6 May 2013: Get thee a wife?

First thing “supine angel” workout, Congee (watery today), completed the Grand High Reread of All’s Well That Ends Well.

All’s Well a pleasant surprise. Not only was AWTEW written at a relatively late date in Shakespeare’s life it bears no marks (unlike its companion piece considered superior, Measure for Measure) of co-authorship and as such seems to flow, with characters that announce their personalities in language. But like Measure for Measure and unlike Twelfth Night or As You Like It, AWTEW could have been quickly field stripped and made into a tragedy with Bertram and Parolles as two good old boys that do Helena in.

But we like Helena too much, along with Diana and most of the significant characters in the play including Parolles. Shakespeare therefore followed the comedic rule (“nobody dies”). I cannot think of any Shakespeare play designated “comedy” in which a character dies as his or her punishment for villainy. But this reasoning might be circular; Shakespeare never said “the Tempest, All’s Well , … are to be called “comedies”. The designation, unlike “tragedy” never appears in the known titles of Shakespeare quartos nor in the first Folio; comedy is the default, so the mere appearance of “The Taming of the Shrew” announces a comedy, whereas Romeo and Juliet had to be “marked” as Lamentable. But this test is also flawed; the Winter’s Tale is a comedy by this test in which the counselor of Leontes is eaten by a bear. My head as well as my butt hurts.

But let’s drop these speculations (in the “textual ontology” of the Shakespearean canon) or now and turn to a lighter matter: Shakespeare’s attitude towards marriage.

It is strange indeed that Shakespeare was so pro-marriage in his plays; at the end of Much Ado About Nothing a profoundly contented Benedick happily recommends marriage to all and sundry:

First, of my word; therefore play, music. Prince,
thou art sad; get thee a wife, get thee a wife:
there is no staff more reverend than one tipped with horn.

His favorite female character, Rosalinde of As You Like It, eagerly pairs people up in the penultimate “act” to the finale, one of marriage. In Shakespeare, illicit romance and shacking up without a prospect of marriage never thrives. Yet he abandoned his wife…perhaps.

It is thought to take a cold bastard to pull a stunt like that, but a deeper Wisdom admonishes us here, asking if the cold bastard might not want to take a step with such salvific/redemptory potential, preferring pickles and wines in Stratford to supporting two households.

Perhaps, and I write with considerable bias since I took Shakespeare’s step in 1981, it takes the better man to face the truth of love’s absence. A married man looks forward to coming home from work; in ’81 I needed a double martini to face the guilt and pain of home. Shakespeare’s poetry is written by someone equally “sensitive”, which is to say useless until he mans up and does what is necessary, from leaving his wife (while supporting the kids) or facing a cancer diagnosis.

Merely “sensitive” men turn into rats under what TS Eliot called “the pain of living and the drug of dreams” like Pasternak’s Pasha in Dr Zhivago, a Trotsky figure who flees Lara’s love but dies a mile from her home. He’s like Zhivago when young in his idealism but unlike Zhivago doesn’t follow the path of love. Shakespeare I think did so; for one thing a job in theater may have allowed him to remit money to Anne Hathaway through trusty friends traveling to Stratford.

Today likely shall be a dual workout day for after this morning’s workout I look forward to physio this afternoon.

05042013: All is True

Congee and All Is True/Henry VIII Act 4, following a first-thing 20 minute workout supine.

According to Wells and Taylor, no part of Act 4 is by Shakespeare. Nonetheless I read it because it is part of the traditional canon. Many people thought that Shakespeare meant to chronicle English history all the way to the birth of Elizabeth even as Ralph Holinshed had chronicled English/British/Scottish history by taking the story back to Genesis in his history.

But that’s absurd. Shakespeare, of course, never filled in the spaces between King John and Edward III (assuming that Shakespeare wrote more than a bit if Edward III). And how the devil would one make a play about ANY incident in Henry VII’s deliberately boring reign? Your best bet would be the Perkin Warbeck nonsense.

My dual thesis, which my cancer-foreshortened life may, perhaps, never allow me to defend, is that we must be aware of a divide in the canon of plays more or less by Shakespeare, into plays expressing his genius as a forerunner of the Romantic single author of the single text, and his more workaday genius at making money by being a team member or team leader.

On the one hand, Shakespeare, as Ted Hughes maintains, was almost Ground Zero, the epicenter of several historical collisions who reacted by creating single-author works of genius from Romeo and Juliet to the second version of King Lear. We can discern his world-view which happens to be important by studying the careful architecture of these plays.

