Dr. Metablog

"Colloquial Conversation" in Othello

There is an ocean of difference between colloquial conversation in real life and the dialogue that appears in Shakespeare's works, even when his plays are at their least artificial and most mimetic.

In its most ordinary use, the word "conversation" means nothing more that the talk in which real men and women engage in the greater part of their social lives. These conversations might include formal or semi-formal events such as oration, debate, interview, negotiation, interrogation, official inquiry, ceremony , arbitration, sermon, lecture etc. -- all of them linguistic interactions that are governed by specific although for the most part unarticulated rules. "Colloquial" conversation, on the other hand, refers specifically to the wave of informal, unplanned, unregulated and unrehearsed exchanges that occur over dinner, on the street, by the water-cooler, at the tavern. Such conversations, although not incapable of eloquence, are on the whole disorderly, sprawling and haphazard. They are brimful of uncompleted or suspended thoughts (or thoughts introduced by one interlocutor and then either completed or re-directed by another), with syntactic collapse and improvisation, with references to shared experience that may seem to be grand leaps of logic to an eavesdropper but that are perfectly intelligible to the participants, with mumbles and grunts, extended pauses (some meaningless, some momentous), with apparently inexplicable ellipses, with overlaps in which a number of participants speak simultaneously, with unmediated zigzags from the profound to the trivial, with repetitions and backtracks, with mis-speakings, mis-hearings, clarifications, false starts, fragments, non-verbal but sometimes significant ecphoneses or "response cries" (ooh-ooh), and with a flotilla of other very ordinary and very natural curiosities. Real colloquial conversation is spontaneous; it is the activity of two or more intelligences working together to shape meaning. Real talk is essentially untranscribable, and students of conversation who have made an effort to set such interactions down on paper have had perforce to resort to elaborate and imperfect diagrams and codes.

In strong contrast, dialogue in Shakespeare's plays very seldom attempts to approximate colloquial conversation. And with good reason: Elizabethan dramas seldom stoop to represent the casual situations in which conversation is likely to occur. Instead, the circumstances upon which the plays dwell are typically formal or ceremonial, and the dialogue in which they are enacted consists for the most part of speeches that delineate an emotion or moral response to a conflict, of debates over the proper course of action, of reports on past or distant events, as well as judicial or ritualistic confrontation, soliloquy, meditation, prayer, boast, threat and counter-threat and various other kinds of regulated discourse in which the artless and random quality of ordinary talk would be entirely inappropriate. The dialogue in comedies, though in a different register, is equally artificial, consisting as it does, of wit-combats, jests, and the conceits that clownage keeps in pay. Shakespeare's most colloquial exchanges, unlike real-life conversation, are on the whole orderly, sequential, composed in intelligible syntax and in complete thoughts. It goes without saying that dramatic dialogue is, with the exception of the rare improvisational moment, not spontaneous at all but the studied product of a single controlling intelligence. 

During the first years of his career as a playwright, Shakespeare experimented with a variety of revolutionary ways to compose dialogue (not generally, but on propitious occasions) that, although not in any real sense congruent to actual spoken conversation, nevertheless managed to create the illusion of a natural and colloquial sound. The employment of dialogue that might pass for real utterance was not an inheritance from earlier dramatists but was a craft that Shakespeare had to develop on his own. The fabrication of such dialogue is an unobtrusive art that does not call attention to itself -- in point of fact, colloquial conversation is most successful when it is least noticeable. While the great leviathan examples of Shakespeare's rhetorical mastery have been subjected to exhaustive analysis, colloquial conversation is so small and so inconspicuous a fish that it has managed for hundreds of years to slip the nets of critical analysis.

There is a finely-crafted instance of seemingly-natural colloquial conversation in Othello.

As Emilia helps Desdemona prepare herself for bed, the two women gingerly feel their way toward an issue of great sensitivity -- the domination of women by men. It is a relaxed and intimate conference, all the more obviously so because it follows in the wake of an anguished and highly-wrought -- and rhetorically elevated -- scene in which Desdemona has been slandered as an adulterer and as a daughter of the game.

What techniques does Shakespeare employ to make the exchange between Desdemona and Emilia appear quite so marvelously natural?

Attempting to console her sorrowful mistress, Emilia offers the opinion that it would have been better if Desdemona had never known Othello. Desdemona contradicts her serving-woman:

    Des.  So would not I:  my love dost so approve him,

    That even his stubbornness, his checks, his frowns

    (Prithee unpin me) have grace and favor.

"Prithee unpin me" comes as a genuine surprise because it is syntactically discontinuous from the sentence in which it is embedded. It's a separate topic. Dialogue in Elizabethan drama ordinarily deals with issues sequentially rather than simultaneously, but dialogue begins to sound a bit like conversation when the interlocutors engage more than one subject at a time. That the two themes of the discourse are located on different rhetorical levels (the rather formal series of nouns in parallel -- stubbornness, checks, frowns-- in contraste to the offhand parenthetical instruction), suggests that something interesting and different is about to occur.

The progress toward real or realistic-sounding conversation, initiated with "unpin me here," continues when Emilia's response engages neither Othello's mysterious anger or Desdemona's unpinning, but introduces a third subject: "I have laid those sheets you bade me on the bed."  With this sentence Emilia does more than simply resume a discussion of so ordinary a matter as bedclothes, she also replicates a common feature of colloquial conversation -- its practice of referring without overt signal to a past mutual experience -- i.e. "you bade me."

Now Desdemona drifts off in a direction of her own.

    All's one:  good faith, how foolish are our minds?

    If I do die before, prithee shroud me

    In one of these same sheets.

"All[s one" -- with its variant "all's one for that" is a common Elizabethan demotic catch phrase: here it serves a meaningless filler. Desdemona's meander from death to shrouds to sheets is designed to reflect her own private, internal non-volitional synaptic leaps. Her apology - "how foolish are our minds" - reflects both Desdemona's and Shakespeare's knowledge that the sentences violate the habit of dramatic dialogue in that they are ordered not by logic but by association.

Emilia's mild but polite rebuke ("Come, come, you talk") is followed by a sentence in which Desdemona introduces the fourth separate and distinct subject of this unfolding conversation.

    My mother had a maid called Barbary.

    She was in love, and he she loved proved mad,

    And did forsake her.

Desdemona has fallen into a reverie in which she re-lives an experience of the childhood that Shakespeare has newly and spontaneously invented for her. In these two-and-a-half lines, Shakespeare audaciously allows Desdemona to introduce three new but extremely pertinent characters: Desdemona's mother, hitherto unknown to the audience, her mother's forsaken maid Barbary, and the maid's lunatic and inconstant lover. The effect of Desdemona's brief but poignant recollection is to reinforce the illusion that she is an autonomous speaker, giving shape to her sentences as they precipitate out of her battered and not-entirely-disciplined consciousness. An astute audience (or readership) will certainly notice that Desdemona projects her own plight onto these imaginary meta-beings, and although the psychological ramifications of their creation are rich indeed, Shakespeare's use of these improvised beings to mimic the habits of real talk is as fully wonderful.

Desdemona continues:

            She (.e. Barbary) had song of willow.

    An old thing 'twas, but it expressed her fortune.      

    And she died singing it. That song tonight, 

   Will not go from my mind. I have much to do 

    But to go hang my head all at one side

    And sing it like poor Barbary..  Prithee dispatch.

To enforce the quotidian quality of the dialogue, Shakespeare invokes a phenomenon familiar to every reader or hearer: the tune that seems to repeat of its own accord in one's mind. The result: Desdemona has been provided with a memory, and her memory holds a song, and that song is now apparently going to sing itself independent of the character's own will. But what occurs is not only the illusion that Desdemona reveals an inner experience; it is also that these reflections are cast in such courageously monosyllabic language. And just to assure us that the characters not not float from their dock in the material universe, Desdemona's instruction to Emilia --"Prithee dispatch" - sustains the exact colloquial mode initiated by "Prithee unpin me" and anchors both women in the real present. 

Both song and reverie are now shunted aside as the conversation comes to a small climax. The two ladies continue to imitate the randomness of real talk:

    Emelia.  Shall I go fetch your nightgown?    

    Desdemona.  No, unpin me here.

    This Ludovico is a proper man.

    Emilia.  A very handsome man.

    Desdemona:  He speaks well.

    Emilia:  I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip. 

Desdemona and Emilia drift from topic to topic: nightgowns leads by some unarticulated but easy-to-imagine route to Ludovico and his masculine allure, thence to Ludovico's habits of speech and at last to the very vivid and memorable 'lady in Venice" -- a colorful personage who springs from Emilia's fabricated pre-history, and who flashes across the stage in a hyperbole of brilliant but unstressed beauty (and whose inexplicable passion asserts that women can prosecute love-longing fully as irrationally as men). And then, just when it seems as if the maid Barbary has been left in the lurch and forgotten, the conversation turns back upon itself and Desdemona breaks into the song of the poor soul who sat sighing by a sycamore tree. To reinforce the apparent spontaneity of the moment, Shakespeare makes Desdemona repeatedly interrupt (and even amend) her own singing :  "Lay by these"... "Prithee high thee;  he'll come anon"... "Nay that's not next.  Hark who is't that knockes."  This broken series of syntactically independent units, periodically intruded into the song, are invented for the sole purpose of giving emphasis to the naturalness and immediacy of the moment.

Shakespeare has therefore created the appearance of spontaneous conversation by forsaking the straight path of normative dramatic dialogue. Desdemona and Emilia intertwine present and past, real and fanciful, public and private, high language and low, song and speech, understatement and exaggeration, syntactic coherence and syntactic collapse, all within a context of shared knowledge and almost sisterly intimacy.

The colloquial moment is fleeting, for even before the scene comes to a close, Shakespeare returns to a more traditional dramatic idiom. Nevertheless, the episode has done important work: Emilia's great feminist manifesto ("Let husbands know,/ Their wives have sense like them") which will follow immediately after this exchange, has been so effectively grounded in a real, earthy, and contemporary context that it must stir every sensitive intelligence with its grand appeal to equity.

It has long been acknowledged that the exotic Moor speaks in a highly particularized, elaborate, and picturesque idiolect of his own - the music that sweeps in with the icy currents of the Pontic sea and allows the Moor's great dignity to find its grand expression. Desdemona and Emilia sing a far calmer but more original song, and their impromptu domestic duet is surely no less and perhaps even a greater artistic achievement than Othello's stupendous arias.

More on Othello:  here, here, and here.

Othello/ Otello

I prefer my opera to be aural rather than visual. Opera is a form that is made for listening, not watching -- at least in my view. The music, Mozart or Verdi, is frequently transcendent and most satisfying. But on those occasions when I venture to the opera house and I have to deal with the cultic, cachectic audience and the grand-opera worshippers as well as the ridiculous plots, the unhandsome singers, the interminable intermissions, the staginess and artifice and the general all-around silliness -- as well as pay through the nose for the privilege of doing so, well then, I'm not always a happy fellow.

I know the sound of Verdi's Otello moderately well, having played the Placido Domingo version often enough for the laser to have bored holes into the cd. Moreover, as it happens, I'm moderately familiar with Shakespeare's play). But I had never seen a performance of Otello until this past Saturday when we betook ourselves and our bagels and our Granny Smiths to the Century Theatre to watch the Metropolitan Opera's Live in HD performance. It was, frankly, glorious -- Renee Fleming in the electronic flesh, moving us to tears with the willow song (along with Verdi's bonus, dubious Ave Maria).  

