Be honest--how many of you have read this thing since high school? I hadn't until yesterday, and good grief, it is not the play I thought I remembered. It was today's subject in my Hardcore Book Group, in which we are reading all of Shakespeare in roughly chronological order, and though opinions on it were diverse, we all agreed on one thing: there is some sick shit going on in Verona. I'll take it a step further and venture the opinion that "Romeo and Juliet" is a cruel, manipulative work about violent perverts. So there!
The general cultural appraisal of "R&J" would seem to be that it is a tragic tale of doomed love. Fair enough. But I was shocked at how detached it actually is from conventional sympathies. Romeo is painfully flighty, Juliet in open rebellion against her choleric father and embittered mother. "By my count," the Lady Capulet tells her marriage-shy daughter, "I was your mother much upon these years / That you are now a maid." In other words, I didn't get to be happy when I was thirteen, and neither should you. The supporting players say almost nothing that is not a double entendre, and their jokes often come at the most inappropriate moments; homoerotic tension abounds, even in the opening passages, wherein a couple of Capulet servingmen verbally duel with "tools," "naked weapons," and "standing" "pieces of flesh." Juliet's Nurse, commonly played as a source of comic relief, proves to be cruel and vindictive in the end, and bawdiness turns to bloodiness in an eyeblink whenever characters clash.
The play reads like a comedy for long pages until Mercutio is killed in act three; his "plague o' both your houses" tips the slapstick into doom, and from then on every move is a mistake, and every mistake results in death. There is, ultimately, nobody to truly engage our empathy--everyone is too small, too flawed, too shortsighted. It is easy to forget, if you haven't read the play in a while, that in act one Romeo is mooning over somebody named Rosaline, and when he starts in with Juliet everyone assumes he still talking about yesterday's girl. He is, in other words, an impetuous child. Threatening suicide is his answer to every problem, much as (accurately, it turns out) doomsaying is Juliet's response to every drama. Meanwhile, Capulet comes off as an affable oaf until he reams out Tybalt for street fighting; even then we give him the benefit of the doubt. Tybalt's a jerk, after all. But when he unleashes his fury on Juliet--"Hang thee, young baggage!"--we are shocked and appalled.
A reader can never get comfortable here; the play twists and turns and screams along at a furious pace, never giving anything time to sink in. But this, ultimately, is the source of its greatness. It's ugly and mean and mesmerizing, and surprisingly radical in purpose and method.
One group member compared it to the Divine Comedy--in that case of that famously blasphemous poem, its instant popularity became, in his words, "a cyst" that the Church had to grow around. What better way to defuse "Romeo and Juliet"'s power, another group member responded, than to force every high school student to read it? In my high school, we even watched the quite racy 1968 Franco Zeffirelli movie of it, ensuring our innoculation against the bonds between violence and sex.
On second thought, maybe that didn't work so well, after all.
Showing posts with label shakespeare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shakespeare. Show all posts
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Monday, May 12, 2008
Titus Andronicus
Yeah, you know the one. The one where everybody gets their limbs cut off. The one where the scheming Tamora gets her dead sons served to her at a banquent, in the form of a pie.
The CW on this play is that it's among Shakespeare's worst, and it's true that it's no Lear. But it has several things going for it, some of them unexpected. Among the expected things: it's fast-paced, a quick read, and very likely a lot of fun to stage. In addition, its dramatic arcs are many and brief: you reach for the candy, you eat the candy. What the thing is about is not really the point--indeed, at first it seems as though it's going to be another succession drama, and before the first act (possibly the work of George Peele, says The Oxford Shakespeare) is through, it's turned into a revenge free-for-all. Its pleasures are not subtle ones.
But the surprises. Among them is getting to see Titus as a kind of proto-Lear or proto-Hamlet. He goes mad (though not quite mad enough for Tamora's dumbass plan to work), he experiences doubt. He's a warrior gone to seed, a hot-tempered military grunt who has no sense of strategy. You know, like McCain. He doesn't get much good poetry, but he has his moments, and I can see how a good actor, informed by Shakespeare's later plays, could get some decent milage out of the guy.
