Sunday, December 1, 2013

How Not To Write Historical Fiction

I remember how piqued I was when a Publishers Weekly reviewer criticized my first novel, My Father Had a Daughter. She didn't like the book -- a fiction based on the life of Shakespeare's youngest child, Judith -- because it didn't end with the girl's death, like the sad fantasy about Shakespeare's sister spun by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own. Woolf's protagonist was also named Judith, and Woolf's Judith killed herself. The critic thought mine should have, too. Yet it wasn't this puzzling critique that sparked my ire. What got to me was this critic's disparagement of my novel's

Friday, November 1, 2013

Saint Shakespeare

On All Saints Day, not only may you buy a secular "Saint Shakespeare" candle (, you may also ask: what saints did Shakespeare like? He wrote plays in a militantly Protestant England that had severely demoted saints during its Reformation some sixty years before. The famous shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury had been dismantled (and looted). No one was going on merry pilgrimage there, or to St. Mary at Walsingham, and it was forbidden to pray to St. Cuthbert of Durham, which is one of the reasons you've never heard of him. English saints were not marching in, but roving, sad, invisible and homeless, across the land. Yet they weren't forgotten. They were still enshrined in the calendar (St. Swithin's Day, St. Lucy's Day -- who are these people?). Even though the church nearest Shakespeare's Globe had its name changed from "St. Mary's" to "St. Savior's" during the Elizabethan period, many churches, not to mention towns, retained their traditional saints' names. And saints still throve in the popular imagination. So it shouldn't surprise us that references to this saint or that pop up all over the place in Shakespeare. Here, in honor of the day, are five notable Shakespeare saints.

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Elizabethan Paint Jobs

 I've long been fascinated by the horrible things late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Englishwomen of means did to their faces, in order to conform to a standard of beauty that was largely prescribed by literature. What standard? Eyes like suns or stars, skin like snow (except for the cheeks, wherein red and white roses were to be mingled), lips like cherries, teeth like polished alabaster. (Somehow that reminds me of George Washington.) Many people know Shakespeare's famous poetic critique of this (when you think about it) bizarre visual ideal, Sonnet 130, which begins, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun," and includes the line "coral is far more red than her lips' red." Not so many folks are familiar with the kind of poetry Will was reacting to, so here's a sample, from his contemporary Thomas Campion: "There is a garden in her face / Where roses and white lilies grow; / A heav'nly paradise is that place / Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow." Now, let's stop right there.  The woman may have a fungal skin disease, and on top of that, the fruits in her face are flowing, like, maybe, applesauce. Yet there's more. "Those cherries [the lips] fairly do enclose / Of orient pearl a double row [her choppers] / Which when her lovely laughter shows, / They look like rose-buds fill'd with snow."
     This is hardly grammatical. Campion clearly stuck the word "They" in the last line

Sunday, September 1, 2013

Lights Under Bushels: Renaissance Folk in Hiding

I recently talked with a friend of mine, Chuck Bentley, at the Starbucks in our local Barnes & Noble where he and his wife Donna hang out. Chuck is hands down the finest Michigan Shakespearean actor I have ever seen perform, and his skill is worthy of the major theaters of New York and Chicago, which I have visited more times than I can count. He might have gone to the big city, but he chooses to write and perform here, in Kalamazoo, participating in or organizing local productions, all the while happily championing

Thursday, August 1, 2013

The Ten Best Shakespeare Performances on Film

For this August post I'm sharing my choices for the Ten Greatest Shakespeare Performances Ever Committed To Film Based on an Incomplete Sample of What's Out There Because Shakespeare's Been on Film for Over a Century and I've Seen Less than Half of It. So perhaps I should call what follows The Ten Best Shakespeare Performances in Films I Have Seen and Happen To Remember. Another possibility: Random Choices of Great Shakespeare Performances I'm Thinking about Today. All are good titles, so please choose the one you like best. Now, like David Letterman, I'm going to start with my tenth-ranked winner.

Monday, July 1, 2013

Did Shakespeare Write Everyone Else's Plays?



 At twenty-something he went off to London. Instinctively, he had already trained himself to the habit of feigning that he was somebody . . . .  

