Shakespeare: The Sonnets

Shakespeare's Sonnets are famous for clever, moving, haunting and melancholy rhymes. But they are equally famous for the unsettled controversies that have swirled around them for at least the last 150 years or so.
Some say the "young man" whom Shakespeare urges to marry and have children is one of two Earls: the first candidate being Henry Wroithsley, Earl of Southampton, who was without question the nobleman Shakespeare dedicated his two long poems "The Rape of Lucrece" and "Venus and Adonis".

Those two major poems were likely written between 1593 and 1594, when the theatres in London were closed due to fear of plagues and a time when, historians surmise, Shakespeare was in unusual need for a well-off patron. Legend has it that Southampton rewarded the Stratford poet with a enough money to buy a major share in his theatrical company, the only playwright of his time to have such a benefit.

It is thought by the major Elizabethan historian, A.W. Rowse ,that Shakespeare wrote his admiring poems to Southampton at a time when he was smitten by the younger man, an appreciation which was reciprocated for a time by the nobleman until a rival poet (possibly Christopher Marlowe) stole the Earl's affections until his death in 1593.

Others say the beloved earl was an even younger man, the Earl of Pembroke, who was the object of the poet's attraction. That earl, William Herbert by another name, was also the man that the actors John Hennings and Henry Condell dedicated The First Folio to when it was published some six years after their fellow player (and company playwright's) death in 1616.

SONNET 130
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.




There is also mention of a "dark mistress" in the later poems. The identity is also controversial, some like George Bernard Shaw thought that the lady was Mary Fitton, a future wife of William Herbert and a mistress-in-waiting at Queen Elizabeth's Court.

Rowse however believed with some serious evidence in his book "Shakespeare the Man" (1971) that the mistress whose "eyes were nothing like the sun" (Sonnet 130) was Emilea Bassano Lanier, a woman who also married well (quite a few times in fact) and was once the mistress of Lord Hunsdon, the man who was the patron of Shakespeare's theatrical company, the Lord Chamberlain's men. She was also a published poet herself --unusual for that time and place,and maybe a clue as to why Shakespeare was so taken with her. (for more, see link below)


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emilia_Lanier

David Gilmour (Shakespeare's Sonnet 18)

The former "Pink Floyd" band-mate, recording producer, solo artist and philanthropist performs one of Shakespeare's best-loved sonnets.

Visions of Shakespeare's "Othello"

(below,  the great American actor Paul Robeson and Peggy Ashcroft in a scene from the London, 1930 production of Othello in London.) 

 

 

"Othello" was likely written by Shakespeare sometime around 1604, at least that is when it was recorded as being first performed.  It is taken from a short story by an Italian writer named Giraldi Cinthio, but seems considerably improved by the playwright based on the available English version, which is rather a rambling and disjointed tale.  A friend of mine who has studied Italian literature called the story a "hack job".

Shakespeare's "Othello" is direct and precise by contrast---we see a story set in Venice and later in Cyprus of a great general who is a Moor and a converted Christian who does great service to the Venetian Republic.  Despite his great travails of a life in exotic places and in countless battles,  he is taken in by Iago, a villain of rare power who seemingly  is willing to destroy all those around Othello and then himself and will do anything and use anyone--even his own wife, Emilia--to set the course of this evil plot involving a misplaced handkerchief, invidious gossip,  false and misleading interpretations of simple chivalrous gestures, and literal back-stabbing of his fellow officers.

Iago knows the weaknesses of all those around him, and yet no one suspects him until they are wounded or wronged beyond measure.    

What drives Iago? Is it just because he is an ensign and is past up for promotion to lieutenant by a younger man, Cassio? It hardly seems enough of a reason to justify the deviousness and malice in the way Iago takes advantage of Othello's trust and twists him into a terrible crime.  

A lot of theories are out there about this--racism, sexual attraction to either Desdemona or maybe Othello himself, but Shakespeare doesn't seem to me to be too worried about any specific reason.  Othello is a great man with a gaping blind spot for the virtue of his new wife,  and so his fall will be pitied because it is from such a height  that the falls, and that, unlike, say, Hamlet who doubts everybody, the Moor's inherent trust in Iago is so abused.  

I wondered when I last read this play if Iago is,simply,  evil for the sake of being evil. This makes the play perhaps the most modern of the great tragedies of Shakespeare--we live in a world where sociopaths and serial killers haunt our media.  Like the scorpion in Franz Kafka's  fable from "The Trial" about the reptile killing a frog while on his back in the middle of a stream, even though the scorpion himself will die. It is just Iago's nature and no explanation therefore could be seen as having a purpose.  How else, perhaps,  to explain the speech here by Kenneth Branagh in a 1995 version of the play:   

 

Here is from the Third Scene of the First Act, where Othello speaks to the Venetian Senate and his new father-in-law, Brabentio, a worthy of the city, on how he and the older man's daughter were secretly wed.  This is from Orson Welles' 1952 version, and it also my favorite speech in the play.          

