Studying on my feet

This post was originally published in my Secret Diary of PhD Candidate column for The Shakespeare Standard.

Dearest Readers and Well-wishers,

Apologies for the long period of silence…let’s just say I’ve been gathering material to share with you. Although my enthusiasm still shines bright, I can’t tell stress how far it’s been put to the test these days: studying for my 8-hour Comprehensive Exam, piecing together a coherent (and, ideally, cogent) scholarship application, writing a paper that I could proudly deliver to the luminaries at Cambridge, and, well, a slew of events in my personal life (funny how it gets in the way sometimes!), that required my attention and emotional investment.

Yet, here I am, once again, sitting in an airport after an outstanding conference, feeling all warm and fuzzy inside for the friends I’ve made and the thoughts they’ve provoked. Two weeks ago, I sat in my office, resignedly acknowledging its function as an on-campus retreat for the occasional panic attack. — Trot off to England for a week when my ‘Comps’ studies aren’t even close to complete? When I can’t even articulate my proposed dissertation topic for a mandatory scholarship application, due in less than a month? And move apartments even sooner? — I knew I needed a vacation and kept reminding myself that it would be a working one, but somehow it felt like the most reckless and irresponsible thing to do when my nose was meant to be firmly affixed to the grindstone.

Spacey rockin' Gaddafi’s signature shades

On my very first night, I attended closing night of The Bridge Project’s Richard III at The Old Vic. Sam Mendes and Kevin Spacey did not disappoint. Spacey’s Richard reminded me of the character’s roots in the stock Machiavel figure, but the role took on modern relevance with undeniable parallels to the Libyan dictator who clings to power by the skin of his nails, Muammar Gaddafi.

The next day, on a specifically non-Shakespearean date for afternoon tea, my friend and I got lost in the labyrinth known as Kensington. We came upon the former home of T.S. Eliot. This prompted flashbacks to a particularly torturous study I undertook on the writer’s philosophy that Hamlet was an artistic “failure” in its lacking of the crucial objective correlative. Clearly, there is no escape from Shakespeare in London – you turn the corner and he’s always there in spirit!

I soon moved on to Cambridge, where I finally got to meet some colleagues from Open Shakespeare and the Open Knowledge Foundation. I had recently written an article for them about my experiences with Shakespeare and the Internet, and it was great to sit with the team in real-time and brainstorm innovative ways to bring Shakespeare’s texts to life online in an interactive way. It’s amazing how I spend so much time communicating with both my Open Shakespeare and Shakespeare Standard colleagues online, but it’s really so nice to meet the team in person. It was a fantastic experience, and one I hope to repeat soon!

Dragging my blistered feet back to my dormitory at St. Catherine’s College, I shivered in my drafty quarters and thought of scholarship student Christopher Marlowe, snuggling up to roommate Robert Thexton for warmth, and supposedly even some nocturnal enjoyment.

Tastes like chicken?

On Tuesday, the day of the conference, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the Centre for Material Texts was overrun by Early Modernists. This led me to learn the invaluable lesson of, in the future, checking the conference program, not simply as I narcissistically had, for the joy of seeing my name in print amongst ‘pros’, but also to develop a better understanding of said pros’ research interests. A rookie error, I had assumed that the conference, “Eating Words: Text, Image, and Food” was geared to scholars across historical fields and faculties, but I ended up explaining humanist pedagogy to those who had indeed written the book on it. A valuable learning experience nonetheless, I was fortunate to have had it amidst such gracious, supportive hosts.

It was wonderful to spend a couple of days surrounded by fellow bibliophiles, and I even had the opportunity to attend an event at Plurabelle Books celebrating bibliophagy – the literal, rather than the commonly figurative, consumption of books. I managed to nibble on a tiny corner of a page, but I think I’ll stick to my personal vice, the casual sniffing of printed media.

English Poet Laureate Andrew Motion marveling over the texts at the Ritblat Gallery

When I returned to London, I took advantage of my close proximity to the British Library and visited the ‘Treasures’ at my beloved Ritblat Gallery. Aside from marveling over Jane Austen’s writing desk and reading specs (and indeed caving in and buying a Persuasion mug at the BL gift shop), I got a chance to stand inches away from several Renaissance quartos and, my personal favorite, Shakespeare’s First Folio. I must give credit to the curators of this exhibit, as they show Shakespeare’s works as not simply standing on a pedestal of the author’s own wit, but also as largely indebted to source texts and the works of his contemporaries, such as Marlowe and Ben Jonson.

