Could The Tempest really be the work of Shakespeare, our Bard?
It is so awful in so many ways that, in Solomon’s opinion, there is no way this monstrosity could be anything more than a group effort that MAY possibly have had some minor posthumous input and contribution from the Great Man.
Solomon has never seen a serious challenge to the authorship of this play, but this comedy-fantasy-romance bears so little traces of a master’s hand that it is inconceivable that we should attribute it to the Master.
If the first-production date of 1611 is accurate, then this means that there is a seven years’ gap between the death of Edward de Vere, the real Shakespeare, and the appearance of this play. That there was so much time between his death and the first production of this play pretty much assures that there is little if any connection between The Tempest and Shakespeare.
In all respects, it seems like a vehicle created by and for a troupe of men to show off their favorite shtick; to give their work a whiff of respectability, they attributed it to Shakespeare, whom they may have worked with and whose work they certainly were familiar with. That they could get away with such a fraud seven years after his death, though, reinforces Solomon’s contention that the general public was unaware of who the real Shakespeare was. Think Clifford Irving fooling the world about Howard Hughes in OUR time, so such things are indeed possible.
Solomon was amused recently when he went through The Tempest with pen in hand to write down all the lines that he feels rise to the heights of Shakespearean greatness; then he compared his list to an Internet site that does the same. Solomon's list was less than half a handwritten page; theirs was just about every other line in the play. Obviously, we don’t agree. Someone here is very wrong, and it ain’t Solomon!
But more than a paucity of inspired language is the utter idiocy of the plot. If the name of “Shakespeare” were not associated with The Tempest, would anyone ever think this to be the work of a genius? The humor is sophomoric and cruel, the characters are one-dimensional, the plot hinges on magic and drunkenness and accidents. What’s to show genius here?
The Tempest is “proof” that Shakespeare created a successful hoax about his true identity that only insiders knew—and so his name was able to be exploited after his death. As far as the general public knew, he was still alive and writing. Solomon believes that anything after Macbeth is primarily, and probably wholly, someone else’s work.
The most connection that Shakespeare may have had to The Tempest, if there was any at all, was probably along the lines of a discarded sketch for an idea, some unused lines he may have tossed out, or some drunken ramblings in his later years remembered by acquaintances. His connection to what exists is undoubtedly tangential—and perhaps non-existent. Regardless, the work certainly bears neither his direct hand nor his imprimatur.
There’s nothing good, let alone classical, about The Tempest, and certainly no reason to treat it as if it is anything other than Jacobean ephemera. Those who refuse to acknowledge how obvious a forgery the thing is are of that type of people who pay outrageous sums for brand names--and refuse to see the “Made in China” tags on their Rolexes.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Saturday, November 8, 2008
The Great Divide
The Great Divide
Trends come, trends go, but how on earth did we get to this point of in-your-face cleavage at every turn? And what does cleavage have to do with Shakespeare?
Ah, you see, Solomon believes there is a connection, and that connection has to do with the proliferation of these so-called Renaissance Faires. Now Solomon has nothing against people wanting to dress up in Elizabethan garb and imitate the Bard’s manner of speaking, but more than being a Shakespearean love fest, these things have become excuses for women to see how much of their comely (hopefully) bosoms they can expose.
In Solomon’s youth, the only women who showed cleavage were those zaftig matrons who had probably nursed a whole brood of kids and had a cleavage up to their chins. Collateral cleavage, so to speak. Occasionally when ladies going to a formal event would wear a gown with a slightly daring décolletage—but the children were in bed when the great divide stepped out.
But are the ladies bigger today than they were when Solomon went to school? He certainly didn’t know any girls who could or would if she could show cleavage. Alas. But today!!! How do the lads keep their minds on their studies?
Solomon attributes this increasing cornucopia, with cups no longer full but overflowing, to things like high fructose corn syrup and sodium fluoride and bottled water and cell phones. Whatever has caused this change in the female form, he can’t help but reflect on his country cousins of years gone by who competed in 4-H and county fairs to produce the “chicken of tomorrow,” chickens with breasts of unparalleled voluptuousness.
Apparently the chicken feed used then has found its way into the food chain for American women, for today America has mammaries the likes of which have never been in history—or at least this man’s history. And I used to read National Geographic!
But more puzzling than the cause of the increase of the size of our earliest sustenance is the increase in the acceptability of showing them off. It is now fully acceptable, perhaps laudable, to put them out there, cinched up, pushed out, quivering, trembling, barely contained, like two straining Rottweilers ready to burst their tethers.
Solomon supposes that we can blame or thank Shakespeare and Elizabethan times (at least the Renaissance Faire interpretation of these things), for ladies have used them as license to unleash their hounds to the very last millimeter of their permissibility and restraint. The understanding seems to be that in those olden days, the bonnie lasses showed the lusty laddies what they could expect with one mere yank of a bustier lace. And surely if this posturing were good enough for the Bard, then it’s good enough for us.
If a lady can give a rough approximation of Shakespearean manner of speaking—being able to recite the Paternoster in the King James style will do--then she is not immodest or provocative if she reveals what Solomon never saw as a youth, even at the beach. Fortunately, it is not necessary to pay admission to a Faire to see the heaving of the twin rotundities. Women who once dressed as if there were such a thing as modesty now come at us as if she has put two state capitals in her top. Solomon suggests assuming that she wants to give you a lesson in classical architecture and you had better pay attention.
Now, Solomon is always a gentleman who knows that it is fun but not at all nice or polite to stare into on-coming headlights. But since knickknack shelves have become continental shelves and since titillation has become advertisement, he says, “Gentlemen, start your engines! Look to your heart’s content. Look as if sharia law is going to be imposed soon.”
And if she takes offense, then tell her, in your best Shakespearean accent, “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”
Trends come, trends go, but how on earth did we get to this point of in-your-face cleavage at every turn? And what does cleavage have to do with Shakespeare?
Ah, you see, Solomon believes there is a connection, and that connection has to do with the proliferation of these so-called Renaissance Faires. Now Solomon has nothing against people wanting to dress up in Elizabethan garb and imitate the Bard’s manner of speaking, but more than being a Shakespearean love fest, these things have become excuses for women to see how much of their comely (hopefully) bosoms they can expose.
In Solomon’s youth, the only women who showed cleavage were those zaftig matrons who had probably nursed a whole brood of kids and had a cleavage up to their chins. Collateral cleavage, so to speak. Occasionally when ladies going to a formal event would wear a gown with a slightly daring décolletage—but the children were in bed when the great divide stepped out.
But are the ladies bigger today than they were when Solomon went to school? He certainly didn’t know any girls who could or would if she could show cleavage. Alas. But today!!! How do the lads keep their minds on their studies?
Solomon attributes this increasing cornucopia, with cups no longer full but overflowing, to things like high fructose corn syrup and sodium fluoride and bottled water and cell phones. Whatever has caused this change in the female form, he can’t help but reflect on his country cousins of years gone by who competed in 4-H and county fairs to produce the “chicken of tomorrow,” chickens with breasts of unparalleled voluptuousness.
Apparently the chicken feed used then has found its way into the food chain for American women, for today America has mammaries the likes of which have never been in history—or at least this man’s history. And I used to read National Geographic!
But more puzzling than the cause of the increase of the size of our earliest sustenance is the increase in the acceptability of showing them off. It is now fully acceptable, perhaps laudable, to put them out there, cinched up, pushed out, quivering, trembling, barely contained, like two straining Rottweilers ready to burst their tethers.
Solomon supposes that we can blame or thank Shakespeare and Elizabethan times (at least the Renaissance Faire interpretation of these things), for ladies have used them as license to unleash their hounds to the very last millimeter of their permissibility and restraint. The understanding seems to be that in those olden days, the bonnie lasses showed the lusty laddies what they could expect with one mere yank of a bustier lace. And surely if this posturing were good enough for the Bard, then it’s good enough for us.
If a lady can give a rough approximation of Shakespearean manner of speaking—being able to recite the Paternoster in the King James style will do--then she is not immodest or provocative if she reveals what Solomon never saw as a youth, even at the beach. Fortunately, it is not necessary to pay admission to a Faire to see the heaving of the twin rotundities. Women who once dressed as if there were such a thing as modesty now come at us as if she has put two state capitals in her top. Solomon suggests assuming that she wants to give you a lesson in classical architecture and you had better pay attention.
