Sonnet Book We have a run of 750 sonnetbooks. Each book signed by William S
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Thought becomes substance: ink on pulp, consequently timber. Trees fell so I could scribble. Quill and ink must have been such a mess. And…dip-scratch scratch scr- dip. Think for the next four or six syllables-dip- scratch scratch scra -dip- tch. An active writer thus.
Besides parchment supply worries plus the 3rd wing feathers of geese for the quills! plus candlelight flickering, hopefully in a draught free room, a chair, a desk, and the inevitable research materials.
A viewpoint which must have existed then as now: ‘Never had much use for writin’ nor readin’ for that matter’.
Ideas happen in the evening is a long held belief of mine, more likely a self-fulfilling prophecy. On first waking too, before life’s daily rituals begin. Coffee, nicotine, toast maybe, fruit more often. Nature is usually up before me, running on the spot.
Weather and TV can sometimes ruin or make my day. The TV remote is my totem, an electronic arm feeding me media pablum. We’re all babies and don’t mind being spoon-fed when it comes to weapons of mass distraction, chemically enhanced health, and fossil fuel supplies. And oh yeah, lest we forget, fake people like Anchorpersons, Weather diviners and Sports guy.
And slaves to ease of use, access and egress that we are, we buy in to the shiny brmm-brums and cheap travel in tin cylinders pushing 600-800 mph. And boy are we surprised when accidents happen. Well not really ‘coz we’ve got Reality TV and Internet. See it live folks!
The 7 Deadlies as linked to major demons and devils and their antidotes.
Lucifer- Pride or Vanity vs Humility
Mammon- Greed or Covetousness or Avarice vs Liberality
Asmodeus or Ashmodai- Lust vs Chastity
Satan- Anger or Wrath vs Patience
Beelzebub- Gluttony vs Abstinence
Leviathan- Envy vs Kindness
Belphegor- Sloth vs Diligence
Habitual sin is Vice.
Religiously, the Protestants vs the Catholics pretty much sums up Sh’s time. The Catholics were losing as International Commerce and Piracy was winning. Luther and Calvin were the important figures in Protestantism, though the Anglican Church was formed not solely by desire to adhere to either’s teachings but by Henry 8’s idea to divorce Catherine of Aragon to bed Anne Boleyn. Ironically this union resulted in England’s greatest Queen, Elizabeth 1st.
Let it thunder to the tune of Greensleeves, hail kissing-comfits, and snow eringoes; let there come a tempest of provocation, I will shelter me here’.
Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 5, Scene 5, l. 20-22.
Ah Sir John Falstaff.
Neopolitan love song about a Dark Lady
If you’re a fan of Mob films or know any Italian/North American immigrants you’ll love this song. My favourite line is ‘te voglio bene e t’odio’, which is roughly, ‘I love you and I hate you’.
Listen to the start of this anthem The lyrics once again are about unrequited love.
Christopher, Tony you gotta hear this!
What to say to myself about myself, others, risks involved, my needs and rights.
I choose
where to be,
how to act,
what to say and do,
who I want to be with,
what to concentrate on or believe in,
when to go along and when to resist,
who I ought to trust or avoid.
And most importantly I choose
what behaviours to emit in reaction to others choosing for themselves.
‘No man is an island’ someone once said. Human psychology is here to show us how many people are shipwrecked in their own minds. Psychologists and therapists tell us it is about choice, and choice is more often than not, limited. Unlimited choice paralyses me. Choice within parameters eg ‘you can have this one or that one, or any one of these but not these.’ gets my goat.
Because then emotions, attachments and identifications happen. Add emotions to the mix, and it’s amazing anything gets done. Is evolution really about mankind getting better and smarter than we were?
‘If there be nothing new, but that which is,
hath been before, how are our brains beguiled,
which labouring for invention bear amiss
the second burthen of a former child?’
Q59:1-4.
Every producer of the performing arts encounters the same problem known as bums on seats. Or who is paying for all these egos to strut and fret their hour upon the stage. Even under worst scenario conditions I thank heaven for being paid to entertain an audience. But what is an audience?
It could be you, or you, or me for that matter. It could be that agent, booker, producer, or director. It could that critic, or scholar, or fellow performer. Even worse it could be your mum!
My favourite kind of audience is completely unknown to me. It’s a full-house of paying customers waiting in anticipation for the show about to happen. As a performer people ask me, ‘Don’t you get nervous?’ As a professional I tell them, ‘Hell yes!’ That nervousness takes many forms: sometimes hyper-activity, othertimes a great drowsiness and yawning. But all performers should be left alone before they take the stage.
