Art to Enchant, Spirit to Enforce

Now my charms are all o’erthrown,

And what strength I have’s mine own,

Which is most faint. Now, ’tis true,

I must be here confined by you,

Or sent to Naples. Let me not,

Since I have my dukedom got

And pardoned the deceiver, dwell

In this bare island by your spell,

But release me from my bands

With the help of your good hands.

Gentle breath of yours my sails

Must fill, or else my project fails,

Which was to please. Now I want

Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,

And my ending is despair,

Unless I be relieved by prayer,

Which pierces so that it assaults

Mercy itself and frees all faults.

As you from crimes would pardoned be,

Let your indulgence set me free.

   – The Tempest, epilogue, spoken by the wizard Prospero

                                                                                                   

           

That’s the first speech that truly enchanted me the first time I read Shakespeare outside of High School. That reading’d be a little over four years back, and I still find delight in it. Since exploring The Tempest back in 2011, I’ve journeyed through nine more of his 37-39 plays (let’s go with 39). That means I’m a hair past a quarter of the way through the Canon.

Well, the bug’s bitten me again, and once I’m through with my current pair of reads (Moby Dick and a book on Economics 101), I’m may try my hand once again with the Bard.

Oh, and I had another insight that’s spurred this re-interest in Shakespeare. I’ve long written here that when I turn 50 (ach! much closer than I’d like it to be, though I still have over a year to go), in an effort to combat mental degradation (and why not?), I would return to the higher mathematics I studied in college physics. Well, I’m not so sure of that, for a variety of reasons.

One is that I see my teenaged nephew, a budding mathematician, how natural it all comes to him. I was never a mathematical natural; always had to work at it, but when I did, I was richly rewarded. Second is, well, perhaps the old synapses, axons and dendrites up in the neural network that makes up me brain, uh, perhaps they may have petrified or atrophied over the past decade. Or two, or three. After all, mathematics is a young man’s game (it’s been said that if you ain’t made a name for yourself in mathematics by age thirty, hang up your Number Two pencil).

It came to me out of the ether that memorizing Shakespeare would be an equally effective way of combating the old specter of dementia. Short speeches, then longer ones. It’d be fun, enlightening, and inspiring. Especially for a writer like myself, for Will is the premier pensmith of the entire English language. It’s been written that he used 29,000 words in his 900,000+ words of plays – and the average American man or woman uses 7,500 to 10,000. That alone gives me chills.

So, sometime mid-June, I think I’m going to crack open a Shakespeare play, then watch it on a library DVD. And, of course, blog about it.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more …

Bonus:

Here’s the video of the Tempest epilogue above, featuring the great Michael Hordern, he of the Voice of Frith the rabbit-god in Watership Down …

The DVD of Our Discontent

So Saturday the wife left me to go over her friend’s house, leaving me alone in the big mansion.  We put the little ones to sleep a little after eight, then, after giving her a passive aggressive guilt trip, I settled down to do what I really wanted to do:

Watch the early-80s BBC production of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Richard III, on DVD.

Four years ago I went through a mini-Shakespeare phase where I found the perfect way to learn and enjoy the Bard: read the play, then re-read it while watching the BBC DVDs of it, most of which can be found at your local library.  I did a half-dozen plays this way, until I was forced to stop, having just started a new job that demanded a bit extra of my attention.

On a whim last week, looking for something fresh and poetic, I thumbed through an omnibus of Shakespeareana from the Great Books I have in the basement.  I landed on Richard III.  The next day I saw a battered paperback copy of that play for sale at a library so I took it for a sign from ye gods, purchased it, and immediately began reading it.

Which brings us to the BBC production of the play.  Suffice it to say, it is loooooooooooooooong.  I read that it is Shakespeare’s second- and third-longest play (depending on the source, I guess).  The DVD is 228 minutes long, which is almost Ben-Hur-ian in duration.  Following along in the paperback, I managed only the first act, a little over an hour invested, with a short cupcake break somewhere in the middle.

Like all the plays, it’s good.  Real good.  (“Good” – how’s that for an adjective, eh Shakespeare?)  Made those lines jump off the page, brought out new tensions I had not seen alone in the sentences of iambic pentameter.  Took a while for the actor who played Richard to meet my approval, as my brain image of the character was more fiendish, grotesque, and moustache-twisting.  But after fifteen minutes, this actor, Ron Cook, has now been firmly established to me as the evil, scheming, usurping would-be leader of England. 

Now – to seek out three more hours in which to finish it!

Once More Into the Breach

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;

Or close the wall up with our English dead!

In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man,

As modest stillness and humility;

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

Then imitate the action of the tiger:

Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood,

Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage:

Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;

Let it pry through the portage of the head,

Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it

As fearfully as doth a galled rock

O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,

Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean.

Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide;

Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit

To his full height. On, on, you noblest English,

Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!

Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,

Have in these parts from morn till even fought,

And sheathed their swords for lack of argument.

Dishonour not your mothers: now attest,

That those whom you call’d fathers did beget you.

