Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Spaghetti Shakespeare: Contemporary Review of Johnny Hamlet



The review continues . . .

Links: The Film at IMDB.

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Monday, March 30, 2015

Book Note: The Dead Fathers Club

Haig, Matt. The Dead Fathers Club. New York: Penguin, 2006.

I finished reading this a little to late for it to form part of the discussion of modern versions of Hamlet in my Modern Shakespearean Fiction class, but it may make its way into future versions of the course—as an option, I think, rather than as a course text for everyone.

The protagonist, Philip, is eleven years old—which is on the young side for derivative versions of the Danish Prince—and that might lead some readers to think that this is young adult fiction. Partly because of the extent and kind of profanity in the book, I would not classify it as such. The novel also grapples intriguingly with issues and ideas of a more advanced kind—though all in the voice of an eleven-year-old boy.

The voice struck me most profoundly. It's well-crafted, captures the tone of an eleven-year-old boy, and has great interest in itself. Here's the opening of the book—in a chapter called "The First Time I Saw Dad After He Died":


Perhaps it's because I'm currently re-reading The Sound and the Fury, but I was impressed by the creation of a voice that can relate everything it sees but lacks the maturity necessary to comprehend or to interpret it.

I also appreciated how the narrative follows Hamlet's—but only to a certain extent. It doesn't make itself into an obvious Hamlet derivative, but it's filled with moments that call our attention to the play. Here are some of my favorites:

  • In the first chapter, some men are smoking Hamlet brand cigars (2)
  • The boy's angelfish is called "Gertie which is short for GERTRUDE which is a funny name" (63)
  • The character called "Dads Ghost" says, about Uncle Alan, "He sits there smiling. That evil villain sits there smiling. Trying to worm his way in like a maggot. Smiling smiling smiling. Look at him Philip. Look at him. Smiling damned villain" (72)
  • In an effort to show how he could bring the pub to profitability, Uncle Alan tells Philip's mom to "Take all those Real Ales." She asks, "What about them?" and we get this line in reply: "Uncle Alan folded his arms still nose whistling and he said Stale flat unprofitable" (77)
  • The Ophelia analogue (whose name is Leah) has an older brother named Dane (84)
  • Number six on a list of "Ways I can kill Uncle Alan" that our protagonist makes is "POISON. You can pour poison into someones ear when they sleep and it kills them. Bu there are no poison shops any more. Weedkiller is poison but I dont know if you can pour it into ears" (126)
  • Philip, who is a bit of a Roman History buff, says, "I know that Romulus was like Uncle Alan because he killed his brother and became the first King of Rome 2800 years ago" (186)
  • In a pub quiz, this question comes up: "Another tricky one. In which play by William Shakespeare do we find the line There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so?" (186)
There are some very intriguing alterations to the plot, but I really can't go into them without causing major spoilers. With an appropriate qualification about the obscenities in mind, The Dead Fathers Club provides an interesting take on Hamlet—one that invites us to return to the play for yet another reading.

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Sunday, March 29, 2015

Langston Hughes and Shakespeare

Hughes, Langston. "Shakespeare in Harlem." Shakespeare in Harlem. Illus. E. McKnight Kauffer. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1942. 111.

I'm teaching a survey of American Literature for the first time in my long and illustrious career, and I still find myself looking for the Shakespeare angle whenever it seems appropriate.

Langston Hughes wrote a poem called "Shakespeare in Harlem" in a volume called Shakespeare in Harlem. [Apparently, he also wrote  a play called Shakespeare in Harlem, but I haven't yet been able to track it down.] Like many of Hughes' works, it has a deceptively simple façade. I'll provide the text and then an image of the full page spread for the poem:
Hey ninny neigh!
And a hey nonny noe!
Where, oh, where
Did my sweet mama go?

Hey ninny neigh
With a tra-la-la-la!
They say your sweet mama
Went home to her ma. (111)

It may not be Hughes' best poem, but it does the work of turning Shakespearean songs into the blues. 

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Wednesday, March 25, 2015

A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Guthrie Theatre (2015)






The play's opening line.

Hippolyta, I woo'd thee with my sword,
And won thy love, doing thee injuries;
But I will wed thee in another key,

The relationship between Hippolyta and Theseus.


The Indian Boy.






Guthrie asides.




Into the [Scary] Woods.


Administration of the Love Potion.


The "Jack Shall Have Jill" song.



Rude Mechanicals.






Final blessing.

With this field-dew consecrate,
Every fairy take his gait,
And each several chamber bless,
Through this palace, with sweet peace,
And the owner of it blest


Links: The Play at the Guthrie's Web Site.

