Being the Bardolator that I am means that my preferences for Shakespeare's plays runs on a continuum more than a binary. I don't hate any of them, and while I do love some more than others (Richard II and Coriolanus come to mind once the masterpieces have leapt about the list), there are some that I like less well. Titus Andronicus is so bitter, so painful, so dark and depressing that I'm not a really a fan of it. Having seen Cymbeline a couple of weeks ago, I can also say that it was…fine. I'm okay with not experiencing it again for a long time. A Midsummer Night's Dream is also in that category of liking it less well than others, though that comes from exposure more than anything within the play itself. I've seen it performed I don't know how often and had it on my curriculum at least three times. Unlike Hamlet, which is a well deep enough for me to dip into it annually and still not sound it, A Midsummer Night's Dream does not have enough beyond light laughter to really draw me toward it. That isn't to say laughter can't be worthwhile in and of itself; The Comedy of Errors is even more sparse on the profundity and is still a lot of fun. In fact, I took my entire family, from my eight-year-old up to my teenager, to see the Utah Shakespeare Festival version of that play this summer, and I laughed all the way through. I enjoyed it for what it was, as that's all it's trying to be. Having just finished A Midsummer Night's Dream this afternoon, I find that I'm not much changed in my opinion about it. The fairy magic and Bottom will always be the best parts of this play; the problematic solution to the lovers' quarrel will always stick out to me. The premise, if you've forgotten, is that there are lovers: Hermia and Lysander, who want to get married. Unfortunately, Hermia's dad, Egeus, is a dirtbag who wants Hermia to marry Demetrius. Not only does Hermia not care for Demetrius, but the man has "made love" (1.1.107) to Helena, another young woman of Athens. (It's always important to remember that, despite how many sex jokes and innuendoes Shakespeare puts into his plays, this isn't one of them: To make love is to woo or court a person.) So Helena wants Demetrius who wants Hermia who wants Lysander. The antics of the play really take off when the four lovers head into the woods to escape Egeus' ultimatum that Hermia must marry his preference for her or face death. Because this is a fairytale, the woods are packed with fairies, including the irrepressible Robin Goodfellow (also known as Puck), King Oberon, and Titania. Oberon has his own subplot about laying claim to a changeling child that Titania has in her train of followers--a subplot that's resolved off-stage and related to us in a brief explanation in 4.1--but his main purpose is to get the squabbling lovers (remember, Demetrius wants Hermia) to stop fighting. To that end, he has Puck put a special love potion on the eyes of…the wrong guy. If one wanted to take a more cynical stance on this play, it's really about four horny people who are interested in having sex and which partner they get doesn't matter much. Yes, Hermia (and Helena, though she doesn't demonstrate it as Hermia does) is interested in consummating her relationship with Lysander, but only after getting married. Lysander is much more anxious for their relationship to become more physical, and that becomes parodic when the love juice accidentally lands on his eyes. He falls for Helena, spurns Hermia, and then ends up trying to woo Helena with a surprising level of gusto. Because Demetrius isn't interested in Helena, then changes his tune after he gets some of that Love Potion Number 9 in his face, Helena ends up with two men vying for her attention. Helena is furious at being made the butt of their jokes: Wherefore was I to this keen mockery born? She rightly takes issue with becoming this focus of infatuation, then has to deal with the fury of her best friend, Hermia, who is now being abandoned by Lysander… Look, the interplay of the characters can be a little complicated. It's harder to read than some other plays by the Bard because of the close proximity of the girls' names (Helena and Hermia) and the interchangeability of the men (Lysander and Demetrius both lust after Helena). Many years ago, I had to come up with a mnemonic to help me keep the pairings straight, or else I become hopelessly lost: Both pairs are supposed to have an L and an M in their names. So Lysander and Hermia go together, while Demetrius and Helena are a couple. And that's part of the point, I think, of the play: When it comes to purely physical relationships, the partnering is one of proximity and convenience, not of compatibility. It's a rather cynical take on what it means to fall in love, surely. The play is filled with slapstick, hijinks, and verbal flourishes, but it's all to further this thesis that love is as mercurial as…well, a dream. But that isn't all. (When it's Shakespeare, there's always a bit more than just the surface story.) Yes, there's a big problem with the concept of consent: Egeus will only consent to having Demetrius marry his daughter, Hermia. More alarmingly, Helena--who seems to love Demetrius purely, though she's not too happy about him behaving so unaccountably strange during the second act--ends up with Demetrius by the end, the love potion removed from Lysander's eyes and leaving Demetrius still drugged. We're told in the final scene by Oberon (or perhaps it's simply a song sung--the First Folio doesn't give him these lines specifically) that "So shall all the couples three/Ever true in loving be" (5.2.37-38). The spell, it seems, will always be on Demetrius, shifting his consent from Hermia to Helena. When I think of it that way, I bristle. These meddling fairies have essentially forced Demetrius into a situation that he didn't choose, their manipulation pushing him into a relationship that he didn't want. But I think there's something more to it. There's magic in words--well-wrought words, I should say--and there are many things about which we change our minds. What is it, exactly, that convinces us to change course? There can be a lot of things, from political ideologies to religious dogma to personal experiences, all of which work on us to get us to move. An example that's a bit of a thing right now is how President Nelson, the leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has asked that members of the Church get vaccinated and to mask up when social distancing isn't possible. It has caused a kerfuffle, to say the least, as there is a strong anti-mask sentiment among the rank-and-file of members (in my experience, I should say) and now those who felt that their God-given right to breathe contagions into the air is being challenged by the man they claim has a God-given privilege to guide the Church on Earth. What will convince someone to wear a mask during church meetings? Science hasn't done it for many of them; social pressures likewise seem irrelevant. Fearmongers, grifters, hucksters, and other bad actors have eroded the faith of some members in the reality of the global pandemic. Will they change their minds because President Nelson asks them to? Am I comparing, then, the leader of my church to a magical love potion? Well, to a certain extent, yes. The largest difference is that this masking example still hinges on the consent/choice of those who are struggling with changing their minds, while Demetrius has no say in what happens to him. He doesn't even know why he suddenly can't live without Helena. On the other hand, how did you first fall in love? Was that a conscious choice, one that you made out of a rational weighing of the merits of the object of your affection? Or was it something that just…happened, something that, as Mr. Darcy says of his path toward loving Mrs. Darcy, "I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun"? Perhaps there is little choice in falling in love, which is all that this play is concerned with. For us foolish mortals, however, the choice remains on whether or not we remain in love. So maybe the love potion is the mechanism by which Demetrius falls for Helena; let us pretend that, once that has faded, he chooses to remain with her. Of course, there's a lot more to this play than just the lovers, and the hands-down best would have to be Nick Bottom, a weaver of Athens. He is guileless, charming, foolish, brash, and enthusiastic. He's also incapable of keeping the right words in his mind (when he says "deflowered" instead of "devoured", it leads to really bad connotations about what the lion purportedly does to Thisby) or of remaining dissuaded of what he wants. And what he wants is to perform a farcical play for Theseus and Hippolyta on their wedding day (at night). It is his genuineness that pulls me toward him. He is foolish, yes, but he's authentically so. He bungles most everything, but it does tend to go well despite all of that. And there is--though Bottom certainly doesn't know it--a profundity to the speech he utters upon waking up in the forest, his memories of having the head of a donkey and being wooed by Titania (another victim of the love potion): I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was--there is no man can tell what. Methought I was,--and methought I had,--but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom's Dream, because it hath no bottom… (4.1.199-209) His attempt to recreate 1 Corinthians 2:9-10 is delightful, and it points to the simplicity of the man who is trying his best despite not having all his facts straight. It's a brilliant bit of characterization that is in line with everything else we see of Bottom throughout the play entire. It's also rather indicative of the dichotomies, paradoxes, and oxymorons that Shakespeare weaves throughout the play. Okay, so a bit of personal history here: I took one (and only one) Shakespeare class during my college days. Most of the term was spent in rehearsals where I and four other girls were tasked with doing an abridgment of 5.1 of A Midsummer Night's Dream. As I was the only guy, they (naturally) cast me as Thisby, the female lover who kills herself most tragically for love. So there are parts of this scene that live in my memory, even if I wouldn't be able to perfectly recite the words. This part of the play is absolutely my favorite, as it resides close to my heart. In this scene, Theseus says the line "That is hot ice and wondrous strange snow" (5.1.59), which has stuck with me because of its fundamental paradox. How can you have hot ice? But it isn't just there: We get lots of paradoxes and oxymorons in the speeches of the characters, which adds to the impossibility and dream-like quality of the play itself. In other words, through this constant paradoxical pressure that Shakespeare baked into the poetry, we get a strange sense of a world where impossible things can happen, where our typical boundaries of expectation and reality are bent, twisted, or lost entirely. "So musical a discord," says Hippolyta in 4.1.115, "such sweet thunder." These are not typical--discord does not make music and what thunder savors of sweetness?