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…a wee bit closer to finding the building with sonnet 30 chiseled on its exterior. We think it may be in Leiden. The architecture is neo-classical, so that fits. The Dutch are nothing if not experimental with their building arts.
It’s the corner of the Houtstraat and Rapenburg 30, Leiden. (Thanks Pip)!
I also like that about people who decorate their buildings with a poem. There’s an Emily Dickinson poem painted on someone’s wall on the Marnixstraat close to the Leidseplein. It goes…
‘To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
a clover, a bee and a reverie.
The reverie alone will do, if bees are few’
…off the top of my head.
Love the shortness and pithiness. Pithy is a great word to mouth. Thick lipped drunks mumbling in the night. Pity us you straight-edgers.
As the man says in sonnet 111,
‘Even that your pity is enough to cure me’.
…this book excited me because it confirmed my own thinking on his thinking. I approach Shakespeare’s writing primarily from a linguistic starting point, and only then from a literary stand point. Obviously we cannot know how he spoke what he wrote, but he tells us he might easily have spoken what he wrote.
‘for if i should despair I should grow mad,
and in my madness might speak ill of thee,’ Sonnet 140.9-10
I for one, will not deny him his voice, mad or otherwise. This man organised his thoughts, or what he wrote, into the forms that were available in the literary culture of his time. This is where form meets content, and these two in Shakespeare always inform one another, creating more content.
The most important forms for us and him are his lyrical verse poems in long narrative and sonnet forms, and his plays in the genres of Tragedy, History, and Comedy, ending with Tragi-comedy and Romance.
So far, well-known facts reproduced in every schoolbook worth its salt on Sh. But how did he turn the salt of the sweat of his brow to that of his salary? What is it that makes him stand out? Why is he still so highly regarded?
Yes, we know he is a cultural artefact and has much to thank the British Empire for, but that has happened since his death. (See Gary Taylor’s book, ‘Re-inventing Shakespeare’). Our concern here is what drove him as a writer to write in the way that he did. What makes him unique?
I defer now to some points made in Philip Davis’ book:
(any comments I make or add will be in parentheses)
where he defines ‘the crucial evolutionary component in Sh.
It is not a character that speaks, but a life-force. The template is activated by means of dramatic testing. A performative process of thought consonant with the implicit world view from which it derives.
Shakespearean thinking since Shakespeare has reproduced a static model for the paradigm of the dramatically thinking poet. Sh disputes in enthymemes not syllogisms, i.e. the implication is all, not the express stating. It is non-linear, traversing multiple space-times simultaneously. This type of thinking was old-fashioned even by the middle of the 17thC.
Sh’s performative shape is the circle not the line. He feels out the originating places by creating spatial situations, thoughts come out of this. It is always more than he or anyone can control. His first want is drama in language. His characters are half-created and half-generated by the thoughts that happen as they think, speak and act their parts.
Each character feels the maximum of his/herself, but cannot reach the whole. Fullness is his first principle of spaces between mind and space and imagination, where the image is constantly in a state of flux.
These spaces are the ‘it’, the non-human, pre-human, which gradually forms the whole. The play itself thinks through the actual process of forming itself. There is a constant constraint where resistance and mutation, change and limitation, tiny spaces and taut pressures, make a productive conflict.’
due to time constraints, I will be true to the rest of what he has to say.
It’s just that I’ll save it for another rainy day.
Aside from the oft mentioned pies in Titus, could he make a good soup? The 3 witches had a recipe. Does Makkers mention the Campbell’s in his rush to the throne?
Panic in this shakey blog when my domain disappeared for a couple of weeks. The bill is now paid, the joker is satisfied and we are back on the air or ether. Once again lessons were learned when a domain renewal site, which trawls for outdated sites of unsuspecting bozos like myself and tries to charge them an arm and a leg for hooking them back up. To these people I wish all the outcome of an average Shakespearean tragedy, with them in the role of protagonist.
