Great play, Shakespeare...

[Volpone]

OK. I've had a few reading projects. I'm working my way through the Holy Bible. And I'm reading "The General" by Forster. I'm also reading "The Complete Works of Shakespeare." You know, in Olden Dayes, when there were malls? And malls had bookstores? Waldenbooks and B. Dalton's? They'd have the big table at the front of the store where they'd have a bunch of open source material that they could print up cheap and sell for a nice profit. When I was 19, 20, I got a copy of "The Complete Works of Shakespeare." For years it has sat in my bookshelf and I'd read about as much of it as I had of the Bible. I did make it up through "Richard III" once before setting it aside for a decade or two. Since I've been decluttering and had some time, I decided to tackle it again.

I took a page from making it through the Bible: people say the New Testament is easier to read, so start there. I figured Shakespeare would get better the more he wrote, so I started at the back. Nope. You know how "1984" by Van Halen or "The Joshua Tree" by U2 is better than their later stuff? Shakespeare wrote some REALLY bad plays towards the end. For that matter he wrote some really bad plays in the beginning. I kind of expect he has his share of stinkers throughout the body of work.

One, weird, annoying thing: Sometimes the characters will start speaking in rhyme. I mean, that's what we think of when we maybe think Shakespeare, but no. Most of the time the dialog doesn't rhyme. But sometimes it does. It will just be going along and then BAM! 2-3 pages of the dialogue will rhyme. Then it goes back to normal with no reason to it.

And then there's the plots. You know how you need to suspend disbelief for some movies? Boy, howdy. I'm reading "A Comedy of Errors" right now. I saw it performed once and I don't remember it being this hokey but...here's the plot: There's a wealthy merchant. While he and his wife were traveling, she gave birth to identical twin brothers. Inexplicably they decided to name them the same thing. Antipholes or something, but we'll just say Daryl. Daryl and Daryl. Meanwhile, a poor woman gave birth to identical twins at the same time. And she decided to name them both Dromio. Say Larry. So the merchant gets the bright idea to hire Larry and Larry to be servants for Daryl and Daryl. Things are great. BUT! On the way home, there's a shipwreck. So Dad and Larry and Daryl make it home eventually, but Mom and Larry and Daryl wind up being rescued by someone else. It never occurs to them to go home, they just grow up in the other city. Meanwhile, Dad and Larry and Daryl all set out in search for Larry and Daryl. Dad gets arrested and just gets set aside for a bit to the big conclusion. But Larry and Daryl wind up in the city Larry and Daryl live in. So Daryl sends Larry back to the hotel with a big sum of money. So Daryl stands around for a bit, complaining about how impossible a task it will ever be to find his brother Daryl. Meanwhile, Larry (who happens to be dressed EXACTLY like Larry) runs into Daryl. Daryl wants to know if the money is safe and Larry says he doesn't know what Daryl is talking about but that Daryl's wife sent Larry to bring him back because he's late for dinner. This sort of thing happens all the time. Larry's wife and her sister run into Larry at the market and drag him and Daryl home for dinner. Meanwhile Larry and Daryl come home for dinner but Daryl won't let them in. They're outside the door so obviously they can't see each other. And even though they look exactly the same, no one recognizes each other's voices or thinks to open the door or look out a window. Larry and Larry, in addition to having the same name, wearing the same clothes, and looking the same, have identical birthmarks. You get the idea. Oh, and Larry doesn't love Larry's wife. Larry loves Larry's wife's sister.

I mean, he has to set it up this way for the whacky hi-jinks, but it is just too much of a suspension of disbelief. The fact that not one but two parents would give their twins the same name, that two sets of twins would be born at the same place at the same time, that the twins would be identical down to birthmarks, that they'd be wearing identical clothing--in spite of living their entire lives in different cities. And then, the whole purpose that the one set of twins is traveling for is to find their brothers. But when suddenly everyone recognizes them and knows their names they're just like "Huh. This is weird. Everyone in this town must be witches," not "OMG! We must have finally found our long lost twin brothers! This must be where they live!"

 

[Volpone]

OK. Finished Romeo & Juliet. Is it Shakespeare's first solid play? I dunno. But it's pretty good. And so different than what we think of when we hear Romeo & Juliet. In a nutshell:

The Montagues and the Capulets hate each other and their people constantly look for excuses to get into fights. The prince tries to keep the peace. Romeo is mopey because he has a crush on a girl who wants to be a nun. So Romeo's friend, the prince's cousin decides to show him other girls. They get wind of a big party at the Capulets. It is a masquerade, so they decide to sneak in. Romeo is smitten by Capulet's not-quite 14 year old daughter, steals a kiss and she falls in love with him too. A Capulet realizes a Montague is there and wants to kill him but Papa Montague forbids it.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...Another one of the prince's cousins wants to marry Juliet but her dad drags his heels and says to wait until she's 16. Mama Capulet is trying to convince her to marry off right now.

