What I Read in 2025 (Part 4)

Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here, Part 3 is here.

King Lear

Shakespeare

Obviously one of the greatest plays ever written, & probably my favorite among Shakespeare's tragedies (I'm too much like Hamlet to have that as my favorite!). I'll just restrict myself to one thing here: my standard Shakespeare since I started reading him decades ago has been the Signet Classic edition. I bought myself each volume, long ago, until I had all 40, even having to ask a local bookstore owner to order for me the ones I could not find on occasional trips to the mall's B Dalton or Walden books (remember those?). I have, & have read, other editions, but Signet Classic was my basic. Time is taking its toll on everything & my copies are starting to fall apart. This time around my copy of Lear literally split in two, just like his kingdom. I sure did get my 75 cents worth out of that purchase, though.

All's Well That Ends Well

Shakespeare

I've actually already re-read this one! I'll tell a little story about the one time I saw it, on a far too rare trip to London, long ago. It was at the Royal Shakespeare Company, & the director made the brilliant choice to set it during the First World War, a time of great social upheaval, particularly in the roles of women, which put Helena's work as a doctor in a social perspective. Peggy Ashcroft played the Countess Rousillon, in her last stage appearance. I knew who she was & was excited to get a chance to see her on stage. And she was absolutely extraordinary. She was lambent, & I mean that literally: she seemed to glow with an internal light. Her performance is what I mostly remember from that long-ago staging. I have never seen anything like her luminosity, before or since. For a while I cynically, briefly, thought that it was just stage lighting. But then I realized that that couldn't be the case – if it were, everyone would have themselves lit that way. If you had enough money, you'd have the proper lighting follow you around wherever you went, from soiree to drugstore, the effect was that extraordinary. So I bow to the shining memory of the great Peggy Ashcroft.

The Two Noble Kinsmen

Shakespeare & John Fletcher

This one is also a bit static, at least in reading, though I've seen a DVD from the Globe & it seems to work quite well on stage. It's difficult not to feel that at points probably Fletcher is playing off his collaborator's previous work (specifically, the madness of the Jailer's Daughter, which hearkens back to Ophelia's), & of course the whole thing is working off Chaucer. It does have one line that has reverberated in my head for years: "On the sinister side the heart lies". This is on the one hand simply a factual statement: sinister means left, & the heart is on the left side of the body. On the other hand, sinister has some obviously threatening connotations, & lies also does double-duty as "location" & "telling untruths". A haunting set of puns.

The Tempest

Shakespeare

Another work whose familiarity may disguise for us how enchanting & very strange it is.

Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong's Rendezvous with American History

Yunte Huang

A very interesting biography/cultural history centered on Anna May Wong, a brilliant performer whose career was limited by, guess what, American racism. Huang has also written books about Chang & Eng, the original "Siamese" twins (now usually called conjoined twins) & about Charlie Chan; he conceives of this book as part of a trilogy about the Chinese-American experience as seen through these particular lenses. I found it an absorbing read, though occasionally there were some assertions that threw me: one that sticks in my mind is that the Supreme Court ended Prohibition. It took a constitutional amendment to do that, not a Court decision. That's a relatively minor point. I'd be interested in reading his other books.

Time Regained

Proust

There's always the feeling, each time one finishes something like In Search of Lost Time & puts it on a list like this, that there should be some sort of profound summation. Instead I've realized that this novel has seeped so deeply into my viewpoint & even personality that it is impossible to dismiss it with a summation, no matter what profundities I manage to throw in there. It is simply one of the books of my life. As I assume I mentioned earlier, I've read it about every ten years or so, since back when it was regularly referred to with Scott Moncrieff's evocative & Shakespearean but inaccurate title Remembrance of Things Past. When I finished this time I will admit I wondered if maybe I was now done with reading & re-reading Proust, but lately I find myself referring to different themes & scenes & pondering different elements & I'm thinking now it will make its way back into the rotation at some point, & I will see how I have changed since our last encounter, & how it has shifted its prisms during my time.

