Month: December 2013

My little Dave Matthews joke.  Because here’s Dave Matthews putting the “Come Away” song from Twelfth Night (Act 2, Scene 4) to music:

I found it hard to understand him, particularly in the beginning, so here’s the words:

Clown

Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
O, prepare it!
My part of death, no one so true
Did share it.
Not a flower, not a flower sweet
On my black coffin let there be strown;
Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown:
A thousand thousand sighs to save,
Lay me, O, where
Sad true lover never find my grave,
To weep there!

What do you think?   I thought it was slow and mumbly, myself.  But as I wrote on Twitter, it’s always a big deal to me when professional musicians go after Shakespeare.  David Gilmour’s rendition of Sonnet 18 changed my life.  If they can bring the audience for their music into my world?  It’s a win for everybody.  If music makes people understand and remember Shakespeare?  Yes please.

Spotted this question about nose painting on Reddit, but it’s not getting much conversation over there and I think it’s interesting.

The question is this: When the Porter in Macbeth says that drink provokes “nose-painting, sleep and urine,” what exactly is nose-painting?  The student in question assumed, as do many online resources that it refers to the idea that your nose turns red when you drink too much. His teacher apparently told him that it was more vulgar than that.

Well, off to Filthy Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s Bawdy I went.  Both list it as a euphemism for sex without going into any detail that I can find.

But here’s the thing.  Look at the context:

MACDUFF 

What three things does drink especially provoke? 

Porter 

Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and
urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes;
it provokes the desire, but it takes
away the performance: therefore, much drink
may be said to be an equivocator with lechery:
it makes him, and it mars him; it sets
him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him,
and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and
not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him
in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.

So his first joke was that drink makes you want to sleep, urinate, and … well, you know.  But then he starts calling it “lechery” and does the rest of the speech about how drink “takes away the performance”, and the more I read that, the more I realize that almost every word is a euphemism for something sexual.  “Stand to and not stand to” is particularly illustrative on dear Mr. Shakespeare’s part.

That doesn’t seem to flow.  “Drink provokes sex, sleep and urine.  Sex, it provokes and unprovokes…”  What?

“Drink makes your nose red, makes you sleepy, and makes you need to pee.  Sex?  Sex is funny when you’re drinking.  You want it, you just cant do it.”  Makes more sense to me.

I believe that Macbeth is the only place Shakespeare used nose-painting, so we can’t compare context elsewhere.  All of the online references I find suggest that it is the “your nose turns red” thing, not the sex thing.

What do you think?  Anybody got some more academic references, like an OED, where we can get something definitive?

While the most hardcore of Shakespeare geeks debates the merits of another Ethan Hawke version of Shakespeare (and whether the flame throwers were a good idea), I thought it might be a good opportunity to play catch up with the rest of the world who are scratching their heads and asking, “Cymbeline? Wotzat?” Well, brace yourself. This is not your Mama’s Shakespeare. (Your mother was a high school English teacher, right?)

1) Unless you study these things, you’ve almost certainly never heard of Cymbeline. IMDB shows only 5 filmed productions dating back all the way to 1913 (and counting this yet to be released one). In comparison, I stopped counting Hamlet productions at 30+, and that wasn’t even counting all the variations (Hamlet 2, Zombie Hamlet, and so on). Romeo and Juliet has even more. Many Shakespeare plays have become ingrained in our cultural subconscious to the point where we all recognize various Shakespeare references before we ever sit down to watch the show. You’ve almost certainly seen a balcony scene reference, or Hamlet talking to his skull, or Macbeth’s witches around their cauldron. You’ve almost certainly never seen any Cymbeline.

2) The only quote you’re likely to recognize will also probably make you cry. There’s no “To be or not to be” here, no light through yonder window breaking, no witches chanting around a bubbling cauldron. If you recognize anything that comes out of this play, chances are it is this funeral dirge:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. 

Fear no more the frown o’ the great;
Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke:
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust. 

Fear no more the lightning-flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan;
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust. 

No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renownéd be thy grave!

3) It’s not a tragedy, or a comedy, or a history. It’s true that Shakespeare plays had a certain formula you could rely on. Comedies end with a wedding (or, well, the promise of one), and the joke is that tragedies always end with everybody dead. Ok, fine it’s more complicated than that, but you get the idea. Cymbeline breaks all the rules. It’s listed in the First Folio as a tragedy, but hardly anybody dies, and rumor has it that the editors of the Folio may have never actually seen a performance of this one. There’s not really a single central “tragic hero” like you might expect to find. It has a happy ending, but everybody was already married. It’s arguably something of a history, because Cymbeline was a real king who ruled at the same time as another of Shakespeare’s favorites, Julius Caesar. And, like watching a production of Julius Caesar, you’re likely to come away from Cymbeline wondering, “Ok, now, wait, how much of that was actual history and how much did Shakespeare just make up?” In short it’s a little bit of everything, which leads us to …

4) Lazy sitcoms did not invent the “clip show” or “greatest hits,” lazy Elizabethan playwrights did. (Credit to Shakespeare geeks MagpieAndWhale and TheRoaringGirl for those expressions.) Shakespeare had his favorite characters and plot devices, and threw them all into the stew for this one. To borrow from theroaringgirl’s useful summary, “It has star-crossed lovers, missing princes, a manipulative wife, an aging king, a trusty servant, a villainous liar (whose name literally means “little Iago”), a “breeches part,” an idealized pastoral setting, war with Rome, getting lost in wales, a visit from the Gods, a soothsayer, songs, mistaken identity, a death-like sleep, and the most convoluted 5th act reveal ever written.” Orson Welles is credited with the quote, “Now we sit through Shakespeare to recognize the quotations.” If point #2 told us that there’s not going to be many quotations to recognize, the good news is that there’s probably going to be a whole lot of plot you’ll recognize from other plays.

5) Most critics over the centuries have hated it. Samuel Johnson did not want to “waste criticism” on its “unresisting imbecility”. George Bernard shaw called it “stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order.” Henry James offers, “The thing is a florid fairy-tale, of a construction so loose and unpropped that it can scarce be said to stand upright at all.” I bet Ethan Hawke and friends can’t wait for the latest crop of reviews to come out! (Credit to blog Ten Pages or More for these and more similar quotes.) None of this stops them from calling it “Shakespeare’s undiscovered masterpiece” in the trailer however.

6) It’s a pastoral comedy with a happy ending, done in the style of a flamethrower-wielding motorcycle gang. You did watch the trailer, right? I’m not making that up. As someone else noted, it’s like doing Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It with a motorcycle gang. And flamethrowers.

There’s your lesson in Cymbeline for the day. So – if you weren’t already planning to go see it (because hey, Shakespeare movie!), did I convince you?

P.S. – What do you think of the new font?  Too big?  I’m trying it out.