Eric The Blue

In re the Shakespeare controversy

At Salon, Laura Miller has a review of Anonymous, the new movie concerning how Shakespeare's plays were written by Christopher Marlowe.  Marlowe seems an odd choice.  He was dead at 29, in 1593, by which time he had written the plays--The Jew of Malta, Dr Faustus, Edward the Second, Tamburlaine--on which his reputation as the second greatest Elizabethan playwright rest.  His biography is busy.  John Berryman's essay on him begins by observing that Marlowe was

a professional secret agent, a notorious unbeliever, a manifest homosexual, cruel, quarrelsome, and perhaps murderous, his habitual associates scoundrels and traitors. . . . Let us take both the atheism and the homosexuality seriously, because Marlowe did: he was missionary about both and he could have been burned for either. . . .

If to this busy lifestyle we add the authorship of some thirty plays, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest, it begins to appear that Marlowe's ten or so years of adult life must have been unmarred by the stomach flu. 

But of the suggested alternative authors for the plays of William Shakespeare, Marlowe is not unusually implausible.  Here is Harry Levin on the subject:

The figure of Shakespeare as a practical man of affairs, though well attested by the evidence, seemed rather too modest to occupy the lofty pedastel reared by the Bardolaters.  Hence the strange proliferation of irresponsible theories proposing rival candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare's work, most of them titled and all of them colorful but none of them circumstanced to have done the job--as William Shakespeare indubitably was.

In general, theories of great intricacy, with many moving parts and involving elaborate conspiracies concocted in the pursuit of vague ends, may be dismissed as the play things of hobbyists.  There is a simple theory that explains a lot.  Shakespeare wrote the plays that have, since he lived and died, been attributed to him.  Ben Jonson and the editors of the First Folio edition were contemporary admirers, not co-conspirators in an extravagant fraud.  It's natural to be curious about the man who wrote these great plays, and frustrating that more isn't known.  But it's better to have his works than his biography.

UPDATE: I breezed over Miller's review too quickly.  Her first paragraph refers to Much Ado About Something, a 2003 documentary that does make the case for Christopher Marlowe being the author of Shakespeare's plays.  Anonymous, however, advances the notion that the actual author is Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who, unlike Marlowe, had a title and no known literary ability.  He died in 1604, ten years after Marlowe (that helps), but before several of Shakespeare's greatest works were first performed (that's a problem).  As Levin writes, it's a "strange proliferation."

Jeff Johnson speaks

The local OWS movement has been camping out on the north plaza of the Hennepin County Government Center, where I work, for a few weeks now.  County Commissioner Jeff Johnson is not pleased.  He attended a meeting of the Midwestern Republican Leadership Conference that kicked off at the same time as the protest and said:

Because of you, I don't have to spend my Friday afternoon with 1000 or so clueless, obnoxious and, frankly, very messy anarchists, socialists, flower children, or whatever they call themselves.  Instead, I get to spend my Friday with 1000 or so patriots.

He has since "apologized" on his blog.  If you follow the link you will see to what degree his expressive powers rise to the challenges posed by the "nonapology apology" rhetorical form.  What he said about the protesters is all true, but he should have kept the truth to himself.  It has to do with church and lessons he teaches his children, etc.  He does not take a stance on the business strategy of socializing risk and privatizing profit.  At least his conception of a "patriot" is clear:  anyone who attends the Midwestern Republican Leadership Conference. 

I think Dr Johnson was wrong.  Patriotism is the first resort of a scoundrel.

Meanwhile, John Cassidy, of The New Yorker, has an offbeat, enjoyable post concerning the identities of some unlikely supporters of OWS.  Everything Cassidy writes is interesting.  As long as I'm thinking about it, I'm adding him to my Blog Roll; and, as long as you're in his neighborhood, check out his expert dismissals of the tax plans of leading Republican presidential contenders: "9-9-9" Cain and the optional nonflat flat tax of the one with the nicest hair.

John Keats

John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London, the oldest of five children born to the chief ostler at a horse-lending firm and his wife, who was the daughter of the livery's owner.  Three boys and a girl survived infancy.  The parents had been 20 and 19 at their marriage, which occurred about a year before John was born.  The father died after falling from a horse when Keats was 8, and the mother died of tuberculosis when he was 14.  The livery business had prospered, and the Keats children were provided for in the estate of their maternal grandparents, but their guardian, a tea merchant to whom the adjective "unimaginative" is applied by diverse writers, held virtually all of it while Keats lived.  The children, when they were older, were told that they were not to receive their inheritance till the youngest, the girl Fanny, attained her majority, and also that the estate was the subject of a lawsuit that made distribution impossible.  The will was poorly drafted, but neither claim was true, and it seems likely that the tea merchant invested the funds for his own profit.  Keats was not the type to pursue him on the question.  Chronically short of funds, partly because he loaned what he had to other impoverished artists, his letters asking for loans were so hesitant and indirect that the recipients sometimes did not realize they were being solicited.

