I Love Shakespeare

…Sir Peter Hall’s insistence on a pause, howsoever slight, at the end of an IP verse line is sound.

Silence rather.

It allows the listener’s ear to hear,
their mind to digest the meaning of the utterance;
and the speaker to remain poised,
if it is a run-on line.

Or stop,
and continue fresh at the beginning
of the next line, if it is end-stopped.

The one speaks to the mind, the other the voice.
Both are of major-minor and equal importance,
in terms of balance in Sh’s style of writing.

His words were written to be spoken.
Indeed he infuses his Sonnets with direct speech.
He was/is addressing such persons in verse and rime as:

Time, the fair young man, mistress, other poet, a rose, his Muse,

to name but a few who were once real and imaginary still.

He questions his thought process as it’s evolving,
so appearing alive and spontaneous,
despite its dead delivery in dry ink.

This conceit is his, not mine.
His philosophy and psychology within the argument is all of his era.
Our philosophies and psychologies devolve and differ from his,
yet the similarities are in surplus.

So back to me here,
looking at breathing and phrasing,
in immortal lines some two thousand,
more long, sounded and furiously dumb.

It’s the silences and the mind’s churnings that fascinate,
determinedly in the moment, figuratively for all eternity.

His eternal lines promised in his Sonnets,
are at once a monument to time and lover’s past,
and a living monument even in the mouths of men,
courtesy of your senses and wits.

BTW Sonnets are not how to make
your name as an actor.

The play’s the thing.
The characters you best adapt.
The roles they offer.
If you’re lucky.

…So dipping into Sh’s philosophical perspective we find a slew of themes which any decent philosopher (ie anyone who thinks about what life is all about) encounters today. Such as:

* Skepticism and the possibility of human knowledge
* The nature of self and personal identity
* The understanding of causation (no cause, no cause)
* The existence and nature of evil
* The formative power of language

Are you epistemologically at sea?
Do you strive for epistemological perfection?
Does your epistemological modesty prevent your full blown skepticism?
Is your desire for knowledge thwarted by illusion, error and uncertainty?
How much more can we know than we actually know nothing?

Enter the world of the skeptic. A philosophical tradition Shakespeare got from the arch Euro-skeptic Michel de Montaigne. Let’s compare the two.

Montaigne = dramatic, anecdotal, poetic, powerful writer
His Essays = personal lively pungent exposes of his self-knowledge
His Style = persuasive, affective, full of rugged wisdom and brutal honesty.

In a word: Unflinching.

Sound familiar Shakesphereans?

Death is never far from their discourse; a steady eyed contemplation of its terrors and mysteries.
Their contrarian skepticism is highlighted in the problem of Other Minds: the interior-exterior split, the private-public dichotomy, personal-social relations. This last contained in one anxiously telling axiom

my knowledge of my mind opposed to your knowledge of my mind.

SELF is a drama.

Drama comprises a number of selves (my her him your) in some kind of interaction.
Drama concerns conscious beings equipped with a suitably rich psychology.
Drama also concerns the individual self as it exists over time.

Self leads to our projected personality and character as described by Others.
Are personality and character then a metaphysical essence, or a social construct?
What effect does madness have on personality? Is there a psychological metamorphosis?
What is identity? same as it ever was? How do sleep and dreams affect the self?

The Self is interactive and theatrical. it is a form of role-playing. All the world is a stage, he says. But how well do you know your part? Self-knowledge is not always reliable. Think but on abnormal states of mind, hallucinations, dreams, insanity. The mind is subject to rational and extra-rational conflicting forces.

We are Homo Dramatis conflicting Men of Action and Men of Imagination. Shakespeare dealt his characters sharp epistemic shocks, about who they actually were as opposed to who they thought they were. His dramas are psycho-dramas, where significant action takes place inside the characters’ souls.

He offers us the human mind as we recognise it. He is a moral psychologist. This shocking familiarity is what makes this writer live. Plainspoken, forthright accurate honesty is Sh’s primary virtue. The universe around seems to operate with sublime indifference to the moral status of humans.

Shakespeare is most conspicuous in his absence from his writings. He reflects rather than constructs. He represents human nature as he observed it. Reality imposed itself on his vision. And the world never looked the same again.

