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. I have long struggled with my addiction to Twitter. I gave it up for Lent, then was right back on the thing as soon as it was "allowed" again. I spend approximately two minutes (not exaggerating) a day on Facebook and multiple hours--spread throughout the day--on the bird-platform. I've talked about it before, so I don't need to rehash old statements. The long and the short of it (#shakespeareiseverywhere) is that I prefer that social media to the Book of Faces.
One of the reasons that I like Twitter so much is that it gives me a chance to read from a lot of unexpected sources and get insights into what a lot of people are talking about. I've purged my follow list a couple of times, trying each time to focus more on what I really want out of the platform: Information regarding agents, writers, and goings-on in the world of my interests (teaching and publication and comic books and video games and Shakespeare and…and…). I do a poor- to fair job parsing down the accounts, then tend to accumulate more and more until I need to winnow again. It seems that time is upon me again. What's happening is kind of inside baseball (to use a phrase I know exists but doesn't make any sense to me), but the basic thrust is this: Comic book and book publishing are getting their turns in the sunlight, and it isn't a pretty sight. I don't buy a lot of comics these days--I don't buy a lot of anything, thanks to Ms. Rona--so I don't know exactly who's doing what and how they're abusing their power. However, this site helps put a finger on the reckoning that's going on. It isn't just comic books, either: The reason that I even found the aforelinked website is because a writer named Myke Cole and his friend (and fellow writer) Sam Sykes both are dealing with allegations of misconduct and abuse. I say allegations, but Myke Cole, during the heat of the #MeToo movement, wrote about it in February 2018--and it seems like he hadn't changed his attitudes or behaviors. I don't know the details of the newest stuff, but both he and Sam Sykes have been called out as perpetrators of sexual harassment. I own one book each from the two men, though I've never read them. (I'm a fan of ebooks in principle, though I tend to prefer non-fiction on my ereader, and since both of the purchases were electronic, well…) Their main interest to me was watching them banter across the internet in some decidedly hilarious interactions. Cole had a lot of worthwhile things to say about the recent protests, about how white supremacy usurps and twists historical concepts to serve their purposes, and the need for police defunding and abolition. Sykes had a number of insightful threads about the creative and writing process, and he was a great amplifier for artists whose work he liked. As far as I knew, they were just normal creatives on Twitter with books for sale. I guess I was right: They were "normal". And that's the problem. It's not hard (like, really not hard at all) to recognize that all people deserve to be treated as human, that their consent and preferences be taken into account when interacting with them, and that they should never be made to feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Women in particular (and by that, of course, I include transwomen--because they're women, obvs--and non-binary people who rely on female designations for whatever reason) are human beings with equal rights, boundaries, and personal agency. Yet women in particular end up becoming targets of sexual harassment (and worse) far too often. Men, too, are put into compromised positions by others in power. It is an abhorrent reality that too many people face. The #MeToo movement helped show us how pervasive sexual misconduct (to put a too-polite word on the behavior) is within American society. Misogyny in any form ought to be anathema to, well, everyone. It has no place in our world. …except that it's here. It doesn't deserve to be here. It's like the divine right of kings: At best a relic of an antiquated age that needs no renaissance, at worst a tool that some may seek to remain in power for whatever personal gain they hope to achieve. (And lest you think that there aren't a lot of people who wish for a king in America, you perhaps haven't been paying attention to the loudest and most ardent followers of President Trump.) Misogyny (and its less-frequently seen sibling, misandry) shouldn't be in the world, yet it is. And we have to do something about it. No cancer is cured without intervention; no malady of humankind will go away without confrontation. There are lots of complexities in this issue, but the part that is most salient, I think, is a recognition of power. As cis-het White males who've been published, both Cole and Sykes are in positions that create a power imbalance. Power imbalances are inherent in our system--parent/child, teacher/student, politician/voter (in theory), employer/employee--and the differences in power positions is the area in which abuses are most likely to occur. The idea that an abuser can do heinous things and get away with it is one of the ways that these power imbalances become more and more entrenched. In the case of two published and visible (comparatively) writers, there's an additional power dynamic that a non-writer may not immediately see: Envy. I can't speak for other creative enterprises (though I imagine it's pretty similar), but in the writing community, aspiring writers are the most vocal and eager component of a fanbase. Book signings are often scenes of long lines of would-be writers hoping to get a bit of the signee's luck to rub off on them. The reason is pretty simple: It is extremely hard to break into writing. It's even harder to make a career out of it. And it's next to impossible to gain a wide readership. The competition is omnipresent and fierce. Going to a writer's conference is going into a place where the air has been replaced with desperation. Aspirants are desperate to learn something that will get them on the other side of the panel--to have "made it" and to be the one dispensing advice rather than writing it down. Published authors are desperate to keep their success going--to shill their books to the attendees and hope that the can earn out sometime in the near future. Editors are desperate to find someone whose work will provide a stable residual income for them; agents are desperate to strike a partnership with someone whose writing they love. Despite the fact that everyone is desperate, there