too many hobbies

Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet is a play about sex, drugs, youth and death.  Yes, Shakespeare anticipated the power ballad.  He's just that good.  It was written probably around the same time as A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the two plays together are more or less a möbius strip of romantic dramedy.

Fighting and fucking are continuously conflated in R&J until you can barely tell which is which anymore.  Double- and triple- and maybe more-entendres flash through the verse like the lightning of lovers' oaths, "which doth cease to be/Ere one can say it lightens."  Everything happens too fast; this play is like that day that you're in such a hurry to get out of your house so you won't be late for work that you forget your keys so you can't start your car so you have to wait around for the locksmith and you end up missing work entirely, when you should have just spent an extra five minutes in the first place getting your head together. 

Every young character ends up penetrated in the end, except Benvolio (Why does he escape?  I'm still not sure.  What do you think?), and Romeo.  Significantly, he dies by the cup, while Juliet becomes a sheath for a happy dagger.  A graveyard consummation, then, with a possible Elizabethan pun on 'to die' meaning to orgasm.  Is there a possible occult connection there, as well?  The cup and the dagger seem pretty ritualistic to me, and need I point out that the play turns on a letter that is undelivered just after Mercutio (a.k.a. Mercury) dies?  (Mercutio's famous dying curse is, of course, "A plague a' both your houses!" and the letter never makes it out to Mantua because of a plague.)

Speaking of Mercury, in addition to making sure the mail gets delivered, he's also responsible for bringing dreams to mortals.  So, when Mercutio goes off on a tangent about Queen Mab riding around in her hazel-nut shell, maybe it's not just a randomly pretty speech.  Not to mention it's a speech about fairies and dreams, which is kind of a shoutout to that other awesome play coming soon to a theater near you.

That other play had something to say about lovers and poets, and so does this one.  Marjorie Garber writes that the first lines that Romeo and Juliet exchange are 'love at first sonnet':

If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this,
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this:
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in pray'r.
O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do,
They pray - grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.
Then move not while my prayer's effect I take.

This is a poem that works, which is to say, it gets the poets laid.  It's also kind of in direct opposition to most sonnets which are all about how much it sucks not to be getting any.  Previously, with Rosaline (and, not to make any biographical conjectures, but when last we saw Rosaline, in Love's Labour's Lost, she was quite possibly a Dark Lady analog), Romeo had exactly that sort of relationship, and was actually pretty bad at making poetry, as well.  It's not until he has a willing partner in poetry that he meets his romantic match.

The Rosaline thing also makes Romeo and Juliet's relationship real.  Yes, they are young, but they are also undeniably in love.  What Romeo had with Rosaline was infatuation, a crush, doting, as Friar Lawrence calls it; what he and Juliet have is the real deal.  Which is what makes it all so, well, tragic, at the end.

I really want to talk about Juliet, because for all Romeo's poetry and duelling and whatnot, she's really the heart of the play.  She's the sun, for goodness' sake!  And yet, for being the sun, she longs for nothing but the night:

Give me my Romeo, and, when I shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

She even tries, after her brief tryst with Romeo, to deny the dawn and pretend the lark is the nightingale.  She's such a formidable personality by the end of the play that it's painful to watch her being smacked down by her father and betrayed by her nurse.  In the end it's her elders, and their feuds and their rules and their hijacking of youth culture - hey, maybe Shakespeare was anticipating the Baby Boomers' effect on the 21st century - ruin her life.

The Tragedy of King Richard the Second

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings

- Richard II, the emo king

The plot of this play is pretty easy to summarize: Richard II is a bad king who is squeezing nobles and commoners alike for cash and squandering it on easy living for himself and his favorites, and who can't command his way out of a paper bag.  He exiles Bolingbroke and Mowbray instead of letting them duel out a charge of treason (which verdict might implicate Richard in the death of his uncle).  He villanously tents his fingers at the death of John of Gaunt (Bolingbroke's father, and Richard's other uncle), then strips John's estate of cash with which he scarpers off to war in Ireland.  When Bolingbroke returns prematurely to retrieve what's left of his father's lands and goods, he easily sways both the nobles and the commoners to his cause, and when Richard returns from his little wars he finds he doesn't have much of a country left to come home to.  Richard resigns his crown to Bolingbroke (now Henry IV) and is first imprisoned and then murdered.

