In the December 13 issue of the New Yorker, there was an interesting article, by John Lahr, on the career of the film director Elia Kazan, in which he gave his reason for leaving acting to become a director (and later, a writer). He said that he found "being an actor... a humiliating profession". This brought to mind something that I had heard, in a completely different context, regarding the early performing days of the jazz giant Charlie Parker and the rough, insulting treatment that he received from older musicians during that time. The point was that the experience of being embarrassed can be a powerful motivator for the learning process. In the case of Parker, if it wasn't public humiliation that motivated him, something certainly did: he became one of the most technically proficient, ground-breaking musical artists in history. And I wonder if there were similar instances in the early career of another technically proficient, ground-breaking artist - this one a playwright from Stratford - who brought depth and empathy to seemingly every part that he wrote. He's still considered the ne plus ultra of actors' writers.

Further to Friday's post regarding the excerpt of Sir Thomas More, which may have been revised by Shakespeare, and Stanley Wells' book (Shakespeare: For All Time) which brought it to my attention (and which contains a reproduction of the manuscript) - a couple of things: 1. Wells rightly finds an echo of the last two lines ("... and men like ravenous fishes/ Would feed on one another") in a speech by Albany in 4.2 of King Lear ("Humanity must perforce prey on itself/ Like monsters of the deep"). And there are also Shakespearean touches in both the detailed descriptions of specific moments ("their babies at their backs") and the empathy that results. There is also the fact that the straightforward deployment of argument (as in debating) is so much a part of Shakespearean drama. Finally there is the example of word class conversion ("shark" as a verb) which shows Shakespeare's ability to transcend not only rules but expectations. I, for one, am convinced. The excerpt is the work of Shakespeare.

I'll return to the excerpt from Sir Thomas More tomorrow, but for today, the following seems more timely.

In preparing for my upcoming lectures on Henry IV, Part One, I found the following elucidation of the thematic content of the "popinjay" scene (1.3) in Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare. It's a scene usually considered no more than an aside, or at best an amusing anecdote that helps in the delineation of Hotspur's character. In its essence, it's an excuse offered up by Harry Percy (Hotspur) to Henry IV, as to why he has not sent his prisoners to the king (the ransom of named captives was, of course, one of the most lucrative spoils of war), and it centers around the messenger who was to pick them up on behalf of the king. This messenger offends Hotspur with his appearance and chat, neither of which, in Hotspur's opinion, becomes the battlefield. (The speech should be read in its entirety, so here's a link: http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=henry4p1&Act=1&Scene=3&Scope=scene.)

But the timely part arrives toward the end of the tirade when Hotspur describes the perfumed lord expressing anger over the extraction of salt-petre (one of the three ingredients of gunpowder, along with charcoal and sulfur) from the earth. Asimov describes the significance of the moment this way:

"Prior to 1400, castle walls were invulnerable to anything but a long siege, and armored knights could fight freely in battle without much fear of being killed (except once in a while by another armored knight - and even then capture and subsequent ransom was the usual procedure). The nobility was safe, in other words, and could well afford to be brave and to despise the lowborn, who were not trained in the complicated use of arms, did not own horses to bestride, and had to fight poorly armored and afoot, so that they were killed in droves.

But then came gunpowder. Now cannon, fired by lowborn men, beat down the castle walls. What's more, a gun in the hand of a cobbler or a peasant could send its bullet through the armor of the best knight in the land long before that knight's lance or sword could reach the gunner... Gunpowder made knights and castles obsolete, and it was that, more than anything else, that ended the feudal system... Obviously, the aristocracy, longing for the good old days, would sigh for a time when gunpowder had not been invented to put the lowborn on a par with the highborn, and the fop expresses that view..."

I think you might see what I'm getting at: The internet is the gunpowder of this time and the changes that are going to be its results are just starting to play themselves out. And so, today's post is dedicated to the good people of Egypt.

One of the most compelling moments in Stanley Wells' excellent 2002 book, Shakespeare: For All Time, is his discussion of the manuscript revision done to the anonymous play, Sir Thomas More, which may be Shakespeare's, and thus the only surviving literary work in his handwriting, aside from "half a dozen signatures". Wells explains that the play, never performed in its own time due to difficulties with the censors, contains many striking passages, including the following, which I'll let him introduce (I'll have some thoughts on it tomorrow):

"Since late in the nineteenth century many scholars have believed that one of the revisers was Shakespeare. The principal passage in what is known as Hand D impressively portrays events leading up to the riots of Londoners against foreign immigrants on 'Ill May Day', 1517. More, sent by the authorities as a peacemaker, subdues the rioters in powerful and humane speeches of controlled rhetoric: to the demand that foreigners - 'strangers' - be expelled he responds:

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise

Hath chid down all the majesty of England.

Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,

Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage

Plodding to th' ports and coasts for transportation,

And that you sit as kings in your desires,

Authority quite silenced by your brawl

And you in ruff of your opinions clothed:

What had you got? I'll tell you. You had taught

How insolence and strong hand should prevail,

How order should be quelled - and by this pattern

Not one of you should live an aged man,

For other ruffians as their fancies wrought

With selfsame hand, self reasons, and self right

Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes

Would feed on one another."

It's one of the great paradoxes of Shakespeare that work written in poetic form (as even the prose is, really) is almost startling in its realism. How could this be? It's my belief that poetry, simultaneously the most overlooked and the most important form of literature, provides the answer. The type of thinking that it requires is what leads toward the profundities that it invariably finds. It's also my belief that the lack of respect and attention that it's receiving in our time is a cause for serious concern.

In previous posts, I've written about the fact that the high school curriculum has turned away from poetry and toward social studies. Well, here's a William Carlos Williams quote that summarizes the difference between the two perfectly: "It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack of what is found there."

Further to yesterday's post on the influence that Shakespeare's acting experience had on his writing, it occurred to me, while preparing for my upcoming lectures on the two parts of Henry IV (see January 5 post for dates, times and locations - or email the address above), that one of the challenges that he set for himself was to re-cast old ideas and material into a dramatic form that was both playable (i.e. good for the actor) and memorable (i.e. good for the audience member). My point is that as an actor, he would have had the opportunity of having performed some less than good works (such as The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, a probable source for the plays in question), which may have then triggered in him the desire to improve on them. This, I believe, became one of his primary methods of working for the rest of his career. It would also partially explain why Shakespeare seemed to be equally as inspired by bad sources as good ones.

The scene that brought this to my mind was act four, scene five from Henry IV, Part Two that is clearly derived from the cliche of the heir apparent trying on the borrowed crown. In the hands of most writers (even now, I'm sorry to say), this scene would most probably remain contrived and dull, but Shakespeare used it as an opportunity to make explorations into all sorts of psychological and philosophical territories that are both very actable and very real. Here's a link to the scene: http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=henry4p2&Act=4&Scene=5&Scope=scene.

It occurred to me today that Shakespeare's acting career (some theorize that he did quite a bit of it, starting in the lost years) must have had quite a bit of impact on his writing one. The fact that he would have gained a lot of understanding regarding the experience of getting in front of crowds, performing actions, speaking memorized words, and carrying a story must have played a part in his work. In my December 10 post, I compared Shakespeare to Duke Ellington, but I didn't mention the performing parallel (Ellington was a great pianist), and now I realize that it might have been the most important of all. The varied experiences of these two giants, both generally acknowledged as the best in their fields, brings up the question of whether the arts, like many other endeavours, have become too specialized, compartmentalized even.

Marchette Chute's Shakespeare in London (1965) is one of the most engaging of the biographies. Its portrait of the time is vivid and convincing, and it reminds us of how much is actually known about Shakespeare's life: quite a lot, in fact. She also seems quite certain of what was taught to Shakespeare and his classmates at the Stratford grammar school, even though it's my understanding that no one else is entirely sure of the contents of the curriculum. Chute, however, writes the following: "The curriculum of Stratford grammar school, like that of every other grammar school in England was serious, thorough and dull. There was no attempt whatever to fit the boys for the ordinary life they were going to find when they graduated, for all school theory in England was based on the medieval system. The purpose of schools in the Middle Ages was to turn out learned clerks for church positions, and therefore what the little boys of Renaissance England learned was Latin, more Latin, and still more Latin. About a decade after Shakespeare entered the classroom a London teacher urged that English should also be taught in the schools, but no one paid any attention to so radical a suggestion."

If this were the case, it would at least partially explain why the teachers in Shakespeare's plays, particularly Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost and Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor (with its hilarious impromptu grammar quiz scene) are made the objects of fun, shall we say. But there may have been an upside to this sort of training, for Shakespeare at least: 1. The disciplined and systematic approach to the nuts and bolts of language may have provided grounding for his unmatched sentence construction. As a great teacher I once had the fortune to study with put it, "It's a paradox, but you have to take root to fly." 2. The freedom that Shakespeare must have felt afterward to be working in English, a language that was relatively young at the time (compared to Latin, it still is), and that, for various reasons (his work being a large one), has always managed to escape rules-based constrictions.

