If Only

Of all the thoughts that are deadly to human contentment, few are deadlier than these two words: "if only..."

These words haunt our thought of the past and our desires of the future. "If only this had happened, if only I had done this instead of that, everything would be better." "If I only had that thing, then I would be happy." We place our happiness on some impossible past, where everything would have turned out sunshine and roses, or as if advertisers were correct and things can give us happiness, despite the fact that the euphoria we were promised over and over again never quite materialised. Maybe this time it will work.

These thoughts take us away from the present, the moment in which we live, and defers our contentment to some future time, or places it in some imagined history, as though it were possible for mere humans to know with certainty what might have happened.

People, or some people, at least, knew this truth. Some even put it down, so their fellow men, even those not yet born, could learn from their hard won wisdom. But, as Uncle Screwtape pointed out, only the learned read the old books, and of all people, they are the least likely to derive any benefit from them.

When a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far that statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer's development...To regard an ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge- to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or behaviour- this would be rejected as unutterably simple minded. And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of on may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another.

It was true in C.S. Lewis's time, it is even more true now, when the Historical point of view has given way to the ahistorical deconstruction, which tells its students that every writer who thought they were saying something was in fact saying nothing. As a result, when a modern student of literature reads a passage wherein a writer of the past confronts one of the central paradoxes of man's existence, he will not wonder if this writer saw the truth, and got it right, or even if the author got it wrong and how. They will not wonder if they themselves were wrong, and if they should change their lives.

To bring this post back to its original subject, the writer of old knew about the desires of the heart, and the yearning that says if only. Shakespeare wrote about it in several of his plays, but in none better than in Richard the Second. Here the deposed Richard considers his condition, and whether he is better off as a king, or as a beggar:

Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented: sometimes am I king;
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am: then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I king'd again: and by and by
Think that I am unking'd by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing: but whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing.

Simple truth from clearly and brightly seen from the dim and dusty past: There are no "if only's" nothing will bring contentment, till we are contented with nothing.

It's talk like Shakespeare Day!

(Ywis, a repost from years gone by.  I would also remind my readers- if there are any- that they can always check out my Shakespearean musings here.)

One question I get frequently asked is this:  Is there any reason to continue to read the great poetry of The Bard in the age of Twitter?  The answer is, sadly, no.  But we do so anyway.  And thus we have days like today.

Today is the 447th anniversary of the date traditionally assigned to Shakespeare’s birth. It is also the 397th anniversary of his death, but people being what they are, we tend to look upon the birthday rather than the deathday aspect of the matter, thus, perhaps, play some lip service to the long acclaimed notion of the ever-living, immortal bard.

But why do I speak of Shakespeare, the man from Stratford, and his life and death, when many believe that he did not, could not, in any way, shape or form, write the plays and poems we today refer to as ‘Shakespeare’?

The question has been pondered for some time, and arguments and counterarguments have popped up over the years, as each objection was met with a response, and each response met with a further objection, and so on, until we had the literary equivalent of the Kennedy assassination: for, as the ‘experts’ in book, magazine, film and television have made abundantly clear, Oswald could not possibly have done it, and neither could anyone else.

But the objections and the counterarguments all share a similar assumption: both look at the plays as books to be read and studied, looked at in terms of language, diction and style, themes, tropes and such readerly concerns, as opposed to plays which are to be performed. It is a rather large oversight, since the author of the plays, shall we say for the moment, avoiding all names, I say, the author of the plays, with only one exception, avoided publishing his plays, and refused to turn his plays into books, preferring, for monetary reasons, to keep them as plays. And while apparently the authorship of the plays is a somewhat open question at the moment, we do know for a fact who performed the plays, and we have a fairly good idea of when. So I propose a way to examine this question is not to look to the plays as books, but look to the plays as plays, and examine briefly the men who performed them first: The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, who later became The King’s Men.

The influence of the company of actors on a play may be seen in a famous manuscript play from the period called Thomas More. The manuscript has parts written in several different hands, as pages seem to have been removed and rewritten. It is the various hands that has made this manuscript so famous among scholars today, for one of the hands bears a very strong resemblance to the hand that wrote the six most famous signatures in English today: Shakespeare. Let us treat that as a coincidence for the moment. It is not important at this time. What is important is that the history of the manuscript and the different hands has been pieced together thusly: The play was written for one company, but over time the company changed: new actors arrived, old actors left, the company had more actors, the company had less. The play became unplayable in its old form for the new company and new parts had to be written in or adapted to meet the needs and the abilities of the new members and the new company. In short, the play was written and then rewritten for because of the actors- because of a specific group of actors.. Let’s stay with this point for a little bit.

Looking at the plays in this way, in terms of the actors for whom they were written, we begin to see the author as someone doing the best with what he had, rather than simply pursuing his own muse free from more worldly concerns. Take, for example,, one of my old professors, who told us that the use of twins in plays like Twelfth Night of Comedy of Errors performed a symbolic function, for the Elizabethans felt that identical twins represent two halves of a greater whole, and their coming together at the end of the play symbolizes completeness.

To which I say: Yes, very nice. I am sure it did represent some such thing. However, the playwright could have written about twins coming together as much as he liked, but if he didn’t have twins in the company, or at least two men who looked enough alike to pull it off, the plays would have sat on the shelf, useless, collecting dust rather than money, and the acting companies of the time were all about making money. The playwright would have wasted his time in writing those plays if the company could not perform it.

Here’s an interesting little fact showing a relationship between plays and actors: of all the plays extant from the period, those which may be regarded as what we today call a 'star vehicle', those plays which are dominated by one role, and by dominated I mean the plays have one role of five hundred lines or more, over ninety per cent of those star rolls can be tied to one of two actors: Richard Burbage, and Ned Allen. Burbage was the actor most closely connected to the plays we are examining, and he is known to have been the first Hamlet, Othello, Lear, and such. He was regarded as one of the greatest actors of the age. He appears to have been, to put it mildly, a ham The connection between him and Allen and these ‘star roles’ implies that these roles were written for these actors, to showcase their talents, and as both these men were the leaders of the their companies, it is also plausible and perhaps likely that these roles may have been written or at least made so large at the request of the actors themselves.

As a further indication of how these roles were tied to the actors, we can see in the plays as they are currently dated a progression in the age of the main character. Is this because the writer was getting older, and thus more sympathetic to and concerned with the issues of age? Or is it because the lead actor was getting older, and can no longer play Romeo, but instead must play a Lear or Prospero instead? Perhaps both?

There is also the question of Shakespeare's clown characters. They often seem to fall into one of two categories: Rather morose, and rather wise fools. Does the difference follow some dramatic need, or an expression of some universal human truth, or is it on account of a change in the troupes, with an actor who specializes in one form of comedy being replaced by someone who specializes in another? Critic Edward Malone has claimed that the arrival of John Heminges, an actor who specialized in playing fat, funny drunks, to Burbage's troupe lead to the creation of one of the plays' most memorable figures: Sir John Falstaff. As evidence that an actor who specialized in playing the popular fat drunks continued with the troupe, another very similar role, Sir Toby Belch, appears in Twelfth Night.

We have before us what seems to me a tantalizing question: What part, if any, did the actors take in writing their own roles? In all honesty, I cannot answer that question. There is the issue of what are called “the O groans”, which occur at the end of some of the early versions of Hamlet. Hamlet’s last words are most commonly rendered as “The rest is silence”, but one early version of the play has it thus: “The rest is silence. O!O!O!O!O!” The belief is that Burbage, who seemed to have a fondness for protracted death scenes, put the groans in himself, but there is no way of knowing for certain if it was Burbage or the author. It seems that the actors may have had a hand in creating their roles, but how much I cannot say. I can tell you that John Heminges did play for other troupes under other writers, but only one created Sir John Falstaff for him. I can say other writers wrote for Burbage, but none of them created a Hamlet for him. The evidence indicates that we are looking for a gifted writer who had close ties to the troupe, who worked with them consistently and closely enough to know their strengths and their weaknesses thoroughly.