Thus the first sentence in the editor's headnote to the section on Keats in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: "No major poet had a less propitious origin."  His personality first comes into view in the reminiscence of his schoolteacher and friend, Charles Cowden Clarke:

He was not merely the "favourite of all," like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his high-mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from anyone, superior or equal, who had known him.

When Keats was 15, his guardian took him out of school and apprenticed him to an apothecary and surgeon at Edmonton, just to the north of London.  By this time, however, he  had discovered books and poetry.  He read widely and set upon an ambitious course of self-education in the art of poetry.  In 1815, he  continued his medical studies at a London hospital, but it was the next year that his first famous poem, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," was written.  He had four more years to write, and five to live.

There is nothing in literary history to compare with the rapidity of Keats's development.  His first great project was Endymion, a long poem that he  regarded as a kind of "exercise in invention."  I find it almost unreadable; M.H. Abrams, the editor of the section on the Romantics in The Norton Anthology, writes in a footnote that "[t]he poem's constitution is so cloudy, however, that its purport is disputed." It was published in 1818.  The next year, 1819, is frequently called Keats's annus mirabilis, the "year of wonders" in which he composed several of the finest lyric poems in the English language--the "Ode to Psyche," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," and "Ode on Melancholy" were all written within about a three week period in April and May, between the composition of the ballad "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and the ode "To Autumn."  To the summer months belong the great longer poem, Lamia, which retells a story from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.  He also was carrying on with an even more ambitious effort, The Fall of Hyperion, which however he left unfinished: he completed the first canto (468 lines) and 61 lines of Canto II. In a letter, he revealed his dissatisfaction with the work: it has too much of "the false beauty proceeding from art," not enough "true voice of feeling."  (Keats's poems are available online.)

Meanwhile, private misfortune dogged him.  Money was a constant problem.  The Keats orphans were close, but one boy, George, emigrated to America; another, Tom, died of tuberculosis in 1818, when he was 19, after being nursed by John for several months; and the girl, Fanny, was practically quarantined at a school at Walthamstow, perhaps because the guardian did not want her and John putting their heads together on financial matters.  While Tom was dying, Keats fell in love with Fanny Brawne, but his poverty and devotion to poetry, then his illness, kept them from marrying. 

What Keats called his "posthumous existence" may be dated to February 3, 1820, when he coughed up blood, thereby signalling the onset of the disease that had killed both his mother and brother.  He was 24.  The story of his last year is lacerating.  The "treatment" included a starvation diet, the letting of blood (in equal measure to what he coughed up), rest, and, before his last winter could begin, a journey to mild Italy, where he finally died, at Rome, on February 23, 1821.  He seems to have been conscious mainly of unfinished work, waste, and pain.  He asked that his epitaph be, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

A word about his letters.  They proceed in headlong rushes, spelling and grammar be damned, as his hand struggled to keep pace with his racing brain.  In a way they are the opposite of the calm, stately progression of thought and observation one beholds in his poetry.  They were cherished by their first recipients, partly for their own qualities and partly because Keats himself was cherished by his friends.  In time individual specimens have come to be indentified by ideas Keats introduced and the phrases he used to describe them--the letters on "negative capability," "the chamber of maiden thought," "the vale of soul-making," and so on.  Individual passages make one love Keats.  Distraught by the falling out of friends, he writes, in a letter to Benjamin Bailey:

Things have happen'd lately of great Perplexity--You must have heard of them--Reynolds and Haydon retorting and recriminating--and parting for ever--the same thing has happened between Haydon and Hunt--It is unfortunate--Men should bear with each other--there lives not the Man who may not be cut up, aye hashed to pieces on his weakest side. . . .

His last letter, written to Charles Brown from Rome on November 30, 1820, begins:

'Tis the most difficult thing in the world to [sic] me to write a letter. . . . I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.  God knows how it would have been--but it appears to me--however, I will not speak of that subject.