Good from far

That evening I met up with two of my favorite people in the world – fellow bardolators from my MA days, future Shakespearean heavy-hitters, otherwise known as my London Theatre Buddies. Quickly becoming tradition, we enjoyed our second biennial ‘Thai Food and Tempest’ night, heading to the Theatre Royal Haymarket to catch Trevor Nunn’s rendition of the play, starring Ralph Fiennes. While the use of an hourglass prop was a great way to remind us that The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s few plays to maintain Aristotle’s unities of time and space, the production was otherwise a disappointment. I jokingly defend Nunn by suggesting that he must have spent the show’s budget in paying for the principal actor, but I’m serious when I say that nothing was gained from the sparse set. This is especially disappointing because Nunn himself had proved that a deliberately austere mise en scène can be beneficial with his seminal production of Macbeth in 1979. I wish I could justify this production that seemed far too concerned with the smoke-and-mirrors use of harnesses to make Ariel fly, but really, this production added little to nothing to the vibrant legacy of this “rich and strange” play.

The good and evil angel fighting for Faustus’s soul

A much more memorable production was the Globe Theatre’s Dr. Faustus. This was the first time I’ve seen Faustus in performance and it genuinely contributed to my understanding of the play. It made me realize that Mephistopheles is a much more dynamic, but also sorrowful, character, and the Globe can always be relied upon to bring the bawdiness and vulgarity of Early Modern plays to life onstage, replete with plenty of [hopefully] fake urine. My favorite part of the play? The concluding jig in which the resurrected Faustus and Mephistopheles entertained the audience with a bout of ‘dueling lutes’.

And now I’m back at Heathrow, feet throbbing from such a busy week, but all the while feeling intellectually rejuvenated and incredibly blessed. Friends, both old and new, have given me exceptional food for thought (pun most definitely intended) for my scholarship applications, and the living, breathing, examples of Early Modern Drama that I’ve encountered have inspired me to get back to blogging and, more importantly, confront that grindstone head-on!

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!

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.

If music be the food of love, play on – Twelfth Night at The Stratford Festival

Alas, Poor Yorick! The summer’s almost over! Now I sip at the dregs of my final Balzac’s iced tea and while I try to articulate what I experienced this afternoon. Twelfth Night is a wonderful play; it’s a family favourite, which is why the Stratford Festival (nay, any Shakespeare festival) seems to play it on a 4-year loop with As You Like It, Much Ado, and Midsummer. That being said, Twelfth Night is far from fluff, and although it’s a comedy, there’s personal trauma, tragedy, loss, and grief bubbling not too far beneath the surface for those who are looking for it.

Dennehy as Sir Toby on Stratford's Official Twelfth Night Poster

I’m not going to lie, I had my reservations when the audience began to wildly applaud as stage/film star Brian Dennehy (best known to me as Montague in Luhrmann’s R+J) came onstage. It reminded me of last year’s The Tempest, where you could actually see Christopher Plummer break character and bask in the applause, which is why I tend to grumble when people blindly worship the stage vetran. But Dennehy didn’t force the audience to see this ensemble-driven play as being led by his shining star. I appreciated this, especially because Sir Toby is but half of the slap-stick tag-team, completed by Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Not having done any research on the cast before I got there, I was over the moon to find that the role was being played by Stephen Ouimette, also known as the deliciously snarky ghost of director Oliver Welles in Slings and Arrows. Onstage, the two were a hilarious team, but their achievements were crowned by Sir Andrew’s spontaneous vomiting in one scene (staged but shocking), and his accidental dropping of his towel in a steam-room scene, a gaff that I’m sure was not staged. It shocked the audience into a two-minute round of applause and I applaud Sir Toby and Fabian’s heroic efforts to maintain straight faces in character.

Feste was also a favorite of mine. An excellent character on the page, I’ve been disappointed by some stage renditions of it, and tend to use Sir Ben Kingsley’s take on the character in the Trevor Nunn film as the standard by which to judge others. Ben Carlson’s took a much different take on the character, proving that an actor’s goal mustn’t be to replicate or emulate another actor playing the character, but rather to emulate the essence of the character himself, finding within the text rationale for playing him a certain way. While Ben Kingsley played a more stoic, Buddha-like, but ultimately fun-loving and kind-hearted Feste, Stratford’s Ben basked in the character’s ambivalence: mischievous but doleful, and entirely unapologetic in his perpetual pan-handling.