On a happier note I did a performance of the show in Belfast with the Out to Lunch festival, followed by a radio interview with Alan Simpson on BBC Northern Ireland. A 24 hour visit, which was a blast, in the new Belfast manner. What a fantastically forward looking vibe is arising in that city now that the troubles have quietened to a murmur.
Great audience, caring and practical assistance from the organiser, my thanks to all.
…Shakespeare’s mum.
Mary Arden. The youngest I believe of 8 sisters. Correcto mundo says wiki. And she made 8 in turn. The first two of whom died. Then William.
Her dad Robert Arden probably did not approve of his youngest daughter’s choice of husband. John Shakspear, Sh’s dad, was one of the four sons of Richard Shaksper, a farmer of Snitterfield. A village close to where the Arden’s lived.
Mary must have loved John, one would assume. (We know, ass u me). Love and Shakespeare never being too far apart as a source of argument.
Mary too, must have loved her first born son, William, especially after bearing and losing two girls before him. And then again loved him more, after a burst of the plague in Stratford when Will was an infant.
He’ll survive, she may have thought, but she could never have imagined in what way. Or has a mother’s love for her child changed these five hundred courses of the sun? Who knows what she thought?
Sickness is the great mediator between life’s dreams and aspirations and the reality that death attends us. Always. And so too does birth, life, renewal.
Sickness in the sonnets is associated with love. A bitter sweet affair inducing fever and madness.
After death, all that’s left is memory. His verse, as he tells us, is that. And that is this. This is the best I have. The rest varies to other words.
‘look what is best, that best I wish in thee,
this wish i have, then ten times happy me!’
Mary Arden’s house was worshipped by Bardolaters for centuries, and turned out in the late 20th C/early 21stC to be the property next door!
Fortunately for the Shakespeare Trust, on its land. The Shakespeare properties are, one might say, little more than a cottage industry. Al Pacino’s reaction to the properties in his film Looking for Richard is hilarious. His disbelief. I wonder where he stands on the orthodox/conspiracy scale?
Poesy is all my argument with these sonnets, not conspiracy. Sweet music is the result, rhythm and flow, let it go.
I think it was his mum who made sure he did his homework and keep an open mind about the relativity of it all.
Then again i also think he taught himself to read. Like a new-born crocodile chomping it’s first water insect. Shades of Cleopatra already forming in the Nile of his creativity.
His mum was also his source for religion. Her family members, not too far removed, were burned and others beheaded for their Catholic conspiracies.
Whether Shakespeare was Catholici or Protestanti is a big question for some. The Old Faith seems to exert a big influence on his works. What with nunneries and friars, but they could just reflect his sources too.
However the Protestantism of England cannot have been the Protestantism of Europe. Elizabeth was Henry’s daughter and no-one’s mum, and her dad created the Church of England, not from religious conviction. But for love and lust. He said.
But politics is politics and myths are to be made, and Shakespeare definitely helped there. See his major and minor tetralogies. Though of course he was no less than his fellow playwrights, helping to create the myth of Elizabeth, mother to her realm.
…for thy sake, for her sake are all used in the sonnets. the total count for this prepositional phrase is only 8 times. Sake only being used in combination with for and one of the pronouns mentioned.
I love the phrase especially with for pity’s sake, for God’s sake. it’s such a withering phrase.There’s a lot riding on it. Each usage here in Q1609 Sonnets is a heightened emotional plea. In fact each setting for these 8 usages in these six sonnets is one of betrayal. A lover stolen by another lover. Ouch! Very common.
It starts in the triangle affair between Young Man, Poet and his Mistress,
used 3 times in sonnet 42 in lines 7, 8, and 12.
‘and for my sake even so doth she abuse me,
suffering my friend for my sake to approve her,’
note the feminine lines here.
back to the masculine,
‘and both for my sake lay on me this cross.
10 monosyllables, brilliant!
