800 Words: Imperfect Shakespeare

"Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion."

- Dr. Samuel Johnson

“It must be own’d’, that with all these great excellencies, he has almost as great defects; and that as he has certainly written better, so he has perhaps written worse, than any other”.

- Alexander Pope

‘His is a fine but untutored nature: he has neither regularity, nor propriety, nor art: in the midst of his sublimity he sometimes descends to grossness, and in the most impressive scenes to

buffoonery: his tragedy is chaos, illuminated by a hundred shafts of light”.

- Voltaire

“Would he had blotted a thousand lines.”

- Ben Jonson

“[Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans] ne’er knew the laws of heroick or dramatick poesy, nor -- faith -- to write true English neighter. [Shakespeare] is many times flat and insipid, his comic wit degenerating into clenches and his serious swelling into bombast.”

- John Dryden

Those lips that Love's own hand did make

Breathed forth the sound that said 'I hate,'

To me that languish'd for her sake:

But when she saw my woeful state,

Straight in her heart did mercy come,

Chiding that tongue that ever sweet

Was used in giving gentle doom,

And taught it thus anew to greet:

'I hate' she alter'd with an end,

That follow'd it as gentle day

Doth follow night, who like a fiend

From heaven to hell is flown away;

  'I hate' from hate away she threw,

  And saved my life, saying -- 'not you.'

- Sonnet 145

Thanks to Professor Taylor’s poetry class during my freshman year, the example of Sonnet 145 stands out in my mind as especially bad Shakespeare. Professor Taylor told us not to worry about writing bad poetry, because even Shakespeare could write verse of incredible badness. He was absolutely right - that sonnet sucks. Nobody, not even anybody in love, ever died a thousand deaths after hearing the person they love saying ‘I hate’ in the instant before wondering if she was about to say ‘you.’ And instead of her hating someone else, it’s just ‘not you.’ This is pure sentimental sop. I don’t doubt it made a thousand corseted ladies of Jane Austen’s generation swoon, but it’s still bad poetry.

In the Age of the Internet, three thousand years of literature seems in danger of death by neglect. Shakespeare is the only literary writer of eminence in the last three thousand years whose survival through it seems completely guaranteed, and in our demotic, egalitarian age, we think of Shakespeare as the pinnacle of literary refinement. But Shakespeare was considered anything but refined for most of the last 450 years. Even those writers who loved him acknowledged his faults. Many of them particularly loved him for his faults. His promotion to ‘Greatest… Writer… Ever...’ was done by critics of the German romantic movement like Goethe and Schiller, Schlegel and Tieck and Herder, and they loved him particularly for his barbarism and his lack of artifice - precisely the qualities which, in today's public imagination, he lacks.

The fundamental problem of Shakespeare in our day is absurdly simple: he’s overexposed. Anyone with even a modicum of aesthetic curiosity knows his plays so well that we can never be surprised by them, and so the wider public views them as effete and pretentious. If you were to compare Shakespeare to classical music, Shakespeare would be a vast plurality of ‘classical’ literature personified. The power he has over literature and theater is the power of Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Verdi, and Brahms combined into one figure. Somehow, even in our amnesiac age, Shakespeare is still valued as one of the greatest cultural touchstones. Chekhov and Moliere don’t even have a chance in the theater against Hamlet and Midsummer, Don Quixote, Pantegruel, and Montaigne don’t have a chance against Malvolio, Falstaff, and Hamlet.  But such is his hold over the public’s imagination that surely a generation will one day rise up and say that Shakespeare holds a tyranny over us just as people used to say that classical music and Classical education once did. Furthermore, most contemporary actors sound hopelessly incompetent when speaking Shakespearean verse, and if you can’t make the verse sound natural, the plays fall flat as a pancake. Shakespeare is clearly dying the same death as most Western Art, even if his death is slower. And once he’s dead to the public, will any of the Western Tradition still live for people?

The Shakespeare skeptics are manifold and well known, most famous among them being: Dryden, Pepys, Pope, Voltaire, Darwin, Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, Shaw, T.S. Eliot, Tolkien, George Steiner. Some of them liked Shakespeare with reservations, many of them were legitimate. Others hated him. Tolstoy positively loathed him - he saw in Shakespeare, correctly, a base exploitativeness and lack of moral vision, with what he perceived as unbearable tedium in their place. He was particularly savage about King Lear. He regarded the character development as “artificial,” the plot “wholly unbelievable”, and the death scenes “absurd.” Ironically, four years after he wrote about King Lear, Tolstoy’s final act, spent as an 82-year-old man freezing to death in a train station after leaving his family in disgust, was an uncannily similar end to the famous King he so virulently dismissed.  

Voltaire liked Shakespeare, at least when the former was a young man, but constantly bemoaned his ‘barbarism.’ It’s true that Shakespeare emits gales of violence as the sea does waves, and uses his violence as a crutch so that we don’t have to consider deeper issues, but it’s better to accept melodramatic stage violence than to indulge real-life repression. Shakespeare’s fare is clearly unfit for the artifices of Rococo court life, and the artifices of the French court were repressive enough that it caused the entire continent to erupt in unprecedented violence a mere decade after Voltaire’s passing.

Bernard Shaw agreed aboiut the base exploitativeness, and even if Shaw was wrong about Shakespeare, he made his point well.

“Search [in Shakespeare] for statesmanship, or even citizenship, or any sense of the commonwealth, material or spiritual, and you will not find the making of a decent vestryman or curate in the whole horde. As to faith, hope, courage, conviction, or any of the true heroic qualities, you find nothing but death made sensational, despair made stage-sublime, sex made romantic, and barrenness covered up by sentimentality and the mechanical lilt of blank verse.”

Shaw was a realist who had nothing but contempt for the irrational, considering it a vestige of a bygone era (imagine the invective he’d pour on Game of Thrones…). But Shaw’s own life was an eloquent testament to the limits of rationality. He was as fierce a political polemicist as he was effective a playwright, and unlike many of his plays, he was distinctively idiotic as a newspaper columnist. He called the smallpox vaccination ‘a peculiarly filthy piece of witchcraft,’ he was a fierce supporter of Stalin and repeatedly called reports of the Soviet famine ‘slanderous,’ he endorsed eugenic projects, and loudly advocated for the exoneration of Nazi War Criminals. Without the humility which irrational speculation provides, these are the types of conclusions toward which pure rationalism leads us.

