Dr. Metablog

The "Singing Man of Windsor"

In The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth, it is reported that Falstaff once boldly compared the King to a "singing man of Windsor" -- and was punished for doing so.  Who is this "singing man." 

Here we have another unsolved Shakespeare mystery.  The throwaway reference to a "singing man of Windsor" must have tickled Globe audiences, but later playgoers (and scholars) can't guess why. 

The singer owes his shadowy existence to Mistress Quickly, who inserts him into a one of her rambling narratives, the point of which is to claim that Falstaff has promised to marry her.  "Didst thou not swear to me... when the Prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing man of Windsor...."

Presumptuous indeed for Falstaff to compare his King to any ordinary mortal -- but what, we may ask, was so offensive about the "singing man" that his mere mention provoked the prince to violence?  Misshapen, ugly, drunken, foolish?  There must have been more jeer in the "singing man" than is now obvious. 

The phrase "singing man" was a techical term that described not popular balladeers but professional choristers, usually priests, who were associated with a church or college. It's known that there was a priest of Windsor named Maudelen who resembled Richard II and was deployed as a figurehead in a plot to overthrow the king. Is it possible that Falstaff''s "singing man" referred to Maudelen and therefore challenged the legitimacy of Henry's kingship.  Shakespeare knew this story (it appears in Holinshed's Chronicles), but Maudelen is not known to have been a singer, and so the theory, weak as it is, seems to founder badly. 

More likely is that there was a real, notorious Windsor singer, offensive in some unknown way, who enjoyed local celebrity in the 1590s.  Would Shakespeare insert a real person into the history play?  Well, yes, he does such things. This sequence of Henry plays, nominally set in the early decades of the fifteenth century, is given to anachronism and occasionally introduces one of Shakespeare's contemporaries into the story, perhaps as some sort of private joke.  A "William Visor of Woncote" who was very likely a member of the Visor or Vizard family of Woodmancote in Gloucestershire is mentioned by Shallow's factotum Davy.  And then there's "Clement Perkes a' th' Hill," who as been traced to the Purchas or Perkis family who dwelled on Stinchcombe Hill.  And also the "re-nosed innkeeper of Daventry" (Daventry is a village on the London-Coventry road that Shakspeare no doubt frequented.)  These imagined beings are indulgences on Shakespeare's part that might have amused the knowledgeable but can only puzzle us. The "singing man of Windsor" would be another such bafflement. 

Another Merchant Mystery

In The Merchant of Venice, as it appears in one up-to-date modern edtion, Portia's husband-to-be Bassanio is attended by a pair of friends named Solanio and Salerio.  Yet In another equally authoritative edition of the play, the friends are named Solanio and Salerino -- and moreover, in this edition, a third and apparently separate character named Salerio enters half-way through the play.  What's going on?  Why the inconsistency?

First some onomastic context.  Shakespeare could be quite casual about the naming of his characters.  In The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth, there are two distinct figures, one named Bardolph and the other, for no good reason, Lord Bardolph. Two separate and very different Jacques complicate As You Like It, while in The Taming of the Shrew, easy-to-confuse Gremio and Grumio have needlessly perplexed generations of readers. Even in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare twice used the name Balthazar: initially for a servant of Portia and then a second time, gratuitously, as the pseudonym that Portia adopts when she poses as a Paduan lawyer. But nowhere is Shakespeare quite so arbitrary as he is with the names of the two (or is it three?) Sallies.

Solanio, Salarino, and Salerio all inhabited Merchant when it first appeared in the 1600 quarto edition known to scholars as Q1, but whether Shakespeare meant there to be two characters or three is a matter of mystery.  It's possible, in fact, that the playwright changed his mind in the course of writing.  And what would be evidence for Shakespeare's indecision? Scholars have now determined that the first Merchant quarto was set in type by compositors who worked from a manuscript in Shakespeare's own handwriting -- an "autograph" -- that preserved evidence of the writer, quill in hand, in the very thick of invention.  Shakespeare himself, it appears, vacillated about the names by which to denote the Sallies and also about how many of them there were to be. His waffling was reproduced by the compositors who dutifully set what they had in front of them -- first thoughts, re-thinkings, revisions, errors, and all.  No wonder that modern editors have been baffled.

Here's a brief outline of a complicated textual tangle.  In the stage direction with which the play begins, Shakespeare introduces two of the characters in question.  "Enter... Salaryno, and Salanio."   In terms of personality, the pair seem to be conceived as twins or doubles -- both are excessively talkative, long on enthusiasm and short on common sense.  It appears that Shakespeare not only cast the two characters from the same psychological mold, but that he also decided to underline their similarity by giving them near-identical names -- and it from this initial decision the the confusions springs. The trouble begins right there in the play's first scene.  If Shakespeare had retained his original names and followed his customary procedure, he would have assigned Salaryno and Salanio the abbreviated speech headings "Sala." and "Sala." for -- clearly a recipe for disaster.  So before he had entered fifty lines into the scene, the playwright traded in one vowel for another and transformed Salanio into "Sola." It's curious that in the first scene of The Merchant of Venice (as it appears in Q1), Salanio enters but Solanio exits. Oddly enough, the pattern repeats itself when Solanio re-appears in the subsequent scene in which the Sallies and Lorenzo plan Jessica's elopement.  Solanio is once again Salanio in the initial stage direction and Solanio or "Sola." in the speech headings.  Was Shakespeare irresolute or simply forgetful?  

