm going to get through Hank V without putting old Falsie through a window.

Aha. I just peeked ahead. He isn't really in it all that much, except to die.

Yay! When do we start?

Not this week. This week we're reading The Merchant of Venice. Too much history at one time gives me gas.

Oh, and P.S. I'd just like to point out:

I'm starting to believe I might actually get through this! But oh now...

What am I going to read on the stairmaster when I'm done?

Wait a Second: Who Cut the Cheese?

2008-08-03T09:39:00.000-07:00

A Comedy of Errors = The Parent Trap + The Prince and the Pauper - anybody having any clue what's going on.

Two sets of identical twins, separated at practically-birth into one-of-each pairs (it doesn’t really matter how this happened. If you must know, there was a boat involved. There usually is.). One set of mismatched twins grows up in Syracuse, the other in Ephesus, neither knows about the other. Decades pass. And then, because Willie and his Poor Boys find this sort of thing irresistibly thigh-slapping, the Syracusian pair washes up on Ephesian shores.

Commence hilarity!

This play was 67 pages long in the Yale, and I swear to god at least twenty of them were filled with some variation of “But you just—” “No, I didn’t!” Six at the beginning are filled explaining the whole separated-twins thing, and five at the end do nothing but sum up what’s happened. Which leaves only about thirty-five pages for it to actually happen in. And what happens is this:

There’s a gold chain delivered to one twin and (for simplicity’s sake we’ll say) billed to the other. “But I gave the gold chain to you.” “No you didn’t.” “But I paid you for the gold chain.” “No, you didn’t.” And then the wife chimes in “Where’s my gold chain?” I delivered it to you husband.” “No you didn’t.”

Har de frickin’ har. Oh my god if I ever hear the words “gold” and “chain” in the same sentence again I’m going to shoot somebody.

The funniest part for me was on pages 23 through 26 or so, where he keeps up a Dr. Suessian rhyme scheme through four pages and seven characters. My favorite line?

A man may break a word with you, sir, and words are but wind:
Ay, and break it in your face, so he break it not behind.

Okay, so Dr. Suess would not rhyme “wind” with “hind,” but hey.
A fart joke’s still a fart joke, least that’s what I always say.

I'm Henry IV, Part One! I am!

2008-07-27T04:21:00.000-07:00

I don't have a lot of time this morning, so I will just say this about Henry IV, Part One:

1. I read these in the wrong order. Turns out Richard III did not immediately succeed Richard II, and somehow I didn't figure that out while I read it. Der.

2. Henry IV is the selfsame Bolingbroke who took the crown from Richard II a couple weeks ago. Bastard. But now he's gone all noble and righteous. I still don't like him, because I still feel bad for poor old Dick, but it was kind of fun to run into him again. It made me feel all smart to realize I understood what all characters were talking about. Even if I didn't figure out the above Richard III thing until somewhere in Act 3.

3. Falstaff is disgusting, and if he were my friend -- well, he wouldn't be. He's a corpulent, oleaginous, stupid lazy pig, who fakes dying on the battlefield so his adversary will move on to someone else, and then later claims to have killed the adversary -- straight to the face of the guy who actually did. Ugh. Falstaff makes me want to take a bath.

4. People have compared George W. Bush to Henry V (and no, that's not a typo, I'm talking about the Henry who's still a prince in this book; he gets his own book later), because of the boozy-youth-cum-world-leader angle. But they are wrong. Henry V took the first opportunity to put his idiocy behind him, and he actually fought the war he waged. With honor, too.

Hopefully I'll have more to say about ol' Hank IV when I read part two of his story -- but that won't be for a few weeks, because next up is The Comedy of Errors. The suspense isn't really killing me, however.

After all, I'm pretty sure he's gonna croak it at the end.

Suicide Is Painless

2008-07-20T05:44:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry, I know I used this line before, on the other famous play I read and actually understood, but I have to repeat myself: Romeo ain't nothing but a punk. And a great big girlie one, at that.

Naturally, I was already familiar with Romeo and Juliet. Not only do we all know the romanti-tragic story inside-out and sideways, but I was also forced to read it for my eighth-grade English class. Or maybe seventh grade, I don't remember. We were definitely young enough that all the dick jokes at the beginning of the play went right over our heads. Or over my head, at least. I can't speak for the rest of the dickheads in that class.

But anyway, speaking of dicks, I did not remember that Romeo starts out the play in love with someone else entirely. If I'm not mistaken, this beloved Rosaline never actually shows up -- she's just a name he gets all swoony over -- but she's the reason he attends that fateful party in the first place. You know, the one at which he first clamps lamps on Juliet? He risks life and limb, crashes a party at the house of his archnemesis, just to breathe the same air as this woman (or, I should say "woman" because she's probably only like thirteen years old), and then immediately throws her over for the pretty girl.

Punk.

Big (or, I should say, little), girlie punk.

Also a bit violently impulsive, what? Between the time he decides he's "in love" with Juliet and the end of the play -- a grand total of something like seventy hours -- he kills not one but two people, and they're both relatives of Juliet's, to boot! Way to endear, Romeo. No wonder she was all "take all myself."

Oh. Yeah. Wait. Hang on. Three. He kills three people, actually. If you're counting the fact that he offed himself.

Big girlie punk.

Despair, and Die!

2008-07-13T05:20:00.000-07:00

I always thought the famous quote “Now is the winter of our discontent” was a declarative statement – like “Today is Monday.” “Now is sad winter.” Not in a million years would I have known it was from Richard III, but I thought I understood, more or less, what the words meant.

I was wrong. Again. Here’s the whole quote: “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York.” In other words, “Now is happy summer, yay!” It’s metaphorical, of course, but still. That’s just the first two lines of the stupid play. Imagine how much misunderstanding I managed to cram into the other 140 pages.

Because of the holiday last weekend, I read this one in two bursts. I got up to page 66, then put it aside for four days while I made salads and cooked chickens, drank beer and blew things up. By the time I picked up the book again, I had all but forgotten what I’d read. Something about a hunchbacked asshole killing people left and right? But if that were so, why did they all still seem to like him anyway?

Ah, because he’s a charmer.

Richard II may have been a hopeless idiot, but this one’s a Disney villain. Always in the wings, wringing his hands and conniving. Oleaginous and seemingly weak, he gets people to trust him and then, literally, stabs them in the back. Or, well, not literally. Literally, he gets someone else to do the stabbing. And they do it!

Eventually, of course, his charms wear off and he has to resort to holding hostages and other such nefarious devices. Before that happens, though, he turns in an epic performance of dogged slimitude in an eleven-page exchange with Queen Elizabeth (not that one; the widow of Edward IV). She starts out cursing him and calling the roll of all the men he’s recently killed – among them her husband, sons, brother and assorted friends – and ends up agreeing to let him woo her daughter. No, worse: she agrees to do the wooing for him!

Something about that smacks of the 2004 election, but I can’t put my finger on quite what it is…

Anyway, he gets his comeuppance in the end. The last act takes place on a battlefield, where Richmond (the Disney hero) has come to, as he puts it, knock the bloody tyrant out of England’s chair. The ghosts of all the dead folks visit both leaders in respective dreams, telling Richmond that angels are fighting with him, and telling Richard to despair and die. For once, the hunchbacky bastard he does what's expected of him, but not before uttering one final, famous line:

“A horse! a horse!” he cries, “my kingdom for a—”

Well, you know.

He doesn’t get the steed he’s crying for. Loses the kingdom anyway. Gets slain by noble Richmond. Who then steps forward with a memorable passage of his own:

God and arms be praised, victorious friends:
The day is ours, the bloody dog is dead.

Now that is a declarative statement if I’ve ever heard one.

Although, the “bloody dog” thing? I’m pretty sure he meant it metaphorically.

Exit, Pursued By a Bear

2008-06-29T05:09:00.000-07:00

I read The Winter’s Tale during the first week of summer just to be obnoxious, but I needn’t have bothered. It’s got nothing to do with wintertime at all. There is, however, a character called Dorcas – and a guy says “dildos” in Act IV.

So there’s that!

This is another one of those “I put on a hat and now you can’t recognize me” plays, kicked off with about 40 pages of “Did you f*ck my wife?” The answer is no, he didn’t. But she dies for it anyway, and her newborn (not bastard) daughter – gets left for dead on the cold, cold ground. The guy who's told to do it intends to save her, but this big old bear comes along and chases him away...

She doesn’t die, though. She’s found, she grows up, she marries a prince and there is much rejoicing. Well, actually, there was no rejoicing. They had to run away to get married – and maybe they weren’t actually married, that part I’m not clear on – because nobody knows she’s really a princess, so she’s believed to be not good enough for him.

Coincidentally enough, they wind up in her father’s kingdom, where there’s all this confusion and – oh, and also there’s a bad guy who robs people – and just when the identies are going to get sorted out once and for all – the punchline, if you will, that he’s been building towards for a hundred pages – Shakespeare cuts the scene and starts a new one, in which he has two completely different characters just walk around telling each other about the big denouement. It happened offstage, and we missed it!

Grr! Where's that bear?

But then old Willie tucks in a final twist scenario. I don’t know if I’m spectacularly thick or what, but I’m not quite sure what is really supposed to have happened here. Was the dead wife/mother really alive all along, or did they really make an age-progressed statue of her and magically bring it to life? Is this Days of our Lives, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer? I really ought to do a bit more research before I start writing up these things.

I know that guy really does get chased offstage by a bear, though.

It does not end well.

I Liked Your Almanac, At Least

2008-06-22T12:12:00.000-07:00

Poor Richard II.

I read this entire play – and it’s a relatively long one, too – without thinking of a single thing to say about it. I kept thinking something would spring to mind, but nothing did. Thankfully, I had a backup plan:

There’s a recurring theme in there about how Poor Dick can’t come up with money to finance his war with Ireland. So if all else failed, I figured, I could ask Johnny for his take – on the man, if he’d never seen or read the play. He would surely say something all brogueish and pithy, and I could build my essay around that.

