A few weeks back the good people at Overlook Press sent me a copy of Will, which imagines Shakespeare on his deathbed dictating his last will and testament to his lawyer.

Given the prominent role the mystery of the will plays in the authorship question, what with talk of second-best beds and no mention of books and theatre things, such a task is quite daunting to begin with. When you open to the first page and realize that Rushmore intends to tell Shakespeare’s story in first person, well, to borrow a phrase from the vernacular let’s say the man has some serious grapefruits on him. Know what I mean?

And what does the voice of Will say? Well, he quotes and references himself quite often. Not in a bad way, not like Rushmore can’t think of anything better to have him say. Instead we get a man who spent his life crafting a phrase and now mocks his own talent at doing so, borrowing his character’s words to express his points, those words having come from his own brain in the first place. Very believable for a playwright recounting his life. He even puns on his own work, such as referring to a particular term as a “brave new word.” I particularly got a kick out of him working the word “groatsworth” into the narrative, I can only imagine how small a portion of the audience gets that reference.

What else does grumpy old Will tell his lawyer? Well he swears a lot. Talks about bodily functions in graphic detail, obsesses about death. That second bit is pretty interesting. Lots of undiscovered country talk. A fascinating digression on Lazarus and why nobody bothered to ask him any questions about the Great Beyond. In Rushmore’s version, Will spent his childhood haunted by ghost stories and visits to haunted cemeteries. He does
Not paint a pleasant picture of life for young Will.

I won’t lie, the narrative is hard to follow. Shakespeare is the narrator, speaking to his lawyer. So 80% of every page is supposed to be conversational, but never with a quotation mark or a “Shakespeare said…” Between every few paragraphs the lawyer interjects with typically a single sentence, and it’s almost like the author does that just to make sure we don’t forget Will isn’t just talking into a tape recorder.

And then periodically it switches to third person, which leaves me wondering if that is an editor’s mistake. You’ll get a line like (paraphrased), “Then Frances took a bite of his meal.” Ummm… The narrator Shakespeare is speaking to Frances the lawyer, so who is talking there? It happens infrequently enough to be jarring when it does.

What of the big questions? The second best bed and all that? I’m not done with the book yet so I can’t spoil it for you. I can tell you that I’m anxious to find out for myself!

Posted with LifeCast

I tell myself every year, don’t go with people. 🙂  The show’s been rained out for a week so the crowd is huge.  I convince our dinner dates to skip dessert so we have any chance at all of getting a seat.   Our seats are in the back, and they stink.  We can see people walking around on stage, but anything that involves sitting on the stage, or worse, down in front of the stage, we’ll have just audio. The opening few scenes worried me a bit.  I was thinking that they’d catch the audiences attention, what with the fight between Oliver and Orlando happening so quickly.  But, first disappointment.  Orlando throws him instantly into a quick hammerlock sort of hold, and that’s that.  No fight.  Later, the fight with Charles goes longer, but not any better.  I was hoping for something more in the judo/grappling style, but what I got was bad professional wrestling.  Seriously.  Punching, kicking, all that sort of thing.  Perhaps they thought they were making it look like the popular “mixed martial arts” style.  These folks could have learned something from the WWE, such as “When you are going to pretend to drive your knee up into the head of your opponent, but you’re going to come short by about a foot?  Yeah, don’t be turned *toward* the audience so they all see that.”  That’s why I thought maybe more of a grappling style, because it seems to be safer to teach someone to fall realistically than to actually hit each other realistically. Rosalind and Celia were handled much better.  For my taste they did the “giggling school girl” thing a bit too much (complete with that cliched “grab each other by both hands/forearms and then screaming while jumping up and down in a circle”), but if that’s what works for the audience, it won’t kill me.  The forest scenes were interesting.  Maybe somebody who saw the show can tell me….why the plane?  The forest scene involves a downed airplane, and I think from the distance we were at that Duke Senior was dressed as an aviator.  So I’m guessing the interpretation was “the exiled Duke was flying from his kingdom when he crashed in the forest”?  I don’t recall any specific references to it, expressed or implied. Pretty big prop to never mention. I don’t think the crowd really got Touchstone (who was dressed in a bright yellow suit that made me alternately think “vaudeville” and “carnival barker”).  His humor, that whole sort of “I’m bored so I will play a wordgame with you”, never really seemed to get much of a laugh. Jaques on the other hand got a reaction every time.  Someone had told me that the actor playing this role was Bottom last year, and once I knew that it was hard to hear anything else.  Maybe he’s got all the funniest lines, or maybe he just delivers them better.  [Can I just admit, I would never have thought about pronouncing the name Jay-Kwees?  I just always assumed it was like the French “Jack”.  This is my first time seeing AYLI performed.] One telling moment came when he began, “All the world’s a stage…”  and I swear, the crowd noise ceased and heads turned.  It was like people otherwise bored with the show suddenly perked up and went “Ohhhhhh!  THIS is where that comes from!”  I thought it was funny as all heck. Anyway, the rest of the show goes pretty much as you might expect.  Rosalind’s got all the good stuff, especially in her interaction with Orlando.  Her pretending to be a man (and often forgetting) has probably all been done before, but that doesn’t make it not funny.   I think the audience for the most part could have done without the whole Phebe/Silvius subplot, which really seems like it’s there just to flesh out the second half. I can’t say I loved it.  It was nice, and funny in the expected places, but what else can I really say?  Sometimes the acting seemed pretty wooden, other times it seemed like they went for the easy interpretation (like all the giggling schoolgirl stuff).  Our friends left at intermission.  Not being big Shakespeare fans to begin with, the lousy seats just put it over the top.  My wife stuck it out with me (what’s she gonna do, I’ve got the keys? :)) although toward the end she was asking me to point to paragraphs in the synopsis to see how far along we were. Of the comedies I’ve seen on the Common (Dream, Shrew, Much Ado, AYLI), this one ends up fourth of the four.  Somebody’s gotta be, I suppose.

It’s taken me almost 2 years to finish Shakespeare Wars, and given how often I’ve blogged about individual pieces it’s somewhat anticlimactic to review it now.  But, I’ll give it a shot.

Start with a common assumption about the quality of Shakespeare’s works.  That it is possible to run into another person, discuss that special something that makes Shakespeare Shakespearean, and understand what each other is talking about, even if you can’t define it.  (I find, when I really get animated, that I either stop talking all together because words can’t adequately express it, or I just start cussing like George Carlin because of the outlet it provides in getting one’s point across :))

In one way, this book is Rosenbaum’s effort to define what that something is.  He gives plenty of examples that skirt around the issue.  His retelling of Brooks’ famous “split the atom and release the infinite energies” line, for example, is what convinced me to buy the book.  Lines like that abound throughout the book, making the Shakespeare lover in us all laugh and rock back and forth in our chairs and say, “Yes!  yes yes yes!  Exactly!” to no one in particular, because we know there’s someone on the other end of the page, the author, who has captured the feeling exactly as we felt it.

He speaks of Cordelia’s line, “No cause, no cause…” in such reverent tones that the memory of the moment brings tears to his eyes even as he types it, and we believe him. He describes Kevin Kline’s Falstaff almost entirely based on how the character gets up from a bench in the first scene, as if that were enough to capture the entire performance.  And we know it is, because we’ve all had moments like that, split seconds in time, where you feel some brief glimpse into the bottomlessness of what Shakespeare’s words provide.

I chose that word bottomlessness on purpose, because it is a major theme in the book and it’s where I think things start to go over the edge for me.  Rosenbaum’s position seems to be, “Ok, let’s assume that a true and perfect understanding of what it means to be Shakespearean is like a bottomless void, and we will never know the real answers for certain.   Now, having agreed to that, let’s spend our lives pursuing the answer anyway.”

And that’s where, as a logic-driven engineering sort, I mentally start to check out.  If you’ve agreed that there is no true answer, then pursuit of one can only lead to madness.  I had an idea once for a book called What Shakespeare Means To Me, which would essentially be a collection of those moments in time, those glimpses of the infinite, that we’ve all had the joy of experiencing.  I would read a book like that.  Just story after story of shared bliss.  Where Shakespeare Wars was that, I was all about it.  Heck, where it was about that it was all I could do to not rush back to the computer and blog about it (as I often did anyway).

But the remainder of the book ends up being an exploration of every corner of Shakespeare’s works by the various personalities who champion each direction as being the one true source for the one true answer.  There’s the Original Spelling group.  The Two Hamlets and the Three Lears war.  The “never blotted a line” argument.  The “close readers”.  Where each of these was a lesson in how one might study Shakespeare, I was all for it.  Where it turned into a story about one individual who has spent 30 thankless years trying to prove his point, I don’t know what I was. I can’t really say I was sympathetic.

There is more in this book that bored me than thrilled me.  Rosenbaum spends much of the book (he opens and closes with it) salivating over Brooks’ Dream, something that I never saw and apparently will never be able to see.  When he tries to define the infinite, either through his own experience or the example of others, I was usually lost.  But we he pointed to specific examples – Kline, Welles, even Clare Danes as Juliet – things that I could share in, I was hooked.  It was those moments that kept me reading this book, because they are just that good.

Karen over at Classical Comics was nice enough to send me some review copies after the announcement of their US publishing deal.  Her company publishes “graphic novel” versions of Shakespeare (and other classics). I received two copies of Macbeth (they also offer Henry V) yesterday – one “original text” and one “plain text”.  This, I thought, would be interesting – I could go back and forth and compare both!  Fun. As graphic novels they are quite good.  I showed them to a colleague who is more the comic geek than I, and he was immediately impressed.  He did question some of the coloring choices, but we are talking about Macbeth here, so it doesn’t bother me at all to have a heavy emphasis on the darker colors (lots of red and black, but Macbeth himself spends the story dressed in purple).   The visuals are what you might expect, lots of violence and blood, plenty of “action”.  When we first see Macbeth (as the soldier recounts the “unseamed from nave to chaps” line) I swear he’s actually delivering a flying sidekick to one badguy while skewering another.  All it needed was some Batman style BAM! noises.  Ok, not really. There is also a massive amount of supplemental material, including a visual cast of characters so you’ll always know whose talking, maps, and a history lesson.  There’s certainly plenty to read here once you’re done with the comic itself. I chose to read the plain text version, and did so in less than an hour (two train rides).  A few times I thought I found possible mistakes in the translation, and not only consulted my original text version, but also my actual original text that I keep on all my computers, and I was mistaken each time.  Heck, I even learned a few things!  For instance I’d gotten it into my head that Lady Macbeth said “If I had a child, I’d bash its brains in….” but she does indeed say “I have given suck”, clear evidence that she did have a child.  Likewise I’d forgotten all about Malcolm’s argument to Macduff that, ahem, he’s too into the ladies, shall we say, to be king?  Unfortunately what I found over and over again is that the plain text version – which is basically a direct translation from the original, as opposed to a retelling – serves merely to emphasize everything that is wrong and hated about Shakespeare to begin with.  Some examples:

• References still won’t make any sense, only now they stand out more.  “They tore into the enemy as if they wanted to cover themselves in blood, or create another Golgotha.”  You may understand that line a little better than, “Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds, or memorise another Golgotha, I cannot tell” but you either know the Golgotha reference or you don’t.  I suppose if you look at it in a more positive way, the plain text version leaves you with just one thing to lookup in the dictionary instead of several.  But I found it jarring.
• Shakespearean characters talk too much.  Seriously.  Once you understand what they’re saying a little better it is more painfully obvious that they are not speaking in a way you’d expect any real person to speak.  Like after the murder of Duncan when someone (Banquo?) says, “Let’s get together again when we’re properly dressed and investigate this bloody piece of work.  We’re all too full of confusion and suspicion now — but I trust in God and for that reason I’m prepared to fight against all hidden treason and malice.”  Yes, that’s a translation of what Shakespeare had him say, but if you’re just looking to read a story cover to cover you’re left saying “Who are these people and who talks like that??”   (More on this in a bit)
• When you translate, you take away the poetry.  I learn this when I watch the faces of my kids as I retell Shakespearean stories to them.  My 6yr old is starting to give me confused looks that say, “I don’t see what’s so great about that story, Daddy.”  In this case, our favorite final lines get translated into, “I will not surrender just to kiss the ground in front of young Malcolm’s feet and to be jeered at by the common rabble.  Though Birnam Wood has come to Dunsinane, and though you’re not born of a woman, I’ll fight you to the end.  My shield’s in front of my body.  Lay on Macduff, and damned be the one who first shouts Stop, Enough!” Fine fine, yes that’s what he said, but that’s hardly the kind of thing that would make people 400 years later say, “Hey, remember when Macbeth said I’ll fight you to the end?  That was awesome.”

These are not failings of this particular edition – I could have made those same three points of any “plain text” translation.  Classical Comics also offers a “quick text” version that I did not see, although I suspect that it does away with the first two points relatively nicely since it is not bound to be such a thesaurus-driven translation as the plain text. Having vented about plain text translations in general, let me now turn to the original text version.  Now we’re talking.  Here’s exactly the kind of thing that I’d read for myself – the real text, backed up with cool pictures.  You can’t beat it.  Never ask again “What’s going on in this scene?”  You’ll know.  Oh look, two guys on horseback talking.  Cool.  That makes sense.  I will keep an eye on their offerings and may even snag copies for myself (original text only thankyouverymuch!) of plays I’m less familiar with.  Not that they’ll likely ever do a Cymbeline, but you never know. It’s projects like this that make me wish e-books were a thing of the present.  The visuals in this book are identical, regardless of what text you choose.  So how about an e-book delivery mechanism that defaults to original text, and then only when you touch a dialogue balloon does it translate itself?  That way you can choose to read the translations as you need them, or even better go back and forth and tell yourself “Ok, now I understand what happened here, let me look again at how Shakespeare really wrote it….Ohh!  Now I get it!”  I wonder if they have any plans to do a sort of 3-in-1 binding so that buyers wont have to choose which versions they want? Hint hint? All in all I find these books wonderful.  The quality of the presentation is excellent, as I said.  And the supplemental material is a complete bonus that I did not expect.  My issues are entirely with the plain text translation.  But that’s fine, because I’m holding a copy of the original text as well :). Let me put it this way, they tell me that The Tempest is coming out in January 2009.  I’ll be getting it.  I’ll probably be getting all three versions, actually.  That way my kids can grow up with them.