Sonnet 61, line 12 has
‘to play the watchman ever for thy sake’
reflecting on the unkind absence of the young man sometime after and during the affair.
This sonnet is similar to sonnet 27 btw, by being a reflection back on a trip taken away from the beloved.
‘O for my sake’ starts sonnet 111 addressed to the guilty goddess of his harmful deeds.
Sonnet 134 is tied to the triangle affair, but from the mistress’ point of view.
‘and both for my sake lay on me this cross’
appears in line 12.
The famous Anne Hathaway sonnet in tetrameters, sonnet 145 has the female persona screaming, I hate:
‘to me that languished for her sake’
in line 3. The betrayal is milder because situated around her lips vowing to hate the poet. But still betrayal.
the final example is in sonnet 149, line 4:
‘Do i not think on thee when i forgot
am of myself, all tyrant for thy sake?’
A beautifully righteously angry diatribe at his mistress infidelities. She makes him feel tyrannical. God they must have had fun making the beast with two backs. Yes I know they may just be poetical constructs, but hell’s bells it resonates with my experience.
so for my sake I’m glad these scarcely blotted papers are within my examination.
…here is a short essay on whether ideas arise spontaneously or are influenced by earlier ideas. Ask the English if the Dutch helped out at the Spanish Armada? Or Herr Gutenberg where his movable type press idea
came from:
‘Johannes Gutenberg’s development, in mid fifteenth-century Mainz, of printing with movable metal type was enormously consequential’ ie it made texts available to an increasing percentage of the population and helped to spark the European Renaissance. Here.
So it is surprising how much remains unknown about Gutenberg and his invention, such as its year of creation, what the press looked like, what tools were used to prepare the type, or what financial structure supported the print operation.
Another question also remains unanswered: Was Gutenberg aware that he was far from the first to print with movable metal type, and that printing in this manner had been done in Asia since the early thirteenth century?
The question if there was a direct influence from the orient on the invention of printing with movable type in Germany around 1440, says Eva Hanebutt-Benz of the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, it cannot be solved so far in the context of the scholarly research. Here.
What is certain, however, is that that printing with movable wooden type is documented from the eleventh century; that printing with movable metal type had been an active enterprise in Korea since 1234;
that other printing technologies had Asian origins and were subsequently transmitted to the West;
that a single empire (the Mongol khanates) stretched from Korea to Europe through much of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, facilitating cross-cultural exchange across a large region;
that there was considerable East-West travel, contact, and exchange during this period; that the written record of such contacts records only a fraction of what actually occurred;
and that there was awareness of Asian printing in Europe in the centuries before Gutenberg.
For all these reasons it is likely that Europe’s print revolution did not occur independently but was influenced or inspired by similar printing in Asia.’
these ideas taken from here
…Robert S. Miola ISBN 0-19-871169-7 (paperback) O.U.P.
The newest scholarship on the subject is presented in this book. Your humble thief, who learned from the best, remains determined to steal from the best, when his best is not good enough. So here for your edification is a tieved summary of the introduction and final chapters in this book.
‘G.B. Shaw, an Irishman, praised Shakespeare’s gift of telling a story (provided someone told it to him first)’.
Sh freely borrowed characters, plots, and ideas, and as freely ignored or contradicted them too. He used several sources simultaneously for character or incident. Today this is known as plagiarism, but then it was known as imitatio, or creative imitation. The genius was in the transformation, not the invention.
Schoolboy practice in Sh’s time was reading, translating, and writing, from Latin to English and back again. This happened all day as schoolboys experience it, over a period of about 10 years, which fostered habits one assumes of thinking, reading, and writing.
A schoolboy’s inner ear would be developed through the Elizabethan love of word-play: repartee, double-entendre, puns, and quibbles. Unless he was a thickie. All this reading aloud and reciting verse, necessarily puts an emphasis on memory.
