The Hollow Crown: Henry IV part 1

One way to fight the winter blues is to accept that it’s too cold for any sane person to leave the house. Instead, we must find ways to enjoy the great indoors. My proposed solution is twofold: the first is the miracle of slow-cooked applesauce. While you don’t get the pleasure of licking the tinfoil lid off the childhood favorite, eating it warm, straight out of the slow cooker, will change your life forever. The second part of the solution is to get into your jam-jams and comfiest robe, and watch lots and lots of movies.

Jeremy Irons as Henry IV

…Shakespeare movies, that is! I’ve been downloading way too many BBC adaptations and watching too few, so last night I decided to change that. I’ve been on a little Tom Hiddleston kick lately (can you blame me?), so I started with 1 Henry IV. I consider this the most unfortunately-named Shakespeare play, as its boring title doesn’t signify its compelling main character (Prince Hal), the fun he has with Shakespeare’s most comic character (Falstaff), and coming of age that Prince experiences in this play.

Michelle Dockery as Lady Percy

This production is certainly well cast. Few actors make better brooding, guilt-ridden rulers than Jeremy Irons, slightly less lecherous than in his role as Rodrigo Borgia, and Hiddleston plays a bright-eyed mischievous Prince Hal. Michelle Dockery, fresh from Downton Abbey, glows, alabaster as ever, and I really enjoyed the way Richard Eyre amped up the flirtiness between Kate and Hotspur, who is often portrayed as loving his horse more than his wife.

Prince Hal and Falstaff, besties for life?

Simon Russell Beale, who has been treading the boards of the English stage nonstop for the past couple of years, was a good Falstaff. Good, not great, and I’ve been trying to put my finger on why. I love the character, an irresponsible, lecherous, glutton who leeches off friends both high and low, yet his true devotion to Hal peeks through. What I don’t appreciate is that Richard Eyre thought it necessary to back each of Falstaff’s sympathetic speeches with an affecting violin track. I recognize that medium of film allows for certain enhancements to the text that the stage does not, but that does not mean that Shakespeare’s words themselves need more enhancing than an actor’s clear voice. Take, for example, the following speech:

Well, ’tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? how then? Can honour set to a leg? no: or an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is honour? a word. What is in that word honour? What is that honour? air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no. Doth he hear it? no. ‘Tis insensible, then. Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? no. Why? detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon: and so ends my catechism.

This is one of the most profound speeches in the Shakespearean canon. Honour inspires me to fight, by why should I, when I might just die? What is the value of dying in the name of honour? Will honour heal my bloody wounds? Will honour take care of my family when I’m gone? The dead man can find few, if any, practical applications for honour, so why pursue it? Falstaff asks these rhetorical questions, offering a catechism in the name of the Abbot of Unreason, all the while showing just exactly how reasonable he is. Falstaff is the one to make us question the nature of heroism: is the king heroic for forcing his army to fight and kill a hundred thousand “rebels”, who on any other day would be counted as fellow countrymen? Is Hal heroic for leaving the tavern in order to aid the King in a war that was only brought on after his father took the crown from Richard II? Falstaff may be a leech on society, but Shakespeare’s words show he is the one shrewd enough to know the finality of death, a truth that need no violins to prove it.

Ladies with Attitude

Polonius said that “Brevity is the soul of wit”, so in an effort not to spend too much time procrastinating from my very, very busy comprehensive exam study schedule, “I will be brief.”

I know that they often get caught up in the mix of letters and numbers, but it’s most definitely worth your while to read any of Shakespeare’s early “Henry” plays: Henry the Fourth, parts 1 and 2, Henry the Fifth (a personal favourite), and the three parts of Henry 6.

Don't mess with me.

Having only read the Henry 6 plays this summer, I was really happy to see that the blandness of the play’s name is not reflected in his very exciting characters, especially the women. In 1 Henry 6, we see the sharp-tongued Joan of Arc wrestle the French dauphin to the ground (in layman’s terms, she kicked his butt!), but I’d have to give the “Ladies with Attitude” award to Eleanor Cobham, who offers us today’s arresting image:

Could I come near your beauty with my nails

I’d scratch my ten commandments in your face.    (2 Henry 6, 1.3.142-3)

Ouch! I can’t help laughing when re-reading such serious Renaissance trash-talking! It both recognizes that she’s a woman and therefore lacks the conventional weaponry of the period (which was left to the men, who promptly began killing each other), but also that she is ferocious on her own. So the next time you need an effective threat (or party gag), think about Eleanor Cobham. It’s her brand, Shakespeare’s brand, of rhetorical power that will reduce your opponent either to laughter or to tears.

