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Hump Day Shakespearean Quote – 18 March 2015

stanley-tucci-puck

With this, the last Wednesday of winter, it’s time to celebrate. Spring is almost here and after that, Summer.   From one of The Bard’s most popular plays, performed more often today than just about any other, here’s the lovely and lyrical closing lines of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

If we shadows have offended, 
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
If you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.  

—A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 5, Scene i 

The ethereal spirit Puck delivers this postlude, which at first blush seems so much fluff.   But I think Shakespeare is saying something important here about the reality of theatre and the nature of Art. He has Puck urging the audience to pretend this was all but a dream–or is he? Shakespeare and Puck are playing with us: Puck, throughout the course of the play, has proven himself a trickster, yet he claims to be ‘honest Puck’; he admits the play’s themes are ‘weak and idle’ yet here we are, 400 years later, still parsing them out; the actors are shadows and the play ‘no more yielding than a dream’, yet they still have the power to offend–sending Puck out to address the audience directly to plead for amends. 

Such a strangely thoughtful ending, more than just a beautiful reel of couplets, it’s an evocative rumination on reality and dream, on memory and imagination.   And all of this at the tail end of a delightful fantasy-comedy.   

The image is of Stanley Tucci’s delightfully ridiculous Puck from the 1999 movie.

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Sunday Sonnet – 15 March 2015

116 original

I attended the wedding yesterday of a young friend. The ceremony she and her newly minted husband wrote themselves, full of style, panache and sweetness. There’s wasn’t much old or traditional in their ceremony or reception–or was there? Of course there was: The love of true minds–a kind of love they promised one another which is never perfect but the most beautiful thing in the world. It’s complicated, and never in the course of human Art has that kind of love been better expressed than in Will Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116: 

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark, 
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 
Within his bending sickle’s compass come; 
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, 
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved. 

There is such a timeliness beauty, eloquence and truth to this sonnet–so perfect in its realization of the Elizabethan sonnet form, so infinitely depthless in its meanings and cross-meanings, so breathtaking in its imagery–that it’s never been matched by another poet. And yet–if one knows nothing of poetry, if one finds Shakespeare intimidating–even a cursory read or listen to these lines can raise your spirits and thrill your heart with its lyrical beauty. 

Read it aloud today with someone you love.

And to my young friends, congratulations. 

The image is the Elizabethan text of Sonnet 116, printed with the font and characters common to that era.

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Poe Potpourri for Friday the 13th!

13th

Today for all you triskaidekaphobiacs I thought I’d share some of my favorite quotes from Edgar A. Poe. Enjoy!

My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.

–‘The Black Cat’ (1843) 

TRUE!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken!

–‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (1843) 

Of Madame L’Espanaye no traces were here seen; but an unusual quantity of soot being observed in the fire-place, a search was made in the chimney, and (horrible to relate!) the corpse of the daughter, head downward, was dragged therefrom; it having been thus forced up the narrow aperture for a considerable distance. The body was quite warm.

–‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) 

I WAS sick—sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence—the dread sentence of death—was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears.

–‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (1842)

A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul —a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of bygone times are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key.

–‘Ms. Found in a Bottle’ (1833) 

Not hear it?—yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long—long—long—many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it—yet I dared not—oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!—I dared not—I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin…

–‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) 

The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

–‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (1846) 

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

–from a letter written by Poe

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Hump Day Shakespearean Quote – 11 March 2015

kate-fleetwood-02

In Shakespeare, one of the most delicious curses ever uttered comes from the lips of a woman, not a man. Lady Macbeth readies to welcome King Duncan to Macbeth’s castle and to his death. She summons all the powers of heaven and hell to ‘unsex her’–that is, turn her into a man in order to make her cruel, and order to compensate for the lack of masculine strength and courage in her husband. 

LADY MACBETH: 

The raven himself is hoarse

That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan

Under my battlements. Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;

Stop up the access and passage to remorse,

That no compunctious visitings of nature

Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between

The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,

And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,

Wherever in your sightless substances

You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night,

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,

To cry ‘Hold, hold!’ 

