Poem of the Week 2024/45

Our legions are brimful, our cause is ripe.

The enemy increaseth every day;

We, at the height, are ready to decline.

There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

– William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene 3, ll 214 - 223

I had a different poem planned for today, but agitation over the presidential election has gotten the better of me & my original selection will have to wait. This passage jumped into my mind, because Shakespeare has something to say to every moment, & this does feel like a turning point in the country's history, a pretty clear choice between a backward-looking – well, that's not quite the right phrase; backward, yes, but looking to a past that was invented, or merely hallucinated, by some citizens, to the exclusion & often intense suffering of many other citizens – rage-filled fascist (who is also, quite clearly, in cognitive decline, & I do not say that lightly or callously) versus, you know, an actual functioning adult, who has a track record of trying to help her fellow citizens. And yet it's close. I remain baffled & frankly disgusted. I guess this election, like the Civil War (of which it is, in fact, another manifestation) will never end, but only continue in different mutations.

Brutus makes this speech to persuade his fellow conspirators to join battle at Philippi with the forces of Octavius Caesar (later to be Caesar Augustus), Marc Anthony, & the negligible Lepidus. Brutus, famously described in his funeral oration for Caesar by Marc Anthony with searing, sneering irony as "an honorable man", is, in actual fact, an honorable man, brought in my Cassius to lend moral & intellectual respectability to their plot to assassinate Caesar, thereby ending his burgeoning power. The alliance between the conspirators is already fraying, but Cassius gives in to Brutus, to conciliate him, with disastrous results for their cause.

Yet Brutus really isn't wrong in his assessment: he knows their alliance, their armies, their power, are all starting to fall apart, while the strength of Octavius & Anthony is growing. Strike while the iron is hot, in other words, & strike before your enemy gets out of your control. Brutus, being a philosophically inclined politician, speaks not of strategy or military advantage, as a politician or a general would, but of things a philosopher would talk of: how to live in the world, how to judge the unknowable ways of Fortune (& of History). The metaphors are grand: the ocean, the tide rising & falling, the full sea, & we in our uncertain little ship, trying to negotiate the hazards around us. Brutus knows that the events around us are uncontrollable; it's how we respond that makes a successful life. We are on a voyage, separated from the deep & powerful sea only by our relatively frail ship, trying to negotiate often unseen dangers. Brutus's advice here is actually quite sound; it turns out to be exactly the wrong thing to do, as the more realistic & calculating Cassius had tried to say, but still: good advice. But the mysterious turns of Fortune (or, as we might say, of History) are as unfathomable as the sea.

When I was young, Julius Caesar used to be featured on high school reading lists (which is not where I read it; I read all of Shakespeare on my own); I suspect the real reason is that the verse is fairly straightforward (plus there's a stabbing, & ghosts, & it's "historical", but not about English kings we don't care about anymore unless it's through Shakespeare's words), but it used to be presented as showing "Shakespeare supported democracy", because we like to believe that great artists believe what we claim to believe. This struck juvenile & precocious me as, you know, implausible: even the American revolutionaries, two centuries after Shakespeare's birth, didn't believe in "democracy" the way we understand it (which is one of the reasons we're saddled with the goddam Electoral College), & even if Shakespeare (the all-seeing!) had somehow decided democracy was the way to go, it's unlikely that he could present a work defending it under a monarchy vigilant of its prerogatives & on the constant look-out for subversion.

So Julius Caesar is not about "supporting democracy"; as always with Shakespeare, any interpretation can be undercut, even if it's the official resolution of the play (think of the happy ending of The Merchant of Venice; after what we've experienced of Shylock, & why he acts the way he does, & how he's treated (& how in turn he treats others), it's difficult to take the "happy ending" without some reservations; even the end of Twelfth Night leads some people I know to a feeling of sadness for the madly-used Malvolio). We can come away concluding that it was wrong to assassinate Julius Caesar, but Caesar himself is presented as a superstitious, flawed man with a constant politician's eye on the main chance – he often seems like a performative Noble Roman, in such moments as the one in which someone urges on him a petition concerning his own safety & he grandly announced that that one will be considered last.

So if you need to find a "meaning" or "moral" in this play, perhaps it's only that we are all wandering, lost, through the mysteries of life. Noble, well-meant actions end up in murder, deceit, & treachery; cruelty & cunning result in peace & prosperity. Much depends on chance & actions & outcomes we don't control. Brutus & Cassius thought they were saving the Republic, or (for Cassius), maybe just themselves; centuries later, Dante stuck each of them, along with the arch-traitor Judas Iscariot, each in one of Satan's three mouths. Others consider them heroes &, despite their aristocratic standing, revolutionary role models.

All we can do is try for the best. That means choosing openness, respect, accountability, mutual support. If my deluded fellow citizens & our semi-functioning system do put the fascist back in power, it's important to remember that we still don't know how things will turn out. Keep hopeful, keep fighting.

Perhaps by the time this entry is posted, we will know if Americans chose, to be blunt, Right or Wrong. But it's good to keep in mind, for purposes of checking our own egos, that everybody thinks their choice is for the Right. The essential thing is to look clearly, widely, & compassionately (to see, in short, with the sort of vision Shakespeare had).

Poem of the Week 2024/42

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 ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou seest 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 seest the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the deathbed whereon it must expire,

Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

    This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

    To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

– William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73

This sumptuous & celebrated sonnet is, on the surface, deceptively simple. Each of the three quatrains takes a standard trope indicating waning energies / the end of life – the autumn of the year, sunset &  night falling, a fire dying into embers – & works it into a vivid poetic statement, followed by a concluding couplet suggesting the recipient, seeing these things, can only feel love strengthened by impending loss.

The first quatrain portrays Fall not in the usual terms of fields bared by harvest but by the dying leaves (there's nothing fruitful here). Yet there's something odd in the second line when the poet initially says no leaves are left on the boughs but then immediately amends that to "well, maybe a few" – why the self-revision? Why the insistence on some remaining energy? It's not a word order necessitated by rhyme, so something else must be going on.

After this odd moment, the poet returns to the description of Fall: cold (the coldness of Winter / Death) is approaching, which makes the boughs shake (almost as if they were human limbs shivering). The boughs are likened, in a famous phrase, to bare ruined choirs, likening the natural world of trees stripped of leaves to the surrounding English landscape dotted with monastic ruins. It's worth remembering that those ruins were, just a few decades before Shakespeare was born, vital institutions, until Henry VIII decided he was better off without them. Again, this is perhaps a suggestion that beneath this image of wasting away is some underlying vitality, at least until quite recently, which is what late means in this context (as when we refer to a recently deceased person as the late X). Associating himself with the choirs is also a way of emphasizing that the speaker is older than the recipient, perhaps of a generation that could remember back to the choirs when they were, like the poet, singing. Is there something a touch histrionic in the sweet birds, especially coming, as they do, after a sere series of terms: dead leaves, stripped boughs, shaking with cold, bare, ruined: even words that have a different function, like hang & late, carry overtones of suffering & missing out.

The second stanza runs along much the same lines: the speaker compares himself to twilight; the busy day has sunk out of sight, & by and by black night (oblivion, & not just the temporary oblivion of sleep, Death's second self) covers all. By and by also seems perhaps a touch melodramatic, indicating an impending darkness that is less imminent than it actually would be at that time of day.