Now, Solomon is always a gentleman who knows that it is fun but not at all nice or polite to stare into on-coming headlights. But since knickknack shelves have become continental shelves and since titillation has become advertisement, he says, “Gentlemen, start your engines! Look to your heart’s content. Look as if sharia law is going to be imposed soon.”
And if she takes offense, then tell her, in your best Shakespearean accent, “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”
Monday, November 3, 2008
The Charmed Pot: Sonnet 76
The Charmèd Pot
Let’s take a look at Sonnet 76, one of those more mysterious gems:
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.
Now, Solomon has always suspected that Shakespeare used some substances to help him with that old imagination factor that his outré language sense required. But Solomon does not think the Bard confined his indulgences to mere alcohol.
You see, Sonnet 76 mentions “a noted weed” that he keeps invention in. What on earth was he referring to? And in Macbeth, the famous ingredients of the witches’ potion are thrown in “the charmed pot,” and then, lo and behold, a hallucinogenic vision emerges.
Now, do we really think this is all just coincidence? That such musings are merely the product of OUR over-active imaginations, perhaps even a projected wish-fulfillment? Solomon thinks not. He thinks that our Bard did indeed indulge himself with smoking or ingesting the loco weed, and Sonnet 76 is his announcement of this fact.
Let’s not forget that an intellect as profound as his was surely capable of disguising the meaning of what he was saying, of inserting sly, overt, but ambiguous references to his peculiar little vices. And he surely would have delighted in parading his sins in front of the entire world with the knowledge that, though his sins could be seen by all, they could be proved by none.
Solomon believes that all geniuses of wit indulge in this perverse game. He is remind of one of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous stories, “The Purloined Letter.” In this old detective story, the police must find a letter that they know is in an apartment, but, after ripping the place apart, they cannot find. It is up to M. Dupin, Poe’s detective, to deduce that sometimes the best way to hide something is to put it right in front of your nose. In this case, the letter is right on the mantle, a place so obvious that it is overlooked.
Solomon believes that Shakespeare hid things—his identity, his sins, his peccadilloes—in plain sight where no one could possibly think to find such things. Surely “compounds strange” are other drugs that he would have had access to but chose not to use, sticking with his “noted weed.”
If disreputable drug use is laid out for us, what else might be sitting right in front of us? What other sins of the master are laid bare for us to see, if only we task ourselves to admit that the possibility that presents itself is really there? Our bard was nothing if not vain, arrogant, and so cocksure of his superior intellect that he could not only walk on the edge of the moral parapet but dance on it and not fall off.
Let’s take a look at Sonnet 76, one of those more mysterious gems:
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.
Now, Solomon has always suspected that Shakespeare used some substances to help him with that old imagination factor that his outré language sense required. But Solomon does not think the Bard confined his indulgences to mere alcohol.
You see, Sonnet 76 mentions “a noted weed” that he keeps invention in. What on earth was he referring to? And in Macbeth, the famous ingredients of the witches’ potion are thrown in “the charmed pot,” and then, lo and behold, a hallucinogenic vision emerges.
Now, do we really think this is all just coincidence? That such musings are merely the product of OUR over-active imaginations, perhaps even a projected wish-fulfillment? Solomon thinks not. He thinks that our Bard did indeed indulge himself with smoking or ingesting the loco weed, and Sonnet 76 is his announcement of this fact.
Let’s not forget that an intellect as profound as his was surely capable of disguising the meaning of what he was saying, of inserting sly, overt, but ambiguous references to his peculiar little vices. And he surely would have delighted in parading his sins in front of the entire world with the knowledge that, though his sins could be seen by all, they could be proved by none.
Solomon believes that all geniuses of wit indulge in this perverse game. He is remind of one of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous stories, “The Purloined Letter.” In this old detective story, the police must find a letter that they know is in an apartment, but, after ripping the place apart, they cannot find. It is up to M. Dupin, Poe’s detective, to deduce that sometimes the best way to hide something is to put it right in front of your nose. In this case, the letter is right on the mantle, a place so obvious that it is overlooked.
Solomon believes that Shakespeare hid things—his identity, his sins, his peccadilloes—in plain sight where no one could possibly think to find such things. Surely “compounds strange” are other drugs that he would have had access to but chose not to use, sticking with his “noted weed.”
If disreputable drug use is laid out for us, what else might be sitting right in front of us? What other sins of the master are laid bare for us to see, if only we task ourselves to admit that the possibility that presents itself is really there? Our bard was nothing if not vain, arrogant, and so cocksure of his superior intellect that he could not only walk on the edge of the moral parapet but dance on it and not fall off.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Sorry to have taken so long! Othello
The Bard Says No to Obama
Is that Shakespeare I hear calling to us as our election day draws near? Solomon thinks so.
Last week, Solomon reread Othello, that sinister tragedy of jealousy—and of evil manipulation. And, after a week’s worth of solitary absorption (no one should ever discuss Shakespeare immediately upon reading him), he came to the conclusion, with a familiar nod to George Santayana’s dictum about history, that those who don’t know their Shakespeare are doomed to blindly become players in his tragedies.
You see, it dawned on Solomon that Othello bears an uncanny relationship and relevance to our own political situation at the moment. We have Obama, whose name starts with the same letter and has the same syllable pattern as the doomed protagonist. Coincidence! We think not! Shakespearean prescience!
Of course, Iago, the sadistic “ancient” to Othello, malevolently manipulates him. Well, doesn’t Iago’s name just look ever so much like “Chicago,” the malevolent and manipulative socialist political machine that so controls Obama?
And why does Othello so trust Iago when we know that Iago spews lies and is following a wicked agenda of hatred? Is not our Iago also our debased mainstream media, which conceals truths, tenders deceptions, and perpetrates out-and-out lies?
Who is Othello? Why, he is the Moor, possibly a Muslim, but of indeterminate ethnicity, perhaps dusky, perhaps black. He is one of Shakespeare’s mysteries, the first and only non-white major character in the whole canon.
And then there is Desdemona, the lovely woman who falls in love with Othello—or rather falls in love with his voice and his stories. She leaves her family to follow this blustering Moor, forsaking her father for thrilling possibilities—possibilities that go dreadfully wrong.
So who is she in our national drama? Why, the other character with four syllables to her name. America, of course. A country enamored of a cultured voice after eight years of inarticulate babbling. Willing to trust without verifying. Ablaze with a yearning for change. Full of hope.
Iago, not Othello, remember, is the one who wants to destroy things. Like a viper from hell, Iago plays upon Othello’s goodness to first distrust Desdemona, and then to hate her, and ultimately to destroy her.
Her fate is sealed by, of all things, a handkerchief. Never has a simple piece of cloth been made to be such an instrument of suspicion and then death. Planted by Iago in Cassio’s chamber, Desdemona’s handkerchief is a gift from Othello, which he comes to believe she values too lightly and has given away; it becomes his “proof” of her infidelity. Never has such tragedy been perpetrated for something so inconsequential.
Nevertheless, Othello is beyond reason and he smothers her on the marriage bed, as she with her last breath says, “O, falsely, falsely murder’d!” When asked who has murdered her, she gasps, “Nobody. I myself.”
Is this not the saddest thing of all? She actually believes she has brought on her own death by loving Othello! And you know what?
She’s right!
This, ladies and gentlemen, is just what’s going to happen to America. She is going to elect the Moor, but the Moor trusts his Iago, not his Desdemona. As Critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge tells us in his analysis of the play, “Othello does not kill Desdemona in jealousy, but rather in a conviction forced upon him by the almost superhuman art of Iago, such a conviction as any man would and must have entertained who had believed Iago’s honesty as Othello did.”
Othello/Obama will just as surely destroy this country by suffocating our freedoms, all the while taking marching orders from the evil media. As in the play, sadly, we will repent too late. America will be just “one, whose subdued eyes albeit unused to the melting mood, drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees their medicinable gum.”
Alas, each drop that falls “will prove a crocodile.”
So Solomon urges you to brush up your Shakespeare. See what our Bard predicts for those who love “not wisely, but too well.”
Is that Shakespeare I hear calling to us as our election day draws near? Solomon thinks so.
Last week, Solomon reread Othello, that sinister tragedy of jealousy—and of evil manipulation. And, after a week’s worth of solitary absorption (no one should ever discuss Shakespeare immediately upon reading him), he came to the conclusion, with a familiar nod to George Santayana’s dictum about history, that those who don’t know their Shakespeare are doomed to blindly become players in his tragedies.
