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Sunday Sonnet – 02 August 2015

300px-Adonis_Mazarin_Louvre_MR239

Shakespeare was no stranger to hyperbole, and in sonnet 106 he goes all the way, to the point of being ridiculous. But the language is so beautiful, and the imagery is so straight forward and accessible. that for a moment the reader might find her or himself swept up by the main argument: that the Young Man’s beauty is so great, even Art cannot capture his beauty:

106

When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,
Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty’s best,
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
I see their antique pen would have express’d
Even such a beauty as you master now.
So all their praises are but prophecies
Of this our time, all you prefiguring;
And, for they look’d but with divining eyes,
They had not skill enough your worth to sing:
For we, which now behold these present days,
Had eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

Could this Elizabethan Young Man have been so beautiful that even the ancients couldn’t capture him? Hardly likely. Yet Sonnet 106 declares ‘They had not skill enough your worth to sing.’   Crazy. And then Shakespeare–who in other sonnets has suggested this his verses will live on forever–admits that even present day poets cannot capture the Young Man’s beauty:

For we, which now behold these present days,
Had eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

There’s a coy lie in all this, for the Poet has made plainly obvious in many other sonnets that it’s only in Art, and in the lines of immortal verses that real beauty can be preserved. But you see, the 154 Sonnets taken as a whole form a narrative; and that story is the map of the human heart, which is ever fickle, ever changing.

The image is of how the Greeks attempted to capture the image of male beauty: an ancient statue of Adonis, the Greek god of Love, currently in the Louvre. Who better captures youthful beauty–the ancient Greek sculptors or Mr. Shakespeare, our Elizabethan poet?

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Weekly Shakespeare Quote – 30 July 2015

hamlet-ghost-

One of all my all time favorite Shakespeare speeches is pretty kick-ass, and plays wonderfully even today, 400 years later. It’s a speech actors love to sink their teeth into (it’s not a true monologue since there’s some interjections from another character, and it’s not a soliloquy, but it’s still a hell of a thing). And more than its marvelous theme, it tells a great story, acting as the springboard to Hamlet’s madness. Yes, it’s the Ghost, Hamlet’s slain father, recounting his tale of woe, speaking from the depths of purgatorial torment. It’s long, but delicious.

GHOST:

I am thy father’s spirit,

Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,

And for the day confined to fast in fires,

Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purged 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,

Thy knotted and combinèd locks to part,

And each particular hair to stand an end

Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.

But this eternal blazon must not be

To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list!

If thou didst ever thy dear father love–

HAMLET:

Oh God!

GHOST:

Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder–

HAMLET:

Murder!

GHOST:

Murder most foul as in the best it is;

But this most foul, strange and unnatural.

HAMLET:

Haste me to know’t, that I, with wings as swift

As meditation or the thoughts of love,

May sweep to my revenge.

GHOST:

I find thee apt;

And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed

That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,

Wouldst thou not stir in this. Now, Hamlet, hear:

‘Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,

A serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark

Is by a forgèd process of my death

Rankly abused. But know, thou noble youth,

The serpent that did sting thy father’s life

Now wears his crown.

HAMLET:

O my prophetic soul! My uncle!

GHOST:

Ay, that incestuous, that adulterous beast,

With witchcraft of his wit, with traiterous gifts–

O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power

So to seduce! — won to his shameful lust

The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen.

O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there,

From me, whose love was of that dignity

That it went hand in hand even with the vow

I made to her in marriage, and to decline

Upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor

To those of mine!

But virtue, as it never will be moved,

Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven,

So lust, though to a radiant angel linked,

Will sate itself in a celestial bed

And prey on garbage.

But soft, methinks I scent the morning air.

Brief let me be. Sleeping within my orchard,

My custom always of the afternoon,

Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole

With juice of cursed hebona in a vial,

And in the porches of my ears did pour

The leperous distilment, whose effect

Holds such an enmity with blood of man

That swift as quicksilver it courses through

The natural gates and alleys of the body,

And with a sudden vigor it doth posset

And curd, like eager droppings into milk,

The thin and wholesome blood. So did it mine,

And a most instant tetter barked about

Most lazar-like with vile and loathsome crust

All my smooth body.