The third stanza follows a similar pattern: it opens, as does the second, with In me thou seest, followed by an elaboration of a basic metaphor for ending: this time, it's a fire dying out. The fire, reduced to a glow, is at the stage where it is being consumed by the ash it has already produced, the ashes, specifically, of a spent youth. The metaphor is strengthened by the invocation of a deathbed. But, again, there is an emphasis on the strength that was there, & which has not quite entirely disappeared, though the end is near.

So what is going on here? It's important to remember that Shakespeare's sonnets were initially circulated in manuscript (this was not an unusual practice) & when they were published, it was, apparently, without the poet's agreement or supervision. No one really know why or to whom Shakespeare wrote the series (though theories, of course, abound). This sonnet is part of the series traditionally held to have been addressed to an unknown young man, though there's nothing in the phrasing of this particular poem that genders the recipient, & the order of the sonnets as they've come down to us may be by someone other than the poet.

Clearly, though, a single individual is being addressed here: the thou who is repeatedly conjured to notice the impending end of the speaker must be not only an individual, but an intimate (thou strikes a modern reader as formal, because it is archaic, but in Shakespeare's day it was, like the French tu, the singular second person, used for an intimate or social inferior). One of the many unknowable things about the sonnets is when exactly they were written, but scholarly speculation is that he wrote them, give or take a few years, around the age of 30. Even considering that death came earlier then for most people (Shakespeare himself was 52 when he died), it seems a bit odd for a man in his 30s – out of his youth, but one would think in the prime of his life – to draw repeated & elaborate attention to his oncoming demise. And he seems aware that his recipient is maybe not giving him his full attention; each quatrain opens with instructions on what the recipient is supposed to be seeing, & the speaker feels the need to make his point three separate times, in three separate ways, though always with some similar adjuration: thou mayst in me behold or (twice) In me thou seest.

After repeatedly telling his apparently younger friend that the end is near, the concluding couplet sums up the lesson, as it usually does in sonnets with this three-quatrains-and-a-couplet construction: all this I'm telling you is going to make your love for me even stronger, as you won't have me around to love for much longer. But the phrasing is notable: this thou perceiv'st: perceive means to become aware or conscious of something, to come to a realization, to interpret or view someone or something in a particular way: in other words, this is not something the recipient is realizing on his own (otherwise, why would the speaker have to reinforce the image repeatedly?) but something the speaker hopes the recipient will come to realize, a learned response, an insight he will, at some point, achieve – someday, when I'm gone, you'll wish you'd loved me more! Also, given the preceding quatrains, all of which suggest it is the speaker who will be leaving, the last line suddenly makes the recipient the one who will be leaving. Is the speaker perhaps aware that the recipient is drifting away from him, & the whole sonnet is, essentially, a dramatic speech warning him that the speaker won't be around forever & he should keep loving him while he can? Does the strange shift in who is leaving intimate that the speaker knows, perhaps on a not-quite conscious level, that the recipient is planning on leaving him?

Another thing no one knows about Shakespeare's sonnets is what relation, if any, they bear to his life. There is an assumption that they are autobiographical (if only we could crack the code!), but that may or may not be true – we are, after all, talking about probably the greatest dramatist in history; clearly he was able to imagine himself into all sorts of moods & situations that have little, no, or tangential connection to the facts of his biography. There seems something a touch theatrical, even slightly comic, but also deeply moving, about this sonnet read as a speech (& keep in mind that Shakespeare did incorporate sonnets into some of his plays, most famously when Romeo & Juliet meet for the first time): we have here a man summoning up dazzling rhetorical powers to persuade a younger & perhaps slightly uninterested friend that in fact his (the poet's) end is near & that's all the more reason to keep his (the friend's) love strong. Hence the underlying hints of on-going vigor beneath the eloquent, picturesque invocations of impending death. In this light, the poem, no matter what remove it is from Shakespeare's lived experience, is not only gorgeous, but also slightly comic, & also deeply poignant: comic & poignant in the way of all attempts to persuade someone else that their love for us should be as strong (at least!) as our love for them.

There are many editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, of course: I use the Signet Classic.

Poem of the Week 2024/35

Song

Fear no more the heat o' th' sun

    Nor the furious winter's rages;

Thou thy worldly task hast done,

    Home art gone and ta'en thy wages.

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Fear no more the frown o' th' great;

    Thou are past the tyrant's stroke.

Care no more to clothe and eat;

    To  thee the reed is as the oak.

The scepter, learning, physic, must

All follow this and come to dust.

Fear no more the lightning flash,

    Nor th' all-dreaded thunder-stone;

Fear not slander, censure rash;

    Thou hast finished joy and moan.

All lovers young, all lovers must

Consign to thee and come to dust.

No exorciser harm thee,

    Nor no witchcraft charm thee.

Ghost unlaid forbear thee;

    Nothing ill come near thee.

Quiet consummation have,

And renownèd be thy grave.

– William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, Act IV, scene 2, ll 258 - 281

Cymbeline is one of Shakespeare's four late romances (the other three being Pericles, The Winter's Tale, & The Tempest) & even in that fanciful, fairy-tale influenced company it is an extremely strange play. It combines multiple times & places – early Britain & Wales, the Rome of Caesar Augustus, the Italy of the Renaissance – into a famously complex plot; the chain of discoveries in Act V that resolves the various storylines is notoriously complicated (so much so that Shaw wrote a condensed finale, Cymbeline Refinished, as an aid to theatrical producers). And the cavalcade of plot points must be deliberate, as an additional & completely unnecessary one is added right before the finale, when the jailed Posthumus has a vision of his dead family & the god Jupiter, who leaves him with a cryptic prophecy that must now also be interpreted before the action can be considered complete. The play is filled with characters giving us elaborate explanations of their backstories or of their actions & motivations; there's even amusing meta commentary on this convention, as when Cornelius the Doctor explains to us, in an aside, that he has given the wicked stepmother (the Queen) what she thinks is deadly poison, but is actually a medication that causes a sleep that feigns death, & contrary to the standard assumption that characters speaking an aside to the audience are not noticed doing so by those on stage, the Queen repeats to him her previous injunction to go ahead & leave. He does finally get off the stage, having given us another key piece of plot knowledge.

The box containing the alleged poison is not the only container that isn't what it seems; there is an elaborate plot involving an attempted seduction & a treacherous man hidden in a trunk. There is the trunk of the Queen's loutish & menacing son, which gets mistaken by the heroine, Imogen, for the body of her husband Posthumus (the corpse has been beheaded, so this is a plausible mistake, one of several involving bodies that are mistaken in one way or another). Most of the characters are at one point or another (or all the way through), either actively deceiving others or in outright disguise. These remarks are the barest summary of the play, but as you can see, it is crowded with incident & colorful characters, although the title role is not one of them. Cymbeline is the King of Britain & I can't think of another title role in Shakespeare's plays who is so much a cipher, more of a plot device than a character, so consistently overshadowed by the people & actions around him.

I think the play used to be staged more often than it is now; I base this loose assumption on the number of reviews / references in Shaw's theater criticism (right now as part of the on-going upheaval around me, I can't find my copy of that wonderful volume, Shaw on Shakespeare, but my memory is that he reviewed it more than once, & not as a rarity; whereas I believe he never saw a staging of The Winter's Tale, which is now almost a standard), as well as the fact that the Act V revision he wrote was meant as a practical piece of theater. And references to the great Shakespearean heroines often use to include Imogen, though I think anyone coming up with such a list these days would most likely not automatically think of her.

