Hamlet's Dresser

Several years ago, I read about Bob Smith's memoir, Hamlet's Dresser, on Maria Grazia's blog, Fly High.  My thought at the time was why have I never heard about this book before, and my thought on finally reading it earlier this month was what took me so long to get around to it.

It is a superb memoir--heartbreaking, inspiring, and realistic.  Bob Smith was born into a fairly ordinary family that was hurtled into extraordinary circumstances when his younger sister, Carolyn, was born with severe mental and physical disabilities.   

At only ten years old, Bob found solace from the heavy burden laid on him by his father's disapproval, his mother's dependencies, and his sister's incapacity to function in the plays and sonnets of William Shakespeare.  A librarian gave him a copy of The Merchant of Venice, whose opening line, "In sooth, I know not why I am so sad" resonated so profoundly with the lonely, heartsick, scared  little boy that he read the whole play, and never stopped.

He read the Shakespeare canon over and over throughout his teenage years, and found work at the Stratford, CT Shakespeare Festival when it opened when he was 16, in 1951.  His first job was as dresser to the actor who played Hamlet. 

One of my favorite anecdotes in the book is when Smith describes his response to director John Houseman's query into how he will get Hamlet through a particularly fast clothing change (involving wrapping him into a flowing cape) between scenes.  Smith, who has a lot of experience dressing his sister, says "Sew it into a figure eight and I'll stand on the stairs above him and drop it over his head.  As long as we get the front on the front we won't have to worry about anything except catching Claudius."

I really liked the structure of the memoir, which begins and is interspersed with anecdotes pertaining to his current work with seniors.  He teaches "The Shakespeare" at senior centers in Manhattan--reading and discussing the plays with elderly people who often don't have much to look forward to beyond his weekly discussions.  Like all great teachers, he never underestimates his students' ability to grasp the difficult language in order to get to the very real and often painful truths that Shakespeare illuminates in his works.  

What makes the memoir so interesting and well-structured is that the truths illuminated in the plays and sonnets are reflected directly in Smith's own life and in those of the seniors he teaches.

I also really enjoyed reading Smith's anecdotes about backstage at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival during the years he was involved in it.  Working with the likes of Katherine Hepburn, Jessica Tandy, John Houseman, Will Geer, and Bert Lahr made for very interesting reading.

Reading this memoir has rekindled my interest in rereading Shakespeare myself.  It's been awhile since I finished my read-through of the plays, and I didn't go to my local Shakespeare festival at all last year.  I'm happy to say that Macbeth, Midsummer's Night Dream, and Richard II are all on my agenda for this summer...plus the very intriguing new movie of Much Ado About Nothing.

Hamlet's Dresser is on my TBR Pile Challenge for 2013--it is the 7th out of 12 books selected from the pile that I have now read.  I think Remains of the Day will be next!

Austen and Shakespeare in the Space-Time Continuum

I just started reading A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen, edited by Susannah Carson, and found an interesting idea in the second essay, the one by Eudora Welty entitled "The Radiance of Jane Austen." While the bulk of the essay itself was interesting and well-written, it didn't really say much I hadn't already heard, or read, or thought about except her opening paragraph:

Jane Austen will soon be closer in calendar time to Shakespeare than to us. Within the reading life of the next generation, that constellation of six bright stars will have swung that many years deeper into the one sky, vast and crowded, of English literature. Will these future readers be in danger of letting the novels elude them because of distance, so that their pleasure will not be anything like ours? The future of fiction is a mystery; it is like the future of ourselves.

I confess I did the math, and Welty is right. Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died in 1616. Austen was born in 1775 and died in 1817. Austen died 201 years after Shakespeare died. In 2018, it will be 201 years since Austen died. I'm not sure what this really means, though. On the surface, it seems to suggest the Austen's world is more similar to Shakespeare's than to ours, which isn't really a new idea. Her work is definitely more understandable to the modern reader than Shakespeare's plays and poetry are. I think Welty is saying that the further we get from Austen, the more inaccessible it will become. That may be, but the raw emotion of Shakespeare's greatest characters transcend the trappings into which the stories themselves are housed. Likewise with Austen's characters.