--and neither is this enchanted wood just outside of Athens. I think that's really cool. There are some other components to this play that I noticed, but I think this has probably gone on long enough. If you haven't watched a Shakespeare play in a long time (or ever), my over-familiarity with it leading me to like it less shouldn't dissuade you from making the choice to give it a try. If you don't like it, just take Robin's advice during the Epilogue: If we shadows have offended, My "baby William", which is seven years old next week, is the Complete Works of William Shakespeare International Student Edition. I bought it from William Shakespeare's childhood giftshop, adjacent to his birthplace, for thirty-five quid. It was my big souvenir from that trip and it has been my go-to version of Shakespeare. This is a deliberate choice, as I have a host of copies of the Complete Works. One is the Barnes and Noble discount version. Another is the first copy that I ever remember trying to read, one gifted to me from my maternal grandmother. Another is an illustrated version. I also have the one given to me for my 18th birthday. (That was the first edition that I read completely--poetry excluded.) Despite having so many editions that mean a lot to me, I've focused on "baby William" as the one that I mark and annotate, creating cross-references as they appear and appeal to me; it is the version of Shakespeare that I read for enjoyment. Since 2019, I decided to reread that entire book. I'm on no timeline--there's no rush to complete the canon. I'm simply going through as often as I can, reading when it strikes me, and writing up my thoughts about the play when I'm finished. With that recap of what this string of essays is all about, I'll now give a few thoughts about Love's Labour's Lost. I like it. I mean, it's not the best thing I've ever read, but it has a lot to commend it. There are some enjoyable scenes, and the premise is too ludicrous to hate. After all, who doesn't see the immediate dramatic result of four bachelors declaring that they will avoid all worldly contact--especially of women--for three years in order to become better scholars? The arrival of the princess and her entourage is the arrival of the best parts of the play, with the women not only being more engaging and interesting, but also better sports, more clever characters, and generally worth much more than the attention that they get. The princess of France gets a total of 10% of the lines--her match, the King of Navarre, gets 11%. Those lines are almost always the better ones, and though Biron is supposed to be the main wordsmith and primary protagonist (and he's also the gabbiest character, with 25% of the lines), he always strikes me as a bit of a bore. Take, for example, how the princess talks with her servant. Boyet is a sly observer of people, and he knows that his place is as a server to his princess. Nevertheless, the two will deliver lines of ease and familiarity, though always with the correct distinctions of class maintained. At the beginning of the second act's first scene, Boyet and the ladies are talking about where they are. Boyet explains that it's the princess' role to speak with Ferdinand, the king of Navarre. He urges her to Be now as prodigal of all dear grace Admittedly, I repunctuated the first line of the princess, so that it reads, "Good Lord, Boyet, my beauty, though but mean…", thus giving it a tinge of good-natured exasperation. The point, however, I think still stands. She is incredibly quick-witted and she lets that shine in almost every scene. She and her female companions are able to easily see through the gifts and love-notes the smitten males have sent them, and they recognize that these attempts to woo are just as laughable as they appear to the audience. They play along, just as eager for a good time as those in the theater's seats, all the while knowing the score. There's an insouciant indulgence that I get from the princess ("We are wise girls to mock our lovers so" (5.2.58)) and I really wish there were more lines from her and quite a bit less from the men. Indeed, the male lovers are essentially all interchangeable in a play where interchangeability is a part of the theme. (Interestingly, the next play is A Midsummer Night's Dream where this theme is drawn in even clearer lines.) After all, we have duplicates galore: Holofernes and Nathaniel are both erudites (though the latter is perhaps a more sycophantic version of what he sees in the former); Dull and Costard (and Mote, to an extent) all occupy a similar position in the society; who, save the actors who play them, can differentiate between Longueville and Dumaine? Stand out moments are often derived out of a bit of wordplay rather than pure character, with a possible exception of Costard's confusion about the word remuneration during 3.1. Now will I look to his remuneration. Remuneration! O, that's the Latin word for three farthings: three farthings--remuneration.--'What's the price of this inkle?'--'One penny.'--'No, I'll give you a remuneration:' why, it carries it. Remuneration! why, it is a fairer name than French crown. I will never buy and sell out of this word. (125-130) This play has a tendency--in part because of Holofernes and Nathaniel--to tend toward sesquipedalian expressions. Shakespeare sends up this tendency, parodying it by parroting it with the misunderstanding of the lower class. Since this is seen better (and with more examples) in Much Ado About Nothing's Dogberry, I won't comment more here. Maybe this is where Shakespeare first started down the path that ends with the confounded constable? At any rate, I love the way that Costard does with remuneration what any of us might do with an unfamiliar word: Try to use the context for some sort of meaning. Granted, this may lead us astray--I teach my students the word prodigal every year because there's an assumption that it has to do with a fall from grace or a grievous sin. That it has to do with being a spendthrift isn't really as clear the title of Parable of the Prodigal Son might seem. (It's also refreshing to see some of the characters on the stage being as equally confused about the language as the people in the audience can be: I'm not going to lie, the footnotes and marginalia were crucial in my understanding and appreciation of this play.) Shakespeare also experimented with poetry a bit here, using a lot of rhymes and even different metrical standards throughout. I'm less of a fan of Shakespeare's lyrical period. Some of it has to do with Milton's observation in the second edition of Paradise Lost: "Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially…" (though I might disagree with him that it was "the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter"). There's already a great deal of artificiality to Shakespeare's language, where so much of the syntax is warped to better express his thoughts and to fit within the blank verse's syllabic requirements. When those poetical tricks are amplified by rhyming, my own attention wanes. The bigger issue, for me at least, is it seems to cheapen whatever the character is trying to say, making the rhyme become more important than the substance. While this isn't always the case, it is often enough--especially in this play--that it distracts me. There is one thing that I'm rather curious about, though, and that's how Rosaline is described. Save for two references to her "white hand", Rosaline is commented on with enough racially coded language that I can't help but think that she's Black. An editor of my Norton Edition, Walter Cohen, argues that "only Rosaline's hair and eyes are black" (page 773). The ending of 3.1 describes her as "A whitely wanton with a velvet brow, / With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes" (181-182), which certainly fits for the latter half of Cohen's argument. (I don't know how he got to the conclusion about her hair color.) However, this is turns into a matter of deciding which details have more weight and which have more metaphor. As I mentioned, there are two instances of her hand being called "white" or "snow-white" (3.1.153 and 4.2.121 respectively), and a reference to her brow (as mentioned above). These seem to point toward the idea that she's white--for obvious reasons. But when the men start teasing each other about the women they've fallen for, Biron (who is in love with Rosaline), rejoins the king: FERDINAND These to me seem much more direct a description than the potentially-metaphorical descriptions of her "white hand" and brow. It could easily be a mistake on Shakespeare's part--he's never been one to care a great deal for continuity--to have left in small descriptions of Rosaline's hand; it could also be his inclusion of the romantic ideal that Biron is voicing, rather than describing her actual aspect. If this really is an example of a (presumably) white male wooing and seeking the affections of a Black woman, it's something that I haven't seen explored in all of the literature I've read on the play. (Full disclosure: I've not explored a lot of scholarship on this particular play, and I don't really remember much of what others have said.)
