Dr. Metablog

King Lear, V.i

Today's contribution is the work of resident Shakespearean Pauline Harlem, the internationally-acclaimed author of Anagrams for Fun and Profit (2005) and The Naked Anagrammatist (2007).

William Shakespeare, culture hero and playwright, is so often idolized for the great iconic moments and the big megaphonic speeches that quieter but equally luminous effects may go unnoticed. A good example of such an oversight is the extremely brief scene that graces the end of the History of King Lear -- eleven lines in total that have never been granted the praise they deserve.

As King Lear winds to a close, readers (or playgoers) are exhausted. Not only are their emotions wrung, but their capacities have been taxed just trying to track the crowded details of the plot. Even the author had trouble keeping King Lear's entangled stories in mind -- perhaps because he revised the play several times. Yet although Shakespeare may have slipped on a detail or two, he never lost sight of the main lines of the parallel plots. In the one, Cordelia marshals her army against that of Lear's enemies, which is led by her wicked sisters Goneril and Regan; in the other plot, old Gloucester, cruelly blinded, is carried to Dover by his faithful son Edgar. Gloucester intends to put an end to his own life. Edgar has a different agenda; it's his plan to rescue his father from suicidal despair and by doing so save the old Earl's soul. 

In the third-from-last scene of the play, Cordelia tenderly and reverently reveals herself to her father. The tragedy's very last scene is long and complex, encompassing a formal duel between Edgar and his half-brother Edmund in which Edmund is mortally wounded, plus the suicides of the wicked sisters and the murder of the good one, and finally the deathbed speeches of Lear himself. Between the weighty matters of the last and of the antepenultimate scenes, Shakespeare tucks in a brief enactment that can easily be overlooked -- but which shouldn't be. It's one of the pinnacles of playwriting, as splendid a piece of art as the world will see between the last big bang and the next -- or until all molecular motion ceases -- and even afterward. 

Shakespeare carefully sets off the scene from its surroundings. It both begins and ends with a child taking a father by the hand and attempting to draw him to safety -- an image of care and concern with deep roots in both "real life" and the western literary tradition. First Cordelia wordlessly leads her maddened father across the stage. Just as the pair exit, Edgar stumbles on stage with his own father in tow. The brief exchange between father and son pauses while Edgar secludes Gloucester. Then comes the conflict between good and evil figured in the offstage roar of battle. Edgar returns, exchanges another couple of sentences with his father, and then takes his hand and leads him on. It's an unobtrusive scene, brief and understated -- and for Shakespeare, relatively languageless. But every single word tells.

Here is the scene exactly as it appeared in the quarto of 1605. For you internet wanderers who have accidentally found your way to this blague and who've never been offered the opportunity to look at Shakespeare in the raw, unedited and unmodernized, this passage offers some good examples of the playwright's quirky spelling and of his characteristically minimalist punctuation. (The medial u's -- standard in Elizabethan printing -- should be read as v's; i.e. "thrive" for "thriue.") 

Alarum.  Enter the powers of France over the stage, Cordelia with her father in her hand.  Enter Edgar and Gloster.

 

   Edg.  Here father, take the shadow of this bush

For your good hoast, pray that the right may thriue

If euer I returne to you again ile bring you comfort.  Exit.

  Glost. Grace goe with you sir.  Alarum and retreat.

  Edg.  Away old man, giue me thy hand, away,

King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter taine,

Give me thy hand, come on.

   Glost. No farther sir, a man may rot euen here.

   Edg.  What in ill thoughts againe men must indure,

Their going hence, euen as their coming hither,

Ripeness is all come on.

Let me provide just a bit of historical context. Before Shakespeare tackled the story of King Lear, it had been told many times on stage, in poetry, and in mythic history. In every previous versions, the armies that are led by Cordelia triumph in the battle that comes to pass in this scene. Because the story is nowadays so familiar, it's hard for us to imagine exactly how surprised and shocked early audiences would have been at the battle's outcome. Doubtless they would be entirely confident that Lear will succeed. Even today, anyone reading or hearing the scene's first lines would reasonably assume that the armies of justice will conquer and that the long British nightmare will finally end. Shakespeare deliberately raises such hopes only to dash them. Edgar's first sentence lulls us into false security. "Pray that the right may thrive" is plainly a signal to the audience that everything is going to come out just fine. There's an even stronger "foreshadowing" of success in Edgar's definitive announcement that "if ever I return to you again, I'll bring you comfort." Sly old Will has set a grand trap. And it's not just the plain import of the sentences; it's the warm and cozy vocabulary: "host," "pray," "right," "thrive," "comfort," "grace." It's all light and clarity and optimism. But King Lear is a play, as the audience well knows, in which "the worst is not/ So long as we can say 'This is the worst'"  There's no bottom to this play's misery. And so Edgar, briefly absent, returns to the stage with the blunt, four-word message that is an arrow to every sentient heart: "King Lear hath lost." And onto this mountain of grief Shakespeare piles even worse news: that Lear and his innocent, loving daughter have been "taine" -- ta'en, taken, or as we would say, captured. In the first moments of the scene the audience might be comforted that Lear is in the charge of his daughter and Gloucester in that of his son, and that young and sensible people have finally come to the aid of the old fools. But good things do not last -- not in this play. The forces of evil that King Lear unleashes are far from exhausted. They will continue to ruin lives and blight hopes right to the end. 

It's Shakespeare's usual practice to lead his audience to anticipate one thing, but to give them another; this scene, like many such, is carefully constructed to overturn easy expectations. It seems impossible but it's true that in these eleven lines Shakespeare has embedded a second reversal that is equally momentous as the first.