The word ‘lendlings’ in the title is actually ‘lendings’. I misread it but it lent itself to my imagination in the sphere of foundlings.

So this post closes with a grateful acknowledgement to Colin McGinn for lending his intellect to these questions. His book is filled with insights into the plays MND, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and especially King Lear.

Further he deals with general themes, gender, psychology, ethics, tragedy and the truth behind Shakespeare’s genius.

…i think i can take it as a truism that I ‘m influenced by the last thing i read. yesterday my amazon order arrived.

1 Shakespeare’s Philosophy: …by Colin McGinn Skimmed read preface and conclusion. Much underlining and agreement with this modern day philosopher.

2 So Long as Men Can Breathe… by Clinton heylin

3 The Shakespeare Wars: by Ron Rosenbaum

4 The Trivium: The Liberal Arts by Sister Miriam Joseph

5 A Shakespeare Thesaurus by Marvin Spevack

Lost in music…

….to those who turned up to the Shakespeare Centre. Yes the weather got the better of us!

The show had its trial run and nobody had to choose between lead, silver, or gold, or even a pound of flesh. A recording was made and we can now study it to make it better and more streamlined. The 45 plus (age and number) audience had readers and listeners and a scholar or three.

I thank each and everyone. Especially those following on book so i had to fess up to my mistakes. 46 mine eye and heart are at a mortal war (muddled 2nd quatrain) and 66 Tired with all these for restful death I cry, (that damn 5th line).

We stayed at the Quilt and Croissant B&B on the Evesham road. We dined at the Coconut Lagoon and had the experience. We re-acquainted with old friends and caught up on shakespeare’s hall of fame and new painting. I swear he winked and smiled at me.

The dirty duck still provides good shelter for thesps and tourists alike. We didn’t do the Julius Caesar matinee in favour of parents having that rare afternoon lazing in a warm bed without interruption. According to some we made the better choice.

Now let’s get this e-version of the sonnets done and we can relax. Tonight i re-record sonnets 10, 44, 46, 79, 88, 91, 103, 127, 129 and 132 for the various shibboleths that crept in on the first recording.

Not unusual as the newest dollar version downloadable from I-Tunes likewise has its faults that creep in twixt vows and change decrees of kings. At least the former, I’m not sure Kings subject themselves to a sonnet’s tyranny.

BTW it turns out Kenny B. hasn’t turned to the dark side though he is being wooed by the Orksfordians.

Assist ye extempore gods of rime for I am sure i shall turn sonnets!
Quartos fill’d with his most high deserts.

So go through the first 17 sonnets and look for the sprung lines. (in the quarto facsimile or a sparsely edited version) There are an awful lot of examples. Almost every sonnet!

Is this coz the writer is unsure of his line and how to handle the right amount of content to space. I mean sentences don’t have the rigour of the metre. They are easier to create and refute. They offer larger scope than a line.

Towards the end of the sequence from about 137-154 he is busting lines open less frequently. and breaking them up into smaller parts more.

My point is that a sonnet with 14 end-stopped lines is actually a rarity in this series of sonnets. part of Shakespeare’s stylistic change is packing vital information into small packages.

The sonnet in Elizabethan times was compared to the Bed of Procrustes. Procrustes had a bed and if his victims didn’t fit coz they were too long, he chopped a bit off. If they were too short, he stretched them until they fit.

Take a look at sonnets 50 + 51 for examples of riding the verse like a horse!

Compare the verse of RIchard 2nd +- 1593, to A Winter’s Tale +- 1610. The first is riming couplets telling a tale of woe, throughout the second is sparse blank verse stuffed with raw emotion.

Rambling on is easy. Hitting the right note sublimely takes work and lots of practice.

…i thought i’d made it up but no it exists in the urban dictionary. As does blography. Either way it exists!

If you can’t make the show tomorrow night here’s some content:

The purpose of this show is to see this Quarto of Sonnets by William Shakespeare as a whole, which is apparently MORE than the sum of its parts.

1-154 is what we have.

Now I work in numbers as each number corresponds to a sonnet and what it contains. I know very few other scholars or actors who can recognise them by number alone.