As far as representation goes, I've seen a great many "color-blind" castings of plays. Often, it's a fitting choice, as the character's race doesn't affect the story in deeply noticeable ways. However, having Rosaline be "canonically" Black really makes a large difference in how race in Shakespeare can be discussed, to say nothing of the fact that she would be the only Black female character in the oeuvre (Cleopatra, being from Egypt, may necessitate splitting the claim in two). Aaron the Moor, from Titus Andronicus, the prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice, and Othello in his play make up the primary characters of color. There's a valid and worthwhile argument to put Caliban (from The Tempest) in that category, too, as well as Shylock and Tubal (the two named Jews from Merchant, though whether or not Jessica would count is a matter for a different essay). I may be wrong here, but I think that's the entire list of people of color in the plays. I find this sort of thing really important. Shakespeare as a product of white nationalism and British imperialism is one of the more uncomfortable aspects of his legacy that I struggle with. It's hard to love something so unabashedly when I know that the thing I love has been the means of hurting other people, even those far removed in time and place from me. And while I operate under no delusions that Shakespeare was some sort of proto-progressive or in any way looking to provide token characters of a different race or religion, I find a lot to unpack in the conversation between Ferdinand and Biron about a Black woman. There are so many cultural assumptions that Biron is refuting as he confesses his love for her, and the idea that Rosaline is a clever, complete human never fails to come across to the reader. Despite white supremacists' claims to the contrary, there most definitely were Black people--and other people of color, too--that lived in the highly metropolitan and economically-vibrant London during the Elizabethan and Jacobean time period. Though it's fair to say the majority of people were white, it's ahistorical to think that everyone in England was white at that time. The slave trade in England began just two years before Shakespeare was born (which was 23 April 1564, if you were curious), meaning that his entire life was spent with his country trading in the lives of human beings as if they were cattle. Not only were Liverpool and Bristol slave ports, but as Reni Eddo-Lodge points out, so were "Lancaster, Exeter, Plymouth, Bridport, Chester, Lancashire's Poulton-le-Fylde and, of course, London" (Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, page 5). Black people have always been a part of European history. Reflecting the world around him, Shakespeare seems to have incorporated a minority-race character, a Black woman. Who knows? Perhaps she was inspired by any of the sundry "sources" of the Dark Lady in the Sonnets--"Lucy Negro, [a] bawdy-house keeper of Clerkenwell's stews, or Hundson'd mistress Aemilia Lanyer, or else Pembroke's silly paramour Mary Fitton" (Park Honan's Shakespeare: A Life. Page 230). Personally, I doubt that. It makes more sense that he bumped into people of color throughout his life in the red-light district of London and that filtered into his art. While I would like to put more time and thought into this argument, I think I'll end with a final bit about the second play in this reread: Love's Labour's Won. We have two references to this "sequel" (who knows if it actually continued the story from the first play): One from a man named Francis Meres in 1598 (meaning he saw it when it was a brand new production), and another from a bookseller in 1603 (when the play would've been comparatively older). Neither lists the author of the plays, nor what they were about. Considering the unorthodox ending--the princess and her entourage leave unmarried, as the death of the princess' father necessitates her departure, meaning that the recent lovers never get married--it isn't a surprise to think that there's a sequel somewhere out there. Like Cardenio, another lost play by Shakespeare, we only have vestigial wisps that float around the historical landscape, evanescent and intangible. Maybe if we had that play, I would be able to assert my interpretation about Rosaline more fully. As it stands, this play is on its own. It's light and strange, a valuable if faulty addition to the Complete Works. Definitely worth checking out… …unless you're thinking of picking up Kenneth Branagh's musical version. That one is not good. At all. Read it instead, if you have to choose. Whenever I have a Shakespeare class, I always try to get The Comedy of Errors into the curriculum. (Since I let the students pick which plays we study, this is not guaranteed to happen.) It has some reasons for this: Of all of Shakespeare's plays, it is the shortest, clocking in at just over 14,000 words; it hues closely to the concept of the dramatic unities (character, time, and place), which makes it easier to follow; and it's flat out funny. Yes, a performance of it is better than reading it--as is quite often the case with Shakespeare--and I usually show them the Globe 2014 version. While it's not the best one I've ever seen (that would be the 2014 Utah Shakespeare Festival production), it's a lot of fun and it gives the class a lot to enjoy. One of the things that's amazing to me about this play is the way that Shakespearean preoccupations still manage to haunt the play, giving this light, breezy comedy unexpected depth. Yes, the zaniness of the plot tends to overshadow any deeper contemplations, I admit it. However, these themes are powerful though mildly drawn. For example, he considers the inevitability of death, the plasticity of madness and sanity, and the intricacies of identity, all while having two sets of identically named and -dressed twins galivanting through Ephesus in a single afternoon. On Death The play begins with a tragic story from Egeon. He explains the convoluted setup for the hilarity that's to come. And though people rightly fixate on the highly improbable chance of Egeon and Emilia both having one natural-born and one adopted son being split apart "by a mighty rock" (1.1.101), what fascinates me is the unjustly punitive laws that Duke Solinus' country has embraced. He explains, If any born at Ephesus be seen This takes trade wars to a whole new level (as it was merchant-class related problems that led to this harsh law), meaning that Egeon is bounded for a doom of birth. Shakespeare doesn't make a lot of this--people being born into their castes fits his view of the world (just look at how Dromioes are treated)--but to me it's indicative of the Homeric concept of "being born to die". Consider the first two lines of the play: "Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall / And by the doom of death end woes and all." Yet in the exuberance of the rest of the play, this possibility is almost entirely ignored. Unlike the later play Measure for Measure, where the possible death of a character is due to a rather uncriminal action (in the case of The Comedy of Errors, it's by virtue of his homeland; in Measure, it's by virtue of fathering a child on a fiancé), the characters don't seek to resolve the problem as a matter of course. That it resolves itself happily is more a generic trope than anything else, though a more somber ending wouldn't jive with the colorful Ephesus that we see here. Nevertheless, death is everywhere in Shakespeare's plays, and he uses that all too-familiar visage to season his comedies with less than comedic outcomes. I appreciate this, as it means that there is nothing that can truly be taken for granted. Indeed, plays like Othello and Romeo and Juliet generate a tragicomic tone that ends on tragedy for the very reason that sometimes Shakespeare won't allow the plot to protect the characters. Sometimes, even in what might seem like a comedy, the stakes can be felt this way, with The Comedy of Errors as a fair proof of that. On Madness Insanity is another constant in his plays. Broadly speaking, there are plenty of other pieces of drama--Shakespearean and contemporaneous to him--that treat on this theme. (As an example of this, I often think of 4.2 of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi wherein the eponymous Duchess is confronted by upwards of eight madmen in order to try to torture her.) Though pre-Enlightenment, the English Renaissance was hardly a medieval haven of pure superstition. Sure, they had their quirks--their beliefs in the balance of bodily humors and how they thought people's eyes work are a couple that spring to mind--but they weren't allergic to the concept of reason. After all, it's Hamlet who says, "Sure He that made us with such large discourse, / Looking before and after, gave us not / That capability and god-like reason / To fust in us unused […]" (4.4.34-38). The depravation of one's ability to reason is something that, I think, we still fear to a certain extent, our scientific process into the workings of the mind notwithstanding. For a late-sixteenth century playwright, it's clear that the value of being able to think was high on Shakespeare's list. The characters in The Comedy of Errors are prone to ascribe witchcraft, sorcery, or satanic influence to explain the otherwise inexplicable behaviors of the Antipholi. During 4.4, as Antipholus of Ephesus strikes out at Doctor Pinch, Antipholus' courtesan shouts, "Mark how he trembles in his ecstasy" (46). A few lines later, the doctor's analysis is in: "Both man and master is possessed. / I know it by their pale and deadly looks" (87-88). His prescription is within the boundaries of accepted practices of the time: " They must be bound and laid in some dark room" (89), a typical remedy for those deemed insane. (This is the treatment that Malvolio suffers in the latter part of Twelfth Night, too.) But the judgment on loss of wit runs both ways. Antipholus of Syracuse (I use the mnemonic of the "stranger" twin to remember this), having beaten the man he thought was his servant, looks about the bustling port of Ephesus and tells the audience They say this town is full of cozenage, After some shenanigans, Antipholus of Syracuse surmises that "Lapland sorcerers inhabit here" (4.3.11), which gives rise to his assumption that it is the courtesan who is in league with Satan: ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE And while the courtesan tries to pass it off as a fit of being "marvelous merry" ("being hyper", I suppose, would be our modern version of this), it's clear that this explanation loses its validity as the play rushes to its ridiculous and enjoyable ending. Surely it is a crazy version of Ephesus, one with hints of violence inside the irrational. Only once reason reasserts itself in the lengthy fifth act do we see violence subside. Who's mad and who's not only becomes clear to the characters when the correct identities can be asserted, which leads us to… On Identity The last piece of this play that both informs the entirety and dances on the fringes is the concept of identity. My Norton International Student Edition (not for sale in the US or Canada) has an opening essay on the play by none other than Stephen Greenblatt. In it, he points out Montaigne's story about a Frenchman: […] a cunning imposter succeeded in assuming the identity of Martin Guerre, a man who had disappeared some years before. The imposter lived in the community for three years, sleeping with Guerre's wife and farming his land, until the real Martin Guerre unexpectedly returned. Convicted of fraud, the imposter confessed and was hanged. (717) Greenblatt goes on with another Montaigne quote: "[…] The more I frequent myself and know myself, the more my deformity astonish me, and the less I understand myself" (717). These as a preface help to underscore just how crucial identity is to the characters--and, by extension, to us. The entire reason Antipholus of Syracuse is wandering the wide world is in order to find his long-lost mother and brother. He'd grown up with Egeon, knowing that he had family, and at last he is seeking them out. In one of this play's rare monologues (the best resources for knowing the minds of Shakespearean characters), he says, I to the world am like a drop of water His Dromio has his own existential crises when the servant happens upon Nell, the kitchen wench and wife to the Dromio of Ephesus. "Do you know me sir? Am I Dromio? Am I your man? Am I myself?" (3.2.73-74). These questions make us laugh, as does the exaggerated, grotesque description of poor Nell, but only because we're in this version of the world where doppelgangers exist. In our own, we only have our own mirrors to look in, our own sense of self when we ask if we are who we are.
Though he has his fair share of foibles (as do all of us; as do all of Shakespeare's characters), Antipholus of Ephesus has done things in his past--including fighting by the duke's side in war--that differentiate him from his twin. Antipholus of Ephesus is of a faster, hotter temper. But, like his brother, he is quick to beat Dromio who--like his brother--is fast to respond with a pun and a fetch of wit. The fact that the Antipholi do behave differently shows his trademark knack for characterization and points strongly to an individual sense of self. After all, Dromio of Syracuse has quite different taste in women than Dromio of Ephesus does. Keeping that in mind, what does it mean to be "a drop of water that in the ocean seeks another drop"? Not just in terms of the vast ocean of humanity, but also within our relationships and interactions? While in a society and a rapidly growing, globalized world, what does it mean to be one's self? And what do we do when we find someone we are so similar to that the connection is uncanny? Pretty profound questions for a comedy, I'd say. Much like the narrative poem Venus and Adonis (which I wrote about previously), Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece is an oft-overlooked part of the Bard's oeuvre. There are lots of reasons for this--the fact that it isn't a drama would probably be a large one--but I suspect our motivations, as modern readers, to avoid this poem comes from the topic. Especially in a time when we're (fortunately) becoming more and more aware of the ways in which sexual assault are discussed, The Rape of Lucrece can be a really challenging text.
