not sure how I feel about that

Wasn’t David Foster Wallace the one who killed himself? Whose book Infinite Jest some people have raved about, whereas I, thinking I might not like it, read Oblivion instead – a volume of his short stories. Which had flashes of brilliance and humour, acres of obsessiveness, and an overarching underpinning misery that makes even me seem like a jolly optimist.

I just analysed my writing and

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Richard II

I watched the first hour of Richard II yesterday afternoon. I didn’t like it much, lots of men shouting at each other about honour and right and preparing for war. I wasn’t sure about Jacobi’s slightly camp performance but apparently there’s historical backing for that.  A picture of an effeminate, weak man, blithely exploiting the land and the landowners with no regard for the rights of others,  his authorisation being  his absolute right as monarch. And there as Gielgud delivering the ‘sceptred isle’ speech – fascinating to have it in context, which is that England is going to the dogs. (History is so boring, really. People have been saying how great England is and how it’s falling apart for ever, apparently.)

Then I read the rest of the play, and today watched (most of ) it.

“Pray, let’s sit down and speak of the deaths of kings”     -    what a line! I thought Jacobi’s performance wonderful in this. Richard moves between his rage that his kinghood should be so mistreated and a sad acceptance of his humbling – these aspects continue to war in him. Unless I missed it, there’s no suggestion that he thinks his own behaviour any reason for his current position, no suggestion of regret.

Romeo and Juliet

This was a relief.

This is the first of the plays on the schedule that I’m really familiar with (who isn’t?).

It seemed much easier to read. I’m guessing that though this may be partly because Shakespeare was on top form, it’s also because of the familiarity. Which makes me realise that one of the things that this project is about is learning to read Shakespeare. It’s not easy; it becomes easier with familiarity.

As for R&J, this is the first time I’ve felt even faintly moved by it. Their extreme youth has always had the effect on me of wanting to tell them to grow up a bit before they start taking themselves so seriously. So I’m regarding my ‘faintly moved’ as progress in allowing myself to be swept up by the poetry.

Love’s Labours Lost

Four earnest young men vow to forswear women for three years, in order to improve their minds (the men’s minds, that is). Four young women meet them. Four young men fall in love with four young women, who tease them for a while before agreeing to marry them. The comic relief is in the form of a pedant where the joke is his pedantry and a Spaniard where the joke is his flowery language (even more than the rest of them).

Shakespeare’s plots are never his best point. This may be Shakespeare’s only play where the plot, like a courtly dance, is carefully patterned to make it a pleasing device in is own right. Which is just as well. The introduction to LLL suggests that it was meant as a kind of satire on flowery language, and meant to suggest that language is no substitute for more earth-bound interests (especially the love of men and women).

My question is, why his language didn’t work its magic here? Is it just me, and if not was that deliberate in order to demonstrate his argument?

The comedy of errors DVD

Beautifully played farce, i.e. comedy of errors. Very glad I watched rather than trying to read it. It would be easier with the RSC version, but not as funny as seeing it.

The most serious part seem to be the man and wife relationships- – the arguments of Taming of the Shrew revisited, with the difference of a wife who has an exasperating and unfaithful husband to live with – why wouldn’t she be shrewish (from one  point of view) or just hurt (from another).

Time management

Yesterday the only bit of Shakespeare I managed was the first 20 minutes of King John on DVD. I did read the allotted section of Proust, but have decided to give Marcel up for the duration of the Shakespeare project, on the grounds that I can catch up with him later – I probably need less external incentive to read him than to read Shakespeare.

Ingrid, initiator of this wild idea, is offering resources on her blog. I know I wouldn’t find the time to read anything else beside the plays and in any case am holding on to the idea that I’m doing this for fun. That includes expressing my own naive responses to the plays unknown to me, uncoloured by ‘reading around’.

Having said that, I got the RSC Shakespeare yesterday. It looks wonderful. I was previously reading from an edition that I got as a school prize in 1963. The RSC version has short introductions to each play that seem, as far as I’ve looked into them (not very), elegant and useful. It’s also much easier to read, and the characters’ names are given in full. When that concerns for instance Antipholus of Ephesus, it makes quite a difference.

Titus Andronicus

I’m only on Act II and am already overwhelmed by murder, lust  and revenge. I just stopped reading (again); this time where ‘Lavinia enters, her hands cut off, her tongue cut out, and ravished’.

Thoughts about how times change gave way to wondering, since it’s set in some mythical Roman time, whether it’s the Elizabethan equivalent of a horror movie.

(Later)

The DVD sleeve says “…numerous characters face a bloody and horrific death. Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy ….[has] passages of great poetry”. Well, yes. Somewhere in Act III I got hopeful that the killing was mostly over and we could concentrate on the poetry. It didn’t last though.

I did have plans to both read and watch plays I’m unfamiliar with, but don’t think I can face this one again, especially if there’s a lot of blood about, or if the scene in which Titus and brother carry the heads of his sons while Lavinia holds Titus’s cut off hand between her teeth is portrayed too graphically.

Taming of the Shrew DVD

If 38:38 does nothing else for me; if I fail with the rest of the project – no matter. Because I’ve already discovered something I’d failed to notice before, which is that Shakespeare is entertaining, properly approached (in reading) properly performed (in acting/directing).

I was pleased that the TV version shared my simple views  – it dealt with the induction scene by leaving it out, and it dealt with the possible problematic of being able to stomach Petruchio’s dealing with Kate by very cleverly in their first encounter making it erotic enough – they started to fancy each other pretty quickly, and throughout there was a recognition from each of what was being played out that made the ‘taming’ something other than a subjugation, more like a shared agreement of how their life together would be. Within the Elizabethan context, where her choices were non-existent anyway, it looked good. Might as well have a nice time in bed.

King John

This (maybe along with some Henries) is the play I’ve least heard spoken of. Now I’ve read it I’m not surprised. Even with the help of plot synopses, the rapidity of side-changing, mind-changing, and fortunes-of-war changing is bewildering.

• There’s this though:
  • ……………………that pale, that white-fac’d shore
  • Whose foot spurns back the ocean’s roaring tides
  • And coops from other lands her islanders-

 

A whole mythology in a few words – the ‘white cliffs of Dover’, ‘the island race’, Great Britain, and in that word “coops” the little Englander mentality that tends to run alongside the Churchillian resonances