She was superb; so were the orchestra, the costumes, the sets, even the overacting, villainous Iago, who would have twirled his mustachios, if he had had them, and the non-acting, expressionless Othello.

Our "guide," a robust, comfortable mezzo whose name I should know but didn't catch, made the claim that Verdi's Otello improved upon Shakespeare's Othello. A highly dubious claim, I think, but then, I don't know how to measure the value of the grand "Othello music," that Shakespeareans so much admire, against the cellos and the bassoons. Whether for better or worse, however, there's a heck of a lot in Shakespeare's play that didn't make it across the centuries and genres and into Verdi's opera. More than can be said in a paragraph or a blaguepost. 

For starters, Shakespeare created a multi-layered society, not just elaborate sets. His city of Venice has a sense of itself as a successful, orderly, civilized, and advanced community. Into this world strides Othello, not only an outlander but an African and a erotic exotic. Although Venice needs his soldiership, he's still a black man in a racist world who marries a willful patrician lady who prefers him to  the "wealthy curled darlings of the nation." It's an unlikely, perilous match: he's "declined into the vale of years" while she's very very young. He's a soldier who's been around the world; she's the secluded mistress of the house affairs. He's commanding; she's naive. 

Verdi must have loved Othello, although not necessarily for the right reasons. How could a play that ends on a bed, with a climactic murder-suicide, not have excited the instincts of the composer of Aida. Nothing more appropriate for grand opera than Othello and Desdemona -- and yet o so simple a representation compared with Shakespeare's rich figures and complex society.

Imagine a Merchant of Venice in which Shylock is not Jewish, or a King Lear in which Lear is a troubled forty-something and you're well on your way to grasping an Othello in which melanin is replaced with melodrama.    

As a result, even when Verdi brought tears to my eyes, it was because I was seeing through the opera to the play that lies beneath it.

And sometimes I was crying because I so desperately missed the beauties and the profundity that Verdi had not seen fit to include.

De Sternuente, or, Of Sneezing

I enjoy fighting off a sneeze. It takes practice and concentration. When the sneeze urge emerges, without warning, the battle is joined. On the side of the sneeze -- dust or some other foreign particles passing through the nasal hairs, reaching  the nasal mucosa, releasing a flood of histamines which irritate the nerve cells and signal the brain to stimulate the trigeminal network and activate the pharyngeal and tracheal muscles, producing a noisy, 100-mile-an-hour blast of microbes and snot. On the side of restraint -- nothing but enormous personal discipline and the desire not to surrender to animal nature. There are some, who are less committed to mind-over-body, who employ the fingertips to pinch the end of the nose, or, alternatively, who press a knuckle against the philtrum, the infranasal depression which Shakespeare, curiously, called "the valley" -- but frankly, when it comes to resisting sternutation, digital success is only half a loaf. It's far more rewarding to think one's way to a rare victory in the lifelong sneezomachia. Not to sneeze is a triumph of the will.

Which is not to assert that a good sneeze gives no pleasure, if a person would give oneself over to it. It's simply that the sneeze, especially one of the window-rattling variety, is entirely anarchic and inartistic, which might be why there is so slight a sneeze literature. Although hard to believe, it's a fact that Puck is the only character in all of Shakespeare's plays who deigns to mention the sneeze, but he weakens its disruptive force by employing the archaism "neeze." The best-known literary sneeze (or, at least, the only one that now comes to mind) occurs in Pope's Rape of the Lock, when Belinda, ravished by Sir Plume's "glittering forfex," throws snuff in the baron's nose. Immediately "with starting tears each eye o'erflows,/ And the high dome re-echoes to his nose."

Snuff artificially stimulates sneezing, which may or may not be be why Michael, Tsar of all the Russians, proposed amputating the noses of snuffers. Michael's contemporary, Pope Urban VIII, merely threatened excommunication. Some say that the practice of saying "God bless you" to sneezers originated with Pope Gregory the Great, and has to do with the superstition that the soul leaves the sneezing body, perhaps nasally.

Why is it that no one ever says "God bless you" to farters, who are as much in need of divine intervention as sneezers. Society demands that farting, though shameful (and belching, though comic), should be controlled; sneezing is, except for the most determined among us, uncontrollable.  

Shakespeare's Breasts

There's an event in Shakespeare's Cymbeline that both intrigues and baffles me -- perhaps because I have so pedestrian an imagination. Iachimo wagers that he can seduce Imogen, but he's forcibly rebuffed by the young princess. Unwilling to lose his bet, he resorts to a nasty subterfuge and smuggles himself into Imogen's bedroom while she's asleep. Iachimo's plan is to memorize some "natural notes about her body" so that he can claim to have "pick'd the lock and ta'en/The treasure of her Honour." Scoundrel that he is, he  lifts up her blanket and peeps under her nightclothes. There he discovers "on her left Brest/ A mole, Cinque-spotted: Like the Crimson drops/ I'th' bottome of a Cowslippe." Armed with this intimacy, he prepares to confront Imogen's beloved Posthumus Leonatus and win the wager. It's a troublesome bit of business, and performers must decide whether to present the scene chastely, or erotically, or pruriently.

But there's also a problem of credibility that most moderns might overlook, but which troubles me. The first Imogen, the Imogen of 1610, was not a young woman but a pre-adolescent male actor. When Iachimo studied him/her closely enough to see the five-spotted mole, he saw no female breast at all. He pretended that he saw it and persuaded the audience that he had done so. Talk about efferontery. Talk about "suspension of disbelief."

How was the scene played? How did Shakespeare convince the playgoers that the absence of a breast equals the presence of a breast?  And how did he do so without causing some of the cruder members of the audience to ruin the scene by guffawing or tittering.

It would seem that the playwright would try to hide or disguise the fact that his female characters were not female and that Imogen was a beardless, breastless boy. But in this scene, Shakespeare is anything but apologetic. In fact, he thrusts theatrical trickery right in the face of the audience. "I can make you believe anything," he seems to say. And why, indeed, should we boggle at a boy with breasts, when in the same scene, Imogen sleeps, even though she's not really sleeping. And Iachimo soliloquizes aloud and everyone in the audience conspires to pretend that Imogen doesn't know that he's there and wouldn't be awakened by his voice. So why not also agree to suspend our disbelief in the boy's female traits.

Perhaps it's my own downright mid-Westerm positivism, but the breastedness of the boy seems to me to present a different order of illusion than the belief in say, a highly-conventionalized device like the soliloquy. But Shakespeare does not compromise. Iachimo stares at an empty space, and says, that's a breast right there. And he looks at it not fleetingly or glancingly, but with great particularity. Look, there's a mole. There are five spots on it. Trust me. 

The breasts, it must be conceded, are literary rather than real. Those crimson drops and the attendant cowslip are out of pastoral poetry, not out of observation. It would be tempting to claim that Cymbeline was written for the page rather than the stage If we didn't know better. Simon Forman, mountebank and astrologer, attended a performance of Cymbeline at the Globe in 1611 and reported that Iachimo "vewed her [i.e.Imogen] in her bed and the markes of her body." He saw "her"; he did not see a boy pretending to be "her" and he didn't make any fuss about her bosom. Case closed, perhaps.

Imogen's are not Shakespeare's only imaginary breasts. Lady Macbeth's breasts, though psychologically crucial, are less problematical because they are alluded to rather than unveiled. They're functional. "I have given Sucke, and know/ How tender 'tis to loue the Babe that milkes me,/ I would, while it was smyling in my Face,/ Haue pluckt my Nipple from his Bonelesse Gummes,/ And dasht the Braines out, had I so sworne." For me, it's easier to believe that the actor that played vicious Lady M. is a boy than to believe that the character ever either bore or loved an infant (there's no other mention of her manchild in the play). Nevertheless, Shakespeare had no compunctions about calling attention to the boy actor's absent nipples and even more so, his unlikely lactatory prowess. Lady Macbeth's breasts must be the least welcoming in literature, but they're not incredible.

An even more remarkable instance of nursing brings Cleopatra to her end. Cleopatra kills herself when she applies the asp to his/her non-existent breast. "Peace, peace:/ Dost thou not see my Baby at my breast/ That suckes the Nurse asleepe?" Cleopatra's quintessential mothering engenders a dimension of feminity that she has denied until the moment of death. In this case, the intensity of  Cleopatra's language overwhelms any possible skepticism about her womanliness. Cleopatra's breasts are credible. More than credible -- unquestionable and undeniable.

They are a Shakespearean miracle.

Cymbeline at the Barrow Street Theatre

I have a sour relationship with "the stage" -- and especially with staged Shakespeare plays. The theatre and I just don't get along. I think it's because my expectations are too grand. When I go to the theatre, I want to be ravished, but more often I'm bored, or worse than bored, embarrassed. I long to laugh, to cry, to be transported --but instead, I find myself to be entirely too conscious of the efforts and the contrivances of directors and designers and actors. Moreover, how am I supposed to achieve ecstasy when the guy in the next seat is snuffling and fidgeting and making inappropriate sounds at the wrong moments. And besides, I probably know more about the Shakespeare play that I'm watching than my comrades in the audience and I have opinions about what the play is supposed to mean and how it should be performed, and so I become intolerant and over-critical. And when one is busy criticizing, and one misses one's inexplicably-deleted favorite lines, one has strayed from the path that leads to rapture. When I sit still and concentrate on the book, I can achieve moments of private transcendence. When I'm at the theatre, the theatre gets in my way.  

Despite all, I went to see ("hear," Elizabethans would say) Cymbeline at the Barrrow Street Theatre and, I joyfully confess, had a good time. Cymbeline isn't performed much and I had never seen it done (except for the pedestrian BBC-TV version, which doesn't count). I was in doubt whether such a long, complex, plot-heavy play could be performed. But the young Barrow Street people were earnest and enthusiastic and pretty and well-rehearsed. Their Cymbeline was swiftly-paced and offered some delightful moments. I was genuinely impressed.

But I was not satisfied. I was not transported.

Was it a problem with the delivery, or was it the fault of the listeners, that when Imogen learns that her husband/lover Posthumus Leonatus is at Milford Haven, and cries out, "O for a horse with wings," the audience laughed. Oh, please, audience, don't laugh, and please, actors, don't play it for laughs. Imogen's imaginative expression is designed to capture her frustrated yearning for the mate from whom she has been forcibly separated and to express all the sexual longing of vibrant youth. She's head over heels in love and she's not making a joke of it.  A "horse with wings" is not a piece of grotesquerie, as the audience and the actors seemed to assume -- it's simply the fastest means of transport that anyone could imagine until 200 years after Cymbeline was written, when engineers started to play with the idea of a steam-driven engine. I so much wanted  last night's Imogen to express, with that line, the kind of emotion that brings me to tears in my study. But alas.

And similarly, when Imogen and Posthumus are reconciled at last, and they embrace (an act that the  the audience has been anticipating for hours), Posthumus is given the most poetically resonant line in the play. "Hang there," he says, "like fruit, my soul,/ Til the tree die." The line, compact of images, is just outside our easy comprehension, but we know at a minimum that trees take a very long time to die and that Posthumus and Imogen are now linked into one soul and that Imogen is like "fruit" in the sense of sweetness and juiciness and fertility -- indeed the ramifying plot has found its way to fruition. And so has the chain of imagery that began in the first moments of the play, when Imogen told us that her father, "like the tyrannous breathing of the north/ Shakes all our buds from growing." It took five acts, but those blighted buds finally ripened. I'm sorry to say that in the Barrow Street version, this touchstone of poetry was not emphasized but swallowed; if you weren't waiting for the line, you would have missed it entirely. Another moment of potential ecstasy surrendered.