Thus was I sleeping by a brother’s hand

Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched,

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,

Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled,

No reck’ning made, but sent to my account

With all my imperfections on my head.

O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible!

If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not.

Let not the royal bed of Denmark be

A couch for luxury and damnèd incest.

But howsomever thou pursues this act,

Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive

Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven

And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge

To prick and sting her. Fare thee well at once.

The glowworm shows the matin to be near

And gins to pale his uneffectual fire.

Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me.

—Hamlet, Act I, Scene v

Regret, love, betrayal, murder, incest, suffering and a longing for redemption. Who could ask for more?

Here’s the other evocative thing about this speech: Our best scholarly evidence tells us that Shakespeare was primarily a playwright and not a player–that he didn’t play the leads in his plays. But there’s strong evidence that Shakespeare did play the Ghost in Hamlet’s premiere at the Globe Theatre. Imagine these inspired words issuing from the lips of the Bard himself…

The image is of Brian Blessed playing the Ghost in Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film of Hamlet.

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Sunday Sonnet – 26 July 2015

Syphilis

Shakespeare ends the most magnificent collection of sonnets ever written in the English language with a warning about venereal disease. How romantic.

154

The little Love-god lying once asleep
Laid by his side his heart-inflaming brand,
Whilst many nymphs that vow’d chaste life to keep
Came tripping by; but in her maiden hand
The fairest votary took up that fire
Which many legions of true hearts had warm’d;
And so the general of hot desire
Was sleeping by a virgin hand disarm’d.
This brand she quenched in a cool well by,
Which from Love’s fire took heat perpetual,
Growing a bath and healthful remedy
For men diseased; but I, my mistress’ thrall,
Came there for cure, and this by that I prove,
Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love.

Cupid’s love torch (phallic symbol) burns just a bit too hot. Diana’s nymphs (she was the virgin goddess of the hunt) try to cool its heat in a nearby spring (fertility symbol). It heats up the pool so much, that now those waters can cure diseased men! The is for men diseased with the maladies of love, namely syphilis. And so the Poet, having caught that venereal disease from his mistress, goes into the hot waters to be cured. What does the Poet learn? The cure hasn’t cured his ardor for the woman who put him there.

This closing sonnet is a companion piece to the previous sonnet, #153, which also talks about syphilis and the Elizabethan cure for the disease–a rather dangerous and painful process involving inhaling mercury vapors in searing baths.

There has been a lot of scholarly argument regarding these two Cupid/hot bath/VD sonnets, and their connections to the two previous narratives–the Young Man Sonnets, and the Dark Lady Sonnets. I think they’re connected to both, and serve as an ironical denouement to this love triangle. Pervious verses show that the Young Man and the Dark Lady do intersect, and they both betray the Poet. So how better to end this winding narrative–so elusive, so full of unanswered questions, so contrary to the accepted poetic notions of Romantic Love–than to have the Poet come down with VD?

Rumors abound in scholarly circles that Shakespeare himself might have had syphilis. It’s impossible to ever know. Regardless, he certainly knew of it.

The image is from an anonymous woodcut, circa 1500, of a physician treating syphilis.

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Sunday Sonnet – 12 July 2015

William_Cecil

Today we return to Shakespeare’s early numbered sonnets, almost to the beginning, when the Poet is urging his Young Man to beget a child so that his beauty might be preserved. The poet, in comparing the Young Man to the very ascendancy and brilliance of the Sun itself, could be accused of hyperbole. But when the language is so lovely, perhaps we can forgive the Poet for reaching so high:

7

Lo! in the orient when the gracious light

Lifts up his burning head, each under eye

Doth homage to his new-appearing sight,

Serving with looks his sacred majesty;

And having climbed the steep-up heavenly hill,

Resembling strong youth in his middle age,

Yet mortal looks adore his beauty still,

Attending on his golden pilgrimage:

But when from highmost pitch, with weary car,

Like feeble age, he reeleth from the day,

The eyes, ‘fore duteous, now converted are

From his low tract, and look another way:

   So thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon

   Unlooked on diest unless thou get a son

If you read through to the end, it’s evident the Sun’s track through the heavens is a metaphor for all people–the passage of human life. And the play on ‘sun’ and ‘son’ is unmistakable.

