Eric The Blue

Shakespeare in a time of coronavirus

Social distancing? Self-quarantine? I've been practicing for this for years. All the fun, convivial people are freaking out as my eye scans, lasciviously, the bookcase. Finally, alone with you guys. School's not out till almost 4. 

But then, before the fun can begin, school cancelled indefinitely and I'm called back to the world: for example, IT support for online learning assignments, just the kind of work English majors can expect to get. The coronavirus giveth, and the coronavirus taketh away. 

Rosanne Cash, also standing at the intersection of books and pestilence, tweeted:

Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he wrote King Lear.

— rosanne cash (@rosannecash) March 14, 2020

Well over a quarter million likes and more than 50,000 retweets. I got tired of scrolling through 3,000 comments to see whether anyone questioned her source. Here is Frank Kermode in The Riverside Shakespeare:

King Lear was entered in the Stationers' Register on November 26, 1607, and the entry mentions that it was performed "uppon S. Stephens night at Christmas last,"  that is, December 26, 1606. The lower limit is March 1603, when Samuel Harsnett published his Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, a work from which Shakespeare took the names of Edgar's devils, and which he also remembered at some other points [in the play].

And there follows more learned discussion, narrowing the date of composition to 1604, possibly leaking into 1605. We don't know much about Shakespeare's daily habits, but there would have been no reason for him to be quarantined in 1604. The previous year, 1603, had been a bad one, 30,000 dead of plague in London, but it was not enough for the theatres to close, as they had for the seasons of 1592 and 1593, to which years belong Shakespeare's long narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. But who wants to say we owe those almost unknown poems to Shakespeare having been under quarantine? No one reads them except scholars, and scholars only read them because Shakespeare wrote them. Shakespeare's grocery lists would probably be the subject of PhD dissertations if they were extant, but they aren't. 

I love Rosanne Cash, and it's sort of a romantic notion to think of Shakespeare writing a play about the end of the world during a pestilence—maybe that's why she thinks it happened that way, but it didn't. He didn't need to be under quarantine to get things done. Besides writing plays, he acted in them, was a shareholder in the acting company that performed his works (as well as the works of others), and owned a 10% interest in the theatre in which these works were performed. Actor, playwright,  businessman, litigant—for, on at least two occasions, he sued people who (he claimed) owed him relatively small sums of money. A real multitasker but, I'm afraid, a disappointment to people with gushing feelings about how artistic geniuses likely live. Of all the penetrating commentary included in The Riverside Shakespeare, the one sentence that sticks in my mind, from Harry Levin's General Introduction, is: "The figure of Shakespeare as a practical man of affairs, though well attested by the evidence, seemed rather too modest to occupy the lofty pedestal reared by the Bardolaters." 

But, followers of Rosanne Cash, by all means, write more great songs while you're social distancing. I hope your kids don't distract you. Shakespeare's, by the way, were almost certainly a hundred miles away with their mother in Stratford-on-Avon when, toward the end of Lear, with chaos and dissolution encroaching, their dad made the old king say to his loving daughter:

              . . . Come, let's away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out—
And take upon 's the mystery of things
As if we were God's spies; and we'll wear out,
In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by th' moon.

Droppings

1. Someone needs to tell Mayor Pete that the shirt-and-tie-without-a-jacket look has been ruined forever by Jim Jordan. You wouldn't think a gay guy would need a fashion tip from me, but then, I am stuck in a monolingual state. Maybe he was studying while I watched Queer Eye.

2. In Shakespeare's tragedies about good loving gone bad, the force of the tragedy is diminished somewhat by the slender basis for said love. Romeo is just a dopey teenager caught on the rebound. "You woo by the book," complains Juliet, who isn't as stupid as her wooer. She means that Romeo's lines, displaced in time, sound lifted from mediocre rom-coms, and she's right. As for Othello, here's how he describes the provenance of his marriage to Desdemona:

She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I loved her that she did pity them.