The excerpt from Richard II quoted in yesterday's post contains many forerunners of ideas that would be further explored in Hamlet, as I mentioned. There are even storyline echoes of the latter in lines about kings being haunted by "the ghosts they have deposed", and others "sleeping kill'd". The references to worms, bones, paste, and burials of course bring to mind the churchyard scene (5.1), and then there is the unusual word "antic" which is very important to the plot because Hamlet uses it to introduce his plan to simulate madness ("As I perchance hereafter shall think meet/ To put an antic disposition on").

Finally, there's the overlap in the characters of the protagonists themselves. How much of it there is would be a matter of opinion, but there's no question there is some. One quality they certainly share is the ability to get away with actions quite egregious in nature - in the minds of audiences, anyway - less so with other characters, which is probably due to the way they show their humanity so openly and completely. We forgive them the way we do ourselves.

On a lighter note, here's a link to the highly amusing theme song (I think it's called "Cheer Up, Hamlet") to the first season of the highly amusing television series called Slings and Arrows, which starred Paul Gross and ran from 2003 to 2006: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvmMt_xG1tI&feature=related.

In yesterday's post, I referred to Richard II as a forerunner of Hamlet, and although that would probably not be considered a controversial statement by too many, I'd still like to mention one supporting passage, which I find to be perhaps the most extraordinary in the entire play. It occurs in 3.2, the scene in which Richard returns from his Irish wars and is met with a barrage of bad news: 1. His arrival a day late has led to rumours of his decease amongst his Welsh troops, and they have disbanded. 2. Bolingbroke, returned from banishment to claim the inheritance that Richard commandeered, has gathered followers with every step, and it seems inevitable that a bloodless revolution and Richard's deposition are just around the corner. 3. Richard discovers that his friends and counselors, Bushy, Green, and the Earl of Wiltshire have all been put to death by Bolingbroke, this after having roundly cursed them for not doing better in the kingdom's defense. And throughout the scene, his followers have tried to shore him up, telling him that he's not defeated yet and so forth, but it's at this point that Richard tells them to stop doing so. Here's the speech (with its seeds of Hamlet):

... of comfort no man speak:

Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;

Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,

Let's choose executors and talk of wills:

And yet not so, for what can we bequeath

Save our deposed bodies to the ground?

Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke's,

And nothing can we call our own but death

And that small model of the barren earth

Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings;

How some have been deposed; some slain in war,

Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;

Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;

All murder'd: for within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king

Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,

Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,

Allowing him a breath, a little scene,

To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,

Infusing him with self and vain conceit,

As if this flesh which walls about our life,

Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus

Comes at the last and with a little pin

Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!

Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood

With solemn reverence: throw away respect,

Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,

For you have but mistook me all this while:

I live with bread like you, feel want,

Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,

How can you say to me, I am a king?

Richard II was a very important play in Shakespeare's career. I believe it was a turning point in fact, because it was here that he became less concerned with such things as getting historical facts straight, and more concerned with exploring the human condition - to depths that have yet to be equaled by any other artist. And Richard himself, a forerunner of Hamlet and other great introspective protagonists, was the reason for the shift becoming permanent. It must have been an almost shocking experience for audience members of that time to see a monarch portrayed in such a manner, and it still is, in fact, if we consider it carefully. The story of his reign and deposition, though not well known now, would have been very familiar to Elizabethan audiences, similar in importance to Watergate to our time. Shakespeare's decision to use those events for the revelation of the inner workings of the mind of a king has been interpreted in various ways: Several critics have even called him "socially conservative" because he seems to sympathize with the deposed king, but I wouldn't agree. Richard's revealed humanity clearly contradicts his own view of himself as the "Lord's anointed", and it surprises him as much as it does the audience, but the underlying message is actually a very subversive one: Every person on this planet, including monarchs, is a human being.

Among many interesting facts learned during the research for my recent lectures on Richard II is the fact that it was probably written at roughly the same time as A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet (1595). See the connection? The three plays are usually considered the most lyrical of their respective genres (history, comedy and tragedy, respectively) in the Shakespeare canon. (By the way, these three were also quite probably the first plays that he wrote after joining The Lord Chamberlain's Men, the theater group that he was to work with for the rest of his career. It's doubtful that they regretted their decision to accept him.)