A few years ago I was rereading Mansfield Park and Henry Crawford's reading of Henry VIII struck me as worth noting. Why that play? It is hardly ever produced anymore, and yet there was something in it that caused Austen to choose it as the play Crawford read aloud from to Fanny when he was wooing her.

"Shakespeare," observes Henry Crawford, "is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with him by instinct."

Edmund Bertram agrees: "No doubt, one is familiar with Shakespeare ...from one's earliest years. His celebrated passages are quoted by every body; they are in half the books we open, and we all talk Shakespeare,..."

These days, I would venture to say that Austen is a part of more people's constitutions that ever before. Certainly in my little corner of the blogosphere "everyone is familiar with Austen ...Her celebrated passages are quoted by every body; they are in half the books we open, and we all talk Austen."

I think what I like about the opening passage of the Welty essay is that it's an interesting factoid and one that could have a deeper meaning, or not. It's just been fun to wrestle with a bit.

Act IV of The Book of William

I finished Act IV of Paul Collins' The Book of William last night and am happy to report that I am still loving this book. The book is mostly a chronological look at the fates of the First Folios (i.e., the original compendium of Shakespeare's plays) and Acts III and IV are mostly about the scholars and amateur enthusiasts who tracked down and established a census of the First Folios. My favorite part had to do with the photographing of the recovered Folios in the mid-nineteenth century, and then the various machines (e.g., the Hinman blink comparator) that were developed in order to compare copies of Folios in order to establish a definitive text for the plays as virtually all of the Folios had been "repaired" over the centuries with pages from other versions of the plays.



Act IV also describes in some detail the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. Collins visited not only the basement vault which houses the library's collection of seventy-nine First Folios, but got to personally look at several of them. I think I know where I'm going on my next literary pilgrimage.

In the meantime, I discovered that the Folger's website provides a pdf of a digital facsimile of one the First Folios. For your viewing pleasure, click here. The Folger has a wonderful website which I plan to explore...

The Reign of Edward III - Definitely Co-Authored by Shakespeare?

After checking my Yahoo mail this morning, I saw an article on Yahoo (that wasn't about Colorado's own "balloon boy"!) that caught my eye. It's from Time magazine and it's entitled How Plagiarism Software Found a New Shakespeare Play.

The gist of the story is that Sir Brian Vickers, a literature professor at the University of London, used a software program called Pl@giarism to compare writing patterns between Edward III and the undisputed works of Shakespeare. His conclusion is that Shakespeare definitely wrote parts of The Reign of Edward III and Thomas Kyd wrote other parts.

My problem with this approach (i.e., matching strings of words--the more matching strings the more likely that the author of the compared works is the same person) is that it doesn't account for the fact that other playwrights probably lifted Shakespeare's phrases and incorporated them into their own works just as he did theirs. Imitation is the highest form of flattery and plagarism in the Elizabethan world was rampant.

Furthermore, Shakespeare invented so many words and phrases that attributing authorship based on matching phrases seems to ignore a distinguishing characteristic of Shakespeare as an author. I'm not suggesting that the literary detectives should look for unique phrases rather than matching phrases, but I do wonder whether the methodology holds true for Shakespeare.

I would be more convinced that Shakespeare was the author or co-author of this play if there was any evidence that it was part of the repertoire of one of the acting companies that he was associated with. It's significant to me that it wasn't part of the First Folio.

Playing Shakespeare - Irony and Ambiguity

Isn't this a cool painting? It's called "All the World's a Stage," and it's by James Christensen.

I managed to watch disc 3, episode 1 of Playing Shakespeare earlier this week, and was delighted that John Barton, Shakespearean director and host of the show, tackled not only irony and ambiguity but also included sonnets in the examples.

