I started the project of reading the works of Shakespeare in late June, 2012, as a whim, really.  I thought one of two things would come of it.  Either I would peter out after a half dozen plays or I would take years to get through them all.  I was not prepared to become so engrossed, so enchanted, so possessed  that I would read every play at least once and watch every production I could lay my hands on by mid-September.  It was a magical way to spend the summer, more refreshing and mind-changing than a long vacation.

Now I feel rather bereft.  Such an immersion in this mind that we call Shakespeare made me feel like I had spent the summer with a grandfather I didn’t know I had.   This wise old guy who made me laugh and cry with his stories and who comforted my existential angst.

I retained my love of some of the plays I had read in college: Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth, The Tempest.  I added to my list: The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure, Henry VI parts one, two, and three, Henry V, Othello, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale.

 I became fond of minor characters:

Jack Cade in Henry VI part two

Sir Anthony Aguecheek in Twelfth Night

Mistress Quickly in The Merry Wives of Windsor

Lucio in Measure for Measure

Philip (the Bastard) Faulconbridge in King John

Hotspur in Henry IV part one

Capulet (Juliet’s father) in Romeo and Juliet

Emilia in Othello

Paulina in The Winter’s Tale

I loved characters that I don’t think I was meant to love:

Edmund in King Lear

Joan de Pucelle in Henry VI part one

Thersites in Troilus and Cressida

I hated characters I don’t think I was meant to hate:

Isabella in Measure for Measure,

Falstaff in Henry IV parts one and two

I loved Dogberry and Bottom and all the fools: Touchstone (As You Like It), Feste (Twelfth Night), Lear’s Fool who is called “fool” by everyone in the play and “Lear’s fool” by people who write about the play.

For three months I lived at the beginning of the 17^th century.  I got used to Shakespeare’s language and vocabulary, and to cadences as slow as the Elizabethan pace of life.  It was hard to read other writing.  I said “How now?” to my friends and went around my house thinking “Good, my lord.”

I closed the book on The Tempest, and came back to present time unwillingly.  School started, my studio rumbled back into operation (www.elenalouiserichmond.com), and did you know there was an election going on? It’s October.  The cold and the dark are encroaching, and after my summer of Shakespeare, I feel like I’ve gotten on the freeway before I was quite awake.

During such an agitating election campaign it’s comforting to think that 400 years ago people behaved the same way as they do now and for the same reasons.  Four hundred years of “gaudy, blabbing and remorseful days have crept into the bosom of the sea” (Henry VI, Part two) since Shakespeare lived, and Western Civ is still here.

I still have 154 Shakespeare sonnets to look forward to!

The Tempest is Shakespeare’s final play.  He’d written the histories, the comedies and the tragedies.  Then he wrote four romances–more what we would call fantasies—that slowly warmed up to this farewell to the stage and no doubt to the life he’d led in London.  Like a lot of us have discovered in our later years, the world that formed us breaks apart.  This theme threads through The Tempest.

When I think about The Tempest I always think of Caliban.  I remember a professor pointing out that the little song Caliban sings: “Ban, ban Caliban” is a suggestion that in his own way, this odd creature is trying to make poetry.  Caliban is earthy, a not-noble savage.  He was roaming about the island when Prospero, fleeing an intrigue at his court, arrived with his small daughter Miranda.  Prospero enslaved Caliban to do grunt work and to keep him away from Miranda.  Caliban deeply resents the curtailment of his life, but he has gotten a glimmer of something bigger than himself during his long association with and imprisonment by Prospero.  He expresses this in a lovely speech in which I notice he has no trouble using language:

Be not afeared: the isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about my ears; and sometimes voices

That if I then had waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming.

The clouds methought would open and show riches

Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked,

I cried to dream again. (III, ii)

Levels of awareness in The Tempest are suggested by how the characters use language.  From his study of the occult Prospero has discovered how to harness the magic and power of words.   He uses words to create a storm and cause a ship to run aground on the island he and Miranda have inhabited for twelve years.  The play opens with the storm. On the ship are Prospero’s enemies: His brother Antonio who usurped Prospero’s dukedom while Prospero studied the Hermetic mysteries.   Antonio and assorted aristocrats are up on the ship deck interfering with the very capable captain and boatswain, attempting to manage the ship in the storm.  They use language in an attempt to assert their ruling position in the world.

In the next scene we meet Prospero, Miranda and Ariel.  Ariel is an air nymph who had been imprisoned in a tree (by Caliban’s mother, the witch Sycorax but you don’t have to remember that, I just like to say Sycorax).  Prospero freed Ariel from the tree but indentured him as his servant until Prospero has accomplished his grand plan of righting his family’s wrong.   Ariel is thought in action, he carries the energy of language.  Prospero says his words, Ariel makes them happen.

Gradually we meet everyone on the ship.  Prospero and Ariel have arranged for them to wash up on different parts of the island in isolated groups. The usurping Duke and various aristocracy are thrown together on one part of the island.  Ferdinand, a royal son, has been isolated so he can slowly be led to Miranda and into the transforming power of love.  A butler and a jester pop up together, and find Caliban who thinks the two of them are gods. This trio provides drunken comedic intervals while they make plans to rule the island.