Individuals, especially those whose lives are spent mostly in taking care of a family, from my father to Shakespeare, are not thought to have a useful or novel world-view. But somehow Shakespeare’s multiple shocks prior to 1597, from unknown shocks causing him to flee to London to the death of his son, acted upon him tectonically, and very coincidentally he had, unlike most other people of his time, an outlet in the theater.

But by the mid 1610s it seems he had finished and was content to use embers of his fire to collaborate. The fire may have burned him: the blinding of Gloucester in Lear is bad enough to watch, writing it must have been worse.

Change Record

4 May 2012 Changes from proofreading

23 April 2013: More on the “Shakespeare authorship question”.

I apologize for the extensive revisions that this piece is undergoing online as you watch. I think its thesis, that there exists an unaltered Shakespeare text if we take out plays before about 1595 and after about 1600 except for the “big” tragedies (except for the Scottish play), and that we best draw conclusions from this distilled text, is unheard, and important.

Here’s a BBC story for St George’s day which rather sadly continues to waste time on “Shakespeare authorship” where we know that half educated Philistines who swotted A-levels with a tutor and hate Shakespeare, not ever, not once, hearing his music like to vent their destructive, animalistic, Troglodyte hatred by claiming that “Shakespeare” did not write “Shakespeare”.

William Leahy is the chair of “Shakespeare authorship studies” at Brunel University in the UK. As in Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Great Eastern, etc. Oh dear.

Snobbery? Moi? Well, it’s like this. As a graduate of Roosevelt University, a fifth rate nonetheless genuine university in Chicago charter’d in 1945 to not exclude any racial or gender group, and a quondam perfesser at DeVry, a time-honored if for-profit institution in Chicago, I have trusted academic fraud once too often, fraud I do not regard myself as participating in, and one form of academic fraud I find is the exaltation of engineers such as Isambard “Kingdom” Brunel.

The devil of it that that a part or subset of his “authorship studies” is a legitimate pursuit. We’d like to know more about what lines in what plays were penned, as we know most were penned, by an inspired actor-businessman. Of course, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor have already done much of this research but you lot could go look for Cardenio, I suppose.

Leahy, while being a responsible academic, “questions authorship” not in the sense of advancing a different candidate for the author of the Shakespeare corpus but by trying to show that Shakespeare was a co-author and broker and not a single “author”. Well, guess what. He was, but only for a part of his career. He seems to have preferred single authorship to arbitrage until a distinct shock of the early 17th century, possibly the death of his son experienced as a delayed reaction (as these things often are: as I may experience the death of my son). Other speculations include the fear of having acquired syphilis (cf. Measure for Measure).

Our favorite plays are to all appearances written by a non-depressed, rather jocund single author who sounds like a kind and decent man as opposed, say, to the author of Edward II (the very likely self-hating closet fairy Christopher Marlowe). Our favorite plays are in a “Shakespearean” style, earmarks of which include an architectonic sense that would be violated by co-authorship. Measure for Measure is harder to like because even in S’s time, most folks could not find it in themselves to condemn “fornication”, but for social cohesion, and the maintenance of a brutal class system and property ownership, even the more liberal authorities, like Duke in Measure for Measure, had to act a necessary charade of propriety at variance at least with human instincts until those instincts wither with age.

What’s an “architectonic sense”? Well, we find a clear analysis of Romeo and Juliet in Wells’ and Taylor’s Oxford Works. The ground of the plot is laid in a sonnet by Prologue. Escalus’ interventions divide the action into blocks above the level of the scene so we always know where we stand, whereas we are dazzled and confused in Henry VI part 1, less so in 2, and still less in Part 3: High School students can understand Romeo and Juliet.

Romeo and Juliet is a crowd pleaser and Love’s Labour’s Lost a cult favorite only. Working unbothered because at the time of Romeo and Juliet Henslowe et al. knew best to stand back, and Shakespeare’s concentration was unbroken and the initial fight, a skylark darkened with Tybalt’s introduction of killing, is balanced by the later fight for much more serious stakes after Tybalt accidentally kills Mercutio.

It was not until the Romantic era that it was thought that a novel or play might be best written either by a single author or at most two chaps more or less engaged in a Vulcan mind-meld. This held sway and by the 1960s was the ruling ideology: the “New” Criticism actually was a conservative backlash to this, which insisted that the author, not the text, had the intentions we must find. Then deconstruction and feminism focused our attention on the text, for as Derrida had said, there’s nothing BUT the text.