Their literary culture was of quotation and allusion, usually of the Classics and the Bible. The use of Commonplace books was encouraged to collect and retain this knowledge.
Reading was, Miola argues, associative and eclectic, simultaneous and synchronic.
The precedence was given to Copia, or abundance over accuracy, to pieces of individual texts over contexts, multiplicity over coherence.
Reading was less logical and more analogical i.e. across texts, looking for parallels, a mix and matching of texts and stories.
The Elizabethans were active readers, trained to find arguments for and against, within any given text. They would often make marginalia, or notes in the margin, which would form a dialogue with the text. (I do the same, it’s fun)!
Often texts were read aloud, meaning group sessions were not uncommon. This also means there were readers and hearers and that their reading was public, social and participatory.
The core curriculum of shared sources would be the Latin and Greek Classics, the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Protestant horror book, Foxe’s Acts and Martyrs. Texts were available to the public in manuscript, to which end thousands of scriveners and scribes remained employed.
Printed texts were available in Broadsides (single sheet), Chapbooks (up to 24 pages), Pamphlets (bit more expensive, sensational and topical) and Books (which arrived in varying sizes of Octavo, Quarto and Folio).
Renaissance books then differ: in format, in construction, in punctuation, in spelling, in typeface, and in language. Latin being the language of educated discourse.
Moreover there was a strong didactic impulse, focusing on political and moral conditions. There were an awful lot of Sermons, Homilies and Devotional literature. And many literary and historical texts have polemical prefaces and notes, elucidating the content for the early modern reader.
Shakespeare’s focus is often on moral concerns, a vocabulary of ethics, standards of conduct, and choices between right and wrong.
For examples of this argument feel free to buy this book and read the other chapters. Or visit your local University library, which is what i did.
The reading habits of Shakespeare that can be sifted from Miola’s study are tenfold:
1. Sh. read competitively
2. Sh. read eclectically
3. Sh focused on Dramatic character
4. Sh expanded the role of his women (i.e. female characters)
5. Sh romanticised Eros, and focused on Love
6. Sh increased the ethical and intellectual complexity of his sources
7. Sh added to his sources comic characters and subplots
8. Sh emphasised contrast in Locality within the play eg Court vs Country
9. Sh read retentively and reminiscently
10. Sh read experimentally and defiantly
Miola’s conclusion, (as is mine own), is that Shakespeare as a working man of the theatre (can’t stress that job description enough) read, consulted, wrote, doctored, revised, watched, rehearsed, and acted, in hundreds of scenes and plays. His method proves to be flexible, accessible and expandable.
And here’s the point as far as i’m concerned with this book, because I thought i’d never agree with it, hating theory as i do. Miola thanks the new theories of literature for allowing this kind of investigation and revision of Shakespearean study.
As he says, a new model is created for engaging with the past. A model that is horizontal and associative, showing that texts exist in complicated cultural relations as ‘intertexts’. This means early modern texts that Shakespeare never read can be used to show us a context in which his texts can be read. That’s new historicism isn’t it?
I try to read his sonnets with all this intertextuality in mind. I have on one level 154 sonnets as a series. I have on a lower level individual and series of sonnets within that series of 154.
I have at the lowest level between 140-154 syllables in each particular sonnet, with a few exceptions. These are all essentially connected and mark the quest from the page to the stage.
But what happens when you connect the text to your memory and bring these page-bound, still-born letters back to life and sound them off at the drop of a hat. It becomes an experiment in wit and will. The closest thing to their original intent.
Polyptoton is a figure in rhetoric, belonging to those that are puns. It takes a word and echoes it with another word derived from the same root….
Paranomosia repeats a word similar in sound to one already used;
Antanaclasis repeats a word while shifting from one meaning to another.
Syllepsis is an ambiguity, it uses a word which has two different meanings.