Here we are at last, at the very end of the play; the audience has every reason to believe that it will be gratified with a big, climactic, flashy battle. It's always been the way. But once again, expectations are defeated and the audience gets both less and more than it anticipated. Instead of lances and swords and duels to the death -- he allows us simply some offstage clatter. Why?  Before he wrote King Lear, Shakespeare had staged many such battles. But he wasn't a film director with an unlimited budget and with all sorts of technological resources at hand; all he had at his disposal was a sunlit stage thirty-four feet wide and a handful of supernumeraries. Not nearly enough. Shakespeare adepts will be well aware that the playwright had already expressed, some half a dozen years before, his great frustration with the limitations of his martial scenes. In Henry V, the Chorus, speaking for the author, had apologized for inadequate representations of warfare: "our scene must to the battle fly,/ Where - O for pity- we shall much disgrace/ With four or five most vile and ragged foils/ Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous/ The name of Agincourt." In King Lear, Shakespeare shocked his audience with the outcome of the battle, but he shocked them even more, if possible, by not giving them the battle at all. King Lear is too serious, too desperate, too sad for yet another ridiculous brawl. Nor did Shakespeare take the other easy option -- the long narrative of the sort with which messengers had been regaling audiences from the days of Aeschylus. Instead, Shakespeare offers his audience a profoundly revolutionary experience: noise, followed by four monosyllables. "King Lear hath lost."  Could any artist be more economical -- or more devastating.

These eleven lines therefore constitute an entire tragedy in little. Hope, followed by loss and despair -- succeeded by a moderately uplifting moral. Hearing the horrid news, Gloucester once again falls into suicidal thoughts. "No further, sir.  A man may rot even here." The defeated old man is weary of the world and anxious to leave it behind. But Edgar will have none of his despair. "What, in ill thoughts again?" he says.  (The word "ill" is stronger in Elizabethan English than it is now; it's closer in meaning to our "evil.") "Men must endure/ Their going hence, even as their coming hither."  Shakespeare doesn't say, "You must endure." It's the more general, "men must endure"; not the individual, but the species. We're on this planet and we're human and the world may be, as Chaucer says, "a thoroughfare of woe" and we're born in pain and we die in pain, but it's our burden and our obligation to endure, to hold on. It's not exactly an optimistic statement, but it's realistic, and stoic, and appropriate to the context, and it's wise. And then Edgar/Shakespeare adds a further expression of condensed and gnomic wisdom: "ripeness is all."  "Ripeness is all" -- to expand the metaphor -- signifies that we human beings can't opt out, can't surrender until the cycle of life draws to its natural close. We, or men, or humanity, must continue the struggle to the last breath. Shakespeare doesn't say, if you commit suicide, you're going to go to hell. He doesn't, at this point in the magnificent eleven lines, threaten Gloucester with eternal damnation. Instead, he exhorts him to persist, to endure, to live life to the bitter end. And when Edgar says to Gloucester, "Come on," and father and son leave the stage hand-in-hand, we appreciate and admire, even in the midst of all the horror, the perennial human virtues of endurance and loyalty and love.

Another Folly: the "Shakespeare Authorship Question."

This guest entry was contributed by Pauline Harlem, the internationally-acclaimed author of The Wonderful World of Anagrams (New York, 2006). 

 

"Just last week, the Washington Post published a pair of articles on "who wrote Shakespeare's plays." The one claimed that Shakespeare's plays were written by Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford; the other re-asserted the traditional view that William Shakespeare wrote William Shakespeare's plays. By juxtaposing the two articles -- one for, one against -- the Post is guilty of outrageous anti-intellectualism.The authorship of the Shakespeare plays is not an open question. It's as if the Post were to offer its readers two articles, one in support of evolution and the other in favor of new-earth creationism. Just as the matter of evolution is a settled question, so the authorship of the plays is not -- and never has been -- in any sort of doubt. The true believers who keep stirring the pot are faith-based cranks, fanatics, and conspiracy theorists who ignore the usual rules of evidence and reason.  Shame on the Post for giving them a voice!

The nay-sayers discard the historical record and ask this question: is it likely that Shakespeare, with his small-town background and (it's claimed) limited education, could have written plays that demonstrate a sophisticated knowledge of the law, the court, geography, seamanship, etc?  As to the matter of likelihood, who could possibly disagree?  Of course it isn't likely that these extraordinary plays would have been written by anyone -- but it happened nevertheless. It's also unlikely that the theory of relativity would have been developed by a civil servant in a Swiss Patent Office; it's extremely unlikely that the most transcendent music ever written would have been composed by a man who was totally deaf; it's beyond belief that an autodidact living in intellectual isolation in Madras could single-handedly recreate a big hunk of modern mathematics; it's more than incredible that a hermit-like lens-grinder living in self-imposed intellectual exile would be one of the western world's most innovative and progressive philosophers. What is "likely" and what actually happens are two entirely different kettles of fish -- especially when genius is concerned. Despite the unlikeliness, Shakespeare existed and he wrote plays and poems.  His name is on thirty-six of the plays and his friends and colleagues and contemporary admirers testify not only to his existence but to his accomplishments. Among the thousands of books and the corridors of unpublished manuscripts and records that survive from his time, there's not a scrap of information to hint that the plays weren't his. Not a scrap, not a jot, not an inkling, not a tittle.  Nothing.   

The fallacious claims of the Oxfordians, Baconians, Elizabethians, Rutlandians, et. al. have been refuted time and time again. Here's a representative sample of the quality of the argument  -- it's from the recent Washington Post article. "[It's unlikely that Shakespeare wrote the plays because he] never left England -- but sixteen of the plays are set in Italy or the Mediterranean." Persuasive? In what universe must authors travel the world in order to set their plays outside of England?  Certainly not in the world of Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights. Did Christopher Marlowe travel to Malta in order to compose The Jew of Malta or to the Asian steppe to astonish the world with the Scythian shepherd or to Wittenberg to trouble the orthodox with Doctor Faustus?  Thomas Kyd never left England, but managed to startle theater-goers with The Spanish Tragedy.  Ben Jonson never made his way to Italy, but he had no trouble putting Volpone in Venice. John Ford, no traveler, set 'Tis Pity She's a Whore in Parma. John Webster's two great plays The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil are set in Italy, a country on which Webster never set eyes. Thomas Middleton's masterpiece, The Changeling takes place Alicante, in Spain -- but Middleton was a Londoner who never went abroad.  And so on and on, endlessly. Like his friends and competitors, Shakespeare wrote out of books. He, and they, pillaged the literature for promising stories. If the story happened to have originated in Italy, that's exactly where it remained. The playwrights were not geographers or social historians and they created not real but literary places.  Marlowe's Germany and Middleton's Spain and Webster's Italy are no more German or Spanish or Italian than Shakespeare's Belmont is Belmontian or for that matter, W. S. Gilbert's Mikado is Japanese.  Did Shakespeare need to travel to Denmark to write Hamlet or to Vienna to write Measure for Measure?  It's nonsensical to think so.  It's an argument without a scrap of merit. It's not honest.