are different degrees here. Power is strongest in the editors. They tend to be the ones acquiring the new talent, going to bat for the new books and new authors. This means that the editors have additional leverage over people who are desperate, and that increased power can far too often translate into heinous abuses. (A non-writing example would have to be Harvey Weinstein, who doesn't need any more thought spared to him.) Though neither Cole nor Sykes is an editor, they're both guys who "made it". They're one step closer to the dream. That means that people who might not normally accept an off-color or sexually suggestive remark will give a partial laugh and half-smile when it comes from an author that they like, or an agent they're thinking of querying. Richard Paul Evens learned the hard way that giving an unsolicited hug to fans can cross a line he didn't realize was there--and he did it, as the article says, probably "thousands of times". Were there thousands of victims? No. But there were some, and they were victimized because of the power imbalance. (Another example of this, though its effects are more diffuse: J.K. Rowling, despite having a lot of progressive concepts and values in her books, is a TERF, and she's recently come under fire for comments that dismiss transwomen. In this case, her power is less personal--she has an immense influence in the writing world, despite the fact that she isn't writing nearly as much as she has in the past--and it has turned into a flashpoint for a number of fans. So while you couldn't say that a specific person is harmed by Rowling's statements in the same way that the victims of Cole's or Sykes' behavior have been, there's still a kind of abuse that's happening here.) The results of these allegations have come rapidly. Cole has removed himself from Twitter for the foreseeable future; Sykes is insisting that victims continue to speak out. Everyone responds to this situation in slightly different ways. In my case, I remain in an uncomfortable crux that I've been in for many years now: What to do with the fact that human beings are behind so many of the things that I love. This isn't to dismiss the negative things that come from the embedded misogyny and racism that has built the world I live in. Being human means making mistakes, of course, but that doesn't mean that success should be deprived you because of those mistakes--but neither does it mean that second (or third or tenth) chances should be afforded, either. In some cases, it's a matter of reception. Milton and Shakespeare are near and dear to my heart and they're also emblematic of the Dead White Male that dominates the English departments. Eve in Paradise Lost moves between shockingly original and disappointingly dismissed. Kate in The Taming of the Shrew is a portrait of Stockholm Syndrome and one of the great tragedies in the canon, despite being a comedy. How can I maintain my feminist credentials, as it were, when embracing these two anti-women writers? Neither Milton nor Shakespeare can be "cancelled"--their presence in the world of letters is settled, at least during my lifetime. Their works are crucial to our modern identities, regardless of whether or not we recognize it. And I can't very well stop buying Milton or Shakespeare--they aren't getting royalties, and voting with my wallet will do nothing to their reputation. If economics is the barometer, the Bard and the prophet-bard are safe from reprisal. But what about Rowling, Cole, Sykes, or any other number of "problematic" authors who've done/said something that shows a sinister side to them that I can't agree with? My dollars will support Orson Scott Card if I buy his book, which means that I continue to empower a known- and proud homophobe. Is buying another round of butterbeer at Universal Studios only prolonging how long Rowling will be visible, pertinent, and capable of spreading her misconceptions about women? Now that I've purchased their books, is my continued non-reading of Cole and Sykes a way of boycotting them? And how is that different than the fact that I haven't gotten around to reading their books in the first place? These kinds of questions have been on my mind, as I said before, for years. And while I may have given examples that don't resonate with you. Maybe there are other views that these people espouse that you fundamentally disagree with--like Cole's calls to abolish the police. So you're okay with seeing his career end (will it, though?) or go on an unexpected and prolonged hiatus. You now will no longer buy books from a guy you weren't planning on buying from anyway. Have you done something to him? A creative's life is one of perpetual rejection (most of it's hidden, as authors don't stalk bookstores and feel personally offended when every patron who walked past her book on the aisle leaves without even picking up the book), so are you doing anything by boycotting his books? People talk about voting with their wallets all of the time--I used the phrase myself in the course of this essay--but I don't think it's quite as clear cut as we'd like to assume. After all, you may be able to buy a book from Rowling or Card or Sykes or Cole, but you could just as easily buy a book from Okorafor or Kuang or Chu or Kowal. All of these authors write in the same science fiction/fantasy genre, so why not pick one of these "less problematic" writers? Except you can't go to Hogwarts with Kuang and Okorfor's version of Ender is a Black girl named Binti, and does Kowal have as much fantasy violence in her books? In other words, you normally can't read one person's book and get the same story from a different author. So if Hogwarts means something important to me, something crucial, then I can't just go anywhere else. See? It's complicated… Or maybe it isn't. What's the difference between writers anyway? If you don't like one person's story, buy someone else's. Write your own books (which only makes sense to anyone who's never tried to write a book before). Don't do research into the humans who make your art. Don't expect them to abide by your own morals. Only buy from those who share your morals. Only retread what you've seen before, keeping your diet safe and vanilla, hypoallergenic and without surprises. Refrain from interpreting, interpolating, or interrogating the books you read--it's just fiction, it's just a story. No need to put anything else into it. I don't know how to square this circle. I bring it up from time to time in an attempt to get my feelings figured out, but