Well, all else failed. So this morning, I asked Himself. And you know what he said?

“Oh, that poor bastard. What about him?”

I explained my conundrum, maybe building up the thing about the war with Ireland a little more than it actually played out in the book, and asked him what the Irish thought about him.

“We really don’t,” he said. “He was just mostly clueless. Nah. Nobody I know holds a grudge against that man. The first one who ever knew what she was doing over there was Elizabeth I.”

I let that shocking comment lie there, just like I’m going to do now.

“Why?” he went on. “What does the play have to say about him?”

“Well, that's the thing: it really doesn’t, either,” I said. “He just seems to plod through life, succumbing to one defeat after another. I mean, maybe I misunderstood something, but it seemed to me that this guy, Bolingbroke, essentially just shows up one day and says ‘Richard, I’m the king now. Give me your crown.’ And Richard just sags his shoulders, goes ‘Oh, man!’ and hands it over.”

“Yeah. He really wasn’t very bright.”

“And later – when he’s in exile, or house arrest, or wherever he is – this same Bolingbroke, who is King now of course, shows up again and says ‘Don’t live here anymore. Live over there now.’ And – again! – Poor Richard just sighs ‘Oh, man,’ and moves.”

Johnny laughed.

“And in the beginning,” I was on a roll now, “these two guys are disagreeing about something and Richard orders them to duel, but before either of them can draw a knife or pistol or whatever, he steps forward and is all ‘No, no, wait. Don’t duel. You there, you’re banished for life, and you other guy are banished for ten years. No, wait. Six.”

“Yeah,” Johnny said. "He never knew what the hell he wanted. And he couldn’t stomach fighting. That’s why the whole war with Ireland thing just doesn’t matter.”

“Oh! Speaking about that,” In my vigor to make fun, I forgot that I’d implied the Irish war was a major plot point. “The only reason the war with Ireland ever comes up is because he can’t figure out how to finance it. There’s this one point when he actually sends one of his advisors over to Lady Whatever to ask for cash to fight the Micks, and his advisor is like ‘Didn’t anybody tell you? Lady Whatever is dead, dude.’ And again, King Richard’s reaction’s just ‘Oh, man!’

“The only character in it who makes any sense is the Queen, and she—”

“She was nuts,” Johnny interrupted.

“Yeah, well, she just has these random scenes scattered throughout, and all she ever does is weep and holler doom.”

“She was nuts,” Johnny said again.

“Yeah. She just keeps saying ‘Something bad’s going to happen! I can feel it!’ while her ladies and advisers try to convince her it’s not true, or at least try to get her to shut up.”

“She was nuts, I’m tellin’ ya!”

“Yeah. Maybe. Until something bad does happen.”

“Oh yeah, that’s right. They got ‘im, didn’t they?”

“Yup.”

“Poisoned?”

“Nope, stabbed. Well... I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that he was stabbed.”

“And then what?”

“And then he said ‘Oh, man.’ And then he died.”

The end.

There is no guarantee that anything in the above is anything remotely close to true, either regarding the content of the play or the facts of Richard II’s historical person. But I liked the conversation, so I presented it verbatim. Or as close to verbatim as I could recall, after five hours and a single beer.

And anyway, it saved me having to actually write.

Beavis and Butthead

2008-06-15T03:54:00.000-07:00

This is the play I got the title of this blog from. A lady is asked which of the Two Gentleman of Verona she thinks is the finer, she chooses one, and when she’s asked to explain her decision she replies “I think him so because I think him so.”

Which is about as good an explanation of why any of us fall in love as I can think of. You?

Unfortunately, she’s not so much a lady as a lady’s maid, and she’s not one of the seventeen million people in this play who falls in love.

And I’m lying again. There aren’t seventeen million people in this play. In fact, according to I-don’t-remember-what, of all of Shakespeare’s plays, the Gentlemen has the fewest characters. I got excited when I heard that, but then I counted them. Sixteen. Plus assorted servants and musicians. Not exactly minimal, that number, what?

Of those sixteen, let’s see: Proteus is in love with Julia, and Valentine is in love with Silvia. Silvia is in love with Valentine, but she’s supposed to marry Thurio. Then Proteus decides Julia’s old hat and he wants Silvia, too. So Julia dresses up as a man (because it wouldn’t be Shakespearean comedy without a little cross-dressing) and goes after him. There’s also a dog named Crab.

Then after that, it’s one big knock-knock joke.

Knock knock!
Who’s there?
Opens!
Opens who?
Oh, puns get quite annoying after eighty pages!

Seriously, that whatever-I-read says that this is one of the first plays he wrote, and I don’t know if I’d say it shows, but it does read like a kid with a new toy. For the first half at least, he simply cannot let a double meaning go without giving it an old wink and a nudge.

Hm.

I should probably tear those pages out and thumbtack them to the wall behind my desk, to remind myself how very unclever that kind of thing can sound after a while.

But, Whither Pumbaa?

2008-06-08T05:50:00.000-07:00

After I finished with Timon of Athens, I searched out a couple of synopsises (synopses? synopsi? I read some summaries) online, just to make sure I understood correctly what was going on. Because, more than any other play so far – even more than the horror show of Titus Andronicus – the plotline of this one made me ill. Before I wrote about it, before I embraced it as a confirmation of my bitter, misanthropic view of all humanity, I wanted to make sure I hadn’t tuned out for a second and missed a crucial plot point in Act III.

I didn’t. I disagree with the summaries on a few fairly central issues, but my general interpretation stands: People, for the most part, suck.

The basic idea here is that Timon has a lot of friends as long as he has a lot of money. He buys things for people, supports their causes, gives away buckets of gold to strangers on the tiniest whim. But when the money runs out, he is abandoned, and all his so-called “friends” actually get pissed at him when he requests their help. While wearing the gold and jewels that Timon himself gave them, they claim abject poverty, then make up stories amongst themselves as to why it was rude of him to ask.

We’ve been there, Johnny and I. More times than I care to count. We have never actually gone begging in the lean times, but people find ways to refuse us anyhow.

There’s the long-time friend whose rent we paid when he was threatened with eviction; he turned around and took a job right out from under Johnny’s nose, and that thankless little cuss can’t even paint. There’s the other old acquaintance whose house Johnny helped fix up for nothing; when we bought ours, he helped shaft us to the tune of seven grand. Then there’s the just-met fellow whom Johnny put in nights and weekends for because the jamoke took on a job that called for more skill than he had on his entire crew; Johnny stepped in at the last minute, saved his ass, and a month later has more or less given up on being paid.

Partly you could say we’re trusting the wrong people. Johnny wants to believe that everyone is good; I know they aren’t, but I can’t always tell the difference, and I don’t want to believe that everyone is bad. It’s starting to look like it, though. And I swear to god, if one more person that I’ve put my trust in lets me down, I might just consider following Timon’s example and taking to the woods.

He didn’t do it in a “live-deliberately” kind of way, but more like a “lost his house and had to eat tree roots” survival strategy. Out there, he happened to find a secret hidden stash of gold, but then gave most of it away to the first guy he ran across, asking only that the fellow stab a few Athenians on his behalf. When word got out that he did, in fact, have money after all, the sucky people started making pilgrimages to his neck of the woods so as to pretend-befriend him all over again.

And here’s where my interpretation differs with what I’ve read in the summaries. They claim that Flavius was the only true friend and trustworthy person in his life; I say it was Apemantus. Flavius is a servant, see, and yes, a loyal one -- but by his own admission wishes good fortune for Timon only so that he might be gainfully employed again himself. When Timon thrusts the last of his found gold upon Flavius and tells him to flee his sight, he puts up a weak argument, and does.

This is Shakespeare, people. We all know that a true friend and loyal servant would have stayed in the woods eating tree root alongside his master -- or, actually, three paces behind his master -- and then at some point found a way to drink some poison in his stead.

Apemantus, on the other hand, has been there all along and taken nothing. Not gold, not gifts, not even so much as a plate of food at Timon’s famous feasts. He is most certainly churlish (as the Dramatis Personae describes him) about the situation, and he can be confrontational in a “speaking truth to power” kind of way. But as far as I'm concerned, his friendship in lean times can be trusted, because he never had his hand out for anything when times were flush.

Unfortunately, when Apemantus seeks out Timon in the forest, what starts out as (I believe) genuinely proffered advice rapidly devolves into a diatribe of “I told you so.” By this point Timon is as narky as Apemantus ever was, and the two of them wind up hurling insults (and a stone or two) at one another, until Apemantus storms off in a huff.

This, too, sounds painfully familiar.

Whenever Johnny comes home with a new scheme that involves lending a hand to another unproven friend (or, just as often, a near-stranger), I always try to put my foot down and refuse. But he gets so upset by the suggestion that people might not be, at heart, always good, that I wind up feeling as if I’m doubting him, and I back down. He’s like goddamn Diogenes, only instead of a lamp he walks around with a baseball bat, handing it to everyone and looking for the one man who won’t turn around and brain him with it. It’s exhausting, to say the least. And it proved fatal to Timon in the end.

The play doesn’t spell it out specifically – and all the summaries I read just say he died – but I think it’s pretty obvious the poor bastard offed himself. I certainly don't mean to imply that I would follow that example, but well, read this. It's from his final speech:

I have a tree, which grows here in my close,
That mine own use invites me to cut down,
And shortly I must fell it.

If that’s not a suicide note, then what the hell else is it supposed to mean?

Hakuna matata, indeed.

How Would You Like It?

