***
Impressionist Jim Meskimen impresses in this excerpt from Shakespeare’s Richard III with a plethora of spot-on celebrity impersonations. I think his Richard Burton, Woody Allen, and Garrison Keillor are particularly good, but I don’t think there’s a miss in the lot. Let me know which ones you most enjoy.
More at Jim Meskimen
***
I’m not a big fan of clothes shopping, so when I needed some lightweight chinos last week, I ducked into the first store I saw, rifled through the pants on the first table as one walks in the door, and found two pairs in my waist and inseam size. As I carried the two identical slacks to the cashier, the clerk chased after me, asking if I was going to try them on.
I was in a hurry for another appointment, and I know my fit pretty well, so I told him no thanks. He shrugged his shoulders, and I continued walking over to the cashier. The cashier rings them up, and for the two of them it comes to $200 plus tax. I was non-plussed. I have never paid that much for chinos in my life. I would have expected that for such a price they would have diamonds and rubies embedded in the slacks. But I swallowed hard, paid for them, and headed back home with them.
A week later, I still haven’t tried them on or cut out the labels, but I figure, let me see why these chinos are worth $100 apiece. As soon as I start to try to get into them, the awful truth becomes apparent: they are way too small. I can barely squeeze into them. My memory of my correct waist size was, shall we say…faulty.
My wife’s reaction makes it clear that, “No, Jack, that’s not the style, and onlookers should not be intimately aware of whether you dress left or right.” So it’s clear I look even more foolish than usual in those pants. So with a sigh. I’m resigned to exchanging the pants for a better size that would not force me to use a crowbar to get into them.
I’m more than annoyed, since the shop was an hour subway ride away, and this is going to kill a whole weekend afternoon, but I took a book along with me to pass the time on the trip. Turns out it was a pretty interesting book, Tyrant: Shakespeare & Politics by Stephen Greenblatt.
I go into the store, and fortunately I’m able to find some sizes of the same chinos I had bought that look like they might be candidates for fitting me properly. I take them into the fitting room and actually try them on—what a concept!—and one of them fits perfectly this time. So I grab another pair of the same size, and go up to the cashier for the exchange.
As the young woman at the cash register starts to swap my pants for the exchange, she glances at the Shakespeare book in my hand and asks me if it was an interesting book.
“Yes, sure. It’s a very interesting book. It’s got a lot in common with your store. It’s about Banana Republics.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s about the kings and emperors in Shakespeare. The author asks, “What did Shakespeare have to say about tyrants?”
“In what sense?”
“What’s the psychological make-up of a tyrant? Where does that personality come from? How are tyrants allowed to come to power? How do they rule, how are they resisted, and most importantly, how are they finally stopped?”
“Donald Trump.”
“Well, Trump’s name is never mentioned, but it’s clear that that’s who the author is directly pointing to. Julius Caesar, Richard III, Coriolanus. The lust for power, the appeal to a false populism even as he despises the common people, and the demand for narcissistic approval from all around him.”
“Like King Lear, who had to have the approval of all three of his daughters, or else he would retaliate with vindictive power.”
“Exactly. Are you an actor?”
“No, I read a lot of Shakespeare. I was an English major in college. That’s why now I’m a cashier. Speaking of which, instead of doing an exchange of your pants, I got a better idea. I just noticed that these pants just went on sale yesterday. They’re actually on a two for one sale. So rather than exchange them, I’ll put this transaction in the system as a return of the ones you bought last week, which will give you a credit on your card for $200. Then I’ll ring up these two new pants as a separate transaction so you’ll be eligible for the two for one sale for $100.”
I was beyond happy.
And so, thanks to Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt, and a very kind young woman, I got the right size pants, $100 off my original bill, and met another Shakespeare lover.
A good day after all.
As the ancients said:
“Art, and the Shakespeare-in-the-Park line, is long, but Life is short.”
One of New York City’s delights in the summer is the free theater offered by the Public Theater in Central Park’s Delacorte Theatre. Usually it consists of two different Shakespeare plays, one that opens in June and the other in July.
To get the free tickets, you have to show up at the Delacorte in the morning and wait on line until noon, when the tickets for that evening, a maximum of two per person, are given out.
The problem is figuring out what time to get on the line; although there are many tickets given out, for a popular production it is possible to be on the line and have enough people in front of you so that the tickets run out before they get to you. There’s nothing worse than getting to the park and seeing a long long line in front of you, and wait for hours, only to be told that there are no more tickets for that evening.
If you call up the Public and ask them what would be a recommended time to get there, they are cagily unhelpful. They will refuse to suggest a time, rightly feeling, I suppose, that if they gave out a time, it would just mean that people would all show up a bit earlier than that and cause a bottleneck even earlier.
If you are 65 or over, or disabled—and they will ask for proof—you may wait instead on a “Senior” line. Each person may still get two tickets, one of which must be for Senior or a disabled person, but the other ticketholder does not have to be a Senior or disabled. But if you call up the box office about the Senior line, they still will be quite Sphinx-like concerning what time to arrive to guarantee a ticket.
So, since I waited on line today, I decided I would keep track of how many people showed up hour by hour. This way you can judge for yourself what time you might want to come.
So, a couple of caveats; the best day, hands down, to guarantee admission, is to come on a weekday while the show is in previews , before its official opening. Once the play gets its initial media reviews, even if they are not positive, potential audience members become more aware of the show and the lines get longer, earlier. With that in mind here’s what happened today, waiting to get tickets for tonight’s performance of Othello:
7:00 AM: I arrived at the park, and there were 35 people ahead of me on the regular line. There was no one on the senior line.
8:00 AM: There were now 80 people on the regular line and 10 people on the Senior line.
9:00 AM: The regular line now had 115 people waiting, and 15 were on the Senior line.
10:00 AM: The regular line grew to 140 people, and the Senior line to 30.
