Let me see if I’ve got this straight. There’s a page in the playbook of Jonson’s Sejanus: His Fall containing two poems dedicated to Jonson. One, we apparently know, is by Hugh Holland. The other, the sonnet in question, is signed with the pseudonym Cygnus.
Swan? Is that you?
You know what cygnus means in Latin, right? It means swan.
You know what Ben Jonson called Shakespeare in the First Folio, too, I bet. You got it. Some feel that both must have been written by Holland. But is it possible that Cygnus is Shakespeare?
The sonnet is provided in the accompanying article. Thoughts? It feels a little stilted at times, which makes me lean toward “not Shakespeare,” but I’m hardly an academic at these things.
Still, it’s always exciting to think “maybe new Shakespaere content?” I’m always open to the possibility.
Soon I’m going to have the chance to do something I haven’t done in years. I’m going in to my son’s classroom to talk about Shakespeare. I used to do this all the time when my kids were in elementary school. But now I’ve got two off in college and he’s soon to follow them. I have no idea what I’ll do or say.
What I do know is that the class knows this, and my spies tell me that some of them immediately wanted to know about my site so they could cyberstalk me. I wish I’d anticipated that – the blog’s been a bit messy lately, for a number of reasons that I will not turn into excuses. I should do better.
That was a number of days ago at this point, so I expect that most of them got bored and forgot all about me.
But! Maybe I picked up some new followers. Maybe there are some other students in the class that are interested in the subject matter, maybe even as excited for the novelty of somebody like me coming in as speaker as I am about being said speaker. I remember high school. I remember being a nerd. I remember the joy of knowing things and the fear of showing it, lest ye be bullied. In fact, it’s part of my mission to do what I can to break that pattern. If something brings you joy, you shouldn’t be afraid to demonstrate it. I was almost twenty years out of high school before I figured that out.
So! For the secret nerds that are still reading, let’s have an easter egg:
Corambis
When I come to class, tell me that word and what its significance is to Shakespeare. I’ll have a prize for the first person to do so. (For the record, my son doesn’t know the answer, nor does he know I’m making this post. So there’ll be no cheating there.)
No comments on this post! No hints from regular readers!
I have been writing about Shakespeare on this site for literally my children’s entire lives. If you go back far enough you’ll find the sonnet I wrote for my daughter when she was born. Over the years whenever my love for my children crossed over with my love for Shakespeare, “geeklet stories” were born. The kids are off to college now so the precocious nature of the stories has waned quite a bit, but my desire to share them with the world never will.
Last week I’m driving my daughter home from college when she says, “Next week they’re showing Falstaff at school.”
“See it,” I say, barely letting her finish the sentence. “That’s the other name for Orson Welles’ Chimes At Midnight, arguably one of the best Shakespeare adaptations ever put to film. Just last week I was talking about it with a coworker who asked for recommendations about Shakespeare movies and I told him that one. The fun thing is that he’s not a Shakespeare fan, he’s a movie fan, so it’s a good test because when you like a Shakespeare movie because it’s a movie, without even knowing the Shakespeare, you’ve got something special. Absolutely make sure you get the opportunity to see it if they’re showing it.”
“Did he like it?”
“He loved it. Came back into the office raving about it. You kids have seen parts of it, it’s the one with that famous I know thee not, old man speech I’ve shown you. One of my favorite Shakespeare scenes of all time.”
While I was babbling she was looking at her phone, as teenagers tend to do when their parents talk. “It says here it’s by a guy named Verdi.”
Sad face. “Oh. That’s the opera. Entirely different thing, ignore everything I just said.”
I know it’s not “entirely” a different thing, it’s still about the same Shakespeare character, and I did explain that.
You never know where you’ll find some Shakespeare. I saw the trailer for the new Air movie about Nike, which prominently features people talking *about* Michael Jordan but no actual Michael Jordan. So off I went to IMDB, curious to see who would be playing him. I found it interesting that the actor in that role is listed seventh, behind the actor playing his father, Julius Tennon, who doesn’t even have a headshot. So I clicked to learn more about Julius Tennon and found …
Operation Othello is “a futuristic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello set in the world of an elite naval special forces unit.”
