Pater Familias » Shakespeare

SEAM AND GREASE (COMMENT).

Philip — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 19:29:17 +0000

SEAM AND GREASE (COMMENT). I think that Professor Liberman’s association of “unseaming” with “guts” remains valid. My OED gives the usage of “seam” for “fat” or “grease” going back to 1200, with examples from 1483, 1513 and 1541. I think that for an Elizabethan audience, “unseaming” would evoke visions of a butcher at work. I also think that this meaning of “seam” would be evoked by the passage from Troilus and Cressida (II, iii, 183-189) and that this association would be reinforced by the later lines in the speech (lines 194-195):

By going to Achilles.
That were to enlard his fat-already pride….

In both cases, I think the metaphors operate in two different ways at once. I like this conclusion because, as I posted here, I read William Empson’s SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY when I was young and love it.

SEAMS AND SEWING (COMMENT).

Philip — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 19:28:12 +0000

SEAMS AND SEWING (COMMENT). I posted here on Professor Biberman’s observation that in the phrase “he unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops”, Shakespeare’s audience would be familiar with the use of “seam” to refer to “guts.” Trent commented that the sewing analogy is logical when applied to both the phrase from Macbeth and to another passage from Shakespeare. The passage is from Troilus and Cressida, and I am retyping it here because the quotation in the comments was garbled by the software. In the passage (II, iii, 183-189)), Ulysses is speaking about Achilles and his pride:

Shall the proud lord
That bastes his arrogance with his own seam,
And never suffers matter of the world
Enter his thoughts, save such as doth revolve
And ruminate himself, shall he be worshipp’d
Of that we hod an idol more than he?

I like to think of Shakespeare as a glovemaker’s son, so I am happy to have these sewing metaphors. (Note that the idea of unseaming by ripping out stitches and the idea of basting or preliminary sewing fit with the process of making gloves).

“THE SEAMY SIDE” IN SHAKESPEARE.

Philip — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 18:35:19 +0000

“THE SEAMY SIDE” IN SHAKESPEARE. I sent Mary Jane Professor Biberman’s article, and she was reminded of some of Emilia’s lines in Othello. (Mary Jane played Emilia in college). Emilia is protesting to Iago against the accusation that Emilia has slept with Othello: “Some such squire he was/ That turned your wit the seamy side without,/ And made you to suspect me with the Moor.” As the footnote in the Riverside Shakespeare says, “seamy side without” means “wrong side out.” Mary Jane has long thought that it was apt for a glovemaker’s son to use the metaphor.

UNSEAMING IN SHAKESPEARE.

Philip — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:32:53 +0000

UNSEAMING IN SHAKESPEARE. Professor Biberman gives the example of the word “unseamed” in Macbeth, in the phrase “he unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops.” This is the only appearance of the word “unseamed” in Shakespeare. We saw a very good performance of Macbeth over the weekend at Curtain Call, and the phrase struck me then. as it always does. I did not know what Professor Biberman adds: “Shakespeare’s audience was familiar with the notion that men are made of guts, OR SEAM [my emphasis].” “Nave to th’ chaps” was graphic enough.

SHAKESPEARE’S INVENTED WORDS.

Philip — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 22:31:29 +0000

SHAKESPEARE’S INVENTED WORDS. The discussion of Sarah Palin’s use of the new word “refudiate” led to this informative article by Professor Matthew Biberman about Shakespeare’s neoligisms. (link via realclearpolitics). (My position on the controversy is that I am in favor of new words). Professor Biberman makes the valuable statistical point that Shakespeare gets credit for coining a lot of new words simply because the creators of the Oxford English Dictionary, in creating its history of word usage, relied on Shakespeare’s works as an archive.

ANOTHER NOVEL PRODUCTION CONCEPT FOR SHAKESPEARE.

Philip — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 22:50:37 +0000

ANOTHER NOVEL PRODUCTION CONCEPT FOR SHAKESPEARE. I posted here on a director’s concept of Prospero as a pizza chef who’s lost his position. The Onion has a report on another novel concept. To quote the director: I know when most people hear The Merchant Of Venice, they think 1960s Las Vegas, a high-powered Manhattan stock brokerage, or an 18th-century Georgia slave plantation, but I think it’s high time to shake things up a bit. The great thing about Shakespeare is that the themes in his plays are so universal that they can be adapted to just about any time and place.” The novel setting he has chosen: 16th century Venice.