Be copy now to men of grosser blood,

And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,

Whose limbs were made in England, show us here

The mettle of your pasture: let us swear

That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;

For there is none of you so mean and base,

That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,

Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:

Follow your spirit; and upon this charge,

Cry ‘God for Harry! England! and Saint George!’

- Henry V, Act III, scene I

Again, again, again – looking at yet another tough week (day / month / hour) at work.  Getting really done with this.  The job started off fun, really fun, three-and-a-half years ago.  Now, like in any job, I suppose, additional responsibilities and duties and tasks have been assigned to me, adding up over the weeks months years, while less and less support and backup and general assistance were offered.  2015 has been the year of the Crisis of the Month of the Week (or day, or hour).  Some not my fault yet my responsibility, other stuff having nothing to do with me but still somehow my responsibility to get ’em fixed.  Some things genuinely my faults as one who juggles so many items at once while putting out fires will inevitably drop one.  

I’ve only slept eight hours the entire weekend, and all I could think about during those enjoyable, relaxing, tender moments with my little girls was how the hourglass was tick tick ticking down to zero hour Monday morning.  Oh, and my shoulder is absolutely killing me.  Has to be a pinched nerve or something.  Been bugging me off and on since the week before Christmas, and now it’s just a continuous painful ache.

In addition to Hell Week part Eleven at work, we get our taxes done Tuesday (fingers crossed for a moderate refund) and I get my new glasses on Thursday.  Yay!  I’ll be able to see at night.  There’s also a night basketball game for Little One somewhere in there.

Good news:  In preparing for tax day I cleaned off the writing desk.  Now I can actually write.  Also watched a couple of decent flicks this weekend, which I may blog about sometime this week.  Dunno.  I feel like I’m preparing to go a couple of rounds with Tyson, so if I’m still standing on my feet come Friday at 5 pm (my favorite part of the week, ’cuz I take the girls out for pizza), I’ll consider that a victory.

The Winter of Our Discontent

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York;

And all the clouds that loured upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths,

Our bruisèd arms hung up for monuments,

Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,

Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.

Grim-visaged War hath smoothed his wrinkled front,

And now, instead of mounting barbèd steeds

To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,

He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber

To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks

Nor made to court an amorous looking glass;

I, that am rudely stamped, and want love’s majesty

To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;

I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,

Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,

Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time

Into this breathing world scarce half made up,

And that so lamely and unfashionable

That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;

Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,

Have no delight to pass away the time,

Unless to spy my shadow in the sun

And descant on mine own deformity.

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

I am determinèd to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

– Richard III, Act I, scene I, lines 1-31

[Read by myself in the uppermost bleachers at my daughter’s final basketball game of the season, during only those periods of time she sat resting on the bench.  They won, 19-10, and finished the season 7-9.  Richard of Gloucester, the speaker of the above citing lines, would go on to murder his way to the throne of England, and end his life ingloriously on the battlefield.]

Picard and the Bard

Sweet words from Patrick Stewart regarding the greatest writer of the English langauge:

“Having spent so much of my life with Shakespeare’s world, passions and ideas in my head and in my mouth, he feels like a friend – someone who just went out of the room to get another bottle of wine.”

Nice quote.

By the way, despite the tentative reading plan I’m formulating for 2015, I’m being tempted to resume my journey through Shakespeare.  I left off a little over three years ago after reading something like a dozen or so out of his 38-ish number of plays. 

I also, on a whim, picked up a strange book from one of the local libraries: Star Wars, written out as a Shakespearean play.  Will shoot through that one night this week, I expect.

What if Shakespeare Wrote ...

A year or so ago I posted, here, a video of comedian Jim Breuer doing a bit about the hard rock band AC/DC doing “The Hokey Pokey.”

Well, a couple of days ago this came to my attention: What if Shakespeare wrote “The Hokey Pokey”? Sure, it’s old, it’s been circulating on the Internet forever, but man, I have to say, this verily made me laugh out loud.


O proud left foot, that ventures quick within
Then soon upon a backward journey lithe
Anon, once more the gesture, then begin:
Command sinistral pedestal to writhe.
Commence thou then the fervid Hokey-Poke.
A mad gyration, hips in wanton swirl.
To spin! A wilde release from heaven’s yoke.
Blessed dervish! Surely canst go, girl.
The Hoke, the poke – banish now thy doubt
Verily, I say, ’tis what it’s all about.

O Thous't Blouddy Moratorium!

I'm going to put my Shakespeare reading quest on hold. How long this hold shall be, I am uncertain. At least until my life gets to a more stable, secure foundation. Read: until I get a job. A dignified, meaningful, and sane one, if such a one exists nowadays.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed it immensely. I started off with a bang in May and got bogged down a bit once I started work the end of June. But it was during this period I read my favorite works, the Henry IV stuff, so though I had a bunch of other ephemera on my mind, I was still progressing from play to play, every fortnight or so.

Then I got to Lear right around the time I lost my job. And I discovered I just couldn't give it the attention it well deserves. Combination of monkey mind meets perpetual, habitual worry. How could I enjoy this old king losing his sanity when I felt that my own was on quite shaky ground?

