Sherry Chandler

When all else fails, turn to Shakespeare

Sonnet 60

Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end,
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,
Crooked eclipses ‘gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.

— William Shakespeare

I have been delving parallels in my brow, whether or no it was ever a beauty, trying to come up with something intelligent to put out here on this blog today and, having just decided that it’s not going to happen, I also decided to let Mr. Shakespeare act as my place holder.

How’s that for ego?

I ran across this particular sonnet in an instructing anthology by Helen Vendler called Poems, Poets, Poetry (Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1997).

What, you might ask yourself, could be the subject of such an anthology?

As an introduction to Sonnet 60, Ms. Vendler says:

When poets describe Time, they tend to employ many of the images of passing time that have entered cultural memory — such motifs as the waves of the sea, the progress of the sun from dawn to dusk, the fall of great men, the tragedy of early death, Time the Grim Reaper, and so on. Here, using such time-honored resources, is Shakespeare on Time. [p. 13]

I was struck by the last couplet — it’s sort of the “Summer’s Day” motif from Sonnet 18:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Modern-day poets don’t say that. Such a statement might get you laughed out of the workshop.

The closing couplet here in Sonnet 60 is perhaps more modest, one we would feel more comfortable espousing.

Speaking of ego.

There are trials, and then there are trials

Sonnet CLIII

CUPID laid by his brand and fell asleep:
A maid of Dian’s this advantage found,
And his love-kindling fire did quickly steep
In a cold valley-fountain of that ground;
Which borrow’d from this holy fire of Love
A dateless lively heat, still to endure,
And grew a seething bath, which yet men prove
Against strange maladies a sovereign cure.
But at my mistress’ eye Love’s brand new-fired,
The boy for trial needs would touch my breast;
I, sick withal, the help of bath desired,
And thither hied, a sad distemper’d guest,
But found no cure: the bath for my help lies
Where Cupid got new fire, my mistress’ eyes.

— William Shakespeare, from Craig, W.J., ed. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (London: Oxford University Press: 1914); Bartleby.com, 2000

Mr. Shakespeare has a birthday

from As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII:

JAQUES:
A fool, a fool! I met a fool i’ the forest,
A motley fool; a miserable world!
As I do live by food, I met a fool
Who laid him down and bask’d him in the sun,
And rail’d on Lady Fortune in good terms,
In good set terms and yet a motley fool.
‘Good morrow, fool,’ quoth I. ‘No, sir,’ quoth he,
‘Call me not fool till heaven hath sent me fortune:’
And then he drew a dial from his poke,
And, looking on it with lack-lustre eye,
Says very wisely, ‘It is ten o’clock:
Thus we may see,’ quoth he, ‘how the world wags:
‘Tis but an hour ago since it was nine,
And after one hour more ’twill be eleven;
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;
And thereby hangs a tale.’ When I did hear
The motley fool thus moral on the time,
My lungs began to crow like chanticleer,
That fools should be so deep-contemplative,
And I did laugh sans intermission
An hour by his dial. O noble fool!
A worthy fool! Motley’s the only wear.

DUKE SENIOR:
What fool is this?

JAQUES:
O worthy fool! One that hath been a courtier,
And says, if ladies be but young and fair,
They have the gift to know it: and in his brain,
Which is as dry as the remainder biscuit
After a voyage, he hath strange places cramm’d
With observation, the which he vents
In mangled forms. O that I were a fool!
I am ambitious for a motley coat.

DUKE SENIOR:
Thou shalt have one.

JAQUES:
It is my only suit;
Provided that you weed your better judgments
Of all opinion that grows rank in them
That I am wise. I must have liberty
Withal, as large a charter as the wind,
To blow on whom I please; for so fools have;
And they that are most galled with my folly,
They most must laugh. And why, sir, must they so?
The ‘why’ is plain as way to parish church:
He that a fool doth very wisely hit
Doth very foolishly, although he smart,
Not to seem senseless of the bob: if not,
The wise man’s folly is anatomized
Even by the squandering glances of the fool.
Invest me in my motley; give me leave
To speak my mind, and I will through and through
Cleanse the foul body of the infected world,
If they will patiently receive my medicine.

Shakespeare — Portraits

The Shakespeare portrait newly unveiled by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust shows us a man with a twinkle in his eye and a Mona Lisa smile just beginning to curve on his lips.

Methinks he would have been a jolly man with whom to quaff a glass of ale.

Certainly he looks lively and intelligent enough to have written his own works and he is handsome enough to have charmed a virgin queen.