Now Romeo is mopey over Juliet, sneaks into her yard on pain of death and learns she feels the same way. They hash out the problem of their families being mortal enemies and sneak off to get secretly married.

While this is happening, the hotheaded Capulet from the party is out looking for Romeo and instead finds Romeo's friend, the prince's cousin. Words are exchanged. Romeo shows up and tries to diffuse things but they both draw on each other and Romeo's friend gets killed while Romeo is trying to break up the fight. This pisses Romeo off, so he kills the guy. The Capulets want him dead but the prince just banishes him.

Juliet learns of her cousin's death at Romeo's hand and decides she loved her cousin but loves Romeo more. The priest who married them comes up with a plan for Romeo to consummate their marriage and then go off to a nearby town until things cool off. But Juliet's Dad decides she's too sad over her cousin's death and decides to marry her off to the prince's other cousin.
At this point, instead of just coming clean, the priest that married them comes up with a plan to give her a poison that will make it look like she's dead, but she'll revive in 48 hours--and to send a messenger to Romeo so he'll come help spirit her off to the nearby town to live happily ever after.

Except the messenger doesn't get through, so Romeo finds out about Juliet's "Death" and buys some poison and comes back to break into her grave and commit suicide. But when he shows up, he runs into Juliet's other fiance, who insists on picking a fight with Romeo and gets himself killed. Romeo drinks the poison and dies. Juliet wakes up and sees Romeo is dead and stabs herself. Eventually the authorities show up, piece together what happened and the Montagues and the Capulets make amends.

All in all, it's pretty fucked up.

 

[Volpone]

"A Midsummer Night's Dream." Whacky comedy. Farce. Fairly short. Relatively straightforward, but confusing enough that we shall see if I can explain it.

Theseus, Prince of Athens, is set to be married to Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons in a few days. One of his subjects comes to him because he wants his daughter, Hermia, to marry Demetrius, but Hermia loves Lysander. Lysander argues that he is as good or better than Demetrius and besides, Demetrius had a thing for Helen before he ghosted her. But Hermia's Dad and Theseus aren't convinced and they give her 24 hours to decide to marry Demetrius, be killed, or become a nun. So Lysander decides they will elope and they plan to meet in a woods outside of town. They happen to run into Helen and decide to tell her their plans and instead of saying "cool, this means I get Demetrius," she says "I'll tell Demetrius about this because...reasons!"

Meanwhile, a group of tradesmen decide to stage a community theater play in honor of Theseus' wedding. They decide to rehears it in a woods outside of town.

Meanwhile! Fairy King Oberon is fighting with is wife, Titania because she has stolen an Indian boy for a changeling. Oberon wants the boy but Titania won't give him up, so he sends Puck to get him a love potion. The Plan is to make Titania fall in love with something horrible and only remove the spell if she gives up the Indian boy.

MEANWHILE!!! Demetrius shows up in the woods, looking for Lysander and Hermia. Helen is following him and he's trying to get rid of her. Oberon decides to use his love potion to make Demetrius love Helen (while still extorting his wife). Puck gets back with the ingredients and Oberon tells him to also use them on a man in Athenian clothes.

Puck fails to find Demetrius and Helen but he does find Lysander and Hermia. Lysander is a man in Athenian clothes, so he uses the potion. MEANWHILE!!!!!! Helen gets separated from Demetrius and finds sleeping Lysander and Hermia. Lysander wakes up, sees Helen, and falls in love with her.

MEANWHILE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The actors show up. Puck decides it would be funny if he gave one of the actors the head of a jackass. This scares off all the other actors and the Ass-head accidentally wakes up Titania, who falls in love with him.

MEANWHILLLLLEEEEEEEE!!!!!!! Oberon realize Puck fucked up hexed the wrong guy, so he sends him back out to make Demetrius fall in love with Helen. Now the unloved Helen has 2 suitors and no one likes Hermia. Helen reasonably assumes this is all a cruel prank on her and pitches a fit.

Eventually, Puck unhexes Lysander, everyone falls asleep again, Titania give Oberon the Indian boy so he unhexes her and Puck turns the community theater guy back to a normal person.

