It’s been an odd sort of year. Once upon a time I used to post multiple times a day. My average of several years was near 2posts/day at one point. Now it’s more like a few times a month. Life gets in the way. Social media has made it easier to simply like and retweet various stories quickly, instead of firing up a blog post to wrap them and send them back out into the world with my own “value add”. Every day I look at my backlogs of material to write about, books to review, stuff to giveaway, and wish that I could do nothing but Shakespeare full time.
Which makes this year especially troublesome for me because, as you may have noticed, it’s the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. So, as people tend to do because we like numbers with lots of zeroes in them, we’ve all been inundated with Shakespeare stories from every possible source and every possible angle for the last several months. Every day for months I’ve scanned my daily headlines, seen another project of massive scale and thought, “I wonder what I’ll do?”
Well, here we are, and I’ve taken the Cordelia option.
I thought about making some hipster jokes about how you my faithful Shakespeare geeks have been into Shakespeare since long before everybody else jumped on the bandwagon. But that’s not fair, because at the end of the day if all this hoop-de-doo makes new fans of some people, then I’m all for it. I’m not denying the latecomers.
Instead I like to think of what the Catholic priest wishes he could say to the standing room only congregation on Easter Sunday each year: “Welcome! Where’ve you been?”
Shakespeare makes life better. That was true yesterday, it’s true today, and it will be true tomorrow and another 400 years from now.
Absolutely, celebrate the man and his works on his birthday. Just don’t stop.
Author Jean Hegland knows how to pitch a Shakespeare geek. She told me that her latest novel, Still Time, was “about a Shakespeare scholar struggling with dementia who is trying to come to terms with his life even as his estranged daughter (an aspiring video game designer named Miranda) is attempting to reconcile with him.
I told her that the Lear/Prospero crossover was going to get me all misty-eyed even thinking about it. The whole “video game designer” thing is just a bonus for my computer programmer life 🙂
I’m not going to lie. This is a difficult book to read. It opens, for heaven’s sake, with a wife explaining to her husband why she has to put him in a nursing home. It opens with that. There’s not going to be any “happily ever after” here when you start like that.
Look, I’ve always said that Shakespeare means different things to you depending on where you are in life. The entirety of human emotion is, at one point or another, played out on Shakespeare’s stage. When we say he wrote the recipe for what it means to be human, he didn’t leave out any chapters.
There will come a time in everyone’s life when they have to experience the closing act. Maybe it’s for your parents, or your grandparents, or yourself. It’s never a fun topic to think about because, as I said, we know how it ends, and it’s not going to be happy. But there is oh so much Shakespeare to help us through it.
That is exactly what this novel wants to do. It strikes such a personal chord that I counted half a dozen moments (at least!) that come straight out of my life. But you have to take the good with the bad. When he complains of no longer being able to organize his thoughts clearly in his head, how brilliant large-scale theories come to him so frequently but yet he can’t seem to pull them together coherently when he attempts to write them down, I know exactly what he means and fear that it will only get worse. When he realizes that he’s forgotten the ending to King Lear, it is heartbreaking as I simultaneously imagine what that must be like while I pray that I never learn.
Structurally speaking, this is not the kind of book I usually read. One of the reasons that I love Shakespeare is that I believe in dialogue-driven character development. I could read an entire novel of nothing but people talking to each other as long as I didn’t lose track of the pronouns. This is a novel about the thoughts of a man alone in a nursing home, and I admit to skimming at times, waiting for a visitor to show up so people could start speaking out loud. There is a plot – we do learn about his estranged daughter and what’s going on in her life, all mapped against musings of the theme of forgiveness and second chances in Shakespeare’s late plays. But when you put one character who speaks in snippets of Shakespeare into a conversation with a character who actively denies them, there had better be some depth in that other character. I didn’t see it. Maybe that’s yet another personal chord, giving me a glimpse into a future where I don’t understand what is important in my children’s lives and why what is important to me is not important to them.
That’s perhaps the most compelling thing I can say about this book – not only does everything that happens map back to Shakespeare, but it maps back to me. Chances are, you’re going to feel the same way. Whenever people want to whine about the relevance of Shakespeare today, this is what we try to explain. Everybody gets older, everybody has regrets, everybody wishes for the chance for reconciliation and forgiveness. Shakespeare knew that. Jean Hegland knows that.