2008-06-01T06:56:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, a girl fell in love with a boy. He loved her too, but they neither of them knew it. She wound up dressing as a boy for complicated reasons that don’t much matter here, and then a girl fell in love with her. Meanwhile she – our girl-boy – pretended to pretend she was a girl, so she could spend time with the boy who loved her, pretending to try to make the him give up his affections. In the end, something like twelve couples wind up getting married, and they all live happily ever after except for one guy, who becomes a monk.

Pretty standard Shakespearean farce, in other words.

But the thing that grabbed me about As You Like It was that right there in the middle of it – smack dab in the first scene of Act IV, to be precise – lies the answer to one of the burning questions scholars have failed to answer about the Bard’s personal life, and I can't imagine how they've missed it all these years.

See, there isn’t too much known about the man that Shakespeare was. His accepted biography is limited to legally-documented facts: he was born, got married, had a couple kids, bought a house in one town and rented in another, then eventually died; but that’s really it. Anything else is merely speculation.

And hoo, boy, has there been speculation! Left-handed, red-headed, Masonic homosexual who may or may not have really been an illiterate Muslim woman with six fingers on each hand; probably couldn’t sign his (or her) own name even with an X, let alone compose the body of work that bears it.

Bullshit.

But one minorly salacious tidbit that I have wondered about is this: why didn’t he live with his wife? He bought (everyone is always careful to point out) the “second-largest” house in Stratford Upon Avon, then left his family there and rented a series of apartments for himself in London.

Why?

London's where the theater was, certainly enough, but couldn’t the family have lived there? Or, seeing as how he was writing the plays and not (usually) performing them, couldn’t he have worked from home in Stratford? Was he speculating real estate? Maintaining ties to his place of birth? Hiding a girlfriend? Hiding a boyfriend?

What?

Well, I’ll tell you what. Read this:

… maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives. [A wife] will be more jealous of thee than a Barbary cock-pigeon over his hen, more clamorous than a parrot against rain, more new-fangled than an ape, more giddy in [her] desires than a monkey. [A wife] will weep for nothing, like Diana in the fountain, and will do that when you are dispos’d to be merry. [A wife] will laugh like a hyen, and that when thou art inclin’d to sleep …You shall never take her without her answer unless you take her without her tongue. O, that woman that cannot make her fault her husband’s occasion, let her never nurse her child herself, for she will breed it like a fool.

In other words: he hated living with the bitch.

Now, I’m not saying Anne Hathaway was actually a bitch (although I will say I wouldn’t blame her if she was, what with him knocking her up and then going off to live carefree in London town) but just: married life is always what it is. You court, you woo, you swoon, you – you-know – and then eventually somebody has to fart. Old Willie probably had a particularly sensitive nose, and so poor Anne went down in history as the object of speculative cuckolding just because she happened to do her farting in a famous writer’s bed.

Hmm...

I guess that means that all of you – and especially Johnny – can consider yourselves warned:

There will be no farting in my general direction.

Thank you.

The Play That Launched a Thousand Sh*ts

2008-05-25T14:12:00.000-07:00

This one's a tosser. Troilus and Cressida. The plot -- well, if you've ever read The Iliad (or if you ever happen to watch the evening news) you know how this one goes: City at siege, troops wracked by war, soldiers killed and their lifeless bodies dragged through enemy streets while people cheer. Blah-de-f'ing-blah-de-blah.

There's also a love story here (hence the title) but it doesn't take up more than 1/4 of the book, and it's only tangentially connected to the war. Which is why the pseduo-epo-nomenclature makes absolutely perfect sense.

Anyway, none of this is either here or there, because the real point of this play is the cursing.

Someone I once knew had one of those "magnetic poetry" sets on their fridge that was made up of Shakespearean insults. The only two I remember from it from back then are "Jackanape" and "Whoreson" -- neither of which are easily worked into conversation without looking like a jackanape yourself -- but there were thousands. Well, hundreds, anyway. And I'd bet at least two-thirds of them came from this play.

Here's a representative paragraph from Act V, scene 4. It's spoken by a fellow named Thersites -- described in the list of actors as "a deformed and scurrilous Grecian," and probably the most prolific and inventive of all potty-mouths. (If you understand that Troilus gave Cressida a sleeve of his garment as a remembrance and it has since been taken from her when she refused to divulge its source, then this paragraph also, incidentally, serves as a fairly decent plot synopsis to this point. If you're paying attention. Which I am usually not.):

Now they are clapper-clawing one another, I'll go look on. That dissembling abominable varlet, Diomed, has got that same scurvy, doting, foolish young knave's sleeve of Troy there in his helm. I would fain see them meet, that that same young Troyan ass that loves the whore there might send that Greekish whoremasterly villain with the sleeve back to the dissembling, luxurious drab of a sleeveless errant. O' th' tother side, the policy of those crafty swearing rascals -- that stale old-mouse-eaten dry cheese, Nestor, and that same dog-fox Ulysses -- is not proved worth a blackberry. They set me up, in policy, that mongrel cur Ajax against that dog of as bad a kind, Achilles. And now is the cur Ajax prouder than the cur Achilles and will not arm today. Whereupon, the Grecians began to proclaim barbarism, and policy grows into an ill opinion.

Oooh, he said "ill opinion!"

I can't help wondering about the hyphenation, though. Was it a typo, do you think (it wasn't mine), or did Shakespeare really mean to say "old-mouse-eaten"? Is being eaten by an old mouse somehow worse than being eaten by a young one? For a stale dry cheese, I mean? Do old mice wind up tearing you into little bits and gumming you to death?

Either way, I think I'll call people abominable varlets from now on.

Enough! Enough! My Lord!

2008-05-18T13:21:00.000-07:00

I'm here. I swear to god I'm here. And I've been reading.

I read Midsummer Night's Dream a while ago, but I haven't had the chance to write about it because I've been away all Sundays since. I did think I was going to write about it this week in combination with the next play that I read, but I haven't technically managed to finish the next one yet. So here we go, Midsummer, solo:

The Dream doesn't really count as a new thing for me, because I worked tech on an amateur production of it about a thousand years ago, so it's not like I was reading something new. But it came up at the top of the pile, and it had to get read eventually, therefore it's what I read. Besides, I got something out of MSND this time that I never got when I was backstage helping aging queens out of their undergarments.

Back then, I had no idea how much snideliness and anger Mr. Bard had packed between the ass-head jokes. Maybe I was inured to certain streams of snideliness and anger by all those naked, sweaty queens, but I never got then that the whole play-within-a-play thing was actually a big backhanded slap to everyone who ever had the plebeian nerve to misunderstand his art.

Good for you, Bardy, I say! That act was ballsy, and not a little rude.

I mean, how dare a person not understand every obscure reference you slide into a simple sentence! How dare they not have read everything you have! How dare they think a spade's a spade, just because you use some words that seem to call it so! How dare they!?

Prick.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they were just characters. Tiggle-butt and Flop-bottom and all the rest (or whatever the actor-characters names). Maybe they weren't meant to take the piss out of the system. Maybe I've misunderstood. Perhaps insulting the audience you were paid to please was the stuff of hifalutin comedy back in the Elizabethan day.

I'd like to think I was wrong, as a matter of fact. I'd like to think this whole endeavor was intended to be sincerely droll. Because there is a minor character in the Dream that I never noticed before -- not one of those flop-bottomed ones, but even more secondary -- whose name is Egeus.

And the Folio abbreviates his name as Ege.

If I Had Fairies to Attend on Me, This Would Be a Lot Easier

2008-05-07T06:13:00.001-07:00

I haven't quit this, I swear to god. I just haven't been home and healthy on a Sunday for a little while. I won't be this week, either, which is why I'm checking in today.

I am still reading, and next week (the 18th), when I get back on the stick, I'm going to to a twofer:

A Midsummer Night's Dream, and
Whatever Historical Play I Pull Out of the Bag Tomorrow

Tune in next week to see how I manage to tie those two disparate (or maybe not) things into one cohesive, if half-assed, book report!

Also, I Think He Might Have Been A Mason

2008-04-20T05:18:00.000-07:00

I’m not one for the recidivist conspiracy-type theory. I don’t care what color Jesus was or whether he had kids, I don’t think Hitler was secretly Jewish, and I simply can't accept that every single other historical figure I’ve ever heard of was either bipolar or gay. Unless you show me a letter in Abraham Lincoln’s indisputable script that says “Dear Future Historian: I have sex with men!” then I just plain old don’t want to hear it. It doesn’t matter, as far as I’m concerned, and the speculation is beneath us all.

So, to continue that train of thought to its logical conclusion: Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. Now sit down. Go watch the “X-Files” or something and leave me alone.

Very scientific argument, don’t you think? Maybe I should try to get it published.

Anyway, this week I read Pericles, Prince of Tyre. For those of you unfamiliar with the story, it’s – well, it’s a doozy. It’s kind of a poor man’s Odyssey, with incest and prostitution, murder and reincarnation, gods and fishermen and kings. The story travels all over the place, but it never seems to really go anywhere. Even the poet/narrator who opens every act by telling what’s about to happen – in iambic pentameter with a very simple rhyme scheme – never actually has anything to say. No warnings or insights, no “what fools these mortals be.” Just “This here is the act about the murder” and exit stage left.

It just doesn’t feel like Shakespeare, is what I’m saying. Although that wasn’t my first thought.

My first thought, honestly, after having read The Tempest last week and only barely figuring it out, was: “Phew! This one is easy!” The poems read like Dr. Suess, and there’s nothing in the plot that’s hard to understand – I mean, once you accept that if you give a dead girl a stern talking-to, she’ll just shake it off and come on back to life.

But the further along I got, the more I realized there was nothing going on. I’m no scholar, and I’m only a third of the way through his plays, but I’ve seen enough by now to form some expectations. Among them: if it’s a comedy, there’s cross-dressing involved sooner or later; if it’s a tragedy, there’s blood, and plenty of it; and if it’s history, then there’s a lesson buried somewhere, usually regarding man’s inhumanity to man. This had none of those. This was just an adventure story, and not a very well-told one, at that.

