The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven.

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name. (V, i)

 

I’ve loved this line since I first heard it in high school. Giving “to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.”  I felt like an “airy nothing” when I was a kid.  Becoming a person is like writing a poem. It’s like being the dreamer who dreams the dream. Even if we’ve been burdened with an oppressive religious education, eventually we get to write (right) ourselves and to decide what it means to be who we are.

Having said that, I’ll move on to the strata of this play: There are the aristocrats, Theseus (who says the line I just quoted) and Hippolyta who are to be married on Midsummer’s Day.  There is “Helymitria,” my term for the interchangeable bright young upper class things Hermia, Helena, Demetrius, and Lysander.  Oberon and Titania are the King and Queen of an unseen (by mortals) world of fairies.  Robin Goodfellow–Puck for short—is Oberon’s all-round mischief-maker and messenger, a Mercury figure.

And finally my favorites: the “Hard-handed men that work in Athens, which never labored in their minds until now.”(V, i)  Anyone who performs or who works with performers will recognize this bunch. In my music studio, I organize bi-monthly recitals for my adult singing students called “Terrified Adults and Spotlight Whores Sunday Afternoon Musicales.”  In the play, we’ve got Bottom, the Spotlight Whore and Snug, the Terrified Adult.  The rest of their players are aspiring to either position.  We’ve got the sincerely officious pedant, Peter Quince.  In my analogy I guess that would be me.

The gang is rehearsing a play called “A tedious brief of young Pyramus and his love for Thisby; a very tragical mirth.”  They’ve entered themselves in a competition to entertain Theseus and Hippolyta after their wedding ceremony.  All of them nearly wet their pants when they learn they have been chosen to perform.  What performer, amateur or professional, doesn’t recognize this?

They need a wall for their play because Pyramus and Thisby carry on their love affair through a chink in the wall that separates them:

 

Snout: You can never bring in a wall. What say you, Bottom?
Bottom: Some man or other must present Wall. And let him have some plaster, or some loam, or some roughcast about him to signify wall. And let him hold his fingers thus, and through that cranny shall Pyramus and Thisbe whisper.

 

I love this!  This is what makes amateur theatricals, in many ways, so much more alive than productions with a huge budget. When you don’t have a lot of money you need a lot of imagination.  As Theseus says: “The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them.” (V, i)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream continually asks the question, “Are you sure that we are awake?” (IV, i) and continually presents levels of dreaming and waking, imagination and concreteness. Here are more of its lines:

 

*. . . chanting faint hymns to the cold, fruitless moon (I, i)

 

*The course of true love never did run smooth (I, i)

 

*Things base and vile, holding no quantity

Love can transpose to form dignity

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind. (I, i)

 

*You may do it extempore, for it is nothing but roaring. (I, ii)

(This is Peter Quince’s reassurance to Snug that he will be ok in the part of the lion)

 

*Every mother’s son (I, ii)

 

*I must go and seek some dewdrops here,

And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear. (II, i)

 

*Lord what fools these mortals be! (IV, ii)

 

 

After my sojourn in the rotten state of Denmark, the innocent foils and fights of a country village were a little hard settle into. I read the play and thought, Ok what did I miss?  The BBC did a wonderful job with this play.  Prunella Scales, Judy Davis, Elizabeth Spriggs, Ben Kingsley, Alan Bennett, and Ron Cook brought it to life.  After watching these old pros, I read the play again and had a good time with it. It prefigures not only Restoration comedy but television comedies like “Keeping Up Appearances.”  All the zany characters are here.

Sir John Falstaff is one of the characters. There seems to be a general lamenting among the commentators that he is not the brilliant Falstaff of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2. Yes, he is.  The lovable, incorrigible, lord of misrule who said funny things is also an irresponsible, alcoholic, arrested adolescent who is incapable of love or intimacy.   But Falstaff isn’t my favorite in any play.  Is it a guy thing? Because I’m with Mistress Ford when she says, “What tempest threw this whale with so many tuns of oil in his belly ashore at Windsor?” (II, i)

In any case, the play is not about him.  It’s about the merry wives: Mistress Ford and Mistress Page.  John Falstaff needs money. He thinks he can (literally) screw some out of Mrs Page and Mrs Ford. To this end he sends each of them a love letter. Class act that he is, he copies out the exact letter twice but changes the names in the salutation.  The women are onto him before they even finish reading the letters.

Mrs. Quickly is the “she-mercury” for just about everyone. She runs messages between all the plotters and planners. (Quickly, get it?)  She also pimps for nearly everyone.  She has a courtesy title and is full of malapropisms:

*She’s a fartuous a civil modest wife (II, ii)

*Her husband has a marvelous infection to the little page (II, ii)

Mrs. Quickly arranges for Falstaff to meet Mrs. Ford at her home during hours when her husband is away.  Falstaff’s associates, Pistol and Nym, unrepentant petty criminals, think Falstaff’s plan is too low even for them.  They tell the husbands.  Master Page doesn’t expect his wife to fall for it but Master Ford, a “very jealousy man,” is suspicious of that his wife might, for no good reason, I might add.  He has the same disease as Othello but this play doesn’t have any creepy murder scenes.

Mr. Ford disguises himself as someone he calls Mr. Brook (Ford/Brook. Get it?) who pays a call on Falstaff and flatters (but also pays) the old fool into setting up an assignation for him and his own wife, Mrs. Ford.  Falstaff tells Mr. Brook about his appointment with Mrs. Ford.

Falstaff’s page tattles to Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page. The women hatch a plot. When Mr. Brook shows up for the assignation the wives are smuggling Falstaff out in a load of dirty laundry with instructions to dump everything in a ditch.  In this exchange following the dumping of Falstaff, Mistress Quickly means to use the word direction.

*Falstaff:  Mistress Ford? I have had ford enough; I was thrown into the ford; I have my belly full of ford.

Mistress Quickly: Alas . . . that was not her fault.  She does so take on with her men—they mistook their erection.

