Short, Sharp, Shakespeare (A Continuing Shakespeare Dreams Series)

March 17, 2014October 13, 2018 ~ duane ~ Leave a comment

This will mark the fifth time that I’m documenting a dream that has Shakespeare in it:

Blogging Shakespeare Dreams (November 2005)
Shakespeare Dreams (July 2010)
Bad Shakespeare Dreams (June 2012)
Dreaming in Shakespeare

I wish I could remember more of this one. I was on some sort of sports team, can’t tell/remember whether it was an adult thing or I was a kid again. But the coach was actually using a Shakespeare speech for motivation! Like so many of my dreams I kind of sort of recognized it, and desperately wanted to head for my search engine to double check my sources. It had a vague Coriolanus-like “make you a sword of me” type of feel to it.

Anyway, here’s the kicker, the coach asks everybody (sitting crosslegged on the grass, listening intently) whether they know where that speech comes from. I do not raise my hand because I am unable to verify the source. But sure enough just about every other kid(?) does! It was mortifying.

That’s about it. Nobody pointed and mocked. Nobody even really noticed. It was entirely in my head, thinking “Wow an actual opportunity to be asked an actual spontaneous Shakespeare question and I have to choose between not answering at all, or possibly getting the answer wrong?”

It’s always funny when insecurities show their little ugly heads. That looks like a pretty clearcut case of “Impostor Syndrome”, this feeling that one day I’m going to walk into a situation where everybody not only knows Shakespeare, they know it far better than I do and look at me like an idiot for thinking I knew something.

Why I Love My Shakespeare Life

October 5, 2013August 1, 2017 ~ duane ~ 3 Comments

This post brought to you by three or four glasses of cabernet sauvignon, so put it in its appropriate context.

We had company this evening, one of the dads came over to watch the baseball game while his daughter (and mine) were off at their first middle school dance, and the moms were off at some other mom’s house. So eventually the guests depart, the game is over, and we’re left to clean up.

I realize that the television has stopped showing baseball and is now showing some old dude with a bushy beard talking to some other guys in poofy clothes. I run to the kitchen and grab my wife by the face while she is mopping. “Henry IV Part 2!” I squeal at her. “Do you have any idea how happy Shakespeare makes me?!”

“Who is that?” asks my 7yr old son.

“That is Prince Hal who at the end of the movie is King Henry,” I tell him. “It is a very sad scene, one of the saddest scenes in all of Shakespeare, and it is awesome. It is one of my favorites.”

“Why is it sad?” he asks.

“Well,” I tell him, “Pretend that I am the king. That would make you the prince, right? That means that one day you’re going to be the king. Well, until then, you are just out hanging around with your friends, partying, doing crazy stuff, you know, like friends do. And then one day you find out that the king, that’s me, has died, and that means that you’re the king now. And your best friend is all, ‘Oh, cool, you’re the king, we are going to do awesome stuff together!’ and you turn to him and you say, “We’re not friends anymore.”

“Why can’t I be friends with my friend anymore?” he asks.

“Because you’re the king now, and the king has very important responsibilities, and he’s not allowed to hang out with regular people and do crazy wild things like he’s been doing. It’s very sad, and his friend knows it’s sad, and the king knows it’s sad, but they both know that it has to be that way.”

With that I race to the remote control and start bringing up my copy of Chimes at Midnight.

At this point my son begins to cry. “I don’t want to see it if it’s sad!” he wails. Despite my overwhelming desire to jump right to that scene, I resist and go help my wife clean the kitchen. “I’ve shown you that scene, right?” I ask her. I then begin reciting the scene. “My jove, my king! Speak to me, my heart! I know thee not, old man…..so, so sad. And so amazing. Have I shown you that scene yet? You know I’m going to.”

My son is apparently now on a Shakespeare kick. “I want to see where somebody says To be or not to be,” he tells me. Being a Shakespeare Geek I happen to have Richard Burton’s Hamlet ripped and ready to go, and move to start it. But then I realize that he’s already vetoed the sad stuff, and it’s not like Hamlet is a laugh riot. So I ask him whether he wants to see To be or not to be, or if he wants to see one of the funny ones. He tells me he wants to see one of the funny ones.

