Shakespeare is a serious passion of mine, and I imagine
this study will go on the rest of my life. When I am able, I pick up books
related to his works. Also, I often receive them as gifts, which always makes
me happy. Here are notes on the books I’ve read recently.
All The Sonnets Of Shakespeare edited by
Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells – This book contains not only the 154
sonnets published in 1609, but all the sonnets within Shakespeare’s plays. The
sonnets are arranged in the order in which they were written, at least as far
as it is known. That means they do not have the usual numbers assigned to them,
though those numbers are included at the bottom of each page for reference. The
book’s introduction gets into the sonnets contained within Shakespeare’s plays
before then turning to the 154 sonnets. The editors write: “Part of the
originality of
Shakespeare’s Sonnets
lies in the fact that it is not a sequence; it is a collection, or an
anthology. But it contains within it mini-sequences and pairs of sonnets which
are revealing of what Shakespeare wanted to write about. We do not know who was
responsible for the 1609 order, but since whoever it was knew the poems well,
we have no objection to believing it was Shakespeare himself” (p. 17). Each
sonnet is presented on its own page, with notes afterward, including the number
originally assigned to it, as I mentioned. And sometimes in the notes,
connections are drawn between certain sonnets and certain plays, in similar
uses of language. For example, in a note regarding Sonnet No. 14, we get this
note: “But…derive (cf
Love’s Labour’s
Lost 4.3.326: ‘From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive’)” (p. 139). This
book was published in 2020. My copy is from the third printing, in 2021.
William Shakespeare’s Strange Case Of Doctor
Jekyll And Mister Hyde by Ian Doescher – Ian Doescher has adapted many
screenplays and stories to fit in with the work of Shakespeare. The story is
divided into five acts and presented in iambic pentameter. And, as usual, there
are references to lines from some of Shakespeare’s plays. For example, he has
the doctor say, “We should have found the lady a grave lass” (p. 14), a nod to
Mercutio’s “Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.” The
character Gabriel Utterson directly quotes Hamlet, saying, “Eat of the fish
that fed of that worm” (p. 18). Doescher refers to
Hamlet several times in this book. Poole says, “O, what a noble mind
is here o’erthrown” (p. 37), directly quoting Ophelia. Jekyll says, “Reliev’d
of all the thousand nat’ral shocks – /The whips and scorns of time that all do
bear” (p. 42), nodding to two separate lines in Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy.
Doctor Lanyon quotes Gertrude, saying “More matter, with less art” (p. 67). And
Poole later uses Hamlet’s final line, or a slight variation on it, saying, “The
rest was silence” (p. 88). Ian Doescher also playfully refers to a few other
horror movies in one speech by Inspector Newcomen, including
Halloween,
Friday The 13th and
A
Nightmare On Elm Street. This book was published in 2022.
Monty Python, Shakespeare And English
Renaissance Drama by Darl Larsen – This book combines two things that
I’m passionate about – Shakespeare and Monty Python. Darl Larsen finds some
common elements, such as how both have entered the common language, and that
descriptive words exist for both: “Shakespearean” and “Pythonesque.” And both
Shakespeare and Monty Python broke the fourth wall. Larsen also gets into how
Monty Python used Shakespeare’s work, writing: “From hospital wards for
overwrought Shakespearean actors to the first performance of
Measure For Measure underwater, from
Shakespeare doing the dishes to Hamlet on a psychiatrist’s couch, the Bard was
appropriated by Python, but this appropriation wasn’t limited to textural
concerns. We shall see later that Python revived and revised much surrounding
this ‘icon of western culture,’ including, but not limited to, his
writing-to-type technique, the Renaissance’s and Shakespeare’s use of men in
women’s roles, his penchant for historical anachronisms and violation of the
dramatic unities, his pointed verbal jousting, his relegation to otherness of
any language other than English, etc.” (p. 16). Larsen writes: “As the Knights
approach Camelot, its beauty is praised, and Patsy mumbles, ‘It’s only a
model.’ He is quickly ‘shushed’ by other characters. This seems an echo of the
Chorus offering the unreality of the ‘unworthy scaffold’ that is the stage and
set for
Henry V: ‘Can this cockpit
hold/The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram’/Within this wooden O the very
casques/That did affright the air at Agincourt?’ (1.1.10-14). The sentiment is
the same: acknowledgment of the artifice of the production, of the
representation of historical material” (pages 69-69). Darl Larsen offers some
interesting thoughts on the effect of Falstaff on
Henry V, particularly with respect to the Chorus. He writes, “It
seems apparent that the specter of Falstaff – the character out of history who
drew attention to the artifice of the production of history – made Shakespeare
extremely self-conscious of the limitations of the stage in recreating or
reproducing historical episodes” (p. 108). The book also brings Ben Jonson into
the mix, with Larsen writing, “He viewed his plays as meriting careful study,
while Shakespeare and Python often seemed to almost go out of their way to
simply entertain. Considering the venues of Shakespeare and Python as opposed
to Jonson – the more public forum versus, often, the insulation of the court –
this elevation of entertainment over instruction by both Python and Shakespeare
isn’t surprising” (p. 43). And it is crazy to learn that the fart line in
Holy Grail is a variation on a line from
one of Jonson’s plays. Seriously. Larsen writes, “In
The Alchemist, Jonson’s second line seems almost an answer: ‘Thy
worst. I fart at thee’ (1.1.2), which becomes an insult adapted to the screen
in
Monty Python’s Holy Grail” (p.
