Tag Archives: Shakespeare

A Rag Man?

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shakespeare anagram

“In one of the Bard’s best thought of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.”

The quote above might seem like a nice little summary of Shakespeare’s play, and it is; but more interestingly and more remarkably, the above sentence of one hundred letters is an anagram of:

“To be or not to be

That is the question.

Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

Yes, every single letter in the Shakespeare quote comprises the sentence that describes those very lines.  The creator of this anagram, fortunately, is not lost to the sands of times; he is Cory Calhoun, master anagrammist who you can read more about here.

Perhaps one day, you, too, will say “I’ll make a wise phrase”—but “William Shakespeare” will have beaten you to it. For “we all make his praise.”

The Unexpected Guest: C.P. Shakes

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IMG_0783

(Click to enlarge)

A special guest showed up for the 5th Annual Shakespeare Sonnet Slam, in which I participated, in Central Park this week.

C.P. Shakes, arrived with Perdita the Pigeon on his shoulder, and performed Sonnet #149 with the bird taking every other line.

Later, Mr. Shakes confided to me that the C.P. stood for Central Park.

My own assigned Sonnet #133 was a little more subdued:

sonnet slam jack 2

The weather was an unlikely 49 degrees with winds making it seem even colder. But we made it through with no major mishaps. It took us almost exactly three hours to perform all 154 sonnets. The highlight for me was the performance of Sonnet #18 (“Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?) by the wonderful actor Richard Thomas.  I’m hoping to be able to post audio/video of it later next month.

Shame, Where is Thy Blush?: Analyzing a Sonnet from an Actor’s Point of View

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Gack!!!

The Shakespeare Sonnet Slam is only a few days away and I haven’t finished memorizing or analyzing my assigned sonnet yet.

Sonnet 133 to be exact. One of the strangest, most interesting, and perhaps most pornographic of the sonnets, best I can tell.

Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan
For that deep wound it gives my friend and me:
Is’t not enough to torture me alone,
But slave to slavery my sweet’st friend must be?
Me from myself thy cruel eye hath taken,
And my next self thou harder hast engrossed;
Of him, myself, and thee I am forsaken,
A torment thrice threefold thus to be crossed.
Prison my heart in thy steel bosom’s ward,
But then my friend’s heart let my poor heart bail;
Whoe’er keeps me, let my heart be his guard:
Thou canst not then use rigour in my jail.
    And yet thou wilt; for I, being pent in thee,
    Perforce am thine, and all that is in me.

Now, one is not required to memorize for the slam, and I plan to have the typed sonnet with me, but given my eyesight, nervousness, and laziness, if I’m going to make any sense of this, it’s best to memorize. I know that the only way I can memorize something like this is if I manage to uncover its sense. And that’s what its all about. You don’t have to do great acting up there, but you do have to talk sense.

All right, how to find that sense from what first looks nonsense?

First: the structure of the sonnet gives you lots of clues. Shakespeare’s sonnets are always structured as three quatrains and a final couplet. So lets look at the poem again, divided that way:

Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan
For that deep wound it gives my friend and me:
Is’t not enough to torture me alone,
But slave to slavery my sweet’st friend must be?

***
Me from myself thy cruel eye hath taken,
And my next self thou harder hast engrossed;
Of him, myself, and thee I am forsaken,
A torment thrice threefold thus to be crossed.

***
Prison my heart in thy steel bosom’s ward,
But then my friend’s heart let my poor heart bail;
Whoe’er keeps me, let my heart be his guard:
Thou canst not then use rigour in my jail.

***
  And yet thou wilt; for I, being pent in thee,
    Perforce am thine, and all that is in me.

That is how I approach memorizing a sonnet. Each quatrain is another thought, argument, or approach. The final couplet is generally a wry commentary on the preceding approaches; either it is a clever summary of them, or a recognition of the futility of the speaker’s thoughts.

So let’s start off with the first quatrain.

Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan
For that deep wound it gives my friend and me:
Is’t not enough to torture me alone,
But slave to slavery my sweet’st friend must be?