Cymbeline

Shakespeare

I have the feeling this play used to be a lot more popular (maybe just on stage) than it is now (I'm basing this on the delightful collection of Shaw's Shakespeare reviews, which I read avidly many years ago). I've always loved it, partly for its mishmash of different times & places & partly for the amazingly convoluted finale, which step by step unravels the absurdly complicated plot (& as if it weren't complicated enough, right before Act 5 begins Shakespeare throws in some more, completely gratuitous, complications in the form of a dream sent to Posthumus in prison).

Radical Hollywood

Paul Buhle & David Wagner

An encyclopedic look at attempts to convey leftist political messages in Hollywood films. Not surprisingly, despite the political hay made by right-wingers over Communist (or generally leftist) influence on American entertainment, it was a constant, often unsuccessful struggle against timidity & the self-interest of capitalism. The progressivism was generally economic (rather than, say, concentrated on civil rights), which may have made it more suspect. For popular entertainment, Hollywood sure doesn't push for the people (or The People, to use the lingo, which of course refers only to some of the people). Nice to see some respect paid to these idealists, who often suffered for their attempts to bring some thoughtful political depth to mass entertainment.

Coriolanus

Shakespeare

This is another one that gets more fascinating each time I encounter it (which is often enough so that, again, my copy is falling apart). The complex portrayals of both aristocrats & plebes is just endlessly prismatic. Since I mentioned seeing Peggy Ashcroft on stage, I will name-drop seeing Ian McKellan in the title role of this play, also on a trip to London. As I was leaving the show, I overheard two old ladies, one telling the other that she wasn't sure about McKellan's looks, as she had always pictured Coriolanus as "a big, rough, hairy fellow". No idea where she got this, or what she got out of the play, but considering his complicated relationship with his formidable mother, a certain dependent boyishness seems essential to the role.

What Is Remembered

Alice B Toklas

I had read this many years ago, & reread it last year as I was thinking about it in the context of all the other Stein & Stein-related books I've been reading. It's quite poignant, evocative & often rather poetic, but also cagey: Toklas tells what she wants to tell, & the book ends when Stein's life does. An interesting sidelight into a relationship that was more complex than it sometimes seems. (I think I first read this in high school – on my own, of course, not as part of a class – & it's linked with the memory of my French teacher mentioning once the days when he worked in a bank in Paris & one day a fellow teller drew his attention to a dried-up old lady at another window: "That's the famous Alice B Toklas," he informed my future teacher. I wonder if anyone in the class besides me was dazzled by  this glimpse of a vanished world.)

The Book of Revelation: A Biography

Timothy Beal

This book is part of a fascinating series published by Princeton University Press, Lives of Great Religious Books, which are basically reception histories of some of the world's key spiritual texts. This is a relatively brief book that covers a lot of ground: the background of Revelation, its strange & sometimes controversial fit with the rest of the approved books of the Bible, the ways it has been interpreted, not just theologically but politically & cinematically, & the some of the author's own history as someone who grew up in an evangelical Protestant household that believed in the end-times. In addition to the words of John, Beal also covers visual interpretations of the book (& it is one of the more vividly visual books of the Bible), from the famous woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer to movies of the sort that play not at the cineplex but at evangelical churches. Rich & engrossing.

Measure for Measure

Shakespeare

I've always found this one of the most fascinating plays in the canon. I had read it a couple of times before going to college, but I read it again of course for more than one class; I recall one discussion session in which the opening topic was whether Isabella was "frigid" or not (I will mention right now that the professor was a woman, & a self-described feminist). Something about this approach –starting off with Isabella's presumed sexual peculiarities – struck me as wrong-headed, but I wasn't quite able to formulate my objections (&, being fairly timid about speaking in class, I'm not sure I would have said anything anyway). The point, to me, was that it didn't matter what Isabella's sexual make-up was: she was being coerced by Angelo into having sex with him, & that's rape, regardless of what was going on with her (& she was, of course, planning to enter a strict order of nuns). I'm not saying that the class was defending Angelo, but they were starting with "what's the deal with Isabella?", which struck me as t he wrong way around. What's the deal with Angelo, who, in a city overfull with sex workers, has to single out & victimize the one woman who, in austerity & integrity, most resembles him? Why does he need to humiliate this mirror of himself? Years later, during the notorious confirmation hearings for the notorious Clarence Thomas, I read an editorial that compared him to Othello. That struck me as a stretch, & a comparison prompted mostly by their mutual skin color (at this point I have no idea who the writer was or what newspaper or magazine I read it in). I remember thinking, no, he's like Angelo: why is he singling out a woman who is a mirror of his own experiences? (Yes, clearly, I believed Thomas's word against his.)