—Macbeth, Act I Scene v 

In Shakespeare’s time, women were considered property, and not even allowed to act on stage. So when Macbeth premiered, this powerful and dangerous speech would be spoken by a boy actor. Considering the Elizabethan attitude toward women as weaker vessels, this is an extraordinary speech: beyond the searing poetic eloquence of its language, there are levels upon levels of subtext: what did Shakespeare think of women, and what did his audience think when they heard Lady Macbeth hurl such words, demanding the darkest spirits of the underworld to ‘unsex’ her–and dry up her mother’s milk into poison? 

The image is of Kate Fleetwood, my favorite film Lady Macbeth, from the fantastic 2010 movie.

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Sunday Sonnet – 08 March 2015

SonnetsQuarto001356

This sonnet is especially evocative for me because it appears that an actual event or circumstance inspired it: the Poet gives the Young Man a blank book. For someone like me, who’s writing a novel about Shakespeare, the notion that the sonnets might reflect actual events in the Bard’s life becomes irresistible:

77

Thy glass will show thee how thy beauties wear,
Thy dial how thy precious minutes waste;
The vacant leaves thy mind’s imprint will bear,
And of this book this learning mayst thou taste.
The wrinkles which thy glass will truly show
Of mouthed graves will give thee memory;
Thou by thy dial’s shady stealth mayst know
Time’s thievish progress to eternity.
Look, what thy memory can not contain
Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find
Those children nursed, deliver’d from thy brain,
To take a new acquaintance of thy mind.
These offices, so oft as thou wilt look,
Shall profit thee and much enrich thy book.

Shakespearean scholarship is undecided about the biographical veracity of the Sonnets. But this one and one other (a Dark Lady sonnet where she’s playing music on a virginal) both seem to include specific details from actual events. Do the other major events of the sonnets–the Poet’s love for a Young Man and a Dark Lady; circumstances of physical parting; specific instances of betrayal–reflect chapters in Will’s life? 

I like to believe so. Though this debate has gone on for years, and a complete parsing out of all the arguments for and against would fill entire book, two main points convince me:

First, the Sonnets were published in 1609 without Shakespeare’s permission. Yet much of Shakespeare’s contemporary fame came from his profession as a Poet and not a playwright, including his publication of Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle.’ So why not publish the Sonnets he had been writing for years? Simple: their highly personal nature–in cases, so personal as to be dangerous (homosexual acts in Elizabethan England were punishable by imprisonment). 

Second, because autobiographical inspiration is the way of Artistry. This is more of a right brain kind of argument, but history is full of hundreds of instances where great writers drew from their own experiences to create their stories. No, of course Shakespeare never ruled an ancient Roman Empire like in Julius Caesar; no, of course he didn’t avenge his father’s death like Hamlet did. But Will lived and recognized and empathized with all the great emotions, trials and hopes of the human condition (and expressed them brilliantly). And in the case of his very private sonnets, those troubles and aspirations bubble to surface in curiously detailed and repetitive ways. 

The image comes from an actual First Edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1609.

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Friday’s Poe Quote – Ciphers! – 06 March 2015

poe-the-gold-bug-1843-granger

In addition to Poe’s detective stories with Inspector Dupin, Poe wrote one other story that fits into his meme of ‘ratiocination’–that is, Poe’s science of deduction that launched the entire modern genre of detective fiction. Poe wrote ‘The Gold-Bug’ in 1843 for a contest. His tale about buried treasure, secret writing and ciphers:   

“Here Legrand, having re-heated the parchment, submitted it to my inspection. The following characters were rudely traced, in a red tint, between the death’s-head and the goat:    

“53æææ305))6*;4826)4æ)4æ);806*;48æ8æ60))85;1æ);:æ   

*8æ83(88)5*æ;46(;88*96*?;8)*æ(;485);5*æ2:*æ(;4956*   

2(5*–4)8æ8*;4069285);)6æ8)4ææ;1(æ9;48081;8:8æ1;4   

8æ85;4)485æ528806*81(æ9;48;(88;4(æ?34;48)4æ;161;:   

188;æ?;” 

“But,” said I, returning him the slip, “I am as much in the dark as ever. Were all the jewels of Golconda awaiting me upon my solution of this enigma, I am quite sure that I should be unable to earn them.” 