When you walk on, the first thing an audience does is judge you, or size you up. Now there is no way on God’s green earth you can control this. Worse, if their opinion of you or what you do is negative, you still have no control. Ca, c’est la vie, que tu as choisi. So live with it.
Audiences enter into a contract when they buy a ticket to see a performance. There is an expectation that the performer knows his stuff and by paying admission they will observe and allow him/her to do it in the hope that some form of transcendence will happen. Audiences are there for an escape from their own inner worlds. Or they have an agenda.
The basic dilemma of the performing arts falls to the distinction between entertainment and edification. Is it serious or is it fun? The publicity usually makes clear which form you will be paying for.
Personally I do both kinds depending on who hires me.
How do you get a sonnet on the page to come to life? Breathe on it.
Sometimes I drink too much before I go to practice sonnets.
‘When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,’ Q43:1.
I love the image of a drunk’s eyes winking closed. The rest of this sonnet is stuffed with antithesis reminiscent of inebriated babbling. If you consider that the previous 3 sonnets all deal with the triangle relationship people make so much biographical grist out of, it kinda fits.
That Shakes was a drinker is apocryphal. He supposedly wrote a ditty about a drinking match between the villages around Stratford. His father may have dropped out of civic service due to dipsomania. We are told he was a member of the monthly Mermaid Tavern friday night club.
Ben Jonson said to Drummond of Hawthorne that after he tied night to day with writing he would then do the same drinking. And finally it was a merry meeting of Jonson, Drayton and Sh at his daughter Judith’s wedding that lead to his catching a terminal cold.
This last story is often undermined as Drayton was apparently Teetotal. Why I guess they didn’t need designated drivers back then! (Bewust Onbeschonken Bestuurder, or BOB, in Dutch. Dus ben jij de Bob? of ben ik de BOB? Nee jongens, Bob is de BOB).
‘From such fragile threads are recondite hypotheses spun’. Shakespeare’s Lives, Samuel Schoenbaum. p.537.
One doesn’t want to dally too far, as he says,
‘down the dark path of cryptogram hunting, wherein lies Baconianism and madness’.
If you never read it, my first post promised Sh. without the nonsense. However I recognise my own patent speculations are as insanely constructed, though they often lack the conviction of the extremists. Still it’s worth the struggle. We’re gonna get elemental and archival on their ass! Fight Bacon with Fire, mmm lekker! Oxford with Air, phrummph! excuse me Ma’am i’m off to Europe.
‘Thus do new critical methods furnish a modern variation on age-old Bardolatry.’ ibid; p. 546
I will be true.
‘For if I should despair I should grow mad,
and in my madness might speak ill of thee.
Now this ill-wresting world is grown so bad,
mad slanderers by mad ears believed be. Q140:9-12.
A sad tale’s best for winter. Mamilius, Act 2, Sc. 1, L.26.
Recognised as one of Sh’s later plays, approx. 1611, it is based on Robert Greene’s novel Pandosto: the Triumph of Time, which dates back to the beginnings of Sh’s London career around 1590-ish. For orthodox biographers Greene is the one who makes the first official allusion to Sh. in his Green’s Groatsworth of Wit, approx. 1592. Greene was quite a lad about town and one of the famed University Wits. He died in poverty, depending on the charity of a poor couple.
This blog assumes you know the play. If not, read it! Leontes becomes insanely jealous of his best friend Polixenes, and his wife, Hermione within 10 lines. Antigonus gets told to lose their baby daughter Perdita on the coast of Bohemia (see if you can google.earth that one). Then he gets chased and eaten by a bear in the most descriptive stage direction we have from Sh. (exit pursued by a bear). Hermione re-enacts an Ovidian myth as the statue that re-animates. Time as the chorus gives a 16 couplet intro to Act 4, mirroring the number of years his daughter Perdita is banished. So how old is she now?
The Winter’s Tale contains the 4 themes dealt with in most of Sh’s plays.
1. Conflict- rivalry in love and war; within or between families; etc.
2. Appearance and Reality- Women as men, evil bastards are seemingly kind, characters pretend to be mad, actors and acting within the play being acted.
3. Order and Disorder- disturbances in persons, nature and society.
4. Metamorphosis- Characters change in some way along with the backgrounds wherein they are presented.
Other themes:
Romance, the balance between Divine and Human moral tone, Time, Sins of the powerful and elderly, the natural goodness of youth, Supernatural phenomena or Providence vs human virtue, Religious experience vs human impotence, Mercy and the power of Love (spiritual not sexual),Art orders human affairs to show how they resist destruction and decay of time.
