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…’the Taming of a Shrew’ i was no longer certain if the moon was the moon, or the colour red, red. A literary teaser to see if the audience is ripe for esoteric Shakespeareana. If i say ‘Dekker’, do you immediately think of your roofing guy (dakdekker), or DO YOU think of Daphne Dekkers, a much more dangerous phenomenon? You might otherwise think of your washing, or your bodyguard, or think in English… Whatever.
He’s snuck some free time to indulge pen to paper again, like a monkey at a typewriter for all eternity. Giggles and laughter ensue. Binnenpret dan. (‘Binnenpret’ is literally translated as ‘inside fun’ and is the direct opposite of ‘binnenvet’ or ‘inside fat’ or that feeling of chewing something over in your mind. The laughter of the former is to the fat of the latter liposuction of the suffering soul).
Not exactly a playful language ‘dutch’, is it? Individual and particular, yes. Noooooo, me you don’t see speaking like a dutchie, therefore no i is given a chance to rule the roost exclusively. Together we are one, between shame lips and prepuce, past that plus-minus feeling, we become one.
here inside, it’s a big audience I’m playing for. I myself exist out of thousands of thoughts and shapes. All convinced of their being right. Sometimes thoughts in opposition to each other, where I claims to be right above another I.
My name is legion. Spout devils and hellfire. Strange huh? the word strange? Funny innit? Weird is strange too. Hmmm weirdo? Yeah you, you funny little weirdo!
But everything good comes to an end sooner or later. Your prince or princess once again becomes a toad. And we become two slightly sticky, exhausted exteriors, which remain as a sign of our love. When two become one, one does and will suffer, becoming two separates eyeing one another.
Strange is the way of love.
…Elizabethan make-up and hairstyles:
download this pdf file and read it. Follow the links for more information.
Also go to this blog and read this post on Elizabethan Fashion and make-up.
Jan Jonk heeft vertalingen gemaakt van alle stukken, maar alleen de eerste bedrijf zit op internet. 
…many years ago I bought an A-Z of Shakespeare by Charles Boyce, with a foreword by Terry Hands, then Artistic Director of the RSC. I take the following lines from the preface to illustrate our intention being the same with the definitions that follow:
‘This book (blog) is not meant as scholarship; my intention has been to assemble conveniently a body of lore for the information and entertainment of the student and general reader.’
And Charles, what a brilliant book! Mine is tattered, highlighted and still in frequent use.
And so general reader read on.
‘Comedy is:
Drama that provokes laughter at human behaviour, usually involves romantic love with a happy ending.
Conventionally enacted the struggle of young lovers to surmount some difficulty, usually presented by elders, and the play ended happily in marriage or the prospect of marriage. Sometimes the struggle was to bring separated lovers or family members together.
In the end Shakespere’s comedies are about love. Love in Shakespearean comedy is stronger than the inertia of custom, the power of evil, or the fortunes of chance and time. That is obstacles to love are overcome, conflicts are resolved and errors forgiven in a general aura of reconciliation and marital bliss.
The context of marriage as a solution affirms and guarantees the future. Marriage, with its promise of offspring, reinvigorates society and transcends the purely personal element in sexual attraction and romantic love.
Comedy confirms our awareness that life transcends the individual.
Tragedy is:
Drama that deals with a noble protagonist placed in a highly stressful situation that leads to a disastrous, usually fatal conclusion.
These plays focus on a powerful central character whose most outstanding personal quality – his tragic flaw- is the source of his catastrophe.
The protagonist grows in self-awareness and knowledge of human nature, though he cannot halt his disaster.
e.g. Hamlet’s thoughtfulness, Lear’s emotional intensity, Othello’s obsessive love, Macbeth’s ambition.
In a tragic universe, we are all flawed precisely because we are human.
Tragi-comedy is:
Drama that combines elements of tragedy and comedy,
especially when a tragic plot results in a happy ending.
A tragicomedy lacks deaths, yet brings some characters near it,
which is enough to make it no comedy. That is elements of tragedy
find their resolution in the traditional happy ending of comedy.
Romances belong to the genre of tragi-comedy –
All Romances share a number of themes.
The theme of separation and reunion of family members is highly important.
The related idea of exile also features prominently with the banished characters restored to their rightful homes at the play’s end.
Jealousy is also a prominent theme.
Significantly the romances speak to the need for patience in adversity,
and the importance of providence in human affairs.
This concept outweighs any given individual’s fate,
or even the development of individual personalities.