Shakespeare has been showing up in my reading lately. Adam Gopnik — yes, I’ve been back at my stack of old New Yorkers — says

There�s another rhetorical style that runs like the Mississippi right down the middle of the mid-nineteenth-century American mind, shaping phrases and supervising thoughts, flowing as strong as the classical, the Biblical, and the lawyerly, and that is the Shakespearean. Lincoln�s love of Shakespeare is familiar, but is usually treated as a delightful character trait, like his fondness for ice cream or the comedy of Artemus Ward. But Lincoln�s taste in Shakespeare was narrow, significant, and almost obsessive. He didn�t love �A Midsummer Night�s Dream� and �As You Like It�; it was the histories and three of the tragedies that held him. In 1863, he repeatedly went to see �Henry IV� when James H. Hackett was playing Falstaff, with all the Falstaffian black comedy against conscription and the cult of honor. He took volumes of Shakespeare out of the Library of Congress; went to a Washington theatre to see the famous E. L. Davenport in �Hamlet�; attended private recitations of Shakespeare; sought out a production of �Othello�; watched Edwin Booth, John Wilkes�s brother, in �Richard III,� and the greatest American Shakespearean, Edwin Forrest, in �King Lear,� at Ford�s. Just five days before the assassination, on April 9, 1865, steaming up the Potomac in the Presidential yacht, he spent �several hours� reading aloud from Shakespeare to those on board. Reciting from his favorite plays was a weakness of his; on August 22, 1863, [his secretary] Hay records in his diary that he fell asleep at the Soldiers� Home while listening to Lincoln recite Shakespeare.

The idea of Abraham Lincoln boring the help with recitations of Shakespeare pleases me. But it was not Shakespeare of the Giaconda smile that Lincoln loved. Gopnik continues:

But even stranger and more striking is Lincoln�s identification or, at the very least, fascination with the figure of Claudius. In that same letter to Hackett, Lincoln insisted that Claudius�s soliloquy beginning �O, my offense is rank� was superior to any of Hamlet�s, and we know that he committed it to memory, and would recite it at length even to acquaintances�an artist who had come to paint his portrait, for instance. Lincoln�s evaluation was as unorthodox then as it is now. And what is the burden of Claudius�s speech? It is about guilt and ambition, and about the fraternal blood-dealing that that produces. As Kenneth Tynan has pointed out, Claudius�s tragedy is that he is clearly the most able man in Denmark, but he has got his throne through blood and cannot be free of the taint.

As it happens, we have just been watching the 1980 BBC production of Hamlet, in which Derek Jacobi plays the antic cherub and rolls his barrel basso provocatively over some of Shakespeare’s most delightful lines. Jacobi’s Hamlet is truly mad, and his scene-chewing rather overpowers Patrick Stewart’s quieter Claudius. A member of my household was also moved to giggles by the wig Stewart is wearing for the production. It does tend to reduce that great dome of skull to silliness.

Still, Claudius cannot be completely denied his moments. And Stewart is a masterful actor.

Just as an aside, before I go on to more serious matter, Lalla Ward, onetime Romana (the only woman Time Lord) to Tom Baker’s Doctor Who, made an aggressive and affecting performance as Ophelia.

But here’s the speech in question, from Hamlet Act 3, Scene 3:

O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,
A brother’s murder. Pray can I not,
Though inclination be as sharp as will.
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent;
And, like a man to double business bound,
I stand in pause where I shall first begin,
And both neglect. What if this cursed hand
Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood,
Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens
To wash it white as snow? 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? Then I’ll look up;
My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer
Can serve my turn? “Forgive me my foul murder”?
That cannot be; since I am still possess’d
Of those effects for which I did the murder,
My crown, mine own ambition and my queen.
May one be pardon’d and retain th’ offence?
In the corrupted currents of this world
Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft ’tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law: but ’tis not so above;
There is no shuffling, there the action lies
In his true nature; and we ourselves compell’d,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
To give in evidence. What then? what rests?
Try what repentance can: what can it not?
Yet what can it when one can not repent?
O wretched state! O bosom black as death!
O limed soul, that, struggling to be free,
Art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay!
Bow, stubborn knees; and, heart with strings of steel,
Be soft as sinews of the newborn babe!
All may be well.

Mr. Darwin also has a 200th birthday

�There is grandeur in this view of life… from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.� — Charles Darwin

And it is being celebrated big in the UK. I even heard that the Church of England issued an apology to the man. You can check out The Guardian for a nice video overview of Darwin’s life. The Guardian reminds us that Darwin enjoyed reading Lord Byron and William Shakespeare.

I will remind you that you can read Darwin’s Beagle Diariy online here. February 12, 1834 found Darwin in the Straits of Magellan:

With very baffling winds we anchored late in the evening in Gregory Bay, where our friends the Indians anxiously seemed to desire our presence. During the day we passed close to Elizabeth Island, on North end of which there was a party of Fuegians with their canoe &c. They were tall men & clothed in mantles; & belong probably to the East Coast; the same set of men we saw in Good Success Bay; they clearly are different from the Fuegians, & ought to be called foot Patagonians. Jemmy Button had a great horror of these men, under the name of “Ohens men”. “When the leaf is red, he used to say, Ohens men come over the hill & fight very much.”

