Five-Day Shakespeare

The last act devolves into abject groveling, because the Histories have caught up with the Present. Baby Elizabeth therefore gets a lot of praise. A lot. She wasn’t Queen when this play was written, but there’s a big speech at the end all about how

[…] when

The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,

Her ashes new create another heir

As great in admiration as herself,

So shall she leave her blessedness to one,

When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness,

As great in admiration as herself,

So shall she leave her blessedness to one,

When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness,

Who from the sacred ashes of her honour

Shall star-like rise as great in fame as she was,

As I suspected, reading the plays in historical order is making it easier to track everyone's relationship to each other. There is an excellent chance that this time I will come away remembering that it is Richard, Duke of York, House of Plantagenet, up against Henry of the House of Lancaster, and that Plantagenet goes with white roses and Lancaster with red.

And I enjoyed it when people started bringing up the way Henry IV seized the throne. Back then, it felt like the text more or less approved of Richard II being ousted, and then Henry V was widely beloved.but now even Henry VI is asiding to the audience about how thin his claim is. Suddenly I have opinions on British succession, I guess.

We’re back!

I had a bit of a break because I had to move from an apartment to a house, which naturally messed up all of my carefully honed routines. And I think I forgot to log this most recent reading of Henry V, so about that: I realized that I could read all of the French in that play. So Duolingo does eventually have an effect! But also, that means that I can be done with French. I’m switching to Japanese.

Anyway, Henry VI Part One still feels like several disconnected stories happening at once. There’s the slow loss of France, with the mighty unstoppable Talbot (who gets stopped pretty definitively) and Joan, whose name is either Pucelle or Puzel or “of Arc” or “of Aire” or presumably other names in other editions. There’s the squabbling about who gets to influence the young King. There’s Suffolk’s late-play plan to marry the King to a woman Suffolk loves, which comes out of nowhere and I still think was added to a stock play to fit it with Part Two. And there’s the origin of the Wars of the Roses, with the actual roses showing up. It doesn’t really hold together for me as a single story, but each part is enjoyable when it’s happening.

Let's talk about titles. Here's how the two Henry IV plays are titled in the Folio:

These seem like willfully unhelpful subtitles to me. "The First Part of Henry the Fourth with the Life and Death of HENRY Sirnamed HOT-SPURRE"? Sure, Hotspur is in it, but what about Prince Hal? And Falstaff? They're both much more prominent in the play, to the point where I would argue that what people remember about the play is Hal and Falstaff's relationship. You don't get much of Hotspur's life, really.

The second play is titled, "The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, Containing his Death: and the Coronation of King Henry the Fift." Hal gets into the subtitle of this one, and he's barely in the play! This one does have the tranference of power from Henry IV to Henry V, but again I feel that what people tend to take away from it is how Hal treats Falstaff at the end. And Falstaff's many speeches, as he spends almost the entire play out of Hal's orbit.

These weren't always the titles of these plays. The quarto text for the first one reads "The History of Henrie the Fourth; With the battle at Shrewsbury between the King and Lord Henry Percy, surnamed Henrie Hotspur of the North, With the humorous conceits of Sir John Falstaffe."

Similarly, the second part was called in the quarto (deep breath), "The Second part of Henrie the fourth, continuing to his death, and coronation of Henrie the fift. Wit the humours of Sir John Falstaffe, and swaggering Pistol."

I think both plays' subtitles should mention Falstaff, although I admit that doesn't do a lot to distinguish them from each other. But in my opinion, he is the star of the show in three different plays and should get at least some mention on the title pages. More than Pistol, anyway, who has like two scenes in the second part. I guess swaggering was very memorable?

I keep trying to divine Shakespeare's opinion of the monarchy, and I know it's dumb of me. Practically everyone alive in England at the time was a supporter of the basic concept of the monarchy. And even if he wasn't, it would have been politically unwise to write plays about how monarchies were bad.