Shakespeare's sonnets, except for the most popular, elude me. I love the sonnet structure and words themselves are rich, but finding meaning is hard. Hearing them delivered by a skilled actor makes them far less slippery.

I've been slowly making my way through James Shapiro's excellent book, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, so it was especially interesting to hear Ben Kingsley deliver Sonnet 138 (When My Love Swears), which Shapiro discussed at length in the chapter on the case of the purloined sonnets (see here for my post on that topic).

Backing up to irony and ambiguity, Barton coached the actors to play up whatever irony can be detected in the words themselves by stressing specific words--what he termed speaking in capital letters or inverted commas--and using facial expressions to excentuate the double-meaning of the words. However, many passages are ambiguous--it's not a fluke that the plays and characters have been discussed vigorously for the past 400 years--and the ambiguity allows the actor to interpret the character and situation and emotion and motivation and the trick is to convey that interpretation to the audience so that they are not confused or lost by the performance.

There was a wonderful example in which Richard Pasco delivered the speech from Richard II that includes the wonderful lines,

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;

Pasco delivered this first as he did it when he played RII, presumably with the RSC. Then, coached by Barton, he played up irony, with RII mocking himself. Finally, a third time, again at Barton's urging, he delivered it much more quickly. Seeing the three versions one after each other was truly marvelous. I think a mistake most actors make with regards to Shakespeare must be delivering the lines too slowly and too reverently. The quicker pace in the third rendition added a level of self-mockery that I hadn't anticipated.

Alan Howard also did a great back-to-back variation on the speech that the herald Mountjoy delivers to Henry V when he first comes to propose, on behalf of the Dauphin, that HV ransome himself in lieu of battling the French. The first delivery was a typical haughty tone. The second was a tone of mock sympathy that really drove home the arrogance and was delightful.

To end the session, Michael Pennington and Tony Church played Hector and Ulysses from the scene in Troilus and Cressida in which they survey the walls of Troy and discuss what is to come. Barton had them play this scene 3-4 times, and it was amazing to see how subtle variations such as sitting versus standing affected the interaction and tone between the two. In this final scene, Barton drove home the point that irony is completely in the realm of interpretation. When you move from blatant sarcasm (i.e., unambiguous sarcasm that jumps off the page at the reader), to irony, you move from the objective to the subjective.

At the Movies with Henry V

I've been reading and discussing Henry V along with Ann from TableTalk, and last week I watched all three movie versions, starting with the BBC version starring David Gwillim, then the Kenneth Branagh version, and ending with the Laurence Olivier movie.



The BBC version was most true to the text, with only a few lines deleted, all scenes were virtually intact. Gwillim also played Prince Hal in both parts of the Henry IV BBC productions, and I thought he, more than either Branagh or Olivier, retained the boyish charm of Hal with impish smiles and a ready laugh that was rarely forced. He was an extremely likeable Henry who clearly was doing what he had to do in his job (e.g., sentencing the three traitors, allowing the execution of Bardolph, and ordering the throats of the French prisoners to be cut).



Much has been written about the violence and realism of Branagh's version of Henry V, so I won't go there. What struck me was the vast difference between Branagh's and Qwillim's portrayal of the same character. Branagh's Henry is truly his father's son. In the opening act, he is positively menacing and calculating to a fault--at one point, I thought he was going to order the destruction of the death planet, he seemed so much like a dark lord from a sci-fi flick. While he had his lighter moments, overall his interaction with his troops seemed far more cynical, most likely because I couldn't forget the opening of the movie. Since it had been many years since I watched the film, I eagerly awaited his reaction when he heard that Bardolph was to be hanged, and I was relieved that Branagh let a look of dismay flicker across his eyes. That flicker did a lot to redeem him for me.