You see, it dawned on Solomon that Othello bears an uncanny relationship and relevance to our own political situation at the moment. We have Obama, whose name starts with the same letter and has the same syllable pattern as the doomed protagonist. Coincidence! We think not! Shakespearean prescience!
Of course, Iago, the sadistic “ancient” to Othello, malevolently manipulates him. Well, doesn’t Iago’s name just look ever so much like “Chicago,” the malevolent and manipulative socialist political machine that so controls Obama?
And why does Othello so trust Iago when we know that Iago spews lies and is following a wicked agenda of hatred? Is not our Iago also our debased mainstream media, which conceals truths, tenders deceptions, and perpetrates out-and-out lies?
Who is Othello? Why, he is the Moor, possibly a Muslim, but of indeterminate ethnicity, perhaps dusky, perhaps black. He is one of Shakespeare’s mysteries, the first and only non-white major character in the whole canon.
And then there is Desdemona, the lovely woman who falls in love with Othello—or rather falls in love with his voice and his stories. She leaves her family to follow this blustering Moor, forsaking her father for thrilling possibilities—possibilities that go dreadfully wrong.
So who is she in our national drama? Why, the other character with four syllables to her name. America, of course. A country enamored of a cultured voice after eight years of inarticulate babbling. Willing to trust without verifying. Ablaze with a yearning for change. Full of hope.
Iago, not Othello, remember, is the one who wants to destroy things. Like a viper from hell, Iago plays upon Othello’s goodness to first distrust Desdemona, and then to hate her, and ultimately to destroy her.
Her fate is sealed by, of all things, a handkerchief. Never has a simple piece of cloth been made to be such an instrument of suspicion and then death. Planted by Iago in Cassio’s chamber, Desdemona’s handkerchief is a gift from Othello, which he comes to believe she values too lightly and has given away; it becomes his “proof” of her infidelity. Never has such tragedy been perpetrated for something so inconsequential.
Nevertheless, Othello is beyond reason and he smothers her on the marriage bed, as she with her last breath says, “O, falsely, falsely murder’d!” When asked who has murdered her, she gasps, “Nobody. I myself.”
Is this not the saddest thing of all? She actually believes she has brought on her own death by loving Othello! And you know what?
She’s right!
This, ladies and gentlemen, is just what’s going to happen to America. She is going to elect the Moor, but the Moor trusts his Iago, not his Desdemona. As Critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge tells us in his analysis of the play, “Othello does not kill Desdemona in jealousy, but rather in a conviction forced upon him by the almost superhuman art of Iago, such a conviction as any man would and must have entertained who had believed Iago’s honesty as Othello did.”
Othello/Obama will just as surely destroy this country by suffocating our freedoms, all the while taking marching orders from the evil media. As in the play, sadly, we will repent too late. America will be just “one, whose subdued eyes albeit unused to the melting mood, drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees their medicinable gum.”
Alas, each drop that falls “will prove a crocodile.”
So Solomon urges you to brush up your Shakespeare. See what our Bard predicts for those who love “not wisely, but too well.”
Sunday, February 3, 2008
The Bourn Ultimatum
If you have not yet read the previous entries, I am propounding a new theory of Hamlet that makes much more sense than does the traditional view. This is completely based on the actual text. My view is that Claudius is not the fratricidal, regicidal, incest-driven monster that everyone assumes killed his brother, king, future brother-in-law, but rather that Prince Hamlet did the killing.
Yes, that part’s a bit different, isn’t it? Well, today, yet another one of those incredibly dreary and rainy days in Southern California that the weather experts tell us will do nothing to relieve drought conditions, I am going to concentrate on a telling line in the “To Be” speech, Act III, Scene 1.
And why, pray tell, does Lord Hamlet contemplate suicide so memorably? What, exactly, has traumatized him so much that offing himself seems like a plan? Well, the death of his father, I suppose, (the traditionalists would tell us that he has just discovered from a ghost that his dear old dad was actually murdered) has plunged him into the slough of despair.
But quite frankly, this doesn’t make sense on a psychological level. First of all, he can’t settle in his mind when exactly his father did die. Like a strung-out junkie, he babbles different and contradictory time lines, only to be clarified by Ophelia (assuming she has not lost her mind yet) when she reminds him that it is at least FOUR MONTHS!!! since the death, not the two hours he thinks has elapsed (III, 2). This is a rather unseemly delay for such a reaction to set in.
So, why does he make such an egregious error? Ah, you say, because he is pretending to be mad. Nonsense, I say. He IS mad because he is the culprit for whom the crime is always fresh, the unhealed running sore that is immune from respite. Time, for a madman, is an irrelevant issue, the country from whose bourn he cannot escape. Every day is Groundhog Day to a man like Hamlet, who must replay the events continually.
Secondly, Hamlet is far from being a boy—he is a grown, albeit immature, man who seems to have failed to launch, as the Zeitgeisian cant would say. Bright, clever, moderately talented, devious--and totally mad! He is a man capable of creating consistently only dissension and distress to those around him—and one wholly unfit for kingship.
So he is a court jester sans real responsibility. Why would he think of killing himself? Obviously, because he has done something in his insanity that deserves the greatest of punishments; he has committed the greatest of crimes—regicide (killing the king, by the by, is higher on Shakespeare’s crime list that "mere" parricide). Remember, Prince Hamlet himself says he is only mad north-northwest (in the interminable Act II, Scene 2), so he knows that when he killed his father, his sane self watched and could do nothing. His sane self seeks release by suicide; the insane side stops him and urges him onward to new crimes.
Now, back to the “To Be” speech. The telling line is this most over-looked one. He says that death is “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” Now, isn’t this a wee bit curious from someone who supposedly, just a very short time before, has been given marching orders from just such a spirit and that this spirit has indeed returned from that undiscovered country!? Is his memory that short?
Not at all. He remembers that he was talking to the “ghost,” but he knows full well that this "ghost" is all too human, an actor portraying a ghost, speaking words that Hamlet himself wrote to help convince himself that it is not he that has killed his father, but rather his uncle.
Prince Hamlet creates an eleborate ruse to murder the guilt (but not the guilty) of the unforgivable crime he has committed. Remember, as Hamlet himself says, nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so (II, 2). Thus, if he can "think" it possible, likely, undeniable that Claudius is the murderer, then it will be so! Wonderful mad logic!
You see, Hamlet knows there is no ghost that has returned from death’s boundaries, and he gives himself away to us in the most famous of all Shakespearean speeches. Of course, Hamlet wishes with all his being that his father will return and exonerate him, the son, from the crime-of-crimes he (the son) has committed. But since the dead don’t walk or talk, Prince Hamlet has had to resort to the next best thing—a theatrical illusion which walks and talks and provides a new "truth."
Isn't it interesting that theatrical illusion is exactly what Edward de Vere himself traded in? Did he not create an alter ego who spoke truth that he as Oxford could not? He might as well have been talking about himself, the nobleman who killed himself by slaughtering his reputation and position and then traded in theatrical illusion to provide himself worth (and a name) and vindication for losing those things he had arrogantly thown away with both hands. I want you to see Hamlet, therefore, as an autobiographical exorcism; if you do, things become MUCH more interesting!
So, my friends, reflect on the line “From whose bourn no traveler returns,” and then provide another, more logical explanation, than the one I just propounded.
Ah, I didn’t think you would.
Now, for those of you impatiently champing at the bit to throw in my face what I call the sine qua non that PROVES Claudius as the culprit (namely his soliloquy after the play-within-a-play), I ask only that you be patient, and all will be revealed and explained.
Until next time.
Yes, that part’s a bit different, isn’t it? Well, today, yet another one of those incredibly dreary and rainy days in Southern California that the weather experts tell us will do nothing to relieve drought conditions, I am going to concentrate on a telling line in the “To Be” speech, Act III, Scene 1.
And why, pray tell, does Lord Hamlet contemplate suicide so memorably? What, exactly, has traumatized him so much that offing himself seems like a plan? Well, the death of his father, I suppose, (the traditionalists would tell us that he has just discovered from a ghost that his dear old dad was actually murdered) has plunged him into the slough of despair.