So, the Shakespeare-in-a-Year is put aside for now. I read eleven plays (plus half of Lear) of Will's 37 or 39, or just under a third, in four months. I'm happy, 'cuz I was on track to get 'em all done in a twelvemonth. But there are other things that, regrettably, demand my attention at this moment.

Additionally, I read four books on the Bard and two on his plays. I feel that I can now discuss intelligently (or at least without embarrassing myself) on a wide variety of Shakespeareana, at least in comparison to six months ago. And I still remain fascinated by his words, his rhymes, his rhythm, his characters, his plots, his dramatization, and the overall subject of Elizabethan England.

Who'd'a thought?

I intend to do a great deal more spiritual reading (and squeeze in an SF quickie every now and then). With a little luck I can hopefully return to these wonderful plays in the springtime. I know I'll miss them and the experience I have come to love approaching a Shakespeare play for the first time.

The Grammer of Macbeth

About a dozen years ago, just before I won that trifecta called marriage, house, and children, the wife and I - excuse my, my girlfriend-slash-fiance and I - would venture into NYC with another couple every year to see an off-Broadway play. Then we'd eat and drink at a fine-dining establishment and have a grand old time, a money-no-object type of time.

We did this three years in a row. First year we saw Kevin Spacey in The Iceman Cometh. Good, if a bit longish and verbose. Good enough to inspire me to borrow and read O'Neill's play. Next year we saw Quentin Tarantino and Marisa Tomei in Wait Until Dark. Kinda corny but fast-paced and loaded with more than a few genuine scares.

The third year we saw my one and only Shakespearean play: Macbeth.

Starring Kelsey Grammer in the title role.

I am unqualified to make any critical judgments here, other than as a Shakespearean newbie accessing a decade-old memory. But I will tell you what my gut is telling me: somehow it didn't work. Too lazy to research reviews from the time period, but I don't think they were glowing.

Still, I give Frasier credit for tackling the role.

Why don't I think it worked?

Well, most of all, it was trying to be "modern," I suppose, "modern" meaning "edgy" and "avant garde." I'd prefer something more traditional, something closer to the way Shakespeare staged it. But I was seeing it in New York City and not the Globe Theatre in London, so that's to be expected.

Here's what I remember most. The stage was completely black. The curtains were black. Everyone (except Lady Macbeth, who wore a white nightgown) was costumed in a drab, black uniform. There were two ladders on either side of the rear stage, both leading up to a horizontal ladder connecting the two. It looked a lot like a depressing playground where Dieter from SNL's Sprockets might bring his children.

This was the first Shakespeare in fifteen years for me, since my high school class plodded through Romeo and Juliet. What surprised me - what really, truly surprised me - was how foreign the whole thing sounded to my unschooled ear. English four centuries old could have been Sanskrit or Mandarin Chinese for all I knew. I caught every tenth word and lost myself puzzling out a phrase while the fast-spoken dialogue raced lines ahead of me. The only way I knew what was going on was to "read between the lines" observing the characters' actions.

Grammer himself threw himself into the role, but, you know, all I could see was Dr. Frazier Crane. I give anyone who can memorize and perform a thousand lines of spoken dialogue super-props. However, he was a little on the paunchy side in a too-tight black uniform, so convincing as a Scottish warlord he was not.

I was aware of the whole Lady Macbeth-guilty conscience theme, but the actress just seemed a tad too histrionic for my tastes. I was like, come on, Lady, get to the knifing scene already.

The length was not too bad (lines must have been cut from the play to keep it at about three hours). My wife had to suffer, though. Some corpulent bozo behind her decided to noisily suck on a bag of cough drops, one after the other, all through those 180 minutes. But she came out okay. A stage-door hound, she managed to have Mr. Grammer autograph her Playbill (as did Mr. Spacey two years prior).

Thinking about this all in depth for the first time in a decade, I'd grade the experience a solid-C. Still, that being said, I would not mind seeing either Macbeth again (preferably in a more traditional staging) or Kelsey Grammer tackling another Shakespearean role.

How's that for an open mind?

Nature's Soft Nurse

How many thousand of my poorest subjects
Are at this hour asleep! O sleep, O gentle sleep,
Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?
Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee,
And hushed with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber,
Than in the perfumed chambers of the great,
Under the canopies of costly state,
And lulled with sound of sweetest melody?
O thou dull god, why liest thou with the vile
In loathsome beds and leavest the kingly couch
A watch-case or a common larum bell?
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the shipboy's eyes and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge
And in the visitation of the winds,
Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
Curling their monstrous heads and hanging them
With deafing clamor in the slippery clouds
That with the hurly death itself awakes?
Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose
To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude,
And, in the calmest and most stillest night,
WIth all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then, happy low, lie down.
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

- Henry IV part II, Act 3, Scene 1, 4-31


I love nothing more so than a sound night's sleep. Thursday night Patch, affrighted by a bad dream, awoke us at 1:30, a recurring nightmare (which recurred a half-hour later), and I was up. It might be psychological, it might be physical based in my biochemistry, but I knew I'd be up. I tossed and turned for forty-five minutes, then went downstairs to the couch. There I had the patience for only thirty minutes' tossing. Then I went down another flight to the basement, to the writing office, and surfed the web for three hours. Back upstairs to the couch and - wouldn't ya know it? - I fell asleep twenty minutes before the wife gets up and into the shower.