Emo Shakespeare

I know it’s been a while since I’ve last written. I also know that I missed the biggest day of any Bardolator’s year: Shakespeare’s birthday. Oh well. Shit happens. Shakespeare supposedly was born and died on the same day of the year: his birthday, my birthday, April 23. As much as we bring his thoughts to life, Shakespeare has been dead for hundreds of years. His memory will still be alive next year, and I’ll be sure to make next year’s post super special.

At the moment not feeling in a celebratory mood myself, I find myself thinking once again to Shakespeare’s emo prince, the great Dane (Jr.) himself: Hamlet. I last left off with Hamlet waxing fashionista on us, but now I’d like to steer us back to why Hamlet was so concerned over his mother’s shoes: he was bummed out. His dad had just died and the unfortunate double-edged sword of life is that people come and go, yet a good pair of black pumps lasts forever.

So I bring you Hamlet: bummed out, feelin’ emo, Justin Bieber hair covering up his tearful eyes. His friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern try to get to the bottom of his grief so they can turn his frown upside down. But the prince has a hard time tearing himself out from his emotional rut. Hamlet responds:

I have of late–but wherefore I know not–lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or to cry after reading those words – 400 years ago, a thousand years from now, today – he just gets it. Shakespeare is able to set down his quill and say: “This is what grief feels like,” and I love him for it. Sometimes we say “there are no words,” but Shakespeare has, once again, proved us wrong.

Can fashion prove that Shakespeare wrote “Shakespeare”?

As a rule, I like to stay away from the infamous “authorship debate,” which suggests that someone else wrote the plays that we attribute to William Shakespeare. My first justification for maintaining this distance is that we’re completely lacking in evidence that would support an absolutely inarguable truth on either side, but I generally pooh-pooh the issue because nothing is going to change the fact that the plays are here today. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, so I prefer to focus on the sweetness than what’s in a name.

That being said, I was enjoying a millionth re-watch of Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet last night and it re-affirmed my prejudiced-but-eternally-unproven belief that the glove-maker’s boy from Stratford-upon-Avon wrote these amazing plays.

I know that some might laugh at how many times I’ll re-read a play or even re-watch a single production, but it’s amazing what you remember – those big lines – “To thine own self be true,” “Frailty, thy name is woman,” and the iconic “Alas, Poor Yorick!” – and what you overlook in anticipation of those parts, getting ready to lip-sync along with the production (oh please, like you haven’t taken joy in going along with the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, so proud to have retained it verbatim from high-school memorization assignments!). It’s what we overlook that I’d like to look at today, showing how these seemingly insignificant parts might reveal deeper truths.

Let’s start with the first instance, looking at what Polonius says only a couple lines before this usually awkward courtier profoundly urges Laertes: “To thine own self be true.” Polonius, like any parent, is giving his son some last-minute advice before his return to school in Paris:

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,

But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;

For the apparel oft proclaims the man,

And they in France of the best rank and station

Are of a most select and generous chief in that.

Talk to the hand: Early Modern gloves

So Polonius likes to look good. Not surprising, and not surprising that he wants his son to preserve the family reputation abroad. Polonius speaks in aphorisms that could easily be Hallmark-card wisdom today, and although I like to think of Shakespeare as one of the greatest writers of all time, these suggestions could have even been proverbial back then. But when I think of “the apparel oft proclaims the man,” I am genuinely struck by how appropriate those words are today, and am just waiting for some French fashion house to snatch it up for their SS 2012 campaign.

 

You know who else might have used that line as a selling-tool? Perhaps a glover in the London suburbs. Shakespeare’s father was a tradesman, not a member of the landed gentry, and I think that line offers a perfect defense of his family business. The rich had to look presentable, as fashion statements in the royal court did say something about one’s character – and whose responsibility was it to ensure that when someone talked to the hand, that hand looked damn good? Papa Shakespeare.