In writing the character of Feste, Shakespeare introduced an entirely new fool to the stage: gone were Will Kempe’s slapstick Clowns as found in the Dogberries and Nick Bottoms, and present was Robert Armin’s Fool, the “corruptor of words,” manifested by the likes of Feste and Lear’s Fool. These vagabond-like characters are professionally attached, but never harbouring any physical or permanent attachment to any character. My mysteriously fading away when their guidance is no longer needed, these characters likewise appear out of nowhere. Maria tells Feste: “My lady will hang thee for thy absence,” and Carlson forbids us from being sure where he’s been: could he have fled the scene upon the death of Olivia’s brother, a lamentable time in which the Fool’s gibes were unwelcome? Or perhaps he was suffering from the loss, too, harbouring a homosexual love for him much akin to Antonio’s for Sebastian? For a moment, I even felt like his character might have been in love with his mistress Olivia, not unlike Malvolio. Whatever the case, he has returned from beyond. He brings with him the carnivalesque celebration of Twelfth Night, the night when all social structures are inverted and the fool himself performs the roles of Lord of Misrule and Abbot of Unreason.

Ben Carlson as Feste on the album cover - I still can't get the songs out of my head!

By far the most exciting part of this production was its musicality. At first I was skeptical, thinking that it couldn’t have possibly been a coincidence that Stratford was staging a musical Shakespeare in the same year that Josie Rourke staged an 80’s music-inspired Much Ado, but frankly, I needed the reminder that not everyone is as doggedly anglocentric as I am. My favorite professor at Royal Holloway was always hinting that somebody should write a dissertation on the mysteries hidden within the songs in Shakespeare’s plays. Twelfth Night is especially full of them, as per the play’s famous opening lines: “If music be the food of love, play on.” Sometimes, like in the exceptionally hilarious kitchen scene, the Fool riles up his audience with a joking ditty and playful banging on pots and pans until they wake up the surly Malvolio. Later in the play, we are reminded that this fool is not all benevolence, standing above the imprisoned Malvolio’s cell and tauntingly singing that the servant’s mistress “loves another.” Unapologetic for truly being the only character rational enough to expose the foolishness of those around him, Feste is silently exiled from the romantic final action of the play, because, as we’re told in Midsummer Night’s Dream, “To say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days.”

Final verdict? A heartfelt “go see it!”: bring the whole family, and then buy the cd for cheesey singalongs on the way home!

Twelfth Night is playing at the Festival Theatre in Stratford, Ontario, until October 28. 

Loving Shakespeare does not make me noble

This post was originally published in my Secret Diary of PhD Candidate column for The Shakespeare Standard.

I know that ol’ Will Shakespeare has been sitting comfortably upon his pedestal for the past few centuries, but sometimes we have to step back and remind ourselves of two things:

One: Shakespeare’s work contains a certain levity that implies that he didn’t take himself too seriously. I’m not prescribing opinions to him when I say that, but I am saying that his work is chock-full of seriously bawdy, sexist, and racist humour that prompts me to believe that he was havin’ a laugh while writing the words that have inspired us all this time.

That brood was pretty sexy when I was 14

Two: The love of Shakespeare does not require you to start wearing horn-rimmed glasses and elbow patches (although the latter is highly recommended), or take your own study of Shakespeare too seriously. In my opinion, it’s perfectly acceptable if one’s motive for watching R&J is to see Leo, rather than watching for the Shakespearean content exclusively.

Likewise, I enjoy taking my guilty pleasure of reading celebrity gossip to the level of reading it in a Shakespearean context. Preferring not to read into the speculative biographies (“Didn’t you know that Shakespeare was gay?”), I take pleasure in the scandals within the plays themselves and those that inevitably erupt during their production.

This started with an obsession with Antony Sher’s biographies and theatre diaries, Year of the King, Beside Myself, and Woza Shakespeare!: I got to learn about the gritty research he did in interviewing murderers for his role as Macbeth, and enjoyed unfolding his complex colleagues-and-lovers relationship with now-husband, RSC Chief Associate Director Gregory Doran.