Some people call Shakespeare’s moral autism ‘cosmic artistry.’ They say that Shakespeare exists beyond worldly concerns, and perhaps they’re right. But we can’t deny that Shakespeare lacks the quality that makes so many other great artists great - a moral sense. Shakespeare is what Ferdinand Schiller would call a ‘naive’ poet, who derives his gift purely from nature and practices his art without any concern for what happens in the world around him. More ‘sentimental’ contemporaries of Shakespeare, who gained their artistic strength from observing the affairs of the wider world, met with terrible fates. Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s great rival as a comic playwright, was tortured. Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s great rival as a tragic playwright, was murdered. Shakespeare clearly commented upon world events, but did it so abstractly that no reader or audience member of his time could swear that the situation in his plays were analagous. How can anyone read Hamlet or King Lear and not see the elderly Queen Elizabeth in her declining years. How can anybody read King Lear or Macb*th and not see the specter of the Scottish King James VI; soon to inherit England’s throne and thought by many to have obtained it through corrupt means? How can any audience member of his time see The Tempest and not think of the first colonial settlers leaving for the New World.

But there’s little evidence that Shakespeare was issuing a critique of world events, even an allegorical one. Rather, he was shrewdly playing upon the fears and imaginations of his public as any master showman would, presenting an England and Scotland yet again torn apart by war, or presenting an entirely new world populated by all the magical beings which Francis Bacon’s science was disproving within their own.  

Indeed, to me, Shakespeare is at his best when he preserves the magic and mystery of the universe. In the high tragedies, his psychological insight is so keen that it’s almost clinical. The ferociousness of the characters are almost matched by their need to let us know every nuance of their thought. It is an unbelievable triumph of characterization but also its own worst defect, couching the excitement of the melodrama within pedanticism, crudely juxtaposing a scene of high tragedy with a scene with a scene of low comedy. In life, comedy and tragedy intermingle from the angle of viewpoint, and there are some artists: Mozart, Chekhov, Jean Renoir, Rembrandt, Stephen Sondheim, Kafka, who can blur the distance between comedy and tragedy with effortless ambiguity - every action can seem equally funny and sad. Compared to them, Shakespeare can be downright clumsy, because Shakespeare does not seek to create characters to whom we can relate. His characters may be ‘realer than us,’ but they are not lifelike.

He is, at heart, a completely unspoiled nature. His real identity has to be William Shakespeare, because no nobleman could write with Shakespeare’s lack of artifice. Only a man hugely acquainted with nature could write A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Twelfth Night. Only a man acquainted with earthy lowlives could write the Falstaff plays. Only a man well acquainted with uneasy access to sex could write Romeo and Juliet or As You Like It. And only a man well-acquainted with peasant superstition could have written Macb*th (surely his most effective tragedy) and The Tempest.

The German Romantics were right, Shakespeare’s greatest gift was for his portrayal of nature and the irrational. His greatest psychological portrait is, in fact, in one of his last and slightly less known plays - The Winter’s Tale. Far more than Hamlet or Iago, Leontes is a true portrait of human beings - working themselves up into a fury over completely irrational fears which they acquired for completely irrational reasons. It was as though Shakespeare finally gave up in trying to explain human behavior, and showed us in all our irrational, messy glory. Shakespeare’s irrationality, not his rationalism, was his greatest gift. If we can compare him to a contemporary figure, it would not be a refined artist like Stephen Sondheim or Martin Scorsese or Ben Jonson or Christopher Marlowe, it would be to an impeccable showman whose theatrical magic always plays to the gallery even as he tries (and often fails) to please the highbrow critics. It would be Steven Spielberg. Like Spielberg, Shakespeare dispenses of twenty scenes in the time it takes most playwrights and directors to get through a single scene. Like Spielberg, Shakespeare has an uncanny eye for melodrama and the cosmically irrational while more fastidious playwrights and filmmakers are hung up on the particularities of their characters’ behavior. Like Spielberg, Shakespeare raised the technique of his particular craft, be it theatrical language or cinematic visuals, to its absolute zenith. Like Spielberg, Shakespeare has an odd double taste for both excessive violence and excessive sentimentality. Like Spielberg, Shakespeare had little taste for polemic or social critique and practiced his art as a master showman. Like Spielberg, Shakespeare excelled in nearly every genre to which he put his hand. Like Spielberg, Shakespeare is endlessly discussed, but ultimately unknowable, seeming to have no personality outside of his work. And like Spielberg, Shakespeare was far better loved as an entertainer than respected as an artist in his own day. Who knows what Spielberg’s reputation may be in two-hundred years time (or twenty..)? But it’s entirely possible that critics living in a less ironic age will find in Spielberg a cosmic artist for all-time - certainly he’s already the most influential artist of our day, and the artist whose absolute genius is agreed upon by the largest number of audience members.

Is Shakespeare the ‘Greatest… Writer… Ever…’? Well..., no. He’s certainly in the first rank, but is there truly justification for calling him a greater writer than Chaucer, or Chekhov, or Moliere, or Cervantes, or Montaigne, or Tacitus, or Kafka, or Ovid, or Homer, or Tolstoy, or Rabelais, or Joyce, or Voltaire, or Aristophanes, or Turgenev, or Pushkin, or Yeats, or whoever wrote certain books of the Bible, or surely many others whom I’ve either not yet read or don’t yet see them for the proper value? How can you possibly rank giants like these? Surely there isn’t such a thing as the ‘Greatest’ in Art. You can’t quantify artistic greatness, you can only qualify it and say ‘this is why it’s great.’ In Shakespeare’s case, he surely designed the greatest linguistic tapestry I’ve ever read, and put it in the service of creating characters of stupendous interior life, placed in scenarios of unbearable excitement, juxtaposing pathos with humor as only a master showman could. Even if he was too bombastic and melodramatic, even if he padded his plays with boring passages, even if he’s over-exposed, even if he gravitates too readily to emotional extremes, even if his fans obsess over him to the point of a cult, even if his plays aren’t particularly relatable, even if he wrote much clearly bigoted material, even if he mistakened psychological insight for moral vision, even if he so often exploited our baser instincts, we should forgive him all his gaucheries. Like we would any greatly valued friend, we forgive Shakespeare his flaws and celebrate his strengths, because a person of such cosmic value should be appreciated for exactly who he is.  