The storm is a metaphor for a world that is being shaken up: the world of the play’s various characters, the Elizabethan world view of the time, Shakespeare’s life, perhaps; and more importantly, our own world, the one we carry around inside our head.  We have our own stories about the way things are.  Myself, I can’t be reminded often enough that I create my own narrative.  It helps when the reminder goes something like this:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.  We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep. (IV, i)

More lines from The Tempest:

*no harm done (I, ii)

*the dark backward and abysm of time (I, ii)

*Good wombs have borne bad sons. (I, ii)

*Hell is empty and all the devils are here. (I, ii)

*Come unto these yellow sands (I, ii)

*Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.  (I, ii)

*Look, he’s winding up the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike. (II, i)

*This is a strange repose, to be asleep with eyes wide open. (II, i)

*What’s past is prologue (II, i)

*Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. (II, ii)

*A born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick. (IV, i)

*Where the bee sucks, there suck I;

In a cow-slip’s bell I lie;

There I couch when owls do cry.

On the bat’s back I do fly

After summer merrily.

Merrily, merrily shall I live now

Under the blossom that hangs on the bough. (V, i)

*O brave new world that has such people in’t! (V, i)

Seattle GreenStage did a Shakespeare in the Park production of Henry VIII this summer.  Most folks aren’t aware Shakespeare wrote a Henry VIII.  I thought the same thing.  When I started reading it this summer, I saw that I had read it in college.  Or at least underlined a bunch of stuff in the preface.  I read it again before I went to see the production.  It was a warm sunny afternoon with a cool breeze and I fell asleep for the entirety of my favorite part of the play.  I fell asleep just as Katherine was entering for her trial and woke up just as she was leaving.  Darn.

For my money, this is Katherine’s play (or Catherine of Aragon as we might remember from school).  At her first appearance, she pleads with the king on behalf of his subjects to lower their taxes while casting reproachful glance at Cardinal Wolsey, the man responsible for the taxes.  Henry’s attitude is that his subjects exist to provide him with the means to play, make war, and do whatever he wants to do.  Cardinal Wolsey, himself wealthy and fond of luxury, is dedicated to making sure the king, and himself by association, can continue to live luxuriously–much like the wealthy do today in our country.

The next time we see Katherine, she is on trial.  Though she has carried four or five babies to term, all the males have died.  Henry has overheard the suggestion that this was God’s judgment on him because Katherine was his brother’s widow when he married her and somewhere in the bowels of the Old Testament there’s an injunction against that.  He’s working this idea at the same time that he’s working Anne Bullen  (or Anne Boleyn).

A lot of the story is imparted to the audience by means of people commenting and gossiping in town and in court.  Here’s Lord Chamberlain and Lord Suffolk:

*C–It seems the marriage with his brother’s wife has crept too near his conscience.

S–No, his conscience has crept too near another lady.

In his determination to have a male heir, Henry plans to have his 20 year marriage pronounced unlawful, a marriage that had evidently been quite warm and happy until he started fretting about his heir.  He gets Wolsey to arrange everything for him. And this is how we end up at the trial, which sounds like something our congressional clown show in Washington D.C. might come up with.  I won’t say which political party.  Here is the king and Wolsey and some slimy operative Wolsey has pulled in from the Vatican. Katherine has no counsel, not a political advocate from her home in Spain, not even another woman in the room.

She comes in, speaks eloquently to the king and ignores Wolsey.  When Wolsey addresses her, she tells him that he has always been her enemy –“it is you have blown this coal betwixt my lord and me” (II, iv)–and she will not allow him to be her judge.  Just in case he’s in any doubt about what she really thinks of him, she adds, “your heart is full of arrogancy, spleen, and pride.”   She demands that her appeal go to the Pope.

Then she walks out of court.

There’s a buzzing:

“‘Tis not well. She’s going away.”

“Call her back.”

“Katherine, Queen of England, come into the court.”

“Madame, you are called back.”

She keeps right on going.  I punch the air.  It’s an impressive scene.

But when I got a chance to see it live, I fell asleep.

Anne Bullen becomes pregnant, the king marries Anne Bullen and his marriage to Katherine is pronounced illegitimate, in that order. Katherine goes into seclusion and eventually dies.  Cardinal Wolsey falls out of favor because not only was he unable to obtain the divorce Henry wanted, he was found to be wealthier than the king. The play ends with the birth of Elizabeth who ironically grows up to be the greatest royal of them all and she wasn’t even male.

Here are lines I liked:

*No man’s pie is freed from his ambitious finger (I, i)

*Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself (I, i)

*All hoods make not monks (III, i)

*a killing frost (III, ii)

*That comfort comes too late,

‘Tis like a pardon after execution. (IV, ii)

Here’s another one for when unwelcome solicitors come knocking at my door:

*How dare you thrust yourselves into my private meditation? (II, ii)

,

This is the play that contains the famous line “All the world’s a stage.”   It’s the beginning of a speech by a melancholy poseur named Jacques, which the text says is pronounced “Jakes.” I enjoyed saying Ja-queeze to myself because Jacques just barely avoids being a Peter Sellers character, so seriously does he take himself.  In a different play he might be a tragic figure, but in this comedy/fantasy, his self-absorption and sense of superiority are company enough for him.  When he goes off at the end to join a monastery, I wonder if the Order will be able to distinguish his posing from their own.

