Dr. Metablog

"Beyond Beyond."

I sometimes think that I must be the world's number one fan of Shakespeare's Cymbeline, which I have just re-read twice during the past week. Here's a play that is seldom performed, infrequently read, rarely referenced, and omitted from most university courses on Shakespeare. Although it's generally grouped with the last plays or, as they have come to be called, the romances, surely fifty people know The Tempest for everyone who is familiar with The Winter's Tale and ten people know The Winter's Tale for everyone who knows (or has even heard the name) of Cymbeline. Nevertheless, I love the play; it's perpetually entrancing.

Cymbeline is the most densely plotted of all of Shakespeare's plays and as a result, it's difficult to follow, especially on the first dozen or score of readings. It's so dense with plot that, in order to cram everything in, Shakespeare devised a most elliptical and condensed style of speech. There are some sentences to which I must still refer to the footnotes for explication -- and sometimes the footnote says, "seems to mean," or "perhaps means, but might also mean."  Moreover, it's a hard play to read for those who don't come to it with a deep familiarity with other of Shakespeare plays, because sometimes the author seems to condense into a phrase or two an idea which he had explored more fully in an earlier work. For example, in a number of the comedies there is an opening scene in which characters discuss their unhappiness -- simply in order to establish a situation in which the play can proceed from sadness to joy. And frequently there's an early reference to the contrast between private emotion and public posture.  n terse, economical Cymbeline, Shakespeare gets these forms out of the way in a flash. An otherwise unknown "Gentleman" begins the play: "You do not meet a man but frowns. Our bloods/ No more obey the heavens than our courtiers/ Still seem as does the King."  And we're off and running.  (Brief translation of the proceeding lines: everyone is sad because they attend to the King's disposition.) It's a forbidding start -- but it covers an enormous lot of ground. As it must, because Cymbeline brings on stage a wicked queen and her doltish son, a physician expert in drugs that cause a person to simulate death (just as in Romeo), a fair princess later to disguise herself as a page, two brothers stolen from the court in swaddling clothes who will become military heroes, an invasion of England by Roman forces, a low-born suitor of great worth who will suffer exile but eventually return to claim his bride, an Italian schemer who wagers than he can seduce a princess, and, moreover, the dream-vision appearance of the hero's dead mother, father and brothers -- and finally a guest appearance of Jove himself who descends on a machine to intervene and prophesy. The play spends four and a half acts tying up thick plot-knots and then a half an act unloosening them. Twenty-four misunderstandings are clarified in couple of hundred lines. The conclusion is a miracle -- or rather, a succession of miracles. Cymbeline is as manipulative as manipulative can be, but I've never been able to read its last lines without dropping real tears.

My favorite scene, just to give an idea of how complicated and outrageous a play it is, comes when Imogen (or in some modern texts Innogen), the princess, awakes from drugged sleep to discover the ass Cloten (who "Cannot take two from twenty, for his heart,/ And leave eighteen) to be dead, his head having been struck off, but wearing the clothes of her lover Posthumus Leonatus (a long story). Imogen naturally takes the one for the other, their bodies being apparently of the same stature. She mourns her headless enemy as though he were her friend. It's a truly bizarre, grotesque and wonderful scene. It is, as Imogen says in another context, "beyond beyond." 

Cymbeline is a rare treasure -- but it's not for the faint of heart, not for skimmers.    

Somnus Imago Mortis

It's an ancient commonplace -- sleep is the image of death.  In some versions, it's a preparation for death: God has provided us with sleep to get us ready for our inevitable end.  "Somnus imago mortis" is all over Shakespeare:  "sleep thou ape of death,"  "death-counterfeiting sleep," etc.

My own personal sleep is so wracked with awakenings and nightmares and night-sweats and fluff in the lung and a feverish tongue that I can't easily think of it as a preparation for anything.  For me, sleep is rather a task, an effort, than a period of oblivion.  I want my tombstone to be inscribed with the motto, "No more insomnia, forever."

But just six weeks ago, I experienced a pure "somnus imago mortis" moment.  I was on a gurney, drugged, prepared for surgery.  I was wheeled into a room.  Time came to a complete halt.  And then several hours later I was awakened. Nothing -- nothing -- intervened from the time that I was put under until the moment when I came to. (Perhaps there was an amnesic in the drug cocktail -- I wouldn't know.)

It was such a profound and eventless sleep that it has, in fact, prepared me for the sleep of death.  There was not a whisper, not a thought, nothing.  Now, at last, I know how it will be.

In the hospital, there was a very welcome rebirth.  But why, then, does the phrase, "I have been half in love with easeful death" continue to resonate in my brain?