At this point, I stopped keeping track. But when tickets were distributed at 12 noon sharp, everyone got tickets.
I have to say this is the first time of many occasions waiting where the line seemed so short. But as I said before that is probably because it was a weekday, and the show was still in previews. Be aware that these guidelines would be very different on a weekend and once a show has been reviewed.
Hope you get to see some of the shows this summer, the productions are always fun, and a worthwhile theater experience.
***
It’s the last half of April which means it’s Shakespeare’s Birthday Sonnet Slam time once again. I’ve been participating in the slam for the last four years, and I’ve written about how to analyze a sonnet for performance several times before (see here and here as well). Each year participants are assigned a sonnet, and within the space of about three hours all 154 sonnets are performed at the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park, New York City.
This year I was randomly assigned Sonnet #43. As I’ve written before, I enjoy being told which sonnet to do, because it exposes me to sonnets which I would not necessarily have been drawn to by myself. Here’s the Sonnet:
Sonnet 43
When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And darkly bright are bright in dark directed;
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,
How would thy shadow’s form form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so?
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay?
All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.
Unlike some of the previous sonnets I have been assigned, at first glance this one seems fairly straightforward, if somewhat repetitious. As usual, the first step is to divide the sonnet into three quatrains and an ending couplet:
When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And darkly bright are bright in dark directed;
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,
How would thy shadow’s form form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so?
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay?
All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.
The first quatrain sets the conceit that runs through the poem: I see more clearly at night, when you are present in my dreams, than the dull day when you are absent.
The second quatrain seems to say nearly the same, but it’s always useful to see what is new in each quatrain. After a few read-throughs I realized that here there is a request underlying this sonnet, and here the poet is expressing his desire to see his beloved, physically, in the daytime.
The third quatrain seems to be marshaling the same argument for your presence. How to distinguish it from the previous quatrain and make it more interesting? Oh, there it is. In the second quatrain, I say your presence would make me happy—but in the third quatrain I say your presence would make me feel blessed. That’s something to hang my hat onto. Two distinctly different appeals.
The final couplet is usually either a summation of the first three quatrains or a distinctly contrary upending of the previous lines. Here, it seems to be the former, but the last phrase of the last line seems peculiar to me. It reads “when dreams do show thee me.” But that seems backwards to the sense of the rest of the poem. Throughout the poem, I have been doing the dreaming, so I was expecting “when dreams do show me thee.” It scans exactly the same so that can’t be the reason the pronouns were switched. I don’t know the reason for that yet, but I do know I can’t ignore it. I’ve found through past experience that the one difficult word or line is often the key to unlocking everything else.
Here’s an early Happy Shakespeare’s Birthday to all.
***
The first line of Hamlet, like many first lines of Shakespeare, announces the theme: “Who’s there?” For Denmark, like the countries we inhabit, is a place where no one is sure who is watching whom, who the enemy is, or on a more metaphysical plane, who makes up the person one calls oneself. Identities are questioned from the outside and the inside. Who and what is real? Can we know others? Can others know us? Can we know ourselves?
Denmark is a prison says Hamlet. It’s a country that seems to be perpetually at War. In such a world, where the enemy can sneak upon you at any moment, nothing is private. The State dominates through surveillance of actions and thoughts. The dangerous one is the one who keeps to him or herself. The notion of privacy has disappeared.
In No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald’s book concerning the revelation of ongoing, illegal, mass warrantless surveillance by the American government, he makes a point that is often overlooked: it is not possible for human beings to grow and develop normally in a society where there is no privacy. Privacy is a necessary condition for being able to try out different versions of ourselves, to both invent and to find out just who we are. To keep sane.
But Denmark is a prison.
In a government where the will of the people is feared, the alarm must sound for Hamlet—Claudius warily declares that “madness in great ones must not unwatched go.” Hamlet feigns madness as protection, to save his true self from scrutiny. Madness acts as a protective shell, the soul’s attempt to keep from being “too much in the sun.” There is no place for Hamlet to feel his feelings without the glare of the court on him. Even his most intimate conversations with Ophelia are watched. Like the sacred ceremony being recorded by an anthropologist, sacredness evaporates. There is no room for the sacred under such conditions, even though humans must have such a place or go mad. The early Shakespeare commentators asked whether Hamlet was really mad or only feigning it. He is both: he feigns madness and is driven mad by his panopticon society.
Hamlet eludes. He puts on an antic disposition. He play acts. What is a human being that s/he can act? For centuries, actors were reviled and cursed, classified with beggars, thieves and prostitutes. They were shapeshifters, untrustworthy, not what they seemed. Worse, an actor seems to have no center. Indeed, Borges once wrote that that was Shakespeare’s glory and curse—Shakespeare was everything and nothing. Everything because he was nothing.
Denmark is a prison. It’s a prison because there is nowhere to hide. A place becomes a prison when there is nowhere to be alone, no way to find out who you are. You are constantly being defined by others, being told who you are, who you must be, what you must do.
But the actor escapes definition. The actor is subversive of the whole notion of fixed identity; subversive of the notion of control. It’s, paradoxically, in the act of acting that Hamlet finds the truth and frees himself.
When we wonder whether art can be revolutionary, an act of resistance, it serves well to remember that every government in the world throughout history has sought to control its art. Surely that must be a salve to those who are not certain whether their efforts are useful. We don’t always know what kind of art will be effective or not, but the possibility that art can be a strong weapon always exists, even when it may be in ways we don’t always fully understand. The actor on the stage is always the promise that we contain multitudes and have the capacity to transform ourselves and society.
The play’s the thing.