Imagery:
Life, Law and rhythm, Working in men and nature, Changes of colour in face, Flowers, Garden, Sickness and medicine.
I must confess to having found my notes from the Shakespeare Institute: an A4 with the themes, a children’s breakdown of the story plus synopsis from the A-Z by Terry Hands, and a photo-copy of the play from my First Folio facsimile. Peter Holland, then director of Institute and now at Notre Dame, provided the insight into the length of Time’s prologue to act 4 being the necessary 32 lines long.
Today I feel like I’m a working actor. The Binger Institute has a new selection of students working on their pet projects, this term their scripts. A Script in Action workshop, mediated by Gillies Mackinnon and Esmee Lammers, is forcing the fledgling Cineasts into reconsidering their baby’s latent or salient features.
We, the actors get into their characters and show the scene as is and what we can bring to it that perhaps they hadn’t considered. This voyage of potential discovery is usually enlightening for everyone involved. And like this blog, is intensely personal.
I think Kenneth Branagh said in his book, there’s nothing better than picking up a bacon-buttie and heading off to rehearsal. Well now I know what he felt. It was of course raining as i made my way there but.
Yesterday’s session with Gillies had lead to catharsis for an unsuspecting young actress. But hey, catharsis is our business. In fact that catharsis resulted in opening up and deepening the scene for all of us.
Today’s session with Esmee was a different barrel of fish. It turned into a heated discussion with actors, director, mediator and spectators all shooting the poor fish from different angles. Not exactly a nice experience for the original creator of the barrel.
They say healthy criticism is necessary in order to learn. But i know my reaction isn’t always positive in the face of criticism. I don’t take it personally since learning what Sh. had to say on the subject.
‘In so profound Abysm I throw all care
Of others voices, that my adders sense,
To critic and to flatterer stopped are:’
Q112:9-11
It was thought that Adders were deaf in Sh’s Time. The best advice given to actors ever, for those after-show dressings down or enthused gushings. And by extension anyone in the creating arts. And further extension to all of us actors on this the world’s stage.
I am an unperfect actor, especially in life. I contradict myself, I refuse to develop, and I lose too many opportunities to selfish ends. Yet I am trying to be good, to be positive, to grow and nourish, not in any shallow Politically Correct New Man approach but rather as a fair and impartial judge to my own wit and will’s often contradictory ways. Accepting who I am, imperfect and flawed.
The more I know myself, the less I like myself. So i let self be and try instead just to be. The Elizabethans had a different idea about self-hood. There was none. People were subject to life alone. No pensions, or compensation boards, or insurance companies, though there were lots of lawyers.
‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the Lawyers!’
HVI pt 2 Act 4: Sc 2.
quoted by Dick (Jack Cades comedy side-kick in the Rebellion)
and make me travel forth without my cloak,
to let base clouds ore-take me in my way,
Hiding thy brav’ry in their rotten smoke.’
I love the sound of rain. A good shower of rain starts with the wind: a cool breeze announces the approaching spatters, barely negligible at first, prompting the upturned palm and ‘is that rain?’ like comments. Slowly the sound of drops hitting everything getting closer, and bam, you’re wet and on the way to soaking. Up above the sky is black and tempestuous, the breeze becomes a soggy gale, with stinging sheets slices of an angular gushing wind.
The storm busies itself around your ears, leaves get lashed like percussion instruments, or singularly impetuously dash headlong into a watery grave. And when the water is streaming from your face and melting your clothing to your body’s form, and you think you can’t take its force or closeness any more! it starts to quiet down, leaving as gradually or suddenly as it came. The clouds become whiter and open, revealing a cold sun and blue skies. And the rain drips and dries on your face.
This latter, this generically-created, conceit of a storm, here above, is from my memories of specific showers and storms playing their symphonic pitter-patter on my senses in various latitudes and longitudes. But of course it is also a little metaphorical drama.
The goal is to see the beloved (the sun), as promised by the beloved. The beloved is not alone, or especially there for you alone, and is in fact surrounded by sychophants and moochers and other undesirables to your desire (the clouds). The rain we will take as tears for this situation and frustration at not reaching the goal of the day. Insults may dart and fly, and shame, humiliation and acute-embarassment are the result.
Sometimes apologies aren’t enough.
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