Production photo by Dan Norman. 

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Book Note: I am Shakespeare

Rylance, Mark. I am Shakespeare. London: Nick Hern Books, 2012.

This play contains Rylance's theory that someone else wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare.  The plot is centered on a man named Frank who is putting on a web broadcast on the authorship question. He's visited by four claimants (Shakespeare, Bacon, Oxford, and Mary Herbert, née Sidney). At the end, everyone in the audience is meant to recognize that it doesn't matter who wrote the plays; they each are meant to stand up and say, "I am Shakespeare."

It's a particularly frustrating play, helping to establish that propaganda very rarely makes good art. Shakespeare managed to do it in Richard III, but that play really has propagandistic elements in an artistic endeavor. This play is almost exclusively "Reasonable Doubt" propaganda.

And that, as you can imagine, gets very tedious very quickly. Old and exploded notions are brought up without any critical judgement—for example, the idea that Joseph Hall and John Marston indicated (by means of a very tenuous, roundabout, coded method) that Francis Bacon wrote Venus and Adonis—and the same tired, exhausted, laughable arguments are presented as if they were fresh—for example, that nothing associates Shakespeare with the works until seven years after his death. There's even this blatantly misleading statement: ". . . even his contemporary theatre managers, Henslowe and Alleyne, don't mention Shakespeare once in their diaries and account books, despite their many references to other playwrights and theatre people" (43). First, Philip Henslowe (who kept the diary— Edward Alleyn was in business with him but no diary of his survives) was not Shakespeare's theatre manager: he managed an entirely different theatre with entirely different actors and authors. While it is true that Henslowe does not mention Shakespeare, no one should expect him to!

I'll give you a few other samples from the play. The first—which starts off in humorous vein, then turns into anti-Stratfordian fantasy—involves the first caller to call-in web broadcast. It turns out to be a telephone solicitor. Here's the bulk of the exchange (click to enlarge the image):

Later in the play, Oxford wanders on for some of the most painful sections of this entire mess. Here's an exchange between Shakespeare and Oxford:

Shakespeare: The Tempest was impelled by a sea voyage that took place in 1609; Macbeth could not have been composed before the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. It's impossible that you wrote them.
Oxford: Oh yes, I'm terribly sorry. I forgot that there has only ever been one sea voyage and one treasonous plot in recorded history. Anonymous versions of Hamlet and King Lear were being performed in the early 1590s. If you wrote these mature plays then you were pushing them out with your first facial hair. (64)
Oxford's first point might be significant if the facts of the shipwreck and the threat to King James I were the only reasons Shakespeare scholars give for dating those plays as they do; however, their dating depends on texts that weren't published until those dates in addition to other arguments. The second part of his argument makes no sense. First, no one is claiming that Shakespeare wrote those particular plays. Second, no one is claiming that they are mature plays. The dates Oxford gives are, at least, accurate. The anonymous King Leir—note the spelling—was written prior to 1594. It survives in a 1605 quarto. The play known as the Ur-Hamlet does not survive, but references to it come from as early as 1589. Shakespeare was twenty-five years old in 1589 and thirty in 1594, giving him plenty of time to grow facial hair (which, in any case, is not a prerequisite to the writing of good plays).

The final bit of nonsense comes in an appendix listing Shakespearean phrases and phrases from Francis Bacon side by side. The claim is that if both men said the same thing, both men must be the same men. A similar argument is often made for the authorship claims of Marlovians (for which, q.v.). Here, the list becomes even more laughable—in two distinct ways. First, many of these are common clichés of the time. If I say "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" and Woody Allen says "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush," does that make us into a single entity? And if I started listing all the authors of the period who said something like "Fortune changes like the moon," we'd have a very tedious week in front of us. Second, many of these have only the very slightest commonality. Is "To hazard all our lives in one small boat" even remotely similar to "You are in the same ship"? Ridiculous!

Mark Rylance may be quite a capable actor, but this misleading, propagandistic play shows him to be lacking in both honesty and scholarship.

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Monday, March 23, 2015

Book Note: The Young Reader's Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet

McKeown, Adam. The Young Reader's Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet. Illus. Peter Fiore. New York: Sterling, 2003.

While trying to track down Michael Rosen and Jane Ray's version of Romeo and Juliet (for which, q.v.), I chanced upon another picture book version, and it has its compelling side as well.

Adam McKeown and Peter Fiore's version is much more detailed. It's almost a young adult novelization of the play. And their version frequently keeps close to the text—but not as close nor with as much care to indicate which words are Shakespeare's and which are the authors.