Realistic characterizations in the romances are weak.
Their symbolic meaning is more pronounced.
The plots are episodic and offer improbable events in exotic locales.
Their characters are frequently subjected to long journeys, often involving shipwrecks.
Seemingly magical developments arise and supernatural beings appear.
There are lots of spectacular scenic effects.
Like the early comedies, young lovers are untied after various tribulations.
However the focus is not only on the younger but also the older generation.
The focus is on family groupings rather than on individuals or couples,
and the action is spread over many years.
The prominence of resurrection is a motif in romances
like the old pagan celebrations for harvest and springtime.
The plays insist that a patient acceptance of the accidents of fate is necessary to survive.
The romances conclude in a spirit of hope as the main characters
are reunited in an aura of reconciliation. The natural good in humanity
is put under pressure but preserved through the action of providence.
The emphasis is on the cycle of regeneration-marriage, reunited families.’
Sublime Shakespeare. Let’s talk about Longinus, as rude and scary as that sounds. His name actually may have been Dionysius or Longinus, or Dionysius Longinus. Historians, working on the accepted method of establishing an author, are unsure as to which name is really his.
This argument could as easily been discussed in Sh’s time; as Longinus, whoever he was, is commenting on the Attic style of rhetoric, circa first century AD. It gives a spin to the old authorship question if you think of Shakespeare asking the question of who he was.
What is absolutely unquestionable is his writing. What you are about to read sums up the ethos of Shakespeare’s rhetorical trickery. Suggesting that he may have read Longinus, whose work was extant in his time, though not popular.
The 5 sources of Sublimity:
1) The power of conceiving Impressive thoughts.
2) Strong Emotion.
3) certain kinds of Figures of thought and speech
4) Nobility of Diction.
5) ‘Composition’, i.e. word-order, rhythm, euphony.
Sublimity is related to the older rhetorical concept of the ‘high’ style. (that’s funny to the coffeeshop shakespearean). The 3 styles of classical rhetoric were known as high, smooth, and slight. Rhetoric is a massive system of doctrine embracing content, arrangement and style. The recipe for each style consists of precepts for diction, sentence-structure, figures and rhythms. Also certain subject matter was appropriate to each style.
Longinus said,
‘ Copying is not enough; we must try to live, re-live, the mental life of the classics’. The crucial judgement is between sublimity and counterfeit imitations. This judgement can only be made by minds of a certain moral and intellectual quality. Do not despair. Training of judgement, imitation and imaginative effort can do much.
The right kind of person must be a product both of endowment and training. A variety of the philosopher’s ‘wise man’.
Someone who knows the really valuable from the sham,
his place as a citizen of the Cosmos,
his greatness and limitations,
his superiority to meanness and materialism.
The whole personality must take charge. Be bold and ingenious in thought, language, or metaphor. Justify it by the brilliance or tension of the emotional context created. The attraction of the novel thought, the pregnant remark, the bold metaphor founded on good sense, enlightened and serious thinking. The enemy is pedantry, frigidity, frivolity.
The argument is that greatness is a natural product, and does not come by teaching. The only art is to be born like that. On the other hand, these natural products are weakened by being reduced to the bare bones of a textbook instruction on how they do what they do.
Sublimity at the right moment tears up like a whirlwind and exhibits the orator’s power in a single blow. Persuasion on the other hand we can control. Experience in invention and the ability to order and arrange material cannot be detected in single passages; we appreciate them only when in the whole context.
Faults incident to the effort to achieve sublimity are turgidity, puerility, false emotion, frigidity, turbid diction and confused imagery. Sublimity is an eminence or excellence of discourse. It is how the greatest poets and prose writers give eternal life to their own fame and grandeur.
Grandeur produces ecstasy rather than persuasion in the hearer. The combination between wonder and astonishment ALWAYS proves superior to the merely persuasive and pleasant. Grandeur is particularly dangerous when left on its own, unaccompanied by knowledge, unsteadied, unballasted, abandoned to mere impulse and ignorant temerity.
…also never suggested that it was someone other than the Stratford boy. He offered this ‘plan de campagne’ for understanding Sh. Something yours truly takes to heart.