I don't mean to imply I think I could do better. It’s just that, in comparison with “to be or not to be”? Pericles ain’t. I was about three-quarters of the way through when I decided to look it up. Find out if it was maybe the first thing he’d ever written. Could little Willie have been merely a child when he churned it out? Or did he suffer a crushing blow to the head in mid-career?

And that’s how I learned this to be one of the plays that “they” consider Shakespeare didn’t write, at least not in its entirety. Although, come to think of it, this can’t be the first I’ve heard. Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare kicked off this whole thing for me to begin with, and I imagine Bryson must have had something to say. I just probably wasn’t listening, wishing instead he would quit his yammering and go watch an Oliver Stone movie or something. So let’s check back and see what he thinks, shall we?

Oh, argh! No index? And—what?! No table of contents, either? I take it back: Bill Bryson is not my hero, he is a pain in my ass!

Never mind. Screw Bryson. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

The editors of the Oxford and Arden editions of Pericles support the contention that it is a collaboration between Shakespeare and [George] Wilkins, citing stylistic links between the play and Wilkins's style that are found nowhere else in Shakespeare. The Cambridge editors reject this contention, arguing that the play is entirely by Shakespeare, and that all the oddities can be defended as a deliberately old-fashioned style.

In other words, it just doesn’t feel like Shakespeare. So the Oxford scholars went out and found a contemporary of his whom they believe it feels more like, and they attribute it – with no other reason, as far as I could tell in my exhaustive research of a single google search – to this George Wilkins character. Meanwhile, the Cambridge editors wish the Oxford boys would go conduct an in-depth analysis of Kevin Trudeau.

I’m not so foolish as to wedge myself between the syllables of Oxbridge. If there is one thing I’ve managed to teach myself in my twelve dozen years on earth (gross!), it is how and when to graciously admit what I don’t know. So I’m not taking a stand. I will restate what I said before, which is that I agree the Prince of Tyre doesn’t feel like Shakespeare, but I won’t speculate as to the reason why. After all, I've never heard of George Wilkins until this afternoon. As far as I know, he and the Bard of Avon could have been a single beast.

Maybe even the kind with – wink wink, hump hump– an extra back?

Something About a Teacup? A Teapot? Something?

2008-04-13T10:14:00.000-07:00

I actually saw The Tempest once. In a community theater. In Melbourne, Florida, I think. And you want to know what else?

I still had no idea what it was about.

Something about a shipwreck, I was pretty sure. Although they practically handed me that piece of information, what with the big cardboard ship running aground on stage and all.

So I cheated a bit and read a synopsis before picking up the play itself. I figured, if I saw the thing and couldn’t suss it out, I didn’t stand much hope of gleaning crucial details while climbing endless pretend sets of stairs.

(I do my morning reading on the stairmaster. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned that, but it bears repeating just in case. Because, you see, exposition is important.)

It turned out to be a damn good thing I read that synopsis, too, because in order to understand what goes on in the play, you really have to understand what’s been going on before. And those details are presented in a flash, on pages 4-12.

Prospero, a one-time Duke of Milan, was shipwrecked with then-three-year-old Miranda a dozen or so years ago. I’m still not clear on whether or not she is technically his daughter, but if I understand him right, he’s none too clear himself. Anyway, Prospero spends those eight opening pages telling Miranda the story of their lives so far – as if the two of them living on an island with only a fairy and an attempted rapist for company, would never in 12 years have talked about how they wound up there.

Oh yeah, and there’s a fairy and a would-be rapist. Monster Caliban, the rapist guy, is the orphaned son of an African witch (although I really don’t know what she has to do with anything). He was on the island when they got there, and they were all friends until Miranda grew up a little and he tried to, you know, "violate her honor." I guess Ariel, the “airy spirit,” used to belong to the dead witch, too, but now he belongs to Prospero – who uses him for magical purposes, and keeps promising to set him free but never does.

All this happened before we arrived, and then they talk about it for eight pages, and then the story starts. Sheesh.

Actually, the story starts on pages 1-3, with another shipwreck. Prospero sent Ariel to take down the ship belonging to the new Duke of Milan, who Prospero believes responsible for his own undoing all those years ago – and who I just looked up and discovered is actually Prospero’s brother. I missed that little bit of information. Huh. How he happened to know they would be sailing by, though, is anybody’s guess.

So they wreck but all survive, and the very first gentleman that comes wandering into camp, Miranda falls head over heels in love with. Slut! Prospero’s like “Hey, kid, slow down! There’s lots of other men in the world and now we’re going to finally get to sail off and meet some of them” (because, oh yeah, the ship didn’t actually, technically, wreck – it was all just a plot to get Propsero a boat ride off the island and get revenge on Brother Usurper). But she’s all “Oh, no, Daddy, I can’t imagine there’s anybody out there better than this guy. O, brave new world that has such people in it!”

Blah blah blah.

So in the end they do sail away. Miranda marries her dude, Prospero gets his Duke on, and Ariel gets let go free at last -- to, I don’t know, flit about the island all by himself, I guess. But I don’t know what ever became of Caliban. I’m sure they said. They must have said. Right?

I don’t remember.

Friends, Romans, Countrymen... Lend Me Your Testicles

2008-04-06T04:20:00.000-07:00

I dreamed last night that I got to the end of Antony and Cleopatra and there was no asp. Closing the book and checking the cover, I realized I’d accidentally picked up King Lear instead, and had somehow read the entire play without so much as noticing. Which is odd, because I’ve read King Lear before. Cordelia and the plunge and all that jazz.

Hm.

Odd, too, because, if anything, Antony and Cleopatra reminds me of Romeo and Juliet – which I’ve also already read. It’s practically the same story, except in this case the star-crossed lovers are old enough to know better, too old to be forgiven their tomfoolery, and therefore I couldn’t muster up two hoots of sympathy for them when they died.

Oh, oops, sorry. Spoiler alert. But come on, that was like two thousand years ago. You have to have known they weren’t going to make it, right?

Anyway, A&C reminds me of R&J for a bunch of reasons: two people aren’t supposed to be in love, but still they are. Society and happenstance conspire to keep them apart, yet they find ways to be together anyway. They even die the same: she fakes her death, he kills himself, and then she follows suit. Ditto!

Except this one just doesn’t feel like a great love story to me. It feels like two selfish people all full of themselves, not quite understanding the concept of being citizens of the world. Antony cheated on his first wife with Cleopatra, and that first wife died in his absence – did he really have to take a second wife? Even if she was just a pawn in a political game? He had no intention of being faithful to her, or the alliance she represents, so why get her all mixed up in everything?

Speaking of not following through on a promise: Cleopatra, did you really have to pledge your whole fleet of ships to that naval battle, only to turn tail and run at the first shot? Fighting a good fight and giving up, I could understand, but if you know you can’t stand the sight of blood, you don’t volunteer to assist the surgeon. You see what I’m saying?

We won’t even talk, Antony, about you leaving your own fleet behind to get trounced while you chased after her like a freaking lapdog. Good god. She might's well have put a collar on you and had done with it. What happened to that nobleman who saved Rome from certain anarchy with his “Lend me your ears” speech after Julius Caesar died? “Lend me your testicles” is more like it.

Grow up, the both of you.

Sheesh.

Ten Things I Didn't Know About Julius Caesar

2008-03-30T05:02:00.000-07:00

I'm out of practice with this, what with St. Patrick's Day and Easter falling on these past two consecutive weekends. Plus I read half of this play, then put it down for a week while a friend was visiting, and then read the rest. So I'm not as on top of it as I have been with the others (ha!), and therefore I've determined that the best approach is to phone it in and move on.

Herewith:

Ten Things I Didn't Know About Julius Caesar

1. It's not over when he dies.

2. "Friends, Romans, countrymen etc." is not spoken by Caesar -- which ought to have been obvious, considering the next line about burying the bastard.

3. It's spoken by Mark Antony. And yet still, for some reason, Shakespeare sees fit to give him his own whole separate play. I'll read it next, and it better be worth it. I mean, "Kiss my grits!" was funny and all, but nobody needed to see Flo.

4. Brutus did not act alone.

5. Though he takes most of the blame. Which is only fair, considering he did the actual stabbing.

6. And also, therefore, he croaks it in the end.

7. Kills himself, actually, by falling on his sword. Except he didn't really -- he made somebody hold the sword for him because he knew he didn't have the balls. But that guy gets to cry Nuremberg, seeing as how he's just a slave.

8. Hey! I knew that last one! I remember it from seventh grade!

9. If you insist on calling yourself a poet, at least don't share your name with a famous conspirator/assassin.

10. Because angry mobs don't always ask to see ID.

Give Me a Sandwich and a Douchebag...

2008-03-09T06:52:00.000-07:00

Charles Dickens had such a knack for character names. He’d make up these decidedly odd, multi-syllabic, nonce appellations that flawlessly encapsulated a personality in a nutshell. They weren’t real words, but they seemed like them – and sometimes even got turned into real words later on. All he had to do was mention the name in passing, and you’d know exactly who that person was before the character was ever introduced. Mr. Fezziwig, for example – as opposed to Ebenezer Scrooge. You don’t have to read the book to know which of those two guys is jolly and which one is kind of mean.

Will Shakespeare, I hate to say, could have learned a thing or two from Chuck in this department.

To be fair, some of his names, like many of his self-coined words, have passed into the lexicon. And to be double-fair, it’s true that King John is a history – most of the characters in it really lived, or had long held their names in popular legend, anyway. So Shakespeare honestly didn’t have much leeway here.

But were Bigot and Bastard really his only options?

