I was eager to read Julius Caesar because I wanted to know the context for the line, “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.”  But I didn’t much care for the play.  I was going to lump it with Henry VIII and write about Julius and Henry but I actually have other plans for Henry.  On top of which, if I just quoted all the famous lines from Julius Caesar, it would take up half this post. So I’ll make my few comments and then leave you to contemplate how much of this play has entered literary consciousness.

I am not all that interested in a bunch of men standing around in togas, overly impressed with themselves, and plotting how they plan to topple one another.  That’s half the play.  The rest of it is war, which interests me even less.

There are two small parts for women: Chalpurnia and Portia, Caesar’s and Brutus’ wives, respectively.  They are so minor they don’t each even get a sentence from me. Actually I think one of Portia’s few speeches makes a good monologue for actors.  The one where she shows off the wound she gave herself in the thigh just to show how tough she was.  Later in the play we learn she has died by swallowing hot coals and Brutus gets to show how stoic he is by not reacting.

I couldn’t read the play as history and think, okay, that’s what happened.  Some of the things that “happened” make me want to first vomit and then pass out: After Caesar is stabbed 23 times, the assassins wash their hands in his blood to suggest the assassination was a holy undertaking.  At the end of the play Cassius and Brutus, knowing they have lost the battle, both die by falling on their swords.  When I read this, I wonder what kind of deformed minds create a culture so obscene that these are understandable, even celebrated actions.  A whole culture still exists–in our country– that glorifies killing other human beings, yammering all the while about honor and freedom, dressing up in little outfits, and leeching the life from our country so they can continue to validate their twisted little ceremonies.

OK, whew, I think this diatribe is also being fed by all the War of the Roses plays that I just read.  It is truly time to move on to the comedies and fantasies.  I found out that the cry of “Havoc!” means that wholesale slaughtering, butchering, plundering, pillaging and raping can begin.  Just the sort of trivia I like to have bustling around my mind.

Here are lines, some of which I have heard since I was in junior high school:

*Beware the ides of March (I, ii)

*. . . with himself at war,

Forgets the shows of love to other men. (I, ii)

*He doth bestride the narrow-world

Like a Colossus, and we petty men

Walk under his huge legs and peep about

To find ourselves dishonorable graves. (I, ii)

*Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.

He thinks too much.  Such men are dangerous. (I, ii)

*. . . it was Greek to me (I, ii)

*Between the acting of a dreadful thing

And the first motion, all the interim is

Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.

The genius and the mortal instruments

Are then in council, and the state of a man,

Like to a little kingdom, suffers then

The nature of an insurrection. (II, i)

*. . . grey lines than fret the clouds are messengers of day. (II, i)

*Cowards die many times before their deaths;

The valiant never taste of death but once. . .

It seems to me most strange that men should fear,

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come. (II, ii)

*Et tu, Bruté? (III, i)

*Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war. . . (III, i)

*Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. .

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interrèd with their bones. . .

Brutus is an honorable man;

So are they all, all honorable men. . .  (III, ii)

*The most unkindest cut of all. (III, ii)

*Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot. (III, ii)

*There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves

Or lose our ventures. (IV, iii)

*Thou shalt see me at Philippi (IV, iii)

*For ever and for ever, farewell. . . (V, i)

I read this play in college when I was still half asleep in the Woman’s Movement.  When I came to it last week, I had a vague idea about the usual characterization of the plot: a bitchy woman is tamed into docility by a husband who asserts his God-given authority over her.  I decided to read it this time with a conviction that Shakespeare doesn’t write that simplistically and that he often subverts the world view of his time.

So here’s this woman, Kate, who’s a scold.  She’s got a younger sister, Bianca, who is an insufferable and superficial flirt, and an ineffectual father.  There’s no mention of what happened to the mother.  Whatever the particulars of the family, I assume that Kate’s shrewishness is her response to it.  She isn’t happy –actually I think she’s frightened–and her temper keeps people from getting in her way.  Everyone is scared of her.

The first thing I noticed about Petruchio, the fellow who is going to “tame” her, is that he’s not afraid of her.  He’s not fazed by her anger.  I deduce from this that he’s not afraid if his own anger either.  He recognizes that Kate is a kindred spirit and he’s immediately interested.  Because she’s a kindred spirit he knows what she might respond to.  I speculate that the course he embarks on is a strategy that someone once used with him.

I think this is subtle.  A man who is planning to dominate a woman is, underneath all the bluster, frightened of her and himself.  Since Petruchio is not frightened, something deeper is going on.  In their first encounter, Kate is intrigued though she tries not to be.  He is at ease. He flirts. He pushes his limits, and sets his limits.

P- Who knows where a wasp does wear his sting?  In his tail.

K -In his tongue.

P -Whose tongue?

K-Yours, if you talk of tales, and so farewell.

P -What, with my tongue in your tail?

She slaps him.

P- I swear I’ll cuff you if you strike me again.

Petruchio makes a quick business arrangement with Kate’s father –all that dowry crap makes me want to gag but this is 500 years ago after all.  Contrast this with the bidding war that goes between the several suitors of Bianca.  In the end I felt that Petruchio truly loves Kate and wants to marry her and the business arrangement hardly matters to him.

The wedding day arrives (III, ii) and Petruchio is late, causing Kate some humiliation and anxiety.

. . .a mad-brain rudesby, full of spleen,

Who wooed in haste and means to wed at leisure.

. . .a frantic fool

Hiding his bitter jests in blunt behavior.

Right there: “. . .full of spleen, hiding his bitter jests in blunt behavior.”  Kate could be talking about herself.

Petruchio finally shows up dressed in outlandish clothes.  Kate is further upset, her father is perturbed, and a friend, Tranio, offers the loan of some clothes more appropriate to a wedding.

Petruchio says, “To me she’s married, not unto my clothes.”

