StSA–The Tempest

Ah, The Tempest. It’s actually tied for the the first Shakespeare play I ever read, back at the very beginning of 6th grade (about 11y.o.; the other was A Comedy of Errors). It one of Shakespeare’s best comedies, detailing the story of a duke (Prospero) wrongfully kicked out of power by his treacherous brother, forced to raise his only child (Miranda) on a deserted island, with the “help” of an air spirit, Ariel. Through a system of convolutions, Ariel ends up freed, Miranda gets together with Ferdinand, and the merry party (with a few exceptions) desert the island, all as it should be.

This play is really fascinating for Prospero, the ex- (and future) duke. Through his will (and the powers of Ariel), he manages to shipwreck his enemies, find a husband for his daughter, and restore himself to his dukedom, with extraordinarily little trouble to himself. He both opens the play (through the titular tempest) and closes it (with a sweeping, gorgeous soliloquy). He’s also the master of delayed gratification, rivaling even the dastardly Iago — he’s been on that island for 14 years, after all, with the power to return home the entire time. He waits (out of 90% brilliance and 10% pettiness) for his enemies to come by the island, so that he can get them to apologize and restore him to his rightful dukedom — not to mention ensure a happy (and well-born) marriage for Miranda.

Miranda, though without the supernatural help of Ariel, is not without cleverness — she’s smart enough to get Ferdinand to take a break with her, she plays chess — with a father like Prospero, it’d be hard for her to be dumb, really. But she does get this line in the play:

O brave new world, that has such people in’t!

It’s a very charming moment from a character who has never seen another human besides her father (Caliban doesn’t count; neither does Sycorax). It’s from this line that many dystopian ideas have been born (I’m shaking my fist at Huxley), and the phrase is now more famous than the play itself, with many having heard it but not knowing that it came from Shakespeare. Yes, Miranda’s seeing the dregs of humanity, but it’s still humanity. She still sees something she recognizes, and wants to celebrate it.

And I think that’s something to scream about.

StSA–Titus Andronicus

Land sakes, man. This one was a slog to get through. It’s possibly also the only Shakespeare play where I felt mildly sick reading it, due to the graphicness of the violence.

Titus Andronicus is basically the tale of a Roman general (Titus) and the Queen of the Goths (Tamora) and how they do a bunch of horrible things to each other (mostly through family members) until at last everyone is dead except for Marcus, Lucius, and Young Lucius, with Lucius becoming the new general.

It’s kind of a downer, honestly. And possibly partially because this is the semester from Hell (I very literally have had a test every week from the 3rd week of February, and will continue to through the end of the semester in April), I actually can’t bring myself to scream about this one at all.

And perhaps that’s my takeaway from Titus; it’s not a play I hate, it’s not a play I love, it’s not a play I’ll read again if I can help it. But there was nothing in it that incensed me, that made me stand up and say “here is what is wrong”; there was nothing in it that I wanted to stand up and say “this is really good”, either. And ‘meh’ is the death knell of books — if I care, it’s because you did something right, whether it’s because it was good or bad.

This play is a catalogue of the horrible things people can do to each other. And I just — I don’t find that appealing. I love history — i’m minoring in it — but this play isn’t like the weird stories in history, where Xerxes attempts to whip and brand the Hellespont into submission, or the army of Liechtenstein, which set out with 80 men for a battle and somehow came back with 81. This isn’t a cool, interesting, or funny tale at all. It’s a record of atrocities, couched in five acts and iambic pentameter.

And I can honestly say I don’t think that’s something to scream about.

StSA–Twelfth Night (A Redux)

This is (I think) the only Shakespeare play that I approached from the model of an adaptation; given my age, it’s not surprising that She’s the Man happened upon me before I had a chance to read Twelfth Night. But I think there’s value in adaptations, so bear with me as I tackle this play a bit differently.

Adaptations do a lot to distill Shakespeare’s plays; as a matter of necessity, they cram a play with hours and hours of dialogue and pacing and situational humor into about an hour and a half in the modern day. Inevitably, things get left out — and those things which get left out generally make or break the adaptation.

Twelfth Night applies itself more generously to adaptation than, say, The Merchant of Venice, because of its broad application of tropes. Think about it — a crossdressing girl, identical twins, love-wet members of a higher social strata, etc etc — there’s not a lot that depends on the Elizabethan mores for the play to make sense, and this particular story is better for its evergreen qualities. Julius Caesar (and even Taming of the Shrew) does not operate outside itself without some heavy lifting — too integral to the structure of the play is the sphere in which it takes play. And while excellent adaptations can be made of these plays (see 10 Things I Hate About You), it is not without a complete facelift.