In any case, the Forest of Arden where most of the action takes place, is a little stage where everyone is watching everyone else.  Over and over the stage directions tell some of the characters to enter to the side where they watch and sometimes comment on what their fellow characters are up to.  If there is a director in the Forest of Arden, it would be Rosalind but I’ll get to her in a minute.

Among the forest residents are both the natives and escapees from dangerous situations in town.  So we are presented with a pastoral setting and various responses to it.  The Elizabethans were wild about pastoral poems, plays and songs.  Their shepherds sat around and wrote elegant poetry, everyone was kind and generous and lived simple, healthy lives.  Kind of a like commune without the drugs and the religious cults.

With the first flush of out-of-towners is Duke Senior who has been usurped by his younger brother. The Duke hopes to set up a utopian society and for the time being seems to have succeeded because they all sit around eating great food, drinking sack, talking philosophy and listening to music.  No mention of drugs. Towards the end of Act II as they are sitting around their utopia, Jacques holds forth:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. (II, vii)

Just as Jacques has put the final touches on his speech about the meaninglessness of life, here comes Orlando who has fled his murderous older brother, practically carrying his decrepit but loyal old servant Adam.  The contrast to Jacques is deliberate as is every other loving relationship in the forest.

The next people to show up are Rosalind and her cousin Celia, having fled the court of the usurping Duke after learning he intends to kill Rosalind.  Rosalind has disguised herself as a young man the better to help her slip out of town.

Rosalind is a rare mixture of maturity, capability, loveliness and merriness.  She is in that pantheon of Shakespeare’s women who cross-dress as young men: Viola, Portia, and Imogen.  I’ve come to the conclusion that one comment Shakespeare might be making in this mechanism is that women are often just that: mature and capable besides being merry and lovely.  But they don’t have any power unless they disguise themselves as men.  He manages to make it both an observation and an ironic commentary.

Rosalind is in love with Orlando and Orlando is in love with his image of a woman he calls Rosalind.  They rediscover each other because Orlando has been writing her bad love poetry and pinning his poems to trees all over the Forest of Arden.  So he’s kind of a puppy. Rosalind stays disguised and keeps her wits about her while she slowly brings Orlando to understand that a woman is a person, not a fantasy.  When she is satisfied that he gets this fact, one that many people in our century still haven’t figured out, she reveals herself.  She also engineers the romances of everyone else in the Forest.  When you want something done, get a woman.

Though there are many layers and other strong characters in As You Like It, in many ways, it is Rosalind’s play and she’s adorable.  In the end everyone finds their own unique meaning of life, which, in my opinion, is better than a utopia.

Here we go with lines I never realized came from this play:

*Well said, that was laid on with a trowel. (I, ii)

*O how full of briers is this working day world. (I, iii)

*Sweet are the uses of adversity. (II, i)

*True is it that we have seen better days. (II, vii)

*Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me,
And turn his merry note
Unto the sweet bird’s throat,
Come hither, come hither, come hither:
Here shall he see no enemy
But winter and rough weather. (II, v)

*Blow, blow, thou winter wind.
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.

Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
That dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp. (II, vii)

*I do so desire we may be better strangers. (III, ii)

*O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful, wonderful!  and yet again wonderful! and after that all out of whooping! (III, ii)

*Thank heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love;

For I must tell you friendly in your ear,

Sell when you can, you are not for all markets. (III, v)

*Come, woo me, woo me! (IV, i)

*Men have died from time to time,

and worms have eaten them, but

not for love (IV, i)

*One can desire too much of a good thing. (IV, i)

*For ever and a day. (IV, i)

*Men are April when they woo, December when they wed. Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives. (IV, i)

*The fool doth think he is wise,

but the wise man knows himself to be a fool. (V, i)

*It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o’er the green corn-field did pass
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding:
Sweet lovers love the spring. (V, iii)

*Bonus Bawdy*

Too late I learned that I’d been reading the plays from an edition with decorous footnotes.  The editors comment mildly “with ribald connotation” over passages that cannot be ignored but give no idea of the tremendous richness of sexual innuendo and double entendres that pervade the plays.  Now that I’ve found out what I’ve been missing I am going to have to read the plays all over again! Can you spot the double meanings in this bit from As You Like It:

And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,

And then from hour to hour we rot and rot

And thereby hangs a tale.  (II, vii)

OK, the images are of fruit hanging on a tree. Also genitalia hanging on a body.  Ripe can also mean sexually ready, sexually wanton, or marriageable. Rot can refer to constant copulation or to venereal disease.  A tale is a story, and a tail describes a non-erect penis.