Falstaff: So did I mine. . . (III, v)

At the next attempt at an assignation, the women dress Falstaff in women’s clothes and shove him out the door while the suspicious Mr. Ford is pawing through the dirty laundry.  Finally they persuade Falstaff to go the old oak tree at night as Herne, the Hunter, the subject of a local myth, and keep an assignation with Mrs. Ford.  They dress him up and put horns on his head.  Now the old fool imagines himself “a Windsor stag,” and Zeus disguised as a bull.  Mistress Quickly dresses the children of the town like fairies, ouphs and witches and sends them out to torment Sir John at the old oak tree where he’s trying to get into Mrs. Ford’s pants.

A second plot has involved the wooing of the Page’s daughter, Anne. Anne has no interest in the three men trying to court her.  Her choice is one Master Fenton.  Mistress Quickly has been pimping for all four of them.  They all think they have a chance with Anne but she is planning to run off with Master Fenton the evening of the denouement at the old oak tree. Everyone ends up dancing, singing and tormenting John Falstaff who finally concedes, “I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass.” (V, v)

Here’s how the play ends:

“Let us every one go home

And laugh this sport o’er by a country fire,

Sir John and all.” (V, v)

 

Here are some lines I liked along the way:

 

*She has brown hair and speaks small like a woman. (I, i)

 

*Thou art the Mars of malcontent. (I, iii)

 

*Here will be an old abusing of God’s patience and the King’s English. (I, iv)

 

*I’ll exhibit a bill in parliament for the putting down of men. (II, i)

 

*Thou hast some crotchets in thy head now. (II, i)

 

*The world’s mine oyster

Which I with sword will open. (II, ii)

 

*Falstaff: Of what quality was your love?

Ford: Like a fair house built on another man’s ground, so that I have lost my edifice by mistaking the place where I erected it. (II, ii)

 

*I cannot tell what the dickens his name is. (III, ii)

 

*A woman would run through fire and water for such a kind heart. (III, iv)

 

*As good luck would have it. (III, v)

 

*Have I laid my brain in the sun and dried it? (V,v)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If I collected a fraction of the available analyses on Hamlet I could organize a Bite of Hamlet the size of a small town.  Hamlet hamlet.  Every block would feature a different flavor and some of us could spend the rest of our lives wandering through the Mandela of ideas, trends, arguments, and responses this play has elicited.  Here are some of mine:

I didn’t use to understand why everyone says Polonius is such a bore.  Now I understand why I couldn’t see it before.  It was because he has that one really great line:

*This above all, to thine own self be true,

And it must follow as the night the day

That thou canst not then be false to any man. (I, iii)

It’s wonderful line. It’s a line to tape on the bathroom mirror so I see it every day.  When I was younger I couldn’t reconcile such a meddling old fuss-pot with such wisdom.  I needed my villains and my heroes to be separate.  Shakespeare has so many levels that if someone needs fundamentals, she can find them.  If she can tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty, there’s comfort available for the discomfort of doing so.

My most personal response to Hamlet came at a time when I was deeply depressed.  Reading his most famous speech, I stopped at the line, “. . . the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to.”  Energy and empathy from 400 years ago rushed through the words.  I wasn’t alone on the road.  Someone was there who understood, even called it “natural.” As I am reading all the plays this summer I find there is almost nothing Shakespeare didn’t understand about what it feels like to be alive.

This reading I was drawn to the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia but I had a lack of empathy for Ophelia that surprised me.  I felt impatient with her.  Apparently Hamlet did, too.  He is a frightened young person, trying to keep his wits about him, and trying to separate from his parents.  Ophelia’s fragility rattles him.  There was time when I felt as crazy as Ophelia, and when I attempted what she accomplished.  I know what it’s like to have a meddling, critical, controlling parent.  I know how infantilizing that is, and how much paralysis and fear it breeds in a developing young woman.  Hamlet knows what Polonius is like, knows the power he holds over his daughter.  But his own immediate crisis is so great that he wants Ophelia to be a steadying person, not to be the person she is.

Hamlet is thinking hard.  He doesn’t want to be sidetracked with Ophelia’s angst.  Ophelia is unhappy and bewildered.  She will soon spin out and not be able to think at all.   Like Hamlet I have thought about suicide.  Thinking about it is what saves one from following through.  Ophelia can’t think.  When Hamlet erupts the two of them are split off from each other.  Cutting off connection and feeling may pull one back from the brink of suicide, but it’s a survival measure that doesn’t make for good decisions about how to live.  To deny either connection or individuation dis-empowers both.

Reading Hamlet gets me thinking about death.  I want to stare death in the face and go down fighting if that’s what’s required.  But if I take my last breath in this world and float into the next, I hope both thinking and feeling states are there.  The readiness is all.

A point about Hamlet and Ophelia that I wanted to clear up is the extent of their relationship. I thought I had “ocular proof” of it being sexual until I realized I had misread a line.  Ophelia is reading her “orisons,” her prayer book, when Hamlet asks her to remember all his sins in her orisons.  Except this was how I read the line:

“Nymph, in thy orifices be all my sins remembered.”

I thought my line sounded better.  It even sounded Shakespearean. I bet I’m not the first to make that slip.

Which reminds me of another slip, a very poignant one.  My beloved high school English teacher Carlye LaBell, had Alzheimers late in her life.  Out for brunch with her family, she studied the menu.  “Omelette,” she said.  “I don’t know what that is but I think I used to teach it.”

Sit down with a cup of tea and put your feet up.  Here are lines from Hamlet:

*How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

. . . ‘tis an unweeded garden

That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely. (I, ii)

 

*. . .frailty thy name is woman. (I, ii)

 

*Neither a borrower or a lender be. (I, iii)

 

*. . .to the manner born. . .