Tranio nods, “He hath some meaning in his mad attire.”

I think the meaning is that Petruchio understands the difference between appearance and something deep inside another human being. He understands the fear underneath Kate’s bad temper.   After the wedding he begins a series of games to disarm her.  He hyperbolizes her behavior by out-shrewing her and by making unreasonable demands.  He is contrary, insisting that she say the moon is out when it’s the sun that’s out.  Some of the “games” involve sleep and food deprivation and what seem like crazy-making brain washing techniques. “He kills her in her own humor.” (IV,i)

The “taming” is farce.  Petruchio doesn’t need to dominate Kate just because it might be his right in Elizabethan England.  Kate doesn’t appear to be a masochist.  She’s not afraid of Petruchio and she doesn’t have to stay with him, get along with him or change at all.  But he treats her differently than anyone ever has and she appears to be thinking about that.  It reminds me of the fights between Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker.  Annie Sullivan and Petruchio recognize Helen and Kate as persons.  They respect them even as they wait for the respect to be acknowledged and returned.

There is a small lovely moment in the streets of Padua when Kate wants to do something and they have this exchange:

P-First kiss me, Kate, and we will.

K- What in the middle of the street.

P- What, art thou ashamed of me?

K-No sir, God forbid, but ashamed to kiss.

P-Why, then let’s home again . . .

K- Nay I will give thee a kiss. Now pray thee, love, stay.

P-Is this not well? Come, my sweet Kate.

Better once than never, for never’s too late.

This little scene worked for me.  I found it as compelling as I did the scene when Kate and Petruchio first meet and have that racy exchange about tongues and tails.  The play is almost finished and my thesis seemingly is blown all to hell by Kate’s speech which Cole Porter turned into a song in Kiss Me, Kate:

I am ashamed that women are so simple

To offer war when they should sue for peace,

Or seek for rule, supremacy and sway,

When they are bound to serve, love and obey. (V,ii)

Ugh.

On the other hand, the above could also be said of men because he who rules can also be ruled.  I think Petruchio knows this. If The Taming of the Shrew is about solving anything by women’s (even consensual) subservience then this is a really stupid play in any historical age.

I don’t care for words like rule and obedience, but I think the idea here is that in love, there is a mutual surrender.  I could argue that Petruchio has already surrendered to Kate.  I think he is smitten with Kate and he wants a relationship of equals and not one where each is hiding bitter jests in blunt behavior.

Here are some great lines:

*I’ll not budge an inch. (Ind, i)

*No profit grows where is no pleasure taken.

In brief sir, study what you most affect. (I,i)

*Kiss me, Kate. (II,i V,i V,ii)

*When will he be here?

When he stands where I am and sees you there. (III, ii)

*The oats have eaten the horses. (III, iii)

*Thereby hangs a tale. (IV, i)

*Where is the life that late I led? (IV, i)

*My cake is dough. (V, i)

*He that is giddy thinks the world turns round. (V, ii)

As a Gemini, I loved this little play full of doppelgangers, losing and finding oneself and mistaken identities.  Shakespeare juggles two sets of look-a-likes like four balls: Antipholus of Syracuse and Antipholus of Ephesus with their corresponding bondsmen, Dromio of Syracuse and Dromio of Ephesus. (Bondsmen.  After 18 plays and five weeks, a person starts talking about bondsmen like they’re nothing out of the ordinary.)

The two Antipholi are twins that have been separated since birth.  Both have acquired, against all odds, twin slaves who were also separated at birth.  Antipholus(S) arrives in Ephesus with Dromio(S) while on a quest for his long lost twin brother.  Ephesus reminds me of Northhampton, Massachusetts.  The downtown area of both places are an on-going carnival with dancing dogs, fortune tellers, people in costumes, street vendors, dancing and performance art on every corner. The setting is whimsical (rather than sin-darkened like the Bible’s characterization of Ephesus) giving it a dream-like setting, which to me signals that there is symbolism to explore.

There’s a carnival whirl of a plot, too, with confusions like these:  1) Antipholus (S) gives Dromio(S) a bag of ducats to take to their hotel for safe-keeping.  Shortly after Dromio (S)leaves, Dromio (E) shows up to call his master to dinner.  When Antipholus (S) asks him what he has done with the ducats, Dromio (E) doesn’t know what he is referring to and Antipholus (S) does not understand why he’s going on about a wife and dinner.  2) Antipholus (S) dines with Antipholus’ (E) wife (who can’t tell he isn’t her husband, of course) and locks her actual husband out of the house. Repeat with a dozen variations, creating a comedy of errors.  Finally at the end all is revealed.

The play is full of people losing and finding themselves.  The two Dromios are both quite merry fellows and when they recognize each other, they are delighted.  Of the two Antipholi, one is affable, the other is disagreeable.  When they acknowledge each other at the end of the play, they seem less than thrilled and they keep their distance. I saw the two Antipholi as suggesting the dark and light side of the same person.  Sometimes we don’t want to know our darker aspects.  And sometimes we are ashamed of our superficialities.  And sometimes we like to keep things permanently disassociated.

There’s another theme of Being Seen and Being Known. Antipholus (S) is uneasy when he walks through the town and everyone seems to know him.  He sends Dromio to the harbor to see if they can ship out the very afternoon of the morning they come in.   Being seen and being known can make a person uneasy.  (Aha, here’s a chance to plug my radio interview.  An NPR interview had been in the works for a few months. When I got word that it was going to air last weekend, I got panicky.  More people are going to hear a particularly difficult part of my story.  It’s a lot of exposure and even though it’s what I signed on for when I published a memoir, it still has to be lived through.  I understand the impulse to ship out.  Here’s the link: http://www.kuow.org/program.php?id=27466.)

