This Week's Reading Assignment

This week's assignment is a play I've never read and never seen performed: Troilus and Cressida. I don't know the characters, the plot or any of the text, so it's rather like discovering a new Shakespeare play in a trunk in Grandma's attic.

As always, I'll post my thoughts at noon next Sunday. Have a great week!

Discussion: Twelfth Night

The play: Twelfth Night: Or, What You Will

The plot tweet: Viola/Cesario loves Orsino but courts Olivia for him; social-climber Malvolio is mercilessly mocked; all ends well with reunion/marriage.

My favorite line:
"If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."

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After four centuries of Shakespearean scholarship, you'd think we could come to agreement on a few things -- for example, whether a play is any good. We have clear concensus about, for example, Hamlet (very good) and Merry Wives of Windsor (should have been eaten by Shakespeare's dog, if he had one). Not so with Twelfth Night:

"This is justly considered as one of the most delightful of Shakespeare's comedies. It is full of sweetness and pleasantry ... it has little satire, and no spleen." (William Hazlitt, 1817)

"Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare's unpleasant plays. It is not a comedy for schoolchildren." (W.H. Auden, 1946)

"Twelfth Night is surely the greatest of all Shakespeare's pure comedies ... (Malvolio) is wickedly funny and is a sublime satire upon the moralizing Ben Jonson." (Harold Bloom, 1998)

So, maybe the play is terrible, and maybe it's one of Shakespeare's greatest. Maybe it's all sweetness and light, and maybe it's a harsh satire of one of Shakespeare's greatest rivals.

One thing is certain: The play is a mash-up of the Bard's previous comedies. We have the vibrant wordplay of Love's Labour's Lost. We have a set of twins separated by shipwreck who turn up in the same town and cause confusion (Comedy of Errors). We have a cross-dressed heroine who educates/influences her beloved (As You Like It). We have a homoerotic character named Antonio who aids a friend at his own peril (Merchant of Venice). Malvolio inhabits the same "outsider" space as Jaques and Shylock. I could go on, but you get the point. There's hardly a character or plot point in this play that Shakespeare hadn't already used somewhere else.

I usually find Marjorie Garber's All of Shakespeare a bit of a slog, but she makes a point about Twelfth Night that is worth repeating. Consider first this stanza of Feste's song, which serves as the epilogue:

A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that's all one, our play is done,
And we'll strive to please you every day.

Now consider the song sung by Lear's fool in a tragedy written a few years later:

He that has and a tiny little wit,
With heigh-ho, the wind and the rain,
Must make content with his fortunes fit,
Though the rain it raineth every day.

Garber's commentary on this comparison:

... the growth of exclusion in these plays, the strength of the excluded characters, the disappearance of those marriage dances in which Renaissance poets imitated the harmony of the spheres, indeed, the remanding of the contracted marriages to a time and space outside or after the play, the emergence of the clear, plaintive voice of the fool -- all of these point toward a new phase in Shakespeare's dramatic development, a broader, more painful, but often a staggeringly beautiful and profound vision of humankind in the tragic universe.

The Shakespeare who wrote Twelfth Night was just months away from writing his darkest and most unsettling comedies, All's Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure. Then came Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. The central question, then, is not whether this play is good or bad, but what it tells us about Shakespeare's growing interest in the darker aspects of his art.

This Week's Reading Assignment

After our month-long "choose your own adventure" project with the sonnets, it's time to get back into the habit of weekly readings. For this week, let's do Twelfth Night. I haven't read it, and I've seen it performed only once, so I'm especially looking forward to this week's assignment.

As always, our discussion starts at noon next Sunday. Happy new year!

Discussion: The Sonnets

When W.H. Auden gave his famous lectures on Shakespeare, he said of the sonnets that no other work of literature had ever baffled scholars as much. I think most scholars would agree on that -- but not on anything else concerning the sonnets.

For example: When were the sonnets written? Did Shakespeare approve their publication? Does the order of the sonnets matter? Are the poems autobiographical? Is this evidence that Shakespeare was bisexual? Who were the fair youth and the dark lady? Does the autobiographical stuff even matter?

This is my first time reading the sonnets all the way through, and I'm definitely not prepared to answer any of those questions. I will say this: It is very hard not to read the sonnets as autobiographical. Shakespeare usually put his words in the mouths of his characters, but the sonnets seem to remove the intermediary ... unless the narrator is yet another of Shakespeare's characters. That's possible, but the sonnets feel intimate and personal in a way that the plays do not.

Most people know sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day") and sonnet 116 ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds"), which, incidentally, was sung at my wedding to the tune of "Danny Boy." But my favorite has always been sonnet 130:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head;
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

The editor of my edition of the sonnets calls this cruel and misogynistic, but to me it seems honest and playful.

