Quick Notes on Shakespeare and (Re)interpretations

A few thoughts I had on rewatching the famed dramaturge. These aren't Cliff Notes, but maybe there's an idea for an essay in here.

MacBeth

I looked up Lady MacBeth to find an actress and got "Movies about marriage." Hmm. I don't recall the MacBeths being marriage role models. They are very devoted to each other in terms of their careers.

Strangely, I have always loved and hated MacBeth. So many wonderful things marred by the MacBeths' too quick surrender to insanity.

King Henry V

• Great lines
• moving and intriguingly devised scenes (king moves disguised to hear what his troops think)
• yet an amazingly dull play. That doesn't seem possible, but it is so. Seems likely a large-scale structural issue. Basically a guy goes to war and wins. Hmm.
• There's a "meta" frame story where it talks about itself as a play. Methinks this is merely to set the stage. I don't see how it adds to the story to talk about itself as a play. Change my mind.
• You can woo a stranger to marry within a day? Maybe it helps if you're a conquering king

Much Ado about Nothing

• Fantastically well constructed
• Re: the Title few today would find the lack of virginity an impediment (although the night before a marriage is poor timing), but really, even just a 100 years ago, wouldn't it have been an impediment still for many?
• As such, with changing mores, will this story be outdated one day soon? viewers unable to connect?

Taming the Shrew 

Shakespeare isn't progressive and no progressive should read him. Clearly he should be kicked out of the cannon. He writes about the 1% and favors the subjugation of women. Fie on him! Hopefully, word about this criminal will spread so we can stop reading him and watching this no-talent word-smythe.

I suspect he isn't racist although it's hard to say. He often sets plays in different countries and not as a mockery.

Where do people in England come from when they pronounce "nothing" as "nuffin"? They are exceedingly difficult to understand. I canna unnerstan nuffin dey say. We non-Englanders need translators.

Cymbeline

A tragedy where the main characters don't die? Maybe Shakespeare was rebelling against form. Nice change. Surely, I read it before as I thought I'd read all of Shakespeare's tragedies. Surely, I'd seen the movie as well. Somehow I didn't remember them.

Good line: "Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered."

The movie takes liberties. One line I misheard at first was "Of God we ask one favor that we may be forgiven from what we presumed to know," which fits the movie. The line is actually Emily Dickinson's, which fits her poem better than Shakespeare. I have no idea why it's in the movie as it doesn't seem to be questioning God as Dickinson is. Here's Dickinson's poem:

Of God we ask one favor,
That we may be forgiven --
For what, he is presumed to know --
The Crime, from us, is hidden --
Immured the whole of Life
Within a magic Prison
We reprimand the Happiness
That too competes with Heaven.

Hamlet

One thing I didn't remember was that Hamlet didn't want his uncle to go to heaven, so he waited to kill him. It seems strange to ponder. Today people want to kill people in church. Does that send them to heaven? Is the murderer trying to do the victims a favor, or does that make today's murderers nonbelievers? On the other hand, how strange to think that if we die one moment one might make it to heaven and in another moment, not. Actually, I don't think most believers think that, do they?

Maybe I read this passage and didn't fully understand what the big deal was--just Hamlet being wishy-washy about whether he was going to do it or not. Fascinating quandary though. I can't recall a similar concern in the literary arts.

Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead  (Tom Stoppard)

Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead is so closely related to Hamlet that I think you'd have to watch the latter then the former. In fact, to be played well, you'd have to have Hamlet actors who'd just done Hamlet do Stoppard's RAGAD for it to feel the most natural since there'd be a tendency to play the characters as if the formerly primary characters as if they were secondary, but they can't be if we are to intrude upon Rose and Guild in the Hamlet play as they do. I expected to love Stoppard's play more than I did. But there are some good lines. My favorite is this:

"There must have been a moment at the beginning where we could have said no. But somehow we missed it."

The Classic Hundred Poems: All-Time Favorites, William Harmon (Editor)

This collection is nearing two decades old. It can register to fight in wars but cannot yet drink alcohol. Legally.

It's hard to debate a clinical selection of poems. The selection is based on the tastes of other anthologists, sampling a thousand, give or take, which is a good sample size. What better introduction to the genre than the best of the best retrospective?

The title could mislead readers who associate "classic" with Greek or Roman culture when a more contemporary sense of the term is intended as applied to the English language.

The reader will find not only the best poems, but also a sense of the changes in subject and taste. One can also sense patterns. Some poets tend to build a laundry list of observations, then lay the reader out with a line that brings the observations into new clarity or context. Others seem to take one path, only to veer off into a new direction--the friction between the two making the poem of interest.

You'll see a number of famous stories that allude to these poems: Andrew Marvell's "World enough and time" (Joe Haldeman, Dan Simmons), "vegetable love" (Pat Murphy), "vaster than empires and more slow" (Ursula LeGuin); William Butler Yeats's "Things fall apart" (Chinua Achebe), "slouching towards Bethlehem" (Joan Didion). So you may as well check up on what some of your favorite authors have been up to.

Most surprising are some of the poets left out: Geoffrey Chaucer, Alexander Pope, and Walt Whitman. Chaucer could perhaps be explained as his greatest work, The Canterbury Tales, is read separately and not short enough for inclusion. Pope can be explained as using humor and satire, which some have difficulty equating with seriousness.

Whitman, though, is a curious case. One might point to homophobia, which might be the case for a few although most of the homoerotic aspects are subdued. Emily Dickinson shied away from Whitman as "scandalous" for an unnamed reason, which may be about what I discuss below. Even when you zoom out to the top 500, you see mostly topical (Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War). Only one seems to hint at Whitman's style or métier, "I Hear America Singing", but even that might be chalked up to illustrating the patriotism of his era as opposed to capturing the poet.

Another reason anthologists left him out might be his lack of meter and looser lines, which make him seem a lesser poet to some anthologists, especially considering the era he springs from. After all, he doesn't have much impact until Allen Ginsberg, so you'd have to wait to see Ginsberg's impact before assigning one to Whitman. The major reason for his exclusion may simply be the title of his magnum opus: "The Song of Myself," which is not especially humble. Readers today still find this mildly shocking, perhaps less so with the advent of Facebook and the Internet.

The primary downfall of the collection is that the notes are so far from the poems in the appendix. One might suggest that the reader doesn't wish to be encumbered by notes, but surely academics who are already familiar with Old English would already be familiar with these poems and probably not interested in such a collection.

It is a valuable collection to fill gaps in or rebuild your literary education. William Harmon also collected a Top 500 Poems--with even fewer notes. If you need notes, maybe grab a Norton anthology.