I’m reading The Shakespeare Wars by Ron Rosenbaum right now, and having trouble blogging about it because I’m finding something worthy of comment on every single page.  I’m only on about page 20.  I knew I was going to like this :). Let me see if I can describe what the experience has been like so far.  I have this picture in my head of a girl I knew in college. I don’t know that she ever actually did what I’m about to describe, or if I’m just putting her in the situation because she seems like a natural.  Anyway, I envision this girl reading a book, and she gets to a certain point where she stops, then she beams a bright smile and hugs the book tightly to herself, shaking back and forth like a 3yr old would hug their most beloved teddy bear. Then she goes back to reading. Does that get the image across?  It’s a feeling of loving a book so much that you want to climb inside of it, to become a part of it or make it a part of you.  It’s not enough to read it and say “I really enjoyed that”, or even to read it cover to cover in one sitting.  It’s about having a far more immediate and emotional need to connect with what you just read.  There are times whenI feel that way about Shakespeare.  And then there are times when I feel that way about people who are writing about Shakespeare. To sum up the Shakespeare Wars, at least as far as I’ve read:    Shakespeare is awesome.  No, seriously.  He defies all previous descriptions of the word.  I could keep repeating myself in different ways for all eternity and still not sufficiently get my point across.  The man is infinite in his awesomeness.  Now and forever, you will be able to discover something new about his genius that will make him…well, that much more awesome.  And it’s at that point that you stop long enough to give the book a nice hug, and then read some more.  Rosenbaum does like 10 pages alone on Bottom’s awakening from his dream.  Just that speech.  Not the whole play, not even the whole scene, just that one speech.  And he still manages to come away feeling like if he kept looking, he would find more to discover.  And, at least to me, it never sounds boring.  That can certainly be a scary thing, this feeling that you will simply never know it all.  But then, I think, we can go back to the old “glass half empty” cliche.  You can revel in what you do know, and every time you gain more knowledge you can rejoice in the discovery.  Or you can constantly look at the impenetrable darkness that is the abyss of the unknown and mope, “I’ll never know if I’m right or wrong, so I’ll just assume I’m wrong….” Personally, I’ll take the former.  

http://bluepyramid.org/library/bookcomp.htm As composed by BluePyramid.org, whoever they are.  Found via Mental Floss which lists several such lists.  So naturally the first thing I did was search them all for Shakespeare, who appears on only this one.  It’s so hard to measure because you have to ask what “book” means.  Is Hamlet a book?  Or only a certain version?  Are we talking about best loved, most read, most purchased? Anyway, the BluePyramid list is my new best friend because it includes Hamlet(#2), Macbeth(#42), King Lear (#49), Romeo and Juliet (#62), Henry V(#199), The Winter’s Tale (#304), The Tempest (#496), Othello (#530) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (#581). Wait….Winter’s Tale?  That’s … different. Anyway, their list is apparently dynamically compiled based on people entering their own personal top 25 and then scoring accordingly, 1 point for position 25, 25 points for position 1.  So if you want to get Shakespeare an even better showing, go add your tuppence.

I’ve had this question for a long time, but I’m not sure I’ve ever brought it up for discussion here on the blog.  We know the general plot of The Tempest — Prospero causes a shipwreck to strand his enemy, his brother Antonio who took Milan from him and stranded him here.  On the boat is also Ferdinand, Miranda sees him and falls in love, and everybody sails back to Milan happily ever after. My question is and always has been, what exactly was Prospero really planning?  Did the entire play go according to what he wanted?  Did he know that Ferdinand was on the boat, and was it in his plan for his daughter to fall in love with him?  Did he always plan the happy reunion we get at the end, or were his original plans for Antonio a bit…darker? I haven’t studied the text of this play as much as some others, I’ve only seen it a few times.  I can’t really put my finger on a passage that clearly says one way or the other whether things go according to plan, or if he changes plans midstream.  

I have heard many different interpretations of Sonnet 130. I’m wondering if one of them is “right”.  In case you don’t recall, Sonnet 130 is this one:

SONNET 130
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
 
Here are some of the intepretations I’ve heard:

1. “My love is really pretty ugly, but that doesn’t matter because I love her anyway.”
2. Shakespeare is making fun of the tradition of the time, all the comparing to this and that, and basically saying “No, my love does not make me want to compare her to anything, she’s unlike any of those things – but that has nothing to with my feelings for her, either.”
3. Shakespeare is referring to a woman that he knows he shouldn’t be with, and he’s trying to convince himself that she’s bad for him by finding everything he can imagine that is the antithesis of the typical love sonnet.  In the end he fails, and no matter how many negative things he can list, it doesn’t change how much he’s in love with her.
4. It’s a joke, the Shakespearean version of “Just kidding.”  “Hey babe, you’re old and ugly.  Just kiddin!  You know I love you, right?”

I think #2 is probably the closest.  That whole theme of “Comparing you to other things just isn’t working for me, because what we have is just on a whole different plane” seems to come through in many other sonnets (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’ day”, anyone?)  I appreciate #3 because it was so different from anything I’d heard before.  I think #1 and #4 are probably pretty unlikely.
Are there other interpretations I’ve missed?

For those that are interested in such things, there’s a great collection of audio peformances called “When Love Speaks” that I highly recommend. In it, Sonnet 130 is performed by Alan Rickman.

UPDATED OCTOBER 2010:  Sonnet 130 actually makes an appearance in my new book Hear My Soul Speak: Wedding Quotations from Shakespeare. One chapter is devoted entirely to sonnets that might make a good ceremonial reading, and I make the case that taken with the right frame of mind, sonnet 130 could well be the best of them all.

Ok, simple question.  When did you “get” it?  Hopefully you know what I’m talking about. Most of us were forced to read Shakespeare in school.  Very few probably saw it as a life changing moment.  We were too busy trying to flip back and forth to the glossary because we were going to be quizzed on every single word.  Not to mention the rote memorization.  I’m talking about the moment where Shakespeare clicked for you, and suddenly it went from being this strange Elizabethan code that you kinda sorta thought you got to, “Wow, there are *people* under these words, I understand what they’re saying to each other and…it’s beautiful.”  Know what I mean?  I thought of this question while reading Rosenbaum’s Shakespeare Wars.  Very early (I think I’m on page 8) he talks about teaching the sonnets and getting to Sonnet 45, trying to explain the line “These present-absent with swift motion slide” and actually feeling like he personally knew what it was like to be in two existences at once, himself and outside himself, sliding back and forth between the two.  I’m doing a lousy job of explaining it the way he did, go read his book. I can tell you mine, though it’s not quite on a par with Rosenbaum’s.  I was in college, doing a paper on Hamlet (specifically, the role of insanity as a defense mechanism).  I’d hit the line “Thrift Horatio, thrift!  The thricebaked meats did coldly furnish forth the wedding tables.”  I was talking to a friend and I said, “Wait…was that a joke?  Did I understand that right?  Did Hamlet just tell Horatio that his mom got remarried in a hurry so that they could use the leftovers from the funeral?”  And suddenly there it was.  Hamlet went from being this masterpiece that I would never be privy to, to…a kid that lost his dad.  There’s a person in there. Make sense?  Somebody else’s turn.