But in all honesty, I must admit that if the players had paused to underline the sentence, I would probably be complaining that they treated the poetry too "poetically" and too portentously. Shakespeare is hard to play, and I'm hard to please.

But I'm not principally concerned that the Barrow boys and girls misread or neglected a line here or there. I'm concerned about their big compromise.

While enjoying the first four acts, I could not help but wonder how six performers on a rudimentary stage were going to deal with the theophany in the fifth act, when Jupiter himself descends from above on the back of an eagle and tells the audience not to worry, that everything is going to work out just fine. The scene is the most important in the play and it's what distinguishes Cymbeline from Shakespeare's earlier and easier and more-easily-performed comedies. But the theophany is hard, and hard to explain, and also, I'm sure, expensive. In my view, Barrow Street should have pulled the goalie and thrown a hail Mary downfield; lay it all out there. But instead, they took an intentional pass. O my gosh! they took a razor to the entire business. No Jupiter, no eagle, no wondrous, mystical, symbolic appearance of Posthumus's lost family, no soothsayer, no riddle, and therefore, I'm sorry to say, no enchantment and no miracle. No miracle, no Cymbeline, at least no Cymbeline as it is known and loved by such as I.

Here's what I think happens in Cymbeline. For four and a half acts, human beings make a mess of things. The king is blinded by uxoriousness, the queen is a machiavellia, Posthumus is vain, Cloten is simply stupid. The characters tie themselves into plot knots and everyone is deceived in part or in whole (although Shakespeare witholds nothing from the audience). Cymbeline thinks his sons are lost, Posthumus thinks Imogen is dead, Lucius Brutus thinks Imogen is a boy, Imogen thinks that Posthumus has been beheaded, and so on. Everyone is wrong; no one knows the whole truth.

And then comes the miracle. Jupiter descends, and 20, or 21, or 22 (depending on who's counting) mistakings are unravelled in five amazing, astounding minutes. Cymbeline is a tragedy for four and half acts and a comedy at the end. And should be played so. Take away Jupiter and take away the miracle. A play about human folly and divine intervention becomes nothing more than Twelfth Night or As You Like It. which is not a bad thing to be, but not what Shakespeare was doing in 1610. It's like scissoring Marina's magical virginity out of Pericles, or Hermione's rebirth out of The Winter's Tale, or Prospero's magic out of The Tempest. It's not right. It undervalues a most thrilling, most remarkable piece of writing. Even those of us who don't believe in miracles want to believe in Shakespeare's miracles.

But -- the Barrow Street guys and gals inspired me to re-read Cymbeline, and, all alone, just me and my Kindle, I once again indulged my ecstasy. So thank you.

"Paradise" in Measure for Measure

The word to watch in a most riveting speech in Measure for Measure is "paradise." 

Young Claudio. whose head is scheduled to be lopped off tomorrow morning, is the speaker. He panics -- and why shouldn't he? After all, his only slip is that he has impregnated his ladylove Juliet. A venial sin, yet in newly-puritanical Vienna, the act of love has led directly to the executioner with his ax and his big black block. Although everyone, certainly including Shakespeare himself, knew that there were many things far worse than to depart this vale of trouble and tears, Claudio is so terrified by his imminent execution that he goes off the philosophical rails. He argues the extreme position (and here comes the speech and the crucial word) that "The weariest and most loathed worldly life/ That age, ache, penury and imprisonment/ Can lay on nature is a paradise/ To what we fear of death." A "paradise?" Goodness gracious!

Although everyone can sympathize, no one should agree with Claudio. Neverthless, the three-and-a-half lines of verse that contain the climactic  word "paradise" (and indeed the long speech in which these lines reside) are so brilliant and colorful that they almost persuade us to do so. One of the reasons the sentence is so wonderful is because Shakespeare brings to bear one of his favorite and most useful figures of speech. To depict Claudio's hysteria, Shakespeare employs a full-throttle hyperbole.

The most transparently hyperbolical words are the grammatical superlatives "weariest" and "most loathed." The hyperbole that resides in the word "paradise" is less obvious but more potent. "Paradise" is the climax -- the word that any good actor or reader must hit hard when he recites or reads the passage. An hyperbolist less gifted than Shakespeare might have written "The weariest and most loathed life is pretty darn good compared to dying," but our author pulls out all the rhetorical stops. To lie in poverty, in pain, in prison is, Claudio asserts, compared to death, a "paradise." 

If, dear attentive and intelligent reader, you will now return to quotation, and read Claudio's lines again, you will feel the hyperbolical power of "paradise." Try it, please. And when you recite the sentence, you will also notice that the initial "p" in climactic "paradise" is prepared for by the plosives in the words that precede it -- "penury" and "imprisonment."

And if you are following instructions and reading aloud, you should be aware that in Shakespeare's time, "ache" was pronounced "aitch" -- a pronunciation that produces a strong and ingenious contrast between the affricates (age, aitch) and the plosives (penury, imprisonment, paradise).

Claudio's hyperbolical lines bring to conclusion a speech which is querulous at the start and panicky at the end.  Here they are in context.  

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where.

To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;

This sensible warm motion to become

A kneaded clod, and the delighted spirit

To bath in fiery floods, or to reside

In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;

To be imprison'd in the viewless winds

And blown with restless violence round about

The pendent world; or to be worse than worst

Of those that lawless and incertain thought

Imagine howling.  'Tis too horrible.

The weariest and most loathed worldly life

That age, ache, penury and imprisonment

Can lay on nature, is a paradise

To what we fear of death.  

("Cold obstruction" means that the body no longer moves -- as opposed to "sensible" (i.e capable of sensation or feeling) "warm motion".  A "kneaded clod" is what a "warm motion" is compressed or compressible into by death. A "delighted spirit" is generally glossed as "formerly capable of delight" but is better understood as "darkened" -- that is, de-lighted. "Viewless" means simply "invisible.")

Shakespeare does not feel obliged to distinguish or judge between these painful visions of an afterlife; instead, he prefers simply to heap together naturalistic, Christian, pagan and "lawless" ideas. 

Students of hyperbole will take note of the inventive phrase "worse than worst," where, it seems, "worst" is insufficiently superlative. Here Shakespeare pushes against the limits of grammar. Bad, worse, worst suffices for most writers, but Shakespeare invents a new adjectival category -- a comparative superlative.

Shakespeare's interest in the worstness of things will reappear in King Lear  when Edgar, encountering his blinded father, realizes that he has not yet touched bottom: "O Gods. Who is't can say "I am at the worst?'/ I am worse than e'er I was." And then an worser insight comes to him: "And worse I may be yet: the worst is not/ So long as we can say 'This is the worst.'" For Edgar, of course, death, that so frightens Claudio, is understood to be a relief and a liberation. Edgar's father dies "smilingly."

Why We Love Macbeth: Two More Reasons

Pound for pound, Macbeth is of all Shakespeare's plays the most unrelenting and horrifying.

One of its greatest moments occurs when Macbeth, seeking additional guidance, pays a second call on the witches. "How now," he demands, "you secret, black, and midnight hags!/ What is't you do?" The witches' response to his question, though exceedingly laconic, is far scarier than anything the most computer-aided-pixelbending horror movie could produce. They simply say: "A deed without a name." Every member of the audience, and every reader, knows that the witches are up to no good, but do they know how bad it is?  No. The audience now learns that what the witches are doing is so loathsome that there's not even a  word for it in the English language (and Shakespeare, of all people, had English to spare). What could they possibly mean by "a deed without a name?" Such a deed must be superlatively evil, worse than anything that the most depraved reader or listener could possibly guess. The immensely suggestive phrase "A deed without a name" pushes the limits both of imagination and language.   

Another magnificent moment comes when Macbeth imagines that Banquo, whom he knows to have been murdered, has taken a seat at his feast. Macbeth is startled and frightened, but he is also indignant -- so indignant that his outrage becomes almost comic. He lapses into a reverie.  

Blood hath been shed ere now, i' the olden time,
Ere human statute purged the gentle weal;
Ay, and since too, murders have been perform'd
Too terrible for the ear: the times has been,
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end; but now they rise again,
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,
And push us from our stools: this is more strange
Than such a murder is.

Macbeth asserts that it used to be the case, both in olden times, before Scotland became civilized, and even into recent days, that there was a natural order to things. If you killed a man ("when the brains were out"), that person had the decency to stay dead ("the man would die/ And there an end"). But now, in these degenerate times, murdered men return and "push us from our stools." Macbeth, who is under the spell of demons and who has committed atrocity after atrocity, claims to be more "natural" than the spectre of Banquo, who is "unnatural." In his eyes, killing people is the new normal, and it goes against the grain when you kill a guy and he doesn't stay killed. It's odd and lovely that Macbeth believes that he has a sincere grievance with the world, especially when he's the one who has thrown things completely out of whack. His exasperated complaint shapes itself into a weird, ironic, perverse nostalgia for better days. We almost -- but not quite -- feel for him.

Brain Chemistry, Macbeth, Nihilism

Our understanding of the human brain is mighty slim.  As a consequence our therapies for insanity, for head injuries, and for dementia are primitive.

When John Donne was dying in 1633, his physicians tied pigeons to his feet. Present-day medicine offers remedies for Alzheimer's sufferers that are no more effective than pigeon tying. Brainwise, we linger in the dark ages (which, by the way, has now been rebranded as "late antiquity"). Or the early medieval period.

Not to say that nothing is known about the brain. There have been advances.

To bring myself up-to-date, I read The Tell-Tale Brain by V. S. Ramachandran, a book which has been making a stir in pop-science circles. Ramachandran's sensible thesis is that there are structures in the human brain that are either undeveloped or that simply don't exist in the brains of apes. To posit so is simply common sense. Human beings do things that apes don't: they study themselves in the mirror, they compose and play piano sonatas, and they think about their place in the universe.  

Ramachandran is an ingenious experimenter but he gets beyond his depth when he waxes philosophical -- which he does far too often. Here's an example of the kind of thinking that rubs me wrong.

"I get chills," says Ramachandran, "whenever I hear Macbeth's immortal soliloquy 'Out out, brief candle!/Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/ And then is heard no more. It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.'"  He says that "these  words are one of the most profound and deeply moving remarks about life that anyone has ever made!"

I don't question Ramachandran's chills, which are his own business, but I'm bothered by his unthinking Bardolatry ("immortal solilquy"; "profound";  "that anyone has ever made").  Poor Will doesn't need any more reverent cliches to be shoveled upon him. He's already buried under heaps of them.    

Bardolatry such as Ramachandran's obstructs thinking. What does it mean to say that Macbeth's soliloquy is "profound... about life?"  Let's go to the tape.

When Macbeth says these words, he's under the spell of the witches, who are "instruments of darkness."  At their suggestion, he's murdered his king, murdered his closest friend Banquo and Banquo's son Fleance, and he's "savagely slaughtered" Macduff's wife and children ("All my pretty ones...  All my pretty chickens and their dam/ At one fell swoop"). Moreover, he's committed uncatalogued atrocities innumerable: "Each new morn/ New widows howl, new orphans cry." His brain is "filled with scorpions" and just before he utters the soliloquy that gives Ramachandran the goosebumps, he learns that his wife, burdened with guilt, has done herself in. Macbeth is not in a good way. 

Macbeth is not a role-model and his philosophical ruminations are neither insightful or profound. Quite the opposite. Though Macbeth is undeniably eloquent, he's become a shallow nihilist. Life, in fact, is not "a tale told by an idiot" and in Shakespeare's late-medieval religious universe, only someone in the throes of the deepest despair, and certain that he is damned for all eternity, would think so. Macbeth has learned exactly the wrong lesson. So, apparently, has Ramachandran.