Last summer, I got to read some seriously scandalous stuff, less related to Shakespeare but rather focused on the sadomasochistic life (and published diary) of 20^th century dandy-cum-theatre-critic Kenneth Tynan, which I highly recommend.

This is not going to end well...the map scene in King Lear

Today, I feel no shame in telling you that I am anxiously awaiting David Weston’s book about his time as Ian McKellen’s understudy on the American tour of Trevor Nunn’s production of King Lear. Covering McKellen: An Understudy’s Tale is said to revolve around the escapades of a cast that includes a napping principal actor, an “arrogant” Romola Garai as Cordelia, and another actress vindictively enjoying a negative review given to another actress.  But were Goneril and Regan any less vindictive? Did Cordelia’s principles not set her on a high-horse that led her sisters to order her death? In a production most notable for Sir Ian’s dropping trou, as it were, I can’t wait to hear all the juicy gossip that will doubtlessly be as entertaining as the scandals that abound Shakespeare’s tragedy itself.

Loving Shakespeare does not make me a more noble reader: it simply proves that my taste for scandal knows no bounds!

 

Did Shakespeare smoke weed? Who cares?!

The best and worst thing about the dearth of information we have about Shakespeare’s life is that it leaves it open to conjecture. Did you know that Shakespeare’s plays were written by someone else? Did you know that Shakespeare was gay?  – classic questions that just cannot be answered unless Sam takes a Quantum Leap and finds out for us, firsthand. That’s what a bunch of South African paleontologists intend to do.

The article begins with the standard Hamlet joke: “To dig… or not to dig? That’s the latest question” – eye roll, please. Oh, the internet. It teaches us new things every day, yet the unlimited space available allows for trite rubbish like that be published.

'Who builds stronger than a mason, a shipwright, or a carpenter?'

At first, I thought that they were going to exhume his body from its place deep beneath Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. I was really annoyed about this, and gave my dear friend and partner in pedagogical crime, Miss Leah Dacks, a complete, profanity-filled lecture on this topic, mainly harping on the fact that a body buried nearly 400 years ago and covered in concrete probably wouldn’t come out so neatly. In a moment of silence-inducing, gravedigger-like wisdom, she assured me: “I’m sure his coffin is just as intact as the day before it was built.”

Luckily, it turns out that they’ve taken heed of Shakespeare’s epitaph: “Bleste be the man that spares thes stones / And curst be he that moves my bones.” Good call, fellas. Apparently, they intend to “perform a forensic analysis by digitally scanning the playwright’s bones, then ‘rendering a 3-D image reconstruction’.”

But what on earth could they be looking for? For starters, they’re going to take some DNA samples to confirm the Bard’s age, cause of death, and gender. Number one: who cares how old he was? Yes, the life expectancy was shorter back then. Move on. Cause of death? What kind of closure is that going to achieve? Could he have died of the plague? Possibly. Venereal disease? Of course. Cancer? Maybe. If it hadn’t been this, would he be alive today? …exactly. Shakespeare retired before he died – he gave the public as much or as little of his work as he chose. Even without exhuming his body, we keep his memory alive today in a way that even the biggest egomaniacs would appreciate: every once in a while we get musicians and movie stars who are conceived as “bigger than Elvis” or “bigger than the Beatles” – so far, nobody’s gotten quite as big as the Bard.

Gweneth Paltrow playing Viola de Lesseps, disguised as Thomas Kent

And what about gender? Let’s not get all Shakespeare in Love on ourselves. It’s embarrassing, really. Are we not liberated enough to respect particular men for being great men? Feminism is important but feminism with blinders is ignorance: Shakespeare was way ahead of his time in terms of his feminist, nay, egalitarian values, but he had share his chauvinist moments, too.

Anyhow, what’s giving this study the most publicity is that they plan to check if the Bard smoked weed. That’s right. Mary Jane, Dope, pot, sweet sweet cheeba. What inspired this grave-robbing? Apparently, in 2001, one of the members of the team found several 17^th-century smoking pipes in the garden of Shakespeare’s home. The pipes revealed “traces of cocaine, cannabis and a hallucinogen derived from nutmeg.” …So that means they were his?