The plot winds itself around the theme of mistaken identities and I got to thinking about ways we mistake ourselves and others:  We mistake someone else’s true nature, we mistake our own natures, and we mistake how others see us.  I can forget that while I live in my own internal world, so does everyone else live in theirs.  I don’t have any control over what others think of me.

This play has to be seen.  It’s too hard to keep everyone straight while one is reading.  The BBC has a great production with Michael Kitchen as the Antipholi and Roger Daltrey of The Who as the two Dromios.  And here are some lines I liked:

*He that commends me to mine own content,

Commends me to the thing I cannot get (I, ii)

*Why, headstrong liberty is lashed with woe,

There’s nothing situate under heaven’s eye

But hath his bound. . . (II, i)

*They say every why hath a wherefore.  (II, ii)

*There’s something in the wind. (III, i)

*If she lives til doomsday, she’ll burn a week longer than the whole world.  (III, ii)

I have a Shakespearean Insults coffee mug.  As I read Richard III, I noticed that a fair number of the slurs from the coffee mug were ones directed at Richard:

*Lump of foul deformity (I, ii)

*Diffused infection of a man (I, ii)

*Thou canst make excuse current but to hang thyself (I, ii)

And these were delivered by the woman he was shortly to marry! He interrupts the funeral procession of Henry VI to propose to Henry’s daughter-in-law whose husband Richard has also killed.  And sure enough by the time the Lady Anne has spit out enough insults, a creepy sort of sexual chemistry has developed.

Then our old friend from Henry VI, Queen Margaret, rears her vicious head says:

*Thou elvish-marked abortive rooting hog! (I, iii)

*This poisonous bunch-backed toad (I, iii)

So he wasn’t the sweetest guy.  Richard himself says:

*Since I cannot prove a lover

To entertain these fair well-spoken days

I am determined to prove a villain. (I, i)

Richard is introduced in Henry VI Part Three.  King Henry holds forth at the end of the play:

*The owl shrieked at thy birth, an evil sign;

The night crow cried, aboding luckless time;

Dogs howled and hideous tempest shook down trees. . .

Thy mother felt more than a mother’s pain,

And yet brought forth less than a mother’s hope,

To wit, an indigested and deformed lump. . .

Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou wast born

To signify thou cam’st to bite the world. . .

Richard puts a stop to this litany by killing Henry.  Then he carries on with:

*And this word ‘love,’ which grey beards call divine,

Be resident in men like one another,

And not in me.  I am myself alone. (Henry VI Part Three, V, iv)

Tho I wouldn’t want to live next door to either of them, I feel drawn to Richard III, kind of like I feel drawn to Stieg Larson’s Lisbeth Salander.  My mother rarely missed a chance to let me know that I was “less than a mother’s hope.” But it is the line “I am myself alone” that touched me, especially during the earlier part of my life when I was depressed and lonely.  I sympathize with Richard even though my deformities were imagined and my murders were symbolic.

After his eldest brother, King Edward IV, dies, Richard manages to snatch the crown even though there are a dozen people ahead of him.  A weasel-like Eddie Haskell character, he goes about the deadly business of making his position secure.  He has the middle brother, the Duke of Clarence, killed, and the story gets about that Clarence was “drowned in a butt of malmsey.” Richard has it put about that some of his rivals were illegitimate.  He does away with a number of lords who arouse his suspicions and even poisons his own wife.  His sadistic and sneaky crimes are compounded until he has his two small nephews, Edward’s sons, murdered.  After this, he starts to decompensate.  His paranoia becomes profound and his erratic behavior loses him so much support that even his horse deserts him.  He dies in battle screaming,

*A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!

So here’s the thing: as irritating as it is to encounter Isaac Asimov’s frustration over every single note of Shakespeare’s improvisations with historical fact, I concur and cheer him on when he says that nothing in Shakespeare’s characterization of Richard II is true.  The historical Richard was quite a lovely fellow.

Josephine Tey, (aka Elizabeth Mackintosh and Gordon Daviot) classic writer of murder mysteries, has written a great little book called The Daughter of Time.  Her detective, Alan Grant, is laid up in hospital recuperating from having fallen through a trap door whilst in pursuit of a criminal.  To while away the time he researches the history of Richard III.  His actress friend brings him a copy of the portrait of Richard from the National Gallery in London.  She says his face is “full of the most dreadful pain.” Grant’s nurse says the man in the portrait has a liver disorder.  His surgeon says he had polio-myelitis as a child.  His sergeant pegs Richard as a judge.  No one thinks it’s the face of a murderer.

Richard III

As Grant finds out, the historical account that everyone cites for Richard was written by a shill of Henry VII who Henry then made Archbishop of Canterbury.  Sir Thomas More took up the slander without questioning its validity and his account made it into both legends and history books which is where Shakespeare found it.

But Grant is a policemen. He looks at what people actually do, where they are, what are their alibis and what eye-witnesses say. His research assistant find records, letters and histories written while Richard was alive.  Turns out he was wise, generous, courageous, able and popular.  There was no outrage about any nephews in the tower being murdered while Richard was alive.  The outrage came two year’s later when Henry VII’s lackey put it about that Richard had murdered the boys.  What seems more than likely is that Henry VII was the one who had them murdered.  In fact Henry VII seems to resemble the Richard in Shakespeare’s play in everything but the hunched-back and the shortened leg.  It wasn’t politic to say any of this until the last of the Tudors was gone.  The record was corrected when James I succeeded Elizabeth I.

The evidence in the case has been known and conceded for hundreds of years but the insistence persists in some dark corners that Richard III was a villain.  This I think we can lay this at the feet of Shakespeare who created a memorable, indelible character that we love to hate and hate to love. The odd thing is that though I love the idea of Richard III being a good guy, I still am charmed and mesmerized by Shakespeare’s villain.  I am glad they are both there.