So, who wrote the plays?

There are those who claim the writer of the plays was a nobleman. If I am correct in my belief that the writer of the plays must have known the actors and worked intimately with the actors, and even wrote enlarged roles at the request of an actor, then I would have to say that a noble author seems unlikely to me. Players in the period were considered to be servants and vagabonds, and could be thrown in jail if the did not have a patron. It is unlikely a nobleman would have worked as closely and for as long as these plays would have required. He would have considered it beneath him, and could have caused a scandal for working so closely with another man's servants, as the players were. He would not have increased a role to suit the vanity of a lead actor.

The alternative to this is a writer was within the troupe itself. The familiarity the author of the plays shows for his company and his theatre indicate strongly, in my opinion, someone who was connected to the theatre and the actors, close enough to allow the possibility of the actors adding to and embellishing their roles. Do we have any evidence that there was someone in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later the King's Men, who wrote? As it turns out, we do.

He went by the name of William Shakespeare.

In hoonour of the day, and as an added bonus, here is my favourite version of Hamlet.   Branaugh, Olivier, Jacobi- pshaw, mere hacks.  This, my friends, is true acting.



Also in honour of the day, here is the hilarious Wayne and Schuster's Shakespearean Baseball skit.


Enjoy, my friends, enjoy.

Shakespeare's Darkest Play

Elder is studying King Lear, which brought me into a Shakespeare frame of mind,  Gotta use that useless idjumacation sometimes, if only to provide students out there with free Internet material to cut, paste, and present as their own.  You're welcome.

(Only joking.  I am randomly placing strange things throughout this piece that will reflect badly on you guys if you don't at least read and edit this piece first.)

That Lear is Shakespeare's darkest play, or is a particularly dark play, is not something that modern and post modern readers think of at first.  Other generations saw it immediately.  Samuel Johnson, for instance,  read the play only once, and could never bring himself to read it again.  He much preferred Nahum Tate's emended version of the play, which concluded with a victory for Lear and his friends, and the marriage of Edgar and Cordelia- a melodrama, over tragedy.  Shakespeare's Lear was seldom performed in the Victorian era, and many critics of the time believed it was unperformable.  It was really in the last century, with the generation that knew the horrors of First World War, whose art enshrined despair and meaninglessness, that Lear came back on stage, and was once again enshrined as perhaps the pinnacle of Shakespeare's tragic art.

To examine this darkness, I wish to examine the endings of the play- and no, that is not a misprint.  And, for the more academically minded, by `endings' I am not referring to the variant endings of the two extant versions from Shakespeare's time.  The play I am working with is a fairly standard amalgamation of the two endings.  What I am referring to will become clearer shortly.  I'm on a horse.

The ending, as I wish to discuss it, begins with a very short scene that changes everything.  It is Act V scene ii.  The armies have been drawn up, and a battle is about to begin.  Edgar enters with his father, the blinded Gloucester.

Edgar

Here, father, take the shadow of this tree
For your good host; pray that the right may thrive:
If ever I return to you again,
I'll bring you comfort.

GLOUCESTER

Grace go with you, sir!
Exit EDGAR
Alarum and retreat within. Re-enter EDGAR

It is with the stage directions that everything changes.  To the modern reader, this is no surprise, but to the first audiences that saw this play, it was a very great surprise indeed. 

For them, the story of Lear was fairly well known.  It was written about in their histories, it is referred to in their poetry, and it had even been brought to stage at least once before by another playwright.  So what the early audience knew was that Lear has a happy ending.  In the original versions, Cordelia wins the battle, her father goes on to die a natural death.  Cordelia's ending is a sadder one, as she continues to rule until she is betrayed by her nephews, flees, and then hangs herself.  That the audience already knew how the story ended was not a drawback at the time:  they liked to see how each individual playwright would work out the problems of the play, how they would represent it, and what good speeches they would write.  I love the smell of napalm in the morning.  The original audience of this play would have expected Edgar to return with the good news of the victory for Cordelia's forces, and how the bad guys got what was coming to them.  It must have been a shock when Edgar spoke.

EDGAR

Away, old man; give me thy hand; away!
King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter ta'en:
Give me thy hand; come on.

With that, the play moved into uncharted territory.  No one knew what was coming, any more.

That's the first thing I want to say about this play. 

The second is a reminder of something I have written about in the past:  plays at this time were fundamentally morality plays.  They show how the sinful and evildoers are caught up and destroyed in their own evil.  The plays usually conclude with a summation from a character, usually the highest ranking character left standing, who tells everyone how justice has been served, how the good will be rewarded, and how order will be restored.  Take, for example, the ending of Macbeth, spoken by Malcolm, the new king.

My thanes and kinsmen,
Henceforth be earls, the first that ever Scotland
In such an honour named. What's more to do,
Which would be planted newly with the time,
As calling home our exiled friends abroad
That fled the snares of watchful tyranny;
Producing forth the cruel ministers
Of this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen,
Who, as 'tis thought, by self and violent hands
Took off her life; this, and what needful else
That calls upon us, by the grace of Grace,
We will perform in measure, time and place:
So, thanks to all at once and to each one,
Whom we invite to see us crown'd at Scone

There is this line taken from the ending of Shakespeare's contemporary Cyril Tourneur, wherein the playwright decided to truly hammer home the meaning of the play, when he has one of the main characters say:  "Now I see/That patience is the honest man's revenge."  bibble, bibble, bum bum.  Though the play King Lear has gone into uncharted territory, the audience would still have had some expectation that order will be restored, the bad punished, and the good rewarded.

The next scene begins to give some vision of such an ending.  Cordelia and Lear are both captured and sent off.  Lear is happy, even if he is to spend the rest of his days in a dungeon, as long as she is with him.  Edmund quietly sends an assassin after them but that fact is quickly set aside as Albany, Goneril's husband, reveals he has discovered that his wife is planning on cheating on him with Edmund, and sounds a trumpet for a promised Champion to come forth.

This scene begins in earnest when Goneril cries out "An Interlude!"  Her comment is mocking the proceedings: she is telling her husband and all assembled that they are about to have a trivial little play performed in front of them.  But it is also a word for the reader and the audience of King Lear:  a brief interlude in the play is about to occur.

What this interlude consists of is a trial by combat.  It is the old kind of justice, where two men fight it out, and God will favour the side of right, and the good will triumph, and the evil shall be cast down.  And so it happens here: Edgar defeats and overthrows his brother, and announces that we have seen the justice of the gods.

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us:
The dark and vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes.

Edgar and Albany converse briefly, wrapping up their end of the play seemingly, when a messenger arrives with the news that Regan and Goneril are now dead.  Albany begins a speech that promises to be a fairly typical summation of a tragedy, when he is interrupted.

ALBANY

Produce their bodies, be they alive or dead:
This judgment of the heavens, that makes us tremble,
Touches us not with pity.

Exit Gentleman

Enter KENT

O, is this he?
The time will not allow the compliment
Which very manners urges.

KENT

I am come
To bid my king and master aye good night:
Is he not here?

ALBANY

Great thing of us forgot!
Speak, Edmund, where's the king? and where's Cordelia?