it always slips free. I don't want to support people who've done harmful things. I don't want to give a pass to creators whose content I like simply because I like what they've made. I also have to acknowledge that someone has a problem with everything that I like for a whole host of reasons, so I have to understand what my own lines in the sand are…and what that says about me. Lastly, what this whole sordid tale exposes to me is the reality that I, too, have made mistakes. Never have I knowingly acted in a way that was intended to be inappropriate or harassing, sexually or otherwise. But that doesn't mean that I haven't been the reason someone felt unsafe or that I had ulterior motives in what I said or did. I know that there have been times--I can think of a couple--where brave women told me that what I was doing was making them uncomfortable. I immediately apologized and changed my behavior and that was the end of it. How many times have I inadvertently "shot mine arrow o'er the house, / And hurt my brother" (Hamlet 5.2) or sister? Lots of questions, I fear. And, as it happens so often for me, precious few answers. 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. In response to the COVID-19 outbreak and the dismissal of schools, I've been working at home this past week. It's been quite a strain to figure out how to create a viable and valuable experience for my students with events moving so quickly. One area that I'm trying to keep going is my Shakespeare class, which is an elective and isn't really designed for circumstances like this. One of my students, however, passed on a suggestion from her dad: Write about how Shakespeare responded to the plague. It was partly in jest, but it sent me down a rabbit-hole of research and made me think more about how lucky we are to have Shakespeare at all. So, without further ado (and a special welcome to my students whom I've sent here as this week's assignment), here are some of my thoughts on Shakespeare and disease. Shakespeare Shouldn't Have Lived The bubonic plague was one of two major plagues that ravaged Europe throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This plague has been studied a lot, with many different hypotheses about its source, its transmission, and much more. Rather than wade into the controversy, it's clear that bubonic plague came from bacteria, probably thanks to ticks that lived on rats and thereby spread. (Hygiene is important, folks; wash your hands and don't keep pet ticks, I guess.) Bubonic plague caused a swelling of the lymph nodes (buboes is the word used to describe this process; hence the name) that led to harsh, darkly colored splotches on the skin. Sometimes the buboes would get so large that treatment involved lancing and draining the swollen areas. Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), this often led to a painful death. Pneumonic plague was highly contagious from person to person via sputum (y'know, what one expels during a cough or sneeze) and tended to be highly contagious for the same reasons that we're concerned about the novel coronavirus. In both cases, people didn't know what was the cause of the diseases, nor how to combat it. They did find that keeping their windows closed and fires stoked seemed to reduce the risk--probably because the homes were too hot for the rats to visit and so they left more people uninfected. The Shakespeare home on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon (which still stands to this day, is cared for by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and, humble bragging here, I've visited twice) was near an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1564--the year that William Shakespeare was born. Park Honan, a biographer of the Bard, imagines a terrified Mary Arden Shakespeare doing everything she could to keep her first-born son, William, safe from an invisible, insidious disease. Having buried children already, it's safe to assume that Honan isn't too far off. In all honesty, William should have died in his cradle and been buried in the graveyard of the Holy Trinity Church. With plague being essentially everywhere, it's a miracle that he survived long enough to write anything at all. Outbreaks of plague varied in intensity and lethality (the worst, of course, was the Black Death between 1347 and 1351 where approximately one-third of Europe ended up dead…maybe as many as 200 million by the end of it, though the numbers are disputable), but was always an issue. There's a reason that mortality rates are often quoted as being so low in the past: Infant mortality was incredibly high, which drags down the overall mortality rate. In the case of John and Mary Shakespeare, their family would eventually number eight, though only one of their four daughters (the second Joan) survived to adulthood. (If you care to know, the birth order was Joan, Margaret, William, Gilbert, Joan, Anne, Richard, and Edmund. There are more details in Park Honan's Shakespeare: A Life if you're interested.) A Plague on Both Your Houses Shakespeare's adult life was predominantly spent in London. Countless hours of his life were spent on the boards of different theaters, mostly the Globe, where he enacted his own plays while writing new dramas that would fundamentally change the Western Canon. However, plague continued to, well, plague the City, which meant that there were major disruptions to his life because of the disease. On an almost week-to-week basis, the theaters could be closed if plague-deaths rose too sharply--say, thirty or forty deaths in the previous seven days--the playhouses would be closed. While there wasn't anything like advanced ticket sales to worry about reimbursing, Shakespeare and his troupe definitely lost money during times of public health emergencies. There were three different times when he had to close up the theater for a protracted amount of time, though: once in 1592, again in 1603 (with an outbreak so bad that the newly-crowned James I was unable to greet his English subjects), and lastly in 1607. The last one happened shortly after Lent, which was the only time that Shakespeare was steadily away from the theater anyway. So following a forced religious vacation, he then had a forced health hiatus. How long were these? Well, they varied: the Elizabethan closure saw him away from the stage for nearly twenty months, though there were a couple of brief seasons there. He spent almost a full year out of London in the 1603 outbreak, and something like sixteen months for the one four