Thursday, February 04, 2021

these notes on Shakespeare

Olivia and Viola/Cesario

[Image source: https://www.alleytheatre.org/press/twelfth-night-photos . Photo by Lynn Lane. Elizabeth Bunch as Olivia and Kim Blanck as Viola in a 2018 Alley Theatre Production of Twelfth Night, directed by Jonathan Moscone, at the Hubbard Theater, Houston.]



I've got no particular excuse,  I'm certainly not a specialist, but I just love writing about Shakespeare. I realized that some people might like to have all the links together in one place, so here's a list that I'll keep up to date. It's a relief to discover that there's still a lot of plays I haven't written about. I still have Twelfth Night ahead of me!


1. On individual plays and poems:

[I'm listing Shakespeare's works in approximately chronological sequence, but I'm not being too strict about it.  For instance, in the first tetralogy I place Henry VI Part 1 first, even though I think it was written last. Oh yes, and "Shakespeare" sometimes means "Shakespeare and Others".]

The Rape of Lucrece
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2018/04/towards-collatia.html
Sonnet 1
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2018/06/but-as-riper.html
Sonnet 29
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2020/10/like-to-lark.html
Sonnet 81
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2014/01/william-shakespeare-sonnet-81.html
Titus Andronicus
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2015/11/william-shakespeare-and-george-peele.html
Love's Labour's Lost
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2014/01/william-shakespeare-loves-labours-lost.html
King John
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2014/02/william-shakespeare-king-john-1595.html
Romeo and Juliet
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2014/01/william-shakespeare-romeo-and-juliet-c.html
The Merchant of Venice
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2014/03/william-shakespeare-merchant-of-venice.html
Much Ado About Nothing
Henry V
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2025/04/alexander-great.html
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Troilus and Cressida
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2021/04/a-choice-of-pandars.html
Othello
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2016/07/othello-and-king-lear.html
Measure For Measure
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2014/03/william-shakespeare-measure-for-measure.html
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-moral-cleanup-in-measure-for-measure.html
King Lear
and Nahum Tate's History of King Lear: 
Pericles, Prince of Tyre


2. On more general Shakespeare topics:


3. On what others have written about Shakespeare:


4. On other dramatists of Shakespeare's time:

[But I'm including Dryden, because of the close connection of All For Love with Antony and Cleopatra.]

George Peele: David and Bethsabe
Thomas Middleton: A Chaste Maid in Cheapside
Thomas Middleton: Women Beware Women
Thomas Middleton and William Rowley: The Changeling


5. On other poets of Shakespeare's time:

Sir John Davies












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Friday, May 26, 2017

John Donne at Lincoln's Inn again.
















[Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%27s_Inn]






Donne's three Epithalamions are some of the most entertaining of his lesser-known poems. The one titled only "Epithalamion made at Lincolnes Inne" is a slightly uncomfortable joyride from its very first stanza:


The Sun-beames in the East are spred,
Leave, leave, faire Bride, your solitary bed,
No more shall you returne to it alone,
It nourseth sadnesse, and your bodies print,
Like to a grave, the yielding downe doth dint;
You and your other you meet there anon;
Put forth, put forth that warme balme-breathing thigh,
Which when next time you in these sheets wil smother
There it must meet another,
Which never was, but must be, oft, more nigh;
Come glad from thence, goe gladder then you came,
To day put on perfection, and a womans name.


 We are guessing here, but I like the idea that this is one of Donne's very early poems, written when he was a student at Lincoln's Inn, probably not long after its obvious model, Spenser's Epithalamion, was published in 1595 (when Donne was 23). That guess is confirmed by the poem's presence in the Westmoreland manuscript.


(Donne may have already moved out of the Inn by this time. The unequivocal evidence for Donne's residence only takes us to late 1593, perhaps 1594. His close connection with Lincoln's Inn, however, persisted all through his life. He was appointed the Preacher of Lincoln's Inn in 1616, soon after his ordination.)


[Information from http://www.lincolnsinn.org.uk/images/word/Library/johndonne.pdf ]




It's further been speculated that the poem was not commissioned for any real-life wedding, but either referred to some obscure student high-jinks,  a burlesque marriage with students in drag, or was just a playful literary exercise. 


"Lincoln's Inn" in the title  isn't just a passing note about where the poem was written. In Stanza two the balm-thighed Bride is described as a wealthy City bride who brings a nice big bag of Angels along with her. In Stanza 3 the Bridegroom is said to be a strange hermaphrodite of study and play... i.e a student at Lincoln's Inn. Stanza 4 specifies the Temple church, though the "two-leav'd gates" may be a sexual reference (as per Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller) as much as to the gates of Babylon in Isaiah 45:1.


In further outrage, Donne manages to turn the unexceptionable wish that the bride and bridegroom will live long, into May the hungry maw of this church fatten on your parents before it devours you.. topping off the whole performance with a comparison in Stanza 8 of the bride


Like an appointed lamb, when tenderly
   The priest comes on his knees t'embowell her; ...


