1) De Vere Studies
After one awkward class period filled with BBC film clips, however,
a class-and-community trip to Ashland, Oregon, for the Shakespeare
festival intervened. Once there, I had a couple hours between my
tour-guide duties and checked out the bookstore. A thick book on
the authorship question looked interesting, but I couldn't see
shelling out that much cash for the Charlton Ogburn book, The
Mysterious William Shakespeare. Next to it was a much thinner
Richard Whalen book, Shakespeare: Who Was He? for only a
fraction of the price. Most importantly, it contained a short
section specifically on All's Well. Bingo. I bought it,
went outside, sat down in the green, and as Prince Hal from the
night before played Frisbee with Hotspur, I read. The book told
me that the play makes little sense unless understood as
semi-autobiography. It's like Hamlet in that regard (indeed
like all the plays), but Hamlet and others were usually
revised in ways that make the works universal, relevant to us all,
whereas All's Well doesn't seem to have gotten that attention
and resulting dimension. I read the whole book and immediately after
returning home ordered the Ogburn book, read that cover to cover
twice in a row, and subsequently hoarded everything I could get
my hands on regarding the case for the Edward de Vere, 17th Earl
of Oxford, as the author of the plays.
Now this stuff makes sense. It's exhilarating knowing that this
work emerged out of real experience, real pain, real struggles,
anxieties, betrayals, elations -- out of someone's real life --
instead of out of the blue or off the top of a grain-merchant and
money-lender's head. From his own life, "Shake-speare" made art
of this caliber! "Life beats down and crushes the soul and art
reminds you that you have one" (Stella Adler). I'd say I understand
art and literature immeasurably better now; I am probably a better
teacher. Everyone knows I am now an addict too, and, as I
occasionally admit, my Oxfordian Shakespeare obsession has ruined
my life, which is fine because I didn't like that life anyway, and
now I'm ever exhilarated.
2) Enobarbus
First, the name itself is a joy. One can very effectively annoy people by
saying this name for no other reason than to indulge in the sound of it.
A few years ago I swore I was going to name my next cat Enobarbus, but
alas this did not come to pass at the time, since even at a few weeks
old he was clearly destined to be a "Spike." However, early in 2008
another brother/sister pair joined the household: Cleopatra and
Enobarbus. This one definitely is an Enobarbus.
I inconsistently list it as reason #312 in the discussion of Antony
and Cleopatra, but perhaps my favorite line from Shakespeare is
Enobarbus' response to Cleopatra's languid question: "What shall we do,
Enobarbus?" He answers, "Think and die" (III.xiii.1-2). That may be
what indeed happens to Enobarbus in the play.
3) Alcohol
As the elder Ogburns note:
4) Time
The experience of life vs. time, or self vs. time -- who has conveyed
that better than Shakespeare in a play like Macbeth? I read once
that all mystical people have particular trouble with the concept of
time, or getting past it. And the famous soliloquy from Macbeth
really is less about idiocy than about time:
5) The Reduced Shakespeare Company
See the video of their version of The Complete Works of William
Shakespeare (Abridged).
6) "'Sneck up!"
The exclamation occurs in Twelfth Night when Sir Toby's carousing
is interrupted by the puritanical Malvolio (II.iii). It's simply a
contraction for "His neck up!" (i.e., "Hang him!"), but it sounds a lot
cruder. You can get away nicely with saying this: people don't know what
you mean exactly, but they can catch the drift from the sound of the
phrase itself.
7) St. Crispin's Day
Henry V's glorious inspirational speech is the most delightful pile of
fine-sounding rhetoric in the language. Who in hell ever heard of St.
Crispin's Day?! What a joke! St. Crispin is the patron saint of
shoemakers! How arbitrary can you get?
When Gwyneth Paltrow hosted SNL and pretended to be British
(because of her several movie roles), she indicated that Englishness
was essentially "having tea and scones on St. Crispin's Day." It's
even a goofy sounding name for a saint. What's not to love?
