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• As such, with changing mores, will this story be outdated one day soon?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."

Star Trek: Season 1, Episode 9. "Dagger of the Mind"

 Summary:

The Enterprise beams down goods to Tantalus V, a planet penal colony with unorthodox methods of healing its prisoners. A prisoner escapes, threatens violence to the Enterprise crew. It turns out that the prisoner was the assistant, a former psychiatrist himself, Simon Van Gelder.

Analysis with spoilers:

Kirk goes down with Dr. Helen Noel. Kirk investigates, but Noel balks. They try out the neural neutralizer for themselves and find out Kirk can be made hungry for food and Noel. Then Dr. Adams appears and.

The attempt at romance between the attractive couple was nice as was the profound ending, but this one had problems. Of the episodes thus far, this one stretches incredulity. Really, you don't inspect goods from a penal colony? No one comes to pick it up? How did they get so far away before they realized Van Gelder had escaped?

Kirk seems to have had a Christmas fling with Dr. Helen Noel, where she wanted more than he did--an assumption from her continued interest and Kirk's reluctance to have her along. Also, from Noel's described how they danced and Kirk speaking of the stars, but she tries to invest more in the scene. This leads to the "accidental" embrace in the elevator. Yet they keep holding on to one another, which negates Kirk's earlier supposed reluctance.

Moreover, on the ship, Kirk is sold on Dr. Tristan Adams due to his renown, but as soon as he begins investigation, he's dubious and Dr. Helen Noel is the accepting one. In fact, she backs up Adams with the quote below, something I suspect would be suspect if not controversial to anyone working in a psychoanalytic capacity. Really? Deleting or changing memories is that well accepted?

How did Simon Van Gelder and Tristan Adams get in this fix, anyway? I mean the true story.

Who would use a device that made a sane man insane? Captain Kirk apparently. Hey, let's see if I go insane, too!  Why does Adams suddenly turn on Kirk instead of letting him think it's harmless?

This is minor--rather humorous actually--but Kirk cannot open a screen and needs Noel's help. Later, Noel opens a screen with ease. This brings up a question of why no one on the colony has never tried to escape through the ducts before.

Now for my favorite part: the ending. When Dr. Tristan Adams eats his just desserts, the power comes back on, and the neural neutralizer empties his mind with no one to fill it, he dies of loneliness. Therefore, emptiness = loneliness, and loneliness = death. There's an unusually long silence at the end, a silent note held for longer than normal on TV, and it's eerily effective. However, Kirk breaks it with a smile, for some reason.

The episode alludes to Tantalus, a man punished for cooking his son for the gods with eternal dissatisfaction of desires--water recedes as he bends drink, branches laden with fruit always stay just out of reach. Perhaps Dr. Tristan Adams is Tantalus for having destroyed his assistant although the metaphor doesn't fit well as their punishments are different.

Likewise, the name Tristan does not appear to allude to Tristan the lover. Finally, the title comes from MacBeth (see quote below), the titular character of which appears delusional, sees a dagger, and decides quick action is needed.

Quotes:

• "A shifting of memory patterns is basic psychotherapy." -- Dr. Helen Noel

• Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going,
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o' th' other senses,
Or else worth all the rest. I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There’s no such thing.
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one half-world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtained sleep. Witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate’s offerings, and withered murder,
Alarumed by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives.
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.

--MacBeth Act 2 scene 1, Shakespeare

Author: 

S. Bar-David or Shimon Wincelberg.

*Notes:

1. First use of Vulcan mind-meld psychotherapy 
2. You cannot use communicators or beam anything while shields are raised.

The Curse by Arthur C. Clarke

The future nuclear war was once a common trope in SF.  Although threats remain, it hasn't seized the consciousness of the contemporary SF writer.  Or maybe they feel all that needs to be said, has been.

This 1946 story had to be one of the earliest examples.  Clarke brings the war home to England where twenty bombs alone hit London.  You might say this has spoilers, but as the story has no plot or character, I'm not sure how it can be.

This vignette packs poignant irony.  First, though the light of day is dying--enlightenment, it might be read as well--light due to radiation keeps the graves readable.  The   second relates to Shakespeare's tombstone epitaph in Stratford upon Avon that reads*,

GOOD FREND FOR IESUS SAKE FORBEARE,
TO DIGG THE DVST ENCLOASED HEARE.
BLESTE BE YE MAN YT SPARES THES STONES,
AND CVRST BE HE YT MOVES MY BONES.

Here the irony pointed out is that no curse, forthrightly stated, is carried out.  However, a far greater curse has befallen England, irrevocably changing life and its environment.

*An interesting if irrelevant comment about Shakespeare's grave may be found here.