But quite frankly, this doesn’t make sense on a psychological level. First of all, he can’t settle in his mind when exactly his father did die. Like a strung-out junkie, he babbles different and contradictory time lines, only to be clarified by Ophelia (assuming she has not lost her mind yet) when she reminds him that it is at least FOUR MONTHS!!! since the death, not the two hours he thinks has elapsed (III, 2). This is a rather unseemly delay for such a reaction to set in.
So, why does he make such an egregious error? Ah, you say, because he is pretending to be mad. Nonsense, I say. He IS mad because he is the culprit for whom the crime is always fresh, the unhealed running sore that is immune from respite. Time, for a madman, is an irrelevant issue, the country from whose bourn he cannot escape. Every day is Groundhog Day to a man like Hamlet, who must replay the events continually.
Secondly, Hamlet is far from being a boy—he is a grown, albeit immature, man who seems to have failed to launch, as the Zeitgeisian cant would say. Bright, clever, moderately talented, devious--and totally mad! He is a man capable of creating consistently only dissension and distress to those around him—and one wholly unfit for kingship.
So he is a court jester sans real responsibility. Why would he think of killing himself? Obviously, because he has done something in his insanity that deserves the greatest of punishments; he has committed the greatest of crimes—regicide (killing the king, by the by, is higher on Shakespeare’s crime list that "mere" parricide). Remember, Prince Hamlet himself says he is only mad north-northwest (in the interminable Act II, Scene 2), so he knows that when he killed his father, his sane self watched and could do nothing. His sane self seeks release by suicide; the insane side stops him and urges him onward to new crimes.
Now, back to the “To Be” speech. The telling line is this most over-looked one. He says that death is “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” Now, isn’t this a wee bit curious from someone who supposedly, just a very short time before, has been given marching orders from just such a spirit and that this spirit has indeed returned from that undiscovered country!? Is his memory that short?
Not at all. He remembers that he was talking to the “ghost,” but he knows full well that this "ghost" is all too human, an actor portraying a ghost, speaking words that Hamlet himself wrote to help convince himself that it is not he that has killed his father, but rather his uncle.
Prince Hamlet creates an eleborate ruse to murder the guilt (but not the guilty) of the unforgivable crime he has committed. Remember, as Hamlet himself says, nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so (II, 2). Thus, if he can "think" it possible, likely, undeniable that Claudius is the murderer, then it will be so! Wonderful mad logic!
You see, Hamlet knows there is no ghost that has returned from death’s boundaries, and he gives himself away to us in the most famous of all Shakespearean speeches. Of course, Hamlet wishes with all his being that his father will return and exonerate him, the son, from the crime-of-crimes he (the son) has committed. But since the dead don’t walk or talk, Prince Hamlet has had to resort to the next best thing—a theatrical illusion which walks and talks and provides a new "truth."
Isn't it interesting that theatrical illusion is exactly what Edward de Vere himself traded in? Did he not create an alter ego who spoke truth that he as Oxford could not? He might as well have been talking about himself, the nobleman who killed himself by slaughtering his reputation and position and then traded in theatrical illusion to provide himself worth (and a name) and vindication for losing those things he had arrogantly thown away with both hands. I want you to see Hamlet, therefore, as an autobiographical exorcism; if you do, things become MUCH more interesting!
So, my friends, reflect on the line “From whose bourn no traveler returns,” and then provide another, more logical explanation, than the one I just propounded.
Ah, I didn’t think you would.
Now, for those of you impatiently champing at the bit to throw in my face what I call the sine qua non that PROVES Claudius as the culprit (namely his soliloquy after the play-within-a-play), I ask only that you be patient, and all will be revealed and explained.
Until next time.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Our Guilty Goddess
I know we all have a “guilty goddess,” just as our Bard did. We have a play or sonnet that we particularly like but which most people just don’t get. We have our secret work of his that fills us with pleasure unalloyed and that brings us to the brink of understanding. We love that which most don’t love.
My secret pleasure, the work that I read as if with a flashlight in a tent when everyone else has gone to sleep, is Antony and Cleopatra. I have a copy of this play in a beautifully (albeit decrepit) bound volume that fills me with great pleasure just by the sensuous pleasure of touching it.
The play is unperformable. I have never heard of, let alone seen, a production of this monstrosity, yet it has lines that absolutely thrill me beyond the here and now.
One of these days, I will share with you my thoughts on this neglected masterpiece (which, I know, some of you would rather not be a part of our Bard’s cannon). I have never seen it performed, and I doubt that I ever shall. But it is my favorite work of our Bard, bar none.
I thought all of you might like to share your guilty pleasures with us, those works that most overlook but which you find as compelling as catnip. Go at it, my lads and lasses! Tell us of your “guilty goddesses.”
My secret pleasure, the work that I read as if with a flashlight in a tent when everyone else has gone to sleep, is Antony and Cleopatra. I have a copy of this play in a beautifully (albeit decrepit) bound volume that fills me with great pleasure just by the sensuous pleasure of touching it.
The play is unperformable. I have never heard of, let alone seen, a production of this monstrosity, yet it has lines that absolutely thrill me beyond the here and now.
One of these days, I will share with you my thoughts on this neglected masterpiece (which, I know, some of you would rather not be a part of our Bard’s cannon). I have never seen it performed, and I doubt that I ever shall. But it is my favorite work of our Bard, bar none.
I thought all of you might like to share your guilty pleasures with us, those works that most overlook but which you find as compelling as catnip. Go at it, my lads and lasses! Tell us of your “guilty goddesses.”
Them Pesky Ghosts
(Read Claudius Got a Bum Rap before this)
A second support for the theory that Hamlet, not Claudius, killed his King Hamlet rests on the nature of those pesky ghosts. “Ghosts” he says, emphasizing the plural. “Surely you mean ‘ghost.’”
No I don’t. The plural is supported by the play.
Now, everyone assumes there is just one ghost because in all ghostly appearances it is that of the deceased King Hamlet. But if you honestly think there is a real ghost, then you’re no further evolved than some primitive who has no knowledge beyond fear. News bulletin: There is no such thing as ghosts!
And it doesn’t excuse you to say that Shakespeare believed in ghosts. Do you honestly believe that a mind as rare as his held stock in such unprovable and ludicrous nonsense? Granted, he used such things as elves and fairies in his trifles such as Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. But Hamlet is a serious work and cannot rest on such whimsy. Only one other serious work contains any supernatural elements, that being Macbeth (and we’ll debunk the supernatural in that piece at another time), so don’t go thinking that our Bard actually believed in ghosts.
Yes, of course I know that a ghost appears in the story, but Shakespeare was playing with us, seeing if we would be stupid enough to fall for something so patently absurd. And obviously we as a society, over the past four hundred years, have.
Time for a new look at these ghosts.
There are clearly two different ghosts in this story—one jumps out of the way when it is pursued by weapons (whatever does a dead shade have to fear from sword points and has need of armor, for God’s sake!?); the other one can walk through walls. One can be seen and heard by others and one cannot be seen or heard by anyone--except Hamlet. One ghost appears only in the dark of night, while the other appears during the day. Hmmm. Suspicious. Let’s explore.
The ghost that does all the talking to Hamlet, that tells him how dear old dad died and that he, the son, should get revenge, seems to have some terribly earthbound characteristics. Other than the fact that we are told it is a ghost, is there anything that proves it to be from the supernatural? There is not, so I contend that this ghost is a person playing a ghost!
Why do people assume it is King Hamlet? (a) Because it’s in the king’s castle and (b) because it’s wearing the kings armor. Come on. It’s night, and this ghost has to disappear with the crowing of the cock (until it doesn’t have to obey such rules later on—that’s weird). Why does it come out only at night? So it can’t be seen as the hoax it really is.
It never speaks in front of anyone but only allows Hamlet to hear it speak. Why? Because the voice is NOT that of the late king, but rather of a person playing him.
Who would be playing this part? Why, an actor of course. Someone trained in impersonation and in learning lines and performing for money. Are there any actors in the play. You know there’s a whole troupe of them that mysteriously show up at the castle. To their leader, Hamlet says, “O my old friend! Why, they face is valanced since I saw thee last.” I believe that the last Hamlet saw the actor was playing King Hamlet’s ghost on the battlements of Elsinore!
And just what are we to make of Hamlet’s line, “I heard thee speak me a speech once, but it was never acted, or, if it was, not above once.”? This line is glossed over as unimportant, but it is crucial to understanding that the speech that was spoken was the one given by the ghost about the death of King Hamlet. Of course it was spoken only once!