It's hard to sympathize with anyone in this play.  There's no fool, or clown, or bastard to make you laugh or to feel sorry for.  Bolingbroke is a politician, and he's good at what he does, but he's not particularly interesting.  Richard is interesting, but he's also self-centered, venal, and incompetent.  As he loses his position and his freedom, he becomes more poetic and considered, but it's always all about him.  His final soliloquy isn't about what it means to be human, but what it means to be Richard.

So, while his fall from king to man is interesting to watch, it's not especially moving.  He and the older generation of characters believe that the king is annointed by God (and, can I just say, while we're on the subject, that the word 'chrism' really squicks me out?), and Bolingbroke and his realpolitik cohort school them otherwise.  This would be a good place to note that Richard II was the play that Essex paid Shakespeare's company to perform on the eve of his (failed) rebellion, prompting Queen Elizabeth to remark, "I am Richard the Second, know ye not that?"  It probably wasn't the play's fault that the rebellion failed, but since the forced resignation of Richard II eventually led to years terrible, bloody civil war, maybe it wasn't the best choice.

I'll be honest with you, this play left me a bit cold.  Apart from noting how some of the language and some of Richard's meditations pave the way from Hamlet, I didn't really get much out of it, but, although I've read the play a couple of times I've never yet seen it performed.  I can imagine that a good actor might make me see Richard in a different, more sympathetic, light, but until then I don't have much more to say.

Let's Review

Yesterday I finished writing up King John, which sort of signals the end of the early plays.  The next one on my list is Richard II, and up ahead are about twenty or so plays that represent Shakespeare in his prime.  Since all but one of the early plays were actually written up on my livejournal, I thought I'd post a list here so anyone who missed them over there could go take a look:

Henry VI Part 1
Henry VI Part 2
Henry VI Part 3
Richard III
The Comedy of Errors
The Rape of Lucrece/Titus Andronicus
The Taming of the Shrew
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Love's Labour's Lost
King John

And, on the Sonnets, I've done the Dedication, and Sonnet 1.

The Life and Death of King John

I don't know about you, but when I think of King John, I think of him:

but Shakespeare managed to write a play about King John without bringing up either Robin Hood or the Magna Carta.  Since he's the genius playwright I don't suppose we can fault him too much, but it does seem to me that he wasted an awful good opportunity, there.

Shakespeare's King John is a lot more like him:

and fans of The Lion in Winter will also recognize Queen Elinor and King Philip.  Fans of cinema in general will note that King John has the distinction of being the first Shakespeare play ever filmed.

The Life and Death of King John shares much of its plot with the earlier, anonymous The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England, but nobody's certain if it's an earlier draft, also written by Shakespeare, or whether there's another, even earlier play that they both are sourced from, or if Shakespeare was just a big ol' copycat.  In any case, what is certain is that the King John of the play has a lot in common with Queen Elizabeth: at odds with another, possibly more legitimate claimant to the throne, at odds with the Pope, there's even an incredible sinking armada.

Elizabeth, however, made much better choices.  The play begins with Elinor and John receiving word that King Philip of France is acknowledging Arthur (Geoffrey (John's older brother)'s son) the true King of England and about to wage war on his behalf.  After promising to do likewise to defend his throne, John hears the case of Philip and Robert Faulconbridge.  Philip, the older of the two brothers, has been disinherited by his father, and Robert is claiming all his land, on account of everyone thinks he (Philip) is a bastard.  And, in fact, he is, but it soon becomes clear that he's the bastard of one Richard.  You know, the Lionhearted?  So, while Robert gets the land, Philip gets a promotion, and a new name (Richard Plantagenet). 