years later. Now, Shakespeare didn't rest during this time. Much like our shifting of habitual gears during our voluntary quarantine, there was still plenty to do. He just needed a place to do it. Many troupes would use this time as an excuse to get out of the packed city and out into the midlands of England, and Shakespeare's was no exception. In a way, it was a type of social distancing--rather than remaining in the cramped quarters of London, they would travel out into the countryside where they could tour from village to village, gaining a few shillings or so at each stop. For Shakespeare, he believed with the rest of the people of his time that it was the air--a miasma--that caused the sicknesses. Country air, it was believed, was more healthful and beneficial to the body. That fewer people were close together, a natural social distancing, is the more likely explanation as to why the country was, overall, less likely to be plague-afflicted. To go from place to place required money, of course, but it also required special permissions. A group of people couldn't simply travel through Yorkshire and put on plays at every town. If they tried, they could get in huge trouble. Not only that, but more puritanically-minded city-, town-, or village councils could reject the players before they even set up their portable stage. To overcome that, a troupe would need a patron. In the days of Queen Elizabeth, the players at the Globe were called the Lord Chamberlain's Men--they had the permission of the nobility to perform. This was a pass, as it were, to showcase their stories in many places throughout the realm. It was not, however, carte blanche, and there were ways of being overruled if a person of power took a disliking to them. With the advent of the Stuart king, the Lord Chamberlain's Men became the King's Men, with a royal dispensation to be allowed to perform. This allowed the company to continue on, despite the health problems besetting the country. Lessons Learned? As I researched and refreshed myself on this aspect of Shakespeare's life, I'm surprised by some of the things that are similar--and different--between our experience now and his. The social distancing was a natural consequence of being an agrarian society, one that we're far removed from. However, the government frequently took away the free exercise of market-behaviors from its people whenever the threat to the public's overall health was high. We haven't seen a lot of rebellion against this quarantine yet, and though it could very much be considered legal, there's always a possibility that the police powers that are being lightly used in our situation may turn into some nasty lawsuits later on. America isn't England--for obvious reasons--but we still have a tendency to do what we're asked when an existential threat like a disease threatens us. I'm also struck by the ingenuity of Shakespeare's work. He took the time to write additional plays--indeed, this may be one ingredient into why he was able to produce the staggering number of plays that he crafted--and diversified his skills by selling his pen to write some of his 154 sonnets. Like us, he surely got to spend more time at home and get to know his family a bit better. And, like us, that probably was a double-edged sword. I would be remiss if I didn't point out that disease stole away his only son, Hamnet, in 1596. There's not a lot to go on--a burial registry--but it's a stark reminder of the fragility of youth in the face of an invisible invader. Hamnet was 11; my second child turns 10 today. The idea that he would only have one year remaining him is too painful to entertain. I have no proof of this--after all, King John was written sometime in the 1590s, and perhaps even in 1596--but this speech given by Constance, a grieving mother, strikes me as reverberating with a greater depth of emotion than an imagination (even one as prodigious as Shakespeare's) would be unable to convey. I feel that these lines speak from experience: Grief fills the room up of my absent child, And there's also this to consider: Despite the dangers of living through these plague years, Shakespeare did survive. He gifted us the unparalleled endowment of his writing--another miracle, as is the fact that the writing was preserved--and changed the world as a result. Maybe, in a smaller way surely, we, too, will get through this difficult time with great gifts for the future.
Lots of tweets and social media posts are showcasing the major personal events of the past decade. I threw together a quick list myself, but thought that it could be worthwhile to go through with a bit more detail. As far as I can remember, here are some of the interesting things that happened in the twenty-teens.
2010 The decade began with me and a fellow teacher doing a short film Winterim. (Winterims will be brought up in each year for the simple reason that they're actually something different in my otherwise pretty consistent teaching career.) This was my second year at the school, but the first year as a full-time teacher. By the time March came along, my second child was born, which was a different experience than the first one--having a wireless baby was new and exciting. Not only that, but the delivery wasn't as hard on my wife, which was great: I couldn't understand how women could have more children when I saw how badly it hurt my wife to give birth our first. With Number Two arriving, I comprehended that births usually don't lay up the mother for a solid week. Of course, that doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of hospital stuff that year. Son Number Two had a condition called hypospadias, so he had to have a minor surgery along with a circumcision. Not only that, but Son Number One had his third--and, thus far, last--heart surgery to correct his tricuspid atresia, which consumed the entirety of June. At the time, we lived in our townhome, which fit our family just fine. We kept going forward with work and school (I was taking night classes to get an endorsement in history). I began work on what I thought would be my magnum opus, Writ in Blood. This would consume my writing for a couple more years. Come August, the curriculum I had taught for the past two years shifted a bit, pushing the 10th grade toward a broader swath of history. Instead of going from middle ages to the Victorian era, I now taught from the Italian Renaissance up to modern day. This shift was (so far) the biggest change in my curricula that I've had to adjust to. I'm glad that we did, as