There’s circumstantial evidence that Shakespeare might’ve been commissioned to write these early sonnets to the young Earl of Southampton, imploring the Young Man to procreate. Who would’ve paid Shakespeare to write these poems for such an unusual reason? It might’ve been none other than Queen Elizabeth’s own chief advisor and Secretary of State, William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Southampton didn’t have a lot of interest in marrying a woman, but it seems he and Shakespeare might’ve had an interest in each other. Later on, the sequence of the Poet’s sonnets to the Young Man move way beyond Burghley’s original (alleged) commission, into the realm of out-and-out romantic love poetry.

All of the prattle about possible historical connections to Sonnet 7 is just one example of Shakespeare’s 154 Sonnets’ historical connections: Beyond the majesty of their poetics and the sheer breadth and depth of being able to compose 154 connected verses, the historical and biographical questions these sonnets raise provide an unending quest for poets, readers, scholars and historians: Why did Shakespeare write 154 of them that when read together weave their own narrative, and why did Shakespeare himself never seek to publicly publish them?

The image is of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, whose connection to Shakespeare we’ll never really know. The painter is anonymous, but the original hangs in Britain’s National Portrait Gallery.  

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Weekly Shakespeare Quote – 09 July 2015

2nd_Earl_of_Essex_by_Marcus_Gheeraerts_the_Younger

This week Shakespeare gives us a lesson on how to deliver a brilliant take-down.   John of Gaunt’s speech from Richard II unreels as a powerful and poetic testament to all that makes England great. But…

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,
Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son,
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!

–from Richard II, Act II Scene i

In the end, however, at ‘Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it’, Gaunt turns his brilliant evocation of England’s beauty into a condemnation of Richard–to the King’s face. Gaunt delivers this speech from his deathbed, and after finishing it shambles off stage to die–before the infuriated Richard can have him killed.

More than just a turning point in the play, this speech is a great example of Shakespeare’s ability to set up expectations and then turn them on the audience. But rather than frustrate us, it surprises and delights.

Richard II was a risky play for Shakespeare. In Elizabethan times, any hint that a playwright might be criticizing the monarch could be taken the wrong way. In fact, years after the play was first produced, supporters of Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, arranged for a repeat performance of Richard II in connection with Essex’s attempted coup of Elizabeth’s throne. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, including Shakespeare, had to do some fast taking to exonerate themselves, pleading ignorance of Essex’s plot. Eventually, Essex was executed for treason.

The image is of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, painted by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger.

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Sunday Sonnet – 05 July 2015

Sonnet 144

Let’s have some fun today. Some four hundred years Shakespeare evidently did, composing this delicious sonnet about the betrayals of a bisexual love triangle. Here the Young Man of the earlier sonnets intersects with the Dark Lady of the later sonnets. The Poet fears that the Dark Lady might have seduced the Poet’s sweet young boy away from him:

144

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still;
The better angel is a man right fair, 
The worser spirit a woman colour’d ill. 
To win me soon to hell, my female evil 
Tempteth my better angel from my side, 
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil, 
Wooing his purity with her foul pride. 
And whether that my angel be turn’d fiend 
Suspect I may, but not directly tell; 
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another’s hell: 
Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.

The Poet’s obviously furious that his better angel–the sweet Young Man–is in all likelihood inside (in a sexual way) the Poet’s other angel–the devilish Dark Lady: ‘I guess one angel in another’s hell:’.   But it almost feels that Shakespeare shows his hand a bit here, for despite the Poet’s pique, the nest of puns and turns in this poem are delightful.

Beyond the fun of it all, this sonnet sings on multiple levels: two angels, one of comfort, one of despair, signifying the common internal struggle all humans share.   The very Elizabethan notion that the two forces which influence us, angel and devil, are delineated by gender: men being good and fair, women being evil and dark:

The better angel is a man right fair, 
The worser spirit a woman colour’d ill. 

Yet, amazingly so for the times, the Poet in this sonnet all but admits to bisexuality.

And while all this is going on, the sonnet itself is a superb example of the Elizabethan sonnet form, that in itself an achievement.   All of this makes Sonnet144 an enduring masterpiece: poetic, provocative, delicious, beautiful, insightful.  

The gorgeous image comes from a wood engraving by Isac Friedlander, circa 1931, created specifically for Sonnet 144.