Beshrew … Err … let’s start off with that first word—Beshrew. What does it mean? The dictionaries tell us “curse.” Okay, so we’re starting off pretty strong, the speaker (let’s say “I,” from now on) is cursing someone (let’s say “you,” from now on). Why am I cursing you? Because you are making my heart groan. And not only me, but the same for my best friend. Wait a second, my best friend and I are both in love with you! And you know it, and yet you cruelly delight in it. The three of us are caught in an awful compelling love triangle.

Now the loyalty to a same-sex best friend is a theme that runs throughout Shakespeare’s plays. It’s extraordinarily important to Shakespeare’s characters. Betrayal of a supposed friend is the motor of Julius Caesar, Othello, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and many more of his plays. So we need to take this very seriously.

So let’s go back to that first quatrain again, words like “deep wound” begin to take on a sexual meaning. My friend is hopelessly enthralled with you; you who have gleefully sliced our friendship apart with a deep wound. You have enslaved not only me, but my best friend. That is the crime of crimes.

Onto the second quatrain.

Me from myself thy cruel eye hath taken,
And my next self thou harder hast engrossed;
Of him, myself, and thee I am forsaken,
A torment thrice threefold thus to be crossed.

A change in the main thought now. The first quatrain was about cruel you; this second quatrain is about how I and you and my best friend have now irrevocably changed our relationships. The first line says that at first it was me whose soul (and body!) you had corrupted. The next line talks about “my next self” i.e. the one closest to me, my best friend, as being corrupted as well. You engrossed him harder. And if you want to go for the sexual meaning there, why not?

The next two lines say that my relationship is torn with you, my friend, and myself. But worse, each of us has three torn relationships now because of this madness, and to repair it would require each of us to repair the three relationships.

The third quatrain seeks a way to resolve the dilemma.

Prison my heart in thy steel bosom’s ward,
But then my friend’s heart let my poor heart bail;
Whoe’er keeps me, let my heart be his guard:
Thou canst not then use rigour in my jail.

I beg you to let me be your only lover; be cruel to me, so that my friend can be spared your cruelty. And perhaps, when you understand how important it is for me to shield my friend, to not betray him, then you will be a little kinder to me, in admiration of my loyalty.

But in the final couplet I have to admit that my dream of being free of you and your cruelty—and my own need for you—is a fantasy. And these last two lines are incredibly evocative and can be read so many ways.

And yet thou wilt; for I, being pent in thee,
    Perforce am thine, and all that is in me.

Right now, I think the most daring is to hit the final rhyme. Usually, I’m not a fan of stressing the rhyme in verse, but I think ending couplets in Shakespeare are an exception. So being pent in thee, “and all that is in me.”  But stressing me in the last line  almost forces the rhythm to add an additional stress on that. So,

And yet thou wilt; for I, being pent in thee,
    Perforce am thine, and all that is in me.

Was that Shakespeare’s intention? I can’t say. But I think it is a viable subtext for an actor. An actor always looks for a strong compelling subtext, even if it looks like other interpretations might be more likely. More, after the slam takes place later this week.

I Scorn to Change My State With Kings

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Part of the pleasure when I participated in the Central Park Shakespeare Sonnet Slam last year was listening to the other actors. I remember really liking the performance of the actor who went four sonnets before me, doing Sonnet 29–“When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes.” I had no idea who he was.

Last night I happily came upon a YouTube video of that actor performing the sonnet at the Sonnet Slam; I know it was the same actor, because I could see myself in the video, sitting on stage, waiting to go to the mic. The actor’s name is Ben Crystal. You can see the video above.

But it also turns out that Ben Crystal is a brilliant scholar of Shakespeare’s verse and an excellent teacher. Below, you can hear him give an extraordinary lecture on the acting and dissection of Shakespearean verse.  You will come away from it equipped with more tools for understanding and acting Shakespeare. If you don’t have the time to view the whole lecture, at least listen to his reading of the sonnet. It’s very, very well done.