That being said, it is a really good piece of poetry on almost every level. In fact, the area where it isn't "good" is in the topic it treats: Rape narratives are distasteful, and to speak highly of this one feels contradictory. I fully admit that it's one of my biases at play here. I don't feel that fratricide is too uncomfortable a topic, despite being firmly anti-murder in my morals, so discussing Hamlet doesn't come with it any additional problems. But when it comes to other topics, I'm less keen to jump into the discomfort that the narrative conjures. Reading Lucrece is hard from a modern point of view because of how rapists and rape victims are treated. Things are not good when it comes to this societal ill, despite all of the progress of the past 400 years since Shakespeare wrote his poem. They aren't even better, in my estimation, just different. There are a lot of antiquated ideas that Lucrece espouses as she wallows in guilt and shame after what Tarquin does to her; these are also ideas that modern day victims of sexual exploitation suffer. There are old-fashioned concepts of what it means to be married, and what duties a wife has to her husband (and, implicitly, vice versa); these concepts aren't dead with the advent of the digital age, instead living on in millions of households currently. Oh, the verbiage has changed, true. But the implications of these beliefs are fundamentally unchanged. One thing that is also unchanged from then to now, however, is that Tarquin's act is considered reprehensible by his victim, her husband, her father, and the congregated lords of Rome who arrive at her home to hear her story. The same emotions of fury and rage, of desire for vengeance and violence, flow through Collatine in the final couple of dozen stanzas of the poem that any modern might feel. He doesn't disbelieve his wife or doubt her story, however, which does put him in a different category than many people when victims of sexual abuse step forward. (Look, for example, at the different responses to Dr. Blasey Ford's account during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process.) Another difference between how we view rape victims is that there's a stronger push toward exculpating the feelings of guilt in the victim herself. Life is complicated, and there are usually multiple angles of responsibility and blame in many different actions. Rape, however, is absolutely the fault of the rapist. The (usually) man who does the deed bears the burden of that crime. Lucrece, unfortunately, doesn't believe that. Oh, she comes close, don't get me wrong. Just before her drastic decision to end her life, she asks these brilliant and pointed questions--questions, I should add, that are exactly the right thing to ask, though she presupposes all the wrong answers--of the gathered lords: 'What is the quality of mine offence, Being constrain'd with dreadful circumstance? May my pure mind with the foul act dispense, My low-declined honour to advance? May any terms acquit me from this chance? The poison'd fountain clears itself again; And why not I from this compelled stain?' (1702-1708) She has no "quality of offence" because she's done nothing wrong. It isn't her fault that Tarquin raced from the camp to Collatium where he, despite some of his own misgivings, yielded to his lusts and violated his friend's wife. It's Tarquin's fault. It's always the rapist's fault. But she doesn't believe that--and there's the real crux of the difficulty in this piece. It's not only that it's dealing with one of the most heinous crimes we have; it's the internalized misogyny that Lucrece deals with that makes this poem so hard to read and think about. After the horrendous act (which is not described in any detail by Shakespeare), Lucrece is left alone to wallow in her guilt and shock and dismay and grief. Among many other things, she says, 'Well, well, dear Collatine, thou shalt not know The stained taste of violated troth; I will not wrong thy true affection so, To flatter thee with an infringed oath;' (1058-1061) She did no infringing: It was Tarquin. This is the sort of thinking that makes no sense to me, adding an unseen (to Shakespeare, at least) complication to the text. And it isn't as though she exclusively thinks of herself as having betrayed her husband, that the sin resides solely in her…it's just that it's mostly exclusively. She does say, "Not that devoured, but that which doth devour/Is worthy blame" (1256-1257), but that line of thinking isn't supported in the rest of the poem. As a reader, seeing the guilt she carries makes it additionally tricky to deal with something other than the crime when you consider how many great lines that Lucrece drops as she processes her woe. (In a lot of ways, Lucrece is the paragon of Shakespearean women, with voice, presence, compassion, and a piercing insight. It makes it doubly tragic that such a powerful character is so often overlooked.) Consider, for example, these observations: 'The baser is he, coming from a king, To shame his hope with deeds degenerate: The mightier man, the mightier is the thing That makes him honour'd, or begets him hate; For greatest scandal waits on greatest state. The moon being clouded presently is miss'd, But little stars may hide them when they list. (emphasis mine, 1002-1008) This struck particularly hard during our 2020 elections, where one candidate has over two dozen allegations of sexual assault (to say nothing of allegations about paying off a porn star to keep quiet about an extramarital affair) and another whose interactions with at least eight women constitutes sexual harassment--or worse. Seeing this reminded me of the chilling lines from the poorly-named Angelo in Measure for Measure, where he tells the nun, Isabella, "Say what you can, my false o'erweighs your true" (emphasis mine, 2.4.170). The point of a leader is to, well, lead. As Lucrece argues to Tarquin's intentions, "For princes are the glass, the school, the book/Where subjects' eyes do learn, do read, do look" (615-616). Even in a democratic-republic where the power is derived from the people and shaped by the Constitution, how our political leaders behave gives license to those who follow. Only a quarter of actual rapes are reported, and of that number, less than 1% lead to felony convictions. When high profile cases of sexual misconduct result in no punishment (consider the aforementioned Dr. Ford, who had to get a security detail to deal with the death threats, while the accused got a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court), it gives a disturbing credence to that Measure for Measure quote. I think it's fair to say, along with Lucrece, that "kings' misdeeds cannot be hid in clay" (608). I'd like to tell you that The Rape of Lucrece is a tale where things go right, where the victim is believed and her shame expunged while the villain is appropriately punished. Unfortunately, that isn't the case: Lucrece ends her life because of the shame, and the men who remain seek vengeance fail to do more than banish Prince Tarquin. This is no small thing: Removing the king of Rome eventually led to the Roman republic. In those times, however, it wasn't considered morally wrong to kill the man who had committed this type of crime. The fact that Tarquin lost his father's kingdom but kept his life is a chilling foreshadowing of many future miscarriages of justice. But what of the poem itself? I mentioned before that it's a beautiful piece of work. There are some stunning pieces of wordplay and fascinating refrains, to say nothing of the nuggets of wisdom that Shakespeare is so adroit at crafting. I'll give a couple of examples to indicate the whole. Throughout the poem, Shakespeare employs "contraries" (his word) or paradoxes (my word) to describe the feelings and events. They're used so frequently that, despite being on the lookout for them, I know I missed a few. "Thou nobly base, they basely dignified" (660); "He in his speed looks for the morning light; / She prays she never may behold the day" (745-746); "How he in peace is wounded, not in war" (830); "To hold their cursèd-blessèd fortune long" (866); "Thy honey turns to gall, thy joy to grief" (889). These contraries help draw attention to the images he's creating, helping us understand the extremities that the characters are dealing with. Shakespeare will also deploy repetition to great effect. Consider this lambasting of Tarquin as Lucrece levels curse after curse on his head. 'Let him have time to tear his curled hair, Let him have time against himself to rave, Let him have time of Time's help to despair, Let him have time to live a loathed slave, Let him have time a beggar's orts to crave, And time to see one that by alms doth live Disdain to him disdained scraps to give. 'Let him have time to see his friends his foes, And merry fools to mock at him resort; Let him have time to mark how slow time goes In time of sorrow, and how swift and short His time of folly and his time of sport; And ever let his unrecalling crime Have time to wail th' abusing of his time. (emphases mine, 981-994) This echo of the word "time" gives us a sense of regret for the now-past moment that led to her tragedy. She recognizes how much can hinge on such an ephemeral, rapidly shifting thing as time, and how it can be so elastic in our perception. More than that, she's calling out to future generations--the story, which transpired in 509 BCE, was well known to Shakespeare's audiences, though its popularity has faded since--to remember the shame that she's suffered. And, in my case at least, I view this less about her shame and more about the deplorable behavior of Tarquin. (Of course, I don't agree with the Renaissance conception that female chastity was a physical condition as much as a mental condition, so it's not surprising I view things differently.) This kind of repetition is also embedded within certain lines, such as "And for himself himself he must forsake: / […] When he himself himself confounds, betrays […]" (156, 160). There's also "Whose deed hath made herself herself detest: / At last she smilingly with this gives o'er; / 'Fool, fool!' quoth she, 'his wounds will not be sore'" (1566). The line 795 has this one: "But I alone alone must sit and pine […]". These work as emphases, but often as grammatically powerful expressions, too. "Whose deed hath made herself herself detest" uses the second herself reflexively (we would render this "made her detest herself"), and puts the emotional feelings squarely on Lucrece. Agree or disagree with her conclusion, it's crucial that we understand the victim on her terms: For her, she is to blame for failing to protect her marital vows more fully. If we can't understand that as her point of reference, the poem becomes murky. Another aspect of this piece that really stood out to me was how, in the depths of her misery, she turned to the classics to find validation. Note, I didn't say comfort. That's not necessarily what the classics (or Shakespeare) are for. In Lucrece's mind--and, I daresay, in the Elizabethan/Jacobean mind, too--the words of the past aren't supposed to act as a balm for the woes of the present. Instead, it's a mirror in which they see a parallel of their own suffering. There's a kind of commiserating solidarity in reading this way, and Shakespeare--whose marginalia (if it ever existed) is lost to us--gives us a glimpse into what he saw when he read the story