Faulconbridge (who is, by the way, henceforth refered to in the script at Bast.), is pretty much everyone's favorite character.  He's funny, he's loyal, he's a good man in a fight, and he's more or less the most honorable person in the play.

Anyway, off they go to France, where they encounter King Philip, Arthur, Constance (Arthur's mother), and the Duke of Austria (the guy who killed King Richard) at the gates of Angiers.  After some wrangling between Elinor and Constance, the assorted nobles ask the men of Angiers to say who they think is the rightful king, to which the smartypants townsfolk reply, "We'll tell you when you're done fighting."  So the two armies fight for a while, but then Faulconbridge suggests that the two armies should join forces to sack Angiers, on account of their indecisiveness, and then continue on with their present conflict.  To which the Angiersfolk reply, "Oh, you mean this gate key?"  Okay, not really, but they immediately come up with the idea of marrying Blanche of Spain (John's niece) to the Dauphin of France, in order to come to some kind of accord that doesn't end with their town being burnt to the ground.  Fortunately, for them, everyone (except Constance and Arthur) goes for it, and the wedding's on.

Unfortunately, just then Cardinal Pandulph shows up to ruin everyone's fun by reminding them that John has been thwarting the Pope's will and is due to be excommunicated with extreme predjudice.  He convinces Phillip to make war once more on England, which gives Faulconbridge the opportunity to kill the Duke of Austria, who he's been almost constantly (and entertainingly) baiting this whole time.  John says, "Screw this, we're outta here," and heads back to England, but not before taking Arthur captive.  At which point this exchange happens, and I'm quoting it here so you can refer back to it later.

K. John: He is a very serpent in my way,
And wheresoe'er this foot of mine doth tread,
He lies before me.  Dost thou understand me?
Thou art his keeper.
Hub.: And I'll keep him so,
That he shall not offend your Majesty.
K. John: Death.
Hub.: My lord?
K. John.: A grave.
Hub. He shall not live.

Arthur's capture gives Constance a chance to chew the scenery, which she especially loves to do, but, of course, Shakespeare being the genius playwright, manages to still give her her humanity.  Just about when you've gotten sick of her handwringing, hair-tearing histrionics (and so, by the way, has everyone on stage), she demonstrates that her melodramatic tendencies don't entirely preclude actual depth of feeling:

K. Phi.: You are as fond of grief as of your child.
Const.: Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?

And, it seems she has reason to fear, because the next we see of Arthur, old Hubert's fixing to put out his eyes with a hot poker.  In a harrowing scene, Arthur manages to convince Hubert not to blind or kill him.

Which is a good thing, because King John is having trouble with some of his nobles, who think that not only should Arthur not be killed, but that he shouldn't be imprisoned, either (eye-gouging is right out).  At which point Hubert helpfully shows up to inform the King that he's discharged his duty and killed Arthur.  Oops. 

K. John: Why urgest thou so oft young Arthur's death?
Thy hand hath murd'red him.  I had a mighty cause
To wish him dead, but thou hadst none to kill him.
Hub.: No had, my lord?  Why, did you not provoke me?
K. John: It is the curse of kings to be attended
By slaves that take their humours for a warrant

Fortunately for the King, Hubert goes on to confess that he didn't actually kill Arthur after all.  John sends him running after the nobles to tell them the good news.

Meanwhile, back at Hubert's house, Arthur throws himself off the walls and dies.   The nobles come across his body in the streets, and, soon after, Hubert catches up to tell them he didn't actually kill Arthur after all.  Hilarity ensues.

The nobles go join the Dauphin's invading armies.  In order to stem the invasion/rebellion, John makes up to the Pope, and Pandulph tries to convince France to back off, but to no avail.  Just when things are looking bleak, the French armada sinks somewhere in the Channel, and the fickle English nobles, upon hearing that the Dauphin plans to kill them once he's conquered England, defect again, leaving Louis to run home to Paris.