Who could have guessed that they'd come to grief? As Desdemona's father would tell you, marriages might succeed more frequently if arranged by parents, over the objections of the principals.

3. What do you know, a shooting this morning at a church in Texas. Bloody Mary bars, people—assuming they have them in Texas and they're deemed safe to be open on Sunday, as gun shops presumably are.

4. I wonder whether the Buckeye football coach suffers from innumeracy. Five minutes into the fourth quarter, it makes little sense to take a 2-point lead by kicking an extra point.

5. If Trump's closest advisors would under oath refute the Democrats' theory of the case, he wouldn't be blocking them from testifying. Duh!

O O O O that Shakespeherian rag

The place of A.C. Bradley in the history of Shakespeare criticism may be judged by the following lines from the pen of some forgotten wag of the 1920s, which places it a couple of decades after the publication of Shakespearean Tragedy and a decade before Bradley's death, in 1935:

I dreamt last night that Shakespeare's Ghost
Sat for a civil service post.
The English paper for that year
Had several questions on King Lear--
Which Shakespeare answered very badly,
Because he hadn't read his Bradley.

The most interesting droppings from the Wikipedia entry for Bradley concern how he was the youngest of 21 [sic] children born to the preacher Charles Bradley and his second wife, a circumstance that may account for Bradley never marrying and living for much of his adult life with one of his many sisters: I imagine each of them, at some point in their young lives, separately considering the crowded conditions in the parsonage and concluding that there must be a better way to live.  

Shakespearean Tragedy is largely a commentary on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, which are taken up in turn and in the order of probable composition.  For the general reader, the attraction is accessibility.  Over and over again, you read something and think it's exactly right and would have occurred to you, too, if only you were as smart and careful a reader as Bradley.  For example:

Imagine Goneril uttering the famous words [of Lady Macbeth, explaining why she had not herself killed Duncan], Had he not resembled/My father as he slept, I had done 't.  They are spoken, I think, without any sentiment--impatiently, as though she regretted her weakness: but it was there.

I wonder whether Bradley's choice of plays to discuss elevated them above the others (so strong has been his influence), or whether he chose them because they were already regarded as preeminent.  It does seem that Hamlet, the first of them, likely written in 1600, the year Shakespeare turned 36, represents a new phase: it's about half again as long as any of its approximately twenty predecessors in the drama and contains more than 600 words that Shakespeare had not till then deployed in any play or poem.  He also for the first time abandons plot plausibility in order to create swirling effects of psychological disturbance, despair, savagery, and nihilism--effects that carry through in Othello (1603?), King Lear (1605?), and Macbeth (1606?).  The implications for Shakespeare's biography are intriguing but Bradley's focus is on these four plays, especially the characters.  One learns to keep one's guard up and not be knocked out by famous, soaring passages that are frequently turned in some way by a terse and regrettably forgotten reply.  

Macbeth:
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

Doctor:
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.

And from The Tempest:

Miranda:
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in 't!

Prospero:
'Tis new to thee.

Much ado about Shakespeare

Discussing the options at Southwest High's "summer enrichment" program at the supper table, our 11-year-old made it pretty clear that "Much Ado About Shakespeare" is not for her.  She went so far as to suggest that Shakespeare is for "loser dweebs" like her loser dweeb stepdad.  I have to admit, the peppy course description, emphasizing how kids only THINK Shakespeare is boring, protested way too much.  Also, I've recently reread Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, and, even putting aside language difficulties, the plays are disorienting. 

I mean mainly that the plots don't make very much sense.  The whole set-up to King Lear seems implausible.  Why does the king insist that his daughters flatter him?  Considering that he does, why won't Cordelia play along?  It's preposterous.  In Macbeth, the two principals seem to trade characters off stage, between scenes.  First, he's cracking under the stress while she tries to prop him up; then, next time she's on stage, it's her mind that's diseased and he's putting on his armor.