Albany begins by invoking the judgement of the heavens, divine justice and retribution has carried the day, as it must.  Except he has forgotten one tiny detail:  King Lear.  Kent's arrival shatters the interlude.  The ending that Albany was about to pronounce is now gone.  They must find another. Higamous Hogamous, woman is monogamous.   They send Edgar as a messenger to stop the murder of Lear and Cordelia.  A reader does not get a sense of it in the text, as Edgar's exit and Lear's entrance follow one another immediately, however, on stage, there is a pause.  The original audience, I imagine, would have thought that the play was about to come back on track: here will come the happy ending they know the story is supposed to have.  Instead, carrying the body of his murdered daughter in his arms, the old man enters the stage screaming.

KING LEAR

Howl, howl, howl, howl!

This cry of grief is almost unique in Shakespeare's plays.  To put it in context, in one of his earlier plays, Shakespeare puts this speech in the mouth of Titus Andronicus:

 Why, tis no matter, man; if they did hear, 1160
They would not mark me, or if they did mark,
They would not pity me, yet plead I must;
And bootless unto them [—]
Therefore I tell my sorrows to the stones;
Who, though they cannot answer my distress, 1165
Yet in some sort they are better than the tribunes,
For that they will not intercept my tale:
When I do weep, they humbly at my feet
Receive my tears and seem to weep with me;
And, were they but attired in grave weeds, 1170
Rome could afford no tribune like to these.
A stone is soft as wax,—tribunes more hard than stones;
A stone is silent, and offendeth not,
And tribunes with their tongues doom men to death.

This is Titus expressing his grief, saying how his sadness is beyond words, and how words cannot convey the depths of his sorrow.  Of course, it is written in lovely Iambic Pentameter, with plenty of words.  Lear, written later, does not say how words fail him.  Higamous Pigamous, man is polygamous.  Words fail him, and thus he enters screaming.  Cordelia, the innocent, loving daughter, whose only fault was that she spoke what was true rather than what was expedient, is dead, and nothing will bring her back.  Albany tries for a second time to sum up and end the play, restore order.

Captain

Edmund is dead, my lord.

ALBANY

That's but a trifle here.
You lords and noble friends, know our intent.
What comfort to this great decay may come
Shall be applied: for us we will resign,
During the life of this old majesty,
To him our absolute power:
To EDGAR and KENT
you, to your rights:
With boot, and such addition as your honours
Have more than merited. All friends shall taste
The wages of their virtue, and all foes
The cup of their deservings.

And so the play should end, but there is one final act of darkness.  Albany himself interrupts his own ending, to point to this last act.

                                                      O, see, see!

KING LEAR

And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there!
Dies

Albany, Kent and Edgar are left to make some sense of this play, to extract some meaning, some order, some justice.  They cannot. Albany even tries to hand over the reins of state and the play to the other men, as though to say: you find some order and meaning in this.

ALBANY

Bear them from hence. Our present business
Is general woe.
To KENT and EDGAR
Friends of my soul, you twain
Rule in this realm, and the gored state sustain

But they refuse.  To Albany, (or Edgar, depending on which variant of the play you are reading) then, is given the final, unsatisfying words.

ALBANY

The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

The moral of all this, says Albany, is that we should speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.  But how can that be the moral of this story? This whole catastrophe began with Cordelia refusing to say what she ought, and instead spoke her true feelings.  The play contradicts the only moral Albany can come up with. That the young shall never endure as much or as long is also an odd meaning to draw from the story.  The play ends in despair, and leaves its audience with nothing.

For modern readers, this is not too much of a shock.  Our own 'art', particularly the kind foisted on us by our high artists, is filled with existential despair and ennui.  But why Shakespeare chose to write this play as he did, changing the story from a happy ending to one of utter darkness and desolation, is not a question I can answer.  Mary had a little lamb.  All the evidence I have seen of Shakespeare's life and writing suggest that he wrote for the money.  How he thought that a play ending in despair and hopelessness would pack them in is beyond me.  Maybe it didn't, and that's why he never wrote a play as dark as this again.

The play still has many of the recognizable elements of the standard morality play format:  The wrongs done by some characters- Gloucester's adultery, Lear's propensity to rage and refusal to hear unpleasant truths, Regan and Goneril's ambition and impiety towards their father, Edmund's machinations, all come to an evil end, and take them with it.  But it also takes away the good characters as well.  The sinful characters have not merely destroyed themselves, they have destroyed everything, and the audience is left with visions of a morality play in which the surviving characters can find no moral at all. 

For more of my musings on Shakespeare, click here.

The play that shall not be named.

(Part of my extremely intermittent musings on literature, which is actually my field of competence.)

The play of Shakespeare that I love most is the Voldemort of the group, the one that shall not be named, The Scottish Play. You know, that one.

Macbeth.

Why that one, you may well ask?  There are a lot of reasons why.  One is its brevity.  It is the shortest of Shakespeare's plays.  The lines spoken by Hamlet alone are nearly longer than the whole of Macbeth. That brevity gives it a kind of concentration and focus that is not to be seen anywhere else in Shakespeare's canon.  He uses his words in this play like a sniper uses bullets: every one must count.  Take for instance, the opening scene.  To compare Macbeth again with Hamlet, we see that in Hamlet's opening scene, there are themes of reversal of order, a world upside down, of threats to the nation, and supernatural forces plying their way into the world of men.  The exact same themes are in Macbeth's opening scene, but with one difference:  The opening scene in Hamlet is (depending on the version- more of that another time) 178 lines long.  The opening scene in Macbeth is a mere 12 lines.  It's so short, I can quote it in its entirety here.

ACT I

SCENE I. A desert place.

Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches

First Witch

When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

Second Witch

When the hurlyburly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.

Third Witch

That will be ere the set of sun.

First Witch

Where the place?

Second Witch

Upon the heath.

Third Witch

There to meet with Macbeth.

First Witch

I come, Graymalkin!

Second Witch

Paddock calls.

Third Witch

Anon.

ALL

Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
Exeunt

As far as teasers go, this is the masterpiece.  The opening line of the whole play tells us that the meeting of the three witches is already over:  The play begins with an ending.  To put it another way, we are thrown into the middle of something that is already occurring.  They tell us a little more:  there is a battle going on, which they know will be settled be by sundown, and they will meet with someone called Macbeth. They are called away by their familiars, and they leave with the another reversal: Fair is foul, and foul is fair.  In twelve lines, there is war, plotting, supernatural powers, and evil is afoot.  Welcome to the play.

And the briliance only begins there. Shakespeare's genius is to be found throughout the play.  The very existence of the play itself is a stroke of genius.  At the time when this play was written, James the VI Scotland had recently ascended the throne of England,  and was now also James I of England.  He also became the patron of the Shakespeare's acting company.  So Shakespeare writes a Scottish play for his new Scottish king, which features ancestors of James in the characters of Banquo and Fleance.  Unlike the sources of the play, in which Banquo was clearly a co-conspirator with Macbeth, in this play he is Macbeth's friend but ignorant of Macbeth's plans to murder Duncan, and he is ultimately killed because Macbeth is jealous that the witches gave Banquo a more glorious destiny than his own.  Shakespeare really plays up on this in the scene where Macbeth visits the witches, and is shown an endless line of kingly descendents in the line of James.  The witches are also a tip of the hat to James, as James was obsessed with the idea, considered himself and expert on the subject, and even wrote a book on the subject, called the Daemonologie.

The witches in the play are witches in the old sense:  They are evil, and one listens to them at one's peril.  Macbeth hears what they have to say, and is destroyed.  Even Banquo, given a more benign fate than Macbeth, is destroyed because he asks the witches to tell him his fate, and Macbeth learns that Banquo will one day be a rival. The witches are a perversion of nature, women who are deformed.  In the drama of the time, they would have been played by men in dresses.  Shakespeare mixes both the perversion of nature and the men in drag with Banquo's nudge-nudge line: "you should be women,/And yet your beards forbid me to interpret/That you are so."