The character who does get the good poetry is Aaron, the moor. He represents, surprise surprise, the very embodiment of evil; we are still a ways off from Othello (or, as villainy goes, even Iago, for that matter). But he speaks with great nobility and integrity, and without all the asinine mush-mouthed verbosity of, say, Marcus, who, when he sees that his neice is drooling blood, goes on for ten lines or so about how cool it looks.
No, Aaron is a small, brilliant creation. He sires Tamora's bastard child; when she gives birth, she sends it to Aaron via a nurse, who tells him to kill it. Instead, he kills the nurse. At the end of the scene, he carries off the baby, saying:
It's worth noting that the baby's almost the only one alive at the end--they even kill the clown.
The great unanswered question that we posed in the hardcore book group about this play is: how on earth did it come to exist? It's clearly Shakespeare's, but it's utterly nuts, and unlike anything else in the oeurve. Personally, I think the guy was just fucking around. He probably wrote the thing in a weekend--or tried to, and ended up getting distracted by the unexpected depth he was bringing to the characters. Not too much depth, mind you--but enough so that he filed it all away for future plays. It's gross, and fascinating.
The CW on this play is that it's among Shakespeare's worst, and it's true that it's no Lear. But it has several things going for it, some of them unexpected. Among the expected things: it's fast-paced, a quick read, and very likely a lot of fun to stage. In addition, its dramatic arcs are many and brief: you reach for the candy, you eat the candy. What the thing is about is not really the point--indeed, at first it seems as though it's going to be another succession drama, and before the first act (possibly the work of George Peele, says The Oxford Shakespeare) is through, it's turned into a revenge free-for-all. Its pleasures are not subtle ones.
But the surprises. Among them is getting to see Titus as a kind of proto-Lear or proto-Hamlet. He goes mad (though not quite mad enough for Tamora's dumbass plan to work), he experiences doubt. He's a warrior gone to seed, a hot-tempered military grunt who has no sense of strategy. You know, like McCain. He doesn't get much good poetry, but he has his moments, and I can see how a good actor, informed by Shakespeare's later plays, could get some decent milage out of the guy.
The character who does get the good poetry is Aaron, the moor. He represents, surprise surprise, the very embodiment of evil; we are still a ways off from Othello (or, as villainy goes, even Iago, for that matter). But he speaks with great nobility and integrity, and without all the asinine mush-mouthed verbosity of, say, Marcus, who, when he sees that his neice is drooling blood, goes on for ten lines or so about how cool it looks.
No, Aaron is a small, brilliant creation. He sires Tamora's bastard child; when she gives birth, she sends it to Aaron via a nurse, who tells him to kill it. Instead, he kills the nurse. At the end of the scene, he carries off the baby, saying:
Come on, you thick-lipped slave, I'll bear you hence,
For it is you that puts us to our shifts.
I'll make you feed on berries and on roots,
And fat on curds and whey, and suck the goat,
And cabin in a cave, and bring you up
To be a warrior and command a camp.
It's worth noting that the baby's almost the only one alive at the end--they even kill the clown.
The great unanswered question that we posed in the hardcore book group about this play is: how on earth did it come to exist? It's clearly Shakespeare's, but it's utterly nuts, and unlike anything else in the oeurve. Personally, I think the guy was just fucking around. He probably wrote the thing in a weekend--or tried to, and ended up getting distracted by the unexpected depth he was bringing to the characters. Not too much depth, mind you--but enough so that he filed it all away for future plays. It's gross, and fascinating.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
M-M-M-My Aesthetic
As a teacher of writing, I think I am getting a bit of a reputation for riding one particular hobby horse--the one where I tell students over and over to simplify and clarify their prose, to use as few words as possible to get their point across. One grad student out and out accused me of being totally biased against any kind of "beautiful" or "lyrical" writing.
And given my rhetoric, she had a point. I am generally suspicious of excessive elaboration--it usually has to prove its usefulness to me before I can accept it. If I had to say I had a particular aesthetic, it would be that of simple language expressing complex ideas. By "simple" I don't mean intentionally reductive or minimalist--I just mean no more than is necessary.