People look to Shakespeare’s writing for further evidence. There’s Othello’s line for starters: “O thou weed who art so lovely fair and smell’st so sweet that the senses ache at thee,” and then there’s Sonnet 76:

Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods, and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O! know sweet love I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.

Okay, so people assume that Shakespeare was one of those people who believes in herbal-induced literary inspiration. It wouldn’t be surprising but that doesn’t mean it’s true.

Can you inhale inspiration?

For those of you who are a bit fuzzy about how to appropriately use the term “anachronism,” this is the perfect example. We think of artists smoking weed and deriving inspiration today: Snoop Dogg, Willie Nelson, even Lady Gaga – but that doesn’t mean that people four hundred years ago did the same. Applying what is socially accepted or recognized as truth today to events of 400 years ago doesn’t always result in a perfect fit. It would be ignoring a whole handful of factors that provide an entirely different context to what we’re looking at. First off, just because we call it ‘weed’ today doesn’t mean that it was called ‘weed’ back then. Shakespeare lived in England. It’s a very, very wet country: there are plenty of weeds. We can’t expect him to have been thinking about what comes into our heads when we hear “weed” today. Number two: different plants were used as stimulants back then, and just because essences of marijuana and opium were in the pipes doesn’t mean that Shakespeare was planning to mellow out to some [nonexistent] reggae music and chowin’ down on pizza pops [also, unfortunately, nonexistent in the Bard’s time]. Nonetheless, the articles about this study are usually accompanied with a carefully chosen picture of the Bard rocking a ‘do that looks to be inspired by the Seth Rogen Jew-fro.

Pass the Cheetos, mate

This paleontologist suggests: “If we find grooves between the canine and the incisor, that will tell us if he was chewing on a pipe as well as smoking.” This is what you’re spending public funds on? Please. I care about arts education as much as the next Shakespeare scholar, but how is this going to benefit the nation’s youth? Do you want Stratford to become the Diaspora of Amsterdam, just months before the London Olympics? I’m just waiting for all the new strains to pop up – A Midsummer Night’s Weed, Much Ado About Chronic, and Coriolanus Kush.

Long story short: why do we care if Shakespeare smoked weed? I know people will continue to disagree with me on this topic, but I think it’s just as useless as the authorship debate. Why must we try to take such an out-freaking-standing playwright down a peg or two? Why are we trying to undersell the potential talent of our species?

…Or are we putting pot smokers on a pedestal? Are we doing the “smoking pot makes you more creative” thing? Because if so, the next formal line of reasoning is to consider that Shakespeare was a business man – he wore all the hats in Early Modern Drama field: he wrote, he acted and he was a shareholder in his theatre company. So now we’re saying that, to be highly productive human beings, nay, contributors to the cultural fabric of society, it’s preferable to smoke weed “because Shakespeare did it”?

What if these paleontologists do their thing and find out that, indeed, Shakespeare did die of the clap (he probably did)? Will this finding inspire a whole new demographic to practice safer sex? I can hear all those parents now: “Son, if you forget to wear a condom on prom night, you’ll wind up like William Shakespeare?” – that oughta scare ‘em straight.

 

 

 

Family field trip to the happiest place on earth: Stratford!

My name is Erin and I’m an Anglophile. No surprise there. That being said, Canada holds a huge place in my heart. Aside from the free health care and government-subsidized university education, I love my country because it’s so keen on Shakespeare that its devoted a whole town to celebrating his work! Stratford is not just the hometown of Justin Bieber (can you believe that spell-check doesn’t recognize that name yet?); it’s home to the wonderful Stratford Festival.

A 13 year-old Biebs jamming out in the steps of the Avon Theatre

Dedicated to the classics without taking themselves too seriously – they got Canadian sweethearts the Barenaked Ladies to compose the tunes for As You Like It in 2005! – I’m so excited to be enjoy the 2011 season with my family.

What are we going to see? I’m hitting up Twelfth Night, a standard Stratford crowd-pleaser with my mother, father (aka, The Doctor), and Grandma, who’s totally into Shakespeare and will even listen to my little pre-show lecture on our way up. I joked with my dad that I would bring him a copy of Twelfth Night so he has time to read it before the show, and I swear I could hear his eyes roll 250 kilometres away. I know he comes along for me and I love him for it.