Therefore, the lead player is the earthly ghost of King Hamlet. But who is responsible for this? Well, it would have to be someone who could let the player into the castle, and only one person knew the player. That would be the prince. Also, when Hamlet learns from Rosencrantz that players are coming, he registers no surprise but incredibly says, “He that plays the king shall be welcome.” You see, these players whom Hamlet was “wont to take such delight in” are arranged by him to come. But one has had a previous royal performance written so as “might [not] indict the author.”
And who might be the author of the speech that the earthly ghost did give? Why, Prince Hamlet, of course. Imagine that the words of the ghost were written by Hamlet, giving a detailed description of how his crime was committed. Only the perpetrator of the crime would have been able to describe the details in the way they are done. Dead men, even in Shakespeare’s day, did not relate the manner of their deaths. Then, as now, it took an eye witness.
If you say this is nonsense, then you might as well you say you believe in the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, too. Keep telling yourself that you are a citizen of the 21st Century and there is no such thing as ghosts—and you MUST come to a new interpretation of this play!
More coming on those pesky ghosts, namely WHY? WHY? WHY?
Claudius Got a Bum Rap
Can anyone tell me one good trait that Hamlet possesses? I didn’t think so. Yet the traditional view of this boy-man is that he’s this poor, put-upon tragic soul.
I think it’s way past time that we put this notion to bed and start exploring a totally new look at what ACTUALLY was going on there in Denmark.
First off, let’s look at the supposed villain of this piece, Claudius. According to absolutely all critics and scholars, Claudius committed (1) fratricide, (b) regicide, and (c) something akin to incest with murder thrown in to achieve it. Wow! This is the Shakespearean trifecta of unforgivable sins, and all in one man!
But in his soliloquies and behavior, does he display even one iota of a nature so perfidious that hell would have to have a special addition just for him? Does anyone but Hamlet have even one suspicion—or even one unkind thing to say—about this man? Surely SOMEone in Denmark would have uttered a demurring word about such evil.
Yet none of this happens. There is only one person on a hate campaign against Claudius, and this is the narcissistic, demented Hamlet, the man passed over to be king in favor of a former king’s brother. Doesn’t this make you just a wee bit suspicious about whether Shakespeare might have played a really nifty hoax on us mortals?
Well, it does me, and I’m here to set the record straight. Claudius didn’t kill King Hamlet—he was done in by none other than his madcap son!
King Hamlet died with an earful of dripping poison and a body covered with strange eruptions—so I’m assuming Danish forensic methods were indeed so backward that their investigators, who were assigned to the biggest crime in Denmark possibly ever!, just shrugged and said, “Nothing out of the ordinary here.”
Pshaw! If Claudius had been even remotely implicated, he would not have been elevated to the throne and allowed to marry the queen. However, if a royal son known for erratic, irresponsible behavior had been implicated, there might indeed be a cover-up to prevent the shocking scandal from becoming public. But that son would be denied the throne.
Now, doesn’t this make more sense? And it also explains why Hamlet never complains about not being king—he does, from time to time, know a hawk from a handsaw, and he knows the reason only too well. “Hamlet, dear, you know perfectly well that you killed your father, the leader of a sovereign country, and that, well, somewhat disqualifies you. You’re completely mad, you see. Now don’t bother Mommy with this matter of why you’re not king ever again.”
So this is the starting point for a theory. Discard the notion that Claudius killed his brother, accept the premise that Hamlet killed his father, and let’s see where this trail leads us. First point of proof: Who has the more likely disposition to crime? Point awarded to Hamlet!
I think it’s way past time that we put this notion to bed and start exploring a totally new look at what ACTUALLY was going on there in Denmark.
First off, let’s look at the supposed villain of this piece, Claudius. According to absolutely all critics and scholars, Claudius committed (1) fratricide, (b) regicide, and (c) something akin to incest with murder thrown in to achieve it. Wow! This is the Shakespearean trifecta of unforgivable sins, and all in one man!
But in his soliloquies and behavior, does he display even one iota of a nature so perfidious that hell would have to have a special addition just for him? Does anyone but Hamlet have even one suspicion—or even one unkind thing to say—about this man? Surely SOMEone in Denmark would have uttered a demurring word about such evil.
Yet none of this happens. There is only one person on a hate campaign against Claudius, and this is the narcissistic, demented Hamlet, the man passed over to be king in favor of a former king’s brother. Doesn’t this make you just a wee bit suspicious about whether Shakespeare might have played a really nifty hoax on us mortals?
Well, it does me, and I’m here to set the record straight. Claudius didn’t kill King Hamlet—he was done in by none other than his madcap son!
King Hamlet died with an earful of dripping poison and a body covered with strange eruptions—so I’m assuming Danish forensic methods were indeed so backward that their investigators, who were assigned to the biggest crime in Denmark possibly ever!, just shrugged and said, “Nothing out of the ordinary here.”
Pshaw! If Claudius had been even remotely implicated, he would not have been elevated to the throne and allowed to marry the queen. However, if a royal son known for erratic, irresponsible behavior had been implicated, there might indeed be a cover-up to prevent the shocking scandal from becoming public. But that son would be denied the throne.
Now, doesn’t this make more sense? And it also explains why Hamlet never complains about not being king—he does, from time to time, know a hawk from a handsaw, and he knows the reason only too well. “Hamlet, dear, you know perfectly well that you killed your father, the leader of a sovereign country, and that, well, somewhat disqualifies you. You’re completely mad, you see. Now don’t bother Mommy with this matter of why you’re not king ever again.”
So this is the starting point for a theory. Discard the notion that Claudius killed his brother, accept the premise that Hamlet killed his father, and let’s see where this trail leads us. First point of proof: Who has the more likely disposition to crime? Point awarded to Hamlet!
Sunday, January 13, 2008
The Dark Lady Lifts Her Dress
I was going to get into my totally new interpretation of Hamlet that I started with the last posting, but I’ve become a bit sidetracked because of something I read this week.
It was a bunch of twaddle about the Dark Lady and who she might be and I just couldn’t resist bashing this nonsense. The “Dark Lady” begins putting in “her” appearances in the sonnets about 127. Now, the first one hundred and twenty-six sonnets are an ever-increasing obsession with a young man, and then, voila, a “dark lady” appears.
Critics fall all over themselves trying to identify this Elizabethan lass, and they think themselves quite clever by quoting all the possibilities buried in obscure places. But no matter how clever our scholars are, they make one huge mistake: They take the sonnets out of context!
De Vere did not suddenly abandon his obsession. People, even bards, just don’t do that. Perhaps the critics feel relieved that FINALLY there is a woman seeming to enter Oxford’s life and this puts to rest those nasty innuendos that perhaps our bard was walking a bit too far away from the fence on the gay side of the pasture. So people have jumped on the Dark Lady (well, a poor wording) like a sailor who’s been at sea way too long on the first strumpet he lays eyes on.
But this Dark Lady mystery is not solved by looking into dusty records of that long-ago time, but rather must be solved, as are all of Shakespeare’s mysteries, by looking into the sonnets themselves.
Granted, there is the illusion of a new character finally being introduced in the sonnets about the 120’s, but rather than the emergence of a new person, it is really something quite different. The mystery is not WHO the Dark Lady is but rather WHAT she might be!
In 121, de Vere says, “I am that I am.” Almost Biblical, that, don’t you think? Though the great King James translation wouldn’t be done during his lifetime, I wonder if someone on the committee didn’t put this wording there in honor of our bard. Well, be that as it may. What does he mean by this quote? He’s clearly confessing something that he sees about himself that is vile (“Tis better to be vile than vile esteem’d”) but he doesn’t get around to identifying what this is.
Well, if the previous 120 poems aren’t enough to tip you off, then you are being deliberately obtuse. He’s referring, of course, to his compulsive homosexual attraction, that same flamboyant obsession that probably landed him in disgrace (or at least out of fashion) with “fortune and men’s eyes.” But until relatively recently, homosexuality truly was the love that dared not speak its name, and so it was wise to speak in heavily veiled terms, lest one’s outspokenness might lead one to some nasty imprisonment, torture, and death or banishment.
I believe that he had already come to be known as the second queen of the time, and that it was only his lineage, connections, and quick wit that saved him this fate. As Henry was slipping inexorably from his orbit of control, he dabbled more in the dark recesses of his sexuality until finally, in sonnet 130, he comes right out and says who his mistress is: His Homosexual Lust!