And now Salanio/Solanio's companion, Salarino, also begins to mutate.  When Jessica steals from Shylock's house, she is accompanied by a character who bears the name Salerino -- that is, Salarino/Salaryno rechristened with a medial "e."  We're now a third of the way through the play, and readers have already encountered two characters, one of whom is named Salanio/Solanio and the other Salarino/Salarynol/Salerino. At this point things become truly messy.  Jessica elopes with Lorenzo and they and their co-conspirators flee Venice for Belmont.  Gratiano, first to arrive at the country retreat, greets Lorenzo and his bride Jessica and an accompanying friend.  "But who comes here?" he inquires. "Lorenzo and his infidel?/ What, and my old Venetian friend Salerio?"  Who, we may ask, is this Salerio?  Readers who have been paying attention know that Gratiano doesn't have an "old Venetian friend" Salerio. Instead, he has two old Venetian friends -- Solanio and Salarino.  Is Salerio a new character?  Or, given the whimsicality of Q1's spellings, is he simply a orthographical variant of one of the Sallies with whom readers are already acquainted? 

The action then returns immediately to Venice where a new scene begins with the following stage direction:  "Enter the Iew (i.e. Shylock) and Salerio."  But Salerio, if he's anything more than a spelling error, can't be in both Venice and Belmont at the same time (in fact, he's just been commsssioned to carry a message from country to city).  An edtor vents her frustration:  "Q1's Salerio cannot be right, as he is on the way back to Venice."  Apparently Shakespeare himself was totally befuddled about whom he had named what and where he had sent whom. Certainly, the printers themselves were baffled. The three earliest edtions of The Merchant of Venice each assign a different name to the Sally who remained in Venice in the company of Shylock.  In Q1, as we've just noted, it's Salerio;  in the lightly-edited second quarto (dated 1600, but actually a forgery printed in 1619), he is Salarino, and in the 1623 Folio, it's Solanio.

If Q1 did, as is supposed, follow Shakespeare's manuscript, then the playwright himself made the muddle, but who can say for certain that the confusion wasn't the fault of one of the various scribes, book holders, compositors, or editors through whose hands the manuscript might have passed.  In any case, the snarl wasn't untangled in Shakespeare's time, and it hasn't been sorted out since.  Some editors give two characters, some three;  some name the characters Solanio and Salarino, and some add a Salerio to the mix.  

Why didn't Shakespeare simply create one all-purpose Sally?  Because the duplication makes dramatic sense.  When one of the Sallies attacks Shylock venemously, his bigotry might be dismissed as personal idiosyncrasy, but when two of them gang up, they speak not as individuals but as a chorus that expresses the nasty side of Venetian society.  

But why didn't Shakespeare himself fix the problem? Did he leave it to his actors to work it out on the stage, or was he a big-picture guy indifferent to such details.  Perhaps he did sort it all out in a scribal or subsequent version of the play to which Elizabethan printers never gained access?

In any case, Shakespeare learned a lesson from his adventure with Salerio, Solanio and Salarino.  When he next came to invent characters who were doubles or twins, he took the precaution to give them names that were impossible to confound:  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.   

A Merchant Mystery

In the middle of The Merchant of Venice, right out of the blue, without warning, the audience is suddenly told that Launcelot the clown has gotten a "Negro" pregnant.  Who is this 'Negro'?  Why haven't we heard of her before?  Why does Shakespeare introduce her into his play?  And why, having invented her, does he precipitously drop her?  A loose end, to be sure.

The pregnancy seems to be unplanned, both by the characters and the author. It occurs at the point in the play when Shylock's runaway daughter Jessica, newly married and newly converted to Christianity, engages her bridegroom Lorenzo and their clown/servant Launcelot in a bit of superficial banter.  Launcelot puts forward the barren jest that Lorenzo is "no good member of the commonwealth," for "in converting Jews to Christianity, [he] raises the price of pork."  Lorenzo veers from the context to reply sharply. "I shall answer that better to the commonwealth that you can the getting up of the Negro's belly. The Moor is with child by you, Launcelot."  Up until this very moment, there had been no mention of a "Moor" or "Negro" (north Africans and sub-Saharan Africans were not always distinguished in the Elizabethan imagination).  It's a sensational, unanticipated accusation and one that Launcelot does not deny. Instead, he attempts to deflect Lorenzo's indignation with clownish wordplay.  The subject is abandoned as precipitously as it was raised and the pregnant Moor vanishes from the play.  Neither Launcelot nor any other character has alluded to a "Negro" before, nor had there even been the slightest hint that Launcelot has been wooing a lady  A perplexed editor simply shrugs his shoulders: "This passage has not been explained."

