Yeah, they're pretty gay

Picked up a pb copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets, which I have not read since my sophomore year in college more than half a century ago.

Read the first few this morning at Riverside Park, where I had parked under a tree to keep the car from roasting me alive.

Can't beat the elegance and facility of language of his poetry.

The hatred of Caius Martius

Coriolanus.

Interestingly and well done.

A splendid soldier of Rome, Caius Martius defeats the Volsci at Corioles and earns the title Coriolanus.

His friends seek to make him Consul and the senate is all agog, but he loathes the plebs who claim "the people are the city", and they know it. Sent by his mother and the city's leaders to gain their suffrage he is easily provoked into revealing his burning hatred and scorn for them all. He is banished by them from the city.

Consumed with even greater loathing and proving the plebs right, out of hate he goes over to the Volsci and offers to lead them on to crush Rome. Their leader Aufidius accepts. He leads the Volsci toward Rome.

Rome panics and sends his erstwhile friends to persuade him to stop, but he won't. His mother, wife, and son come to beg and he refuses. His mother, furious, rages at him for his betrayal of his city, his friends, and of everyone who loves him. He relents and agrees to make peace between Rome and the Volsci.

At a ceremony in Rome, the Roman consul signs the peace deal for Rome and Cauis Martius, the traitor, the enemy of his homeland and his own family, signs for the Volsci.

But Aufidius is enraged at his betrayal of him and his city when faced by the tears of his mother, wife, and child and, when he returns to the Volsci from Rome, denies him even his title "Coriolanus", awarded, after all, by Rome for his earlier defeat of himself and his people.

Caius now vents his rage and contempt at Aufidius, his soldiers, and his state and is killed for it. His hatred has at last killed him.

The play is not about politics, intrinsically, but about hate.

It is about politics only extrinsically, so far as politics is how the principals, and chiefly Caius Martius, live out their hate.

So far as politics is made to be about hate.

Gad. Missed this, just yesterday.

Shakespeare Day 2020: Dame Judi Dench reads from Richard II

This week marks William Shakespeare's birthday and one month since the UK entered into lockdown to help fight the spread of coronavirus.

Shakespeare, who was born in 1564, endured a life chequered by outbreaks of plague. 

It is believed Shakespeare wrote some of his most well known plays, including King Lear, during a period of lockdown when his theatre was closed.

To mark the playwright's birthday, which is also Shakespeare Day, some of Britain’s most famous Shakespearean actors, including Dame Judi Dench, read from an excerpt of Richard II.

Well, that was an afternoon

Proteus:

"O, how this spring of love resembleth

The uncertain glory of an April day;

Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,

And by and by a cloud takes all away."

The Two Gentlemen of Verona (I, iii, 84-87)

A few lines from the end of Act I we get the passage that suggests April is the month to read this very short play. So I did. Today.

The poetry is wonderful, the language supple, beautiful, and fluent, and the thing is stuffed with contests and sallies of wit from start to finish.

To the point of tedium, actually.

There is no action to speak of and the plot, such as it is, doesn’t begin until the top of Act III.

Between Acts II and III I went for a walk at the Bridgeville upper mall, the one with the Longhorn Steak House, the LA Fitness, and the Big Lots whose main entrance is across Washington Road from an Arby’s my late wife used to like.

Just wanted to walk around a different parking lot.

Afterwards, went for an extended drive before going home.

70 degrees F and beautiful, it was, in the burbs of Pittsburgh.

Anyway, finished the play in not much more than two hours or so and had supper, too, after that.

And I must say I agree with Harold Bloom the plot and main characters make this play too slight and silly to even be absurd, morally as well as otherwise.

It is what it is and not everything in Shakespeare is really much good.

Oh, racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny, too.

But those three are everywhere in Shakespeare.

More shallow than a sidewalk puddle, this play.

Can't beat him for beauty of language

Proteus:

"O, how this spring of love resembleth

The uncertain glory of an April day;

Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,

And by and by a cloud takes all away."

The Two Gentlemen of Verona (I, iii, 84-87)

The Ides of March

Yesterday was that.

So of course I read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, finishing just a few minutes ago.

Take that, coronavirus.

We are all of us always rushing toward death, anyway.

So far, so good.

Hopkins at 82

I didn't expect it, but his Amazon Lear was remarkable.

A while back he made a success of Titus Andronicus.

Henry's incognito turn among his troops the eve of Agincourt

He rejects responsibility for the deaths of his own soldiers fighting under compulsion his war for his gain and whines about the loneliness and awesome responsibility of monarchs.