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Sunday Sonnet – 28 June 2015

Sonnet 129

Once again Shakespeare turns the Romantic ideal of a love sonnet on its head, bitterly attacking romantic love in Sonnet 129: a visceral attack against sensual love–an attack, really, against his sensual beloved, The Dark Lady.

129

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

No, the Dark Lady isn’t mentioned by name or gender in this verse. But 129’s placement in the Dark Lady sequence, between a lovely sonnet where the Poet watches her play on a virginal (#128) and the delightful parody homage to her physically repellent nature (#130), this verse leaves no doubt as to whom it’s about.  

Or, better put, it leaves no doubt as to what it’s about: the luxury of sinful lovemaking. How extreme and crazed human behavior is before sex; how uncontrolled, yet delightful, it is during sex; how regretful it is after.

And please, read this sonnet aloud: its use of repetition, its deliciously ferocious language, the way it skips back and forth in time, all evoke the uncontrolled actions of lovers in the act.   Yet, strangely so, the sonnet remains so impersonal. In the end, the Poet regards what he and she did as only that: an impersonal act.

The image is an anonymous woodcut of an Elizabethan couple getting it on in a very unapproved manner: purchased sex in a brothel.

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Weekly Shakespeare Quote – 25-June-2015

Paulinajpg

Characters fully fleshed out, exquisite language and a wide range of tales and adventures might’ve been enough to ensure Shakespeare’s immortality. But one other facet–in my humble estimation–seals the deal, placing him at the forefront of human literature: The great morality of Shakespeare’s works.   Take, for example, Paulina’s scathing speech from one of Shakespeare’s last plays, The Winter’s Tale:

Paulina

What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me? 
What wheels? racks? fires? what flaying? boiling?
In leads or oils? what old or newer torture
Must I receive, whose every word deserves
To taste of thy most worst? Thy tyranny
Together working with thy jealousies, 
Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle
For girls of nine, O, think what they have done
And then run mad indeed, stark mad! for all
Thy by-gone fooleries were but spices of it.
That thou betray’dst Polixenes,’twas nothing; 
That did but show thee, of a fool, inconstant
And damnable ingrateful: nor was’t much,
Thou wouldst have poison’d good Camillo’s honour,
To have him kill a king: poor trespasses,
More monstrous standing by: whereof I reckon 
The casting forth to crows thy baby-daughter
To be or none or little; though a devil
Would have shed water out of fire ere done’t:
Nor is’t directly laid to thee, the death
Of the young prince, whose honourable thoughts, 
Thoughts high for one so tender, cleft the heart
That could conceive a gross and foolish sire
Blemish’d his gracious dam: this is not, no,
Laid to thy answer: but the last,—O lords,
When I have said, cry ‘woe!’ the queen, the queen, 
The sweet’st, dear’st creature’s dead,
and vengeance for’t
Not dropp’d down yet.

—The Winter’s Tale, Act III Scene ii

King Leontes has spent much of the play as a tyrant. Shakespeare places Paulina’s grand condemnation and take down in the mouth a woman (which means when it first played in Shakespeare’s day, it was spoken by a boy). By this point in his career, Shakespeare was doing what no other playwright had done since the Ancient Greeks: empower a woman’s voice on a grand scale–the judgment of a tyrannical male ruler’s acts of cruelty, torture, while lauding the integrity and virtue of the servant he destroyed–you guessed it, also a woman.

In addition to all this, there’s a lot to love in this speech: beyond the list of tortures (an Elizabethan mainstay in Shakespeare’s world), Paulina treats us to searing language that in the hands of an accomplished actor, ignites the stage:

“More monstrous standing by: whereof I reckon

The casting forth to crows thy baby-daughter–”

“–cleft the heart

That could conceive a gross and foolish sire–”

The image comes from a 2010 production of The Winter’s Tale at Boston’s Shakespeare and Company, with Corinna May as Paulina. There is no great movie edition of The Winter’s Tale. It’s always been a difficult play to produce, what with its elements of romance, tragedy and comedy intertwined; and its plot, at first approach, seems derivative. But this play, when produced with care, craft and nuance, becomes a stunning morality tale about sin, grace and redemption. A 400 year old masterpiece that still defies convention to this very day.