The Winter's Tale

Shakespeare

This is one of the plays that has become hugely popular in our own time. I don't think it was big on the 19th-century stage. I love the artificiality of it, the very sophisticated use of the simplest theatrical tricks: someone dressed as Time enters as announces that 16 years have passed. OK! Given the way many of us experience time, I find something like that in a way more realistic than the painfully mundane "kitchen sink" dramas. The telescoped portrayal of Leontes's jealousy is a dramatic & psychological tour de force. I saw one performance that brought out the boyishness of the King (meaning also a sort of sexual immaturity & insecurity, & an almost romantic attachment to his friend Polixenes) that made it all quite convincing (in fact the character reminded me of someone I knew who was struggling with various sexuality issues). Another interesting role is Paulina. She always goes too far, she's even a bit of a nag, but she has a good & generous heart in many ways. I've seen performances that didn't bring this out, which was a mistake: in the scene in which she persuades the guards to let her through with the baby, she harangues the man but at the end realizes she's maybe gone too far with someone who is essentially powerless & she assures him she'll protect him from the consequences of his action. In this particular performance, she sniped those lines at him contemptuously & with condescension. What a mistake. I knew then it would be a fairly long evening.

The World of Christopher Marlowe

David Riggs

With the end of Shakespeare's plays approaching, I decided I'd reread Marlowe, so this was prep work.  Marlowe had a short & not always well documented life; this book is an excellent survey, as its title suggests, of the world in which he grew up: how a poor boy went to University on a scholarship, what he would study there, how he would try to make a living, the sort of intellectual currents he would have come across, & how those are reflected in his plays. Riggs suggests that Elizabeth I had knowledge of the plan to murder Marlowe: a far greater mark against her, if so, than the execution of Mary Queen of Scots.

Camera Man

Dana Stevens

About Buster Keaton. Stevens had the clever idea of using Keaton's life, through vaudeville, cinema, & television, & his experiences with writers, studio executives, & others, as an angle on a sort of media-centered history of the 20th century. Entertaining & thoughtful, though I value his film College more highly than she does (maybe it just hits home more for me) & I disliked her rather trendy criticisms of Chaplin, which are mostly based on his sexual history (there's no indication that any of his female friends was unwilling, even if we find some of them, as did some of his contemporaries, a bit young for him).

Hamlet

Shakespeare

Saved this one for last. In the odd way in which certain artists or artworks, while retaining their high position, get put slightly out of the spotlight by other artists or artworks – for example, a few years ago, I stopped hearing about Beethoven as the pinnacle of Western composers, & while he wasn't cast aside, the top spot was increasingly assigned to Mozart, at least by some –I have a feeling that the play now considered the height of tragedy is King Lear rather than Hamlet. Perhaps its almost nihilistic bleakness & absurdity speak more to our century.

Make Believe: The Broadway Musical in the 1920s

Ethan Mordden

This was an unexpectedly solid history. I had picked up the notion (from where I don't know) that Mordden was mostly going to offer anecdotes of a bitchy/amusing variety, but the knowledge is detailed & wide-reaching. He did a similar volume for the ensuing decades, up until I think the 1970s, & I've added them to the relentlessly growing TBR pile. This one made me want to find recordings of all the works he mentioned.

A Drifting Life

Yoshihiro Tatsumi

I was wandering through the Biography/Autobiography section of the library & saw a thick paperback volume that stood out as it looked like manga rather than a regular biography, so I took it out. I was not familiar with Tatsumi before I read this, but he is  indeed a manga artist, one who helped create an audience for darker stories. This is a wonderful book: a history of manga, a history of post-war Japan, a history of a family, & a history of a young man finding his way in the world & discovering his path as an artist, all evocatively written & drawn, with a sense familiar to readers of Japanese literature of this world as evanescent & in many ways puzzling.