Unfortunately, John has been poisoned by a disgruntled monk, and can't savor the victory.  His description of dying is painfully poetic: "I am a scribbled form, drawn with a pen/Upon a parchment, and against this fire/Do I shrink up."  His son Henry arrives to pick up the pieces, and the Bastard Faulconbridge is loyal to the last lines of the play, which are all about how England will never be conquered from without as long as it manages not to be undone from within.

Sonnet 1

Download sonnet_1.m4a

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 --
Thyself 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.

I've read several arguments that the first 17 sonnets were most likely written to a young nobleman to convince him to marry and have kids; in this scenario Shakespeare is commissioned by an older, concerned relative of said nobleman (there's mention of "his sugred Sonnets among his private friends" in Francis Mere's Palladis Tamia, published in 1598).  Whatever the biography, immortality through children is certainly a continuing theme through these sonnets, as is immortality through art (a.k.a. the sucky immortality).

I personally really enjoy how decease plays off of increase and contracted.  From decease we also get buriest and grave, and from increase and contracted we move on to tender and due, because Shakespeare loves his commerce.  Bright eyes and sweet self both hint that the tender churl in question might be more than just work for hire material.  At the end, "tender churl", "mak'st waste in niggarding", and glutton all rapidly press on the main theme of hoarding (of oneself) being ultimately wasteful.  Then right afterwards you're left with that unsatisfying last line to turn over (and over and over); I'm as yet unsure if that's meant to lead you back up to reread the poem or on to the next one or what.

Seriously, no one that I've read can seem to come up with a useful gloss of that last line.  Although it echoes the themes of the poem, it doesn't actually seem to rationally mean anything.  Try it and see, and let me know if you come up with anything.

Remember: I make no claim to original scholarship on this website, just my own, quirky-yet-somewhat-competent interpretation.

Also!  If you'd like to hear me read sonnets on a regular basis, you can now subscribe to the podcast version (below and to the right in the sidebar).

Dedication

Beloved of conspiracy theorists everywhere, I couldn't get started in on the Sonnets without at least mentioning the dedication page of the 1609 Quarto edition.  Apparently the awkward phrasing, weird layout, and all those dots just scream cypher to some people.

The style of the text (that is, centered, all caps, with periods in between) is most likely meant to invoke a classical lapidary-style inscription, and echoes other contemporary works, notably Johnson's Volpone and Sejanus.  T.T. stands for Thomas Thorpe, the up-market publisher of the quarto, but, of course, no one knows if he wrote the dedication or if it was Shakespeare (no one's really sure if Shakespeare oversaw, or even approved the publication - many believe it's an unauthorized hack job).  The lead candidate for most likely to be Mr. W.H. is William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, also the undisputed dedicatee (along with his brother) of the First Folio, although some still hold out for the dashing Henry Wriothsley of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece dedicatory fame.  Discussions of the identity of good ol' W. are complicated by the possible link between him (via 'onlie begetter') and the Fair Youth of the sonnets.

But why am I bothering with boring old facts when there are codes to be broken and mysteries to be solved?  Those periods aren't Roman, dammit!  They obviously, if you completely rearrange them, outline the shape of the Royal Arch Jewel, thus proving that Shakespeare (er, Bacon) was a Freemason.

And, speaking of Bacon, did you know that if you take the first three lines of the dedication, along with the title page, and 'decrypt' it, the fourth line (well-wishing adventurer setting FORTH. and all) reads o o n y p i r c y p p h r s b e k a a n b a c o n, which proves, proves! that Bacon wrote it (twice, apparently), using a cypphr (that's Olde English for code) with nypir (which is Olde English for John Napier, Scottish mathematician and populariser of (bum bum bum) the decimal point).

If, on the other hand, you prefer gematria to cryptograms, you will discover that the author was... a Freemason, again, only this time played by everyone's favorite undead author, Kit Marlowe.  Yes, if you only were to make a right triangle using the measurements of Christopher and Marlowe (translated first into Greek, then magically into numbers), the hypotenuse of the resulting triangle would measure 2120, which, and this is no coincidence, is also what you get when you add up the magical numerical values of the first and last letters of every line, and, and! is also the value of the combined magical numerical values of the letters in the line 'our everliving poet'.  Because he's undead, get it?