I wonder how some people can talk so much. For me, it’s really difficult. I mean, if I must, I can, but it’s a big effort. Now it’s true that I am used to speaking in public, and I am used to being on a stage; but that’s script reading, not talking; it’s a world of difference. And the same with writing: some writers cannot stop writing. They keep their detailed diaries and journals, often from a young age, with an enviable fluency. On the other hand, writers like myself have to be chained to the chair and desk while writing. I kind of understand this difference in writers. With a writer, the voluble ones have the advantage of being able to get that first draft done quickly, and they don’t agonize over every word. But, still, those writers understand that a first draft is just a first draft. They know and accept that it’s not going to come out right that first time. But what I don’t understand is how some people can keep talking, since it’s not just a first draft, and there’s no chance to edit it once it’s out there. It’s already published–in a matter of speaking. Or is that it? Do they simply trust that they can keep talking and revise themselves in the moment?
I don’t know what I am writing until I write it. This essay itself has gone through many drafts (not enough!), and each time I’m discovering what it is I want to say. But I almost never allow myself that same luxury as a speaker. I almost never surprise myself as a speaker. Do others?
When I do radio I much prefer to edit interviews than do live radio, because I think the listener deserves more than my unedited wanderings. I am not a fan of poetry that reads like unedited diary musings. That seems inartistic to me. I don’t expect anyone to make any sense of my first drafts. The only time that I allow myself to speak without thinking first is during an acting improv, because to me, the stage is a very safe place, and I never have to take responsibility for what a character says.
But real life? No, I will not allow that. Do the talkers do what I do in an improv and silence their inner critic (or does it not exist for them)? Or does the inner critic work so quickly that they don’t worry about what comes out? Or are they confident that they can just keep talking, and in so doing revise as they talk? Maybe that’s what explains the compulsive quality of some of the non-stop talkers I’ve known. Are they revising, revising, and refusing to stop until the final product seems right? Or is it that they simply do not care that there may be some unwanted leakage? In the end, my attempts to manage myself are futile anyway, and maybe I just feel more wary and ashamed than I need to feel. The talkers have such a trust in themselves and their ideas, and there seems to be no border between their inside and outside. I don’t know how to be so transparent.
But I also see that talking is used as a defense, just as silence is used as a defense. Is it that the talker cannot imagine silence being used as a defense any more than the quiet one can understand the use of talking as a defense? Choose your weapon.
Still, I don’t even understand the biology and physics of the non-stop talker. How, I wonder to myself, is it physically possible for a person to be like a record player, putting the needle on the phonograph record and having it play straight through non-stop? Is the person doing in public what I am doing privately in my head all the time? Maybe those words are not meant for the public but for the talker? Is it that the talker cannot hear his or her own self-talk unless it’s spoken out loud?
Shakespeare talks a lot about talking. And his characters can certainly talk–to themselves and to others. But he makes fun of Polonius for babbling too much, and the silky flowing words of the King, Claudius, are treacherous ones. Yet Hamlet, who speaks more lines than any other character in Shakespeare, speaks with restraint in public. When questioned about his malaise he offers up only, “I am too much in the sun,” and “I lack advancement,” and, of course, his succinct book review: “Words, words, words.” The true bulk of his lines are thoughts which he shares only with himself–and the audience who paid to hear them.
I think that even if I wanted to change the way I was, I could not do it.
Is the truth in the stream of consciousness or the reflection upon it? Which is our deepest self?
***
What an odd and thought-provoking play.
The play as advertised on the title page of its First Quarto publication declares its putative genre: a Pleasant Conceited Comedy. And so it is for four and a half acts. Not only is it based on a simple comedy plot conceit—four royal gents, including the King of Navarre, try to forswear thoughts of women, but give up as soon as four women visitors, including the Princess of France, arrive—but the copious wordplay, wealth of literary allusions, and satirical sallies aimed at the pretensions of the educated classes, indicate the young “upstart crow” of a playwright calling attention to his easy gifts, leaving his calling card with not a little hubris. The play is drunk with puns and verbal sparring, and with parodies of those who would spend so much time twisting words into what they’re not. Shakespeare juggles the words, plot, and characters with due ostentation, like a strolling player with four balls in the air at once. There is no hiding art with art here: his art is all out there on display.
The play at first seems to share a theme that most of Shakespeare’s comedies embody: love makes us all mad and makes us do silly, out of character things. And like many of the other comedies, Love’s Labour’s Lost employs many of the same comic plot devices with its verbal sparring between lovers, disguises, mistaken identities, and maskings and unmaskings.
And this is how the play goes for four and a half acts. The men woo the ladies, the ladies demur, the men disguise themselves and try to trick the ladies, but the women get their own back by swapping identities among themselves during a masked entertainment. Finally the duplicities are uncovered and the women triumph, embarrassing the men, getting the men to admit their faults and their love. It’s just at this juncture in the other comedies where there would be a laughing, a forgiving, and the men and women would conclude by dancing a merry jig, with weddings in the air. That’s what the theatrical clock anyway says should happen here, given the stage time left to wrap up.
But here instead in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare does an extraordinary thing. A messenger delivers the news from France that the Princess’s father has died. The news casts a terrible pall on the proceedings and causes the women to withdraw completely. Even though the men earnestly declare their love for the women as honestly as they can, the women will have none of it; they are too perturbed by sorrow and get ready to go back home to France. It’s a remarkable moment; it’s as if someone had come out and said to the audience, sorry folks, there’s no comedy tonight, one of the actors has died. . .we tried to keep your sorrows at bay for the last few hours, but unhappy reality always creeps in, and so it has again. The women must go home to mourn; they say that they will be back in twelve months, but only if the men can prove they have become better people, and have done genuine social penance in that time. And we are left hanging.
In construction, Love’s Labour’s Lost is unique in the Shakespeare canon. Although other Shakespeare plays shift gears in the final moments as Love’s Labour’s Lost does, those other so-called “problem plays” —Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, and All’s Well that Ends Well, for example—do so in a decidedly different way. Those plays start off as apparent tragedies, and then suddenly by a happy turn of events, often due to an act of bold and generous forgiveness, lovers are reconciled, friendships are repaired, and the world is righted once again. But not so in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Its construction is the very opposite of the problem plays. It seems to have every intention of being a comedy, but in the last moments the play morphs into sadness, snatched from the jaws of happiness. As far as I know, Shakespeare doesn’t do that anywhere else.