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Sunday Sonnet – Summer Solstice – 21 June 2015

Poster produced for the London, Midland & Scottish Railway (LMS) to promote rail travel to Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, and the LMS Welcombe Hotel, described as 'England's newest country house hotel'. As the birthplace of the playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Stratford-upon-Avon was promoted extensively to the American market. c 1923. Artwork by Warwick Goble, who studied at Westminster School of Art and started out as a lithographer. He exhibited at the Royal Academy and other leading galleries. He illustrated many books and designed posters for the LMS and Great Western Railway (GWR).
Poster produced for the London, Midland & Scottish Railway (LMS) to promote rail travel to Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, and the LMS Welcombe Hotel, described as ‘England’s newest country house hotel’. As the birthplace of the playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Stratford-upon-Avon was promoted extensively to the American market. c 1923. Artwork by Warwick Goble, who studied at Westminster School of Art and started out as a lithographer. He exhibited at the Royal Academy and other leading galleries. He illustrated many books and designed posters for the LMS and Great Western Railway (GWR).

In celebration of the Summer Solstice this morning, let’s enjoy The Bard’s sonnet famous for its seasons metaphor. Three winters have overcome three summers; and three springs have led to three autumns. It even references June:

104

To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold
Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride,
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn’d
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn’d,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah! yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand,
Steal from his figure and no pace perceived;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion and mine eye may be deceived:
For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred;
Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead.

Beyond the beauty and cleverness of the metaphorical seasonal changes–and the natural aging that comes with them–Shakespeare tantalizes us with what seems to be a time span of how long he’s known the Young Man. About three years (or, if you’re a numerologist or conspiracy theorist, 9 years or 12 years). And so for those of us who like to hope or believe that the Young Man was an actual person Will Shakespeare knew in real life, this sonnets seems to suggest that when this was written, Will had known his Young Man for three years.

But the important thing about this sonnet is its message, one Shakespeare obsessed over in many of the sonnets and in his plays: time, and how it so slowly steals away youth and beauty:

‘So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion and mine eye may be deceived’

Yet, despite the aging of time, Love can blind us to those changes.

The image comes from a tourism poster for Stratford-upon-Avon (Shakespeare’s birthplace and home town), produced by the Midland and Scottish Railway, circa 1923.

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Weekly Shakespearean Quote – 18 June 2015

vivien-leigh-cleopatra-2

Mortals though we be, only the most morbid of us think of our last breath and how we’ll face it. I’ll tell you something–I hope I can face it as bravely and nobly as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. After her beloved Antony dies (of a self-inflicted wound, a la Romeo and Juliet), Cleopatra decides to follow Antony. She doesn’t have to die–Caesar offers a life of sorts, but it’d be a diminished existence. And so Cleopatra calls for her robe and crown, and thus poisoned with an Asp, embraces the afterlife:

CLEOPATRA

Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have

Immortal longings in me: now no more

The juice of Egypt’s grape shall moist this lip:

Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear

Antony call; I see him rouse himself

To praise my noble act; I hear him mock

The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men

To excuse their after wrath: husband, I come:

Now to that name my courage prove my title!

I am fire and air; my other elements

I give to baser life. So; have you done?

Come then, and take the last warmth of my lips.

Farewell, kind Charmian; Iras, long farewell.

Kisses them. IRAS falls and dies

Have I the aspic in my lips? Dost fall?

If thou and nature can so gently part,

The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch,

Which hurts, and is desired. Dost thou lie still?

If thus thou vanishest, thou tell’st the world

It is not worth leave-taking.

—Antony and Cleopatra, Act V Scene ii

Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra in the latter part of his career, after the great tragedies of Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, after his female characters had become stronger, multifaceted, fully-fleshed humans. Shakespeare was at the height of his powers, and dared to do whatever he wished. Apparently he wished to create this powerful woman. Astonishing, considering the culture Shakespeare lived and wrote in, where women were considered not only inferior, but property.

Revel in the beauty of Cleopatra’s acts and words: After calling for her robe and crown, she kisses her servants Charmain and Iras to death, since the venom of an asp drips from her lips. As the fangs of the asp take her to death, she likens it to love: “The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch.”

The image comes from the 1945 film Caesar and Cleopatra, with the ethereal Vivien Leigh as the immortal Queen.