At the time of this writing I have not finished the book. I am honestly afraid of how it ends. I know that Winter’s Tale and Tempest manage to pull off a happy ending, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed!
Apparently “gender bending” Shakespeare is going to be Emma Rice’s thing. First she got us all talking about how Cymbeline should really be called Imogen, since she’s got most of the lines.
Now she wants to cast Helena as Helenus, a gay man.
Helena wasn’t exactly a role model for feminist ideals the way Shakespeare originally wrote her, what with that whole “use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me” thing. Now imagine just how homophobic this is going to make Demetrius look when there’s a man saying it? I suppose that they could also go with a more offensive stereotype and make some sort of sadomasochistic joke about it, too, just to throw that out there.
There’s also an obvious complication in that, for this to end up a happy ending, we need to decide whether this makes Demetrius gay as well? You can’t play him gay from the start because then he’d have no interest in marrying Hermia. Besies, since he’s the only one left under Oberon’s love potion, what exactly does that imply? (For more on this, check out Were The World Mine, which deals precisely with some of these issues.)
I don’t mind interesting new interpretation. I just wonder whether this lady is doing these things because she thinks they’re really good ideas, or if she’s just trying to see how many cages she can rattle.
Maybe next time she’ll set Merchant of Venice in Nazi Germany? That’d be a hoot, huh?
It turns out that not only can’t your average teenager tell the difference between Justin Bieber and William Shakespeare, they can’t tell the difference between William Shakespeare and Batman, either.
The Bieber thing is relatively new, and I find it relatively ridiculous. Everybody knows that the only person who could have written a timeless quote like, “And I was like baby, baby, baby oh!” is Edward de Vere.
The Batman thing, however, goes back to a Sporcle quiz that I think a lot of us have seen, since it’s been around since 2012. What’s giving that one some extra Google juice, however, is that the results of the quiz were analyzed by none other than Nate Silver’s site FiveThirtyEight, because apparently they got bored analyzing US political races. If you’ve never heard of them, they’re known for their mad statistical analysis skillz. So it’s interesting that they’d turn their machinery onto something as innocuous as an old Sporcle quiz.
The coolest thing to me is that Sporcle themselves sent me the latter link. I’ve been playing their stuff for years, and consider their site to be something of the grandfather of viral quizzes. I asked whether they accept submissions, so maybe we’ll get to generate some new Shakespeare quizzes of our own?
Any Marlowe fans in the audience? Take note! A new fictionalized account of Kit’s life is now available from Endeavor Press:
Christopher Marlowe: poet, playwright, lover, brawler, spy.
Protestant England is threatened by Catholic powers on the continent. Catholic conspirators plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth, and a planned invasion of England has the backing of Rome. Absolved of allegiance to the Queen, whom the Pope has excommunicated, papists in England are persecuted and priests who minister to them are publicly tortured and executed.
Sir Francis Walsingham, chief of the Queen’s secret service, maintains a spy network to monitor the activities of Catholics in England and on the continent. Many of his spies are students recruited at Cambridge, and Christopher Marlowe, known as Kit, is one of them.
Kit Marlowe’s first assignment is to infiltrate a conspiracy to assassinate the Queen. He wins the trust of the conspirators and is instrumental in exposing them, then witnesses their ghastly execution at Tyburn. Determined to give up the dirty business of spying, Kit returns to Cambridge
He acquires a patron, Tom Walsingham, cousin of Sir Francis, and begins his meteoric rise as a dramatist.
Through his rising reputation as a dramatist and his connections, Kit becomes a member of circles that include such prominent figures as Sir Walter Raleigh and the so-called School of Night. One evening he meets William Shakespeare and his dark mistress.
But while he enjoys the friendship of some powerful figures, his quick temper, barbed tongue and fearlessly open mind earn him the enmity of others, including someone who plots his assassination.
Horses of the Night is a magisterial work of historical fiction, vividly bringing to life both this turbulent period of history and the multi-faceted life of one of Britain’s most revered literary figures.