OK, enough for this round.

What I read in 2025 (part 3)

Part 1 is here & Part 2 (which is just Shakespeare's history plays) is here.

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, or supposedly should be; 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. . . .

What I read in 2025 (part 2)

 Part 1 is here.

King John

Shakespeare

So now we get into the history plays. This one is unrelated to the main series, but covers similar themes (chiefly, where does power come from & how does it operate & maintain itself). I'm surprised this play doesn't get staged more often; it has a lot going for it, including many characters any actor would find a gold mine.

Richard II

Shakespeare

As they say in the movies, it begins. That is, the arc of royal history as seen by the Tudors, from Richard II losing out to Henry IV, the kingdom descending into the chaos of the War of the Roses & the final triumph of the youthful Henry VII (I am deliberately omitting Henry V, as I'll have more to say about him & his play in a bit). But this first spectacularly inappropriate king is foreshadowed for us by the vacillating King John, who is weak in a different way from Richard. It can be difficult at first to realize just how weak Richard is, as he is an endless fountain of whirling words. But it's his creation of himself through histrionic speeches, his over-reactions, his theatrical self-representation, that occupies his attention, not governing a kingdom that is slipping away from him. (He provide an interesting contrast with Henry V, another theatrical, self-created king, as I discuss below. Interesting that Richard captures my sympathies in a way Henry does not.) I love the abdication scene, where Richard displays the dazzling bounce of wordplay so beloved of Elizabethans (& me, though not everyone responds to it) to such an extent that one exasperated noble interrupts to ask if he's actually going to, you know, do something, meaning abdicate. The wonderful thing about Shakespeare is that the dizzying puns carry psychological weight: 

Ay, no; no, ay; for I must nothing be.

Therefore no “no,” for I resign to thee.

Now, mark me how I will undo myself. . . . 

"No [I]": exactly. He's fascinating, but would you really want to have to rely on him as ruler?

Henry IV, Part One

Henry IV, Part Two

Henry V

Shakespeare

The Henry IV plays are of course endlessly rich, but I've always found Henry V a bit of a slog. The first Henry IV play was apparently so popular it required a sequel, & the characters (particularly, of course, Falstaff, but we shouldn't underestimate the depth of the others) are so rich that the story could easily continue, even though the basic psychological dilemma – Prince Hal's insistence on acting the wild man, to his father's dismay – is, if not actually solved in Part One, mitigated enough so that Henry IV & Hal can enact the same process of transgression then forgiveness at the end of Part Two. But then that's the beauty of Hal's behavior: he sets it up so that he will only be what his father wants him to be once the father is safely dead, & therefore can never know that his son did not disgrace him. Henry IV may be a master of realpolitik, but Hal's cynicism puts him to shame: at the end of his very first scene, he announces to us via soliloquy that his wildness is all an act, a deliberate choice so that, in a PR coup, he can suddenly, upon accession to the throne, become dignified & stately. It's almost just a side benefit that his behavior until then will cause pain to his usurping father.

Causing pain to father figures is just part of who Hal ineluctably is: witness his treatment of Falstaff, who shows genuine, if self-interested, affection for the heir to the throne, whereas there's often an edge to Hal's rejoinders, most particularly in the scene in which he & Falstaff act out Hal's reception by his royal father (again, note the theatricality of what they do; it's all playacting with Hal). the one ending with Falstaff exclaiming "Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world!" to which Hal, his mask slipping a bit, gives the chilling response, "I do, I will." Other characters rush in with news, breaking the moment.  One wonders where they would have gone from there without the interruption.

Banish all the world is pretty much what Henry V has done; he is a hollow man, one who has played a part for so long that all he can do is play parts. The play Henry V is often described as Shakespeare's portrait of a model King. I raise an eyebrow sky-high at this. For one thing, that's just not how Shakespeare operates. His characteristic mode is excess, & that includes multiple angles on his characters. He's not really in the business of setting up paragons & ideals. There's just too much in the play that works against the view that it's some sort of handbook for royal governance.