 

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Nonfiction
Author:	James Shapiro

"So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee".--Sonnet 18

From the introduction to the book, written by the author, a Columbia University English Literature Professor:

"I spent 15 years on my previous book ["A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599"] ... and I thought by the time I finished that I kind of put the authorship question to rest, because I put what Shakespeare had done in a well-documented year," Shapiro said. "But ... I went into one of those schools where I was doing outreach, and early on in the book I talk about a fourth-grader whose brother had told him Shakespeare hadn't written his works, and I was really at a loss. How do you argue with an 11-year-old? And had it really trickled down that far?"


This book goes over the so-called "Shakespeare controversy" that grew out of mainly pseudo-scholars--some intelligent and influential, some just daffy-- trying to prove that William Shakespeare didn't write the plays and sonnets attributed to him.Shapiro devotes the first 200 pages of the book laying out the history of this controversy and then the last fifty pages or so demolishing it. There is simply no serious evidence of any conspiracy to use "the Stratford Man" as a "front" for a patron of the court of Elizabeth or James to write plays. We now know that Shakespeare collaborated on some plays in the beginning and the end of his career, most famously at the end with John Fletcher and a couple others on parts of "Pericles, Prince of Tyre", "Timom of Athens", "Henry VIII", etc.

He also very likely wrote part of an unfinished play on Sir Thomas More--a copy of which may have some 80 lines written in his own hand. Also, some earlier plays of his like the "Henry VI" trilogy might have been doctored by him to help an inferior hand who had first crack at a commercial play.


And never forget Shakespeare was a commercial writer, not a guy just using the medium of the early English stage for dropping clues about his earlier life. He drew on history or comedy or plays of revenge and tragedy because they made money, not because it was part of his own Stratford or London experiences.

The trouble concerning "the authorship question" started in earnest in the 19th Century when Shakespeare's best plays became more and more the standard by which all other playwrights were measured. It was then that a great deal of searching bout for records of the man himself began. What was found was generally discouraging--no diaries, no "foul papers" (original copies of the plays in the author's hands, et al).

The records that were available on William Shakespeare were not that remarkable, either. Some legal documents, a marriage license, his will, some court testimony in a breach of promise case, et al. Nothing exciting. His books were not mentioned in his will. He sued people and dealt in other petty legal affairs. (Or perhaps his wife did in his name, but no matter.)

For some reason all the other evidence--that Shakespeare's contemporaries like Ben Jonson referred to him as a writer in their contribution to the First Folio, that King James made his company The King's Men and his plays bore his name in the royal records and in the bookstalls around St. Paul's Cathedral--all that wasn't enough. "Absence of evidence" became "evidence of absence." Besides, how could a guy like our William write such plays if he didn't have a Oxford or Cambridge education. No matter that his teachers at the school in Stratford he attended were all university educated and anyone of those could have recognized his talents and encouraged him. Or that he might have had access to a library in his "lost years" and got many idea for his early plays while serving as a private tutor in a wealthy family home. Or that Shakespeare simply hounded the bookstalls of London and absorbed information and background the way great minds can do. That's not enough.

Even those who kept diaries that were extant and mentioned great skills as a playwright and poet (like the Oxford student Francis Meres,who mentions a dozen of his plays and his "sugared" sonnets) or the famous "Upstart Crow" criticism of Shakespeare from a dying playwright Robert Greene wasn't enough to stop the sub-culture of amateur literary detectives who labeled the "Stratford Man" a fraud and proposed others for the mantle of the great writer.

Candidates for this post included for a time (1) Francis Bacon, the philosopher and statesman (2) Christopher Marlowe, the second most famous play writer of his day, whose certain death and possible murder in 1593 was, for some, a clever ruse to go on writing plays outside England and mailing them to Shakespeare's Lord Chamberlain's Men for performance. (For what reason? Well, I'm sure there is one.)

And (3) the most popular fellow for the conspiracy--Edward DeVere, 16th Earl of Oxford. All these three men had university educations and, to give Oxford a boost, he was a nobleman and, so the thinking goes, how could anyone but a nobleman write plays about kings and such. Plus he was once captured by pirates (as "Hamlet" was!) and had three daughters (as King Lear did!) so it all fits together, right? Case closed. (Except that Oxford died in 1604, and Shakespeare still had to write "Macbeth", "Lear", "The Tempest", et al ). Hmmm. That's a bit of a stretch.