Can do! I fire up Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Taming of the Shrew. Here’s how I explain it to my boy. “There’s this girl, Katherine, and she hates boys. She’s sworn that she’s never going to marry a boy because all boys stink. Well along comes this boy Petruchio, and he says I’m going to marry Katherine! And then they get into a whole big fight and she chucks things at his head, and it’s really funny.”

So there we sit, my son and I, watching Taming of the Shrew. I fast forward to the famous “wooing” scene, and I do play by play as it approaches. “Ok, see in there? That’s Katherine, and she hates to be called Kate. She’s pitching a tantrum and breaking all of her stuff. Petruchio is outside, and he knows he has to go in there and woo her, and he’s building up his courage, telling himself that no matter how much she yells, he’s just going to tell her that her voice sounds like an angel singing…”

And we go through the entire scene, my son asking questions and me doing my best to keep him interested. “What is that pile of stuff she fell in?” That’s feathers, in the old days you had to make your own pillows. She thinks she got away from him, but he’s not done chasing her yet. See? Here he comes again…

“She’s holding an apple, is she going to throw an apple at him?” Probably, yes. Sure enough Richard Burton pops his head up through the trap door and she hurls a macintosh at him.

At one point I realize that my wife has gone up to get into her pajamas and is now just hanging around waiting for our eldest to get home from the dance. “I’m watching Taming of the Shrew with my son!” I tell her. “And he is paying attention! I am so very, very happy! And hey this isn’t even like it’s just Shakespare, this is Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, this is a classic love story we’re talking about here!”

Meanwhile I get random questions, like “So if I was king, would I still be able to be best friends with David?” “Absolutely,” I tell him, “The rules were different back then. Hal’s friend Falstaff was kind of a bad guy.”

“Kind of?”

“Well…how can I explain it? Not like a bad bad guy, he was…..hmmm…”

“Medium.”

“Yeah, medium. He was hanging out with guys that were medium. And when you’re a king you can’t hang out with those kind of people anymore.”

Eventually Petruchio catches Katherine, and I end that particular movie. I ask if my son still wants to see to be or not to be, he tells me yes. “Ok,” I tell him, “This is going to be cool. Because the man that was just playing Katherine’s boyfriend, who was chasing her all over the place? Well, now he’s Hamlet.”

Just picture this, for a moment. My 7yr old son is curled up under a blanket on the couch waiting for the To be or not to be scene. I am standing in front of the television with a remote control in one hand and my phone in the other, where I have brought up the text of Hamlet and am now working back and forth to determine whether I’ve fast forwarded too far. At last I hit the right moment, and pause it. “Ok here we go!” I tell him. “See that guy? That’s Claudius, the bad guy king.”

“Why is he a bad guy king?”

“Because he stole the throne from Hamlet. And that guy there? That’s Polonius. He works for the king, so he’s a bad guy too. That girl? That’s Hamlet’s girlfriend. Polonius has told her that she has to go to Hamlet and say that she doesn’t love him.”

“Why can’t she just say no?”

“Because that guy is her father. And when you were a girl back in Shakespeare’s time, when your father told you to do something, you had to do it, even if he was a bad guy and you didn’t want to.”

And with that, I was watching Richard Burton perform Hamlet while sitting on the couch with my son. It was….bliss.

I explain to my son, “Now see you have to wait for the end, because this is a very important scene. Ophelia, Hamlet’s girlfriend, is going to come up to Hamlet and give him back his presents and tell him that she doesn’t love him.”

“Why?”

“Well because her father told her she has to. Also, because she thinks he’s a little crazy, like everyone else does. Hamlet doesn’t know that, though. Hamlet thinks that she’s the only person left who understands that he’s only pretending.”

“Why is he pretending to be crazy?”

“So he can spy on the bad king. He thinks that the bad guy king cheated to win the throne, and Hamlet wants to win it back, so to do that he has to get close to the bad king to learn more about whether he is guilty, and he thinks that the way to do that is to pretend to be crazy so nobody will pay attention to him. Now,shhhh, here comes Ophelia…”

Funny thing? I don’t like the way they do this scene. I race to my iPad and begin googling.

At this point, by the way, my daughter has arrived home and she is now off to bed, along with my wife. They are both calling down that my son needs to go to bed. I call back that he’ll be up in a minute.