. . . it is a custom more honored in the breach than the observance. (I, iv)

 

*Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. (I, iv)

 

*Murder most foul. (I, v)

 

*There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in our philosophy. (I, v)

 

*Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth. (II, i)

 

*Brevity is the soul of wit. (II, ii)

 

*More matter, with less art. (II, ii)

 

*Though this be madness, yet there is method in it. (II, ii)

 

*. . . the indifferent children of the earth. (II, ii)

 

*There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. (II, ii)

 

*What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god; the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. (II, ii)

 

*I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw (II, ii)

 

*The play’s the thing

Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king (II, ii)

 

*To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. . .
. . . who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all. . .  (III, i)

 

*Get thee to a nunnery. (III, i)

 

*Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it,
as many of your players do, I had as lief the
town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air
too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently;
for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say,
the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget
a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it
offends me to the soul to hear a robustious
periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to
very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who
for the most part are capable of nothing but
inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have such
a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant; it
out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.  (III, ii)

 

*‘Tis now the very witching time of night

When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out

Contagion to the world. (III, ii)

 

*The lady doth protest too much methinks. (III, ii)

 

*You would play upon me, you would

Seem to know my stops,

You would pluck out the heart of my mystery. (III, ii)

 

*A king of shreds and patches (III, iv)

 

*Hoist with his own petard (III, iv)

 

*. . . cruel to be kind ( III, iv)

 

*How should I know your true love know

From another one?

By his cockle hat and staff

And his sandals shoon. (IV, v)

 

*The say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. (IV, v)

 

*Tomorrow is St Valentine’s Day

All in the morning betime

And I a maid at your window

To be your Valentine (IV, v)

 

*There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. . .

there’s pansies, that’s for thought. . .

there’s fennel. . . columbines.

there’s rue. . . we may call it herb o’ grace on Sundays. . .

there’s a daisy. . . (IV, v)

 

*For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy. . . (IV, v)

 

*And will ‘a not come again?

And will ‘a not come again?

Oh no, he is dead,

Go to thy deathbed;

He never will come again. (IV, v)

 

*There lives within the very flame of love

A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it. (IV, vii)

 

*Long purples. . . our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them. (IV, vii)

 

*Alas poor Yorick! I knew him Horatio. (V, i)

 

*Sweets to the sweet. (V, i) (I’m not sure how many people realize this is Gertrude’s line as she throws flowers into Ophelia’s grave.)

 

*The quick and the dead (V, i)

 

*The cat will mew, the dog will have his day (V, i)

 

*There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will (V, ii)

 

*There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.  If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come.  The readiness is all. (V, ii)

 

*Now cracks a noble heart.  Good night, sweet Prince,

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. (V, ii)

 

*Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. (V, ii)

 

I read somewhere that people either take to Othello or they hate it.  I took to it.  The plot is as improbable as an opera but no one sees an opera for the plot.  Beyond this particular plot is a human dilemma that I expect we are all familiar with: Jealousy and its cousin envy.  I see Othello as jealous and Iago as envious. Even one of these emotions is dangerous enough, but both of them firing up the minds of people not given to self reflection is disastrous.

The complete title of the play is Othello, the Moor of Venice. Moor is shorthand for African.  There’s no specification for what part of Africa.  Othello is a celebrated and beloved general in the Venetian army and at the opening of the play he has just eloped with Desdemona, a Venetian woman.  Though the story is Othello’s tragedy, this play belongs to his ensign, Iago.  One of Othello’s early lines is “I must be found.” One of Iago’s is “I am not what I am.” (I, i).  We’ll see how that works out.

The play opens with Iago complaining that Cassio, a “mere arithmetician” has been chosen as Othello’s lieutenant and he, Iago is his “ancient,” his ensign.  He envies Cassio’s position. Iago also has it in his head that Othello has “done my office betwixt my sheets,” which is truly insane because there is a suggestion that both Othello and Iago are impotent.  Immediately the army is called to fight in Cyprus and Desdemona goes with them and her new husband. Iago begins to orchestrate a symphony of lies designed to insinuate into Othello the notion that Desdemona is having an affair with Cassio.

In Cyprus, there is an immediate victory and the soldier’s victory party gets out of control.  Cassio, who tends to get stupid after one drink, is egged on by Iago with potent liquor until he gets past stupid and starts a huge brawl.  Othello breaks up the fight like a father at a pajama party and discharges Cassio from the army.  Iago encourages Cassio to ask Desdemona to take up his case with Othello.  When Desdemona and Cassio are in conversation, Iago calls attention to them:

IAGO Ha! I like not that.

OTHELLO What dost thou say?

IAGO Nothing, my lord: or if–I know not what.

OTHELLO Was not that Cassio parted from my wife?

IAGO Cassio, my lord! No, sure, I cannot think it,
That he would steal away so guilty-like,
Seeing you coming.

OTHELLO I do believe ’twas he. . .

IAGO Did Michael Cassio, when you woo’d my lady,
Know of your love?

OTHELLO He did, from first to last: why dost thou ask?

IAGO But for a satisfaction of my thought;
No further harm.

OTHELLO Why of thy thought, Iago?

IAGO I did not think he had been acquainted with her.

OTHELLO O, yes; and went between us very oft.

IAGO Indeed!

OTHELLO Indeed! ay, indeed: discern’st thou aught in that?
Is he not honest?

IAGO Honest, my lord!

OTHELLO Honest! ay, honest.

IAGO My lord, for aught I know.

OTHELLO What dost thou think?

IAGO Think, my lord!

OTHELLO Think, my lord!
By heaven, he echoes me,
As if there were some monster in his thought
Too hideous to be shown. Thou dost mean something:
I heard thee say even now, thou likedst not that,
When Cassio left my wife: what didst not like?
. . .Show me thy thought.

This is how it starts.  I found the slow planting of suspicions in Othello’s mind chilling both on the page and in the three different productions I watched.  It worked for me every time.  Because the truth is that most of us are not far from jealous and envious thoughts. It doesn’t take much.

*Trifles light as air
Are to the jealous confirmation strong
As proofs of holy writ. (III, iii)

And as Emilia, Iago’s wife says,

*They are not ever jealous for the cause,
But jealous for they’re jealous. ‘Tis a monster
Begot upon itself, born on itself.  (IV, iii)

After the initial seed is planted there’s the business with the handkerchief.  Iago has asked Emilia several times to pinch Desdemona’s handkerchief and though it’s not clear why he wants it, we can be sure it’s not to have it copied to make a set for Desdemona as a marriage gift.  Emilia, who was one of my favorite characters, has got her own problems with Iago.  Here is her assessment of her marriage:

*Tis not a year or two shows us a man.
They are all but stomachs and we all but food;
They eat us hungrily, and when they are full,
They belch us.  (III, iv)

When Desdemona drops the handkerchief, I gather Emilia picks it up hoping to gain some attention and favor with Iago. If there was ever a moment to holler in the theater, this is it: “Don’t pick up the handkerchief!”  Because the rest of the play hinges on the symbol of and the fantasies around that handkerchief beginning with  Iago planting it in Cassio’s closet and spinning the story that Desdemona has given it to Cassio.