But is it even a fact that that sixteen of Shakespeare's plays are set in "Italy or the Mediterranean." Only by a stretch. Do the sixteen plays include Othello, the Moor of Venice -- four acts of which occur in Cyprus?  And is the argument that Shakespeare or some other author had to travel to off-the-beaten-Elizabethan-track Cyprus in order to write it?  Do the sixteen include A Midsummer Night's Dream, nominally set in Athens but in fact stuffed with English tradesman and English fairies?  Or The Comedy of Errors, which takes place, in part, in ancient Ephesus in Asia Minor. Or Pericles in Antioch? The Tempest occurs on an enchanted island which is called Bermuda but seems to be somewhere between Naples and Libya. Would a playwright need to traverse the Mediterranean in order to bring Ariel and Caliban to life?  Is it any sort of argument that plays set in the great age of Rome (Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus) required a playwright to abandon his careful reading of North's Plutarch for a time-travel trip to ancient Italy?  Shakespeare no more had to cross the Alps to write his sixteen plays than he had to board a time machine to dark age Scotland to write Macbeth or teleport himself to ancient Britain in order to write King Lear or Cymbeline.

 

The author of the Post article knows these facts. He knows that the travel argument, and the other tissue-thin assertions that he advances, have been refuted over and over again.  But like all faith-based controversialists, he does not withdraw or concede or counter. He merely repeats and repeats and repeats, because his personal conviction is prior to and more important than either evidence or reason.  He's not conducting a legitimate search for truth; instead, he is in thrall to an irrational and deeply-held conviction. Facts will be bent to support his extra-logical hypothesis. His intellectual processes mimic the creationists, the holocaust-deniers, the flat-earthers. Such minds are not reachable -- but there's not the slightest reason for a respectable newspaper to give them space."

Thanks, Pauline. I couldn't have said it any better myself.  V.

"A Strange Slavery to Beauty"

On September 6, 1664, Sam Pepys purchased for his young wife a pair of gloves trimmed with yellow ribbon. At 20 shillings, he knew that he overpaid but he was not at all sorry, because Doll, the 'Change woman from whom he made the purchase was "so pretty, that, God forgive me! I could not think it too much -- which is a strange slavery that I stand in to beauty, that I value nothing near it."  Pepys, God forgive him, was not only enthralled by handsome women, but was attentive to beauty in all its manifestations.  He loved plays and performances, paintings and prints and architecture, as well as music, especially songs and ballads.  Pepys's life was ruled by his "strange slavery to beauty."

 

But why should he have described his fascination as "strange?"  If there is a single trait that distinguishes not just Pepys but human beings as a species, it is an irrepressible love of things beautiful.  For every one of their senses, humans have created an appropriate form of art. Hearing?  Music and song.  Sight? drawing and painting and sculpture and film. Taste? elaborate cookery. Motion?  the dance.  Speech and language?  literature from lyric to epic to novel.  Moreover, there's scarcely a substance that human beings have encountered in their time on the planet that they haven't transformed into something harmonious and elegant.  At first, bone and stone and fur; and then wood and metal and cloth and clay.  Occasionally, some anthropologist will emerge from his laboratory with a theory that the fundamental human trait is  -- you name it -- aggressiveness, or territoriality, or the ability to play games, or an interest in the future, or the capacity for bonding into societies.  Such theories have a bit of truth, but they overlook the obvious.  The essence of humanity, in my view, is the drive to create and to appreciate beauty.  Pepys' "strange slavery" is not a bit strange;  it's universal.

 

As for myself, I believe that I can remember the exact day, hour and minute when I was first struck by beauty.  My moment of ascension occurred in a garden.  I must have been twelve or thirteen years old (and therefore not fully human).  One spring day I tagged along with a gang of schoolyard savages to the Zoo to see if we could get ourselves into a little trouble.  So there we were, running about, screaming and hiding and throwing stones at each other and clods of dirt at the respectable zoo patrons. Someone must have called the cops, because the next thing I knew we had all scattered and I was running as fast as I could.  In those days I was small and spry and any fence that I couldn't squeeze through I could certainly clamber over.  And what's a little barbed wire to a frightened urchin?  Separated from my cohort, I became completely lost.  Eventually, I found myself in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden which was then as now adjacent to the zoo.  I climbed over one or two more fences and entered (not by a gate, but surreptitiously) the famous, mature, refined Japanese Garden -- one of the great artistic achievements in all of America.  I was dazzled in all my senses-- it was a true epiphany.  I particularly remember the red cut leaf maples and the wisteria.  Of course I was too ignorant to know that it was wisteria;  I only knew that I was surrounded by magnificent cascades of blue flowers in abundant bloom.

 

Here are some pictures of the garden.  Just take a look, and then try to imagine an uncivilized pre-adolescent, a scared, sweaty, ragtag child, a product of concrete schoolyards and filthy subways stumbling upon such a amenable place.

 

What good fortune it was to have vaulted that one last fence!

 

I think that I've spent the rest of my life trying to get back to that garden -- or, more accurately, I've spent it trying to recreate and to re-live the aesthetic explosion that I experienced at that epiphanic moment.  When I travel. I make it a point to visit the world-famous gardens, and when I'm at home I work on my own landscape.  But it's not just gardens -- the most ephemeral of art forms --to which I stand in strange slavery.  I've found the aesthetic shiver in other places.  Poetry, Shakespeare in particular, is always at hand.  Is there a civilized soul who can read "Do not laugh at me;/ For (as I am a man) I think this lady/ To be my child, Cordelia" without dropping a pleasurable tear.  The Winter's Tale, which is the finest play in the history of this or any other universe, is a fountain of delights, especially Perdita's "I was not much afeard; for once or twice/ I was about to speak and tell him plainly,/ The selfsame sun that shines upon his court/ Hides not his visage from our cottage but/ Looks on alike" -- a sentiment which may be the most genuinely democratic in thirty-eight otherwise monarchist dramas.  Visual arts also are a constant source of pure delight;  in a gallery of Rembrandts at the Metropolitan Museum I was once so ecstatic that my heart began to beat uncontrollably.  And in Helsinki, I had a moment of pure architectural joy at the Church of the Rock -- the most beautiful and holy of buildings.