I much prefer what I teach now. Still, it was one of the biggest changes in my career. Just before Thanksgiving Break, the school moved buildings. We went from a refurbished bowling alley to a custom made school. Though I've moved rooms a couple of times since those days, I am happy to report that we haven't had to move the entire school again. That's a relief, I must say. 2011 I started this year teaming up with the same teacher as the previous year. This time, we did a Garage Band Winterim, where we set the kids up in small bands, had them compose a song, and then perform it for the parents at Winterfest. This was fun, as it gave me a chance to play the guitar more than I normally do, and the students did--for the most part--a really great job. Most of this year is pretty unremarkable, save for a couple of things. One, I pressed on with Writ in Blood, which remains one of the books that I'm most proud of, despite the fact that it was flatly rejected during submissions and rather ruined when I went back and tried to tinker with the thing. The second is that this is the year that I deeply studied World War II. That gave me a whole new way of seeing this monumental event, which is something that I try to transmit to my students every year, even now. I believe we went to Disneyland this year for the first time with our oldest. He loved it to pieces. 2012 Thus began one of the biggest pivots of my life: I taught the Harry Potter Winterim to nine students. Then, with them, my wife, and my coteacher, we flew out to Orlando to visit the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. The class was inexpressibly impactful, and it ended up changing not just how I viewed the book series, but sent me down a path I never expected: I started playing quidditch. This came about because we learned how to play with the Winterim, but the enjoyment of the sport led to creating an actual team. I joined the Crimson Fliers during the summer of 2012, which I pursued for four years or so. I still love and deeply miss quidditch, in part because of its connection to such a special experience (the Harry Potter Winterim specifically, but Harry Potter more broadly, too), but also because the people I met during quidditch are some of the most remarkable human beings I've ever had the pleasure of getting to know. It's a scar--one that will likely remain with me for another decade. I continued working on Writ in Blood as I finished up my history endorsement. Back then, I would go to class on Saturday mornings, take three hours of notes, eat a high-calorie, low-cost lunch at Burger King, then slam out a chapter or two at the UVU library before heading home. I really enjoyed this, as it allowed me time to write. By this point, I had stopped teaching three sections of Socratic Seminar and instead had things like mythology or two sections of creative writing to help round out my teaching day. That sort of flexibility remains with me to this day, meaning I have two sections of Socratic 10 and two elective classes of different stripes. The election of 2012 was a divisive one (aren't they all?) and it was the first time since '08 that I was more than just dimly aware of politics. Because I'm Mormon (you know: a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), there was, I think, an assumption that I'd be voting for Mittens Romney; I didn't. I think about that election a lot--how the GOP tried a nice guy approach and was soundly defeated, so they went with the most vile they could and won--and how the world might be different had Baseball Mitt had taken the White House. At the very least, we wouldn't have to deal with Agent Orange. 2013 This Winterim saw me making comic books with the students. Like almost all of the Winterims of the decade, I taught with another teacher. This time, it was the art teacher, who's also a big comic book fan. It was a fun experience, but in the aftermath of what 2012 had done for me, it wasn't particularly memorable. By the time 2013 rolled around, I was pretty established in my career. There was a reputation at the school to maintain, plenty of stuff to keep me busy, and the addition of our third child--another boy, bringing our family to its full allotment. I turned thirty that year, which meant a lot to me at the time. I think the idea of having finished my twenties with every goal checked off save one (being published) was significant. I think this also gave me a bit of an existential crisis, as I didn't really have a lot else to try to do. Not that this year specifically stands out to me, but I should point out that every year, Gayle and I went down to the Utah Shakespeare Festival, both during the summer and again in the fall with the students. We had family vacations of all different sorts, though I'm hard pressed to remember what we did each year. I do know that in the fall of 2013, though, I got a new assignment: Teaching the Shakespeare class. I remember this specifically because I sat with my newest son on my lap, reading Twelfth Night aloud to him as he slept. It was a pleasant experience, to say the least, but it was all in preparation of teaching the Concurrent Enrollment English 1010 class with a fellow teacher at the school. So it was equal parts preparation and pleasure, I suppose. The Shakespeare class was greatly enhanced by what came around at the end of the year and beginning of the next. Over Thanksgiving Break in 2013, I left the country for the first time: I took a short trip to Paris to better prepare for Winterim 2014. This was surprisingly impactful to me, and I rely on my Parisian experience whenever I'm teaching my students about Les Misérables or French history--especially the First World War. There's something profound about being in the places where history happens, and I'm hopeful that someday--not that I've any idea how it'll happen--I can return to Europe and England. 