Well, Sigmund Freud thought so, thanks to the books of a fellow named James Looney (rhymes with 'bony') and Mark Twain thought so and other celebrated people. (It's odd to me that an autodidact like Twain would come to think this way, but he felt strongly that a writer could only write what he experienced. His last book was a defense of the Baconian cause, "Is Shakespeare Dead". According to Shapiro, Twain took great stock that a cipher decoding system would reveal Bacon as the author. Whatever that cipher was never amounted to anything.)


Even modern celebrities like Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance buy this idea.

Well, as Shapiro talks about in the book--a funny thing happened to how we view literature from the Age of Elizabeth and James to the last 120-odd years of the modern era. That something is that writers write what they experience directly and all writing is in some way autobiographical. "The fact," as Shapiro writes, "is even if Shakespeare occasionally drew in his poems and plays on personal experiences, and i don't know that he did, I don't see how anyone can know with any confidence when and where he does so...It's wiser to accept that these experiences can no longer be recovered" (page 269).

this is an interesting read I think for both those who enjoy the plays of William Shakespeare of Stratford, the glover's son who made good, and those who enjoy the ida of a mystery to be solved, even if the solution in this case was already known and everything else a large school of false leads.

I leave the last words to Laura Miller in her review of this same book for Salon.com. :

"We now live in a self-reflexive, autobiographical age. Shakespeare did not. We long to see ourselves in him, but, as Shapiro writes, "the greatest anachronism of all [lies] in assuming that people have always experienced the world the same way we ourselves do." When he finally gets around to laying out the evidence for Shakespeare as Shakespeare, Shapiro makes the excellent argument that, despite the anti-Stratfordians' contempt for what (Henry) James called the "supremely vulgar" life of a professional actor, it just might have been the perfect preparation for the author of those immortal plays and poems. Whatever the actor's profession lacked in breadth of experience, it surely made up in its embrace of the imagination. Who else makes a regular habit of imagining himself into other people's skins?"

ORSON WELLES as Shakespeare's FALSTAFF, Dean Martin Show 1968

A wonderful and rare moment in a variety television show. Orson Welles reciting the "sheeri-sack" speech from Shakespeare's "Henry IV, Part Two" from Act Four of the great Elizabethan history play.

As a young writer/director, Welles redacted five of Shakespeare's plays--two featuring the mischief-making reprobate Sir John Falstaff--into a late 1930's Broadway production called "Five Kings".

After playing all of Shakespeare's great tragic characters--save "Hamlet"--either on stage, screen or television in between, he played the "fat knight" himself in his own favorite film "Chimes at Midnight" (1964). Here he is four years later on his friend Dean Martin's program, recreating a brief bit of his original theatrical genius for millions of viewers.

"Hamlet" --Setting Things Right Despite Cursed Spite (But Not Quite)

Walking into the theater to see a recent production of Hamlet at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I was surprised to find an actor already on stage a full fifteen minutes before the play was scheduled to begin. (see photo, left.)

Hamlet (Don Donohue) is seated by himself on a stage made up as representing a chapel.  A casket with the flag of Denmark is at the front of the stage.  It s clear the production has added a silent prologue--the son of the warrior King Hamlet, sitting all alone after the funeral of his father.  As the "curtain time" draws nearer, other actors come in and out taking the chairs about the young man away into some backstage area.  It is clear there has been a service for the monarch, and clearer that the son is in no hurry to part from his father.  At last, he gets up and walks over to the casket,touches it gently, and then departs. An effective opening I think.

And so the play begins.

The contemporary staging of "Hamlet" had a few things I had never seen in previous productions.  The Ghost was played by a deaf actor (Howie Seago) who give his lines in American sign language, with Hamlet saying them aloud for the benefit of the audience while "signing" with his father . The only words the ghost spoke in any of his scenes was"List, O List!" in an awkward and tormented  way that made the words convey an extra measure of agony for their being cried out by a man presumably deaf for a long, long time.  

 There was also the matter of the travelling players. The play they perform, "The Murder of Gonzogo", with some additional lines from Hamlet himself, was done as a hip-hop production.  At first this was jarring to me, but soon it did make sense--this play has a sense of modernity about it that makes it easily transformable to modern times.  If this is a modern Kingdom of Denmark in some parallel world we would expect modern performance styles from a small troupe of "players".