I think the exemplar of this aesthetic is probably Shakespeare, whose Comedy of Errors I read yesterday, and discussed today with the book group. It's not a major play, but it is highly entertaining and extraordinarily clever (two sets of twins, separated at birth, endure an afternoon of being mistaken for one another). It's also extremely straightforward in its language--anyone can understand it--yet musical to the ear. Perhaps most importantly, it harbors a lot of darkness and fear: the highly implausible plot has the threat of a beheading hanging over it, and the characters immerse themselves in marital disharmony, mental illness, political intrigue, and Christian philosophy. (Doug, the book group's retired pastor, had a lot to say about the influence on the play of Paul's Letter to the Ephesians.) Shakespeare is like a magician, who uses clear, fluid motions to do incredible and mysterious things.
But the thing about your personal aesthetic is, there's always something lying in wait to contradict it. Ulysses is perhaps the antithesis of my aesthetic--it's sprawling, pretentious, confusing, and stylistically inconsistent; it is the product of a supremely arrogant mind without the slightest concern for the comfort of its audience, in total opposition to Shakespeare's egalitarian appeal. And it ends with a big, gooey, overwritten and underpunctuated flourish involving buttocks ("plump mellow yellow smellow melons," in case you haven't had the pleasure).
And yet, I think Ulysses is freaking awesome. I think about it all the time, and it has surely influenced my work. I regard it as one of my twenty or so favorite novels, if you could even call it one. What's up with that?
Frankly, I have no idea. I could mutter something to you about containing multitudes, but I won't even bother. When it comes to art, it is not possible to appreciate too many different things. You can't stand Schoenberg until some string quartet or other makes you cry. You find pork chops repulsive until finally somebody cooks them right. You tell yourself your whole life that you're not into brunettes until suddenly you're married to one. Like Stephen Dedalus on the beach, taste is protean, and is to be assumed unstable at all times, and it's a good thing, too, because this means the world will never run out of stuff for you to love.
And given my rhetoric, she had a point. I am generally suspicious of excessive elaboration--it usually has to prove its usefulness to me before I can accept it. If I had to say I had a particular aesthetic, it would be that of simple language expressing complex ideas. By "simple" I don't mean intentionally reductive or minimalist--I just mean no more than is necessary.
I think the exemplar of this aesthetic is probably Shakespeare, whose Comedy of Errors I read yesterday, and discussed today with the book group. It's not a major play, but it is highly entertaining and extraordinarily clever (two sets of twins, separated at birth, endure an afternoon of being mistaken for one another). It's also extremely straightforward in its language--anyone can understand it--yet musical to the ear. Perhaps most importantly, it harbors a lot of darkness and fear: the highly implausible plot has the threat of a beheading hanging over it, and the characters immerse themselves in marital disharmony, mental illness, political intrigue, and Christian philosophy. (Doug, the book group's retired pastor, had a lot to say about the influence on the play of Paul's Letter to the Ephesians.) Shakespeare is like a magician, who uses clear, fluid motions to do incredible and mysterious things.
But the thing about your personal aesthetic is, there's always something lying in wait to contradict it. Ulysses is perhaps the antithesis of my aesthetic--it's sprawling, pretentious, confusing, and stylistically inconsistent; it is the product of a supremely arrogant mind without the slightest concern for the comfort of its audience, in total opposition to Shakespeare's egalitarian appeal. And it ends with a big, gooey, overwritten and underpunctuated flourish involving buttocks ("plump mellow yellow smellow melons," in case you haven't had the pleasure).
And yet, I think Ulysses is freaking awesome. I think about it all the time, and it has surely influenced my work. I regard it as one of my twenty or so favorite novels, if you could even call it one. What's up with that?