The play opens with a Chorus, meaning a single narrator, who cries out "O for a muse of fire!" I remember my Shakespeare professor at Cal, Janet Adelman, pointing out what an odd line this is: "Shakespeare had a muse of fire" were her words, & surely by this pint in his career he knew it. Later, the Chorus will decry the inadequacies of the theater to portray the mighty events & royal splendors it's representing. I think what we have here is Brecht's alienation effect avant la lettre: we are constantly made aware of the staged, theatrical quality of what we're seeing. It's all constructed, like Hal/Henry V's persona, only with enough nails & sutures & taping shown to raise doubts for those paying attention.

Look at the whole invasion of France, which forms the major action of the play: at the end of Henry IV Part Two, the dying king gives his son classic advice on what to do when your hold on power is shaky & you need a distraction from looming troubles: "Be it thy course to busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels . . . . " (You know, like invading Venezuela, or claiming Greenland.) Henry V opens, once the Chorus bounds off, with the bishop of Ely & the archbishop of Canterbury essentially saying that in order to forestall a bill that would take some of the riches of the Church, they will give Henry a huge sum (that is, a bribe) to conduct wars in France. It's never, ever a good thing in Shakespeare when the Catholic hierarchy gets together to try to control things (or protect their own interests, which amounts to the same thing).

And this claim to France is apparently vague enough so that Henry has to have it explained to him, which is done in a very lengthy speech of dazzling obscurity, based on whether women can inherit & where Pharamond (you know: Pharamond!) thought the "Salic land" was & blah blah blah. I assume even people more adept at genealogies than I am find this forest too thick for easy traveling. How could this not be intentionally ironic on some level? And at the end, it turns out Henry had already decided: the ambassador from France is waiting outside. He'd already decided, but he needed the cover story. It's a consistent pattern with Henry that he avoids responsibility: if, during the invasion, he threatens to destroy a town, giving them gruesome details about how they're going to suffer, then it's their fault, not his, because they didn't surrender. Even when the outcome is good, in his mind, he disclaims responsibility: after his victory at Agincourt, he repeatedly announces that the credit goes to God. That's because Henry himself doesn't quite exist, except as a performative gesture that seems suited to the moment.

He's this way with his own people to, as witness his whiny "Upon the king!" soliloquy, when he, in disguise (again), essentially tricks a common soldier into giving his opinion of the King & his wars. The soldier feels that if he's killed in a foreign land, without having the chance to say goodbye to his family or to receive the last rites, the King has responsibility for his end. Henry, of course, doesn't like this, but Henry, of course, is incorrect. He brought this war on, he uprooted the common soldiers from their towns, & he does bear responsibility for what happens to them there. 

That scene with the soldier also results in a mean trick played upon both the soldier & Fluellen, the Welsh captain who is possibly the only truly boring character Shakespeare ever created (but even he deserves better than this sub-frat-boy-style prank). It's a bit of tomfoolery about striking someone who is wearing a glove given as a pledge. The predictable ensues, & Henry buys them off with money (which is pretty insulting, & so much for that sentimental touch of Harry in the night). This happens after God wins for him at Agincourt. The bathos of the descent from a great military victory to stupid pranks, again, has to be intentionally pointed at some level. (Incidentally, people often point out that Magna Carta is never mentioned in King John, but the real sin of historical omission is the failure to mention the English longbows & their role in Agincourt in Henry V.)

By now, it's clear to those paying attention that Henry V has no real core to his being, but shifts guises (& evades responsibility for his actions) at all times. This brings us to the scene in which he "courts" Princess Katherine of France. She's listed as an article in the peace agreements, & it's clearly a dynasty-driven choice of spouse, but Henry pretends he's just a bluff soldier unskilled at wooing the pretty girl, even though we've seen him, as Prince Hal, slinging wit & woo like a pro with Doll Tearsheet & Mistress Quckly. After saying he's just no good at this kind of thing, gosh darn it, he them proceeds to talk her (& our) ears off, pirouetting prettily among the puns like the daintiest sonneteer at the most refined court.