And concludes:

Write to George as soon as you receive this, and tell him how I am, as far as you can guess; and also a note to my sister--who walks about my imagination like a ghost--she is so like Tom.  I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter.  I always made an awkward bow.

God bless you!
John Keats

 

Keats toward the end

I'm working my way toward the end of Walter Jackson Bate's biography of Keats.  Such a short life, such a long book:  at 700+ pages, it works out to almost 30 pages per year.  I'd hate to have to read 30 pages about what I did between my most recent birthdays.

I'm far enough along so that Keats is now, by his own description, living a posthumous existence.  He's coughing up blood.  He's stopped writing  poetry.  Periods where he appears to grasp at hope alternate with those in which he knows he's dying and begins withdrawing from life.  He's broke and relies on friends for lodging.  A note of bitterness sometimes creeps into his letters, especially those to Fanny Brawne, his fiancee.  He does not know it but he will one day be regarded as one of the greatest English poets.  He's 24.

At the end of the last chapter I've finished, Bate describes an event that partakes of something almost like comedy.  Keats was living at the home of Leigh Hunt.  Fanny Brawne sent a letter, and when it arrived Mrs. Hunt, being busy with a child, asked the maid to bring it to Keats.  The maid, however, was discontented--among other things, she resented the extra burden imposed upon her by such a sick man living in the house.  She did not immediately deliver the letter, which fell into the hands of the Hunts' 10-year-old son, and, by the time Keats finally got it, the seal had been broken.  In health he might have relished a story concerning how the complaints of house servants exert their influence on the lives of "the great."  He was, however, sufficiently distraught by the broken seal to determine to move from the Hunts' house.  It was over a letter as prosaic as the events leading to the delayed delivery. 

I say the event partakes of something almost like comedy, but it also has the effect of highlighting the misery Keats endured at the end.  His life got off to a bad start--his father died when he was 8, his mother when he was 14--and the story of his last year makes difficult reading. 

The Electoral College: George Will speaks, says the emperor is splendidly dressed

A few days ago, George Will used his syndicated column to defend the Electoral College.  It's tempting to say that his bow tie must be restricting the flow of oxygen to his brain, but his arguments aren't a lot worse than those unfurled by less well-dressed champions of the Rube Goldberg machine we trot out every four years when it's time to select the chief executive. 

Much of what Will has to say is summed up in this sentence from the end of the column: "Today's electoral vote system provides incentives for parties to alter the attributes that make them uncompetetive in important states."

Well.  It is in that case an incentive whose allure they can resist.  The District of Columbia and 17 states, with 238 electoral votes, have voted for the Democratic presidential candidate for five elections in a  row.  These states make whole regions of the country--the northeast, the western Great Lakes, and the Pacific rim.  They include New York, Illinois, and California.  The Republicans, anyway, are failing in their effort to "alter the attributes that make them uncompetetive in important states."

Of course, we all know that's because they aren't even trying.  The Republicans do not moderate their positions in order to compete in these states.  They blow these states off.  The Electoral College has the opposite effect of what Will claims.  This is obvious to anyone who cares to notice.  It's as if the part of Will's  brain that concocts arguments is at the service of a picture preference that's impervious to reality.

At least he's right about the despicable ruse Pennsylvania Republicans are planning. 

John McIntyre: You don't say

John McIntyre, proprietor of the You Don't Say blog, reports that his readers, unless their appetites can be satisfied by fifteen free page views per month, will soon need to purchase an electronic subscription to the Baltimore Sun. The details persuade me that judicious, spaced visits will make it possible to read all his posts without a subscription.  That's good, because I'd hate to do without such vigorous, sensible posts as this one, on the Occupy Wall Street protests.  Of course, McIntyre's bailiwick is language--he's the Sun's chief copy guy--and he's a fount of good sense on that subject, too: see, for just one for instance, his take down of those whose rules do not allow for sentences beginning with conjunctions.  It's a bit of nonsense that would require a lot of editing symbols in the margins of the King James version of the Bible.

Which reminds me of a story about Churchill.  He took pains with his prose, and once, when an editor had recast one of his sentences so as to avoid ending it with a preposition, is supposed to have fumed: "That's the kind of English up with which I will not put!" 

Put downs

The other day I'm reading along in Walter Jackson Bate's biography of John Keats when I came to the section concerning the critical reviews of Endymion, Keats's first long poem.  The work was savaged in several of the conservative journals of the time, and Byron, in Don Juan, famously surmised that the nasty reviews had mortally wounded Keats, who died (of consumption) just a few years later, at 25:

 
'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle
Should let itself be snuffed out by an article.