In another play, the unhappy turn of events at the end might serve as a plot twist in the middle of the play, only to be merrily overcome by the end. But no such luck in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The time is out of joint. One of the men announces quite openly to the other players (and the audience):
BEROWNE:
Our wooing doth not end like an old play:
Jack hath not Gill. These ladies’ courtesy
Might well have made our sport a comedy.
Come, sir, it wants a twelvemonth an’ a day,
And then ’twill end.
That’s too long for a play.
The play ends with a song, not by the assembled would-be lovers, but by players representing Spring and Winter, introduced by Armado, a foolish visiting nobleman. The song about spring warns married couples that they are subject to being cuckolded, while the song about winter reminds the assembled of all the chores and drudgery that the cold weather brings, albeit bringing perhaps a kind of small domestic satisfaction. When the songs are over Armado says in a bittersweet curtain speech, “The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.” Mercury traditionally was the deliverer of messages, while Apollo was the God of art, music and poetry. It was as if Shakespeare were saying, as an artist he could ease you with the comforts of art, but he couldn’t close his eyes to what life could bring at any moment. One unfortunate message is enough to turn any happiness upside down. It is an odd, odd ending for a comedy. The curtain comes down as Armado says, “You that way, we this way.”
Who is Armado addressing that line to? Who is the “you” and the “we”? The men and the women of the play? The audience and the actors? Or Shakespeare and everybody else? For community and the very act of storytelling seem to be at root the very essence of comedy, yet Shakespeare insists on ending with a separation.
It was an audacious jump. Shakespeare wanted to go “that way,” differently from the “this way” of others. He could set a plot in motion as well as any other trifling theatrical, he could parry and thrust his wit as sharply as any of his peers. But in the end he wanted something different. By this time, he had already thrown Aristotle out the window—no precious Unities of time and place for him, the world was too encompassing for that—but he now also wanted to do away with false endings that spoke of finality, when the truth was that everything one knows can change in an instant, and happiness can turn into sadness in a heartbeat.
What could have prompted such a desire in the playwright at this time? The Quarto title page may provide a clue. It was printed in 1598, but the notice on the page declares that it had been performed for the Queen the previous Christmas in 1597. So it’s not unlikely that the play was composed around 1596-1597. But in 1596, the successful London playwright got a visit from Mercury himself with the news from Stratford-On-Avon: Shakespeare’s only son, eleven-year-old Hamnet, had died. Was it this awful blow that turned a sunny comedy into a darker meditation on the ephemeral nature of life? I think it must be so.
What must Will’s audiences have thought of the play? It was thought well enough of, that it was published in several Quarto and Folio editions. But perhaps that was for the more literary-minded, because actual productions of the play after its initial performances were few and far between until the 20th century. I think, ultimately, that the play was not a crowd-pleaser. In short order, the practical-minded impresario Shakespeare eventually came to his senses, and never wrote such a bitter comedy again. In truth, the very comedic form which Love’s Labour’s Lost subverts is exactly the kind of comedy that Shakespeare then goes ahead and writes for the next decade. He never seeks to end a comedy in such a melancholy way again. So figuratively he writes with one hand behind his back, and the titles give his contempt away: As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night or What You Will— that’s what you want from Will, that’s what you will get.
He never did write a comedy like Love’s Labour’s Lost again, although certainly he expressed the darker side of his nature in the tragedies and the histories. He retired after 37 plays, a wealthy man, with a newly minted coat-of-arms, to his house in Stratford-on-Avon. But Love’s Labour’s Lost stands as a bold experiment in form by a young playwright near the peak of his powers who once allowed Mercury’s harsh words to interrupt Apollo’s song.
***
The final scene of Othello, set in Desdemona’s bed chamber where Othello, standing over Desdemona while she sleeps, decides to kill her.
Performed here on the 1944 audio record by Paul Robeson as Othello, Uta Hagen as his doomed wife Desdemona, Jose Ferrer as the evil Iago, who falsely convinces Othello of Desdemona’s unfaithfulness, and Edith King as Iago’s wife, Emilia, who realizes with horror what her husband has done. I don’t think I’ll ever hear a better rendition.
Thanks to YouTuber Xenu
***
So last night I was riding on the subway, on a line I don’t usually take, and standing next to me were two attractive women in deep conversation. I kept looking at one of the women because she seemed very familiar to me and yet I couldn’t place her. But I was sure I had seen her or met her before.
I racked my brain over and over, cursing my terrible memory, but I couldn’t figure it out. Well my stop finally came and I had to get off, but at the moment I hit the door, it came to me. I turned back around and called to her,
“Sixty-nine! You were Sonnet number Sixty-nine. ” She looked towards me, laughed, and nodded yes. I mouthed my words as I got off and pointed to myself, “Number Seventy.”
Since she had been assigned to read the sonnet before mine in the Shakespeare Sonnet Slam, she was my cue.
“Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again.”
***
Today is Shakespeare’s birthday. If you’ve never read it, this very short story about Shakespeare by Borges comes closest to describing the man who I imagine WS to be.
I had the pleasure two days ago of participating in the 7th Annual Shakespeare’s Birthday Sonnet Slam. It was a drizzly, misty day that made all of Central Park look like a French Impressionist painting. The producers told us that if it rained hard, we would simply continue and gather up the audience to join us up on the outdoor bandshell stage in Central Park. It never happened, but it was a cozy thought to think about.