But before that and at a very late date in the American midwest, we all wanted to be Dead White Males.

Hacks, thought Orson Welles and Scott Fitzgerald, in all probability, work cheerfully as script doctors in a “team”, and Welles and Fitzgerald paid a heavy price for having Romantic desires in the twentieth century.

Welles destroyed RKO Radio Pictures and went on to a life of failure, intoning “we will sell no wine before its time” in the 1970s to pay the rent; he beggared himself to make pictures such as Chimes at Midnight whose worth is only now evident.

Fitz, more subject than Welles to the rigors of alcoholism, just couldn’t find the money or hours in the alcoholic’s foreshortened day to do much more than fragments save where his payment depended on finishing, for example the Pat Hobby stories about a painfully self-destructive screen writer.

To return to the main topic, by “our favorite plays” I mean the set of plays derived using this algorithm:

* Take the Collected Works

* Remove the early plays, roughly, those written before 1595

* Remove the later plays except for the big tragedies, except for the Scottish play (remove it): the big tragedies are the quartet Hamlet, Othello, Lear and the Scottish Play (sigh, Macbeth) but of Macbeth we have no uncorrupted text according to Wells, Taylor et al. A collaborator in Macbeth enters clearly when Hecate enters to scold the three Shakespearean witches and lead them in a dance. Shakespeare generally subcontracted the masque and dancing save when he had complete artistic control, in the Tempest and perhaps the Winter’s Tale, where the magic and masque is integrated with the plot seamlessly (“our revels now are ended”)

* Of the “late Roman” plays Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens and Coriolanus retain Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, discard Timon (Wells and Taylor of the Oxford Complete Works demonstrate that Timon was a collaboration

Bingo, this is core Shakespeare from which we can draw the best and most distilled conclusions; and this is no broker, this is no actor manager. It’s a Romantic artist struggling towards Bethlehem in the unimaginably brutal conditions of a proto Stalinist police state.

Let’s look closer.

The plays writ approximately before 1595 (before Richard II and Romeo and Juliet) have for us the markers of a journeyman and not a Shakespeare in full mastership: these plays are the Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, the “Henrician Trilogy”, Titus Andronicus, Richard III, A Comedy of Errors. In most of them there are signs of at least editorial supervision and at most co-authorship

Of course, it is itself “lamentable” that Richard III must be squeezed

“Deform’d, unfinished, scarce half made up
And that so lamely and unfashionable…”

into the one-dimensional, Procrustean bed of our model as that same poor chap was found deformed for centuries in Leicester until this year but in general all these plays, while not except for the Henrician Trilogy being co-authored, bear the marks of an incredible, almost exponential learning process, culminating in Richard III. This still has the one thought per one or two lines and avoidance of enjambement of the Henrician trilogy but it’s clear that by Richard III, having learned history play writing sitting possibly with Marlowe and writing the Henrician Trilogy, Shakespeare was set free on Richard III. He might make mistakes in romantic comedy (something he’d disprove shortly in Romeo and Juliet) but not in history.

We include the zenith of the comedic Shakespeare between, roughly, 1595 and 1600 with the apogee being 1599: Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King John, The Merchant of Venice, the “second” Henrician trilogy (Henry IV 1/2, Henry V), the Merry Wives, Much Ado, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, the golden Rosalinde almost destroying her creator, almost dazzling the poor chap.

Our assay forces us to consider whether S’s greatest work was As You Like It, whether his greatest character was Rosalinde and whether his genius was comedic and not tragic in the solution of what Ted Hughes calls “the tragic equation”. But Hamlet like Rosalinde is unflawed.

So we keep the “great” tragedies excluding the Scottish play (Macbeth if you’re not superstitious) for which we have no reliable text, and I’d guess that the Hecate scenes, so clearly not Shakespeare, are the result of this aporia independent of Shakespeare’s will: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra. Note that per Wells and Taylor there are two bona-fide versions of Lear, the 1608 Lear with its marvelous remedies for the eye gouge and the more compact 1623 Lear.

Coriolanus is an anomaly since it echoes the intensity, and single authorship, of Julius Caesar. Timon on the other hand might’ve been partly co-authored although not clearly in response to popular demand: almost in defiance. This is why I say we add these “to taste”, like eye of newt or toe of dog.