Okay, one more to-be-fair: Bigot is – or was, at the time – actually the name of a people in Southern Gaul (I looked it up). So Shakespeare’s “Lord Bigot” may have been simply intended to be a big mucky-muck among them. But I doubt it. Because, you see, I actually looked up two things this time, and it turns out that “bigot” was well-established as an insult by the time he used it. Not in our modern sense, but it’s a safe bet that everybody would have understood it to mean, at the very least, “religious hypocrite.”

And it just so happens that he doesn’t show up until after the whole “will King John bow to the Pope?” kerfuffle in Act V. Even then, he doesn’t have a single line. His job is just to stand there and be, as it were, a visual aid. An Elizabethan Power Point slide for those of us who might not understand the subtext without the charts and arrows.

Bastard, on the other hand, is not that guy’s given name. His real name is Phillip. But, after an expository scene in the beginning explaining that he is, indeed, a bastard (the “who’s your daddy?” kind, not just the random asshole), he is never called by name again. His job, for the most part, is to trail people around and wait for them to walk off stage, so he can talk to himself, and thereby explain to us, about whatever just happened that we may have missed.

Charts and arrows.

Anyway, the basic story of the play here is that King John is not – or is at least not universally understood to be – the rightful king of England. Just who is, however, is open to dispute. Could be his nephew, could be the king of France. Doesn’t really matter. The point is, after a hundred pages of machinations and excommunications and war and arguing about it, King John and the nephew are both dead, and England has lost all its land in France.

So I’m on the stairmaster and I’m turning the final page, and I’m congratulating myself on knowing without having to flip back through it what the whole thing was about. I’m just beginning to formulate the germ of an idea for an essay about how if King John had been willing to step back and serve the greater good, then he mightn’t have been king but at least it would have ended up okay. And then, just as I’m about to close the book and step off the machine, I come to this:

“This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.”

Dammit! There it is! In a nutshell! Exactly what I was gearing up to say!

I changed my mind. Shakespeare was really good at naming characters. Especially this one.

Bastard.

Tit for Tat

2008-03-02T04:43:00.000-08:00

I couldn’t tell, reading Measure for Measure, whether it was supposed to be comedy or not. It’s certainly not a tragedy: nobody dies. And it’s not a history: at least, I don’t think there was ever really a Duke who dressed up as a Friar to convince a nun to pretend to sleep with his deputy. But it sure as hell isn’t very funny.

Not even in the it-doesn’t-make-me-laugh-but-at-least-I-can-see-the-humor way of a cross-dressing farce like Twelfth Night. The only part in it that amused me was when the Duke says “I have to go now, but I will send the Friar” then steps off stage, dons the robe, comes immediately back on, and nobody knows him. That right there is pretty darn absurd, if you’re asking me.

But the rest of it? Here’s the deal:

Duke purports to leave town, appoints Angelo to do whatever Dukes do in his place. Angelo immediately declares war on fornication, arrests Claudio for knocking up his will-be wife. Claudio’s sister, Isabella, a novitiate, goes to Angelo to plead for her brother’s life. Angelo says if she sleeps with him, he’ll let Claudio go. She refuses – her logic being: better he should die unjustly and spend a happy afterlife, than that she should extend his years on earth by breaking her brand-new nun vows and dooming herself to eternal hell.

Then the Duke shows up in his friar cloak. He knows that Angelo got married five years ago and has ever since refused to sleep with or acknowledge his own wife. So the Duke sets a plot in motion whereby Isabella agrees to sleep with Angelo, but insists that it be perfectly dark and they don’t speak during the act at all, then she sends Mariana, Angelo’s betrothed, in her stead. This way Claudio will live, Isabella stays pure, and Mariana gets her due.

But the sniveling little twit orders Claudio beheaded anyway. And he wants the head brought to him in a sack.

He actually orders two heads chopped off on the same day, but only one brought to him, so the Duke’s brilliant plan is to just chop off the one, then cut the hair and dye the beard and pass it off as Claudio. Hell, nobody recognizes him in his Obi-Wan-Kenobe getup, why should they be able to tell the difference between one dead head and another?

But that other condemned guy refuses to be executed that day on the grounds he’s been drinking all night. Nice prison, what? If I’m ever on death row, then that is where I want to spend it, getting drunk and telling the warden what I will and will not do.

Fortunately, some other random prisoner up and died the night before, and he even happens to have the same color hair as Claudio! So they use his head instead, Angelo’s happy, and Isabella is devastated.

I’m not sure why she couldn’t have been let in on the little secret until the big reveal in the final scene. Maybe they didn’t trust her acting skills, or maybe it was just a test. Because in that final scene, the Duke “returns,” orders Angelo killed for Claudio’s death, and Isabella begs the Duke to spare his life. Her argument, if I’m understanding it correctly, is: who can blame him for wanting to sleep with me? And besides, he didn’t, anyway. She seems to miss the point, that this was supposed to be about punishing him for having killed her brother.

But it doesn’t matter, because brother’s not dead after all. And after he’s led out onstage alive, the Duke, out of nowhere, asks Isabella for her hand in marriage. She never answers (in fact, she never speaks again) but I think we’re meant to assume that she’ll say yes – seeing as how, in the Duke’s final speech, everybody is pretty much ordered to get married and live happily ever after. (And, if the sonnets that I read last week are any indication, I assume they’ll all be having lots of children.)

So you see why I’m confused. Not particularly funny, but not all that tragic, either – and certainly not historic. Just a play, more or less. A play about people being pure shit to each other, which in the end gets wrapped up happily. If, that is, you’re willing to accept that the main protagonist – the novitiate who set the whole plot in motion by refusing to go against her vows even to save her brother’s life – doesn’t really want to be a Sister in the first place.

Then again, maybe that’s why Isabella never answered the Duke’s proposal. Maybe, as soon as the curtain falls, she smacks him in the gob, hitches up her skirts and hightails it back to the nunnery.

Add a little Benny Hill music, and maybe a boob or two popping out of her habit as she runs, and you’ve got pure comic gold.

Don't forget, Shakespeare was British, after all.

Hamlet Was a Punk

2008-02-24T06:37:00.000-08:00

Turns out I’ve never read Hamlet.

I thought I had. I was sure I had. I even, when I began this project, put it in the “easy” column of the list I’m keeping in my head because of the fact that I had read it all before.

I hadn’t.

And it turns out that one Mel Gibson, one Kenneth Branagh, one episode of This American Life, and a habit of stopping everything whenever Rosencrantz and Guildenstern comes on TV, does not add up to having actually read the freakin’ play.

Still, though, it’s fair to say I knew it. More than I did Coriolanus or Titus Andronicus before I read them, that’s for sure. I knew about poor Yorick and about the players, I knew about crazy, doomed Ophelia and her father getting stabbed behind the curtain, I knew about Hamlet’s suicidal tendencies and could even recite his “What a piece of work is man” soliloquy verbatim, thanks to a two-decade long, unshakeable obsession with the soundtrack to Hair.

What I didn’t understand, until about page 3, was the perfectly obvious and sensical fact that not every single word Bill Shakespeare wrote was genius. And that the most famous of his plays are oceans better than the ones most folks don’t know.

Hamlet, for example? Much better than, oh, say, Coriolanus.

Duh.

Now, I’m not going to get into a whole discussion of what’s so great about it. I would just embarrass myself, because I’m sure it’s all been said before. Suffice to say that parts of it sing like music, parts of it smirk with slyness, and parts of it, honestly, I still don’t understand (“Sir, his definement suffers no perdition in you; though, I know, to divide him inventorially would dozy th’ arithmetic of memory, and yet but yaw neither, in respect of his quick sail.” Huh?).

But I do have to borrow, and share, someone else’s interpretation of the play. I couldn’t read it without thinking of this fellow, and I can’t really come up with anything cleverer to add.

That This Life episode I mentioned earlier? It was about a woman who travels around putting on Shakespeare plays in prisons. They only get one shot at performance after months of rehearsals, and inmates have to share the roles because there aren’t enough to go around. In this particular rendition, five different guys were cast as the great Dane.

But it was Horatio that got me. Played by a don’t-mess guy by the name of Big Hutch – a guy who’s never getting out of prison for whatever he did, and who likes to call himself the Killer Whale because, he says, he just flows through and people get out of his way. When asked his opinion on the whole Hamlet scenario, Big Hutch had this to say (and let's be clear: I’m paraphrasing. I wouldn't want Big Hutch to think he'd been misquoted.):

"Hamlet," he started,"was a punk. Why he gotta waste four hours waffling about shit? Dude killed your daddy – if you believes you saw your Daddy-ghost, then you gots to believe what that Ghost say. Don’t need to go puttin’ on no play to prove it! Dude killed your daddy, you got a job to do. Just shut yo’ mouth, man. Get it done."

You can’t deny Big Hutch has got a point. Would’ve made for a much shorter play, though. Maybe not so many sing-like-music moments, either.

Sonnet Week -- The End (For Now)!

2008-02-23T05:24:00.000-08:00

#14

I think he's starting to realize that we're not having kids. Because he's saying really mean things about my end (meaning death, not derriere) and doom and stuff like that.

Sonnet Week Two!

2008-02-22T04:45:00.000-08:00

#13

Last line:

"You had a father, let your son say so."

This is the first time it strikes me as odd: he is a man, writing to a man, calling him beautiful and love and all the rest (I'm not the only one to point this out; I remember reading in the Bryson that many of the sonnets are addressed to a "Beautiful Youth" or something like that, whom everyone acknowledges was something more than a friend to our Theatrical Bard), and insisting that he procreate?

Dude, five hundred years later we still can't pull that shit off.

Sonnet Week Two!

2008-02-21T04:22:00.000-08:00

#12

You think I'm kidding about this kid thins? Here, after lots of pretty words about dead flowers and dried-up trees, the last two lines:

"And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence."

I'm not imagining this. Right?

Sonnet Week Two!

2008-02-20T03:10:00.000-08:00

I peeked ahead, and the "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" poem is #18, so this "have kids" stuff can't possibly go on for too much longer.