Now on to the Olivier version. I first saw this film when I was a young adolescent. This was one of my father's favorite movies, and he went whenever it was playing (mostly only at art film theaters in the 1960s and 1970s in those pre-VHS days) and took me with him. Imagine my surprise when I later learned that Olivier used only about half of the lines that Shakespeare gave him to work with! Once I learned all about how Henry V was made during WWII as part of the War Effort, I became very jaded about the movie. I'm a purist and would rather not have any lines cut let alone have them cut for political reasons.

I watched the Olivier version over the weekend fully expecting to dislike it. I was hyper-aware of what had been cut and was hyper-sensitive to the glorification of war aspect of the movie, but I confess that I found myself caught up in the film again, from the charming reenactment of an early production of the play in May 1600 at the Globe Theatre to the bright costumes, heavy makeup, and stylized sets, even after we fully entered the cinematic world as Henry and the English travelled from Southampton to France.

And then I watched the movie again while I listened to film historian Bruce Eder explain what Olivier was trying to do and how he achieved it--this was an extra on the DVD. Eder's commentary was absolutely fascinating--especially the part about how the French court sets/scenes and even some of the battle scenes (e.g., the Once More Into the Breach speech) and the post-battle scene in the village of Agincourt (i.e., where Pistol commits himself to being a cutpurse) were cinematic recreations of paintings from a medieval book of hours. Here's an example I found that looks strikingly like the set for the French court when the king and his men are worrying about the approaching English.



I now have a renewed appreciation for Olivier's Henry V. What's next? I wish someone would do a complete Henry V (including all the scenes which show Henry in a not so completely sympathetic light) but with Olivier's vision. I love the Globe Theater start/end, and I love the Book of Hours inspiration, but I want the whole play not just the patriotic parts.

There's so much more to talk about--comparing the Katherines, comparing the Fluellens and Gowers, comparing the Boars Head gang, but I need to go and read Dorian Gray so that I can write about that next.

Playing Shakespeare - Set Speeches and Soliloquy

Disc two only had two episodes--the first I talked about briefly in last Sunday's post, it was how to play Shylock...interesting but pale when compared to the second workshop on disc two, Set Speeches and Soliloquy. Here are the notes I took whilst watching.

The job of the actor, of course, is to hold the attention of the audience by telling a story. This is easier to do with dialogue because you have the natural tension between two or more actors conversing, learning, interacting, discovering, debating. In Shakespeare's set speeches and soliloquys, the actor's job is the same but it is hard because the actor must interact with the audience. In a way, I think John Barton, the director who leads the workshops, is saying that set speeches/soliloquys can become like dialogue with the audience being the silent other participant in the dialogue.

Barton says that speeches and soliloquys can easily allow the play to lose the story momentum when the actor generalizes the emotion instead of keeping it fresh and discovering it as the text unfolds.

Sinead Cusack led the examples by delivering Portia's Mercy speech--Barton used this example to show how the initial dialogue to a speech should be used to trigger the emotion so that the speech is delivered as a response to provocation, with the thoughts being explored in real time, and resolved as if for the first time.

I also loved seeing Barbara Leigh-Hunt as deposed Queen Margaret in RIII telling current Queen Elizabeth what the future holds for her. The point Barton made with this example was how it's easy and dangerous for an actor to treat a speech as rhetoric and then lose the sense of the text in the rhythm of the words.

Patrick Stewart as Titus was exceptionally good--not just because I don't like the play and avoid it when possible, and so it was a treat to actually hear good things about it. Here Barton talked about how an actor can use the words to cope with and express the emotion. He had Stewart deliver the speech twice--first with raw emotion in which the words were completely lost and the meaning of them irrelevant, and the second time with Stewart trying to convey the emotion behind each image, and so giving a deeper sense of the horrific feeling that Titus was subject to.

Tony Church as the Archbishop of Canterbury in HV delivered the speech justifying HV's claim to the throne of France, and demonstrated Barton's point that an actor needs to juggle seriousness with comedy, varying the tempo in order to hold the audience's attention.