800 Words: The ABC's of The Marriage of Figaro - Back in the Theater

I.

I’m not comfortable in the theater. I’m a shy, bookish man who loves music and eating well above company, and whose entire social life revolves around a continual performance art. I’m only comfortable if I’m the biggest ham in the room, and I don’t share stages particularly well. I have always preferred the company of instrumentalists - they’re generally like me, ugly and negligible, the last person in a room to be noticed unless we draw attention to ourselves, spectacular failures in love and avoiding of hard work in everything except the things we love too much to work hard at other things. There are few rewards for most instrumentalists except for the art which comes in being one. Unlike actors, singers, dancers, our art is not our persons, and our persons generally appear less well-kept than theirs, but rather in how we can apply our persons to appendages which are not born as part of us.

I remember when I was the conductor for Voices of Washington. During the drives to rehearsal, I used to have to coach myself into leadership and out of a panic attack, spending hours in advance working up the nerve to impose some semblance of my will on singers, who are the last kinds of people who want to be told what to do. I spent a year of my life in a state of terror (hardly the first), trying as best I could to convince myself that I was fighting a battle that could ever be won. I was dissatisfied, utterly dissatisfied, with the state of the music I love, and I remain so. I wanted to start an artistic organization built on lines completely different than any organization of which I knew anything about, built on lines that would no longer keep a person like me - learning disabled and uncredentialed - out of its ranks so successfully. Given the scope of my ambition, the task was so inhumanly difficult that to have succeeded at it in my mind meant that I would have automatically become the one thing I ever desired to be in my life - a great artist. And I was prepared to sacrifice anything to make it happen - my money, my physical and mental health, my friendships, my integrity. I learned all sorts of terrible things in that year, about other people and about myself.

But who was I to change the way things are done in music? A nothing, a graduate of a third-rate music school, whom everybody seemed to agree had long since flushed his first-rate talent down the toilet. A singer, like an actor or a dancer, is a talent vulnerable as an egg. There are so many ways to crack the shell before its time, so many ways to screw it up once you start cooking, so many ways to serve it that make the diner sick. But how could I protect all of those eggs when I was clearly no less vulnerable than any of them? In truth, the project was over from the fevered moment of its conception during a period around which I usually had less than a hundred dollars to my name. I hated nearly every minute of the experience that followed, I hated the terror I felt that another singer would melt down, or drop out, and I especially the insincerity of harassing singers into joining, knowing that my clear desperation for more members would probably annoy them and ruin any good will that might eventually lead them to join during a period when I was less desperate. For a long time afterward, the experience killed my ambition. And I was all too content to be the idiot son, (barely) working in a family business for which I have no interest. In its wake, this blog was born.

The organization shut down over three years ago, such a joke that nobody even heard from it. It was supposed to be a worldwide phenomenon and it’s ‘greatest’ triumph got about 6,000 youtube views. Much has happened since then. By all appearances, I’ve become more successful, and if such a thing matters, I’m certainly much closer to happiness. But now comes the acid test.

There’s no ignoring it. I’m back in the arena. I’m playing regularly in two bands, I’ve been conducting a chorus for nearly five years which I’ve become ambitious to make into a celebrated institution, at some point, I’m about to start seriously composing again, and most intimidatingly, I’m directing my first opera, and it’s the greatest of them all.

I know that I’m a different person now, because I have no idea what the singers really think of me, and truth be told, I don’t really care. Don't get me wrong, I hope they respect me, and I certainly would like to be hired again. Even if I never direct for the stage again, I’ll have directed the one stage play I’ve always wanted to stage above all others. However small the audience, some people will finally see a few of the thoughts on the one subject which has most obsessed me since I was a kid - how should the great works be interpreted?

II.

There is no recreative work of art, not by Beethoven, not by The Beatles, not by Stephen Sondheim, not by Chekhov, not by Shakespeare himself, which it should be a greater pleasure to interpret than this one. It took Shakespeare his entire career to arrive at the Mozartian transcendence - the forgiveness which you find in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, and yet by the time Shakespeare arrived at it, his greatest gifts were depleted. Few people would argue that Leontes or Prospero are as interesting as Hamlet or Lear. Shakespeare’s greatest gifts were for the portrayal of the dissolution - to the Bard, most friendship is fleeting, most love mere folly. Shakespeare is at his most powerful when he argues that there is no true hope for love, for friendship, for family, for ambition. To Shakespeare, all hopes seem to arrive at nothing. One could argue that his entire career was a process of disillusionment, first he lost his ability to care about pressing political concerns, then he lost his belief that comedy could distract us from suffering, then he lost his belief that human motivations could be explained. Finally, he arrived at one final belief on which he ended his career as the Playwright of the Ages, and that belief was the transcendent Forgiveness which says that no matter what our sins, we might, with a surfeit of seemingly superhuman effort of understanding, arrive at an understanding which gives a charitable meaning to our lives, even if it’s too late to improve them. Mozart started his career as Opera Composer of the Ages with exactly that belief, manifest in seven transcendent works, and did not live long enough to lose this belief. All of the great characters in Mozart’s gallery, as plentiful as any sampling from Shakespeare's greatest plays, show that Mozart could arrive at the divine transcendence of Shakespeare’s final conclusions, and do so without stinting on character development in a manner Shakespeare relinquished so that he could arrive there. Mozart was able to do so because he believed in all those things Shakespeare clearly did not - institutions, marriage, family, friendship, ambition. Was he right to believe so? Who knows, but it spurred him to be the only artist of the theater whose achievement and depth perhaps surpasses the Bard himself. And as a result, Mozart's greatest works are all simultaneously as political, comic, and psychologically insightful as Shakespeare's were in periods when he preferred one quality to the others.

The Marriage of Figaro is pure happiness - a happy work not because it’s uniformly happy, but because the happiness is earned by so much suffering. In the newer sense, it has comedy in spades, but in the older sense of comedy, in the sense of a fraught journey that ends happily, there is no purer one than this.