And what is all this for? For a stake in France that is meltingly brief but will distort & haunt British history for years after. And the audience was aware of this: the Henry VI plays had been hugely successful, & there is a constant theme in them of the loss of France. In fact, at the end of Henry V, the Chorus shows up for a farewell appearance, & spends the final half of his/her last speech reminding us that what we've just seen won is going to be quickly lost, very quickly lost, with tragic results, as we all know from seeing the earlier plays. So Henry's brief victory was not only pointless & unnecessary, but an on-going cause of grief: a model King? Really?

Henry VI, Part One

Henry VI, Part Two

Henry VI, Part Three

Shakespeare

I really love these plays, & though the Henry IV plays are obviously superior in many ways, I might even have greater affection for these plays than for their betters. There's something about the descent into chaos, through heedlessness, selfishness, & cruelty, that, to state the obvious, seems very resonant with our times. I would love to see a staging of the trilogy, & I mean pretty much as written, not some War of the Roses mash-up done so that people can put on Richard III without having the audience spend the whole play going "Who is Queen Margaret, & why is she so upset?" Henry VI is another in Shakespeare's portrait gallery of Inappropriate Kings; he strikes me as an interesting prefiguration of Hamlet: both men are thrust by fate & chance into an active role for which they are temperamentally ill-suited.

Richard III

Shakespeare

Shaw gave the perfect summary: the greatest Punch & Judy show ever written. Richard is one of those Elizabethan villains so zestful in their scheming that they become almost lovable. But even here, with an official Tudor villain, Shakespeare humanizes him: his night terrors, his complex attitude to his body.

Henry VIII

Shakespeare (& John Fletcher)

A bit removed from the series, but it serves as a capstone. I find this play, like Henry V, a bit of a slog, but for different reasons: it seems a bit diffuse, a bit on-the-surface, a bit pageant-like, with plenty of colorful processions & suchlike separated by set-piece moments of pathos, exemplary stories of the fall of the great. I have heard it's very effective on stage; I've never had the chance to test this proposition in person, but it makes sense, as pageants are, by their nature, things better seen than read about. There's an interesting dance going on in this play; there's sympathy for Katherine, but not too much, as where would that leave Elizabeth I, the daughter of her successor; Anne Boleyn's fate is not mentioned; Henry is presented with "plausible deniability:" his roving eye is caught by Anne, but we're also supposed to think he's genuinely troubled by the validity of his marriage to his brother's widow. The characterization of him is not too probing, mostly limited to his tendency to exclaim Ha! I guess it's appropriate for Shakespeare to end his examination of British royalty with a slightly dull, noncommittal pageant: a foreshadowing of royalty in our own time.

OK, I guess that's enough for now. More 2025 reading to come!

What I read in 2025 (part 1)

I wrote one of these in 2023 (you can find it here) & figured I would do it again, though I feel as if I've had less time to read this year. I don't know if that's actually true, as I don't really track reading time, but it sure feels that way. Maybe it's because I've developed the habit (or this tendency has worsened) of starting a book & then reading it only in fits & starts, so it takes much longer to finish than you'd think it would, based on its length. Despite all that, this list will be long, but lots of the items are plays, which are, for obvious reasons, fairly short.

If you read the introduction to the 2023 list, you'll see I lay out the rules (books completed in the year, cover-to-cover, even if I started them earlier) & I mention some reading I do every morning: one chapter of the King James translation of the Bible & one poem by Emily Dickinson. I am now up to the epistles in the Bible, so nearing the end of the cover-to-cover read-through; when I finish, I might go back to hopping among the books, or maybe I'll just circle back to the beginning. I'm around poem #1500 for Dickinson, as since the edition I use contains 1,775 poems, I will finish it this year, at which point I will probably just go back to the beginning & start over. But maybe this time I'll read two or even three poems a day; time is running shorter for all of us. In 2023 I also mentioned reading a few pages of Finnegans Wake each day. After I went through it a few times, I decide to switch things up & moved on to Gertrude Stein: a few pages a day, two to six, usually. Those books will appear on this list, or at least some of them will, the ones I finished.