Hamlet is the most perplexing.  It's been pointed out that, in the old play from which Shakespeare took the story, Hamlet is a mere boy, the king knows he knows, and the boy feigns madness in order not to be immediately killed.  Shakespeare's changes remove the motivation for the main character to pretend to be crazy, yet his main character pretends to be crazy, too.  It's a strategy without an objective.

Maybe the easiest true thing to say about this is that plots and plausibility don't help create in the theatre a whirling nightmare of an experience.  If it makes sense, it won't seem disturbing enough.  I don't think these plays are boring but I can see why normal young people wouldn't care for them.

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was christened on April 26, 1564--the year of Michelangelo's death, and Calvin's--at the Church of the Holy Trinity, in Stratford-on-Avon, a small market town in Warwickshire, about 100 miles northwest of London.  He was the eldest child of six (to survive infancy)--four boys, two girls--born to John Shakespeare, a leatherworker, and Mary Arden, the daughter of a prosperous landowner.

John Shakespeare was active in town politics and in 1568 was elected bailiff, what we now call mayor, which would have permitted William to attend the local grammar school free of charge.  The curriculum stressed rhetoric, Christian ethics, and classical literature; it seems a virtual certainty that Shakespeare, who did not attend university, acquired the formal part of his education at this school.  The documentary record loses track of him, however, between his birth and the marriage license that was obtained on November 27, 1582.  His wife, the former Anne Hathaway, was 26, eight years his senior. Their first child, Susanna, was born six months later.  There has been much speculation about Anne, to whom 34 years later Shakespeare bequeathed his "second best bed," and the details of their marriage in general--whether, for example, it was a "shotgun wedding."  It's evident that during the twenty years or so that Shakespeare spent mainly in London, acting and pursuing business interests related to the theatre and composing 38 dramas, a dozen or so being widely regarded as among the very greatest works of the world's literature, they lived apart, she remaining at Stratford-on-Avon, where twins Hamnet and Judith were born in 1585.  The biographical record being too scanty to satisfy curiosity on this point and others, his literary output has naturally been mined for clues, and some have found significance in the passage in The Winter's Tale wherein a shepherd laments that from the ages of 16 to 23 young men do nothing "but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting." 

After the birth of the twins, Shakespeare again drops from sight until, in 1592, he is attacked in a pamphlet by the writer Robert Greene, a university-educated playwright who appears to have taken offense at the way in which a lowly actor was now establishing himself as a dramatist.  So between 1585 and 1592 Shakespeare had moved to London and acquired enough of a reputation in the theatre to have aroused a fellow practitioner's envy.  He also seems to have had defenders, for the publisher of the pamphlet soon issued a written apology in which some personal traits of the young dramatist are mentioned:

I am as sory as if the originall fault had beene my fault, because my selfe haue seene his demeanor no lesse ciuill than he excelent in the qualitie he  professes: Besides, diuers of worship haue reported his vprightnes of dealing, which argues his  honesty, and his facetious grace in writting, that approoues his Art.

From now on the broad outlines, if not the details of daily living, are chronicled in theatre records, property deeds, business documents, court records, and the like.  The picture that  emerges is of a practical man of affairs, extremely busy in his work life, where he excelled and prospered.  It has not escaped notice that on a couple of occasions he used the courts to enforce the payment of relatively small debts.  In 1597, he purchased, for sixty pounds, the second most valuable residence in Stratford-on-Avon.  Had he died  in the same year, he would have lived three years longer than did Marlowe, the second greatest dramatist of the period, and it is possible the two would be regarded similarly.  But starting right around 1600, the year in which Hamlet was likely composed, Shakespeare's work turned.  To the next six or seven years belong the tragedies of Othello, Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra.  For those inclined to read Shakespeare's autobiography in his plays, Hamlet seems a break through.  It is longer by half than anything before it, a linguistic analysis reveals more than 600 words that had not been deployed in more than twenty earlier plays (and two long poems), and plausibility is sacrificed in order to achieve disturbing effects--for example, the "antic disposition" adopted by the hero makes perfect sense in Shakespeare's source but not in the play that he wrote, where it is nevertheless preserved.  The audience, wondering whether Hamlet will indeed take revenge for the murder of his father, is confronted with unexpected soliloquoys in which the topic of suicide is at the fore.  One critic has remarked that, of all Shakespeare's characters, only Hamlet could have written his plays.  Many have sensed or supposed that Hamlet is the character closest to Shakespeare the man.