                         -- Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing

The town was an ocean of faces and noise. He stood in the Strand, a pack on his back, confounded, and thought, I am a drop in the surrounding sea. Anonymity was new to him, but this mental habit was old, inescapable, and often unconscious: the instinctive apprehension of real things by means, and only by means, of metaphor. The sun was never the sun, but a hot wench in scarlet taffeta. The moon? A loon’s mournful wail. Thus his mind was made, or mismade. Yet what in Stratford had made him conspicuous, peculiar, and strangely wanting could profit him in London. He’d come to the place where the word-merchants were, to make a virtue of necessity.
    He translated himself, at first to a player named Shakspere. Yet soon

Saturday, June 1, 2013

Shakespeare Profiteers Make Out Like Bandits!

Have you checked out these suits who are making a killing marketing "corporate" Shakespeare? To be accurate, some business types are only trying to cash in, while some actually are profiting, big time. Google "Shakespeare in business" and you'll find a slew of "Get rich the Shakespeare way" books, including Paul Corrigan's Shakespeare on Management and Jay Shafritz's no less (or more) originally titled Shakespeare on Management. (Book description: "William Shakespeare's vast and important contributions to literature have long been acknowledged, but his shrewd insights into business and management have been all but ignored -- until now.") Even some folks with an actual interest in theater are sucking up to the corporations, a trend which, hilariously spoofed in one episode of the Canadian TV series Slings and Arrows, turns out to be perversely real. The Nashville Shakespeare Festival now offers "Business Workshops for Professional Development" ("Making your world a stage, all year round!"). If you want to spend the rest of your day in a state of shock and depression, watch their promotional video:

No one can deny that Shakespeare himself was a shrewd businessman. He knew enough to buy stock in his own theater company, the most successful in England,

Saturday, May 4, 2013

The Five Reasons for Hamlet's Delay

Hey, this is just a note to all you students writing papers on Hamlet. Guess what? This is just a blog post. It's not a refereed scholarly article. So don't quote from it. Don't plagiarize from it, either, because your teachers are watching you. Their eyes are everywhere. 😆😆😆😆😆  Still want to read it? Ok, go ahead.


My answer to last week's Shakespeare puzzle, “Why does Hamlet delay?,” got so long I had to turn it into a blog-post. This proves that if you read Hamlet enough times you get as wordy as its protagonist. In the end I boiled it all down to these FIVE REASONS HAMLET MUST TAKE HIS SWEET TIME TO AVENGE HIS FATHER’S MURDER:

1.      Mr. Thoughtful. First, let’s consider Hamlet’s claim that he’ll avenge his dad “with wings as swift as meditation.” Shouldn’t this be “with wings as swift as an F-1 bomber’s,”or, in keeping with the half-medieval moment, “with wings as swift as some really fast eagles’”? (That one would maintain the meter, and the poetry is clearly as good as Shakespeare’s.) But he says “meditation,” something not all that swift, and that signals to us, if Hamlet’s tortured soliloquy in scene 2 hasn’t already, that this is a guy prone to ponder things from various angles before acting, which can take time. This is a guy who was kicked out of the University of Wittenberg for failure to complete his honors thesis, “Applications of the Pythagorean Theorem to Polish Sled Construction,” within the ten-year allotted time-span. This is a guy who's 30 and still lives with his mom. This is a guy -- well, I could go on, and were I Hamlet, I would, but I'll get to the bottom line, which is, there are ample grounds to blame Hamlet’s analytical tendency for his delay. Hamlet himself will do so when he says “the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,” in a speech that proves his point. But, on the other hand, Hamlet’s as hard on himself as he is on everyone else, and numerous other circumstances in the play justify his waiting til act 5. (I mean, besides that the play would be a rip-off if he just went and stabbed Claudius immediately.) These other reasons are:

2.       "Questionable" Ghost.  As one of my readers pointed out, this Ghost needs some looking into (if we can look into a ghost). Hamlet’s friends don’t trust the Ghost at all, and warn him that if he follows it, it might tempt him into madness and suicide, which very nearly does happen. I always tell my students to quote the plays to back up their claims, so here you have it: “What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord? / Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff / . . . And there assume some other horrible form / Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason?” (1.4.77-81). Hamlet seems to think it's a compliment when he calls the Ghost "questionable," but I don't. I think the Ghost is questionable. Even though the Ghost compares himself to an angel (and Claudius to garbage), and even though Horatio hopefully says “Heaven will direct it” as Hamlet chases off after Ghosty (does Horatio mean Heaven will direct the Ghost or will direct “the state of Denmark” to which Marcellus has just referred?), still, despite all this, the fact is that the Ghost isn’t some kind of heavenly messenger. Nor is he from Purgatory, despite his claim that he’s stuck in a place where you stay till all your sins get burned off. Why is this not Purgatory? Because they don’t let you out of Purgatory at night to commission killings. Ask Dante. Also, because Protestant Elizabethan audiences had been taught to consider Purgatory a myth. And playgoers were also used to seeing the hollow under-stage realm into which the Ghost disappears, and from which he then speaks, used to represent a Hell from which painted devils emerged. So Hamlet’s not too far off the mark when he says, at the end of act 2, “The spirit I have seen may be a devil.” It’s reasonable for him to do further detective work on Claudius, and that's what he does with “The Mousetrap.”

3.      Hamlet’s Honor, or, In Search of a Duel. Who wants to be a sneaky revenger sticking a dagger in someone’s back, or poisoning him while he’s asleep, or with a cup or an envenomed foil? Claudius, that’s who. Or Laertes, his shill. Hamlet’s like Claudius in some ways (hmm, how long has this relationship between Gertrude and Claudius been going on? Whose son is Hamlet? Subject of another blog). Both Hamlet and "Uncle" Claudius are cautious and strategic. But Hamlet’s also got the obligation to live up to the legacy of his father -- I mean, his "father" -- whose way was to engage in open, declared combat (like against Old Fortinbras). A sneaky revenger hides his intentions, but an honorable revenger (who also just adores the theater) might stage a little play to warn Claudius, “Guess what! I’m onto you!” It makes the game a little riskier, but it does force an eventual open confrontation between these two “mighty opposites,” Hamlet and his uncle. In fact, much of the language that frames the act five combat between Hamlet and Laertes, Claudius' dupe and proxy, describes a thwarted quest for the kind of judicial combat popular in Germanic (more than in English) realms in the late medieval period, whereby a charge of a capital crime, if unprovable by ordinary legal means, might be "proved' against the accused through an open duel. Act five is one of the parts of the play caught between medieval and Renaissance worlds, like a sketch superimposed on another sketch. Hamlet is challenged to "play" against Laertes in what seems a modern fencing match, even though Laertes, whose dad Hamlet has recently whacked, has ample reason to issue a formal (medieval) challenge (though he might be prevented by Hamlet's royal rank from doing so even if Claudius hadn't talked him into a sneaky poisoning trick). Yet even though the match is explicitly proposed only to settle a bet, the servant who issues the challenge then calls the event "the opposition of [Hamlet's] person in trial," using medieval judicial terms, and Hamlet seems to accept the challenge as such, questioning what weapons will be used, checking them before the combat, and asking Laertes for a formal pardon before they begin. His proffered insanity defense at this moment is, I confess, a little iffy in terms of honor, but it's possible he really does think he was a little bit nuts in act 3, scene 4. We do. He was. In any case, Laertes rejects Hamlet's apology and plea, and the fight takes place, and turns eventually into an explicit conviction and punishment of Claudius' "Treason! treason!," a charge shouted by "All." It's a judicial combat manque, but it's a lot more like a duel of honor than are the usual killings in revenge plays, as I'll show below.

4.      Claudius Might Repent. Okay. Early in the play the Ghost has told Hamlet to “avenge” his murder, and there’s no getting away from the fact that this usually means sticking a bodkin into someone. But there’s a little ambiguity in the Ghost’s later instruction that Hamlet “Let not the royal bed of Denmark be / A couch for luxury and damned incest” (which is the Ghost’s, and Hamlet’s, interpretation of Gertrude’s marriage to her brother-in-law. You’ll hardly ever see the phrase “in-law” in Shakespeare, because marriage was considered physically to merge the blood of the spouse with that of the new family. Elizabethans didn’t know about genes and that DNA only merged in offspring). Also, there’s some leeway in the Ghost’s “howsomever thou pursues this act” (that act being the freshening up of Denmark’s royal couch). So, even though Hamlet hates Claudius, he can allow for the possibility that Claudius might voluntarily repent of his deed and subject himself to formal justice, in which case Hamlet wouldn't have to assassinate him. How do I know this? I read the play. Look at what Hamlet says before he puts on “The Mousetrap”: “Hum. I have heard / That guilty creatures sitting at a play / Have, by the very cunning of the scene, / Been struck so to the soul that presently / They have proclaimed their malefactions” (end of 2.2). See? And Claudius very nearly does confess. Consider his agonized soliloquy after seeing his crime represented in Hamlet’s incredibly wordy playlet (Hamlet expanded it). It may seem like Claudius cuts the play off because it’s way too boring, but no. The play makes him feel guilty, so he runs to his chapel and tries to confess his sin. Once there, unfortunately for him but fortunately for the play, he decides confessing is really not worth it.