Gosh, great literature can sometimes be dangerous, can't it?

It's no secret that the universe with its billions and billions of galaxies will go on very well without us.  Shakespeare, like everyone else, knew that when looked at from the strictly scientific point of view, human beings are no more than "many a thousand grains/ That issue out of dust."  But just because we're tiny and it's enormous, we're not compelled to admire the despairing and empty philosphy to which Macbeth subscribes.

Not while there are red wheelbarrows, winter love in dark corners, and "little nameless, unremembered acts/ Of kindness and of love." 

My Swiss Cheese Brain

As a youth, I could memorize poetry with great ease.  Nowadays, with a toe into the water of my eighth decade, what was once a snap has become a frustration.  But inasmuch as the authorities continually remind us geezers that we need to keep the intelligence well-lubricated, I persist.  Yet it now takes two or three hard weeks to memorize a speech in one of Shakespeare's plays that, fifty years ago, I might have learned in less than an hour.

I've been trying to commit to the old brain Othello's magnificent speech about wooing Desdemona -- the one with "antres vast and deserts idle" -- about which I reported last week.   Instead of memorizing fluently and quickly, my swiss cheese brain continually generates gaps, fissures and holes.  For example, take this passage.   

This to hear would Desdemona seriously incline

But still the house affairs would draw her thence

Which ever as she could with haste dispatch

She'd come again, and with a greedy ear

Devour up my discourse.

There's no reason why this sentence shouldn't be easy enough.  I read and study it, but when I shut the book and try to recite, it comes up this way:

She'd come again and with a  greedy [empty space] 

Devour up my discourse. 

The word "ear" has evaporated, or rather fallen into the black hole of memory, or gotten stuck in the synaptic link between two nerve cells.

I peer into the book once again and take a second crack.  

She'd come again and with a greedy ear

Devour up my [empty space].    

Ear appears, discourse disappears.  And so on through the thirty-two line passages.  Nouns sink beneath the waves and then bob to the surface.  And these lacunae occur again and again. And again.

It is fascinating to me that I retain the rhythm of the pentameter line and that I always know that I am missing a two-syllable noun.  Nevertheless, the precise word will not emerge -- at least at the moment that I need it.  But it's there, coated with polysaccharides, lurking in an obscure empty space behind a neuron.  It's astonishing that the words that disappear are almost always nouns.  I have very little trouble with other parts of speech.  But then noun-loss is a recognized characteristic of your "mature" brain. 

Because it has taken so long to memorize, I have become extremely well-acquainted with the speech.  Slow motion has its advantages.  Othello tells us that Desdemona would come "with greedy ear [to] devour up [his] discourse."  It wasn't until I had gone over that sentence a hundred times that I realized that Shakespeare used "devour" to connect with the "cannibals that do each other eat" in the earlier part of the speech.  It's a purposeful comparison: while wandering and errant Othello encountered anthropophagi, domestic Desdemona, confined to house affairs, was only able to eat words.   

Clever fellow, that Will S. 

Antres, Antrees, Antars

One of my loyal readers (see "Comments" to previous post) wants to know how the word "antres" was pronounced. It's a reasonable inquiry but like many questions about Shakespeare, its answer is not easy.  

I myself pronounce "antres" just as I would "antlers," but without the "l". If I were to guess at an Elizabethan pronounciation (and it would be a guess, even though I've stumbled through the volumes on Shakespearean pronunciation by Kokeritz and Cercignani), I would say the word with a more open initial vowel:  "ahnters." But can we ever be certain how words were pronounced four hundred years ago?  Especially nonce-words like antres? 

Moreover, Shakespeare did not spell antres, "antres.'  Antres is a brilliant editorial intervention that made its initial appearance in Lewis Theobald's The Works of Shakespeare in 1733.

The first time that Othello saw print, in the 1622 quarto, antres was "Antrees." The second time, in the first Folio of 1623, antres was "Antars."  Are either one of these spellings, each of which yields a different pronounciation, authoritative?  It is impossible to know. With some plays, it's clear that F was set from Q, and that therefore any divergences are likely to be errors. But in the case of Othello, Q and F descend independently from a lost original (and it's been suggested that Q reveals evidence of the interpolations and misunderstandings of actors). Neither "Anteers" or "Antars" is definitive. Either pronunciation can therefore be justified.   

Perhaps Shakespeare changed his mind. Perhaps a scribe or a typesetter, struggling with a unique and unfamiliar work, took a guess. The rest is silence.            

 

All About Antres

"Antres" is among the rarest of rare words. Shakespeare's Othello speaks of "antres vast and deserts idle" in the magnificent oration in which he takes issue with the Venetian bigotry that claimed that he was only able to win white Desdemona by employing drugs and witchcraft. No, it wasn't because he was a sorcerer; it was because he was accomplished, heroic, romantic. "Antres" is one of the exotic words that defines the great African general as a non-Venetian -- an outlander, an "erring barbarian," an "extravagant and wheeling stranger."

Shakespeare coined "antres" just for the occasion, deriving it from Latin antrum, a cave. He never used "antres" again, nor did anyone else until Keats fleetingly revived the word two centuries afterward. "Antres" never domesticated into English and remains curious and remote, eternally in need of an explanatory footnote. It is unlikely that Shakespeare expected that a popular or even a courtly audience would grasp "antres" at first hearing. It's a risky word, but Shakespeare didn't become Shakespeare without taking risks.

The playwright coupled the neologism "antres" to another shiny new Latinism to produce "antres vast," a phrase which translates into the language of 2017 as "really big caves." Yet no translation can do justice to the spacious resonance of "antres vast." The caverns to which Othello refers are monstrously huge -- grown grander and even more inaccessible because Shakespeare ingeniously placed the modifier after rather than before the noun. "Antres vast" are a hundredfold more mysterious -- darker, more echoic, more glinty with stalactites and stalagmites -- than "vast antres."  

"Antres vast" occurs in tandem with a second and equally remarkable noun-adjective combination: "deserts idle." Othello reports that before he came to Venice, he had not only traversed "rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven" but had also dwelt among "antres vast and deserts idle." Strictly speaking, deserts cannot be "idle," but they can be vacant or useless. "Deserts idle" reinforces and augments "antres vast." Taken together, the two phrases are infinitely more evocative than either alone.

As a structure of sound, "antres vast and deserts idle" pivots on the "d" of "and" and the "d" of "deserts" and it positions "antres" and "idle" in symmetrical opposition. The two key words are dissimilar yet cleverly interlinked, each comprised of an open vowel (Antres, Idle), a dental (anTres, iDle), and a liquid (antRes, idLe). It is not by accident that "antres vast and deserts idle" is such a euphonious and mouth-filling phrase.      

Shakespeare not only invented "antres" for Othello's oration but also took care to surround it with other linguistic novelties. For example: Othello claims to have encountered "cannibals that each other eat/ The anthropophagi." "Cannibal" is now a commonplace noun, but in 1604 it was a newcomer to the language. "Cannibal" derives from "Carib," the name of a recently-encountered people--reputed to be man-eaters --who gave their appellation to the sea in which they lived. "Cannibal" was sufficiently strange--it had only made harbor in England (arriving by way of Spain) in the 1550s--that Shakespeare felt a need to define it, which he did once in English ("that each other eat") and once in Greek ("anthropophagi"). "Anthropophagi," a word that had originated with Herodotus, was as new to English--and as seldom employed--as "cannibal."   

"Antres vast," "deserts idle," "cannibals" and "anthropophagi" play crucial parts in Othello's stirring autobiographical fragment.           

         I spake of most disastrous chances,

Of moving accidents by flood and field,

Of hair-breadth scapes i'th'imminent deadly breach,

Of being taken by the insolent foe

And sold to slavery;  of my redemption thence,

And portance in my travel's history:

Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,

Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven,

It was my hint to speak -- such was the process.

And of the cannibals that each other eat,

The anthropophagi, and men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders.

It's an astonishing story, each element more incredible than the one that precedes it. Hair-breadth escapes?  Every hero can boast of them. Redemption from slavery? A bit less likely. Hills whose heads touch heaven? A pardonable hyperbole. Cannibals?  Surely, less believable still. The Othello landscape then crosses the border from exotic to fabulous when it adduces "men whose heads/ Do grow beneath their shoulders." These headless men are the blemmyae -- Nubian or sometimes Ethiopian -- who were a feature of  pseudo-anthropological folklore from Pliny to Sir Walter Raleigh. The skepticism that these monstrous creatures ought to provoke is diluted because the road to the blemmyes passes through "antres vast and deserts idle." If audiences had not been lulled and seduced by "antres," they might dismiss Othello as a mere braggart soldier--rather than admire him for the near-magician that he becomes in his self-dramatization.   

Shakespeare had yet another purpose for "antres vast." In the sentence that treads on the heels of the "men whose heads/ Do grow beneath their shoulders," Othello abruptly turned his attention to Desdemona. His language dulls. "This (i.e. his exotic narrative) to hear would Desdemona seriously incline,/ But still the house affairs would draw her hence." Shakespeare strategically contrasts Othello's vocabulary to Desdemona's when he juxtaposes "antres vast" to "house affairs." Only the tinnest of ears can fail to be struck by the difference between the two phrases. Antres vast--house affairs; house affairs--antres vast. The gap between these two most pregnant phrases is small enough to allow the electric impulses of sex and romance to spark, but is too wide to allow genuine understanding or empathy to shoot the gap. The tragedy of Desdemona and Othello arises out of the unbridgeable space between "antres vast" and "house affairs."

Shakespeare therefore knew exactly what he was about when he invented the word "antres."

If he had been in a more antic mood, less determined to characterize Othello's massive dignity, he might have coined a word from another Latin word for cave, e.g. spelunca.  But "spelunkies vast" -- or even "spelunkies splendid" -- could not possibly do the work of "antres vast." 

In Which the Blogger Loses his Cool

The Takacs Quartet graces us with six superb concerts a year.  It's true that they sometimes hanker after strange new composers -- Psathos, Part etc. -- whose compositions set my teeth on edge like the vile squealings of the wry-necked fife or like a brazen canstick turned or like the gratings of a dry wheel on an axletree  -- but mostly they play what distinguished Quartets are ordained to play, that is, the great central European tradition from Haydn to Brahms.  But last night, the Takacs, eek and alas, ventured into new and grim territory.  Horribile dictu, they offered an original, commissioned Drama that purported to be Serious and Illuminating.  It warn't.  It was a interminable playlet about Beethoven's last years founded on the composer's letters and conversation books.  It was barren.  It was predictable, uninsightful, reductive, shallow, witless, dull, and pretentious.  I started to squirm (boredom feeding on embarrassment and embarrassment on boredom) after a couple of minutes, then broke into a sweat, but after a few minutes resigned myself to my middle-of-the-row captivity and I did what I always do in such situations -- recited to myself long-ago-memorized poetry.  When the Drama mercifully ended, I was consoled to hear the woman in front of me (a member of the music faculty) say to her companion, "Do you think they know how bad that was?"

Do they?  I hope so.  I hope that the playwright, a tyro named  ------ Morse, recognizes that he's not Tom Stoppard or even Tom Stoppard diluted to a 1% tincture, and that he takes up a profession that inflicts less pain on innocent bystanders.   