Barton then moved on to soliloquy and stressed that to be successful an actor must let the emotion displayed arise out of the situation itself, tell the internal story, and be spontaneous, as "if these words were being spoken for the first time."

Jane Lapotaire did a terrific job delivering a soliloquy from Troilus and Cressida. The first time, Barton asked her to talk to herself, and Barton used this to show how the speech easily got stuck on one note, Cressida's vanity. When she talked to the audience in the second delivery, it was much easier to follow her thought process and understand her as a character.

The other highlights of the soliloquy section were Judi Dench as Viola highlighting both pain and comedy of her situation (i.e., discovering that Olivia was in love with her, while she is in love with Orsino) and Michael Pennington as Hamlet delivering the To Be speech. Both were terrific and I feel priviledged to see both, even if only in a workshop setting.

Barton's final parting advice? Don't be too solemn and you must share the text with the audience.

While looking for an appropriate image for this post, I stumbled across Hamlet - A User's Guide, by Michael Pennington. As if I don't have enough to read already, but I couldn't resist and it's on my Amazon list now!

The Passionate Pilgrim – Shakespeare’s Sonnets

I reread the portion of James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare that deals with the rogue publication of some of Shakespeare’s sonnets along with others not his and still others that might be his, but on an off day, in a collection entitled The Passionate Pilgrim. I was struck again by Shapiro’s contention that the plays were public and the sonnets were private. The latter evolved over time, were worked on and reworked for their own sake and as canvases for Shakespeare to play with themes he later incorporated into the plays. Shapiro says that Shakespeare only shared his sonnets with a select few. What he doesn't speculate on is which of those select few let William Jaggard get his hands on them and publish them without permission. That's a good mystery for someone to solve!

I also really enjoyed the notion Shapiro introduces in this section that Shakespeare would have haunted the bookstalls of London:

There’s no way that Shakespeare could have bought or borrowed even a fraction of the books that went into the making of his plays. Besides his main sources for his British histories and Roman tragedies, which he probably owned—Holinshed’s Chronicles and Plutarch’s Lives, he drew on hundreds of other works. From what we know of Shakespeare’s insatiable appetite for books, no patron’s collection—assuming that Shakespeare had access to one or more—could have accommodated his curiosity and range. London’s bookshops were by necessity Shakespeare’s working libraries, and he must have spent a good many hours browsing there, moving from one seller’s wares to the next (since, unlike today, each bookseller had a distinctive stock), either jotting down ideas in a commonplace book or storing them away in his prodigious actor’s memory. P. 191

I also enjoyed reading how Marlowe’s poem “Live with me and be my love” was included in The Passionate Pilgrim, and so initially ascribed to Shakespeare. The really interesting part was how it was alluded to and echoed and mocked by both Shakespeare and Marlowe, and according to Shapiro is “one of the finest expression of pastoral in English poetry.” I didn’t know that!

Shapiro’s discussion on the sonnets and their creation and abduction morphs into a discussion of As You Like It, the play Shakespeare wrote over the summer of 1599. The discussion is rich and complex, but one gem jumped out at me:

…As You Like It is rooted in its place and time…its real topicality resides…in its attentiveness to evolving notions of Elizabethan comedy and pastoral. Comedy tends to have a briefer shelf life than other genres even as it’s more popular…What’s funny or delightful to one generation often feels pointless and strained to the next. When conventions and social expectations change, comedy must, too.

From my own somewhat limited play-going experience, it does seem that modern audiences laugh at the physical comedy that most directors ensure is present in most productions of the comedies/romances. The dramatic language still sways us mightily, but I don’t think we really would get most of the verbal jokes without help, Beatrice and Benedict, not withstanding. Maybe Shakespeare's genius lies in the fact that we think his comedies are funny at all. This notion certainly cements Austen's place in the Pantheon of literary geniuses...is there another writer who is as truly funny over time as Austen?