One approach to all such speculation is to dismiss it as overwrought and purely conjectural.  Those otherwise inclined will note that Shakespeare's son Hamnet was buried in 1596, his father in 1601.  The critic Edward Dowden identified four periods to Shakespeare's career and labeled them "In the workshop," "In the world," "Out of the depths," and "On the heights."  This seemed to indicate that autobiography was the principal force exerting itself on this "practical man of affairs" and has been dismissed as too pat.  Yet it is true that there is much gaiety in the plays composed before 1600, that his work for most of the next decade was characterized by savagery and nihilism, which then modulated into something like serene acceptance in such late works as The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. He retired and returned to Stratford-on-Avon in about 1612.  He made a will in March of 1616 and died on the 23rd of the following month, almost exactly 52 years after his birth.  The recurring word in the testimony of contemporary acquaintances is "gentle," which then was more closely related to gentilesse than it is today.  "The best verbal vignette," according to Alfred Harbage, "was written by his rival Ben Jonson, the more impressive for being imbedded in a context mainly critical":

. . . . I loved the man, and doe honour his memory (on this side idolatry) as much as any. Hee was indeed  honest, and of an open and free nature: had an excellent Phantsie, brave notions, and gentle expressions. . . .

Bear free and patient thoughts

King Lear: the commentary, if it does not swoon over Lear's "redemptive suffering," discovers a statement of bottomless nihilism.  It won't decide the question but, in the sources from which Shakespeare drew the story, Cordelia lives happily ever after.  One of the very many very memorable speeches in the play that Shakespeare wrote concerns Lear's conception of how he and she would spend their time if this happy ending were permitted:    

                        Come, let's away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too--
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out--
And take upon 's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies; and we'll wear out,
In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by th' moon.

The reader may make out, amidst the horrendous suffering, some advice, something to put up against the horrors that are pitilessly depicted.  Renounce the world.  Be patient.  "Bear free and patient thoughts," is how Edgar puts it, to his father, who wants to kill himself.  Maybe it doesn't seem like much.  His father, after all, has had both eyes plucked out--"One side will mock another. Th' other too."--in a scene so brutal that it caused one famous critic, Lionel Trilling, to observe that questions about its propriety as art have been raised by critics who otherwise are unwilling to admit that Shakepeare ever went wrong.

A stray word on Othello

Othello, holder of the lowest profile among the famous four (being the four taken up by A.C. Bradley in Shakespearean Tragedy), has been my recent coffee-shop companion.  Iago has gotten a lot of attention in his 400 years.   Coleridge spoke of his "motiveless malignity," and more than 150 years later Joan Didion began Play It As It Lays:

What makes Iago evil? some people ask.  I never ask.

This most famous of villains has been for so long the object of earnest inquiry that to dismiss his riddle, or deny that there even is one, suggests something has gone awry in the dismisser.  But what about Othello himself?  He's usually played as some deep-throated magnificence--"Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them"--whose tragic fall elicits horror but respect.  Not sure I see it.  "She loved me for the dangers I had passed," he says, explaining his history with Desdemona, "[a]nd I loved her that she did pity them."  The Duke's response--"I think this tale would win my daughter too"--reinforces one's sense of a certain conventional hollowness.  Iago is always given credit for being an evil genius but, really, how hard is it to gull Othello? 