Twelfth Night doesn’t need this; it is both a blank slate and an intensely relatable experience. While we may not be a crossdressing twin working for a duke we’ve fallen in love with, most of us have felt the almost extravagant hopelessness (and pseudo-masochism) of keeping oneself in close proximity to one we love who loves someone else. We’ve all stood back, like Molovio, and watched the world descend into what must be lunacy, only to be accused of madness ourselves. And we’ve all, like Sebastian, walked into a situation where everyone was intimately familiar with us but we had no knowledge of them — and thus are forced by social niceties (and possible greed) to play along and say “Yeah…I remember you! Of course!”, even as we reach for another cup of punch at our high school reunion.

These are intensely relatable circumstances, and these situations are where the strength of Twelfth Night stands.

And, as for me, I think that’s something to scream about.

StSA–Julius Caesar

The other play in the running for my favorite Shakespeare play (and certainly the best of his tragedies), Julius Caesar is a masterpiece for many reasons, but the one I’m interested in is its rhetoric. Thus, even though we have the great Caesar, the ‘honorable’ Brutus, and the ‘lean and hungry’ Cassuis, my favorite bits of the play always include Antony and his speeches.

Antony manages to turn the public’s opinion with possibly the most sarcastic speech in the history of sarcastic speeches, to bring about the death of those who killed Caesar, and to still make me root for him throughout all his political machinations. Even though he expresses contempt and ridicule for those who killed Caesar, he is still able to recognize virtue in Brutus (whom he previously derided as an “honorable man”) and gives us my favorite Shakespeare quote of all time:

This was the noblest Roman of all

All the conspirators, save only he,

Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;

He only, in a general honest though,

And common good to all, made one of them.

His life was gentle; and the elements

So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up

And say to all the world, This was a man!

Beautifully written, and electrifying to hear if you’re lucky enough to have a capable actor playing Antony.

Of all Shakespeare’s tragedies, Julius Caesar is one of two that doesn’t attempt to cloak itself (to great effect, 9 times out of 10) in a veil of utmost misery; to make you feel that nothing could ever be right again. Instead, it produces a feeling that the errors of men drive the world, for better or for worse. We don’t know how Rome would have turned out if Caesar had indeed been crowned king; we don’t know what tornadoes that butterfly might have created. But Shakespeare’s job isn’t to explore that; it’s to lend an air of humanity to an event (and its subsequent events) that achieved an almost mystical quality by the time we got to the 1600s.

Julius Caesar is breathtaking in its clear-cut, realistic portrayal of humanity and of the nature of man. We still have politicians like Cassius, a few like Brutus, and perhaps one or two in a century like Caesar. We have Rhetoricians like Antony, able to sway the public at will while still being admirable people in and of themselves, and we have opportunists like Octavius, who can be great, provided they’re pointed in the right direction.

Shakespeare is often dismissed as arcane, impossible to read and even harder to comprehend. But his writings are just as pertinent today as they were over 400 years ago.

And I think that’s something to scream about.

StSA–The Taming? of the Shrew

To be honest, The Taming of the Shrew is my absolute favorite Shakespeare play. It’s hilarious, well plotted, and contains one of the most interesting relationships between a couple that has ever been written.

And no one dies pointlessly, which is always a bonus.

However, in professing this opinion, I often get odd looks and the occasional insult. People ask how I can support a so obviously vicious and sexist play.

To this, I answer: either you didn’t read with even half your brain engaged, or you need to brush up on comprehension before reading Shakespeare.

And I can back it up.

The two main schools of thought towards the “taming” of Katherina is that either she’s tamed or she’s not; either that she means her speech at the end or she doesn’t. These two interpretations are generally how the character is played on film and on stage — which is a shame. Because I don’t think either are right.

And while I realize the enormous amount of hubris in declaring 90% of scholarship on this play null and void, I’d ask you hear me out. Because at the end of it, this play invokes Occam’s Razor — the simplest explanation is the best.

Those who take offense at Katherina’s “taming” start with the false assumption that there was nothing in her that needed changing in the first place. For heaven’s sake, this is a woman who ties up her sister when she suspects her of lying, who throws things and screams abuse is and is not just rude, but abusive herself.