8) Harold C. Goddard
He was the chair of the English Department at Swarthmore College from
1909 to 1946 and died a few years later, but he was in the process of
publishing his thoughts and lectures on Shakespeare at the end. His
publisher named the work The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951) and
its insightfulness is almost always superb. All the best bits in that
Bloom book come from Goddard, not always acknowledged. Normally I am
repulsed by intertextual allusions, but Goddard refers to and actually
makes me want to find the time to read Dostoevski. Other Oxfordians
sing his praises, and I'm sure if he were alive we'd be succeeding
in bringing him over to our side.
9) Music
Not just the "Hey nonny nonny" song from the Branagh Much Ado About
Nothing and "Hey ho, the wind and the rain" song from the Renaissance
Films Twelfth Night, but the implications that the plays contain
original lyrics and ample evidence that Shakespeare knows music
thoroughly. The De Vere Studies Conference lately features madrigals and
the proposition that English Renaissance music is another thing
Shakespeare invented, transforming what he'd heard in Italy. Where is the
Shakespeare music? Published under pseudonyms, of course ... again.
10) Animal Rights?!
Among its other "beef-witted" failures, orthodoxy tends to treat Ovid's
Metamorphoses as merely a compendium of classical myths. They
discuss Ovid's style instead of his perspective -- indeed, no
acknowledgement is given regarding any real perspective on the poet's
part. So excerpts seem arbitrarily selected in anthologies of ancient
hits. I've even seen many anthologies without any trace or
acknowledgement of Book XV where Ovid's perspective finally does emerge
quite powerfully.
In his jagged mythohistorical chronology, Ovid takes wide side-step in
the last book of Metamorphoses to Pythagoras. We generally know
only that theorem regarding hypotenuses and that rubbish, but Pythagoras
was known for his views on metempsychosis (the transmigration of souls)
and animal rights. A hundred years ago, vegetarians were known as
Pythagoreans. The perspective is poignantly given, and at great length,
by Ovid. The Romans go back to killing animals in the remainder of Book
XV, but the long section on Pythagoras serves as Ovid's commentary on the
natural world: Metamorphoses has already told us that it is filled
with souls. It's not necessarily that we need to subscribe wholeheartedly
to Pythagoras' philosophy and way of life, although it's a good idea for
a myriad of reasons -- it's not that we should respect a tree or a bird
because it might be the reincarnation of Aunt Millie; rather, we should
respect that tree or bird because it too has a life story.
Some extreme English teachers claim that we are our stories, that
all we have is our stories. This sounds a bit batty, and a literal
reception of Metamorphoses, even in this respect, is suffocatingly
anthropocentric. But understood on these human terms, and granted some
tolerance for the dramatic nature of them, the stories of
Metamorphoses are the stories behind various flora and fauna --
the things on earth that do indeed have life and with which perhaps we
can occasionally empathize.
Oxford read this part of Ovid too -- not just Pyramus and Thisby and some
other bits. In the climactic scene in The Merchant of Venice,
Shylock is unmoved and the butchery is prepared for. Gratiano claims that
he is partially persuaded by Pythagorean notions of the transmigration of
souls, since Shylock clearly has a dog's, or wolf's -- and Gratiano here
is royally missing the point of even the "pagan" Pythagoras, who proposed
an appreciation for the souls of all things. It's another moment
in the play where Shakespeare dramatizes the hypocrisy of Christians.
A scene usually omitted from productions of As You Like It follows
up on the early woodland scene of Duke Senior noting a touch of regret
for hunting down the native inhabitants of the forest -- the deer. This
is when Jaques' similar sensitivity is mentioned and, we initially think,
being mocked for being so squeamish and effete (II.i). But later (IV.ii),
there's a scene in which the Duke's men have killed a deer. This first
might be passed off as a literalization of the hunting of the "hart" -- a
long-time metaphor with an obvious pun in the realm of love literature.
