Shakespeare's Flowers — Finished Re-read 2010.12.03

This is a nice little read. It is always pleasant to read Shakespeare, of course, and this is a very small collection — which leads to my one quibble, which is that I keep thinking when I finish it that this could be a bit longer. (That is a bit mean-spirited on my part, because I haven't actually done the real research required to confirm this, but I can't help thinking it.) But the collection is excellent, even so, so it gets ☆☆☆☆☆.    

William Shakespeare.
San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1995.
ISBN 081180836X

Included is one of my favourite little poems from A Midsummer Night's Dream:

Titania
Be kind and courteous to this gentleman.
Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes.
Feed him with apricots and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries;
The honeybags steal from the humble-bees,
And for night tapers crop their waxen thighs
And light them at the fiery glow-worms' eyes
To have my love to bed, and to arise;
And pluck the wings from painted butterflies
To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes.
Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies (3.1.156-166).

Shakespeare: The World as a Stage — Finished 2010.10.07

A delightful, funny, shocking, interesting, learned and wonderful read. I found particularly amusing the final chapter, in which Bryson de-bunks the Shakespeare debunkers — which have included Orson Wells, Derek Jacobi, Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, and more than a few others despite an overwhelming lack of evidence or even clear arguments.

Anyway, here is a nice sample of Bryson's writing from that final chapter:

... in 1918 a schoolmaster from Gateshead, in north-east England, with the inescapably noteworthy name of J. Thomas Looney, put the finishing touches to his life's work, a book called Shakespeare Identified, in which he proved to his own satisfaction that the actual author of Shakespeare was the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, one Edward de Vere. It took him two years to find a publisher willing to publish the book under his own name. Looney steadfastly refused to adopt a pseudonym, arguing, perhaps just a touch desperately, that his name had nothing to do with insanity and was in fact pronounced loney. (Interestingly, Looney was not alone in having a mirthful surname. As Samuel Schoenbaum once noted with clear pleasure, other prominent anti-Stratfordians of the time included Sherwood E. Silliman and George M. Battey (p186).)

Bryson describes how this whole anti-Stratford movement appears to have gotten started by an unstable  American woman with the surname Bacon and charm enough to get money to travel to England and for an extended multi-year period, do research without talking to people. The trip proved to her mind that Francis Bacon was the author, although she did not actual state that in her book but rather inferred it.

Reading this is very amusing! The more so because a few years ago one of my co-workers dropped off some documents that contained links to proofs that Shakespeare's words were the work of someone else. But of course they didn't actually prove anything. JB found it amusing to try to stir me up, given my organizing annually for my work mates a group trip to our local Shakespeare festival. Anyway, he made the argument that '... historically it doesn't make sense that Shakespeare wrote what he did' he argued in similar vein to all anti-Stratfordians. (I think it a weak argument, but it would seem that others like it.)

'So, JB,' I asked him, 'have you read any Bacon or Marlowe?' These were the two with intellect and education enough to be the 'real' Shakespeare in his research.

'No,' he said, 'I'm looking at this strictly from an historical perspective.'

'Well, JB,' I responded, 'I have read both those writers — and they did not write the words that the world ascribes to Shakespeare. Bacon's writing is pontifical dreck and Marlowe's is black and lacking the depth of human understanding you get from Shakespeare.'

Paul Budra, Professor of English @ SFU,  was asked to express his opinion on the matter  at a well attended lecture at Vancouver's Bard-on-the-Beach Shakespeare festival a few years ago. (The tone of the querent suggested that he was one of the anti-Stratfordians.) Prof. Budra's answer was short and to the point: 'I am open to that possibility. However, there is not one single piece of evidence in existence, not even a tiny one despite years of painstaking research, that would indicate that anyone else wrote these plays. On the other hand, there is a great deal of direct evidence that he did.'

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Bill Bryson.Shakespeare: The World as a Stage. London, GB: Harper Perennial 2008. ISBN: 000719790X.

Chuang Tzu via Thomas Merton — 2009.12.15

Thomas Merton

The Way of Chuang Tzu (莊子).

Published by New Directions

(by Mclelland & Stewart, Ltd. in Canada), 1969.

ISBN: 0-8112-0103-1

(Excerpts and references refer to The Texts of Taoism translated by James Legge.)

This book was a nice little find in a used book store man years ago. I grabbed it in my ongoing effort at collecting, serendipitously, translations/versions of Chuang Tzu's works. When I first looked at it, I thought it was okay, and gave it three stars (out of five).

Today I re-visited it, and am delighted by it! I will now upgrade this to a full five stars.

☆☆☆☆☆

I either forgot or skipped past Merton's introduction, which, today, I thoroughly enjoyed.