Our method may be unfamiliar to the literary scholar who’s more like to add “eye of newt”, but it’s perhaps more familiar in its reductionism to a mathematical procedure. Just because S was perforce an actor-manager didn’t mean that was his essence…what he wanted to be.

The Tempest, which among the late, co-authored romances and All is True (Henry VIII) stands alone, as if after some years after the apogee tragedies, Shakespeare had one more play in him and was able, as an actor-manager with equity, to write as a farewell to authorship as opposed to script doctoring and arbitrage…which would explain Cardenio, the Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII; they are collaborations which follow The Tempest, where S’s architectonic expertise and facility with the verse of critical passages was needed.

If I wax poetic, too goddamn bad: all except pomo turds (but not all pomos) fail to recognize that to write about the history of philosophy is to philosophize: this is why Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy is still in print: Bertie unlike modern midgets was self-confident enough to be the single author of a History. Literary criticism is itself literature because it ain’t science, for sure, and it violates Occam’s Razor to give it its own territory outside of either literature or science.

OK. We’ve nailed the set of “great” Shakespeare at the expense, of course, of violating the “deconstructive” rule, that we may not create a male/female, major/minor “binary opposition” because the “major” feeds off the minor. This is, as Fluellen would say, an excellent moral, but denies what to me is a pretty obvious narrative line concerning Shakespeare’s life: he hit a wall in the early 16th century and thereafter preferred to arbitrage and co-author.

Owing to the failed harvests of the onset of what we now know was a bit of an Ice Age lasting until the mid 19th century, Shakespeare may have been under a lot of financial pressure, his colleagues now less willing to risk full plays on the more keenly critical upper-class audience of the Jacobean onset, his wife needing money. Just as I’m still numbed by the loss of my eldest son last year (damn? You mean I cannot email my son? WTF?) Shakespeare may have been undergoing a delayed reaction to Hamnet’s death in 1596.

But characteristic of our so-called “favorite plays”, something that to me exhibits a remarkable uniformity, is that none of these plays bear any mark of collaboration and despite the groaned warnings of deconstruction, their speaker is a unitary, kind male voice epitomized by Duke Senior in As You Like It…even in the abominable Titus: watch Sir Anthony Hopkins in Julie Taymor’s straight up traditional version: Shakespeare, like Titus, is trying to find a way out of the “revenge” formula. Perhaps because he could not in Titus, we get no more Guignol or buckets of blood from Shakespeare.

Literary criticism as practiced today, in the schools only, of course would probably exclude my efforts, so it’s not the case that one can in an institutionalized setting write anything considered valuable except as vetted by a fairly brutal process which I don’t, owing the First Amendment, have to agree to endure. Theses advisers in English departments feel that there should be some rather strict criteria precisely to avoid questioning of more than minimal funding in all but first-tier places such as Princeton. This essay meets none of them in order to theorize why focusing on collaborative Shakespeare, while not as bad as what is usually written under the heading “The Shakespeare Authorship Question”, misses the point and fails to add to the layperson’s understanding of Shakespeare.

Change Record (Dates in international style)
01052013 Added this change record
01052013 Timon of Athens NOT a single-author play
01052013 Added an extended discussion of architectonics

22 April 2013

Congee, Midsummer Night’s Dream Acts 1 and 2. Bad side effects from chemo include sleeping all the time and diarrhea.

More and more struck by the fact that while the academic fashion is to focus on the Shakespeare plays of the 17th century except for The Tempest and the great Tragedies (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra), “problematic” plays, like Measure for Measure, and to ignore The Tempest and the best 16th century plays such as Romeo and Juliet as somehow “entry level”, the plays that have come down to us in good texts, known to be authored by Shakespeare alone being relatively ignored, Shakespeare’s true greatness remains in his single-authored plays and not in his problem plays. Of course, the problem plays probably merit more academic study than the straightforwardly great plays; but for students, overemphasis on problem plays can be a turnoff.

As soul and body begin to fall asunder…the misery of repeated onsets of diarrhea on Saturday with copious and unmanageable shits, not able to go to the toilet on my own. Instead I am in an adult diaper with the nurses uncomplainingly and expertly changing me. Because I used to change my son’s own copious shits, I know expertise in doing so without a mess when I see, and feel, it done to me. But this one more immobilizing humiliation. I may need some sort of medication when next I’m out to prevent an incident.