Keats actually was not very much affected by the reviews, which nevertheless drew fire from his defenders.  There was Hazlitt's "Letter to William Gifford"--Gifford was the editor of Quarterly Review, a Tory magazine that could not abide Keats and his liberal, free-thinking friends--commencing, "You have an ugly trick of saying what is not true of anyone you do not like; and it will be the object of this letter to cure you of it."  According to Bate, this "letter" is "one of the half dozen most sustained pieces of invective in English"--I wish I could find it online.  But Gifford was only the editor.  Of the actual reviewer, John Wilson Croker, Macaulay wrote that he (Croker) would travel "a hundred miles through sleet and snow, on the top of a coach, in a December night, to search a parish register, for the sake of showing that a man is illegitimate, or a woman older than she says she is."

It's good to know that such a fellow could find work in the journalistic organs of the first quarter of the nineteenth century.  Croker: was he named by Dickens?

Keats himself wrote in a letter that "the commonest man shows a grace in a quarrel," for "the energies displayed in it are fine."  I read a lot, and almost all of it is completely forgotten, but bits of barbed invective lodge in my mind for years.  Possibly I am just not a very nice person.  Here are some examples of things I'll never forget:

• Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, on George Bush II: "He was born on third base, and acts like he hit a triple."
• A condensed review of "Beverly Hills Cop": "Eddie Murphy tricks the white dumbos.  For some  reason, audiences love it." 
• A golf caddy, after a country-club member, having made a score of incalculable proportions, complained of having drawn "the worst caddy ever": "Sir, that would be entirely too great a coincidence."
• To close with a recent example,  Christopher Benfey, writing about Mitt Romney at the NYRB Blog: "On television, Mitt looks like someone hired to play the president in a movie that couldn't afford Clooney."

Nontransformational

If you're suffering that kind of sunken mood for which any sensation at all might be therapeutic, I recommend going to Hendrik Hertzberg's blog--he's on the Blog Roll down and to the right--and, in his Categories, click on Campaign '08.  Those were heady days, all about "hope" and "transformation."  Is the adjectival form of "transformation" "transformational" or "transformative"?  No one has to know, because no one is talking about transformation anymore.

On the middle east, to take one example, Obama now sounds like a spokesman for the Netanyahoo government.  "Let's be honest," he said in his speech to the UN General Assembly, "the fault lies entirely with the Palestinians."  I don't know his exact words but that was the gist of it.  Nothing about occupation, settlements, 1967 borders, the Nakba.  Everything about Israeli citizens murdered while riding public transporation.  It's clear that the United States will exercise its veto power to keep the UN from recognizing a Palestinian state. 

Here's what would be transformational, transformative, and tending to effect a transformation: if when the question of Palestinian statehood came before the Security Council, the United States abstained from  the vote.  Charles Cecil, a former foreign service officer posted to the middle east, describes what would happen then:

The resolution would pass.  The world would be stunned.  The United States would enter an entirely new order in our relations with the Muslim countries of the world.  The vision [Obama] outlined in Cairo for better relations with the Muslim world would take the largest step forward of [his] presidency.  The United States would once again have regained the high moral ground we so often claim to occupy.  The energies loosed by the "Arab spring" would continue to be devoted to their own domestic affairs rather than being diverted into condemning the United States.  We are hypocrites when we claim to want justice for the Palestinians but we do nothing meaningful to help achieve this.

Not going to happen.  The standard line in the Obama government is that Israel and the Palestinians must negotiate an agreement.  To get its state, Israel did not have to negotiate with the Palestinians, and it is not going to negotiate now when it can continue to achieve on the ground, with new settlements, what would never be accepted in a fair agreement.

After the 2008 election, there was a New Yorker cover that was all dark except for the Lincoln memorial and the "O" in "The New Yorker," both of which shimmered in white light.  It was the artistic counterpart of Hertzberg's editorial euphoria.  I was myself a victim, to a degree.  My post for November 5, 2008, entitled "Dyspeptic Jubilation," concluded:

The moments surrounding ten o'clock local time, when CNN finally called Virginia for Obama just before turning the Pacific rim blue as the polls closed in the west, the announcement of the projected winner accompanied by shots of a variegated and cheering throng in Chicago, were for this dour Norwegian positively exhilirating.  What a night!

"Were there ever any writhed not at passed joy?" 

UPDATE: Though if McCain had won, things would be worse; and, if Perry does, they certainly will be.