Moving along, the line “Frailty, thy name is woman” and I have a relationship, but to sum it up in Facebook terms: “it’s complicated.” I don’t know if Shakespeare realized that he was a writer, as fellow playwright Ben Jonson put it, “not of an age but for all time,” but that quote has given my gender a bad name for centuries! That being said, there are times when I believe it. But enough about me – let’s look at what prompted Hamlet to utter such harsh words:

Frailty, thy name is woman!—

A little month, or ere those shoes were old

With which she follow’d my poor father’s body,

Like Niobe, all tears…

Interesting…we have another shout-out to the fashion world. Here, Hamlet’s thinking about the shoes that his mother Gertrude is wearing in the present (sometimes depicted as her wedding to her former brother-in-law, Claudius) and remembers when she wore them for her father’s funeral. He notes that the shoes have barely gotten any wear between the time she walked behind her first husband’s funeral procession to the time she walked down the aisle beside her second.

The thing with Shakespeare, though, is that even these tiny details, these seemingly insignificant idiosyncratic turns of phrase, are telling. Who else would think about the quality of women’s shoes? A male university student? He’d probably rather concern himself with exams or his girlfriend, the fair Ophelia.  And I get it, he’s lost his father and is mourning, but do you really think he’d remember his mother’s mourning shoes, probably hidden under petticoats? Doubtful. But who would care? Someone who’s probably well versed in the ways of fashion, in the fine crafting required of leather accoutrements: a glove-maker’s son, William Shakespeare.

Last, but certainly not the final word on the matter, let’s have a look at Shakespeare’s renowned gravedigger scene. Before I grew into my bardolatry as I know it today, I would sit in the theatre restlessly, waiting one, two, three hours to see Hamlet hold up that skull – so iconic – but really, it had no meaning to me back then. Now, I have a far greater understanding about mortality in general and have developed an even creepier fascination with the morbid, in particular. That being said, I probably wouldn’t wander around graveyards (one ramble through an Edinburgh cemetery to find the resting place of the original Tom Riddle, excluded). Hamlet did, and after starting up a banter with his local gravedigger, Hamlet asks the following question:

How long will a man lie i’ the earth ere he rot?

The Gravedigger responds:

I’ faith, if he be not rotten before he die–as we have many pocky cor[p]ses now-a-days, that will scarce hold the laying in–he will last you some eight year or nine year: a tanner will last you nine year.

Hamlet:

Why he more than another?

Gravedigger:

Why, sir, his hide is so tanned with his trade, that he will keep out water a great while; and your water is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body.

So once again, we see this concern with trade, an understanding of the finer details of leather-working that a member of the landed gentry probably wouldn’t have concerned himself with in his daily life, let alone deem worthy enough to write about in a script that would reach thousands of viewers. But a glove-maker’s son seems a bit more feasible — whether the gravedigger’s projections were accurate or not, it’s definitely the kind of morbid joke that would probably come out in the drunken table talk of … a glove-maker.

That’s all for now, folks! Let me know what you think – comment below!

Procrastinating with Shakespeare!

Something tough about writing an essay about Shakespeare is that I get caught up in all these wonderfully arresting images. This one was so literally delicious that I had to stop and write about it… or at least that’s what I tell myself to feel better for procrastinating.

When Hamlet meets his school buddy Horatio at his home/castle in Elsinore, Denmark, Hamlet jokingly remarks, “We’ll teach you to drink deep ere you depart,” but seriously asks his friend why he is not back at school. On a more somber note, Horatio responds: “My lord, I came to see your father’s funeral.” In a classically emo retort, Hamlet responds: “I think it was to see my mother’s wedding.”

Hamlet’s not entirely wrong for being so snarky: his mother Gertrude marries her brother-in-law, Claudius, shortly after her husband, Hamlet Sr., mysteriously dies. The prince’s next remarks to Horatio are just so fantastic that they deserve to be in-set (normally a taboo for quotes with three or less lines, but I think taboo is what we’re going for!), and broadcasted across the Internet:

Thrift, thrift, Horatio. The funeral baked meats

Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.