2014 This was the Winterim that has the largest effect on me, followed by the World Wars Tour (2017) and my first Harry Potter (2012). I and a dozen or so students flew out to England and had a literary tour. We visited the big tourist sites (and sights), including the Tower of London, Trafalgar Square, and Piccadilly Circus. But we had special additions: Seeing John Milton's grave, visiting Stratford-upon-Avon and Shakespeare's grave, and the Harry Potter backstage museum in Watford. We saw the Eagle and Child (where Tolkien and Lewis would meet and talk about their fictional worlds that have made such a large difference in my life), Cambridge, Oxford, and many other places that will always live on in my mind as foundational. It was truly a remarkable experience. With that sort of a high, it was difficult to return to the normalcy of 2014. I had finished Writ in Blood sometime between 2013 and 2014, and having spent over three years on a single book, I decided to no longer try to write sprawling behemoths. Instead, I began what is my normal way of working, which is to make a novel that's between 50- and 100,000 words. The first experience I had with that was writing Chelsea Washington and the Pathway of Night, my only attempt at a young adult novel. I'm still pretty happy with it, at least in terms of what I was trying to accomplish, and it really helped set me up with the idea that I can start and end a novel in the same year--in this case, it only took a couple of months. My experiences with quidditch continued apace, and I went to Quidditch World Cup 7 in South Carolina that April. It was wonderful to see so many committed athletes, to try to play better than I had before, and to go through something that I never thought would be a part of my life: Sports. Despite going to England for nearly two weeks, I'm pretty certain we went to Disneyland this year. I know we went at some point around here. Strange to say, it's kind of hard to remember. I do know that it was at the end of this year--right before Thanksgiving, I think--that a couple of important things happened. One, we decided to move out and rent our townhome, thus allowing us to save a bit of money with which to--we hoped--spend on a newer, bigger home. The five of us were feeling a bit cramped. (Also, my calling as Elders' Quorum president had been eating away at me and this would get me out. It's selfish, I know, but that's the truth.) Two, I self-diagnosed myself as having depression. It came about slowly, as I realized that what a lot of people on Twitter were describing was similar to my own experiences. Once I realized that I have some sort of chemical imbalance in my head, a lot of my life started to make more sense. I didn't do anything with this information, per se, but it was an important start. 2015 Winterim this year went to The Lord of the Rings, which involved not only studying the text closely, but having the students try to pull a Tolkien and invent their own languages and secondary worlds. It was pretty fun, and I know that I enjoyed it. Much like the comic book Winterim, however, it hasn't stuck in my mind as strongly as some of the others. This year saw me and a coworker joining forces to tackle the Shakespeare class again, which was necessary because I'm still without a Master's degree. Still, I enjoyed teaching Shakespeare in this way, with the texts being the foundation for the different styles of writing that we were teaching the students. Quidditch World Cup 8 happened (again in South Carolina), which I attended with my team. It was fantastic--the Crimson Elite finished 18th in the nation, which is no small thing, in my view. It also marked the last time that I was to play a tournament with my quidditch friend. I retired from quidditch some time between 2015 and 2016 (I don't remember when, exactly). I don't regret that--it was sweet while it lasted, but it couldn't remain. But that doesn't mean I don't miss it. Living with the in-laws was far from an ideal experience, but it did help the way we'd hoped: We were able to get some money saved up for our own house. While we were basement dwellers, my oldest son turned eight, which meant that he decided to be baptized into the Church. I hadn't really anticipated it happening in my in-laws' ward, but my wife and I bought the townhome in January of 2008--eight or nine months before the housing bubble popped. That slowed down our ability to move on from "Old Place" (as we now call it). That summer was a new chapter (lol, pun) in my writing, as I finally mustered up the courage to ask my wife if I could abandon her for the better part of a week to have a writing retreat. I went in the middle of June and wrote most of what I later called Conduits. I wrote 34,443 words (I made a spreadsheet that kept track of the numbers) and had at last figured out how I can best work: Highly focused, in a single place, where my responsibilities can't reasonably be split in any other direction. Since then, I've had numerous retreats, all of which having done a great deal to help my writing along. Oh, and I also started my annual NaNoWriMo tradition this year, too. 2016 This Winterim was really great for me, as it was a chance to teach about dinosaurs. I teamed up with the biology teacher and we had a great time talking about dinosaurs, having the students come up with their own museum layouts, and learning about the terrible lizards. We even visited St. George for a day or two to see some dinosaur-related things, and we got lost in the Nevada desert with a bus full of kids. We made it home all right in the end, and it was a great adventure for us all. By the time spring rolled around, our renters were ready to move on and so were we. We sold our townhome and, with the equity (not much, but some) from it, we were able to move into a much bigger home. New Place (as we call it) is where we still are, and where I'm writing this now. Our first summer in New Place was a busy one, as we moved in on the fifth of July. We had a lot of settling in to do, as well as adjusting to the new commute we'd have every day. Not only that, but I used a week or so right before we moved to go out to the cabin and have a writing retreat. It's become a staple of my summers, now. By the time November came around, Gayle and I were preparing for another European trip--packing bags, making sure we knew where our passports were, getting schedules settled--and then the election came. It's fair to say that I was much more attentive to the entire thing, and the feelings I had about the election are still raw. We had started listening to the Hamilton soundtrack during our move, and so there was a sense of optimism that I'd been harboring for a few months. When the election came out with Clinton having over three million more votes yet still losing the presidency, I had a really hard time believing that America was on the right track. I've yet to change my mind on that. 2017 The World Wars Tour was supposed to be a really powerful and profound experience--and, to an extent, it was--but there's always an issue with time. We spent far too much of it traveling from one place to another, rather than really soaking in what