By the time Iago’s plan is fully baked, he has agreed to murder Cassio “for” Othello and Othello has determined to kill Desdemona.  The scene in the bedroom where Othello smothers his wife is hard to read and hard to watch.  At the same time, it’s engrossing, horrifying, fascinating, and sad.

Emilia interrupts the murder and puts together the mischief of the handkerchief. She convinces Othello of how mis-guided he has been.  Desdemona, true to the end, dies claiming to have taken her own life. By now Iago, Cassio and a bunch of officials are on the scene. Iago kills Emilia and Othello kills himself.  They both die alongside Desdemona.

In five acts, Iago is described by nearly everyone in the play as honest, right down into the last scene.  By my count there were thirteen instances.  That’s too many to be credible.  But Iago told us right from the start, “I am not what I am.”

Othello is portrayed as suggestible.  He believes in charms and portents.  He says the handkerchief had been a present from his father to his mother and had magical qualities.  He’s a soldier, not much given to self-reflection.  We assume that he hasn’t much of an interior life but looks outside himself for truth.  But at the end of the play when he realizes the truth of Iago’s villainy, he looks down at Iago’s feet and murmurs, “but that’s a fable.”  What he expects to see are the devil’s cloven hoofs but instead he sees human feet.  Maybe he learns something about his own gullibility. “I must be found,” he says in the first act.  Maybe he’s found a piece of himself.

The last thing Iago says is “What you know, you know.”  While this can be interpreted any number of ways, I read it as an assessment of how jealousy works. We get jealous thoughts into our heads and that’s the story we are sticking with. We don’t allow any influence to change our minds even it means alleviation of our misery.

Emilia has a speech that I found remarkable and about 400 years ahead of its time.  There are still people today who don’t understand this:

*But I do think it is their husbands’ faults
If wives do fall: say that they slack their duties,
And pour our treasures into foreign laps,
Or else break out in peevish jealousies,
Throwing restraint upon us; or say they strike us,
Or scant our former having in despite;
Why, we have galls, and though we have some grace,
Yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them: they see and smell
And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
As husbands have. What is it that they do
When they change us for others? Is it sport?
I think it is: and doth affection breed it?
I think it doth: is’t frailty that thus errs?
It is so too: and have not we affections,
Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have?
Then let them use us well: else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.  (IV, iii)

Here are more great lines:

*She gave me for my pains a world of sighs (I, iii)

*To mourn a mischief that is past is gone
Is the next way to draw a new mischief on. (I, iii)

*The robbed that smiles steals something from the thief (I, iii)

*Virtue? A fig! (I, iii)

*Put money in thy purse. (I, iii)

*There are many events in the womb of time, which will be delivered (I, iii)

*Reputation, reputation, reputation!
O! I have lost my reputation! (II, iii)

*Who steals my purse steals trash; tis something, nothing;
‘Twas mine, ‘tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.  (III, iii)

*O beware, my lord, of jealousy!
It is the green-eyed monster, which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.  (III, iii)

*Hot, hot, and moist. (III, iv)

*The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,
Sing all a green willow
Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,
Sing willow, willow, willow. (IV, iii)

*It is the cause. (V, i)

*Speak of one that loved not wisely, but too well. (V, ii)

*He was great of heart. (V, ii)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had heard this play was not for the faint-hearted.  It hadn’t been performed for a hundred or so odd years when Olivier mounted a production at Stratford in 1955.  They used to tally up how many people fainted every night, the record being 22.  In the same spirit of accounting, I have tallied up the body count:

Act 1

1 stabbed body: hewn and thrown on a fire, and entrails ritually sacrificed.

1 additional fatal stabbing

 

Act II

1 fatal stabbing

1 rape (with victim laying on her husband’s dead body, see previous item)

2 hands cut off

1 tongue cut out

 

Act III

1 hand cut off

2 decapitations

 

Act IV

1 fatal stabbing

1 hanging

 

Act V

2 cut throats

2 decapitated heads baked into a pie (and fed to their mother)

3 fatal stabbings

1 multiple stabbing (also fatal)

1 dead baby (not clear how this comes about)

1 live burial

 

Apparently revenge plays were all the rage for a time with the Elizabethans and this was Shakespeare’s contribution.  Call it a pot-boiler, artists need to live after all.  The whole business starts when Titus Andronicus comes home triumphant after nine years of battling the Goths.  With him are his eldest son in a coffin, and his captives: Tamora, Queen of the Goths, her three sons and her lover, Aaron the Moor.

“Honor” demands that Titus Andronicus sacrifice one of the captives so he chooses the oldest son. Tamora pleads for her son but Titus can’t offend the gods.  This is one of the few deaths that occur offstage but we, along with the gods, do get to see the entrails brought back for the sacrifice.  And thus begins the chain of revenge.

Of all the horrible things that happen in this play, the most haunting is what happens to Titus’ daughter Lavinia.  The two remaining sons of Tamora kill Lavinia’s husband, and rape her with her head lying across her husband’s body.  Then they hack off her hands and cut out her tongue.  For the rest of the play until her own father “puts her out of her misery” at the end, she is in most of the scenes, haunting the stage.

Her uncle Marcus finds Lavinia wandering around in a state of shock.  He is a decent man but the first thing he does when he sees his niece is launch into a speech that’s 50 lines long.  When the men in the family manage to gather around Lavinia to comfort and care for her, their attentions spans are short and they soon drift off into more speeches, leaving her to sit alone.  I decided that this is partly the way shock behaves.  Even these warriors who think nothing of hacking people to pieces are at a loss when it comes to the mutilation of someone they love.

The reason given for Lavinia’s mutilation is so she can’t communicate who has raped her.  She can’t speak nor write their names.  But she finally manages to scratch their names in the sand with a stick that she guides with her mouth and the stumps of her arms.  She indicates that she was raped by directing the men’s attention to a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphosis and the story of Philomela whose tongue was cut out so she couldn’t say who raped her.  It’s still a powerful image today: women (or young altar boys) being silenced not necessarily by mutilation but by means of shame, disbelief or threats of violence.  The images in this play are hideous and grotesque but there is a sense in which some things have not changed.