But where there is no explanation, there is room for conjecture.

The fleeting and mysterious black woman reminds us that The Merchant of Venice explores questions of exogamy. Jewish Jessica elopes with Christian Lorenzo, while the heiress Portia, a native Venetian, is pursued unsuccessfully by Morocco, a "tawny Moor."  When Morocco fails the test that might have won him Portia for his bride, Portia expresses pleasure in words that were acceptable then but are unpleasant now: "Let all of his complexion (i.e. race) choose me so."  So it would seem that one possible explanation of Launcelot's insemination of the Moor is that Shakespeare started a hare that he didn't bother to pursue;  he was sufficiently intrigued by interracial sexual doings to provide Launcelot with a non-white lover, supplementing comedy with farce -- but he lacked either the inclination or the space to develop the relationship such more fully. (The fertile subject of love between the races was one that Shakespeare had previously engaged in Titus Andronicus -- in which Aaron the Moor fathers a child upon Tamora, the queen of the Goths -- and would become the tragic motif of Othello. 

There's a second possible explanation for the presence of the pregnant Moor.  It's known that as originally perormed, the part of the clown Launcelot was played by the much celebrated comedian Will Kemp, whose part Shakespeare might have wanted to sweeten.  Who now can imagine with what facial expressiona or gestures Kemp, in 1596, responded to Lorenzo's charge.  The visual comedy of the past is unrecoverable.  Even though Launcelot's quibble on the homonym Moor/more ("It is much that the Moor should be more than reason...") lies absolutely limp on the modern page, we can guess that it would have been made much of  (who knows how?) by the great comedian for whom it was composed.

So that while Launcelot's getting the Moor pregnant must remain ultimately mysterious, its odd and curious introduction at this juncture of the play very possibly offered its original audience a moment of humor which later readers and playgoers will never understand or appreciate.

Unsatisfying answers I know.  But we must accept the fact that the past is not always explicable.

What the Heck is an Elfskin?

In one modern edition of Shakespeare's The First Part of King Henry the Fourth, Falstaff, in a fit of exuberant swearing, describes Hal as an "eel-skin."  But in another edition, the word is "elfskin."  What's going on?  Only one of these curious words can be "correct."  

Paunchy Falstaff attacks Prince Hal with a string of half-comic, half-offensive epithets:  "you starveling, you elfskin (or eel-skin), you dried neat's tongue, you bulls-pizzle, you stockfish...."  A "starveling" is a person emaciated by hunger, "stockfish" is desiccated cod, and a "bull's pizzle," which an Elizabethan might dry to use as a whip, is self-explanatory.  But "elfskin" or "eelskin?"  "Elfskin" is the original reading, although in actual fact the earliest quarto prints not "elfskin" but "elsskin" where the first "s" is the old-fashioned "long s."  "Elsskin" was as incomprehensible then as now and someone who participated in the making of the 1623 Folio changed the word to "elfskin" on the grounds, it is easy to imagine, that that the "long s" properly signified an "f."  If "elfskin" is a word, then it's a Shakespearean coinage -- the word being otherwise unknown and the skin of elves not a subject of speculation even in an era that took such imaginary beings more seriously than does ours. Is it possible that, considering the context, "elfskin" could carry the meaning "as thin as fairy skin" -- even though elves were generally described as small and stunted rather than diaphonous? 

The alternative, "eel-skin" is the inspiration of Sir Thomas Hanmer, whose edition of Shakespeare's works appeared in 1744.  "Eel-skin" jibes with "stockfish" and "neat's tongue" as an example of Falstaff's fixation on edibles, although it was the eel itself rather than its skin that was the delicacy.  As Hanmer well knew, Shakespeare had used the word "eel-skin" in a not dissimilar context in King John, when Philip the Bastard described his feeble half-brother's skinny arms as "two eel-skins stuffed."

"Elfskin" is therefore the earlier reading, closer by 150 years to William S. himself, but "eel-skin," though it dates only to the mid-eighteenth century, is much more colorful and apposite. It's therefore entirely possible that Hanmer restored Shakespeare's original intention.  Possible, but not proven.    

Some Rituals

Shakespeare's audiences were notoriously raucous.  Folks entered and left during performances, commented loudly on the action and the actors, and ate oranges and hazelnuts during performances.  (When the Rose Theater was excavated in 1994, its floor was found to be paved with crushed hazelnut litter.)  The Rose, the Globe, and the Fortune were noisy, busy, vital places, far different from today's excessively reverent theaters.  I wish it were otherwise.  I would be much more interested in live theater if I didn't feel that I was stepping into a museum or mausoleum.  Why shouldn't we voice our approval or disapproval?  A vigorous environment did not inhibit gentle Will.  Nowadays we have more Awe but less Art. 