PLAYWRIGHTS AND STATISTICS.

Philip — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 23:32:38 +0000

PLAYWRIGHTS AND STATISTICS. A difficulty confronting the statistical analysts of Shakespeare’s plays is that they reach different conclusions. Lukas Erne in his review summarizes the findings of contemporary scholars about Henry VI, Part I.

Gary Taylor: Part I is by Shakespeare, Thomas Nashe and two unknown collaborators. Brian Vickers: It’s by Shakespeare, Nashe and Thomas Kyd. Hugh Craig and Arthur Kinney: It’s by Shakespeare, Nashe (perhaps) and Christopher Marlowe.

I posted here on Richard Feynman’s explanation of how difficult it is to design statistical experiments. As I posted here, “Nature doesn’t run very good experiments.” It looks like Elizabethan dramatists didn’t either.

FIGURING OUT WHO SHAKESPEARE’S COLLABORATORS WERE.

Philip — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 22:11:20 +0000

FIGURING OUT WHO SHAKESPEARE’S COLLABORATORS WERE. How do scholars determine that Shakespeare had collaborators on a play? One current way is by statistical analysis. Lukas Erne in the Times Literary Supplement (June 4, 2010) writes about the “growing consensus…that Shakespeare repeatedly collaborated with other dramatists….” He was reviewing SHAKESPEARE, COMPUTERS, AND THE MYSTERY OF AUTHORSHIP, edited by Hugh Craig and Arthur F. Kinney. A typical computer analysis is based on word frequency. The study looks at a segment of a play whose authorship is contested and sees whether it contains an above average number of words that Shakespeare used frequently. The word frequency in the segment may instead reflect that of another playwright. Interestingly, the word that Shakespeare used least, compared with contemporary dramatists, is “Yes.” He tended to use “yea” or “aye” instead. The word Shakespeare used most, compared with his peers, is “gentle.”

HOW RAFFISH WAS SHAKESPEARE?

Philip — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 03:00:49 +0000

HOW RAFFISH WAS SHAKESPEARE? I mentioned what I had read about George Wilkins, the brothelkeeper and collaborator with Shakespeare, to a friend of Nick’s who has acted in Pericles. He smiled and said something about how that was consistent with how he thought of Shakespeare. I was surprised. I have always thought of Shakespeare as a respected bourgeois citizen of Stratford.

SHAKESPEARE’S LOW-LIFE COLLABORATOR.

Philip — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 02:55:57 +0000

SHAKESPEARE’S LOW-LIFE COLLABORATOR. Charles Nicholl wrote a book, THE LODGER: SHAKESPEARE ON SILVER STREET, about Shakespeare’s testimony in a court case involving his landlord. Nicholl has an article in the London Review of Books (June 24, 2010) which contains new information about the landlord. What struck me, however, was the information about George Wilkins, who is thought to have collaborated with Shakespeare on Pericles. (Marjorie Garber says: “It seems clear from internal evidence that most of the first two acts of Pericles were written by someone else, probably George Wilkins….”) Nicholl’s article refers to George Wilkins as a “hack author and brothelkeeper” and says that “Wilkins frequently appeared before the Middlesex magistrates, sometimes on charges of gross violence against the prostitutes who worked for him.” Despite the expertise of Wilkins, Marjorie Garber says that the brothel scenes in Pericles are surely by Shakespeare.”

A HORSE ON A TREADMILL.

Philip — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 22:31:57 +0000

A HORSE ON A TREADMILL. The Bridge Project, founded by Sam Mendes, has been bringing Shakespeare and Chekhov to audiences around the world for the past two years. An article about the company in the weekend Financial Times (June 18/June 19) included comments by one actor abut the differences in audiences. The German audiences, he thought, were “unnervingly polite”—no laughing, no coughing, no shuffling. On the other hand, “In Paris and Madrid they were so exuberant….” I mentioned this to Mary Jane, and she said that she had been to a play in France once, but that her experience was different. It was a performance of Cyrano at the Theatre Mogador that she found very exciting, but there was little response from the audience until a scene where there was a horse moving forward on a treadmill. The audience went crazy about the horse.

MEDIEVAL KNIGHTS AS ATHLETES.