There weren’t a lot of lines I wanted to remember.  Aaron the Moor has some funny comments but they need their context.

*Stage direction: Enter a messenger with two heads and a hand. (III, i)

 

*I have done a thousand dreadful things

As willingly as one would kill a fly.  (V,i)

 

*If one good deed in all my life I did,

I do repent it from my very soul. (V, iii)

 

Here’s a line I thought I might use with the next solicitor who knocks on my door. It might make them leave faster than my trying to explain what “No Solicitors” means:

*Who doth molest my contemplation? (V, ii)

 

 

 

 

 

 

At first read, I couldn’t have been less interested in this play.  But it is classed as one of Shakespeare’s great tragedies. There had to be something in it besides an aging playboy slobbering all over a drama queen.  It was finally the sheer extravagance of the language that worked its way into me.  I found myself going around the house thinking, “I wish you joy of the worm” (V, ii) and opening the door on a glorious summer morning, thinking “O thou day o’ the world!” (IV, viii)

Here’s the plot:

Antony, Caesar, and Lepidus are the triumvirate holding down the Roman Empire. Caesar has the west, Antony has the east and Lepidus has the far west and Africa. Cleopatra is Queen of Egypt.

When the play opens, Antony and Cleopatra are debauching around Egypt when word comes that Fulvia, Antony’s wife, who has been waging war against the empire, is dead.  Caesar thinks Antony has been aligned with his late wife. Antony has been more interested in dressing himself up in Cleopatra’s little things than aligning with his wife, but he knows that without the pre-occupation of fighting Fulvia, Caesar will come after him. Antony decides he must leave his “lascivious wassails” and hie to Rome.  Or as Cleopatra puts it: “on the sudden a Roman thought has struck him.” (I, ii)  Antony prepares to leave.  Cleopatra pouts.  She and Antony slobber over each other.  But it’s exquisite slobbering:

*Eternity was in our lips and eyes,

Bliss in our brows bent.

 

*O my oblivion is a very Antony,

And I am all forgotten (I, iii)

So we leave the “strange invisible perfume” of Egypt and follow Antony to sterile, proper Rome where people yammer about honor while they kill each other. In order to assure Caesar of his loyalty Antony marries Caesar’s sister Octavia.  The poor messenger who has to relay this news to Cleopatra is nearly mauled by her.  But Antony longs for his “serpent of old Nile.”  He finds a reason to leave Octavia.  The reason isn’t good enough for Caesar who then pursues Antony.

Throughout the play, Antony is identified with the element of earth while Cleopatra takes up water, fire, and all the air, which seems about right for someone who today would probably be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder.  In any case, Cleopatra talks Antony, who was once a celebrated soldier, into fighting Caesar on the sea. Cleopatra joins him with her fleet.  During the battle, she retreats, and Antony –because he is so besotted with her—follows.  Many of his men defect to Caesar in disgust and fear, giving Caesar the day.

There follows scenes of recriminations, reminiscences and regret. Cleopatra for whom self-preservation trumps even Antony makes noises about aligning with Caesar.  Antony erupts to the point where Cleopatra and her two women hole up in Cleopatra’s “monument,” that is, in the tomb she has built for her own burial.  From here she sends a messenger to tell Antony that she has died, hoping to jerk him out of his rage. She wants a report his reaction.

She has tried this before.  In Act I she demonstrated her technique when she wanted to keep Antony from leaving for Rome:

*See where he is, who’s with him, what he does:
I did not send you: if you find him sad,
Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report
That I am sudden sick: quick, and return. (I, iii)

But now the stakes are higher and the game is more dangerous. In despair over what has happened to his life, his fortunes, and his love, Antony stabs himself.  Barely alive, he is taken to Cleopatra.  “I am dying, Egypt, dying. . .” he says to her.  By now (Act IV) I have stopped rolling my eyes over Cleopatra’s manipulations and Antony’s infatuation and I am getting choked up. Something ancient and human seems to come pouring through the language.  Antony dies and Cleopatra says:

*O! Wither’d is the garland of the war,

Th’ soldier’s pole is fall’n; young boys and girls

Are level now with man; the odds is gone;

And there is nothing left remarkable

Beneath the visiting moon.  (IV, xv)

“The visiting moon.”  What a lovely image.  It suggests the movement and changeability of the moon, of Cleopatra, and of life itself.

Caesar shows up and assures Cleopatra that he is only concerned about her welfare, her needs, and her comfort.  He wants to make sure she stays fattened up for the oven.  Cleopatra offers him a complete inventory of her wealth but makes sure that he finds out she has held back half of it.  She wants him to think she is planning for a future. Two reptilian politicians circling each other.

When Caesar leaves, one of his men, less than loyal and probably infatuated with Cleopatra, tells her that it is Caesar’s plan to lead her through the streets of Rome in chains before she is executed.  She had guessed as much. She has her women dress her in her robes and crown preparatory to her suicide.

An odd little fellow comes to visit. “He brings you figs,” says the guard.

Amongst the figs are asps. “I wish you joy o’ th’ worm,” says the odd little fellow.

Cleopatra and her two women are found dead from snake venom when Caesar comes for her.  He has her buried with Antony.  More of The Language:

*Kingdoms are clay (I, i)

 

*In time we hate that which we often fear. (I, ii)

 

*The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne

Burn’d on the water; the poop was beaten gold,

Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

The winds were love-sick with them. . .

From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast
Her people out upon her; and Antony,
Enthroned i’ the market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to the air; which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in nature.  (II, ii)

 

*My salad days,

When I was green in judgment. (I, v)

 

*Give me some music: music, moody food

Of us that trade in love. (II, v)

 

*To be furious is to be frightened out of fear. (III, xiii)

 

*Secret house of death. . . the case of that huge spirit is cold. (IV, xv)

 

*O sun!