The play may have slipped a bit with theatrical producers, but this song remains well-known. It comes a bit past the halfway mark of the show. It is sung in alternating stanzas & then lines by Guiderius/Polydore & his brother Arviragus/Cadwal, the two sons of Cymbeline who were kidnapped at an early age & raised in the mountains of Wales, ignorant of their origin (hence the two names). They are singing it to Imogen, disguised as the page boy Fidele, whom they think is dead (she has taken the poison / sleeping potion, having been told it was helpful medicine, one in the on-going series of misunderstandings & false information believed true). Imogen is sister to the two young men, though none of them yet knows their relationship. The song provides an oasis of reflection, a moment of stillness, a pause in the on-going machinery of the plot. It provides an almost philosophical reflection on the surrounding frenzy of actions at cross-purposes, hidden motives, rage & regret, lust & loss: it all ends with death. The play itself does not; it has a happy ending, filled with reunions, recoveries, & forgiveness, but in the center of the show sits this reminder of death.

The song also balances out an unpleasant strain in the play, in which "blood", meaning class origin, will out: the two young princes, raised in the wilderness & ignorant of their birthright, are nonetheless filled with the spirit of your ideal princes; the King finds himself strangely drawn to a young pageboy, who is his daughter in disguise; there is much surprise that a peasant soldier can fight valiantly (he turns out to be Posthumus, an aristocrat in, of course, disguise). Opposed to this sense of birth / blood as destiny is the reminder that all end up in the grave; in the celebrated lines from the first stanza, Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. The word play on come to dust, meaning both end up dead (dust you are, & to dust shall you return) & coming to clear the built-up dust out of the chimney, is characteristic of Shakespeare's many-layered language. It's a wonderful line, though of course the singers, who dwell in a cave, could really have no idea of what a chimney-sweeper is or does. (Presumably this is one of the evils of court life told to them by Belarius/Morgan, the wronged noble who kidnapped them.)

The first stanza is the standout; there is a dignity about it, & a reach: the extremes of hot & cold weather, the dignified image of the worker, receiving his wages for whatever he has managed to accomplish, going "home", followed by the memorable final lines, encompassing the Golden with the Lowly. It is consolatory – fear no more; your task is done. It is elegiac – excessive heat is over, furious cold is over, the day is done & you're going home.

The second stanza continues in the same vein. Again the subject of the song, the now-dead person addressed with the intimate & affectionate thou, is adjured not to fear, this time earthly power rather than that of extreme Nature, & comforted with the thought of being now past caring about even the basic necessities. The stanza ends with another proclamation that everyone must come to this, but this time the list is of the great & accomplished (the scepter, learning, physic: that is, governors, scholars & priests, & doctors) who cannot escape death.

The third stanza continues listing the earthly concerns that the mourned one is now past, concerns both natural (lightning & thunder) & social (slander & censure). A thunder-stone can refer to various things, but in this context it's pretty clearly meant as "whatever causes the thunder", the aural equivalent of the lightning flash. (Interestingly, my Signet Classic edition of the play doesn't annotate that word, though it does others that seem to me more obvious.) But this stanza also takes a turn away from the earlier ones: it is not only difficult & painful things that the mourned one is done with, but happy things: joy, as well as moan, is now finished. Love is done, & even young lovers end like this. (Consign in this context means end up the same category as you, that is, dead.) The dead are bereft of the beauty of life, as well as its struggles.

The final stanza is a sort of charm, a conjuration that nothing harm the body in its grave. This is suitable not only for the period in which the play is set, but the one in which it was written; think of the epitaph on Shakespeare's own grave. An exorciser would be one who performs exorcisms, that is, one who summons spirits from a body or a place; an unlaid ghost would be a spirit not laid to rest, one doomed to haunt the earth (like Hamlet's father, for instance). So apparently even the grave is not free from disturbances & struggles; the elegy ends with this protective prayer for quiet in the grave – yet not the quiet that comes from being forgotten; the final line is a wish that the mourned one, in this case a youth the singers have known only very briefly, whose story they never learned, may not be forgotten. It's a poignant moment in a tumultuous drama.

I took the text from the Signet Classic Shakespeare, which now seems to be available only in a 3-play volume, but of course there are many editions of the play available.

Poem of the Week 2024/27

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes, shall outlive this pow'rful rhyme,

But you shall shine more bright in these contents

Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.

When wasteful war shall statues overturn,

And broils root out the work of masonry,

Nor Mar's his fire nor war's quick fire shall burn

The living record of your memory.

'Gainst death and all oblivious enmity

Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room

Even in the eyes of all posterity

That wear this world out to the ending doom.

    So, till the judgment that yourself arise,

    You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.

– William Shakespeare

Given Shakespeare's long-time status as a world-wide cultural monument, & the widespread use of the English language as, if not a first, then a nearly universal second language, & the fame of this particular sonnet, it's easy for us to miss how breathtakingly arrogant & even delusional it is.

England at the time was, of course, even smaller than it is today, as Scotland was still a separate country & the Irish were barely under British control. Located on the edge of the Eurasian landmass, cut off by the sea from the rest of Europe, under constant threat from the superior strength of Catholic Spain & France, centuries behind the intellectual & cultural developments of a hotspot like the Italian city-states, not so far away in time from a series of bloody internal wars over succession & facing more of the same as their aging Queen (resplendent though she was) was clearly going to die without producing an heir, emerging from a series of back-&-forth switches between Catholic & Protestant religions, with a growing minority of Dissenters & Puritans, speakers of a language generally unknown outside the realm . . . . England was at this time a marginal & chaotic place, & English literature was pretty much being invented at this time. So for a poet to claim that his rhyme (in a form borrowed from the more sophisticated literature of Italy) would last through Judgment Day is, even for a poet, audacious.

The idea that poets grant eternal fame through their verse is rooted in the classical tradition, but, as noted above, England was not exactly the center of the classical revival. Yet Shakespeare does not acknowledge the marginal status of his language or his country: he simply claims the territory, with an assurance & magnificence that have helped to make his prophecy come true. And he saw clearly not only the power of officially acknowledged poetry but also the scruffier precincts of dramatic poetry: as Hamlet says of the traveling players, they are "the abstract and brief chronicles of the time: after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live".

The poet stakes his claim in the very first line: not the golden but the gilded monuments are cited, suggesting that the princes have a veneer of glory but nothing substantial beneath that. Once the princes are safely under the marble, who's paying attention to them? The stone is unswept, smeared  & dirty with the passage of time (sluttish here suggests slovenly or slatternly, not sexually promiscuous – though that more modern definition isn't really inappropriate; there are lots of princes & rulers, & Time promiscuously gathers them all in, without too much distinction).

The second quatrain moves beyond the general forward movement & neglect of Time to the specific example of War, deliberately trying to root out – as every gardener knows, that means to destroy utterly – the memorials & memory of the previous regimes. The mention of overturning statues must be a recollection of the smashing of images that followed Henry VIII's break with the Catholic church & the subsequent imposition of a Protestant church on England: the references to war & the destruction of monuments are not hypothetical possibilities here, but actual events in living memory in a state perpetually besieged by internal & external forces.