Absolutely horrid, inedible, dry pork for lunch, and the feeble noises of a neighbor whose cough turns into weeping, for through emphysema, I believe, he has no air left for coughing. This seems to be a rough patch indeed.

15 April 2013

Congee, fortified with Ensure nutrition milk, later, at midday.

Ensure is becoming rather tasty which is a bad sign that like Robert de Niro in The Deer Hunter, I’m adapting to an environment perhaps too well.

Finished the Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint (a technically perfect but forgettable poem that no-one reads; I hardly could be bothered to try to understand, from the poem, what was going on; Sparknotes heah Ah comes).

The Sonnets on the other hand are magnificent. Like Glenn Gould as a performer or Bach as a composer, the Sonnets start with an eerie technical perfection.

Ben Jonson claimed that Shakespeare “never blotted [erased or crossed-out]” a line. I found as a poet *maudit* that revisions before the invention of word processors running on unshared computers uglified the poem.

You want to see the poem as a sensuous and neat creation lying well on the page but a mere mortal needs to fake this using a computer. Shakespeare, it appears, did not.

The sonnets go on to reveal that at the time of their writing Shakespeare may have been experiencing a repeat of an episode in Stratford ten years prior, when perhaps (perhaps! Always perhaps!): his homosexual’s disgust with the female body and idealization of the male body.

That this was a “homosexual’s” disgust doesn’t mean Shakespeare was gay. The bad news is that straight men can behave like queers and go to the opera or weary of their wives temporarily in a madness as Leontes wearies of Hermione in the Winter’s Tale.

I’d guess that S left Stratford willingly because he was rather sick of getting jumped by an aging and perhaps large Anne Hathaway demanding money for the straw bill, and this soured him on her body. But as Ted Hughes shows in “Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being”, Shakespeare’s plays may have been an expiation of this flight from the Goddess.

Workout, later at 2:00 PM: 20 minutes rackety row, 4 laps walk.

12 April 2013

Congee, completed King Lear and got started on Macbeth. I don’t like Macbeth, I must admit: it’s too high school-ey and the text is corrupt beyond the Hecate passages which we know are Middleton; modern scholars say that much of the original text is lost.

However, Middleton must have had, in Shakespeare’s opinion, “a good fist” for playwriting since he was a major co-author when Shakespeare in his later career was too lazy, perhaps too ill (some modern scholars say that Shakespeare may have had a rare cancer of the tear ducts; this would make sense for the guy must have cried many bitter tears over Hathaway and Hamnet).

I very much like the way, in the 1608 version, Albany, “the milk livered man” according to Goneril, takes charge at the end. Feminists think that the don’t need sub-”Alpha” males (who are “alpha” through their own proclamation) and share, in the case of feminists identified with the corporation, the alpha view of the other ranks: non-Alpha males are considered in our culture to be unworthy geeks.

But Albany, unlike Henry VI who merely tries, does a good job in Act V apart from failing to rescue Lear and Cordelia. S clearly felt that the ideal ruler would be humble and if possible non-violent.

Prospero in the Tempest is often cited as a tyrant; his critics refuse to credit him for preferring “closeness and study” to ruling but I find him close to an ideal model of kingship, even fatherhood, for stocking his boat, when fleeing his brother, with books.

Fathers who read make IMHO good fathers. Lincoln is photographed tenderly sharing books with his youngest son. Fathers who read often delight in buying and sharing books, especially their favorites from their own childhood.

In light of this it disturbs me that Prospero is dismissed so readily as less interesting than Miranda or Caliban by feminist-influenced critics. You have only to watch a gender-bender version of the play (such as Helen Mirren’s in which she plays “Prospera” which scans exactly the same as “Prospero”, thus does no violence to the text) to find Prospera an interesting character.

10 April 2013

Congee (good texture today but found it after nodding off, so it wasn’t completely hot) and finished Othello. Next in this, the Edward G. Nilges Grand High Shakespeare Re-read: the 1608 version of King Lear. This is the version with a more plangent reunion scene as seen on the BBC version, more development of the supposedly “weak” Albany and a more detailed revolt of the servants of Cornwall, including flax and whites of an egg as a palliative for having your eyes gouged out.

I believe that the populist tone of the first (1608) version went over well at the Globe but didn’t translate to middle-class enclosed theaters where there may have been fear of the Jacquerie of the first version. Shakespeare may have been asked to “tone it down” and being an easy-going guy, he did so.