of the Battle of Troy. For a protracted segment of the poem, Lucrece studies a beautiful painting depicting the sack of Troy. Starting on line 1366 and going through line 1568, Lucrece finds in the tragedy of Ilium the similar feelings and parallels of her own sadness. She casts Helen as both a rape victim herself and a "strumpet that began this stir" (1471). The misery of Priam's death at Pyrrhus' hand (1467) gets attention, and the traitorous Sinon (who convinced the Trojans to allow the wooden horse into their gates) receives a vicious attack from the bereft Lucrece: She tears out his part in the picture with her nails. I, too, often find solidarity in knowing that those of previous eras feel how I feel. It ties me into the broader fabric of humanity, showing me that for all of my advanced technology and specialized skills, I'm still merely human. Though it isn't about comfort qua comforting aphorisms or brain-dulling platitudes, there is some comfort in hearing that I'm not alone. "But I alone alone must sit and pine" stops being true when Lucrece stands up and looks into the lessons and the emotions of the past. She seeks out the universal within the specific and finds herself there--in my mind, that's why I keep returning to Shakespeare. I see myself more clearly through his words than any other's. And what words he chooses. I could dedicate an entire essay just to his word choice in this poem--and the way that words are a type of power within it--but I'll satisfy my itch with highlighting this particular demonstration of the Bard's prowess: 'It cannot be,' quoth she, 'that so much guile'-- She would have said 'can lurk in such a look;' But Tarquin's shape came in her mind the while, And from her tongue 'can lurk' from 'cannot' took: 'It cannot be' she in that sense forsook, And turn'd it thus, 'It cannot be, I find, But such a face should bear a wicked mind.' (1534-1540) Shakespeare seems incapable of not utilizing his dramatic flair for demonstrating a person's galloping thoughts, even when he's pulling double duty of narrator and character speaker. Look at how Lucrece lurches from thought to voice to halted conclusion. It's incredible to see Shakespeare so effortlessly giving us the thoughts of this poor woman, all embedded in the rigid rhyme system of the poem's structure, and demonstrate the twisting tumult of her mind. How many of us have had a similar experience? One where we are in the middle of speaking our point only to realize that what we were going to say at the outset no longer connects to the conclusion? To so beautifully capture all of that in a sparse seven lines. That's just incredible to me. And that sums up the contraries of my feelings toward the poem: On one hand, there is incredible beauty and poetic power here. There's a huge amount of pity and pathos that Shakespeare condenses into 1,855 lines, with some gorgeous descriptions and golden phrases. As a piece of art, it's sublime. And yet, looking at what's being discussed immediately reins in my enthusiasm. To make art out of violation is crass at best, even as I recognize that its creation happened in a time when they viewed rape differently than we do now. I struggle to recommend this poem, yet at the same time I definitely want more people to read it. As is so often the case with Shakespeare, his writing is nuanced, expressive, and--above all--filled with the complexity of life. Read at your own risk. In my rereading of Shakespeare, I'm actually doing a couple of readings--that is, there are some gaps in my Shakespearean experience. Those gaps are the narrative poems. I can now, however, strike Venus and Adonis from the short list of "Shakespeare that I haven't read", as I finished the almost 1,200 line poem today. Wowza. That's what I think of this poem. Wowza. Since Venus and Adonis isn't particularly well known, let me give a quick synopsis for those who'd like to know: Venus, the goddess of love, wants to sleep with the most beautiful man in the world, Adonis. Adonis, a mortal hunter, is pretty much only interested in riding his horse and hunting a boar. When Venus shows up to get some action, Adonis isn't having it. She drapes herself on him, woos him with honeyed words, and basically does everything within her not-insubstantial power (she is the goddess of love, remember) to get him horizontal. Adonis doesn't care about Venus, her advances, or her arguments about why he should explore country matters with her, eventually riding away on his palfrey and abandoning Venus in the forest. When morning comes, Adonis is out hunting the boar, only to be gored mortally by the animal. Venus finds his body, weeps and mourns, then transforms him into an anemone. She then retreats to her domain to mourn the loss of the love that could never be. Admittedly, summarizing this story (which is from Ovid's Metamorphoses) doesn't do it much justice at all. The source material isn't quite as lengthy (from my dim memories of reading Ovid seven years ago) as the poem itself, and though there's precious little plot, Shakespeare manages to squeeze about 1,200 lines in this "remake". And, as is often the case whilst looking at the Bard's writings, how Shakespeare tells his stories matters more than what happens in the stories. First of all, Shakespeare uses a popular rhyming pattern--ababcc--in what is officially called sesta rima. However, much like the English sonnet format that now bears his name, this kind of rhyming is known as "Venus and Adonis stanza" based upon its association with our Sweet Swan of Avon. The rhyming can be plain (he rhymes "rest" and "breast" quite a bit) or daring (starting on line 1141, he rhymes fraud/o'erstrawed and breathing-while/beguile), but it's always in that effortless manner that Milton described as "easy numbers flow". Shakespeare, who wrote this poem during the plague outbreak of 1592-93, uses his poetry to woo some patronage from the Earl of Southampton by exercising his virtuosic talents on the page. While we aren't much for narrative poetry these days (or much of anything that isn't firmly lyrical poetry), it doesn't take too long before the artificiality of iambic pentameter in the rhyming quatrain/ending couplet starts to feel natural and comfortable. I don't really conceive of this as Shakespeare showing off, necessarily; it's more of an extension of his ability off the stage and onto the page. What really stood out to me, however, was the reversal of expectations. Shakespeare does this a couple of times in his plays, too, but it's a really sustained look at the wooing conventions of the time. Helena, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, laments the gender roles' rigidity: "We cannot fight for love, as men may do; / We should be wood and were not made to woo" (2.1.241-2). This small aspect of that whole play is the entirety of the tension of Venus and Adonis. The goddess of love comes into Adonis' life and expects that this mortal man to react "normally" when she comes on to him. Adonis, however, will have none of it, wishing that she would just leave him alone. The roles of the spurned lover and the uninterested object of affection are stereotypically male/female. Venus and Adonis shifts that binary, and I have to admit, it's amazingly effective. Surely part of the reason I felt this way is through my own experience being conditioned that men like physical affection and women occasionally dole it out. This kind of thinking isn't exclusively for intercourse, either. I come from a really conservative background--prudish would be too gentle a term, I think--where simply asking someone on a date was almost entirely the purview of the male. Dances like MORP were fun in part because of that reversal--the girl asked the guy. Here's a poem where the most attractive woman in all of existence is literally throwing herself onto a guy, encouraging him to kiss her, to experience her (and some of the ways that Shakespeare frames these "requests" are almost blush-inducing, despite not being particularly explicit), and what does he do? "Nah. I'm good." I think someone who was better at queer theory could make a case about Adonis' asexuality, but that was definitely something that came to my mind, in part because the question of "Why would you not?" kept rattling around my head. Fortunately, the text answers this, at least to a certain extent: He'd rather be hunting, he's supposed to be with his friends, and he's far too young for a tryst in the forest. What stood out the most to me was his delineation between lust and love--a line that I try to help my students understand every year. What have you urged that I cannot reprove? For a young guy who claims he doesn't know much, this is some pretty sound understanding. He rejects Venus' frequent arguments that he is being selfish by not making a copy of himself for others to enjoy--that beauty unshared is a beauty lost. This is an argument that recycles throughout Shakespeare: His sonnets are replete with this concept, and there's even an interesting exchange between Helen and Paroles in All's Well that Ends Well (1.1.105-151). In it, Paroles argues that virginity is "against the rule of nature" and only through losing virginity can more virgins be made, all of which mirrors and expands on Venusian arguments in this poem.
I have to wonder what Shakespeare was hoping would be the takeaway/effect on people as they read this poem. Did he want them to look at gender roles and say, "Wait, why is it this way?" Did he hope they would reconsider the yearnings of the flesh and be more thoughtful in their desires? Was he interested in "natural" copulations (Adonis' horse runs off to mate with a young mare part way through the poem) and wanted to juxtapose them with "unnatural" ones? Androgyny was a coveted aspect for a person during his time: Was he expressing his own culturally-accepted type of homosexual attraction? Elizabethans didn't think a man could be raped, so was this poem supposed to be a story proving that hypothesis (since, despite all of her physical attractions and even rolling on the ground with him, Adonis never gives in)? I don't know. All of these are possible, or none of them. Paradoxes abound in the poem, done (I think) to make the reader recognize the impossibilities of certain situations. The story of Venus and Adonis is supposed to be, to an extent, a paradox, too. And if that's the case, then it's not really something we're supposed to be able to reconcile. However you take it, the poem is fascinating and worth reading. I always encourage people to read more Shakespeare, but the length of his plays can be a bit of a barrier. Maybe a narrative poem or two could fill you up? Pass a pleasant hour or two in the forest with a goddess and her unwilling object of devotion? If nothing else, it'll make you think. As part of my rereading of Shakespeare, I finally finished reading Richard III. I've been struggling to get much of the Bard read--a process that's my own fault, really. In all actuality, I should be able to read a play in an afternoon, since that's about how long it takes to have one performed and I read faster than actors speak. But I don't read Shakespeare that way: I read with a pencil in hand, cross-references to other plays when I think of them, and a careful attention to what I'm reading. The result is that I go through very, very slowly. I finished Richard III at the end of April, despite having started it in January.