Understanding Shakespeare:
‘He who desires to understand Shakespeare truly must understand the relations in which Shakespeare stood to the Renaissance and the Reformation, to the age of Elizabeth and the age of James;
he must be familiar with the history of the struggle for supremacy between the old classical forms and the new spirit of romance, between the school of Sidney, and Daniel, and Johnson, and the school of Marlowe and Marlowe’s greater son;
he must know the materials that were at Shakespeare’s disposal, and the method in which he used them, and the conditions of theatric presentation in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, their limitations and their opportunities for freedom, and the literary criticism of Shakespeare’s day, its aims and modes and canons;
he must study the English language in its progress, and blank or rhymed verse in its various developments;
he must study the Greek drama, and the connection between the art of the creator of the Agamemnon and the art of the creator of Macbeth; in a word,
he must be able to bind Elizabethan London to the Athens of Pericles, and to learn Shakespeare’s true position in the history of European drama and the drama of the world.’
(Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1891)
…it’s official. He’s come out strong, flying his colours, planting himself on the side of Orthodoxy and the historical record as it stands.
His sources in England, in Stratford, of the staunchest orthodox scholarship, as represented by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust scholars in residence, Drs. Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson.
His sources throughout are excellent, and essential sources. In fact he based rather a lot of what he wrote on Professor Wells’ authority. Non sancs droit.
His chapter on the Folger Shakepeare Library is good and the juxtaposing of a Jonson Folio (1616) with a Shakespeare Folio (1623) was a brilliant move by the librarian.
Would I could have talked to him in his research phase!
Bryson, not Stanley.
“Bill”, i would have said, “this is Bill talking.
Bill, it’s a mystery, and there are tens of thousands of texts, for and against different aspects of Shakespeare and his works.
And there are thousands more texts for and against Shakespeare having been Shakespeare.
Are you gonna read them all Bill?
You have to look upon his book Bill,
therein you can read him like a book, feel him live:
alive in your mouth, ‘LIVE’ in your mind’s eye.
All yours.
Gloriously sublime Shakespeare.
And remember, Bill,
‘Whatever knocks the reader Out’
is sublime.
You have to look into your heart, Bill
and accept the facts as known,
accept the questions about the facts known,
accept the claimants that the facts are not the real facts,
not accept their twisting of the facts,
into a different set of supposed facts,
trying to negate the known facts,
and say to yourself Bill,
‘Thank God he’s a country boy!’
I think that should be your message Bill. ”
And he did it without my prompting.
Of course as is my wont with books I own,
(in this case borrowed from Ben, whoops),
I’ve annotated the book, coarsely in places.
I could have used another sixty pages of what you really think Bill.
You did give me one or two and more extrapolations though.
And for that, i am most grateful i read this book.
Now Ben needs a new copy. Or do i give it back as is? Cheeky!
…I’m unsure as to whom the first term belongs, maybe John Barton’s of RSC fame? But it holds Elizabethan and Jacobean together concisely. Jacobethan.
Sounds too late to be early and too early to be late.
Consensus is a slippery word and despite others opinions, i’m down with it.
Now if only this meant something.
Int: Office set-up as booths where a local Amsterdams Underworld Penose typetjes are screaming into mobiles telling people on the dam to sing the Wilhelmus! and go buy me a Rembrandt joint!
All the while directing their spies in the field to plant the next assignment.
Yes folks this is the world of office and company outings.
And there hidden from the boss’s eyes, I’m highlighting in front of me:
Gary Schmidgall’s ‘Shakespeare and the Poet’s Life’
which provided me with a handful of big words.
Cynosure,
nonarmigerous,
suasoria,
exargastic
maculate.
So put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Close-up: p.129 of said book, chapter four “Chameleon Muse”
‘Consider, first, the pyramid of English society.
The overwhelming majority of turn-of-the-century population of over
4,000,000 – including farmers, laborers, menial servants,
apprentices, the jobless, itinerant, and dregs –
made up the lowest echelon.
Above these was a class comprising an estimated
160,000-260,000 individuals who in some way were
privileged by landhold, rent, accumulated assets, or domicile.
Next above this class were the approximately
16,000 persons who constituted the lesser country gentry,
followed by the still more affluent class comprising
1,000-2,500 members of the greater country gentry
(wealthy, established families and holders of knighthoods,
deputy lieutenancies, commissions of the peace, and shrieval offices)
and the most powerful commercial and professional figures in London.
Above them towered the
60 or so peers of the realm
and, at the apex,
the
royal
family
and
1 King or Queen.
The Court itself was a kind of miniature version of the entire pyramid.
“the Court,”
as Wallace MacCaffrey has summarized,
“comprehended the chamber, the household, the gentlemen pensioners,
and the yeoman guards, and accounted for at least a
1,000 persons.
it was divided, on the one hand,
into an elite of peers, knights, ladies and gentlemen,
and, on the other,
into a mass of of household servants, guards,
hunting or stable attendants, and artficers.