So the first claim of “sexism” because a female character is changed is already no good — Katherina definitely needs a personality shift. Not a reversal, you see — but neither the play nor Petruchio call for that.

And here we come to Petruchio — the much-maligned other main character in the story. Yes, he marries Katherina for money. Boo hoo. Who is he putting out by doing so? Baptista was going to marry Katherina off — the question was only who and how fast could it happen. It might as well be to someone who actually liked Katherina.

Yes, I posit that he did. Because no one would marry someone — no matter what the dowry — as physically violent as Katherina if they didn’t actually think that they could stand being around her. This idea is cemented in their verbal sparring match in Act 2, where they are shown to be each other’s equals, both in general intellect and in quick-witted tongues (and a slightly bawdy sense of humor/way of speaking).

Petruchio proceeds to embarrass her. This is fact. But the question is why? Why make a fool out of himself (other than the simple fact that he didn’t care what people think of him)?

Answer? He’s showing her what she does. He does it a bit differently, but Katherina has been acting just as poorly in society as he is, and he’s showing her, possibly for the first time in her life, how she appears to others. Not the fierce person she sees herself as, but as someone who does not have the wits to belong in society.

Social niceties are a thing for a reason. They allow to the world to function. By acting so ridiculously abrasively and despotically, Katherina is truly positing herself as the most selfish person in the world.

Tl;dr? He’s showing her that she has flaws. Not quirks, but flaws. And while everyone does, she makes a point of imposing her flaws on others and tantruming when everything doesn’t go her way. So Petruchio does the same thing.

After the marriage, he shows her how obnoxious it is when someone dominates the terms of an argument, eventually wearing her down to the point where she agrees with whatever she says. And it’s after this that I’d argue that she finally gets the point. She finally understands exactly what Petruchio is trying to tell her — albeit in a roundabout way, because that’s just how Petruchio rolls (and because if he’d told her this outright, she wouldn’t have listened nor believed him).

And then, the natural conclusion is in the famous (and much derided) speech. And here’s the answer:

Katherine’s not tamed, in the awful sexist way that professors often want to point out as a way of devaluing this play (and often Shakespeare as a whole). What she has learned is how to be herself and be socially appropriate.

Look at the speech — it’s absolutely just as harsh and ‘shrewish’ as her speech to Bianca at the beginning of the play. So what’s the difference?

She’s learned how to discipline (and really, how to yell at) her sister while being socially appropriate. What names to use, what accusations to level, etc. It doesn’t matter if they’re true or not — some were true and some were false before. What’s important is that she’s learned that she can behave however she wants if she twists it slightly and puts forth the appearance of behaving as a polite lady should (such as coming when Petruchio asked her to — which, really, is simple politeness, not any sort of sexism).

She didn’t stop expressing herself. She learned to do it just a bit differently.

I adore Katherina. She’s my favorite character in the play — though the blustery, clever Petruchio is a close second. And so watching her change, and learn, is a phenomenal experience. It’s one of the reasons I love this play so much, and why I feel the need to correct people when they don’t get it.

Because the simplest answer here is that Katherina is the protagonist. As the protagonist, she needs to have an arc of character growth. And it’s a positive one.

And I think that’s something to scream about.

StSA–The Problem With Lear

To make up for the fact that I didn’t have a Shakespeare post last week, you get two this week — one tragedy (from last week) and one comedy (this week’s play).

King Lear is my father’s favorite Shakespeare play, which was enough to give me pause before even starting it, as my father and I tend to get along like oil and water on a good day. But I pushed on with an open mind, thinking that there are a few different books my father and I agree on (generally anything by David McCullough), so this might be one of them.

I, just like Lear in the play, should have gone with my first thought when dividing the kingdom of my time. It would have saved a lot of problems.

My main issue with King Lear is that, in the end, there is no one for me to root for. I may feel bad for Lear, but I also feel bad for Edmund — who, after all, couldn’t help the circumstances of his birth. Cordelia is too passive (and then too stupid) for me to get behind, and her sisters are even worse. The final scene where Lear carries in the corpse of the only daughter who actually gave two figs about him was supposed to be heart wrenching in the senselessness of her death, but instead led me to banging my head on the wall at the senselessness of the tale.

Everyone who could have learned is dead, and everyone alive did not need the lesson in the first place. And to top it all off, there’s no hero for me to root for.