But this is an actual kill. So Jaques dripping with sarcasm probably
unappreciated proposes that the murderer of the deer be pompously paraded
back to camp as "a Roman conqueror" (IV.ii.3-4) and that he wear the
horns upon his head as a sign of victory (a depiction of a fool, the
ubiquitous joke about cuckoldry in Elizabethan literature), and also that
we provide a glorious song: "'Tis no matter how it be in tune, / so it
make noise enough" (IV.ii.8-9). The would-be foresters sing a stupid
fruity court song about horn-wearing -- another standard courtly trope
that seems rancid and moronic in light of the kill. I say
non-anachronistic kudos to Jaques for being nauseated by macho hunting
b.s.
This comes as a surprise because who in Elizabethan England would have
considered this perspective? Not the normal nobility. Certainly not a
butcher's son who made dramatic speeches while hacking away at corpses in
the backyard.
Sir Andrew in Twelfth Night is astoundingly stupid, so his
speculations that he is "a great eater of beef" and that he thinks "that
does harm to [his] wit" (I.iii.85-86) might be dismissed as an idiotic
idea circulating in the 1580s. But Thersites in Troilus and
Cressida calls Ajax a "beef-witted lord" (II.i.13) quite
convincingly.
Associations between meat-eating and anger (choler, and/or violence) show
up in The Taming of the Shrew. Caesar's chicken sacrifice for omen
reading seems pretty moronic in the play, and sacrifice (and humans
associating it with the gods) is condemned by Ovid's Pythagoras.
Fleshpeddling, albeit the flesh of animals, is an issue in
Merchant and a disturbing comic banter with a dark underside in
As You Like It.
I continue (finally, I don't know why I didn't bother until now) pursuing
these animal and culinary issues in the canon. Given what I know of
Medieval and Renaissance food history, I'd have to say finally that
Oxford was not vegetarian. Drat. The options just weren't there. But if
they had been ... !
Who else in his period and circumstances even considered these matters?!
11) The Little Things
Instead of saying, "I don't know," one gradually finds oneself saying, "I
know not that." Wanting to go inside and saying, "I am too much in the
sun." Pondering the phrase "an allowed fool." Thinking at family
reunions, "A little more than kin and less than kind." Being able to
curse with panache: "Wasn't it Shakespeare who said, 'O hell'" (Helena in
A Midsummer Night's Dream: "O spite, o hell!"). There's so much
that this begins another list, I suppose.
In the meantime, here's another bardolatristic essay from a former
student:
"O the Humanity!"
I never liked liking what others like, so I avoided Shakespeare as a
student, and I didn't "get" how to read plays. As a literature teacher
in colleges, though, I had to include a few plays in survey courses.
But the first time I taught an entire semester of Shakespeare, 1999
when I was given a class during an emergency situation, I hadn't read
much Shakespeare, so I had students vote for what they wanted to read.
They opted for All's Well That Ends Well because it would be
the last work of the semester and sounded upbeat. I started to read
and panicked: the play made absolutely no sense. I could not tell
whose perspective I should be crediting, who I was to consider a
nitwit, where is the comedy, what were the relationships between
characters and their attitudes? I was lost; what was I going to say
to students about this one?
There are many passages in both plays and sonnets ... which testify to
the poet's acquaintance with insomnia. It is natural that with his
impressionable and abnormally stimulated mind, he found sleep
tormentingly elusive and was often tempted to court relaxation with
drink. Iago implies this when he says of Cassio: "'Tis evermore the
prologue to his sleep; / He'll watch the horologe a double set, / If
drink rock not his cradle" (II.iii.130-132). This was patently not
characteristic of Cassio, who has to be urged to take wine; but it is
easy to picture a high-strung poet like Oxford watching the clock round
twice before sleeping. (509)
Shakespeare is ambivalent about alcohol. He clearly finds it delicious,
of course, but recognizes and abhors its consequences to "self." In
Twelfth Night, when asked by Olivia, Feste says that a drunken man
is "Like a drown'd man, a fool, and a madman. / One draught above heat
makes him a fool, the second mads him, and a third drowns him"
(I.v.131f). One wants to maintain that "heat," but the scales are easily
tipp(l)ed.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
The passage makes Charlton Ogburn weep.
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
(V.v.19-28)