IAGO
. . . . There are a kind of men so loose of soul
That in their sleeps will mutter their affairs.
One of this kind is Cassio.
In sleep I heard him say, 'Sweet Desdemona,
Let us be wary, let us hide our loves!'
And then, sir, would he gripe and wring my hand,
Cry 'O sweet creature!' and then kiss me hard,
As if he plucked up kisses by the roots
That grew upon my lips; then laid his leg
Over my thigh, and sighed, and kissed, and then
Cried 'Cursed fate that gave thee to the Moor!'

OTHELLO
O monstrous! monstrous!

Is it crazy to be less impressed by the diabolical cleverness of Iago than by the--shall we say--lack of a certain adult shrewdness in Othello?  As the action winds down Emilia berates Othello, "O gull! O dolt! As ignorant as dirt!"--and who can disagree?  The whole play may be done as a low farce. 

Farcical, but brutal: as usual, the stage is strewn with corpses.

Hamlet talks with the king

You've heard of the nice lady who loved Hamlet because it has so many famous sayings.  I've been re-reading it and came today to a passage that the nice lady may have forgotten about.  It's in the third scene of the fourth act.  Hamlet, having killed Polonius, is called before the king, who asks, a little plaintively, "Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius?"  Hamlet answers, "At supper."  That Hamlet!  He doesn't mean that Polonius is eating supper.  It's the worms who are eating.  The king really wants to know where the body is but Hamlet riffs on how a beggar may fish with a worm that has supped upon a king, in which case royalty is obliged to make its way through the beggar's digestive tract.

It's not all famous soliloquies, "To be or not to be" perfectly enunciated and accompanied by graceful gestures.  Speaking of that, however: what exactly is going on?  Hamlet's problem is whether or not to believe the ghost, whether or not to take revenge upon the new king, his uncle, right?  But then, pretty much without warning, he assumes a position alone on the stage and declares that the question is not why he doesn't kill his uncle but why he doesn't kill himself.  He's got death on his mind.  It's possible he wasn't altogether healthy back in the days before the play began and his dad the king was taking those daily constitutionals in the orchard.

I King Henry IV

I'm coming to the conclusion of I King Henry IV and my reaction, which I think is in line with that of millions of others over the past 400+ years, is: less royal court, more Falstaff, please.  Indeed, scholars have speculated that II King Henry IV is an (initially) unplanned sequel intended to take advantage of the public's fondness for the boozy wheezing fatso who, in the first scene of Act V, provides this memorable summary of his personal "catechism" (in the context of preparation for battle, he has just been informed by the Prince of Wales that "he owes God a death"):

'Tis  not due yet: I would be loath to pay him before his day. What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me?  Well, 'tis  no matter; honor pricks me on.  Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honor set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honor? A word. What is that word honor? Air--a trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. 'Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon--and so ends my catechism.

The officially-approved, Cliffs-notes interpretation is that the play depicts different character types and that Falstaff is a foil to the impulsive Hotspur, who is so hot for glory.  The one is too much this way, the other too much the other way, and what is recommended is for the humors to be mixed as, at the end, they are in the reformed Prince Hal. Very tidy.  If that was the intention, it seems to me that Shakespeare confounded himself, somewhat in the manner of Dostoevski making Ivan Karamazov's brief against God so convincing that it's the main thing readers remember about his last novel.  Who remembers Hotspur?  The official history concerning the king and the rebels, their conventional reckonings and assumptions--all obliterated by Falstaff's subversive intelligence.  Where will honor get you?  Into a casket.  Who has it?  "He that died a Wednesday" (while Falstaff was drinking and whoring, which pastimes he pursued again on Thursday).

Charged with raising a force through conscription, Falstaff accepts cash payoffs from anyone of means, so that his "soldiers" are a rag-a-tag collection of ne'er-do-wells.  Prince Hal, well along the road to reformation now, enters with Westmoreland to review the troops, which is the occasion for this exchange:

PRINCE  . . . . But tell me, Jack, whose fellows are these that come after?

FALSTAFF  Mine, Hal, mine.