The line of division between the two was a sharp one,
and advancement across it uncommon in Elizabeth’s time.”
MacCaffrey estimates that, in 1567, the elite consisted of perhaps
175 men and
12 or a dozen women,
and it is doubtful that the figure grew very much under
Queen Elizabeth. (1558-1603).
The court in the Shakespearean canon is approximately faithful to the social conflux that MacCaffrey describes.’
So the answer to the question where did Shakespeare acquire his knowledge of Court is: as the stable boy did, although sporting a kindlier wit perhaps. Har har har. Piss boy, get me my bucket!
shot ends and pulls back to reality and a 2 year old destroying the kitchen.
Establishing shot: terrace outside het ballonnetje on the Roeterstraat, Amsterdam. Man at a round wooden table, sitting on a long wooden bench, typing on a black mac laptop. Sparks fly from an overhead wire as a tram goes by. Zoom in on fingers typing…
The Authorship discussion revolves around this topic: Aristos vs Demos. Unless you believe it was Christopher Marlowe, the Playwright with the most similar biography to, and of an age with, Shakespeare, who wrote Shakespeare.
The difference being that Shakespeare didn’t go to University like Marlowe. Get recruited into an espionage position. Or die in mysterious circumstances at age 29, after a stellar career as Playwright in the late 1580’s and early 1590’s. Marlowe was a playwright like Shakespeare wanted to be. Shakespeare copied him.
He took Marlowe’s mastery of blank verse and bombastic spectacle, which the theatre of the 1580’s demanded, and forged it into the tastes that would be the comic, romantic and historical flavour of the 1590’s, his style changed towards more serious matter when satire reared its cynical head in the late 1590’s. Shakespeare isn’t a satirist, he’s too much for-all-time for that.
His style comes to fruition in his tragedies, late comedies, and late Romances from 1599 until about 1609. This last decade was his most brilliant as a writer. The names of his protagonists almost stand as people in their own right. Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Mark Antony, Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Shylock, Portia, Jacques. Shakespeare’s verse of the later plays is highly complex and spare and so shorthand for the moment the character is in. His theatrical sensibility is laid out in complex characters, allowing actors to move through the Concerto that is the Play in full sail.
Marlowe too understood the theatrical pulse of his time and embodied that spirit in Tamburlaine the Great, Dr Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and Edward 2nd. Shakespeare had serious competition with this guy around. These plays are powerful pieces of theatre. Compare his Tamburlaine with Titus Andronicus, or Jew of Malta with The Merchant of Venice. To my ears they sound completely different. Marlowe had his style, Shakespeare his.
Shakespeare consciously developed his over a 20-25 year period (approx.1588-1612.) But who’s to say Chris didn’t want to rework and disguise his former style after his ‘death’? And live in anonymous exile until his ‘real’ death in Padua in 1625. (I believe we have a record of a death of the foreigner, Marlei or some such spelling),
Marlowe went to Cambridge University, being a low-born native of that city, and having won a scholarship from the Cambridge Grammar School, King’s School. Cambridge University is a school for the elite, the Aristos and the brightest minds of a generation, if recognised as such by watchful teachers.
The Aristos share certain freedoms the Demos don’t have; like privilege and freedom of movement. But they also have obligations; like Land-Owning, Wealth or Penury, and Courtly service. The Court was the ˜nec plus ultra” or place-to-be, as an Aristo. Or the worst, depending on geography and Religious preference.
The Queen was the centre of the Court, and the Aristos revolved around her in varying degrees of favour. Around the Aristos revolved in turn, the poets and painters looking for patronage, also in varying degrees of favour.
In between the Aristos and their suitors for patronage would be a defensive line of loyal or seemingly loyal, servants. The Aristos’ obligation was to support the Monarchy and assist its continued existence at Court and Abroad, whilst wheedling away for personal Royal privilege.
The Court was therefore a microcosm of power, something the Demos were just beginning to share in Elizabeth’s time. Politically in England, the House of Commons represents the Demos, and the House of Lords represents the Aristos. The House of Commons in Elizabethan London represented the new ideas of Commerce and Exploration. The Court represented Status, Religion and Diplomacy rooted in History.