In a small English major corner of my being, I have always wanted to understand the War of the Roses which theoretically is covered in the Henry VI plays.  Except that Shakespeare was a writer of historical fiction.  Historians who are determined to get their facts correct prove, in doing so, why Shakespeare chose to fabricate and condense.  No one would watch a play based on a chronology of history.  Whatever else I have done after getting through the Henrys, I believe I have now got straight the chronology of all of Shakespeare’s history plays.

The Henry VI plays (there are actually only three) haven’t that much to do with Henry VI who would have made a better scholar or clergyman than a king.  He’s like a piece of tofu.  He doesn’t have much personality himself but he soaks up and disperses the flavors of a bunch of cut-throat, brave, bitter, enraged, funny, thoughtful, determined, and wily characters in the three plays that bear his name.

Part One:

The first play has a fabricated scene that suggests the War of the Roses began as a quibble among law students.  They are making too much noise in Temple Hall so they go into the garden where they choose sides by picking white or red roses off the bushes.  I made a list: White/York: Richard, Salisbury, Warwick.  Red/Lancaster: everyone else.  That wasn’t too hard.  My college notes suggest I had the chance to do this 35 years ago, but apparently I didn’t.

The other attraction of Part One is Joan de Pucelle AKA Joan of Arc.  She is portrayed, from the English perspective, as a witch, a whore, a liar. She is more interesting than the saintly Talbot on the English side who can do no wrong and who is quite boring until his son dies in his arms on the battlefield and he says, “and there died my Icarus, my blossom, in his pride.” That made me cry.

Part Two:

I loved Henry VI Part Two.  I read it in one day like I would a fast-paced mystery that I couldn’t put down.  It begins with the marriage-by-proxy of Henry to Margaret of Anjou.  The insufferable Duke of Suffolk marries her in France and brings her to England to transfer the title to King Henry.  She comes not only without a dowry but part of the deal is that England give back to France two of the provinces they had won during the reign of Henry V.  No one is happy about this and everyone hates Margaret except for Suffolk and possibly Henry VI.  It’s hard to know with him because he is so nervous and fussy and holy he might not recognize in himself anything so forthright as hate.

There follows a lot of deaths and banishments.  Eleanor, the Duchess of Gloucester and wife of the king’s uncle and long-time guardian, is set-up to be caught in a séance wherein traitorous ideas are floated and she is sentenced to a penance of walking barefoot through the streets for three days with only a white sheet to cover her.  The stage directions say “with verses pinned on her back.”  I am guessing the verses outlined the charges against her and did not say things like “Kick me” or “I’m with stupid.” Then she is sent off to the Isle of Man for the rest of her life.  I will remember Eleanor the next time I think I am having a bad day.

The next person to go is the Duke of Gloucester himself.  He was arguably the only decent fellow at the court, always excepting the saintly King.  The king faints at the news of the Duke’s death.  When he comes to, he is distraught, thus giving Queen Margaret a chance to play the martyr:

Erect his statue and worship it,

And make my image but an alehouse sign.

Although almost everyone has reason to want Gloucester dead, Suffolk is implicated in the actual death thus allowing everyone else the chance to keep their dirty little motivations quiet a bit longer.  He is given three days to get out of the country before he will be executed.  On his way across the channel he is killed by pirates and his head delivered to Margaret who sobs over it.  She always demands sympathy for herself that she does not extend to anyone else.

So it’s safe to say that things in England have escalated beyond a quibble among law students.  The Elizabethans were even more obsessed with Order and Hierarchy than today’s Southern Baptists.  Their worldview, the great chain of beings, was a hierarchy from God on down to the worm that turns.  If someone gets out of line, it corrupts everyone and everything beneath. Fighting over the hierarchy of succession is the real cause of the War of the Roses.  That pirates would kill a Duke is unthinkable and suggests that something is seriously wrong with The Order.

Then all hell breaks loose with a rebellion of what the aristocrats refer to as “the commons” and organized by one Jack Cade. The rabble races from southern England to London and drives the King and Queen to parts north.  Their main complaints are the loss of provinces in France, their hatred of Queen Margaret, and their oppression by the learned classes.

Here is some reporting from the streets during the rebellion:

*We are in order when we are most out of order.

*I will make it felony to drink small beer.

*The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

*Away with him, away with him!  He speaks Latin!

*Thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb and such abominable words as no Christian can endure to hear.

(The following made me burst out laughing.  The gang is playing with the severed heads of two courtiers:)

*Let them kiss one another, for they loved well when they were alive.  Now part them again, lest they consult about giving up of some more towns in France.

Part Three:

In Part Three is the sobering scene of a world truly out of order.  The stage directions say “Enter a Son that hath killed his father” and “Enter, at another door, a Father that hath killed his son.”  Their speeches are heartbreaking.  I have scribbled in the margin a note from a college lecture: “This is what it means to have a civil war.”  Shakespeare’s timing is perfect.  He presents us with these tragic figures when we are wiping away tears of laughter after the farcical Jack Cade’s rebellion.

Underneath all the action, coolly biding his time is Richard, (York) who has a legitimate claim to the throne that has been occupied for six plays by the Henrys (Lancaster).  He isn’t sorry to see Gloucester go.  He has secretly incited the Jack Cade rebellion.  He endures petty slights at court with great self-control.  But he has laid the groundwork for an end he doesn’t live to experience.

The big event of Part Three for me was the recognition of a speech by the vicious and venomous Queen Margaret.  One of my voice students (the Seattle area actor, Jenni Taggart) learned it for an audition and I got to watch it develop over the course of weeks while we worked on her vocal registers.  Margaret torments the wounded Richard with a handkerchief drenched with the blood of his murdered youngest child–sweet Rutland—giving him the chance to call her a she-wolf and question the humanity of someone who would gloat over the death of a young boy.  Let’s pause a minute and wonder if Margaret might have been slightly less horrible is she hadn’t been used as a bargaining chip and married by proxy, for God’s sake, to someone Match.com would never have put her with, then dragged across the channel to a country of sixty religions and only one sauce. Hmmm. . .nah.

