http://nerdvana.freedomblogging.com/2009/08/03/doctor-who-star-brings-his-hamlet-to-pbs/25473/ There was a great deal of speculation about this deal, but apparently it’s official – they will be putting the David Tennant / Patrick Stewart Hamlet onto DVD, and PBS will showing it in 2010. Can’t wait! As I’ve mentioned, I don’t know much about Tennant but this seems like the best chance to learn. I’m fascinated by the number of times I’ve seen this mentioned from the Dr. Who perspective where people add almost parenthetically “Oh yeah, it has Patrick Stewart the Star Trek guy, too.” Those folks need to do their Shakespeare homework! 🙂
Review : So Long As Men Can Breathe, by Clinton Heylin
So long as men can breathe and eyes can see, people are going to be arguing about Shakespeare’s Sonnets. On this the 400th anniversary of their publication, Clinton Heylin’s book gives us a roadmap of how we got here, though there’s no reason to think that we’re any closer to the truth now than we were then. What surprised me most, although I suppose it shouldn’t have, is that Shakespeare is not in this – like, at all. For those that are unfamiliar with the history of the sonnets, they were published in 1609 by a man named Thomas Thorpe, and the question ever since has been, “Who’s Shakespeare to him, or he to Shakespeare?” We have no records, so we have to guess. Were they stolen? Heylin uses the expression “publisher/pirate” quite frequently, and many of the commentaries on publication use variations on the expression “came into possession,” whatever that means. So while other books on the sonnets will take the text and look at “What did Shakespeare mean by this?” Heylin’s book asks the question more like “Who printed it, in what sequence and grouping, and how did this change how future generations interpreted what Shakespeare might have meant?” Most of the setup for the “Shakespeare didn’t want these published” argument comes from the fact that there are multiple and obvious mistakes in the initial printing, something that would not have happened if the author was working alongside the publisher to see the finished result. I have to admit, it’s a pretty logical point, and I don’t know the answer. Perhaps it’s true that the mistakes just weren’t as big a deal as Heylin suggests, and Shakespeare didn’t care all that much. From there it becomes a history lesson in sonnet interpretation (once you get past some fighting and suing each other over who had the rights to publish what, and who stole from whom). When did the Dark Lady come into the picture, and what are the different theories about her identity? Which editors took the position that Shakespeare was gay, and which felt obliged go with the “nonono, that’s just how men talked to other men in Shakespeare’s day” interpretation? I remember hearing that one in high school ;). I never really bought that one, because you can read some of Shakespeare’s own dedications (like the one at the front of Venus and Adonis) and you can see just how flowery he did get, and how very different it is from the outpouring of love found in the sonnets. Speaking of dedications, just who was “W.H”? The sonnets are dedicated to these mysterious initials, and the book spends significant time right off the bat discussing the possible theories, most notably Pembroke (William Herbert) and Southhampton (Henry Wriothesley). If you’re already saying “Hey wait, that second guy is an H.W., not a W.H,” then you’re starting to get a glimpse at what this detective story is all about – maybe it was a typo or a mistake? Or maybe a secret code! Heylin, by the way, seems to come down pretty strongly on the Pembroke side. I don’t recall him ever actually stating his belief on the subject, but the argument does stick in my brain as being pretty lopsided in favor. [ Here’s my query : Do we know for certain that Shakespeare wrote the dedication, since we don’t even know if he wanted the sonnets published? Perhaps Thorpe wrote it himself? If that’s the case, then shouldn’t we be asking who WH is to Thorpe, rather than to Shakespeare? Some people see “we’ll never know the answer” as a challenge – others, like me, see it as an opportunity to say “then let’s stop asking the question, shall we?” ] I have books on Shakespeare the man, and I have books on the sonnets themselves. I think it’s a worthy addition to anybody’s book collection to look specifically at the editing of the sonnets like this. We may never know exactly what Shakespeare meant, but at least we can take a realistic look at what cases have been made, who made them, and why. Only then can you really decide for yourself whether you’ve found the answer than sounds right to you.