It's also a bit steamier than I'd expect from a picture book!

I'm providing an example of the same scene that I wrote about for Michael Rosen and Jane Ray's version of Romeo and Juliet: Romeo meets Juliet at the Capulet ball. Click on the image below to enlarge it.

That provides a good glimpse at the prose and its use of Shakespeare's words. It also gives you a hint of the illustrations, which are a bit more realistic than those in the previous version but with quite a bit of artistry.

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Thursday, March 19, 2015

Romeo and Juliet in Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman

"What is Love?" By Carl Binder. Perf. Jane Seymour, Joe Lando, and Chad Allen. Dir. Daniel Attias. Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Season 3, episode 19. CBS. 11 February 1995. DVD. A&E Home Video, 2009.

I never particularly liked Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman—but I also freely admit to vast ignorance of the show. First, I thought (erroneously) that the reason Beverly Crusher left the Starship Enterprise in season two of Star Trek: The Next Generation was that Gates McFadden wanted to play the role of Dr. Quinn but the schedules couldn't, for that season, be reconciled. Second, I considered the show to be merely a version of Little House on the Prairie for older viewers interested primarily in cheesy romance. Actually, the jury is still out on that one.

But I find that I have, however slightly, digressed. In an episode in season three, the town decides to put on a production of Romeo and Juliet for Valentine's Day. Not uncoincidentally, the students of the town have been given an essay assignment: Answer the question "What is Love?" After the expected kurfuffle of lovers and friends falling out and misunderstanding each other (all of which one boy, pen in hand, poignantly observes), the director getting laryngitis, the lead getting laryngitis (if I remember correctly—the show doesn't lend itself to deep concentration), et cetera, everything starts coming together just in time for the big show. And that's where the clip below picks up. Enjoy!

Links: The Episode at IMDB.

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Book Note: Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

Rosen, Michael. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Illus. Jane Ray. Cambridge: Candlewick Press, 2004.

I don't often run across a picture book version of a Shakespeare play that I think would be worthwhile to review, but Michael Rosen and Jane Ray's version of Romeo and Juliet is an exception for one essential reason.

It's not the illustrations. They are very creditable, and they have a unique style, but they don't particularly stand out. I do appreciate that they're not sentimentalized—the characters in the story have a realistic, warts-and-all feel to them.

It's not the summary of the story. It takes some effort to do that well—especially for a younger age group—but that's something of which many are capable.

What caught my attention was the particular marriage of summary, illustration, and integration of Shakespeare's text. I'm used to seeing either complete retellings of Shakespeare's plots or illustrated editions of his text. In this book, there's a substantial amount of the text of Shakespeare's play:

I find that to be a very satisfactory marriage of text, summary, footnote, and illustration.

I also appreciated this chart of the other characters—just to help us keep them all straight!

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Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Book Note: Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? Puts the Authorship Question to Rest in a Different Way

Shahan, John M. and Alexander Waugh. Shakespeare Beyond Doubt?: Exposing an Industry in Denial. Tamarac: Llumina Press, 2013.

By way of contrast to Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? (note the clever question mark that is part of its title) offers nothing new, substantive, or interesting. It trots out the same old conspiracy theory verbiage that has been debunked and debunked and debunked like a platoon of the  Marine Corps hearing reveille for the thousandth time.

The image above provides a side-by-side comparison of the two volumes. While larger in size than Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? evidently failed to get the rights to use an image from Shakespeare in Love (or even Anonymous, which might be a logical second choice) for its cover. Shakespeare Beyond Doubt was published by Cambridge University Press, an immensely reputable press; Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? was published by Llumina Press—well, really, it was self-published: Llumina Press is a vanity press rather than a press with an editorial board and a peer review system.

But that's all, so to speak, judging two books by their covers. The contents are the more important part. Here we find that Shakespeare Beyond Doubt has listened to authors like the authors of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? and carefully, thoughtfully, and meticulously dealt with their misapprehensions. The authors of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? (which was published after Shakespeare Beyond Doubt) seem not to have read Shakespeare Beyond Doubt. They do not respond to the careful argumentation of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt; instead, they return to their misapprehensions and misrepresentations and merely reiterate them.

For example, here are a few of the "Twenty-One Good Reasons to Doubt that Shakespeare was 'Shakespeare'" (xi):

Like much conspiracy theory argument, this might be technically true up to a point. There's no postcard saying, "Hi, I'm Shakespeare, author of works like Hamlet or Othello," and Shakespeare didn't see his complete works through publication (like Ben Jonson did). But he did supervise the publication of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, each of which has a dedication signed "William Shakespeare." The dedication of Venus and Adonis begins with these words: "I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your Lordship." Could that possibly be construed as a claim to the authorship of the lines that follow? Perhaps the multiple other publications that bear his name could also be considered claims of authorship.