   Secrecy, artifice and surveillance are a major part of the play.  The guards are dressed like modern security officers. Claudius' chief spymaster, of course,  is his minister Polonius (Richard Elmore) , who also provides a good deal of the comic relief with his verbosity and long-winded advice to his two offspring, Ophelia (Susannah Flood) and Laertes. Since this is a modern rendering we get to see surveillance cameras about the palace and  at one point Polonius makes his daughter wear a "wire" to find out if Hamlet is really mad or playing at it.    

This play has a myriad number of  simple and complex themes running through it.  The internecine drama of people in high places scheming to undo their enemies carries us through Shakespeare's longest play like a guided missle. 

After all the productions I've seen, I confess I've never been quite able to make up my mind about the main character here---he seems to be equal parts scholar, militant, power-hungry, meloncholy, morose and fatalistic, spiritual and reasonable, misogynist and arch-romantic, crude and kind, angry and brutal, and most of all human.  It is said of Hamlet that he is like a real person who finds himself put down in a play.    Of that much I can agree in describing one of the most complex characters any playwright ever made. 

I've never seen a bad Hamlet or a mediorce production.  Olivier's film version is memorable, but so are so many others and the stage productions I've seen always leave me wondering what new twists and ideas will come from the next production.  

 

 

 

Ralph Vaughan Williams - Serenade to Music (original version for 16 soloists) part one

This is a cold Winter night where I am and this music--warm and serene--I hope will ease any heavy hearts.

One of the most beautiful shorter symphonic I've had the pleasure of hearing: composed in 1938 and performed for the first time at the Royal Albert Hall. it was composed by Williams as part of a jubilee concert for a friend, Sir Henry J Wood.
The words in the chorus come from Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice", specifically ACT V, Scene One where--after the drama of the trial featuring Shylock and Lorenzo's friend Antonio has concluded successfully (at least to the characters here) ---the lovers Lorenzo and Jessica are united and listening to beautiful music on a romantic evening in a country home called Belmont.
The lines from the singers here are taken from Lorenzo's lines in that act.

The first performance of "Serenade to Music" brought tears to the eyes of many in the Albert Hall, including one of Vaughan Williams and Sir John Wood's friends, the great Sergi Rachmaninov, who was present at the concert hall that evening after performing his Second Concerto in the first half of the program.

The Russian composer later wrote that he had never been so moved by music. The second half is also on You Tube.

The Taming of the Shrew - Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton-- Petruchio woos Katharina (1/2)

I thought I'd celebrate Ms. Elizabeth Taylor's apparently successful recent heart surgery by showing a clip from my favorite of the several films she made with her most famous past husband, Richard Burton.


This clip from the 1967 film (directed by Franco Zefferelli) features part of one of the most famous and funniest scenes (Act II, Scene I) of Shakespeare's play, written in 1594.

Katharina is an ill-tempered woman but the conceited nobleman, Petruchio, takes on the challenge of taming and marrying her. After a bad start, the suitor with his work cut out for him redoubles his efforts and uses some reverse psychology to win her heart. If you watch this scene carefully, you'll notice she at least starts to entertain the idea that he's a match for her.

I think this is one of Shakespeare's great "battle of the sexes" plays, right up with Beatrice and Benedict's verbal sparring from the comedy "Much Ado About Noting" and the heavy emoting and power-playing of Anthony and Cleopatra written about a decade after this work.

The film is sumptuous to look at, and has a great supporting cast, including Michael York as a young swain, Michael Horden as a befuddled father, and Victor Spinetti doing a fine comic turn as a harassed music tutor. However, if you want a more faithful adaptation of the play, I'd recommend looking for a DVD copy of the 1980 BBC version of the play with John Cleese and Sarah Badel, directed by Jonathan Miller.

"Equivocation": Shakespeare Has A Story To Tell....Or Else!

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	Bill Cain

"Why me?"

These are the first words of Bill Cain's new play, "Equivocation".


The speaker is none other than William Shakespeare, chief playwright of "The King's Men", the leading "theatrical cooperative" in London. It's early in the year 1606, and the middle-aged artist is at the top of his game, having written histories,comedies and tragedies for over a decade to much acclaim. But the man who has summoned him, Robert Cecil, Secretary of State for the Kingdom of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales under James I, does not want Will to write another play about long-dead nobility from The War of the Roses, or a farce about twins separated at birth or some play about an ancient Worthy like Julius Caesar.

That stuff won't cut it this time.

Shakespeare or "Shag" (played by Anthony Heald, a very good actor who you might have seen in films of playing a judge on the series "Boston Legal) is literally made an offer he can't refuse. His majesty elevated the company of players after he came down from Scotland to rule both kingdoms in 1603, right after the death of Queen Elizabeth, the lady who put his mother, Mary of Scotland, to death fifteen years earlier.