I left dispirited, especially for the actors, who tried to force a marriage of Shakespearean style of performance to prosaic vocabulary and sentence structures.  I do not use the word "Shakespearean" in a good way:  I refer to that highly artificial, unnatural way of speaking and moving that, inherited and debased from an ancient tradition, has stupefied and narcotized dutiful culture-hungry audiences at summer festivals all over America.  Shakespeare himself was clear that he did not want his actors to strut and bellow, but strut and bellow was what they did last night.  If the actors did not split the ears of all the groundlings, they certainly split mine.  Why do they speak in that ridiculous manner when their aim should be "to hold the mirror up to nature."  It's wrong of me to say so, but I felt that I could look into the soul of the actor who played Beethoven and see a man who imagined that  he was playing Lear at the Old Vic, when he was in fact performing in a play that might, just might, satisfy the requirements for an M.A. in creative writing at some off-brand college ("he's worked very hard on this so we might as well pass him"), and that he was going to show "them" how it's done, but instead he offered us sufferers a copy of a copy of a pale copy.

Egads, I'm breaking into a sweat again just thinking about it.

I pay good money to hear the Takacs -- and concert after concert, I get my money's worth, and much more.  I want Schubert.  I want Mozart.  If I wanted amateur theatricals, I would go to he local dinner theater.  Or to the high school around the corner.  

Who Is Violenta? What Is She?

Here's a puzzle about a character's name that will interest detectives or dedicated Shakespeareans -- and perhaps only the most dedicated of Shakespearean detectives.

As everyone knows, the "heroine" and dominant figure in Twelfth Night is an audacious, sensitive, and intelligent young lady to whom Shakespeare gave the name Viola. It is Viola who, shipwrecked on the Illyrian shores, disguises herself as a man, enlists herself as a servant to Duke (or Count) Orsino, whom she rapidly comes to admire, and is then dispatched by Orsino to woo in proxy his beloved, Lady Olivia the recalcitrant. Viola has the misfortune, while in mannish guise, to provoke Olivia's romantic interest. The complications that arise from these mistakings take five amusing acts to resolve. But it's Viola's play, from first to last, and there is no question about her identity or her name. 

Viola first comes on stage in the second scene of the play. The stage direction in the 1623 Folio is unambiguous. Enter Viola, a Captaine, and Saylors. In the speech headings throughout the play, Viola regularly appears as Vio., just as Maria is Mar., Clown is Clo., and Malvolio is Mal. There is but one exception to this practice -- and here begins the mystery. In the middle of Act 2, scene 5, Viola comes as ambassador to Olivia but the stage direction reads, inexplicably, Enter Violenta. Who is Violenta, what is she? Inasmuch as Viola's name has been and will continue to be Viola, how did it happen that just this one time she comes to be called by a similar but very different name? The most likely explanation is that it's a mere slip -- either an error of the compositor who set the Folio line, or an error of the scribe who made a fair copy of Shakespeare's manuscript, or of W. S. himself, nodding over his quill and inkhorn.

But for Shakespeareans, "Violenta" is most interesting name. While the playwright created no characters named Violenta, there was one time when he came very close to doing so. The near-Violenta almost appears in  All's Well That Ends Well, the play that is printed in the Folio just before Twelfth Night. In All's Well, Helen, who is obsessed with Bertram, pursues her absconded and disloyal husband to Florence. There she discovers that Bertram has been wooing a woman called Diana. But Diana was not originally conceived as Diana. She had a momentary and evanescent pre-existence as Violenta. Enter old Widdow of Florence, her daughter, Violenta and Mariana, with other Citizens." So says the stage direction, but in the scene that the s.d. introduces, there is no Violenta. No person of that name says a word. In her stead there appears a Diana (or Dia.), whose entrance onto the stage is unannounced. Diana appears where Violenta was heralded. Clearly Shakespeare changed his mind.

It is therefore clear that the Folio compositors were working with a holograph that preserved Shakespeare's first thoughts. Diana, the o-so-pure maid whom Bertram cannot conquer, was orignally intended to be Violenta, who, it is reasonable to infer from her name, would have repelled the young seducer's advances not with virtue but with shrewishness. Later, when Shakespeare altered his conception, Violenta turned into the mirage or ghost who both is and is not present in All's Well.  

The Violenta of All's Well can therefore be understood as a first pass at Diana. But what possible explanation is there for the substitution of Violenta for Viola in Twelfth Night?  It's a hard question, and the not-entirely-satisfactory but best answer is that the typesetter who worked on both of these plays (Compositor B, so-called) carried the name from one play to the other. Let us suppose that he had just set "Enter... Violenta" in All's Well when he resumed work on Twelfth Night. There he encountered the abbreviation "VIo." and, the longer name still reverberating in his mind, expanded Vio. to Violenta.  

That's the end of the story. But there's a fascinating postscript. When, in All's Well, Bertram makes his move on Diana, there's this exchange (including the introductory stage direction):

Enter Bertram, and the Maide called Diana.

Ber. They told me that your name was Fontybell.

Dia. No, my good Lord, Diana.

Fontybell? Beautiful fountain? It would seem that Diana/Violenta once had still another name. Or that Shakespeare wants us to think so.

"They told me that your name was Fontybell" is a pure, lovely, and haunting line of poetry, but it's unrelated to anything else in the play. It's a free-standing mystery, utterly without explanation.   

More Real Shakespeare Mysteries can be found here, here,  here.

 

Prostituting that Past-Cure Malady

i''ve read All's Well that Ends Well many times (thrice just in the last week), always with puzzlement and  dissatisfaction. It's a confused and confusing play. My best guess is that Shakespeare got going on some appealing but intractable material and struggled with it for many years but was never able to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion. 

Until this last reading, I had never paid much attention to the King of France who is, I think, more of a plot mechanism than a rounded character. Shakespeare never even bothered to give him a first name -- he's "King" but whether Charles or Louis or Lothair we're never told. He plays a crucial part in the fable, because, dying of a "fistula," he is cured by our heroine Helen and in exchange grants her the husband of her choice (her obsession, actually) -- the handsome soldier and crass lout Bertram. Later in the play, after Bertram has fled from the marriage, the King again intervenes to restore him (against his will) to Helen. The King is short-tempered and highly conscious of his regal status -- as Kings are in literature -- but he is not particularly eloquent or interesting. 

But in my most recent reading, I was struck by some lines that I had not registered in my salad days. Helen urges the King to allow her to try her "receipts" (i.e. prescriptions or drugs) on him. He resists, of course, simply so that Helen may overcome another contrived obstacle. But the King's sentences, fable apart, are very pertinent, most particularly to those of us who have staggered to life's endgame:  

                                We thank you, maiden,

But may not be so credulous of cure,

When our most learned doctors leave us and

The congregated college have concluded

That laboring art can never ransom nature

From her inaidable estate. I say we must not

So stain our judgment, or corrupt our hope,

To prostitute our past-cure malady

To empirics, or to dissever so

Our great self and our credit to esteem

A senseless help, when help past sense we deem.

"Empiric" is Shakespearean for "phonies."  The King will not compromise his rationality or his dignity by indulging himself with the sixteenth-century version of faith-healers, herbalists, reiki masters, homeopaths, naturists or any other of the enormous plague of quack-quacks who litter our anti-rational landscape. 

Good for him, I say, even though, as it turns out, he's wrong and the maiden successfully works her receipts. Shakespeare keeps us out of the sickroom, so we don't know exactly what she prescribes (just as well), but we do learn that the credulous bystanders attribute the cure not to science but to divine intervention. As the very orthodox and conventional Lafeu puts it, "They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons to make modern (i.e. routine, everyday) and familiar, things [that are] supernatural and causeless.  Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear (i.e. fear of the unknown)" -- an interpretation that might made sense in Shakespeare's scientifically-ignorant late medieval world, but which is no longer applicable.  

Nevertheless, I trust that when my time comes, I will follow the King's good example and come to terms with reality rather than succumb to irrationality and "esteem a senseless hope."    

We Are All Frail/ Brooks Conrad

Even moderately serious baseball-watchers know that we've just experienced a disaster of the Mickey Owens-Willie Davis-Bill Buckner variety. Poor Brooks Conrad, a journeyman infielder, playing for the Atlanta Braves in an important playoff game, committed three horrible errors. He bobbled a ball, dropped a popup, and then, with the game on the line, let a routine grounder go right through his legs. He was nutmegged, as they say in soccer. Game over, Atlanta eliminated. The hi-def TV camera focussed on him, allowing millions of Americans to lipread the poor guy's puzzled, exasperated, embarrassed, "What the fuck." Interviewed after the game, Conrad was more decorous but no less defeated: "I wanted to dig a hole and go to sleep in it."

Sleep won't do it, because Conrad's errors will be re-played forever and ever and ever.

The play that lost the game was one that Brooks Conrad has made time and time again -- at Arizona State, during his ten years in the minors, and during his three-year (229 at bats, 53 hits) and now completed major league career. He wouldn't have been in the game -- as a substitute for the injured Martin Prado -- if he didn't have the ability to put a glove on a pop fly or handle a ground ball. One of the announcers called it accurately:  "they say you make errors with the glove but in this case the problem is right between his ears."  Brooks Conrad somehow lost the ability to do things that should have been entirely routine  -- which is why I feel so sorry for him, and why I identify so strongly with him.  It could happen to anybody, anytime. I remember once driving along on a big four-lane and for a second I forgot which foot operated the accelerator and which the clutch.  I panicked, momentarily, but I recovered, and no one ever knew.  didn't have millions of people watching me and clucking.

I'm glad to say that the next day, when Brooks took the field during warmups (he was mercifully held out of the game), Atlanta fans gave him a big cheer. "We are all frail," as Angelo says, and it's not wrong for us to be reminded of it once in a while. But poor Brooks, condemned to a lifetime of waking up in the middle of the night, Buster Posey's grounder skidding past his glove and through his legs, runners endlessly, one after another, in an infinitely loop, crossing home plate to the deafening roar of the crowd. 

A Conversation in Romeo and Juliet

The artistry of Romeo and Juliet I.v.30-41 is, I fear, under-appreciated. It's an utterly revolutionary moment in the history of the drama, but it's so subtle, so art-that-hides-art, that it easily slips under the radar. Let me quote in full.

Capulet.  Nay sit, nay sit, good cousin Capulet,

For you and I are past our dancing days.

How long is't now since last yourself and I

Were in a masque?

Cousin Capulet.   By'r Lady, thirty years.

Capulet.  What, man, 'tis not so much, 'tis not so much.

'Tis since the nuptial of Lucentio

Come Pentecost as quickly as it will,

Some five and twenty years: and then we masqu'd.

Cousin Capulet.  "Tis more, 'tis more, his son is elder, sir:

His son is thirty.

Capulet.    Will you tell me that?

His son was but a ward two years ago.

Romeo.  What lady's that which doth enrich the hand

Of yonder knight?

Romeo and Juliet is a play of rhetorical experimentation. In its course, Shakespeare employs extravagant puns and wordplay, rhyme, prose, embedded sonnets, stichomythia, two passages of contrived, Petrarchan oxymora, outrageous bawdy, lament both real and parodic -- everything, in fact, that was in the garner of a 1590s playwright.

The overlooked conversation between old Capulet and his cousin is an innovative piece of rhetoric of Shakespeare's own invention. It's simply everyday, colloquial conversation -- in his time, a complete and utter novelty.

It's two old guys talking the way old guys talk when they're savoring the past. Repetitions: "'tis not so much, 'tis not so much" and "'tis more, 'tis more"; mock challenge: "will you tell me that"?; references to details known only to the participants: "Tis since the nuptial of Lucentio..."; homely exaggerations: "His son was but a ward two years ago." Even though Shakespeare casts the passage in blank verse, he manages to capture the authentic sound of real people engaged in real conversation.