I feel the same about visits to the symphony (but I'm more tolerant, especially on a Brahms or Beethoven evening).  The ritual of concert-going amuses me: the various instrumentalists wandering to their places, then the concertmaster, then at last the maestro, the polite applause, the bowing, etc.  There's an old story about "the man from Borneo"  -- when Borneo was synonymous with the end of the earth -- who was taken to the Boston Philharmonic.  After the concert, the M from B was asked, "Which part of the concert did you like best."  "Before the man with the stick came on."      

Yesterday I went to see our local university basketball team. It wasn't a very good game and my mind wandered to the elements of the ritual:  first the warming up, then the teams leave the court, then the Star-Spangled Banner, then the overexcited introduction of the starters, ("at six five from San Bernadino California") and of course the blond perky cheerleaders with their theatrical enthusiasm and familiar tumbling routines.  And the band, playing their hearts out during the TV timeouts.  It's all so very schematized and overdetermined.  But exciting nevertheless.   

Both the symphony and the basketball game are highly ritualized, but I have to admit that on the whole, I'm more comfortable at the arena than at the concert hall.  Especially when I have to cough; nothing more awkward than trying to suppress a cough during a pianissimo passage -- especially for those of us who are inordinately sensitive to social censure.   

I wish the symphonies could incorporate some of the vitality of basketball.  At the arena, the members of the band swing their trombones to left and right.  Why couldn't the violins and violas give us a little of that?  And then we have the tuba cheer, where the tubists come on court and whirl in rapid circles.  What an opportunity for cellos and double-basses to show off their skill and add some visual excitement to the performance.  The cheerleaders regularly climb each others' shoulders.  Why not the woodwinds?    

And the audiences?  They can participate by eating oranges and hazelnuts.  And shouting approval.  "Go woodwinds!"   

No Words, No Words? Hush.

A few nights ago, I attended a performance by our local treasure, the ever-glorious Takacs Quartet.  Without asking my leave, they chose to play works by Aarvo Part and Philip Glass.  I suppose that there must be virtues to "minimalist" music, but a single motif played over and over again in the same tempo, with the same unvarying dynamics, and in the same non-key -- what's the point?  Music without melody, harmony, or rhythm is like a novel without a plot or like a severely abstract painting. Sorry folks, I'm antediluvian. A relic.  I want a story and I want it dressed in rhyme and meter.  It's exhilaration that I crave, not forty-five long minutes of total ripvanwinkleization.      

I was already in a sulky mood at the intermission when Mr. and Mrs. Talkative behind me, after gushing over the minimalists, directed their intellects toward Shakespeare. Mrs T. announced, "You don't need to read a Shakespeare play before seeing it.  Just read a plot summary so that you know what's happening."  Mr. T. agreed:  "Absolutely.  Going to the theater is all about the costumes and the set and the business. As long as you have a general idea of the story, you don't need to understand the words."   

No need to understand Shakespeare's words?  Go to the theater and ignore the words of the finest poet in human history?  What are the Talkatives thinking?  The costumes are the work of the costumer;  the business is the work of the director and the stage designer.  The only part of the performance that is Shakespeare's is the language. 

One of the teachers of my youth, the late and much lamented Alfred Harbage  -- the finest Shakespeare scholar of his generation -- used to say that he didn't care what the actors did on stage as long as he could hear the words.   I'm not nearly so tolerant.  I don't want Rosiland and Orlando to send email messages to each other -- I want them to articulate.  I don't want Cinna and Metullus Cimber to be dressed as blackshirt fascist thugs.  And I certainly don't want Snug and Bottom to ride to the Duke's Oak on motorcycles.  Such antics are stupid and distracting.

The performance for which I'd pay a premium price is one at the Theatre, or at the old Globe, or at the Blackfriars during the years when Shakespeare was teaching the parts to Burbage and Hemmings and Kemp.  Dollars to doughnuts he insisted that the actors pronounce the words distinctly.   

After the grating intermission, the Talkatives ran out of insights and my indignation began to wane.  Eventually Ed, Andras, Karoly and Gerry returned to the stage and played one of Haydn's great Opus 76 quartets.  It was transcendent -- melodic, intelligent and intelligible, warm, robust and sensuous.  It was music.   

King Lear, V.i

Today's contribution is the work of resident Shakespearean Pauline Harlem, the internationally-acclaimed author of Anagrams for Fun and Profit (2005) and The Naked Anagrammatist (2007).

William Shakespeare, culture hero and playwright, is so often idolized for the great iconic moments and the big megaphonic speeches that quieter but equally luminous effects go unnoticed.  A good example of such an oversight is the extremely brief scene that graces the end of the History of King Lear -- eleven lines in total that have never been granted the praise they deserve.