Burn the great sphere thou mov’st in; darkling stand

The varying shore o’ the world (IV, xiii)

 

*The bright day is done,

And we are for the dark. (V, ii)

 

*A woman is a dish for the gods,

If the devil drive her not. (V, ii)

 

*His face was as the heavens, and therein stuck

A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted

The little O, th’earth. (V, ii)

 

*From head to foot, I am marble-constant. (V, ii)

 

 

My immediate thought when I started reading this play was it could be called The Two Frat Boys of Verona.  After I met the rest of the cast, I regressed the characters even further.  This is a great play for a high school drama department. Teen-aged Love and Angst in Verona.  In fact, this could be happening one street over from Romeo and Juliet, also set in Verona. Bizarro Romeo and Juliet.  There are six good parts for young actors—Valentine and Proteus, the two “gentlemen,” and their servants plus Silvia and Julia, the two unfortunate young women they are involved with and several smaller roles, including a dog.  In any case, once I settled down to this being a play about young people, I stopped fussing about the immaturity of the characters and found things to enjoy.

Valentine’s servant is named Speed and for his first entrance he is running late.  Just a funny little detail.  Proteus’ servant is Launce and he’s the one with the dog whose name is Crab. I have to say I think the last thing two adolescent boys need are servants but that’s the aristocracy for you.

The “gentlemen” Proteus is named after the mythological sea god who was, like water, capable of changing forms.  Proteus’ tacking back and forth is what drives the plot. Speed and Launce, along for the sail, lounge on the deck and make funny comments.

Here’s the plot: Valentine and Silvia moon over each other. Proteus and Julia moon over each other but Proteus is also is attached to Valentine in an ambiguous way. Then Proteus starts to swoon over Silvia, possibly as a stand-in for Valentine. Julia hears Proteus singing a love song to Silvia and is heartbroken.

The four of them end up in a forest outside Mantua where Proteus tries to rape Silvia and is intercepted by Valentine who is outraged.  Proteus immediately begs forgiveness and Valentine immediately forgives while Silvia remains silent for the rest of the play.  Apparently the outrage was the betrayal of Valentine not the attempted assault on Silvia.  Julia swoons.  When she comes to, the four of them get things sorted, plan a double wedding and have a group hug.

It reads like a half-baked play (and is considered one of Shakespeare’s first) so I don’t know if it warrants some of my comments but it did get me thinking about relationships if only as a way to bring some value (other than comic) to the play.

There are triangles within triangles within The Two Gentlemen of Verona that suggest different kinds of love.  The love between the two gentlemen volleys back and forth between the loves the two gentlemen have for the two women. Unaddressed is the love between women: the relationship between Julia and her servant is close and sweet.  The friendship between Julia and Silvia is undefined.  We are all used to this.  Women’s love for women has quietly gone on in all its various forms whether the women were single or married.  Men’s love for men has been more public and more strictly monitored in western society. That love and friendship can intermingle has been taken up in TV comedies like Seinfeld and Friends.

Love is an ambiguous business and I think Shakespeare was comfortable with that.  I get the feeling he was attracted to whoever he was attracted to regardless of what was between his or her legs. I personally loathe the labels of gay, straight, bi, trans.  These partitions are initial gates into a vast field of love where people’s experiences and feelings are remarkably similar and there is room for everyone.

This play includes the poem “Who is Silvia?” which Schubert set to music and which is a famous song in classical vocal literature.  I first heard it in the German, sung by (the sublime) Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

*Who is Silvia? what is she,

That all our swains commend her?

Holy, fair and wise is she;

The heavens such grace did lend her,

That she might admiréd be. (IV, ii)

 

Other lines I liked:

 

*Fire that’s closest kept burns most of all. (I, ii)

 

*O! how this spring of love resembleth

The uncertain glory of an April day! (I, iii)

 

*Alas, how love can trifle with itself (IV, iv)

 

“allycholly” (IV, ii)—a wheedling word for melancholy.  Kind of like saying “the blues” on a day that’s not terminally bad, but bad enough.

 

When I was an English major at Whitman College we used to say “a done paper is a good paper.”  That wasn’t true and neither is all well that ends well.  I found this to be a sour play with a depressing ending a wee bit too close to home.

When it opens, we meet the Countess, her son Bertram and her adopted daughter Helena.  We learn that Helena’s father was a brilliant physician who died when Helena was a child. The Countess adopted her and raised her as a much beloved daughter. We learn that Helena never stopped mourning her father: “the tyranny of her sorrows takes all livelihood from her cheek.” And finally we learn that Helena pines after Bertram:

“I think not on my father. . .

I have forgot him.  My imagination

carries no favor in’t but Bertam’s. . .

a bright particular star.”

That was all the information I needed.  She says she has forgotten her father and clearly she idealizes Bertram.  Those are the ingredients for an obsession that a woman might call love but is actually a longing for a father.  It’s an obsession one does not easily give up.

Sigmund Freud said that wherever he went he found the poets had preceded him. Even so, I found myself a bit stunned at Shakespeare’s perspicuity in this play. He seems to have an understanding of female sexuality that I’m not sure is even all that common today.  It certainly wasn’t mentioned in any commentaries I looked at. They mostly wondered what Helena could possibly see in Bertram. To me it seemed obvious that what she sees is her own idealization since Bertram is vapid, arrogant, and shallow.  His own mother sees that.  But that is the nature of obsession.  One idealizes the object without regard for any clear assessment of his qualities or for how he treats her.

In the second act, Helena goes to the dying king of France with secret medicinal preparations that her doctor father left to her in his will.  She thinks she can offer the king a cure.  She is introduced to the king by a lord who refers to himself as “Cressid’s uncle.”  This would be a reference to Pandarus, the pimp, from Troilus and Cressida.  With its hint of sexual exploitation, it further suggests Helena’s fatherless vulnerability to men.

She does provide the cure the king needs and in gratitude, he offers to reward her with whatever she wants.  She says she wants to marry Bertram.  At this point, I am holding my own head and groaning.  Even if Bertram wasn’t a dickhead, this is not the way to experience love in one’s life.

Bertram is appalled.  Him marry a doctor’s daughter?  He refuses.  The king forces the marriage.  Bertram leaves for the wars without so much as kissing Helena.  He gives her a nasty note saying “when thou canst get the ring from my finger which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband.”