The context is our friend Jacques quoting Touchstone, the fool.  Although Jacques is mocking him, Touchstone sounds an awful lot like Jacques himself.  A touchstone is a stone that is used to ascertain the precious metal content of say, a piece of gold.  And Touchstone, the fool, is a measure of other people’s wisdom and self awareness.

g

Nobody knows you when you’re down and out.

Shakespeare’s psychological insight in this play interests me more than some obvious parallels with what goes on in our political and religious discourse so I am going to stick to that and leave the cheap shots to someone else.   In the fourth act, Timon says “I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind.” (IV, iii)  This statement by definition also means that he hates himself.  At this point in the play, Timon is living in a cave and eating roots.

Here’s what got him to this bestial state:  When we first meet Timon he is a charming, personable, and generous lord who gets a rush out of being a benefactor to anyone who needs money.  He gives money to his friends and patronizes painters, poets, merchants and jewelers.  He entertains lavishly and his life is full of people.

In the second act, his own creditors come calling and Timon finally pays attention to his steward who has tried to tell him for years that he cannot give away his wealth in the careless way he likes to do.   Timon responds, “I am wealthy in my friends!”  He will ask them for help.

He sends out various servants to his “friends” whom he has supported and bailed out of trouble. The ensuing scenes read like a parable of Jesus except they are funny, which Jesus’ parables might actually have been before The Religious got a hold of them.  First of all, the servants take empty boxes which they expect Timon’s friends to fill with money but Timon’s friends at first all imagine the boxes contains gifts for them. When they realize that Timon is asking them for help, they fall all over themselves to make excuses.

The first friend says, “La, la, la, la. . .Many a time I have dined with him and come again to supper to purpose. . . him spend less. . . this is no time to lend money, especially upon bare friendship without security.”

The second friend smacks his head and says if Timon had only asked two hours earlier he would have some money for him but he has just invested it.

The third friend is outraged that he wasn’t asked first of all and if that’s all that Timon thinks of him he can find someone else to beg from.

Timon is shocked and infuriated at this.  When he calms down he invites all his friends to a feast.  They are a little wary but convince themselves that he has somehow recovered his fortune and the gravy train is about to pull into the station again.  However, the dinner turns out to be bowls of water with stones in them.  While Timon berates his guests he throws their “dinner” at them and drives them out of the house.  He goes off to live in a cave and snarl at everyone who comes to visit.  Then he dies.

This is a stripped down version of things.  There are a few men who love Timon and don’t desert him though he does abandon them.  There’s a cynical philosopher who doesn’t quite rise to the wisdom of a fool, but who has some funny lines.  The only women are a couple of bawds, which is a word I needed to get familiar with when I began reading these plays.

Timon did not become a misanthrope as a result of his friends’ rejection of him.  He already was one and for much the same reason that Coriolanus was.  Neither man allows himself to feel human because neither man allows himself to be vulnerable.  To be vulnerable means one is an ordinary human being who needs other ordinary human beings.  When we’re the rich guy on top or the one who has “more self-awareness” or who thinks she is in a position to label others as “dysfunctional,” or “sinful,” it can be a long, long fall from the pinnacle to mere humanity where we’re all in this together and we all are dysfunctional, sinful and lack self-awareness.

The outrage when one falls from the pedestal is not so much that one isn’t getting what he asked for, but that he feels exposed in his humanness, his vulnerability and his need for forgiveness.  .  . just like everyone else.  It’s not as though everyone around Timon didn’t already know he was a human being, but in the game of superiority, you only have to fool one person.  Timon’s tragedy is that he died without this awareness.

Here are lines I liked:

*Tis not enough to help the feeble up,

But to support him after. (I, i)

Why this is the world’s soul and just of the same piece

Is every flatterers’ spirit. Who can call him

His friend that dips in the same dish? (III, ii)

*Nothing emboldens sin so much as mercy. (III, v)

*We have seen better days. (IV, ii)

*Life’s uncertain voyage. (V, i)

My first thought was “oh god, not another Roman war play.”  But like every other Shakespeare play, it found a home in me. I read it and watched two different productions of it.  It’s striking how many different aspects an actor or director can choose to amplify.

The play opens with the citizens of Rome close to rioting because they are hungry.  The food they grow is either eaten by the wealthy, sold back to the farmers at exorbitant prices or it rots in storage.  Menenius, one of the upper class patricians, soothes the crowd with a humorous, sympathetic explanation of trickle-down economics.  Just as they are nodding their heads and saying “OK, that makes sense,” Coriolanus, a celebrated solider who hopes to be elected to the highest office in Rome, shows up.  He sneers,

*What’s the matter, you dissentious rogues;

That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion

Make yourselves scabs? (I, i)

Good god, I think.  I am going to hate this guy.  I am completely on the side of the citizenry.  But then it turns out that the citizenry behave much like a particular swathe does in our country.  They believe any ludicrous thing they are told if it appeals to their small-minded impatience.  They are uneducated, unreflective and stubborn.  The only thing I can’t fault the citizenry for is that they are hungry.  They have that point.