Frankly, I have no idea. I could mutter something to you about containing multitudes, but I won't even bother. When it comes to art, it is not possible to appreciate too many different things. You can't stand Schoenberg until some string quartet or other makes you cry. You find pork chops repulsive until finally somebody cooks them right. You tell yourself your whole life that you're not into brunettes until suddenly you're married to one. Like Stephen Dedalus on the beach, taste is protean, and is to be assumed unstable at all times, and it's a good thing, too, because this means the world will never run out of stuff for you to love.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
The Taming of the Shrew
The heroic ploughing-through (with my hardcore book group) of the entirety of Shakespeare continues this weekend, with The Taming of the Shrew. Goodness me, this play is freaking insane. At times, it seems to exist solely as an exercise in identity-switching, elaborate costumery, and nuptial parody; at others it showcases the brilliance of the early Shakespeare, with all the attendant clever wordplay and witty banter. Mostly, though, it just seems like a mess. The bulk of it, as many of you will already know, is actually a play-within-a-play; the inner play is about two sisters, one shrewish and embittered, the other beautiful and mild; their father won't let the nice one get married until the nasty one does, and so a pack of suitors hatches a plot to make all this happen.
Plotwise, it's ridiculous on its face; the problem of the shrew's marriage is solved almost immediately, and the suitors' disguises and inventions are almost completely unnecessary (and ultimately seem to amount to nothing). Furthermore the outer play--the main action is all a performance being viewed by a common drunk whom some noblemen have dressed up in fly threads and convinced that he is a lord who's been having a bad dream for fifteen years--never resolves (except in a few non-Folio bits that might or might not have been written by Shakespeare).
And finally, those traditionalists who wish to cast Katherine's final speech as anything other than outright misogyny are fighting one hell of an uphill battle. It's pretty grim stuff, that, and I realized reading it that I had been secretly hoping for some kind of comic female empowerment or something. No such luck--the shrew is tamed, and tamed by brutal psychological abuse. Ha ha!!!
Nevertheless, the young Shakespeare was really on a tear. Anybody else would have made this mess unwatchable, methinks; Shakespeare manages to infuse every pointless scene with manic energy and terrific little flashes of character. It seems, two plays in, a worthwhile experiment to read all these in order (we're going by the Oxford order, which differs from some scholars'); it gives one a chance to watch Shakespeare develop as a regular writer, rather than be forced to pay homage to him, in the usual manner, as the father of English literature. So far, he's just a brash young man knocking out some clever plays. It is very exciting to imagine Hamlet and Lear preparing to be born.
Plotwise, it's ridiculous on its face; the problem of the shrew's marriage is solved almost immediately, and the suitors' disguises and inventions are almost completely unnecessary (and ultimately seem to amount to nothing). Furthermore the outer play--the main action is all a performance being viewed by a common drunk whom some noblemen have dressed up in fly threads and convinced that he is a lord who's been having a bad dream for fifteen years--never resolves (except in a few non-Folio bits that might or might not have been written by Shakespeare).
And finally, those traditionalists who wish to cast Katherine's final speech as anything other than outright misogyny are fighting one hell of an uphill battle. It's pretty grim stuff, that, and I realized reading it that I had been secretly hoping for some kind of comic female empowerment or something. No such luck--the shrew is tamed, and tamed by brutal psychological abuse. Ha ha!!!
Nevertheless, the young Shakespeare was really on a tear. Anybody else would have made this mess unwatchable, methinks; Shakespeare manages to infuse every pointless scene with manic energy and terrific little flashes of character. It seems, two plays in, a worthwhile experiment to read all these in order (we're going by the Oxford order, which differs from some scholars'); it gives one a chance to watch Shakespeare develop as a regular writer, rather than be forced to pay homage to him, in the usual manner, as the father of English literature. So far, he's just a brash young man knocking out some clever plays. It is very exciting to imagine Hamlet and Lear preparing to be born.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Readin' Shakespeare
Holy moly, is this our first post about Shakespeare? Where's our lit cred, for Pete's sake? Considering my first post was about Stephen King, I think we're overdue.