Playing Shakespeare - disc 1

I heard about Playing Shakespeare, a series of taped workshops led by legendary Shakespearean director, John Barton, and finally got the opportunity to watch disc 1 over the weekend.

Judi Dench wasn't in the first three episodes, which constitute the first disc, but awonderfully young Ian McKellan, Patrick Stewart, and Ben Kingsley among others, read lines, acted scenes, and talked about their craft. Frankly, the first episode was a tad slow--partly I needed to get used to the format, and partly there wasn't a lot happening on stage as Barton mostly talked about Elizabethan acting versus modern, method acting and the development of the naturalistic approach with minimal examples.

Episode two, "Using the Verse," was fascinating. Barton talked at length and a variety of actors provided examples and anecdotes relating to how iambic pentameter not only works but helps actors memorize lines, interpret character, and breath. Also interesting was the discussion regarding how Shakespeare broke the rules for effect.

And episode three, "Language and Character," was the best of three with full speeches delivered with Barton's pre-scene coaching. The best bit in this episode is when Barton delivers a speech in what he thinks, with some reservation, to be close to how an Elizabethan actors would have sounded. The other wonderful bit was the discussion of the most important word in Shakespeare and the showing of a skit in an over-zealous director (Stephen Fry) coaches an actor (Hugh Laurie) regarding Time. V. funny and apropos! Here it is, although Playing Shakespeare only shows it from about 2 min on.



After the two budding Shakespearean actors who call me Mom are done with this disc, it goes back to Netflix. Luckily I have disc two to tide me over until disc three arrives.

Travelogue: Stratford Upon Avon

Stratford was a delight from the minute we arrived until we left two days later. In reviewing our photos to select the ones for this posting, I'm struck by the overall silliness of them--from the photo of Poundland (the UK's equivalent of the Dollar Store) to the posing with the many statues of Shakespeare and his characters that dot the town.

Of course, visiting the shrines around town was a treat. I especially liked the birthplace, which is part of the Shakespeare Center that provides a diorama type exhibit with various artifacts that might have been Shakespeare's. There's a lovely garden on the site where the New House once stood, and the church where Shakespeare and wife and one of the daughters is buried was really lovely. We took a bus out to Anne Hathaway's cottage and loved it and the gardens surrounding it. We didn't have time to visit Mary Arden's farm, but rode by it on the bus back to town.



This is a bird-scarer from the garden at Anne Hathaway's Cottage.

We got to see a Royal Shakespeare Company production of As You Like It, which I consider one of the best if not the best productions of a Shakespeare play I've seen despite it being performed in a makeshift theatre while their main theatre is being renovated. The acting was superb, the set fantastic (basically just trapdoors and ladders), and the overall experience terrific...until an usher announced, at about ten lines from the end of the play, that a fire alarm was sounding and everyone had to vacate the building.

Our B&B in Stratford was our second favorite of the trip. The proprietor, Pascal, was a delight and he made a point of introducing all of his guests as each arrived in the breakfast room each day. He also was a wealth of information about the town, and steered us to the type of restaurants we were in the mood for.

Stratford was also memorable for the plethora of gifts, tacky and otherwise, we were able to find. Our refrigerator now boasts a goofy Shakespeare magnet surrounded by a collection of the best insults hurled at each other by his characters. Sarah acquired a really good reference book that provides synopses and interesting tidbits for each of the plays. I decided not to waste the £1.95 for the complete works of Wm Shakespeare as printed on newsprint paper and guaranteed to disintegrate on the first usage.

We loved walking around the town itself. Picturesque, interesting, and very walkable, and there were plenty of real (i.e., not touristy Bard) shops to completely satisfy us. Sarah finally got to shop in an H&M and wore the outfit she bought to As You Like It. We had a wonderful high tea and were amused by the biker-chick owner who kept on scolding the poor pretty waitresses who were silly enough to work for her. We strolled along the Avon and people and bird watched to our hearts content.