5. The Revenge Play Ethic. Yes, Hamlet does seem to have gotten murderous again when he comes upon Claudius kneeling and trying to pray. He tells the audience the only reason he’s not stabbing Claudius just now is that he doesn’t want to risk sending him to heaven by murdering him in the middle of this repentance that isn’t actually happening only Hamlet doesn’t know it isn't. But this scruple is fully in keeping with the revenge-play convention. Were Hamlet a conventional revenger, he would engineer for his enemy a punishment that was at least as bad as the original crime and guaranteed to send the victim to hellfire, even if it also damned himself, the revenger. I mean, have you read any of these other early-modern revenge plays? Try Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, where an adulterous wife is poisoned with a prayer-book. Or The White Devil, where two guys disguised as monks suddenly throw off their hoods and stab their enemies in a festive act-five bloodbath. The best is Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, where the brother of a ravished woman tricks her rapist into kissing a skull dressed  in a wig and wearing poisoned makeup. The rapist gags and dies. The Revenger's Tragedy has the additional virtue of containing the tragic character with the hands-down, best-ever early-modern stage-play name, "Supervacuo." I was tempted to name my kid this, though I finally went with "Euphorion," which is what Aristotle named his son, and it's turned out to be much more descriptive. But back to Hamlet. My point is that Hamlet is doing what your average revenger would do by refusing to kill Claudius when he's praying. That sort of unspectacular slaying would not satisfy tragic justice nor the depraved Globe audience. But, as I’ve said, Hamlet doesn’t know his own self. He’s a radical tragic figure in that he's not a conventional revenger. He's too honorable to be the sneaky backstabber or poisoner. By taking his time, by waiting, he allows Providence to give him a public moment that's both spectacular (a double revenge on Claudius! Poisoned foil and poisoned drink!) and not the slightest bit sneaky. The undisguised Hamlet kills Claudius in an open forum after Claudius has been publicly accused by the dying Laertes (“The king’s to blame!”) and ample evidence of Claudius’ guilt has been set before all, in the form of various dead bodies strewn over the stage. It’s like one of those crime shows where a bunch of extra people have to die before everyone can agree that the original culprit actually is the real culprit. We knew Claudius was guilty because we heard Claudius’ confessional soliloquy (and that is the only way we knew). But Hamlet didn’t hear that. He had to collect evidence.

Have I convinced you? I hope so, since that's all I've got. Except this (accept this):  the non-philosophical action Hamlet of your dreams. Just click here.

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Wednesday, May 1, 2013

#ShakeAss at the Royal York

It's a few weeks late, but since April Fool's Day and Shakespeare's Birthday intervened and
demanded to be addressed, I'm just now reporting on the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, which took place at the end of March at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel in Toronto, and was marked by many fine  and much-applauded moments, not least of which was the public unveiling of the association's new informal Twitter hashtag, "ShakeAss." Let me just start by saying that people in Canada are really, really nice; I mean, almost supernaturally nice, eerily nice. As an example, upon my arrival at the general zone of the conference hotel in downtown Toronto late on a Thursday night, suffering from a variety of cranial pains due to my having struck myself forcibly on the nose with a tennis racquet two weeks before (don't ask),