Coriolanus is an easy man to hate because he is arrogant, lacks social skills, and would certainly despise me.  But by the end of the play I felt some empathy for him.  For starters he has this Mother.  Volumnia.  She makes her first appearance with her daughter-in-law who sews meekly while Volumnia goes on for 17 lines about what a god her son is.

There was a hint about this mother-son relationship in the first dialogue of the play when one of the hungry citizens remarks on Coriolanus’ war record:

*Men can be content to say it was for his country, he did it to please his mother. . . (I, i)

Coriolanus is happy and independent on the battlefield.  He fights as though he is the only one there.  In fact he seems to find his fellow soldiers an annoyance.  And back in town in the world of relationships, civility, and diplomacy he’s a disaster.  In order to get this Counsel position he wants (and feels he is entitled to by virtue of who he is) he has to ask for votes much like our politicians do.  He has to cajole, finesse and charm the citizenry.  He whines to Menenius.

C–What must I do?

M–Speak to them in a wholesome manner

C–Bid them wash their faces and keep their teeth clean.

Coriolanus behaves so badly the citizenry reject him.  He throws a temper tantrum and threatens to sub-due them by force.  This is treasonous and the police are called in. Menenius hustles him home to Mother.  Volumnia tells him to crawl a little, to be contrite, get the position he wants and then crush the citizenry.  Do it for Mother.

*Pray be content, Mother.  I am going to the marketplace.  Chide me no more. (III. ii)

But he can’t do it. He erupts again.  Psychologically he is a boy of 10 whose mother has always indulged him, and who has taught him he is superior to rank and file human beings.  He can only function in a world where he is left alone to feel superior.  He finds that world on the battlefield and alone with Mother.

Coriolanus is exiled.  He leaves pouting “I shall be loved when I am lacked.” (IV, i)

Or when they don’t have him to kick around any more.

Then in a stunning display of immaturity, in an attitude of “I’ll show them!” he goes to the enemy and offers to fight with them against his home.  The enemy are the Volsces (pronounced like Bolshis) and their leader Aufidius is both brave and canny.  Coriolanus only recognizes the soldier.  “He is a lion I am proud to hunt” he says. (I, i)

Coriolanus dresses like a peasant and does for Aufidius, the worthy lion, what he could not bring himself to do for his own people: he begs, he is submissive.  The scene between the two of them plays like a love scene.  If I have my human development theory straight, everything would be unconsciously sexual to Coriolanus. Every experience would be intense, self-centered, sexual, and immediate.  Aufidius on the other hand could coolly assess this opportunity and think about what he wants to do with it.  He could slit Coriolanus’ throat right there. But Aufidius is smart.  He will kill Coriolanus after using his knowledge to conquer Rome.

Rome is just about to cave in to the Volsces when they realize that Coriolanus intends to raze the city, not conquer it.  Mother is called in.  Volumnia plays the martyr card and I had to smile when I read this.  It seems mothers have been doing this, oh, forever:

*Thou hast never in thy life

Showed thy dear mother any courtesy

When she, poor hen, fond of no second brood. . .

Yada yada yada                  (V, iii, italics mine)

When this doesn’t work, Volumnia goes deadly and declares she will curse her son while she is burning to death.

Coriolanus finally breaks down and briefly becomes “people who need people,” a vulnerable human being.  He acknowledges that occasionally something else might be more important than whatever he, on an impulsive whim, might want.  He says he will broker a peace.  Probably not he personally since he doesn’t have that skill set but we take his drift.

Aufidius has been quietly astonished at this family dynamic with its weird mother/wife-boy/man relationship.  Coriolanus holds out his hands and in effect says to Aufidius, “You see how I couldn’t possibly refuse her, even at the point of victory.  Could you refuse her?”

When the two men meet later, Aufidius calls Coriolanus what he is, a mamma’s boy, provoking him into another of his tiresome rages.  The scene plays like a sexual climax with the Volsces chanting, “Kill, kill, kill, kill” which they do.  The stage directions say “Aufidius stands on him.”

I pitied Corilanus in the end.  I know how a dominating and powerful parent can prevent one from growing up and individualizing. Coriolanus’s world was split.  Psychologically he could only exist by shutting out the complicated, nuanced world of other people.  His only meaningful relationship was with his mother.  The two of them lived in the toxic mess they had created together.  A line from Macbeth seems to fit here:

*The love that follows us sometimes is our trouble,

Which still we thank as love. ( Macbeth I, vi)

Here are more lines from Coriolanus:

*Such a nature . . . disdains the shadow which he treads on at noon (I, i)

*There is a world elsewhere. (III, iii)

*Chaste as the icicle (V, iii)

Pericles, Prince of Tyre takes the form of a hero’s journey—actually it takes the form of an exceptionally bad B-movie—but Shakespeare makes it work somehow.  There were a few stops along the way that left me reeling in their rawness. Right out of the gate, 25 lines in, we are told by Gower, the narrator that in Antioch is a king who took such a liking to his own daughter that

“her to incest did provoke.

Bad child, worse father! To entice his own

to evil should be done by none.”