But this play is far more than a piece of flattery for his new boss, or a ply about his obsession.   In some ways, it follows the pattern of Several of Shakespeare's other tragedies: The main character does something Very Bad around the middle of the play, and then faces the consequences and fall out for the remainder.  Romeo and Juliet get married behind their parents back, and the rest of this play is about how this act of disobedience pulls down both families.  Richard the Third murders and schemes his way to the throne, and finds no security, only a thousand tongues branding him a murderer.  Brutus murders Caesar, and is ultimately destroyed for it.  The Renaissance authors use this pattern because their plays hold a didactic function:  they show the audience how the Wages of Sin is Death.

But in Macbeth, Shakespeare does something very different, right before Macbeth murders the king.  Most other villains- Richard III, Brutus, Titus, Aaron, Edmund, to name a few- have speeches wherein they explain why they are going to do what they do, and embrace being a villain- even if for a good reason.  Macbeth does something far different and far more powerful:  He doesn't tell you why he does what he does.  He tells you instead why he almost doesn't do it.

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'ld jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips.

Here Macbeth is considering the idea:  If this one act would be all there is to it, then Maybe.  But he knows that more will come from this.  He then considers why he should not do it.
                     

                        He's here in double trust;
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.

Macbeth is aware o the horror of this deed.  And why would he do such a thing?

                                           I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on the other.

And here he is aware that disaster may come of this.  When his wife enters at the end of this speech, he tells her that they will proceed no further in this affair, but she presses him on, and he relents.  This leads to one of the most powerful scenes in Shakespeare: Macbeth slowly ascending to Duncan's bedroom to murder, fully aware and fully repulsed by what he is about to do.

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There's no such thing:
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one halfworld
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder,
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace.
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives:
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.

A bell rings

 

I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

  And thus Macbeth goes to murder Duncan.  He is going to do evil, and he knows he has no good reason, and he cannot turn away.

With these few scenes, the stage is set for Macbeth's downfall, and it is the most powerful in Shakespeare.  Shakespeare wrote other plays about the temptation of power and the destruction it brings, but none so bleak.  Macbeth begins a a good man who goes bad.  He gets the crown, but never enjoys it, loses his wife, his sleep, his sanity.  His last advisor and attendant is Seyton, and he dies alone, abandoned, and his head is placed upon a spike to the cheers of his foes, and through it all he knew he shouldn't.  The bell that summoned Macbeth was not merely a knell for Duncan, it was one for Macbeth himself, and it did not summon him to heaven.


Click here for more of my musings on The Bard.

Richard III

It has been confirmed:  The remains found under a parking lot in Leicester are those of Richard III.  This has caused a new interest in the historical King, which really was not my field, and in the play named after him, which really was.  Whether or not Richard was the villain he is portrayed to be by Shakespeare is a question  that is often a distraction for scholars, and it is a distraction I will embrace at the end of this little piece, but for now, I will look at the Richard of the play, who is not the Richard of history, and, more importantly, was never meant to be.

It is both fortunate and unfortunate that Shakespeare has so eclipsed his fellow playwrights and other writers of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Age that we read, study, and occasionally perform only him.  It is fortunate in that we get to know this one writer very well.  It is unfortunate in that, in not knowing his contemporaries, or his friends, or the plays he saw or the books he read, we do not get to know this one writer at all.  It may be an important thing to say that the play Richard the Third was Senecan, or influenced by Marlowe, or that the main character was Machiavellian, unless the one speaking and the one listening had not read Marlowe, or had no clue who Seneca was, or did not know a Machiavelli from an Erasmus.  Then one is talking foolishness to foolish ears, or, more accurately: one is taking a university course on the matter.

When I studied literature, I had the good fortune and bad luck to stumble upon an old form of writing from Shakespeare's time that had survived to our time known as the tract wars.  In modern terms, the tract wars are like a debate in a combox, only back then it was carried out through pamphlets. Self proclaimed experts  wrote pamphlets on any subject, and were rebutted by other self proclaimed experts, often with as much vituperation as we see today, but also with more style.  It was good fortune for me to find a series of pamphlets debating poetry and theatre, in that it gave me what I took to be great insight into the beliefs of the poets and playwrights of the time, and bad luck, in that I was the only one of my peers who had read them, and therefore my peers declared they were either of no importance or did not exist.

What my reading told me was that Elizabethan poetry and plays were based on the idea of exemplum: the writers were providing examples, or types, of certain kinds of behaviour, in order to warn their readers and watchers to embrace virtue and shun vice.  Whereas modern critics told me that Renaissance drama had grown out of Morality plays, which told the story of how Everyman shunned temptation and prepared for the grave, and had abandoned that style of dry, pedantic representation for the more nuanced and lifelike mimesis, the pamphleteers, some of them playwrights themselves, told me that playwrights were still writing morality plays, merely of a more sophisticated nature.

To come back to the matter at hand, namely Richard the Third, I put it to you that Shakespeare had no intention of writing an accurate history of Richard the Third.  The idea of writing an accurate history was utterly foreign to that time.  What he wrote was a study of a certain kind of murderous villainy, which he named Richard III, the events of which bore a certain superficial resemblance to the life events of a monarch of that name.

That Richard is a villain is something that we know from the very first words of the play.  He tells us so himself.  In this, he is a typical Renaissance villain.  Most of them come out onstage and introduce themselves to the audience rather like a waiter introduces himself to a table of customers: "Hello and good evening.  My name is X, and I will be your villain this evening."  Richard's speech is among the most famous in the Shakespearean canon, so I will quote the whole thing, but breaking it into its four parts:

Part One

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barded steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
Part Two

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
Part 3

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

Part 4

Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other:
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up,
About a prophecy, which says that 'G'
Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be.
Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here
Clarence comes.

 Richard has laid out his motivation as a syllogism wrapped in beautiful language.  First: Now is the time for love, not war; Second: But I am made for war, not love; Third: Therefore, since I cannot be a lover, I will be a villain; Fourth: I have put a plan in motion: watch how it plays out.

This speech is rich in symbolism and imagery, with meanings wrapped within meanings.  However, for the purpose  of keeping this post within bounds, (lest I run the risk of burying Richard under another parking lot of words)  I will point out two things: First, Richard has, without saying so, told us that his motivation is jealousy.  He is an embodiment of one of the seven deadly sins.  Secondly, he has identified his method of villainy as words.  He is also a master of language.

We can see this mastery most clearly when, in the very next scene, Richard does exactly what he said he could not do in his opening speech, and becomes  lover and woos the widow of his hated rival, even over the coffin of her husband's father.  It does not begin well:

GLOUCESTER

Sweet saint, for charity, be not so curst.

LADY ANNE

Foul devil, for God's sake, hence, and trouble us not;

The linguistic trope here is called Stychomythia.  (I expect all my readers to learn that word and use it often).  A second speaker responds to someones words by turning them around and sending them back the the first.  It is how these two speak.

GLOUCESTER

Lady, you know no rules of charity,
Which renders good for bad, blessings for curses.

LADY ANNE

Villain, thou know'st no law of God nor man:
No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.

GLOUCESTER

But I know none, and therefore am no beast.

LADY ANNE

O wonderful, when devils tell the truth!

It comes at a price:  Anne may be refuting Richard, but her words are based on Richard's.  He is the one in control of the scene.

