As You Like It
Shakespeare
the lovely green & golden world
The Comedy of Errors
Shakespeare
This reads surprisingly well, unlike most farces
The Faerie Queene
Edmund Spenser
I re-read this last year, & loved it so much all over again that when I finished the last page I turned back to the beginning & read it all again. This time I switched from my battered Yale University Press paperback to a lovely copy the Heritage Press issued in 1953 to mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. It has lovely woodcuts by Agnes Miller Parker. It does not have any annotations, but at this point I'm not so reliant on them & if a usage stumped me I could always refer back to the Yale paperback. Spenser is one of the most rich & sensuous of English poets. His subject matter – knights, sorceresses, dragons, quests – will probably always go in & out of favor & fashion, but I think we are definitely in a Spenserian moment (dragons!). Last year in conjunction with the Faerie Queene I read Catherine Nicholson's Reading & Not Reading the Faerie Queene: Spenser and the Making of Literary Criticism, which I strongly recommend if you're interested in Spenser's epic. The subtitle suggests the book is more limited than it really is; it uses each Book of the epic as a springboard for a reception history of the work. The chapter on why The Faeries Queene is still printed with something like the original spelling, rather than the modernizing usually applied to early modern texts, is particularly fascinating (I used to work as a typesetter, albeit an electronic one).
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Shakespeare
Well, OK. It's a bit slapdash; enjoyable enough, though the wives strike me as a bit too smug ("wives may be merry & yet be honest too": whatever). Its main contribution to the world is in serving as the inspiration for Verdi's Falstaff; Shakespeare, like Plump Jack, is not only witty in himself, but the cause of wit in others. Somewhere I have a volume of Auden's lectures on Shakespeare (bought years ago, still not read) & apparently for his lecture on this play he walked into the classroom, put Verdi's opera on, & had nothing more to say.
Sodom & Gomorrah
Marcel Proust
Volume 4 of In Search of Lost Time. This is the one in which the secret, mostly queer, sexual engine of this world is opened up for the Narrator, who by chance is made a voyeur at an encounter between the formidable Baron de Charlus & the tailor Jupien. It's the key that unlocks the adult world, foreshadowed in the first volume when the Narrator, as a child, is unintentionally a witness to a lesbian scene between Vinteuil's daughter & her "friend". Voyeurism, unintentional & otherwise, is one of the recurring themes of this series. It's a bit fashionable now for people to roll their eyes at how everyone in this novel turns out to be gay except the Narrator (though the term queer is both capacious & flexible enough to incorporate him; I now people nowadays who call themselves queer with less justification). I think such a reaction is mostly an attempt to be sophisticated at the cost of historical awareness. It's only recently (very recently) that same-sex relations were accorded any kind of respect, & even now that is not a universal attitude. (And there have been other periods that were relatively open in various ways about same-sex attraction; there's no guarantee that our somewhat positive moment will last.)
Narrative Poems
Shakespeare
I hadn't read these in a while. Venus & Adonis is quite saucy & delightful, with lots of amusing gender-flipping (Adonis is the coy beauty who isn't interested in love, while Venus is the aggressor; in one rather comic scene, she pulls him off his horse in her eagerness). The Rape of Lucrece is, as is only suitable, more ponderous going.
The Bravest Voices
Ida Cook
One of my sisters told me about this memoir; I had never heard of it, which, in retrospect, kind of surprises me. Ida Cook was a British woman who, under the pseudonym Mary Burchell, wrote romance novels. She did some other things, too: she & her sister Louise were passionate opera fans, & anyone with an interest in the art form will swoon at not only the performances they heard but the friends they made, among them Amelita Galli-Curci &, in particular, Rosa Ponselle (& later, towards the beginning of her career, Maria Callas). There must have been something special about them; Cook is too modest (too mid-century British, perhaps) to say this, but to become friends with such a series of renowned singers says a lot about their appeal, even beyond the joy in seeing two plucky young women determined to scrimp & save until they could afford to travel to New York & the Metropolitan Opera to hear their favorites (Galli-Curci hosted them & gave them tickets when they arrived). It's like reading a real-life version of James McCourt's Mawrdew Czgowchwz, in which opera is the center of the world. But in the middle of that story is another one: during the 1930s, thanks to their friendship with some European musicians, the sisters used their opera-centered trips to continental Europe to help smuggle out possessions (sometimes wearing the jewels & telling the border patrols that they were paste from Woolworth's) & information for the increasingly threatened Jewish artists. They also helped a number of Jews get out, sponsoring them in England. After the war they resumed their opera-centered lives. An amazing story.
Michelangelo & the Pope's Ceiling
Ross King
An impulsive grab from the library (there are more of those coming, lots more). Interesting & detailed account of the painting of the Sistine Ceiling, which Michelangelo didn't want to do, of course.
Mrs Reynolds & Five Earlier Novelettes
Gertrude Stein
Stein wrote Mrs Reynolds during World War II, when she & Alice B Toklas were, as Jewish lesbian Americans, in extreme danger. It is an indirect account of living under such constant tension. The war is happening, & two frightening characters, Angel Harper (Adolf Hitler) & Joseph Lane (Stalin) float overhead. Mrs Reynolds helps control her anxiety by, among other methods, relying on the prophecies of Saint Odile (of Alsace), an eighth-century nun whose ambiguous words pointed towards the ultimate defeat of the Germans. The atmosphere of anxiety is so well captured. The novel would not be improved if it were a more straightforward historical rendering; it is an eternally relevant evocation of living under tension. The name Angel Harper is ingenious. It sounds seraphic & poetic: angels! harps! But the menace is palpable.
Twelfth Night
Shakespeare
One of my all-time favorites. I seldom see it done right, though. There is an underlying melancholy, a poetic wistfulness, a twilight mood, that is often shoved out of the way in favor of a more farcical approach to staging. The Merry Wives of Windsor supposedly was written because Elizabeth I wanted to see Falstaff in love; the "romance" of Toby Belch & Maria is closer to that than the Merry Wives.
The Taming of the Shrew
Shakespeare
I hadn't read this one in a while. It's still staged frequently, which is somewhat surprising. But audiences seem to love it & I think many directors see it as a puzzle to be solved: how to make the gender politics less regressive? I have probably mentioned this before, but not recently so here goes: I saw a production in Boston that for me really nailed a lot about the play. I can't remember the name of the theater; it was in the 1980s, in a small space on Beacon Hill (I still have the program somewhere, I'm sure) It was set in a vaudeville house; Kate started as one of the baggy-pants comedians & ended up as one of the soubrettes; she delivered the long final speech in mincing tones & it was, honestly, one of the most genuinely terrifying things I've ever seen on stage. It stayed true to the play but was thought-provoking. That is my way of stating I loathe The Wink. You know what I'm talking about: Kate delivers her long final speech & then, when Petruchio isn't looking, winks at the audience. What I hate about it is that it turns Kate into Biance: someone who pays lip service to "the patriarchy" but then goes her own way. I think that's untrue to the character. Kate is an extremist: at the start, she is not only a shrew, she is the most notorious, violent-tongued shrew around. When she is "tamed" (using techniques – sleep deprivation, starvation, arbitrary & absurd pronouncements & orders – that are regularly used to break prisoners) she turns into a true believer in a husband' supremacy. Whatever she believes, she is fully committed to. No winking for her! A problem with the play is that the script has not survived in complete form: it's often forgotten (& usually omitted in performance) that there is a framing story, in which a rambunctious drunk (a male Kate, in a way) named Christopher Sly is, in fairy-tale fashion & for the amusement of some aristocrats, fooled into thinking that he is a great lord who has been ill. The Taming story is a play within a play, meant to entertain him. As such, it is not meant as a realistic picture of the world, but a farcical view, almost a parody, of that world's social assumptions. When Bianca & the Widow at the end show that, once they're married, they aren't going to continue to acquiesce in male supremacy, it's an echo of Sly's forthcoming return to his powerless state of drunken obscurity. But sadly that ending was not preserved, & the framing story just hangs in mid-air.
Absolute Monarchs
John Julius Norwich
This is a history of the papacy; though that is obviously an immense & comp0licated story, this is a relatively concise & extremely entertaining history; in fact, a wild ride. I enjoyed it so much I could overlook Norwich's dismissive comments about Robert Browning's The Ring & the Book, which I think is one of the great Victorian novels (which I wrote about here). He also suggests the possibility that Julius II had an affair with Michelangelo! It's a tribute to Norwich that this suggestion seems plausible rather than salacious or sensationalistic (but also: wow).
The Captive
Marcel Proust
Just as his characters change through time in the course of the novel (or novels), so do our perceptions of his characters change in our times, as we read &/or re-read & as our world changes around us. That's one way of saying I had misremembered a major point from the end of Sodom & Gomorrah, even though I've read In Search about every ten years since I was a teenager (long ago, for those keeping score at home): my recollection, or perhaps what I wanted to have happen, was that when the Narrator's affair with Albertine is re-ignited by the discovery of her long-time friendship (but how intimate a frienship?) with the lesbian Mlle Vinteuil & her girlfriend, it's because he sees the intimacy between two women as an emotional territory to which he has no access; possessing Albertine is an attempt to possess an emotional life he, as a man, can have no part in. It's actually more regressive than that: he wants to "protect" her from this "vice". He does so by, as the title suggests, keeping her virtually a prisoner. This control is not something most current readers are going to sympathize with. The novel doesn't, though, suggest that we should, or need to: this is one of the varieties of love. I said earlier that the Narrator could be described as "queer", & I stick by that: his openness to same-sex lovers is, in the context of his world, enough of a variation from the straight & narrow. He does refer often to homosexuality as a "vice" but inevitably dances it back, with phrases such as "if it be a vice". Albertine is a slippery character; we (or I) can't help sympathizing with her wish to live her own life, but she also willingly plays along with the Narrator's control of her; she remains just a touch out of reach of the Narrator & of us, which lends some strength to my thought that the Narrator's desire to control her is related to his wish to possess that which ultimately can't be possessed.
Antony & Cleopatra
Shakespeare
Every time I read this one it strikes me as more & more astonishing: the rapid, almost cinematic scenes; the astute analysis of power, erotic & political; the analysis of gender (the fluid, sophisticated Egyptians versus the forthrightly male Romans); the flashes of great poetry; the whole exotic love-death at the end. . . Cleopatra is such a great role. Maybe some day I'll get to see it on stage.
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare
One of the greatest & most universally beloved of the plays. This is probably the one I've seen staged most often. I will admit that Bottom, to me, is not the great role it is often presented as, but that doesn't really matter. An endlessly rich play, with its mixture of worlds: the fairy world, the Athenians, the workers. It's often overlooked how sophisticated the humor often is. The burlesque of Pyramus & Thisby, for example, often presented as crude farce, is in fact an extremely cultured parody of Elizabethan dramatic poetry & dramatic tropes as well as of Arthur Golding's celebrated translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Titus Andronicus
Shakespeare
I've always had a soft spot for this play. It used to be standard to describe it as Shakespeare's worst play, or even to deny that The Master had any hand in it. On the contrary, it's a very strong play, & works well on stage (as anyone can attest who has seen the Julie Taymor film). It foreshadows King Lear in its analysis of self-willed power destroying itself & its country. The notorious violence plays better for an audience that is used to Tarantino films.
Marcel Proust: A Life
Edmund White
This brief volume is the only thing I've read by White. It was from the library; I think I spotted it when I checked out (last year) a biography of Proust's mother. Its a good brief life; as you might expect, given the author, he's very interested in his subject's sexuality. There is an odd moment when he describes the recessive, scrupulous musician Vinteuil as "a wimp" which seems weird & hardly le mot juste, & not only because "wimp" has, thankfully, fallen a bit out of use.
Romeo & Juliet
Shakespeare
An interesting thing that adaptations of this play often miss is its lightness & fantasy. The intensity of the young lovers seems to take place in a world different from the one they live in (hence their frequent use of the sky, the heavens, the stars, as descriptors for their love). But stories of young love are not really my thing, & maybe that's one of the reasons that, though I've seen adaptations (operas, ballets) of R&J performed live, I've never seen the play itself on stage. Maybe that's OK. Directors frequently stage some obvious "reason" for the family feud (one family is White & one Black! one is Catholic & one Protestant – & we're in Northern Ireland! one family is the Hatfields & the others the McCoys!) but that's West Side Story, not Romeo & Juliet. It's right there in the first line: "Two households, both alike in dignity. . . " There's mention of an "ancient grudge", but no cause for the grudge is ever given. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Shakespeare to slip in a few lines about some specific origin of the feud, so his failure to do so must be a deliberate choice: there is no reason for the state of enmity; it just has long been so, & so it continues. (Let me also note that in the Pyramus & Thisbe episode of the Metamorphoses, often cited as one of the inspirations for this play, Ovid also does not give a reason for the enmity between the families of the lovers.) Making the families specific antagonistic factions gives substantial historical & political precedence for the enmity that is not meant to be there. The "ancient grudge" between the Capulets & the Montagues is merely a habit, & an absurd one.
The Fugitive
Marcel Proust
Our Narrator deals with the consequences of his actions, once Albertine breaks free. Again, multiple perspectives, through time & through different, incomplete & arbitrary, bits of information unsettle where we thought we were.
Wars I Have Seen
Gertrude Stein
It was sort of by chance that this was the Stein book I picked up after Mrs Reynolds, but it turned out to be an excellent choice, as it is the real-life version of that fictionalized account of living through the fascist occupation of France. Written secretly, it is a fascinating account of what it's like to live under the constant downward pressure of the occupation. Stein opens with remembered wars from the rest of her life, including stories told her about the American Civil War.
Troilus & Cressida
Shakespeare
Such a great play, so much anger & corruption amid the official heroism, & such a short, slender tale of love running through it.
I Heard Her Call My Name
Lucy Sante
This is Sante's memoir of her times & her gender transition. Her times sort of overlap mine, so that's one fascinating aspect: a memoir of the intellectual & cultural currents of the time; she was involved in the NY Review of Books, which I was reading at the time, & am still reading. She explores her relations with women both admirable & not so admirable (wives, girlfriends, her mother) as well as with the woman she eventually felt or admitted was inside her. Those of us who have never felt comfortable in our bodies will relate to her discomfort, even if hers takes a different form. I have to say, though, that once or twice she mentions that as a man she had never experienced being dismissed or ignored because of her gender, & . . . I accept her version of her life, but: really? I am absolutely flabbergasted when men say things like that. Is their experience of being a man in our world really so different from mine? I am frequently ignored, dismissed, or targeted because of my gender, & I'm not even talking about the times when I'm being attacked for my many failures to live up to assumptions about how men are, I'm talking about people who just see me as a generic Man & react (negatively) accordingly. That claim was a minor moment in an interesting read, but obviously it's one of those minor things that resonated with a particular reader (in this case, me).
Othello
Shakespeare
This is one of the most psychologically & verbally subtle of Shakespeare's plays, which is saying a lot, of course.
Sonnets
Shakespeare
I hadn't read these in quite a while. They are even stranger & more beautiful than I had remembered.
Joan of Arc: Maid, Myth, & History
Timothy Wilson Smith
I find Saint Joan endlessly fascinating. What I particularly liked about this book was that it continues past her life into a reception history, exploring her changing image & the different ways she was understood & used down the centuries.
Tender Buttons
Gertrude Stein
Echt Stein. I've read this before. People often wince when I mention Stein; my theory is that if you connect with her rhythms on a deep level, you're all in. If you don't you don't. What is meaning? what does meaning mean? As Stein said, if you enjoy it, you understand it.
Love's Labors Lost
Shakespeare
This is a gorgeous iridescent bubble of a play, but I have to admit I'm not always in the mood for it. It is an early example of Shakespeare's fascination with lovers who fight a battle of wits that both conceals & reveals their feelings (see: Beatrice & Benedick). I have to confess that I am, as they say, triggered by scenes in which people talk during a performance; in this one, while the allegedly witty lords & ladies mock the best efforts of the lower orders to put on a pageant, one of the performers stands up for himself by pointing out, "This is not just, my lord; not generous" & YES.
These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson
Martha Ackmann
This is an example of the trend in biographies on taking isolated moments & using that as a way of telling a life (rather than a chronological procession from birth to death). I find this an excellent approach, as it plunges us right into what we're there, & earlier & somewhat extraneous information can be fit in where suitable. This book gives a lively sense of what Dickinson was doing & feeling.
OK, I think that's enough for this entry. More to come. . . .
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