48). Back to Shakespeare, Larsen writes: “Like Shakespeare’s work, Python’s
sketches and scripts are meant to be performed, realized visually, and not read
as poetry or literature. If anything, Python attacked the notion of effete
intellectualism in favor of experience” (p. 155). This book was published in
2003.
Upstart Crow: The Scripts by Ben Elton
–
Upstart Crow is one of my favorite recent
television programs, and the folks responsible for it certainly know their
Shakespeare. This book contains the scripts from the first two seasons, with
footnotes just like the various editions of Shakespeare’s plays. I love the
joke about, and explanation of, the word “wherefore” in the first episode, and
there is a humorous footnote about that as well. And Anne says: “Although, if I
was being really picky, Romeo’s just his Christian name, isn’t it? And that’s
not the issue. It’s his surname that’s the problem” (p. 7). And in the
footnote, it says, “No scholar has ever sought fit to point out this obvious
howler.” In the second episode, Will is mentioning some ideas he has for plays:
“‘Seventeen Gentlemen Of Verona’. That needs trimming” (p. 41). Ben Elton must
really dislike Harold Pinter’s work, for he takes several jabs at him in the
footnotes, such as this: “The arts establishment deliberately favours the
obscure and boring over the robust and popular because they think it makes them
look clever. Hence Harold Pinter getting a Nobel Prize for literature. I mean,
seriously” (p. 92). Here is another example: “Theatres in Shakespeare’s time
and indeed for long after were thought to be places where the pursuit of every
vice was more important than the actual play being presented. Anyone who’s sat
through a Pinter play might well have wished that the tradition had not died
out” (p. 330). I love the note about the word “hanged”: “The correct grammar
would, of course, be ‘hanged for murder’. Shakespeare deniers will seize upon
this slip as proof of their insane conspiracy theories arguing that someone who
says ‘hung’ instead of ‘hanged’ couldn’t possibly have written
Hamlet” (p. 129). In the final episode
of the first season, Gabrielle Glaister makes a special appearance as Kate, a
character she had also played in the second season of
Blackadder. This is the footnote: “Scholars have speculated that
evidence of this very ‘Bob’ can be found in another historical source, the
venerable
Blackadder Chronicles, an
ancient but fragmented family history which came to light in the 1980s. Whether
this Judge Bob is indeed the same person who was briefly in a cross-dressing,
trans-inquisitive relationship with Edmund Blackadder during the mid-sixteenth
century will always remain a point of speculation” (p. 176). In the second
episode of the second season, Burbage comments that at least one thing in
Richard The Third is a lie. Will
replies, “I prefer the phrase ‘alternative fact’” (p. 214). The footnote reads:
“Many scholars over the years have marvelled at how Shakespeare’s works speak
to each new generation with equal force, that his political and philosophical
vision can illuminate any age. Here, for instance, Shakespeare satirizes Trump
adviser Kellyanne Conway almost four hundred years before she was born” (9p.
214). This book was published in 2018.
The Tragedy Of Othello The Moor Of Venice
by William Shakespeare – This edition is from
The Pelican Shakespeare series, and was edited by Gerald Eades
Bentley. In the section titled “Shakespeare And His Stage,” when mentioning that
early list of Shakespeare’s plays that includes “Love labors won,” a parenthetical
note reads, “
Taming of the Shrew?”
That was always my thought as well, that
Love’s
Labour’s Won was actually
The Taming
Of The Shrew. In the introduction, Gerald Eades Bentley writes: “To the
same end Shakespeare has minimized the number of characters in this play. Not
only is the cast of
Othello smaller
than those of the other three tragedies – it has half to two-thirds the number of
characters – but in it the secondary characters, Brabantio, Cassio, Roderigo,
and Emilia, are undeveloped save for their relations to the plotting of Iago or
the downfall of Othello and Desdemona” (p. 16). And: “
Othello differs again from the usual Shakespearean pattern in the
extent to which the power of evil is concentrated in one figure. The conflict
of good and evil in an ostensibly Christian world was always a basic element in
Elizabethan tragedies, and Shakespeare’s presentation of the conflict is
everywhere more subtle and complex than that of any of his contemporaries, but
in the other Shakespearean tragedies the evil is more dispersed through various
characters or even, as in
King Lear,
through the entire world of the play. Here the inherent weaknesses of Desdemona
and Othello are made fatal through the maneuvering of Iago” (p. 17). Also in
the introduction, Gerald Eades Bentley asks, “Can Othello’s assured mastery of
threatening situations be so unshakable as it has seemed in the two big
dramatic scenes of the act if he is so naïve in his Judgment of Iago?” (p. 20).
At the end of the introduction, he writes: “This is the tragedy, then, of
another deluded mortal who destroys what he loves best, so that his own death
is only an appropriate corollary. King Lear and Coriolanus and Brutus do
likewise, but they destroy themselves in a context of troubled kingdoms and
empires, while the little world of Othello’s tragedy is his own marriage and
his false friend, ‘honest Iago’” (pages 24-25). This book was first published
in 1958. The copy I read was from the 1965 printing.