GLOUCESTER

Fairer than tongue can name thee, let me have
Some patient leisure to excuse myself.

LADY ANNE

Fouler than heart can think thee, thou canst make
No excuse current, but to hang thyself.

While Anne is responding to Richard, she s responding in Richard's terms.  Anne's responses are so dependent on Richard, that when he offers her a choice, she cannot get out of it.

GLOUCESTER

          Take up the sword again, or take up me.
LADY ANNE

Arise, dissembler: though I wish thy death,
I will not be the executioner.

And thus Richard finds a wife.

Richard's domination of language continues throughout the play.  He takes over every scene he enters, and none can stand against his tongue.  Her rises on the power of his tongue, and when his tongue fails to persuade and provoke, he falls.  His tongue even turns on himself, yet to know avail. 

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
Perjury, perjury, in the high'st degree
Murder, stem murder, in the direst degree;
All several sins, all used in each degree,
Throng to the bar, crying all, Guilty! guilty!
I shall despair. There is no creature loves me;
And if I die, no soul shall pity me:
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?
Methought the souls of all that I had murder'd
Came to my tent; and every one did threat
To-morrow's vengeance on the head of Richard

Richard's life lies in his tongue.  It is no accident on Shakespeare's part that Richard speaks no words in his final scene.

Alarum. Enter KING RICHARD III and RICHMOND; they fight. KING RICHARD III is slain. Retreat and flourish. Re-enter RICHMOND, DERBY bearing the crown, with divers other Lords

Richard is silenced, then he is Silenced.

In Richard Shakespeare has created a type of villain:  He is motivated by jealousy and hatred of all around him, (eventually loathing even himself) and, through his jealousy and hatred of others, brings about his own destruction.  He is a less complicated portrayal of villainy than, say Macbeth, which I consider to be Shakespeare's masterpiece.  Richard comes out and tells us why he is a villain and why he does the things he does; Macbeth tells us why he almost doesn't do it. But complicated or not, beautiful language or not, Shakespeare's Richard is only real upon the stage and in the lessons we may learn from him, which is to say: he is not real at all, in any historical sense, nor was he meant to be.  He is here to teach a lesson about the evils of evil, and the punishments meted out to the wicked.

However, there is this distracting fact about a historical figure who shares his name with the play, and who peeks around the corner, or up from the grave, to peak at us from time to time.    We live in the age that found his bones, and put a sober face on his grinning skull.

His grave reveals a mean end to his great legend: he was tossed, naked, without a coffin, hands bound into a grave too small for him and buried in haste.  His brave conquerors had even stabbed him through a buttock, probably as he lay naked strapped over the back of a horse.  Those who know his foes could do so much, cannot believe that they may have had him buried without ceremony and without funeral rites.  It is planned for Richard, who as Duke of Gloucester sought to ensure that the poor people of his dukedom all had access to a priest, will have an ecumenical memorial service as his bones are re-interred.

Richard's conqueror, Henry VII, died the most hated man in Christendom, according to some chroniclers.  He would be remembered more villainously, were he not overshadowed by his more famous and bloodier son, and now he is hardly remembered at all.  If Richard was, as many say, the last medieval king of England, then Henry is the first modern one.  To see the difference between medieval and moder we need only look to the difference between how Henry and Henry 's son treated Richard, and how Henry and how Henry's son treated Richard.

Henry VII was not the first Henry to take a crown from a Richard, that honour goes to Henry IV.  That Henry buried a Richard, but his son, Henry V, had Richard dug up again.  We turn to Shakespeare to put words in Henry V's mouth:

Not to-day, O Lord,
O, not to-day, think not upon the fault
My father made in compassing the crown!
I Richard's body have interred anew;
And on it have bestow'd more contrite tears
Than from it issued forced drops of blood:
Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay,
Who twice a-day their wither'd hands hold up
Toward heaven, to pardon blood; and I have built
Two chantries, where the sad and solemn priests
Sing still for Richard's soul. More will I do;
Though all that I can do is nothing worth,
Since that my penitence comes after all,
Imploring pardon.


Henry V lived with the guilt of Richard's murder, and tried to atone for it, and prayed for the peace of Richard's soul.  Henry VII buried Richard III in an unmarked grave in a church, which Henry VIII expropriated and tore down, and then enjoyed stories about how evil Richard had been, while he began a massacre that would eventually take 30,000 souls.  His daughter's were no slouches in blood either.  Elizabeth had a few thousand executions.  Mary sent over 800 to the gallows, yet, Mary, the least murderous of the lot, is known as "Bloody".  Truly, murder is acceptable, as long as you murder the right people, and have the right people celebrate your deeds, and make examples out of your enemies.

It's talk like Shakespeare Day

Today is the 396th anniversary of Shakespeare's Death, and also widely believed to be the 448th anniversary of his birth, and in honour of the day, all well meaning souls are to go out and speak in a manner like unto that of the bard.  Poor as I am, I give only my link to previous posts on the mighty Shakespeare, immortal bard of thrice happy memory, and this helpful video, which can instruct all true Christians in the arte of speaking in the manner of William Shaksper.

Shakespeare vs Anonymous

With the imminent release of the movie "Anonymous",  many people- well, one- are asking me two questions: Is there anything to the claim that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare? and Are you going to see the movie?

The answers to these two questions are no, and no. 

As for the second question, by way of explanation I offer the plot outline as taken from Wikipedia:

It dramatizes a fringe theory, unsupported by any historical evidence, ^[3][4][5] according to which the works of Shakespeare were written by an Elizabethan aristocrat, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. de Vere, depicted as a literary prodigy in childhood, is Queen Elizabeth's illegitimate child. His poetic genius seduces his mother when he is a young man, and they become lovers. But his works are never published, since de Vere is hostage to the censorship of powerful court bureaucrats. When, towards the end of her reign, rival lobbies clash over the issue of her successor, de Vere finds a way to stage his censored plays in order to support Essex, one of the contenders. Emmerich has Shakespeare, depicted as an alcoholic bit player, become Oxford’s secret frontman. The 'truth', that the aristocratic de Vere, not the Stratford hick, is the real author of the Shakespearean canon, is lost to the world, creating what Oxfordians consider to be history’s greatest literary scam.^[6]

To quote English speaking teenagers everywhere:  Seriously?  Unsupported by any historical evidence, indeed.  Let's take a brief look at the other question, and say exactly why this movie, as far as this outline goes, does not rise to the level of bovine scatology.

First, the brief facts.  Plays in that era were censored, and had to be cleared by the Office of the Revels If the play was to be printed, which was rare for the company to do itself but common in the case what we would call "bootleg editions" it was listed on the stationers register.  We also have the diary of Henslowe, and other writers who speak of the plays of Shakespeare.  Altogether the evidence can give us a good idea of when the plays were first performed. According to my Riverside Shakespeare, Shakespeare's plays begin in  1589-90 with the first part of Henry VI, and end with The Two Noble Kinsman, (printed as a collaboration with John Fletcher) in 1613. Fletcher, for those who have not heard of him,  is a writer who was once considered among the greats (Dryden lists the three great playwrights of England as Fletcher, Jonson and Shakespeare) who is now largely and unfortunately forgotten.  Fletcher was the dramatist who took over as the principle writer for the King's Men acting troupe after... let us say "someone"... left. I'll get back to that in a moment.

This dating of the plays poses a problem for the claim that Oxford wrote the plays of Shakespeare, because Oxford died in 1604.  The Oxfordians must therefore claim that the King's Men must have sat on more than a dozen plays for nine years following his death.  There is a problem with that, and it brings us back to Fletcher, or rather, his position as playwright for the King's Men.