Now pacing in the wings is the youngest son, Richard III, the greatest villain of them all and one of my favorite characters.  But before I get to him, here are more memorable lines from Henry VI:

Part One:

*Glory is like a circle in the water

Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,

Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought. (I, ii)

*Unbidden guests are often welcomest when they are gone (II, ii)

*I’ll note you in my book of memory (II, iv)

*She’s beautiful and therefore to be wooed;

She is a woman, therefore to be won. (V, iii)

Part Two:

*Could I come near your beauty with my nails,

I’d set my ten commandments in your face. (I, iii)

*Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep. (III, i)

*What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. (III, iii)

*So bad a death argues a monstrous life. (III, iii)

*The gaudy, blabbing and remorseful day

Is crept into the bosom of the sea. (III, iii)

*Small things make base men proud. (IV, i)

Part Three:

*The smallest worm will turn being trodden on. (II, ii)

*Things ill got had ever bad success. (II, ii)

*Ill blows the wind that profits nobody. (II, v)

*Both of you are birds of a selfsame feather. (III, iii)

*Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind. (V, vi)

*He’s sudden if a thing comes into his head. (V, v)

Before I read this play I knew only a few things about it: there’s a character named Shylock, the play is said to be anti-Semitic and Judi Dench “loathes it.”  As I read it and thought about it, I wanted to tweak it, to change this emphasis or those words.  I wanted to make it acceptable to modern audiences.  In the end I decided it stands best as it is.

There are two parallel plot lines.  The play begins with Antonio offering to help his friend Bassanio secure a loan.  Antonio has a bunch of ships that he expects to come into Venice within the month but he currently has no cash.  He offers his physical self as collateral to Shylock, a moneylender.  Shylock agrees to loan him the money interest free but his terms are a pound of Antonio’s flesh should he be unable to pay the debt.

The second plot has to do with Portia, a rich woman living not far from Venice in Belmont, a kind of Club Med community.  Portia’s father’s will stipulates that she may marry the man who chooses correctly among three boxes: The gold box grants what many men desire, the silver box grants what one deserves, the lead box claims to requires him to give all he has.  The lead box is the correct choice. Portia is on pins and needles watching a string of suitors open the gold and silver boxes.  She knows she wants to marry Bassanio.

Bassanio also wants to marry Portia but he thinks he needs Antonio’s money to make himself attractive to Portia.  He intends to pay Antonio back with his wife’s money once he has married. Portia offers Bassanio enough hints that he chooses the lead box and so they marry.

Meantime the debt has come due, Antonio’s ships have not returned and Shylock is demanding his pound of flesh.  The deal goes to court.  Portia dresses up as a man and passes herself off as a doctor of letters in order to maneuver the outcome in Antonio’s favor.

That’s the laundered version.  Here are some of the stains:

Shylock is presented as a loathsome individual, hated and derided because he is Jewish.  In the end he loses almost everything, is forced to convert to Christianity and forced to say “I am content.”

Portia is being controlled by her father from his grave.  His will has made no provisions for what Portia herself may actually desire.  Even though Portia has initiative and energy within women’s marginalized position in society, she doesn’t do anything with it beyond her own immediate self-interest.   Though she has a famous speech about mercy, she doesn’t have any for Shylock.

The other characters are boring, rich and shallow.  None of them appeal to me, none of them are likeable. Everyone pretends to be something he or she is not with varying degrees of consciousness about how they all use each other.  They all extract their own pounds of flesh from each other in different ways.

I actually dislike Shylock the least, not because he is especially likeable but because he is so badly treated that I feel righteous pity which is in its own way demeaning.   I expect that for Elizabethan audiences it was meant to be the other way around.  Or maybe the play was meant to be the disturbing thing that it is but the disturbance is felt differently depending on who sees it.  It’s like those boxes.  The choice of box reveals something about the chooser.

It’s exciting to have a shiveringly bad villain in a play.  It’s fine if that villain also happens to be Jewish, or gay or female or black or Asian or Muslim.  It’s when a person is considered a villain purely because of his race or religion or gender that stereo-types are born and bigotry flourishes.   But Shakespeare has not presented (or created) a stereo-type unless one chooses to see it that way, which is why I think the idea of the boxes is so interesting.  He exposes fault lines if one wants to open those boxes.  When Shylock is defending his legal right to take his pound of flesh he says:

*You have among you many a purchased slave,

Which like your asses and your dogs and

Mules you use in abject and in slavish parts,

Because you bought them.  Shall I say to you,

‘Let them be free!’. . . you will answer,

‘The slaves are ours.’ So I do answer you.

The pound of flesh which I demand of him

Is dearly bought, is mine, and I will have it.  (IV, i)

This is a shrewd point but there’s no evidence that any character in the play takes it.

The final point of Shylock’s other powerful speech is often omitted when it’s quoted but I left it in because I think it makes the point almost better than the “prick us, do we not bleed” bit that Shylock is a human being, a person.

*He hath disgraced me and hind’red me half a million, laughed at my losses. Mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies–and what is his reason?  I am a Jew.  Hath not a Jew eyes?  Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?—fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?  If you prick us, do we not bleed?  If you tickle us, do we not laugh?  If you poison us, do we not die?  And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?  (III, i)

Here are more great lines:

*The devil can cite scripture for his purpose. (I, iii)

*It is a wise father that knows his own child. (II, ii)

*. . .in the end, truth will out (II, ii)

*All that glisters is not gold. (II, vii)

*The quality of mercy is not strained.