Still, I did it, and I've some things to say about this one. Richard III marks a genuine beginning to his writing style that he flirted with in Titus Andronicus but set aside until this play, and that is a focus on a single character. All of his plays are filled with characters, of course--as a writer of plays, he had to consider how his fellow actors would be given their jobs, after all. The early comedies and even the first histories that he wrote, however, are ensemble pieces. Two Gentlemen of Verona has, of course, two main characters and their attendant love interests. Because Taming of the Shrew is a comedy, it has to have the A-plot love interest and the B-plot love interest. History plays are (up to Richard III) split in focus among the different factions and battles. Only in Titus Andronicus do we finally see the intimations of a main character in the plays. Unfortunately, that play is pretty gruesome and lands poorly. It's a bit like The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. He wanted to write a novel that would hit America in the heart (and instill the desire to spread socialism throughout the country, to cease the exploitation of the American worker); instead, he hit it in the stomach, which led to regulations about how slaughterhouses worked. Titus Andronicus might have been intended for a different effect, but the result is that the blood-soaked stage covers anything that might have been happening inside of the characters. Enter Richard of Gloucester. This malevolent Machiavel had already been showcased in 3 Henry VI (where Prince Edward says to Richard "Thou, misshapen Dick", much to the hilarity of future sophomores throughout centuries), and the foundation of what Richard will become in his own play are set down brilliantly. However, Richard's presence in the background of 3 Henry VI is inversely proportional to his presence in its sequel: From the first line he speaks (the famously misunderstood first line: "Now is the winter of our discontent…") until his enduring bargain, "My kingdom for a horse!", he is a force to be reckoned with. With the adroitness of an acrobat, Richard manipulates everyone around him, tugging and cajoling, threatening and promising, nimbly dancing through the many obstacles between him and his goal: The crown. To me, Richard III is the pivot of Shakespeare's genius. (I don't doubt that other Bardolators would disagree with me, by the way: Most hermeneutics are polemics by another name anyway.) It's here that we start to see his mastery of the soliloquy--the unpacking of a character's heart with words* becomes one of the greatest tools within Shakespeare's heady arsenal of dramatic representation of humankind. Couple with his unparalleled poetry, Shakespeare really starts to move into a new level of expression through his protracted examination of Richard III. For Shakespeare to achieve this analysis, he has to do what he always does with his histories: He telescopes events, conflates historical characters, abridges conflicts, and places people in the wrong place at the wrong time.** This is all secondary--or even tertiary--to what he's trying to accomplish. And what is that? Well, it's a theme that seems to preoccupy the Bard: What happens when you give a mortal man too much power? Much of Shakespeare's canon is ruminations on power. He often comes to similar conclusions: Bad things transpire. Indeed, when I read his work under this light, it makes The Tempest an even more powerful story…but that's an analysis for a different day. There is a sense of legitimate power--legitimate use of power, I should say--within some of the plays. I get the sense that he wasn't particularly impressed with the house of York*** and that they ended up "getting theirs". However, when it comes to Richard III, he documents an ambitious man's obsession with power at any cost, up to and including the seduction of his niece (4.4) and the ordering for his nephews to be killed and buried in the walls of the Tower (4.2). This sort of sustained attention helps to generate two conflicting emotions: Admiration for Richard's tenacity and reprehension for his behaviors. Tyrants have long been a part of the makeup of the world. Though we've few historical examples of the Platonic Philosopher-King who rules despite not wanting the job, our drama prefers people of greater drive and motivation. And that's what really makes Richard III (and much of the play Richard III) so compelling: The main character, though we loathe him, actually does what he sets out to do. That's storytelling 101: Give the character a goal, put obstacles in front of that goal, and the pleasure of the story is seeing how the character overcomes those difficulties to achieve the goal. And that leads to the flaws of the piece: Richard III is a bloated play. It is the second longest play in the canon (Hamlet clocks in at 29,844 words; Richard III has 28,439), and it feels it. Unlike the longer (and superior) Hamlet, Richard III struggles to maintain its full narrative drive the entire time. The reason for this is simple: Both Hamlet and Richard have goals. Hamlet doesn't succeed in achieving his goal until 5.2, the final scene of the play. Richard, however, gets what he's after by 4.2, thus leaving the rest of Act 4 and all of Act 5 to finish off the story. Shakespeare manages to keep Richard's attempts to remain king--his new goal--worthwhile; unfortunately, there's also a lot of cursing going on with Queen Margaret and the other women in the play, plus the machinations of events outside of Richard's control. The result of this is that the play doesn't contain the same intensity in the latter portion as in the earlier acts.‡ These are quibbles: Richard himself is such a compelling and charismatic character that it's hard not to like him--at least, in the same way that one likes horror movies, war stories, or rubber-necks a bad accident on the freeway. There's a vile charm about him that we can't help but enjoy. We want him to succeed only so that his fall is stronger and more potent having seen what he did to attain such heights. In this he's a precursor to Milton's Satan, giving us the insights into the darkness of ambition- and pride-gilded minds. This is only possible because of Shakespeare's shift from ensemble to lead. Surely Richard Burbage--the best actor of the company and the man who first voiced all of Shakespeare's most iconic roles--had something to do with it. Perhaps Shakespeare finally understood how well his characters could be expressed and so gave greater attention to the way he represented humanity. Or, maybe, it was happenstance: Perhaps the Bard grew tired of always writing sprawling stories of (comparatively) shallow characters and was ready to try something new. Maybe the structure of history allowed him to expand in interesting ways. (This is something I've found to be true in my own writing: Rewriting an already-told tale takes some of the burden off of the mind, allowing growth in different directions.) Whatever prompted Mr. Shakespeare to do what he did, I'm glad it happened. The arrival of this bad-guy-as-protagonist changed the way Shakespeare wrote, shifting his abilities toward even more powerful representations. Though I highly doubt it was clear to William Shakespeare when he wrote Richard III, the "lump of foul deformity" (1.2.57) ended up becoming the foundation for the apotheosis of dramatic representation: Macbeth, Lear, and--above all--Hamlet. Pretty good for someone not even yet 30 years old. --- * I couldn't help myself from this little allusion to Hamlet 2.2. Nor could I help myself from pointing out the allusion, which is just bad manners. ** This is most obvious when you look at the deposed Queen Margaret, who is still in the English court--basically as a tool to harass the characters--even though in reality she had, for much of the time the play is covering, already returned to her native France and/or was dead (the play covers a fair swath of years). *** I'm not going to weigh in on the idea that Shakespeare wrote Richard III as propaganda for the Tudors, or that he was secretly persuaded by the White Rose side of the Wars of the Roses; I'm talking about how he portrays the historical characters in the plays. ‡ When Shakespeare addresses this kind of story again in Macbeth, he solves the problem in a couple of ways: One, he shortens the story (Macbeth only has 16,372 words--a full 12,000 fewer words than Richard III); and two, he drops this line into Macbeth's mouth, rendering the shift in goals so clearly that it's easy to understand Macbeth's intellectual movement: "To be thus is nothing/But to be safely thus…" (3.1.49-50). Despite wanting to reread the entirety of Shakespeare's oeuvre in a year, I come to the end of the first third of November having barely finished six plays. I don't have a defense, though I do bring an explanation: With the Wooden O Symposium of 2018 scarcely more than a year gone, I really didn't want to retread 1 Henry VI again. For that--and other reasons, of course--I chose to forego much of my Shakespearean reading. I knew that I wouldn't get the whole thing done, and though I was hoping to get more of it finished than not, I'm glad to be able to finally move out of the shadow of Shakespeare's least developed plays (in my opinion) and into something a bit more interesting. After all, Richard III is next on the docket, and since that will also be at the Utah Shakespeare Festival this upcoming season, reading it in the next little bit will have additional rewards. However, this is part of my rereading of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and I'm focusing on this early, early play. I don't think I agree with Tina Packer's argument in Women of Will that this play was probably a rewrite of Shakespeare's school project, but it certainly has its share of blemishes. It is action-packed, with over a dozen battles, as well as characters running around with their clothes abandoned, plus the ever-interesting Joan la Pucelle makes for a slightly better experience, but on the whole, it feels much more performative than other plays. Yes, I recognize the irony in that: Plays are meant to be performed. But other Shakespearean works have a humanity and inwardness that is absent for most of this play. I think the conversation "between" Margaret and Suffolk in 5.5 is a good indication of this. In the scene, Suffolk is talking to Margaret, the princess of Naples, and is so smitten by her beauty that he stands around, musing to himself in front of her. Here's a protracted quote (28-59): MARGARET
