Shakespeare Study: More Miscellaneous Books

Shakespeare has become a serious passion of mine in the last decade or so, and I frequently pick up more 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.

William Shakespeare’s The Taming Of The Clueless by Ian Doescher – Author Ian Doescher began retelling the Star Wars films as if they’d been written by William Shakespeare, and after the success of those books, started branching out to other films. The Taming Of The Clueless is obviously an adaptation of the 1995 film Clueless, itself a loose adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. It is presented in iambic pentameter, and contains lots of playful references to Shakespeare’s plays. For example, Cher refers to Cordelia’s lines when she says, “They have begot thee, bred thee, loved thee; thou/Return those duties back as are right fit” (p. 17). And on the next page, Ian Doescher refers to “the green-ey’d monster,” from Othello. The character Travis delivers a play on Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy: “And sleep – and by sleep to say we end/The horrid grades our work is heir to” (p. 26). His teacher soon continues the reference: “If ye would shuffle off this mortal coil,/You must postpone ‘til second period” (p. 26). And in the first dialogue between Cher and Josh, we have something like the back-and-forth between Katherine and Petruchio, as the book’s title suggests. Cher later uses Henry V’s lines when she says, “When I have match’d my racket to these balls,/I shall, indeed, by heaven, play a set” (p. 56). Cher also echoes Polonius’ advice when she says, “give thy thoughts no tongue,/Nor any unproportion’d thought its act./Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar” (p. 74). Travis borrows from Puck’s final speech: “If my blunder has offended thee,/Soon Travis shall restore amends, Cher” (p. 76). As you might recall, the film Clueless contains a Hamlet reference, when Cher corrects Heather regarding which character says “To thine own self be true,” and so that references is found in these pages as well. Josh later quotes The Merchant Of Venice: “Thy quality of mercy is not strain’d” (p. 121). Tai refers to Love’s Labour’s Lost when she says, “Canst sparkle still the right Promethean fire” (p. 148). I appreciate that Ian Doescher takes an opportunity to poke fun at lizard woman Kellyanne Conway by calling a fabrication “facts alternative” (p. 139). This book was published in 2020.

William Shakespeare’s Tragical History Of Frankenstein by Ian Doescher – I then read another of Ian Doescher’s adaptations. While most of the adaptations he’s written were based on films, this one is based on Mary Shelley’s novel rather than on one of the many Frankenstein movies. As with his other adaptations, this book contains plenty of references to lines from Shakespeare’s plays. For example, Victor Frankenstein says, “O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heav’n/Keep me in temper: I would not be mad!” (pages 24-25), echoing King Lear’s lines. The Monster quotes Hamlet, saying, “Words, words, words” (p. 33). The Monster also borrows words from The Tempest: “You taught me language; and my profit on’t/Is, I know how to curse” (p. 38). In the play, those words are spoken by Caliban, making them a perfect choice for the Monster, for he is a sort of Caliban, isn’t he? The Monster borrows from Hamlet again when he says, “I should have taken arms against a sea/Of troubles and destroy’d my very self” (p. 40). Of course, “Or to take arms against a sea of troubles” comes from Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy, which begins with the line “To be or not to be,” a question the Monster seems to be struggling with as well. The Monster also takes inspiration from Romeo And Juliet, saying “Thou art a Frankenstein, in sooth? A lad/By any other name would smell more sweet” (p. 48). Alphonse borrows lines from Polonius: “I would find out the cause of this effect,/Or rather say, the cause of this defect,/For this effect defective comes by cause” (p. 77). Victor also borrows from Hamlet when he says, “Alas, I am hoist by my own petard” (p. 88). And then soon after that, Victor says, “To resist the many thousand shocks/That flesh is heir to” (p. 94), playing on a line from Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. There is quite a bit of Hamlet in this book, for the Monster later says, “‘tis a consummation/Devoutly to be wish’d” (p. 127), which interestingly completes the line that Victor began on that earlier page. This book was published in 2020.

 