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath.  It is twice blest;

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.  (IV, ii)

I hadn’t read Romeo and Juliet since college and my impression was that it was two hours of that damn balcony scene and half an hour of fencing.  So I am glad I read it again because after a few false starts and with the help of the BBC, I enjoyed it.  Like the rest of the plays I’ve read, it’s gotten under my skin.

All the commentaries I’ve looked at agree on two things: “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” does not mean “Where are you Romeo?”  It means “Why is your name Romeo?”  Pass it on because it would be nice if the pedants could get over it.  The other thing everyone mentions is that the play is bursting with romantic, bawdy and sexual innuendo.

I was plugging away at the text when I got to Mercutio’s mention of Queen Mab and a little tinkerbell went off.  Queen Mab.  The Queen Mab speech. (http://www.monologuearchive.com/s/shakespeare_067.html) This carried me back to my junior high school years when the Franco Zefferelli movie of Romeo and Juliet came out.  My friends and I saw the movie.  We bought the soundtrack.  We read every Tiger Beat and 16 Magazine that covered its stars.  We bought the sheet music to the theme song.  My friend Mary played it on her flute and I played it on the piano.  We sang the sappy words with all the earnestness and solemnity of 14-year-old girls who had only a vague notion of what a virgin was.  (I say had because I’m not sure the species exists any longer.)

We loved that movie and it encouraged us to read the play.  Mary started calling everyone “ladybird.”  She was prone to spout things like “Beautiful tyrant! Fiend angelical!” (III, ii) She memorized the Queen Mab speech and told me it was full of dirty words but we didn’t know which ones those were.  (I still don’t.) We acted out the balcony scene.  We tried to drape ourselves so our small breasts would burst into our necks like Juliet’s.

I have to say that I still needed the antics of the filmed versions to pick up a lot of the “bawdy and sexual” references.  The Pelican Shakespeare is circumspect in its footnotes, apologetically citing an occasional phallic symbol or intoning “with ribald innuendo.”  In the films the men grab their codpieces to emphasize their points.  Now because this never would have been encouraged when I was in junior high school or even college, I suppose on the grounds that we were puerile enough, I am going to wallow in some of the sexual references:

*Draw thy tool. (I, i)

*The blind bow-boy’s butt-shaft (II, iv)

*This driveling love is like a great natural that runs lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole. (II, iv)

*. . .the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon. (II, iv)

And then there is the reference that took my breath away once I understood that die is an Elizabethan term for orgasm and death is shortly to take Romeo:

*Give me my Romeo; and when he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night. . . (III, ii)

Here is more from Romeo and Juliet:

*Star-crossed lovers. (I, i)

*Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love.

Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate,

O anything of nothing first create!

O heavy lightness, serious vanity,

Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,

Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health

Still-waking sleep. . .  (I, i)

*It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night

As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear (I, v)

*But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east and Juliet is the sun!  (II, ii)

*What’s in a name?   That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.  (II, ii)

*Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow. . .

*For naught so vile that on earth doth live

But to the earth some special good doth give;

For aught so good but, strained from that fair use,

Revolts from the true birth, stumbling on abuse.  (II, iii)

*fool’s paradise  (II, iv)

*A plague a both your houses! (III, i)

*O true apothecary. . . O happy dagger (V, iii)

“A sad tale’s best for winter.”

With King Lear still in my system, it was hard to find a nook in which to lodge The Winter’s Tale. Then I didn’t think I had anything much to say about it, but something came to me during a church service.  First, here’s the sad tale for winter:

Polixenes, king of Bohemia and Leontes, king of Sicilia knew each other as boys and have been close friends all their lives.  Polixenes has been visiting in Sicilia for the past nine months and is readying to go home.  While watching him and Hermione, the queen of Sicilia, engage in a cheerful and friendly banter, Leontes suddenly becomes consumed with the notion that Polixenes is the father of the child the pregnant Hermione is carrying.  Polixenes has been with them for nine months, Hermione’s baby is just about due and, look, here they are enjoying themselves.  It all adds up to they’ve been fucking each other.

Leontes orders his servant Camillo to kill Polixenes.  Camillo instead warns Polixenes and because now both their lives are in danger, they escape to Bohemia together.  Leontes orders a trial for the queen and simultaneously puts in a request for the Oracle at Delphi to rule on his wife’s guilt or innocence.  Hermione gives birth to a daughter.  Leontes orders the baby who is called Perdita —Lost— to be taken into the wild and abandoned.  The fellow who performs this ignominious task has intriguing exit instructions.  It says “Exit pursued by a bear.”  We learn shortly that he is eaten by said bear.

A shepherd scoops up the baby.

The Oracle’s clear acquittal of Hermione comes in the middle of her trial with a rider that the king will not have an heir if “that which is lost be not found.”  This isn’t what the king wants to hear because by now Leontes has made as big a fool of himself as some Popes have.  Also like some Popes he digs in his heels, and refuses to admit he’s culpable.  When the king and queen’s young son dies of grief and anxiety over the way his father is behaving, Leontes declares that the boy has died of shame over his adulterous mother.  Finally Hermione herself collapses and dies.

Time appears onstage and tells us in a long speech that sixteen years have gone by.

I’ll skip over several acts to say that Polixenes’ son, Florizel, falls in love with Perdita, the abandoned daughter of Leontes and the action all ends up back in Sicilia where it began.  Leontes is a changed man.  Having admitted his terrible mistakes, he has come to terms with his grief.  He never expected to be re-united with his old friend Polixenes (which I can now type without checking to see if I’ve spelled it correctly) and certainly never imagined that his daughter was alive.  But there everyone is.  However the best is yet to come.

I haven’t mentioned my favorite character, Paulina, formerly an attendant to Hermione.  A woman of spirit and goodness, she defended Hermione and all but attacked the king for his stupid jealousy.  She has protected the memory of Hermione all this time. She’s had a statue made of the former queen and the reunited friends and family gather for the unveiling. It is during this love fest that the statue comes to life and steps down to become part of the healed family.