But why?  It's all a trick or device to set off the sentence of Romeo's that follows.

Unlike the Capulet cousins, Romeo is wholly captured by the language of splendid and hyperbolic love-longing. Shakespeare therefore encourages his audience to contrast the everyday quality of "His son was but a ward two years ago" with Romeo's "What lady's that which doth enrich the hand/ Of yonder knight." Needless to say, there are no knights at this merchant-class gathering. "Knights" are a creation of Romeo's imagination. So is the slightly archaic phrase "yonder knight," which is directly out of the world of romance and clashes magnificently with the context that Shakespeare has so carefully contrived. So too the inversion "what lady's that" instead of "who is that lady" and the highly poetical (and supremely beautiful) "enrich the hand."

Romeo's sentence is at the same time very serious and highly comic -- a triumph of Shakespeare's original and  almost invisible craft.

"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.    

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!

Earthquakes - Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc - King Lear

We all remember, and we're all still shocked and amazed that the late, unlamentable Jerry Falwell proclaimed that the 9/11 attacks on the US were caused by "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians." How to understand either the logic or the brain of such a thinker? We moderns tend to reason in terms of cause and effect, and cause and effect just doesn't cut it with Falwell. Was he thinking something like, feminists cause sin (a debatable proposition) and Al-Qaeda wants to cleanse us, so they run the airplanes into the towers. That would be unbelievable nonsense, even for Falwell. Here's another attempt to divine his mind: feminists are dangerous and evil and therefore the good old US of A has become Sodom/Gomorrah/Ephesus and the Big Guy in the Sky is offended and therefore he engaged Al-Qaeda to punish the US for its sins by enabling or permitting those young Saudi jerks to fly planes into the towers in order to persuade us to repudiate the feminists. Does that make sense? Very little. 

Similarly, Pat Robertson deduced that Hurricane Katrina was all about abortion. In this case, the Ancient of Days didn't even bother to enlist human agents. Noticing that there were abortions being performed in the US, he let loose the winds from the caves in which he had confined them and instructed them to bust up the New Orleans dikes and drown a lot of people.   

Jerry and Pat are a pair of idiots, not only because they lack intelligence, but also because their view of the world is five hundred or a thousand years behind the times. They'd be mainstream in dark/medieval Europe when Attila the Hun and Timur (or Tamburlaine) the Great competed for the title of Scourge of God -- the flagellum dei. They pillaged and burned and raped over vast areas of the world not because they were  imperialists and conquerors but because they were instruments of god. They wreaked vengeance on our sins. It was orthodoxy. Cause and effect? Sorry, not part of the picture.   

The fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc  -- "after this therefore because of this"  -- means that just because B comes after A doesn't mean that A causes B. Just because an abortion is followed by a hurricane doesn't mean that the abortion caused the hurricane. Just because someone prays to one or another god and recovers from illness doesn't mean that the prayer caused the cure. The volcano isn't quiescent because we sacrificed the maiden. No religion, not a single one, can bear the light of post hoc. Fully honored, it puts them all out of business. Along with all the other varieties of magical thinking. 

All this hardly bears mentioning except that a couple of days ago, a 'senior Iranian cleric" Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, pronounced that very soon a massive earthquake will devastate the city of Teheran and that the earthquake will be caused by "women who do not dress modestly. [Such women] lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes." There's a chain of logic for you. A guy catches a glimpse of a lock of hair, or, god forbid, a bit of bosom, and boom -- earthquake.  But it's not his fault -- it's that his natural chastity has been compromised by them there female blandishments. Delilah all over again. Forget the movement of tectonic plates. The energy released in earthquakes isn't caused by subduction. It's ankles.The senior Iranian cleric has not correctly grasped the meaning of the demotic phrase, "the earth moved."

Sedighi is a boob and is even more presumptuous and illogical than Pat and Jerry. The earthquake hasn't even occurred and he's already blaming it on the outfits. He's launched a pre-emptive strike on post hoc. His is a fallacy so monumentally illogical that hasn't yet earned a name.     

It's instructive that Shakespeare, writing before the age of reason and before the scientific revolution, offered a full debate on the subject. In King Lear, Gloucester takes the traditional view. Eclipses, like hurricanes, are filled with meaning. Gloucester does not hold with reason or with the logic that he calls "the wisdom of nature."

"These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects: love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide. In cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason, and the bond cracked 'twixt son and father... We have seen the best of our time:  machinations, hollowness, treachery and all ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our graves." 

Gloucester's bastard son Edmund dismisses tradition and argues scientifically and rationally.   

"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune -- often the surfeit of our own behavior -- we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star. My father compounded with my mother under the dragon's tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major; so that it follows, I am rough and lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing." 

Gloucester is, in our terms, superstitious and simple, but he's also orthodox and reverent. Edmund is realistic and rational, but he is also as loathsome a villain as Shakespeare ever created. Shakespeare is a late medieval writer, which is why he should not necessarily be looked to for moral advice but rather for great poetry, great stories, and aesthetic bliss.

Meanwhile, the "excellent foppery of the world" has become the province of fundamentalists of all stripes. 

Strange Flesh

Plutarch makes much of Antonius' "hardness in adversity notwithstanding his fine bringing up." Shakespeare knew these words very well; in fact, his copy of Plutarch was open to this exact sentence when he mended his quill and began to compose the famous speech in Anthony and Cleopatra that begins "Anthony, leave thy lascivious wassails."

Here are Plutarch's words (exactly as they came to Shakespeare through Sir Thomas North's translation). The passage that particularly stimulated the playwright appears (thanks to the magic of word processing), in a font of vivid blue. 

"Hirtius and Pansa, then consuls [were sent by Octavius Caesar] to drive Antonius out of Italy. These two consuls... besieged the city of Modena, and there overthrew him in battle, but both the consuls were slain there. Antonius, flying upon this overthrow, fell into great misery all at once, but the chiefest want of all other, and that pinched him most, was famine. Howbeit, he was of such a strong nature that by patience he would overcome any adversity, and the heavier fortune lay upon him, the more constant showed he himself.... And therefore it was a wonderful example to the soldiers, to see Antonius, that was brought up in all fineness and superfluity, so easily to drink puddle water, and eat wild fruits and roots; and moreover it is reported that even as they passed the Alps, they did eat the bark of trees, and such beasts as man never tasted of their flesh before. 

Shakespeare kept the sense of the passage but put Plutarch's words into the mouth of Octavius Caesar, who despises, envies, but also fears Anthony, his absent rival.     

                                                        Anthony,

Leave thy lascivious wassails.  When thou once   

Was beaten from Modena, where thou slew'st

Hirtius and Pansa, consuls, at thy heel

Did famine follow, who thou fought'st against,

(Though daintily brought up) with patience more

Than savages could suffer.  Thou did'st drink

The stale of horses, and the gilded puddle

Which beasts would cough at.  Thy palate then did deign

The roughest berry on the rudest hedge.

Yea, like the stag, when snow the pasture sheets,

The barks of trees thou browsed.  On the Alps,

It is reported thou did'st eat strange flesh,

Which some did die to look on.  And all this

(It wounds thine honor that I speak it now)

Was born so like a soldier, that thy cheek

So much as lanked not. 

Plutarch is shocked that high-born Antonius could bring himself to eat "wild fruits," but Shakespeare, ever willing to push an idea to the limit, makes Anthony's diet even more crude. "Thy palate then did deign [i.e. find worthy]/ The roughest berry on the rudest hedge" -- that is to say, Anthony eats not just "wild fruit," but the less palatable "roughest berry." In an even harsher transformation, Plutarch's "puddle water" becomes "the stale (i.e. urine) of horses, and the gilded puddle/ Which beasts would cough at."  It may be stoic to drink "puddle water," but it is a far greater challenge to a dainty constitution to survive on horse piss. As the passage continues, Anthony's diet becomes progressively more exotic. Plutarch says that Antonius consumed "beasts as man never tasted of their flesh before," and seems to imagine Antonius as an adventurer at the utmost boundary of culinary experience. But when Shakespeare suggests that Anthony ate "strange flesh/ Which some did die to look upon," Anthony becomes not just a soldier/explorer coping with natural adversity but a demi-god or some other kind of supernatural figure able to triumph over enchantment or magic -- one who can incorporate fleshly food that would kill at a glance men with natures less powerful than his own.  

Shakespeare characteristically intensifies, exaggerates, or hyperbolizes Plutarch's already extravagant tale. He raises the rhetorical ante. Whatever Plutarch proffers, Shakespeare doubles and redoubles. 

The animal theme that runs through this series of transformations begins with the evolution of Plutarch's phrase "by patience he would overcome any adversity" into Shakespeare's "patience more than savages could suffer." More patience than savages?  What would that be? Shakespeare provides an answer to an implicit, unspoken question, which is, What is a more, or worse, or a lower being than a savage? The answer seems to be "an animal" -- and consequently Shakespeare employs images of bestiality throughout this speech: the horses whose stale must be guzzled, the beasts who cough at the gilded puddle, the stag who browses the bark of trees under sheets of snow, and, climatically, the strange magical flesh that some -- but not Anthony -- die to look upon. In a characteristically Shakespearean paradox, as the passage proceeds Anthony becomes both more animal and more heroic -- at the same time both baser and yet more transcendent. 

And what is that strange and magic Alpine flesh?  It's impossible to say, and Shakespeare offers no clue. Perhaps it's mere hyperbole -- an author carried away by his own rhetorical power. Does Anthony violate the ultimate food taboo and become a cannibal?  Some readers have thought so, but the evidence is lacking. 

There is, however, a hint that Octavius himself thinks that the strange flesh episode is nothing more than a tall tale. "On the  Alps, it is reported.... " 

Lascivious Wassails

In Anthony and Cleopatra, Caesar, who is disciplined and ascetic, both envies and scorns Anthony. In one of the play's greatest moments, Caesar apostrophizes his hedonistic, indulgent rival. "Anthony," he begins, "Leave thy lascivious wassails." "Lascivious wassails" is a most marvelous phrase -- not only because of its serpentine hissing, but because it is so colorful. In another context, the word "wassails" might signify conviviality, but in this case it is so contaminated by the wickedness of "lascivious" that it can only be taken to signify bouts of drunken excess. "Lascivious wassails" is glancingly oxymoronic and consequently embodies Caesar's confused and contradictory feelings toward Anthony.

It's an especially pertinent phrase because the speech that follows celebrates those qualities of Anthony which Caesar most admires (and which he simultaneously finds most threatening) -- his Spartan, soldierly ability to put aside luxurious food and drink and to subsist on "the bark of trees," and, if necessary, to drink from "the gilded puddle that beasts would cough at." 

"Lascivious wassails" is brilliant in its freestanding self and without doubt entirely appropriate to its context. It's one of Shakespeare's all-time-great encapsulations -- a condensed and beautiful phrase.    

Except that it's not Shakespeare's. Or, more precisely, it is probably not Shakespeare.

The Folio text of Anthony and Cleopatra seems to have been set from a transcript of Shakespeare's manuscript. It's the only early printing (there are no Quartos). In the Folio, the line appears this way: "Anthony,/ Leaue thy lasciuious Vassailes." "Vassailes" was, for the first hundred years of its existence, understood to mean "vassals." Caesar, it appears, wants Anthony to take leave of not his cups but his followers. In the fourth Folio of 1683, the irregular spelling "vassailes" was regularized to "vassals." "Wassails" did not arrive on the scene until 1724 and was the ingenious, inspired invention of Alexander Pope. Every single editor since Pope, no doubt taken with the beauty of the phrase, has printed "wassails." 