Shakespeare Sonnet Slam

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Last April, I participated in the 4th Annual Shakespeare Sonnet Slam in Central Park. It’s a lot of fun—participants perform all 154 sonnets in order, one per person, all in one afternoon. It’s open to anyone who wants to do it. Email them about a month before Shakespeare’s birthday, April 26th, 2015, and they will assign you a sonnet to perform for this year’s event on April 24th.

I was assigned Sonnet 33 last year. I have to admit I wasn’t familiar with it beforehand. You can read it below. (BTW, it’s easier to deconstruct the meaning of a sonnet by breaking it up into three quatrains and a final couplet.)

Sonnet 33

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine,
With all triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out, alack, he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.

Just for fun back then, since I was playing around with learning how to edit sound digitally, using computer software, I made this recording of the sonnet.

Pro audio editing tip: You can make anything, even reading the phone book, sound a hundred times better if you layer it over a bed of Pachibel’s Canon in D.  🙂

(Click on the triangle to play)

Bodyless Head by Topless Body: Shakespeare’s Cymbeline

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85_d__0_Cymbeline

A group of friends and I meet each month to read a Shakespeare play, one act at a time. For the past few months we’ve been working on Cymbeline, one of the more obscure plays in the canon. We’ve finally finished reading it, and what a wild ride it was! We were laughing out loud at all the crazy twists and turns of the story.

It’s unlike anything else I’ve read by Shakespeare. It’s plot, plot, plot, plot, and then more plot. But the plot makes almost no sense. It’s large doses of randomness and chaos. Deceived lovers, pretenders to the throne, headless bodies, bodyless heads, women dressed as men, kings in rags, poison that is not poison; it’s a romance, it’s a tragedy, it’s a comedy, it’s a history, it’s an all-in-one, all-purpose, all-singing, all-dancing, Shakespeare Uberfest. It can be called a truly post-modern play, written centuries before that word post-modern was even a glint in some corduroy-jacketed academic’s vocabulary.

What’s fun is to see how Shakespeare takes his previous plays, and William Burroughs-like, cuts and pastes his way to creating a new work. Our group caught echoes of King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, As You Like It, Titus Andronicus, and The Merchant of Venice in the play. We imagined Shakespeare rummaging through the prop closet and finding different props, fashioning a play as if he were Jonathan Winters improvising with found objects. The apparent method of construction is also very amusing—as soon as one character’s entanglement is depicted, another character gets involved in another improbable subplot and so on, until it seems as if there is no way that all the threads could be unravelled and resolved. Add to that, that almost every character ends up in some sort of disguise, and you have a recipe for total miscommunication. And yet Shakespeare does, in the end, pull it all together. In doing so, however, he violates,—purposely?—every one of Aristotle’s recommendations for the drama.

What are we left with? I think, more than anything, I was strongly left with Shakespeare’s deep belief in reconciliation, repentance, restitution, and redemption. No matter how chaotic the world gets in a Shakespeare play, it does, in the end, return to sanity. And almost always, the return to sanity is made possible by forgiveness on the part of those wronged, and apology by those who did the wrong. Claudius in Hamlet says:

Whereto serves mercy
But to confront the visage of offence?
And what’s in prayer but this two-fold force,
To be forestalled ere we come to fall,
Or pardon’d being down?

and:

Try what repentance can: what can it not?

Even Claudius the murderer understands the power of forgiveness and repentance.

At the end of Cymbeline, like so many of the plays, the world is made livable again by  acts of forgiveness, along with the consequent apologies by the wrong-doers. The King and his daughter forgive, the deceivers apologize, and the world is set right again.

Shakespeare is calling us, telling his audience, that in such a dangerous and chaotic world, there is only one strategy for continued survival. Humankind is endlessly fallible; if we want the world to continue, then only continued forgiveness will keep the Globe intact. It’s a fascinating play, and a production of it is slated to play this summer at the Delacorte Theater in NYC. Can’t wait.

Lie There, My Art: Magic, Will, and Ego

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christopher+plummer+prospero

The magic happens, but where does it come from?

In traditional stage magic, it comes from one place—the magician. The will of the magician, to be more precise. The beginning student magician is told that if s/he is going to enact the part of conjurer, then there must always be a moment during each effect when the magic is accounted for, when seemingly that will has  been exerted.