Wow. Showing, once again, his mastery of imagery, Shakespeare has managed to depict such a profound life-change in such a mundane way. It’s sad and it’s bitter, but Hamlet maintains control over the situation by joking about it.

…And after those lines, I just want to laugh every time I sit down to a delicious meal of leftovers.

Thanks for procrastinating with me today! Back to the grindstone for this bardolator!

Coriolanus knows how to deliver a threat!

Right now is that wonderful and stressful time before school when you realize that you have to move out of your house, move into somewhere else, buy new clothes, housewares, schoolbooks, say good-bye to your friends aaaand hopefully get a jump-start on one, at least one, assignment!

My project of choice is my grant application, due in November. I don’t expect to complete it in the next two weeks, but I figure that I’ll thank myself for the outline later. As I was reading over the notes I wrote circa November (and I thank myself for those, now!), I came across such a deliciously Arresting Image, spoken by Coriolanus.

A very hunky Kenneth Branagh as Coriolanus, in a 1992 production also starring Judi Dench

This is a lesser-known  Shakespearean play, one in which the title character is both the protagonist and his own worst enemy. And his country’s. A prominent warrior, Coriolanus refuses to display his war wounds to the masses, a common way to share Rome’s military victory with the rest of the nation. Perhaps a victim of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the character does not wish to pander to the plebeians, and his rejection gets insulting, quickly. He is eventually exiled from his own country, and then teams up with his former enemy to get his revenge on Rome. Very teenage daddy issues. But a teenager couldn’t come up with a threat as gruesomely poetic is this:

‘Hence, rotten thing, or I shall shake thy bones / Out of thy garments’ (III.i.180-1)

I hope for your own sake that next time you hear this threat, it will be coming out of Ralph Fiennes’s mouth in his modern-dress  cinematic adaptation of the play, featuring none other than the interminable Vanessa Redgrave as Volumnia and the super-sexy Gerard Butler as the macho (and maybe a little camp) Aufidius.

Ahhh… I needed that. Now, back to work!

Henry VI, Part 1

I love Shakespeare for the universal appeal of his writing. I love that someone from every single country in the world has probably read or watched a rendition of Hamlet. That being said, I also have a weakness for the obscure and esoteric so, in an effort to get back into ‘fighting shape’ before returning to academia in September, I decided to read a lesser-known Shakespeare play.

The play I chose is called Henry VI, Part I. The first of the king’s

The English Coat of Arms, adopted in 1198

eponymous trilogy begins to detail England’s loss of the French land that Henry V had pillaged. Before continuing, I’ll admit that I haven’t finished reading the play. Why? Because the language is so wonderful and I have to keep stopping to absorb it all! If I wrote a textbook, that would be the definition of an Arresting Image. After all this time, I still find it uncanny how one man can make a set of letters come to life in the form of a dramatic battle scene.

With that, here is my arresting image of the day:

Hark, countrymen! either renew the fight,
Or tear the lions out of England’s coat;
Renounce your soil, give sheep in lions’ stead:
Sheep run not half so treacherous from the wolf,
Or horse or oxen from the leopard,
As you fly from your oft-subdued slaves.

Spoken by the valiant Talbot, these lines abound in metaphors. Comparing human characteristics to animals makes the character types in the play (brave, chivalric, cowardly, two-timing) accessible to anyone. Shakespeare’s viewers didn’t have to have seen a lion or leopard to know that they are fast – it was the job of fairy tales to do that. Many of us have never seen battle, but we understand how Talbot is trying to motivate his soldiers based on metaphors that they could easily access. Genius. In a moment when he could have gotten carried away with the passions of war, Shakespeare took the time to pause and decide how to get his viewers onto the same page. What did he come up with? A successfully Arresting Image.

Julius Caesar

Bear-baiting at the Globe Theatre: a form of entertainment where dogs attack and kill a bear

This week on ‘Arresting Images’: Julius Caesar!