And yet...Richard II is the story of a rightful king (Richard II) being deposed by a usurper (Bolingbroke/Henry IV). The text is fairly unambiguous on this point. But also, Richard is a pretty bad king. Very wishy-washy. And the implication, at least, is that Henry IV will be a better one. So what's the opinion of the play here? Richard says that because God made him King, God will preserve his reign, but that immediately does not happen.

So, forgetting the author, what's the play's opinion of the divine right of kings? Well, it appears to be of the opinion that normal lineal succession is correct, until it turns out someone too useless to be king, at which point anyone who can raise a big enough army gets to be king. Which...I guess, but it's not exactly a ringing endorsement of the system.

King John doesn't get a lot of respect. I mean the play, but I guess the actual dude doesn't either. Nobody likes him much.

I like the play, though. It's got The Bastard, who stirs up trouble constantly. At one point when King John (of England) and King Philip (of France) are outside the city of Angers (an English city that for dumb historical reasons is located in France), they want the citizens of Angers to throw their support behind either John or Arthur, who has a claim to the English throne. The citizens say that they support "The King of England," once the two armies decide who that actually is.

The Bastard's proposal is that the two armies cooperate to level the city, then fight to decide who gets to rule the rubble. Everyone seems on board with this obviously self-destructive plan, but then John sells out all of his claims in France for an alliance that lasts for maybe two scenes before he and Philip are at it again. What a nitwit.

My first time through the plays I was concentrating on understanding what was going on. You know, just trying to parse everything. This has freed me up to focus on the beauty of the language this time through.

Oxford says that Shakespeare may have written scenes four through seven, or possibly four through eight. They might be right. The writing is much fancier in those scenes.

The play itself is cheerfully tawdry. Arden's wife wants to get rid of him so she can be with this other guy, and they hire two scumbags named Black Will and Shakebag to kill him. Then a series of coincidences repeatedly save Arden from being murdered, and a lot of comedy ensues. I assume. I mean, I guess it could be played straight, but it seemed to me while reading it that these two fell down a lot, which is usually a sign of a comedy.

There are a couple of other accomplices, and eventually Arden does get murdered and everyone involved immediately gets caught and executed. It's based on a real story, which is fun, but the basic concept of somebody accidentally avoiding being murdered repeatedly probably predates this play.

I think this was pretty popular in its day (1591), although I can't find the source of that belief at the moment. It allegedly invented the genres of both "domestic tragedy" and "black comedy," depending on who you ask, so that's pretty impressive no matter who wrote it.

I enjoyed it, but it didn't really feel Shakespearean most of the time. Still, it's nice to check in on the other plays of the era.

If you dig at all into Sonnet scholarship, you will find people questioning its presentation as being mostly declarations of love for a man with a few declarations of love for a black woman.

The basic argument is that we only think that because of the order the Sonnets are presented in, which creates a false narrative. Only a few of the sonnets actually mention that they're devoted to a man. I don't buy it, because the narrative as presented is so strong. Am I being asked to believe that the printer had a handful of poems and cunningly assembled them to create a narrative that isn't there? Man, judging by the First Folio, the concept of organizing things on purpose would not occur to anyone for hundreds of years.

There are also some people who argue that we can't assume that the sonnets represent the legitimate point of view of William Shakespeare.

First of all, he started his dedication to "The Rape of Lucrece" with, "the love I dedicate to your lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety," so it's not like he isn't on record declaring his love for a man.

But also, what about Sonnet 136? After two poems full of puns on the word "will," he closes with

And then thou lovest me for my name is Will

I submit that if we were not meant to interpret these first-person poems as being from the point of view of William Shakespeare, that line probably wouldn't be in there.

Anyway, I loved reading these. They're great.

Well, as advertised, it's mostly about Tarquin raping Lucrece. Fairly uncomfortable reading, Mr. Shakespeare!