This kind of humiliation is nothing to a woman obsessed.  Helena is determined to have the object of her obsession.  She follows Bertram and meets Diana, a woman with whom he is trying to conduct an affair. Diana persuades Bertram to give her his ring and then the two women hatch The Bed Trick whereby Bertram thinks he is bedding Diana, but Helena slips between the sheets instead.  So Bertram is stupid on top of everything else.

When it all gets untangled, Bertram, because he is again forced to by the king, promises to “love her dearly–ever, ever dearly.” Those “evers” sound pretty oily to me.  Since Helena finally possesses the object of her obsession and since she says (twice) that all’s well that ends well, scholars and critics have been unable to class this play as a tragedy.  I think it’s a tragedy when any person (male or female) thinks so poorly of herself that she settles for a loveless relationship because she thinks this is the best life has to offer.

Here are some lines to throw around at social gatherings:

*Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,

Which we ascribe to heaven.  (I, i)

 

*I should love a bright, particular star. (I, i)

 

*He must needs go that the devil drives. (I, iii)

 

*Countess: Marry, that’s a bountiful answer that fits all questions.

LaVatch: It’s like barber’s chair that fits all buttocks.  (II, ii)

 

*The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together. (IV, iii)

 

*Simply the thing that I am shall make me live. . .there’s place and means for every man alive. (IV, iii)

 

*All’s well that ends well; still the fine’s the crown. (IV, iv)

(It helps here to know that the word fine means “the end,” like the Fine in music.  Now read it again.  It’s elegant, no? I still don’t think Helena is happy.)

 

 

 

 

I enjoyed this nasty little play.  It’s got sex, religion and hypocrisy.  It’s so topical I don’t understand why theater companies all over the country aren’t performing it. The title comes from the Sermon on the Mount, the King James version because Shakespeare loves his thees and thous: “Judge not that ye be not judged.  For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” The play takes place in Shakespeare’s imagination but he calls the city Vienna where “corruption boil and bubble til it o’er run the stew.” (V, i) Among the self-deluded bunch of characters are:

The Duke. He has recently passed a law that punishes fornication with death.  Now he claims to be going away and leaving his deputy to enforce it.  But instead he hides out in the friary pretending to be a friar so he can see what happens.

Angelo. The Duke’s deputy. He is so upright he “scarce confesses that his blood flows.”

Isabella. She’s becoming a nun in order to keep the lid on her sensuality and sexual energy.

The ironic heart of the play is carried by Lucio, a goodhearted trickster, and possibly the only sane person in Vienna.  He weaves in and out of the action with mischief and compassion.  There’s an odd character called Barnardine.  In prison for murder, his nine years of appeals have run out.  His odd little scene expresses the absurdity of what passes for civic order in society.  Then there’s a collection of drabs, knaves, bawds and tapsters who interact like Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Angelo’s first action as Deputy of this city of vice is to sentence to death Claudio, the brother of Isabella, the sublimating novice. Claudio and Juliet, his fiancée, are pregnant and that actually would have been legal but they hadn’t officially registered their common law marriage because they are waiting for Juliet’s family to pony up a dowry.  Juliet, incidentally is also sentenced to death, after the baby is born.  Angelo, the upright, had dumped his legal fiancée, Mariana when her dowry disappeared in a family misfortune.

Isabella pleads with Angelo for her brother’s life, thus putting two repressed individuals in close proximity.  Isabella plays the guilt or mercy card, depending on how one looks at it, and says, “Ask your heart what it dost know that’s like my brother’s fault.”  Angelo’s alarm, hypocrisy and sado-masochism are activated.  He tells Isabella he will spare her brother’s life if she will sleep with him. At this she wants to forfeit the game, but the Duke who has been playing friar all this time, gets wind of things and begins to meddle.  He proposes The Bed Trick: he suggests that Isabella accept Angelo’s terms but Angelo’s ex-fiancèe, Mariana, will be substituted in the bed.

While this is going on, Barnardine’s time on earth has finally run out and he has this conversation with the executioner’s assistant, Pompey:

Pompey: Master Barnardine, you must rise and be hanged, Master Barnardine.

Barnardine: A pox o’ your throat, who makes that noise there?  What are you?

Pompey: Your friends, sir, the hangmen.  You must be so good, sir, to rise and be put to death.

Barnardine: Away you rogue, away!  I am sleepy.

Pompey: Pray Master Barnardine, awake til you are executed and sleep afterwards. . .

Barnardine: I swear I will not die today for any man’s persuasion.  (IV, iii)

 

After the assignation with Isabella/Mariana, Angelo starts worrying that this will get about: “a deflowered maid, and by an eminent body that enforced the law against it.”  He reneges on his promise to Isabella, orders the execution of Claudio and decides to dispose of the murderer Barnardine at the same time.  The Duke/friar intervenes and prevents the execution but because he is a sadist, who by now is playing God, he tells Isabella that her brother is dead.

The Duke comes back to town as the Duke and there’s a public meeting.  At this point, Angelo thinks he has slept with Isabella and both Angelo and Isabella think Claudio is dead.  The truth is publicly untangled. Angelo is humiliated but I get the feeling that his masochism rather enjoys this.  The Duke sentences him to death and Isabella seconds this.  In doing so, her inability to show the mercy she wanted for herself is exposed.   Mariana pleads for Angelo’s life until finally the Duke pardons everyone except Lucio who is sentenced to death for the heinous crime of poking fun at the Duke.

Angelo and Mariana are forced to marry. And Isabella sets aside her vows and marries the Duke.  As a character much later in history might say: “Too, too sick-making.”  Also much later in history, nothing much has changed.  Civic leaders are still lying to citizens and still breaking their own laws.  The church is still self-deluded, repressed, and sado-masochistic.  Proud little men and women “dressed in brief authority” still play God.  The innocent are still punished.

Claudio and Juliet are married. That’s the only good thing that happens in this play. Except that Barnardine gets his way: he will not die for any man’s persuasion.

Here are lines I liked:

*Pompey- Yonder man is carried to prison.

Mistress Overdone: Well, what’s he done?

Pompey: A woman.

Mistress Overdone: But what’s his offense?