I believe I have only read Hamlet, Lear, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Tempest. That's it...until now. Because my book group has decided to read all thirty-six plays, in order (according, anyway, to Norton), over the next four years, and intersperse them with the sonnets, and a few contemporary writers, Jonson and Marlowe, specifically.
Loyal readers might recall that this book group had been slogging through Proust for some time, and while we enjoyed and are continuing to enjoy him, the experience is sometimes akin to serving a lifetime sentence in an extremely beautiful prison in which everyone is wearing fascinating hats. Shakespeare, on the other hand, is the precise opposite--he is a breath of fresh air, hilarious and cutting and far-ranging in scope.
That is not to say that the first of this project, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, is the most emblematic of those virtues. In many ways, it kind of stinks. A comic meditation on love and friendship (and, enigmatically, the idea of service), it's about two friends, Valentine and Proteus, who fall in love with two women, Silvia and Julia. Valentine is the more honorable of the two men, while Proteus is, well, protean, sneakily reinventing himself to suit the situation, lying to everyone he meets, and generally making a mess of things. Proteus is in love with Julia, you see, until he hears Valentine go on about Silvia, at which time he falls in love with Silvia, then betrays Valentine to her father in a ploy to separate the lovers. The play ends with Proteus actually attempting to rape Silvia--Valentine catches him in the act, denounces him, and, five lines later, forgives him for everything, and everybody agrees to get married.
Whaaa? No, it doesn't make any sense at all. But the play is interesting, not only because of the way the young Shakespeare grabs hold of the cliches of genre and bends them into all kinds of crazy shapes; not only because of some really very nice verse here and there; and not only because of the terrific clown Lance and his urinating dog Crab--but because it's really about two men awkwardly expressing their intense love for each other through the unfortunate medium of a couple of women. Not that it's homoerotic--although Shakespeare's famous bawdy punning is already evident throughout--but it does grapple, quite amusingly, with the notion of male friendship, and in what strange ways sex is brought to bear upon it.
If you read it, don't look for it to push the same buttons Lear does. Rather, think of it as an Elizabethan Superbad.
I believe I have only read Hamlet, Lear, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Tempest. That's it...until now. Because my book group has decided to read all thirty-six plays, in order (according, anyway, to Norton), over the next four years, and intersperse them with the sonnets, and a few contemporary writers, Jonson and Marlowe, specifically.
Loyal readers might recall that this book group had been slogging through Proust for some time, and while we enjoyed and are continuing to enjoy him, the experience is sometimes akin to serving a lifetime sentence in an extremely beautiful prison in which everyone is wearing fascinating hats. Shakespeare, on the other hand, is the precise opposite--he is a breath of fresh air, hilarious and cutting and far-ranging in scope.
That is not to say that the first of this project, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, is the most emblematic of those virtues. In many ways, it kind of stinks. A comic meditation on love and friendship (and, enigmatically, the idea of service), it's about two friends, Valentine and Proteus, who fall in love with two women, Silvia and Julia. Valentine is the more honorable of the two men, while Proteus is, well, protean, sneakily reinventing himself to suit the situation, lying to everyone he meets, and generally making a mess of things. Proteus is in love with Julia, you see, until he hears Valentine go on about Silvia, at which time he falls in love with Silvia, then betrays Valentine to her father in a ploy to separate the lovers. The play ends with Proteus actually attempting to rape Silvia--Valentine catches him in the act, denounces him, and, five lines later, forgives him for everything, and everybody agrees to get married.
Whaaa? No, it doesn't make any sense at all. But the play is interesting, not only because of the way the young Shakespeare grabs hold of the cliches of genre and bends them into all kinds of crazy shapes; not only because of some really very nice verse here and there; and not only because of the terrific clown Lance and his urinating dog Crab--but because it's really about two men awkwardly expressing their intense love for each other through the unfortunate medium of a couple of women. Not that it's homoerotic--although Shakespeare's famous bawdy punning is already evident throughout--but it does grapple, quite amusingly, with the notion of male friendship, and in what strange ways sex is brought to bear upon it.
If you read it, don't look for it to push the same buttons Lear does. Rather, think of it as an Elizabethan Superbad.
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