On June 23 1592, the theatres of London closed because of the Plague, and did not open again until August 1594. While they were closed, William Shakespeare wrote two long narrative poems: “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece.” They were hugely successful and got reprinted a ton. Shakespeare was primarily famous as a poet during his life, and that reputation was set by these two poems, which nobody ever talks about today. It’s all plays first, sonnets thereafter, and narrative poems forgotten. People say that his poetic successes explain why Comedy of Errors has so much rhyming in it.

Anyway, I read Venus and Adonis. It was pleasant soft-core smut.

It was dedicated to (and therefore written at the patronage of?) Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. He’s sometimes identified as the “fair youth” from the sonnets, but as I have not yet read them, I couldn’t possibly comment.

I will say that Wriothesley sponsored the poem that introduced the word “dildo” to the English language, and it did so in explicit terms. This dude was just commissioning poets to write porn for him. He was 19 or 20 and looked like this:

I like the relationship between the titular kinsmen. They start out completely devoted to each other:

PALAMON I do not think it possible out friendship Should ever leave us ARCITES Till our death it cannot And after death our spirits shall be led To those that love eternally.

So naturally they immediately clap eyes on Emilia and both fall madly in love with each other. They spend the rest of the play vowing to kill each other, but other than that they're still on pretty good terms. That's a funny premise!

And...that's the last Shakespeare play! He apparently contributed to Arden of Faversham, so I'll have to go back and pick that up at some point, but for now I think it's probably time to get into the poetry.

They say that this play is only half-Shakespeare and had its name changed to fill out the History section in the First Folio. I buy it. The presumed Fletcher stuff isn’t bad, it doesn’t offend my eyes, but it’s not, you know, Shakespearean.

It ends with the soppiest speech ever in praise of the baby Elizabeth, who of course had somewhat recently completed a long reign as England’s monarch. It felt more propagandistic than even Henry V, and that’s saying something.

I don't have any Great Thoughts at the moment, so here are some Small Thoughts.

People in Shakespeare plays always assume that shipwrecks are fatal, even if they themselves have just survived a shipwreck.

People talk about the Aristotelian Unities (well, some people do), and The Tempest does conform to the Unity of Place (it's all on the island...except for the ship scene) and Unity of Time (the action of the play takes about as long to watch as it does to happen). But it doesn't conform to the Unity of Action, because in addition to the romance plot there's the issue of Prospero taking revenge on those who have wronged him (although he chooses not to in the end) and also Caliban. Also, Shakespeare clearly didn't care about the Unities for most of his career, and they're not even Aristotelian. They're based on mistranslations into Italian in the fifteenth century. In conclusion, people talk too much about the Aristotelian Unities. The people that talk about them at all, I mean.

I know somebody that used to play a character named "Caliban" in this Vampire LARP I used to do, and it is very distracting.

Well, after I complained about The Winter's Tale skipping the revelation scene in favor of covering that in dialogue, I got Cymbeline. It's absolutely full of trickery, and it all gets unwound in Act V. It takes forever. At one point, Jupiter descends from the heavens on an eagle and we're still nowhere near the resolution.

I did like the way the "Romans" were sometimes Ancient Romans and sometimes Shakespeare-era Italians named "Giacomo".

Okay, I admit it: this play exists in a weird mish-mash of genres.

For the first three acts, it's strictly a tragedy, in which King Leontes goes batshit insane with jealousy based on the flimsiest of pretexts and tries to kill his childhood friend King Polixenes, his wife Hermione, his newborn daughter, and probably his son if his son hadn't conveniently died of grief or something offstage.

Then in Act IV, it's suddenly a cheerful pastoral comedy livened up by a cheerful pickpocket named Autolycus (reverse Xena shoutout!) and easy dramatic irony where the two children of the Kings talk about how they want to get married, Oh if only she weren't the daughter of a lowly shepherd etc. etc. Then Polixenes ruins everything at the end of the act, and it seems like we're back to the King-based tragedy.