Think about it. No man of Oxford’s stature would have had a female mistress of such lowness and ugliness that he would refer to her in the terms he does in 130. Sonnet 129, its immediate precursor, laments his one true love which is “lust in action.” His sex drive is “past reason” and “no sooner had” than hated. This is no woman he’s talking about.
Read Sonnet 130 again and you’ll realize that the cheeks he’s talking about are ass cheeks on a man—hence no roses there! And the breath? Well, I need not get graphic. Every detail makes much more sense describing the object of his lust that is not a female—and what’s more, it makes sense in context.
The Dark Lady is man-to-man sex; “black” is his code for this and lets us make sense of lines like “Thy black is fairest in my judgment’s place,” and “In nothing art thou black save in thy deeds” (Sonnet 131).
Yes, our bard was indeed in love with his Dark Lady, but she is a part of him that he was able to compartmentalize and, somewhat, conceal from his contemporaries. But then, they didn’t have access to the whole flood of sonnets and we do, and yet we choose to ignore what he is telling us.
So, the next time you read something about Shakespeare’s love for a mysterious Dark Lady, roll your eyes heavenward and think what fools these mortals be.
Oxford's Dark Lady didn't mysteriously come into being after 126 sonnets had been composed. She wasn't some new lady in waiting who surfaced at Hampton Court or anywhere else. This gal was present from the start of the sonnets though he himself wasn't acknowledging her presence or the power of her appeal to him. Shakespeare's mistress was alway trotting along with him but so heavily veiled that maybe even he didn't recognize her. But when he finally does unveil her, to us and to himself, he knew she must have no name.
It was a bunch of twaddle about the Dark Lady and who she might be and I just couldn’t resist bashing this nonsense. The “Dark Lady” begins putting in “her” appearances in the sonnets about 127. Now, the first one hundred and twenty-six sonnets are an ever-increasing obsession with a young man, and then, voila, a “dark lady” appears.
Critics fall all over themselves trying to identify this Elizabethan lass, and they think themselves quite clever by quoting all the possibilities buried in obscure places. But no matter how clever our scholars are, they make one huge mistake: They take the sonnets out of context!
De Vere did not suddenly abandon his obsession. People, even bards, just don’t do that. Perhaps the critics feel relieved that FINALLY there is a woman seeming to enter Oxford’s life and this puts to rest those nasty innuendos that perhaps our bard was walking a bit too far away from the fence on the gay side of the pasture. So people have jumped on the Dark Lady (well, a poor wording) like a sailor who’s been at sea way too long on the first strumpet he lays eyes on.
But this Dark Lady mystery is not solved by looking into dusty records of that long-ago time, but rather must be solved, as are all of Shakespeare’s mysteries, by looking into the sonnets themselves.
Granted, there is the illusion of a new character finally being introduced in the sonnets about the 120’s, but rather than the emergence of a new person, it is really something quite different. The mystery is not WHO the Dark Lady is but rather WHAT she might be!
In 121, de Vere says, “I am that I am.” Almost Biblical, that, don’t you think? Though the great King James translation wouldn’t be done during his lifetime, I wonder if someone on the committee didn’t put this wording there in honor of our bard. Well, be that as it may. What does he mean by this quote? He’s clearly confessing something that he sees about himself that is vile (“Tis better to be vile than vile esteem’d”) but he doesn’t get around to identifying what this is.
Well, if the previous 120 poems aren’t enough to tip you off, then you are being deliberately obtuse. He’s referring, of course, to his compulsive homosexual attraction, that same flamboyant obsession that probably landed him in disgrace (or at least out of fashion) with “fortune and men’s eyes.” But until relatively recently, homosexuality truly was the love that dared not speak its name, and so it was wise to speak in heavily veiled terms, lest one’s outspokenness might lead one to some nasty imprisonment, torture, and death or banishment.
I believe that he had already come to be known as the second queen of the time, and that it was only his lineage, connections, and quick wit that saved him this fate. As Henry was slipping inexorably from his orbit of control, he dabbled more in the dark recesses of his sexuality until finally, in sonnet 130, he comes right out and says who his mistress is: His Homosexual Lust!
Think about it. No man of Oxford’s stature would have had a female mistress of such lowness and ugliness that he would refer to her in the terms he does in 130. Sonnet 129, its immediate precursor, laments his one true love which is “lust in action.” His sex drive is “past reason” and “no sooner had” than hated. This is no woman he’s talking about.
Read Sonnet 130 again and you’ll realize that the cheeks he’s talking about are ass cheeks on a man—hence no roses there! And the breath? Well, I need not get graphic. Every detail makes much more sense describing the object of his lust that is not a female—and what’s more, it makes sense in context.
The Dark Lady is man-to-man sex; “black” is his code for this and lets us make sense of lines like “Thy black is fairest in my judgment’s place,” and “In nothing art thou black save in thy deeds” (Sonnet 131).
Yes, our bard was indeed in love with his Dark Lady, but she is a part of him that he was able to compartmentalize and, somewhat, conceal from his contemporaries. But then, they didn’t have access to the whole flood of sonnets and we do, and yet we choose to ignore what he is telling us.
So, the next time you read something about Shakespeare’s love for a mysterious Dark Lady, roll your eyes heavenward and think what fools these mortals be.
Oxford's Dark Lady didn't mysteriously come into being after 126 sonnets had been composed. She wasn't some new lady in waiting who surfaced at Hampton Court or anywhere else. This gal was present from the start of the sonnets though he himself wasn't acknowledging her presence or the power of her appeal to him. Shakespeare's mistress was alway trotting along with him but so heavily veiled that maybe even he didn't recognize her. But when he finally does unveil her, to us and to himself, he knew she must have no name.
Friday, January 4, 2008
Dusting Off Hamlet
In Culture’s dress-up box there are many fun costumes that we can wear to the Grand Party. But none has been taken out, shaken up a bit, and donned in fashion all anew as Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The old warhorse has been trotting the boards for lo these four hundred years, always new, always bright, and always---insufferably dull. Like that legendary unmarried aunt in the next county, who is always reputed to be a beauty beyond compare, a cook extraordinaire, and a pillar of all the virtues we hold dear. Until she materializes in the flesh, as it were. Then we discover that she is less than the songs of her praises.
And such is the masterpiece of our Western World. We study her; we profess our love to her; we admire her for the quality of her parts. But dear Lord, don’t make me spend any time with her! She’s a bore! She talks too much. She gasps breathlessly, endlessly like the self-obsessed, delusional patient upon the psychiatrist’s couch that she is. A neurotic woman with too much time on her hands and not enough love in her life.
I don’t hate Hamlet. I just won’t spend another minute of my ever-diminishing lifespan watching her prance and preen upon the stage or screen. And yet the old girl won’t rest. Like the old whores who lived in my hometown, she keeps rising like Dracula and his brides, to shimmy and shake every time a new man comes to town.
Well, here I am, the new man in town, and she is shimmying and shaking not only in my face but in my subconscious, wanting to be loved, to be embraced, but most of all--to be understood. Why should I give one moment’s thought to this crazy old whore? The Cliff Notes plot summary tells us all. A Danish prince’s father is cruelly murdered so that the perpetrator can obtain the throne and the queen; the prince is told to seek revenge via the ghost of the father; the murder is avenged but at a cost (of the entire Danish royal family). So what’s not to understand?
Yes, if only it would end there and this Reader’s Digest plot summary be the be-all and the end-all. But something is dreadfully amiss that skirts the edges of our consciousness, something that doesn’t sit well, good acting be damned. And that something is that the Genius of the World, the man who wrote this work, the Bard of Avon, created something that doesn’t make sense.
The man we know as Shakespeare poured more of his ineffable brilliance and insight about the meaning of being a human being into this work than into any of his other works. Using the language of English but the gift of the gods, this man let escape insights into humanity that have never before captured the essence of the mystery, majesty, and divinity of human life itself. Even with the prejudices and predilections of a man of his time, birth, and condition, he was able to see beyond all of these things into the infinite, into the sublime, into the black hole where resides the excised sacrificial beating heart of humanity.
And thus we must treat Hamlet reverentially, tiptoeing around the corpse in the living room, the stern countenance of our great ancestor--intimidating and profoundly serious. But it is this attitude about the play that keeps it in a state of suspended animation that with each passing year, each passing generation, makes it more and more remote, with its rarefied dust eventually striking the nostrils of only the highest of the high priests of arcane literature. Well, quite frankly, this work is headed to the dustbin to be added to the ash heap of oblivion if some fundamental restoration isn’t done to it.