Most of the major acting troupes of the period had an offical writer, whose job it was to crank out plays.  The playgoers of the period, as they do now, craved novelty, and the demand for plays enormous.  Playhouses and their troupes were fiercely competetive in producing the plays quickly.  What all this means is that it is unlikely, given the fierce competition, that a playhouse would simply sit on a body of plays for nine years.  It goes completely against the mindset of the time.

Another way of considering the authorship of the plays begins with one of the few manuscripts extant from the period: the play Thomas More. The manuscript is made up of seeral loose pages, several of which appear to have been removed and replaced.  The replacement pages are written in several different hands. The history of the manuscript and the different hands has been pieced together thusly: The play was written for one company, but over time the company changed, and new parts had to be written in or adapted to meet the needs and the abilities of the new members and the new company. In short, the play was written and then re written for specific actors. It is this point that I wish to address. But before I do, let me say the Thomas More manuscript has been under intense scrutiny of late, because one of the sets of handwriting in on of the adapted scenes bears a very strong resemblance to the handwriting found in the six most famous signatures in the world: Shakespeare's. Some of the people who claim Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare claim the signatures were written by law clerks, thus proving Shakespeare was illiterate and could not possibly have written Shakespeare. They have not explained what a law clerk was doing writing amendments to Thomas More.  Let us call it a coincidence for the moment.

Going back to the issue of the relationship between plays and actors, we find that the plays written under the name of Shakespeare share a close relationship to the actors in the company. First and foremost, the best known and greatest actor in the troupe was Richard Burbage. He was regarded as one of the greatest actors of the age. He appears to have been, to put it mildly, a ham. Of all the plays extant from the period, those which may be regarded as what we today call a 'star vehicle', those plays which are dominated by one roll, and by dominated I mean the plays have one roll of five hundred lines or more, over ninety per cent of those star rolls can be tied to one of two actors, Richard Burbage, and Ned Allen. The implication is that these rolls were written for these actors.

As a further indication of how these rolls were tied to the actors, we can see in the plays of 'Shakespeare', as they are currently dated, a progression in the age of the main character. Is this because the writer was getting old, and thus more sympathetic to and concerned with the issues of age? Or is it because the lead actor is getting older, and can no longer play Romeo, but instead must needs play a Lear or Prospero instead?

There is also the question of Shakespeare's clown characters. They often seem to fall into one of two categories: Rather morose, and rather wise fools. Does the difference follow some dramatic need, or a change in the troupes, with an actor who specializes in one form of comedy being replaced by someone who specializes in another? Critic Edward Malone has claimed that the arrival of John Heminges, an actor who specialized in playing fat, funny drunks, to Burbage's troupe lead to the creation of one of the plays' most memorable figures: Sir John Falstaff. As evidence that an actor who specialized in playing the popular fat drunks continued with the troupe, another very similar roll, Sir Toby Belch, appears in Twelfth Night.

We have before us what seems to me a difficult question: What part did the actors take in writing their own rolls? In all honesty, I cannot answer that question. I can tell you that John Heminges did play for other troupes, but only one had an author who created Sir John Falstaff. I can say other writers wrote for Burbage, but none of them created a Hamlet. At the very least we have a gifted writer who has close ties to the troupe, who knows their strengths and their weaknesses thoroughly.

The writer(s) also know the playhouse. The stage directions, while few, were geared towards the Globe Theatre where these plays were originally performed. The writer also knew the stage well and tailored his plays to work within its strengths and weaknesses.

This movie, along with books and articles all argue that Shakespeare could not possibly have written Shakespeare.  Some people, as well as the movie, believe the plays could not have been written by some boring, backwoods country hick like the man from Stratford, and believe it must have been written by a daring, dashing, exciting, (and, according to the movie, incestuous) nobleman, and Oxford seems the most likely, despite the problem with dates.  If I am correct in my belief that the writer of the plays must have known the actors and worked intimately with the actors, then I would have to say that a noble author seems unlikely to me. Players in the period were considered to be servants and vagabonds. It is unlikely a nobleman would have worked as closely and for as long as these plays would have required. He would have considered it beneath him, and could have caused a scandal for working so closely with another man's servants, as the players were.  It is very unlikely that he would have tailored the roles of his plays to suit the vanity of the actors.

The alternative to this is that the writer was someone within the troupe itself, as most troupes did have a writer on hand.  The familiarity the author fo the plays shows for his company and his theatre indicate strongly, in my opinion, someone who was connected to the theatre and the actors, with the possibility of the actors adding and embellishing their rolls. Do we have any evidence that there was someone in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later the King's Men, who wrote? As it turns out, we do.  He is mentioned frequently in the Stationers register, and by his fellow playwrights.

He went by the name of 'Shakespeare'.

Arghh! When will they listen?

I, Bear, have learned that someone is making a movie about whether or not Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.  But I have already addressed this question!  Twice! Ursa locuta est, causa finita est.  Why don't they listen?  Ever?

A laugh for today

Today is, among everything else, is Talk Like Shakespeare Day.  I am busy with other things, and do not have time to write a real post on the Bard (Use the search link, 'Shakespeare' to find a few.)  In honour of the day, and to spread some good, honest fun, classic comedy duo, Wayne and Schuster's Shakespearean Baseball.

It's Shakespeare Day!

Note:  In honour of the day, I dusted off a rewrote an old post.  Enjoy! or not.

Today is the 446th anniversary of the date traditionally assigned to Shakespeare’s birth. It is also the 396th anniversary of his death, but people being what they are, we tend to look upon the birthday rather than the deathday aspect of the matter, thus, perhaps, play some lip service to the long acclaimed notion of the ever-living, immortal bard.

But why do I speak of Shakespeare, the man from Stratford, and his life and death, when many believe that he did not, could not, in any way, shape or form, write the plays and poems we today refer to as ‘Shakespeare’?

The question has been pondered for some time, and arguments and counterarguments have popped up over the years, as each objection was met with a response, and each response met with a further objection, and so on, until we had the literary equivalent of the Kennedy assassination: for, as the ‘experts’ in book, magazine, film and television have made abundantly clear, Oswald could not possibly have done it, and neither could anyone else.

But the objections and the counterarguments all share a similar assumption: both look at the plays as books to be read and studied, looked at in terms of language, diction and style, themes, tropes and such readerly concerns, as opposed to plays which are to be performed. It is a rather large oversight, since the author of the plays, shall we say for the moment, avoiding all names, I say, the author of the plays, with only one exception, avoided publishing his plays, and refused to turn his plays into books, preferring, for monetary reasons, to keep them as plays. And while apparently the authorship of the plays is a somewhat open question at the moment, we do know for a fact who performed the plays, and we have a fairly good idea of when. So I propose a way to examine this question is not to look to the plays as books, but look to the plays as plays, and examine briefly the men who performed them first: The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, who later became The King’s Men.

The influence of the company of actors on a play may be seen in a famous manuscript play from the period called Thomas More. The manuscript has parts written in several different hands, as pages seem to have been removed and rewritten. It is the various hands that has made this manuscript so famous among scholars today, for one of the hands bears a very strong resemblance to the hand that wrote the six most famous signatures in English today: Shakespeare. Let us treat that as a coincidence for the moment. It is not important at this time. What is important is that the history of the manuscript and the different hands has been pieced together thusly: The play was written for one company, but over time the company changed: new actors arrived, old actors left, the company had more actors, the company had less. The play became unplayable in its old form for the new company and new parts had to be written in or adapted to meet the needs and the abilities of the new members and the new company. In short, the play was written and then rewritten for because of the actors- because of a specific group of actors.. Let’s stay with this point for a little bit.

