http://www.shakespeareteacher.com/blog/archives/476 Well, ShakespeareTeacher has officially impressed me.  I don’t think I even got to see Shakespeare until 9th grade, and even then it was all Taming of the Shrew / Julius Caesar / Romeo and Juliet.  He’s got a class not only doing Cymbeline, but filming an entire talk show about it – including an alternate ending, and a commercial for a Cymbeline video game!  Wow.  Most people you meet who know anything about Shakespeare will still never know, sometimes never have even heard of, Cymbeline. Video included at the link, although I wish the sound was better.  I have to crank it up to max to hear the individual students, but then the overwhelming noise of the applause blows my eardrums out.  But that’s pretty standard for a no frills auditorium shoot, can’t really fault him (or the kids) for that.

When I speak of the opening to Romeo and Juliet I tend to jump right into the entrance of the Montagues, and the subsequent thumb biting.  The opening lines to me have always been simple word play intended to do little more than calm the audience down and let them know the play’s starting.  I get that they are punning off of each other, and if it’s a competition, it seems like Gregory wins (the person who goes second in such a contest usually does).  So, what is “carry coals” supposed to mean, and why is it important for Sampson to say it?  It sounds roughly like “We’re nobody’s bitches”, pardon my language.  But that’s what it sounds like, like some young kid strutting around with nobody to bully so he tells his friend “Hey, we don’t take no crap from no one,” like his friend needs to be told that. Well, then we’d be colliers – but what’s that mean? “If we be in choler we’ll draw” seems straightforward enough — piss me off (choler==anger), and I’ll draw my sword. “Draw your neck out of the collar” — keep out of trouble, stay out of the hangman’s noose / guillotine?  Would such a reference be accurate for Shakespeare, or is that a miss? “I strike quickly, being moved.”  – Sampson gives up on the punning there, apparently, and starts over with more of the “I don’t take crap from nobody” stuff. Gregory plays up on the passive voice – “But thou art not quickly moved to strike” sounds suspiciously like “You’re too chicken to take the first swing.” “A dog of the house of Montague moves me” — (thanks for the Montague reference!) “To move is to stir, to be valiant is to stand, therefore if thou art moved, thou runn’st away”  – does anybody else get the feeling that Gregory is not evenly matched in this battle of wits? … and then it gets into the whole “maidenhead” discussion.  I could keep going but there seems a good place to break.  I’m mostly curious about those first two lines (and, well, whether I’ve grossly misinterpreted any of the others).

Here’s how I describe an outstanding new restaurant to people:  The food tastes so good that after that first bite, before you’ve even finished chewing it, while you can still taste it, and you turn to the person next to you, grab her by the shoulder, and wordlessly stare at her, wide-eyed, where if you had your mouth to speak the words would come out something like, “Oh….my…..god…..”  Words won’t do justice to the sensory experience, so the best you can hope for is something more … extrasensory? You know what I’m talking about? You ever get that rush with Shakespeare?  Sometimes I get blindsided by it. Yesterday, as I mentioned in an earlier post, we were discussing Macbeth.  The line came up, “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes” and I said to my coworker, “You know, if you give it a second, that’s just a damned scary line.  That’s like something Lovecraftian.  Conjures up this mysterious image of a dark shape on the horizon, you don’t know what it is, but you know it’s coming, and it scares the living bejesus out of you.” Same type of thing.  Words just don’t quite cut it.  I know what I was trying to say, I even had the image in my head, I just couldn’t capture it.

Talking about Macbeth today, my 25yr old coworker told me that the only play he really remembers well from school is Hamlet. “Maybe I’m just going through my cranky geek phase,” say I, “But Hamlet has just lost its luster for me.  There comes a time when you study it so much and you’ve analyzed every word, it’s just so hard to appreciate the brilliance anymore.  It’s hard to argue that it is perfection when you know for a fact that Shakespeare wrote at least 3 different versions of something.  Which one is better?  Why?  Did he just change it at will, and we only have those few copies?” I wonder if that’s true for the real hardcore Shakespeare academics, or if they simply take it to a different level.   I remember thinking during Rosenbaum’s Shakespeare War how often he commented on questions that were impossible to answer, but the pursuit of those answers anyway.  As an engineer that hurts my brain.  If I know a question to be unanswerable, then dwelling on it would make me depressed.  And if we basically say, “We don’t know which version is ‘more Shakespearean’ and never will”, that does not motivate me to hunt for the answer, it makes me sad that the answer does not exist. Anybody know what I’m talking about?  I think I’m more into Lear lately not just because I’m the father of daughters, but also because it is relatively new ground to me.  I haven’t analyzed it into the ground yet.

Funny exchange at work the other day.  Not technically Shakespeare related, but it could just as easily have been:
“You’re a better man than I am.”

“By the living god that made me?”

“…”

“Kipling?  Gunga Din?”

“I recognize it, yes, you just caught me off guard.”

“I remember that bit, but I can’t remember how it starts….though I’ve batted and I’ve brayed you?  By the living god that made you, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.”

“Sounds familiar, but you’re way beyond me.”

[Google google google]  “Ah!  Though I’ve belted you and flayed you…”

“That makes more sense.”

“You know, I’m happy that I had that wrong, because if I’d seriously managed to pull a frickin Gunga Din reference out of thin air, and done so accurately, I would have been impossible to live with.”

“Yes, I can imagine that would be true.”