This thing has to get personal or it’s doomed!
Every creator’s greatest work is all about himself. Whether a building, a painting, a musical composition, a literary work--the masterpieces are what they are because they are autobiographical. Who’s that Christ-like figure sitting in the center of that long table in “The Last Supper”? Why, it’s DaVinci as he saw himself, the center of the universe, patient, beatific, all-knowing, in a world of chaos and betrayal. I don’t care what the medium: Look at the masterpiece and you are looking into the heart and soul of the creator.
Yet this is absolutely not considered when looking at Hamlet--the author is as detached from his masterpiece as was a French king from his peasants. It’s as if it makes no difference who wrote the thing--the work is all that matters. But without an author, the work is soulless, like a reflection in a mirror without anyone standing in front of the mirror. Or like a vampire standing in front of the mirror and causing no reflection.
No. The author and the work are complementary and inseparable.
We must know what the author was up to when he created his work, but with Shakespeare this is less than easy. Tradition has it that the part of the ghost in Hamlet was actually played by the author when the play was first performed at the Globe Theater. And I think this is very telling that we’ve treated Shakespeare as a ghost ever since, never as a man.
Why is this? Why do we deny humanity to the most humanistic of writers? Are we so pompous and cocksure that we don’t need the author? Not really. The answer to this oversight or omission or whatever it might be considered has not been deliberate--on OUR part. I do think it was deliberate and forced upon us by the author himself.
Elusive is a word that is an understatement in describing our attempts to know the man behind the words that were penned in the English Renaissance. The traditional view of the playwright as the man from Stratford on Avon is a laughable fiction maintained more to promote tourism to the English countryside than to provide a plausible biography of our bard. That an uneducated country bumpkin who never went more than forty miles from home in his whole life was able to create the world of Shakespeare’s poetry is utter nonsense. Our man was an aristocrat of the first order with a great education and great connections who took the bumpkin’s name--with whatever financial arrangements the two of them worked out lost in the mist of time. I can take no criticism of the works of Shakespeare seriously if the critic does not attribute the works to their only rightful source--Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford.
People do not leap from writing nothing into writing masterpieces of poetry and drama--yet we are to believe that the man from Stratford did just this. And great writers do not degenerate into subliterate drivel as the will of Shakespeare attests to. There is too precipitous an ascension to the heights and a too profound sinking to the depths to be remotely believable.
But de Vere was educated, trained, traveled, and connected from an early age, and his writing shows progress in letters and poetry. De Vere was early known as a wit, bon vivant, and exceptionally skilled verbal talent. But there is no stage where he shows a maturing talent. Why? The reason is undoubtedly that he quit writing under his own name in favor of the assumed one of William Shakespeare.
And why would he assume a name of a real contemporaneous person? For a nobleman in Elizabeth’s court to write poetry under his own name was certainly not forbidden or frowned upon; indeed, it was encouraged. But writing for the theater most certainly was seen as less than honorable for one of the noble class. It was akin to working in commerce. The nobility did not soil their hands for the rabble to applaud or hiss.
Though his reason to use a pseudonym was surely to shield himself and the court from disgrace, still the world of Elizabeth’s court and that time’s London were fairly small. This is a secret that was likely known in the inner circles and perhaps in larger circles as well.
I think his reason for doing so was more complex. Part of his reason surely lay with the name William Shakespeare itself. De Vere, I believe, wanted that name for its verbal possibilities. His own did not have any play within it, but Will Shakespeare--now here was a three syllable combination that can be at least three verbs or three nouns or combinations thereof that the clever de Vere could imagine all pertained to him. By altering the meaning of one of the syllables, an identity could be whatever he wanted it to be. The name, in short, amused him.
That it was attached to a real person, albeit a not overly bright one, working at a theater in London must have appealed to de Vere’s sense of dramatic comedy, intrigue, irony, and drama. With money and puffery, he probably convinced the real Shakespeare to allow him to use his name and maintain the fiction that he, the lowly one, was the author of the works. (Had a man of Oxford’s status, wit, and money approached me with such an offer of money for silence, I would have jumped at the chance.)
More in the Next Posting
And I promise I will get back to the subject of Hamlet.
And such is the masterpiece of our Western World. We study her; we profess our love to her; we admire her for the quality of her parts. But dear Lord, don’t make me spend any time with her! She’s a bore! She talks too much. She gasps breathlessly, endlessly like the self-obsessed, delusional patient upon the psychiatrist’s couch that she is. A neurotic woman with too much time on her hands and not enough love in her life.
I don’t hate Hamlet. I just won’t spend another minute of my ever-diminishing lifespan watching her prance and preen upon the stage or screen. And yet the old girl won’t rest. Like the old whores who lived in my hometown, she keeps rising like Dracula and his brides, to shimmy and shake every time a new man comes to town.
Well, here I am, the new man in town, and she is shimmying and shaking not only in my face but in my subconscious, wanting to be loved, to be embraced, but most of all--to be understood. Why should I give one moment’s thought to this crazy old whore? The Cliff Notes plot summary tells us all. A Danish prince’s father is cruelly murdered so that the perpetrator can obtain the throne and the queen; the prince is told to seek revenge via the ghost of the father; the murder is avenged but at a cost (of the entire Danish royal family). So what’s not to understand?
Yes, if only it would end there and this Reader’s Digest plot summary be the be-all and the end-all. But something is dreadfully amiss that skirts the edges of our consciousness, something that doesn’t sit well, good acting be damned. And that something is that the Genius of the World, the man who wrote this work, the Bard of Avon, created something that doesn’t make sense.
The man we know as Shakespeare poured more of his ineffable brilliance and insight about the meaning of being a human being into this work than into any of his other works. Using the language of English but the gift of the gods, this man let escape insights into humanity that have never before captured the essence of the mystery, majesty, and divinity of human life itself. Even with the prejudices and predilections of a man of his time, birth, and condition, he was able to see beyond all of these things into the infinite, into the sublime, into the black hole where resides the excised sacrificial beating heart of humanity.
And thus we must treat Hamlet reverentially, tiptoeing around the corpse in the living room, the stern countenance of our great ancestor--intimidating and profoundly serious. But it is this attitude about the play that keeps it in a state of suspended animation that with each passing year, each passing generation, makes it more and more remote, with its rarefied dust eventually striking the nostrils of only the highest of the high priests of arcane literature. Well, quite frankly, this work is headed to the dustbin to be added to the ash heap of oblivion if some fundamental restoration isn’t done to it.
This thing has to get personal or it’s doomed!
Every creator’s greatest work is all about himself. Whether a building, a painting, a musical composition, a literary work--the masterpieces are what they are because they are autobiographical. Who’s that Christ-like figure sitting in the center of that long table in “The Last Supper”? Why, it’s DaVinci as he saw himself, the center of the universe, patient, beatific, all-knowing, in a world of chaos and betrayal. I don’t care what the medium: Look at the masterpiece and you are looking into the heart and soul of the creator.
Yet this is absolutely not considered when looking at Hamlet--the author is as detached from his masterpiece as was a French king from his peasants. It’s as if it makes no difference who wrote the thing--the work is all that matters. But without an author, the work is soulless, like a reflection in a mirror without anyone standing in front of the mirror. Or like a vampire standing in front of the mirror and causing no reflection.
No. The author and the work are complementary and inseparable.
We must know what the author was up to when he created his work, but with Shakespeare this is less than easy. Tradition has it that the part of the ghost in Hamlet was actually played by the author when the play was first performed at the Globe Theater. And I think this is very telling that we’ve treated Shakespeare as a ghost ever since, never as a man.
Why is this? Why do we deny humanity to the most humanistic of writers? Are we so pompous and cocksure that we don’t need the author? Not really. The answer to this oversight or omission or whatever it might be considered has not been deliberate--on OUR part. I do think it was deliberate and forced upon us by the author himself.