Shakespeare’s Tragedies: All That Matters by Michael Scott – This book focuses on the four big tragedies: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and Othello, with a chapter dedicated to each of those plays. In the chapter on Hamlet, Scott writes, regarding Ophelia’s line about violets, “Violets were thought by the Elizabethans to be able to cure melancholy” (p. 22). Drawing a connection between Hamlet and Ophelia regarding madness and the deaths of parents, Scott writes, “Hamlet has put on a disposition of madness following the Ghost’s revelation of the manner of his father’s death, while Ophelia is portrayed as going mad due to her father’s death” (p. 22). Regarding religion, Scott writes: “Distortions of the sacraments appear throughout the play. In Catholicism a sacrament is an outward sign of inward grace. So what does the distortion signify? Ophelia, for example, is not cleansed by the water of baptism but drowns in water. Her death is proclaimed as being ‘suspect’ by the Church and she is not allowed to be buried in consecrated ground. At the end of the play, the wine in the communion cup, which in the sacrament of the Eucharist Catholics believe is transformed into the actual blood of Christ, is transformed into a deadly poisonous drink” (p. 35). Then in the chapter on King Lear, regarding Lear’s dividing of the kingdom, Scott writes: “this episode is not a competition, since as soon as Goneril has spoken, the king gives her her land and as soon as Regan has spoken he gives her her land. This exchange is telling, however, in that Lear is asking his daughters to measure something, to render into crass sensory terms something that is immeasurable. You cannot quantify love, and in this staged competition we are invited to support Cordelia against her garrulous and, it turns out, deceitful sisters” (p. 47). Scott also writes, about Lear: “Shakespeare depicts Lear as having the power to construct not only his own reality, but reality per se. Because he has authority, everyone has to conform with the order, the ceremony, the games, the tests that he creates. But Cordelia will not conform; she is a woman who resists, her resistance attracting sympathy since Lear is clearly wrong in what he is doing” (p. 48). In the chapter on Macbeth, regarding the historical context of equivocation and treachery, Scott writes: “The Gunpowder Plot was not the first attempt on the new king’s life. In 1600 the Scottish Earl of Gowrie had attempted to assassinate James while the king was Gowrie’s guest. Thus there was a real-life parallel to the assassination by Macbeth of the king who was lodging under his protection” (pages 66-67). And in the chapter on Othello, regarding racism in Elizabethan and Jacobean society, Scott writes, “One of the events celebrations James I’s wedding in Oslo (1589) had four black men dancing naked in the snow in front of him and his queen, Anne of Denmark; the men subsequently died of the cold. Black people were servants, entertainers, prostitutes” (p. 84). And regarding some elements that are left unknown, Scott writes: “For example, what has led up to Desdemona’s elopement? What has her father done to encourage the relationship between her and Othello? Who is Bianca? What is her relationship with Cassio? In short, we are asked to go through the same process of evaluating evidence as Rodorigo, Brabantio, Cassio and finally Othello” (p. 95). Michael Scott also touches upon Romeo And Juliet before the end of the book. This book was published in 2015.

MacTrump by Ian Doescher and Jacopo Della Quercia – I’ve had this book for a while, but put off reading it because I needed a break from all things Trump. However, it seems that until he’s in prison, we’re not going to get that break. And I figured, hey, if in this book he ends up like Macbeth, then there’s a happy ending, so I finally did read it. The messenger in this story is named McTweet, and McTweet actually begins the first scene with something akin to the beginning of Jacques’ famous speech, but also playing on a line from Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech. The names take form closer to characters from the plays. For example, Barrack O’Bama becomes Banquo O’Bama. Pelosi becomes Prosperosi. There is a fool named Fooliani, which is perfect. Stormy Daniels becomes Tempest Daniels, and FOX News becomes Pox Network. The soldier’s line “All hail Lady MacTrump – third wife, first lady” (p. 19) made me laugh. Lady MacTrump has a secret crush on O’Bama, which of course makes complete sense, and in a soliloquy she speaks of how Trump is jealous of O’Bama, and, as you might guess, she uses the phrase from Othello, “the green-ey’d monster” (p. 40). There is also a reference to the nude photos that Melania Trump posed for. There are even references to Trump’s incestuous relationship with Ivanka: “MacTrump loves her beyond a father’s love” (p. 20), and to the Access Hollywood tape. And there is a reference to Trump’s father being in the KKK. The book plays on Trump’s obsession with the size of his crowds, and gets into his desire for total authoritarianism, also poking fun at the gross stupidity of his followers and at Kellyanne Conway and her alternative facts. Stephen Miller becomes Gorgamiller, a monster who rises through the trap door. It is Ivanka who plays the role of Lady Macbeth, urging Trump to action, to fire Comey: “So screw your courage to the sticking place” (p. 70). She is the one who schemes. Like King Lear, Trump wants to hear from his children how much they love him: “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” (p. 126). Rather than wiping blood from her hands, Lady MacTrump tries to scrub the words “I verily don’t care. Do you?” from her clothes, a really nice touch. This book contains illustrations, including one of Sean Spicer hiding behind a bush. MacTrump was published in 2019, yet in it MacTrump plans on facing Biden in the 2020 election.