The resolution of all of this takes place offstage and is related in dialogue. That seems like a very unusual decision, but on the other hand everyone knows how it's going to go, right? Obviously Leontes will be shown the Maguffin Box that proves that Perdita is his daughter and Polixenes will approve the marriage and so on. I feel like the audience will still feel at least vaguely cheated out of the promised resolution if they don't actually see it happen. Instead, some Gentlemen tell Autolycus how well it was acted. But it wasn't!

Very odd.

And then Hermione either comes back to life or we find out she was alive the whole time. Also odd.

The header images I've been using are from the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive. One thing about Shakespeare is that there's literal centuries of stuff about him, and some of it is available on the Internet. In this case, it's an archive of, as you can tell from the name of the site, illustrations from Victorian editions of Shakespeare.

Okay, so Coriolanus. Yet again, I found myself enjoying a play most people don't seem to like. If Coriolanus has a tragic flaw that leads to his downfall, I don't think it's exactly "pride." I think it's "being a huge jerk at all times."

At one point, when he's been refused Consulship by the people for the fairly good reason that he didn't seem to want it and refused to ask them for their approval, he's going to the two Tribunes. He's counseled to be mild. He says over and over again that he will be mild. Then he gets to the meeting and immediately starts shouting at them. I think this guy is hilarious.

He's got two modes: being good at being a general and being terrible at being a politician, and both of them involve shouting at people he considers lesser than him. Which is everyone.

I want to say what an odd play this is. But I just watched Poor Things, and the standards of weirdness have really changed over the past 400 years.

What stood out to me as I read Pericles was that the author (or authors, as I buy the argument that the first two acts were by someone other than Shakespeare) is pushing against the limitations of the form. The stages of the day had minimal set dressing and costuming, right? That's why in Julius Caesar, there's a reference to a doublet. So when the scene moves, it has to be conveyed in dialogue or through a stage convention like "Everyone holding up torches means that it's night."

But Pericles takes fourteen years to play out. Pericles (the man, not the play) goes all over the place, getting into multiple shipwrecks and so on. So the way they have to convey where the next scene is is by having a narrator character (Gower) just come out and say:

We left him on the sea. We there him lost, Whence, driven before the winds, he is arrived Here where his daughter dwells, and on this coast Suppose him now at anchor. The city strived God Neptune's annual feast to keep, from whence Lysimachus our Tyrian ship espies, His banners sable, trimmed with rich expense; And to him in his barge with fervour hies. In your supposing once more put your sight; Of heavy Pericles, think this his barque, Where what is done in action, more if might Shall be discovered. Please you sit and hark.

See, because they weren't yet making the stage actually look like a ship with banners sable and so forth, they had to essentially have the voiceover explain what the audience should be seeing. This is after Gower has covered a lot of the plot that also wouldn't fit on stage.

Earlier, it's even more direct:

GOWER Patience then, And think you now are all in Mytilene.

Shakespeare just wants a caption to appear on screen, telling people where they are. Sadly for him, the technology won't be invented for quite some time. And I guess the audiences weren't ready for lines like "Well, here we are in Myteline" every other scene. It's a very sweeping story, and I don't think it quite fits into the strictures of Jacobean theatre.

Also, about those shipwrecks...Shakespeare sure does love shipwrecks, huh? Pericles survives two in this play, and in one we have the classic bit where people are separated and both assume the other is dead until they miraculously reunite in the fifth act. Already saw that in both The Comedy of Errors AND Twelfth Night! And I haven't even reached The Tempest yet.

I guess by my metric this is a Tragedy, since the play is named after a character in it. And Pericles goes through an awful lot of hardships, but he does end up okay at the end.

Finally, I would like to say that if you are sleeping with your daughter (like Antiochus at the beginning of the play) and making suitors answer riddles for the chance to woo her...maybe don't make the riddle be so transparently about the fact that you're sleeping with your daughter. That was bound to blow up in his face eventually.