 

But of all art forms, it's music that is most reliably transcendent.  My tastes have evolved over the years:  Dvorak and Mahler are in the past but Beethoven's great fugue still sets my spine on edge and so does the long harpsichord solo in Bach's Fifth Brandenburg.  Recordings usually (but not always) work better than live performances.  When I'm in the right mood, I play the shivery passages again and again.  Nowadays the single most lovely piece of music is the great chaconne from Bach's second violin partita.  Hilary Hahn's performance is my favorite, but the chaconne is almost as exciting in Celadonio Romero's guitar transcription and in the Brahms piano version (for virtuoso left hand only).  The chaconne does all that music can do, and it does it in fifteen unaccompanied minutes.

 

It's not just classical music.  I'm also strangely enslaved to what is now called "golden era gospel" -- the singing of the "Heavenly Gospel Singers" and the "Harmonizing Four" and Clara Ward and Brother Joe May and Dorothy Love Coates and the "Swan Silvertones" and the "Five Blind Boys of Alabama." A small sample of some of my many, many favorites:  Mahalia Jackson's long live version of "How I Got Over"; the "Roberta Martin Singers"' "Standing on the Promises"; Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Marie Knight singing "Beams of Heaven"; the "Sensational Nightingales" "Brightly Beams";  perhaps the best of the best:  Professor J. Earle Hines, "God Be With You."  In such great music resides the aesthetic ecstasy, that, when we open ourselves to it, makes us most completely human. 

Flying the Flag

Yesterday, we dug out our grand old American flag and flew it from the holder that I had improvised after 9/11. We flew it to celebrate two great changes: a) the Democratic triumph in Tuesday's election, which restored a bit of our faith in representative government, and b) the end of the arrogant reign of Donald Rumsfeld, the principal mover (except for the cowboy-in-chief himself) of this foolish, disastrous adventurism in the Middle East. We're hoping for a return to common sense in America, but we're not entirely optimistic  -- the guy who's in charge doesn't read, can't admit he's ever made a mistake, and takes his marching orders from a) Rove, b) his gut, and c) his narrow, parochial version of the great signifier in the sky  -- in what order of priority no one knows. 

Rumsfeld should have been out on his ass years ago. He had lost the respect of the soldiers, certainly of the generals, the congress, and, as we now know from the election results, of ordinary Americans everywhere. However, until yesterday he could still patronize and mystify the journalists, and he could still issue instructions to those beneath him in the chain of command.  And generals obey even when they despise the person issuing the orders.

In 1606, Shakespeare described the psychological relations between the generals and their civilian commander. Of Macbeth, Angus says that "Those he commands move only in command,/ Nothing in love." That is, they do what they're told, but they hate doing it. Here's the full transcript of Angus's remarks: "Now does [Macbeth] feel/ His secret murders sticking on his hands;/ Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach;/ Those he commands move only in command,/ Nothing in love: Now does he feel his title/ Hang loose upon him, like a giant's robe/ Upon a dwarfish thief."

It's hopeless to expect that Rumsfeld would recognize that the mantle of Secretary of Defense hung upon him as Angus describes Macbeth's (or, as does, a fortiori, the presidential mantle upon its own wearer) -- there's not sufficient insight or perspective or self-knowledge around the White House these days. But we know exactly what Angus meant, and we know that some of our so-called leaders are nothing more than dwarfish thiefs.     

("Minutely" means "every minute";  "Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach" means "every minute a revolt [by one of his former followers] pays Macbeth back for his own breach of faith, i.e. assassinating Duncan.)

What We Heard in the Fifties

Regular readers (and even stray internet pilgrims) know that Dr. M. has composed a series of entries called What We Read in the Fifties, in which he's revisited books that were noteworthy or notorious during the days of his youth. It's been a rewarding exercise, at least for him. Some of the books have been canonical novels that were required reading in English class at Erasmus Hall High School, some have been pop best-sellers which his more earnest teachers would have scorned, and some have been cheap sensational paperbacks passed under the desk from hand to grimy pubescent hand.

In the years that have passed since I first read these books, rivers have changed course, glaciers have melted, and American society has altered almost beyond recognition -- and yet the books have remained exactly the same. Reading them has been an exercise in nostalgia and a test of memory, and also an unwelcome insight into the incalculable callowness of adolescence. And yet, Dr. Metablog has found readers -- or, at least, he thinks he has, for in May and in December, when high school students all over America, yea, even across the waters, write their assigned term papers on Lord of the Flies or The Catcher in the Rye, blague-traffic spikes, and the dissenting views offered in these essaylets are plagiarized and offered to a new generation of English teachers, who reward them with grades of D or F. 

I fear, however, that my readers might have gathered an erroneous impression of 1950s Flatbushian youth -- that they might have been literate or intellectual. Let me clear my conscience and confess that for every hour that I spent reading books that had actual bindings, I spent ten hours reading comic books and an equal measure with my ear to the radio. It was the comics that taught me how to read; I was well along in years before I came to realize that there were such things as lower-case letters and that there could be sentences that didn't end with exclamation points! In my neighborhood, super-heroes (Batman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman) were as common as squirrels or starlings. But radio -- radio serials-- affected us even more than the comics. Radio stimulated the imagination, took us to worlds far way, presented us with alternative realities. Members of my age-cohort will not forget the glories of radio:Jack Armstrong, the All-American boy, who trotted the globe in support of native ideals and Wheaties; Bobbie Benson, the youth who inherited the B-Bar-B ranch in the Big Bend country, and who, along with Tex, Windy, and Harka, triumphed daily over snakes, droughts, famines and outlaws; the Shadow, who had the power to "cloud men's minds so they cannot see him," and who taught us, every day, that "the weed of crime bears bitter fruit"; Sergeant Preston of the Northwest Mounted, who fought crime and bad guys in the Yukon with horse and dog ("Well, King, this case is closed"); and the Lone Ranger, who with the aid of Tonto and the "thundering hoof beats of the great horse Silver" and with the marvelous voices of exotic Detroit's Fred Foy and Brace Beemer, created an enduring mythology of a spacious but vague and unlocatable west. 

Radio gave scope to the listener's imagination. When television came along, and these programs were translated into a visual form, they were all inevitably diminished. It's no wonder that the great epics (Gilgamesh, the Odyssey and Iliad, Beowulf, the Icelandic sagas) are oral creations. The spoken word can cast spells that are beyond the capacity of visual forms. When it comes to heroes, a single word is worth a thousand pictures.

Radio prepared me for Shakespeare. It's a fact that when Londoners crossed the Thames to attend the Globe, they did not go to "see" a play; they went to "hear" a play. There's a world of difference between seeing and hearing. When we "see" a movie, 90% of the information comes to us through the eye. In a Shakespeare play, it's exactly the opposite -- 90%, or more, of the information comes to us by way of the ear -- which is why recordings of Shakespeare's plays can be so entirely successful and so true to the original intent. And because the plays are primarily oral, with their big speeches and complicated rhetorical patterning and brilliant displays of verbal acuity, they can also be larger-than-life -- and they can be heroic. Shakespeare's plays are closer to radio than they are to any other modern literary form. Those of us who grew up with radio bring to Shakespeare an intuitive understanding of oral forms that precede television, film, and even precede the theater itself  -- especially decadent modern theater with its compulsive and distracting visual distortions.   

Shakespeare and Dogs

In a recent post, I casually mentioned that William Shakespeare was not fond of dogs and I offered as evidence the fact that the two villainous sisters in King Lear are called "dog-hearted daughters." Not convincing, says one of my readers. Is that so? Well, let me offer further evidence of dog-heartedness. Shakespeare's first true villain, Richard of Gloucester, is metaphorically speaking, a dog. According to the legend, which the character himself embraces and flaunts, Richard was born with a full set of teeth "which plainly signified/ That I should snarl and bite and play the dog." Not a tractable or ingratiating dog either, but one who is both treacherous and poisonous: "when he fawns, he bites; and when he bites,/ His venom tooth will rankle to the death." At the end of Richard III, when Richard is killed at the climactic battle of Bosworth Field, his heroic Tudor successor Henry Richmond proclaims victory in these words: "God and your arms be praised, victorious friends,/ The day is ours, the bloody dog is dead."  So here's a pretty pack of hounds: Goneril, Regan, and Richard of Gloucester. And yet one more villain -- Iago in Othello: "O damn'd Iago. O inhuman dog." 

In the Shakespearian universe, villains are regularly described as dogs, but dogs are never, ever, characterized as loyal, or affectionate, or helpful. They're anything but our newspaper-fetching friends.  On the contrary, dogs are "base," "unmanner'd," "thievish," "mangy," "hellish," "whoreson," "coward," "rascal," and "bloody." Shakespeare often uses the dysphemism "cur" for dog. Curs are "mongrel," "cruel-hearted," "o'erweening," "whoreson indistinguishable," and "venom-mouth'd." Hounds, highly regarded by some for their hunting ability, are "false" or "fell and cruel." Both Richard of Gloucester and Macbeth are "hell-hounds." Shakespeare's dogs are regularly associated with disorder, violence and evil;  everyone knows Mark Anthony's "Cry 'havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war."

Shakespeare draws upon dogs when he wants to describe an uncivilized and wild world. Henry IV fears what England will become when his undisciplined son succeeds him: "For the fifth Harry from curb'd license plucks/ The muzzle of restraint, and the wild dog/ Shall flesh his tooth on every innocent." Dogs are untrustworthy, because they are "easily won to fawn on any man." "They turn... As dogs upon their masters." When the conspirators murdered Caesar, they "fawn'd like hounds,/  And bowed like bondsmen, kissing Caesar's feet;/ Whilst damned Casca, like a cur, behind/ Struck Caesar on the neck." Dogs are not only disloyal, they're disgusting as well. In The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth, Archbishop Scroop complains that the common people are no more loyal to Henry than they were to his predecessor Richard II. "So, thou (i.e. the people) common dog, did'st thou disgorge/ Thy glutton bosom of the royal Richard./ And thou would'st eat thy dead vomit up,/ And howl'st to find it." 

Shakespeare knew his dogs and had their names at his finger tips. Macbeth runs through a catalog:  "hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs/ Shoughs, water-rugs and demi-wolves, are clept/ All by the name of dogs." Mad Edgar, in Lear, makes a similar list: "Be thy mouth or black or white,/ Tooth that poisons if it bite;/ Mastiff, greyhound, mongrel grim./ Hound or spaniel, brach or lym,/ Bobtail tyke or trundle tail." Shakespeare had a particular and peculiar dislike of fawning dogs, whom (as was first noticed by Walter Whiter in 1794) he lumps together with (strange as it seems) candy or sweets, and images of melting. When Hotspur thinks back to an early encounter with the future King Henry IV, he remembers "Why, what a candy deal of courtesy, this fawning greyhound then did proffer me." In Anthony and Cleopatra, Anthony realizes that his followers are abandoning him; he laments that "the hearts/ That spaniel'd me at heels, to whom I gave/ Their wishes, do discandy, Melt their sweets/ On blossoming Caesar; and this pine is bark'd/ That overtopp'd them all." Flattering dogs and sweets are bound so closely in Shakespeare's subconscious that sometimes the dog is implicit rather than explicit. Hamlet to Horatio: "Why should the poor be flattered./ No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp,/ And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee,/ Where thrift  [i.e. advantage] may follow fawning." A reader who is familiar with Shakespeare's imagination can detect the ghost of a fawning spaniel behind that "candied tongue." The ghost of a ghost is there also in King Lear, where Lear, in his madness, imagines that he surrounded by a pack of hounds: "The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me." 

Did Shakespeare suffer some traumatic childhood event involving dogs and candy? It has been so suspected?  Whether yea nor nay, it's more than clear that Shakespeare's loathing of dogs was not of the surface; it was a deep and elemental revulsion. 

Bush Read "Three Shakespeares"

More outrageous even than "mission accomplished" is the absurd claim that, during 2006, our very own president, George W. Bush, has read fifty-three books. It's a fool's game to try to re-invent the class dunce as an intellectual, but they're trying.

There's some incriminating videotape floating around the "internets" in which POTUS, heretofore known to devour only the box scores, boasts that he's an "ek-a-lek-tic" (his pronunciation!) reader. Not only has he been laying into Camus, he's also read "three Shakespeares." He's both full o' shit and unidiomatic. Native speakers of English don't say "three Shakespeares"; they say they've read "three Shakespeare plays."  Next the Great Decider will tell us he's just hustled over to the Kennedy Center where he listened to three Bachs.

The White House press office has supplied the names of two of the plays to which Bush lays claim  -- Hamlet and Macbeth. Was there a third play?  If there was, it's name, like the third murderer and the fabulous WMDs, is lost to history.   

If W. had actually turned the pages of Hamlet and Macbeth, he might have noticed that in both plays, a bad man has become head of state by extralegal means.  Claudius poured a bit of poison into the ears of Hamlet's father and Macbeth stabbed Duncan. Neither ruler thrives in his ill-gained position, and neither has been able to repent his evil deed. Claudius can't bring himself to pray and Macbeth's way has fallen into the sere and yellow leaf. Fat chance that our unelected president would notice the parallel to his own situation -- or that he would be moved to repentance and renunciation. In the world of literature, there's justice:  Claudius is run through with a sword and Macbeth is beheaded. No such luck in real life.

And what about the mysterious third play that the Uniter claims to have read?  If he were looking for parallels to his own career, he could flatter himself by reading one of the three plays that dramatize the life of King Henry V, in which a scapegrace prince reforms, gives up alcohol and screwing around, and becomes the conqueror of France. The parallel is inexact, because Henry enjoyed some traits of character that George distinctly lacks: courage, eloquence, and the willingness to endure the same hardships as the soldiers who serve under him. A better parallel to George II is the succeeding Henry-- Henry VI-- a pious, immature, weak man unable to control his powerful advisers.

In truth, the character in the thirty-seven "Shakespeares" whom Bush most resembles is neither Claudius, Macbeth, nor either of the Henrys, but Lepidus in Anthony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare depicts Lepidus as a man who's happened into a position far beyond his natural abilities. He's way over his head in the Second Triumvirate, not at all of the stature of the heroic but flawed Anthony or the efficient, masterful Caesar. Even the servants recognize that Lepidus is simply bush-league. One of them tells the audience that "to be called into a huge sphere, and not to be seen to move in't, are the holes where eyes should be, which pitifully disaster the cheeks."  This is a bit of Shakespearean obscurity certainly beyond the budding intellectuality of incurious George. It means simply that Lepidus must fill a position as huge as a Ptolemaic sphere, but he can't because he's tiny and makes no impression at all, and as a consequence his circle is as vacant as an eye-socket that lacks an eye. Shakespeare does not think well of Lepidus and soon allows him to be carried off the stage, drunk. So much for morally and intellectually pitiful men who try to play with the big boys! 

Bush might be even less than a Lepidus, who, when he's not drunk, speaks plainly enough. Perhaps a better comparison is to one of Shakespeare's braggart soldiers, like Parolles in All's Well That Ends Well, or to one of the malapropizing clowns -- as for example Much Ado About Nothing's Dogberry.  Dogberry is given to such Bushlingo moments as "is our whole dissembly appeared" and "be vigitant."  And other illiteracies.  But it was beyond even Shakespeare to imagine a world in which a clown could become head of state.  To him, such a reversal of the natural order would have been unthinkable.      

A Rare Baseball-Shakespeare Confluence

It's not often that there's an intersection of the disparate universes of Shakespeare and baseball. Yet even such distant areas of experience occasionally overlap.

A contributor to a Shakespeare discussion group of which I am a member recently wrote about Jim Bouton's Ball Four (1970) (a very good baseball book), "Like Bill Bradley's excellent Life on the Road, it was written from the player's perspective." If I remember correctly from my own reading, it neither sensationalized nor glamorized professional athletics.

This Shakespeare correspondent had "recently read Howard Bryant's earnest history of baseball in the 1990s called Juicing the Game (Viking, 2005) and was reminded that Ball Four did not make Bouton's fellow ballplayers happy." "Bouton revealed to the world what most everyone in baseball already knew, and what most people outside it suspected: Players took amphetamines.... They had girls in different cities.'  Ball Four sold two million copies but Bouton himself was ostracized and eventually harassed out of baseball."

Now comes the baseball-Shakespeare confluence. Juicing the Game reports that sometime after Ball Four appeared, Bouton was "on the mound against Cincinnati... when he heard the voice of Pete Rose bellowing from the top step of the dugout, 'Fuck you, Shakespeare'. Literary criticism has seldom been more explicit."   

It's a good story, but the correspondent to the Shakespeare list does not fully explicate its significance. "Fuck you, Shakespeare" uses the epithet "Shakespeare" as a generic term for a writer -- almost as though Pete Rose could not think of the name of any other author. Under ordinary circumstances, to call someone a Shakespeare would be laudatory. This particular usage is either a very uncommon or a unique instance of the epithet serving as a term of derogation. In a way, it's a tribute to Shakespeare's prominence. "Fuck you, Flaubert," had such words been bellowed by Pete Rose, would have carried a dissimilar valence.

I myself feel confident in surmising that Rose's acquaintance with Shakespearean drama -- and with the written word in general -- is less than profound. No one, even those who vastly admired the convicted rapscallion's skill with the bat, has ever confused 'Charley Hustle' with 'Bertie' Russell or Charley Dickens.

"Fuck you, Shakespeare" reminds me of two of my favorite baseball/intelligence anecdotes. The first is the laudatory evaluation of Yale-educated Yankee pitcher Ron Darling by his teammate, center-fielder Mickey Rivers: "he knows the answers to things what I don't even know the question of."  A second anecdote has a similar valence. I 'll call the participants in the following genuine conversation Player A and Player B because I no longer recall who they were (although I do remember that both were Yankees). Player A: "That guy is a total idiot." Player B: "What are you saying? He has an IQ of a hundred thirty." Player A: "Yeah?  Outta what?"

May 9.  My brother Jon called to say that Ron Darling never played for the Yankees. He hypothesizes a memory failure on my part: Darling was with the Mets and the center-fielder in question therefore must have been Mookie Wilson (former Rockies outfielder Preston Wilson's uncle and stepfather [note Hamlet reference] and the man who hit the grounder that went through Bill Buckner's legs). But the identification of Darling's admirer isn't crucial; let's just agree that he was someone with the linguistic competence of a Pete Rose.

Reduplicatives

Reduplicatives, sometimes called "echo words," or "echo phrases" are formulations such as hobnob, pell-mell, herky-jerky, hoity-toity, itsy-bitsy, niminy-piminy.

In English, there are two principal classes of reduplicatives. Category one consists of rhymes such as hodge-podge, willy-nilly, helter-skelter, kowtow, harum-scarum, jeepers-creepers, okey-dokey, heebie-jeebie, gang-bang, hocus-pocus (reputed to derive from the words of the Latin mass:  hoc est corpus meum);  the second category contains words that are formed by ablaut or vowel shift, such as ping-pong, shilly-shally, zig-zag, bibble-babble, pitter-patter, splish-splash, flim-flam.

There are also some lovely oddities that resist classification: dipsy-doodle, topsy-turvey, hunky-dory, tilly-valley, and, at the outer limit, hullabaloo.

Of the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of reduplicatives, almost all are comprised of one or two syllables, but there are occasional threes: higgledy-piggledy, jiggery-pokery. To the best of my knowledge, there are no four-syllable reduplicatives. 

Many are diminutives or are dismissive: hanky-panky, namby-pamby, claptrap, mumbo-jumbo.

The language continues to generate reduplicatives. Some now common reduplicatives were unknown to my youth: Maui-wowie, boob-tube, creature-feature (a horror movie), fender-bender, gender-bender, chick-flick, AC-DC, fag-hag, chop-shop (a place where stolen cars are cut into parts), brain-drain, artsy-fartsy.

But reduplicatives are as old as the language. Shakespeare, who was fond of reduplicatives, used them not just for comic effect, but at critical dramatic moments. Some well-known examples: the weird sisters in Macbeth will meet again "When the hurly-burly's done,/ When the battle's lost and won." "Hurly-burly" signals the sisters' contempt for human effort. In Hamlet, Claudius admits that it was a mistake to bury Polonius in secret haste: "we have done but greenly/ In hugger-mugger to inter him."  The Catholic Hotspur (in The First Part of King Henry the Fourth) complains that the great pagan magician Glendower speaks "such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff/ As puts me from my faith."  A less famous but still wonderful reduplicative appears in All's Well That Ends Well, where the braggart soldier Parolles argues in purple pentameters that his young master Bertram should abandon his bride and go the wars:  "He wears his honor in a box unseen,/ That hugs his kicky-wicky here at home,/Spending his manly marrow in her arms,/ Which should sustain the bound and high curvet/ Of Mar's fiery steed."  The rare "kicky-wicky," which some derive from French quelque chose, is brutally insulting.         

Three men come into a restaurant: one is from Walla-Walla, one from Pago-Pago, and one from Ryukyu. They order cous-cous, mahi-mahi, and a kiwi salad. They ask the mu-mu clad waitress (who suffers from beri-beri) about the quality of the food. In some versions of this edifying story, she replies, "So-so."  What else might she have said?

Why an Old Humanist Sometimes Feels That the World Has Changed

Here's the description of a project posted on a literary website by (I'm guessing) a young Shakespeare scholar: "I want to create a comprehensive XML schema for Shakespeare's plays, and then apply the schema in an online prototype. The schema will conform to TEI standards where possible and appropriate, and exceed them where necessary. Creating a DTD will not give us the versatility we want, so we have moved to a schema instead."

"XML schema?"  "TEI standards?"  "DTD?"  What language are we speaking? 

Beethoven Manuscript; Missing Shakespeare Play

The latest New Yorker reports the discovery of a long-lost manuscript by Beethoven. It's not a new piece, but an arrangement for piano, four hands, of the composer’s “Grosse Fuge,” or “Great Fugue,” -- which is one of the most exciting and challenging pieces of music in the known universe. The manuscript was sold at Sotheby's in December to an unnamed buyer for $1.95 million. I know the Grosse Fuge very well in the form of a string quartet; I would love to hear the four-hand piano version sometime soon.

The Beethoven discovery renews my hope that some day another long-lost item will re-emerge -- the Shakespeare play that's been missing for just about four hundred years.

In 1598, Francis Meres compiled a list of the plays of Shakespeare that were known to him: he mentioned, among a dozen others, Shakespeare's "Loue Labors lost, [and] his Loues labours wonne." No one gave much credence to Meres, who was thought to have hallucinated the second play, until 1953, when a book by Thomas Gataker called Certaine Sermons (1637) was rebound and two sheets of paper covered with Elizabethan handwriting were discovered in the backing. The papers were part of the ledger of an otherwise unknown stationer in Exeter and listed the books that were in his stock in August, 1603. Among them: "marchant of vennis," "taming of a shrew," "loves labor lost" and "loves labor won."  So Meres was right all along; Shakespeare had in truth written a play called Love's Labor's Won. And it had been published. But the play must have soon disappeared because the diligent compilers of the great 1623 Folio either didn't know of it or couldn't locate a copy.

It's possible that the play has vanished into oblivion, but it's also possible that a copy lies in a closet, drawer or vault. The Beethoven fugue was found by a librarian who was cleaning a cabinet at the Palmer Theological Seminary in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania  -- how the manuscript found its way to that location is anyone's guess. The Thomas Malory manuscript -- one of the most important literary discoveries of the last century -- was lying unidentified in plain sight on top of a safe in Winchester Cathedral. So it's not at all impossible that a quarto of Love's Labor's Won still lurks somewhere, waiting. 

There are some other Shakespeare items of interest (and no doubt of monetary value) that might also resurface. There's the missing quarto zero (Q0) of The First Part of King Henry the Fourth (only a few pages of which are known, and then only because they were accidentally bound into a copy of a later quarto); there's Cardenio (co-authored with John Fletcher), which was probably Shakespeare's last effort; there might also be a fuller manuscript version of Macbeth (the Folio play seems to have been deliberately shortened for provincial performance).  Also of interest: the anonymous Hamlet that was written a decade or so before Shakespeare's, and which the playwright used as the basis of his revision. Only a single line of the earlier play has survived: the ghost is known to have cried, as shrilly as a street-seller of oysters, "Hamlet, revenge." 