each place had to offer. I definitely would do the tour differently if I had a chance to try again, but the trip wasn't a disaster by any means. It was, as I've mentioned before, an incredible experience that changed my life. Walking through a death camp, through a battlefield, through a museum of collected artifacts, of talking to a man who saw his own father die on the family room floor because of Nazi shells…it was unforgettable. My Shakespeare classes were changing again--we were doing a "Stage and Page" version of the class now--but other than that, there really weren't a lot of big things going down. My writing continued, with some weekly progress in the form of my creative writing classes, though without any sort of progress on the publication front. I'd finished a couple of other books, though I was still reluctant to edit them in any sort of noticeable way. Then summer came, and I brought my writing group along with for a writing retreat. It was very successful--in that month, I wrote over 77,000 words--and it also brought into the world War Golem, the book that I think is the most prepared for some sort of publication. (Whether or not that ever happens is unknown--doubted by me, believed in by most everyone else.) That summer was also remarkable because it was a Disneyland year. I remember this fully, as I got to visit an old high school friend who lives in California. We had a great trip with the Mouse and my friend, including a visit to Blizzard Entertainment campus and seeing some of the neat things they have there. On the way home, I picked up a copy of It from the Barnes and Noble in St. George. That book, as any frequent reader of my essays knows, has also fundamentally changed my life. 2018 I had originally planned on doing a Shakespeare Winterim, but it fell apart at the last minute and I ended up needing to dust off an old one and resubmit it: Thus I taught, for the first time, a repeat Winterim. Ironically, it was the same one that I'd taught my first year--now almost ten years before. The Video Game Winterim was really enjoyable--we played VR games, students invented their ideas for their own video games, and I blew their little minds with some light theory. I wouldn't mind doing that one again, though not for another year or two, methinks. I'd prefer a fresh crop of students--no double dipping. This year marched along in pretty familiar strokes. We did manage to go to Moab for a family vacation during Spring Break, which was a lot of fun. My second son decided to get baptized. My wife and I kept teaching; I kept doing the things that I'd normally do (going to LTUE in February, for example, as I've done every year since the beginning of the decade--I guess I should've mentioned that in 2010, yeah?). One thing I started doing differently in 2018, though, was writing in my reading journal about the things that I thought about whilst reading a book. I don't do that with all of them, but getting into that habit meant a lot. When summer came around, I decided to reread It, this time with pen in hand. Some of my most honest and profound personal thoughts came because of that experience, which is why I love It. I had my writing retreats--solo (56,000 words) and as a group (33,000 words)--and pushed out War Golems, the sequel (it has a plural on it, see?). I haven't looked at the book since I wrote it, but it's never too far from the back of my mind. I'm still not certain how I feel about it, which is probably a good thing--it's not settled, as it were. One remarkable thing about 2018, however, was that I was accepted to a special training at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. I went there with a coworker and had a fantastic experience. I saw much of the city, the monuments, and the Library, as well as some time in the Folger Shakespeare Library and I got to handle original, 17th century copies of Paradise Lost. It was definitely a highlight of the year and of my whole life, honestly. 2019 That brings us to this year. My Winterim was on fantasy literature, so we got to go to my wife's happy place, Evermore, and I got to enjoy a lot of time in some of my favorite pieces of literature. Both this year's and 2018's Winterims saw me teaching by myself--there wasn't time to pull someone in on last years, and this year's didn't need another set of hands--but I still had a good time. It was not, perhaps, the most incredible experience I've ever had, but not everything has to be. One of my writing group friends suggested that we pool together some cash and rent an Air BnB for a winter retreat, which we did at the end of January. It was successful, despite being shorter than I'm used to, and I finished up a NaNoWriMo book, as well as worked on a novella I've been picking at for over a year. I ended up with just over 15,000 words for the day and a half of work. A surprise came our way when my wife was offered a slightly different teaching job for the fall of 2019. Instead of teaching six classes of eight grade science, she would only teach three classes and spend the rest of the time as a teaching coach. She decided to go through with it, despite her reservations about the new administration at her school. Summer saw us at Yellowstone National Park--which the boys in particular loved; I liked it, despite having conjunctivitis--as well as a couple of writing retreats (75,000 words between the two) getting some of my novella-project taken care of. The new school year started without me teaching creative writing for the first time in almost a decade, as well as a CE class and a Shakespeare class--separate this time. It has been a fairly straightforward year, though the decade has treated me differently than I had ever anticipated. Never would I have thought that I would be a world traveler; not on a teacher's salary--and, strangely enough, I only went because I'm a teacher. My family has blossomed and continues to grow. My oldest now comes to school with me (he's in 7th grade). I have written over 1.7 million words since I got married, with the vast majority of those being written in the last decade. The one great regret--the largest failure of my goals and thoughts about the future--is that I'm still unpublished. I know that everyone has a different path, a different journey toward being published. Knowing that, however, doesn't really take the sting away. I do hope that I can change that…though I don't know how I will. I'm not really sure what the future holds. For now, it's enough to look forward with some hope, some trepidation, some familiarity, some newness. In short, there's a life in front of me. I now only need to go and live it. More than one person (meaning, I think, two) has told me that I would really like the BBC program Upstart Crow. Since the winter break started, I came down with a gnarly cold that has kept me doing precious little: A couple of the days were so bad that I didn't have enough energy to read or play video games, which, if you've ever tried those activities, are not particularly high-demand on the energy front.