I'm also doing a simultaneous read of 13 different translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses, but I should probably do a separate entry on that. As you can imagine, that takes a while, & it's not something you'd want to slam through anyway.

There will be a lot of Shakespeare on this list, as I re-read his complete works this year. I read him regularly, as I have for decades, but this is the first time I read everything in a row, one thing after another. I came close in a college course, a two-quarter Shakespeare survey (taught by Janet Adelman at Cal) in which we read all the plays (except for the Merry Wives of Windsor, which she, like many lovers of Falstaff, disliked, as in it he is a buffoon & a gull & not the mighty character from the Henry IV plays) so she told us we could read it over the break if we wanted to but she wouldn't discuss it – of course I did read it over the break). But for that course we didn't read the sonnets or the narrative poems. Occasionally I will read all the history plays in a row. But last January I had picked up Macbeth again to read on BART. I always have a separate BART book; for a while, back when I worked in offices & went to many, many live performances, I did most of my reading on BART. But it's gotten increasingly difficult to read on BART, mostly because of device-related noise. People are, as we all know, idiots, & I do not understand why someone would think an entire car on a train should have to listen to whatever nonsense they're listening to (people, headphones exist!). But there it is. (Yes, I use earplugs, but they don't quite get the job done.) So I'm looking for something that fits easily into my satchel & that can be interrupted (I've read the plays so many times, yes I know that makes me sound unbearable, but I can pick them up & put them down at any point & not be lost). So I had Macbeth & thought, sure, let's just keep going. For years I read through the complete works, beginning, as I had the first time around, with Twelfth Night & ending with Hamlet (always smart to keep something excellent in reserve for the end). Eventually I realized / decided that I didn't need to read every play every time; I could read King Lear three times & read Merry Wives maybe once (I don't hate it, but it's not really a favorite). So there were a few I hadn't read in quite a while, until last year. But this year is already passing, so let's get to it:

Macbeth

Shakespeare

Really struck this time by the bird imagery; still working out the way it's used. I think I re-watched Throne of Blood in conjunction with this. I should post movie updates as well.

Walden

Henry David Thoreau

I had started re-reading this a couple of years earlier. I read it slowly, with long gaps, which is a good way to read this book in particular (though it's also increasingly the way I read everything). I had read it in college, for an American literature course. I was fascinated then by the reactions when people saw me carrying it around: ten years earlier it had been a touchstone book, but when I read it (in the late 1970s) every person said, Oh, I had to read that in high school, & I hated it. I could image their idealistic high school English teachers, assigning the significant books of their generation, to an ensuing generation that wasn't having it. Thoreau is always going to be thorny, I think, & controversial; I need to read more of him. A few years ago the New Yorker ran an article attacking him by a woman whose name I can't remember. It seemed to me she missed his point(s) completely. I remember she went on about how he doesn't give the exact depth of some body of water. In that American lit class, we had an entire lecture on how he doesn't give us the exact depth, & what that means. In short, she was a journalist & Thoreau was a poet & philosopher & she just didn't get him.

Timon of Athens

Shakespeare

This one has actually been staged a few times recently, which is interesting. This play, with its heedless millionaire turned misanthrope, seems to hit the current world in a suggestive way (I saw a staging in which Timon was, though I dislike this term, a tech bro – provocative, especially as I'd always pictures Timon as an older man, possibly influenced by the Milton Glaser cover for my Signet Classic Shakespeare edition). When I first read it decades ago, the consensus was that it was unfinished. Recently I looked for more current thinking, &, as collaboration is a big thing now (no more solitary genius expressing his vision!) Timon is presented as a co-written work. But that still doesn't explain some of the loose ends, like why Alcibiades makes a long speech begging for mercy for someone we don't know anything about, or why the amount of money Timon needs keeps changing.

