Art is My Religion

Month: April 2015

  • Hump Day Shakespearean Quote – 29 April 2015

    >Christopher Plummer as Prospero: The filmed version of his live performance in The Tempest is the next best thing to being at Stratford.

    Some believe this is the greatest Shakespearean speech ever. Which, if true, would make it one of the great speeches in English literature:

    PROPERO:

    Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
    And ye that on the sands with printless foot
    Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
    When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
    By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
    Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime
    Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
    To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid,
    Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm’d
    The noontide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds,
    And ‘twixt the green sea and the azured vault
    Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
    Have I given fire and rifted Jove’s stout oak
    With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
    Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck’d up
    The pine and cedar: graves at my command
    Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth
    By my so potent art. But this rough magic
    I here abjure, and, when I have required
    Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
    To work mine end upon their senses that
    This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
    Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
    And deeper than did ever plummet sound
    I’ll drown my book. 

    —The Tempest, Act V, Scene i 

    This is the last great speech of the last play Shakespeare wrote entirely himself.  And it’s not hard to see Shakespeare drawing a connection between the aging magician, Prospero, and himself, the aging playwright. For Prospero, at play’s end, is at the height of his magical powers; and arguably, The Tempest saw the playwright also at the height of his powers.   Both the magician and playwright choose to ‘break my staff…’ A pun on his own name? Finally to ‘drown my book.’ And before these final pronouncements, the soliloquy registers a train of triumphs and accomplishments. Each of the lines of this speech easily harkens back to any innumerable scenes or characters in his thirty-some plays. 

    Like many of greatest artists and athletes of today’s world, the Bard chose to go out on top. 

    The image comes from Christopher Plummer as Prospero in a 2010 version of Shakespeare’s play.

  • Sunday Sonnet – 26 April 2015

    courthouse

    Today a sonnet to friendship seems appropriate to me because this weekend I’m briefly seeing a lot of friends I seldom get to visit.   Part of the Young Man sequence of sonnets, this beautiful poem speaks to the melancholy of departed friends, and the memories you take with you:

    30

    When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
    I summon up remembrance of things past,
    I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
    And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
    Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
    For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
    And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
    And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
    Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
    And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
    The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
    Which I new pay as if not paid before.
    But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
    All losses are restored and sorrows end. 

    One of the remarkable things about this poem it its use of Elizabethan courtroom language: ‘Sessions’; ‘cancell’d’; ‘expense’; ‘grievances’; ‘account’; ‘pay’ and ‘paid’; ‘losses are restored’. The love for separated friends and courtroom lingo don’t seem an obvious match, but Shakespeare makes it work.

    Lost chances, lost friends, the death of friends or loved ones brings the Poet to tears. However, all he has to do is think upon his dear friend–in this case the Young Man–and all his sorrows end. 

    Finally, ‘remembrance of things past’ from the gorgeous pair of opening lines is a phrase made famous by the translated English title of Proust’s 20th century classic novel.   

    The image is of the Hawkshead Courthouse in the Lake District, an example of what many courthouses might have looked like in the time of Shakespeare.

  • Happy Shakespeare’s Birthday!

    shake

    Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

    As I foretold you, were all spirits and

    Are melted into air, into thin air:

    And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

    The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

    The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

    Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

    And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

    Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

    As dreams are made on, and our little life

    Is rounded with a sleep.

    –William Shakespeare

    From The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1

  • Hump Day Shakespearean Quotes–Tomorrow is Shakespeare’s Birthday!

    Will for About

    If I were King, we’d celebrate the 23rd of April as a National Holiday, the birthdate of the greatest writer of Western Literature. And even though he wrote his plays and poetry four centuries ago in the earliest form of modern English–‘Elizabethan English’–his ideas and phrases and characters and themes still resonate with us today. They have, in fact, settled deep into our daily lives. To celebrate his birthday this year, allow me to share just a few of the many dozens of popular phrases Shakespeare coined, with an example here or there of their uses in our modern day world. Enjoy!

    All our yesterdays

    ‘All our yesterdays’ from Macbeth

    Though not used in every day speech as a tossed off quip, it’s often used in art, including pop art. One of the most favorite episodes of the Original Star Trek’s third season was called ‘All Our Yesterdays,’ a time-travel yarn. And Shakespeare was obsessed with time.

    ‘Bated breath’ from The Merchant of Venice

    Such a common phrase, coined by Shylock.

    BraveNewWorld_FirstEdition

    ‘Brave new world’ from The Tempest

    Made famous again by Aldous Huxley in the 20th century with his landmark science fiction classic about dystopian society. Both Huxley and the Bard used this phrase ironically.  

