When I heard that Tad Williams, author of the excellent “Otherland” scifi series, had written a Shakespeare book?  I went on the hunt.  It’s pretty much out of print so I had to hunt a little farther than usual, but I did manage to find it. The Tempest ends with Prospero and Miranda leaving the island, Ariel released from bondage, and Caliban…. what? Left alone to rule the island? How’s he feel about that? Is it what he wanted? Flash forward 20 years.  Prospero has passed away, Miranda is married with kids of her own.  And Caliban has at last escaped the island and shown up in her room to tell his side of the story. The premise, is pretty neat.  It makes me think of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and all that “who is really the monster here” stuff that comes along with listening to the monster tell his side of the story. Unfortunately the execution turns out incredibly boring.  The book is written in second person – told from Caliban to Miranda.  I’m not a big fan of that style, it’s jarring to me to keep reading lines like, “I see by your expression that you do remember the place I’m talking about.”  Argh. No, no I as the reader do not.  Don’t do that. I’m aware that I am reading a book about fictional characters, third person he-said/she-said is fine with me. Now take that style and tell 20 years of story (more, actually) from the point of view of a character who didn’t even know how to speak for the first half of it.  Caliban tells the story of how he and his mother arrived at the island, and how they survived.  The amount of story that Williams has to backfill, since Shakespeare gave us none of it, is pretty hefty.  How’d they get there? Much like Prospero she was kicked out of town and put on a boat to starve.  Why?  Because she was a witch, not to mention pregnant. Who was Caliban’s daddy? Doesn’t say.  Why did she not teach Caliban language herself? Townspeople burnt out her tongue before they shipped her off.  Ah. How, then, does Caliban know all the details of the story, if she was not able to tell him and she died before Prospero showed up?!  Turns out that Prospero knew all about her from before she was sent off to the island, and knew all about her and Setebos. Imagine if you could remember when you were 6 months old, before you knew how to talk.  Now imagine trying to explain what you were feeling.  Worse, imagine a hundred or so pages of that. That’s what Caliban’s story is like. Truthfully it’s just not for me. The overwhelming feature that keeps pulling me back to Shakespeare is the essence of what it means to be human that he puts into each character.  It’s hard enough to do that with Caliban, it’s not like in this day and age we get a lot of feral children introduced to society who come to regret it.   It dawns on me that there’s a certain irony in comparison to A Brave New World, where the “savage” is actually the wisest character of the bunch, and he spends most of his time quoting Shakespeare! Here you’ve got a Shakespeare original and somebody putting a book’s worth of non-Shakespeare words in his mouth.

http://www.365characters.net/ Somebody comes up to you and asks you to name a fictional character, for a project that they are doing.  Who do you pick?  Naturally I go skimming to see if anybody’s picked Shakespeare, and I see that the current entry (#255) is Ophelia. The project itself seems to be about artistic interpretation – a “portrait” a day. The concept of character is interesting, though.  At first I thought the artist wanted specific people (like, for example, Ophelia).  But paging through previous days I see generic ideas like “librarian” or “cook”. I flipped back to about 150 or so and did not see any other specific Shakespeare characters, but maybe somebody else in a different time zone (it’s late here and I’m sleepy!) can flip through the rest and see what other Shakespeare showed up.

How much of a Shakespeare geek am I? When I see a forum thread titled “Your favorite quote of all time?” I cruise through it looking for Shakespeare, even though in this particular case it’s very much a computer-geek board with little chance of Mr. Shakespeare showing up. http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/b3mo9/what_is_your_favorite_quote_of_all_time/ At the time, I count 3 Shakespeare – all from Hamlet, and yet all different quotes.  That’s kinda interesting.

Did you know that there’s actually two documented references to William Shakespeare’s marriage … to two different people?  Days before his recorded marriage to Anne Hathaway is another line, referring to Anne Whateley. Most frequently this is written off as clerical error or simple misspelling in a time when Mr. Shakespeare himself seems to never really write his name the same way twice. But what if Anne Whateley was a real person, Shakespeare’s true first love, and his marriage to her was unable to happen because he went and knocked up Anne Hathaway?  Could you get a book out of that premise? http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/120268-mistress-shakespeare-by-karen-harper/ Karen Harper did.  Better than just a planned first marriage that did not occur, she goes all Romeo and Juliet and has Will and Anne#1 marry in secret, but then he has to go and do the shotgun wedding thing with that other hussy.  I’m not sure, reading this review, whether Anne#1 ever takes issue with her man knocking up some other broad, or if she’s cool like that. I suppose it’s a quaint idea, but as for the reviewer’s suggestion that “Shakespeare buffs need something new to mull over, and Harper provides it,” I dunno about that.  I’m sure it makes a nice story, and we do all love to map “real” stories onto Shakespeare’s archetypes for maximum effect, but how realistic would a “secret” wedding have been, really?  From everything I’ve understood about the time period, documentation and doing such things by letter of the law was very important.  Didn’t they even need special permission of some sort to waive some requirements in order to make the wedding happen in a hurry?  If it was at all as easy as grabbing a priest and saying I Do, I think they would have done that first and filled out the paperwork later. But then, I’m no expert in the historical side of things like Ms. Harper, so maybe this sort of thing happened all the time?

http://www.shicho.net/38/ Just got an email from Ingrid, a fellow “tech geek with a love of literature” who wants to beef up her Shakespeare by doing a maddening one-play-a-day read through starting on March 1. She’s looking for folks who might be interested in reading along, in what I can only describe as something of a “speed book club”.  I can’t pull it off, I don’t have nearly the time or attention span to tackle such a thing, but I promised that I’d post her request. Anybody up for a month of Shakespeare?    She’s calling her project “38 Plays in 38 Days” and has a site up (linked) to track progress. Good luck!