Oh? Tell me more!
Tennon has multiple acting credits dating back to the 1980s, not sure why he doesn’t have a headshot on file (there are plenty of photos). In fact, he’s got a production coming with Viola Davis, JuVee Productions, and this is their project. Debuting at Cannes in 2019 as a “VR series,” and I’m even more curious now about what that means:
“We believe Immersive Media is an integral part of the future of storytelling and presents a unique opportunity to bring a voice to the voiceless. As an ‘empathy machine,’ we’re excited to see how VR can allow viewers to be intimately present with powerful characters across the broad spectrum of humanity.”
“As an avid Shakespeare lover who has been lucky enough to witness and perform his profound words on stage,” Chieffo says, “I was inspired to present the original text in a way that is accessible and exhilarating to a modern audience.”
IMDB calls it a TV Movie. I’m wondering if they adapted it into something more traditional for wider release because the press release seems to imply it’s something more like a game. I don’t think we have a good name yet for immersive movies where you put on the headset and “experience” the story, but really the story is still the same no matter what you do.
I’m sure you know the news I’m talking about. The following is just stream of consciousness on the subject.
Can I see some ID, please?
There’s not a Gen-X AP English kid out there that didn’t see this film. It was always a good day when the teacher said you were going to watch a movie, but how often did they tell you ahead of time that this movie contained nudity?
In the 1980s, that’s what we had to work with – the 1968 Zeffirelli version of the movie, starring Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting (and Michael York as a badass Tybalt, let’s not forget him!) Let’s not forget it won some Oscars. It was a good movie. It just so happened to have a brief bit of nudity, and the naked people happened to be 16 years old. (How was that even possible? Well, it was filmed in Italy, for one. In the 1960s. Rules were different?)
Fast forward to the 90s and suddenly everybody got to watch the 1996 Romeo+Juliet with Leo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, and everything changed. The 1968 went back into the archives, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t recall it being all that big of a deal. We knew it existed. Some of us had seen it. So?
Here we are, fifty-something years later. The director, Franco Zeffirelli, died a few years ago. Guess what? Here come the stories. We didn’t want to do the nude scene. He lied to us. Could we please have fifty million dollars?
Oh, and did we mention that in 2021 she’s on record saying that she was broke? So, let’s see, built her whole career on the fame that this movie brought, now she needs money, and the guy she’s accusing is gone. Jackpot.
“Repackaging what is essentially pornography,” the article says. Have these people heard of the internet? Do we really think anybody’s wading through Shakespeare for a half-second glimpse of something that you could probably see at will by visiting a nude beach in Italy? Granted, it’s been a long, long time since I saw the scene in question (and given today’s world I’m not going to go looking for it) but in the time it would take you to fast-forward to it you could have googled stuff a thousand times worse.
By today’s standards, literally everything about this story would be unacceptable. No question. Hussey, like many child stars, has had a pretty terrible life coming out of this (mental health issues, abusive relationships, etc…) Pin that on the entire system, absolutely. There’s multiple generations of child actors that are right there with you. But to reach back fifty years, after decades of promoting both the accused (she worked with him again) and the movie (she’s spoken well of the production in the past), now you want money? I don’t think so. I hope this goes nowhere. This story, not anything about the original movie, gives Shakespeare a bad name.
Oh – for those that aren’t familiar with the term Streisand Effect, it refers to people who try to hide things on the Internet, or say “Nobody can see this!” Most of the people that hear that never saw it in the first place, never even knew about it, but now that you said that, they go hunt it down. Named for Barbara Streisand, who tried to suppress the California Coastal Records project from including pictures that showed her house, resulting in way more people seeing the pictures than ever would have if she’d said nothing.
I’m not saying that there are people out there who hear about a movie that includes a brief glimpse of a topless 16yr old and think, “Man, I gotta see that,” but, come on, this is the internet. Of course there are.