In the third quatrain & the concluding couplet, Shakespeare moves beyond the forgetfulness caused by Time's regular passing & the active destruction of war into a grandly eschatological view: he is positioning himself (more accurately, his words) against death & ultimately the end of the world & the Last Judgment (this was a world that believed, though perhaps only on an official level, that Christ would return to judge the living & the dead); he asserts that his lines will last until the very end, the destruction & transfiguration, of the known world.

But of course it isn't accurate to say that poetry (particularly in the days when printing was fairly new & not inevitable for a writer, who, in the early modern world, often circulated their works in manuscript among their friends) outlives the depredations of Time & political or religious attempts to wipe it out: we have only to look at the huge gaps in what is left of even the most celebrated authors of Greece & Rome, or the chancy survival in a single manuscript of such now-celebrated works at Beowulf or Sir Gawain & the Green Knight, to realize how great a role chance plays in the survival of even the greatest works, particularly from the time before printing became widespread.

Is there some fear of loss lying, however deeply submerged, behind the bravado of this poem's assertions? Counterbalancing the confident assertion of the poet's power in this sonnet is a parallel track: he is addressing a lover. How much of the poem's forceful assertion is the poet's effort to persuade the lover (& perhaps himself) that he is worth paying attention to? From this perspective, his insistence can seem perhaps a bit overdone, in an effort to persuade this other person, who may or may not be responsive: I am giving you eternal life through my words, he insists; you will become an epitome for future lovers. The poet dismisses the chance of princes against Time's indifference & destruction, but does so while pleading for his lover to love him back, or at least pay some attention to his words. An indifferent lover can be harsher than princes or Time.

The ironic thing is that, against the odds – England's dicey state, Shakespeare's ambiguous status as poet & player (& therefore not a serious, powerful man), the tenuous state of the English language & literature – his words did come true. These lines will indeed last as long as English is read, which will, most likely, be until the world blows up in some way. The lover he addresses has indeed achieved immortality through his words, & lives in the eyes of, if not lovers, then lovers of poetry. But no one knows who exactly the lover is. There is much speculation on the identity of the "Dark Lady of the Sonnets" as well as that of the young man some of them are addressed to, but nothing is certain. There's nothing in this poem that even tells us whether it's addressed to the lady or the youth. The unnamed "lover", who may or may not even have been a specific person (Shakespeare might have been addressing some idealized but non-existent lover), has been transubstantiated into an eternally dazzling (but anonymous) image of The Loved Object.

There are many editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, of course, but I use the Signet Classic edition. This is Sonnet 55.

Poem of the Week 2024/17

When that I was and a little tiny boy,

    With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

A foolish thing was but a toy,

    For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came to man's estate,

    With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,

    For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came, alas, to wive,

    With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

By swaggering could I never thrive,

    For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came unto my beds,

    With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

With tosspots still had drunken heads,

    For the rain it raineth every day.

A great while ago the world begun,

    With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;

But that's all one, our play is done,

    And we'll strive to please you every day.

– William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act V, scene i, ll 391 - 410

He that has and a little tiny wit,

    With heigh-ho, the wind and the rain,

Must make content with his fortunes fit,

    Though the rain it raineth every day.

King Lear, Act III, scene ii, ll 74 - 77

Yesterday, 23 April, is the date traditionally assumed to be Shakespeare's birthday, but as he was not of an age but for all time, I figure it's OK to slip this form of commemoration to the day after.

The first & longer song above is the final moment of Twelfth Night. The action of the play has already concluded with Duke Orsino's speech tying up the various plot strands: go placate Malvolio, as we need information from him about the sea captain; his beloved Olivia will now be his sister, & he plans to stay on at her place until everything is settled; he will still refer to Viola by her male pseudonym, Cesario, until she's back in women's garb, when she will be "Orsino's mistress and his fancy's queen" – the same fancy (imagination) he indulged in his celebrated opening lines of the play, "If music be the food of love, play on, / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die". Guided by the whims of his fancy, Orsino's love for Viola seems unlikely to be as strong or as long-lasting as hers for him (a supposition foreshadowed & strengthened by their debate in Act II, scene iv). It's part of the underlying melancholy of this funny & sad play. (Most productions I've seen play up the farce at the expense of the poetry & pensiveness, which is too bad.)

This song continues the overcast mood of the play (very overcast, with all the wind & the rain). It is delivered by the fool Feste, who has sung other mournful & lovely songs for us, along with some drunken rounds. He wanders between households, disappearing & reappearing without excuse (his first appearance in the play, in Act I scene v, begins with the maid Maria reprimanding him for being gone without leave). Though involved in the action, particularly the plot against Malvolio, he stands a bit outside of it all. And in his final song, he sounds a bit outside his usual character; here he is not a witty jester but an ordinary, very ordinary, man, beaten down by life in general. In the final stanza, he abandons all pretense of being anything but a working actor, packing up his stage props & hoping you've found the show worth your time.

The song progresses through the stages of a man's life (very specifically a man's), somewhat in the manner of Jacques's famous, & more elaborately theatrical & poetical, Seven Ages of Man speech in As You Like It, Act II, scene vii. It begins with the singer as "a little tiny boy", surrounded by foolish things & trifles. But the second & fourth lines of this stanza, & each stanza to follow until a variant in the last line of the last stanza, cast a gloomier mood over the lyrics: after the traditional nonsense refrain of "hey, ho", we immediately get "the wind and the rain". Is the singer shrugging off the bad weather? defying it with a cheerful hey ho? merely noting its inevitability? Whatever it is, the wind & the rain are his constant companions through life. No golden afternoons here!

In the second stanza, the singer is now a man, & aware of the duplicity & cheating rampant among his kind: he shuts the gates against them. Then he marries, unhappily (alas!), though we don't hear his wife's side of things (personally I imagine her as sister to Chaucer's Wife of Bath, standing up for herself against a husband who tries to dominate through the ineffective arrogance of his swaggering). Then he becomes an old man (a physical diminution which seems to lie behind the more vivid metaphor of his coming "unto his beds"); he drinks too much, & hangs out with drunkards (tosspots). A sad & ordinary life, sad in its ordinariness, ordinary in its sadness. He still repeats his hey ho (philosophical acceptance? on-going resistance? merely the mental habit of a lifetime, carried into alcoholic elder years?) in the face of the constant wind & rain. Presumably some sunshine would be a  good thing, but he's beyond lamenting its absence, or wishing for its presence. (I at least find some beauty in the drama of the wind & rain; I keep picturing something like Hiroshige's Driving Rain at Shono).

The phrasing of the song, its persistent refrains, & its emblematic view of life make it sound like an old ballad, some sort of summation of folk wisdom. It's a beautiful & amusing song (the guy can't catch a break), but also resigned & even hopeless (because, again, the guy can't catch a break). The first line of the final stanza, A great while ago the world begun, moves us beyond the individual singer into a world-view, but one that does not contradict our singer's damp & chilly experience. That's all one, he shrugs, resigning himself to . . . fate? destiny? the universe? God? the general hardness of living? The simplifications of this sunless life lend it a ruefully comic aspect.

And as we all know, there is a very fine & blurry line between comedy & tragedy. This song must have been fairly popular, as it received a bit of a sequel in King Lear. Again, it is sung by a licensed jester, the enigmatic & satirical Fool, who comments on action that he is mostly apart from. He loyally follows Lear out into the literal wind & rain of the storm on the heath, which is where he sings his stanza. (Shortly after this song, the Fool makes his odd reference to a prophecy by Merlin, who will live after his (the Fool's) time: does this strange unearthly figure have some sort of second sight?)