Seana McKenna as Richard III

My mom is the biggest trooper of all: after all those years of schlepping her family to “get some culture,” I think she’s accepted the “you’ve made your bed, now sleep in it” mentality and agrees to see any play I want. This includes a female-led Richard III, which we’re excited for after hearing great reviews. She may be looking forward to that but I am 99% sure she’s not at all excited about Titus Andronicus, which I’ve been going on about incessantly since my MA year. Is it wrong to talk about forced cannibalism over supper?

Stratford is exceptional and not just for the theatre. Before an oh-so-dangerous Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory appeared at my local mall, it was a huge treat to get it in Stratford. Oh! would I pace … trying to decide on the perfect confection (whoever can figure out what the answer is, I’d love to hear it). Now my guilty pleasure is Distinctly Tea, where I buy loose-leaf tea faster than I can consume it!

What really keeps us coming back to Stratford is York Street Kitchen. I shouldn’t even be telling you about this place, seldom can we get a table without standing in line, but it is the best build-your-own sandwich place, ever. Or maybe it’s because my Type A personality enjoys an endorphin release every time I check something on a checklist! And then there’s Balzac’s, which boasts some really special treats, including a Margaret Atwood-endorsed bird friendly coffee. But why do I go there? A chance to stalk Colm Feore. Has it worked yet? Alas, poor yorick!…no. But I’ll tell you one thing: I’m super excited to be going and I can’t wait to keep trying!

Richard III, starring Kevin Spacey, dir. Sam Mendes (!!!)

Who is a very happy girl today? That’s right, me! As per my last post, things in my personal life took a pretty nasty turn right around the Bard’s birthday, but I really needed to “cast my nighted colour off” and, in the words of someone that probably wasn’t Shakespeare, “keep on truckin’.”

I find that the best way to pick oneself up from really bad news is to get some exceptionally good news. I was lucky enough to get some in the form of an invitation to speak at a conference in Cambridge in September. Cambridge! I’ve never been and am over the moon to be able to go. Seriously. When I found out, I must have been jumping high enough to get to the moon, or at very least Cloud 9.

First and foremost, I’m just so overjoyed to have the honour to stand on a soapbox for 20 minutes and get to talk about two of my favorite subjects: Titus Andronicus and food! Mmmm….meatpie! What is also keeping me up at night is the chance to reunite with some very special friends and see some outstanding, once-in-a-lifetime kind of theatre. Pièce de résistance? Richard III, directed by Sam Mendes, who is reunited with the man playing “bottled spider” himself: Kevin freakin’ Spacey.

It all started a few months ago when my very charming friend, the wonderful Pete Mason, put a shout-out on Facebook to ask if anyone wanted to see it with him. I was dying to, and felt really crummy that I was missing out on such an outstanding opportunity. Precious short moments after I got into the conference, I was messaging him, desperately hoping that he hadn’t already made plans and bought tickets. I was in luck that he was available, but we had a very small window of time in which I could see the play: closing night, to be exact. So Pete called, and I got woken up to the most hilarious anecdote that I’d like to share with you right now…

Pete calls the number, because this is such a hot ticket that tickets for most showings aren’t even offered online. The fellow on the phone tells him “we only have single seats left, and they’re all restricted view.” At this point in reading his message, I’m biting my nails. Pete asks, “For which days?”, to which the man on the phone responds, “All of them.” Pete calls this a “tragedy of fittingly Shakespearean proportions,” but luckily, there’s more to this message: “You’re not under 25, are you?” Yes! Yes we are!!! What does this mean???

Thanks to a kind donation from steel magnate Aditya Mittal, there are 100 seats available for the under 25s at just £12 each for every performance of the Old Vic's forthcoming productions.

It means that the English are fantastic! Despite all the cuts to arts funding since the beginning of the accursed “credit crunch,” the powers that be are still so concerned with the cultural upbringing of their youth that they have special seats reserved for us at theatres. Where exactly? Front row. For how much? Well, they’re normally £42.50, which is a bargain if you ask me: I’ve had worse seats to worse plays in North America and the tickets have cost a whole lot more. But we’re not paying £42.50. We’re paying £12 to sit at spitting distance from Kevin Spacey. I hope that one day, there will be a whole blog post devoted to being spit on by Kevin Spacey. God bless the English and their determination to stand behind their theatre. They have made me a very, very happy girl.

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!