This is one of my favorite pictures from the whole trip, taken atop the bus we rode out to the Cottage and Farm, and it typifies the giddy feeling we had during our 48 hours in Stratford Upon Avon.

What I Learned About Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Shapiro’s 1599

I read James Shapiro's A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (P.S.) a few weeks ago, and am enjoying to no end going back and rereading it while I prepare blogs on each of the plays Shakespeare produced in that incredibly creative year. I learned a lot more than I'm able to reproduce here. Suffice it to say...if you have even a passing interest in Shakespeare, this is a terrific book.

On to Julius Caesar and the spring of 1599...


This is Ciarán Hinds in HBO's Rome, but I can't think of a better image for Caesar. If only he would play Shakespeare's Caesar for us.

1. There was a second Spanish Armada that threatened England in 1599, eleven years after the more famous invasion attempt in 1588.

2. Writing about Julius Caesar during the final years of Elizabeth I’s life and reign was risky—Elizabeth I was an aging, childless monarch, and with the still remembered examples of Richard II, who also had political trouble with Ireland and was overthrown by an ambitious aristocrat, Henry Bolingbroke (aka Henry IV, the father of the warrior king, Henry V, who had been the hero of the play Shakespeare completed before working on Julius Caesar) and Richard III, who was overthrown by Henry Tudor (i.e., Elizabeth I’s grandfather), the censors were sensitive to not letting anything into print that suggested that overthrowing an annointed monarch could be rationalized as a good thing. According to Shapiro, Elizabeth I actually said, “I am Richard II, know ye not that?

The authorities were concerned that Londoners might draw the same conclusions as their rebellious ancestors had two centuries earlier, when they supported a charismatic aristocrat’s overthrow of a childless monarch who had taxed them ruthlessly and mismanaged Ireland. P. 121

3. “Of all the major playwrights of the 1590s, he [Shakespeare] alone had managed to avoid a major confrontation with those in power. He had seen the innocent Thomas Kyd broken by torture on the rack, Christopher Marlowe possibly assassinated, and Ben Jonson imprisoned…His rivals were now either dead or impoverished. Genius also meant knowing what you could get away with writing.” P. 126

Shakespeare’s works are notorious for not revealing the author’s political and religious views, not to mention his sexual orientation—perhaps this atmosphere of severe censorship in which one had to get a license in order to have a manuscript printed required that genius be honed towards ambiguity, thereby ensuring a longevity and timelessness to the works.

Shakespeare wrote JC during a time of intense book burning by the government and all manner of works were censored—satire, histories, plays.

4. “No play by Shakespeare explores censorship and silencing so deeply as…Julius Caesar.” P.127 At yet, with regards the murder of Cinna the poet, who the Roman mob mistakes for Cinna the conspirator, Shapiro comments that it is surprising that Shakespeare shows so little sympathy for the fate of a fellow poet. Shapiro says that “The message seems to be that it’s a wise poet who knows his place and time, who doesn’t go looking for trouble in a dangerous political world.” P. 127

Earlier Shapiro had suggested that Shakespeare needed to write about topical issues in order to keep the attention of his audience, and so the challenge for Shakespeare was to write topically but neutrally…not an easy task.

5. The notion of the “popularity” of a political figure, a major theme in Julius Caesar, is one that is highly charged in the late 1590s as the meaning of the word itself in a political context was undergoing a significant change. In the mid-sixteenth century, the word popularity was used to describe “a radical form of democracy that was the opposite of tyranny. The new sense of the word, having to do with courting popular favor, emerged in the 1590s, and Shakespeare is one of the first to employ it in this sense. Shakespeare used the term first in HIV, pt 1 in 1596 and in HV in 1599, and then focuses on popularity as a concept throughout JC.