Okay, so I made the undead part up, but he'd have to be, wouldn't he, if he were publishing the Sonnets in 1609?

The Sonnets and their dedication aren't only beloved by internet crackpots, though.  They're also beloved by serious literary crackpots who want to prove that Shakespeare was secretly Catholic or a woman or one nobleman or another or... a Freemason, again (Freemason, Rosicrucian, same diff). 

I could probably make fun of these guys all day, but really, deep down, I think it's a bit sad that so many people look at Shakespeare's poetry and all they can see in it is an agenda.  Nobody on the authorship question/conspiracy theory trip wants to actually read it, think about it, or enjoy it; they just want to claim it, get a piece of it.

Fortunately, there are many dedicated readers, thinker abouters and enjoyers of Shakespeare out there to counteract the crackpots, and for them the dedication is just the page before the poetry.

Versionary

When I write about and refer to Shakespeare, I have three texts that I'm usually working from.  For the plays I use The Riverside Shakespeare; not the latest version, but the one that I bought in college and lugged up and down Orchard Hill faithfully for several years.  For the sonnets, I use the Riverside, and I also use the Arden version edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones, and a Yale University Press version edited by Stephen Booth.

The Riverside Shakespeare is my go-to, desert island, collected works of Shakespeare, mostly because it's the one I happen to own, and those suckers are expensive.  It does its job, anyway, with enough material and notes to get you by until you level up from amateur to professional scholar, and you can certainly supplement it with other texts if need be.

Since I'm currently taking a closer look at the sonnets, I've found the Riverside version a little inadequate to the task.  The notes are very simple and straightforward word and grammar definitions and explications, and not quite as crunchy as I'd like.  Thus, the other books:

The Arden version has a lengthy introduction with biographical information and speculation, and I like how it's presented.  Each page has one sonnet, with the opposite page dedicated to the notes.  The notes themselves present Duncan-Jones' gloss of the sonnet, and detail about the probable meanings of words and phrases, historical and scholarly context, all that kind of thing.

The Booth version is the most overwhelming and difficult, and therefore my current favorite.  The presentation is a little annoying: on the right-hand page is a reproduction of the Quarto text of the sonnets, and on the left-hand page is the same sonnets, only modernized.  This is great, because you can analyze the originals and decide for yourself if you like the editor's decisions, but it's horrible, because the sonnets get chopped up between pages and you have to flip back and forth between the poems and Booth's notes.

And, oh! the notes.  There are 133 pages of sonnets (that's each one twice, remember), and 403 pages of notes.  Booth explains in his preface, "All of us were brought up on the idea that what poets say is sublime -- takes us beyond reason; my commentary tries to describe the physics by which we get there...  The notes to this edition attempt to indicate not only what words mean but when they mean it; the notes try actively to discourage analyses that treat syntax as if it existed in a static state."  They are dense and sometimes hard to read, but also often brilliant.  Unfortunately, not only do you have to flip back and forth from the sonnet to the notes (which, if you were ambitious, you could overcome by memorizing the sonnets), but the notes themselves are also very inter-referential, and you have to go flipping about all over the place if you want to get all the references.  If someone were to put the whole thing up on the web, it would be genius.

(Okay, I admit to having developed something of a geek crush on Stephen Booth ever since I read the chapter about him in Ron Rosenbaums' The Shakespeare Wars, but, really, his work on the sonnets is good.)

There are also several versions of Shakespeare on the web, some of which sites I've linked to in the sidebar.  I'm not very good at reading anything longer than a page or so online, so I tend to skip those for the most part, although they're good for quickly looking up a line or speech or whatever.  And, speaking of longer than a page or so, this is starting to push it, isn't it?  Next time: the dedication that launched a thousand conspiracy theories.