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Shakespeare Saturday – 21 January 2017

lady-macbeth

Today seems apropos for Shakespeare’s great speech about women’s empowerment–or lack thereof. 

It’s easy to cast Lady Macbeth as a supreme villainess, and that’s what so many scholars and directors have done over the centuries.  But think of when Shakespeare wrote the role of Lady Macbeth: women were property, not even allowed to act on stage–a boy had to speak Lady Macbeth’s lines.  But by the time of Macbeth, Shakespeare’s writing had matured, and he began to give us women’s roles that probably shocked some of his Elizabethan theatre-goers. 

And so we have Lady Macbeth, who first spoke on the stage of the Globe Theatre, but still speaks to us today:  She came to life in a universe where all power sat in the laps of men.  Hers was a profound desire for empowerment, and the only way she could express it was a yearning to unsex herself–that is, make her masculine.  Of course that is not how we’d prefer to think of it or express it today–but in truth, isn’t that what our world still forces women do?     

Lady Macbeth

…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 murd’ring 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!”

–from Macbeth, Act I Scene v

The image is of Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth from the 2015 film version. 

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Happy Halloween from William Shakespeare!

halloween-2016

Halloween as we know it today didn’t exist in Shakespeare’s time.  Our dark and costumed celebration evolved from many sources, including the Celtic ‘Samhain’ and the ongoing cultural and religious clashes between the pagan practices of the British Isles and the invasion of Christianity.  And so plenty of end-of-harvest rituals with pagan origins were practiced in Elizabethan times, especially in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. 

Certainly Shakespeare was aware of these, for his plays contain many examples of pagan and Christian myths, all mashed up. Judging by the way Shakespeare could chill and terrify his audiences, could one be blamed if they thought Shakespeare invented this holiday?  Of course he didn’t, but The Bard knew how to mix myth, superstition, paganism, Christianity, monsters, ghosts and curses.  Here are four of some my favorite creepy speeches from Shakespeare, my way of wishing everyone a very Bardic Halloween.  Enjoy! 

Caliban, from The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 2:

All the infections that the sun sucks up

From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall and make him

By inchmeal a disease! His spirits hear me

And yet I needs must curse. But they’ll nor pinch,

Fright me with urchin-shows, pitch me i’ th’ mire,

Nor lead me like a firebrand in the dark

Out of my way, unless he bid ’em. But

For every trifle are they set upon me,

Sometime like apes that mow and chatter at me,

And after bite me, then like hedgehogs which

Lie tumbling in my barefoot way and mount

Their pricks at my footfall. Sometime am I

All wound with adders who with cloven tongues

Do hiss me into madness.

 

Iago, from Othello, Act 2 Scene 3:

How am I then a villain

To counsel Cassio to this parallel course,

Directly to his good? Divinity of hell!

When devils will the blackest sins put on

They do suggest at first with heavenly shows

As I do now. For whiles this honest fool

Plies Desdemona to repair his fortune

And she for him pleads strongly to the Moor,

I’ll pour this pestilence into his ear:

 

The Ghost, from Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 5:

I am thy father’s spirit,

Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,

And for the day confin’d to fast in fires,

Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purg’d away. But that I am forbid

To tell the secrets of my prison house,

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,

Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres…

 

Lady Macbeth, from Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 5:

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 murd’ring 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!”

 

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Sunday Sonnet – 24 January 2016

kate fleetwood

Shakespeare wrote in an era where women were considered property. However, if one looks at the trajectory of his plays from his first in1589 to his later plays in the 1600’s, his female characters become more complex, more powerful and, indeed, more fully human. It’s in this deeply sexist society that Shakespeare began to break away from the Elizabethan norm. So too his Sonnets (published in 1603), specifically in the Poet’s love affair with the Dark Lady, where the Poet finds himself ensnared into a relationship with a woman who has become utterly and completely more powerful than him:

150

O, from what power hast thou this powerful might
With insufficiency my heart to sway?
To make me give the lie to my true sight,
And swear that brightness doth not grace the day?
Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill,
That in the very refuse of thy deeds
There is such strength and warrantize of skill
That, in my mind, thy worst all best exceeds?
Who taught thee how to make me love thee more
The more I hear and see just cause of hate?
O, though I love what others do abhor,
With others thou shouldst not abhor my state:
If thy unworthiness raised love in me,
More worthy I to be beloved of thee.

In this Sonnet, the Dark Lady excels in all things bad; her dominion over the Poet remains despite all her flaws. But he doesn’t hate her–he loves her! His sonnet argues that her unworthiness has made him love her, and because of that he’s the one who deserves her love in return. Her power over him is so strong, that he would even disbelieve it’s light during the day: ‘To make me give the lie to my true sight / And swear that brightness doth not grace the day?’ Moreover, she executes her evil actions so skillfully, he thinks them better than anyone else’s good acts:

That in the very refuse of thy deeds
There is such strength and warrantize of skill
That, in my mind, thy worst all best exceeds?

Personally, when I read this sonnet (and some of the other Dark Lady sonnets), I can’t help but think of Lady Macbeth (Macbeth, written in about 1606). One of Lady Macbeth’s most astonishing speeches is about a society where her femininity has no power. So she must calls upon the spirits to be to ‘unsex’ her:

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 murd’ring 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

So magnificent, what an incredible speech.

And what an amazing writer. Shakespeare was somehow able to see beyond the patriarchal constrictions of the Elizabethan world, and dared to imagine what it must be like to be a woman; that is, powerless.

The image is of the amazing Kate Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth from the 2010 film.

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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.