6. Shapiro makes the case that Shakespeare skillfully walks a narrow, wobbly fence in his portrayal of the two sides of the argument regarding whether Caesar was a tyrant and was justifiably “removed” from office or was savagely murdered, but it was one thing “to stage such a play, another to publish it. There would be no quarto editions of this popular play in Shakespeare’s lifetime: twenty-four years would pass before Englishmen and –women could buy and read Julius Caesar.” P.133

7. In JC, “the various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary events, even Shakespeare’s own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse each other.” P. 134

It contains 2500 lines, and is 800 lines shorter than HV, and it’s all in verse. It also contains fewer invented words than any other of his plays, and it has none of the inconsistencies that characterize HV.

Shapiro feels that Shakespeare was completely focused on creating a new type of work—compressed, tight, focused—and this enabled him to achieve a breakthrough. Shapiro says that Brutus’s pondering of the murder of Caesar is “one of Shakespeare’s first great soliloquies.” P. 135

In addition, in this play Shakespeare discovers that “brevity is the soul of wit”—that is, what characters don’t say can be as important as what they do say. Shapiro says that in JC the most memorable speeches are the shortest: Caesar’s “Et tu, Brute” and Brutus’s “Portia is dead.”

8. “Part of Shakespeare’s genius was discovering in Plutarch’s old story the fault lines of his own milieu.”

During this time of censorship, war with Ireland, concern over a charismatic aristocrat with bounding ambition, Shakespeare wrote a very topical play that explored “assassination, succession, tyrannicide, holidays” in a way that was allowable by the censors and is a masterpiece that foreshadows other masterpieces to come.

1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

I finally got started on A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (P.S.), which I learned about from Nick Hornby. It is as terrific as I had hoped. I love the premise--instead of doing a traditional birth-to-death bio, author James Shapiro, examines Shakespeare's life and works indepth during the course of one critical year, 1599. He explores not only what Shakespeare himself was up to (and this was arguably the most important year in his career), but also the weather, what people were eating, discusssing, the current political situation, what preachers were preaching about, etc. Shapiro puts Shakespeare in context, which is probably the most important task in analyzing a life and works.

So what was Shakespeare up to in 1599? Well, he wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar, and As You Like It, and drafted Hamlet. And that was in his spare time at night, when he wasn't acting, directing, and generally managing the business affairs of his acting troupe. For all of those people who worry about what Shakespeare was doing in London away from his wife, it looks like he was working. There's an old saw that success is 10% talent and 90% hard work. I won't discount the genius that was Shakespeare, but he did work hard.

Now on to the really interesting notion that Shapiro leads with:

...cradle to grave biographers of Shakespeare tend to assume that what makes people who they are now, made people who they were then. Historians of sixteenth century England are not so sure. Because almost no one thought to write a memoir or keep a diary in Shakespeare's day...we don't know whether their emotional lives were like ours.

Their formative years certainly weren't. Strangers breast-fed infants, and babies were often swaddled for their first year. Childhood was brief, and most adolescents, rich and poor, were sent from home to live and serve in other households. Plague, death in childbirth, harvest failures, and high infant mortality rates may have diminished the intensity of family bonds...

Even constants such as love and marriage weren't the same...the meaning of key concepts, like what constitutes an "individual," was different....Given that this was an age of faith, or at the least, one in which church attendance was mandatory, religion, too, played a greater role in shaping how life, death, and the afterlife were imagined.

All this suggests that as much as we might want Shakespeare to have been like us, he wasn't. Conventional biographies of Shakespeare are necessary fictions that will always be with us--less for what they tell us about Shakespeare's life than for what they reveal about our fantasies of who we want Shakespeare to be.

This got me to thinking about other biographies--certainly most writers are not as illusive as Shakespeare, but how far back can we go before we can say that we really cannot understand an author because the worlds that we inhabit are just too different?

I would go so far as to say that, to paraphrase Shapiro, conventional biographies are necessary fictions--less for what they tell us about another's life than for what they reveal about our fantasies of who we want to be. Maybe this is why we read in general--reading for self-knowledge transcends reading bios.