As King Lear winds to a close, readers (or playgoers) are exhausted.  Not only are their emotions wrung, but their capacities have been taxed just trying to track the crowded details of the plot.  Even the author had trouble keeping King Lear's entangled stories in mind -- perhaps because he revised the play several times.  Yet although Shakespeare may have slipped on detail or two, he never lost sight of the main lines of the parallel plots.  In the one, Cordelia marshals her army against that of Lear's enemies, which is led by her wicked sisters Goneril and Regan;  in the other plot, old Gloucester, cruelly blinded, is carried to Dover by his faithful son Edgar.  Gloucester intends to put an end to his own life.  Edgar has a different agenda;  it's his plan to rescue his father from suicidal despair and by doing so save the old Earl's soul. 

In the third-from-last scene of the play, Cordelia tenderly and reverently reveals herself to her father. The tragedy's very last scene is long and complex, encompassing a formal duel between Edgar and his half-brother Edmund in which Edmund is mortally wounded, plus the suicides of the wicked sisters and the murder of the good one, and finally the deathbed speeches of Lear himself.  Between the weighty matters of the last and of the antepenultimate scenes, Shakespeare tucks in a brief enactment that can easily be overlooked -- but which shouldn't be.  It's one of the pinnacles of playwriting, as splendid a piece of art as the world will see between the last big bang and the next -- or until all molecular motion ceases -- and afterward. 

Shakespeare carefully sets off the scene from its surroundings.  It both begins and ends with a child taking a father by the hand and attempting to draw him to safety -- and image of care and concern with deep roots in both "real life" and the western literary tradition.  First Cordelia wordlessly leads her maddened father across the stage.  Just as the pair exit, Edgar stumbles on stage with his own father in tow.  The brief exchange between father and son pauses while Edgar secludes Gloucester.  Then comes the conflict between good and evil figured in the offstage roar of battle.  Edgar returns, exchanges another couple of sentences with his father, and then takes his hand and leads him on.  It's an unobtrusive scene, brief and understated -- and for Shakespeare, relatively languageless.  But every single word tells.

Here is the scene exactly has it appeared in the quarto of 1605.  For you internet wanderers who have accidentally found your way to this blague and who've never been offered the opportunity to look at Shakespeare in the raw, unedited and unmodernized, this passage offers some good examples of the playwright's quirky spelling and of his characteristically minimalist punctuation.  (The medial u's -- standard in Elizabethan printing -- should be read as v's;  i.e. "thrive" for "thriue.") 

Alarum.  Enter the powers of France over the stage, Cordelia with her father in her hand.  Enter Edgar and Gloster.

   Edg.  Here father, take the shadow of this bush

For your good hoast, pray that the right may thriue

If euer I returne to you again ile bring you comfort.  Exit.

  Glost. Grace goe with you sir.  Alarum and retreat.

  Edg.  Away old man, giue me thy hand, away,

King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter taine,

Give me thy hand, come on.

   Glost. No farther sir, a man may rot euen here.

   Edg.  What in ill thoughts againe men must indure,

Their going hence, euen as their coming hither,

Ripeness is all come on.

Let me provide just a bit of historical context.  Before Shakespeare tackled the story of King Lear, it had been told many times on stage, in poetry, and in mythic history.  In all the previous versions, the armies that are led by Cordelia triumph in the battle that comes to pass in this scene.  Because the story is so familiar nowadays, it's hard for us to imagine exactly how surprised and shocked early audiences would have been at the battle's outcome.  Doubtless they would be entirely confident that Lear will win. Even today, anyone reading or hearing the scene's first lines would reasonably assume that the armies of justice will conquer and that the long British nightmare will finally end.  Shakespeare deliberately raises such hopes only to dash them.  Edgar's first sentence lulls us into false security.  "Pray that the right may thrive" is plainly a signal to the audience that everything is going to come out just fine.  There's an even stronger "foreshadowing" of success in Edgar's definitive announcement that "if ever I return to you again, I'll bring you comfort."  Sly old Will has set a grand trap.  And it's not just the plain import of the sentences;  it's the warm and cozy vocabulary:  "host," "pray," "right," "thrive," "comfort," "grace."  It's all light and clarity and optimism.  But King Lear is a play, as the audience well knows, in which "the worst is not/ So long as we can say 'This is the worst'"  There's no bottom to this play's misery.  And so Edgar, briefly absent, returns to the stage with the blunt, four-word message that is an arrow to every sentient heart: ""King Lear hath lost."  And onto this mountain of grief Shakespeare piles even worse news:  that Lear and his innocent, loving daughter have been "taine" -- ta'en, taken, or as we would say, captured.  In the first moments of the scene the audience might be comforted that Lear is in the charge of his daughter and Gloucester in that of his son, and that young and sensible people have finally come to the aid of the old fools.  But good things do not last -- not in this play.  The forces of evil that King Lear unleashes are far from exhausted.  They will continue to ruin lives and hopes right to the end. 

It's Shakespeare's usual practice to lead his audience to anticipate one thing, but to give them another;  this scene, like many such, is carefully constructed to overturn easy expectations.  It seems impossible but it's the case that in these eleven lines Shakespeare has embedded a second reversal that is equally momentous.