Theseus and Hippolyta go out to the woods outside town for some bear hunting and find all the sleeping people. Lysander wakes up and loves Hermia. Demetrius wakes up and loves Helen. The actor sneaks off to rejoin his friends. Everyone decided to get married. The actors all show up to put on their play and be heckled throughout.

And that's about it.

Next is King John, which really points out just how much of Shakespeare is trash-talking. I mean, there are literally pages of "Your Mom's a whore!" "I know you are, but what am I?"

 

[Volpone]

I'm still fairly early in but I will talk about the History plays a bit, having just finished "King John." They're interesting. First, you wonder how much Elizabethans knew about, say 300 years earlier (or Roman times) and if maybe we know more about King John than Shakespeare did. Then--particularly the English histories--you wonder how much politics played into them. He wrote "Henry VIII." IIRC, Henry was Elizabeth I's grandfather. Richard III is not going to be portrayed in a good light because his house had a different claim to the throne than Elizabeth. And then there's the clergy. Since the Church of England was the official state religion in Shakespeare's time, Roman Catholic cardinals and bishops get portrayed in about the same light he had for Jews and blacks.

 

[Volpone]

About halfway through "Taming of the Shrew." You know the play: Everyone likes the younger daughter but the father refuses to marry her off before her horrible bitchy older sister. A guy from out of town takes the offer and sets about winning her over.

OR IS IT?!?!?!?

The play actually starts with a drunk getting 86'ed over an unpaid bartab. While the owner if off to find the cops, the drunk passes out in a ditch. A lord and his servants are returning from a hunt, see him, and decide it will be funny to take him home, clean him up, put him in bed and tell him he's a lord who's been insane for the past 15 years. They dress the page boy up as a woman and tell the drunk "she" is his wife. Once he wakes up they convince him of all this. He's all set to do the nasty with the page boy but they tell him his doctor said he has to take it slow and ask if he wants to see a play first. The drunk agrees.

And then we get into the story we know. WTF? What just happened? Oh well, maybe it will make sense later. And sure enough, at the end of a scene, we get a sidebar back to the pranksters asking the drunk how he is enjoying the play. He says he likes it and the tell him there is more to see.

So apparently what we think of as "The Taming of the Shrew" is actually supposed to be a play within a play and the actual play is about a prank played on a drunk. But once this is established, we never see the frame plot characters again in the play and the play ends without any resolution--or even mention--of what happens to the drunk. Very odd. I probably have to go read an article on it and see what the scholars have to say about it.

 

[jack]

That's the character of Christopher Sly you're talking about.

Some editions of the play include extra scenes from another play (The Taming of a Shrew – believed to be a shoddy bootleg copy of Shakespeare's play). At the end of A Shrew, Sly wakes up in front of the tavern and thinks the Lord's prank has all been a dream. A bartender tells him to go home to his wife and Sly says he will go home, where he plans to tame his shrewish wife now that he knows how. There's no evidence that Shakespeare wrote any of this, but the scene raises some interesting questions about how seriously we should take Petruchio's "taming school."

 

[Volpone]

Gah. 8 or 9 more plays to read (less if I don't read "Hamlet," which I've read a few times) and I'm starting to burn out. I am getting to the more famous ones--Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, etc--working on 12th Night right now. They're a lot less painful than the early (and late) plays, but they'll still bog down in parts. There are times when they'll get into a "Yo mama so..." exchange that goes on for a page or so. Or there'll be puns and wordplay that are probably quite entertaining and clever--if you're from 17th century England. But if you're from 21st century USA it's like "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries" "Indeed? Well get thee to a shrubbery," and you're going "WTH are they talking about?"

 

[Loktar]

You're a better man than me. I too own The Complete works of Shakespeare. Never read any of it. I doubt I ever will. I did read Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth in high school though. Looks nice displayed on my bookshelf along with the books I've never read and the ones I'll never read again.

 

[Volpone]

I was bored. Really, really bored. And also considering decluttering. Figured I should read it or stick it in a Little Free Library somewhere.

The version of "Hamlet" we read in high school was nice because it had footnotes: "Indeed, my Lord, he wore his beaver up." ["'beaver' is the visor on a helmet."] Oh. OK.

 

[Volpone]

There should be a Shakespeare bingo/drinking game. In almost every one of the comedies, at some point a woman winds up dressing up as a man for one reason or another. Then you get a bit where the "boy" falls in love with a man who is in love with a girl who's in love with the "boy." There's usually a twin in there somewhere too. Doing "12th Night" right now and I'm betting the lost male twin winds up marrying the girl who's in love with the female twin dressed as a boy. Be interesting to see how the Duke winds up marrying the "boy" in his court instead of the woman he's infatuated with.