But there are some interesting shifts from the Twelfth Night song to the lagniappe in King Lear: for one thing, we no longer have the impression that the singer is speaking of himself, & of himself as a sort of Everyman; here the first line singles out He that has and a little tiny wit: we don't know if the Fool means himself, Lear, or someone else, but the line does seem to make a distinction between those with "a little tiny wit" & others – he's commenting, to some extent, on the arbitrary divisions of fate (or destiny, the universe, chance, God. . . ). As in Twelfth Night's "a little tiny boy", we get the intensifier of a redundant "little tiny", but here it refers to insight & intelligence, not just to the general state of being a small boy. Such a one must make content with his fortunes fit (that is, be satisfied with the hard fortune that suits his level of wit/intelligence) though the rain it raineth every day. Though is an important switch there; in the Twelfth Night song, For the rain it raineth every day states a general truth; switching for (because) to though (that is, despite the fact that for you it raineth every day – it doesn't do so for all people, as for implies) makes it a more peculiar & individual fate. The rain is part of the hard fortune you must deal with, possibly through your own fault (that is, the fault of your "little tiny wit" & the errors it has led you into). In Twelfth Night, there is some human solidarity in the universal wind & rain; in King Lear, it becomes part of the inexplicable & arbitrary cruelties that fall on some but not on others possibly more deserving of punishment.

The reappearance of the comedy's song in the tragedy is an interesting link between what are probably my two favorite plays by Shakespeare. I used the Signet Classic editions (general editor Sylan Barnet), though of course there are many editions of both plays available.

Shotgun Players: A Midsummer Night's Dream

Last Sunday I was at the Shotgun Players production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by William Thomas Hodgson, the opening play of the theater's 2024 season. Midsummer Night's Dream is probably the Shakespeare play I have seen staged most often, & I've read it many times (I re-read it just a few weeks ago). & this production made me laugh out loud several times. That's really high praise.

The whole look (scenic design by Sarah Phykitt, costume designs by Ashley Renee as realized by Madeline Berger, if I'm reading the program correctly) is both hodge-podge & sophisticated. The set is a unit, with alcoves & cubbyholes built in, & passageway ramps going up & across, leading down to enough bare space in the front of the stage for fights (sword & verbal) & chases & sweet meet-ups. There are enough natural touches – tufts of foliage, tree trunks with rough bark – to make it plausible as the forest, but enough formal structure to let it pass for an interior in Athens. The costumes are a wild mélange of bright colors & wild patterns, harmonious in their dissonance.

The text is trimmed reasonably, with a few words thrown in to hilarious effect; not to give anything away, but one character starts off her speech with "Bitch, . . ." It was unexpectedly funny, as was the way they riffed on Bottom's inability to get the names of Pyramus & Thisbe correct. The "bergomask" at the end of the mechanicals' play, given in lieu of an epilogue, was a song from Twelfth Night; this journey also ended in lovers' meeting, so it did slide right into context. Egeus is now Hermia's mother instead of father, a change I am all in favor of; the authority there is generational & parental, not necessarily patriarchal. Titania's attendant fairies were, for I think the first time in the stagings I have seen, given distinct personalities, & some had comically negative reactions to the strange ass-headed commoner their mistress is inexplicably enamoured of, whom she had them serving.

Another noteworthy thing about this production, though I feel funny about mentioning it, as it always sounds so patronizing to say it, but clearly it's a point with this production, so here goes: they have a wonderfully open & diverse approach to casting, going beyond race- & gender-blind casting; some of the male characters are androgynous, some of the women are large; nothing is made of this (except for Helena's being taller than Hermia, which is canon), & nothing should be; they're all beautiful embodiments of their characters. Again, it seems condescending to talk about how wonderful that young lovers & heroic warriors look like ordinary people, & making a point of saying it even contributes, in subtle, indirect ways, to reinforcing the traditional standards of casting that are being ignored (in that it makes you conscious of those standards), but it's a good direction to go in, so . . . I mention it.

Such casting wouldn't be much good without strong performers, & the cast is by & large excellent. I was particularly impressed with Rolanda D Bell as Helena; often with productions of Shakespeare you feel they've learned the lines but not in a deep level, but Bell not only read the verse musically, but she spoke it as if it was very naturally the way this character would speak; you could see the shifting psychology underneath the pentameter. I don't know if she's done much Shakespeare (if not, this was particularly impressive) but I hope she continues. I also really liked Oscar Woodrow Harper III as Bottom, who is a character I can easily get enough of, but Harper, who had an inexplicable Southern twang & a bit of Elvis-like swagger, made him quite charming as well as hilarious – you really understood why the other mechanicals felt Bottom was the one man in Athens necessary for their play.

Mentioning those two isn't to slight the rest of the cast, many of whom play multiple roles. All of them give the audience giddy moments. Egeus, mentioned earlier, is played by Susannah Martin, who also plays Quince & Peaseblossom. Her attempts as Quince to rein in the rambunctious Bottom are an amusing echo of her attempts as Egeus to rein in Hermia; this is one of the serendipitous insights you get with such casting (she's also very funny as a Peaseblossom dragooned into serving Bottom, another, more distant, echo of her role as Quince). Aside from Bell as Helena, the quartet of lovers is rounded out with Celeste Kamiya, a lively powerhouse as Hermia (she also plays one of the fairies); she & Helena share some sweet sisterly moments amid the madness. Fenner Merlick is an insinuating Demetrius, just on the right side of shady. At my performance, Lysander was performed by Devin A Cunningham, who was apparently pulled in at something like the last minute, as he had to have a script with him – but he handled that so unobtrusively, & gave such a lively & physical characterization, that not being offbook was not intrusive. So Kudos to him.

Jamin Jollo filled the minor role of Philostrate & the major role of Puck, to which he brought an impish physicality, just on the right side of malicious. Radhika Rao has the traditionally doubled roles of Hippolyta & Titania, & Veronica Renner doubles as Theseus & Oberon, both authoritative in their spheres. Kevin Rebultan (Moth, a different unnamed Fairy, & Flute) was especially good as Thisbe, & Matt Standley (as Snug & Snout) gets more laughs out of less material than I would have thought possible.

My performance was a mask-mandatory matinee. I wonder how long those can continue, given that the majority of the audience was pretty careless about masking. With a few exceptions, they had them on, but often were wearing them incorrectly, were removing them to eat & drink in the theater, took them off during the performance (the young woman next to me had hers entirely off for most of the second act; she may have forgotten to put it back on when she finished her drink). & honestly, I don't see people getting more careful about masking. Either the theater is going to have to start enforcing the rule in a way that will . . . ruffle some feathers? annoy people? not sit well with them? be a burden all around? – or they're going to have to lift the "mandatory" part. I know some people deliberately choose the mask-mandatory performances, but others choose the performance based on date or time or some other factor. Personally, I am fine either way (despite the weird harassment I was subjected to at Shotgun's last play of last season), but I do think that people who are uncomfortable around people who aren't wearing masks are probably, at this point, just not going out at all. But the rule should be either enforced or modified.

Anyway: this season at Shotgun is off to an excellent start with this fresh, inventive, & very funny production. It's been extended to 27 April; go if you can.