And you can find the complete works of Darwin online here, including audio of the Beagle Diary.

And it might be a good time to re-post Langdon Smith’s poem:

Evolution

When you were a tadpole and I was a fish
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then.

Mindless we lived and mindless we loved
And mindless at last we died;
And deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift
We slumbered side by side.
The world turned on in the lathe of time,
The hot lands heaved amain,
Till we caught our breath from the womb of death
And crept into life again.

We were amphibians, scaled and tailed,
And drab as a dead man�s hand;
We coiled at ease �neath the dripping trees
Or trailed through the mud and sand.
Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet
Writing a language dumb,
With never a spark in the empty dark
To hint at a life to come.

Yet happy we lived and happy we loved,
And happy we died once more;
Our forms were rolled in the clinging mold
Of a Neocomian shore.
The eons came and the eons fled
And the sleep that wrapped us fast
Was riven away in a newer day
And the night of death was passed.

Then light and swift through the jungle trees
We swung in our airy flights,
Or breathed in the balms of the fronded palms
In the hush of the moonless nights;
And oh! what beautiful years were there
When our hearts clung each to each;
When life was filled and our senses thrilled
In the first faint dawn of speech.

Thus life by life and love by love
We passed through the cycles strange,
And breath by breath and death by death
We followed the chain of change.
Till there came a time in the law of life
When over the nursing sod
The shadows broke and the soul awoke
In a strange, dim dream of God.

I was thewed like an Auroch bull
And tusked like the great cave bear;
And you, my sweet, from head to feet
Were gowned in your glorious hair.
Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave,
When the night fell o�er the plain
And the moon hung red o�er the river bed
We mumbled the bones of the slain.

I flaked a flint to a cutting edge
And shaped it with brutish craft;
I broke a shank from the woodland lank
And fitted it, head and haft;
Than I hid me close to the reedy tarn,
Where the mammoth came to drink;
Through the brawn and bone I drove the stone
And slew him upon the brink.

Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes,
Loud answered our kith and kin;
From west to east to the crimson feast
The clan came tramping in.
O�er joint and gristle and padded hoof
We fought and clawed and tore,
And cheek by jowl with many a growl
We talked the marvel o�er.

I carved that fight on a reindeer bone
With rude and hairy hand;
I pictured his fall on the cavern wall
That men might understand.
For we lived by blood and the right of might
Ere human laws were drawn,
And the age of sin did not begin
Til our brutal tusks were gone.

And that was a million years ago
In a time that no man knows;
Yet here tonight in the mellow light
We sit at Delmonico�s.
Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs,
Your hair is dark as jet,
Your years are few, your life is new,
Your soul untried, and yet �

Our trail is on the Kimmeridge clay
And the scarp of the Purbeck flags;
We have left our bones in the Bagshot stones
And deep in the Coralline crags;
Our love is old, our lives are old,
And death shall come amain;
Should it come today, what man may say
We shall not live again?

God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds
And furnish�d them wings to fly;
He sowed our spawn in the world�s dim dawn,
And I know that it shall not die,
Though cities have sprung above the graves
Where the crook-bone men made war
And the ox-wain creaks o�er the buried caves
Where the mummied mammoths are.

Then as we linger at luncheon here
O�er many a dainty dish,
Let us drink anew to the time when you
Were a tadpole and I was a fish.

__________
Update: By way of Lance Mannion, see also this film from the Vancouver Film School.

Update 2: Michael Lind, writing in Salon, says that Abraham Lincoln “believed” in biological evolution but did not particularly believe in Jesus Christ:

While Lincoln did not believe that Jesus was the son of God, he did believe in biological evolution. His law partner Herndon recalled that Lincoln took great interest in “Vestiges of Creation” (1844) by Robert Chambers, a book that popularized the idea of evolution even before Darwin published his theory of natural selection as its mechanism: “The treatise interested him greatly, and he was deeply impressed with the notion of the so-called ‘universal law’ — evolution; he did not extend greatly his researches, but by continued thinking in a single channel seemed to grow into a warm advocate of the new doctrine.”

The logic of sonnets

During her summer workshop, Revision as Regeneration, Leatha Kendrick cited a paucity of rhyme words in English as one reason that Shakespeare and other Elizabethan practitioners of the sonnet deviated from the Italian/Petrarchan form. The classical Petrarchan sonnet works with only two sets of rhymes — ab in the octave, cd in the sestet. This kind of rhyming is easy enough to do in Italian, with its inflected endings, but bloody hard in English. By contrast, the English/Shakespearean sonnet allows twice as many sets of rhymes — ab, cd, ef, gg.

