neglecting shakespeare.

Last night I failed to post a blog on Shakespeare. Rather than fulfilling my student obligations, I chose to see/hear Michael Ondaatje read at the Salt Lake City Library. Although this was completely unrelated to Shakespeare, I do feel like it aided in my life-long learning, and I dragged my husband with me, and although he has never read Ondaatje's work, last night prompted him to do so. I plan on buying him Anna's Shadow, from which Ondaatje read from, and I know my hubs will absolutely love it.
Anyway, once again, although I don't feel like Ondaatje and Shakespeare have much in common other than being beautiful poets and writers, I think that what I've learned from this class, as far as social learning and life-long learning go, I was able to implement those techniques into an event that turned out to mean more to just me, as I initially thought my husband would think it was a bore, but because I shared a social learning event with my husband, he is expanding his interests in literature beyond the Beats, and was able to really enjoy the experience. And being able to share an author that I admire and respect with my husband was a wonderful experience in itself.
And maybe, if I keep thinking about it, I will find some common occurrences between these two authors.

the tempest!

So yesterday I noticed that Julie Taymor's The Tempest was playing at the Broadway in Salt Lake, so my husband took me to see it, and it was incredible. Again, incredible.
The movie followed the play to script, except for when Prospera (Helen Mirren) told Miranda how they came to be on the island, they had to add a story so that there was a justifiable reason behind Prospero being Prospera, a woman. But the screenwriters were able to make that bit of dialog sound Shakespearean, so it wasn't as distracting, but still...you knew it wasn't part of the original.
And the best part of the whole movie had to be the spectacle scenes with Ariel. There were many interesting things they did with that character, and I was blown away with the visual effects. At some points in the play, Ariel was shown with a woman's breasts, which was interesting considering how ambiguous a character Ariel has been throughout history.
My husband, who isn't normally a Shakespeare film fan, loved this film. So, if he loved it, maybe you could too.

random acts of shakespeare.

As I stated in a post a few weeks ago, I want to summarize my contact with Shakespeare through the week. I'll try to make these random Shakespeare posts over the weekends. And now, I'll begin.

One. My husband and I watched Titus, and although I've never read the play, I can without a doubt say that this has to be the most brutal and tragic of all Shakespeare plays. Although there was the visual elements that aided in making the drama more extreme, I tried to focus mostly on the language and the story so that I can make the claim that Titus Andronicus is darker than any Shakespearean tragedy I've ever read. Other than that, I thought it was a very interesting film with a lot of interesting visual elements. I would be interested in reading this play at some future date too. The film really sparked my interest in what seems to be a very heavy play.

Two. Yesterday I accompanied my husband and my parents to see BYU's experimental theater's Much Ado About Nothing. I thought it was very entertaining, and the audience seemed to really be enjoying all the bantering too. One thing that my husband pointed out was that this production of the play focused more on Hero and Claudio's relationship, which is not what I would call the highlight of the entire play, so that was interesting. Something that I was impressed with was the renditions of the actual songs from the play. That was great hearing "Sigh no more lady" in 40s style music. Fun stuff. Overall we all enjoyed the play, and I thought it was worth it to see a student's version of one of Shakespeare's great comedies.

And these, ladies and gentlemen, are some random acts of Shakespeare.

sketchy hamlet.

Earlier on in the semester, I started doing sketches of what I was visualizing in my mind while reading Shakespeare plays. Dr. Burton told me I should post my sketches and drawings for any of you who would care to view them!

So, here they are. Tell me what you think, and what you would do differently. I'm also thinking that for the end of the semester I'll do one really detailed watercolor of something Shakespearean, so any ideas you have for that are welcome!

"I have heard / The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn, / Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat / Awake the god of day, and at his warning, /  Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air, / Th'extravagant and erring spirit hies / To his confine"
Horatio. Act 1, Scene 1

"O wretched state, O bosom black as death, / O limed soul that, struggling to be free, / Art more engaged!
 Help, angels! Make assay. / Bow, stubborn knees, and hear with strings of steel, /
Be soft as sinews of the newborn babe! / All may be well."
King. Scene 3, Act 3.

"See what a grace was seated on his brow: / Hyperion's curls, the front of Jove himself, / An eye like Mars to threaten and command, / A station like the herald Mercury / New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill-- / A combination and a form indeed /  Where every god did seem to set his seal / To give the world assurance of a man."
Hamlet. Act 3, Scene 4.

shakespeare through the week.