(The photograph above is from the outside wall of the Ashby Stage; as usual, the mural changes with each play, & again as usual, it is by graphic artist R.Black)

Live from the Met: Roméo et Juliette

My Opera List tells me I have seen Gounod's Roméo et Juliette twice on stage, but the first performance I don't remember at all & the second was deeply flawed (for one thing, they decided to replace a lot of the non-aria parts with Shakespeare's dialogue, even though they had a cast of young singers for most of whom English was a second language – R&J is not an easy play to perform & it was just asking too much of the singers), so I headed out to the Met livecast last Saturday. It was touch-&-go for me until the last minute, as the local rain was heavier than expected, but I did make it to the theater in time – I, normally panicked at the thought of not being in my seat at least 20 minutes before the show starts, was even hoping I would cut it so close I wouldn't have to listen to the ridiculous pre-livecast promos from Rolex & other luxury brands, but there I was, & there they were.

The rain had mostly cleared up by the time I left for the theater, but in New York they were, as Peter Gelb described them during intermission, "torrential", which led to some transmission problems. This was unfortunate & annoying, but also something to take in stride. You know what was really irritating? Listening to the reactions of the audience around me. Much stirring about, loud talking, slow claps (I wonder what that woman thought she was accomplishing), huffing & puffing . . . I had the impression most of my audience thought there was someone in a booth running a projector who could fix things. I don't bother too much with tech stuff but . . . I thought it was generally known the livecasts use satellite transmissions? Which are sometimes interrupted by natural causes? Nothing like an opera audience to make even an aging Luddite feel youthful & tech-savvy.

Irritations aside, I found the show thoroughly enjoyable. It brought to mind last autumn's L'Elisir d'Amore at San Francisco Opera (my write-up is here), in that I can't imagine this opera being given a better presentation. I know people for whom Gounod is a non-starter but I don't have a problem with him. I do have a problem with most Shakespeare operas, but though this one does not capture the strange atmosphere & wild poetry of Shakespeare's play (neither, to my mind, does Verdi's Otello), it does an excellent job of conveying what most people remember or think they know of the play, which is the heightened passion of two youthful lovers, doomed by family hatreds. The plot (& there's a lot of plot machinery in R&J) is pared down: Romeo has poison, but no apothecary who sells it to him.

An adaptation of this sort is going to hang on the two performers in the title role, & here's where the Met came up strong; physically & dramatically & vocally, Nadine Sierra & Benjamin Bernheim were ideal. Both are attractive & youthful looking (they're not going to pass for teenagers, but then R&J seldom do). Sierra has such joy in the role & such commitment to it; as she progresses from a somewhat shy girl, eager for & hesitant about love (at least until she sights Romeo), she sang with splendor & controlled abandon. I had heard her before, but Bernheim was new to me, though years ago I heard a recording of his, I think. He can have a touch of goofiness (as does Romeo) but he is handsome & has great hair; the costumes by Catherine Zuber highlighted his sexiness, with a plunging neckline (his was much lower than Sierra's) & high black leather boots (he could probably use the same costume if he ever sings Hamlet, maybe minus the ruffles on the shirt). He sang with elegant virility & he & Sierra clearly have excellent chemistry together. He is scheduled for the title role in next season's first livecast, Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann, an opera I much prefer to this one, so I'm looking forward to that.

The secondary roles were also very strong, even though the characters themselves are diminished from their Shakespearean originals; even Mercutio seems subsidiary. He was sung (very nicely!) by Will Liverman, last seen by me in the title role of the livecast of Anthony Davis's X. Frederick Ballentine was an appropriately snarling presence as Tybalt, Samantha Hankey lively in the trouser role of Stéphano (a role built up from the play, actually, in a reverse of the usual cutting-down), Alfred Walker an imposing Frère Laurent. I was glad to see so many Black singers, & very glad to see that there was no attempt to separate the Capulets & the Montagues racially; you see this frequently with productions of Shakespeare's play (one family is white & the other black! or, we're in Ireland & one family is Catholic & the other Protestant! & so forth) & it drives me nuts, as that is not Romeo & Juliet, it is West Side Story. Dividing the families like that gives a cultural/social/political/religious dimension (or even justification) to the quarrel that isn't supposed to be there. The whole point is that there is no reason for the quarrel: it just is, & has been for so long that no one questions it. No origin for the animosity is ever given. It's right there in the first line of the play: "Two households, both alike in state & dignity. . . " The pointlessness is part of the tragedy.

Anyway, no need to ride that hobbyhorse right now. The production is, to borrow the Met's own word, sumptuous, & Yannick Nézet-Séguin was certainly a convincing advocate for the work, for which he had assembled a dazzling cast – almost too dazzling, with too much artistic power, some might think, for the work in question, but, as I said, they were making the best case for this opera that could be made.

Antony & Cleopatra at San Francisco Opera

Last Saturday I was at the San Francisco Opera for the first time since December 2019, when I saw a disappointing production of Hansel & Gretel; my first post-lockdown visit was a happier occasion: the kick-off to SFO's centennial season with the world premiere of the new John Adams opera, Antony & Cleopatra, based mostly on Shakespeare (thanks to Lisa Hirsch for inviting me along).

I was one of the many disappointed in Adams's previous opera, Girls of the Golden West, which I found simultaneously meandering & inert, &, as with Doctor Atomic, I felt the libretto, a patchwork by Peter Sellars, was a large part of the problem. I'll admit I was one of those making the easy joke that Shakespeare would be a better librettist than Sellars, but honestly, that's not necessarily the case: any one trying to set Shakespeare's plays as operas is running up against a giant mountain of marble: not only do you have a long performance/reading history of these masterpieces of the stage (to go along with the operatic masterpieces any new opera is, however consciously or unconsciously, compared against), you have the sheer power (as well as familiarity) of Shakespeare's words, which have sunk into & shaped our own language, centuries later. There are very few Shakespeare operas that I think can stand up with their source; I can muster only a cold admiration for Verdi's Otello, as I prefer the messier, grimier original to the neatly wrapped nobility of Boito's adaptation. Of the Shakespeare-based operas I've heard, my short list of true successes are Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream & Verdi's Falstaff (which, really, outpaces Merry Wives by miles). (I will also gladly concede that The Boys from Syracuse is an improvement on The Comedy of Errors.)

So I'm happy to report that Antony & Cleopatra looks likely to join that company for me; kudos to Adams, who prepared the libretto himself (with some additions from Virgil, Plutarch & other classical writers), in consultation with dramaturg Lucia Scheckner & director Elkanah Pulitzer. As was to be expected, the focus of this rich, sprawling play, with its multitude of people, places, & themes (both poetic & political), had to be narrowed. Many favorite moments are, inevitably, lost. Some story lines (particularly Enobarbus's) suffer a bit. But adjusting to that is part of taking in what is, although based on a familiar work, also an entirely new one that needs to stand independently. The central relationships among Antony, Cleopatra, Octavian (the nascent Caesar Augustus), & his sister Octavia (married off to Marc Antony in a failed attempt to cement a peace between the two rivals) are fully present. The additional texts also work well: the most prominent of these is a passage, used towards the end of the opera, from the Aeneid about the future imperial glory of Rome, given to Octavian & chorus (one of the few big choral numbers in the opera, which is an interesting change for Adams, whose earlier operas, particularly The Death of Klinghoffer, tend to be chorus-rich): it's the Leader & his multitudes, an accurate reflection of the new political order Octavian is ushering in, replacing the multiple personality cults of his Egyptian rivals with a single one of his own. The use of Dryden's translation is particularly astute, as the regularity of his rhyming couplets gives a sense of conformity & control to the passage, in contrast to the freer, more fluid blank verse of Shakespeare.