But there is no such thing as a happy ending. Happiness is real, but endings are not. If we can conceive of the infinite, then infinity exists. And the infinity of Figaro lies in that the happiness of its ending can become sadness or horror just a few minutes after the Count’s apology.

Save The Cunning Little Vixen, no work of opera in my experience has this infinite amplitude - so much joy, so much suffering, so much fun, so much horror, so much depth swimming beneath such a seemingly superficial surface that still, 225 years later, people dismiss Figaro as the lightweight comedy it’s clearly not.

(The Cunning Little Vixen - Figaro’s one rival? Its one superior?)

III.

(What my cast might think of me…)

This has become a completely different Figaro from the one I hoped I’d create when I began. It’s darker, raunchier, comedically broader, but also more nuanced and personal. An extreme confluence of coincidences have led me to a production of my favorite work of art on which I impose myself on this work I love more than all others in a manner I never meant to. My interpretive hands will be all over this production - there will be narrations written by me over music I selected, line after line interpreted in manners that would shock anyone who knew the work well. Long before I was involved in this production, the producer clearly wanted a ‘hands-on’ director. For financial reasons, more than an hour of music’s been cut, and what’s left is being played in the pit by a piano with a string quartet. It’s replaced with narrations to fill the gaps which the director has to write. I argued, at length, to leave every note in which we possible could, including the ones which are normally unplayed and unsung. I was overruled, and the result is that I’m waiting for the day that I’ll be accused by somebody, whether a singer or a critic or a family member, of obscuring Mozart for my own ego.

But now that the dimensions of the production have changed so completely from the ‘traditional’ ones I love so much, I’ve become something of a detective, obsessed by the thought that every line, every potential implication, the entire universe of Figaro, needs to be teased out of the text and music as best I ever can, because if it isn’t, I may never again get the chance to get it in. I worry, and yet I’m also excited, by how much this is turning into ‘my’ Figaro.

I’ve become a theatrical ‘regie’ against my own instincts. I usually hate theatrical interventions on opera - not usually because I disagree, but because I find them distractions. Opera has, for the most part, always existed in a theater of the mind - occupied by thoughts conscious and unconscious. All the potential meanings which make opera an absorbing experience always existed within the mind of the listener, but today’s director’s job is to bring out what was already there.

The music of opera means less to today’s audiences than it once did, and the end result is that opera simply isn’t as good as it once was. It has become the dual property of a dessicated intellectual set which insists that music purely of the head can capture the heart, and a particularly affluent conservative set which wants to see opera mean precisely what it did a hundred years ago. Both of them have corrupted the artform, and the result is that there is no living opera composer of note short of John Adams and Philip Glass who can consistently capture even a portion of note from the opera-going public (and their portion is still quite small). Opera as it once existed in another era has long since been replaced by the cinema, whose stars are as important to our day’s public imagination as opera stars and theater actors used to be, and whose greatest directors are worshipped as the world once worshipped composers. It used to be that the Broadway Musical offered a connection to the precious communicable past, but even Broadway is a hollow shell of its former self - lumbering through megaproductions and adaptations of movies while original work by true artists lies unproduced and unencouraged. Even the truly artistic side of Broadway cannot be what it was, how can it be when the larger public insists on a purely commercial product?

But even Broadway has a health which the opera world couldn’t achieve with a year’s worth of wheezing. Forget the young up-and-comers who are still learning, however wonderful and promising they are - even the greatest singers of today cannot express nearly as much to as many people as they once did. All the revelatory immediacy of truly new music, with all its brutally violent emotions, used to exist within the opera listeners unconscious and grip them just as much, if not even moreso, than the most popular music of today. But today’s classical music only captures a pathetically miniscule portion of the world’s audience, and therefore far littler of it can express with the same universality, because its creators do not have a large audience on which to practice. The world of ‘opera’ no longer exists - even if this music never was the world’s lingua franca, it was once far closer. And was, necessarily therefore, better music-making.

So in order to sell these operas to new audiences, these conscious and unconscious meanings have to be explained. Against every nostalgic fibre of my being, I have to concede that the world has moved on from opera as I understand it. Even a work as great and universal as The Marriage of Figaro, as great a work of art as the world has yet produced, cannot speak for itself any longer. In a world that no longer immediately hears Mozart’s beauty and greatness, the greatness has to be brought out for the whole world to see, or else no one will have any reason to listen anymore.

800 Words: A Rare Word in Praise of Ignorance

Homeless guy sees rich man on the street. He asks for some change.

The rich man says “Neither a borrower nor a lender be. - William Shakespeare”

The homeless man replies “Fuck you. - David Mamet”

William Shakespeare’s plays were written by William Shakespeare. Edmund DeVere didn’t write them, neither did Christopher Marlowe, neither did Francis Bacon, neither did Queen Elizabeth, neither did Elvis.

People like to allege that William Shakespeare, a middle class tradesman with barely a grammar school education, could not have written the Shakespeare plays, but the truth is that only a middle class tradesman with barely a grammar school education could have written them. No member of the ruling class would ever be let within any offstage proximity to a troop of tradesmen/players like those in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, nor would any nobleman but a rapscallion as great as Prince Hal have any cause to come within any distance of the vagabond posse of Sir John Falstaff's in Henry IV. Furthermore, an aristocrat would have been well-traveled enough to have better knowledge of geography than Shakespeare, in The Winter’s Tale a character states that Bohemia has a ‘coast-line’, and in two plays separated by twenty years he has characters sail from Milan.

But most importantly, Shakespeare’s frame of literary reference, while reasonably impressive, was clearly a bit limited by the standards of his day. Shakespeare, the world class plagiarizer who pilfered from so many earlier sources, would surely telegraph any scrap of material he read which left any impression on him. And clearly there are eminent writers of former generations who influenced certain works: Chaucer in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Trolius & Cressida, Montaigne in The Tempest, Plutarch in the plays about Classical Rome (Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar), Boccaccio in All’s Well that Ends Well, Plautus in The Comedy of Errors. Julius Caesar and Titus Andronicus show that he might have read some Seneca and Cicero, and clearly there is no way he’d have written the sonnets without reading Petrarch. But where does Homer show up? Or Aeschylus? Or Sophocles? Or Herodotus? Or Plato and Aristotle? Or Livy? Or Virgil? Or Tacitus? Or Dante? Or Ariosto? Or Erasmus? Or Tasso? Or any other number of eminent writers which any educated aristocrat would be expected to read and quote liberally in Shakespeare’s time. Had Shakespeare read Homer, or Dante, or Sophocles, then surely there be a lot more evidence of his reading in the text. Wouldn’t there?