Even if you don't read the entirety of the conversation--if we're being generous in calling it that--you need only cast your eyes down the left-hand side and see how frequently the [Aside] crops up. These two are talking past each other--sharing the same space without acknowledging the other. Even when Margaret is directly addressed, she still responds in an aside. From a technical standpoint, this is rather clumsy. Though Shakespeare will utilize the aside as a way for a character to unfold her or his thoughts in later plays, this particular example shows an ineptitude in characterization. What we as an audience get is an on-stage fretting--a performance of internal conflict--that isn't an honest unfolding. The technique of the soliloquy--of which Shakespeare is an undisputed master--is supposed to give us access to those innermost thoughts of the character. When the components of a soliloquy are broken up like this, it becomes fractured and though we can understand Suffolk's inner turmoil, it doesn't imbed itself into the story. We can forgive Hamlet for stepping to the edge of the stage and saying that he is upset at his uncle-father and aunt-mother getting married so quickly--it doesn't detract at all, and actually allows us a greater insight into the conflict of the human on stage. Seeing this quasi-schizophrenic jumping of thoughts from one character to the other and then back again merely serves to underscore the theatricality of the moment. More than anything, though, the feeling of performance comes from the end of Joan la Pucelle's tumultuous life. I can only guess at the Bard's politics, but it seems clear that, problems with the crown or the state religion that he may (or, more likely, may not) have had regardless, Shakespeare was an Englishman through and through. Joan, therefore, is clearly performing the role of a virgin warrior, though Shakespeare constantly treats that concept with disdain and disbelief. First of all, he selects "la Pucelle" to designate her, though "Joan of Arc" or "Joan d'Arc" would also have served. The French word pucelle meant "maid" or "virgin", but the English slang term puzzel, pronounced in almost the same way, was another word for "slut". This is no accident (look at Talbot's work on 1.6.85: "Pucelle or pucelle, Dauphin or dog-fish…" as the clearest example), and Shakespeare will take every chance to diminish Joan's accomplishments. After all, if she was as she claimed--a virgin inspired by God to lead the French to victory over the English--then the inherent rightness of the English cause would be called into question. To that end, Shakespeare utilizes innuendo in almost every conversation that Joan is a part of. She's constantly called a whore by the English, or a witch, or a hag. If the battle goes to the French, she's hailed as a beauty and a wonder. If the battle goes to the English, she's remonstrated and called a harlot. She's one of those who, in the first scene of Act 2, abandons the battlefield in front of the English with the stage directions "They [the French] fly, leaving their clothes behind", another example--depending on the director, I suppose--of her sluttish ways. Nothing, however, demonstrates what Shakespeare thought of this old English enemy than 5.3 and 5.6. In the first instance, the entire scene is dedicated to Joan pleading to the actual fiendish spirits that have, thus far unseen by the audience, helped Joan to her sundry successes throughout the play. She pleads with them, "Where I was wont to feed you with my blood, /I'll lop a member off and give it you/ In earnest of a further benefit" (13-15). When they refuse to continue helping, she even promises that her body will "Pay the recompense if you will grant my suit" (19). She is forsaken by the fiends--and we're left with the impression that she had done unspeakable things with and for them to gain the powers she'd used earlier--and therefore caught by the English. It is during the penultimate scene of the play, 5.6, that we see Joan's performative behaviors brought to a head. She's condemned for being a sorceress, and after denying her connection to the shepherd who fathered her (who, upon leaving, shouts to the English, "O burn her, burn her! Hanging is too good" (33)), is forced to defend herself in what I think must be considered a sham court. At first she declares she's a virgin, of pure heart and intent (49-53). Then, when it's clear that her chastity is of no use, she then claims that she is actually pregnant ("I am with child, ye bloody homicides" (62)), though the father of the child constantly shifts. They guess the Dauphin (67), but she insists that it's Alençon (73) who's guilty of paternity. When that doesn't fly, she tries to implicate René King of Naples (78). The play doesn't specifically indicate whether or not she was actually pregnant and only used that as a defense against burning, though the reality doesn't seem to matter; it's performed by her, rather than being a part of her character. When I think of this sort of storytelling and I compare it to the powerhouse moments in The Winter's Tale and Hermione defends herself from her husband's baseless surmises and jealousies, it's clear to me the way that Shakespeare improved his craft. Yes, the parallels aren't perfect--Joan is depicted as truly guilty of something heinous, while Hermione rebuffs Leontes' perversions of justice with power and vigor--but it feels as though Joan is acting like Joan in this play, while anyone who portrays Hermione will be given a human to depict. I don't know of anyone whose favorite play is 1 Henry VI. It is rough, limited in female characters (there are two in the whole play: Margaret and Joan), and though quick-paced, loses some of what I expect when I come to Shakespeare's writing: Well-wrought characters working their ways through immense difficulty. As far as its use in the canon, I think that it's crucial to see how the king Henry VI changes throughout all three of the pieces. But whether or not that justifies in spending more time in his court is an open question. Nevertheless, like Titus Andronicus and Taming of the Shrew, though there are flaws--immense flaws in both of them, actually--I think they indicate the greater power that Shakespeare is able to bring to storytelling than what others of the time could produce. Most people's highlights or masterpieces would be something like Titus, Shrew, or 1 Henry VI; for Shakespeare, these are the prologue to much greater plays, much greater characterizations. I can hardly wait to read more. As my reread of Shakespeare's entire oeuvre limps on (I'm way behind on my goal), I can now cross off Titus Andronicus' bloody romp through bitterness and revenge. It's kind of nice to know that such emotions will be tucked away for some time--at least until I reach Timon of Athens. This play…man. I'm feeling like there's a recurring theme in these early Shakespeare plays: I'm kind of glad that I'm not going to reread them anytime soon. Taming of the Shrew, Two Gents, and Titus Andronicus are all…unpleasant, though--to Shakespeare's credit--differently so. I chalk it up to a comparative thing: I know that Shakespeare can do better than what we got, but he didn't know that when he was writing these things. Obviously, 3 Henry VI worked well for me, but its predecessor was rough. My next one is 1 Henry VI and that's a rough piece, too. Essentially, I'm gritting my teeth so that I can get to Richard III and the rest of the enjoyable work that Shakespeare put down after these early attempts…stumbled, shall we say? It should be mentioned that these plays aren't objectively bad. Other playwrights would be proud to have their names on something like Taming of the Shrew. But I can't escape my moment in history any more than Shakespeare could, so the lens through which I stare at these plays can't help but wish for better representation, stronger characterization, and less casual sexism. It's inescapable that the stuff is there, and I can contextualize it and read through it just fine. But it is still hard to read about the domestic abuse of Katharine or, in this case, the violation of Lavinia and not blanch. And blanching is an apt term for this play. It starts off with conflict and tension--something that good writing is always supposed to have--and it never really lets up. People always vie for control or power in this play, and (another early flub in the Bard's work) change their minds with dizzying rapidity. This shifting of ideas isn't quite like what George does in 3 Henry VI where he's literally moving from one side of the conflict to the other and back again. I mean like this: Act 1 scene 1 opens with Saturninus and Bassianus arguing about who should be emperor of Rome. Marcus, the brother to Titus, comes in and speaks some words about how great Titus is and asks the two to stop arguing about being an emperor. Saturninus says, "How fair the Tribune speaks to calm my thoughts." Bassianus follows up by completely altering his mood: Marcus Andronicus, so I do affy (trust) Just like that--a handful of lines from Marcus--and a potential civil war is averted. People will affirm one thing and, by the end of the scene, go against what they just said. It's almost whiplash-inducing.
However, the real frustration with this play, in my opinion, is that Shakespeare (who was never big on the Aristotelean version of playwrighting in the first place) doesn't give us a tragic hero whose fall we can pity. While Shakespeare will revisit the abused old man trope in King Lear (to a completely different effect), his treatment of Titus is one of disdain. There's little nobility in Titus, save that he would rather be maimed himself than allow others to be dismembered for him. Aside from that virtuous behavior, he's pretty horrible. When Tamora pleads for mercy, Titus says that they must sacrifice her son: "…and die he must/ T'appease their groaning shadows that are gone" (1.1.125-6). Why? To appease the dead? Tamora, then, is understandably infuriated; when her fortunes change and she's able to seduce Saturninus (who was demanding Lavinia and then, abruptly, lusts after the queen of the Goths instead), she is--understandably, I think, though not justifiably--keen on using her newfound power to extract vengeance on Titus. Her coldness and ruthlessness are characteristics that Queen Margaret demonstrated earlier, with Lady Macbeth becoming the eventual example par excellence by the end of Shakespeare's run. What she lacks, however, is any sort of interiority that other evil women in Shakespeare--Lear's daughters come to mind--will enjoy. Thus her schemes are particularly abhorrent, as they seem to lack much motivation save she was wronged. She laughs at Aaron's plot to rape and mutilate Lavinia, actively cheering on her sons and devising a way to frame Titus' sons for the murder of Lavinia's husband, Bassianus (see, for example, how she's told by Aaron of the plot in 2.3.38-45 and then she calls him her "sweet Moor, sweeter to me than life" (51)). The play itself is best known for the pie baking part at the end, but there are few moments of levity or redemption of character behavior at all in the play. Generously, I could argue that Shakespeare is condemning the bloodthirsty cycle of vengeance, robbing Rome of any sense of justice. A wrong righted is not done through another wrong. But the conclusion is implicit and thin, drawn as it is in the shadows of the grotesqueries that this play contains. Yes, there's cannibalism when Tamora and Saturninus eat meat pies into which Titus has baked Tamora's rapist sons. There's traumas galore--decapitations of Titus' sons, his own dismemberment (for no purpose, it should be added), the savage raping of Lavinia on the corpse of her dead husband--and a couple of other moments to add to this. The baffling response of Marcus to Lavinia's horror (in which he waxes poetic from 2.4.11-57, a good three to four minutes of soliloquizing about the gruesome mutilations rendered her) is only overpowered by the shock at the abrupt murder of Lavinia by her own father in front of Saturninus and Tamora during the final scene. My brother saw the Globe put on a production of Titus Andronicus a few years ago. Not only did someone pass out during the play due to the gore (a common occurrence; apparently, they had paramedics standing by* for that very reason), but the stage was so coated with fake blood that intermission saw the stagehands squeegeeing off the planks so that the actors didn't slip on it. The whole play left me feeling uneasy and uncomfortable. My wife and I saw one version of the play, and though it was well done, I don't think that I would really want to see it again. It's gruesome, dark, and nihilistic, the kind of play that makes most any day one of sunshine if only by contrast. Rather than plumbing the depths of human loss, as Shakespeare will do with other tragedies, it relies on blood-spilling spectacle to shock its audience into an approximation of emotion. Though immensely popular in its day (considering that other popular entertainments of the time included bearbaiting and cockfighting, the sanguinary nature of the play was probably a draw, rather than a detraction to the Elizabethan audiences), Titus feels like there was some violent demon inside of Shakespeare which had to be exorcized. Fortunately for us, it was; Shakespeare will not shy away from explicit violence in other works, but he will rely on the humanity of it, rather than the spectacle, to explore the interplay between power and revenge. I'm glad to have this one done. --- * I almost said "at hand", but that seems a little tasteless when talking about Titus, don't you think? Wow. The ending of this play is brutal.