Either version is a comment on Thatcher who was probably the sort of schoolgirl or “Top Girl” who would write a paper justifying the behavior of Goneril and Regan. Yeah, that’s a sort of obligatory “Cathago delenda est” this week of Thatcher’s passing, but I’ll make no apology.

In my video of the Harvard class on the late Shakespeare Marjorie Garber points out that until this discovery/realization/admission that there are two distinct versions of Lear of equal quality (where the 1608 is more of a crowd pleaser and the Folio version more focused) editors would collate the two plays producing something not by Shakespeare.

Critical insights have been based on the more extensive material in the 1608 play. In that version alone does Albany unload on his wife:

Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile:
Filths savour but themselves. What have you done?
Tigers, not daughters, what have you perform’d?
A father, and a gracious aged man,
Whose reverence even the head-lugg’d bear would lick,
Most barbarous, most degenerate! have you madded.
Could my good brother suffer you to do it?
A man, a prince, by him so benefited!
If that the heavens do not their visible spirits
Send quickly down to tame these vile offences,
It will come,
Humanity must perforce prey on itself,
Like monsters of the deep.

In the 1608 version, the “weak” character Albany nonetheless triumphs and is given the last lines of the play, lines normally given over to victorious characters such as Fortinbras in Hamlet (“Let the soldiers shoot”). In the Folio, this is given to the victorious single-combat warrior Edgar no longer masked as Tom o’ Bedlam, therefore no longer identified with “the wretched of the earth”. Whereas Albany is a wronged husband and a cuckold.

Margaret Thatcher, far from being (in my personal view) a feminist heroine, introduced an impossible construction of masculinity as do the evil sisters of King Lear. Thatcher undercut “wet” Tories who wanted to go slow on “reform” (where “reform” meant “dismantling the welfare state and handing out wealth to insiders”). Thatcher portrayed them as flaccid sexual partners in an inappropriate sexualization of 10 Downing Street and this resulted in the tragic silliness of a mediaeval poll tax and her ouster, not by Labour but by her own allies.

In reading Lear we have to imagine an unbelievably violent world. The Pop-trash novels of Bernard Cornwall such as his “Azincourt” help as does the Pop-trash TV programs about Sharpe’s Rifles and the Flashman series to show that even the 19th century and even in Britain (or the USA) everyday life was a more violent place, day to day, in the 1950s.

This violence was controlled and channeled by a deep and necessary sexism accepted by all parties. You messed around with an upper class woman, you die. On top of these institutions of frozen violence, other institutions bound together with writing served to enforce a rackety social harmony.

7 April 2013

First-thing “Angel” workout on arising (cycling legs and arms lying down), reasonable congee not overly watery, and I finished Hamlet in the Grand High Shakespeare Re-read. Next: Othello in this sub-sequence, which shall comprise the “great” tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and the sublime Lear.

Discovered that Wells and Taylor, the editors of my edition of the complete works (Oxford University Press), using the Folio text exclusively and not the Q2 (“good” quarto) text, omitted a lyrical speech by Horatio and what to me now is a fulcrum of the play on which the action turns.

Horatio’s speech, on the night when he discovers the Ghost with the others, recommends itself merely through its eldritch quality:

A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye.
In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets:
As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse:
And even the like precurse of fierce events,
As harbingers preceding still the fates
And prologue to the omen coming on,
Have heaven and earth together demonstrated
Unto our climatures and countrymen.–
But soft, behold! lo, where it comes again!

The speech advances Horatio’s characterization as a scholar and in common with the rest of the scene, which takes place just before day-break, evokes a feeling of supernatural dread that we share with Horatio and the watchmen.

Branagh made sure, it seems, that Act IV Sc 4 stayed in in full perhaps because he wished to deliver this grand, and in comparison to “to be or not to be” or “that this too too solid flesh would melt” critical speech, critical in that it is in light of Hamlet’s decisiveness in Act 5 immediately following IV.4, Hamlet is never again “irresolute”:

How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused.

I feel rather strongly that “cutting” Shakespeare is less a responsible assertion of directorial authority meant to make the play more comprehensible and compact (wasn’t that Shakespeare’s job, and didn’t we just stand in awe at his ability to do things like that?) or relieve the audience of “boredom”, than an assertion of directorial power even over S. himself. We resent as well as love our cultural monuments insofar as cultural monuments act as gatekeepers to our advancement so the game becomes to get to the point where we can like dogs, run up to the Shakespaherean text and take out chunks and gobbets.