    ‘Break the ice’ from The Taming of the Shrew

    You’ll be doing this with cocktails soon enough this evening; who knew that this oft-used quip came from the Bard?

    ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’ from Hamlet

    Ironically, this comes from Hamlet, Shakespeare’s longest play.

    ‘Cold comfort’ from The Taming of the Shrew and King John

    Shakespeare so loved this, he used it twice.

    ‘Crack of doom’ from Macbeth

    No, Tolkien didn’t create this.   The three weird sisters in Macbeth did, when predicting Macbeth’s….doom.

    ‘Dead as a doornail’ from 2 Henry VI

    I use this phrase every night after work, just before my first cocktail.

    04-kevin-spacy

    ‘Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war’ from Julius Caesar

    Most recently used by Kevin Spacey in House of Cards.

    ‘Eaten me out of house and home’ from 2 Henry IV

    What my hosts say to me every time I visit.

    ‘Foregone conclusion’ from Othello

    Othello speaks this, but it’s the evil Iago who prompts it. A powerful phrase, be careful when you use it–it’s so often untrue.

    M8DADOF EC056

    ‘The game is afoot’ from I Henry IV

    Conan Doyle borrowed this for Sherlock Holmes.

    ‘Good riddance’ from Troilus and Cressida

    One of our favorite modern phrases, don’t you think?

    ‘It was Greek to me’ from Julius Caesar

    Many people feel this about Shakespeare when they first try to read him. Give him a chance!

    ‘In a pickle’ from The Tempest

    Such a silly aphorism, from one of the most sublime plays ever written.

    ‘In my heart of hearts’ from Hamlet

    Spoken by lovers till this very day, first used in one of the most grim tragedies ever written.

    ‘Killing frost’ from Henry VIII

    We have one of these every year, yet no one used the phrase till The Bard.

    ‘Knock knock! Who’s there?’ from Macbeth

    Yes, Macbeth is one of the bloodiest tragedies ever written, but here you go.   Something every child learns. In the play, this is one of the few instances of humor, though even the humor here is pretty dark.

    Something-Wicked

    ‘Something wicked this way comes’ from Macbeth

    Ray Bradbury titled his classic novel of dark fantasy after this evocative phrase.

    sound and fury

    ‘Sound and fury’ from Macbeth

    Faulkner used this for his famous classic, The Sound and the Fury.

    ‘Too much of a good thing’ from As You Like It

    Yes, even in the squalor of Elizabethan life, it was possible to have too much of a good thing.

    ‘Wear my heart upon my sleeve’ from Othello

    However, the villain of Othello famously did not wear his heart on his sleeve, but kept his evil designs guarded till the very end.

    charles-dickens

    ‘What the dickens?’ from The Merry Wives of Windsor

    No, this did not come from Charles Dickens.

    by any other name

    ‘What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ from Romeo and Juliet

    Yes, even Romeo and Juliet could inspire the writers of the original Star Trek.

  • Friday’s Maniacal Poe Quote – 17 April 2015

    Oval Portrait

    Poe once wrote, ‘The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.’ His ghostly yarn, “The Oval Portrait”, embodies this notion.   

    She was a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee. And evil was the hour when she saw, and loved, and wedded the painter. He, passionate, studious, austere, and having already a bride in his Art; she a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee; all light and smiles, and frolicsome as the young fawn; loving and cherishing all things; hating only the Art which was her rival; dreading only the pallet and brushes and other untoward instruments which deprived her of the countenance of her lover. It was thus a terrible thing for this lady to hear the painter speak of his desire to portray even his young bride.

    –from ‘The Oval Portrait’ (1842)

    The story is very short, but nonetheless encompasses several important Poe tropes in only about two pages: a gothic setting; a beautiful woman; Art and the Artist; Death; and how the innocent usually die first. 

    ‘The Oval Portrait’s’ concept that a portrait can collect or reflect the physical or moral aspects of a living human certainly caught Oscar Wilde’s attention. It’s said that Wilde thought so highly of Poe’s tale, that it inspired his idea for The Picture of Dorian Gray.

    The image is a daguerreotype of Poe taken in 1848, during the last year of his life–after the long and lingering death of his beautiful wife, Virginia.

  • Hump Day (a day late) Shakespearean Quote – 16 April 2015

    Steven-Lee-Johnson-as-Puck-in-Midsummer-Nights-Dream-Chicago-Shakespeare

    Spring is upon us here in Wisconsin, so how about an airy, summer-like delight from the magical Puck, aka Robin Goodfellow? This delightful verse–especially in the hands of a skilled actor–can ‘spring’ to hilarious delight: 

    PUCK

    My mistress with a monster is in love.