To try to gain some sort of mental/physical/emotional/spiritual recharge during the break, I decided to try out Upstart Crow. (I used a free trial membership to the BBC's Amazon affiliate, BritBox, which I cancelled once I was done with the show.) This was a very wise decision, as it vastly improved my mood--it kept the sickness of my body from wearing down my too-temperamental emotions. Normally, I'm not a fan of laugh-track comedy shows, though I have a bit of a soft-spot for niche British comedies (as I'm still a fan of 'Allo 'Allo, which takes place in Nazi-occupied France and was a part of my childhood). Still, I figured I could give Upstart Crow a chance, what with it being on a free trial anyway. There's a lot to commend it. The writing is funny and satirical, with a couple of running gags throughout the whole show that I particularly enjoy: Shakespeare will often remind us all that Robert Greene "hates my gutlings"; every time Shakespeare has to commute from London to Stratford, he makes lengthy rants about the poor transportation service that is copied and pasted from most people's experience in the Underground; many of the shows are based around his plays, with some of the random, extraordinary, or downright bizarre moments being used as a way to further the plot, often with wry observations about them, culminating with a "Hang on. Hang the futuck on!" as a note that Shakespeare has cottoned onto something; the characters will comment on how Shakespeare uses language, particularly some of his (now) famous phrases, and remark how they don't make sense or they can't really see how they would ever catch on. I think what really works for me is that it is irreverent, crass, and critical, while at the same time, thoughtful, well-researched, and comes from a place of love. There are moments where modern-day interpretations of Shakespeare's works come out in lengthy analyses, all delivered with an ironic twist that made me laugh until I coughed. There were plenty of genuine Shakespearean lines--some said by Will himself, others by the rest of the cast--and there were plenty of jokes about the times that made me laugh because of the research that I've done on the Elizabethan times. I think it's fun, too, because Shakespeare is a mixture of success, competency, arrogance, shyness, and good intentions. There's plenty of conversation in the world of Bardolatry about whether or not Shakespeare was faithful to his wife. I kind of think that, men and society being what they were at the time, Shakespeare probably thought of his family, for the most part, as a hindrance to what he was doing in London. Upstart Crow, however, incorporates the family dynamic really well: Anne Shakespeare (formerly Anne Hathaway) is a major player, and Will goes from London to Stratford-upon-Avon (in the aforementioned commutes) frequently. This gives him a connection to his family, and though he has his own desires and urges and flaws, he truly cares about his family and his wife. They only really play with the possibility of Will being unfaithful in one of the stories, and it works really well--in fact, it's my favorite episode, which is the last one of the third season (not counting the Christmas special, which is now the only version of A Christmas Carol that I will probably ever want to watch). At this point, if you're reading along and thinking, I might have a go at that show, then, since Steve is such a fan, then I'll put in a spoiler for this next bit. See, as this season finale came along (called "Go On and I Will Follow"), I was able to rather predict the ending of the story: Hamnet Shakespeare, William's only son, died when he was only about 11 or so. In the episode, a lot was being made about Hamnet and his confirmation, which led me to know (or, more accurately, guess) that Hamnet wasn't going to survive the episode. I was right: Hamnet dies while Will is away, and he comes home to a bereaved family. This works in the context of the show really well because the stories have woven the homelife with the worklife in a way that makes the characters feel like his loving--if strange--family. Will doesn't feel like an absentee father, despite being somewhat disconnected from the lives of his family, and so the grief that rocks them is really profound. And, when Sue Shakespeare, his oldest daughter, asks him if he truly believes that Hamnet is still alive, that there's an afterlife, William answers her (I think) honestly, "No. I don't think there's anything else." That is a bone of contention within Bardolators (we really don't have a lot else to do, honestly), as some people think that he's fully Protestant, others that he's a closeted Catholic, and yet others that think he's a nihilist. (The late Harold Bloom says of Hamlet (whom he closely identified with Shakespeare) as being, like himself, "Of a gnostic sect of one.") I don't know what Shakespeare believed; I don't know how much of him is in the plays or poetry. But I get a pretty strong sense that he's interested in people here and now, not what we may be on the other side. As a result, this response is really potent. It stakes a particular claim about Shakespeare--as do a number of other instances--and I think it strengthens the show as a result. Now, the thing isn't perfect; the production values are pretty small, and though they do a great job with the material, this is no Game of Thrones style TV. Sometimes the jokes a touch predictable (the running gags have that as a point against them as well, yes?), and they can sometimes feel a bit too shouty for my taste. Also, it's not easily available here--though I will be poking around to see if there's a Blu-ray collection that works in the US--which is sad. On the whole, though, it's well written, funny, thoughtful, touching, and a brilliant love letter to the Bard--to that upstart crow, as Robert Greene once wrote, who changed the world. I love it. 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. |
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