While such practical craft may have driven the change, Paul Fussell implies, in Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (Random House, 1965), that there is something essentially English about the Shakespearean form. The Italian sonnet is shaped for emotion, the English for wit:

Although the basic action of both Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets is similar, it is the proportioning that makes the immense difference between them. Both present and then “solve” problems, the Petrachan sonnet form in its octave and sestet, the Shakespearean in its comparatively hypertrophied initial twelve lines and then its couplet. In the Petrarchan sonnet the problem is often solved by reasoned perception or by a relatively expansive and formal meditative process, for the sestet allows enough room for the undertaking of prudent, highly reasonable kinds of resolutions. But in the Shakespearean sonnet, because resolution must take place within the tiny compass of a twenty-syllable couplet, the “solution” is more likely to be the fruit of wit, or paradox, or even a quick shaft of sophistry, logical cleverness, or outright comedy. In the Shakespearean sonnet, the turn tends to pivot on one of the logical adverbs — for, then, so, but, yet, lest, thus, therefore — words which constitute syntactical figures of self-conscious dialectic. The crucial operations of such words in assisting the Shakespearean sonneteer to “solve his problem” tend to make the Shakespearean sonnet a little showplace of rhetoric or advocacy or logic—or mock logic. Furthermore, the very disproportion of the two parts of the Shakespearean sonnet, the gross imbalance between the twelve-line problem and the two-line solution, has about it something vaguely risible and even straight-faced farcical: it invites images of balloons and pins.

And even when the final couplet does not resolve the conflicts or entanglements presented by the preceding quatrains, there remains something ineffably witty about the form of the Shakespearean sonnet, something that distinguishes it essentially as a form from the Petrarchan. If the shape of the Petrarchan sonnet, with its two slightly unbalanced sections devoted to pressure and release, seems to accord with the dynamics of much emotional experience, the shape of the Shakespearean, with its smaller units and its “commentary” couplet, seems to accord with the modes of the intellectual, analytic, and even satiric operations of the human sensibility. [pp. 122-123]

As You Like It

We’ve had a Japanese twist to our movies lately, having watched Letters From Iwo Jima and Kenneth Branagh’s version of As You Like It in one week.

Branagh’s take on the play — at least he doesn’t call “William Shakespeare’s As You Like It,” a sure indication that much liberty has been taken with the original — sets it in Victorian Japan. Unfortunately for me, about all that offered was a chance to see what a great Darth Vader Brian Blessed would have made. Blessed is cast as both the good duke (Senior) and the bad duke (Frederick). The former he plays with avuncular smarm and the latter with dark gusto. But the Japanese armor has to bring the Star Wars figure to mind. But again, I’m convinced George Lucas stole Darth Vader’s look for Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood.

Though 19th Century Japan may seem counter-intuitive for a Shakespeare play, as hubby points out, none of it matters once Willie has maneuvered his characters into the Forst of Arden, for there is neverland. In neverland, it is fun to watch Blessed, of course, and Kevin Kline, who is probably the United States’s best Shakespearean actor. The NYTimes says

…[Mr. Kiline] seems unable ever to hit a false note. As a thoroughgoing depressive here, he brings some clairvoyance to melancholy, which suits him.

Mr. Kline has, without fanfare, become a kind of elder statesman of American acting, with no taint on him. His face is so kindly and his voice so unforced that viewers can�t help wanting the satisfaction of seeing him cover the big hits…

He is also wonderfully graceful and he gets to use some of his dancer’s moves in this role.

Otherwise, if you want the genius of Branagh’s Shakespeare adaptations, I’d recommend his Hamlet . Here’s Andrea Gronvall in The Chicago Reader:

Although it�s far from the worst thing I�ve ever watched on the small screen, this As You Like It is notable chiefly for Branagh�s puzzling creative decisions. While his fin de siecle Hamlet used the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Europe�s slide into world war as the backdrop for the protagonist�s existential dilemma, As You Like It employs its period and locale only as window dressing. The movie opens with a Kabuki performance (by one of the film�s few Japanese actors, Takuya Shimada) that�s disrupted by Duke Frederick�s takeover of his brother�s estate. Interiors follow the lines of traditional Japanese architecture, but nothing is made of how rooms influence the lives of those within them. (Contrast that with the many mirrored doors and hidden passageways in Hamlet, where the production design fits the court intrigue like an expensive glove.)

Try also Branagh’s Henry V. Even his Much Ado About Nothing, which at least offers Emma Thompson.

Maybe what’s missing in all of this is Branagh himself in a major role?