Pompey: Fishing for trout in a peculiar river. (I, ii)

 

*We must not make a scarecrow of the law,

Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,

And let it keep one shape til custom make it

Their perch and not their terror. (II, i)

 

*Does your worship mean to geld and splay all the youth of the city? (II, i)

 

*. . .man, proud man,

Dressed in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he’s most assured. . .

Plays such fantastical tricks before high heaven

As make the angels weep.  (II, ii)

 

*. . .is this her fault or mine?

The tempter or the tempted, who sins most? (II, ii)

 

*Thou hast not youth nor age,

But as it were an after-dinner’s sleep,

Dreaming on both.  (III, i)

 

*Take, O take these lips away,

That so sweetly were forsworn

And those eyes, the break of day,

Lights that do mislead the morn;

But my kisses bring again, bring again,

Seals of love, but sealed in vain, sealed in vain (IV, i)

 

*I am a kind of burr.  I shall stick. (IV, iii)

 

*Like doth quit like, and measure still for measure. (V, i)

 

 

 

 

 

Reading this play was like standing in an ocean of words and having twelve foot waves of verbiage crash over me.  It’s full of puns, inside jokes, 16th century topical allusions, patter dialogue and about 15 characters who “have been at a great feast of language and have stolen the scraps.”

One of these characters is called Dull.  Sir Anthony Dull.  He has a dull little riddle, which was one of the few exchanges that I immediately understood:

Dull: What was a month old at Cain’s birth that’s not five weeks old as yet?

Holofernes: The moon was a month old when Adam was no more,

And raught not to five weeks when he came to five-score

The allusion holds in the exchange.

 

Dull: ‘Tis true indeed; the collusion holds in the exchange.

 

So I got that one.  I needed help for what went on before the dull riddle:

 

Holofernes: The deer was, as you know, sanguis, in blood.  .  .and anon falleth like a crab on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth.

Nathaniel: Truly, Master Holofernes.  .  . it was a buck of the first head.

Holofernes:Sir Nathaniel, haud credo.

Dull: ‘Twas not a haud credo; ’twas a pricket.

Holofernes: Most barbarous intimation! yet a kind of insinuation, as it were, in via, in way, of explication; facere, as it were, replication, or rather, ostentare, to show, as it were, his inclination, after his undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or rather, unlettered, or ratherest, unconfirmed fashion, to insert again my haud credo for a deer.

Dull: I said the deer was not a haud credo; twas a pricket.

What you have to know—and you have to know it because it took me twenty minutes to get it straight and I’m damned if that is going to waste—is that a “buck of the first head” is a five year old buck, not a deer.  Haud credo is Latin for “I do not think so” but Sir Anthony Dull is hearing the last syllable of “credo” and thinks the reference is to a doe.  A pricket is a two year old male deer, so he keeps insisting that the animal in question is a two year old male deer, not a doe and not a buck.  And Holofernes always talks “ostentare, to show, as it were, his inclination” to verbiate way too much.

Here’s the plot of Love’s Labor’s Lost: The King of Navarre has gathered three young men to his headquarters who are prepared to deny themselves female company in order to study philosophy with him for three years.  One flaw in the plan–beyond the obvious– is that the Princess of France is due on a state visit the very next day. She comes with three female attendants. The men fall in love with the women and try to keep it secret from each other but they all get together in the end. That’s kind of it. There are other characters and, as I said, a tsunami of words.

One interesting word that comes up twice is yclep.  It’s the old English past participle of the verb clepe, which means to call or to name.  Mostly in Shakespeare, I am familiar with the actual words.  It’s the way he uses them that flummoxes me. But yclep was downright weird.  I never took a class in Chaucer in college but I remember hearing the inimitable Dr Thomas D. Howells reading Middle English.  And that reminds me of my advisor Dr. Walter Broman (who I adored) telling us he had spent the summer lying on the porch reading The Faerie Queene and that it had been a pleasant way to pass the summer. I was 19 years old. I thought that sounded nuts.  But here I am spending the summer reading Shakespeare and loving it.

I picked up another strand of memory when I got to Act IV, scene i.  I was sitting outside after dark, reading from a nifty bed-desk with reading light, a Christmas present from my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything.  The character Rosaline sings:

Thou canst not hit it, hit it, hit it,

Thou canst not hit, my good man.

I bolted upright.  My father and I used to chant that song around the house when I was growing up.  Where did we get it?  We must have heard it somewhere.  Lawrence Welk?  What an odd thing to trip over after all this time. The footnote says it’s “ribald” but doesn’t explain how.

But I digress.  Which is kind of what Love Labor’s Lost does all over its five acts.  Here are some exchanges I enjoyed (after I figured them out) and some of the famous lines:

*King: Did you hear the proclamation?

Costard: I do confess much of the hearing it, but little of the marking of it . . .(I, i)

 

*Armado: Boy, what sign is it when a man of great spirit grows melancholy?

Moth: A great sign, sir, that he will look sad. (I, ii)

 

*Remuneration! O! That’s the Latin word for three farthings.  (III, i)

 

*Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves,

Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths.

It is religion to be thus forsworn,

For charity itself fulfills the law

And who can sever love from charity (IV, iii)

 

*Moth (pronounced Mote): They have been at a great feast of language and stolen the scraps.

Costard: O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words.  I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word, for thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus. Thou are easier swallowed than a flap-dragon. (V, i)

(And here you need a footnote to tell you a flap-dragon is a drink of brandy containing a flaming raisin.  Sounds like a Christmas party thing.)

 

*In the posterior of the day which the rude multitude call the afternoon. (V, i)

 

*He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.(V,i)

 

*A light heart lives long. (V, ii)

 

* (Sung by Winter)

When icicles hang by the wall,

And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,

And Tom bears logs into the hall,

And milk comes frozen home in pail,

When blood is nipp’d, and ways be foul,

Then nightly sings the staring-owl,

Tu-who;

Tu-whit, tu-who—a merry note,

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

 

When all aloud the wind doth blow,

And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,

And birds sit brooding in the snow,

And Marian’s nose looks red and raw,

When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,

Then nightly sings the staring owl,

Tu-who;

Tu-whit, tu-who—a merry note,

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.   (V, ii)