romeo and juliet

LibriVox is a fantastic free resource where public-domain works are recorded by volunteers from around the world, at home on their computers. Their selection of Shakespeare includes:

Henry IV Part 1
King Lear
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Richard II
Romeo and Juliet

There’s lots more on LibriVox, including sonnets and works in progress.

I almost included this in my previous post, but decided it needed its own entry. The lovely desdemona commented on one of my previous posts about difficult Shakespearean words:

My favorite misunderstood phrase:

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?

I was at the Globe and saw T-shirts that said this on one side, and then on the other: “Seriously, has anyone seen him?”

Of all places…

For shame, The Globe! “Wherefore” actually means “why,” not “where.”

One of the good things about No Fear Shakespeare (as opposed to the many bad things) is that it helps to clear up vocab issues like this. Watch these two entries here and here in the Show Us Your Shakespeare contest and you’ll see that “wherefore art thou Romeo?” actually means “why are you Romeo?” or some similar interpretation, not “where are you, Romeo?” as most people believe. The word wherefore is cleared up again in Julius Caesar by No Fear Shakespeare, as Shaksper.net points out:

“Tut, I am in their bosoms, and I know wherefore they do it.”- Act 5, Scene
1.

“I know how they think, and I understand why they’re doing this.”- Same
scene, No Fear Shakespeare translation.

I was listening to Classic FM, a fantastic UK radio station, and I heard someone being interviewed compare the lyrical qualities of the music of John Dowland (1563-1626) to the writings of Will Shakespeare. From what I can tell, Dowland was all about longing, heartbreak, desire unfulfilled, and other elements of courtly love that are depressing but have nonetheless entertained us for centuries. (If you think about it, many modern pop songs are about pining for love unattainable or as yet unattained. We’re addicted to this stuff!)

Wikipedia reproduces a snippet from one of Dowland’s songs, Flow my Tears:

Flow, my teares, fall from youre springs,

Exiled for ever, let mee mourn

Where night’s black bird hir sad infamy sings,

There let mee live forlorn.

Without citing examples, I’m going to take a chance and say Shakespeare didn’t take courtly love very seriously in his plays. Most of the examples of courtly love I can remember happened in Shakespeare’s comedies like Merry Wives of Windsor where the practice was rather mocked. But when it comes to his sonnets, my goodness! They’re all positively packed with melodramatic, bittersweet yearning and restrained desire. Here, I’ll flip to a random page in my book o’ sonnets and you’ll see…

Sonnet 75

So are you to my thoughts as food to life,
Or as sweet seasoned showers are to the ground;
And for the peace of you I hold such strife
As ‘twixt a miser and his wealth is found:
Now proud as an enjoyer, and anon
Doubting the filching age will steal his treasure;
Now counting best to be with you alone,
Then bettered that the world may see my pleasure:
Sometime all full with feasting on your sight,
And by and by clean starvèd for a look;
Possessing or pursuing no delight
Save what is had or must from you be took.
Thus do I pine and surfeit day by day,
Or gluttoning on all, or all away.

…it makes me want to gag myself. I seriously just randomly flipped to that sonnet and the last two lines of it happen to more or less define courtly love.

I think the sonnets were like Shakespeare’s little diary that he kept hidden in his top drawer. You know, the one bound in pink with the little space for you to write your name (”This is the secret diary of _______… keep OUT!”) and the little lock on the side that your younger brother breaks open to get at your private thoughts. And there are little hearts doodled on the page margins.

Yeah.

I, for one, am glad that Will didn’t often make courtly love a dominant element of his major works (besides the obvious like Romeo and Juliet or Love’s Labour’s Lost, but I hesitate to call that love courtly, either, per se).

When I shop for music CD’s* at Newbury Comics I make my purchase based on 3 things:

1. Personal recommendations or previous listens. Or, in the absence of either of those…
2. Cool cover art, and most importantly
3. Non-love-themed track titles.

I always, always check to make sure the songs aren’t all called Hey baby or I want you, baby or Be my baby, baby, etc., because I want something more creative than your typical love song. I want music that’s got a few good ideas, and while love songs can have amazing ideas the bulk of them are just chanting the same mantras of desire, lust, and heartbreak that you can find in 100 other places.

Yes, Will Shakespeare included a love story in almost every single one of his plays. But when you think of Titus Andronichus or Richard III or Macbeth or even The Winter’s Tale, do you think of a love story? I don’t. Each has its own emotions and motivations and messages that use love as a tool but don’t exist solely for the telling of the love story. And I think that’s good. People who live their whole lives for love miss out on some of the most exciting thoughts, endeavors, and personal journeys that exist outside of romance. There’s more to life than wooing and procreation. Those drive us, but other things steer us. Don’t be content with going in a straight line, focusing all your energy on the game of love.

That being said, try not to go entirely without love, either. I’m okay if the CD I buy at Newbury Comics has one or two love songs on it.

My point is, Shakespeare seemed to treat love in two distinct ways when he wrote, depending on whether he was writing a play or writing a sonnet. Sonnet Will is definitely Dowlandesque. And even though I seem to have an unhealthy aversion to love songs, I’ll give John Dowland a listen anyhow.

____________________

*I intentionally put that apostrophe in “CD’s.” Writing “CDs” looks weird to me. It’s like writing “I got all As on my report card” or “I grew up in the 1950s.” It just seems wrong without the apostrophe, even though you’re writing plurals and not possessives. “I got A’s.” “I’m from the 90’s.” Much better.

I had a lot of fun last night: the world premier of Panoply, an original play by 11:11 Theatre, opened on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, MA, and I was part of it. Magnificent fun, acting. But surprising as well. Not only does one learn a lot about themselves when they act, but they also learn quite a bit about audiences.

Audiences are just people, but they’re a particular mix of people, living in a particular time and place. Their reactions to the story being told to them may vary depending not only on the day of the week and hour of the performance, but also the much larger social and historical contexts of their lives. Also, their reactions depend heavily on the quality of the story’s authorship and its storytellers.

You already know all this. But it provides a context for the observation that Shakespeare’s humorous moments aren’t necessarily funny to a modern audience. “Yes, duh,” you mutter as your mouse drifts to the Close button on your browser. But wait! This is important: it’s not just that we read a Shakespearean joke and judge it to be either 1) funny or 2) not funny. Rather, there are several layers of humor that, as they go deeper, become more and more invisible to us but, if understood, could lead you to a much deeper understanding of Will’s world and his plays (mind you, I’m not implying here that I have anything beyond a shallow understanding of these things–I am also a student, not an expert, of Shakespeare’s works, so let’s learn together!).

Before I list the layers, I feel it’s appropriate to quote Donald Rumsfeld:

“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are “known knowns”; there are things we know we know. We also know there are “known unknowns”; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also “unknown unknowns” — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
(Thanks, ‘Pedia.)

People laughed at this quote because the word “know” is repeated 14 times in some form or another, but they shouldn’t have laughed. Its message is important and relevant to understanding almost anything. To illustrate, I will now (finally) make up, I mean explain the four layers of humor in Will’s plays:

1. Humor we get
2. Humor we know we don’t get (for instance, when you don’t know what “maidenhead” means, you can’t quite get the pun @ Rom.I.1.39, even though it’s probably obvious to you that a pun takes place at that spot)
3. Humor we know is probably humor but is going over our heads (for instance, you naturally assume that everything Falstaff says in Henry IV is supposed to be funny but you’re not quite able to tell why)
4. Humor we didn’t even know was supposed to be humor

It’s layer #4 that I came across while reading The Merry Wives of Windsor, inspiring me to write this post. An insult, delivered by Pistol, labels Falstaff as a “Base Phrygian Turk” (Wiv.I.3.86). If I hadn’t glanced at the Pelican’s footnotes, I never, ever would have recognized this as a funny thing to say. In fact, I had to go back to the ‘Pedia and do research to figure out why this is funny. It turns out that although Phrygia does, in fact, exist in Turkey, it would have been remembered by Elizabethans as a mostly mythological region in ancient Turkey that acted as an ally to Troy in the fabled Trojan War. So calling Falstaff a “Base (low) Turk” would have been one thing, but calling him a “Base Phrygian Turk” makes no sense, crisscrossing times and places, and demonstrates the ill-educated nature of Pistol’s wit.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I know. It’s not all that funny. And I didn’t even know it was supposed to be funny to begin with! But that illustrates my point: Pistol says a lot of things similar to this, and in order to fully appreciate his character you have to educate yourself to recognize jokes an Elizabethan would get but a modern reader/observer would miss. Otherwise, you’ll think Pistol’s a complete waste of space, and he’s not; he’s a strong comic presence.

Try a handful of simple things:

1. Look up words you don’t know. Sometimes this will lead you recognize humor you didn’t know was there.
2. Pay attention to the presence of misspellings and homophones.
3. When a line seems to come from nowhere, investigate. There’s probably a reason for its existence, and it may be humorous. To your inner-Elizabethan.
4. Read annotated versions of the plays (it’s actually hard to find non-annotated versions of the plays) and pay attention to the notes. After a while you’ll start to pick up on patterns yourself.
5. Go watch good Shakespearean actors perform the plays. If they really are doing their job, they’ll somehow let you know when humor is afoot. Then you can investigate afterwards if you like. (Kenneth Branagh in Much Ado comes to mind: when Benedick is talking about “hanging his bugle in an invisible baldrick” (Ado.I.1.230) Ken delivers the line whimsically even though most of us have no freaking idea what he’s talking about.)

The world premiere of Panoply went smashingly well, I think, and both the actors and the audience were pleased with the way it turned out. But I was still shocked by the points at which the audience responded with laughter versus the points at which they responded with silence. I suppose audiences are all unique, just like the stories that are told to them, and we can’t always see all the layers of humor, emotion, and social context at play before them.

I picked up the book How to Speak Shakespeare by Cal Pritner and Louis Colaianni. It should be titled How to Speak Shakespeare for Students because it spends a lot of time covering extreme basics like the difference between verbs and nouns—but I suppose that the best place to start is at the beginning, and making assumptions about an audience’s prior knowledge often reduces the effectiveness of instruction, so I can understand why the basic grammatical review is there.

Often times puns and alliterations that would have passed you by will pop into plain view when you read the plays aloud, so even if you don’t go crazy and buy a book about reading the plays out loud, try it yourself. It will sound silly at first, but the longer you read, the more you start to “get it.” It was reading Twelfth Night aloud that got me hooked on The Bard.

How to Speak Shakespeare briefly addresses the poetic form of the majority of Will’s works: iambic pentameter. It starts you off by having you read the prologue from Romeo and Juliet in the tedious “da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM” pronunciation. Had the book stopped there, I would have chucked it in the proverbial fire. But the reason I like the book, so far, is that it proceeds to explain to you why you should never read Will’s poetry like that. The reason? It’s boring! Predictable patterns aren’t entertaining or exciting. People want to be surprised; shocked; moved. The best way to read Shakespeare is to learn what an “iambic foot” is and then forget it. When you’re reading Shakespeare, forget you’re reading Shakespeare. You can always tell a bad Shakespeare actor when it sounds like they’re reading poetry when they speak.

Here are some things you might to do avoid “bad Shakespeare acting”:

1. Go to Open Source Shakespeare, copy some lines from a play, paste them into a word processor, then remove all the line breaks. Make it all one big paragraph. Then read it. Forget that it’s poetry. Pretend it’s prose.
2. Watch Ken Brannagh’s Much Ado About Nothing and pay attention to how Denzel Washington speaks. Then pay attention to how Keanu Reeves speaks. Denzel sounds like he’s talking to you in your living room. Keanu sounds like he’s reading poetry.
3. Get yourself worked up before you read Shakespeare out loud. If you’re angry or upset you’ll naturally stress the syllables and words you’re supposed to stress.

Have fun!