Within a Budding Grove

Marcel Proust

I re-read Swann's Way at the end of 2024, but I'm being a purist & this list is only 2025. I re-read Proust about every 10 years (it was a bit over that this time). I've been doing this since the series was known by the evocative but less accurate title Remembrance of Things Past. It's one of the central books of my life. But as with stepping into rivers, you never read the same book twice. I was struck this time by how comical much of Proust is, but often in a very awkward way that maybe struck me when I was younger as almost too embarrassing to be funny. And of course one point of the novel is the shifting in perception: characters change throughout the book, & then they change in how we react to them. When I decided to re-read, I briefly considered picking up one of the newer translations, but I decided to stick with the Moncrieff, as revised by Kilmartin & Enright. It is one of the classic translations, & I already had all the volumes,, in lovely hardback Modern Library editions. But there were a few things (Britishisms, phrasing that's a bit outdated) that made me think I should explore some of the other translations, next time around.

Much Ado About Nothing

Shakespeare

I have to confess that I have increasingly complicated feelings about this play. There's something a bit desperate about the word play between Beatrice & Benedick: have you ever been in a relationship / friendship where you were always supposed to be "on", always "witty"? It can be grating & ultimately exhausting. As Shaw pointed out, much of what B & B say to each other is not particularly clever (in fact, much of it is downright rude); it's the phrasing that makes it magic. Of course breaking out of that endless "wit trap", or trying to, is what the play is about. Claudio is a fine example of one of Shakespeare's young men who is a romantic hero, officially, but not a particularly nice or admirable person. Years ago a friend of mine was understudying the part & he asked me about one of Claudio's lines: why does he ask if Hero is the only child? I pointed out that if Hero is the only child (meaning, there is no male heir), then her husband would inherit her father's estate entirely. Charming fellow! This play is quite popular now. I wonder if it's because of the Branagh film (which I had mixed feelings about), or is it just hitting the zeitgeist in some other way?

Pericles, Prince of Tyre

Shakespeare

Fabulous in every sense.

The Merchant of Venice

Shakespeare

Another play made more complicated by subsequent history. It's a mark of Shakespeare's genius as a playwright that though Shylock remains basically villainous, you can't help but sympathize with him. He's complicated (contrast that with Marlowe's Barabbas from the Jew of Malta, which will show up later on this list, who wins us over basically because of his zest in doing evil, but who lacks the emotional complications of Shylock – his love for his late wife Leah, not to mention his complicated emotions for his daughter & his ducats – but also his sophisticated justification for revenge in the famous "Hath not a Jew eyes" speech). Of course, Shylock sort of swamps the rest of the play, which has many lovely moments (see Berlioz's borrowing in Les Troyens's Nuit d'ivresse of the Act 5 flirtations between Jessica & Lorenzo). Interesting that the Victorians looked on it as a romantic comedy, & for us it's more of a problem play: but of course we live in a post-Shoah world.

Lucy Church Amiably

Gertrude Stein

So Gertrude Stein is making her first appearance. This book has the lovely subtitle "A Novel of Romantic beauty and nature and which Looks Like an Engraving" & that's pretty much it. I know Stein drives a lot of people crazy. My theory is that if you connect with her rhythms on a deep level (& apparently I do), you will love her. Otherwise, maybe not your cup of tea.

The Guermantes Way

Marcel Proust

Volume 3, in which the narrator explores high society. There are some reminders in these novels (the discussion, for instance, of "servants" who started calling themselves "employees") that this is all taking place in a very different world. The high society here, based on an aristocratic descent that is completely alien to an American, for whom money, inherited or not, is the main dividing line, is interesting exactly because it's so foreign. I can understand the romance of someone descended from Genevieve of Brabant; it's historical poetry, a glowing link to a golden past, though of course the actual people are . . .well, people.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Shakespeare

Quite a charming play, though, as is often noted, overshadowed by the later, greater romantic comedies.

The Wife of Bath: A Biography

Marion Turner

Fascinating & engaging history of the sources & offspring of Chaucer's celebrated Wife of Bath (including the intriguing thought that she was one of the sources for Falstaff).

Julius Caesar

Shakespeare

This used to be taught in American high schools, long ago, to show that "Shaespeare approved of democracy" (!!!!!) (& also the verse is not too knotty); it should have been taught as a perfect example of Shakespeare's technique, because no matter what you think of anyone in this play & his or her actions, the playwright forces you to confront another perspective.

OK, that's Part 1.

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.