The music, of course, fills in the missing spaces, creating layers & connections of its own. At Girls of the Golden West I was initially a little surprised at how comparatively spare the music seemed. I had been used to each new score from Adams growing in complexity & lushness, so I needed to adjust my expectations (I'm not sure the approach worked that well in that piece, but the composer apparently felt the need, for whatever reason, for a change in direction). The music for Antony, full of quicksilver transformations, struck me as rich, & even grand, without being overtly, opulently, operatic. The "Roman" music tends to use more brass, & the "Egyptian" music more harps & some relatively unusual percussion, such as celesta & cimbalom, & it uses them without sounding inappropriately or unfashionably "Oriental"/exotic in sound. (After all, though the cultures & personalities are very different, it's not all contrast between the two: Rome & Egypt are both empires run by a few powerful individuals).

Some musical moments that struck me: Octavia, married to Antony & resident in Athens, is lamenting to him that she is caught between her brother & her husband & the tensions rising between them; as she sings her long, yearning lines, we hear, faintly beneath her, the Egyptian instrumentation: you can actually hear the distracted Marc Antony, longing to return to Cleopatra, not listening to her. I think repeated listening will reveal other connections & subtleties like this. In the Adams style, there are also quotations from others: in the scene in which Cleopatra interrogates the messenger who tells her Antony is now married, I heard in her initial reaction a splash of Baba the Turk's "Scorned! Abused!" from The Rake's Progress, which sets the right tone for this scene – strong, dramatic, intense, but also a bit overblown & faintly comic – particularly as the follow-up in which she quizzes him about Octavia, which gives an overtly comic edge to the entire scene, is not included in the libretto. There is also an extended use or adaptation of what sounded to me like the Rhine theme from Das Rheingold, which I believe occurs when Rome declares war on Egypt: evoking a new world, or at least a new empire, rising based on gold connected with the abundant flowing waters of a great river, gold ready to be taken, shaped, & misused for ends both creative & destructive.

There's a lot to ponder with this score, & in particular the final scene. One of the remarkable things about Shakespeare's play is that half of the titular couple dies at the end of Act IV, in a fairly messy way, leaving Cleopatra center stage in Act V for an extended, exalted farewell  to life – given the heavy use of sexual slang in this act (die, come) & her elevation above mundane realities (reflected in her physical elevation on the stage, secured in her Monument), it is pretty much a Shakespearean Liebestod, & given Wagner's influence on Adams, I was expecting the ending to be treated that way. But it's not: I don't want to suggest that the music is a let-down, or not up to the tragic occasion; it continues to be complex & beautiful, but it doesn't soar the way the end of Tristan does, or even the end of Jenůfa. Again, listening to this new work meant adjusting what I was expecting. I was looking to the wrong operatic couple: the ending is more like that of Pelleas et Melisande (& in fact in his program note Adams cites the Debussy as a model for what he was trying to do in this opera).

So what's going on with the ending, besides my need to correct my expectations & listen to the work on its own terms? Part of it may be Adams's on-going resistance to the traditional trappings of Opera – although he must surely be considered at this point one of the most important living operatic composers, his works are, in style & substance, steadily resistant to, or subversive of, the traditionally operatic (some of this resistance may be why he insists on using amplification for the musicians, & yes, he uses it here as well). A resistance to the emotionally blatant – the operatic – may be part of this feeling. His works frequently lean towards the contemplative rather than the action-packed, closer to a Bach Passion than, say, Tosca (see, for example, The Death of Klinghoffer) & he does have a history of quieter, more meditative endings (see, for example, Act III of Nixon in China, after the coloratura fireworks that end Act II). Perhaps the Wagnerian key here is to be found not in Tristan but in the quotation from Rheingold: we've sat through an epic, but no matter how deeply moved we are, these characters will be swept from the stage, & the cycle starts all over again – in short, the lack of the expected musical soaring is an astute philosophical & political comment on the inevitable course of empires, as well as individual lives, however grand. I'm sure further exposure to this opera will lead to further contemplation; the dubious statement that familiarity breeds contempt is nowhere more convincingly refuted than in Operaland. (I will also admit that the long lock-down has left me unused to sitting for extended periods as well as to late hours; physical realities were making themselves known by the end of the three & a half hour running time, & those things also play a part in how spectators feel in the end.)

The production is mostly modern dress, except for the occasional cuirass or sword. I'm not wild about this, but it seems like a sensible solution to a staging problem: you can't count on people knowing how to read ancient outfits (would a purple toga convey status to contemporary audiences the way golden epaulettes do?) & attempts at putting suchlike on modern performers risks making them look uncomfortably & unaccountably draped in sheets & towels. The Romans are mostly in black & Antony's people mostly in white, which is perhaps a bit obvious (the Romans don't come off well here in general) but is also a helpful way to tell the two sides apart, especially if you're in the farther reaches of the opera house. Cleopatra is suitably glam in sparkly evening gowns. There's sort of a semi-contemporary look to the whole production: there are frequent projections conveying Rome or Egypt, but they're in black-&-white, showing buildings (in Rome, that is; Egypt's monuments were always ancient) that postdate, sometimes by centuries, the action of the opera. There are striking stage pictures, particularly a tableau of Antony & Cleopatra & their offspring posing as Osiris & Isis: lots of gold & sparkles.

The performers are all magnificent. It's no surprise at this point that Gerald Finley brings superb empathy & commitment to the aging, flailing, grand Antony, but Amina Edris as Cleopatra will be a revelation to many: in a role written for someone else (Julie Bullock, who withdrew a few months ago because of pregnancy) she gives a glorious, star-making performance as the mercurial queen, easily holding the stage at the end for her extended death scene. (She is also, unlike the historical Cleopatra, of Egyptian descent.) (There is a moment I could do without: when she first realizes Marc Antony is dead, the music stops & she screams; I've experienced effects like this before, & though Edris does it superbly, I find moments like these take me out of the opera. I have no idea if this is written in the score or was inserted by director or performer or what. [UPDATE: see the comments for the source of the scream.]) Paul Appleby provides equal weight as the sweet-faced, sweet-voiced, fanatically & frighteningly ambitious Octavian. The rest of the cast is also excellent: Taylor Raven as Charmian, Brenton Ryan as Eros, Alfred Walker as Enobarbus (he does get one of the work's few arias, a splendid setting of the famous description of Cleopatra floating down the river: "The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne. . . ."), Hadleigh Adams as Agrippa, Philip Skinner as Lepidus, Elizabeth DeShong as Octavia, Timothy Murray as Scarus, Gabrielle Beteag as Iras, & Patrick Blackwell as Maecenas. This was my first time hearing the orchestra led by new Music Director Eun Sun Kim, who did, to my ears, a masterful job of leading the large forces through a completely new & obviously complex score.

This is definitely an opera that deserves frequent hearings, & I hope a recording will be forthcoming – I guess I should work in a variant of "custom cannot stale [its] infinite variety" as I think appreciation for it will only deepen as it takes form in our minds.

(my first steps into the War Memorial Opera House in nearly three years)

Museum Monday 2018/17

April 23 is the traditional date of Shakespeare's birth (1564), and the recorded date of his death (1616), so in honor of the greatest poet in the English language, here is a copy of the First Folio from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC.