For example:

…

[My] 'readings' [of Chuang Tzu] are not attempts at faithful reproduction but ventures in personal and spiritual interpretation. Inevitably, any rendering of Chuang Tzu is bound to be very personal. Though, from the point of view of scholarship, I am not even a dwarf sitting on the shoulders of these giants, and though not all my renderings can even qualify as 'poetry,' I believe that a certain type of reader will enjoy my intuitive approach to a thinker who is subtle, funny, provocative, and not easy to get at (9).

And:

This book is not intended to prove anything or to convince anyone of anything that s/he does not want to hear about in the first place. In other words, it is not a new apologetic subtlety ... in which Christian rabbits will suddenly appear by magic out of a Taoist hat.

I simply like Chuang Tzu because he is what he is and I feel no need to justify this liking to myself or to anyone else. He is far too great to need any apologies from me (10).

And some of the excerpts are delightful. Okay, so that is not so much a product of Merton, but of the genius of Chuang Tzu. Today, for some reason, from the many delightful bits, this is the one that prompted me to blog it:

Three Friends [vi.11]

There were three friends

Discussing life.

One said:

'Can men live together

And know nothing of it?

Work together

And produce nothing?

Can they fly around in space

And forget to exist

World without end?'

The three friends looked at each other

And burst out laughing.

They had no explanation.

Thus they were better friends than before

… (54).

Part of my enjoyment comes, likely, because it echoes of one of my favourite all time poems by Robert Francis:

Waxwings

Four Tao philosophers as cedar waxwings

chat on a February berrybush

in sun, and I am one.

Such merriment and such sobriety –

the small wild fruit on the tall stalk –

was this not always my true style?

Above an elegance of snow, beneath

a silk-blue sky a brotherhood of four

birds. Can you mistake us?

To sun, to feast, and to converse

and all together – for this I have abandoned

all my other lives (139).

From News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness, ed by Robert Bly. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1980.

Then, even more delightfully, is that the ending reminds me of the pivotal scene in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, when Feste, Sir Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek are carousing to the annoyance of the point precise Malvolio (2.3). In both cases an embodiment of formality is castigated by the living carousing on the sadness of life!

Here's Chuang Tzu:

…

Then one friend died.

Confucius

Sent a disciple to help the other two

Chant his obsequies.

The disciple found that the one friend

had composed a song.

While the other played a lute,

They sang:

'Hey, Sung Hu!

Where'd you go?

Hey, Sung Hu!

Where'd you go?

You have gone

Where you really were.

And we are here –

Damn it! We are here!'

Then the disciple of Confucius burst in on them and

Exclaimed: 'May I inquire where you found this in the

Rubrics of obsequies,

This frivolous caroling in the presence of the departed?'

The two friends looked at each other and laughed:

'Poor fellow,' they said, 'he doesn't know the new liturgy! (54).

Now for Shakespeare, from Twelfth Night, 2.3. Feste sings a supposed song of love because Sir Andrew Aguecheek 'cares not for good life.'

O mistress mine, where are you roaming?

O, stay and hear; your true love's coming,

That can sing both high and low:

Trip no further, pretty sweeting;

Journeys end in lovers meeting,

Every wise man's son doth know.

What is love? 'tis not hereafter;

Present mirth hath present laughter;

What's to come is still unsure:

In delay there lies no plenty;

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,

Youth's a stuff will not endure.

Sir Toby Belch reacts to this sad song with a cry to life:

But shall we make the welkin dance indeed? shall we

rouse the night-owl in a catch that will draw three

souls out of one weaver? shall we do that?

And then proceeds to bang pots and pans and sing with his two friends until the unctuous Malvolio comes down to stop them.

And, like Sung Lu's friends castigating the officious disciple of Confucius, Sir Toby snaps at Malvolio:

Out o' tune, sir: ye lie. Art [thou] any more than a

steward? Dost thou think, because thou art

virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

And, I hadn't made the association between Chuang Tzu and Shakespeare in quite this way before, even though I have long thought of Shakespeare as the best Taoist writing in English for many years. And today I realized that that correspondence extends to the naming jokes in this play,which have a great affinity to the naming jokes with which Chuang Tzu riddled his stories.

Orwell's Collected Essays - Being Read 2009.10.10

I have been dipping into Orwell's Collected Essays and there is some great stuff. I was delighted to discover he commented on Shakespeare via his criticism of Tolstoy's splenetic diatribe that denounced Shakespeare as, in Orwell's paraphrase of Tolstoy's polemic:

a writer entirely without merit, one of the worst and most contemptible writers the world has ever seen (154).

Isn't that amazing!