In any event, Shakespeare showed precisely what he thought of such extensive learning with Polonius, who demonstrates extremely well what an idiot a well-educated man can be. Meanwhile, Shakespeare is at great pains to show that his ‘fool’ characters are often the most sensible people in the show: the Fool in King Lear, Feste in Twelfth Night, the First Gravedigger in Hamlet. If such characters were main characters, there would be no play because they would lead lives too sensible to be remarkable. There are plenty of lower-class characters (far too many frankly) on which Shakespeare heaps contempt. But Shakespeare clearly has as much contempt for over-education as ignorance.

Perhaps if Shakespeare knew better the work of writers like Homer and Dante, they would have overpowered his imagination. No writer too familiar with truly extraordinary imaginations would ever be able to equal their imaginative flights unless he were conscious of trying to do outdo them. In the way that Wagner tried to outdo Beethoven, or Milton tried to outdo Shakespeare, or Caravaggio tried to outdo Michelangelo (or Dante tried to outdo Virgil), we see imaginative works which are almost fried by overstimulation. In order to surpass the genius whose shadow treads so heavily on them, every moment, every emotion, every expression of these ‘later geniuses’ has to be outsized to the point that its epic scale obliterates the influence of what came before. But there is little evidence of such gigantism in Shakespeare - the stakes are rarely ever apocalyptic. Even Macbeth and Iago never killed more than a handful. A sense of momentous tragedy is present in many Shakespearean plays, but rarely if ever does such tragedy obscure the human expression, and in no play does an impersonal sense of ‘world events’ obscure the human tragedy. Shakespeare created a language of human expression, a language upon which human beings chewed for half a millenium. But now that the world has moved past written language, perhaps the world has moved past Shakespeare as well.

For at least two centuries, Shakespeare has been the very center of humanist education. Contrary to popular belief, the list of books which must be read grew ever longer until quite recently. In former centuries, the ‘polymath’ or ‘universal man’ who seemingly achieves all the knowledge of the world was also expected to be a man of action. Aristotle counseled Alexander the Great, Leonardo was a military advisor to Cesare Borgia, Franklin and Jefferson were instrumental in forming the United States.  But by the early 1900’s, the list of ‘Great Books’ was so long that an ‘educated man’ could only be a man who devoted his entire life to his education. How could the world possibly add to the store of great learning in a world where no one who achieved universal knowledge could add to it? It is simply not feasible to make education the highest priority in a world with so much knowledge that no one can possibly accumulate it in one lifetime.

We all live in ignorance of a large majority of what the world has to offer, and as such, the world is a smaller place for us all than it is. In a world where a basic level of knowledge is a given, the world begins anew in deciding what to learn is worthwhile. The twentieth century began a process which we might as well call ‘The Great Relearning” (Tom Wolfe’s term), in which everything began with basics.

If any century before ours took so much pride in exhibiting the same level of ignorance in so many areas of endeavor, in the basics of math and science, of literacy, of the humanities and the arts, civilization itself would have collapsed and we’d still be travelling during the day by horse and wagon so we could huddle around the fire at night. But whether or not we want to ignore them, the achievements of past centuries are here to stay - we are so beset by history, so imprisoned by it, so utterly calcified by maintaining it, that we can’t possibly view it as anything but a burden. We live in a society so sophisticated that we dream of little but a primitive resurgence. None of us consider ourselves whole unless we find a way to go back into nature. We listen to simple primitive music with symmetrical beats and a thousand-word vocabulary on technology which goes from our computer to us via space and its the music we call ‘genius,’ we watch stories of the most basic outline on film that produces twenty-four photographs per second and it’s the films we call ‘brilliant,‘ we go camping and bring with us lights which generate their own energy and we think we’re returning to the primitive. The more sophisticated technology grows, the more we yearn for it to express something more primal. Does technology accomplish that primal emotion for us? Can it?

I don’t think we yet know, or can know, the answer to that question. Life’s rules have been completely rewritten. In the computer, mankind leaped arithmetically, and experienced the most revolutionary invention since the printing press. But in the Internet, mankind leaped exponentially, experiencing the most revolutionary invention since books themselves. Or perhaps the internet may prove still more influential, being the most important invention since the invention of writing. Or perhaps the internet is the most historic innovation in history since the invention of history itself. If human nature changes, it changes so gradually that we can’t possibly be aware of change in the span of a lifetime. But there is an enormous probability that life after the invention of the internet is so exponentially different that life after it will be as different as life was for agrarian societies after the invention of recorded information - with exponential improvements in quality of life simultaneous to exponential improvements in the capacity of destruction. Mankind has entered into a new era with undreamt of rewards and risks. No endeavor without risk is worth undertaking, but a risk is a risk because the endeavor runs the risk of failure.

In this brave new world, we are yet again children - adrift in a world we are only beginning to understand. It is in childhood that the learning curve is fastest, and the rules are rewritten which hopefully carry us into adulthood with a mature understanding of the world. In the meantime, there is still potential for disaster unseen. Steven Pinker may argue that the world is safer than ever before, but he doesn’t account for geological and ecological disaster, multi-drug resistant bacteria, loose nuclear and biological weapons, and finite natural resources. The world always seems to be safest right before undreamt of disaster, but it is unfortunately from such undreamt of disasters that the world learns its new lessons which make it safe again. The relative stability and prosperity of today’s world was forged from two world wars, a great depression, and a half-century cold war-by-proxy. The lessons of the Great Depression have staved off a depression which could have dwarfed it, the lessons of two world wars have thus far prevented a single nuclear weapon from being dropped on civilians ever since, and the lessons of the Cold War by proxy has thus far prevented more than half-a-dozen cold regional conflicts from turning hot. These lessons were learned at a terrible price, but the lessons learned have thus far prevented the worst mistakes from repeating themselves. Whether in the cultural lessons of Shakespeare, or the political lessons of Roosevelt, or the scientific lessons of Galileo, or the internet lessons of Al Gore, or a baby hitting his head on the floor after his first attempt to stand up, it is only by blindly groping around in ignorance that we gain any chance of doing better.  