The character of Richard II himself is fascinating, and I'll be writing about him (and his play) for the next few posts at least. One of his most compelling features is his poetic nature, and Shakespeare shows it to us in some daring ways, including this moment from the deposition scene (4.1) which could almost be considered meta-theatrical in quality (I'm using it to mean that the characters are aware of themselves as dramatic creations, as well as forcing the audience to consider them that way). At the point in question, Richard's request for a mirror with which to see the results of sadness on his face has been fulfilled, but then he suddenly dashes it to the ground and makes the following sardonic comment: "For there it is, crack'd in a hundred shivers./ Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport, /How soon my sorrow hath destroy'd my face." Bolingbroke's reply is initially puzzling ("The shadow of your sorrow hath destroy'd The shadow of your face"), but then Richard, like an English major, interprets it:

Say that again.

The shadow of my sorrow! ha! let's see:

'Tis very true, my grief lies all within;

And these external manners of laments

Are merely shadows to the unseen grief

That swells with silence in the tortured soul;

There lies the substance: and I thank thee, king,

For thy great bounty, that not only givest

Me cause to wail but teachest me the way

How to lament the cause.

The word "playwright" itself may give us some insight into the making of Shakespeare. It means simply "one who makes plays", as a "shipwright" is one who does the same with ships. Well and good, but the interesting part is the attitude that the term implies toward the work. Essentially, its use means that it should be looked at primarily as a craft, as opposed to an art. Shakespeare's livelihood and those of the members of his company were reliant on him making plays, and like some classical music composers who had to write a specific amount for various situations (Haydn is an example), the fact that he was expected to produce a certain amount of work (at least two plays a year for most of his career) meant that he could afford relatively little distraction or introspection. He quite simply had to get on with business.

And of course large-scale works like complex dramas or symphonies require a lot of straight how-to knowledge. It's rare even now to find a composer, for example, who has written only one symphony. The hard part is to learn the steps of the process, but once they have been, then the artist can focus on the doing of the thing, rather than wondering what to do next. Shakespeare, clearly, spent his time on the first of these.

What was the primary motivating force behind Shakespeare's astonishing career: art or commerce? The argument for art says that if he were writing for money, he would have written potboilers and so forth. The argument for commerce says that if he were writing for literary posterity, he might as well have stuck to poetry. My guess is that both were involved. Necessary, in fact. Shakespeare's company (the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and later the King's Men) did not travel much and so there was really only the London audience for which to play. Thus it was in Shakespeare's best interest to write plays that would be exciting and suspenseful, while at the same time containing as much substance as possible, the better to attract the same playgoers more than once. Anyone who has seen one of the plays in performance knows the feeling that arises when a line or speech is illuminated by the performance in a unique manner. It makes you want to relive the moment. During those days, I'm quite sure that many did. The philosophical/poetic content, therefore, may have been inspired by the desire and need for audiences.

It's evident that Shakespeare received a very strong early grounding in what used to be known as the trivium: logic, grammar and rhetoric. These disciplines were taught in a style that we would now consider a thing of the past, perhaps even regressive. Exercises, drilling, memorization of terms - these approaches are frowned upon in our more enlightened times. Today, instruction is informed with educational jargon, which if looked at fairly and honestly, says very little, and accomplishes even less. In today's world, we'd be very lucky to find a high school student who could define such rhetorical terms as anaphora (repeating a word or phrase to start of successive clauses or lines), anadiplosis (repeating the final word of a phrase at the beginning of the next), and chiasmus (the repetition of two terms in reverse order), let alone use them. As Woody Allen once wrote (in a different context): This is progress? Here are examples of the figures listed above, all from Richard II, courtesy of the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare:

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England...

(2.1)

My brain I'll prove the female to my soul,

My soul the father . . .

(5.5)

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me...

(5.5)

When we think of Shakespeare's time and place, we tend to think of the negatives: the health problems that would have stemmed from the lack of hygiene and primitive medical care; the political interference with the young theatrical profession, a constant threat to its survival; the relatively small potential audience for which the various companies competed; and many others, of course. But is it possible that these apparent drawbacks were, in fact, advantages. I mean, something went right, obviously, so what was it? I'm going to spend the next couple of posts considering all of this and trying to provide some conjecture that will at least raise some questions regarding the differences in cultural conditions between Shakespeare's time and ours.

Here's a sonnet (123) that touches on the issue:

No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change:

Thy pyramids built up with newer might

To me are nothing novel, nothing strange;

They are but dressings of a former sight.

Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire

What thou dost foist upon us that is old,

And rather make them born to our desire

Than think that we before have heard them told.

Thy registers and thee I both defy,

Not wondering at the present nor the past,

For thy records and what we see doth lie,

Made more or less by thy continual haste.

This I do vow and this shall ever be;

I will be true, despite thy scythe and thee.