PRINCE  I did never see such pitiful rascals.

FALSTAFF  Tut, tut! good enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder.  They'll fill a pit as well as better.  Tush, man, mortal men, mortal men.

My paperback Pelican Shakespeare helpfully glosses, "toss i.e. on a pike."   

Shakespeare in his sonnets

A passage from Francis Meres's Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury, published in 1598, refers to "honey-tongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends, &c."  The passage has persuaded scholarship that most if not all of Shakespeare's known 150 or so sonnets were in existence by the latter part of the 1590s, which would mean they were composed when he was by a few years either side of 30.  They are uneven in quality and remind us that Shakespeare, who died within a few days of his 52nd birthday, was something of a late bloomer: had he been dead at 30, as was his contemporary Christopher Marlowe, literary history would likely regard the two as approximate coequals.  Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth all belong to a 5- or 6-year period coinciding roughly with the second half of his fourth decade of life.

Since he is perhaps the leading cultural icon of western civilization, and knowledge of his biography is mainly limited to documents as colorless as church records and real estate conveyances, there has naturally been a lot of interest in anything that might inform us about his private life.  The sonnets have been in this regard a fertile and possibly over-farmed field.  It's possible to detect two groups of poems: those numbered 1 to 126 concern a young man, the poet's admired friend and social superior, who is encouraged to marry and have children--though it is not always apparent that the subject is the same man, or even a man.  Several of these poems allude to a rival poet who also praises the friend. The remaining 25 or so sonnets concern the famous "dark lady" and an unusual love triangle.  The dark lady--the ideal Elizabethan beauty was a blonde ("snowy breasts" being a cliched term of praise)--is beautiful, promiscuous, and, to the poet, irresistible, though she also arouses in him feelings of disgust with himself. In #144 ("Two loves I have, of comfort and despair"), the dark lady has seduced the trusted friend, and the poet's reaction is not anger over the double betrayal but concern for the welfare of the friend.  The poem, like many of those involving the dark lady, is overtly sexual: in #144, for instance, it is not hard to tell what the poet means when he imagines "one angel in another's hell" (the trusted friend penetrating the dark lady), the proof arriving in the well known symptom of a venereal infection ("Till my bad angel fire my good one out").

The temptation has been to regard these poems as veiled or even coded autobiography, and the reaction to the speculating succumbers to temptation has been to declare all such inquiries irrelevant.  If the author of Macbeth was not himself a mass murderer, then the sonnets, too, are an exercise of imaginative projection.  Hallet Smith, in his introduction to the sonnets in The Riverside Shakespeare, concludes that agnosticism is the responsible position on this question.  Perhaps, but what of our fun?  If only murderers could write of murder, then the literature of murder would be slight; the situation may however be different with love triangles. There is a sense in which the sonnets often seem quite personal--when the poet, for example, more than once puns on his first name. Last gossipy comment: when Shakespeare was 18, he married a woman 26; they had three children, a boy and two girls, but seem to have lived apart, Shakespeare of course in the theatrical world of London and his wife back at Stratford, through the better part of two decades; and Shakespeare, in his will, famously left to her his "second best bed."  It requires a quality of mind akin to negative capability to remain agnostic about the possible meaning of these details without flying to wild conclusions about how they may fit together with the sketchy "story" told by the sonnets.

I said that the sonnets are uneven.  Shakespeare is Shakespeare, but it has to be said that more than half are tangled, boring webs that would never be read if he hadn't written them.  One can find fault even with some that are justly famous.  Of #29, for instance, it seems fair to ask how, if the mere memory of his love elevates him from despair to "heaven's gate," he could nevertheless avoid thinking of her (or him) long enough to get so despondent in the first place.  Keats complained of the "pouncing rhymes," and indeed the concluding couplet lends itself to chimingly cheap endings.  Shakespeare rarely appears to have labored to avoid this pitfall--besides #29, see #12, #30, #60, and #130, all of which conclude gimpily after memorable starts.  I think the best of the lot are #71, #73, #116, and #138, though others will have favorites that I have maybe slandered.  We could still agree that his best sonnets are among the very best short poems in the language.