...This was originally supposed to be a post about Breaking Bad….

Note: I of course forgot the Player King's speeches about Priam and Hecuba, which are taken liberally from Virgil's Aeneid. Even so, if Shakespeare were better acquainted with a work as monumental as The Aeneid, wouldn't we get a play about some stories from it? Or given his opinion of the Players in the 'Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I' speech, maybe he read Virgil and simply didn't like it. I don't blame him...

Note from 2025: How did I not know that Titus Andronicus's plot was almost completely ripped from Ovid?

2nd note: The argument about Shakespeare being middle class was something I read in J.B. Priestly's Literature and Western Man.

800 Words: The ABC's of the Marriage of Figaro - B5 Part 2

B5: Cervantes and Schubert Part 2

I finally read the end of Don Quixote on Saturday. Before we go any further, I should probably clarify that ‘reading the end’ is not the same as finishing. There’s probably an entire half of the book that I’ve not read even once, there are also chapters I’ve probably read half a dozen times. Such is the life of an ADHD reader, constantly dabbling in books before another comes along to steal your attention. Perhaps the reason movies and opera appeal to me more than other genres is that there’s a guaranteed beginning and ending that simply involves you sitting in your seat and paying attention to whatever you like at whatever pace other people set.

I’m an autodidact who only earned a college degree by enrolling in a tenth-rate music program, and I’m hardly a natural bookworm. The act of getting through long books involves a methodical efficiency which I’ve always lacked. I’ve started thousands of ‘important’ books, and probably finished a few hundred at most. If I live another fifty years, I’m sure I’ll finish most of them. But for someone who keeps a blog which bloviates endlessly about intellectual topics, this is a terrifying thing to admit – no matter how many times I admit it on here. There’s an old joke which says that C-students become artists, the A-students become their critics – a different version of it is A-students in Law School become academics, B-students become judges, C-students become rich. But what happens when a D-student still demands entrance into the field?...

What I’m describing is why Don Quixote (at least what I’ve read of it) is still funny, sometimes hilariously so. Most of us (arguably all) are hopelessly stuck longing for things which we are absolutely ill-suited – be it in work, love, or the general state of our lives. There will always jobs we long for that we could never do, loves for which we pine that could only end in disaster, lives we ache to live that are completely ill-suited to who we are. We’re all hopelessly trapped, trying to make things happen for ourselves that rarely happen for anyone, and would be cataclysmic if they ever did. Life is the longing to achieve a state of Schubert, and ending up in a state of John Tesh.

As a young man, Miguel de Cervantes may or may not have fled Castille to the Spanish navy after wounding another student in a duel. He was wounded in battle himself at the age of twenty four – he demanded to fight while experiencing a fever and was shot three times, twice in the chest and once in the left hand, permanently losing use of it. At thirty-eight, he was captured by pirates and was a slave in Algiers for the next five years. During his time in Algiers, he organized atttempts to escape four times, and we can only imagine how he was punished for that. He only left Algiers when his family successfully ransomed him. After a stint in Portugal as a Spanish spy, he returned to Madrid with dreams of being a dramatist. He wrote twenty plays, every one of which is reported to have bombed. He then became a tax collector, only to be jailed twice for discrepancies in his accounting. Legend has it that it was during his second stint in jail that he began work on Don Quixote.

We have no idea how much of Cervantes’s personal experience inspired the book, though many people have alleged that the criminal ‘mastermind’: Gines de Pasamonte who keeps fooling the Don and Sancho to be a stand in for Cervantes himself. What we do know is that a quick glance at the details of the author’s personal life would indicate that he was well prepared to write a story about a person who aspires to greatness, only to fail so miserably that he could only be a figure of fun to others. Whether or not we choose to admit it, we’re all either that person or are terrified of becoming him.

Whether or not Don Quixote was crazy by force or choice, he followed the inner voice which told him how life must be lived so that it can be truly lived – and he paid dearly for it. If this book has a message, it is not that we should cower in fear against our deepest aspirations; it’s only that we’re powerless against them. Whatever our reality, we’re doomed to pursue happiness in whatever way we see fit for however long we’re capable. Even with all evidence pointing to the fact that we will never accomplish our dreams, we’re still doomed to follow them. We shall persist in our lunacies until our dying days, and everybody will think us an idiot for our troubles.

Don Quixote has been called both a wise book and a cruel book – as though the former state could exist without the latter. The reason it is wise is that Don Quixote acknowledges that truth which too many hallowed works pieces of art would never admit; cruelty can be really, really funny. Every time we laugh at Don Quixote’s good nature getting swindled, and the following mayhem in which Sancho Panza gets still more teeth knocked out, we are complicit in the violence done to them. Does this mean that we’d all be capable of laughing if we saw similarly awful things happen to strangers (or even friends) in real life? Quite possibly. Does this mean that any of us would visit the same violence on people if given the chance? Again, it’s quite possible. Laughter is not a benevolent sentiment; if it don’t hurt, it ain’t funny. Every time we laugh at an offensive joke, every time we play a prank, every time we make fun of a friend, we’re contributing to the potential damage of another person. Yet we all do it – the alternative is no fun at all, and therefore we’re probably having our fun at a more ethical person’s expense. We can either be an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing, or we can take our share in life from others so that they’re unable to take it from us. Anyone who has ever experienced depression or addiction, even if only for a few days, would know that there is nothing a person in the throes of it would not do in order to stop it – yet it cannot be stopped. The self becomes divided by forces larger than our control, and we experience revulsion for our compulsions, even as we cannot help indulging them.
Like so many of us, Alonso Quixano became addicted to his pleasure – which was reading chivalric Romances. Was there true love in what these books made him feel, or was it simply infatuation? The romances told him of a world that exists with greater rewards, virtues, and excitements than anything that could exist for a shy retired gentleman of leisure like himself. Now fifty years old, his wits seem to atrophy, and he goes out into the world with the sole intent of being a knight-errant – playing at knightly adventure much as boys a tenth his age might pretend to be an action superhero. When kids do it, it’s supposed to indicate a healthy imagination, but when adults do it, it’s supposed to indicate insanity. Is Alonso Quixano insane?