Enter Pericles who is obviously not apprised of the situation. All he knows is that the daughter of the King of Antioch is available.  He learns there is a riddle to solve and the prize is the daughter.  Mounted on the wall are the heads of all the suitors who couldn’t solve the riddle but Pericles gives it a go.

The riddle is stupid and obvious.  The answer is father-daughter incest.  Pericles understands immediately that solving the riddle is as dangerous as not solving it. As the King says in an aside “He must not live to trumpet my infamy.” As titillating as all this is, it’s the last of our concern with Antioch.

Pericles flees, is shipwrecked and washes up on shore at Pentapolis where he marries Thaisa, the King’s daughter.  He receives word that he’s needed back in Tyre.  Pregnant Thaisa goes with him and dies in childbirth.  She is given a burial at sea and the baby, Marina, is left at Tharsus with Cleon and Dionyza for the time being.

The coffin containing Thaisa washes up at Ephesus where (as we know from The Comedy of Errors) all sorts of magic and occult practitioners offer their services.  One of them brings Thaisa back to life and she takes up as the high priestess at Diana’s temple.

Gower comes out and tells us sixteen years have passed.

Cleon and Dionyza have not been the greatest choice as foster parents.  They’ve been kind to Marina but now that she is 16, Dionyza contracts a little touch of the Texas cheerleader’s mom and feels that Marina is outshining her own daughter.  She orders her to be killed.  But before this can happen, Marina is abducted by pirates and sold to a brothel in Mytilene.

The scenes in the brothel are raw.  There’s a pander (who we all know about from Troilus and Cressida) and his bawd (that would be the madam) and their servant who goes by the name of Boult.  The numbers are down in the brothel because the women are “so pitifully sodden” from being “stewed in the sweating tubs” as a treatment for venereal disease.  A client has died because his “little baggage. . . pooped him; she made him roast meat for worms,” all of which is to say she infected him with venereal disease.

Into this cesspool comes Marina, the virgin.  Pander, Bawd, and Boult salivate over the price they will get from her first client while Marina waits in terror.  But Marina manages to dazzle or shame everyone who comes near her and thus remains “pure.”  The last to be dazzled is the Governor of Mytilene who rescues her from the stew.

Finally here comes Pericles, looking for his daughter.  Besides losing his wife, he’s been shipwrecked several times and who knows what all has been going on in Tyre.  Told his daughter was abducted by pirates, he has gone into a complete funk.  He’s depressed and apathetic.  Marina is brought to work her magic on him, and the two work out that they are father and daughter.

The governor of Mytilene wants to marry Marina.  Before they can do that, they must make a sacrifice at the altar of Diana at Ephesus and we know who is running that show.  And so the whole family is united.

As a story of loss and restoration, Pericles didn’t move me like The Winter’s Tale did.  It felt dis-jointed and contained story lines that got lost and weren’t restored.  There is some thought that Shakespeare didn’t write the entire play and it read that way.  Mid-way through it got tighter and livelier so that even a novice like me noticed it.

After the brothel scene I was most fascinated with the short scenes at Ephesus.  I grew up a kid drenched in Bible stories from Sunday School.  We heard all about the evil at Ephesus and the abomination that was Diana.  Between Pericles and The Comedy of Errors, Ephesus sounds like rather a fun place to be, not to mention a safer place to be stranded than my childhood Sunday Schools classes.

Lines:

*passions of the mind (I, ii)

*One sorrow never comes but brings as heir

That may succeed as his inheritor. (I, iv)

*due diligence (III, chorus)

*O you gods!

Why do you make us love your goodly gifts

And snatch them straight away? (III, i)

*What world is this? (III, ii)

*foul play (IV, iii)

*needful thing (V, iii)

There are women’s names in only three of Shakespeare’s titles: Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Troilus and Cressida.  I think this play should be called Imogen.  Cymbeline, the king is a dolt whereas his daughter Imogen shimmers with courage, imagination and integrity.  It’s a long play which tries to encompass the doings of the Roman Empire with the doings of Celtic Britain which is a bit of a trick since they happened in different centuries.  But it’s the Imogen story that most interested me.

Imogen has married Posthumus (so called because he was born after his father died) and her father Cymbeline is furious.  He intended her to marry his step-son, a clod named Clotus, son of his current Queen whose hobby is to mix deadly poisons and try them out on small animals. In his rage, Cymbeline banishes Posthumus and imprisons Imogen.  Before they part Posthumus gives Imogen a bracelet and she gives him a ring.

In exile, Posthumus gets into a locker room exchange with some other frat boys. As he boasts about his wife’s virtue, he inflames the desire of a villainous character named Iachimo who bets Posthumus he can bag Imogen. Posthumus puts up his wedding ring, Iachimo leaves for Britain and I almost throw my Pelican Shakespeare out my bay window.  I am so sick of this “proof of women’s virtue” crap especially since it’s still going on 400 years later and in our “modern” society.

There’s a truly creepy scene where during the night Iachimo steps out of a trunk that has been delivered to Imogen’s room.  He takes note of the room’s décor before examining Imogen while she sleeps.  While he notes a mole on her left breast, I throw up.  He removes her marriage bracelet.

