http://sketchcast.com/view/S2X4WlD Not bad!

http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2008/01/44-fascinating-things-you-probably-dont-know-about-shakespeare.html#more-4156 I quite like this link, since the 44 things listed typically come with links and graphics backing them up, and in general have several ‘things’ in each item. By my count, I only knew about 19 of them, so I’m happy to have learned quite a bit.  I wonder at some of them – I’ve never seen evidence about the whole “second best bed thing was customary because guests got the best bed” (#43) argument, for instance.    But others, like the reference to Edmund Ironside (#21) were completely new to me.

Scott Newstok, editor of Kenneth Burke On Shakespeare, asked if I would review his book.  This would be a challenge, and I said as much.  I’m no academic, I’m a computer geek.  To put it simply, I have no idea who Kenneth Burke was.  His wikipedia page contains only a single passing reference to Shakespeare (as “lifelong interpreter”, whatever that means), and all the other reviews on Amazon I found said things like “I learned who he was when my roommate in graduate school introduced me to him.”  No help there!  But with that understanding I agreed to take a look at Scott’s book. A quick scan of the book shows that it is truly dedicated to the academic crowd that wants more information about Burke’s work.  Over 1/3rd of the book’s 300 pages are dedicated to Appendices and Notes of various sorts, as well as a hefty index.  That’s not counting the liberal footnotes throughout the book.  There is no biography to speak of, other than a token “About the author” paragraph on the last page.  The introduction goes into great detail about *what* he analyzed, and why and how.  But never do I get any sort of biographical sense of the man and why Shakespeare came into his life at all. In my research I learned that Burke is most famous for his essays (the book is divided into 13 such essays) on Othello and King Lear, so I figured I’d start there.  Not so much.  I can’t understand a word that man is saying.  “Iago As Katharma”, the Othello piece begins.  As what?  On the next page I’m to learn that “katharma” is a Greek word meaning “that which is thrown away in cleansing.”  That is but one example.  One essay is entitled “Socio-anagogic interpretation of Venus and Adonis.”  Yeah, good luck with that.  Maybe those are the kinds of things to make a graduate student sit up and take notice, but they make my eyes glaze over. On recommendation, though, I checked out a very different essay called “Anthony In Behalf of the Play.”  This one I found fascinating.  In it, Burke writes in the voice of Anthony the character, explaining his purpose in the play as a whole.  I learned quickly that this was apparently Burke’s common theme, focusing on the “meta play” and delving into why it did what it did, what a given scene or character was supposed to invoke in the audience.  So as Anthony he explains to the audience that his job is to help the audience figure out what they’re supposed to feel.  Is Caesar a good guy, or a bad guy?  He’s the title character, after all.  Cassius and the conspirators have taken great pains to show how horrible Caesar is, and yet, Cassius and crew are bad guys.  So what should you, the audience, be thinking right now?  I, as Anthony, will walk you through it.  Anthony becomes in Burke’s words a “plot substitute” for Caesar.  Since Anthony is a good guy, we will emotionally attach ourselves to him in Caesar’s absence. The great thing about this essay is that it totally makes sense, it flows naturally, and I could easily see an English professor doing exactly such a thing to explain the play to his class.   I immediately started looking for other such casual essays in the book.   The introductory chapter, entitled “Shakespeare Was What?” was a similar treat to read, although not quite as easy to follow.  I love, for example, how the opening like from Burke is to say right off, “Look, I’m not going to read Shakespeare’s private life into his work.  I can’t find any evidence of it, and even if there were, surely he punched it up a bit anyway.”  He even dives right into the question of homosexuality, claiming that he’s not at all squeamish about it.  (It also did not go unnoticed by me that Burke makes a connection between Shakespeare and  Boolean algebra in regard to the invention of computers :).  As a computer geek I immediately spotted that. :)) One last thing. The Notes section is quite fun to read.  These are the brief explanatory comments added by the editor where it was necessary to clarify what Burke meant.  I actually learned what “socio-anagogic” means!  Apparently Burke made that word up.  But, I also learned that Christopher Marlowe was an English playwright and poet.  Really?  In this book, about this subject, we needed a comment about who Christopher Marlowe was?  And that’s the line we get?   I suppose it makes sense in the overall structure.  I mean, a comment by Burke that just says “the celestial and bookish imagery of Marlowe” merits some note about who he’s talking about.  I’m just used to the sort of book that would just go ahead and make a Marlowe comment right there inline.   In the end, I can’t change my original position – I am not the audience for this book.  It’s not the kind of thing I can read cover to cover, and I don’t ever see myself confidently speaking on Burke and his writing.  It has, however, introduced me to the topic.  And I did learn some things.  From other reviews that I’ve read (mostly to get references to Burke’s body of work), this particular compilation is different in its inclusion of those more casual essays that I found so fascinating.   I’m left wondering if an entire book could have been made out of the ones like that, or if those were the only ones Burke did.  For that matter, perhaps a more dedicated student of this stuff doesn’t see the same distinction I do, and reads the Othello piece with the same appreciation that I read the Anthony one. I think that the sheer breadth of content that Scott has managed to pack into this reasonably sized paperback (I carry it in my backpack) is very impressive.  Just because I’m not as familiar with the topic doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the work that’s gone into it.  If you’re looking for a single volume that cuts across a a wide sampling of everything Burke had to say on the subject of Shakespeare, this one might be worth checking out. 