Oh yeah:

#11

Have kids.

Sonnet Week Two!

2008-02-19T04:29:00.000-08:00

#9

#9

#9

#9

No revolution here. More "have kids" crap. If you don't, you're selfish. If you don't, the world's your widow. If you don't, then what is wrong with you already?

I'm getting really tired of this. How much longer do you think it will go on?

Sonnet Week Two!

2008-02-18T02:57:00.000-08:00

#8

If you don't have kids, you might as well not even exist in this world.

No, seriously, this one also says you should get married.

Which I did. So there.

Sonnet Week!

2008-02-17T03:44:00.001-08:00

#7

Now, apparently, ten kids aren't good enough unless one of them is a son.

Lay off, man. I'm warning you.

Sonnet Week!

2008-02-16T04:46:00.000-08:00

#6

Ten kids? You want me to have ten kids?

Sonnet Week!

2008-02-15T04:05:00.001-08:00

#5

Time passes, beauty fades, so make wine from summer's fruits and drink it in the winter.

(I think he's really talking about babies again, but I am tired of them.)

Sonnet Week.

2008-02-14T13:46:00.000-08:00

#4

Listen, Will, I'm not having kids. Okay?

My beauty dies with me, goddamnit.

Sonnet Week!

2008-02-13T10:03:00.000-08:00

#3

Have kids, already!

Sonnet Week!

2008-02-12T04:08:00.000-08:00

Sonnet #2:

Have kids.

Sonnet Week!

2008-02-11T14:23:00.000-08:00

I'm not going to be around on Sunday to write a big long thing, so I'm reading a big long two-weeker of a play which I will write about on the 24th. In the meantime, I'll read a sonnet a day and sum up my understanding of it as briefly as I can.

Ready?

Sonnet #1:

Narcissists suck.

Corioliar

2008-02-10T08:57:00.000-08:00

Honestly, I can’t decide whether it was such a terrible thing, what happens to Caius Martius at the end of this play. I mean, they call it a tragedy and all, but there are only so many categories to slot Shakespeare’s plays into. Caius (sometimes a.k.a. Coriolanus) getting run through on a sword may not be the saddest thing I ever read, but it’s sure not a comedy. And it’s not like there’s a category for “nebulous moral-political issues resolved by violence.” Is there?

Oh yes, that’s right: History.

Like I said last week, I’m not doing too much backup research here. But I did look up this Corioloanus fellow and while I gather it’s been assumed for a millennium or two that he actually existed, it’s not 100% certain. So I’m going to assume that’s why this isn’t called a history. Plus, apparently this Roman tale is eerily similar to that of a Greek fellow named Themistocles – and we know how those Greeks and Romans like to interchange their myths.

So fine, it’s not a history. But I’m still not convinced it’s a box-of-Kleenex weepfest, either.

Caius Martius comes home victorious from war with six or twelve or twenty-seven wounds upon his person. No one can seem to agree on the number, and he refuses to confirm them or display his scars. This is meant to be a sign of how noble he is, but I, for one, was certain it was going to end up he was faking the whole thing. I was wrong. But can you blame me?

He gets appointed to the Roman Consul based, essentially, on those battle-scars. Nobody asks him if he wants to be a consul, nobody asks him what he would do if he was. He’s just carried on the shoulders of the common people (figuratively speaking) from his victory parade straight through to the Senate chambers.

But, on the way, he makes the mistake of speaking publicly about his actual beliefs.

Turns out he’s not so keen on this “democracy” thing after all. Turns out he thinks those people, the ones who just elected him and cry his name out in the streets, are pretty dumb. Turns out his first act as Consul would be to do away with his ever having to listen to what those dummos have to say.

Well. They never. So before he can be confirmed, the people strip him of his title.

He’s shocked, and pissed. He can’t believe he’s being punished for saying what he really thinks. Especially when he never really wanted to be Consul in the first place. His mother comes in to console him and – get this – her take on the whole thing is “You spoke too soon. You should have kept your trap shut till you were in, and then turned around and wrung your hands and laughed.”

Who’d’a thunk a leader’s mother would be capable of offering cold-hearted advice like that!? Certainly not, well, anyone we know...

So his supporters send him out to make a speech in which he will say he’s all for people power. Naïve as a schoolgirl, he still doesn’t understand why he can’t just say what he believes. “You mean, you want me to go out there and lie to all those people, just to convince them to vote for me?”

Well, duh.

But it doesn’t work. And – this being ancient Rome and not modern-day Portsmouth, New Hampshire – ends with him being banished from the land. So where does he go? Straight to his enemy, of course.

“Listen,” he says. “You’ve seen me fight. You know I’m good. Let’s join up together and smite the hell out of those Roman sonsabitches.”

If you can’t join ’em, burn ’em down, I always say.

Long story short, his mother shows up again and convinces him not to go through with this dastardly plan. He goes to Enemy and says “Sorry, pal. Friends?”

“Friends,” says Enemy, and – after lots of speeches and stuff – stabs him in the gut.

The End.

And the reason I can’t quite see this as a tragedy is that – okay, I will buy that he was noble at the start. He fought with valor and served with purpose and spoke with actual conviction. But once he learned that people sometimes don’t (gasp!), he was a feather in the wind. Lying to this one, betraying that one, doing what his mommy told him – trying, on some level, to follow what was in his heart, but not sure anymore just what that—

Oh.

I see.

The tragedy isn’t that he dies on the last page. The tragedy happened in Act III, Scene ii – exactly halfway through the play.

When he decided to stand up and lie.

Sigh

2008-02-03T05:46:00.000-08:00

I was going to start with All’s Well That Ends Well because I liked the contrariness of it. But then, when I decided to match certain plays up to fitting places on the calendar when possible (Twelfth Night on Twelfth Night, Caesar on the Ides of March), I decided to leave All’s Well for this week. I had a reason, but I’m way too superstitious to tell you right now what that reason is. Some of you who know me may know what I mean, and for the rest, well: I’ll make a note back here tomorrow by way of explanation, come what may. But at this point all I’m willing to venture is that I do hope it ends well.

Anyway, I left this play for this week because I thought I’d have all sorts of funny insights that I could veil and double-mean, and otherwise generally write about in a snarky (yet non-jinxy) manner. About endings and wells and awls and things like that. But I can’t, because this one was hard!

See, I’ve determined to go into this thing mostly blind. I don’t study up on the plays before I read them, I don’t read the notes as I go along, and I don’t peruse any scholarly interpretations when I’m done—

What’s that? You say you can tell? Well, bully for you! I’ll tell you what: you read all the notes and surrounding literature, I’ll read all the plays, and we’ll see who gets to say they’ve read Shakespeare when they’re done.

And no, I don’t feel as though I’m cheating. Bryson made it pretty clear that these works were written for the masses. Meaning everyone. Meaning there were folks in SRO that had put up a month’s wages to be there. Meaning they probably didn’t all catch every reference or appreciate each clever turn of phrase. Even the Queen herself couldn’t possibly have been familiar with all the words Will uses – considering he flat-out invented half of them.

Words like: “accused,” “besmirched,” “invulnerable,” “majestic,” “remorseless,” “bet,” “discontent,” “excitement,” “savagery,” “summit,” “unreal,” “circumstantial,” “gossip,” “olympian,” “swagger,” “amazement,” “green-eyed,” and “champion.”

At least I know what these words mean.

And so far it’s been good. I don’t always understand every line, but I get the general sense, and usually the parts I’ve missed fill themselves in as the action moves along. One page at a time, one play at a time, one week at a time, my system’s served me well. But this week, of all weeks, it let me down. Whole great swathes of play went by with me not cottoning a single thing.

The central plot I understood just fine – Helen, the peasant virgin, loves Betram, the asshole lord. She tricks him into marrying her, then tricks him into knocking her up, and yet somehow at the end of the play she’s still the good guy. Well, he really is a cad. He couldn’t have knocked her up that way if he hadn’t been trying to slip his wick into every other wench that tripped along.

But there is this whole other military sub-plot that just escaped me. I can’t even start it off. All I got is that somebody’s a spineless something, but I don’t know who or why. In this week, of all weeks – when I do, lets face it, desperately hope that all ends well – I couldn’t bring it home. I failed, and now everything is going to end miserably and it’s going to be all my fault. I shouldn’t even be posting this here now because by doing so I’ll probably make it worse, and—

Hey wait! No, it didn’t! Fail me! I changed up! The game plan – I didn’t follow it! It’s my fault I didn’t get this one, but it’s not my fault (not yet, anyway) what happens after here.

See, despite all my “what’s good enough for them is good enough for me” talk, I couldn’t imagine myself or any other old peasant walking in to see a play without at least some general construct of the plot. So if I have no idea what a particular play’s about beforehand (as with Cymbeline, say, or Titus Andronicus, or Twelfth Night) I decided it’s okay for me take a little wiki-peek. Cymbeline’s about an old English king. Got it. Titus is a bloodbath. Right.

But this time, I didn’t. I thought, on this particular occasion, I ought not try to find out ahead of time whether things would, in fact, end well. So I abandoned the game plan, and Things Fell Apart.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about that military sub-plot:

“Back at the warfront, the young lords strive to convince Bertram that his ne'er-do-well friend Parolles is a coward. They set up an elaborate ruse to convince Parolles to recover a company drum stolen by the enemy and trick him into believing he has been captured. Parolles, thinking himself begging for his life, readily spills all his army's secrets to his "captors", betraying Bertram in the process. Dishonored and stripped of his title, Parolles returns to France as a beggar.”

Ooohhh…it was all a ruuuuse… he was never really captured in the fiiiirst place…

But wait a second. Was the drum ever really stolen?

None of my business. I admitted my mistake, I’m moving on. I’m back on track with the game plan now, and that’s all anyone can ask.