Even though I've decided on a focus for research for the remaining of the semester, I thought I would still do a bit of Shakespeare randomness on the weekends; sort of a culmination of Shakespearean oddities of any sort I find during the week. This week I only came across two items.

One. While searching the Shakespeare section of the HBLL, I came across a dissertation (at least I'd like to think it to be) on "Shakespear:" How embarrassing, right?

Two. I read Psycho yesterday for my Gothic literature and film class, and I found a happy note from Mr. Bates:

Norman finished shaving and washed his hands again. He'd noticed this compulsion in himself, particularly during the past week. Guilt feelings. A regular Lady Macbeth. Shakespeare had known a lot about psychology. Norman wondered if he had known other things too. There was the ghost of Hamlet's father, for example (Bloch, 94-95).

Well Norman, you were right about one thing at least...Shakespeare did know about ALL sorts of things!

musings on lear.

My mom has always mentioned to me how much she loves King Lear, so after reading the play, thinking about it, and watching a film adaptation on it, I wanted to get her interpretations of Lear. So here is a brief interview!

King Lear is a pretty heavy text. Do you have any suggestions for first time readers?

Yeah, I think the best suggestion is to have children and enter your senior years. It’s amazing how much more that life experience in those particular areas affects your reading of the play, and you have much greater sympathy with him as a character and with the situations that he’s finding himself in and with this progressive decent into an apparent madness. But you start to wonder if really the world around him is mad.

So when was the first time you read King Lear?

I think the very first time I tried to read it was after I did a production of Macbeth under the direction of my fifth grade teacher and I pulled out a large volume of the complete works of William Shakespeare that we had somewhere in the house and tried to go straight through it and remembered feeling totally lost, that somehow this was like the Bible; it was one of those things that you had to read, so I tried to plow through it but it didn’t mean much. And then I read it as an undergraduate, then as a graduate. I had a class in San Diego and had a teacher who was very big on formalist criticism and we read it very thoroughly, and by that time I had children and life experience, so it was a very different kind of thing that when I had read it as an undergraduate, young student.

So what were the different impressions you had reading it as an undergrad as opposed to when you were a little bit older, reading it as a grad student? What did you take differently from the text?

I think as an undergrad it was rather confusing to me to keep things straight, or to understand this idea of appearances, and the metaphor of the clothing and the nakedness, and it just all seemed like a contrived thing that this man was getting worked up over nothing, I guess there wasn’t the pathos in it that I felt when I read it as an older adult, and when I read it and really went through some of the major themes, I was much more sympathetic to Lear as a character, and that his motivations for doing things, even when they are not completely understood, but at least the outward symptoms of what would seem to be his motivations, started having much more relevance and meaning for me.

What do you think are the basic themes of Lear?

Well, you know it’s easy with Shakespeare to just say the same trite things of parental relationships, or growing old, or loss of control and power, or feeling like your losing those, but those are really so many of the things of our lives. And so they take on layered nuances, you know to see children quarreling about things, which every parent hates to see their children contending for things or resenting each other, that’s just very hurtful as a parent. And then also for someone with that kind of power, it doesn’t matter whatever your little domain is, whether it is around your home, or at work, or relationships with other people, that it’s very threatening to a person’s identity to start sensing power shifts and that somehow you’re being dismissed; that your role, your identity are being challenged. So that was something that really touched me, but also this idea of someone who had been a well-respected, and again a powerful individual, but the appearance or manifesting the appearance of things going out of control, and so manifesting, or exhibiting some of these characteristics are being interpreted by others simply as madness, but to know that there is so much else going on. And the relationship with the fool, that sometimes that inner voice that’s trying to get you to behave, or act, or perceive something a certain way, really is soul-stirring, is troubling, is just so very poignant with Lear that it kind of brings together this idea of family, of growing old, of personal hurt, and not quite knowing how to deal with change.

Do you think that Lear is one of the more relatable plays of Shakespeare? That people can take it into their own lives and relate it to their own experiences?

I think if they choose to. If you have any desire to sympathize with Lear and you don’t just put it off as something too grand, too big, but you find that common element that you might relate to. I think it is difficult because there are so many layers, the metaphors are this range from very complex to kind of simple, overt, but I think that it is definitely one that’s worth exploring, and when people get afraid of taking it on, I think it’s because they’ve had some preconceived notion of it being difficult. I actually loved the fact that I had this teacher who was very much formalist take us through it because seeing those pieces and then stepping back away from that into my own life experience made it one of the most richly rewarding, and if I can say, without being trite, easily understood because it does reflect so many of those things that have become part of my life.