If one can boil the power of a book so famous down to a single sentence, it would probably lie within the tension between what Don Quixote (as a standin for us all) would like the world to be against what the world really is. When Don Quixote sees a pretty farm wench, he transforms her in his mind into a princess. When he sees windmills with his eyes, he sees terrifying giants in his mind. When he sees monks accompanying a noble lady on a road, he believes them to be enchanters who have ensnared the lady – in the author's own time 'enchanters' would be equated automatically with paganism, ergo Men of God become Men of the Devil. In Don Quixote’s mind, every banal notion of what the world really is stood on its head so that the world can become a more exciting place in which the way by which a person can prove his virtue is simple.

And then there’s Sancho Panza, who is as stupid as Don Quixote is crazy. If Don Quixote is every dreamer who sees the world as something it’s not, then Sancho Panza is every hyper-realist who sees the world so close to what it truly is that he believes every single thing he’s told without thinking of whether or not it can be true. These two types need one another, there is a Quixote and a Sancho within every friendship, every partnership, every marriage, and every person. There always has to be a Quixote to tell us what the world is, and a Sancho to believe it.

Every person who’s ever made fun of another must often ask himself what it would be like to be that other person. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t feel the need to make fun of him. The reason Don Quixote is so funny is because we all dread being him – a person so out of touch with reality that we attract misery as magnets attract metal. Yet he’s so over the top in his grandiose aspirations that none of us can possibly be as awfully out of touch as he is. Yet we all fear that we’re far closer than we think we are – and how could it be any other way. We can either be mired in a Schubertian hopelessness, or we can aspire to something better. Perhaps such aspirations will make us feel more miserable in the long run, but we can’t help ourselves. The only alternative is to surrender to misery’s inevitability, and no person on earth would willingly do such a thing.

Just as one can make a comparison and say that Mozart is a better composer than Shakespeare is a writer, I can say with (not nearly) as much certainty that Cervantes was a better writer than Schubert was a composer. Schubert’s music, great as it is, seems like a dead end. Schubert’s music seems to accept the indignities of life as inevitable, and it feels as though he merely waits for death to carry him off. Cervantes may have lived a life of much misery, and he portrayed two characters who probably experienced more combined misery than any characters from ‘Great Literature’ short of a Dostoevsky novel. But both Cervantes and Don Quixote are testimony to the fact that there is a possibility that life, with all its bitter indignities and humiliations, is worth sticking around for until a ripe old age.
Cervantes also had more influence than Schubert on the history of the arts. Beethoven’s rough equivalent figure in literature – Christopher Marlowe – died when he was 29. In his absence, the idea that the author could be as important to a volume’s character and still portray characters of Shakespearean depth fell to Cervantes. Shakespeare and Cervantes lived their lives on calendars that were ten days apart, which created the illusion that they both died on the same day, April 23rd 1616, and together they make the twin poles of literature. Shakespeare, like Mozart, is virtually anonymous in his work – nobody could have much idea of either’s personality from their writing. But like Beethoven, Schubert, and Marlowe, Don Quixote is scrawled with the author’s commentary and force of personality on every page. In Shakespeare, like Mozart, the tragicomedy is in the characters. Mozart’s operas, like Shakespeare plays, teem with living, breathing characters. In Cervantes, like in Beethoven, the tragicomedy is in the author’s personality itself. Beethoven wrote one opera, Fidelio, which is more about ideals than characters. Cervantes’s novel has only two characters that matter, and the rest is simply carried along by the author’s grandiloquent personality. Shakespeare and Mozart seemed to draw characters out of thin air, but Cervantes and Beethoven couldn’t seem to create personalities outside of their own outsize ones, reflecting all their delusional aspirations. Who can doubt that when Don Quixote charged the Windmills, he was hearing the finale of Beethoven’s 5th in his head?

800 Words: Hamlet Rant

I think I’ve always preferred the comedies to the tragedies. What Shakespeare gained in depth, he also gained in longueurs and confusion. Shakespeare learned tragedy, but he was a born comedian. Whereas I love A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night in their totality and would not throw out a moment of them, I’ll take isolated scenes and passages from Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear and love them to death as so many others do. But the thought of watching any of the three uncut is enough to put me to sleep. Those plays need a production from a thoughtful, non-intrusive director who still realizes that Shakespeare needs a bit of help. The only one of the mature tragedies that retains all of Shakespeare’s most profound insights into human nature yet still has unstoppable momentum is Macb*th (yes, I’m always afraid to say it or spell it out, theater or no theater. I do not believe in superstition, yet so many odd things occurred while I was present when Macb*th came up that I don’t ever want to chance fate again). Earlier tragedies like Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet are great works too, and while they have all the unstoppable momentum which the later tragedies lack (ok,...maybe Julius Caesar doesn’t), even Romeo and Juliet falls short of the mature tragedies in their most magnificent scenes - and at least Hamlet doesn’t have Friar Laurence ...yech!



Like Beethoven’s 9th, only a great recreative mind can successfully interpret Hamlet, a play which can seem so confusing on the page. For years, there were so many passages in Hamlet I found confusing. If Hamlet goes mad, why do his insults seem so precisely aimed? Why does Gertrude seem completely sympathetic to Hamlet by the end of the bedroom scene, only to turn on Hamlet later and allege that he’s completely insane. Why does Polonius seem like such a blithering idiot in his dealings with everybody but Laertes? Why does Laertes so quickly buy the testimony from Claudius that Hamlet killed Laertes, and why does Laertes so quickly turn on Claudius and become sympathetic to Hamlet before he dies? And why does the Claudius/Laertes scene have thirty lines of talking about fencing celebrities???