Just for that, this performance is unique!
BTW You can always nod sagely as if you know the sonnet
or screw up your face and shake your head as if suggesting you know and disagree.

Let’s get the obligatory stuff out of the way and have a good look at their ordering:

There are several beginnings, middles, and endings:

Namely sonnets
1 + 126.
127 + 152.
153 + 154

But even within the first set there is an ending in the middle:

Namely between sonnets
87 ‘Farewell! Thou art too dear for my possessing’
and
88 ‘When thou shalt be disposed to set me light’.

There are other breaks and pauses where it seems as if his muse departed him. But not that many of the sonnets are individual stand-alone pieces.

It appears he wrote them in the form of hang-together-in-groups, connected by some stylistic conceit or metrical feature.

The writer here is a Shakespeare, whose tale is not a pretty or virtuous or kind one if you ask me but. And he’s told us much better stories and sketched much better characters more life-like than are represented here.

Also in the sonnets there are three ( 3 in 1) that aren’t properly sonnets by way of structural or metrical deviation, namely sonnets
99 – 15 lines
126- 6 couplets ie 12 lines
145- Tetrameter verse not iambic

Finally the 2 sonnets that were printed in 1599 namely sonnets
138 + 144
And a variant manuscript version of sonnet 4 and 128 ? discovered after their imprinting in 1609.

Well it’s an opening into the whole conundrum…

will post again on saturday or sunday to crow like an upstart.

peace, love and shakespeare.

Sonnet Show Hall’s Croft, Sh’s Son-in-Law’s House, Stratford on Avon, June 5th, 2009.Only two more days to go and praying for good weather and audience. Follow the link above for information. And I look forward to seeing you there.

…so many hours to go. Pray it rains not potatoes!

But the Shakespeare Centre abuts the Birthplace, which is nothing like what it was when he was born though. It beggars belief to think it stood alone. Prime real estate, so close to the market, never. But supposedly his birthplace, though that too would be scann’d.

I mean he could have been born in a field for all we really know and then registered resident of Henley street on the 26th as a citizen in the parish of Stratford legally encoded as baby Gulielmus. BTW ponder on the effect of knowing that was your official name as a little boy. Might spur an interest in Latin?

But the location is correct, his dad John, Chief Alderman of Stratford owned the property now known as the birthplace. Stratford as Shakespeare lived it, left long ago after Garrick had his knees up there (balls up some would say). Some of his townsmen are horrified at his fame and all of this heisa. I think always had and have been.

By the time Shakespeare retired, the Town Council had a predominantly Puritan tilt. Stratford Council had paid groups of actors NOT to play there from about 1607 onwards. And that date i have to check, as i think it’s earlier even still.

Shakespeare, the Stratty one, at that date would be busy (in Jacobean London or his home in Strat) with his romances and his mad old man strain of writing, culminating in his Lears and Leontes.

Unless these are lying-in-waiting, for them to be “created” by Shake-speare, whose corse was stinkin e’en but now, as I passed Oxford, with the manuscripts in me saddlebags to be fair copied and returned to that secret place Chris and Ed share. Conspiracydom!

BTW et tu Kenneth? You who played Hal? Have you been dining with Sir Guiles? Begorrah you’re beguiled lad. AN Oxfordian? A Baconian yes but an Oxfordian? Even Marlowe or a group theory, but The Blue Boar?

Seductive as the dark side Ken.

Song of the siren mate.

I can only weep you’re gone.

Splitter!

I can only base my judgement of Shakspeare on the world around him as he negotiated it. There was in London a literary and theatre scene which collided in productions first for outdoor and elite indoor theatre to an outdoor and true indoor theatre for the massive in-crowd and the elite. The Stuarts loved to party and throw events. Witness the rise of the masques.

All this happened after Elizabeth’s death and if i accept the Oxford argument, ie we back date the creation of his plays to be written before de Vere’s death in 1604) then he anticipated his own death and the cultural literary cycle that lead up to the romances and later tragedies.

Or could it be there was a one off cultural/literary/dramatic genius craftsman, which allowed this one lucky bastard to be Shakespeare. And to spawn an industry that spans the world as a cultural/literary/dramatic marker.

