I tend to give myself projects, to give my life some direction.
I downloaded a free version of the complete works of Shakespeare to my tablet, and over the past months - I can't remember exactly when I began - I've been making my way through them (stopping between plays to read other things).
The poetry appeared at the beginning of the file, so I started with it: the Sonnets, the Rape of Lucrece, Venus and Adonis. The language is often hard, and I haven't been using an annotated edition, so I just plow through passages that I don't completely understand.
I am covering familiar ground, much of it familiar to me personally, since I read a lot of Shakespeare (but not all) when I was a student, and I have seen quite a few productions of Shakespeare in the intervening years, and all of it familiar in a general, cultural sense: scholars have been combing Shakespeare intensely for centuries, as have theater directors, actors, and serious readers. So it's hard to imagine having an idea about Shakespeare or an insight that hasn't appeared hundreds of times in the literature. Nevertheless, one responds to what one reads, and the response is new and important to the reader.
Just last night I finished reading Measure for Measure, which I had read several times, decades ago, and on this reading I was struck by the oddity of the play, just as, when I read King Lear a week or so ago, I was struck by Shakespeare's sudden and astonishing leap from the occasionally tedious facts of British dynastic history to a nightmarish pre-Christian setting, and MacBeth, with its witches and ghosts, MacBeth's insomnia and his wife's sleepwalking.
The action of Measure for Measure is set in motion by the Duke's eccentric behavior, delegating his power to the misnamed Angelo and hiding behind the scenes to see what happens, a Viennese (!) Haroun al-Rashid. The spectator is supposed to like and admire the Duke, though his behavior is cruelly manipulative.
A truly humane person would have stopped the action immediately, stopping in to prevent Claudio's unjust execution and removing Angelo from office before he did any more harm. But instead he allows Claudio to suffer in expectation of decapitation and makes Isabel think that her brother is dead. Of course, if the Duke had acted ethically, there would have been no play.
This of course led me to think of all the manipulative characters I could remember in Shakespeare. Schemers who try to control the action appear in almost every play. Some are successful, like the Duke and Prospero, some are tragically unsuccessful, despite good intentions, like Lear, some are downright evil, like Iago and Lady MacBeth, and some are hard to judge, like Cassius in Julius Caesar.
These manipulators are projections of the author, because theater is a highly manipulative art form. The author creates characters and puts them through trying plots, the director tells the actors how to deliver their lines, the actors recite words that are not their own and perform or mimic actions that they would not ordinarily do, and the whole complex machinery of author, director, actors, stage and costume designers, and so on all work together to manipulate the emotions of the spectator, who is essentially trapped in his or her seat, forced to undergo the drama.
The oddity of Measure for Measure has to do with its being a comedy in form, though not in content, with the mixture of low characters with the highborn - a grotesque sub-plot based on the themes of the main story - and with the sophistical way the Duke and other characters convincingly advance contradictory arguments.
In general I am in favor of reading works of literature, especially old ones, with as much awareness as possible of their oddity.
To be continued, perhaps.
I downloaded a free version of the complete works of Shakespeare to my tablet, and over the past months - I can't remember exactly when I began - I've been making my way through them (stopping between plays to read other things).
The poetry appeared at the beginning of the file, so I started with it: the Sonnets, the Rape of Lucrece, Venus and Adonis. The language is often hard, and I haven't been using an annotated edition, so I just plow through passages that I don't completely understand.
I am covering familiar ground, much of it familiar to me personally, since I read a lot of Shakespeare (but not all) when I was a student, and I have seen quite a few productions of Shakespeare in the intervening years, and all of it familiar in a general, cultural sense: scholars have been combing Shakespeare intensely for centuries, as have theater directors, actors, and serious readers. So it's hard to imagine having an idea about Shakespeare or an insight that hasn't appeared hundreds of times in the literature. Nevertheless, one responds to what one reads, and the response is new and important to the reader.
Just last night I finished reading Measure for Measure, which I had read several times, decades ago, and on this reading I was struck by the oddity of the play, just as, when I read King Lear a week or so ago, I was struck by Shakespeare's sudden and astonishing leap from the occasionally tedious facts of British dynastic history to a nightmarish pre-Christian setting, and MacBeth, with its witches and ghosts, MacBeth's insomnia and his wife's sleepwalking.
The action of Measure for Measure is set in motion by the Duke's eccentric behavior, delegating his power to the misnamed Angelo and hiding behind the scenes to see what happens, a Viennese (!) Haroun al-Rashid. The spectator is supposed to like and admire the Duke, though his behavior is cruelly manipulative.
A truly humane person would have stopped the action immediately, stopping in to prevent Claudio's unjust execution and removing Angelo from office before he did any more harm. But instead he allows Claudio to suffer in expectation of decapitation and makes Isabel think that her brother is dead. Of course, if the Duke had acted ethically, there would have been no play.
This of course led me to think of all the manipulative characters I could remember in Shakespeare. Schemers who try to control the action appear in almost every play. Some are successful, like the Duke and Prospero, some are tragically unsuccessful, despite good intentions, like Lear, some are downright evil, like Iago and Lady MacBeth, and some are hard to judge, like Cassius in Julius Caesar.
These manipulators are projections of the author, because theater is a highly manipulative art form. The author creates characters and puts them through trying plots, the director tells the actors how to deliver their lines, the actors recite words that are not their own and perform or mimic actions that they would not ordinarily do, and the whole complex machinery of author, director, actors, stage and costume designers, and so on all work together to manipulate the emotions of the spectator, who is essentially trapped in his or her seat, forced to undergo the drama.
The oddity of Measure for Measure has to do with its being a comedy in form, though not in content, with the mixture of low characters with the highborn - a grotesque sub-plot based on the themes of the main story - and with the sophistical way the Duke and other characters convincingly advance contradictory arguments.
In general I am in favor of reading works of literature, especially old ones, with as much awareness as possible of their oddity.
To be continued, perhaps.
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