If you do that -- if you do your job -- then, however it ends, it's all Well.

Right, coach?

[update: we lost]

Titus Horrificus

2008-01-27T09:38:00.000-08:00

Titus Andronicus = 94 pages of people being just awful to each other, all in the name of twisted wartime revenge and national pride.

It opens with a Roman coffin being carried home from battle with the Goths. Inside is one of Titus’s four sons. They just about manage to lay the body in the tomb before all hell breaks loose, and after that the playwright has a hard time finding enough scene-space between the bloodbaths to squeeze in any actual, dramatic plot.

Seriously. Look at this list:

P. 6 – Goth Queen’s oldest son gets his arms and legs cut off.

P. 12 – Titus tries to kill his daughter, Lavinia, because she ran off with her true love instead of marrying the Emperor like Titus said, but his son stops him. So he kills the son instead.

P. 30 – The Goth Queen marries the emperor, and her sons kill Lavinia’s new husband.

P. 35 – The boyfriend of the Empress (nee Goth Queen) frames Titus’s sons for the murder; meanwhile her sons take Lavinia offstage, rape her, and cut off her hands and tongue.

P. 46 – Titus’s framed sons face beheading so, in exchange for their lives, Titus cuts off his own hand.

P. 47 – Sons get beheaded anyway.

P. 52 – Titus’s brother kills a fly, and Titus goes all boo-hoo on his ass.

P. 63 – Empress/Goth Queen has a baby, but it’s black like the boyfriend – not white like the Emperor. So the boyfriend kills the nurse that delivered it.

P. 85 – Lavinia and Titus kill the Empress/Goth Queen’s two sons.

P. 88 – He cooks their bodies into a pie and serves it to their mother.

P. 89 – Titus kills Lavinia (so she won’t have to be sad about the whole rape/no-hands-or-tongue thing anymore). Then he kills the Empress/Goth Queen. So the Emperor kills him. And then his son kills the Emperor.

P. 94 – That son, Lucius, is crowned the new emperor – and his first Royal Act is to order the Empress’s boyfriend buried alive up to his neck.

The End.

Not even a Shakespearean “Thanks for coming, we hope you enjoyed the show” soliloquy or anything. Just “Bury him – and while you’re at it, throw the Empress’s body to the dogs!” And the curtain falls with a resounding thud.

Nice, huh?

If I were the kind of person to muse over such things, I might be tempted to see this as a microtale of all civilization: I kill you, your son kills me, my son kills your son, and so on, and so on, and so on like an epic shampoo commercial gone terribly awry.

I might point out that the one moment of empathic humanity in the thing, amidst rapes and births and deaths and marriages, emerges over the killing of a fly – a tiny helpless creature at the mercy of the whims of a greater force – and Titus mourns the bug because he imagines its wee wife and children waiting somewhere for it never to return (he snaps out of it, though, when told the fly looked like the Empress’s boyfriend).

I might mention the fitting irony of the fact that the Empress gets her comeuppance as a direct result of trying to use Titus’s revenge-lust to her own payback-hungry advantage. Or that, although they all feel they’ve been wronged and are performing these heinous deeds in the name of love and justice, there simply aren’t any good guys here.

But I won’t.

In fact, if you read this thing another way, it’s almost funny. In the Pulp Fiction, over-the-top manner of a Monty Python sketch, say, or a South Park episode. Which isn’t to imply that Shakespeare was as impudent as Tarantino, as puerile as Trey Parker, or as scatologically obtuse as Terry Gilliam. Oh no. Just that, well…

If there had been lawnmowers in Elizabethan England, I bet it would have ended with much more panache.

Cymbeline! Cymbeline!

2008-01-20T06:05:00.000-08:00

Here’s a hint: if somebody says to you “I’ll bet you anything I can get your wife to sleep with me,” I don’t care how in love you are. I don’t care how virtuous she is. I don’t care how certain you are of the special bond between you, or how you can feel her heart beat from a half a world away. The only proper answer to “I bet I can f your wife” is, “Thank you, no.” And a punch in the nuts, for good measure.

Gad! Reading this play was like watching a horror movie: Don’t go in the basement! Why are they always going in the basement?

* * *

I’d decided it was time to take a tragic turn. The first two plays I read were comedies, and there’s another one on the horizon – one I was supposed to have read first, but decided to save for a Very Special Occasion that I hope is coming up real soon. But I couldn’t decide which tragedy to read: I felt that, this early in the game, choosing one I’d read before would be like cheating. But then, I didn’t exactly feel like embarking on a g-d six-parter quite yet, either.

The best plan seemed to be: reach blindly into the bag of books and read the first tragedy I laid my hand on. Sonnets? No. As You Like It? No. Cymbeline? What the hell is Cymbeline? I don’t feel like looking it up right now, so: No. Hamlet? My god, I never realized how long Hamlet is. It’s like four times longer than any of the other plays. What the hell is Cymbeline, anyway?

I opened it up to have a look, and the title page harrumphed at me: “The Tragedy of Cymbeline. Ahem.”

Okay good. So we’ll put Hamlet back in the bag for now, then.

* * *

The truth is, you don’t have to read this entire play. Just read the last scene; it’s all recapped there in there for the King, who really hasn’t been in the thing much, otherwise, and who generally doesn’t have a clue what’s going on.

Your wife never loved you and wanted to kill you. Wha?

Your son’s not your son, but no matter, he’s dead. Huh?

Beheaded, in fact, by this long-banished traitor. Who?

Who kidnapped your real sons and raised them as his. Bu-?

Okay, let’s drop the accidental verse. How can I nutshell this? Let me see…

Take the spouse-icide of Macbeth, add the cross-dressing, brother-sister confusing hijinks of Twelfth Night and the whole I-thought-she-was-dead-but-she-wasn’t thing from Romeo and Juliet, toss in the stupid man making a stupid wager on his not-so-stupid wife theme from Shrew, and you’ve got Cymbeline.

(Named, by the way, for a character who barely registers except as someone to explain things to when they get confusing. But if there’s a Shakespearean comparison to be made there, I haven’t read it yet.)

In the end, though, I don’t think this one is so much a tragedy. I mean, Billy wrote it, so he’s allowed to call it what he likes. But the only folks who die are bad guys, true love wins out in the end, long lost children come back home to roost, the false-accused get their reputations back, and there’s even a little cross-dressing thrown in to boot. Sounds like all the hallmarks of a comedy to me.

Ah, but no fart jokes.

That is tragic.

I’m going to be flat-out honest with you: this is not the post that I intended to compose. But I was writing it last night, and when I got to the “Don’t go in the basement” part, Andy showed up. And I had a few beers. And I forgot what I set out to say. I swore I would post here every Sunday about the book I read last week, however, and there's a paper to read and a bathroom to clean and a game to prepare for. So I’m posting what I’ve got.

Hey, I never promised it was going to be Shakespeare…

The Taming of the Who?

2008-01-13T09:17:00.000-08:00

Do you remember how I began this Shakespeare thing? With my whole Liberal Arts, I-get-to-study-what-I-want, pigheadedness? Well, it just so happens that the Liberal Arts Institution that allowed me so much leeway was a Women’s College. And not just any Women’s College, mind you, but one of The Seven.

So, since I’m writing about The Taming of the Shrew, you wouldn’t be amiss if you expected me to get up on my High Feminist Horse and start slashing around at Chauvinist Dragons. But I’m not about to. And here’s why:

First of all, that woman was a shrew. Not just, as some might have her, an outspoken, centuries-before-her-time, strong-minded woman. She was A Shrew. Take any of her lines out of the first few acts, put them in the mouth of a man instead, and you’d expect him to get decked. She’s not merely speaking on her own behalf; she is obnoxious!

Here's her first scene, for example: she walks onstage with her dad and her sister. After two short pages, Dad dismisses Sister, who exits without question. A few lines later, Dad leaves, too, stopping on the way out to tell Katherina she doesn’t have to join him, that he’s only off to have a word with Sister. Here’s Kate’s reply:

Why, and I trust I may go too; may I not?
What! Shall I be appointed hours, as though, belike, I knew not what to take and what to leave? Ha!

And she stalks off in a huff.

See? Shrew!

Or asshole, or pain in the neck. Or kvetch, or brat, or spoiled-baby. Whatever you want to call her, what you want to tell her is: “What are you, three years old? Get over yourself, missy! You don’t have to always stamp your foot and do the opposite of what you’re told, just because you’re told it. Grow the f up, and quit your whinging.”

Which brings me to my second point:

Marriage ain’t easy. Finding someone you might want to marry isn’t easy; finding someone who might want to marry you is harder still; and making it work once you’ve found each other is damned-near impossible. But people do it. All the time. And how do they?

Compromise.

Granted, back in the day when you wound up with someone your father found for you, or someone your father could afford, those first two issues might – might – have been a little easier. But that last one sucks, no matter how you slice it. In fact, if you can figure out a way to slice it without slicing each other – at least figuratively, at least once in a while, at least for the first few years – then you are to be commended. And inducted to the Liar Hall of Fame.

Yes, in this play there are things the Husband does that we would not condone, but the Shrew-Taming is a play. And it’s a comedy. And it’s of another time. Things happen there the way they do because they have to. To keep the plot moving, and the funny up. You can’t (or at least I have determined not to) read all this stuff like it’s going on now.

But one thing I do feel comfortable projecting through the centuries is the simple fact that, in any relationship between two people, one of them is going to come out on top – even if you don’t aim for it as doggedly as did Petrucchio and Kate. If you don’t agree with me on this one, then congratulations are in order, ’cause you won. Or you’ve never been there. Or you’re just a great big lying liar.

Johnny’s and my relationship has been a ten-year struggle. I was a shrew when we first met, and so was he. We both still are. I think the reason our life’s still as contentious as it is, is that neither of us has been willing to admit defeat.