I've mentioned several times the excellent Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory: 1945-2000 (2004), edited by Russ McDonald, as recently as Monday, in fact, and it came to mind again as I was looking through Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) for yesterday's post. Yesterday, I quoted Bloom in regard to the critical position appropriate to working with Shakespeare. Today, I'll quote his thoughts on some of the various critical schools that have sprung up over the last fifty years of Shakespeare study:

"Explaining Shakespeare is an infinite exercise, you will become exhausted long before the plays are emptied out. Allegorizing or ironizing Shakespeare by privileging cultural anthropology or theatrical history or religion or psychoanalysis or politics or Foucault or Marx or feminism works only in limited ways. You are likely, if you are shrewd, to achieve Shakespearean insights into your favorite hobbyhorse, but you are rather less likely to achieve Freudian or Marxist or feminist insight into Shakespeare. His universality will defeat you, his plays know more than you do, and your knowingness consequently will be in danger of dwindling into ignorance."

Not subtle, I'll grant you, but not wrong.

I ended my December 24, 2010 post with the following: "And so the question remains: What is the proper stance for a writer to take vis a vis Shakespeare?" The subject of the post was Frank Kermode's The Age of Shakespeare (2004), and more specifically his statement that his admiration for the playwright, though great, was, like Ben Jonson's, "this side idolatry". A critic who is very much on the other side of the fence, a "proud bardolater", is Harold Bloom, the renowned Yale professor and literary critic. And recently, in having another look at his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) I came across the following answer to the question above (and in my opinion, the definitive one):

"Literary transcendence is now out of fashion, but Shakespeare so transcends his fellow playwrights that critical absurdity hovers near when we seek to confine Shakespeare to his time, place, and profession. These days, critics do not like to begin by standing in awe of Shakespeare, but I know of no other way to begin with him. Wonder, gratitude, shock, amazement are the accurate responses out of which one has to work."

Metaphor is much more than a poetic device. It's a way of thinking. It encourages the mind to see a thing through another. It can be applied to every facet of human endeavour. It is one of the main reasons that reading Shakespeare can be of so much value to everyone, not only English majors, teachers and writers. In fact, it sometimes seems as if every aspect of his work is shot through with the idea. Today, let's consider once more (I wrote about this in a different context in my post of October 8, 2010) what is often called "word class conversion", the technique whereby one part of speech is used as another. Here's an example from act two, scene three of King Lear - the speech in which Edgar decides that the only way to avoid being caught by his father's forces (he's been framed by his half-brother, Edmund) is to disguise himself as a "Bedlam beggar". Check out the three successive nouns used as verbs in the ninth and tenth lines:

I heard myself proclaim'd,

And by the happy hollow of a tree

Escap'd the hunt. No port is free, no place

That guard and most unusual vigilance

Does not attend my taking. Whiles I may scape,

I will preserve myself; and am bethought

To take the basest and most poorest shape

That ever penury, in contempt of man,

Brought near to beast. My face I'll grime with filth,

Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots,

And with presented nakedness outface

The winds and persecutions of the sky.

The country gives me proof and precedent

Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,

Strike in their numb'd and mortified bare arms

Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;

And with this horrible object, from low farms,

Poor pelting villages, sheepcotes, and mills,

Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers,

Enforce their charity. 'Poor Turlygod! poor Tom!'

That's something yet! Edgar I nothing am.

For me, the best description of an often overlooked aspect of Shakespeare's art, the songs, is found in the 1974 Norton Anthology of English Literature (M. H. Abrams, general editor):

"The plays contain some of the finest songs ever written. They are of various types: the aubade, or morning song, the gay pastoral invitation, love songs of various kinds, the ballad sung by wandering minstrels, and the funeral dirge. They illustrate many sides of Shakespeare's genius - his incomparable lyric gift, his ready humor, and his marvelous sensitivity to the sights and sounds of English life, especially the life of the country."

I would add that another aspect of Shakespeare's genius that the songs exemplify is the way that they foster creativity in others. The primary reason for this is that no musical notation survives for them, only the words, and so for each production they must be set to music before they can be sung. Therefore, like every other aspect of Shakespeare, they lead to work, learning, creativity, fun. Here is a setting for one of the songs from the Stratford Festival's 2005 production of As You Like It, wonderfully scored by ex-Barenaked Lady Steven Page: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAqCw1jD1vU, and here are the words:

SONG

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,

Thou art not so unkind

As man's ingratitude;

Thy tooth is not so keen,

Because thou art not seen,

Although thy breath be rude.

Heigh-ho! sing heigh-ho! unto the green holly.

Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.

Then, heigh-ho, the holly!

This life is most jolly.

Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,

That dost not bite so nigh

As benefits forgot;

Though thou the waters warp,

Thy sting is not so sharp

As friend rememb'red not.

Heigh-ho! sing, &c.

Another aspect of what Harold Bloom calls the "Shakespearean difference" is the refinement found in his figurative language. By refinement, I mean precision and uniqueness. Put plainly, his imagery is, in my opinion, the best to be found in literature. A couple of examples came to mind today: the first is from the "This royal throne of kings" speech, spoken by John of Gaunt in Richard II (2.1). It's more famous as a patriotic speech than for anything else (although its real subject is how recent financial mismanagement has led to national shame), but there is one phrase that I hadn't previously appreciated to its deserved level. It's the description of Jesus (and remember: this is a character speaking of his faith, not the author) as "the world's ransom".

The second is from The Merchant of Venice, the scene in which Bassanio is making his selection from among the three caskets (3.2), during which he comments on how people can be misled by appearances (or "ornament", as he calls it). The lines that I find particularly striking in this passage are the last four:

So may the outward shows be least themselves:

The world is still deceived with ornament.

In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,

But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,

Obscures the show of evil? In religion,

What damned error, but some sober brow

Will bless it and approve it with a text,

Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?

There is no vice so simple but assumes

Some mark of virtue on his outward parts:

How many cowards, whose hearts are all as false

As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins

The beards of Hercules and frowning Mars;

Who, inward search'd, have livers white as milk...

I continue to get the feeling that we're still quite a long way from fully understanding Shakespeare's work. Having spent a fair bit of time recently with the splendid Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory: 1945-2000 (Russ McDonald, editor), and taking in its overview of the trends and highlights of the last fifty years of Shakespeare scholarship, I was most impressed at how he still manages to stay ahead of everyone. The fact that one writer could inspire so many different ideas, so many schools of thought, for 400 years- it's simply staggering. And although I was impressed by the variety of thought, I'm not sure that the book shows that many strides have been made toward understanding either the size of Shakespeare's accomplishment or the sophistication of his themes and techniques. Furthermore, many important plays and poems are practically not discussed at all, in favour of the more familiar ones, those we would find in high school programs. That's fair enough I suppose, but I do hope that some progress is made on all the fronts mentioned above in the fifty years to follow. To sum up: I do recommend the book, but Shakespeare, for the most part, remains an undiscovered country.

Another scene in which we get a fleeting meeting with minor characters who are nevertheless memorable occurs during the preparation for the Capulets' masquerade ball (1.5). The servants who are readying the setting are engaging in the primary topic of conversation of employees everywhere and to this day: who is and who isn't working hard enough. Then there's some angling for perks ("marchpane" has become "marzipan" in modern parlance, by the way), which is another frequent activity in the working world. Shakespeare's ear (these characters have a poetry of their own) and insight into the psychological effects of virtually every type of activity is unerring. And even his seemingly small moments can lead to large thinking. Here's the excerpt:

FIRST SERVANT

Where's Potpan, that he helps not to take away? He

shift a trencher? he scrape a trencher!

SECOND SERVANT

When good manners shall lie all in one or two men's

hands and they unwashed too, 'tis a foul thing.

FIRST SERVANT

Away with the joint-stools, remove the

court-cupboard, look to the plate. Good thou, save

me a piece of marchpane; and, as thou lovest me, let

the porter let in Susan Grindstone and Nell.

Antony, and Potpan!

SECOND SERVANT

Ay, boy, ready.

FIRST SERVANT

You are looked for and called for, asked for and

sought for, in the great chamber.

SECOND SERVANT

We cannot be here and there too. Cheerly, boys; be

brisk awhile, and the longer liver take all.

With the recent news that a publisher is coming out with a version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that will be excised of racial slurs, once again people are turning to Shakespearean examples, especially The Merchant of Venice and Othello, for evidence in making their cases, whatever they may be. And so once again, I feel compelled to write the following: Shakespeare didn't say anything in his works; his characters did. Yes, things of a prejudiced nature are said in the plays, but to assume that a character is speaking for the author is a mistake of frightening magnitude. Gentle readers, please do me this favour: Inform as many people as you possibly can of the foolishness of this position. It's an error that has prevented many, many people from having the right perspective toward reading Shakespeare - and Twain as well, for that matter - and even worse, in some cases, from reading them at all.

Here are three quotes which may help in building your arguments:

"Tell all the truth, but tell it slant."

- Emily Dickinson

"That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care."