This was my fourth Sonnet Slam, so I knew what to expect. All 154 sonnets are read in about three hours. Producer Melinda Hall has a very democratic approach to the slam, and it’s fun to see the way professionals and non-professionals alike approach performing the sonnets. One reader brought her dog up with her, and another set her sonnet to music. Each year brings some surprise guests, and this year veteran actor Richard Thomas made an unannounced visit to read Sonnet 29, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes…” It’s also always fun for me to hear others perform the sonnets to which I had been assigned in previous years. I feel a kind of special bond with those particular readers even if we’ve never met, because I can appreciate the struggle that goes into wrestling with those shared sonnets.
I’ve written about analyzing a sonnet before, but based on what I’ve learned this time, I’d humbly like to make a few suggestions about performing sonnets. These suggestions may seem sonnet-specific, but I believe they have wider acting implications as well.
The first thing is this, and it’s not as minor as it may sound at first: You have to pay allegiance to the final couplet’s rhyme. In the rest of the sonnet, the interpretation can spread over line breaks and rhymes, but if you don’t hit the rhymes in the final couplet, there is a real sense of incompleteness for the listener. It’s like a piece of music without the final resolving chord; the rest of the sonnet can be performed beautifully, but if you don’t get the final rhyme stressed, you haven’t closed the deal. Rhyme, even at the expense of sense or archaic pronunciation. (“Love” doesn’t rhyme with “prove” anymore? It doesn’t matter. Make it rhyme in your performance.) Go for the rhyme.
The second thing to remember is that the vast majority of these sonnets are love poems. They are meant, in the end, to win the heart of someone special. So while actors are wont to build little mini-dramas of the sonnets—not a bad thing—it should be remembered too that objectives such as to woo, to praise, to kiss, to seduce, to reassure, to flatter, should take precedence over objectives such as to scold, to complain, to dismiss, to chastise. Not that there aren’t elements of the latter, but in the end, the sonnets are love poems and should end up that way. So humor and self-reflection about the more negative aspects of love are in order, even though the anger may seem flashier to perform.
Finally, make every noun, metaphor, verb as visual and specific as you can for yourself. It’s Acting 101, but it’s especially true in playing Shakespeare that one should not lapse into the generic meaning of the words. The first line from Sonnet 70 should suffice to illustrate:
“That thou be blamed, shall not be thy defect.”
“Thou”: Who am I talking about? What does that person look like? What is my relationship to that person? Where are we?
“Blamed”: Blamed for what? In what manner? By whom? To what end?
“Thy defect”: What form might that defect take? How has this affected my lover? How has it affected our relationship? What do I want to do about it?
And so on. The wonderful thing about the fourteen short lines of a sonnet is that they allow you to do this kind of close work without getting overwhelmed. The important thing that I learned for myself here is that it’s not enough to make intellectual choices, but to pick vivid images that will spur feelings and imagination. Make the metaphor real.
Well, one more nice thing about Shakespeare’s birthday is that it comes around every year, and if the producers so wish, so will the next Shakespeare’s Birthday Sonnet Slam. So if you’re in the NYC area next year, consider signing up in April for one of the sonnets at www.shakespearesonnetslam.com . You will have a wonderful time.
***
It’s April, which means that its time again to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday with the 7th annual Sonnet Slam at the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park, April 21st.
This year, I’ve been assigned Sonnet 70, which seems a little less daunting than some of the others I’ve had in past years.
That thou art blamed shall not be thy defect,
For slander’s mark was ever yet the fair;
The ornament of beauty is suspect,
A crow that flies in heaven’s sweetest air.
So thou be good, slander doth but approve
Thy worth the greater, being woo’d of time:
For canker vice the sweetest buds doth love,
And thou present’st a pure unstained prime.
Thou hast pass’d by the ambush of young days,
Either not assail’d or victor being charg’d;
Yet this thy praise cannot be so thy praise,
To tie up envy, evermore enlarg’d:
If some suspect of ill mask’d not thy show,
Then thou alone kingdoms of hearts should’st owe.
As always, the key to interpreting these sonnets is to first unpack the form into three quatrains and a couplet, and then to make sure that every word is understood with its original Elizabethan meaning. I found the first ten lines here fairly straightforward to understand: beautiful people attract envious slander, so don’t feel too badly about it.
It’s the last four lines which present me with syntactical and comprehension difficulty.
I think the sense of them is something like, thank goodness the power of this poem is not enough to ward off slander —because if it did, then you would be besieged by suitors, and by inference, the poet would not have you to himself. But it’s a little tricky, and I still have to work out its exact meaning.
***
A group of friends and I have been recently reading Shakespeare’s delightful comedy, Love’s Labours Lost. My antenna immediately pricked up at the following lines:
Villain, thou shalt fast for thy offenses ere thou be pardoned.
Well, sir, I hope when I do it I shall do it on a full stomach.
Thou shalt be heavily punished.
I am more bound to you than your fellows, for they are but lightly rewarded.
Take away this villain, shut him up.
Come, you transgressing slave, away.
Let me not be pent up, sir; I will fast, being loose.
No, sir, that were fast and loose; thou shalt to prison.
Shakespeare cleverly packs in multiple puns here. First Armando declares that the clown Costard shall have to fast in prison. But Costard replies that, “I will fast, being loose”—that is, he’ll be able to run more quickly, if only he were free. And Moth tops both of them, saying that Costard’s scheme is “fast and loose”: that is, a scam, akin to a contemporaneous con game, commonly called “Fast and Loose.” He’s saying Costard’s proposal is a scam. But with even more complexity, simultaneously, there’s an additional pun on the phrase “fast and loose,” because it also means “in an irresponsible manner,” as in the phrase, “playing fast and loose with the truth.” And indeed, Costard plays fast and loose with the truth.
But what is of interest right now to this blog is the con game. Fast and Loose is a scam that’s been around for a very long time in one form or another. I had the strange pleasure a few weeks ago of seeing one of my immigrant high school students trying to extract money from his classmates using this ruse. I had to intervene and warn the student that I knew exactly what he was up to.