Asteismus is useful in dialogue, when a word is returned by the answerer with an unlooked for second meaning. so it’s excused from being listed. Doh!
there are some 64 uses of the word will in the Sonnets. Most are the future tense and show intent. But even these uses can be punny…I will be true… and …So will i pray that thou mayst have thy Will… in sonnets 123 and 143 respectively.
Obviously the traditional Will sonnets, ie those accepted by the orthodox, sigh, as massive puns on Shakespeare’s own name are sonnets 135 and 136, with 12 reps in the first and 6 in the second.
The Conspiracy theories inhabit the sonnets implicitly. It is after all the closest thing we have of Will. So let’s say it was that other guy that was actually Will’s Muse, Maecenas and Mentor. Now unless he too was a Will, why would he pun on this word so much?
But what to think of sonnets 88? …and i by this will be a gainer too… that for thy right, myself will bear all wrong…
and 89?…i will comment upon that offence…and i straight will halt…knowing thy will, i will acquaintance strangle…
or …whilst i like a willing patient I will drink…. in sonnet 111?
or sonnet 80? …on your broad main doth wilfully appear…
…steady on Will.
But there’s more…
there are also his …willingly willing wills… besides his being …self-willed… and …wilfull… he flaunts his …wilfulness… and is even … wilful-slow. This guy is so punny!
You might suppose …ills… would even count as well.
Hell, well as well if you slur it a bit…
I’ll… will be next on the list.
or how about…
“how far a modern quill doth come too short’
modern hWill…get it?
‘He thinks no ill’ is another hidden Will. Try saying it slowly and the phonetics will bring in the extra ‘w’.
It started with a wikipedia entry of the day on a Yakuza film Branded to Kill. The digression was made to fetishism and so to a list of paraphilias and other deviations from the norm.
By the time I reached Troilism, my first thought was the same as Steve here below:
From Steve:
I have a disagreement with a friend over the origin of the word troilism. She claims it is straightforward, from the French trois “three”, while I understood that it had its roots in the Shakespeare play Troilus and Cressida, when Ulysses makes Troilus watch his lover Cressida cavorting with Diomedes. I would be very grateful if you could resolve this for us.
The OED says “perhaps from French trois “three”. If they were more certain, they would have omitted the perhaps. However, the first known incidence of the word in writing occurs in Dorland’s Medical Dictionary of 1941. This indicates that troilism was (if it isn’t still) a medical/psychological term. We tend to think that a source of medical term etymologies, especially medical terms having to do with sexual practices, might be more reliable as far as this word’s origins go, and The Dictionary of Sexology claims, with no equivocation, that the term derives from trois. The editors of that work may be privy to primary sources that the OED editors haven’t seen, or they may simply not have considered that Troilus and Cressida might be the source of the term. We tend to believe that the term was formed from trois with influence from ménage à trois, which is recorded at least 50 years earlier than troilism..
This information is from the ‘Take our Word for it’ website, last updated 11/15/06 after 11 years on the web.
Wanted.
Shakespeare.
Dead?
Or
Alive?
Baffling sequence of terminology spewed from a scholar’s lips and mind, which brings us to presentism. No capital required, it’s pretentious enough without.
Keyser Sose type babbling of your humble author. 154 sonnets, 2155 lines, 17,520 words…
James Joyce’s voice intones on your internal tympani fom the past,
‘the sonnets are the happy hunting ground of those who have lost the balance of their minds’.
James Joyce is of course a Stratfordian Shapespherean by default. He drew his own portrait of the artist as a young man and his Ulysses nails his will to the wall.
People used to listen to theatre. That’s why we have the word audience. Audio = I hear.
The actors in the first public theatres were surrounded by the audience. The poor people who paid the least were standing the closest to the stage and the rich were up high in the boxes sheltered from the elements and the riff-raff.
Plays were events people came to listen to and view, Plays were not highly regarded pieces of literature for scholars and professors. The performance of the play was considered the First Publication. The Second Publication was the printed one.