This is one of Shakespeare’s plays that is regularly taught in high schools, so hopefully those of you who are not big Shakespeare enthusiasts will still be familiar with this one. I recently completed an internship with a Shakespeare education organization, and it was for an assignment with them that I first read it. I’m not going to lie, Reader: I find some plays quite tough on the first read. Love’s Labour’s Lost, for instance, is supposed to be a rhetorical masterpiece, but I haven’t been able to sink my teeth into it. This play was different — relatable. When I asked my internship co-ordinator why Julius Caesar was taught so regularly in high schools, he told me it’s because it can be taught as a lesson in Roman history Sure, that’s convenient, but I think it does the deeper issues an injustice. The reason why I am so enthralled is because it is so relevant to political issues not just then, but throughout history, right through to the high school politics and celebrity drama of today.

Julius Caesar is a play about a conspiracy against Caesar, led by a group of his minions who think that the conqueror is too ambitious. When one character, Casca, tells his companions Cassius and Brutus about Caesar’s celebrated return from battle, they concentrate less on the fact that Caesar was offered kingship but physically rejected the crown three times, and focused more on the way ‘he was very loath to lay his / fingers off it.’ In their minds, he pretended to reject the crown but desperately wanted it in his heart. And that, for them, was too ambitious. In the standard style of warriors, you can imagine that they didn’t pull Caesar aside for a chat about political strategy. Instead, Cassius, Brutus, and their gang of conspirators planned this great leader’s murder as a way to save his soul from his supposed ambition. Still with me?

Bringing us up to this week’s Arresting Image, we witness the conspirators’ summit, where they discuss who they’re going to kill and why. While Cassius maintains that they should kill Caesar’s ‘Number Two’, Mark Antony, Brutus reminds Cassius that their purpose is noble and spiritual rather than strategic. But here’s where the linguistic acrobatics come in: the Romans practiced what is called rhetoric, defined as the study of the most effective use of language. This play is the most impressive exercise of rhetoric, as it follows different characters convincing those around them to change their moral outlooks, essentially redefining right and wrong. And this is what Brutus says:

Let us be sacrificers, but not butchers, Caius.
We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar;
And in the spirit of men there is no blood:
O, that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit,
And not dismember Caesar! But, alas,
Caesar must bleed for it! And, gentle friends,
Let’s kill him boldly, but not wrathfully;
Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods,
Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds:
And let our hearts, as subtle masters do,
Stir up their servants to an act of rage,
And after seem to chide ‘em. This shall make
Our purpose necessary and not envious:
Which so appearing to the common eyes,
We shall be call’d purgers, not murderers.
And for Mark Antony, think not of him;
For he can do no more than Caesar’s arm
When Caesar’s head is off.

Ahhhh. A speech like that is the reason why I prefer to read Shakespeare rather than watch it performed. After reading those words, I can’t just move forward; I need to be able to take pause, think, and enjoy the way the Romans always propose a better alternative: not bodily dismemberment, but dismembering the ambition within Caesar’s spirit; not butchery, but mercy; not six of one, but half a dozen of the other! The political speechwriters of today can learn a lot from these Roman wordsmiths!

I’m sorry, reader, if my choices of Arresting Images prove too morbid, but perhaps that’s what aligns me so well with Shakespeare. Living in London in the 1600s meant that he regularly witnessed plague-ridden corpses being piled up on the streets, watched public executions, walked across the Thames to see the decapitated heads of political traitors (the likes of Brutus and Cassius or, in their minds, Caesar) mounted on pikes at the Tower. Shakespeare even caught the odd bear-baiting at the Globe Theatre itself. Re-reading the words ‘Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods, / Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds,’ we can tell that these bear-baiting matches were a likely inspiration to Shakespeare, acting as  an animal parallel to Caesar’s backstabbing at the Forum.

So think of it this way, Reader: Shakespeare was writing about one of the greatest conquerors in history. Sure, this play might have been performed for the royals; sure these words sound a bit difficult at first, but they’re so worthy of comprehension! And who were the people who sunk their teeth into the lofty rhetoric? The people who understood it firsthand: the commoners, ‘groundlings’, who paid for cheap standing tickets at the Globe and returned to the scene of the crime for a good ol’ bear-baiting, one of the earliest forms of commercial theatre!