    Near to her close and consecrated bower,

    While she was in her dull and sleeping hour,

    A crew of patches, rude mechanicals,

    That work for bread upon Athenian stalls,

    Were met together to rehearse a play

    Intended for great Theseus’ nuptial-day.

    The shallowest thick-skin of that barren sort,

    Who Pyramus presented, in their sport

    Forsook his scene and enter’d in a brake

    When I did him at this advantage take,

    An ass’s nole I fixed on his head:

    Anon his Thisbe must be answered,

    And forth my mimic comes. When they him spy,

    As wild geese that the creeping fowler eye,

    Or russet-pated choughs, many in sort,

    Rising and cawing at the gun’s report,

    Sever themselves and madly sweep the sky,

    So, at his sight, away his fellows fly;

    And, at our stamp, here o’er and o’er one falls;

    He murder cries and help from Athens calls.

    Their sense thus weak, lost with their fears thus strong,

    Made senseless things begin to do them wrong;

    For briers and thorns at their apparel snatch;

    Some sleeves, some hats, from yielders all things catch.

    I led them on in this distracted fear,

    And left sweet Pyramus translated there:

    When in that moment, so it came to pass,

    Titania waked and straightway loved an ass. 

    —A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene ii 

    Repeated rhymed couplets, especially to a modern ear, can sound cloying. But in the hands of Shakespeare and a skilled orator, this form lends itself perfectly to the scene at hand, where the magical Puck relates to Oberon how his wife Titania, through the powers of a magic potion, has fallen in love with a ‘rude mechanical’ most recently transformed into an ass. 

    Go ahead, read the last four lines out loud. 

    To this very day, A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, a masterpiece of comic delight and sublime language.   

    The image is of Steven Lee Johnson as Puck in last year’s Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  • Sunday Sonnet – 12 April 2015

    gunshots

    Medical care in Elizabethan times was a regular horror show. Your treatment–if you were unlucky enough to survive long enough to receive care–might come from a physician, a surgeon or an apothecary, depending on the ailment. I call number 147 Shakespeare’s ‘Medical Sonnet.’ The Poet longs to break away from the Dark Lady, but his lust resists all powers of reason. Lust is his fever, and reason is the physician; one has left in lieu of the other. 

    147

    My love is as a fever, longing still
    For that which longer nurseth the disease,
    Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
    The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
    My reason, the physician to my love,
    Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
    Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
    Desire is death, which physic did except.
    Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
    And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
    My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,
    At random from the truth vainly express’d;
    For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,
    Who art as black as hell, as dark as night. 

    The Poet has ignored reason, and so good sense–his physician–has left him: ‘Angry that his prescriptions are not kept, Hath left me.’ The Poet longs for death, but this disease won’t quite kill him: “Desire is death, which physic did except. Finally, the Poet is past the point of caring: “Past cure I am, now reason is past care.’ 

    As if this wonderfully intricate metaphor weren’t enough, Sonnet 147 ends with one of the most delicious couplets ever: 

    For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,
    Who art as black as hell, as dark as night. 

    Finally, the opening: ‘My love is like a fever.’ Rock ‘n’ rollers to this very day have used this metaphor–so worn out we can no longer stand it. Shakespeare invented it.   

    The image comes from the cover of a French book on the treatment of battle wounds, printed in Shakespeare’s time.

  • Friday’s Maniacal Poe Quote – 10 April 2015

    valdemar

    The indefinable boundary between life and death fascinated Poe. In one of his more bizarre and grotesque yarns, Poe explores the power of hypnotism, and whether such a thing as an induced trance might have the power to stave off death. A morally questionable mesmerizer attempts it on a tuberculosis victim, only to yank the voice of Death itself from the lips of the fresh cadaver: 

    I now feel that I have reached a point of this narrative at which every reader will be startled into positive disbelief. It is my business, however, simply to proceed. 

    There was no longer the faintest sign of vitality in M. Valdemar; and concluding him to be dead, we were consigning him to the charge of the nurses, when a strong vibratory motion was observable in the tongue. This continued for perhaps a minute. At the expiration of this period, there issued from the distended and motionless jaws a voice—such as it would be madness in me to attempt describing. There are, indeed, two or three epithets which might be considered as applicable to it in part; I might say, for example, that the sound was harsh, and broken and hollow; but the hideous whole is indescribable, for the simple reason that no similar sounds have ever jarred upon the ear of humanity. 