The Abracadabra, the hocus-pocus moment—when the magic happens—or so the magician would like you to think–represents the moment when the magician is exerting will. The plot is almost always this: something impossible is about to happen, and the will of the magician is what makes it happen. The magic moment is invoked and the magic occurs. The impossible conclusion is revealed.

Stephen Greenblatt has written a wonderful book about William Shakespeare, his life and his plays, and how each informed the other. The name of the book is Will in the World, and Greenblatt consciously uses the word Will in the same punny way that Will did. Humankind’s need to exert will is a constant theme in Shakespeare’s plays.

Whole worlds are created by will. Prospero, the magician from The Tempest manipulates a magical world, just as Will did, and all writers do. The power of creating a universe from one’s will is a heady potion indeed.

How does the magician get such power? Sometimes the power is not in the magician per se, but contained in the artifacts of the magician—the magic wand, the woofle dust, the incantation. But Shakespeare gives away the secret of the magic: when Prospero decides to be a magician no more, he puts down his magic staff, and utters the words, “Lie there, my art.”

“Lie there, my art.” I love the multiple meanings in that phrase. It is Prospero’s and Shakespeare’s secret: art is a lie. That is, a series of carefully planned and calculated lies. Harold Clurman, the influential stage director and critic, entitled his autobiography, “Lies Like Truth.”  The magic “as if.” Treat that cardboard tree “as if ” it were real. The imagination brought into play with the act of will.

There is a problem, however, with all this exercise of Will. The artist might become obnoxious and swell-headed. Fortunately, in a good play, the author’s personality and ego are subsumed by her or his characters. The audience does not have to deal directly with the willful artist.

In a magic show, however, the creative ego is not as easily hidden. After all, in the traditional magic show, the magician’s ego is often the point, plot, and theme of the show—“Look at what I can do. Look how strong my magical will is!”

This can be entertaining for a while, but it can also be highly irritating. Okay, you showed us once you can do the impossible, now what. Oh again? And again? And Again? Boring. How does the magic performer get out of the trap of constantly displaying, over and over, his or her naked will in the world?

When I first delved into magic more seriously as an adult, I was infatuated with the idea of what I then called “Accidental Magic.” My idea was this: I didn’t exactly do magic, but magic seemed to happen when I was around. Example (I never actually did this, I just thought it would be neat): I would just happen to be having a casual conversation in a restaurant with a friend. I steer the talk to asking him to name his favorite card. He does, and all of a sudden the music playing in the background has a lyric about that card. Or, I am at the beach with a friend and as we walk together along on the shore, he discovers a newspaper with the exact date of his birth. Well, I may have been infatuated with that idea, but it turns out magician Gerry Deutsch was doing this way before I had thought of it. He called it “Perverse Magic.” And he has since come up with literally dozens and dozens of such effects, the defining feature of which is that the magic is not caused by the magician’s will. Like Mickey Mouse in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the magic is situated elsewhere, outside of the performer. The audience can’t get tired of the magician’s ego, because the magician makes no ego claims at all.

Here are a couple of Gerry Deutsch effects from the Genii Forum. The how-to is not really important. We will leave that as an exercise for the reader (I’ve always wanted to write that).

“I have a card selected and say it will come to the top and it’s not there — another card (say 4C) is there. I bury the 4C and try again but again the 4C is there. I spell the selected card but at the end it’s the 4C. Finally I say I’ll do the trick with the 4C and say it will go to my pocket but when I reach into my pocket it’s the selected card. I’m surprised and frustrated.”

And for outdoors: “You give out a cry of pain and look at your right foot as if that’s the cause of your pain. You pull your shoe off with your left hand and dump out a rock the size of a strawberry. The right hand then reaches into the same shoe and pulls out another rock, this one the length of a playing card . . .  You shake your head as you limp along.”

Little sketches of eccentric happenings.

No one’s Will or ego. Just whimsy and fantasy and lies.

The stuff that dreams are made on.