*


The thing is, for all of these infelicities and the uncertain occasion of the poem, there's still a freshness and joyousness about the poem. Donne's poetry somehow remains a sexy celebration of marriage at the same time as it contains these burlesque and satirical elements. Perhaps for Donne's age this was not a contradiction.


(Others have pointed out that Donne's Epithalamia have tended to be negatively judged by commentators who want to keep the image of heteronormal marriage free from any complications... thus Victorian disgust at the 26th December Epithalamion not just because the bride was a future assassinator but also homophobically because the groom had been one of James' "minions". Donne's celebration of love has seemed distasteful in this "tainted" context.)


Possibly there's a parallel here with Shakespeare's celebration... you might almost say his creation .... of Victorian ideals of heteronormal courtship, love and marriage -- within a theatrical medium where the actors were all male and the women were played by boys, and alongside his own sonnets which celebrate an idealized same-sex love.
























*


I can't make up my mind if the final line is a straightforward Alexandrine or if "-tion" is mean to be disyllabic, breaking the line into a chiasmic fourteener.  What do others think?


*




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Monday, March 27, 2017

The style at Lincoln's Inn

Sargent Cherry (Prunus sargentii) in Kingsmead Square, Bath (March 26, 2017)


To Mr R. W.

Kindly I envy thy song's perfection,
Built of all th' elements as our bodies are:
That little of earth that's in it, is a fair
Delicious garden where all sweets are sown.
In it is cherishing fire which dries in me
Grief which did drown me: and half quenched by it
Are satiric fires which urged me to have writ
In scorn of all: for now I admire thee.
And as air doth fulfil the hollowness
Of rotten walls, so it mine emptiness,
Where lost and mov'd it did beget this sound,
Which as a lame echo of thine doth rebound.
Oh I was dead, but since thy song new life did give,
I, recreated even by thy creature, live.


*


The young Donne's sonnet (rhyming abbacddceeffgg) already sounds like himself and no-one else. Weird to think that Donne might have written this in the year of Daniel's Delia and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. And in fact I do catch a faint hint of Shakespeare's sonnet-style in that final line, but of course that isn't what holds my attention.


I'm listening, instead, to the Donne style; for instance, the speed of transformation at the third line. The first two lines have promised an enumeration of the four traditional elements (earth, air, fire and water). Donne duly goes on to mention the first (earth), but even now, before the first item in his catalogue, he's begun to subvert this framework by parenthetically prefixing "earth" with "little of". Then fire and water get all mixed up with each other... (in fact water never even gets named, but is implicit in the word "quenched"). The air, finally,  arrives as an analogy, filling a cavity in a rotten wall, before its connection with Woodward's song is established.  (The sonnet depends on us tracking the word "it" like a flying tennis-ball across a court.)


So the promise of the second line is actually kept, but in a breakneck, vivid, lose-your-bearings kind of way that's far more interesting than we might have expected. The strange thing is that this excellence can't be satisfactorily described as artful, i.e. as a game of arrangement and variation, of symmetry with a difference. It's something more instinctive than that, a personal style, a kind of chat where the thought is racing ahead and often switches direction in mid-sentence.


Michelle O'Callaghan suggests that it was Donne's manuscript community of friends, the absence of print's public audience, that made his kind of writing possible.


It makes startling poetry, not only the smart turn of  "little of earth" but "fulfil", the "hollowness / Of rotten walls", "lame echo"...


*


In Donne's time the scheme of the four elements would have been valid and commonplace. (True understanding of elements, though given a theoretical push by Robert Boyle's corpuscularism in 1661, only really came along with Lavoisier in 1789.) Donne's demonstration of the four elements in his friend's song could be regarded as a fancy piece of pseudo-argument,  but there is a real question in it: How comes it that a poem, though just paper and ink, can affect us emotionally like a real person? A poem is not a body, but Donne's "demonstration" of the four elements in the poem does makes us wonder about what sort of amazing thing a poem is. How can it be fertile in sweets (flowers), how can it dry our tears and quench our rage, how can it breathe new life into us?






*

Rowland Woodward went up to Lincoln's Inn in 1591 at the age of 17.  John Donne (a year older than Woodward) joined him in May 1592. Along with others such as the "abysmal" satirist Everard Guilpin, they formed a coterie of wits who encouraged each other's writing. That's the context of Donne's epistles to "Mr R.W." They were seven years together at Lincoln's Inn and afterwards Donne and Woodward remained pals; for example, they crossed paths in Venice in 1608. By then Woodward was leading quite an adventurous life.  He was imprisoned by the Inquisition for spying in Milan, attacked by bandits in France and left for dead. But anyhow, the epistles to "Mr R.W." were written during those early Lincoln's Inn days, round about the mid 1590s. Like Donne's other poems of that period, it appears in the Westmoreland ms (f. 31) in Woodward's own handwriting (which is surprisingly easy to read).


http://digitaldonne.tamu.edu/DisplayText


In line 7, Woodward wrote "hate", instead of "have".  You can see how "hate" might seem to follow on naturally from "satiric fires" but the resulting sentence stubbornly refuses to make sense. So "have" it must be.

Sargent Cherry (Prunus sargentii) in Kingsmead Square, Bath (March 26, 2017)

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