- William Blake

"Shakespeare was in one sense the least moral of all writers: for morality (commonly so called) is made up of antipathies; and his talent consisted in sympathy with human nature in all its shapes, degrees, depressions, and elevations."

- William Hazlitt

One of the many great things about the history plays is the way that they present a cross-section of the societies of the time. Now it's been said that the term "chronicle" is a more accurate term for the plays in question, because they are primarily concerned with the highest levels of power, and to a considerable extant this is true, but they also provide some unforgettable glimpses of life in a wide variety of social levels and settings. And it's a great mental exercise (and great fun) to try to imagine the stories of the characters we encounter, i.e. the events that may have led them to the particular place and time that they occupy in the play(s). In Henry IV, Part One for example, there is a very unusual scene (2.1) involving two carriers and an ostler working at an Inn in Rochester that shows that their concerns are quite removed from the problems of those at the top (managing wars, quelling rebellions and so forth). Or perhaps they are meant to personify the dissatisfaction felt throughout the land. Either way, it's a scene filled with remarkable detail of gritty fifteenth century life. Here's an excerpt:

SECOND CARRIER

Peas and beans are as dank here as a dog, and that

is the next way to give poor jades the bots: this

house is turned upside down since Robin Ostler died.

FIRST CARRIER

Poor fellow, never joyed since the price of oats

rose; it was the death of him.

SECOND CARRIER

I think this be the most villanous house in all

London road for fleas: I am stung like a tench.

FIRST CARRIER

Like a tench! by the mass, there is ne'er a king

christen could be better bit than I have been since

the first cock.

SECOND CARRIER

Why, they will allow us ne'er a jordan, and then we

leak in your chimney; and your chamber-lie breeds

fleas like a loach.

FIRST CARRIER

What, ostler! come away and be hanged!

SECOND CARRIER

I have a gammon of bacon and two razors of ginger,

to be delivered as far as Charing-cross.

FIRST CARRIER

God's body! the turkeys in my pannier are quite

starved. What, ostler! A plague on thee! hast thou

never an eye in thy head? canst not hear? An

'twere not as good deed as drink, to break the pate

on thee, I am a very villain. Come, and be hanged!

hast thou no faith in thee?

Great news: Raul Bhaneja's brilliant Hamlet (Solo) is still on the boards. In fact, it's coming to Montreal's Centaur Theatre for three performances this weekend. In an acting tour de force, Bhaneja plays seventeen roles, each one physically, verbally and psychologically distinctive - I think his Polonius is the finest I've seen, for example. And it poses some very interesting questions regarding topics such as the true nature of personality, and the necessity of thinking like an actor to appreciate drama. It also brings to mind the fact that this particular play has sparked creativity in so many ways - with productions such as this one and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead being two obvious examples. And there are many others, with even more to come. It's a remarkable work for this reason alone, and this version is a must-see.

My next lecture series begins on January 18 (full schedule below) and its subjects will be the English Histories and the 2011 Stratford Season. The eleven plays to be covered are, with a couple of exceptions (Richard III, Twelfth Night, and perhaps The First Part of Henry IV), not among the most frequently performed or read of Shakespeare's works, which is a large part of the reason that I've chosen to focus on them. They deserve more attention, to put it simply. For example, although the history plays may seem removed from us in terms of time (the eight in this series are set during the fifteenth-century War of the Roses), they are nevertheless vital and immediate in terms of content. Their political sophistication is unsurpassed in literature, and the characters and families they contain are unforgettable. In fact, one of the great themes is the effects that political decisions have on families, and vice versa. I'll have plenty more to say about all of this in posts to come, and at the lectures, of course:

George Wall

Shakespeare Lectures

The English Histories & The 2011 Stratford Season

Richard II

Tuesday, January 18 at 11 am

Wednesday, January 19 at 7 pm

The Two Parts of Henry IV

Tuesday, February 1 at 11 am

Wednesday, February 2 at 7 pm

Henry V

Tuesday, February 15 at 11 am

Wednesday, February 16 at 7 pm

The Three Parts of Henry VI

Tuesday, March 1 at 11 am

Wednesday, March 2 at 7 pm

Richard III

Tuesday, March 15 at 11 am

Wednesday, March 16 at 7 pm

The Merry Wives of Windsor

Tuesday, March 29 at 11 am

Wednesday, March 30 at 7 pm

Twelfth Night

Tuesday, April 12 at 11 am

Wednesday, April 13 at 7 pm

Titus Andronicus

Tuesday, April 26 at 11 am

Wednesday, April 27 at 7 pm

The Atwater Library

1200 Atwater

Westmount, Quebec

(514) 935-7344

Admission: $20

Further to yesterday's post, in which I quoted from Stephen Orgel's excellent introduction to the Oxford Tempest, I would like to add two points for consideration. The first is that Shakespeare was certainly aware of the importance of collaborators in getting his work out there in front of people to do what it should, i.e. to communicate. And these collaborators included his sources, his playwright colleagues, his actors and fellow theater professionals, and his audiences, all of whom, the evidence shows, were held in high regard by Shakespeare. The second is that although it could be argued that drama itself, a form of expression which by its very nature requires high levels of participation and interpretation, deserves as much credit as Shakespeare for the creativity that his work has inspired in others, I would simply contend that it would be difficult to imagine the passage in question being written about any other writer. In other words, the openness, the possibilities, the necessity of interpretation are not in his work by accident.

Every so often I come across a passage that seems to me so elemental in its ideas that I feel obliged to quote it without any edits. The following comes from Stephen Orgel's fascinating introduction to the Oxford Edition of The Tempest (1987), and among its many important points, it should help playgoers (me included) to realize that a performance is more finite in its possibilities than is a text. Or, as Emily Dickinson put it, "A pen has so many inflections, a voice but one." Here's the unabridged excerpt:

"But all interpretations are essentially arbitrary, and Shakespearian texts are by nature open, offering the director or critic only a range of possibilities. It is performances and interpretations that are closed, in the sense that they select from and limit the possibilities the text offers in the interests of creating a coherent reading. In what follows I have undertaken to be faithful to what I see as the characteristic openness of the text that has come down to us, and to the variety and complexity of its contexts and their implications. To do this is to indicate the range of the play's possibilities; but it is also to acknowledge that many of them (as is the nature of possibilities) are mutually contradictory. There is nothing anomalous in this. The text that has come down to us is poetry and drama of the highest order, but it is also, paradoxically, both less and more than literature. It is, in its inception, a play script to be realized in performance, with broad areas of ambiguity allowing, and indeed necessitating, a large degree of interpretation. In its own time its only life was in performance, and one way to think of it is as an anthology of performances before Ralph Crane transcribed it for the printer in 1619 or 1620. As a printed text, it is designed to provide in addition the basis for an infinitude of future performances, real and imagined. For all our intuitions of autobiography, the author in it is characteristically unassertive, and offers little guidance in questions of interpretation or coherence. For Shakespeare and his company, the text was only the beginning, not the end, of the play."

The attitude that Shakespeare had toward collaborators, sources, actors and other writers seems best described as one of appreciation. It's clear that he recognized that what he was engaged in was part of a larger framework, both as a playwright working in Elizabethan/Jacobean London, and as a literary artist "for all time", to use Jonson's famous words, and that to be successful (as he was) would require working with and learning from other people. His level-headed attitude toward himself is also a model to learn from. A series of accomplishments of the magnitude that we're considering here doesn't happen without a disciplined and philosophically advanced self-image. In fact, it's interesting to think of him, on a personal level, in contrast with some of his most famous characters, Lear or Hamlet for example, who have trouble seeing themselves accurately. Harold Goddard concludes his very interesting essay in The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951) by calling Shakespeare "an unfallen Hamlet", after having explained that the prince, the character most approaching the capacity of Shakespeare, having to choose between force and art, fatally selects the former. It's purely conjecture, but it must be said that it's difficult to imagine Shakespeare ever having done the same.

Because there is so much that we don't know about the actual process involved in the writing of the plays, we will probably never be able to ascertain with any real accuracy the importance of collaboration to Shakespeare. But there are some clues. Of all the forms of literature, it seems obvious that drama is the most collaborative. The mere presence of the actors and audience alone would seem to prove that contention. Also, in Shakespeare's time, there was much less concern for copyrights and fame than there is now. Rather the idea seems to have been to simply get the plays onto the stage, and the people into the theatres. The fact that Shakespeare never seemed to have any sort of involvement with the publishing of his plays seems to prove this point; only his early poetry got this type of attention from him. Then there is the matter of collaboration with other playwrights. And while scholars generally agree that approximately a quarter of the plays show evidence of having had more than one author, this is an area that remains contentious as well. A final point for today: Shakespeare's collaboration, whatever it entailed, is evidence of strength, not weakness. The fact that each play contains different themes, technical feats, poetic ideas, philosophical content, psychological observations, and approaches to language - and that all of it was done with unparalleled attention to detail - it all points to only one possible conclusion: Shakespeare was a great listener. More on this tomorrow.