Petrucchio was lucky: once wed to him, Katherina could literally not feed herself without permission. Eventually, she got hungry and came around. You really have to read the play to understand why this detail doesn’t piss me off, and even then you may beg to disagree, but — have you read Lysistrata? A girl has got to eat, is all I’m saying.

In the end, Petruchio gets Kate to tell the world that night is day because he says so, then to apologize for her mistake when he says otherwise. Maybe that’s not quite the extreme I’d go for, but remember this: He married her because he needed her dowry. Knowing this, she could easily have walked all over him. And if she did, you’d be pissed at her. Right?

It’s not sexist. Two people got together, one of them won. And they live happily ever after. The end

Which brings me to interpretation number three:

Early on, when they’re together but Katherina is still bitching up the joint, Petrucchio tells everybody that the two of them have an agreement: She loves the crap out of him in private, but in public she shrews it to her heart’s content. It lets her save face, he argues, and he reaps the benefits behind closed doors – wink-wink, nudge-nudge, know what I mean? Technically, we don’t know if this story’s true or not. Going by what we do know so far of both of them, however, “not” is most definitely the safe assumption.

But it’s out there.

So at the end, maybe the opposite is true. Maybe she agreed to act all geisha in public, while behind closed doors he’s cooking the breakfast and doing the dishes and calling her all kinds of Honey-Sweetheart. And maybe she’s getting a little wink-wink of her own.

What I’m aiming at is this: when it comes to other people’s relationships – real or imaginary or celebrity; modern or ancient or somewhere in between; old or young or May/December; gay or straight or, what the hell, polygamous – when it comes to relationships that are Not Yours, in which you are not one of the (however-many) Interested Parties, you just Don’t Know. And never will. Is all I’m saying.

So lets leave our High Horses in their stable, shall we?

Happy Anniversary, my—

I meant to end with “love,” but I choked on’t
Instead, I offer thee this pictograph
The one above, the one below upon’t
Taken toge’er, I hope they make you laugh:

Happy 13th, Johnny!

Twelfth Night or What You Will

2008-01-06T06:38:00.000-08:00

I’ve decided that the plan with this blog is to post here just on Sundays. I might have sudden insights sometimes that make me lunge for the computer in mid-week, but in general it’s going to be Sunday’s child. And therefore, you know, full of grace.

Shut up.

This way, I ought to be able to keep up with the other one and still get actual real-life things accomplished. Aside from that, however, I have no plans. I’ll find out how it develops pretty much when you do, and I’m perfectly willing to entertain requests.

So here goes:

I decided to start with this play specifically because it’s set in Illyria – which is the ancient name for what is now Albania, where my grandfather was born. Also because it’s called Twelfth Night, which happens to be today. And, lastly, because one of the characters is a big fat drunk. Ahem.

It turns out, however, that there is absolutely no reason (at least that I can figure) for the setting. Bryson says Shakespeare sometimes chose locations just for their exotic nature, and that he didn’t always know that much about them. He was pretty safe in doing this, because nobody in the audience had any idea, either. At least this time he managed to land a ship in a place that’s actually near the ocean – which, also according to Bryson, he didn’t always do.

So it’s not about Albania. Which would be okay, except that it also has absolutely nothing to do with the Feast of the Epiphany – aside from a little cross-dressing, which was apparently the traditional way to celebrate the Feast back in the day.

There is a drunk guy, though. That’s something. I just can’t seem to figure out which one he is.

Therefore, considering that neither the name nor the setting have any bearing on the story whatsoever, I’ve decided from here on out to call the play by its subtitle – which seems to me to be far more appropriate.

What You Will is a story about a woman with a crush on another woman who is dressed up as a man and therefore keeps getting mistaken for her own real-life twin brother – who she thinks is dead, and who thinks she is, too, but neither of them are. When the alive-after-all twin brother shows up at the end, he goes and marries the woman who has a crush on his sister, who she thought was a he-man all along (at least I think he does: I missed it when it happened, but it seems to be implied), and then the sister gets yelled at for acting like it never happened because the wife still thinks the sister is the husband, but the sister doesn’t even know it did happen because she still thinks her brother’s dead and it certainly wasn’t her who wed the lady. This is Illyria, not Massachusetts, after all.

See? It’s simple, really.

Then there’s a side plot (there has to be a side plot, because the main one is so blah) in which an actual man is sweet on Woman #1 but, even before the Drag King showed up, she didn’t like him back. We’ve all been there, right? He winds up challenging DK to a duel but she, being a she, sidesteps the whole issue of bloodshed-in-the-name-of-penis-size.

But here’s the part that gets me: There are also these other guys who hate this totally random other guy for reasons that I haven’t quite sussed out. Maybe because he’s always drunk? Seems a little harsh to me. Anyway, they think it’s a big f’ing hoot to play jokes on him and make him think – for no reason whatsoever – that Woman #1’s in love with him.

They get this Illyrian Heather to write notes in her handwriting that say things like “I really love your yellow tights and your cross-garter. Smile at me when you see me even if I never smile back.” When they know full well she cannot stand yellow tights, especially cross-gartered ones – or, as best I can figure, men who smile.

I think I hate this bitch. Who the hell does not like smiles? Especially from men in cross-gartered yellow tights?

Anyway, this sort of thing was apparently every bit as funny in Elizabethan England as it was in Reagan-era high schools. Ha freakin’ ha. It works, and the poor bastard makes an utter fool of himself over a woman he never even thought of in that way before he found the stupid note.

You want to know what is funny, though? Here’s an exerpt from that obnoxious letter:

“If this fall into thy hand, revolve. In my stars I am above thee, but be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.”

Wait a second. This rousing, poetic sentence that we still quote in daily conversation to inspire and explain feats of altruism and heroics – it comes from a forged note meant to sucker a drunk into public humiliation?

Actually, I think I’ve figured out he’s not the drunk, but still. I looked it up in Bartlett’s. That’s the original source, all right.

Jeebers. Talk about your greatness thrust upon.

I Am A Cross-Dressing, Drunken, Lying Tog (Or Maybe Geg, I Can Never Remember Which Is Which)

2008-01-03T14:57:00.000-08:00

I told somebody that my intention was to be contrary and start this Shakespeare Thing with All’s Well That Ends Well. But then I got to thinking:

Here we are (or were, when I was thinking it) at January first, with the actual Twelfth Night itself a mere six days away. Why not start with that one? I could put the play behind me in six days and write about it on the day it’s named for.

I took a couple steps before settling for certain on this course of action. First, I went to my big fat paperback Complete Plays that I’ve had since high school (the manner in which I acquired that paperback is a story for another time – but you can rest assured I didn’t steal it; not technically, anyway).

I went to the paperback because little blue Yale hardcovers are all well and good – they’re antique-looking and pretty, conveniently one-play-at-a-time and portable and everything – but there’s nothing like a one-shot table of contents for a quick comparison of how many pages we’re talking about for each.

Twelfth Night is twenty-three pages in the Complete Plays. About 107 in the Yale. I can do that in six days, easy.

Around now you may be realizing that I’m not going about this in any scholarly sort of way. So you may not be terribly surprised to find out that I turned next to Wikipedia, for a CliffsNotes-style breakdown of the plot. I didn’t actually require the complete synopsis – I’m not writing a paper on it, after all (well, not really). I just wanted to know if Twelfth Night had anything at all to do with Twelfth Night, or if by starting with it I would be breaking my sacred word for naught.

The wiki verdict was: it does. Only barely, and only in the of-the-era-it-was-written sort of way – but still, it counts. Apparently, back in The Day, it was the tradition for folks to cross-dress in all kinds of ways on January 6th. I don’t do that sort of thing anymore but, like any good outcast of my generation, I served time at The Rocky Horror Picture Show. So I get it. And, since it was a Twelfth Night Tradition then, it counts.

(By the way, I think this might work as a strategy going forward. I could write about Caesar on the 15th of March. A Midsummer Night’s Dream on whenever that is. I could even blog The Taming of the Shrew on our anniversary – which, oh crap, is coming up in ten short days. Until right this very moment, I’d forgotten. Well, I bet Himself has, too, so anyway...).

I went next to the Yale to see if I could realistically expect to read twenty pages of it in a half an hour while I was on the Stairmaster. Because, oh yeah, I haven’t said this yet (and I didn’t realize this when I decided to start this little thing): I’ve vowed to finish re-doing my kitchen in the next few months, and I also promised to Irish-Knit a Christening Robe for a Dublin Baby that’s due at the end of April. I am multi-tasking, here, people! I ain’t got time for just lolling around, leisuring, me and some bon-bons and the long-dead Bard.

I opened the Yale Twelfth Night to the middle and read a random page:

“…divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried and every particle and utensil label’d to my will: as, item, two lips indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth…”

Oh, this is going to be easy!

I couldn’t resist flipping to the “Actors’ Names” page to identify this speaker, this Olivia, who had so sealed my fate (see? I’m getting down with the Bard-speak already) and that was where I saw the clincher. The tiny detail, meaningless in any other context, that promised me not only that this one play and I were meant for each other, but also that there seemed to be some cosmic spirit out there cheering me on.

Twelfth Night takes place in Illyria.

Illyria, the ancient name for the region that is now … Albania. And also a few other places like Serbia and Montenegro but they don’t count because I am … Albanian. And also a few other things like Irish and Scottish but they don’t count because I am … making a point here.

A play called Twelfth Night, set in Albania, that I might read, by Kings Day?

With that, it was decided, and I slammed the Yale book closed.

With which act I spilled my beer all over both it and my keyboard.

Which is okay, because the beer only permanently broke one button on the keyboard, and it's one that still has a functionable twin.

Plus, when I started reading the Twelfth Night for real the next morning, I discovered that one of the characters is a famous lush.

Someone is trying to tell me Something from Somewhere.