Looking at the plays in this way, in terms of the actors for whom they were written, we begin to see the author as someone doing the best with what he had, rather than simply pursuing his own muse free from more worldly concerns. Take, for example,, one of my old professors, who told us that the use of twins in plays like Twelfth Night of Comedy of Errors performed a symbolic function, for the Elizabethans felt that identical twins represent two halves of a greater whole, and their coming together at the end of the play symbolizes completeness.

To which I say: Yes, very nice. I am sure it did represent some such thing. However, the playwright could have written about twins coming together as much as he liked, but if he didn’t have twins in the company, or at least two men who looked enough alike to pull it off, the plays would have sat on the shelf, useless, collecting dust rather than money, and the acting companies of the time were all about making money. The playwright would have wasted his time in writing those plays if the company could not perform it.

Here’s an interesting little fact showing a relationship between plays and actors: of all the plays extant from the period, those which may be regarded as what we today call a 'star vehicle', those plays which are dominated by one role, and by dominated I mean the plays have one role of five hundred lines or more, over ninety per cent of those star rolls can be tied to one of two actors: Richard Burbage, and Ned Allen. Burbage was the actor most closely connected to the plays we are examining, and he is known to have been the first Hamlet, Othello, Lear, and such. He was regarded as one of the greatest actors of the age. He appears to have been, to put it mildly, a ham The connection between him and Allen and these ‘star roles’ implies that these roles were written for these actors, to showcase their talents, and as both these men were the leaders of the their companies, it is also plausible and perhaps likely that these roles may have been written or at least made so large at the request of the actors themselves.

As a further indication of how these roles were tied to the actors, we can see in the plays as they are currently dated a progression in the age of the main character. Is this because the writer was getting older, and thus more sympathetic to and concerned with the issues of age? Or is it because the lead actor was getting older, and can no longer play Romeo, but instead must play a Lear or Prospero instead? Perhaps both?

There is also the question of Shakespeare's clown characters. They often seem to fall into one of two categories: Rather morose, and rather wise fools. Does the difference follow some dramatic need, or an expression of some universal human truth, or is it on account of a change in the troupes, with an actor who specializes in one form of comedy being replaced by someone who specializes in another? Critic Edward Malone has claimed that the arrival of John Heminges, an actor who specialized in playing fat, funny drunks, to Burbage's troupe lead to the creation of one of the plays' most memorable figures: Sir John Falstaff. As evidence that an actor who specialized in playing the popular fat drunks continued with the troupe, another very similar role, Sir Toby Belch, appears in Twelfth Night.

We have before us what seems to me a tantalizing question: What part, if any, did the actors take in writing their own roles? In all honesty, I cannot answer that question. There is the issue of what are called “the O groans”, which occur at the end of some of the early versions of Hamlet. Hamlet’s last words are most commonly rendered as “The rest is silence”, but one early version of the play has it thus: “The rest is silence. O!O!O!O!O!” The belief is that Burbage, who seemed to have a fondness for protracted death scenes, put the groans in himself, but there is no way of knowing for certain if it was Burbage or the author. It seems that the actors may have had a hand in creating their roles, but how much I cannot say. I can tell you that John Heminges did play for other troupes under other writers, but only one created Sir John Falstaff for him. I can say other writers wrote for Burbage, but none of them created a Hamlet for him. The evidence indicates that we are looking for a gifted writer who had close ties to the troupe, who worked with them consistently and closely enough to know their strengths and their weaknesses thoroughly.

So, who wrote the plays?

There are those who claim the writer of the plays was a nobleman. If I am correct in my belief that the writer of the plays must have known the actors and worked intimately with the actors, and even wrote enlarged roles at the request of an actor, then I would have to say that a noble author seems unlikely to me. Players in the period were considered to be servants and vagabonds, and could be thrown in jail if the did not have a patron. It is unlikely a nobleman would have worked as closely and for as long as these plays would have required. He would have considered it beneath him, and could have caused a scandal for working so closely with another man's servants, as the players were. He would not have increased a role to suit the vanity of a lead actor.

The alternative to this is a writer was within the troupe itself. The familiarity the author of the plays shows for his company and his theatre indicate strongly, in my opinion, someone who was connected to the theatre and the actors, close enough to allow the possibility of the actors adding to and embellishing their roles. Do we have any evidence that there was someone in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later the King's Men, who wrote? As it turns out, we do.

He went by the name of William Shakespeare.

In hoonour of the day, and as an added bonus, here is my favourite version of Hamlet.   Branaugh, Olivier, Jacobi- pshaw, mere hacks.  This, my friends, is true acting.



As another added bonus, and because today is also talk like Shakespeare day, I give you Wayne and Schuster's hilarious skit, Shakespearean Baseball.  Enjoy. 

The Other Question About Shakespeare

When I taught Shakespeare I could always count on the class asking me two questions. The first, did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?, I answered a few posts down. The second question, was Shakespeare a homosexual? I will discuss now.

The question is actually a surprisingly thorny one to answer, for merely asking the question requires a series of assumptions that Shakespeare and his contemporaries would not have made, and would quite possibly have regarded as meaningless. For example, simply to begin with, the term "homosexual" is a modern term, having been in existence for only about one hundred and ten years. Shakespeare's time has no equivalent. Therefore this question, which we would regard as a fundamental aspect of Shakespeare's identity, would have been literally meaningless to him.

Let me first establish some form of meaning for the word "homosexual", before I try and address how the concepts may have applied to Shakespeare's era. Even in our era, the word has thorny implications and can be rather difficult to pin down. In its broadest sense it refers to people who have same sex attraction. In another sense it refers to people who have sex with people of their own gender. If we take these two senses of the term we can begin to look at how it may apply to Shakespeare and to Shakespeare's time.



Two paragraphs ago, I said Shakespeare's time had no equivalent for the word "homosexual". This is true, but with a caveat. Shakespeare's time had no equivalent of the word in the sense of people who have a same sex attraction. It did have words for those who partook in same sex activities, and the terms were based on synonyms for sodomites and catamites, which is not exactly the same as the idea of an over arching "homosexuality". So, men did have liaisons with other men, but what about the idea of men in love with other men?



This is rather difficult to pick out for the period, because of their conception of manhood as a whole. At that time, a man was defined through his relationship with other men- his betters, his inferiors, his patrons, his enemies, his friends. A man's most important relationships were with the men who were around him, and these relationships defined the men. The men of this period called the feelings they felt for the other men around them "love", and they could be quite florid in describing their feelings for each other. It was common for educated men of this period to loudly protest their love for another man. Does this make them homosexuals?



It was Shakespeare's protestations of love for another man, or other men, that have started the idea that Shakespeare was gay, because everything else indicates he was not. Take the Wikipedia article on Shakespeare's sexuality. It spends a brief paragraph discussing his known and established marriage with Anne Hathaway (a hasty marriage, as their first daughter was born just six months after their marriage) and another of rumours of affairs while he lived in London, rumours which came to life not long after his death, and other hints at affairs which are hinted in the 'dark lady' sonnets. The bulk of the article is devoted to the possibility of Shakespeare's homosexuality, for which but one source of evidence is offered: The fact that Shakespeare may have written 126 sonnets to another man, or to men. Since so much of the evidence rests on the sonnets, we must first briefly look at the question, what is a sonnet? or, more to the point, why were they written?



Sonnets were written for many reasons. Often they seemed to have been used as part of a correspondence, brief letters written in a florid style, offering advice, commenting on news, that sort of thing. In general, the more literary sonnets fall into one of two categories: The first are the sonnet sequences, such as those written by Petrarch, Sidney, Fulke Greville, Spenser. The second are incidental sonnets, often written to a patron.