 April 23 is also the feast of St George, so here's a bonus: the saint as portrayed by the painter nicknamed Il Sodoma, from the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC:

And here's a view of the poor vanquished dragon in the same painting, and he surely deserves a feast day of his own:

for Shakespeare's birthday

For Shakespeare's birthday: read a sonnet, or maybe go write one. This is one of my favorites. Since I have spent most of this month recovering from my second bout of flu this year, I don't have the time and energy to write an analysis, but I think it's pretty straightforward (insofar as these things can be straightforward; I guess I mean it's easy enough to get the gist of it). What's amazing is how clear and true the sentiments are, centuries after they were written.

Sonnet 29

When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love rememb'red such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

William Shakespeare

Poem of the Week 2016/22

Civil War Hits Home

Alarum. Enter a Son that hath killed his Father, at one door; and [later] a Father that hath killed his Son at another door.

SON:
Ill blows the wind that profits nobody.
This man, whom hand to hand I slew in fight,
May be possessèd with some store of crowns;
And I, that haply take them from him now,
May yet, ere night, yield both my life and them
To some man else, as this dead man doth me.
Who's this? O God! it is my father's face,
Whom in this conflict I, unwares, have killed.
O heavy times, begetting such events!
From London by the King was I pressed forth;
My father, being the Earl of Warwick's man,
Came on the part of York, pressed by his master;
And I, who at his hands received my life,
Have by my hands of life bereavèd him.
Pardon me, God! I knew not what I did.
And pardon, father, for I knew not thee!
My tears shall wipe away these bloody marks;
And no more words till they have flowed their fill.

KING HENRY:
O piteous spectacle! O bloody times!
Whiles lions war and battle for their dens,
Poor harmless lambs abide their enmity.
Weep, wretched man! I'll aid thee tear for tear;
And let our hearts and eyes, like civil war,
Be blind with tears, and break o'ercharged with grief.

Enter Father, bearing of his Son.

FATHER:
Thou that so stoutly hath resisted me,
Give me thy gold, if thou hast any gold;
For I have bought it with an hundred blows.
But let me see: is this our foeman's face?
Ah, no, no, no! It is mine only son!
Ah, boy, if any life be left in thee,
Throw up thine eye! See, see what show'rs arise,
Blown with the windy tempest of my heart
Upon thy wounds, that kills mine eye and heart!
O, pity, God, this miserable age!
What stratagems, how fell, how butcherly,
Erroneous, mutinous and unnatural,
This deadly quarrel daily doth beget!
O boy, thy father gave thee life too soon,
And hath bereft thee of thy life too late!

William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 3, Act 2, scene 5, ll 55 - 93

No doubt everyone who spends a lot of time wandering through Shakespeare ends up with some perverse personal preferences, and one of mine is that among the history plays at some strange level I prefer the earlier tetralogy (Henry VI Parts 1 - 3 and Richard III) to the later (Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 - 2, and Henry V). I call them "earlier" in that they are earlier in Shakespeare's career; in actual history Henry VI obviously comes after Henry V. But my concern here is with Shakespeare's writing, not English history. I do recognize that the later tetralogy is superior artistically, theatrically, psychologically . . . but if it weren't, my preference wouldn't qualify as perverse. I do love the extravaganzas of Richard II. My response to Henry IV is handicapped a bit because I am not really a tavern person, though intellectually I can see the brilliance of Falstaff – but intellectually may not be the best way to appreciate Falstaff, despite his cleverness and the many levels on which his language operates. I dislike Prince Hal and dislike him even more as that hollow man Henry V, whose play is frequently described as "a patriotic pageant" and I wish I saw it that way because that would explain why I find it tedious. (I think the play is much more subversive than that frequent reading would suggest; maybe I'll get around to posting about that.)  After the newly ascended king's calculated rejection of Falstaff – one of the cruelest moments in Shakespeare – who wants to admire him while he invades France? I much prefer, for my viewing or (more likely, as these plays are rarely staged) reading pleasure, the gradually increasing social breakdown and savagery of the Henry VI plays, capped off by the anarchic comedy of the tragic Richard III – so irresistible compared to the dull and dutiful Henry V.

Like Hamlet, Henry VI is a man born into a role for which his personality is not suited. Far from being strong and ruthless, or subtle and shrewd, he is saintly and even a bit simple, better suited (as he tells us) to a life as a humble shepherd than as a king, particularly one presiding over a dissolving kingdom. There's a touch of (perhaps justified) self-pity in him as well; he frequently mentions the early age at which he was left both an orphan and a child king. By this point in the drama, he is merely a pawn in the struggle between his ferocious wife and son and their allies and the aspiring Duke of York and his allies. He is wandering the latest battlefield, ordered by his wife to get out of the way (To whom God will, there be the victory! / For Margaret my queen, and Clifford too, / Have chid me from the battle, swearing both / They prosper best of all when I am thence. / Would I were dead, if God's good will were so! . . . Act 2, scene 5, ll 15 - 19.) Over the course of three plays, we have watched as jealousy, intrigues, and rivalry, with the occasional dip into witchcraft, have split Henry's court and then his kingdom, now poised to fall to whoever is both more ruthless and luckier.

In the midst of this total breakdown of the social order, we have this moving battlefield scene. The focus throughout the Henry VI plays is mostly on the powerful aristocrats – there is Jack Cade's rebellion in Part 2, but it is made clear that he is a stalking-horse for the Duke of York's claims to the throne. In this scene, we have ordinary soldiers, each of whom makes a terrible discovery about the man he has just killed. The scene is balanced, almost ritualistic, with the mirror-image killings – by the son of his father, and the father his son – lamented by the two men and the King, each separated from the others. Only Henry is positioned to see the full extent of the damage his reign has brought upon his kingdom. There are repeated references to eyes and hearts, and tears, which overwhelm the soldiers. The two men are nameless, standing in for many others pulled into horrific personal crimes by the battles of King and Duke. The matching images of filicide and parricide are an image of civil war destroying the kingdom.

Both soldiers begin their speeches by preparing to loot the bodies of the men they have just slain. This would explain why they are withdrawn from the on-going fighting; it also gives some insight into how the soldiers are provided for, and of the sometimes hidden costs of war. The crowns referred to in the third line of the excerpt are a type of coin, worth about five shillings – not a huge amount of money; you wouldn't expect a man to go into battle carrying lots of money, but even a little bit is some gain to these men, and the soldier philosophically reflects that some other man might be rifling his corpse for coin before the night falls. (There's also no doubt a pun on the royal crown which has been passed back and forth between the contending houses of Lancaster and York.) Both turn from thoughts of gain to grief and despair once they remove their opponents' helmets; both lift their speeches from the earthly realm by calling on God – not for revenge, or justice, but for pity and forgiveness, which they feel, stricken to their hearts, that they can never receive in this lower world. Both (in the part of this scene that continues beyond the brief excerpt I've given) think of the women at home: it does not occur to either of these basically honest soldiers to hide what he has done. The son wonders how he will tell his mother the sad story of his father's death, and the father knows his wife will never stop grieving for their dead son. They slip away from their armies, to lead sorrowful, grief- and guilt-haunted lives, hidden from our view. And the scene ends as the King is hurried away by Queen Margaret and his son, with their allies – the royal family is still together, at least outwardly, though not for much longer.

This is from the Signet Classic edition of King Henry VI, Part 3, edited by Milton Crane.