Add to that six hours sleep the previous night, five hours the two nights before that, and, well, I am at wit's end. Though I be not a king, I sympathize greatly with Henry's abovementioned plight. You could have a kingdom and a million pounds, and despise it all without good night sleep. Converse holds true, too: the sleep of my daughters - free of visions of ghosts and vampires, that is - brings home ever so true the value of nature's soft nurse.

Lots of sleep in my forecast for this holiday weekend. And I wish plenty for you, too.

Henry Redux

Well, I'm at the halfway point of Henry IV part II. I must say, after a three-week layoff from Willie the Shake, I'm really, really enjoying it. Moreso than I would have even thought three months ago, let alone a year back.

I mean, take in the sheer poetry of these lines:

In poison there is physic, and these news,
Having been well, that would have made me sick,
Being sick, have in some measure made me well.

What they mean, I'm not sure, but over them I've gone at least a dozen times attempting to unravel that knot. To me it's the literary equivalent of one of them funhouse mirror-mazes, one you go through while your in some sorta fever dream.

And Falstaff is back, too, Shakespeare's greatest creation. Listen:


CHIEF JUSTICE: Well, the truth is, Sir John, you live in great infamy.

FALSTAFF: He that buckles himself in my belt cannot live in less.

CHIEF JUSTICE: Your means are very slender, and your waste is great.

FALSTAFF: I would it were otherwise. I would my means were greater and my waist slender.


It's like Mel Brooks directing a scene penned by Frasier's writers. With apologies to the greatest writer in English, I don't think the analogy is too far off the mark.

After this, I tackle Lear. And after that, a comedy, Measure for Measure.

Tarry on!

Decisions, decisions

My agenda for plowing through Shakespeare is to read a play and then watch a play, then move on to the next. One of my local libraries has a whole slew of Folger’s interpretations of the plays (my favorite versions), as well as the local bookstore for about four bucks a piece. The same library has every edition of the BBC Shakespeare 1977-1985 series of plays. So far it’s worked for me, as I’m 7 ½ plays in, close to 20 percent, of my Shakespearean journey.

Now I face a dilemma. One that needs to be resolved this weekend before I derail and hop on to other valleys and vistas.

After reading a couple of histories I switched over to Twelfth Night, which I stole from B&N for two dollars. Had trouble getting into it, this somewhat disconcerting for I read that this is one of Shakespeare’s most critically regarded comedies. So I said to myself, “Perhaps I’ll pick up on much detail I missed in my first reading when I watch the BBC play.” Well, I didn’t say it out loud. More like thought it. Though I do tend to say such things out loud. Usually when I’m alone in the car.

Anyway, in the meantime, I came across a rare Folger’s edition of Henry IV part II. I’d given up on reading part II because, a) I heard it’s a rarely performed play, and b) I ain’t never found a copy nowhere. And I looked, because I enjoyed part I immensely. No library carried. No bookstore carried it. Until I went to Border’s Going Out of Business sale and picked it up, discounted.

But I still had Twelfth Night on the brain. Went to my library to get the BBC DVD and – they didn’t have it! Shakespeare’s most noted comedy, and they didn’t have it! But they did have – Henry IV part II, that most rarely-performed of plays!

Go figure, as they say.

So, do I move on to Henry, or do I keep looking for that Twelfth Night DVD? I’m kinda stuck between gears. I’m like a turtle on it’s back. Like a rock ’em sock ’em robot with his head popped off.

I gotta work today, so I can’t physically get to the library. I could probably log on to the website and put a hold on the play, if it exists and if it’s currently out. That’s probably what I’ll do to resolve this. And in the meantime jump over to Henry. It’ll be a break in continuity, but, hey, it ain’t a perfect world. And if that’s my only complaint today, well, then I’ll consider today a successful one.

Twelfth Night

Just a quick observation about Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

I’m about an Act-and-a-half in, and I noticed something right away. Now, I’m just this joe-guy-off-the-street type who’s reading Will for the first time in most cases. I’m positive this little thing was noted a few centuries before I stumbled along. Probably written about, too, in great depth.

Right off the bat I noticed the names of three major characters –

Olivia
Viola
Malvolio

Contain a preponderable commonality of the letters v, l, o, and i.

Indeed, Olivia and Viola are almost anagrams, save for the extra i. Take away the “mal” prefix from the last character and it’s still not too far removed from an anagram. And of course we all know that “mal” prefix denotes or at least infers something evil, or at least bad.

Now I’m excited about how this plays out with the characters’ personalities and, perhaps, identities. Surely Shakespeare is too great the wordsmith to not allow such similarities be significant.