I, like you, was very sympathetic to Lear, although I don’t have children yet, but do you think that there are those who read in to the play being unsympathetic to Lear, and just see him as a mad man? And if so, why would they take that sort of view?

Sure, because he’s not exactly likeable. I mean, you get a sense that his history has been one that has been full of a power struggle, this ascent, that the people around him are responding to. So through their response you kind of get a sense of a man who was probably not easily likeable, and I think that’s entirely believable. That he’s not this person that you want to identify with, because in many ways he doesn’t drive you to be want to be nobler or greater, but I think that’s the very thing that being able to get over that and get some insight. It’s interesting that reading this book, “What the Dog Saw” by Malcom Gladwell, to consider  that things are not just puzzles to be solved; there’s not just one bit of information that you need when you’re studying a Shakespearean play, they are mysteries, there are so many levels and layers, and if you look at them just as puzzles, well, yes, Lear does things that I don’t like, that I really can’t be sympathetic with, but it goes back to those broader, maybe even universal themes, that if you’re willing to take that chance, or give the play a chance, you may not find many things about Lear that you like, but there certainly may be things that you identify with.

Have you read any other version of King Lear?

I have read Faerie Queen, but it’s been a long time. I actually read it the same semester that I was reading Lear, and it’s been long enough that I don’t actually recall anything like that. But the Lear story shows up in all kinds of ways. In fact I do remember reading Death of a Salesman, and talking about the sons and this salesman as being someone that you kind of want to be sympathetic with, but again you see that are you just being sympathetic because you start identifying with him. And yeah, the sons had been done wrong, but I’m trying to think of anything else specifically. The Lear idea does come to mind a lot, when you see how other artists have incorporated that idea of filial contention, or growing old, or even when films show patients, even now Alzheimer’s patients, or those descending into madness, I think they’re all drawing on a Learesque theme or character.

I even thought about Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth.

Yeah, and you know a lot of fairy tales and things, this idea of the child wanting the throne, or the sons being sent out on their own, and how they respond to that. So I think that any time you see that you kind of wonder how much of that is within this collective imagination.

Good. Anything else you would like to add?

Yeah, Lear, the whole play to me, seems very gray. If you were to ask for a metaphor, and I’ve been, in my work, trying to come up with an identifiable metaphor in working with an exhibition on a work of art or something, I’m trying to think if I were to do something with Lear, it’s just everything about it is gray, from the color of the skin, from the interaction, from the gray hair, from the stripping of the clothes,  and a kind of a sallow body, to a gray, lifeless court relationship and family relationship, and it’s interesting to think about that. And yet I have always loved gray, windy days, and so, for me, there’s a bit of romanticism, I guess, in that. But there’s also something that’s very powerful, that’s not just black or white, its somewhere in the middle. 

the act of decay.

I live in Salt Lake, my mom lives in Salt Lake. She works on campus, and I go to school on campus (imagine that). So we carpool back and forth every day. We get a lot of talking done in those commuting hours, and the other night as we were headed back north, I read an essay out loud to her from last year's Criterion. It's titled "Something Rotten: Hamlet's Onto-Ecology." We were able to discuss several elements of Hamlet with each other as they came up in the essay. The essay focused largely on the body and the existence of the soul, and how human beings are a part from other creatures because we know and can ponder on our own existence. We sorted through that philosophy a little, and then we went off on another tangent about the conspiracy that Shakespeare was a closet Catholic in the very Protestant England. If you read Hamlet that way, as Shakespeare being a Catholic, there is a lot of underlying proof, mostly in respects to purgatory and the salvation of the soul.
Very interesting stuff.
The essay also focused largely on the theme of decay in Hamlet. Because of the death of his father, Hamlet was undoubtedly cornered by thinking of decay, and he mentions so frequently the matter of bodies lying in the earth becoming rotten and decomposed. After reading this mentioned essay on onto-ecology, I read more of Hamlet, and in act four, scene three when Hamlet is being questioned on where he put the body of Polonius, Hamlet tells his uncle that Polonius is "at supper...Not where he eats, but where 'a eaten." Then he goes on to say, "A man may fish with the worm that hath eat / of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that / worm." This quote right here illustrates the cycle of decay, and that once our souls separate our bodies, our bodies become sustenance to maintain other forms of life.
Anyway, I'm glad I read the ontology essay before finishing Hamlet so I was able to read in to the theme of decay and death.
After all, something was indeed rotten in Denmark.