Orwell introduced his examination of Tolstoy's polemic with a general comment on the nature of criticism:

... Criticism becomes more and more openly partisan, and even the pretence of detachment becomes very difficult. But one cannot infer from that that there is no such thing as an aesthetic judgment, that every work of art is simply and solely a political pamphlet and can be judged only as such. If we reason like that we lead our minds into a blind alley in which certain large and obvious facts become inexplicable. And in illustration of this I want to examine one of the greatest pieces of moral, non-aesthetic criticism — anti-aesthetic criticism, one might say — that have been written: Tolstoy's essay on Shakespeare (153).

And I love how Orwell summarizes Tolstoy — it was far more readable than Tolstoy's writing:

Tolstoy's main contention is that Shakespeare is a trivial, shallow writer, with no coherent philosophy, no thoughts or ideas worth bothering about, no interest in social or religious problems, no grasp of character or probability, and, in so far as he could be said to have a definable attitude at all, with a cynical, immoral, worldly outlook on life. He accuses him of patching his plays together without caring twopence for credibility, of dealing in fantastic fables and impossible situations, of making his characters talk in an artificial flowery language completely unlike that of real life. He also accuses him of thrusting anything and everything into his plays — soliloquies, scraps of ballads, discussions, vulgar jokes and so forth — without stopping to think whether they had anything to do with the plot, and also of taking for granted the immoral power politics and unjust social distinctions of the times he lived in. Briefly, he accuses him [of] being a hasty, slovenly writer, a man of doubtful morals, and above all, of not being a thinker' (154).

I wrote my own essay that comments on Orwell's comment on Tolstoy's comment on Shakespeare! (I have criticized the existence of literary critics, and now I am become one — life is funny!) I've called it Tolstoy, Orwell and the Tao of Shakespeare.

Zen and Japanese Culture - Being Read 2009.10.08

Zen and Japanese Culture is turning out to be a fabulous read! And with near perfect synchronicity-petit timing! While writing a response to Tolstoy's essay berating Shakespeare as a hack writer — to understate Tolstoy as transcribed by Orwell — I came across in Zen language an amazing and colourful affirmation of my argument. And one that also affirmed George Orwell's chastisement of Tolstoy — even as Orwell with at best ambivalently praised Shakesepare. I came across Tolstoy's polemic via Orwell's response to it in Vol 2 of his collected short works. (I will be blogging this bit of doggeral when it's done.)

But even without it being a great supporting argument to my own perverse sense of things, it is a nice bit of writing to promote thoughtless thought.

4

There is a famous saying by one of the earlier masters of the T'ang dynasty, which declares that the Tao is no more than one's everyday life experience. When the master was asked what he meant by this, he replied, "When you are hungry you eat, when are are thirsty you drink, when you meet a friend you greet him'. This, some may think, is no more than animal instinct or social usage, and there is nothing that may be called moral, much less spiritual, in it. If we call it the Tao, some may think, what a cheap thing the Tao is after all!

Those who have not penetrated into the depths of our consciousness, including both the conscious and unconscious, are liable to hold such a mistaken notion as the one just cited. But we must remember that, if the Tao is something highly abstract transcending daily experiences, it will have nothing to do with the actualities of life. Life as we live it is not concerned with generalization. If ti were, the intellect would be everything, and the philosopher would be the wisest man. But, as Kierkegaard points out, the philosopher builds a fine palace, but he is doomed not to live in it — he has a shed for himself next door to what he constructed for others, including himself, to look at.

...

The Tao is really very much more than mere animal instinct and social usage, though those elements are also included in it. It is something deeply imbedded in every one of us, indeed in all beings sentient and non-sentient, and it requires something altogether different from so-called scientific analysis. It defies our intellectual pursuit because of being too concrete, too familiar, hence beyond definability. It is there confronting us, no doubt, but not obtrusively and threateningly, like Mount Everest to the mountain-climbers (11-2).

Comedy of Errors: Begun - 2009.06.30

William Shakespeare

Comedy of Errors

Toronto: Oxford University Press 2002.

Edited by Charles Whitworth. ISBN 0-19-281461-3

Re-Read

Began 2009.06.30

Finished 2009.07.17

This is one of the four plays our exquisitely beautiful Bard on the Beach is presenting this year. I have arranged a departmental outing to it. And for great door prizes to be awarded to the best presentation of 20 lines from the play. So, time to bone up and get my tongue working.

Wish me luck.

For those of you unfamiliar or disenfranchised with Shakespeare (most likely because of inadequate teaching of it in high school), this play is a great slapstick-like farce in the same genre as The Marx Brothers or The Three Stooges. For example, a past production here at Bard-on-the-Beach blew down the house down with a very broad flatulence joke. Its all about mistaken identity taken to extreme. Absolutely unbelievable, in the best sense of great farce, and completely engaging.