Discussions of Shakespeare's sonnets, if they take up The Autobiographical Question, invariably relate the anecdote of Wordsworth's remark that Shakespeare, in his sonnets, "unlocked his heart"--to which Browning retorted, "Then the less Shakespeare he."  I take Browning to be saying there's bigger game in the Shakespearean forest.  If you are interested in his biography, and have clicked through the links above, you will have noticed that what the sonnets are more than anything else about is: impermanence, the levelling power of time, the transience of life.  A characteristic emotion, and phrase, concerns "precious friends hid in death's dateless night."  The author of these poems is the author of Macbeth, whose hero denigrated life by comparing it to "a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more."  For all the infinite variety, the theme goes right through the center of his work.  Toward the end of The Tempest, the late play often called "Shakespeare's last word," Prospero expresses it one last time:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors
(As I foretold you) were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air,
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-clapp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

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."

Who wrote Shakespeare's plays?

Shakespeare did.  A recent article in the local daily suggests that the conspiracy theorists are gaining ground, but read closely.  The idea is that Shakespeare, a provincial yokel who never attended university or traveled outside of England, could not be the author of some thirty plays that do not so much depict the world as reproduce it on the page and stage in all its many colors.  Writing is confessional; you have to have lived it to describe it; and the Earl of Oxford, not Shakespeare, has the needed biography.

But the Earl of Oxford died in 1604.  Around ten of the plays were written after that.  In a more fundamental way, the Earl of Oxford could not have lived them, or written them.  William Shakespeare did.

The article names some of the Earl of Oxford's champions: a few actors, a newspaper guy, three justices of the Supreme Court.  Call me an elitist, but why are there no literary scholars among them?  Here is Harry Levin, writing about 35 years ago in his General Introduction to The Riverside Shakespeare:

The figure of Shakespeare as a practical man of affairs, although well attested by the evidence, seemed rather too modest to occupy the lofty pedastel erected 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.

Still true, and the proliferations continue apace.

The principle of Occam's razor--simple explanations are to be preferred to more complicated ones--recommends we conclude that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays.  The alternative view requires too much intrigue, too many conspirators.  The reason the editors of the First Folio attributed the plays to their friend and contemporary, William Shakespeare, is that he really did write them.  Ben Jonson's famous poetic tribute was just that, a poetic tribute to the author, not an exercise in advancing a very intricate web of intrigue and deceit.

A demurring opinion on Macbeth

Last night Amanda and I saw with friends a preview performance of the Guthrie Theatre's new production of Macbeth. I consequently spent my spare moments last week re-reading the play and some of the critical commentary to it that is available to me here at home.  There is one recurring note in the commentary that I just cannot see.  Here, for example, is Mark Van Doren in his Shakespeare:

Shakespeare again has enclosed his evil within a universe of good, his storm center within wide areas of peace. . . . Malcolm speaks the language of the play, but he has recovered its lost idiom. Blood will cease to flow, movement will recommence, fear will be forgotten, sleep will season every life, and the seeds of time will blossom in due order.

And Frank Kermode, in his introduction to Macbeth in The Riverside Shakespeare:

The suffering of the Macbeths may be thought of as caused by the pressure of the world slowly assuming its true shape and crushing them.  This is the work of time; as usual in Shakespeare, evil, however great, burns itself out, and time is the servant of providence. Nowhere is this clearer than in Macbeth.