This year, Santa brought my kids a book called Stories from Shakespeare, by the Usborne company.  By strange coincidence, my wife had been to an Usborne bookselling party a few months prior :).  Anyway, we just started reading it the other night.  I like that my 5yr old asked if King Lear was in it.  Alas, it’s not.  She’s intrigued by the witches on the cover, which (ha!) I tell her are from Macbeth.  At first I was worried that this was just a copy of Lamb’s Tales (which is public domain) with a new copyright slapped on it.  Luckily that’s not the case, these appear to be new translations. The plays included are:  “Twelfth Night”, “Macbeth”, “Romeo and Juliet”, “The Taming of the Shrew”, “The Tempest”, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, “Hamlet”, “The Merchant of Venice”, “As You Like It”, and “The Winter’s Tale”.  An interesting mix.  No King Lear, but also no Much Ado About Nothing.  But yet they include Taming of the Shrew. We started with Twelfth Night.  Since this book has pictures (and when I tell them the stories, I do not), both 3 and 5yr old were immediately intrigued.  Unfortunately that also means that I lost my 3yr old early, as she was so busy wanting to know the identify of every person on every page that she was not getting the story.  My 5yr old hung in as best she could, but I could tell she was confused.  Interestingly she perked up at the mentions of Sebastian and Antonio, two names she recognized from The Tempest :).  I think the level of mistaken identify was a little much for her.  These stories, unlike my own translations, seem like they’re trying to cover every aspect of the original script in as linear a translation as possible.  So, for instance, they did the whole subplot with Sir Toby, Andrew, Maria and Malvolio.  I think that, were I telling this one to my kids off the top of my head, I would have just left it completely out.  I know, I know, sacrilege – but I’d rather have her understand a portion of the story at this age than be confused and not get any of it. I think she wants Macbeth next, because of the witches, but I don’t plan on introducing that one until I’ve at least read their translation first.  I teased Midsummer’s to her, saying that it was about fairies.  5yr olds dig fairies. 🙂

Ok, maybe The Brady Bunch isn’t popular around the world, but here in the United States it’s firmly ingrained into our pop culture subconscious.  Mom always said, don’t play ball in the house. Anyway, anybody with a little trivial knowledge of the show has probably heard that Robert Reed, who played the dad, hated the show.  He fancied himself a serious actor and would often refuse to play certain scenes if he didn’t like the way they were written. What I didn’t know was that he was in the habit of writing lengthy memos to the producer detailing what he didn’t like about them.  And the best part?  He actually uses Shakespeare as the foundation of his argument.  In the linked memo he ultimately is complaining about an episode in which  Bobby, the younger boy, has sold some weird “hair tonic” to Greg, the older boy – and it turned Greg’s hair green.  So naturally, Reed makes the connection to Hamlet: Their dramatis personae are noninterchangable. For example, Hamlet, archtypical of the dramatic character, could not be written into Midsummer Night’s Dream and still retain his identity. Ophelia could not play a scene with Titania; Richard II could not be found in Twelfth Night. In other words, a character indigenous to one style of the theatre cannot function in any of the other styles. In the quoted site (TVSquad) I’ve already brought up Falstaff, though perhaps that is not the best venue to discuss it. 🙂