I then bring up Kenneth Branagh’s rendition of this scene. “Watch this,” I tell my son, “It is the same scene, only different people doing it. When Ophelia gives the presents back I want you to watch Hamlet’s face.” *play* “Wait…..wait……..see? SEE? Right here, SEE? He’s so happy to see her, he knows that she’s the only one that believes him…and then he realizes that she thinks he’s crazy too, and at first he is so sad, you can see how he’s almost going to cry…and now look how mad he gets….”

I then go on to show him the Derek Jacobi and Kevin Kline versions of the same scene, before deciding that he only wanted to hear To be or not to be, and having now heard it, all he wants to do is go to bed.

I finally shut it all down, and tell him how very happy it makes me to be able to watch Shakespeare with him. He tells me that he only wanted to hear somebody say to be or not to be and, having heard that, he’s fine with going to bed.

And that’s precisely what he did. Me? I ran to my laptop to blog this whole evening, because it’s been one to remember.

“This Did Something To Me” : Authors’ Favorite First Lines

July 30, 2013March 23, 2017 ~ duane ~ 2 Comments

When I see articles like The Atlantic’s “‘This Did Something Powerful to Me’: Authors’ Favorite First Lines of Books,” the first thing I think is, of course, “Anybody going to mention Shakespeare?”

Yup. I don’t know who Lydia Davis is but she’s my new best pal because not only does she bring Shakespeare into a discussion where no less than 3 others went with “Call me Ishmael”, she goes where you wouldn’t expect:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

That’s the opening to Sonnet 73, in case you don’t recognize it. How about that? 38 or so plays to choose from and 153 other sonnets, and she reaches right into the middle of the pack to pluck that one.

But wait, there’s more! Look at what she says about why that choice: “the interesting order of the second line.” I love how specific she gets. I assume she’s referring to the “none, or few” bit rather than “few, or none”. It’s a good point. Had Shakespeare said “leaves, or few, or none” there’s a linear (and therefore anticipated) sequence there. But to go the other way like he did makes it more random and unpredictable. Some trees will still have their leaves. Some will have none, some will have few. There’s no pattern.

What do you think? Even if you kept it to the realm of Shakespeare and somebody asked you to name your favorite first line, what would your choice be?

I quite like Sonnet 104’s “To me fair friend you never can be old,” though I’m not sure I’d so quickly throw it out there as my absolute favorite. Have to think more about it.

Most Popular Shakespeare Tattoos

May 8, 2013March 29, 2017 ~ duane ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while and finally had the time to do it. In a highly unscientific manner I punched “Shakespeare tattoo” into the Pinterest search engine, and started tracking what came up. Although there were a variety of Shakespeare images, in this case I was looking purely at the quotes.

Unfortunately if more than one person finds the same image and pins it, all those instances will show up, and it would be near impossible for me to do anything about that. So instead I factored it into the equation. The prevalence of a given Shakespeare tattoo doesn’t just mean “More people have this one” it also means “More people *like* this one.”

I learned that pictures of freshly done tattoos are pretty gross. Many of these showed people all red and swollen which I assume means they took the picture immediately upon completion. I also learned that people will tattoo pretty much anywhere on their body, and saw a fair share of nearly naked people with just a hand covering the bits that weren’t Shakespeare. (Though it’s not on pinterest and was not part of this study I remember seeing a picture of a woman in the bathtub whose Shakespeare tattoo was so high up her leg that I hope she married her tattoo artist afterward.)

In total I looked at 74 Shakespeare tattoos (or, as noted, re-pins of tattoos). I was surprised at how lopsided the distribution was. Seventeen of those (almost 1/4th the total) were unique – I found only one tattoo like it. I think my favorite may have been this one:

“My love was my decay”

Because I saw a gazillion Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Tempest and Sonnet 116….but who goes to Sonnet 80? You’ve got to really know and love your material to pull something that almost guarantees no one you ever meet in life will recognize it. I’ll admit I even passed that one over at first as a not by Shakespeare until I read the note associated with it.

[ All images come from a Pinterest search on “shakespeare tattoo“. I do not own the rights to any images. ]

Eight tattoos were in the category of “a few people have or like this one”. Typically I spotted between 2-4 instances of each of these (in no particular order):

“What’s past is prologue”
“To sleep perchance to dream”
“If music be the food of love play on”
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here”
“Stars, hide your fires”
“These violent delights have violent ends.”
“All these woes shall serve for sweet discourse in our time to come.”