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Go Fishing with Shakespeare

Shakespeare's birthday is worth a blog, although new blog posts ordinarily come up monthly on Shakespeare in Fiction and Fact. (This will in fact be the third April post, since the extraordinary discovery of a new scene from Romeo and Juliet on the oddly meaningful date of April 1st demanded its own story.) Shakespeare is 449 today, and celebrations of his birth among Shakespeare maniacs are in full force on both sides of the Atlantic. If you want to wander down or teleport to the Bankside, London, you can hear world-class theater historians discussing such topics as why the Globe playhouse was round and how Elizabethan London looked when it was plastered with playbills. Washington, D.C., that intellectual town, has declared it open house at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where are stored most of the original First Folios. (These are huge first editions of Shakespeare's complete plays put out by his fellow actors in 1623, and We Capitalize Them.) (Pun unintentional.) In Chicago, they're doing their annual "Chicagoans Talk Like Shakespeare Day," so stay away from there. It's best, I think, to celebrate Shakespeare's birthday in Kalamazoo, where spring has finally arrived and where, though students at Western Michigan University are now taking their Shakespeare finals, many will later be gathered at Shakespeare's Pub downtown on Kalamazoo Avenue. What is that, you say? It's a beautiful old squarish stone building with "Shakespeare" engraved on the front wall, and inside it's a sports bar! But it wasn't always a bar. For seventy years it was the national headquarters of the still enormously successful Shakespeare Fishing Tackle company, begun in 1897 by William Shakespeare, Jr.,

Monday, April 1, 2013

Simply Shakespeare, on Film: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, directed by Joss Whedon

Last Friday, in a prologue to a sneak preview of his new movie, Much Ado about Nothing, Joss Whedon betrayed some anxiety about exposing the film to scholarly scrutiny. The occasion was the Shakespeare Society of America’s annual meeting in Toronto, the audience was several hundred British and North American Shakespeare academics gathered in a vast hotel ballroom, and the mode by which Whedon expressed his nervousness was a fake British accent. Not that he mocked the crowd. That would have been unShakespearean. In his filmed introduction, he alternated between the stuffy drone of an Oxford academic and his regular voice, in which he expressed gratitude to those who’d committed their professional lives to helping students understand and like Shakespeare. When the film began, it became clear pretty quickly that Joss Whedon knew how to do both.

Whedon’s stripped-down, low-budget, black and white version of Shakespeare’s great mid-career comedy is simply Shakespeare, without modernizing gimmicks or tricks.  Except insofar as every transplanting of a play from live theater to film is an adaptation, it isn’t one.  It’s the play. The setting is a Los Angeles-ish mansion in the twenty-first century, to which characters arrive by limo, toting cell phones, but Whedon has made no attempt to update the ceremonial language of the

Lost ROMEO AND JULIET Scene Radically Changes Play

Dateline: April 1, 2013. Printed below is the full text of the newly discovered lost scene from act one of Romeo and Juliet. The scene exists in a quarto version of the play found in February in a British bookseller’s collection. The quarto’s provenance was debated at the Shakespeare Association of America’s just-concluded annual meeting in Toronto, where the consensus of textual scholars was that the work was Shakespeare’s. The finding marks the first “new” (newly discovered) Shakespearean work since that of “Hand D” in the anonymous collaborative 1590s play Sir Thomas More in 1871. The Romeo and Juliet quarto with the additional short sixth scene dates from 1598, and is an interim text between the “bad”quarto version of 1597 and the “Newly corrected, augmented, and amended” version issued by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1599; the process of its authentication is described at length in

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Skeletal Richard

Hi! Welcome to this month's commentary on Shakespeare in the news.
In recent months lots of people have been talking about the finding of King Richard III’s skeleton under a parking lot in Leicester, England. Several people who I didn’t (and don’t) think cared about Richard III at all asked me for my reaction. Did I think it was really him? My own husband asked me this last night.  He thinks I know! In fact, through the wonders of DNA evidence, it’s been established that yes, it’s really Richard III – or was. He was lying in the ruins of a church buried under centuries’ worth of dirt and finally paved over, resident there more or less since he was killed by a serious knife to the head during the last great battle of the Wars of the Roses at Bosworth Field in 1485. That’s a big date, 1485. Henry Tudor, whose forces defeated Richard’s at Bosworth, was crowned that year and began the more than century-long-lasting Tudor dynasty, which ended in 1603 with the death of Henry Tudor’s granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth I. 1485 was also very close to the time William Caxton brought to England the printing press, an excellent invention that would radically expand public literacy and facilitate, over the subsequent century, the mass distribution of ancient and modern books in print, and enable hundreds of English writers of all social levels, including Shakespeare, to speak to the people (kind of like the Internet, our own time’s great textual leap). So 1485 is a pretty good date to choose if you want to mark the end of the middle ages in England and the beginning of the Renaissance. And if we see it that way, Richard III, who perished that year, was the last medieval English king. Maybe that’s why so many people are excited about this dead and now very skinny royal.