Phrasal Verbs: Put .*.

The caprice of phrasal verbs (formerly called verb-adverb combinations) came to my conscious attention sometime in the 1950s, when I first read Mansfield Park. Fanny Price, the heroine, is lying on a couch; her sailor brother William cries, "Poor Fanny!... how soon she is knocked up! Why, the sport is but just begun. I hope we shall keep it up these two hours." I was shocked. In the P. S. 217 schoolyard where I learned my English, "knocked up" had one and only one definition: made pregnant. There could be no doubt-- especially when the meaning of knocked up was confirmed by such transparent sexual equivocations as "sport," and "keep it up these two hours."  When did proper Fanny Price find time to get herself knocked up and how could I have been so inattentive a reader as not to notice?  And where did Jane Austen learn schoolyard slang?

How in the world was I to know that in nineteenth-century England, "knocked up" was an innocent phrasal verb that meant "tired."

Phrasal verbs are treacherous. There's nothing in the basic definitions of either "knock" or "up" that yields tired (or pregnant either, for that matter).

I was equally confused when Othello, quelling a disturbance, commanded the contending parties to "Put up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them." Inasmuch as I wasn't familiar with the phrasal verb, "put up," which means "sheathe," I guessed that "put up" meant its exact opposite -- "brandish." "Put up" is misleading: what's "up" about sheathe?

Just as there is nothing "up" about "up", there is nothing "out" about the "out" in "put out." The meaning that I knew was the demotic one to which my dictionary provides the formal "to indulge in promiscuous sexual intercourse." A woman who puts out can get herself knocked up. But "put out" has other equally unpredictable meanings: "make an effort," for one, and "annoyed" ("I was put out by his use of verbs") for another. Moreover, a person who's put out, can also be "put off," or dissuaded; "put on," or deceived; "put up," or lodged; "put up with," or tolerated; "put down," or harshly criticized. A person can be persuasive and "put across" a point, or be insane and be "put away" in an institution, or can be frugal and "put by" money for a rainy day; or can be gullible and "put upon."  Phrasal verbs are exceedingly nasty little critters, and they must drive English language learners off their collective gourds. 

Next week; same time, same station: got .*.   

The Replacement Child: Juliet

In the narrowest definition, a "replacement child" is a being who is intentionally conceived because an older sibling has recently died. Such substitutes must endure the lifetime burden of competing with a lost and often idealized child. Because it is almost impossible for them to please their parents, they easily become confused and frustrated, or worse.

Here's a dry summary from a learned journal: "When bereaved parents give birth to a child or children subsequent to a perinatal death, their constructions of the family necessarily change. The subsequent child is thought to be at risk of psychopathology (the replacement child syndrome) if parents have not sufficiently grieved their losses."  "At risk of psychopathology" is a hesitant, euphemistic formulation. 

The term "replacement child" has also been defined more broadly: it may, for example, refer to any child in a family that has lost one or more of its offspring (rather than solely to one conceived as a direct consequence of a death). In an even larger sense of the term, there are all kinds of 'symbolic' replacements: one psychologist has gone so far as to suggest that any Jewish child born after the European holocaust should be so considered. This idea seems extreme.

In pre-industrial societies, replacement children received no particular notice because infant deaths were so very commonplace. While there must be many replacement children in traditional literature, the earliest who comes to mind is Juliet in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, which was written in 1595. 

Juliet's biological mother is aloof and distant, but she has a second and more loving parent -- her nurse -- who does much of the actual work of mothering. The nurse has lost her own daughter, Susan, and has become wet-nurse to Juliet. "Susan and she -- God rest all Christian souls --/Were of an age. Well, Susan is with God;/ She was too good for me." Clearly, Shakespeare suggests, Susan has been idealized in her natural mother's mind. The Nurse has a replacement child in Juliet, a state of being that goes far to explain the profound bond between surrogate mother and surrogate daughter.

It is uncharacteristic of Shakespeare to discuss the infancy of his heroines, nor can I think of any other pre-modern work that devotes so much space to wet-nursing or to the trauma of weaning. Although he depicts in detail the relationship between Juliet and her nurse, Shakespeare does not seem to anticipate or foreshadow the interest that later centuries would take in the replacement child syndrome. Instead, he focuses on Juliet's sexual alacrity.

The nurse tells a pertinent story (and leaves us with the impression that she has told it many times before): when Juliet had just learned to walk, she fell and "broke her brow"-- cut her forehead, as we would say. "And then my husband --God be with his soul,/ He was a merry man--took up the child,/ 'Yea,' quoth he, 'dost thou fall upon thy face?/ Thou wilt fall backward when thou has more wit,/ Wilt thou not, Jule?'  And by my holidame,/ The pretty wretch left crying and said 'ay.'"  "Falling backward" is bawdy talk for a woman's posture in sexual intercourse. Retelling her husband's tale, the Nurse dramatizes her expectation that when Juliet comes of age, or "has more wit," she will be eager to fall backward. To this proposition Juliet -- "the pretty wretch"-- says 'Ay.'  Juliet's personal psychology, Shakespeare seems to hint, formed itself to gratify the suggestions of her surrogate mother.

The vigorous sexuality that might be appropriate for the nurse's natural daughter Susan, who would have been a servant girl, has been transferred to the bourgeois Juliet, who, if she had followed the example of her birth mother, would have been properly restrained, repressed, and diffident. In effect, the nurse contrives to live her own desires through her replacement child; the result is Juliet's sexual impetuosity and subsequent death.

William Shakespeare was born in 1564, but an older sister Joan was baptized in 1558 and another, Margaret, in 1562. Both died in infancy. The future playwright was therefore doubly a replacement child.

There's an additional complexity in the family drama because the infants he replaced were female. How this oddity affected his own psychological development is open to speculation. Perhaps because he was the oldest son in a family that had lost two daughters, he was especially cherished. Or perhaps a boy who replaced girls developed the empathy to create complex female characters in an English drama that, until Juliet, had limited itself strictly to one-dimensional stereotypes.