Lord Cecil, who is akin to a Prime Minister to James, is putting the heat on "Shag"--he and His Majesty want him to put off writing the next Globe Theater production ("King Lear') and write a new play about "The Gunpowder Plot." Here is a little background courtesy of a BBC documentary, featuring the fame historian and novelist Lady Antonia Fraser :




Cecil and the King want a play about this Catholic Plot to blow up the kings and his lords. But "Shag" doesn't want to write such a play. It was normally forbidden in Tudor/Stuart England to write about current events. He wants to play it safe, let someone other writer-- Henry Beaumont, John Fletcher, Robert Middleton, et al--write this little propaganda piece that the King has already outlined.

But there are plenty of empty cells in the Tower of London for reluctant playwrights who refuse a royal demand. Thomas Kyd--who wrote the famous "Spanish Tragedy"--had been tortured by 1593 in the Tower when he ran afoul of the authorities a few years earlier. So, rather than a stretch on the rack and a cold cell, Will takes Cecil's money and goes back to the company--headed by his friend and partner, Richard Burbage--and thus commences to write and later rehearse the "official story" of the "guilty" men who stand in the Tower for treason.

As Shakespeare goes about trying to work out the King's outline of the play, he starts finding inconsistencies and implausibilities. Cecil won't supply him with reasonable answers on how the act of terrorism was supposed to be carried out. Such as "all the traitors were gentlemen--what do they know about building a tunnel big enough to carry 36 barrels of gunpowder in the first place? And all this tunnelling would take place right under Cecil's own office? Who might really gain from the discovery of such a dastardly plot. And why would James be in such haa hurry to break precedent and makes this "news event"" a popular entertainment?

For the sake of dramatic tension, Shakespeare becomes an investigator, convincing Cecil to let him talk to some of the conspirators who await execution in the Tower. He begins to see there maybe a counter-narrative to the official story--perhaps the heretical conspirators were set in motion by a "Fifth Columnist" or "False Flag" operation engineered in the highest levels of Whitehall itself. (Similar in some ways to the Babington Plot of 1587 that conned Mary, Queen of Scots, into believing she was in communication with King Philip of Spain while a prisoner of her cousin, Elizabeth. That bit of spymaster dirty-dealing cost James' mother her head. )

"Equivocation" is a play that anyone interested in Jacobean history and power politics would love. And its very relevant giving the issues of torture by "good" governments and questions about terrorism in our own times. A good deal of the subplot is provided by Mr. Cain introducing Shakespeare's youngest daughter, Judith, as a character--a sort of female servant working with her dad and keeping things tidy around the Globe "tiring house" backstage.

Judith is as sharp as a whip, and adds a lot of much needed humor in the play by her witty soliloquies, but her very presence haunts her father at times: she is the twin of his only son, Hamnet, who died before he was ten. The loss of his son has, at least in this play, made Shakespeare a different man than the young poet who was happy to make Richard III a monster if it suited the Tudor Establishment. He is more willing to reach out to those who are in pain--such as a young man who was caught by Cecil's men and is being tortured to tell all of what--apparently little--he really knows.

Cain also does a good job incorporating conjectures about Shakespeare's possible Catholic sympathies--his father, John, may have entertained priests at one time in Stratford and some historians believe Will was a tutor in a Catholic recusant estate in Lancashire before he came to London. He also has a heart-to-heart meeting in the Tower with Henry Garnet, a Jesuit Priest and spy. Here's a bit of his Wikipedia bio:

"Garnet supervised the Jesuit mission for eighteen years with conspicuous success. His life was one of constant danger, concealment and disguises. A price was put on his head; but he was brave and indefatigable in carrying on his evangelization and in ministering to the scattered Catholics, even personally going into their prisons. The result was that he gained many converts, while the number of Jesuits in England increased during his tenure of office from three to forty. It is, however, in connection with the Gunpowder Plot that he is best remembered."

Garnet's emotional and intellectual resources make him similar to Sir Thomas Moore in Robert Bolt's "Man For All Seasons"--you have to respect him highly, even if you might not have agreed with most of what he believed were he brought back to life. But was he really part of any plot? Most historians seem to think so, but others disagree. It is for those who favor the latter group who will find the conclusions drawn by this work the most satisfying.

This play has won The Edgerton Foundation 2008 New American Plays Award and will have more stagings in Seattle and San Francisco apparently next year. I hope many people who love a good intriguing bit of off-beat history will get a chance to see this superb multi-level work.

And now a bit of background from the writer himself:

"Macbeth"-- Risk Taking and the Art of Sticking It to Others

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Other

I saw a recent production of "Macbeth" at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The play starred Peter Macon as the gallant and brave Scottish Thane who gets a bum steer from three witches in the smoky aftermath of the battle. Our Thane gets a couple of the witches' predictions fulfilled and he falls hook, line and sinker for the idea that he will be king. His friend, Banquo isn't so sure about these witches. He's the smart one.

Macbeth, as you might remember from school, then makes the mistake of going home to tell his wife. Lady Macbeth (Robin Goodwin Nordi) is as big a social climber as he is--maybe a little bigger.
Let's her what she has to say about getting ahead in Medieval Scotland


"Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts! unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty; make thick my blood,
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief!"

Talk about a desperate housewife! She does help him in his murderous affairs. And, as he loses his conscience, Lady Macbeth gets her own back. Of course, she also goes a mad, so in a way Macbeth and his wife sort of intersect in their character arcs. She kills herself, he gets morose, then he loses his head--literally.

Macbeth is a fun play to watch because it has a lot of action and sword play. The best scene in this play was when the actor playing MacDuff discovers that his wife and children have been killed by the tyrant Macbeth. The actor did it so well, playing the grieving family man now with no family, that it made one feel it couldn't have been done better.

Maybe not one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies--it was not popular in its time with playgoers apparently--but I'm sure the sorcery-obsessed James got a kick out of it.

Although the professional reviews were lukewarm for this production, I was impressed by the acting, the dark sets that were made up to look like old lava beds surrounding the battlefields and the castle set , and the way the witches, ghosts and demons were presented. This was the first time I had seen "The Scottish Play" in live theater. It was written in 1606, three years after King James VI of Scotland united Scotland and England as James I. Old King Jim was big on witchcraft and apparently wanted a play to celebrate the legitimacy of his reign and the successful discovery of the nefarious Gunpowder Plot, which came close to blowing up the Parliament in November, 1605. (The Catholic Plotters, led by a certain Robert Catsby, a few other Catholics who wanted payback for the suppression of their religion, and an explosive expert named Guy Fawkes--for whom the holiday of course was named after--were all apprehended shortly before they could carry out their plans. They and a couple underground Jesuit leaders in England who got rounded up in the hysteria that followed--were summarily tortured, then drawn and quartered and executed as traitors.) But the play is set about 300 years earlier in the history of the Island, at a point just before James' distant relations come into the line of succession for king of Scotland.

All in all, a good show and a nice bit of a historical reminder that ambition without ethics will almost always lead to a bad end. By the sword or in the Federal Pen, as is the case for certain men of Wall Street in our own times.



Here's the director, Gale Edwards, veteran of Broadway and London productions, talking about the play:

The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Nonfiction
Author:	Ron Rosenbaum

Mr. Rosenbaum's book is an exception to the way most current authors go about presenting William Shakespeare to a general audience. Most of the current crop of non-fiction books in the last few years focus on trying out various theories pieced together from what little biographical details we have about the most important single author in the English Language. The reader is introduced to some sort of theory about how young Will was a secret Catholic, such as in Stephen Goldblatt's recent best-seller, "Will in the World" or how he was actually a front man for some shy but noble writer with a fancy title, good connections to royalty, and a university education. Those books that feed the "anti-Stratfordian" maw of conspiracy theorists who write books with super-clever titles like "Shakespeare: Who Was He?" or "Alias Shakespeare". The premise is always the same: no son of a village glove-maker with an elementary education could write poetry and prose like that!

Refreshingly, Rosenbaum doesn't go into any historical theorizing or twist around the facts to prove his subject is an impostor. He offers instead is a journey around the scholars and writers and actors who concern themselves with the lines, the speeches, the words that went into his plays. It's a very personal journey--he relates how as a young journalist he was transfixed by the 1970 production of Peter Brook's Royal Shakespeare Production of "Midsummer Night's Dream" at Stratford, a production that was so popular it later went to London and New York and has taken on a legendary status in the modern theatre history.

The focus is what makes Shakespeare's verses so "brilliantly transcendent", his ability to create works of art like "Hamlet", "King Lear" and "Midsummer Night's Dream" and imbue them with enough meanings that no actor or reader, much less an audience can plumb the complete depths of meanings hidden in the phrases and similes he draws upon.

Here is a portion of Mr. Rosenbaum's first chapter, his introduction to the book (and himself).
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"Just two years before that I had begun what seemed like a promising academic career at Yale Graduate School's Department of English Literature. As an undergraduate at Yale, I had studied primarily pre-seventeenth-century literature and had been granted a Carnegie Teaching Fellowship to Yale Graduate School, a fellowship designed to spur those undecided about an academic career to spend a year tasting the supposed fruits of such a career without many onerous responsibilities. I was only required to take one graduate seminar and teach one undergraduate class per semester, in return for which I was given an official-sounding appointment to the Yale faculty and named a Junior Fellow of Jonathan Edwards (residential) College.