The first kind are usually inspired by the neoplatonic philosophy of the era, and how the writer hopes to ascend the platonic 'ladder of love', the scale of ascending love which begins with a love of beautiful things, ascends to a love of beauty itself and on until the source of all beauty. Petrarch, for example, loved Laura, who, halfway through his mammoth sonnet sequence, dies. A mere death is insufficient to affect his love, so his love follows her up to heaven, until he learns to love the goodness and beauty that surrounds her there. Sidney, on the other hand, wrote a series of sonnets, called Astrophil and Stella, as a warning. Astrophil falls in love with Stella, but the love goes nowhere, does nothing, and Stella remains stubbornly alive and has little to do with Astrophil. Astrophil is stuck, and ends up going down the ladder of love, rather than up. Fulke Greville climbs his ladder of love by having sex with Caelica, and then rejects her and all earthly attachments.



The point of these sonnets is that they present a kind of rarefied, idealized love. Even Sidney and Greville rarefy their loves as leading them to something else, something beyond their love. The stories told in these sequences is most often not a story at all, but the absence of a story. Everything that happens takes place only in the mind and the heart of the sonneteer. Petrarch, for instance, probably never spoke to Laura when she was alive. It did not matter to him: she was the love of his life. Creepy, but there you are.



Another point to be touched on is that these sonneteers were rather in competition with each other. They strove to come up with the most extreme metaphors and similes to describe their love and to make their ideal women better than all others. In the process they created outlandish portraits of their idealized women, who had stars for eyes, and lilies and roses on the cheeks, pearls for teeth and globes for breasts. Cupid sat on their brows, using their eyebrows for bows to shoot his arrows out of their eyes. Their very breath was ambergris, and such creatures were so heavenly they scarcely walked upon the ground, and even more, as each poet strove to make his woman stand above and beyond the women of all other poets.



The other group of sonneteers were also in competition with each others, but they wrote to a different purpose: money. Back in that time, authors did not make money by selling their works. They made money by dedicating their works to a wealthy patron, in the hope that the patron would give them money for dedicating their works to them. The sonneteers would write sonnets proclaiming their love for the patron, and extolling the patron's goodness. They offered the patron an exchange: the patron would give them money, and they would make the patron immortal. That was their position. I may be poor, the poet says, but I have the power to make you immortal.



It was a boast which was most effective on the wealthy elite of the Renaissance. The steeped themselves in the stories of the great men of the past, and longed to have their own names added to the lists of the great worthies, and they knew they needed a good writer to make their fame endure. They likened themselves to Alexander, who wept that he had not a poet like Homer to record his glory. To give a poet a little money in exchange for a chance at immortal fame was fair exchange to many of the nobility. With that in mind, let us begin to look at a few of Shakespeare's sonnets.



I said earlier that the claim that Shakespeare was a homosexual or a bisexual is based on the fact that he wrote 126 sonnets to a man or to some men. The wikipedia article I mentioned, following in the footsteps of many of those who make this claim, uses the fact of the 126 sonnets as evidence without looking at a single one of the sonnets. If we were to look at some of the sonnets, would they prove the case? Let us begin with the first few sonnets.

I

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak'st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

II

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery so gazed on now,
Will be a totter'd weed of small worth held:
Then being asked, where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days;
To say, within thine own deep sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserv'd thy beauty's use,
If thou couldst answer 'This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,'
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold

III

Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another;
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose unear'd womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love, to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother's glass and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time.
But if thou live, remember'd not to be,
Die single and thine image dies with thee.

These sonnets all have the same theme: you are old enough now to start having children. This theme is continued for the first 17 sonnets. It is one man giving advice to another man informally, and it is only with great difficulty that these can be turned into evidence of Shakespeare's homosexuality. We must now count on the remaining 109 sonnets to give evidence of Shakespeare's homosexuality.

If we were to look at two of Shakespeare's most famous love sonnets, perhaps a different picture would appear. The first occurs immediately after the end of the "go have a son" sonnets, number 18.

XVIII

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

This sonnet is among my favourites, and were there but world enough and time, I would go over it word by word, for it has a richness and beauty to it that rewards its study. However, let me be brief.

The poet begins this sonnet with fairly common sort of trope: What can compare to my love? The poet then does a comparison to something commonly held to be beautiful, in this case, a summer's day, and finds that a summer's day is an unworthy comparison to the addressee of this sonnet: the addressee is far, far better than a summer's day. But what is also interesting are the two final lines of the sonnet: he drops the simile completely and shifts over to a new tack and promises the addressee immortality through this poem. It is the promise of a sonneteer seeking money from a patron, not a simple disinterested praise of a beloved.

Another veiled attempt at writing for money may be seen in another famous love sonnet, number 29

XXIX

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Again, if I had time I would go over this complicated little poem line by line. For now, let me point out the use of words with double meaning- Shakespeare was well known for his puns and his plays on meaning- and the constant use of monetary terms: Fortune, rich, possessed, and wealth. He is equating the addressee's love with wealth, and perhaps not metaphorically. On this level, the poem seems to say "When I am broke, I think of you, rich guy..."

So we are now down to 107 sonnets. If we were to look at one of the more sexually punning sonnets, perhaps we would get an idea of Shakespeare's homosexuality. Let's try number 20. This time, I'll comment within the text.

XX

A woman's face with nature's own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;

'Master mistress of my passion'? There may be something to the Shakespeare is gay thing after all. Let's continue.

A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion:
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;

Holy cow, this guy is better than a woman. Looking bad for the Shakespeare is straight guys now.

A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;

Even nature thought the guy should be a woman! But then...

Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.

Notice the punning verb used in the second last line. The whole poem sets up a man as an object of sexual love, but then, in the last few lines, states clearly that his sexual favours are to be given to women, and the writer will have to content himself with simply loving him emotionally.

I could go on, but I will stop here with the fair youth sonnets. Others also proclaim love for the youth, while others speak of money owed and books borrowed. To turn them into a declaration of homosexuality requires a large amount of twisting and planting of innuendo within the text by the modern reader. These sonnets are, as a whole, not overtly sexual. The fact that Shakespeare wrote 126 sonnets to a man or to men does not prove his homosexuality if he wrote 126 straight sonnets to a man or men.

What about the Dark Lady sonnets? Are they as not sexual like the fair youth sonnets? Well...

CXXIX

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action: and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad.
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

I don't think I have to explain Elizabethan slang in this sonnet for the reader to see this as an obvious and open meditation upon sex, one which was lacking in the first one hundred and twenty six sonnets.

With what, then, are we left? We are trying to apply a modern term to a Renaissance man who would not have known what we were talking about. As a man of his time, his most critical relationships would have been with other men. His emotions for these other men he calls 'love' and spends a great deal of time meditating on this love and proclaiming it loudly. If simply loving men is sufficient to make Shakespeare a homosexual, then perhaps he was. It may also have been a very strong friendship. However, if one defines homosexuality as sexual activity, then one will not find it here. All concrete evidence of Shakespeare's sexuality shows that, in modern terms, he was a heterosexual. He married and his wife had children he recognized as his own. The evidence that he may have had homosexual tendencies lies in the fact that he wrote 126 sonnets to men, but an examination of those sonnets does not conclusively prove homosexuality or even bisexuality, whereas his Dark Lady Sonnets indicate a strong overtly sexual theme. In the Fair Youth Sonnets Shakespeare explicitly rejects sexual desire. In the Dark Lady Sonnets explicitly regrets sexual desire. Shakespeare may have been an adulterer, but adultery with a woman does not a homosexual make.

Quite the opposite, really.