Philip — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 02:07:10 +0000

MEDIEVAL KNIGHTS AS ATHLETES. Mary Jane commented that the actors we saw in the Guerrilla Theatre production of King John, who stripped to the waist for fight scenes, were really “ripped.” Then she commented that the muscularity seemed to be contemporary—an anachronism. And then we thought about it some more and decided that the nobility in about 1200 must have been “ripped.” They were professional warriors who fought with in chain mail with heavy weapons. Every so often when I am watching a football game, I think that the professional football players of today would have been nobility in medieval times. (As an aside, I did some googling and found that chain mail apparently weighed about 30 pounds while plate armor weighed about 90 pounds. However, as this wikipedia article says, “The notion that it was necessary to lift a fully armed knight onto his horse with the help of pulleys is a myth originating in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”)

SEEING KING JOHN VERSUS READING IT.

Philip — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:54:07 +0000

SEEING KING JOHN VERSUS READING IT. Reading all the Shakespeare plays is different from seeing them. There is good reason to being a completist. The Guerrilla Theatre cast found all kinds of things that I had not seen when I read the play. For one thing, I had commented to Mary Jane that I couldn’t imagine how Constance could be played because she enters at high intensity and her lines keep ratcheting up from there. The actress playing Constance, Ginger Eckert, gave meaning to each hysterical line. Tom Schwans captured the Bastard’s duality—participating in the action and standing aside to provide the perspective of a later time (there is an element of time travel because the Bastard seems to speak to and for an Elizabethan audience living four centuries after the action). Mary Jane had wondered how they could find a young boy to play the part of young Arthur (of course,in Shakespeare’s time, not only did boy actors play all the women, but there were important companies where boys played all the parts.) The problem was solved by a fine performance by a young woman, Patricia Lynn. Finally, I had not succeeded in imagining a King John who spoke forcefully and acted weakly as Jordan Kaplan did.

KING JOHN IS A GOOD PLAY.

Philip — Sun, 30 May 2010 23:56:09 +0000

KING JOHN IS A GOOD PLAY. I had never read King John, and had heard no good things about it. Seeing it confirms my view that lesser Shakespeare plays are good plays. As with the lightly-regarded Titus Andronicus and Henry VI plays, there were lots of vivid scenes, and a complex story line. There were foreshadowings of a number of future plays—Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Lear….A problem that history deals the playwright is that King John was a weak and indecisive king. Another problem for the playwright is that the action of the play (reflecting much of King John’s reign) involves diplomacy, negotiations and betrayals on the part of the English and French kings and the Papal emissary, all of which calls for formal speeches. Shakespeare develops a character from a play he used as a source: the Bastard (a bastard son of Richard the Lionheart). Tony Tanner says that the character has been compared by different critics to Petruchio, Berowne, Mercutio, Autolycus, Jaques, Touchstone, Falstaff and Henry V. The Bastard is a character an audience can identify with, but, as newcomer to the court, he also provides an outsider’s comment on medieval courts.The picture of medieval courts is persuasive—diplomacy leading to broken truces and broken vows. The Bastard’s commentary also solves the problem presented by the heightened rhetoric at the court by undercutting and mocking it. (One aside: ” Zounds! I was never so bethumped with words/ Since I first called my brother’s father dad.” Note the short informal word at the end).

A COMPLETIST GOES TO SEE KING JOHN.

Philip — Sun, 30 May 2010 00:38:39 +0000

A COMPLETIST GOES TO SEE KING JOHN. I am a completist. Mary Jane and I saw Shakespeare’s King John last weekend. It was done by the Guerrilla Theatre Company, and it was done splendidly. I wanted to see it because I always try to see Shakespeare plays, but also because it gave me a chance to get closer to having seen all of Shakespeare’s plays. I have now seen 32 of them (I count seeing the movie Titus as equivalent to seeing a performance of Titus Andronicus.) This article calls people who try to see all the works of an author “completists” and cites completists who are working on Horton Foote, Sondheim and August Wilson. The article tells about an English couple who completed all of Shakespeare by going to New York to see The Two Noble Kinsmen. Interestingly, they saw it at the Guerrilla Theatre Company, and I came across the article at the Guerilla Theatre Company website. The article indicates that Edward III should be included in the list of Shakespeare’s plays, so it looks like I still have 7 to go, but I have been very lucky to see as many as I have.