We’ll see. I’m still under the weather, and I want to possibly finish the play soaking in a hot therapeutic tub later tonight.

Shark Punch

My favorite scene from Richard II is, hands down, the infamous “shark punch” performed by Sir John of Gaunt late in Act IV.

[Note: This post brought to you from a parallel universe.]

Jon Finch

In my life, everything is related to everything else, usually in unusual ways. I call this reverse gauge symmetric synchronicity, if for no other reason than I think that sounds cool.

Most recent example?

For the past two months I’ve been reading a Shakespeare play and then borrowing from the library the BBC Shakespeare DVD of said play. I started doing this to cement the play’s experience for me, and also to bring out details and nuances in the text that I may have overlooked in a first read. But, strangely enough, I am really starting to enjoy watching them.

These BBC Shakespeare DVDs were all originally filmed between 1978 and 1985. While everyone’s garbed in Elizabethan costumes, you still have to forgive the hairstyles.

Anyway, one of my favorite BBC Shakespeare actors is Jon Finch. I first watched him as Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing. Strong delivery, strong presence, rolling-writer rolling rrrrrrs. He had some brief screen time last week as the king in Henry IV part I, and last night I see he’s reprising the role (kind of – I’m watching them in reverse chronological order) in Richard II. He’s Henry Bolingbroke, deposer of kings, usurper of thrones, and hypocritical crusader wannabe.

Who is Jon Finch? Well, you wouldn’t really know the name. But in an entirely unrelated online surfage I came across mention of him on a blog devoted to the Alien trilogy.

Whoa!

Turns out Henry Bolingbroke was set to play Kane in the original Alien. Had actually filmed a couple of scenes over three days before a diabetic attack forced him to bow out of the project.

Too bad! While I can’t envision him in the role (perhaps because John Hurt played it perfectly), I have no doubt an actor of his talent would have found it a neat little springboard to wider fame and greater movie roles.

Reverse gauge symmetrical synchronicity: when your favorite Shakespearean actor is linked to your favorite SF horror movie.

Shakespeare Reloaded

So I jumped feet first into Shakespeare with a vengeance back in May. The Tempest, read in two days. A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado About Nothing in four days apiece. Cymbeline took a full week, but As You Like It was knocked down within a seventy-two hour period. Henry IV part I took nine days, but I got sidetracked by some Thomas Pynchon nuttiness.

Then, my journey became somewhat derailed. What does “somewhat derailed” mean? Well, it came this close – and I’m holding the thumb and index finger of my left hand half a millimeter apart – I came this close to chuckin’ it off the tracks.

But no! I am stronger than that! Yes, I hopped over to Westerns for a while, and I just finished my first Zane Grey book. But there’s a purpose behind that passion, a reason for the roundabout rerouting.

More importantly, though, there was that couple of interviews in early June which led to my new position of employment in later June. For the past two weeks I’ve really been just way too busy, considering my available time has shrunk by over half, to focus on the great playwright.

My passion is still there though. I even had a dream about Shakespeare a few nights back. And I finished Riders of the Purple Sage yesterday (review forthcoming). So I am all cleared for a go-ahead with another play.

How should I proceed?

Behind me I have four Shakespearean works on the shelf: Richard II, Richard III, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet. Ham is a little too much to bite off just yet; that’ll probably be my final play. Richard III, the one about the evil hunchback king, I’m very interested in, but that, too, should be reserved for a cleanup position.

Richard II is the direct sequential predecessor to Henry IV part I, which I liked a lot. I’ll probably read this one next (and see the DVD if I can find it at one of the local libraries). Then I’m gonna need to switch to something lighter. Maybe Twelfth Night, or maybe off to the used book store to see if I can score The Comedy of Errors.

Whatever I select, I’ll do so tonight, and I want to complete it by mid-week. After all, the challenge I took up was the well-known (to those of us who travel in nerdy book circles) as the “Shakespeare in a year.” I started May 7, and so far I’ve read six out of thirty-seven / thirty-nine plays. I’m still on point to reach that finish line on time. But only if I get back on track.

Sonnet 129

If you’re of a mind to, read both these sonnets slowly. Which one do you prefer?


1.

Th’ expense of Spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.


2.

Th’ expence of Spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action, and till action, lust
Is periurd, murdrous, blouddy full of blame,
Sauage extreame, rude, cruell, not to trust,
Inioyd no sooner but dispised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated as a swollowed bayt,
On purpose layd to make the taker mad.
Made In pursuit and in possession so,
Had, hauving, and in quest, to haue extreame,
A blisse in proofe and proud and very wo,
Before a ioy proposd behind a dreame,
All this the world well knowes yet none knowes well,
To shun the heauen that leads men to this hell.


The first version is a modernized version of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. Editors over the centuries have updated much of the original spelling and punctuation seen in version 2. As a result, subtle and perhaps not-so-subtle changes in meaning have been forced upon the poem, which now has veered somewhat from what Shakespeare had intended.