"At first things went swimmingly: I was thrilled to find I'd been admitted to a select seminar with Richard Ellmann, the acclaimed biographer of Yeats and Joyce, masterminds of modernism, and felt quite vain when Ellmann singled out a paper I'd read at the seminar, a critique of the determinism of Yeats's muddleheaded mystical cosmology.

"But sometime in the second semester, although enjoying a Shakespeare seminar with Howard Felperin, I lost heart, or maybe it was more that my heart was broken. In point of fact, my heart was broken by a question I asked--and an answer I got--about love.

"The occasion was a special, ad hoc, invitation-only seminar I'd been asked to, a presentation by one of the English department's favorite wunderkind scholars. A paper on Chaucer's lesser-known love-vision poems, including the Book of the Duchess and The Parliament of Fowles.

"Unlike the wild digressive fabliaux of The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer's love-vision poems are exquisite and mysterious shorter works, and I was looking forward to the occasion, although by this time my disillusion with graduate school life had already begun to undermine the pleasure I felt from the study of literature. The faculty sherry parties had a lot to do with it: watching my fellow graduate students assiduously sucking up to Harold Bloom and other stars of the department, their sherry-flushed faces perspiring from the damp mothball-mildew warmth of their tweeds. While the world outside--it was 1968!--was exploding with fearful, thrilling events."

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It was at this point that Rosenbaum went out of academia and into small magazine journalism. He soon had credentials to cover the seminal 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago, the tidal wave political event of the American Counter Culture Movement.

But the book is about his more recent pursuit of Shakespeare. (Apart from recalling his transformative experience with Peter Brook's version of "The Dream". The book reads briskly like a piece of fresh first-person journalism.) Some of the stops are familiar: the controversy over how to depict the character of the villain Shylock in "The Merchant of Venice". (The more villainous the better as far as Roenbaum is concerned.) In his chapter, "Dueling Shylocks", the author ridicules the modern idea some play directors and filmmakers have done by making Shylock a sympathetic figure who is in the play to point out Christian hypocrisy. This doesn't wash so well with Rosenbaum, who is also the author of a best-seeling book called 'Explaining Hitler". He notes that "Merchant" was performed dozens of times in Germany during the Nazi Era.

He also explores the controversy over the various editions of "Hamlet" and "Lear" and how modern publishers and scholars have dealt with the various sometimes subtle, sometimes important textual changes between The First Folio version of the Bard's plays (published in 1623, seven years after his death, by two of Shakespeare's former friends in The King's Players) and some of the unauthorized "quatro" versions that were pirated by booksellers depending on the popularity off the plays. Shakespeare's bloody "Titus Andronicus", an early play in the tradition of Thomas Kyd's "The Spanish Tragedy" was a frequent target for rip-offs. (The copies of the plays were called "quatros" because they were printed on sheets of paper folded with each sheet into four sections.)

It has long been alleged, for instance, that the 1604 Bad Quatro version of "Hamlet" was a text that had been stolen from Shakespeare's fellow players by an actor who likely had a small part in the production.

Rosenbaum brings a good deal of humor to his explorations and interviews. He even finds the time to get back a bit at the arch-Modern American Intellectual, Harold Bloom, for his over-reaching infatuation with Falstaff's character. (Bloom apparently feels Sir John Falstaff is worthy of a holiday unto himself, one of the many blatant cases of "Bardolotry" in Bloom's recent and exasperatingly long tome, "Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human", a title that "gilds the lily" for certain. At one point he opines:

"Bloom! Bloom! Bloom! Like the beating of a big bass drum one can't help hearing it, having it drummed into you. Certainly not if you're writing a book about Shakespeare. What do I think of Bloom? How much time do you have? Short answer: I'm deeply conflicted...My conflicts are not about him, personally; it's impossible not to feel affection for the larger-than-life Falstaffian "character" he plays...Impossible not to wonder if it's all--for better or worse--an act, a performance, a conceptual con game worthy of the con artist of braggadocio he most admires, Sir John Falstaff."

This is a good book to get away from reading the arcana of Shakespeare theories and doubts about his authorship and actually do what a good journalist should do with Old William of Avon--make you want to get back to seeing the plays, watching the movies, and actually reading the words the man wrote.