It's not as though "vassals" doesn't make sense. It's perfectly fine. It's just the "wassails" is better. In this instance, let's face it, Pope outdid Shakespeare. If not for Pope, it is highly likely that it would have been "lascivious vassals" until the end of time. Who beside a great poet would have thought of "wassails?" Certainly not I.

Editors aim for authenticity -- to print what they believe Shakespeare wrote. Shakespeare probably wrote "vassals" -- but "wassails" is so clever that editors cannot help but succumb. They follow the illogic that if it's brilliant, it must be Shakespeare. And so authenticity gladly yields to beauty.   

Other Shakespeare enigmas:  here, and here.

Shakespeare, Eggcorns

In The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth, the Hostess (also known as Nell or Mistress Quickly) regularly makes fritters of the English language. At one point in the play, she is beside herself -- apoplectic, in fact -- because she believes that she has been abused by Falstaff. Reaching for words to equal her anger, she tries for "homicidal" three consecutive times. First she calls Falstaff a "honeysuckle villain," then a "honeyseed rogue" and finally she settles on "hempseed." Although "honeysuckle" and "honeyseed" are amusing guesses, we feel --or perhaps I should speak only for myself-- I feel just a bit guilty that I've let Shakespeare amuse me at the expense of an illiterate woman's linguistic lapses.

I have the same reservations about Charles Dickens's jokes on the unlettered; the word "apoplexy," for example, appears as "happyplexy."  It makes a second appearance in Great Expectations, when Jo Gargery, of whom much is made that he has never learned to read or write, explains that his father died of a "purple leptic fit." 

I think that pillorying linguistic errors is more fun when the perpetrators are not illiterate but pretentious. Such is the case in Sheridan's The Rivals (1775), where Mrs. Malaprop, striving for "pinnacle," refers to a character as "the very pineapple of perfection." The most famous sentence in The Rivals: "Sure, if I reprehend any thing in this world it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs" (apprehend, vernacular, arrangement, epithets).  

In the last couple of years, there's been an attempt to distinguish a subset of such malapropisms as "eggcorns." The neologism derives from the unlearned collapse of "acorn" into "eggcorn" (a substitution which is more intelligible when the word egg is pronounced as in rural "aig"). An eggcorn is supposed to be a special variety of malapropism in that "the new phrase makes sense on some level ('old-timer's disease' for 'Alzheimer's disease'). But what sort of sense?  Why is "baited breath" for "bated breath" anything more than a simple spelling error?  For that matter, "honeysuckle villain" and "honeyseed rogue" also make a kind of sense -- a Shakespearean and psychological sense. The Hostess unconsciously reveals that she's sweet on Falstaff.

In any case, there's now an eggcorn database on the internet.  A goodly number of the eggcorns are errors that have appeared time without number on student essays. I can't guess how often I used to encounter "peak (or peek) one's curiosity," "leech" for "leach," "peon" for "paean," or "pier" for "peer";  or how many times students would "pour" over their work. I remember being stunned the first time that I encountered "morays" for "mores," but I eventually acclimated to that formidable shock. What can it possibly mean to "reek" havoc?  Others common student errors: "spade" for "spayed" (sometimes pluperfectized to "spaded"; "verses" for "versus"; "phase" for "faze"; along with the exceedingly respectful "sirname." I believe that the amount of space I enclosed by circling these common errors as they appeared on coffee-stained student submissions would roughly equal the surface area of Weld County.

The eggcorn database contains some "learned" malapropisms that are new to me. "Hare's breath" and its funhouse mirror twin "hair-brained"; "beyond approach"; "Cadillac converter"; "garbage shoot"; "wet one's appetite." I can't picture "well-quaffed hair," but I can certainly visualize a "wind-powered turban." "It finally donged on me" makes some sense, but "crutch of the matter" is utterly nonsensical. How laid back is a "mellow drama?" To "give up the goat" may have meaning in pastoral societies. My absolute favorite: "pus jewel," as in, "his adolescent face was covered with pus jewels." The avian reference in "one fowl swoop" (for one fell -- i.e. fatal-- swoop) was well anticipated by Macduff:  "What, all my pretty chickens and their dam/ In one fell swoop....  O hell-kite."

And speaking of chickens (and eggs), there's also chocolate "eggclair" and "eggtopic" pregnancy, both of which are weirdly inventive, but neither worth (drumroll, maestro!), a pullet surprise.

The "Singing Man of Windsor"

In The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth, it is reported that Falstaff once boldly compared the King to a "singing man of Windsor" -- and was assaulted for doing so. Who, then, is this controversial "singing man?" 

The evidence that might solve this mystery is buried in the dark backward and abysm of time. The throwaway reference to a "singing man of Windsor" may have tickled Globe audiences, but later playgoers (and scholars) don't have a clue as to why.  

The singing man owes his shadowy existence to Mistress Quickly, who inserts him into a one of her ungainly rambling narratives, the point of which is to claim that Falstaff has promised to marry her. "Didst thou not swear to me... when the Prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing man of Windsor...," she complains. 

Presumptuous indeed for Falstaff to compare his King to any ordinary mortal -- but what, we may ask, was so offensive about the "singing man" that his mere mention provoked the prince to violence?  Misshapen, ugly, drunken, foolish?  There must have been more jeer to the "singing man" than is now obvious. 

The phrase "singing man" was a technical term that described not popular balladeers but professional choristers, usually priests, who were associated with a church or college. Shakespeare knew about a priest of Windsor named Maudelen -- the story is in Holinshed's Chronicles -- who resembled Richard II and was deployed as a figurehead in a plot to overthrow the king. Is it possible that Falstaff''s "singing man" referred to Maudelen and therefore challenged the legitimacy of Henry's kingship?  Maudelen is not known to have been a singer, and so the theory, weak as it is, seems to founder badly. 

More likely is that there was a real, notorious Windsor singer, offensive in some unknown way, who enjoyed local celebrity in the 1590s. Would Shakespeare insert a real person into the history play?  Well, yes, he does such things. This sequence of Henry plays, nominally set in the early decades of the fifteenth century, is given to anachronism and occasionally introduces one of Shakespeare's contemporaries into the story, perhaps as some sort of private joke. A "William Visor of Woncote" who was very likely a member of the Visor or Vizard family of Woodmancote in Gloucestershire is mentioned by Shallow's factotum Davy. And then there's "Clement Perkes a' th' Hill," who as been traced to the Purchas or Perkis family who dwelled on Stinchcombe Hill. And also the "red-nosed innkeeper of Daventry" (Daventry is a village on the London-Coventry road that Shakespeare no doubt frequented.)  These imagined beings are indulgences on Shakespeare's part that might have amused the knowledgeable but can only puzzle us. 

The "singing man of Windsor" stands as another such bafflement. It's a clue to Shakespeare's temperament, but a clue that leads nowhere. 

Another Merchant Mystery

In The Merchant of Venice, as it appears in one up-to-date modern edition, Portia's husband-to-be Bassanio is attended by a pair of friends named Solanio and Salerio. Yet In another equally authoritative edition of the play, the friends are named Solanio and Salerino -- and moreover, in this edition, a third and apparently separate character named Salerio enters half-way through the play. What's going on? Why the inconsistency?

First some onomastic context. Shakespeare could be quite casual about the naming of his characters. In The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth, there are two distinct figures, one named Bardolph and the other, for no good reason, Lord Bardolph. Two separate and very different Jacques complicate As You Like It, while in The Taming of the Shrew, easy-to-confuse Gremio and Grumio have needlessly perplexed generations of readers. Even in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare twice used the name Balthazar -- initially for a servant of Portia and then a second time, gratuitously, as the pseudonym that Portia adopts when she poses as a Paduan lawyer. But nowhere is Shakespeare quite so arbitrary as he is with the names of the two (or is it three?) Sallies.

Solanio, Salarino, and Salerio all inhabited Merchant when it first appeared in the 1600 quarto edition known to scholars as Q1, but whether Shakespeare meant there to be two characters or three is a matter of mystery. It's possible, in fact, that the playwright changed his mind in the course of writing. And what would be evidence for Shakespeare's indecision? Scholars have now determined that the first Merchant quarto was set in type by compositors who worked from a manuscript in Shakespeare's own handwriting -- an "autograph" -- that preserved evidence of the writer, quill in hand, in the very thick of invention. Shakespeare himself, it appears, vacillated about the names by which to denote the Sallies and also about how many of them there were to be. His waffling was reproduced by the compositors who dutifully set what they had in front of them -- first thoughts, re-thinkings, revisions, errors, and all. No wonder that modern editors have been baffled.

Here's a brief outline of a complicated textual tangle. In the stage direction with which the play begins, Shakespeare introduces two of the characters in question. "Enter... Salaryno, and Salanio."  In terms of personality, the pair seem to be conceived as twins or doubles. Both are excessively talkative -- long on enthusiasm and short on common sense. It appears that Shakespeare not only cast the two characters from the same psychological mold, but that he also decided to underline their similarity by giving them near-identical names -- and it is from this initial decision that the confusions springs. The trouble begins right there in the play's first scene. If Shakespeare had retained his original names and followed his customary procedure, he would have assigned Salaryno and Salanio the abbreviated speech headings "Sala." and "Sala." -- clearly a recipe for disaster. So before he had entered fifty lines into the scene, the playwright traded in one vowel for another and transformed Salanio into "Sola." It's a curiosity that in the first scene of The Merchant of Venice (as it appears in Q1), Salanio enters but Solanio exits. Oddly enough, the pattern repeats itself when Solanio re-appears in the subsequent scene in which the Sallies and Lorenzo plan Jessica's elopement. Solanio is once again Salanio in the initial stage direction and Solanio or "Sola." in the speech headings. Was Shakespeare irresolute or simply forgetful?  

And now Salanio/Solanio's companion, Salarino, also begins to mutate. When Jessica steals from Shylock's house, she is accompanied by a character who bears the name Salerino -- that is, Salarino/Salaryno rechristened with a medial "e."  We're now a third of the way through the play, and readers have already encountered two characters, one of whom is named Salanio/Solanio and the other Salarino/Salarynol/Salerino. At this point things become truly messy. Jessica elopes with Lorenzo and they and their co-conspirators flee Venice for Belmont. Gratiano, first to arrive at the country retreat, greets Lorenzo and his bride Jessica and an accompanying friend. "But who comes here?" he inquires. "Lorenzo and his infidel?/ What, and my old Venetian friend Salerio?"  Who, we may ask, is this Salerio?  Readers who have been paying attention know that Gratiano doesn't have an "old Venetian friend" Salerio. Instead, he has two old Venetian friends -- Solanio and Salarino. Is Salerio a new character? Or, given the whimsicality of Q1's spellings, is he simply a orthographical variant of one of the Sallies with whom readers are already acquainted? 

The action then returns immediately to Venice where a new scene begins with the following stage direction: "Enter the Iew (i.e. Shylock) and Salerio."  But Salerio, if he's anything more than a spelling error, can't be in both Venice and Belmont at the same time (in fact, he's just been commisssioned to carry a message from country to city). An editor vents her frustration: "Q1's Salerio cannot be right, as he is on the way back to Venice." Apparently Shakespeare himself was totally befuddled about whom he had named what and where he had sent whom. Certainly, the printers themselves were baffled. The three earliest editions of The Merchant of Venice each assign a different name to the Sally who remained in Venice in the company of Shylock. In Q1, as we've just noted, it's Salerio; in the lightly-edited second quarto (dated 1600, but actually a forgery printed in 1619), he is Salarino, and in the 1623 Folio, it's Solanio.