I was supposed to be “Escalus” in a production a few years back of Measure for Measure but in rehearsal, I was perturbed at several things and managed to get ejected from the production in a profoundly discourteous way (email to me while I was vacationing in Australia).

One was the way in which the director would so freely cut S’s words while saying “blah, blah, blah” which on the face of it showed a lack of respect for the text. Perhaps this lack of respect is but fashionable in our demotic age.

More seriously, when I found it difficult to act opposite an “Angelo” who insisted on not learning lines and who didn’t connect at all with me, acting as if I was not a member of the company of players at all for some reason, perhaps because it was (mostly) English and I was American in a year in which “Shakespeare” was being re-absorbed by “Britain” as a “cultural treasure”: something that for me disregarded the uses of Shakespeare in the USA in the 19th century (notably Lincoln’s) and in India during and after the Raj.

When I spoke to “Angelo” was in fact just before I went to Australia to find a discourteous email terminating me. I’d already shown an out of scale, beyond-expectation commitment to the production and knowledge of the text. I’d memorized the lines suggested for the audition and found differences in the text including Escalus’ ceremonious little quatrain:

Well, heaven forgive him! and forgive us all!
Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall:
Some run from brakes of ice, and answer none:
And some condemned for a fault alone.

“Brakes of ice”, although it appears in the Folio, is an obvious typo whereas “brakes of vice” (laws stopping vice) makes perfect sense.

My input on this change was accepted. I was also able to “stage” the delivery of the quatrain by walking downstage to deliver this aside in a ceremonious fashion.

But far more seriously, a major scene (the remainder of II.1) was brutally cut: this was “Escalus and the riff raff” in which I’d proposed to show that Escalus linked the classes into a unity, where the tight, almost claustrophobic sense we get of “Vienna” is part of the drama: everyone knows everyone, and the lower sort have long expected privilege as a result. This cut damaged the sense of the play..

But once again (I must say with a sigh) I find myself “the man who fell to earth” whose erudition is confused with his vanity because he has both in excess. Both I have in roughly equal measure, but erudition has to do with the truth. Butchering Shakespeare to get butts in seats must have a stop. Instead, we can present pastiche (such as my own pastiche-play, The Well Hung Election) using Shakespeare’s dramatic techniques to keep those techniques alive and recognizable when audiences go to real Shakespeare performances.

This is almost good as pastiche:

Again (I say with sigh) I am the man
Who fell to earth a circuitous freak show
“Deform’d, unfinished sent half before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up”
But unlike the crookback monarch, whose flaws
Innumerous were rightly condemn’d, there are those
Whose virtue makes them warp,
And not fit in.
But that’s an old story press’d between papers
Away pedantic virtue: we must cut our capers.

Real high-class pastiche Shakespeare appropriates his quibbles (as they were known to Johnson) and his tics.

4 April 2013: watery congee

Congee (much too watery today), completed Shakespeare’s [sic] play, newly added to the canon, Edward III.

Developed a new form of exercise for the bedridden, as I am bed-ridden. Call it Kafka’s Cockroach: one cycles the legs and arms, this morning for 1250 revolutions for a good, solid 20 minute workout first thing; since it is the Ching Ming (Spring) festival, the attendants have a holiday and I cannot use the rickety rackety rowing machine. Be careful to avoid scraping your bed-wound which in my bed, too small for Gweilos as it is, is at the L5 lumbar.

Edward III sucked and had no characteristic of a true Shakespeare play. From now on, I shall, in this the Grand High Shakespeare Reread, stay inside the canon that was received as of 1962 and skip such plays as are apocrypha (The Two Noble Kinsmen, etc).

Which hasn’t, fortunately, excluded Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which I have reread in this GHSR. Pericles, which I first read when too young to appreciate it, was a rare find because the coal-seam that distinguishes Shakespeare’s work from the jingly “Gower” speeches that connect scenes in the manner of the masque is quite clear, and Shakespeare put his soul into the tale of a just man separated from his family.

3 April 2013

Congee, Edward III: wondering why on earth Wells and Taylor, the editors of the Oxford Shakespeare, think this is a Shakespeare play. It is but a hack job using the Chronicles (by one Jean Froissart) of this early stage of the Hundred Years’ war(s). Shakespeare seems to have only contributed scraps but this isn’t a “Shakespeare” play.