He says slaves and peasants have it better than the kings who keep them safe.

Act 4, scene 1.

Henry V.

Harfleur

Henry demands the town surrender, threatening else it will be looted and destroyed, the women and girls delivered up to rape, all the people to be killed including the old, the infirm, the infants, and the town itself to be destroyed utterly.

A king to be proud of, eh?

Reading Henry V

The argument for war in Henry V

The Archbishop of Canterbury advises Henry he is rightful king of France under feudal law.

Then he and other clerics and nobles urge war, not because it would serve the interests of the English people, nation, or state, much less the French people, nation, or state, but because it would serve the glory and thirst for power and wealth of the King and his own feudal vassals.

And vindicate feudal law, thus affirming the unquestioned legitimacy of same.

Which is far from denying national feeling enters the matter.

Perhaps anachronistically.

That is for the ordinary soldiery who have really nothing to gain and can only lose by participating in this war.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is for them.

What a line

"A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it."

Samuel Johnson in his Preface to Shakespeare alludes to the Bard's Antony and Cleopatra, and to Antony's content.

What love.

Update.

Just as I do not expect all real people to think, feel, and act as I would in like circumstances, I neither expect nor demand that of characters in a play.

Come to that, characters in any play are never so monotonous as to think, feel, and act always all alike.

On that point, Johnson is just silly.

Launce and Crab

The most notable things in Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Supposedly his first play, why is the verse so much better than in allegedly later plays?

But it is a nothing play.

What fills a theater today?

Comic book movies or other action films.

Or porn.

What filled theaters in the 60s?

Tennessee Williams, Conrad, Shakespeare, Albee.

Or musicals like My Fair Lady.

Reading Mrs. Dalloway.

67° F in Our Town

Proteus:

O, how this spring of love resembleth
The uncertain glory of an April day,
Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,
And by and by a cloud takes all away!

Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act 1, Scene 3, ll. 389 - 392.

How lovely is the spring!

Flowers and dogwoods and magnolias bloom, and tiny leaves are on the lilacs.

After a very mild winter, longer days and more warmth are welcome, nonetheless.

The origin of celebrity culture

Viola:

Orsino! I have heard my father name him.
He was a bachelor then.

Captain:

And is so now, or was so very late;
For but a month ago I went from hence,
And then t'was fresh in murmur - as, you know,
What great ones do the less will prattle of -
That he did seek the love of fair Olivia.

I, 2, ll 28-34.

Twelfth Night, Shakespeare

A figure with the virtue of surprise

Orsino:

O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she purged the air of pestilence.
That instant was I turned into a hart,
And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,
E'er since pursue me.

Act I, Scene 1, lines 18-22.

Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare

So many passages in this play have become Bartlett's, figuratively if not literally.

That this book was still recommended in my high school years by English teachers so utterly dates my youth to the pre-computer, pre-Internet years.

What's that?

Romeo, banished, seems to suppose Juliet will not or cannot go with him.

Why?

Reading R&J

Always full of surprises, our Shakespeare.

In Act II, scene 4, Mercutio complains that Romeo, the night before, gave his friends the slip.

In the same scene, Romeo speaks of Mercutio as one who loves to hear himself talk.

The nurse speaks of a fool's paradise.

Her cooperation in the secret marriage, by the way, is astonishing.

But then the secret marriage is a literary device to diminish offense to the censor, whether official or in the heart of the audience.

Caught!

"Come, we burn daylight, ho!"

Mercutio, Act I, scene 4, line 45, Romeo and Juliet.

In case you thought that was an expression invented by cowboys.

The same scene,  lines 115 thru 122.

Is Shakespeare a fatalist?

Is Romeo?

Is it God who has the steerage of Romeo's course?

Teenage boys, armed, are bloody-minded fools.

Consider, for just one example, Tybalt in Act I, scene 5, who so furiously longs to kill Romeo.

As for the blast of love at first sight in the same scene, see Stendhal.

Or maybe Schopenhauer.

Zeffirelli made it work in 1968.

Can anything teach so well as this the absurd vacuity of exclusive pursuit of self-interest?

As to the scoffers, Act II, scene 1, line 1.

"He jests at scars, that never felt a wound."

Romeo, a propos of nothing,  at Juliet's balcony.

Only an intellectual could be this stupid

The idea that romantic love is an invention of the West, of Western literature, or of late medieval Western literature, and hence so is anything to do with it including lovers' suicides, is so astonishingly obtuse that only a very smart idiot could believe it.

And droves of such idiots could believe it.

De Rougemont.

Interesting read, though.

Reading Romeo and Juliet for the umpteenth time.