So argue Robert Graves and Laura Riding in a short essay entitled “A Study in Original Punctuation and Spelling,” found in the back of my softcover version of the Sonnets. (My book has the poems in their original punctuation and spelling.)

Now, I’m a word nerd, and I read this essay enraptured. The authors begin by discussing the importance of punctuation and spelling, and to punctuate this they spell out the meaning behind a poem of e. e. cummings. You know, that dude we all read in grammar school whose poems never have capitals and often form pictures the way the words and sentences are laid out on a page, and so forth.

But to return to Shakespeare, let’s compare the two versions of Sonnet 129. I ain’t no English lit major, so I’m not going to deconstruct either version. Look up the essay if you’re into that sort of thing; again, I found it interesting, I thought they made their points. I prefer version 2, and I’ll offer some notes from the essay.


- Elizabethans had no typographical v, thus heaven is heauan and savage is sauage. Good to know. On first reading I had some doubts. Perhaps Shakespeare was coining new words or bringing words in from French or something. Perhaps he’s using an Old English word no longer in use. Or maybe it’s the queer spelling of the time. Now you and I know.

- Without knowledge of that u-v thing, however, that proud in line 11 is read as “proud” and not “proved.” Let the reader beware.

- Swallow’d needs to remain swallowed, with the note that Shakespeare often intended the –ed suffix to be a separate syllable. Thus, it should be a three-syllable word, not a two-syllable word some future editor changed it to.

- How much better is the word “murdrous” than the word “murderous”? To me, the former, found in version 2, contains a note of primal menace not found in its later equivalent. Know what I’m saying?

- How about that word “blouddy”? According to the authors of the essay, it should sound more like “blue dye” than our word which sounds like “bluddy.” Immediately I’m transplanted into Elizabethan England pronouncing that word in the original.

- See where that editor put a comma after “bloody”? I like version 2 much better. Compare “blouddy full of blame” to “bloody, full of blame.” Different shading, no?

And on and on. The authors of the essay go in and mention about twenty or thirty more instances.

But they’re preaching to the choir. Me.

My Shakespearean Monologue

One of the best classes I ever took – hands down – was a public speaking class. It was actually a required course at Seton Hall in the early 90s, and it was well worth it. I heartily recommend it to any undergraduate. It turned me from someone who was paralyzingly shy to someone who is still quiet but can talk in front of a group if need be. I wrote a small bit about that, here.

Anyway, as part of the desensitization, about midway through the course, we had to pick a monologue to read up at the podium in front of the class. Not being a Shakespearean buff back then, I went to my local bookstore and picked up Hamlet, because I had at least a passing fancy of the plot. Plus it had that “To be or not to be” speech. But since that was clichéd even to my ill-informed ears, I figured on skimming around the play looking for the requisite two dozen lines to read in front of my younger peers.

I didn’t look very far. Probably because I had a ton of physics and calculus homework. Or had to work that long, 13-hour Tuesday shift at the day job. Or had to get to the rehearsal studio. In any event, seven pages into Hamlet I came across a short passage of Horatio imploring the “ghost” at the castle walls to speak. Seemed interesting. Something I could handle without feeling foolish or phoning it in. Twenty-seven lines, no crazy words. We weren’t required to memorize it, but I did, though I printed it out on a small sheet of lined paper to carry with me just in case.

Here it is:

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 feared 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!
I’ll cross it, though it blast me. – Stay, illusion.

If thou hast any sound or use of voice,
Speak to me.
If there be any good thing to be done
That may to thee do ease and grace to me,
Speak to me.
If thou art privy to thy country’s fate,
Which happily foreknowing may avoid,
O, speak!
Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life
Extorted treasure in the womb of earth,
For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death,
Speak of it. Stay and speak. Stop it, Marcellus.

- Hamlet, I. i. 112-139


Though there were other exercises in the course I had extreme difficulty with (sharing personal information and stories up in front of the class, for example) I really enjoyed the minute or two of the monologue. If I remember correctly, I got an A for this assignment.

I wouldn’t mind trying to memorize other monologues if my memory wasn’t shot to pieces from insomnia, stress, and Diet Coke. And I’d perform it for the little ones, captive strapped into their car seats, as we drove from errand to errand on Saturday mornings.

Shakespeare, KJB, Henry IV

Yes, that’s KJB, as in King James Bible, not KGB, as in the defunct Soviet Union’s internal terrorist organization.

Anyway, had a very busy and draining week – two interviews, couple of Little One functions, wife working extremely late a few nights – so I did not spend much time with Mr. Shakespeare. I did finish Henry IV part I early on and watched two scenes from the BBC production, and, sadly, that’s it.

I did, however, go out to a big used book store and managed to find a complete collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets and an authentic King James Bible. I bought the sonnets because I don’t have them in their totality, just a handful reprinted in the Great Books and a compendium of poetry I have. I bought the KJB for two reasons: one, the very first Bible I had (as a boy) is a KJB New Testament and it’s falling to pieces; it’s what I read when I had my major conversion in 1992. Second, it’s always compared to Shakespeare’s plays as the summit of English literature, written about the same time as the plays were being wrapped up. Indeed, there’s a rumor Shakespeare may even have worked on it, which I briefly address, here.

