Pater Familias

A DISAGREEMENT BETWEEN SCHOLARS. Marjorie Garber and James Shapiro, two brilliant Shakespeare scholars, seem to disagree completely about what happens in the courtship between Rosalyn and Orlando in AS YOU LIKE IT. When does Orlando realize that the boy Ganymede is really Rosalyn in disguise? Garber says, only in the final wedding scene. Shapiro says, much earlier, certainly when they clasp hands during the mock marriage. There is support in the text for either view. I prefer to think, with Shapiro, that Orlando figures it out when they clasp hands and that the lovers are complicit thereafter (I take Kate’s final speech in TAMING OF THE SHREW the same way, that the lovers are finally complicit, instinctively united against the world).

A VIRTUAL AS YOU LIKE IT? Marjorie Garber says that in AS YOU LIKE IT each character who enters Arden experiences it differently. Duke Senior finds it joyful; Orlando finds it threatening. The time may have come for a virtual AS YOU LIKE IT with an avatar for each character entering a computerized forest world—something like the virtual world of WORLD OF WARCRAFT. That world could differ for each avatar. The avatars could also handle the courtship between Orlando and Rosalyn. Rosalyn pretends to be a boy, “Ganymede.” Rosalyn, as “Ganymede”, tells Orlando she will pretend to be Rosalyn, and thus their courtship proceeds. Imagine that Ganymede is Rosalyn’s male avatar. The courtship scenes between the avatars would work. And having a female heroine acting through a male avatar would also preserve the ambiguous sexuality of the original. Shakespeare was a few hundred years ahead of the technology.

LOVE-STRUCK SHEPHERDS. AS YOU LIKE IT has always seemed to me somewhat abstract, and Marjorie Garber gives the explanation. The play makes fun of the conventions of pastoral poetry with sighing shepherds and shepherdesses who write poetry. I don’t know enough about pastoral poetry to appreciate this. Garber makes the analogy that the conventions of the Western movie are as familiar to us as pastoral was to Elizabethans. It occurs to me another analogy is that what Shakespeare does with pastoral is something like what Stephen Sondheim does with nursery tales in INTO THE WOODS.

MARJORIE GARBER. I want to thank Lee Bryant for adding the books section to the blog. Marjorie Garber’s SHAKESPEARE AFTER ALL consists of essays, full of insights and information, on each of the Shakespeare plays. I have been reading them pretty much in order, but yielding occasionally to the temptation to skip ahead.

CAT BONDS. This article by Michael Lewis (author of MONEYBALL) will disappear soon. Kids, I suggest your read it while you have the chance. Lewis describes catastrophe bonds (“cat bonds” for short). If you were to buy a catastrophe bond for a million dollars which is triggered by a hurricane hitting Miami some time in the next five years, and no hurricanes hit Miami during that period, you would get your million dollars back at the end of five years and would have collected a high rate of interest during the period (a high rate of interest to compensate for the risk you ran). If there were a Miami hurricane during the period, you might get only some of your million dollars back. If the hurricane were bad enough, you would get nothing back at the end of five years. Insurance companies that insure against rare events with enormous damage will sell cat bonds to spread their risk. The market has taken off since Hurricane Katrina.

BRANAGH’S AS YOU LIKE IT. Branagh’s master stroke—I submit—is to set the play at a time and in a place where the action doesn’t fit. He sets it in the English colony in nineteenth century Japan. Nick got to see only a couple minutes before going out and said, “There’s going to have to be some ninjas.” And a couple minutes later there were ninjas. The effect of the setting was to disorient me as a viewer, and helped me accept that Arden was imaginary and surprising even though the landscape looked solid and familiar.

THE SECOND FAVORITE SHORT STORY. I was struck by the posts linked below about Fitzgerald’s life because I read “Babylon Revisited” a couple weeks ago after Nick told me that it was his second favorite short story. When I asked, Nick said that he had read the story without thinking of how it reflected Fitzgerald’s life. I agree with Nick that it is a wonderful story, but I couldn’t help thinking of Fitzgerald’s life when I read it.

SCOTT FITZGERALD’S LIFE. The critic Terry Teachout changes his mind in this post and this post about Scott Fitzgerald’s life. In the first post, Teachout expresses what I have thought about the pain and degradation that Fitzgerald’s alcoholism brought him. In the second, a commenter points out that Fitzgerald remained kind and generous throughout his decline and that he continued to write honestly. The commenter changed my mind as well as Teachout’s with his praise for how Fitzgerald dealt with his demons. Fitzgerald’s kindness and generosity show in his writing. One of the things that makes GATSBY a great book is the wisdom of the narrative.

AS YOU LIKE IT—A RECOMMENDATION. Mary Jane and I each thought Branagh’s version of AS YOU LIKE IT is the best we’ve seen. It is being rerun on HBO at odd morning and afternoon times in the next three weeks. The schedule is here. The acting, featuring Kevin Kline as Jaques, is uniformly wonderful.

THE “POWER GUYS” RULE RUSSIA. This lead article in The Economist tells how the former KGB is now ruling Russia. They are referred to as “siloviki” or “power guys.” They constitute a new aristocracy which traces its lineage back beyond the KGB to the Cheka, which was the first police force established by the Bolsheviks. To quote the article: “‘A Chekist is a breed,’ says a former FSB general. A good KGB heritage—a father or grandfather, say, who worked for the service—is highly valued by today’s siloviki. Marriages between siloviki clans are also encouraged.” The last paragraph of the article quotes a KGB figure as deploring the “loss of professionalism” reflected in the polonium assassination in London that I posted about here. I wonder whether the assassination plot was conspicuous by design and thereby did show professionalism. One of the professional trademarks of the new aristocracy is, after all, the open and notorious display of power.