The Henry VI plays aren't often staged, but, having read/watched them all in the past year, I have to admit that's confusing to me. There's a whiff of "new Shakespeare", and 1 Henry VI is, honestly, pretty rough. But I don't see how people can be so in love with watching Richard III and skip his backstory in 3 Henry VI. Since synopses are easily available (or, better yet, the plays themselves, which can be watched/read with relatively little effort), I'm not going to belabor the plot of the play. Instead, I'm thinking more of the way that Shakespeare condenses multiple years of conflict into a two-and-a-half hour play. He gathers up the recurring characters and motifs from 2 Henry VI and then launches a recreation of the Wars of the Roses, a time of civil broil in the 15th century. There are factions and traitors, people who are with one house and then move on to the other house, only to return at the end. It's no secret that George R.R. Martin based A Song of Ice and Fire on the Wars of the Roses (with clear parallels, like the Red Wedding being a more violent version of what causes Warwick to turn against Edward IV, for example, or Tyrion Lannister acting as the parallel to the deformed Richard of Gloucester) as the story is replete with intrigue and action. It was a wise choice for Martin to use this moment in English history for many of the same reasons why Shakespeare picked it. The piece is ambitious--and perhaps that's the biggest flaw of the piece. Unlike in the rest of his history plays, Shakespeare doesn't let us have a central character in the three parts of Henry VI. You would think Henry VI would fit that bill, but he's too passive and uninteresting as a person (until his final scene, in 5.6, that is) to hold the attention of an audience for one play, let alone three. Other characters strive for dominance of the stage in the same way that they strive for the crown. The result is one of a lot happening and little focus. When Shakespeare gets past 1 Henry VI (which, though I disagree with Tina Packer that this is Shakespeare's "high school project" of a play, I would be content in putting it into the canon as the first of Shakespeare's attempts), he will shift his histories* more tightly toward a single character that will propel the plot. Hence the power of a scene of shattered dignity in Richard II making a much larger effect on the audience than it does in 3 Henry VI. Hal and Falstaff make the Henry IV plays memorable in ways that no one else in 3 Henry VI can. Even though I dislike Henry V, his play is focused on a charismatic and thought-provoking character. What do we have for 3 Henry VI? Queen Margaret, of course. But once her best foil (Richard Duke of York) is beheaded, her fangs are plucked by circumstances and the venom she wishes to spit rarely finds a target. Henry VI is lackluster--a historical accuracy, from what I can tell--and so we're left with little to commend the play from the vantage of other Shakespearean works. But that isn't my takeaway. Part of this is informed by the BBC's Hollow Crown series, but if you read 3 Henry VI as the origin story of Richard--the one who will go on to become Richard III in his own play--then 3 Henry VI turns into something else altogether interesting. See, it's difficult to see the Machiavellian Richard from his play in the early parts of this one. He's manipulative and ambitious, yes, but so are a host of other characters. As the play moves forward, however, you can see that Richard's intent was about getting his father into the throne. His own desires and bloodlusts are, early on, invisible--buried, perhaps, or maybe even non-existent. But when his little brother** dies, Richard takes a dark turn. Opportunities begin to open up to him, and he sees how his own violence and deformity are powers that he can wield over others--a reality that he will exploit later on. As the play progresses, Richard gains more and more confidence in the way he can hop-scotch his way to the crown. When he brutally murders and then, as it were, mutilates Henry VI's corpse at the end of the play, a transformation has occurred. The Richard from the beginning of 3 Henry VI is a very different, much darker version of what he was at the beginning. This turns Richard III into an analysis of what happens when a man has chosen to embrace his darkness--of one who sees his physical deformity as evidence of the deformity of his soul--is given free rein. If, for no other reason than that, I think more people should experience 3 Henry VI. --- * I can't remember King John well enough to say if it fits in with this thesis. We'll have to wait and see. ** This is one of the inaccuracies that makes sense to me: Rutland was older than Richard, but there's a lot more pathos in having him be the baby of the family and then brutally murdered. In The Hollow Crown version, Richard is watching the murder happen from a place of hiding, enhancing the idea that Richard's latent evil was, in part, induced by the trauma of seeing his younger brother butchered. One of the "I've-been-meaning-to-get-to-that-book" titles that's still sitting on my shelf is a book called Materialist Shakespeare, which looks at some of Shakespeare's works through a specific, materialist lens. I have no idea what's in there (I've been meaning to get to that book, after all), but it has a couple of familiar names (to me) from Shakespearean scholarship, including Stephen Greenblatt and Katharine Eisaman Maus. It'll be good, I'm sure, once I get there.
While reading 2 Henry VI, however, I was curious to see what the materialists thought of that particular play. After all, John Cade is a proto-Leninist in his rhetoric, his promises, and his violence; who better to include in their analysis? Yet, to my surprise, Cade doesn't show up in the index at all; neither does the play. What gives? Well, frankly, it's a bit of a mystery to me. I have a hypothesis why this particular episode of the Wars of the Roses is glossed over: It's because anyone who finishes 1 Henry VI is pretty much done with Shakespeare's thoughts on that part of the cycle and skips ahead to Richard III. That, in my opinion, is a mistake. Interestingly, the Norton edition of The Complete Works puts 2 Henry VI as an earlier attempt by the bard, with 3 Henry VI and Titus Andronicus being composed before 1 Henry VI. Reading the plays in (estimated) order of composition allows me to see the fledgling Shakespeare as he rambles through some of his early work, trying to milk pathos out of unsympathetic characters or gesturing toward ideas he will more fully develop later. When I sat down to read 2 Henry VI, I fretted over whether I should go with the first part (skipping ahead to do so) and then rolling back to hit the entire trilogy in order. I chose not to, deciding to see what I could see with my memories of last year's viewing of 1 Henry VI to provide the context that I needed to enjoy the second part. I think I can say, without much controversy, is that 1 Henry VI feels like an earlier work than its "sequel". I haven't reread all of 1 Henry VI (I skimmed it and flipped through it for my Wooden O paper, then watched the Utah Shakespeare Festival's version last August) lately--the last time was probably a good three or four years ago in one of my Shakespeare classes. Still, going through it in that context, I remember thinking, This is only good because it's Shakespeare, but it's not very good Shakespeare. It's kind of hard, perhaps, to understand this sentiment, but Shakespeare is consistently the best writer I know of, and he--like everyone--has his ups and downs. Some stories work well (I'm not even going to bother to list his masterpieces, as it's a lengthy list), while others…well, let's just say that Pericles is a thing and leave it at that. For me, 1 Henry VI is in that camp: Not horrible (it's not Everyman, you know), but not the heights that Shakespeare would later ascend to. For that reason, it feels like a more immature work. Which is why I may disagree with the Norton editors in putting it so far into the canon--from an intuitive stance; I haven't looked at Stationers' Register or other evidences of when the play may have been released--and say that, of the two, the second part is much more interesting. John Cade is part of the reason; while he's not as charismatic or engaging as Hotspur's rebellion in the later (in terms of publication order, not historical order) 1 Henry IV, he's still interesting. There's a hint of Christopher Nolan's version of the Joker to Cade--a man who's wild, unpredictable, a bit of an agent of chaos (albeit more focused on claiming the crown than watching London burn--though he does do a bit of that), and untethered by those who seek to use his unique brand of villainy to their advantage. York asserts that he will use Cade to destabilize the reigning Henry VI in order to give him the necessary push to dethrone the man at the end. "I have seduced a headstrong Kentishman,/John Cade of Ashford,/To make commotion, as full well he can,/Under the title of John Mortimer" (3.1.356-359) shows York's willingness to play with fire. Fortunately for York, Cade's escapades die in ignominy as he's bested in swordplay in the garden of Iden (no doubt a deliberate choice on Shakespeare's part) before his corpse is decapitated and his severed head sent to Henry VI as proof of Iden's loyalty. However, York had set loose another contender for the crown with no assurance that Cade would bend to York upon completing the usurpation. That it turned out in his favor has more to do with luck than his own planning. Cade's also interesting because of the promises and bloodthirstiness that fuel his claim. This is the play where the famous "The first thing we do let's kill all the lawyers" (4.2.70) is uttered by Dick the Butcher. The whole concept of a King Cade was one of absolution of hierarchy and money ("there shall be no money" (4.2.66)), of declaring that "all things shall be in common" (4.7.16), and other utopian ideals. To call him a proto-communist may be a bit of a stretch, but his ideas are certainly more radical than York, who merely wants Henry dead so that he (York) can be king. I think that Cade proves to be a catalyst in Shakespeare's mind, a prototype for other, more fiery characters (Hotspur is one; Iago, to a certain extent, as well) and he alone makes the play significantly better than the first part (where Joan of Arc is the most interesting of the characters in that play). This isn't to say I'm in love with 2 Henry VI. It's underrated, that's for certain, but I wouldn't classify it as a masterpiece. ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the name of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! |
AuthorWould you like to support my writings? Feel free to buy me a coffee (which I don't drink, but I do drink hot chocolate) at my Ko-Fi page. Thanks! Archives
July 2022
Categories
All
|