In every type of media, we need a hero — Lord Byron documented this at the beginning of his epic Don Juan (though he called it an “uncommon want”).  The hero doesn’t have to be moral (Walter White isn’t), or sensible (Ted Mosby isn’t) — they don’t even have to be nice (Gregory House certainly isn’t). But we need someone who has enough humanity for us to root for them.

And that’s where King Lear as a story falls down.

There are no moments where we see Lear’s eldest daughters or Edmund as even close to human. And yet, at least they are not disgustingly passive in the way that the rest of the characters are. Even Edgar, possibly the only character I wouldn’t smack soundly, doesn’t make me want to root for him.

I don’t know these characters. I don’t have any frame of reference for these characters, even at the most basic level — that they are recognizable as human. And thus I cannot love these characters — I cannot root for them.

They’re not kind nor competent. Nothing that would lead me to cock my head to the side and muse “Yes, I have met someone like this character. They could be real”.

The heroes that we root for are people that we know. They’re not paragons — because people aren’t perfect. As amazing as Shawn Spencer’s detective abilities are, he would not be half as likable if we all hadn’t met the slightly spastic kid who was far smarter than they let on. More than that, we’ve all had moments where we didn’t let on exactly how much we knew, or how much we saw.

We’ve known Shawns. We, at certain points, have been Shawn. But none of us know a Lear, and none of us have been Lear. Heck, I have a very senile grandpa and I still don’t associate Lear with him. Because my grandfather is a real person, and Lear (and the rest of his court) isn’t.

I’ll be honest, it kind of kills me that this play was such a let down, that it relies on a thin thread of plot where it could have featured great and nuanced characters.

And that’s something to scream about.

StSA–Midsummer Night’s Dream

(I did warn you, to be fair.)

Possibly one of the best known Shakespeare plays, this comedy is a classic example of a scene stealer — of a character who the writer did not expect to be the favorite in the play, nor one the critics rave about.

Too often, scholars attempt to make this play a “serious” offering, citing the omnipotent Oberon, proud, “Ill-met by moonlight” Tatiana, or the mechanicals — specifically, Nick Bottom. I’ve even seem some postulating about the four faeries being the central players. And all of these scholarly attempts try to ignore the giant hurdle that anyone studying Midsummer Night’s Dream has to deal with:

Puck.

And it’s really not their fault — Puck should be simply a mischievous faerie, Oberon’s right-hand-man, and a slightly ambivalent force, morality wise.

But he’s just so much fun to read, let’s be real.

And that’s why people love this play — sure, the absurdity of the mechanical’s production is great, and the guy with the last name ‘Bottom’ being turned into a donkey — that’s prime humor right there — but Puck makes the whole thing work; he is excitable, driven, and constantly in motion. Add to that a healthy appreciation for the absurd –he may as well be eating popcorn with Oberon during the majority of the play — and you have an eminently likable character, if not a wholly moral one.

((Spoiler alert for Shakespeare: his best characters are generally some flavor of amoral.))

If you boil down the elements of the play, it shouldn’t be all that uplifting — we have a woman who has to choose between becoming a nun, dying, or marrying a man she doesn’t love (or like, even, as he had been wooing her best friend before he caught sight of her), her star-crossed lover who is poisoned (accidentally) by a faerie king, a woman whose lover lost interest in her and is desperate to get him back, and a man who violates chivalry, decorum, and good sense, forced to marry an old lover whom he has no tender feelings for — while being bewitched out of his senses permanently.

Add to that a faerie king and queen who are bickering over the life of a mortal, which ends with the king poisoning the queen (temporarily) and making her fall in love with a donkey, then never getting any sort of punishment once she wakes.

Yikes.

This is not a play with a whole lot of ‘nice’ characters. It’s worth noting that Puck might be the character that has endured beyond the play simply because he is the only one who points out the complete absurdity, frowning at the scene in front of him, then learning to enjoy said complete absurdity in a way that none of the other characters can, due to their investment in the plot.

In media, there is a need for someone who cuts the theming and the mood, who is willing to stand back and look at the world they live in and question it. In the ABC series Once Upon a Time, the main character — Emma Swan — served this purpose (though she no longer does, which is part of the reason the show has gone so sharply downhill, but that’s a scream for another time).

This is the same reason why the 2nd and 3rd seasons of Gilmore Girls were so much more realistic than the rest — though Luke occasionally served this purpose, he had lived in Star’s Hollow too long to not get caught up in the almost insufferable quirkiness of its citizens. We needed an outsider — the character of Jess — to look around  and say that, yeah, the town meetings are a bit To Kill A Mockingbird.