–from ‘The Gold-Bug’ 

This ended up being Poe’s most successful and popular story in his lifetime. However, it hasn’t aged as well as some of his other classics like ‘The Tell-Tale Art’ or ‘The Black Cat.’ Namely, the character of Jupiter is such a grotesque caricature of an African American, that most modern readers have trouble getting through the many racist passages of Jupiter’s stilted speech and abject stupidity. 

Nonetheless, ‘The Gold-Bug’ remains a prime of example of period fiction, and if you can get past the stereotyped Jupiter, it’s a great buried treasure yarn and a good introduction to the notion of the ‘substitution cipher’, which is the simplest kind of secret writing. 

The image comes from a wood engraving by Fritz Eichenberg for a 1944 version of the short story, showing the treasure hunters discovering their hidden loot.

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Hump Day Shakespearean Quote – 04 March 2015

richard

In my part of the country, Winter’s all but over, which is a happy time.   Shakespeare used that sentiment in one of his most famous turns of phrase: ‘The winter of our discontent.’ The opening of Richard III leaps upon us as a grand soliloquy, presented by its antihero, the sociopathic and hunchbacked Duke of Gloucester, later renamed Richard: 

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth’d his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barded steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other:
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mew’d up,
About a prophecy, which says that ‘G’
Of Edward’s heirs the murderer shall be.
Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here
Clarence comes. 

—Richard III, Act I, Scene i 

It’s a stupendous speech because Gloucester (Richard) spells out for everyone what ails him (he was born so ugly and deformed that dogs bark at him), and gives argument to why he’s spoiling to play the villain (even though his brother King Edward has banished winter for the summer of peace, Gloucester’s having none of it). 

He boasts that ‘if King Edward be as true and just / As I am subtle, false and treacherous’, he’ll soon have things his way. 

And so Shakespeare is telling his audience that even though they’ve come to see a history, they’re going to bare witness to some deliciously staged mayhem. 

If you’d like to see this brought brilliantly to life, I highly recommend the 1995 film Richard III, starring Ian McKellen as the murderously vile but eloquent King.   This opening speech, in particular, McKellen delivers from a urinal! The graphic shows McKellen in faux Nazi-like regalia: the film was staged as if it took place in an alternate universe England of the 1940s.

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Sunday Sonnet – 01 March 2015

anne_hathaways_cottage

Shakespeare loved puns. But not all of his puns had to be humorous. In this melancholy and desolate sonnet, he endows the word ‘love’ with at least five or six shades of meaning: The Poet’s love for his lover; his lover’s love for him; the two actual different lovers themselves (besides the Poet himself); lust, or the carnal act of love-making; and the generic attribution referring all lovers in the word. For in this sonnet we find a love triangle mixed into the tangle of the emotions and betrayals:

40

Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all;
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call;
All mine was thine before thou hadst this more.
Then if for my love thou my love receivest,
I cannot blame thee for my love thou usest;
But yet be blamed, if thou thyself deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.
I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty;
And yet, love knows, it is a greater grief
To bear love’s wrong than hate’s known injury.
Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,
Kill me with spites; yet we must not be foes. 

Why on earth would Shakespeare decide to play on one word, weaving it through in all kinds of different confusing ways? Just about everything Shakespeare did was intentional. Any us who’ve ever been in throes of a new love affair, are experiencing trouble in an established relationship or, sadly, are involved in the betrayal of love, roil about with a sense of confusion and despair. Our emotions are very mixed.

