Life is a Dream

Just finished a verse translation of the classic by Calderon.

A fine rehash of the lessons of Sophocles and Somerset Maugham, or even Giraudoux, until, at the very end, it refuses so unchristian a view.

And the ending is also otherwise as unsatisfactory as anything you could find in Shakespeare.

Good poetry by Gregary J. Racz.

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.

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.

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.

So it's impossible, now? Well, not much of a loss. I guess.

MAGA Brats Defend Blackface, So That's Where The US Is Today

Is that really what the MAGA kid was talking about?

He seems to be referring to kids painting their faces different colors at sporting events, using white (actual white, not white "flesh color", as it used to be called), black, or blue face paint.

Much as people have been known at soccer games to face-paint the Union Jack onto themselves, or red white and blue stripes, or other colors representing other countries or even players.

So, no, not blackface, not really.

Just black face paint on a white face.

And while we're on the subject, when people talk about Idris Elba playing James Bond they ask the question why Bond has to be white.

They don't ask the question how a black actor can play a white character.

White actors used to play black characters in blackface, which was in legitimate theater just very heavy makeup on every inch of exposed skin making the skin appear as black as you please.

Examples include Laurence Olivier playing Othello in one great film, and the Mahdi in another (Khartoum).

White actors made similar cosmetic adjustments to their appearances while playing Indians - a whole bunch of white actors in The Plainsman and Drums Along the Mohawk.

And likewise when playing East Asians.

Warner Oland playing Charlie Chan, for example, and some other fellow playing Mister Moto, two Asian private eyes who were always much smarter and more decent than any of the white guys in the room.

But that wasn't about race, anyway, but just the usual the private eye is smarter than the cop thing, a convention older than Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Lestrade.

But anyway a white actor can't do that now, and so far as I know there was never a similar stage convention in the United States to signal audiences that a non-white actor was playing a white character.

Did white actors in Elizabethan England use blackface? I don't know.

As I understand it, in Japan, Japanese actors used to use something like whiteface to play white characters.

But that convention might have been abandoned.

Anyway, the result, it appears, is that there is no conventional visual cue to inform otherwise ignorant audiences that an actor of race x is playing a character of differing race y.

And not every character can all that readily be of just any race.

Consider Othello. Or Aaron of Titus Andronicus.

Both recently played brilliantly by black actors, of necessity.

But no loss, really.

We are long past the days when a casting director might plausibly say to himself the best available actor to play a tremendous black character is a famously brilliant white guy.

By the way, women have played men, and men women, using cross dressing and heavy makeup.

Don't recall if that nowadays raises a fuss, though the practise seems to continue.

Doesn't seem to.

But surely it is no more necessary than using white guys in blackface to play Othello?

So I guess something is lost, really, with the loss of black face.

Artistic freedom for the artists.

And the related innocence, for audiences and critics.

What should be condemned and have been lost was not whites using blackface, but whites using blackface for racist parodies and scorn.

Update.

As for the smug look on that kid Sandmann's face, if you were a 17 year old kid in his position maybe your expression wouldn't be winning, either.

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.

L'Illusion Comique

Beautiful verse, not always alexandrines.

A play within a play within the play.

The innermost is confined to Act Five, within the second play within a play, also confined to Act Five.

The first play within the play runs from Act Two to Act Four.

Both the first and second recount adventures of the same people, but the second is rather a sequel, picking them up two years after those of the first.

Within that second those people are actors and perform the innermost play.

Corneille ends with the magician Alcandre's paen to theater and Richelieu.

Fool me once . . .

Cloris explains to Melite why she has not taken back Philandre.

Melite to Cloris: But he dumped you for me. Who can blame him?

Cloris to Melite: And for that I laugh at him and his pleas to take him back.

Act V, Melite, Pierre Corneille.

Summer and Smoke

Illustrating the point that arresting theater about sex can leave you scratching your head, mentally grasping for vanishing meaning.

Yes, Tennessee Williams.

Ditto, Orpheus Descending. 

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.