If you’re looking for a less modern example, look to Pride and Prejudice‘s Elizabeth Bennet, whose own father categorizes her as a “connoisseur of human folly”. She did this too — looked at the world around her and sighed–half-resigned, half-amused–along with Puck — “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

These characters may not always be the most moral or charitable characters — neither Emma nor Jess were, certainly — but they give us an insight to the world; they tell us not that we are outsiders, but merely observers of a world that existed before us and would go on after us. They are integral to our understanding of the world, but also serve to make us invested — not just in the world, but in the world as a construct.

And I think that’s something to scream about.

StSA–Othello

The play, mind you, not the character. Because while I do love the play, Othello the character is by far the least interesting player in it. He’s not much to scream about.

(Also, I’m doing a 20-week Shakespeare challenge, so we may hear about my play-of-the-week occasionally. Heads up.)

But the play is. For those who skipped that day in their senior English class in high school (and for those of you who had mean teachers and read Romeo and Juliet instead), here’s a quick rundown of the plot. Othello, a Moor (which could have meant anything from North African to Sub-Saharan African to Arabic, in Shakespeare’s time), is a leader of the Venetian army who marries a Venetian woman named Desdemona. Through the machinations of Iago (no, not the bird), an “ancient” whom Othello depends on both in battle and in love, everything goes to pot, and the play ends with 4 deaths, 2 woundings, and general sadness. But never fear — along the way there are some brilliant monologues, lots of analogies, and a fair number of phallic jokes. So, in other words, it’s a work by Shakespeare.

So why love the play? The same reason we love the Disney classic “Aladdin” — because of Iago.

Iago, who hates Othello for reasons unknown (he offers up two or three, another 1/2 are implied, and Iago himself refuses to say for certain), decides to ruin Othello’s life — and does so with masterful subtlety, wit, and planning. He is, though he ends up in custody at the end of the play, the ultimate villain — to hear it from himself, “every way makes my gain”. We’re lucky enough that, due to the format of the play, Iago has the ability to address the audience and the unknown, giving insights into how he’ll wheel and deal to reach his ends.

Iago is not moral, truthful, likable, loving — he has no redeemable virtues beyond the obviously sweeping girth of his intellect. There is no reason why we should find Iago even a bit compelling.

And yet we do. Not just because there is something to be said for a good villain, but because there is something to be said for the ambiguity that Iago offers. We don’t know how he ends up — we know he is taken into custody, but a man with brains like Iago cannot be held for long, if he doesn’t want to be there. We don’t know why he does why he does — we know nothing about him other than the many, many faces he presents to the world. And as he ends declaring that he won’t speak a word to his captors, we will never know anything else.

Iago’s not just a chess master, or the villain. He’s a true (and possibly the true) Magnificent Bastard, both to the characters and to the reader.

And people find what they cannot understand fascinating. Why do you think we have scientists?

But the other party I find fascinating (and puzzling, and irritating…) is Desdemona.

And people look at me oddly for this, I know. But if Iago drives the plot through his genius, Desdemona drives it through her selfishness.

Bear with me; this is not to say that Iago is not selfish — no one would say that, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. But Desdemona is uniquely selfish.

She marries Othello, knowing that it will cause problems for him in his work and his social sphere. She volunteers herself to go with him to the warfront (or rather, the supposed warfront), for heaven’s sake. She may have thought she was working for what is best for her, but did she stop for a moment to consider what would be best for Othello?

((That’s what marriage is, after all.))

But no. This was a man who was ambitious, and strong, and caring, and had withstood all prejudice against him — until she came along, until she came to him, claiming to love him but never acting in a way that would tell of it.

Iago may have stoked the embers into flames, but it was Desdemona who provided the fuel.

I don’t say this to demonize her — though some radical feminists will certainly think that of me — but rather to call attention to her. Shakespeare was a very careful writer, and nothing passed through his pen that was not carefully considered. Is it so much to believe that Iago was not the only character created with decided purpose? Is it so much to believe that there can be a villain and an antagonist, and that these two can be different characters?

The beauty of Shakespeare’s plays is that they are infinitely re-readable. Every time you read it, you can focus on a different theme — a different object — a different character. It is not a different play — but perhaps you are a different person reading it.

And I think that’s something to scream about.