So I was sitting in church listening to people sharing good things that have happened and hearing the congregation repeat “thanks be to God.”  I get impatient with this terminology because I think we could more accurately say “thanks be to us all” because all these good things that have happened to people have happened through the agency of other human beings and with the support of all life.  That’s what “God,” a term I don’t use, means to me.  All of life in toto.

To keep from snapping my opinion during the service, my mind wandered to The Winter’s Tale.  There is apparently controversy worthy of Biblical inerrantists about how to interpret the statue’s descent into her human family.  There are those who think that Shakespeare wants us to believe Paulina has secretly been hiding and caring for Hermione for sixteen years, waiting until she is satisfied that the Oracle’s prophecy has been fulfilled. This makes me want to scream: It’s symbolic! Do you understand what that means? This play is a story, a fable, a myth, a winter’s tale to illuminate the stuff of transformation and rebirth.

e.e.cummings’ poem “The Mountains are Dancing” has a line, “when more than was lost has been found” that seems to fit here.  Sometimes when we lose something precious we get back something different, something more, something other.  Something that gives back to us a part of our life.  This was the meaning I took away from the statue and the Oracle.

Leontes’ jealous rage reminded me of Lear’ narcissistic rage when his youngest daughter refuses to fawn all over him. She declares that she loves him as much as due him.  You could say of both men what Regan says of Lear: “he hath ever but slenderly known himself.”  We often jump to conclusions about what’s out there because we are disassociated from what’s inside us.  We experience rebirth within us when we are open to more weightily knowing ourselves, not by contriving something.  Hermione comes back to life and ends the play with a quiet magic that I found powerful.  I don’t need a scientific explanation of how that happened.

Here are my quotable lines:

*You pay a great deal too dear for what’s given freely. (I, i)

*Two lads that thought there was no more behind

But such a day tomorrow as today,

And to be boy eternal.  (I,ii)

*Will you take eggs for money? (I,ii)

(meaning: “will you be imposed upon?”  I really need to start using this phrase)

*. . .bag and baggage (I, ii)

*I may be negligent, foolish and fearful

In every one of these no man is free.  (I, ii)

*You never spoke what did become you less than this. . . (I, ii)

*Let us avoid. (I, ii)

(meaning:”Let us depart.” I need to start using this phrase, too)

*A sad tale’s best for winter. (II, i)

*The silence often of pure innocence

Persuades when speaking fails (II, ii)

*What’s gone and what’s past help

Should be past grief. (III, ii)

*Stage direction: Exit pursued by a bear  (III, iii)

*I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest: for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting. . . would any of these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt this weather?  (III, iii)

*A snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.  (IV, iii)

One thing I have to say about King Lear is that if you watch the play on DVD, it doesn’t enhance the experience to be eating grapes during the eye gouging scene.

It’s a difficult play beyond some of the barbarous and frankly crazy scenes.  I read it twice and watched two different versions of it on DVD before its initial opaque-ness began to dissolve. When it finally cracked open, the themes rushed at me: Appearance and Reality, Disguise and Revelation, Blindness and Sight, Madness and Sanity, Transformation, Redemption, Fate, Do the gods even care? Is there significance to the fact that Cordelia and the Fool never appear together?  It’s an English professor’s either dream or nightmare of possible themes to assign.

Laurence Olivier described Lear like this: “. . .He’s just a stupid old fart.  He’s got a frightful temper. . . completely selfish and utterly inconsiderate.  He does not for a moment think of the consequences of what he has said. He’s simply bad-tempered arrogance with a crown perched on top.”  I’d say he’s much worse than that.  Narcissistic personality disorder comes to mind.  I found Lear to be disturbingly like my mother.

The story begins when Lear decides to retire from being a king so he can have some leisure.  The trouble is that he wants to unload the responsibility but none of the perks.  He still wants deference, attention, and for his every whim to be indulged.  He wants to be bad-tempered, officious and autocratic.  He wants to be the only person in the world who matters.

He divides his kingdom into three parts and plans to give one part to each of his three daughters.  In order to decide who gets the largest parcel, he asks his daughters to describe how much they love him. The elder two, Goneril and Regan, flatter and kiss up, telling him just what he wants to hear.  He laps it up.  The youngest, Cordelia declares that she only loves him as much as is due which is as much as he loves her.  I found this ironic since he isn’t capable of loving anyone but himself.

If Cordelia is a bit self-righteous, it’s nothing like the outrage that her father feels at her truthful answer.  “What can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing will come of nothing,” he says, and he disowns and banishes her.

Lear plans to live for alternate months with Goneril and Regan bringing his entourage and demands with him –doesn’t that sound like fun? The two elder sisters, as soon as they come into their shares of the kingdom, proceed to do to Lear what Lear did to Cordelia.  They take away everything he has and finally refuse to allow him a place to live at all.  They turn him out into a fearful storm where his encroaching senility seethes into full-out madness.

For a while I puzzled over the older sisters’ bad behavior.  That was pure disassociation on my part.  Nothing comes from nothing.  I understand what it feels like to be raised by self-absorbed parents who have no idea that their attitudes and behavior impact their children.  I even wrote a memoir about it (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/99-girdles/)sadism

I believe that all human beings have a full capacity of human feeling and behavior.  We all have within us the many permutations of love, sadness, fear and rage.  I personally interpret the daughters in King Lear as aspects of myself.  I had a mother like Lear and I believe I responded to her at different times in the three ways represented by Goneril, Regan and Cordelia.

Goneril got so little love from her father that she now takes everything she can get for herself.  Her life is a 24 hour-a-day maintenance job.  My mother accused me of that kind of selfishness often enough:

“You think the world revolves around you!”

“Who did I learn that from?”

“I’m your mother!”