Henry V

Welcome back, Reader! Today’s entry will be the first in my series, titled ‘Arresting Images.’ This first image is one of my all-time favourites, coming from Henry V. Now, I know that some might brush away Henry V as lost in the mix of the other Henrys (of which there are 6), neglected in favour of reading a more notable history play like Richard III, or a ‘classic’ like Romeo and Juliet or Othello. Well, Reader, I can’t tell you how highly I recommend this play simply because it is more directly relevant to our lives today than those classics I mentioned. Why? Three words: War on Terror.

This play opens with two high priests looking for a reason to invade France, a clever strategy which will distract the King from sacking the church’s hefty coffers. They search through ecclesiastical history and find that the French crown cannot be transferred through the female line, which is how the current French king got it. If it had been passed through the male line, as per ‘Salic Law,’ the English line would have taken the French throne, or at very least some French land. This theory, however sexist, would be good and well if it did not contradict the grounds for Henry’s own rule, which the clergy conveniently disregard.

This hypocrisy already begins to remind me of the military turmoil of the past decade: who were the Americans posed to fight? The Afghans, the Taliban, the Iraqis, or terrorists across the Middle East? Hadn’t the American government contributed nuclear weapons to Iraq only a decade before? I don’t know enough on this topic, but I can there’s a fishy smell of ambivalence (aka, figuratively speaking out of both sides of one’s mouth), a fishiness that Shakespeare exposes in England’s forefather in Henry V.

Shakespeare uses this play as to demonstrate the uncomfortable and disconcerting nature of an ambivalent rule, showing at once:

-         the benefits and drawbacks to jingoism

-         the unity and divisiveness between the four nations of Great Britain, and their endeavour to fight an external enemy to maintain their own unity

-         the bravery and cowardice of both kings and commoners

and the issue we’re dealing with:

-         the injustice and justification of expending lives (both common and noble) for a flimsy, though supposedly noble cause

At first, Henry displays the appropriate reluctance to send his country to war, telling the clergymen:

God forbid, my dear and faithful lord,
That you should fashion, wrest, or bow your reading,
Or nicely charge your understanding soul
With opening titles miscreate, whose right
Suits not in native colours with the truth;
For God doth know how many now in health
Shall drop their blood in approbation
Of what your reverence shall incite us to.
Therefore take heed how you impawn our person,
How you awake our sleeping sword of war

The king’s democratic, pacifistic spirit lasts but a few lines. When the French prince’s messenger comes with the gag-gift of tennis balls, an insulting jab at the carelessness of his youthful alter-ego ‘Hal’, Henry’s sleeping sword awakens with a vengeance. Soon enough, he has lobbied the four nations: English, Irish, Welsh, and Scots, to fight for his ‘cause’.

Let me tell you, Reader, just like George W. Bush in visiting bases in his military fatigues, King Henry feels pretty darn good about himself for having united his people, mobilizing them against a common enemy. On the night before battle, he disguises himself in order to personally get a feel for how his soldiers are faring. When the common soldiers suggest to their hooded visitor that they hope the cause that they fight for blindly is at least honourable, worthy of having amassed such a huge army instead of being a petty fight that the king could have resolved himself, the disguised king is insulted. One soldier, Williams, puts the stranger in his place, giving him (and us), a glimpse of the same uncertainty that the king himself once had. Yet, Williams speaks with a stronger resolve, built on the knowledge of what’s to come. Shakespeare writes him this speech with such vivid imagery that it reminds us that war is not a fun rainy-day game of RISK, but rather a harsh, painful reality:

But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath
a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and
arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join
together at the latter day and cry all ‘We died at
such a place;’ some swearing, some crying for a
surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind
them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their
children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die
well that die in a battle; for how can they
charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their
argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it
will be a black matter for the king that led them to
it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of
subjection.

This speech gives me all the reasons I need to love Shakespeare. Let me break it down for you:

-         Shakespeare (William S.) is giving the common soldier (Williams) a voice. At the end of the play, the king takes note of the death of fellow nobleman, but worries not about the souls of the commoners. Shakespeare gives this commoner a name and a voice and something so important to say. Never assume that Shakespeare was only a writer for kings: his works say something to everyone.