It’s always best to learn from an expert cheat, so you can click on the video above and watch the expert magician and historian of confidence games, Ricky Jay, demonstrate just what the scam looks like to its pigeons.
Thanks to YouTuber trancehi
It’s been a while since I’ve done this, so here’s my recent summer reading:
The Black Book by Lawrence Durrell was Durrell’s first book. When I was in my twenties I read the Alexandria Quartet and it made a lasting impression on me. I’ve always wanted to go back to it, and there it is, just bought from the second-hand store, sitting on my table waiting for me, but I thought I would try this book first. I don’t know of any other writer whose sheer depth of vocabulary can make me more woozy with words. Reading Durrell is like eating a dense thick chocolate cake, every bite is rich and surprising, but one can’t eat too much at a time: “The Agon, then. Today there is a gale blowing up from the Levant. The morning came like a yellow fog along a roll of developing film. From Bivarie, across the foaming channel I can see the window, the river god has sent us his offering: mud, in a solid tawny line across the bay. The wind has scooped out the very bowels of the potamus across the way, like a mammoth evacuation, and bowled it across at us. The fisherman complain that they cannot see the fish anymore to spear them. Well the rufus sea scorpion and the octopus are safe from their carbide and tridents. Deep-water life utterly shut off, momentously obscure behind the membrane of the mud. The winter Ionian has lapsed back into its original secrecy.” That’s the first paragraph. The story itself is absolutely inscrutable, but it’s worth dipping into and out of, if only for the bejeweled language.
Switch by John Lovick was published about a decade ago, and it is the essential book for performing that great magic effect, The $100 Bill Switch. Lovick gives the history of the switch, as well as a myriad of routines and techniques. Lovick also has a panel of prominent magicians weighing in on such pithy questions as whether one should give away the bill at the end; tip or tipless? (Lovick describes several methods for each type); fast or slow?; and more. It’s pretty difficult to find anything that Lovick hasn’t covered concerning the effect, so if you’re looking to perform the bill switch, this book is invaluable.
With all that said, despite the numerous, well-thought-out illustrations, if this is your first exposure to learning the bill switch, it would probably help to consult first a video resource and then come back to the book. There are just too many subtle details of hand and finger placement and timing to fully grasp the mechanics of the switch without seeing an actual performance of it, both audience view and backstage. Once you get the general outline from video (Michael Ammar’s Classic Rendition video on the bill switch is one possibility), the book is a fantastic resource for the details and variations.
The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro is an illuminating view of one of the most creative years of Shakespeare’s theatrical life. In that one year, he wrote and produced King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. Shapiro’s thesis is that the form and content of those plays were definitively shaped by the political and social events in that turbulent English year. Shapiro takes us month by month through that year and explains how the failed Gunpowder Plot—the 9/11 of its time—gave an excuse to the recently crowned James I to push strongly for both the unification of England and Scotland, and also to crack down on political dissenters, especially on anyone still suspected of practicing Catholicism. Shapiro shows how those two historical facts were reflected in Shakespeare’s plays of that year. The book includes wonderful accounts of what rival companies were doing at the time, and also how the royal companies competed for royal productions.
In the latter part of the book, Shapiro has some very interesting research about the Plague and its effect on theater-goers and acting companies during that year. He paints a very vivid picture of the Plague’s almost unimaginable impact: the theaters in London were decreed to close when the death toll was over thirty a week—and they were closed for several months, death tolls going over a hundred a week in the latter part of the year. Families suspected of harboring the plague would be quarantined by their neighbors, some starving to death under the quarantine, whether the suspicion of disease was correct or not. The church bells would toll when a new dead body was found, and there were weeks when the bells of London seemed to be tolling continuously.
Overall, there was a lot about Shakespeare and English history in this book that was new to me. Slow going at times, but definitely recommended.
Le Petomane by Jean Nohain and F. Caradec is a slim volume about one of the Wonders of the World, a seemingly endless supply of natural gas named Joseph Pujol. Pujol, whose stage name was Le Petomane, had an act which featured his ability to fart at will. Pujol’s talent took him around the world, and he was the star at the famous Moulin Rouge theater in Paris from 1892 to 1914. The authors include several eye-witness accounts. Pujol was a showman who could fart various melodies, and he was also able to extinguish a candle at ten yards, solely through his gassy talents. There is also a funny account of how the King of Belgium traveled incognito to Paris in order to witness a private demonstration.
Pujol’s trick was that there was no trick: his anatomy was such that he was able to ingest air through his anus at will, and then expel it again. We may never see his like again, although the present Presidential candidates seem to be doing a good job of expelling hot air and pulling talking points from their backsides.
***
I hope the title for this post does not refer too much to my posting my 2016 Shakespeare Sonnet Slam video here. My excuses: 1) the producers did an excellent job capturing all the performances on video; 2) it’s edifying to watch a video record of oneself in order to see if the external reality lined up with what the internal experience had been; 3) theater and live performance can be a frustratingly ephemeral experience—it’s nice to have a tangible artifact of the occasion for one’s mental (and virtual) scrapbook.
My previous analysis of the sonnet is here.
You can follow along, including my flub in line five:
Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye,
And all my soul and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account;
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopp’d with tann’d antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
‘Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise,
Painting my age with beauty of thy days.
***
There have been many attempts over the years to set Shakespeare’s sonnets to music, as at least some of them were probably originally meant to be. Rufus Wainwright, the popular singer-songwriter did this a few years ago with several of the sonnets, my favorite of which is this lovely rendition of Sonnet #29.
Click on the video to play.