    –from ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ (1845) 

    The narrator’s attempt to put the dying Mr. Valdemar in a state of suspended animation ends in a spectacularly gruesome denouement. I won’t spoil it for you–the story’s short, you should go read it. But remember this when you do: We know it’s fiction, but when Poe published this in 1845, it wasn’t labeled as fiction; many readers believed it to be a scientific report. Poe fills the story with a plethora of succinct details; the lurid accumulation of leaking bodily fluids, the ghastly anatomical descriptions and abrupt pronouncements of unpleasant sights and smells. These convinced many people that this little horror show actually happened. 

    What many people perhaps didn’t think about is the Poe’s own wife, Virginia, died of tuberculosis. Perhaps there’s a moral lesson buried here, as it were, beneath all the grotesqueries. 

    The image is Harry Clarke’s illustration of the story for a 1919 edition of Poe’s works.

  • Hump Day Shakespearean Quote – 8 April 2015

    Lady Anne

    I’ve touched on this quote before, but it’s so powerful–one of my favorites–that I’d like to quote in its entirety Lady Anne’s speech in its wrathful glory:

    LADY ANNE

    Foul devil, for God’s sake, hence, and trouble us not;

    For thou hast made the happy earth thy hell,

    Fill’d it with cursing cries and deep exclaims.

    If thou delight to view thy heinous deeds,

    Behold this pattern of thy butcheries.

                                                                  She points to the corpse

    O, gentlemen, see, see! dead Henry’s wounds

    Open their congeal’d mouths and bleed afresh!

    Blush, Blush, thou lump of foul deformity;

    For ’tis thy presence that exhales this blood

    From cold and empty veins, where no blood dwells;

    Thy deed, inhuman and unnatural,

    Provokes this deluge most unnatural.

    O God, which this blood madest, revenge his death!

    O earth, which this blood drink’st revenge his death!

    Either heaven with lightning strike the murderer dead,

    Or earth, gape open wide and eat him quick,

    As thou dost swallow up this good king’s blood

    Which his hell-govern’d arm hath butchered! 

    —Richard III, Act I Scene ii 

    This delicious string of curses and insults that Lady Anne hurls at Richard, over the corpse of her dead uncle, King Henry, are a wonder of theatre and characterization. Richard announces right from the opening of the play his evil intentions. The audience has no doubt he’s the villain–the play has no hero. As if there weren’t enough, in Scene ii, the widowed Lady Anne (her husband Prince Edward and her uncle the King are dead) sets out for the audience in her speech Richard’s true character.

    Yet–and this has troubled critics for centuries–in the ensuing scene Richard’s loquacious genius persuades Anne to marry him! Such a shocking turnabout has always been a challenge for actresses playing Anne. It’s certainly possible: the greatest performers are able to evoke Anne’s horror, anger, shock, naivety and scrappy survival instincts all at once. 

    The image is of Kristin Scott Thomas as Lady Anne in the magnificent film adaptation of Richard III from 1995. Ian McKellen looms in the background as Richard. The man with the hole in his head is King Henry.

  • Sunday Sonnet – 5 April 2015

    Startford

    When does Easter fall every year? The simplest explanation is that it’s always on the Sunday after the first Full Moon after the Spring Equinox, though this hasn’t always been the case. The point is that the Early Church Fathers wanted to approximate the timing of Easter to match the of year they imagined the first one occurred on. Anyhow, tying the lives of people to the cycles of Nature–that’s what today’s sonnet is all about: 

    5

    Those hours, that with gentle work did frame

    The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,

    Will play the tyrants to the very same

    And that unfair which fairly doth excel;

    For never-resting time leads summer on

    To hideous winter, and confounds him there;

    Sap checked with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,

    Beauty o’er-snowed and bareness every where:

    Then were not summer’s distillation left,

    A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,

    Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft,

    Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was:

       But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,

       Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet. 

    I believe this sonnet is best enjoyed for its wonderful extended metaphor, and not for its lame argument. Its argument is that Poet’s beautiful Young Man should procreate in order to preserve the ‘summer’s distillation’ of his physical beauty so that in the face of hideous winter, something is left. But what’s really lovely is how Shakespeare ties in the progression of human life through the seasons and how they all relate to one another. Especially flowers, that wilt once winter comes, but remain memorable because of the perfume there were used to create: 

       But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,

       Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet. 

    What I most like in this sonnet are the lines: ‘For never-resting time leads summer on / To hideous winter, and confounds him there.’ A wise warning to us all to cherish and embrace the ones you love, especially on a day like today. 

    The image is from my visit a few years ago to Stratford-upon-Avon on a very spring-like rainy day. This is leading up to entrance of Holy Trinity Church, where William Shakespeare is buried.