Here we are at last, at the very end of the play;  the audience has every reason to believe that it will be gratified with a big, climactic, flashy battle.  It's always been the way.  But once again, expectations are defeated and the audience gets both less and more than it anticipated. Instead of lances and swords and duels to the death -- simply some offstage clatter.  Why?  Before he wrote King Lear, Shakespeare had staged many such battles.  But he wasn't a film director with an unlimited budget and with all sorts of technological resources at hand;  all he had at his disposal was a sunlit stage thirty-four feet wide and a handful of supernumeraries.  Not nearly enough.  Shakespeare adepts will be well aware that the playwright had already expressed, some half a dozen years before, his great frustration with the limitations of his martial scenes.  In Henry V, the Chorus, speaking for the author, had apologized for the inadequate representations of warfare:  "our scene must to the battle fly,/ Where - O for pity- we shall much disgrace/ With four or five most vile and ragged foils/ Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous/ The name of Agincourt."  In King Lear, Shakespeare shocked his audience with the outcome of the battle, but he shocked them even more, if possible, by not giving them the battle at all.  King Lear is too serious, too desperate, too sad for yet another ridiculous brawl.  Nor did Shakespeare take the other easy option -- the long narrative of the sort with which messengers had been regaling audiences from the days of Aeschylus.  Instead, Shakespeare offers his audience a profoundly revolutionary experience:  noise, followed by four monosyllables.  "King Lear hath lost."  Co,uld any artist be more economical -- or more devastating.

These eleven lines therefore constitute an entire tragedy in little.  Hope, followed by loss and despair -- succeeded by a moderately uplifting moral.  Hearing the horrid news, Gloucester once again falls into suicidal thoughts.  "No further, sir.  A man may rot even here."  The defeated old man is weary of the world and anxious to leave it behind.  But Edgar will have none of his despair.  "What, in ill thoughts again?" he says.  (The word "ill" is stronger in Elizabethan English than it is now;  it's closer in meaning to our "evil.")  "Men must endure/ Their going hence, even as their coming hither."  Shakespeare doesn't say, "You must endure."  It's the more general, "men must endure";  not the individual, but the species.  We're on this planet and we're human and the world may be, as Chaucer says , "a thoroughfare of woe" and we're born in pain and we die in pain, but it's our burden and our obligation to endure, to hold on.  It's not exactly an optimistic statement, but it's realistic, and stoic, and appropriate to the context, and i's wise.  And then Edgar/Shakespeare adds a further expression of condensed and gnomic wisdom:  "ripeness is all."  "Ripeness is all" -- to expand the metaphor -- signifies that we human beings can't opt out, can't surrender until the cycle of life draws to its natural close.  We, or men, or humanity, must continue the struggle to the last breath.  Shakespeare doesn't say, if you commit suicide, you're going to go to hell.  He doesn't, at this point in the magnificent eleven lines, threaten Gloucester with eternal damnation.  Instead, he exhorts him to persist, to endure, to live life to the bitter end. And when Edgar says to Gloucester, "Come on," and father and son leave the stage hand-in-hand, we appreciate and admire, even in the midst of all the horror, the perennial human virtues of endurance and loyalty and love.

Another Folly: the "Shakespeare Authorship Question."

This guest entry was contributed by Pauline Harlem, the internationally-acclaimed author of The Wonderful World of Anagrams (New York, 2006). 

"Just last week, the Washington Post published a pair of articles on "who wrote Shakespeare's plays." The one claimed that Shakespeare's plays were written by Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford; the other re-asserted the traditional view that William Shakespeare wrote William Shakespeare's plays.  By juxtaposing the two articles -- one for, one against -- the Post is guilty of outrageous anti-intellectualism. The authorship of the Shakespeare plays is not an open question.  It's as if the Post were to offer its readers two articles, one in support of evolution and the other in favor of new-earth creationism.  Just as the matter of evolution is a settled question, so the authorship of the plays is not --and never has been -- in any sort of doubt.  The true believers who keep stirring the pot are faith-based cranks, fanatics, and conspiracy theorists who ignore the usual rules of evidence and reason.  Shame on the Post for giving them a voice!

The nay-sayers discard the historical record and ask this question: is it likely that Shakespeare, with his small-town background and (it's claimed) limited education, could have written plays that demonstrate a sophisticated knowledge of the law, the court, geography, seamanship, etc?  As to the matter of likelihood, who could possibly disagree?  Of course it isn't likely that these extraordinary plays would have been written by anyone -- but it happened nevertheless.  It's also unlikely that the theory of relativity would have been developed by a civil servant in a Swiss Patent Office; it's extremely unlikely that the most transcendent music ever written would have been composed by a man who was totally deaf; it's beyond belief that an autodidact living in intellectual isolation in Madras could single-handedly recreate a big hunk of modern mathematics; it's more than incredible that a hermit-like lens-grinder living in self-imposed intellectual exile would be one of the western world's most innovative and progressive philosophers.  What is "likely" and what actually happens are two entirely different kettles of fish -- especially when genius is concerned.  Despite the unlikeliness, Shakespeare existed and he wrote plays and poems.  His names is on thirty-six of the plays and his friends and colleagues and contemporary admirers testify not only to his existence but to his accomplishments. Among the thousands of books and the corridors of unpublished manuscripts and records that survive from his time, there's not a scrap of information to hint that the plays weren't his.  Not a scrap, not a jot, not an inkling, not a tittle.  Nothing.   