Thanks to YouTuber sacroom91
(Click to enlarge)
***
So, the 2016 Shakespeare Sonnet Slam last Friday was really enjoyable! It was a beautiful dry day, no rain at all, despite the weather forecast; and unlike last year when the temperature was really cold, it was warm and sunny. There was great variety in the performances, as always: a lovely sonnet performed in French, a high school group who came to watch and perform, a woman who performed with her young baby in her arms, a singer from the cast of the hit Broadway musical Something Rotten, old men, young women, and people I recognized from past years. The highlight for me was the wonderful actor Dana Ivey, who recited “Shall I compare thee,” just beautifully: still and strong and resonant as an oak tree.
Every year, as I get more familiar with the sonnets, I “hear” more of them, and enjoy them that much more. I also feel a kind of silly identification and solidarity with the people who are performing sonnets which I was assigned to in previous years.
I met my actor friend Eve there—she’s a slam recidivist as well—and we both agreed that it goes by so fast when you’re finally up there, that you have no idea what you’ve done. We both had the sensation that we had skipped multiple lines of the sonnet while we were reciting, but I think (I hope!) that was only a feeling.
When I’m up there, actually performing, I don’t try to think too hard about my analysis or preparation; that was homework, and I just have to trust that I’ve done it well. The one thing I’m focusing on in the moment of performance, the one thing that I’m holding onto for dear life, because otherwise stage fright would sweep me away, is to play my action, which I chose in this case to be, “to double my bonds of love with you.” That’s my lifeline.
We finished all 154 sonnets very quickly—started at one, over by four—so I walked over to Strawberry Fields where, of course, there was a young guy playing John Lennon songs on his guitar. Lots of tourists, and he was very accommodating, playing all of their favorite requests. He sang in a key that I could sing in, so I spent a while croaking out John Lennon songs with him, though I have to say that by the fifth rendition of “Imagine,” it was getting old.
We were spared from the rain the whole afternoon, everything looked green and luscious in Central Park, and I finished the day with a $4.00 Double Caramel ice cream pop from the ice cream vendor.
A very nice way to spend a day.
The Shakespeare Sonnet Slam is coming up soon, so here is my preliminary analysis of the sonnet that was chosen for me this time, #62.
Here it is again:
SONNET 62
Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye,
And all my soul and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account;
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopp’d with tann’d antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
‘Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise,
Painting my age with beauty of thy days.
My approach is to memorize the sonnet, even though it’s not required for the Sonnet Slam. I think that until I actually sit down to memorize a piece, I don’t fully realize the particularity of the structure of the sonnet, the weight of each word, the peculiarity of each phrase, the rhythm and emphasis of the piece. Often when memorizing, I’ll have one phrase or more that I keep getting wrong—it seems like it should be what I’m saying, not what is on the page—but it is exactly that discrepancy that needs to be explored and uncovered for meaning and logic.
So, first things first: most of the Shakespearean sonnets have the same structure: 14 lines, made up of three rhyming quatrains, abab, and then a rhyming couplet, cc. Let’s break up Sonnet # 62:
SONNET 62
Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye,
And all my soul and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account;
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopp’d with tann’d antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
‘Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise,
Painting my age with beauty of thy days.
Typically, each quatrain is a variation on one theme, each with its own point to make. The final couplet is usually either a clever summation of the preceding lines, or a clever opposition to them. I think the word “clever” here is apropos, because cleverness is an integral part of a Shakespearean sonnet. No matter how much sentiment is contained in each of these sonnets, they are almost always also self-conscious objects for show. Will just couldn’t help himself on that score. Many of the sonnets were commissioned and many were the objects of public and private performance. In my opinion, a major subtext of all of these sonnets is: “I love you so much, that I wrote this clever witty poem for you.” They are, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, “conceits.” Without this acknowledgement, the sonnets can become lugubrious; as I’ll talk about next time, a more interesting choice for me for performance is to find the playfulness in each composition.
Okay, Quatrain #1: I’m struck by the word “all”:
all mine eye,
And all my soul and all my every part
The accented beats all fall on the word “all” and it’s almost always a good idea to pay attention to the iambic pentameter and not fight it. So, the sonnet writer (“I” from now on), talks of himself in no half-measures. I fully admit my faults. Whether sadly or mockingly or gleefully remains to be decided.
I note also that the structure of the sonnet indicates that “eye” and “remedy” should rhyme—at least it did in Shakespeare’s day. Sometimes it’s pretentious in today’s world to go for the rhyme, but since it’s an unaccented syllable, I’ll probably go for it.
Next, Quatrain #2: I ask myself, what is this quatrain doing that the first did not? It seems to be more specific: “face,” “shape,” “truth,”; but also it stresses that not only do I think that I am wonderful, but I am the best, better than everyone else! —“As I all other in all worths surmount.” And again, the “alls” are hit hard. It’s like Muhammed Ali, “I am the Greatest!”
On to Quatrain #3: Now the turn of the sonnet. “But when my glass shows”…these “buts” in the sonnets are always important, they signal, “I used to think x, but now I realize y.” The acting issue here is to make that emotional turn real by having some specific internal sensory stimuli to allow that change in thought and emotion to happen. Shakespeare provides the impetus—looking in the mirror and seeing the reality of my physical shape, rather than just what I’d like to imagine or feel. Those of us of a certain age have all had those awful moments when the light is too harsh and the wrinkles too deep and the mirror refuses to lie. That’s what I need to capture.
But there are two revelations going on in this quatrain: not only that I am not the physical and mental specimen that I think I am, but that my self-love has been deeply unfair.
The final couplet explains: I only look good to myself because I am basking in your glow, your beauty, and mistaking your aura for my own. This, I think is the hardest part of the sonnet from an acting point of view. It’s a complicated realization that has to be done in a very few words, and the structure of the lines seems difficult right now to me. This is where I think I have the most work ahead of me.
Okay, that’s enough for now. Next time, I’ll talk about actually trying to memorize the sonnet, and seeing how that informs me further.
Peter Barlow in The New Yorker
***
The Sixth Annual Shakespeare Sonnet Slam needs you! In one month on Friday, April 22nd at 1pm, sonneteers will descend on the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park and perform all 154 Shakespeare Sonnets.
