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Clean-up in Aisle Shakespeare

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

There is nothing wrong with Shakespeare that couldn’t be fixed by getting rid of all the violence, and, oh! those sad endings. So many of his plays end with a pile of bodies on stage and no detective to sort it all out for us and arrest the bad guys. No one leaves the theater smiling after seeing one of those productions.

For the first few generations of critics and theater producers that followed Shakespeare, this was a common attitude. The audiences loved Shakespeare from the start, the 1590s, when his plays started to be performed in London, even if they missed some of his … finer points. There were a lot of entertaining murders, after all.

Dr. Simon Forman was a doctor and astrologer of the era who would be forgotten except he kept a diary about his day-to-day life in 1610. In it, he recounts seeing several Shakespeare plays live in production at the Globe Theater. He describes seeing “Macbeth” on April 20, 1610, in what may have been the earliest production of the tragedy. He only devotes a couple paragraphs to describing the play and crams several acts into this:

Simon Forman's diary

Simon Forman’s diary

Then was Macbeth crowned kings; and then he, for fear of Banquo, his old companion, that he should beget kings but be no king himself, he contrived the death of Banquo, and caused him to be murdered on his way as he rode. The next night, being at supper with his noble men whom he had to bid to a feast, to the which also Banquo should have come, he began to speak of noble Banquo, and to wish that he were there. And as he did thus, standing up to drink a carouse to him, the ghost of Banquo came and sat down in his chair behind him. And he, turning about to sit down again, saw the ghost of Banquo, which fronted him so, that he fell into a great passion of fear and fury, uttering many words about his murder, by which, when they hard that Banquo was murdered, they suspected Macbeth. Then MackDove fled to England to the kinges sonn, and soon they raised an army and cam to Scotland, and at Dunstonanse overthrue Macbeth. In the meantime, while MacDove was in England, Macbeth slew MackDove’s wife and children, and after in the battle MackDove slewe Macbeth. Observe also how Macbeth’s queen did rise in the night in her sleep, and walked and talked and confessed all, and the doctor noted her words.

“Macbeth” was an action movie. Did Dr. Forman notice the themes of ambition, the arrogance inside pointless ambition, or the violence that that begets? Perhaps, but the revenge plot seems to have been the shiny bauble that caught his attention.

Enter Nahum Tate to the rescue. The Poet Laureate from 1692 till his death in 1715, in 1681 he wrote “King Lear.” You may have heard of “King Lear,” but that one, the one by William Shakespeare, is too sad. Cordelia is killed, Lear carries her dead body to the stage where he then dies, every audience member with a heart is weeping, and “Who wants a snack now? Anyone?” Everyone wants to go to bed and hide under the covers. Dr. Samuel Johnson thought that Shakespeare had gone too far in killing Cordelia; it “shocked” him, he said. He preferred “The History of King Lear” by Nahum Tate.

Tate’s Lear ends with Lear killing Cordelia’s executioners and Lear’s subsequent announcement of a wedding: He is giving Cordelia’s hand in marriage to Edgar. Lear then says that he is old and will retire to die sometime soon and gives his kingdom to the newly engaged. Edgar speaks the last line: “Truth and Virtue shall at last succeed.”

Tate did not try to put across his play as Shakespeare’s; the title page of the printed edition says it was “revised with alterations” and he writes a poem of praise to his forebear:

‘Twere worth our While t’ have drawn you in this day
By a new Name to our old honest Play;
But he that did this Evenings Treat prepare
Bluntly resolv’d before-hand to declare
Your Entertainment should be most old Fare.
Yet hopes, since in rich Shakespear’s soil it grew,
‘Twill relish yet with those whose Tasts are True,
And his Ambition is to please a Few.

Shakespeare’s rich soil. He goes on to state that plays ought to teach morals:

Why shou’d these Scenes lie hid, in which we find
What may at Once divert and teach the Mind?
Morals were alwaies proper for the Stage,
But are ev’n necessary in this Age.
Poets must take the Churches Teaching Trade …

This is a perfectly reasonable aesthetic stance and one that can be argued over, but not here, not today.

For over a century, Tate’s Lear was the play that theater-goers saw when they attended a production of King Lear. In the mid-1800s, the tragic ending was restored and around that time Shakespeare’s original version became the revolutionary and new version that everyone was talking about.

In the early 1800s, Thomas Bowdler came up with an idea: an edited edition of Shakespeare. His thinking was that if Shakespeare’s plays are of value, why not make those values more obvious? His “Family Shakespeare” promised to be an edition “in which nothing is added to the original Text: but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.” A parent or teacher could confidently place the “Family Shakespeare” in the hands of a pupil and leave them alone with it “without fear”:

From [it] the pupil may derive instruction as well as pleasure; may improve his moral principles, while he refines his taste; and without incurring the danger of being hurt with any indelicacy of expression, may learn the fate of Macbeth, that even a kingdom is dearly purchased, if virtue be the price of acquisition.

Bowdler’s version of Macbeth sounds a bit boring after Dr. Forman’s description of an action-movie Macbeth from two centuries before.

Among his edits, Bowdler changed “Out, damned spot!” to “Out, crimson spot!” and he converted Ophelia’s suicide in “Hamlet” to an accident, which gives the lie to his claim that there would be “nothing added to the original text.”

Just as Tate was ridiculed in his time yet saw his renditions of the plays become popular in their own right, Bowdler was also ridiculed in his time but saw his editions become the best known version of Shakespeare’s plays for generations.

His name became a verb: “To bowdlerize” means to clean up a famous work and make it more “family-oriented.” A hundred years later, the entry for Thomas Bowdler in the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica, the most famous edition of that encyclopedia, plainly states what drives bowdlerization: “false squeamishness.”

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 8 asks, “A restaurant that removed your favorite item from the menu, a bad cover of a great song … Write a post about something that should’ve been left untouched, but wasn’t. Why was the original better?”

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A Work of Art That Is Both and Neither

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Objects do not often speak for themselves. It takes the right artist or poet to find the voice the object demands.

I wish I still possessed a copy of my one published academic paper. I remember its subject but not its point. The late Thomas M. Greene was rumored to have liked it; he may have told someone who told another who eventually (a year later) mentioned to me that he considered my work “unique.” (In academia, “unique” is not always not a back-handed compliment, and if he had been my professor he might have asked me to make it a bit less unique.) Professor Greene was an invited guest to a symposium my graduate studies department was holding; I was one of about ten speakers. My work, unique or not, was not invited to Yale, which Professor Greene called home. I was working on George Herbert and Arcimboldo, who had little to do with one another but were both looking for that moment when a work of art transcends work or art.

George Herbert was an early 17th century poet and Anglican priest, though he might have flipped that order to tell you about himself. In a handful of poems, he gives voices to objects by shaping the poems. Each word is not merely necessary for the sake of meaning, it is needed for the poem to make sense visually. In his poem, “The Altar,” each word is a stone making up the altar that the poem is conceived as being:

A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant rears,
Made of a heart and cemented with tears;
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workman’s tool hath touch’d the same.
A HEART alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow’r doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame
To praise thy name.
That if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
Oh, let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,
And sanctify this ALTAR to be thine.

One word, a single syllable, too many or one word mislaid or deleted, and there is no altar there. It is an altar made of words but no less central to the life of a church than an altar made of stone. The poem appears in the only book of poems that he compiled himself, a book titled “The Temple,” which walks the reader, a “dejected poor soul,” through a church. Thus, the altar, “The Altar,” is central.

In later eras, poems like this came to be called shape or pattern or emblem poems. They are sometimes used to get elementary school students interested in, captivated by, poetry, the potential playfulness and the playful potentials of poetry. “The Altar” is not one of those poems given to elementary school kids with that playful ambition.

It is an altar, however. A “broken altar,” because words are shards of meaning like pieces of stone fitted together to make the church structure. A heart is the only perfect, unbroken, stone for worship, is the only true altar. But all that his heart can make is something out of these pieces of meaning, words, and if he can get out of his own way (“if I chance to hold my peace”), these words as assembled here only exist to worship and love. They are what they are, words, and the words each on their own are not an altar, and a spoken version of this poem is not an altar, either. When is an altar an altar? At what point is a poem something other than, more than, words on a page?

Printed on the page (or screen), it is an altar for Herbert’s church in book form. “The Temple” is like a 17th Century pop-up book for Anglican communicants.

Just before Herbert was writing his worshipful shape poems, an Italian painter named Guiseppe Arcimboldo was working in Milan. Arcimboldo died the year Herbert was born, 1593, and it is extremely unlikely Herbert ever heard of or saw replicas of Arcimboldo’s paintings. He may have understood them better than many contemporaries—by 1633, the year of Herbert’s death, Arcimboldo was already a forgotten figure in art, out of style, passé.

Arcimboldo openly toys with the conceit that what one is looking at is the thing it is depicting. His subject as an artist is the idea that a painting is only a painting and that you the viewer really do most of the work of “believing” that one is looking at something, some thing. This idea is similar to Herbert’s altar of words serving as an idea of an altar and as an altar at the same time.

When is a face a face and when is it a bowl of root vegetables? When is a painting a painting and something greater than a collection of chemicals on canvas?

Vegetables In A Bowl, Or, The Gardener

As with Herbert’s “Altar,” one word, one vegetable, too many or one item mislaid, and there is no face there. It is as carefully assembled as all works of art that appear to be casually thrown together are. If only he had included the actual vegetables in the paints he used …

The Surrealists rediscovered Arcimboldo for themselves in the 1920s and ’30s, and his paintings have been popular ever since. Herbert never went out of fashion, because he was never a fashion. They are each the most humble of flashy artists, taking themselves out (“hold my peace”) of the way in the name of depicting an idea about ideas. An idea that was revolutionary in the 20th Century, that art did and did not depict anything and was its own thing, had precursors centuries earlier. A gardener is his vegetables, an altar has a worshipful voice; art is self-conscious in its forgetting of self.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 7 asks, “Yesterday, your pet/baby/inanimate object could read your post. Today, they can write back (thanks for the suggestion, lifelessons!). Write a post from their point of view (or just pick any non-verbal creature/object).”

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‘Thank You, Fog’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain,” quipped W.H. Auden. Indeed, by the age of 60, Auden’s face looked like the most-read library book in the most popular library; it exhausted any adjectives thrown at it—it was its own adjective. His friend Hannah Arendt said he looked “as if life itself had delineated a kind of face-scape to make manifest the ‘heart’s invisible furies.'”

According to one biographer, Auden suffered from something called Touraine-Solente-Gole syndrome,

in which the skin of the forehead, face, scalp, hands and feet becomes thick and furrowed and peripheral periostitis in the bones reduces the patient’s capacity for activity. There [is] no therapy for the syndrome, which does not affect either life expectancy or mental status, but which account[s] for Auden’s striking appearance of grave, lined melancholy.— “Auden,” Richard Davenport-Hines

auden2

W.H. Auden

Auden probably had never heard of TSG syndrome so he may not have known that his rapid aging was the result of anything other than how he was living his life. It was a life lived in a cloud of cigarette smoke and almost continuous writing. Fueled by amphetamines, which he believed made him more productive, he certainly was productive: four hundred poems (many very long), almost the same number of essays and book reviews, several verse plays, and all written between the mid-1920s and his death in September 1973. At night, to bring that constantly working mind to some static place, he took sleeping pills and drank.

Towards the end, in May 1973, he wrote what may be his last loved poem, “Thank You, Fog.” He had lived in New York for decades and “Grown used to New York weather” and was “all too familiar with Smog.” Fog is unnamed until the end, the final word of the last line, but her name is knowable: Fog is smog’s “unsullied sister,” and years away had allowed the poet to forget “what/You bring to British winters.”

Auden in winter is a poet of few, but precious, loves: company and coziness. Fog brings both as he is kept in, with friends, for a week at Christmas. No birds outside, no outside, just friends doing crosswords and paying no mind to worldly concerns. The outside world, where one “minds one’s p’s and q’s,” only interrupts the proceedings in the form of the “Daily Papers,/vomiting in slip-shod prose/the facts of filth and violence/that we’re too dumb to present:/our earth’s a sorry spot.”

Warm by the fire, warmed by the company of friends, cozy. Aware that the earth’s a sorry spot, but unmoved by this for the moment, as coziness and comfort can sometimes trump it all. It is a cat dozing by a fireplace of a poem, and like a cat, it has claws: Who is the poet thanking? “No summer sun will ever/dismantle the global gloom.” (Ever? Ever.) “Thank you, Fog.”

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It is a rainy, gray November afternoon in upstate New York today, in which the light remains dim from dawn till after dusk; what color there is is colors that were: expired leaves lingering on branches, uncollected rakings shoved into the roads. Autumnal Auden comes to mind.

Thank You, Fog by W.H. Auden
Grown used to New York weather,
all too familiar with Smog,
You, Her unsullied Sister,
I’d quite forgotten and what
You bring to British winters:
now native knowledge returns.

Sworn foe to festination,
daunter of drivers and planes,
volants, of course, will cause You,
but how delighted I am
that You’ve been lured to visit
Wiltshire’s witching countryside
for a whole week at Christmas,
that no one can scurry where
my cosmos is contracted
to an ancient manor-house
and four Selves, joined in friendship,
Jimmy, Tania, Sonia, Me.

Outdoors a shapeless silence,
for even then birds whose blood
is brisk enough to bid them
abide here all the year round,
like the merle and the mavis,
at Your cajoling refrain
their jocund interjections,
no cock considers a scream,
vaguely visible, tree-tops
rustle not but stay there, so
efficiently condensing
Your damp to definite drops.

Indoors specific spaces,
cosy, accommodate to
reminiscence and reading,
crosswords, affinities, fun:
refected by a sapid
supper and regaled by wine,
we sit in a glad circle,
each unaware of our own
nose but alert to the others,
making the most of it, for
how soon we must re-enter,
when lenient days are done,
the world of the work and money
and minding our p’s and q’s.

No summer sun will ever
dismantle the global gloom
cast by the Daily Papers,
vomiting in slip-shod prose
the facts of filth and violence
that we’re too dumb to present:
our earth’s a sorry spot, but
for this special interim,
so restful yet so festive,
Thank You, Thank You, Thank You, Fog

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 6 asks, “Someone or something you can’t communicate with through writing (a baby, a pet, an object) can understand every single word you write today, for one day only. What do you tell them?”

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