The next morning while Cymbeline is setting up a forced marriage ceremony to Clotus, Imogen escapes with the help of Pisanio, a sympathetic servant the Queen has been trying to poison.  Pisanio has received two letters from Posthumus. The one addressed to Imogen tells her to meet him at Milford Haven in Wales.  The one address to Pisanio tells him to kill Imogen.  Pisanio shows both letters to Imogen and together they figure out a plan.

Imogen dresses as a boy and Pisanio gives her a “tonic” that the Queen has given him.  He doesn’t know the Queen intended it as poison.  But the Queen doesn’t know that the herbalist she has been working with is on to her and he has given her a recipe to induce sleep, not death.  In Wales, Imogen is befriended by Belarius and his two sons.  She takes the “tonic” and falls into a deep sleep.  Meantime Cloten, the clod, has dressed himself as Posthumus and has followed her to Wales.  He tries to intimidate one of Belarius’ sons by pulling rank, “Know’st me not by my clothes?” The son lops off his head. So I guess not.

Now comes the most sublime song in all of Shakespeare. (My favorite setting of it is the one by Roger Quilter).  The sons entomb Imogen, believing her to be dead, and sing:

Fear no more the heat o’ the Sun,

Nor the furious Winters rages,

Thou thy worldly task hast don,

Home art gon, and tane thy wages.

Golden Lads, and Girls all must,

As Chimney-Sweepers come to dust.

Fear no more the frown o’ th Great,

Thou art past the Tyrants stroak,

Care no more to clothe and eat,

To thee the Reed is as the Oak:

The Scepter, Learning, Physick must,

All follow this and come to dust.

Fear no more the Lightning flash.

Nor th’ all-dreaded Thunderstone

Fear not Slander, Censure rash.

Thou hast finished joy and moan.

All Lovers young all Lovers must,

Consign to thee and come to dust.

No Exorcisor harm thee,

Nor no witch-craft charm thee.

Ghost unlaid forbear thee.

Nothing ill come near thee.

Quiet consummation have,

And renowned be thy grave.

Their father insists they add the headless body of Cloten to the tomb because he is dressed like nobility. Imogen wakes from her deep sleep and thinks the body next to her is Posthumus.

In order to tie up the plot I would have to bring in the secondary political plot, which didn’t interest me.  I just hoped it would go away.  Isaac Asimov who can usually be relied upon to elucidate the historical bits seems to want to throw his Pelican Shakespeare out the window because he can’t get over that ancient Britain is in a different century than early modern Italy.  But in the end, all is revealed.  Belarius turns out to be a former courtier who Cymbeline, in a snit, had banished.  The two sons turn out to be sons of Cymbeline who Belarius, also in a snit, took with him when he went into exile.  Both Posthumus and Iachimo repent their sophomoric, unconscionable behavior (I think they get off lightly) and the Queen conveniently poisons herself.

Besides the wonderful song quoted above, here are more lines:

*Lest the bargain should catch cold and starve (I, iv)

*Hark! Hark! The lark at heaven’s gate sings (I, iii)

*The game is up. (III, iv)

*What is it to be false? (III, iv)

*I have not slept one wink. (III, iv)

*Society is no comfort to one not sociable. (IV, ii)

*Fortune brings in some boats that are not steer’d. (IV, iii)

*Sir I would advise you to shift a shirt; the violence of action hath made you reek as a sacrifice.  Where air comes out, air come in; there’s none abroad so wholesome as that you vent. (I, ii)

A fuss about a trifle?  I don’t think so.  Marjorie Garber in Shakespeare After All lists some of the possible ways of looking at the word nothing.  She points out that a zero is something of a paradox.  It’s also a full circle or in other words, everything.  And she informs us that “nothing” was Elizabethan slang for the female sexual organs, the penis being presumably “something.”   The female genitalia are more subtle, they’re hidden.   There’s a lot of ado in this play about things that are hidden.

The characters hide behind language and truth is obfuscated by words.  Beatrice and Benedick try to hide their attraction to each other by insults, sarcasm and apparent hate.  Though Dogberry knows the truth of the plot against Hero and Claudio, his mangling of the language almost loses his case.  Because Hero and Claudio need others to speak for them, their own agency is hidden, putting them at the mercy of what other people say.

The most obvious big ado is about whether or not Hero is a virgin on her wedding day.  The ado is about “nothing” because it involves Hero’s genitalia and it’s about nothing because nothing has happened except that a lot of men started talking about her.  I’ll add one more gratuitous nothing: Nothing is so over-rated as virginity.

It’s amazing how fast everyone believes the accusation and the “proof” that Hero and Borachio (Borachio!) have been having it on the night before the wedding.  Even Hero’s own father.  I want to shake him and scream, “Have you even met your daughter?” She is so shy she can’t bear to refer to her own wedding night.

It’s like all the men are idiots except for Benedick.  He is in love with Beatrice and her opinion sways him; but it’s to his credit that he’s in love with such a fiery, engaging, witty, impudent grown-up.  I should mention the priest.  Priests need a good word when it’s warranted.  He believes Hero and Beatrice.  He shows some Solomon-like wisdom is proposing to put it about that Hero has died in order to see what hidden facts that flushes out.

