Here’s a pleasant little treat for you all, courtesy Martin (by way of Japan):
I recently recorded ten ambient guitar interludes inspired by my favourite phrases from Shakespeare’s history plays. These pieces are slowly evolving soundscapes designed to give the listener time to reflect on Shakespeare’s words.
How The Night Came is a collection of 10 original instrumental tracks, freely streamable, available in a “name your price / pay to support the artist” format. This first set is based on the histories but who knows, if he gets some backing maybe he’ll release more?
“What damned error, but some sober brow Will bless it and approve it with a text…?”
–The Merchant of Venice
Copying errors are pernicious. Once introduced, an error can be used as a template for a new copy, and that bad copy can be copied again, and yet again, until soon the error is everywhere.
I’ve identified many copying errors in different versions of Shakespeare’s plays. In one variant of The Taming of the Shrew, for example, L becomes T, and Bianca declares that she will “took” on her books and instruments rather than “look” on them.
Once in while, though, an error will be introduced that actually makes sense. And these kinds of errors are really the most interesting ones. And the most dangerous.
The best example I’ve found comes from Hamlet.
Here’s the original, Act 4, Scene 3:
“A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and EAT of the fish that hath fed of that worm.”
At some point, though, the original E was swapped out for a C:
“A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and CAT of the fish that hath fed of that worm.”
Both versions describe a food chain, one creature eating another:
In the first version, worm eats king, fish eats worm, and man eats fish. But, in the mutant version, the final recipient of the feast is a cat.
This second food chain, like the first, is 100% plausible. Cats DO like fish, after all. In fact, they are famous for eating them.
So: what could be more reasonable?
Reflecting this plausibility, this new version is now INCREDIBLY widespread. Reasonable people fixate on this section, and they quote it again and again and again and again.
There’s another weird twist to the problem. Because, to a certain kind of person–the cat lover–the mutant version may be even more attractive than the original.
For example, guess which version is featured in the book Planet Cat: A Cat-Alog under the heading “Shakespeare on Cats?”
It gets worse, though. Because the mutant version has spawned offspring of its own. In The Classics of Literature In Plain and Simple English (2012), the error is translated like this: “The same worm that eats a king may become food for a fish which serves as the dinner for a cat.”
Where did this cat come from? Perhaps Google Books is to blame. Certainly: it is now on the wrong side of the problem.
In a typical example, as here, the original text is from 1695, and is perfectly good, but Google Books suggests a transcription of “cat.”
This cat is an interloper. It should not exist. And so we are, of course, obligated to resist the error, wherever we find it.
And yet….There is a weird charm to this new version. And something very cat-like.
Shakespeare never intended this cat. But it crept it in anyway, unwanted.
And now that it is there, in everyone’s lap, rubbing its head persistently against our hands, sometimes, just sometimes–in spite of ourselves–we find ourselves petting it anyway.
Damn cat.
Rachel Rodman is a writer and a former scientist. She writes Shakespeare-inspired fiction and once designed an entire biology course framed using the complete plays of Shakespeare. She is currently working to promote creative ways to interweave evolution and popular culture. Her favorite evolutionary truism comes from The Tempest: “what’s past is prologue.”
With Easter approaching, what do you say we go hunting for eggs in Shakespeare’s work? I’m not going to list them all here (since it’s easy to hunt them down with a search engine where’s the fun in that?) but I’ll hit the most famous ones. Add more in the comments!
“Give me an egg, nuncle, and I’ll give thee two crowns.”
Why, after I have cut the egg i’ th’ middle and eat up the
meat, the two crowns of the egg.
When I first tried to read King Lear I couldn’t understand Fool at all. After many readings and watchings, I think the scenes with Lear, Fool and Kent are my favorite (even if I don’t always understand what he’s saying). He’s one of the few people (perhaps the only one?) who can say to the king, “Hey genius, how smart was it to split your kingdom down the middle and then give away both parts?”
Falstaff
Take away these chalices. Go brew me a pottle of
sack finely.
Bardolph
With eggs, sir?
Falstaff
Simple of itself; I’ll no pullet-sperm in my brewage.
Ok Falstaff, eww. How am I supposed to look at my kids’ Easter eggs the same way ever again? (Courtesy Merry Wives of Windsor, for those that don’t remember this charming lesson in animal husbandry showing up in the Henry plays.) I actually googled this to see if I was missing something and saw it turn up in a list entitled “Why Aren’t These Shakespeare Quotes Famous Too?”
What, you egg! [Stabbing him]
Young fry of treachery!
Students love this quote, I regularly see it posted when people reading Macbeth for the first time stumble across it. There are web pages and apps and even books dedicated to Shakespearean Insults, but calling somebody an egg just has a special sort of “What did he just call me?” flare to it.
My favorite part is the second line, where he calls him a young fry of treachery. You know why, don’t you?
Because now he’s a fried egg.
On that note, I’m out of here before anybody gets the pitchforks. What other egg references have you found?
I tried to read Nutshell by Ian McEwan about a year ago and couldn’t get into it. I thought I’d reviewed my attempt to do so about a year ago around Shakespeare’s birthday but I can’t find the post.
Bardfilm recommended that I read through the whole thing, as the ending was worth discussing, so I forced myself through it.
Nutshell is a version of Hamlet told with a unique twist – Hamlet is Gertrude’s unborn child. That’s right, our narrator is a fetus.
In general I’m not a fan of first person narrative, I think it forces way too many unnatural hoops to jump through to get information to the audience in a way that the narrator would have known. Here that is magnified fifty fold, as our narrator can’t see anything that’s going on, nor can he go anywhere that Gertrude (or, as she’s named here, Trudy) doesn’t go. But that doesn’t stop him from knowing about the plot between his mom and her boyfriend (“Claude”) to kill his father (“John” because I guess there’s no easy way to modernize “Hamlet”). He knows when Claude loans his dad money. He knows what his mom is wearing. He knows where his mom and Claude go on dates, what she eats for dinner, and most importantly, what wine she likes.
Seriously, the wine is a recurring theme. It’s one thing to just say that Trudy is a drunk who doesn’t think that being really pregnant is maybe a reason to cut back. She drinks so much and so often that the fetus himself is a budding oenophile, hoping at different times that his mother partakes of a particular vintage. I hated this part in audio, he really sounds like Stewie from Family Guy.
Also to hate is the amount of sex that Trudy and Claude are having. It’s a lot. And, since he’s got a front row seat, it’s described play by play and blow by blow by our narrator (who hates it, if that wasn’t obvious). Have you ever wondered what a sex scene reads like when it’s narrated from the inside? Yeah, don’t.
The most fun part about this book is the way the author tosses in references to the original text, like a treasure hunt. There are so many I can barely remember them, but one easy example was when the narrator said of Claudius, “As a man, he was a real piece of work.” See what he did there? 🙂 References like that are just all over the book, and if you’re a fan of Hamlet you’ll have a great time trying to spot them all.
There’s not much Hamlet story here. No Ophelia, Laertes, Polonius, Horatio. Just Gertrude and Claudius, already together and plotting against Hamlet’s father. At best it’s something of a character study of how the author sees Hamlet. Sometimes it was as if he was going through a checklist — they like to drink in the original? Check. Hamlet’s obsessed with how often his mother is sleeping with his uncle? Check.
But at some point you get to interpret for yourself. Do we like this Gertrude? Is she a good person? How different is she from the original, and how? What do her actions say about her feelings for the men in her life?
If you like plumbing the depths of the framework Shakespeare gave us for these characters, and get a special little thrill of excitement every time you see a Hamlet reference in a completely different context, then you’ll probably like this one. I am part of a book club at work, and none of them are really Shakespeare geeks, so I couldn’t see any of them getting anything out of this at all. One even went so far as to suggest that the author wrote it on a dare, because she’s a fan of his other work.
Lucky for us she’s apparently got some Shakespearean longings in her, and is set to produce a ten-part, female-focused Shakespeare series at the end of this year. It does say she’s producing, so I’m not sure that means we’ll ever get to see her on screen or if she’ll play an entirely behind the scenes role.
What do you think? Let’s pretend she’s going to act. Which female lead would be best for her? I’d love to see her as Regan or Goneril just for fun, but I think she can probably handle a more central role than that.
Here’s a pleasant little treat for you all, courtesy Martin (by way of Japan):