Or at least, most of these were questions I still had until I lived in London and saw Trevor Nunn’s modern dress production of Hamlet at the Old Vic - one of the great revelations of my life. Finally, Hamlet was a play that made sense. Hamlet’s half-madness was no longer confusing, it was simply eccentricity - a method for a depressed twenty-something to gain self-respect. Gertrude might publicly tow Claudius’s line, but by Act IV she views Claudius with revulsion. Whereas Hamlet was a self-loathing adolescent, Laertes was a self-posessed jock - as prone to quick but stupid action as Hamlet is to over-hesitant prudence. I don’t doubt that there are many other valid ways to interpret Hamlet, but Nunn made a series of interpretive choice that clarified the text for me. Was it exactly what Shakespeare had in mind? Who cares.


(exhibit A as to why people should not direct themselves in Shakespeare)

We’ve all seen terrible Hamlets, Shakespeare’s invited bad actors and directors to murder him for 400 years. But occasionally we see the same terrible Hamlet. If Hamlet is difficult to bring off on stage, it’s nearly impossible to bring him off on screen. Unfortunately, most of the actors who’d possess the drive and ambition to bring their own Hamlet to the screen are automatically bad Hamlets, because they radiate far too much self-belief to be believable as considerate introverts. Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet has brilliant moments, yet it remains a disaster. Nobody wants to watch an uncut Hamlet, let alone a Hamlet that seems charismatic enough to be Henry V. Every one of that movie’s 241 minutes is so over-controlled that we cannot ever forget that we are watching Kenneth Branagh. It’s not Shakespeare, it’s four hours of watching ‘the Great Shakespearean Actor’ (emphasis on the ‘o’) Kenneth Branagh, interpret, and interpret, and interpret Shakespeare for us. In his review of the movie, the critic Stephen Hunter quipped that Hamlet should be renamed ‘Ken.’


(A Hamlet who knows how to act for the camera...)

As the “greatest play ever written” Hamlet attracts egomaniacs like magnet attracts metal. This is why it’s always nice to see a Hamlet in which the director doesn’t actually appear on screen. Even if he’s not my favorite among the ‘filmed’ Hamlets (that would be Nicol Williamson), the best of the movie ‘Hamlet’s is Mel Gibson. The movie which surrounds him isn’t very good at all, and Gibson is certainly an egomaniac, and he’s also insane enough to be a natural Hamlet. After watching Olivier, Burton, Kline, and Branagh put the ‘ham’ in Hamlet, it’s nice to see an actor that knows better than to preen about like an untamed gazelle. Mel Gibson is many things, but among them is also one of the most talented screen actors the world has ever seen. Along with Nicol Williamson and Derek Jacobi, he’s one of the few Hamlets I can watch on screen that don’t make me want to throw the television through my window.


(Scofield. Among the best...)

Even among the loose baggy monsters in Shakespeare, Hamlet is not my favorite. King Lear is simply a better play. It has far fewer dry passages, and in place of a single character through which the entire play filters, it has a dozen characters of roughly equal importance, any one of which is more interesting than any of Hamlet’s supporting players. Hamlet ends in a twenty minute fencing match gone awry, Lear ends with two hours of apocalyptic war. Even at Hamlet’s most profound, funniest, most entertaining, Lear is there to best Hamlet every time. So if monsterpieces are your cup of tea, why is Hamlet everybody’s favorite play when Lear is not just better, but bigger?


(Kozintsev Hamlet....easily the best)

In place of a dozen leads, Hamlet has two fascinating characters: Hamlet and Elsinore. Hamlet is an amazing character stuck in an almost completely cliched Shakespeare play. The only other true interest in the play besides Hamlet himself is how Hamlet came to be who he was: how did the court at Elsinore shape Hamlet? And conversely, how does Hamlet come to shape the court at Elsinore? In this way, the Branagh Hamlet scores much better on the Elsinore front than it does on the Hamlet front. But even Branagh must take a back seat to Grigory Kozintsev’s Hamlet - a mid-60’s Soviet film performance of Hamlet directed by Grigory Kozintsev, translated and adapted for the screen by Boris Pasternak and scored by Dimitri Shostakovich (talk about A-list talent...). Kozintsev’s movie is easily the best of the screen Hamlets which I’ve seen. Any movie Hamlet should realize that even the best Hamlet’s portrayal will be a pale shadow of the power he casts in the theater. A movie Hamlet rides upon how well Elsinore is filmed. Not the castle, but all the details of the court itself. Each of the supporting players must be competent, but they also must be directed with enormous detail. By a million miles, the Soviet Hamlet’s Elsinore is the most intricate, most decadent, most ruinous ever put to celluloid. In both Kozintsev’s Hamlet, Shakespeare perhaps became a coded statement about the nature of the Soviet Union and how easily such a burly edifice could crumble.


(The best...)

But then again, Kozintsev made a King Lear half a decade later, and I just watched it for the first time. If Kozintsev’s Hamlet is magnificently dark and tragic, then his Lear is positively cataclysmic. If the Kozintsev Hamlet is about how a corrupt society can can decay into ruin, then his Lear is about how a ruined society can come to dissolve into ash. It has all the bleak intimacy of the Paul Scofield King Lear, and all the bleak pageantry of Kurosawa’s Ran. I used to think the Kozintsev Hamlet was the best of the Shakespeare movies. Now I’m pretty sure, the Kozintsev King Lear is on another level entirely....

...until I see the Orson Welles Shakespeare movies again, or Throne of Blood, or the Zefferelli Romeo and Juliet, or the Ian McKellen Richard III, or the Olivier Henry V, or the Branagh Henry V, or Forbidden Planet, or ‘O’, or the Placido Domingo Otello, or the Trevor Nunn Twelfth Night, or the Anthony Hopkins/Bob Hoskins Othello, or the John Cleese Taming of the Shrew, or the Derek Jacobi Hamlet, or the Nicol Williamson Hamlet, or the Brando/Mason/Gielgud Julius Caesar, or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, or The Lion King, ...y’know there are a lot of good Shakespeare movies out there. There are just more that suck.

For The Harris, Il Giovine, Il DeAngelo, Le and La Malon, Le and La Pothier, La Stanton and La Roque

SONNET 30
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

Well, I mean...it's not like y'all are dead, but I still wish I could see y'all more often :).