There’s no low character speaking prose wiser than the toffs: Henry IV and V were explorations of the class system of 15th century England whereas Edward III is a stiff mediaeval miniature which takes chivalry for granted, unlike say Falstaff in his speech on “honour” in Henry IV-2. And yet Edward III post-dates Henry IV.

This is the last time I shall go outside the canon in this Grand High Shakespeare reread. A play shall have to have been in the Folio or be otherwise traditionally accepted.

Scholars, perhaps overambitious to get noticed, are IMO entirely too anxious to add to artistic or literary canons works without real merit that meet their conventional, narrow and safe views of quality.

“Shall I die?” (A Song) is in the Oxford Shakespeare, but I find it hard to accept “A Song” compared to Venus and Adonis:

EVEN as the sun with purple-colour’d face
Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheek’d Adonis hied him to the chase;
Hunting he loved, but love he laugh’d to scorn;
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him,
And like a bold-faced suitor ‘gins to woo him.

Compare this running metre with the halting rhythm of what we now must accept as also by Shakespeare: “Shall I die? Shall I fly Lovers’ baits and deceits, sorrow breeding? Shall I fend? Shall I send? Shall I shew, and not rue my proceeding?”

Of course, a halting metre may be appropriate where what I’ve called a running metre is not but the sentiment isn’t worth it. Moreover, there is a general consensus today that “A Song” is “A Turkey”. Which makes the real question why must we believe that Shakespeare wrote a lot, or even a little, of bad stuff. It is true that his output was less under his control than that of Ben Jonson because S was “on the game” to make money but I believe that S was at least conflicted about that. His drama could be the product of collaboration but his poetry could not, which is why his major works of poetry (Adonis, Lucrece and the Sonnets) are, like works of art of the 19th century, single works with a clear text written by one author.

The idea of S collaborating on plays is natural but the idea of him collaborating on poems, or even writing bad verse on spec, seems like nonsense. Which means that early in his career S had the experience of being an Author courtesy of his friend Henry Wriothesley. But unlike Peter Shaffer’s Mozart (in Amadeus) S chose to make money through collaboration in the theater. This could have destroyed him as a playwright through excess collaboration were it not his friends’ (not his) decision to publish the Folio. Mozart wanted to write, and get paid for, integral works of art produced by his single genius but S, perhaps, could care less (to use an American solecism). They come closest together in the forms of Die Zauberflote and The Tempest, both single-authored celebrations of life. As compared to the late Romances, the Tempest is accounted to be a single-author work, and the idea of any other fist is absurd.

An example from art is here.

A blundering and second-rate work probably by Honthorst or another Dutchman is celebrated strictly for financial reasons by the museum that owns it as a “Rubens”. The museum needed the attention and the money the attention would bring and I fear that’s the same reason Wells, Taylor et al. decided that this turkey (Edward III) was a Shakespeare, so I get to waste time reading a hack version of what I read, years ago, in Froissart’s Chronicles: Edward’s noble chastity towards the Countess of Salisbury, the “confident and o’erlusty French” before Sluys and Crecy, etc. zzzzz…

The French, as in Henry V, are in Edward III “confident and o’erlusty”. The difference is in the way Shakespeare shows this: in Henry V, Shakespeare devotes a scene to French braggadocio in the night before the battle, which also exposes splits within the French high command (notably between the Constable and the Dauphin) and this explains the French loss at Agincourt, whereas S as the putative author of Edward III, writing after he wrote Henry V, did not feel obligated to dramatically (as a dramatist) to dramatize the explanation of the French defeat as in part due to the splits within the French leadership (recall that the Dauphin’s father, in Act 3 Sc 5, commands his son the Dauphin to stay with him in Rouen: the Dauphin was not supposed to be at Agincourt).

Academics know, today, that culture is being rapidly destroyed by finance from within. My English friends in Hong Kong speak of the wonders of London where today you can hear several major orchestras and see Shakespeare performed by first rate troupes: but the likes of us can neither get positions within those troupes, for they are too few in number to but skim the cream of new theater graduates, nor afford the culture without also getting jobs, primarily in financial services that in my experience are soul-destroying.

i could prophesy, as I have said before. Indeed, as a runner, I have done so with a loud voice in the agora more than once. You should probably feel like a real insider having discovered these words, this blog, for it may be the next big thing…or maybe not.