Commonwealth Shakespeare presents The Comedy of Errors on Boston Common 2009
http://www.commshakes.org Hurray for free Shakespeare on Boston Common! I’ve had a grand time for the past few weeks pimping the show to anybody that would listen. Without Citibank, their big sponsor, the show had to go on entirely via donations this year. They deliberately picked Comedy of Errors, a relatively simple show to stage, to keep costs down (and, I’d expect, a slapstick comedy to bring the audience in a bit more than a Pericles might :)). We got there on Saturday just before 6pm for the 8pm show. I was doing play-by-play on Twitter for those that watch such things. We got our dinner (P.F. Chang’s), got our chair rentals, and found a spot. As usual, all the prime seating near the front of the stage was roped off. I’ve always assumed that was for paying customers. At the time there was a big tent right in the middle, but they took that down. I’m told there were 6000 people there, which I think is pretty good! If everybody coughed up some donation money that would certainly help. The volunteers were a little aggressive in the begging, but you can’t really fault them, can you? I bought a sweatshirt for $25 and the girl working the counter even said, “…unless you want to leave more as a donation.” I informed her that I’d already rented my chairs and put my $20 in the hat that had been passed, and I was all tapped out. [ On a related note, I appreciate that they were all volunteers, though I do wish they’d maybe been trained a little better. I could not get a single question answered, no lie. “Are you doing chair rentals this year?” I don’t know, not my department. “Got rained out last night, huh?” We did? “Did the announcement just say something about discount parking?” I don’t know I wasn’t listening. ] The show of course was wonderful. Is there anybody reading my blog who does not know the plot? Start with a crazy premise – that there’s two sets of identical twins, both of who have a master/servant relationship (Dromio is servant to Antipholus), who do not realize that they’re both in town at the same time. One set, from Syracuse, has come to Ephesus, where the others live. It just so happens that it’s illegal for people from Syracuse to come to Ephesus, which is a whole different plot point. Anyway, you can imagine how the farce goes. Antipholus of Ephesus is married, but Antipholus of Syracuse is not. And then he (of Syracuse) runs into his supposed wife, who has no idea that he’s not her husband. “Come home to dinner!” she says. “Who are you and why are you yelling at me?” he says. You don’t need to follow Shakespeare to know what happens when a husband says that to a wife :). And it just gets sillier from there. The fun thing about this play is that it’s almost entirely about the over the top physical comedy. The Dromios take the brunt of it, getting beaten regularly for screwing up messages delivered to the wrong master. Which of course makes them more likely to run around the stage screaming like crazy people. The “round like a Globe” scene, where Dromio describes just how big fat and sweaty his counterpart’s girlfriend (wife?) is, was hysterical. Act out the words in the right way and the audience comes right along for the ride. We may not know what “break your pate” means but if somebody gets clobbered over the head when it’s said, you can kinda sorta figure it out. How do you pull off two sets of twins on stage? Well it helped that for the Dromios, one of them was clearly maybe 40lbs heavier than his counterpart, something not referenced on stage but clearly noticeable by the audience. Whether that was intentional, I don’t know. They were both dressed identically (as golf caddies). The Antipholuses were much harder, since they looked identical from where I sat. The only way you could really tell was by the staging, and by following the story. There were logical places where one Antipholus just ran out stage left, and then entered stage right, and you’re left saying “Oh, ok, that’s the other one.” Luckily they are never both on stage, at least until the last scene. There is one plot point we did not get (I admit to not reading up on the play before attending). A goldsmith brings a custom made chain to Antipholus, which he had done as a gift for his wife. He even says “Bring it to my wife and she’ll pay you,” so we know that it is intended for her. But later some new woman shows up claiming that she gave him a ring, and in exchange she was to get the chain, or some sort of chain? I was completely lost by that. Where’d she come from? Not knowing what scenes may have been cut I don’t know what we missed. My wife loved the show, telling me that she much prefers the silly comedies to the deeper stuff like Hamlet. “They’re two different things,” I point out. “Sometimes you just go for the laugh. But it’s not like years from now I’ll be saying Hey remember how well Egeon did the scene where he reunites with his long lost wife? This sort of play’s not about that. But I can tell you in detail every Hamlet I’ve seen.” [And for the record that’s different than a few years ago when another couple told us that “for her money, Taming of the Shrew is *better* than Hamlet.” Don’t say things like that, that makes me sad when you say things like that.] The only thing I’m left to figure out is the scene breaks, where they would perform a sort of zany dance number. We’ve got at least a partial beach theme, complete with lifeguard in his chair, and beachballs. Fine. But then a bunch of nuns dance by (was one of them on a bicycle? I forget), and one strips off to reveal a bathing suit underneath. Then come the cops chasing the bad guys, cops run into nuns, everybody dances… know what I mean? I think there’s a name for the style, and I can’t quite place it. Was like something out of a silent movie (though there was a soundtrack). Kind of Benny Hill, though not as fast :). This is the first I’d ever seen Comedy of Errors produced, so I was a little bit lost. Somebody explain the significance? I want to say that the Karamazov’s did a similar thing where there was a circus-like number between scenes. Is all this just to put us in the mood of “Ephesus is a zany place?” Reminds me of Monty Python. If you’re around, go. Go early and camp out with a picnic, or come late and just sit down on the grass. There are a number of food trucks where you can get your dinner, so don’t worry about that. Be generous in your donations, they need everything they can get. I am tremendously appreciative of what they’ve been able to pull off on their own, and I can only hope that each year’s efforts are enough to carry the show on for another year.