Is it really that clear? There are some loose ends, and one of them concerns Banquo's son Fleance, who escaped the murderers who bludgeon his father to death outside Macbeth's castle right before the banquet.  Banquou's dying speech--"O, treachery! Fly, good Fleance, fly, fly, fly!/Thou mayst revenge--O slave!"--is interrupted at the line break by the stage direction, "Exit Fleance."  And he (Fleance) is not seen or heard from again.  Yet the weird sisters appear to have prophesied that he would be king: "Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none," they inform Banquo, in I.iii, after predicting Macbeth's ascent to the throne.  It was on account of that prophecy that Macbeth gave the murderers particular instructions to dispatch Fleance as well as Banquo, and when they report back after the ambush that Fleance escaped, Macbeth says in an aside, "Then comes my fit again. I had else been perfect."

The play ends with the impending coronation of Malcolm, the murdered Duncan's rightful heir.  But I cannot take it as a restoration of order that proves evil has burnt itself out--not with Fleance unaccounted for.  Malcolm should not sleep too soundly.  Fleance is to be king.

Myriad-minded

My wife and I saw a performance of The Merchant of Venice at the new Guthrie here in Minneapolis last weekend.  The production has been the subject of some spirited commentary, in local newspaper editorials and letters to the editor, about the character of Shylock and the question of anti-Semitism.  A rabbi stops short of calling Shakespeare, perhaps the iconic cultural icon, a bigot, but asks rhetorically what the purpose of staging the play could be.  Another theatre-goer answers that the real villains of the play are the hypocritical Christians who, not content to deny the Jew his just suit, torture and humiliate him soon as they gain the upper hand.

The opinions are strong and diverse and I disagree with all of them.  Or maybe it is that I agree with them all only in part.  To claim that Shylock is a victim of the Christian hypocrites, not a vicious caricature of a greedy scheming Jew, requires an ability to close one's eyes and ears for long periods, only to open them again at convenient moments.  Which is a way of allowing that there are such moments, the most famous being the lines in which Shylock asks whether a Jew does not bleed when pricked, laugh when tickled, die when poisoned.   More to the point about the Christian hypocrites, Shylock in the trial scene asserts:

What judgment shall I dread, doing no wrong?
You have among you many a purchased slave,
Which, like your asses and your dogs and mules,
You use in abject and in slavish parts,
Because you bought them. Shall I say to you,
"Let them be free, marry them to your heirs!
Why sweat they under burdens? Let their beds
Be made as soft as yours, and let their palates
Be seasoned with such viands"? You will answer,
"The slaves are ours." So do I answer you.

Perhaps it is that the newspaper prints letters that are all on one side or the other and that Shakespeare is at all times on all sides--thus the phrases, invented by his best critics, such as "negative capability," "myriad-minded," "simultaneousness," all these nicely summarized by Arthur Eastman, in A Short HIstory of Shakespearean Criticism, as "the power to forego the gains derived from a particular vantage point in the interests of an inclusive view."  Shakespeare is more elusive than the letter-writers.

Yet I cannot myself help trying to catch hold of Shakespeare the man.  Little of his biography is known but we do know that, as a mature and prosperous man of the theatre, he more than once used the courts to compel payment of rather small debts.  Stephen Greenblatt, in Will and the World, writes:

For whatever the reason, Shakespeare seems to have treated money--his money, at least--with considerable seriousness.  No one refers to him as a skinflint, but he did not like to waste his substance, and he was clearly determined not to be an easy mark for anyone. In 1604 he was storing more malt in his barn in Stratford than he (or, more to the point, his wife) needed for domestic consumption.  He sold twenty bushels of it to a neighboring apothecary, Philip Rogers, who had a sideline brewing ale.  Rogers's debt, including another two shillings he borrowed from Shakespeare, amounted to a little over two pounds.  When the debtor returned only six shillings, Shakespeare hired a lawyer and took his neighbor to court to recover the remaining thirty-five shillings tenpence and damages.  Thirty-five shillings ten pence was not a trivial sum at the time, but neither was it a king's ransom.  It took energy to pursue the matter, just as it took energy a few years later when Shakespeare once again went to court to recover the six pounds, plus damages, that he said was owed to him by John Addenbrooke.

If "nothing human was alien to him" it might follow that his villains, too, partook of aspects of his character.