Shakespeare was more of an Oxford boy anyway, and I’m sure ought to have gone there. Shakespeare should have known Oxford University, as it was on the way to London from Stratford on Avon. Shakespeare belonged to the Demos, everyone from the Gentry on down in Societal terms. There has always been a rivalry between the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, with the upshot being that Cambridge has always looked down on Oxford.
It’s no wonder Marlowe was recruited to work for Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham at Cambridge. Courtly intrigue has to recruit from somewhere and the finest minds of the country do study at Cambridge. Centuries later, the infamous Philby and Co. would be recruited there to spy for the Russians, in a different set of ideological circumstances.
Just as confusing though when trying to unravel what really happened. Heavens, that happened in the 20th Century! So how much harder the evidence for the 16/17th Centuries?
Zoom out to see the same black laptop later that evening on a red formica table, Frank Stokes party shuffling a song on i-tunes. i-will.
I doubt it.
Here’s a contemporary of Shakespeare whose opinion is never heard because his comments were printed some 27 years after Shakespeare’s death. His name is Sir Richard Baker.
Cut to a First Folio Facsimile ix pages into the introduction:
‘In his Chronicle of the Kings of England, Baker treats in turn the reign of successive sovereigns and at the end he discusses the famous men of the time. For Elizabeth’s reign he notes statesmen such as Burleigh and Walsingham, famous seamen and soldiers -Raleigh, Drake, and the Earl of Essex- and the literary figures who are mostly theologians with the exception of Sir Phillip Sidney. In conclusion Baker observes:
After such men, it might be thought ridiculous to speak of Stage-players; but seeing excellency in the meanest things deserve remembring, and Roscius the Comedian is recorded in History with such commendation, it may be allowed us to do the like with some of our Nation. Richard Bourbidge [Burbage] and Edward Allen, two such actors as no age must ever look to see the like: and, to make their Comedies compleat, Richard Tarleton, who for the part called the Clowns Part, never had his match, never will have. For Writers of Playes, and such as had been Players themselves, William Shakespeare and Benjamin Johnson, have specially left their Names recommended to posterity.
This being the attitude of the times, as a large number of other writers testify, it is small wonder that most playwrights did not bother to see that their works were printed.’
(My FF Facs, with an introduction by Charles Tyler Prouty).
Jump Cut back to the blog:
I love the way Baker misspells everyone else’s name except Shakespeare and Tarleton. And his life-story is a corker. He was 4 years younger than Shakespeare, but lived an extra 30 years. His last 10 years were spent in debtor’s prison; where he wrote his Chronicles. I love the last sentence of the wiki-link on Baker above, where the writer crushes any semblance of defence for an Orthodox victory in naming him as a source. But the fact remains he lived the time, breathed the same air, was a play-goer and a player at Court, before he fell on hard times.
Here is a knee-jerk reaction to the ‘Declaration of Reasonable Doubt’ doing the rounds on the internet as we speak, which can be downloaded here. The mere idea of this doubt makes me doubt the world and all that it inhabits. Man is designed to equivocate and so to broad sweeping argument. Let them be the Galleon, I’ll be a nimble English Man of War.
…or rather the works that Shakespeare himself would have read and been affected by (choose your candidate, it’s irrelevant to this argument). One of these books is George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie. Now Sh must have read this treatise, published in 1589, as this is the basis of his art and artifice, both linguistic and poeticall. He would at that time been have been learning his craft of penmanship and budding as a scribbler of poems and plays.
Gary Schmidgall’s Shakespeare and the Poet’s Life is an excellent examination of the question: Why did Sh give up poetry in favour of playwriting. He adequately supports the argument for the aristos/demos split, the anxiety of performance and jostling for favour.
His work on the dedications and front matter of poems and plays is as refreshing as slurping from a mountain stream after a hard climb. An appendix reproduces John Hind’s dedication to Shakespeare’s patron (Southampton) in almost identical wording to the dedication of Venus and Adonis.
There is no necessity for the dead carcass of another poet upstream to contaminate this kind of scholarship. There is no orthodox short-sightedness and bias here. This work tells more than many a biography.
Of which James Shapiro’s rather good A Year in the Life of WS: 1599 forms more of my present reading and study. Although the speculative factor is great when discussing any of the candidates, it’s always interesting to see how they blend the times and the to few known facts.
Recently I picked up Martin Lings book the ‘Secret of Shakespeare’ and therein lies a tale. It sent me back to Islamic Scientists and Sufism and Archetypes and Symbols and something greater than pathetic Renaissance man. Sheikh Sapir, O sapient one, send me a message via Saker falcon to whet my dull lines and save me from misery.
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