 

[Volpone]

Bah. I forgot a huge chunk of that post: So. In the Elizabethan era, women couldn't be actors. So any female roles were played by men, dressed up as women. So you had all these plays where a man was playing a woman, playing a man.* Well by, say, the Victorian era, you had women actors. And all of a sudden all these Shakespeare plays got dusted off. Because in the Victorian era, women were in big dresses that covered basically everything but their head and their hands. If you were doing "12th Night" or "As You Like It" or any of the many other Shakespeare plays where a woman dresses up as a man, you can have women onstage in tights, showing their legs. (On a related note, in the Shakespeare plays, men are much more on display than women. You get many lines where a women is saying basically "he's got nice legs.")

*This is all cocktail party level of scholarship. I studied all this stuff in college, but I'm just going by memory here.

 

[Volpone]

Most of the way through "Hamlet." I've still got 7 left to read--and some of the best known ones--but at this point I'd say "Hamlet" is the best. At first I thought it was just because I've read it a couple times and seen a couple film versions of it so I understand the story better, but no, it really holds up.

Starts out with a bang with the ghost, setting up the plot, all the characters are well defined and developed as much as they need to be for the plot, the story chugs along without whacky side plots and incongruous contrivances. And the dialog just zings. There's a part, after Hamlet has staged the play that has really P.O.'ed his stepdad, that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern make one last attempt at trying to find out what he's up to and some musician comes by with a recorder and Hamlet takes it and tells them to play him a tune and they say they can't (I forget which one it is, so I'll just say "they"). He says "It's easy. Blow in the end and put your fingers over the holes to make notes," and they say they get that but they don't have any skill to it, to which Hamlet says "you can't play such a simple instrument but you think I'm so simple that you can play me?" or words to that effect. It's just a really great story.

 

[Volpone]

Almost through "Hamlet" and just realized the whole premise of the story is flawed. Want me to ruin it for you?

When Hamlet's father, the King, dies, why does the King's brother become King instead of Hamlet? It's clear that Hamlet is an adult. Unless the Danish line of succession is very odd, one would think the king's adult son would become king at his death. So the whole point of the play is mooted. Claudius has no motive. Unless he's really got the hots for Gertrude.

 

[Volpone]

For those of you keeping score at home, I'm most of the way through Othello. That leaves MacBeth, King Lear, and Antony & Cleopatra and I'll have read all the plays (fuck the sonnets). Othello is so much better than his earlier (or later) plays. the plot is pretty simple and credible and holds together fairly well. And Iago is an absolute cunt. Pure evil.

So basically Othello is an important general who happens to be black. Iago is his lackey who got passed over for promotion and hates him for it. Othello has corrupted a Venetian maid with his BBC and one of her spurned suitors is pissed. So Iago uses him (and everyone else) to fuck over Othello. Iago knows the guy he was passed over for, Cassio, can't hold his liquor, so he gets him drunk and has the spurned suitor pick a fight with him. In the ensuing mess, Cassio gets fired. Iago tells him to plead his case with Othello's new wife, Desdemona. Meanwhile, he tells Othello "Hmm... I don't want to say anything, but Cassio and your new wife seem to be spending and AWFUL lot of time together." He manages to steal a handkerchief Othello gave to his bride and plant it in Cassio's quarters, saying he saw her giving it to him.

Still got a ways to go to see how it all pans out, but basically a lot of innocent people get fucked over because they listen to a douchebag who offers what seems to be sound advice, but then goes behind everyone's back and twists it so it looks suspicious.

 

[Volpone]

Got almost to the end of "Othello" before realizing the plot hole. As I mentioned, Iago is just fucking everyone over and backstabbing (eventually literally) and twisting things around to play everyone against each other for the whole play. And it works because he has a reputation of being an honest trustworthy person. But a few pages before the end, people start to suspect his plot and that's what made me realize the flaw: karma is real. You don't get a reputation for being honest and trustworthy unless you've behaved in an honest and trustworthy way and if you behave in an honest and trustworthy way your whole life, it's pretty likely you have the character of an honest and trustworthy person. So it's very hard to suddenly become a shifty, lying, backstabbing weasel. I mean, he surprises even his own wife (who he winds up murdering because she's squealing on him). That just doesn't hold water.

Started on "Macbeth." That one's relatively short. Then it's just "King Lear" and "Antony and Cleopatra" and I'll have read all the plays.

Fuck the sonnets. I'm not gonna read the sonnets.