One thing I immediately discovered. After reading through a half-dozen of the Bard’s plays (Tempest, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Cymbeline, As You Like It, and Henry IV part I), I find that reading the KJB is a breeze. Whereas the punctuation, the sentence structure, the diction, the vocabulary, used to puzzle me and serve as a roadblock between me and the Word, I found out that the few selections I’ve read this week … flowed.

I remember reading a book three years ago about a guy who decided he was going to read through a broad selection of classics and contemporary works thought to be classics. Then he’d offer his opinions about the author in question and the work. When he got to Hegel, he had a similar experience as I did. He wrote how the work had it’s own internal rhythm, and only after a few hundred pages under his belt could he see how to grasp it, though grasp it he never did. Shakespeare and the KJB is like that, for me, only in this case, I wondrously grasped it, and came out the better for it.

My goal this week is to finish the BBC play and to finish part 2. B&N did not have part 2, so I’m gonna have to go online to see which local library does. Next Saturday I’ll try to post something of interest about Shakespeare or his works (perhaps something on the sonnets) rather than just a self-serving update on my progress through the canon.

One tidbit about Henry IV: I absolutely love the relationship between Prince Hal and Falstaff. The latter, as you may know, is an overweight, older knight devoted to gluttony in all its forms, prone to loud, self-serving boasting, and is thoroughly the life of any room he enters. Young Prince Hal (and many of their companions) enjoy keeping the old man in his place by peppering their speech with good-natured commentary about his corpulence. For example –

Thou art so fat-witted with drinking of old sack …

You will, chops?

Peace, you fat-kidneyed rascal!

Peace, you fat guts!

Falstaff sweats to death, and lards the lean earth as he walks along.

Zounds, you fat paunch …

Why, thou claybrained guts, though knotty-pated fool, thou obscene, greasy tallow-catch –

… this horse-back-breaker, this huge hill of flesh …

And Falstaff, you carried your guts away nimbly …


And that’s just in the first two Acts. The key is that Falstaff takes it all in stride, almost as a point of pride, and attempts to dish it out as bad as he gets it. I don’t know about you, but I laugh out loud when I read those pseudo-slurs and completely enjoyed the interplay and verbal jousting (which is quite common in the plays).

82 Folios

Whoa, I cried out. If someone robbed that joint, they could make $246 million dollars!

Now, I’m not an advocate of crime. I think I had to stay after school one time in grammar school, and I got high school detention – “jugged,” we called it – once. Over twenty-five years of driving, I’ve only had to pay a couple of traffic tickets. So I’m not Dillinger. Nor a Dillinger wannabe.

No, what I was thinking of more was, this would make a great novel. Or a great movie.

Last week I wrote about the First Folio, the 1623 posthumous compilation of most of Shakespeare’s plays by two of his dear friends. Costing about $400 dollars by today’s standards, each could earn up to $3 million on the auction block. Among the 300 or so surviving editions, there is one place on the planet where there are more First Folios sitting together in one spot than anywhere else. 82 of them, to be precise. (Well, as precise as this literary archaeology gets; not all folios are complete.)

Hit that place, and you could make a fortune on the black market.

Sure, like a Van Gogh heist, you won’t see the money right away, and you won’t realize full market value of your stolen art. If you were able to pull a Steve McQueen and make off with all them folios, you’d have to wait a good long while and maybe only sell one at a time, maybe for a million a piece. Possibly less.

Sometime during the Depression, one of the heirs to a coffee fortune and head-honcho of Standard Oil, a Mr. Folger, began looking about for a neat place to house his vast collection of Shakespeareana. In 1934, two years after he died, the Folger Shakespeare Library was established in Washington, DC, in sight of the Capital Building. Folger’s folios were stored there, and the library acquired a few more over the years. It’s also the largest repository for literary documents pre-1750 in the United States. Today it serves as a clearinghouse for all intellectual things Shakespeare, a combined museum and training facility for bardologists.

(Note: the above paragraph is culled from an admittedly sieve-y memory. If you want hard, solid facts, consult wikipedia. I just give the romanticized version.)

Now, I have no clue as to the security of the Folger Shakespeare Library, but I’m sure it’s bad*ss. Maybe not as high-tech as those places Tom Cruise robs in those Mission Impossible flicks, maybe not all lasered-up for Catherine Zeta-Jones to writhe through. But it must be realistically impressive. Because, other artifacts notwithstanding, there’s $246 million dollars worth of First Folios stashed in that establishment.

So Mr. McQueen assembles his team: the safe-cracker, the electronics jammer, the muscle who’s good with a gun, the pretty dame to stir up a distraction. Steve will drive the getaway car. There’s an old, semi-effeminate aristocrat who’ll fence the folios, one at a time, three or four a year, to similar semi-effeminate artistocrats who want them for their private libraries. Only question is, will McQueen and the dame get to Mexico, or does he get popped yards from the border.