Elusive is a word that is an understatement in describing our attempts to know the man behind the words that were penned in the English Renaissance. The traditional view of the playwright as the man from Stratford on Avon is a laughable fiction maintained more to promote tourism to the English countryside than to provide a plausible biography of our bard. That an uneducated country bumpkin who never went more than forty miles from home in his whole life was able to create the world of Shakespeare’s poetry is utter nonsense. Our man was an aristocrat of the first order with a great education and great connections who took the bumpkin’s name--with whatever financial arrangements the two of them worked out lost in the mist of time. I can take no criticism of the works of Shakespeare seriously if the critic does not attribute the works to their only rightful source--Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford.
People do not leap from writing nothing into writing masterpieces of poetry and drama--yet we are to believe that the man from Stratford did just this. And great writers do not degenerate into subliterate drivel as the will of Shakespeare attests to. There is too precipitous an ascension to the heights and a too profound sinking to the depths to be remotely believable.
But de Vere was educated, trained, traveled, and connected from an early age, and his writing shows progress in letters and poetry. De Vere was early known as a wit, bon vivant, and exceptionally skilled verbal talent. But there is no stage where he shows a maturing talent. Why? The reason is undoubtedly that he quit writing under his own name in favor of the assumed one of William Shakespeare.
And why would he assume a name of a real contemporaneous person? For a nobleman in Elizabeth’s court to write poetry under his own name was certainly not forbidden or frowned upon; indeed, it was encouraged. But writing for the theater most certainly was seen as less than honorable for one of the noble class. It was akin to working in commerce. The nobility did not soil their hands for the rabble to applaud or hiss.
Though his reason to use a pseudonym was surely to shield himself and the court from disgrace, still the world of Elizabeth’s court and that time’s London were fairly small. This is a secret that was likely known in the inner circles and perhaps in larger circles as well.
I think his reason for doing so was more complex. Part of his reason surely lay with the name William Shakespeare itself. De Vere, I believe, wanted that name for its verbal possibilities. His own did not have any play within it, but Will Shakespeare--now here was a three syllable combination that can be at least three verbs or three nouns or combinations thereof that the clever de Vere could imagine all pertained to him. By altering the meaning of one of the syllables, an identity could be whatever he wanted it to be. The name, in short, amused him.
That it was attached to a real person, albeit a not overly bright one, working at a theater in London must have appealed to de Vere’s sense of dramatic comedy, intrigue, irony, and drama. With money and puffery, he probably convinced the real Shakespeare to allow him to use his name and maintain the fiction that he, the lowly one, was the author of the works. (Had a man of Oxford’s status, wit, and money approached me with such an offer of money for silence, I would have jumped at the chance.)
More in the Next Posting
And I promise I will get back to the subject of Hamlet.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Death by Footnotes
To decry the dearth of interest in Shakespeare by the younger generations is to overlook the obvious cause of this decline: The Bard is creaking with age and is sinking into incomprehensibility.
His language is glorious, yes, but in a terribly archaic way that has approached the point of being another language. Any text of his works to be even remotely understood requires so many footnotes and interpretations that they fill up nearly half of each page with tiny print explanations. A young reader seeing this naturally is turned off. Anything really fun doesn’t require this much effort.
And they’re right. Imagine watching a movie that was interrupted every few seconds with a commentator telling you what was going on or being said but that without the interruptions wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever. That would be a real crowd pleaser, wouldn’t it?
It is time—no, it’s way past time—that we admitted the English of the 16th Century and the social and political framework of that time are so far removed from our own that we must stop with the footnotes and start with the translations, just as we do with Beowulf and with Canterbury Tales.
Let’s rework Shakespeare’s writing to retain the flavor if not the letter of the master’s stories. We do it with the Bible, so why not him?
Oh no, say the scholars and purists, Shakespeare must be read only in the original. Well, if that is the final opinion, then Shakespeare won’t be read at all--except by those tiresome people who treat him as the voice of a cult.
De Vere never really thought the language would change as much as it has. He speaks in the sonnets of conferring immortality to his precious Henry by force of his unexcelled ability with language, language which he felt to be immutable, since he himself was setting the gold standard for that language.
But the forces of the Western Culture were more potent and dynamic than he could ever imagine. The aristocracy that he assumed was eternal is non-existent in most of the English-speaking world, and even in England itself the faintest shadow of what he knew. This aspect alone in his works makes the need paramount to re-do the works—we cannot expect people to read works whose entire social structure might as well be from another planet.
Distillation is necessary. Condense these stories so that their brilliance is visible—and don’t be afraid to say that they are indeed Shakespeare. The New Shakespeare. Improved. Unshackled from its remote past. And we could have a committee, not unlike that charged with the King James translation of the Bible, be assigned to perform this awesome task.
I personally am not sanguine about the future of our Bard. Trends are moving away from seeing him as the “be all and end all” of writers/thinkers. One can already see that educated people are no longer in possession of a command and/or awe of his achievement and his supremacy. Already his works are being relegated to a higher and higher shelf in the library of works one must have at his command to be considered literate and educated, farther and farther away from the culture he so enriched.
He’s lasted longer than anyone else as a master in the voice in which he actually wrote, but now even HE is in need of a facelift. And it must be a facelift so complete that one need not have footnotes destroying the enjoyment of his works. We can’t change society and the direction it is taking, but we can keep Shakespeare alive for our culture by deciding that modification is better than the purity that leads to nullification.
I realize that this is heresy. I am one of those who enjoy reading Shakespeare without being encumbered by footnotes. And, even though I am fairly knowledgeable and adept at reading the old works, I’m sure there are references and allusions and meanings that I just don’t get. But I refuse to be wonkish about my love of the Bard and descend into that arcane world that argues over the number of angels that dance on the head of a pin.
Get thee gone, vile footnotes! Shakespeare will be reworked without you.
His language is glorious, yes, but in a terribly archaic way that has approached the point of being another language. Any text of his works to be even remotely understood requires so many footnotes and interpretations that they fill up nearly half of each page with tiny print explanations. A young reader seeing this naturally is turned off. Anything really fun doesn’t require this much effort.
And they’re right. Imagine watching a movie that was interrupted every few seconds with a commentator telling you what was going on or being said but that without the interruptions wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever. That would be a real crowd pleaser, wouldn’t it?
It is time—no, it’s way past time—that we admitted the English of the 16th Century and the social and political framework of that time are so far removed from our own that we must stop with the footnotes and start with the translations, just as we do with Beowulf and with Canterbury Tales.
Let’s rework Shakespeare’s writing to retain the flavor if not the letter of the master’s stories. We do it with the Bible, so why not him?
Oh no, say the scholars and purists, Shakespeare must be read only in the original. Well, if that is the final opinion, then Shakespeare won’t be read at all--except by those tiresome people who treat him as the voice of a cult.
De Vere never really thought the language would change as much as it has. He speaks in the sonnets of conferring immortality to his precious Henry by force of his unexcelled ability with language, language which he felt to be immutable, since he himself was setting the gold standard for that language.
But the forces of the Western Culture were more potent and dynamic than he could ever imagine. The aristocracy that he assumed was eternal is non-existent in most of the English-speaking world, and even in England itself the faintest shadow of what he knew. This aspect alone in his works makes the need paramount to re-do the works—we cannot expect people to read works whose entire social structure might as well be from another planet.
Distillation is necessary. Condense these stories so that their brilliance is visible—and don’t be afraid to say that they are indeed Shakespeare. The New Shakespeare. Improved. Unshackled from its remote past. And we could have a committee, not unlike that charged with the King James translation of the Bible, be assigned to perform this awesome task.
I personally am not sanguine about the future of our Bard. Trends are moving away from seeing him as the “be all and end all” of writers/thinkers. One can already see that educated people are no longer in possession of a command and/or awe of his achievement and his supremacy. Already his works are being relegated to a higher and higher shelf in the library of works one must have at his command to be considered literate and educated, farther and farther away from the culture he so enriched.
He’s lasted longer than anyone else as a master in the voice in which he actually wrote, but now even HE is in need of a facelift. And it must be a facelift so complete that one need not have footnotes destroying the enjoyment of his works. We can’t change society and the direction it is taking, but we can keep Shakespeare alive for our culture by deciding that modification is better than the purity that leads to nullification.
I realize that this is heresy. I am one of those who enjoy reading Shakespeare without being encumbered by footnotes. And, even though I am fairly knowledgeable and adept at reading the old works, I’m sure there are references and allusions and meanings that I just don’t get. But I refuse to be wonkish about my love of the Bard and descend into that arcane world that argues over the number of angels that dance on the head of a pin.
Get thee gone, vile footnotes! Shakespeare will be reworked without you.
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