In the end the Poet seems to eek out a half-hearted and woefully inadequate solution to this: 

Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,
Kill me with spites; yet we must not be foes. 

Your betrayal is going to ruin me, but let’s still remain friends. 

The image is a photograph of Anne Hathaway’s cottage. Anne was Shakespeare’s wife, and evidence shows that Will and Anne were estranged for years. It was very likely an unhappy love.  

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Friday’s Maniacal Poe Quote – Cannibalism!

Pym book

Today’s quote comes from Poe’s only novel, Gordon Pym. I’ve talked about this book before, but have reserved its most gruesome excerpt for the dark of late winter: shipwreck survivors reduced to cannibalism.   In this scene, they’ve just drawn straws to see which of the last four starving survivors will fall beneath the knife: 

‘I recovered from my swoon in time to behold the consummation of the tragedy in the death of him who had been chiefly instrumental in bringing it about. He made no resistance whatever, and was stabbed in the back by Peters, when he fell instantly dead. I must not dwell upon the fearful repast which immediately ensued. Such things may be imagined, but words have no power to impress the mind with the exquisite horror of their reality. Let it suffice to say that, having in some measure appeased the raging thirst which consumed us by the blood of the victim, and having by common consent taken off the hands, feet, and head, throwing them together with the entrails, into the sea, we devoured the rest of the body, piecemeal, during the four ever memorable days of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth of the month.’ 

—Narrative of A. Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Chapter 12 

Imagine, if you can, how shocking this must’ve been to readers in 1838 when Pym was published. It’s work like this that helped cement Poe’s reputation as the grand master of the macabre. It’s a flawed novel, gratuitously violent, meandering and lurid, but it blazed a trail, heralding the dark romanticism of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, published only a few years later in 1851. I’m not writing a Herman Melville blog, but yet–of course–Moby Dick is a masterpiece, Gordon Pym ‘just’ a classic. However, Poe struck first and struck hard.   Gordon Pym is a quick and easy read: pick it and enjoy an 18th century classic.   Don’t read it during dinner. 

The image is from the title page of the original published edition of the novel. Parts of the novel were previously serialized, but it didn’t see full publication in book form until 1838.

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Hump Day Shakespearean Quote – 25 February 2015

Kenneth-Branagh-in-Henry--007

Good writers typically save their best for last. But Shakespeare was all about breaking the rules. To start out his early history play, Henry V, he sends out a single actor to announce to everyone that this play is big business–so big that the paltry stage he stands upon can in no way do it justice. He apologizes to the audience for the lack of grandeur and setting, but then pleads the audience for their imagination. But here’s the trick: the language is so stunning, so spectacular and powerful that in the hands of a great orator or actor, this prologue sweeps up the audience into a grand illusion of history: 

Chorus:

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention,

A kingdom for a stage, princes to act

And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,

Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,

Leash’d in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire

Crouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all,

The flat unraised spirits that have dared

On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth

So great an object: can this cockpit hold

The vasty fields of France? or may we cram

Within this wooden O the very casques

That did affright the air at Agincourt?

O, pardon! since a crooked figure may

Attest in little place a million;

And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,

On your imaginary forces work.

Suppose within the girdle of these walls

Are now confined two mighty monarchies,

Whose high upreared and abutting fronts

The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;

Into a thousand parts divide on man,

And make imaginary puissance;

Think when we talk of horses, that you see them

Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth;

For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,

Carry them here and there; jumping o’er times,

Turning the accomplishment of many years

Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,

Admit me Chorus to this history;

Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,

Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.

Exit 

—Henry V, Act I, Prologue 

Technically, this kind of intro is called an ‘Invocation of the Muse’, a trope Shakespeare borrowed from the Classical Greeks. But no one ever did it like Shakespeare–before or after. 

Please read this aloud–and you’ll hear the imagery leaping to life, even as the chorus asks the audience to please use their imaginations. Thus we step into the miracle of live theatre.

The image is of Kenneth Branagh as King Harry, in his quite excellent movie of the play from 1989.