Brief Remarks on Fritters and Turnips

Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor is a moderately successful play but not among Shakespeare's greatest hits. Nevertheless, there are two fragments of first-class witty dialogue that continue to tickle me even after all these years. The first is Falstaff's indignation at Parson Evans's Welsh-accented transformation of the words "cheese" and "butter." EVANS:  Seese is not good to give putter. Your belly is all putter."  FALSTAFF:  "'Seese' and 'putter.'  Have I lived to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of English." There's no mystery about the the imaginatively inappropriate word " fritters" -- it simply means chopped meat fried in a batter.  I don't know why "fritters" amuses me so, but it does. It's off-target and off-kilter and yet so very concrete and specific. 

The second, and even funnier moment, is when Anne Page, one of the few sensible characters in the play, makes it clear that she won't marry the foolish Dr. Caius. "Alas," she says, "I had rather be set quick i'th'earth/ And bowled to death with turnips."  "Set quick" means "buried alive," presumably up to the neck, but it's the lovely, unexpected "turnips" that produces the laughter, perhaps because no one before or since has thought to employ the usually harmless vegetable as a deadly weapon.  I read the police blotters, I should know. 

For the record, Shakespeare never, In the 38+ plays, used either word again. He knew that he had squeezed meaning enough out of both "fritters" and "turnips." 

Wood Heat, c. 1611

There are many curious ideas and events in Shakespeare's Tempest. Here's a trivial one that both bothers and amuses me. For what reason does Prospero keep Caliban in his service and close to home even after he has tried to rape Miranda? Here's the puzzling explanation offered by the great magus himself:  "We cannot miss [do without] him.  He does make our fire,/ Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices/ That profit us." 

The very vague "serves in offices/ That profit us" tells us that even Shakespeare had a hard time justifying Caliban, whose only occupation, it would seem, is to keep the Prosperian fireplace well stoked. He's certainly not keeping the books.

My puzzle: Prospero is a great magician. He can raise storms, put people into trances, devise supernatural banquets and shows, release spirits from cloven pines, and even (though we don't see it) raise the dead ("Graves at my command/ Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth.") If he's so supremely golldarned powerful why can't he magically gather his own firewood? Come to think of it, why does he need firewood at all? Instead of using a stove or fireplace, why does't he just command Ariel to warm things up a bit.

Now I am aware that my concern here is a little on the ridiculous side. Shakespeare is simply making up an excuse to keep Caliban around because Caliban is essential to the play. Nevertheless, it's an odd justification -- although in truth no odder than that Shakespeare feels it necessary to give Caliban a practical, down-to-earth function in such a wildly unmoored-to-reality play.  

(When I was a teacher I would always run aground of the engineering student who would explain to me that Gregor Samsa's metamorphosis into a beetle was unrealistic because a beetle of human size couldn't be supported on insect legs and would be too large to breathe through spirochetes. "It's a story," I would respond. "A fiction. You have to suspend disbelief. You can't accept the transformation but boggle at Gregor's breathing.")

Similarly, it is foolish for me to believe, so to speak, in Caliban, and yet to worry about his log-carrying. Or about the temperature of Prospero's home. 

But I think there is a point to be made about Shakespeare. He could imagine magic but he could not get his mind around practical, down-to-earth post-Baconian technology. He had no trouble making his characters fly, but he couldn't imagine a room (or a cave) being heated except by wood, magically chainsawed and laboriously stacked. In Cymbeline, impatient Imogen, in need of quick transport to Milford Haven, asks for a horse with wings, not a helicopter. Shakespeare was not a technological visionary.   

"Scamels from the Rocke"

Not only Shakespeare specialists, but lay readers and playgoers are puzzled by Caliban's mysterious "scamels." 

From the context, it's clear that scamels are an easily obtained food. Listen as Caliban lists some of the items he can gather from his island's prodigious storehouse:

I prithee let me bring thee where crabs grow;

And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts,

Show thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee how

To snare the nimble marmoset.  I'll bring thee

To clust'ring filberts, and sometimes I'll get thee

Young scamels from the rock.

Alas and alack, there is no such thing as a "scamel."

Caliban's taste in food is catholic, as is to be expected of a hunter-gatherer. Nevertheless, his is not an appealing diet. "Crabs" could refer either to crustaceans or to crab-apples. "Pig-nuts" are barely edible tubers. A "jay's nest" does not sound gourmetish, and even if Caliban means the jays themselves, he's not chosen a species of bird famous for flavor. The "nimble marmoset" is a small monkey which a 1613 pamphlet (too late for The Tempest, written c. 1611) acknowledged to be "good meat". "Filberts"  Shakespeare's spelling is 'Philbirts') are also called hazelnuts, the North American variety of which -- the unappetizing beaked hazelnut -- is better browsed by our native deer than by homines sapientes. But what, prithee, are these peculiar scamels?