The fallacious claims of the Oxfordians, Baconians, Elizabethians, Rutlandians, et. al. have been refuted time and time again.  Here's a representative sample of the quality of the argument  -- it's from the recent Washington Post article. "[It's unlikely that Shakespeare wrote the plays because he] never left England -- but sixteen of the plays are set in Italy or the Mediterranean."  Persuasive?  In what universe must authors travel the world in order to set their plays outside of England?  Certainly not in the world of Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights. Did Christopher Marlowe travel to Malta in order to compose The Jew of Malta or to the Asian steppe to astonish the world with the Scythian shepherd or to Wittenberg to trouble the orthodox with Doctor Faustus?  Thomas Kyd never left England, but managed to startle theater-goers with The Spanish Tragedy.  Ben Jonson never made his way to Italy, but he had no trouble putting Volpone in Venice.  John Ford, no traveler, set 'Tis Pity She's a Whore in Parma. John Webster's two great plays The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil are set in Italy, a country on which Webster never set eyes. Thomas Middleton's masterpiece, The Changeling takes place Alicante, in Spain -- but Middleton was a Londoner who never went abroad.  And so on and on, endlessly.  Like his friends and competitors, Shakespeare wrote out of books.  He, and they, pillaged the literature for promising stories.  If the story happened to have originated in Italy, that's exactly where it remained.  The playwrights were not geographers or social historians and they created not real but literary places.  Marlowe's Germany and Middleton's Spain and Webster's Italy are no more German or Spanish or Italian than Shakespeare's Belmont is Belmontian or for that matter, W. S. Gilbert's Mikado is Japanese.  Did Shakespeare need to travel to Denmark to write Hamlet or to Vienna to write Measure for Measure?  It's nonsensical to think so.  It's an argument without a scrap of merit.  It's not honest.

But is it even a fact that that sixteen of Shakespeare's plays are set in "Italy or the Mediterranean."  Only by a stretch.  Do the sixteen plays include Othello, the Moor of Venice -- four acts of which occur in Cyprus?  And is the argument that Shakespeare or some other author had to travel to off-the-beaten-Elizabethan-track Cyprus in order to write it?  Do the sixteen include A Midsummer Night's Dream, nominally set in Athens but in fact stuffed with English tradesman and English fairies?  Or The Comedy of Errors, which takes place, in part, in ancient Ephesus in Asia Minor.  Or Pericles in Antioch?  The Tempest occurs on an enchanted island which is called Bermuda but seems to be somewhere between Naples and Libya.  Would a playwright need to traverse the Mediterranean in order to bring Ariel and Caliban to life?  Is it any sort of argument that plays set in the great age of Rome (Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus) required a playwright to abandon his careful reading of North's Plutarch for a trip to Italy?  Shakespeare no more had to cross the Alps to write his sixteen plays than he had to board a time machine to dark age Scotland to write Macbeth or teleport himself to ancient Britain in order to write King Lear or Cymbeline.

 

The author of the Post article knows these facts.  He knows that the travel argument, and the other tissue-thin assertions that he advances, have been refuted over and over again.  But like all faith-based controversialists, he does not withdraw or concede or counter.  He merely repeats and repeats and repeats, because his personal conviction is prior to and more important than either evidence or reason.  He's not conducting a legitimate search for truth;  instead, he is in thrall to an irrational and deeply-held conviction.  Facts will be bent to support his extra-logical hypothesis.  His intellectual processes mimic the creationists, the holocaust-deniers, the flat-earthers.  Such minds are not reachable -- but there's not the slightest reason for a respectable newspaper to give them space."

Thanks, Pauline. I couldn't have said it any better myself.  V.

Flying the Flag

Yesterday, we dug out our grand old American flag and flew it from the holder that I had improvised after 9/11.  We flew it to celebrate two great changes:  a) the Democratic triumph in Tuesday's election, which restored a bit of our faith in representative government, and b) the end of the arrogant reign of Donald Rumsfeld, the principal mover (except for the cowboy-in-chief himself) of this foolish, disastrous adventurism in the Middle East.  We're hoping for a return to common sense in America, but we're not entirely optimistic  -- the guy who's in charge doesn't read, can't admit he's ever made a mistake, and takes his marching orders from a) Rove, b) his gut, and c) his narrow, parochial version of the great signifier in the sky  -- in what order of priority no one knows. 

Rumsfeld should have been out on his ass years ago.  He had lost the respect of the soldiers, certainly of the generals, the congress, and, as we now know from the election results, of ordinary Americans everywhere.  However, until yesterday he could still patronize and mystify the journalists, and he could still issue instructions to those beneath him in the chain of command.  And generals obey even when they despise the person issuing the orders.