Me, I have a sister-in-law who lives in D.C. Next time we’re down there (which, regrettably, isn’t that often, though the wife and I used to live in the area), I have a mission: to scope out the Folger’s Shakespeare Library. I’ll only enter during business hours, and the only tools I’ll carry are the tools of my trade – a notebook and a pair of pens.

I can’t think of a better way to spend the afternoon. My wife and kids can, so I’ll be all alone with my thoughts and my desire to get to know the greatest English poet and playwright to ever have lived.

First Folio

Why weren’t the works of William Shakespeare lost to the ages? How did they manage to survive the transmission of over four centuries time? How is it that the greatest body of work in the English language transcended plague, war, impoverishment, vast illiteracy and make it to the shelf behind me as I type?

The answer lies with the devoted work of a handful of men.

The First Folio is a compilation of 36 of Shakespeare’s plays, printed in the fall of 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death. Of those 36, half had never been published before. Only 18 of the 36 plays included existed in quarto editions of varying reliability; the other half had not been published. The work was instigated as a labor of love by John Heminges and Henry Condell, friends and fellow actors with the Bard. If it weren’t for the efforts of these two men, we’d never know The Tempest, Macbeth, or Julius Caesar, just to name a few plays that might have passed from this world. The First Folio could have been influenced by Ben Jonson’s folio of his own work, entitled Workes, done in 1616 while Jonson was still alive.

Why didn’t Shakespeare strive to publish the remaining half of his output during his lifetime? In the Elizabethan age, the theater owners generally owned rights to any and all plays performed; therefore Shakespeare would not necessarily have earned any money off them. Indeed, the only works he did make an effort to publish were his two long-form epic poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.

Also to be found in the First Folio is a list of the actors from Shakespeare’s performing company, the Chamberlain’s Men, 26 names in all, including Shakespeare, Heminges, and Condell. Heminges was the company’s business manager and part-time actor. Legend has it he was the first Falstaff. Condell was an actor noted for his comedic roles.

The First Folio (a “folio” is a large format book) numbers 907 pages; thereby each play averages about 25 pages in length. The First is generally acknowledged as the most authentic version of Shakespeare’s plays, though from a typesetting point of view, the Folios are atrocious. Words are frequently misprinted, stray words appear out of nowhere, page numbering skips about, character names are occasionally substituted with the names of the actors portraying them. Some plays are divided into scenes and acts, others not. Some plays have character lists, some do not; those that do might list characters at the beginning or at the end of the play.

Through research akin to forensic literary detection, nine men have been determined to have worked on the typesetting of the Folios, each hand labeled “A” through “I.” “B” did half the text. “E” was an apprentice and was the worst of the bunch, responsible for many errors and misprints.

There are other descrepancies. Troilus and Cressida, though in the First Folio, is not listed in the Table of Contents because that page was printed before permission to include the play was obtained. Shakespeare’s Pericles was not included in the original Folio. Nor were The Two Noble Kinsmen and Edward III, which only recently were acknowledged to be part of the Shakespearean canon (all three plays were known collaborative efforts).

Copies cost a hefty Elizabethan pound a piece, something like $400 in today’s US currency. Now an original First Folio is worth at least $3 million. That’s quite an investment! 750 to 1200 editions were printed over the course of 18 months, with changes being made throughout the process, so there are different versions of the Folio. A second edition only nine years later suggests a low-volume initial run.

Considering that only 230 plays survive from the time of Will Shakespeare, the First Folio represents 15 percent of that total. Again, without the First Folio, half and maybe more of Shakespeare’s plays may have been lost forever.

A Second Folio was published in 1632 and a Third Folio in 1664. The Third added seven new plays to the canon, though only one, Pericles, would be accepted as authentically Shakespearean. A fourth came out in 1685. A 1709 edition, edited by Nicholas Rowe, “modernized” Shakespeare’s Elizabethen and Jacobean spellings and punctuations. He also systematically divided the plays into Acts and Scenes, and included the first formal biography of the playwright.

About three hundred First Folios survive to this day in various stages of quality and completion. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC has the most of any single entity, 82. More about this in next week’s Shakespeare Saturday.

PLAYS LISTED IN ORDER IN THE FIRST FOLIO

COMEDIES
The Tempest
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Measure for Measure
The Comedy of Errors
Much Ado About Nothing
Love’s Labour’s Lost
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Merchant of Venice
As You Like It
The Taming of the Shrew
All’s Well That Ends Well
Twelfth Night
The Winter’s Tale

HISTORIES
King John
Richard II
Henry IV part I
Henry IV part II
Henry V
Henry VI part I
Henry VI part II
Henry VI part III
Richard III
Henry VIII

TRAGEDIES
Troilus and Cressida
Coriolanus
Titus Andronicus
Romeo and Juliet
Timon of Athens
Julius Caesar
Macbeth
Hamlet
King Lear
Othello
Anthony and Cleopatra
Cymbeline


Sources: Shakespeare by Bill Bryson; Shakespeare: The Writer and his Work, by Stanley Wells, and the wikipedia article on the “First Folio”