There were also a few variations on Sonnet 116, including one person with the entire sonnet but most with a portion of “Love is not love that alters…” Though I like the person who went with “Looks on tempests and is never shaken.” Two different things to focus on.

But then we get to the big winners. Two stood out as clearly more popular than the others. The runner-up, appearing 18 times in my list?

“To thine own self be true.”

I saw Polonius’ advice on more body parts than I can count (such as the pictured foot).

But the winner (appearing 19 times in the list)? Want to take a guess?

“Though she be but little, she is fierce.”

Everybody loves this quote. Not only was it the most popular, I saw a number of people who pinned a different tattoo with the comment, “I like this style, only with the quote about she’s little and fierce.”

What do you think quote choice says about the person? I found it fascinating to consider the different places people have to be in their lives to write of “violent ends” and “all these woes”, compared to those that write of music being the food of love (and bonus points to the creative soul who went with “the earth has music for those who listen” instead). And how about all these “little but fierce” tattoos? Is that a motivational message to the bearer? Or a warning to her enemies? Maybe a little of both.

Review : The Wednesday Wars

April 23, 2013January 23, 2023 ~ duane ~ 3 Comments

The Wednesday Wars plays out like a Shakespeare geek’s version of the hero daydream.

Think back to when you were a child. Surely at one point or another we all dreamed the hero daydream, where bullies backed away from us in the halls, teachers and adults praised our genius, teammates carried us around on their shoulders after we singlehandedly won the big game. You know the drill. All that stuff that would never happen, we just hoped that maybe someday. I remember, and this will seriously date me, that I would someday appear on Johnny Carson because I was just so very precocious, and Johnny would be amazed at how smart I was at such a young age.

Our narrator, seventh-grader “Holling Hoodhood”, has to read The Tempest … and takes away from it the knowledge that most of Caliban’s lines are Shakespearean curse words. So he spends the rest of the book muttering “toads…beetles…bats!” when he’s angry at the situation, sometimes going so far as to shout “The red plague rid you!” at his enemies.

Do you know what happens? Do the bullies of the school all point and laugh and call him an even bigger nerd, knock his books down and give him a wedgie? Oh no, patient reader! In this hero’s daydream the bullies think that these newfangled curses are cool, and it’s only a matter of time before Shakespeare is heard up and down the hallways. I wish!

There’s an even funnier scene when our hero needs a favor from a grownup, who just happens to be in charge of the upcoming Shakespeare show. “What I need,” says the grownup, “What would really save the day? Is to find a 12year old boy that knows his Shakespeare!” Because, you know, that happens. 🙂 And then there’s the scene where he gets to play ball with the Yankees. Yeah.

Much of this story’s structure has been told before. A middle school student growing up in the 60s, having to deal with the teacher that hates him, the bullies that want revenge after he “takes one out,” an older sister who threatens death if he ever comes into her room….you know, the usual. If that’s all it was, I’d have no interest in this book. It is still a young adult book, narrated in that voice, and I found it overly redundant in many points. It’s cute in places (like when Holling’s most pressing concern over his Shakespearean debut is the fact that his costume has feathers on the butt). But his obsession with these things, while in character for a 12yr old, tried my patience on more than one occasion.

What makes this book special is Holling’s relationship with his teacher, Mrs. Baker, who has him working through Shakespeare as part of a special extra assignment. There are bits in the beginning (as noted with Caliban’s curses) where it’s amusing to watch him get into Shakespeare, but it’s not long before they’re taking on bigger and more important issues like “The quality of mercy is not strained” from Merchant. All this is set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War (Mrs. Baker’s husband is missing in action, and Holling’s older sister is considering becoming a flower child).

It’s here that we go from “hero’s daydream” to “Yes, yes, I wish life was more like this.” Everything that happens to Holling has happened and will continue to happen to all young adults at this stage of life. I’m jealous of him because he’s got Shakespeare (and Mrs. Baker) by his side. I mean, come on, he takes a date to Romeo and Juliet … and she likes it! In middle school!

All kidding aside there is a wonderful story being told here, in particular as the narrator’s relationship with his sister evolves. I’ve heard that there might be a sequel in the works, and I’ll definitely put that one on my list as well. I want to live vicariously through this kid.