In 1606, Shakespeare described the psychological relations between the generals and their civilian commander.  Of Macbeth, Angus says that "Those he commands move only in command,/ Nothing in love."  That is, they do what they're told, but they hate doing it.  Here's the full transcript of Angus's remarks:  "Now does [Macbeth] feel/ His secret murders sticking on his hands;/ Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach;/ Those he commands move only in command,/ Nothing in love: Now does he feel his title/ Hang loose upon him, like a giant's robe/ Upon a dwarfish thief."

It's hopeless to expect that Rumsfeld would recognize that the mantle of Secretary of Defense hung upon him as Angus describes Macbeth's (or, as does, a fortiori, the presidential mantle upon its own wearer) -- there's not sufficient insight or perspective or self-knowledge around the White House these days.  But we know exactly what Angus meant, and we know that some of our so-called leaders are nothing more than dwarfish thiefs.     

("Minutely" means "every minute";  "Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach" means "every minute a revolt [by one of his former followers] pays Macbeth back for his own breach of faith, i.e. assassinating Duncan.)

What We Heard in the Fifties

Regular readers (and even stray internet pilgrims) know that Dr. M. has composed a series of entries called What We Read in the Fifties, in which he's revisited books that were noteworthy or notorious during the days of his youth.  It's been a rewarding exercise, at least for him.  Some of the books have been canonical novels that were required reading in English class at Erasmus Hall High School, some have been pop best-sellers which his more earnest teachers would have scorned, and some have been cheap sensational paperbacks passed under the desk from hand to grimy pubescent hand.

In the years that have passed since I first read these books, rivers have changed course, glaciers have melted, and American society has altered almost beyond recognition -- and yet the books have remained exactly the same.  Reading them has been an exercise in nostalgia and a test of memory, and also an unwelcome insight into the incalculable callowness of adolescence.  And yet, Dr. Metablog has found readers -- or, at least, he thinks he has, for in May and in December, when high school students all over America, yea, even across the waters, write their assigned term papers on Lord of the Flies or The Catcher in the Rye, blague-traffic spikes, and the dissenting views offered in these essaylets are plagiarized and offered to a new generation of English teachers, who reward them with grades of D or F. 

I fear, however, that my readers might have gathered an erroneous impression of 1950s Flatbushian youth -- that they might have been literate or intellectual.  Let me clear my conscience and confess that for every hour that I spent reading books that had actual covers, I spent ten hours reading comic books and an equal measure with my ear to the radio.  It was the comics that taught me how to read;  I was well along in years before I came to realize that there were such things as lower-case letters and that there could be sentences that didn't end with exclamation points!  In my neighborhood, super-heroes (Batman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman) were as common as squirrels or starlings.  But radio -- radio serials-- affected us even more than the comics.  Radio stimulated the imagination, took us to worlds far way, presented us with alternative realities.  Members of my age-cohort will not forget the glories of radio: Jack Armstrong, the All-American boy, who trotted the globe in support of native ideals and Wheaties;  Bobbie Benson, the youth who inherited the B-Bar-B ranch in the Big Bend country, and who, along with Tex, Windy, and Harka, triumphed daily over snakes, droughts, famines and outlaws; the Shadow, who had the power to "cloud men's minds so they cannot see him," and who taught us, every day, that "the weed of crime bears bitter fruit"; Sergeant Preston of the Northwest Mounted, who fought crime and bad guys in the Yukon with horse and dog ("Well, King, this case is closed"); and the Lone Ranger, who with the aid of Tonto and the "thundering hoof beats of the great horse Silver" and with the marvelous voices of exotic Detroit's Fred Foy and Brace Beemer, created an enduring mythology of a spacious but vague and unlocatable west. 

Radio gave scope to the listener's imagination.  When television came along, and these programs were translated into a visual form, they were all inevitably diminished.  It's no wonder that the great epics (Gilgamesh,  the Odyssey and Iliad, Beowulf, the Icelandic sagas) are oral creations.  The spoken word can cast spells that are beyond the capacity of visual forms.  When it comes to heroes, a single word is worth a thousand pictures.

Radio prepared me for Shakespeare.  It's a fact that when Londoners crossed the Thames to attend the Globe, they did not go to "see" a play;  they went to "hear" a play.  There's a world of difference between seeing and hearing.  When we "see" a movie, 90% of the information comes to us through the eye.  In a Shakespeare play, it's exactly the opposite -- 90%, or more, of the information comes to us by way of the ear -- which is why recordings of Shakespeare's plays can be so entirely successful and so true to the original intent. And because the plays are primarily oral, with their big speeches and complicated rhetorical patterning and brilliant displays of verbal acuity, they can also be larger-than-life -- and they can be heroic.  Shakespeare's plays are closer to radio than they are to any other modern literary form. Those of us who grew up with radio bring to Shakespeare an intuitive understanding of oral forms that precedes television, film, and even precedes the theater itself  -- especially decadent modern theater with its compulsive and distracting visual distortions.