To want someone else is selfish and unkind to him that is and was. For its him I support here. Conspiracydom is populated by educated converts, who stop at nothing to declare him false, who i think best.

Fie, fine actors and justices too. But other actors and justices, as fine and finer, lack their conspiracist finery. Now if they could convert Sir Anthony Sher and Greg Doran to Oxfordianism the Stratford monument may crumble yet.

Yet even if all the actors and justices of the world deserted our Will, enough of us would find and love him for who he is and not who he was. And i have 2,155 lines of his I want to share for love of him or at the least his legacy. No one died and made me executor, i took on the role voluntarily, and speak it must.

…asked to provide some info for the paper i sat down to enumerate the reasons.

Basically they appeal to my higher nature. I have become a more ethical and moral person by holding up the imperfect mirror the sonnets represent.

Ethics shape the personality and character. In my case as slutty as the Mistress and as arrogant as the fair young man and now feel for the poet. I abase myself for love in the same way through this blog.

They provide fodder for learning about Shakespeare: the man (biography) and his works (literary) and inevitably his social and cultural surroundings (history).

Impossible then not to mention Renaissance Europe with its political and religious turmoils. Extend that to the currents ebbing and flowing from established cultures and religions in the rest of the globe.

Through this all one must broach the psychology and philosophy of the above.

Moral and ethical responsibility conjoin with emotional responsibility.

Imagination carries me into to realms of mythology and archetypes.

They are a balance of scholarly discourse and amateur enthusiasm. Didactically i make Shakespeare accessible to a new generation in classes and workshops and performances.

They require an accounting of the continuum of theatrical history; both his, my own and all that’s intervened.

They are a method of voice development and memory training. Each sonnet is a blueprint for physical action/stasis, emotional repertoire and intellectual wit.

Criticism and theory hover round these poems from the early modern to the post-modern, like bees to pollen.

They made me appreciate and recognise artistry and craftsmanship in all applied forms. Plus they’ve enhanced the discipline of sitting and listening for hours at a time.

Above all i read and speak them for the sheer enjoyment and delight of making Shakespeare live, but with the proviso like Ben Jonson, this side of Bardolatry.

These poems emanated from one man’s breast. They are as quick and as slow as his thought. They are a continuous interplay between form and matter.

Verse and speech intertwined to where one is the other. Art and life appealing to the transcendental in us.

It doesn’t matter if you believe he wrote them or someone else did, whether the characters are real or feigned. They are written and it is a celebration of his passion and my own that i continue to repeat them.

I could have collected stamps and found it just as fascinating. There is something deeply human about focus on non-necessities.

These sonnets illustrate applied effort yielding concrete results for a stage (spoken) and simultaneously contain moments frozen in the silence of the page (written). This is their essential paradox.

I find myself agreeing with Harold Bloom and his deep-reading:

‘We read in search of a mind more original than our own”.

Follow this link for information on the show!!!

Sonnet Show Hall’s Croft, Sh’s Son-in-Law’s House, Stratford on Avon, June 5th, 2009.

Wednesday 20th May is the 400th anniversary of the publication of the sonnets. Assist me, ye gods of rhyme, for i am for quires of sonnets. I feel a marathon coming on.

This just in from Hannibal Hamlin on a recent Shaksper post concerning SHakespeare’s bible choices:
‘
Returning to more substantive scholarly matters, there has also been debate about which English Bibles Shakespeare used. Not the KJV, which appeared only in 1611 and didn’t displace the more popular Geneva Bible for another 40-50 years.

Most often, when it can be determined which translation he used (they are very similar in many instances, and some of Shakespeare’s allusions are not specific), he used the Geneva.

Second in frequency is the Bishops’. The Bishops’ was what was read in churches from about 1568.

The Geneva Bible remained more popular, however, and was more often (and cheaply) printed. Shaheen makes the reasonable suggestion that it was Bishops’ that Shakespeare most often heard, and Geneva that he read.

(Arguments have been made for the Catholic Rheims New Testament, but not convincingly, whatever Shakespeare’s personal faith.) Hannibal’