On this read-through, I also discovered a new favorite, sonnet 28:

How can I then return in happy plight
That am debarred the benefit of rest?
When day's oppression is not eased by night,
But day by night and night by day oppressed,
And each, though enemies to either's reign,
Do in consent shake hands to torture me,
The one by toil, the other to complain
How far I toil, still farther off from thee.
I tell the day to please him, thou art bright,
And dost him grace, when clouds do blot the heaven;
so flatter I the swart-complexioned night,
When sparkling stars twire not thou gild'st the even;
But day doth daily draw my sorrows longer,
And night doth nightly make my grief's length seem stronger.

Because the sonnets feel so intimate and personal, it seems only right that each reader should have his own favorite -- one sonnet that touches him in a personal way. Which sonnet is "yours"? What sonnet did you discover, or re-discover, during this reading?

Discussion: The Sonnets, Part One

How is your sonnet reading going? One thing is certain: You're farther along than I am, or at the very least we're equal, because I haven't read a single one. I'm enjoying this "choose your own adventure" month of sonnets. It's perfect for procrastination, a skill at which I'm very accomplished.

Instead, I've been on a little Kurt Vonnegut kick, re-reading The Sirens of Titan, Breakfast of Champions, Cat's Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. (Vonnegut certainly hated his hometown of Indianapolis!) Today I'm reading Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, about hiking the Appalachian Trail.

What do those books have to do with Shakespeare? Absolutely nothing -- although Bryson has also written an excellent biography of Shakespeare. The sonnet reading is due Jan. 2, so we have plenty of time for holiday parties, frantic shopping and reading that has no relevance to this project. After all, January is a whole month from now. We have plenty of time. (I'll keep saying that until around midnight Jan. 1).

Extra, Extra: "Tempest" Movie Reviews

I can't see Julie Taymor's "The Tempest" when it opens today in limited release, because Indianapolis isn't on the short list. But the reviews are in, and they are disappointing. On the plus side, it makes me less frustrated about not seeing this film right away.

Here's a quick round-up of the reviews I've seen:

Marshall Fine at the Huffington Post: "Slow and grinding, Taymor's version of The Tempest would be dwarfed by any teapot she might decide to set it in."

Robert Beames at the Telegraph: "... time watching The Tempest is not wasted. Even if it is not quite the brave new world for Shakespeare at the cinema that it might have been."

A.O. Scott at the New York Times: "These ideas and others circulate through Ms. Taymor’s film, but rather than cohere into a compellingly new — or satisfyingly traditional — rendering of the play, they slosh around, generating glimmers of insight, slivers of feeling and spasms of sensation, as well as empty dazzle and frustration."

Deborah Young at the Hollywood Reporter: "Far less daring than (Taymor's) 1999 Titus, which took an electrifying, stylized approach of a lesser-known play, The Tempest in comparison looks disappointingly middle of the road."

Betsy Sharkey at the L.A. Times: "Julie Taymor, filmmaking savant of extraordinary vision and voice, suddenly and surprisingly folds. This is a tentative film and a disappointment ..."

On the other hand, Helen Mirren is getting great reviews for her performance as Prospera -- which is to be expected, considering Mirren's abilities. I will still see the movie when it opens here, but definitely with less anticipation than before.

Discussion and Reading Assignment

I read "The Phoenix and the Turtle" this week. So -- allegory of ideal love, turtle dove and phoenix, very sentimental and sweet, la la. "Either was the other's mine" is a lovely little description of selfless love.

So, that's all I really have to say about that.

If your house is like mine, the holidays are already starting to get crazy. So, we're going to do things a bit differently for December. From now through Jan. 2, we're going to focus on the sonnets. Take things at your own pace -- a few each day or all together in a frenzy on New Year's Day.

I've been looking for a handy way to divide up this reading, and the folks at Shakespeare Geek offered some great suggestions. Here is my favorite of the comments, from William Sutton, who runs the I Love Shakespeare blog (thanks, William!):

Read the first 17 as one batch. This is the “make another you” bunch.
Then from 18-35. This is the “getting to immortalize you” batch.
Then from 36-49. This is the “you cheating SOB” batch.
Then 50-76. This is the “take an Ovidian break” batch.
Then 77-90. This is the rival poet and “letting you go” batch.
Then 91-114. This is the “one last chance” batch.
Then 115-126. This is the “it’s over FYM” batch.
Then 127-136. This is the “getting to know the mistress” batch.
Then 137-152. This is the “see what a biatch you are” batch.
Finally 153+154. This is the “see, love is blind” batch.

This is a "choose your own adventure" couple of weeks for "Shakespeare in a Year," but I'll be doing the Sunday posts as usual. Happy holidays!