Search Engine Juggling With Google Chrome
Ok, this is a fairly geeky trick but it’s Shakespeare related so I thought I’d blog it here instead of one of my lesser travelled tech blogs. I’m working on a little side project involving a quotes database. I’ve even built myself up a little web editor so I can crank through them. Problem is that I have text, but what I really want is character and scene. Luckily we have wonderful search engines like http://shakespeare.clusty.com that do exactly what I need. Turns out I can combine the two, using Google Chrome. If you select some text and right click it, a menu option “Search Google for this text” comes up and you’ve just saved yourself a bunch of cut and paste. It even opens up a new tab for you. But, it uses Google as my search engine, by default. More often than not if I try this approach I’ll get a page full of other quote databases, none of which has my character and scene info. Not for long.
- Right click in the awesome bar (that’s the URL/location bar at the top) and you’ll see Edit search engines. Pick that.
- Now Add.
- Pick whatever name and keywords you like. The URL is this: http://clusty.com/search?input-form=simple-billy&query=%s&v:sources=billy-bundle&v:project=billy (noting the %s where the query goes).
- Lastly, go ahead and click Make Default to make Clusty your default Shakespeare search engine.
- Now select some text, right click and you’ll see Search Clusty for text… Presto, I’ve got my character and scene information!
- Remember to put it back when done: Edit search engines, select your primary engine, Make Default. You’ll even notice that Clusty has jumped up into the Default section so you can get to it more easily next time.
Any kind of web research, not just Shakespeare, requires lots of cutting, pasting and cross referencing. If you’ve got a particular search engine doing 99% of the work for you, Chrome can save you a tremendous amount of work this way.
To Willie Hughes It May Concern
Dr. Carl Atkins is the author of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: With Three Hundred Years of Commentary as well as a prolific commenter here at ShakespeareGeek, both while holding down a day job as a medical doctor. Instead of a typical author interview with press blurbs and bio questions we decided to do something different – Carl’s going to guest blog a series for us based on *your* questions. Question (from Paul, aka “emsworth”) : I just read Oscar Wilde’s story, if you want to call it that, "The Portrait of Mr. W. H.," which has to do mostly with a theory (by the characters in the story) that the sonnets were addressed to an effeminate member of Shakespeare’s acting troupe named Willie Hughes. Supposedly, in urging the recipient of the sonnets to have children, Shakespeare was actually encouraging Willie Hughes to take more acting roles. Supposedly, the "Dark Lady" sonnets concerned a woman of whom Shakespeare first became jealous (because of Willie Hughes’s attention to her), then became infatuated with her himself. Was Wilde’s theory entirely fictional? Was this a theory that Wilde seriously urged, other than in his story? Has anyone else ever taken it seriously? Wilde’s theory was entirely fictional, but definitely taken seriously by him and thence others. One might say that it resulted in an entire Willie Hughes fan club. The only so-called evidence that one can accumulate in support of it is the presence in the publisher’s dedication of a reference to an individual whose initials are W. H., the repetition of the word "hues" or "hewes" in Sonnet 20 in reference to the "Young Man", and a vivid imagination. The context of The Sonnets, as I point out in my book, argues against such a theory. What I mean by that is that all other sonnet series written in the late 1500s (and further back to Petrarch) were written by poets as exercises in the expression of the speaker’s love for his beloved. All shared similar themes and conventions, which are also found in Shakespeare’s sonnets. True, as Maurice Evans says, Shakespeare’s sonnet series reads like a convention that been turned on its head, but it is still difficult to view it in isolation out of context with other sonnet series. To do so, one must be very narrowly focused. About the Author This book brings together the scholarship of dozens of the most brilliant commentators who have written about Shakespeare’s Sonnets over the past three hundred years. This edition adds the significant work done by modern editors to the most important commentary culled from the two variorum editions of the last century. Atkins presents a straightforward edition without jargon with the simple goal of finding out how the poems work and how they may be interpreted. He is the first to collate the modern texts so that differences among them can be fully appreciated and compared. His discussion of meter and verse is more substantial than that of any other edition, adding particular dimension to this text. Those coming to "The Sonnets" for the first time and those seeking a fresh look at an old friend will equally find this edition scholastically rigorous and a pleasure to read. Carl D. Atkins is a practicing medical oncologist in New York. Got a question for the author? Send it in and we’ll see if we can get it in the queue!