Antic Fables: Patterns Of Evasion In Shakespeare’s Comedies by A.P. Riemer – The title of this book comes from a line Theseus delivers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in the book’s preface, that line is discussed, with focus on the word “antic,” compared with the Q1 reading of “antique,” and how not only language has changed, but so too cultural attitudes. In the first chapter, Riemer writes, “Shakespeare continues to be a staple of what might still be regarded as the popular theatre because his comedies have escaped the ravages of time” (p. 4). Riemer continues, “In his comedies, the lack, on the whole, of specific reference to contemporary society and manners ensures concentration on other theatrical and poetic possibilities, so that even where particular plays deal with actual situations and people (as is the case, possibly, in Love’s Labour’s Lost), these plays are less explicit in their subject-matter and are therefore better able to survive” (p. 4). A little later in that first chapter, Riemer writes, “Where the theatre is concerned, it is clear that audiences took as much aesthetic pleasure from the performance as from the material performed” (p. 13). Regarding Love’s Labour’s Lost, Riemer writes: “We are unable to say what Shakespeare ‘means’ by the play because all attempts to make it directly relevant to the real world of the late sixteenth century (or of the twentieth century, for that matter) are blocked by the smiling insistence that this is no more than a sport. A refusal to allow itself to be taken solemnly, while offering itself with great seriousness, is a characteristic of the rather odd manner of comedy Shakespeare practised” (p. 22). Regarding Measure For Measure, Riemer writes that the play can be viewed “in part at least, as a technical exercise – an experiment in exploring how far a comedy is able to tolerate emphasis on brutality, greed, lasciviousness, and on the complicated means of arriving at the anticipated happy ending, without shattering the mould of comic conventions” (p. 39). Regarding the characters who aren’t able to take part in the happy endings of the plays, Riemer writes: “The chief distinguishing feature of the characters excluded from happiness is that they are incapable of loving or are incapable of attracting love. Their capacity is often only for self-promotion and for the indulgence of mercenary or materialistic desires. By comparison, even those, like Claudio and Posthumus, who are guilty of a lack of trust and readily believe the slanders against their mistresses’ virtue, are saved because they are loved and because they adhere to an ideal of love, no matter how much their foolishness compromises their belief” (p. 62). Regarding a theme of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Riemer writes, “Love is frenzy; love is conflict. It is also akin to madness, if not madness itself. The Athenian lovers experience a night of hallucinations; Bottom receives an enchantment which he recalls merely as a bizarre dream; the frenzy of love humiliates Titania” (p. 72). Regarding As You Like It, Riemer writes: “Jaques’s well-known monologue on the seven ages of man expresses melancholic disillusionment. But its thematic function in the play is peculiar: it is neither a corrective to the pervasive jollity, nor an instance of despairing sadness which must be conquered. It is a performance, a bravura display, both within the fiction of the play and from the point of view of the theatrical audience” (p. 79). In a later chapter, on The Winter’s Tale, Riemer writes, “One of the more persistently irritating puzzles of literary scholarship has been Shakespeare’s apparently perverse or careless reversal of the settings provided by his source for the two parts of the action. Greene locates the court of Pandosto, Leontes’s counterpart, in Bohemia; the place where the foundling child is reared is the pastoral landscape of Sicily. In The Winter’s Tale, these locations are reversed” (p. 180). Regarding the juice of the magic flower in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Riemer writes, “Puck’s misuse of the drug also has certain analogies with Renaissance attitudes towards the function of art – he is the improper practitioner, that figure of insufficient ability, command, authority or benevolence in whose hands the powerful tools of the artist become dangerous” (p. 200). Riemer also writes about Dream: “we laugh at Bottom as he wakes from his enchantment, and we observe that he reverts soon enough to his former blustering as ‘Bully Bottom’, yet his reminiscences persuade us that (in some ways) he is a privileged being – he had heard the mermaids singing. The play makes no moral or social comment or promise about this achievement; it leads to no greater knowledge or amelioration; this is no conventionally therapeutic comedy, but it indicates – always within the jesting decorum of comedy – the type of transitory and tentative emotional satisfaction the world of art and of illusions is able to produce” (pages 203-204). This book was published in 1980.

Macbeth With Reader’s Guide by Solomon Schlakman – This book, designed to be used in classrooms, contains the text of Macbeth, along with a series of questions prompting discussion. The play itself is presented on the book’s odd-numbered pages, while notes on certain lines and words are on the even-numbered pages. However, the notes are not extensive. In fact, several pages contain just one or two notes, which seems wasteful. Regarding the phrase “chance may crown me” in Act I Scene 3, Schlakman notes: “The crown in Scotland was elective. On the death of the king, the nobles elected someone of royal blood to succeed, unless the king had specifically indicated his successor, in which case the nobles were likely to carry out the king’s wish. Macbeth feels here he would be elected to succeed Duncan, since he is of royal blood and has distinguished himself” (p. 20). This text uses “scotch’d the snake” rather than “scorch’d the snake.” The reader’s guide includes a short introduction before the series of questions. In that introduction, Schlakman writes, “More than the other plays of Shakespeare, Macbeth seems to abound in antithesis and paradox – for a good reason: these related devices involve the use of opposites and contradictions, and the dramatic vision that Macbeth offers is that of a world in which order, regularity, logic, and conventional and accepted values have all been overturned and destroyed” (pages 202-203). The book is part of the Amsco Literature Program, and the text used is that of The Aldus Shakespeare. This book was published in 1972. The copy I read came from North High School in Worcester, where my father taught. Interestingly, someone tore out part of one page of this book, the part containing my favorite speech, the “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech.