Poetry Sunday: Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare

How about a little Shakespeare to brighten your Sunday? This is actually one of my favorites of his sonnets. I have featured it here before but it was way back in 2018, practically a lifetime ago! 

He's writing here about just this time of year but also about this time of life - the autumn of our years. He speaks of the "boughs which shake against the cold...where late the sweet birds sang." There are no boughs shaking against the cold here where daytime temperatures still reach around 90 degrees F. But I am in my autumn and winter is coming.

Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold

by William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare: A review

I first read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar for my high school literature class many, many years ago. Time has dimmed my memories of much that occurred during that period, but I have a pretty clear recollection of this play and my reaction to it. I found it fascinating, particularly the characters of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.

That fascination was recalled to me a few years ago when HBO ran its excellent series set in that period, Rome, with Ciaran Hinds as Caesar and the wonderful James Purefoy as Antony. That series owed a lot Shakespeare's writing, as has probably every new artistic interpretation of that period. 

Shakespeare's language is so much a part of our collective unconscious that we quote him, both figuratively and literally, often when we are not even aware of it. Remember these quotes from this play?

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. 

Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him; The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones...

Beware the ides of March.

There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune...

His life was gentle; and the elements so mixed in him, that Nature might stand up and say to all the world, THIS WAS A MAN!

Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.

Let me have men about me that are fat... Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.  

It was wonderful to stroll down memory lane with William. The words seemed just as fresh as when I first read them back in 19whatever.

What prompted me to reread the play was the notoriety it has caused this summer. Its production by "Shakespeare in the Park" in New York has been in the news because it updated the play to portray Caesar as a well-known current day politician and his rabid followers took great exception to that, disrupting the play and invading the stage to stop it. 

Who would ever have imagined that a 400-year-old play could have such relevancy and could cause such a reaction? Perhaps only Shakespeare. One imagines him chortling and rubbing his hands in glee as he surveyed that scene!

Rereading the play - the plot of which is too well-known to bother summarizing here - I still found it fascinating. I was struck this time especially by the fact that Mark Antony has the best lines in the play - his funeral oration for Caesar and his words on the death of Brutus. (Perhaps my reaction is colored by watching James Purefoy play him!) 

At any rate, I'm glad to have read it again and I am somehow comforted to know that Shakespeare's words still have the power to garner a forceful reaction even from people who may not fully understand them.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars   

Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood: A review

For inventiveness and creative thinking, Margaret Atwood has few peers in the world of modern literature, or, for that matter, in historical literature. One perhaps springs to mind: William Shakespeare. 

How appropriate then that Atwood should have been chosen to participate in the Hogarth Shakespeare series of modern writers rewriting and adapting the Bard's stories for the modern world. Hers is the fourth book in that series.

For her part in the project, Atwood chose what must be one of the more difficult plays to set in modern times, The Tempest. But then, again, it's utterly appropriate that she should give herself such a challenge. She is most definitely up to the task.

I was completely blown away (Forgive my little "tempest" joke!) by Atwood's adaptation. It is an intrepid, no-holds-barred interpretation and it manages to give full recognition to the writer's stated desire for literature to be able to reach everyone, as well as remaining true to the original author's vision. It was a tour de force! 

About that idea of literature being able to reach everyone, this story takes place in a prison, the Fletcher Correctional Institute in Ontario, seemingly a most unlikely place for the presentation of a play by Shakespeare. And how did we come to be here?

We meet our hero, Felix, when he is at the top of his game as Artistic Director of the Makeshiwig Theatre Festival where his imaginative productions of Shakespeare plays have amazed theater-goers for years. His latest plan is to stage The Tempest as it has never been staged before. It will be his crowning achievement. 

But over the years, Felix has made many enemies, including his assistant, the ruthless Tony whose aim is to push Felix out and take over the position himself. In short, he succeeds. Felix is tossed aside and his luminous Tempest never sees the light of day.

This is the third major tragedy of Felix's life. Earlier he had lost his wife and then his adored three-year-old daughter, Miranda. Now he retreats to a shack in the backwoods where he lives in isolation and where his thirst for vengeance against those who have wronged him grows and matures year by year.

His opportunity to enter the world again comes in a most unexpected fashion when he is offered the position of instructor in the "literacy through literature" project at Fletcher. He will be teaching inmates Shakespeare.

His course proves surprisingly popular with the inmates. They stage a play each year with inmates as actors and doing all the technical work, including capturing the action on video to be shown to all the inmates of the institute. The bloodier the play the happier the inmates are in staging it. Macbeth and Richard III are particularly popular.   

But, finally, in the ninth year of his work at the correctional facility, Felix decides to produce that Tempest that he had planned so long ago. At first the inmates are not enthusiastic about a play with fairies in it, but as they get further into it, Felix explains that it is a play about prisons, about being locked away and the inmates accept that concept and begin to really throw themselves into their parts.

Then, the unbelievable happens. Felix's nemeses from long ago are now in the government and they will be coming to the prison to observe the inmates' work. Their aim in coming is really to have an excuse to close the literacy through literature project down, but Felix recognizes it as an opportunity to have his long-delayed revenge upon them. How he accomplishes this with the complicity of his inmate student actors is a delicious denouement.

Did I mention that part of the play within a play is the inmates' own interpretation of Shakespeare and that much of that is done in rap? A hip hop Shakespeare - who would have thunk it? Well, Margaret Atwood would and did. Wonderful!  

In the end, both Shakespeare's play and Atwood's novel are about forgiveness and about letting go, and it is in this poignant strand of her interpretation of the tale of Prospero, Miranda, Ariel, Caliban, Antonio and all the others that Atwood gives the four-hundred-year-old play a new and rich life. And we readers are the richer for it.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

R.I.P., Will

April 23, 2016 marks the 400th anniversary of the death of the greatest playwright in the English language and I can't let the day pass without acknowledging it. Even The New York Times got into the act with an obituary in today's online edition. Trust me, it is worth a read.

All of which started me thinking: If William Shakespeare were alive today, what would he think of social media? Would he be on Twitter? Facebook? Instagram? Could our greatest playwright learn to express himself in 140 characters? Would he accept my "friendship"? Would he, heaven forfend, be a blogger??? 

What would Will think about our tendency to express ourselves in acronyms or shorthand?

 

Maybe it is just as well that he is long dead and doesn't have to hear the depths to which the language that he so lovingly crafted has fallen. R.I.P., Will.

A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare: A review

A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of my goals for my summer reading was to reread the complete works of Shakespeare. Well, the summer has flown by and the only progress I made toward my goal was to read a few of the sonnets. Now that fall has arrived, I decided to finally make a serious start on the project.

What better place to start than perhaps my favorite of the comedies, A Midsummer Night's Dream? I have fond memories of a PBS production of the play when I was growing up.  It made a lasting impression on me and helped to give me at least a glimmer of appreciation for good literature. The twists and turns of the romance between the star-crossed lovers, Lysander and Hermia, were funny and sometimes poignant. The interference in human lives by the king of the fairies, Oberon, the bumbling of his servant, Puck, and, finally, the act of Oberon that puts everything right again make up the core of the plot.

"The course of true love never did run smooth," says Lysander in act 1. That was never more true than in this play, but, in fact, it could be said of all Shakespeare's comedies, as well as some of the tragedies. It's a favorite device of his to cause misunderstandings between lovers and would-be lovers which then become the running theme of the play that is finally resolved in the final act. And so it is with A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The scene is Athens. Lysander loves Hermia and Hermia loves Lysander. But Demetrius also loves Hermia and Hemia's father favors him as a husband for his daughter. Helena, Hermia's best friend, loves Demetrius but he won't give her a second look.

Lysander and Hermia plan to run away together. They meet in a wood outside Athens, but instead of running away, they fall asleep. Helena, hoping to curry favor with Demetrius, tells him about the plot and he goes to the same wood seeking the lovers, but there he, too, falls asleep.

On (mangled) instructions from Oberon, Puck goes to the wood and sprinkles the eyelids of the sleepers with a potion which causes both Demetrius and Lysander to wake up in love with Helena and hating Hermia. Both Helena and Hermia are very confused. Demetrius and Lysander are ready to fight over Helena.

Oh, what hilarity ensues! Finally, Oberon intervenes once again, sets everything right, and Lysander remembers that he loves Hermia, and, suddenly, Demetrius finds that he loves Helena. They all live happily ever after, each with the one he/she loves. The end.

This, of course, is the selfsame plot we have seen reenacted in virtually every romantic comedy since Shakespeare. In plays and on the screen or in literature, it is always the same and we know how it is going to end, but we love it anyway.          

It is not a fluke that Shakespeare is called the greatest writer in English. For one thing, we can hardly get through a day without quoting him. For another, he prefigured practically every plot of every book and short story that came after him and his sonnets are truly timeless. In fact, his writing seems fresh to me still, almost five hundred years later.

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The Shakespeare debt

The exact date of William Shakespeare's birth may not be absolutely known for sure, although there is a record that he was baptized on April 26, 1616, but we know it was around this time in that year. This is the 396th anniversary of his birth, and the debt that our language owes the man continues to accrue interest. 


It is virtually impossible for an English speaker to get through the day without quoting him in some fashion. This was neatly illustrated in a meditation by Bernard Levin that I happened to come upon today, repeated here for your edification:

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare 'It's Greek to me', you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare;  if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool's paradise -- why, be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then -- to give the devil his due -- if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a doornail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then -- by Jove! O Lord! Tut, tut! For goodness' sake! What the dickens! But me no buts -- it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.

So, the long and the short of it is, to give the devil (or the angel) his due, our language would be poor indeed without Will's meaty additions to it. And we may as well admit that we will never be able to repay our debt, not even until the trumpets sound at the crack of doom.