The plays were written for a socially mixed audience. From the servants to the masters, plays were popular entertainment for a paying audience. They were the movies of their time, only now we are spectators, and we used to be an audience.
Do you know who Shakespeare is? I mean who he really is? (stepping into role of text book orthodox scholar) He is the most famous playwright on the planet and has been for over 400 years. He’s the man from Stratford on Avon, who died on the same date he was born.
HE QUOTES FROM SH WORKS.
‘Shall I?’ No please don’t.
‘to be or not to be, is that a question?
So Shakespeare was Shakespeare.
Or was he?
Some say, he was one of the big 3.
The big 3?
WASn’t HE really Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford, courtier, poet and patron, child or childhood friend of Queen Elizabeth?
WAS HE Christopher Marlowe, same age and background as Shakespeare, brilliant young playwright writing masterpiece after masterpiece, whilst working for Elizabeth’s spymaster Walsingham?
OR WAS HE Francis Bacon, philosopher, natural scientist, all-round genius?
OR MAYBE he was Shakespeare himself, making others believe that he wasn’t really himself.
But what would be the motive for writing all these plays,
if it wasn’t to cash in on them while they were hot?
All this naturally leads to conspiracy theories and ends in paranoia?
Who benefits? Cui Bono? (Cui gives a shit)?
But on whose authority am I telling you all this?
Is this worth listening to? What is this?
The key word here is ‘this’
Simply put, this is this.
This interaction, between my keyboard and your eyes and ears.
˜The worth of that is that which it contains,
and that is this, and this with thee remains.
Q74
(This Sonnet Book)
This is poetry, this is literature, this is this audience,
this is the bridge between minds and hearts.
This can be the feelings at a family bbq, shindig, party:
love, hatred, jealousy, envy, the whole range of human emotions.
This is the magic that holds an audience captive and on the edge of their seats.
This is that and that is this.
Simple.
As a young lad from the north east of England, my first encounter with Shakespeare at Grammar School gave me a sore wrist; from filling notebooks with plots, sub-plots, characters and themes.˜A Comedy of Errors” and ˜Twelfth Night”and that old Scottish play.
My first connection with Shakespeare’s dramatic power was in the classroom. Our teacher, we called ˜treasure” coz she had a sunken chest, (I was 13)! and she allowed me and Josephine Cunliffe to improvise, playing Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. We had our classmates, Treasure and ourselves in stitches. The seed was sown.
Shakespeare just gets better as you get older. Life experience is what he’s all about, whether you play his Kings or his fools. Circumstance is created by the genre of the piece, and a story, or rather interweaving stories that mirror one another are revealed in ‘this two hours traffic of our stage’.
That quote was from the prologue, a sonnet that starts Romeo and Juliet. Can you imagine Hamlet in two hours? What a whirlwind that would be. And which version? It’s the same with King Lear? I’m always astounded by how brilliant the Elizabethan actors were at memorizing lines and performing it once or twice, before moving on to another 3 plays before the end of the week say.
Actually I think it’s impossible. Nice experiment for the Original Shakespeare Company to do a week of six different plays at the New Globe perhaps?
Records show us that Elizabethan actors might do four or five different plays in a week. There was no run of six weeks, extending to decennia if popular enough. No Mousetrap, except in Hamlet.
How can you put on a full-scale production, if the actors only get their lines and not even the whole play? That was the Standard Operating Procedure. Otherwise someone had to copy out whole plays for each actor etc. so no here’s your part and the last sentence or half a sentence before you come in. If you were lucky you might find a stray stage-direction, in which case look behind you and run!
Plays did stay popular for a decade and more, and would be reworked or rewritten, like a sequel, to suit popular taste. And the actors presumably would have new bits to learn and/or dredge their memories of former glories when they were so much younger.
There must have been an informal Elizabethan BAFTAS, just without the film and television. At least an old boy’s club, a queen’s club, a gossip section? But hell that’s all lost to history.
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