Among the older guesses: shamois (young kids); scannel (a kind of hawk); scams (a dialectical word for limpets, or snails); seamar, or wild trefoil; sarcelle, the French word for the teal; scallion; seagull.

But modern scholarship has coalesced around "sea-mell." It's now thought (by 90% of those who have studied the question) that Shakespeare knew a manuscript report about a shipwreck called "A true repertory of the wreck and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, upon and from the islands of the Bermudas...July 15, 1610," which was not printed until 1625 in Purchas his Pilgrimes. Among the details that Shakespeare found in the "true repertory" was a brief account of a bird called a "sea-meawe": "a kind of web-footed fowl there is, the bigness of an English plover... [which] hovering in the air made a strange hollow and harsh howling.... Our men found a pretty way to take them, which was by standing on the rocks or sands ... whereof the birds would come flocking to that place nearer and nearer."

"Sea-meawes"  (a variant of seamell) was the word that Shakespeare encountered in the manuscript letter.

I believe that he read the second letter of sea-meawe not as an "e" but as a "c", or, alternatively, Shakespeare's own ms "e" was misread as a "c" by Ralph Crane, the scrivener who prepared a fair copy of Shakespeare's holograph for publication --  or perhaps even the compositor  who was assigned to set the Folio page A5v misread Crane's fair copy. A "scamel," I'm .9 positive, is a seabird hunted from a rock; it's a sea-mew or sea-mell.

The Tempest is filled with words compounded of the prefix "sea" and a second element: sea-nymphs, sea-sorrow, sea-change, sea-swallowed, sea-marge. Why would Shakespeare not have been enchanted by the fortuitous "seamell?" Scamel indeed!

Paternal Wisdom

Regular readers of Dr. Metablog know that the good doctor has been flat on his back for a couple of months.  However, I'm glad to say, the crisis has passed and I'm upright once again.  

While lying there I had an opportunity to think about old times. I began to recall some things that my father used to say.  I wouldn't say proverbs or gnomic wisdom or anything so formal -- just sentences that would occasionally, casually, pass his lips.  Here are a few of them, lightly annotated.  

1."Never omit an opportunity to do a someone a favor, and never be embarrassed to accept a favor." My father would say, "people like to help each other."  My own experience has confirmed my father's wisdom and I've tried to follow his example. However, there was a time that I ran into a stone wall with this one,  I was forced into close dealings with a man whom it was impossible to help -- because whenever I did something for him, he thought that it meant that he had outwitted me. My favor, offered freely, became his triumph. Needless to say, our relationship did not prosper. 

2.  "Anyone can get rich if he makes it the entire effort of his life."  My father was the least materialistic person I've ever known. He had no possessions and wanted none. Not only did money hold no allure, but he was contemptuous of those who felt the need to acquire it. But was he right? Can "anyone" get rich?  I don't think so. I've known people who tried and have gone down in flames.  But I certainly understand my father's point.

3.  "When the stock market is going up, everyone's a genius." I know that my father owned one stock in his entire life -- because a friend insisted. He would have kept his cash in the mattress if he could have. I think that recent world economic events confirm his sentence and lead to a corollary -- "sometimes the geniuses only seem to be geniuses."

4.  "Never get into an argument with a drunk." He was certainly 100% on target on this one. There's just no odds -- even if you win the argument, the drunk doesn't know it. Plus the jerk is liable to throw the beer bottle at you. (I doubt that my father was drunk a single time in his entire life. I was drunk once, in 1962, and it was enough). 

5.  "Try to do the things you're not good at." He said that when he was younger he would say, "I don't like to swim" when the truth of the matter was that he wasn't a good swimmer. (He was a fine athlete.)  He would counsel me -- "do what if you're not good at it. Try it."  I wish I could say that I've honored this precept, but in all honesty, I haven't. Sorry, pop.

6.  "Don't forget to wash behind your ears."  

7.  "Always try to appeal to the better side of human nature."  For example, in raising children, you should not punish a child; instead, you should say, "you don't want to be the kind of person who would do such-and--such."  I believe this saying of his to be practical and useful. Needless to say, my father didn't respect  that side of the political/ religious/ social spectrum that considers human beings to be fallen, inherently depraved and selfish creatures. He was basically optimistic -- though his optimism was certainly tempered by the public events of his last decade.

8.  "Never run with the crowd for the sake of being one of the boys."  This saying was central to his view of the world. I believe it came out of some particular experience of his youth but he never shared the details with me. I can certainly say that I've honored this precept -- perhaps to a fault. I could have been more sociable, more "clubbable"