Orson Welles as Shakespeare's Falstaff: "Chimes at Midnight" (1965)

This is a fan trailer and a scene from "Chimes at Midnight", a film that represents the pinnacle of the near-lifelong quest Orson Welles had to bring portions of three of Shakespeare's plays ("Richard II", Henry IV, Parts One and Two) and one comedy, "The Merry Wives of Windsor", together into a seamless production.
In the late 1930's, while still only in his twenties, Welles mounted a Broadway production of the same material called "Five Kings". It reportedly was a three or four hour affair in the theater and was not as popular with the critics as his first foray into Shakespeare work, 1938's adaptation of "Macbeth", the so-called "Voodoo Macbeth" that was set in Haiti and featured an all-African-American cast. He also directed a New York production of "Julius Caesar" with his Mercury Theatre players--set in a then modern state not unlike contemporary Nazi Germany.

Ten years later Welles did a more traditional version of "Macbeth" on the screen. Unfortunately his luster had faded in Hollywood as a director after his brief triumph with "Citizen Kane". "Macbeth" was shot as a low-budget effort, shot in just three weeks at one of Hollywood's "Poverty Row" studios, Republic Pictures. That film owes something to German Expressionism and the Russian master director Sergi Eisenstein, influences you can still see in "Chimes" . Welles wisely cast himself as the Scottish King.

Budget problems also plagued "Chimes of Midnight" (released as "Falstaff" in the United States during a brief run). Shot in Spain in 1964, the film was made for a million dollars and financing was very iffy at critical times of production.
Due to cost concerns, the major actors Welles rounded up (Sir John Gielgud, Jeanne Moreau, Margaret Rutherford) were only available for a few days. For the Battle of Shrews-bury, a epic battle of "chivalry" that deteriorates into a gripping and mud-strewn melee, Welles never had more than 150 extras to carry a nine-minute battle scene that begins with the chivalrous knights and flags flying--the romantic facade of The War of the Roses which will inevitably end as the muddy, bloody and senseless slaughter of fellow countrymen. .


But the true colors of Welles' (and Shakespeare's) greatness lives in scenes like this next one--the witty reprobate and glutton Sir John Falstaff (Welles) having fun playing king with his "protege", the young Prince Hal. This scene--from Act Two of "Henry IV, Part One" foreshadows the break between the young wastrel prince--who is already becoming a cunning player for power after his father dies--and the cheerful down-to-earth older man Hal will cast away later on.

"Chimes At Midnight" is a hard film to track down. I've only been able to locate a so-so VHS version of the film that was probably a bootleg. Due to legal problems, the film is not available in the United States, but is featured in segments on You Tube and there is a DVD version available from Brazil (!) Sadly, Welles film suffered from poor sound quality from the necessity of using a mediocre laboratory and inferior equipment. Even in a rough state that it will likely always be seen in, this is, however a great film. Welles himself said this was the film he thought "might just get him into Heaven."

Willliam Shakespeare's Birthday (1564)

Start:	Apr 23, '08
Location:	Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Ashland, Oregon) and many other places.

Playwright, theatrical shareholder, poet, social climber, actor, absentee husband and father, "The Sweet Swan of Avon" and a guy who from his First Folio portrait looks like a friendly dude to have around the local alehouse, maybe even one to pick up the reckoning (or tab) for his mates anon and again. Here's to you, Will!

"Henry V"--Sir Larry Olivier fires up the Away Team

This is the first clip of a film from 1944 dramatizing what is the to me the greatest "halftime" speech in English literature. When this film came out, the tide of the worst war in human history was starting to turn for the Allies, but there was a lot to finish. It was a different sort of war Olivier was creating in the fields of Ireland--where this scene was shot--but everyone in America and the UK who saw this when it came out knew who the real enemy was. Contrast this performance--calm, resolute, steady as befits a nation reluctant to go to war but now fixed to finish it--with the subtle hard-edged almost anxious tone that is conveyed in the clip from Kenneth Branagh's 1989 film and its echos of more unjust incursions by Western Powers like the Suez Crisis and especially Vietnam.

Which do you prefer?

Halftime at Agincourt, October, 1415 AD

"I hate war", let me say first off, as the great President Franklin Roosevelt said in 1940, a year before his hand was forced to send men overseas to die. But if war is inevitable, or if the war of daily life sometimes gets to be too much and the day ahead looks bleak, remember this little "git 'er done" speech written by William Shakespeare in 1599 as a way to mark the biggest upset in pre-football Europe. Were that the English and the French were playing "soccer" or tossing the old pigskin that muddy, bloody day when the Welsh longbow beat back the proud and armored nobility of France.

This is the speech you want to hear if there's nothing for it and your backs to the wall. It's from "Henry V", Kenneth Branagh's first film and the one so far it looks as if he's likely to be remembered for.