-         He exposes the hypocrisy of kings by showing that the king’s single moral moment is only good in theory, but worthless in practice. It’s one thing to question the value and virtue of the monarchy today, but in his time, it was a crime punishable by death. Shakespeare tip-toes the line of treason, and deserves props for his gutsiness.

-         Even if this play didn’t give us a stencil outline of the young, beautiful, American (and Canadian, and British, etc.) lives that George W. Bush threw away in pursuit of his unattainable ideal, Shakespeare shows us to question the powers that be. We vote for them because we want to trust them, but to give our lives for their cause is another story. We may, as individuals and as part of our nations, love our countries, but we mustn’t expect our leaders to consider us as individuals when they make decisions. A painful truth, but a truth indeed.

…And that’s all for this week! Please feel free to write in with comments, and especially questions: if you need me to clarify something, don’t be afraid to ask!

Arresting Images

The grammar school where Shakespeare learned how to say what he said

Why do I love reading Shakespeare? Why is it mandatory to read Shakespeare in most North American schools? Why has the rest of the world taken to translating Shakespeare?

I’m going to give you my answer, Reader, and will continue referring back to it through the course of this blog.

My answer: the mind-blowing interplay between what he writes about and how he writes about it.

What he writes about:

-       passion

-       love

-       jealousy

-       sex

-       friendships

-       ambition

-       betrayal

-       death

-       grief

…and so forth. These are issues that we all grapple with at some point in our lives. Shakespeare writes about issues we know, so we can sympathize with his characters and think, ‘How would I deal with this issue if it happened to me?’ and go further to empathize by comparing how we have dealt with these issues in our own pasts. The enjoyment we get out of this subject matter, therefore, is entirely narcissistic, and why not? Shakespeare writes about issues we can relate to, which should ideally make reading his work less scary to take on. He’s not reinventing the wheel. We’ve seen the wheel, driven on that wheel, gotten into the same crashes as his wheels.

What makes reading Shakespeare so scary? His wheel is going in the same direction as ours, but is constructed quite differently. It’s like driving a car in standard: you can’t imagine learning how to do it and doing it without crashing, but once you get a hang of it, you realize that driving standard brings a new grace to driving. You have a whole new control of the vehicle and, from then on, assess the roads around you thinking ‘I can tackle this road so much better in standard!’

Lost? Let me bring you back to my point, Reader. Shakespeare writes about every day issues in the most arresting way. In Shakespeare’s time, students went to school to learn Latin language and Latin literature – English literature as a genre had barely sprung its roots, so they found their amusement and mental exercises in translating these works from Latin to English and back again, each time trying to use the most arresting images and turns of phrase in the English language in order to do the original texts justice. Many people like to point out that Shakespeare was not university educated, but the fact of the matter is that he was doing these challenging exercises in elementary school. Therefore, just as in evaluating the roads as a newly-taught standard driver assessing the roads in terms of gears and clutches, Shakespeare saw the images in the world around him and chose not the easiest way to say something, but the way that would provide you with the most arresting image in your head. The image so true to life, so true to the imagination, that it brought both Queens and prostitutes, lawyers and beggars, out to see his plays.

So, Reader, if my explanation still lives you in the dark, that’s okay, because the only way you can understand what I mean is by reading these passages. As much as I love seeing Shakespeare performed dramatically, the reason why I remain a steadfast reader of the Bard is because the way he writes stops me in my tracks every time. You cannot press pause on a play (although you can with a film!), and Shakespeare deserves that time to stop and just contemplate these most amazing ways he says what he says.

Ideally, I’d like to post one of these arresting images a week, and walk you through exactly how Shakespeare takes an ordinary theme and puts it into words in such an extraordinary manner that for a moment, your mind is blown. In addition to that, I will also be posting about critics and books that have illuminated the way I see Shakespeare, along with productions, and specific actors who, through their performances, bring Shakespeare’s texts to light in ways that I had no personally conceived. The beauty of Shakespeare scholarship being such a large body of scholarship is that, while reading is private, this study is collaborative. So please feel free to post your comments, questions, objections, and so forth, and we can blaze an amazing Shakespearean discourse right here in the blogosphere!