In trying to figure out a way that this could count as technically true, I hurt my brain. Perhaps no one used the word "met" in describing the ways they encountered, interacted with, saw, talked to, wrote to, received messages from, appeared in court with, took a deposition from, or acted with Shakespeare. I point to Stanley Wells' "Allusions to Shakespeare to 1642" in Shakespeare Beyond Doubt for a mass of contemporary connections between people and the playwright Shakespeare.

The second sentence above could do with some clarification. Who thought it was a pseudonym at the time? Where did they say so? How did they say so? When did they say so? That claim needs substantial support.

The parenthetical remark "(after his first two dedications)" undermines good reason number one above. I also fail to understand why direct address to the public is a prerequisite for authorship in the English Renaissance. I also think the Epilogue to 2 Henry IV would count as a public address if such a requirement is necessary. The rest of this good reason is filled with red herrings. With the exception of some actors with star power (Shakespeare was a great author, but he didn't take starring roles—either because he was too busy or because he didn't have the gift of great acting), we know very little about who played what role when. It's not fair to demand that we know something about Shakespeare that we don't know about the majority of actors of the period.

This point is both misleading and irrelevant—especially the word "most." There are letters from some other writers of the period—but how does the absence of a surviving letter disprove authorship? And how about a letter to Shakespeare. We have a draft of one of those. By the way, even though I would like to use that as evidence of Shakespeare's authorship of the plays, I recognize that it, too, is irrelevant to the question of authorship.

First, there's not a clear, consistent difference between the spellings of these (imaginatively distinct) two groups. Second, frankly, who cares? Spelling, whether of names or of words, was notoriously unfixed in the era, and the spelling of the name is irrelevant to the question of authorship.

Really? He had bad handwriting, so he can't have written the plays attributed to him? That's just silly. Indeed, I think it counts in favor of Shakespeare's authorship of Shakespeare. You try writing out thirty-seven or so plays (not to mention a great number of other poems—and not even counting all the drafts for those works) by hand with a goose quill and then sign a document when you are (presumably) ill and (definitely) toward the end of your life. See if your handwriting doesn't suffer a bit!

At least there's an admission that a "commoner" could have "acquired the vast knowledge found in the works" in this good reason. I think that's good enough—a commoner could have done so; one named Shakespeare did do so. I don't even need to mention that Ben Jonson, at least as learned as Shakespeare if not more so, had the same level of education that Shakespeare had.

Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? goes on and on and on in very much the same vein, producing no new evidence (no evidence at all, really) and no new argument. Since the arguments have all been addressed and debunked, the volume simply indicates that the argument is stagnant. The era of questioning Shakespeare's authorship of Shakespeare's plays has come to an end.

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Sunday, March 15, 2015

Book Note: Shakespeare Beyond Doubt Puts the Authorship Question to Rest

Edmondson, Paul, and Stanley Wells, eds. Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Shakespeare Beyond Doubt might have been a rehashing of the fully-convincing arguments put forward in favor of Shakespeare's authorship of the plays attributed to Shakespeare. Instead, it's a genuinely interesting, thoroughly scholarly account both of the state of the authorship question since Delia Bacon's 1857 The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere [sic] Unfolded and of the increasing evidence in favor of Shakespeare's authorship.

The first several essays debunk the common claimants to the authorship, essentially showing, one after the other, why Bacon didn't write the works of Shakespeare, why Marlowe didn't write the works of Shakespeare, why Oxford didn't write the works of Shakespeare, and why no one else wrote the works of Shakespeare.

The next section of the book asserts—in convincing, reasonable, and readable prose—why Shakespeare wrote the plays. Here, I was particularly struck by Stanley Wells' "Allusions to Shakespeare to 1642," in which he piles up text after text that connect Shakespeare to the works written by Shakespeare both during his lifetime and during the years immediately after his death.

The final section thinks carefully about the nature of the authorship question—why it persists, what kinds of stories are told about authorship, and how the doubters have grown skeptical about the nature of historical evidence. There's also a scholarly analysis of Anonymous (for my own take on the film, see this post) and how it failed to achieve its Oxfordian goals.

I expected a rehashing of old arguments—I considered that it might be a shame that these scholars were having to devote time to something that is so self-evident—but I got an intriguing new look at old arguments and quite a bit of good new material that helps to enlarge my appreciation for Shakespeare—both the man and the works.

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—The Tempest