If Q1 did, as is supposed, follow Shakespeare's manuscript, then the playwright himself made the muddle, but who can say for certain that the confusion couldn't have been the fault of one of the various scribes, book holders, compositors, or editors through whose hands the manuscript might have passed.  In any case, the snarl wasn't untangled in Shakespeare's time, and it hasn't been sorted out since. Some editors give two characters, some three;  some name the characters Solanio and Salarino, and some add a Salerio to the mix.  

Why didn't Shakespeare simply create one all-purpose Sally? Because the duplication makes dramatic sense. When one of the Sallies attacks Shylock venemously, his bigotry might be dismissed as personal idiosyncrasy, but when two of them gang up, they speak not as individuals but as a chorus that expresses the nasty side of Venetian society.  

But why didn't Shakespeare himself fix the problem? Did he leave it to his actors to work it out on the stage, or was he a big-picture guy indifferent to such details? Perhaps he did sort it all out in a scribal or subsequent version of the play to which Elizabethan printers never gained access?

In any case, Shakespeare learned a lesson from his adventure with Salerio, Solanio and Salarino. When he next came to invent characters who were doubles or twins, he took the precaution to give them names that were impossible to confound: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.   

A Merchant Mystery

In the middle of The Merchant of Venice, right out of the blue, without warning, the audience is suddenly told that Launcelot the clown has gotten a "Negro" pregnant. Who is this 'Negro'? Why haven't we heard of her before?  Why does Shakespeare introduce her into his play?  And why, having invented her, does he precipitously drop her? A loose end, to be sure.

The pregnancy seems to be unplanned, both by the characters and the author. It occurs at the point in the play when Shylock's runaway daughter Jessica, newly married and newly converted to Christianity, engages her bridegroom Lorenzo and their clown/servant Launcelot in a bit of superficial banter. Launcelot puts forward the barren jest that Lorenzo is "no good member of the commonwealth," for "in converting Jews to Christianity, [he] raises the price of pork." Lorenzo veers from the context to reply sharply. "I shall answer that better to the commonwealth that you can the getting up of the Negro's belly. The Moor is with child by you, Launcelot."  Up until this very moment, there had been no mention of a "Moor" or "Negro" (north Africans and sub-Saharan Africans were not always distinguished in the Elizabethan imagination). It's a sensational, unanticipated accusation and one that Launcelot does not deny. Instead, he attempts to deflect Lorenzo's indignation with clownish wordplay. The subject is abandoned as precipitously as it was raised and the pregnant Moor vanishes from the play.  Neither Launcelot nor any other character has alluded to a "Negro" before, nor had there even been the slightest hint that Launcelot has been wooing a lady  A perplexed editor simply shrugs his shoulders: "This passage has not been explained."

But where there is no explanation, there is room for conjecture.

The fleeting and mysterious black woman reminds us that The Merchant of Venice explores questions of exogamy. Jewish Jessica elopes with Christian Lorenzo, while the heiress Portia, a native Venetian, is pursued unsuccessfully by Morocco, a "tawny Moor." When Morocco fails the test that might have won him Portia for his bride, Portia expresses pleasure in words that were acceptable then but are unpleasant now: "Let all of his complexion (i.e. race) choose me so." So it would seem that one possible explanation for Launcelot's insemination of the Moor is that Shakespeare started a hare that he didn't bother to pursue; he was sufficiently intrigued by interracial sexual doings to provide Launcelot with a non-white lover, supplementing comedy with farce -- but he lacked either the inclination or the space to develop the relationship more fully. (The fertile subject of love between the races was one that Shakespeare had previously engaged in Titus Andronicus -- in which Aaron the Moor fathers a child upon Tamora, the queen of the Goths -- and would become the tragic motif of Othello. 

There's a second possible explanation for the presence of the pregnant Moor.  It's known that as originally perormed, the part of the clown Launcelot was played by the much celebrated comedian Will Kemp, whose part Shakespeare might have wanted to sweeten.  Who now can imagine with what facial expressions or gestures Kemp, in 1596, responded to Lorenzo's charge.  The visual comedy of the past is unrecoverable.  Even though Launcelot's quibble on the homonym Moor/more ("It is much that the Moor should be more than reason...") lies absolutely limp on the modern page, we can guess that it would have been made much of (who knows how?) by the great comedian for whom it was composed.

So that while Launcelot's getting the Moor pregnant must remain ultimately mysterious, its odd and curious introduction at this juncture of the play very possibly offered its original audience a moment of humor which later readers and playgoers will never understand or appreciate.

Unsatisfying answers I know. But we must accept the fact that the past is not always explicable.

What the Heck is an Elfskin?

In one modern edition of Shakespeare's The First Part of King Henry the Fourth, Falstaff, in a fit of exuberant swearing, describes Hal as an "eel-skin."  But in another edition, the word is "elfskin."  What's going on?  Only one of these curious words can be "correct."  

Paunchy Falstaff attacks Prince Hal with a string of half-comic, half-offensive epithets:  "you starveling, you elfskin (or eel-skin), you dried neat's tongue, you bulls-pizzle, you stockfish...."  A "starveling" is a person emaciated by hunger, "stockfish" is desiccated cod, and a "bull's pizzle," which an Elizabethan might dry to use as a whip, is self-explanatory.  But "elfskin" or "eelskin?"  "Elfskin" is the original reading, although in actual fact the earliest quarto prints not "elfskin" but "elsskin" where the first "s" is the old-fashioned "long s."  "Elsskin" was as incomprehensible then as now and someone who participated in the making of the 1623 Folio changed the word to "elfskin" on the grounds, it is easy to imagine, that the first of the two long s's properly signified an "f."  If "elfskin" is a word, then it's a Shakespearean coinage -- the word being otherwise unknown and the skin of elves not a subject of speculation even in an era that took such imaginary beings more seriously than does ours. Is it possible that, considering the context, "elfskin" could carry the meaning "as thin as fairy skin" -- even though elves were generally described as small and stunted rather than diaphonous? 

The alternative, "eel-skin" is the inspiration of Sir Thomas Hanmer, whose edition of Shakespeare's works appeared in 1744.  "Eel-skin" jibes with "stockfish" and "neat's tongue" as an example of Falstaff's fixation on edibles, although it was the eel itself rather than its skin that was the delicacy.  As Hanmer well knew, Shakespeare had used the word "eel-skin" in a not dissimilar context in King John, when Philip the Bastard described his feeble half-brother's skinny arms as "two eel-skins stuffed."

"Elfskin" is therefore the earlier reading, closer by 150 years to William S. himself, but "eel-skin," though it dates only to the mid-eighteenth century, is much more colorful and apposite. It's therefore entirely possible that Hanmer restored Shakespeare's original intention.  Possible, but not proven.    

Some Rituals

Shakespeare's audiences were notoriously raucous.  Folks entered and left during performances, commented loudly on the action and the actors, and ate oranges and hazelnuts during performances.  (When the Rose Theater was excavated in 1994, its floor was found to be paved with crushed hazelnut litter.)  The Rose, the Globe, and the Fortune were noisy, busy, vital places, far different from today's excessively reverent theaters.  I wish it were otherwise.  I would be much more interested in live theater if I didn't feel that I was stepping into a museum or mausoleum.  Why shouldn't we voice our approval or disapproval?  A vigorous environment did not inhibit gentle Will.  Nowadays we have more Awe but less Art. 

I feel the same about visits to the symphony (but I'm more tolerant, especially on a Brahms or Beethoven evening).  The ritual of concert-going amuses me: the various instrumentalists wandering to their places, then the concertmaster, then at last the maestro, the polite applause, the bowing, etc.  There's an old story about "the man from Borneo"  -- when Borneo was synonymous with the end of the earth -- who was taken to the Boston Philharmonic.  After the concert, the M from B was asked, "Which part of the concert did you like best."  "Before the man with the stick came on."      

Yesterday I went to see our local university basketball team. It wasn't a very good game and my mind wandered to the elements of the ritual:  first the warming up, then the teams leave the court, then the Star-Spangled Banner, then the overexcited introduction of the starters, ("at six five from San Bernadino California") and of course the blond perky cheerleaders with their theatrical enthusiasm and familiar tumbling routines.  And the band, playing their hearts out during the TV timeouts.  It's all so very schematized and overdetermined.  But exciting nevertheless.   

Both the symphony and the basketball game are highly ritualized, but I have to admit that on the whole, I'm more comfortable at the arena than at the concert hall.  Especially when I have to cough; nothing more awkward than trying to suppress a cough during a pianissimo passage -- especially for those of us who are inordinately sensitive to social censure.   

I wish the symphonies could incorporate some of the vitality of basketball.  At the arena, the members of the band swing their trombones to left and right.  Why couldn't the violins and violas give us a little of that?  And then we have the tuba cheer, where the tubists come on court and whirl in rapid circles.  What an opportunity for cellos and double-basses to show off their skill and add some visual excitement to the performance.  The cheerleaders regularly climb each others' shoulders.  Why not the woodwinds?    

And the audiences?  They can participate by eating oranges and hazelnuts.  And shouting approval.  "Go woodwinds!"   

No Words, No Words? Hush.

A few nights ago, I attended a performance by our local treasure, the ever-glorious Takacs Quartet. Without asking my leave, they chose to play works by Aarvo Part and Philip Glass. I suppose that there must be virtues to "minimalist" music, but a single motif played over and over again in the same tempo, with the same unvarying dynamics, and in the same non-key -- what's the point? Music without melody, harmony, or rhythm is like a novel without a plot or like a severely abstract painting. Sorry folks, I'm antediluvian. A relic. I want a story and I want it dressed in rhyme and meter. It's exhilaration that I crave, not forty-five long minutes of total ripvanwinkleization.      

I was already in a sulky mood at the intermission when Mr. and Mrs. Talkative behind me, after gushing over the minimalists, directed their intellects toward Shakespeare. Mrs T. announced, "You don't need to read a Shakespeare play before seeing it. Just read a plot summary so that you know what's happening." Mr. T. agreed:  "Absolutely. Going to the theater is all about the costumes and the set and the business. As long as you have a general idea of the story, you don't need to understand the words."   

No need to understand Shakespeare's words?  Go to the theater and ignore the words of the finest poet in human history?  What are the Talkatives thinking?  The costumes are the work of the costumer; the business is the work of the director and the stage designer. The only part of the performance that is Shakespeare's is the language. 

One of the teachers of my youth, the late and much lamented Alfred Harbage  -- the finest Shakespeare scholar of his generation -- used to say that he didn't care what the actors did on stage as long as he could hear the words.  I'm not nearly so tolerant. I don't want Rosiland and Orlando to send email messages to each other -- I want them to articulate. I don't want Cinna and Metullus Cimber to be dressed as blackshirt fascist thugs. And I certainly don't want Snug and Bottom to ride to the Duke's Oak on motorcycles. Such antics are stupid and distracting.

The performance for which I'd pay a premium price is one at the Theatre, or at the old Globe, or at the Blackfriars during the years when Shakespeare was teaching the parts to Burbage and Hemmings and Kemp. Dollars to doughnuts he insisted that the actors pronounce the words distinctly.   

After the grating intermission, the Talkatives ran out of insights and my indignation began to wane. Eventually Ed, Andras, Karoly and Gerry returned to the stage and played one of Haydn's great Opus 76 quartets. It was transcendent -- melodic, intelligent and intelligible, warm, robust and sensuous. It was music.