The truth of the framing of Hero is hidden in Dogberry’s mind but between his malapropisms and his anxiety to be “writ down an ass,” it almost doesn’t get revealed.

I have always liked this play.  The fun of it will always be the sparring and the love between Beatrice and Benedick.

*Beatrice: I wonder that you will still be talking, Signoir Benedick:  Nobody marks you.

Benedick: What! My dear Lady Disdain, are you yet living? (I, i)

*Benedick, the married man. (I, i)

*As merry as the day is long (II, i)

*It keeps on the windy side of care (II, i)

*He that hath a beard is more than a youth; and he that hath no beard is less than a man; and he that is no more than a youth is not for me; and he that is less than a man, I am not for him. (II, i)

*There was a star danced and under that was I born. (II, i)

*I will tell you my drift. (II, i)

*Bait the hook well, this fish will bite (II, iii)

*When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live til I were married. (II, iii)

*He hath a heart as sound as a bell and his tongue is the clapper; for what his heart thinks his tongue speaks. (III, ii)

*Thou wilt be condemned to everlasting redemption for this (IV, ii)

*O that he were here to write me down an ass! (IV, ii)

*For there was never yet philosophers that could endure the toothache patiently (V, i)

*I was not born under a rhyming planet (V, ii)

How about those Macbeths, huh?  They seem like a fun couple.  Actually, as I think other people have noted, they have the best marriage in all of Shakespeare.  They love each other, they have great passion for each other, they understand each other, and they do things together.  It’s this last that’s the problem.  They get a little carried away with murdering people together.  The play is a stunning study of the effects of guilt. You go away with your jaw dropped open, your eyes glazed over, and the eerie feeling that the story really isn’t over.

Macbeth is a familiar play to me because my father used to go around the house quoting lines from it long before I knew where he was getting them.  I assumed they were all from the Pirates of Penzance.

Whenever he and I were at a mall or the library– someplace where we were going to split up and meet later—he would say to me “When shall we three meet again?” (I, i) It’s the first line of Macbeth when we are introduced to the three witches.

Another was “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it.” (I, iv)  This is said about the death of a traitor in the first act.  My father referred it to various politicians.

The line that bears some resemblance to one from the Pirates of Penzance is, “Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once!” (III, iv)  He used to say that to my mother.

And finally, on occasion when we were getting ready to do something or go somewhere, he would erupt with “Lay on, Macduff!” (V, viii)

Macbeth has been a favorite quoting grounds for psychotherapists as befitting a play about guilt:

*Present fears are less than horrible imaginings (I, iii)

*The love that follows us sometimes is our trouble,

Which still we thank as love. (I, vi)

*Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak

Whispers the o’er fraught heart and bids it break. (IV, iii)

*Macbeth: Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?

Doctor:  Therein the patient must minister to himself. (V, iii)

A long time ago I memorized the “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech but I was always confused by the first line: “She should have died hereafter.” I think it was Ian McKellan in a DVD commentary who pointed out that if you read the word should as the subjunctive would it makes more sense and, if possible, lends even more power to the speech: She was going to die sometime. There was always going to be a time when she would die:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (V, v)

The witches in Macbeth are the prototype for today’s Halloween characters.  I could go all feminist here–as I have in so many of these blog posts–and point out how defaming Shakespeare’s characterization is to herbalists, to witches, to intuitives, and to women.  But I won’t because they are such fun.  In any case, they aren’t witches, they are the “weird sisters” or the Wyrds, the Fates.   So there’s the whole discussion of what exactly is Fate?  Is it outside of us or inside us or an amalgamation of the two?

The cesspool in the weird sisters’ pot is not unlike what’s going on in Macbeth’s head.  But are the weird sisters casting spells or are they an external enactment of some recipe of Macbeth’s internal ingredients?

Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays.  It hurls itself with deadly aim right into the heart of the audience.  Here are lines I haven’t already quoted:

*Fair is foul and foul is fair (I, i)

*The weird sisters, hand in hand,

Posters of the sea and land,

Thus do go about, about. (I, iii)

*So foul and fair a day I have not seen. (I, iii)

*Strange images of death (I, iii)

*Come what, come may,

Time and the hour runs thro the roughest day (I, iii)

*. . . the milk of human kindness. (I, v)

*. . .  the be-all and end-all. (I, vii)

*. . .vaulting ambition (I, vii)

*. . .screw your courage to the sticking point. (I, vii)

*The moon is down; I have not heard the clock. (II, i)

*Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care. (II, ii)

*Tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil. (II, ii)

*We have scorched the snake, not killed it. (III, ii)

*I am in blood. (III, iv)

*Double, double, toil and trouble

Fire burn and cauldron bubble (IV, i)

*. . .  eye of newt and toe of frog. . . (IV, i)

*By the pricking of my thumbs

Something wicked this way comes. (IV, i)

*One fell swoop (IV, iii)

*Out damned spot! Out, I say! (V, i)

*What’s done cannot be undone. (V, i)