You can become one of those sonnet slingers by signing up at http://www.shakespearesonnetslam.com/ . While you’re at it, you might want to donate money so that producer—Shakespeare scholar, director, teacher—Melinda Hall can continue doing the fine job she does every year with this. I had the pleasure of interviewing her last year and really enjoyed learning more about Shakespeare from her.
I participated in the Fourth Annual Slam and the Fifth Annual Slam where I read sonnets #33 and #133, respectively. This year I’ve been assigned Sonnet #62. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve grown to like the idea that you cannot choose your own sonnet to do; it forces you to stretch and grapple with whatever the material happens to be, because you have to make some kind of sense of it if you’re to come across on the day of the Slam. When I first read #62, I breathed a sigh of relief because at first glance this sonnet seemed much easier to parse than my two previous ones:
SONNET 62
Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye,
And all my soul and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account;
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopp’d with tann’d antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
‘Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise,
Painting my age with beauty of thy days.
But as I take a closer look, I see there are issues I’ll have to resolve. I hope to post an update in a week or two on my progress.
Al Ross in The New Yorker
I’m looking at all these books on my bookshelves, and wondering about how they have followed me all these years. There are other books, too, books I once thought indispensable which are now sitting in a basement, books that have now not been touched in over two decades. I always thought I would have them. They are still there, as far as I know.
There were more, the books that I grew up with, before my marriage, that I stored in my parents’ house. When my parents remodeled the house, they packed them up, and eventually the boxes of books were moved to the garage. Years later, they told us they were selling the house. We went to the garage to scavenge and sort through the books, eagerly anticipating the reunion of old acquaintances, but on opening the boxes it became clear that there would be no homecoming for these books—they were filled with mold, little bugs, covers were stained, pages were crumbling. I left my friends behind.
When I was in my twenties, I would move from apartment to apartment, roommate to roommate, as one does at that age, and I’d always leave something behind—an old coat in the closet, a sweater in some bottom drawer, a throw rug underneath a piece of furniture. But never, never, ever did I leave behind so much as one book, they traveled with me, as if they were my children.
I remember once in those days, when I was a college student, walking along Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan, near where I lived. I saw a pile of books on the sidewalk, and they stopped me. They looked interesting—the sort that appealed to a geek like me—vintage mathematics books, some science, some history. Never too proud when it came to books, I rummaged through them until I saw the nameplates inside them; I was stopped in my tracks when I realized that they were the books of the professor who had just died in my girlfriend’s apartment house. I didn’t know then, you see, that that’s what happens. It’s not like the books get adopted by the ASPCA. When all is said and done, the contents of the apartment gets dumped once the family has gone through the belongings, while the rest ends up on the sidewalk waiting for the garbage truck. At the time, this was a horrible revelation to me. That a person’s life—for what else, I thought, could you call the books that a person has owned?—would just be dumped on the sidewalk unceremoniously when he or she dies, was just too sad for me to contemplate.
So I look around at all my books now, and I wonder how many of them are going to get dumped on the street when I go. I’ve got a fair amount of magic-related items that, let’s face it, nobody normal is going to want. I’m in generally good health, but I’m at the age where I’m wondering what to do about this. I suppose they could be sold for some money for my family, but the truth is, my wife and surviving relatives wouldn’t know what to do with them, nor would they know how to evaluate and value each item. And yet I think it would be a shame were they to end up on the street or in the dump. So what I’m thinking about now is, to whom could I give them before I go? I guess this is a morbid thought, but if there’s anything that gets me going, it’s the thought of my limited time on this planet. It’s probably the thing that has kept me at the writing keyboard these past few years—knowing that if I don’t do it now, it’s not likely to get done later. And if I don’t figure out now what to do with these books, they’ll end up on the sidewalk. So I’m trying to get to know some young magicians who one day might appreciate such a collection.
The Players, Shakespeare said, are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time. What is it that we who are the brief chroniclers do in this brief time? Artists hope that what they’ve made is forever, or at least has a lasting impact. It never seems consciously that what I do is a fight against the dying of the light, but the closer I get, the more I understand. Do not ask for whom the sanitation worker comes. S/he comes for thee.
***
From The New Yorker
The Fifth Annual Shakespeare’s Birthday Slam took place a while back. I got to talk to the Producer of the Slam, Melinda Hall, and we had a great chat about the sonnets, their history, Shakespeare, Bill Gates, what it takes to survive as an artist in the world, and a knockout reading of “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” by actor Richard Thomas. This was broadcast last Thursday on radio station WBAI 99.5 FM NY. Click on the grey triangle to hear.
Sometimes you’re in a restaurant, and there’s something on the menu that you know you just have to have, because it includes not only one, but two things you love, like Surf and Turf, or Strawberry Shortcake with Chocolate Ice Cream. Well, I felt that same kind of pleasure on stumbling across the above video. Two of my favorite things in the world, Shakespeare and Who’s on First are mashed up and beautifully scripted and acted by NJ actors David Foubert and Jay Leibowitz. Enjoy! And save me a slice of that Key Lime Pecan Pie with Whipped Cream . . .
The story goes, Richard Burbage, arguably the finest English-speaking actor ever,* Shakespeare’s leading man in the Lord Chamberlain’s company, attracted many female admirers. His most popular role was Richard III, one of the most performed of Shakespeare’s plays during his lifetime.
Burbage’s longtime friend, Will Shakespeare, liked to play pranks on him. When Will heard that Burbage had arranged an assignation with a young woman, Shakespeare hurried to her house and tumbled into bed with the lady first. A few minutes later, Burbage arrived, and knocked on the woman’s door, announcing that Richard III had come. But in reply, Burbage heard a male voice on the other side of the door say, “Tell him, William the Conqueror comes before Richard the Third!”
*There’s a nice subject for a future post