“Relevancy?”

Regan is a sadist.  She gets sexually excited during the aforementioned eye-gouging.  Me, I had to spit out my grape.  Even though I think we are all capable of sadism, mine doesn’t rise to the level of Regan’s.  Schaedenfreude is probably the worst I can be accused of.  The murderous rage I felt toward my mother was pretty much confined to verbally abusing my analyst.  Becoming the abuser is a classic response to being abused.

Then there’s Cordelia. She has empathy for Lear in spite of how badly he treated her, and comes to his aid in the end.  In the beginning she is almost haughty in her idealistic refusal to play the stupid game he has set up.  This refusal begins the chain of events that end in her death and almost everyone else’s.

When my father was dying I told him the truth.  When my mother was dying I told her what she wanted to hear.  At the end of their lives I found a way to love them in the ways I knew they wanted.

I feel exposed.  But I think that is the effect a play like King Lear can have.  The archetypal themes strike deep and impel us to do what Edgar says in the last lines of the play, “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” In spite of the dismal ending, I read possibilities of transformation and hope, which is a relief after the play’s frenzy and hate. Cordelia and Lear both die knowing that they love and are loved.

Here are the great lines:

*Love is not love when is mingled with regards that stands aloof from the entire point. (I, i)

*Now, gods, stand up for bastards!  (I, ii)

*This the excellent foppery of the world that when we are sick in fortune, often surfeits of our own behavior, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars; as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion.  (I, ii)

*I have years on my back forty eight.  (I, iv)

*Lear: Dost thou call me fool, boy?
Fool: All thy other titles thou hast given away.  (I, iv)

*How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.  (I, iv)

*Striving to better we often mar what’s well.  (I, iv)

*Lily-livered (II, ii)

*I am a man more sinned against than sinning.  (III, ii)

*. . .foul Flibbertigibbet. (III, iv)

*Fie, foh, and fum

I smell the blood of a British man (III, iv)

*And worse I may be yet.  The worst is not

So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’  (IV, i)

*As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;

They kill us for their sport.  (IV, i)

*Tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind.  (IV, i)

*Howl, howl, howl! . . .she’s dead as earth.  (V, iii)

Here’s rather a maligned fellow.  The king deserves it but not the play itself. The Friendly Shakespeare says The Life and Death of King John is the most unfamiliar and disliked play in the canon. Now I call that jolly unfair.  It has a fabulous part in it for Claire Bloom and some of the most famous phrases in Shakespeare.

When I started reading it I thought my point of reference would be the Magna Carta because while watching a history of Britain over at The Gwen, I realized that this particular King was The John.  But Shakespeare didn’t mention the Magna Carta at all.  He had other points to make and other reasons to write the play.

Isaac Asimov wrote a several thousand page guide to Shakespeare, which doesn’t attempt to interpret the text, but which gives historical background and elucidation of the odd phrase.  His piece about King John is one long comment about how unhistorical the play is. Shakespeare creates Philip Faulconbridge (called unceremoniously Philip the Bastard) for dramatic purposes.  He makes a widow of a woman who herself wasn’t even alive in order to enhance the poignancy of her son’s death.  Then he drags ten years of history into a heap to form the last two acts of the play.

I love this about Shakespeare.  I know it drives the literalistic among us crazy but I love the way he plays fast and loose with facts in order to create something.  He has what I consider a proper attitude toward “facts,” which are contestable and can be deconstructed.  He goes for emotional truth.  He wanted to tell a story about a quarrel over succession rights and how killing a child-king named Arthur set off a chain of events to be explored in further history plays.  And he didn’t want to offend the court of Elizabeth I.  We all have our constraints.

Amongst watercolorists, there are those who want to deliver a scene that mirrors the one in front of them.  And there are those who use what’s in front of them as a staging ground to deliver something that’s in their own imagination.  Among musicians there are those whose joy comes from the notion that they are replicating Bach right down to the touch of the viol de gamba and those to whom the spirit of Bach is one of improvising. We all have our preferences.

King John is a creepy character who with full cooperation from the equally creepy bishop from Rome, which seems a prerequisite for being a bishop at all, orders the assassination of Arthur, the boy-heir to the throne.  Then he relents and decides to just have the child’s eyes gouged out with a hot iron.  After a disturbing scene where Arthur begs to not be mutilated, Hubert, the fellow given the assignment and who also did not exist according to Asimov, cannot bring himself to carry it out.

Hubert hides the child but word has gone out that the King has murdered the boy and his outraged peeps begin to desert him.  The King cravenly tells Hubert that Hubert had misunderstood his orders.  Hubert pulls out the death warrant and asks which part of it he misunderstood.  King John is not so much ashamed as relieved when Hubert confesses that the boy is alive and has full use of his eyes. Meantime, Arthur, in trying to escape from his prison, has fallen to his death.  France goes to war with England because no one believes the child’s death was an accident and the succession is now an open question.

Just when I was hoping someone would murder King John, he dies. Philip the Bastard who, you might recall, does not actually exist, as the (illegitimate) son of Richard the Lion-Hearted actually has some claim to the throne.  He makes the remarkable gesture of recognizing John’s young son Henry as the new king of England.  Though he never became King of England, Ireland and select parts of France, he is the hero of the play. Not bad for someone who didn’t exist.

King John is where we find the phrases “foul play,” “twice-told tale,” “bell, book, and candle,” and the expression “gilding the lily” although the actual line is “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily.”  (I found these in the text, I didn’t look them up in Bartlett’s.)

The news that King John’s mother has died is delivered with the words, “her ear is stopped with dust.”

Arthur’s mother Constance has a heart-rending speech:

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words

Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form . .  (III, iv)

And finally there is a line that I feel sums up my Shakespeare experience thus far:

“Zounds! I was never so bethumped with words. . .” (II, i)