Greer Gilman's Blog, page 83

Pox

Good god.

How did I miss this? There's a brisk cheerful trade among crunchier-than-thou mommies in serious biohazards: chicken pox scabs, snotty tissues, licked lollipops. And they're sending them through the mail. Unmarked. Anything to avoid--drumroll of doom--shots. No, they want their kids to get sick. Sick is natural. They're posting triumphant snapshots of their poxy kids, as if their misery were some sort of dance recital.

Words fail me.

On the other hand, they do put the literary loons into perspective.

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Anon and on

And from our own inimitable ron_drummond : "I suppose that's mean of me to say, but honestly, Anonymous feels like the work of men who have forgotten how to shit."

To which the twice-inimitable sovay has replied: "That is a judgment worthy of Mozart."

Amen. It should be set as a cantata.

Jonathan Kay goes gleefully for Freud:

"De Vere was a spoiled, hysterical, and violent man. But for Freud, his saving grace was that he'd 'lost a beloved and admired father while he was still a boy and completely repudiated his mother, who contracted a new marriage very soon after her husband's death.' How convenient! Thanks to this conspiratorial sleight of hand, Freud repaired this crack in the Shakesperean bedrock of psychoanalysis."

And James Shapiro writes:

"Perhaps the saddest thing about Anonymous is that Emmerich and Orloff, like every supporter of De Vere I have ever encountered, would hotly deny that the class-obsessed and anti-democratic roots of the De Vere movement have influenced them in the slightest, or that its DNA runs through their arguments."

Unsurprisingly, his excellent essay has drawn the comments of every venomous self-righteous crankshaft in the galaxy. (Or one guy and his Punch-and-Judy show.) Like Paul Offit for the anti-vaxers, Shapiro is a locus of resentment for the anti-Shakespeareans. Brave men, both of them: though the pro-disease crusaders are far more dangerous.

This one is magnificently catty, and I want to have its kittens:

"If I were to ... try to judge Anonymous as a nail-biting thriller of court intrigue, lies, and rebellion, I would be forced to admit that, yes, Lisy Christl's costume designs are really pretty goddamn good ...

"One grand 'fuck you' to common intelligence."

Antagony & Ecstasy

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A mess of pottage

"A thick and indigestible pottage populated by most of the English actors left out of 'Harry Potter,' this is a Bard movie for birthers ... The apparently earnest 'Anonymous' is weirdly contradictory: It presents itself as an attempt to bring  overdue justice to one artist by practicing character assassination on another. What's distressing about the film, however, isn't its plodding incoherence or wild-eyed credulousness but its misplaced priority: It suggests that what's most interesting about this writer we call Shakespeare is not the genius of his words but the puzzle of his identity."



The Bloodshot Eye



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Will in the Web

Holger Syme continues to be brilliant:

"Shakespeare didn’t need the Internet in 1600 because he had the London of 1600, which was not unlike a small Internet you could walk around in."

Don't miss Sketches by Boswell.

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Those that cross Tom Rhinoceros

"Historians and literary scholars must assemble themselves into a colossal Godzilla formation, rise towering from the Pacific Ocean, rampage around Hollywood breathing fire, and stomp the hell out of Roland Emmerich's production company."

Reel History

ETA:  "The problem with Anonymous isn’t that it claims someone else wrote all those beautiful words; the problem is that it doesn’t know what they mean, or what to do with them.

I mentioned Ratatouille jokingly earlier, but there is a valid connection. To quote it: “Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.”


On the other hand, this is a fabulous exhibit.  Click on the clicketies!

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All Hallows Eve

iGourd

In Memoriam Steve Jobs.

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"He's an aging rent boy. He's an ex-con Poet Laureate. They fight crime."

I seem to be toying with that Ben-Jonson-as-detective story.  (Not hardboiled but ill-roasted?)  This may well fizzle out—don't hold your breath—but it's being enjoyable.

Meanwhile:

"The American screenwriter John Orloff may have wished for a muse of fire,but unfortunately he's been given an ear of cloth, and his film would hardly pass muster as a sixth-form end-of-term romp."

Philip French quotes "Leslie Howard's great second world war comedy-thriller, Pimpernel Smith, in which one of Hitler's ideological henchmen ... claims that Shakespeare was really a German, and Howard's Smith retorts: "But you'll have to admit, the English translations are rather good."

The Observer (with a sidebar of links)

****

Oh dear. No coat-tails.

"Sony’s limited-release newcomer, Anonymous (Tomatometer 45%),
directed by Ronald Emmerich, failed to make a name for itself, with a
scant $1 million on 265 locations, good for a paltry $3,774 per screen
average. The $30-million film’s lackluster opening suggests a lack of
interest, at least to the movie-going public (as opposed to academics),
in the question it poses: was Shakespeare a fraud? That, coupled with
no big-name topliners, proved the film’s early undoing."

Nyah.

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Sweet suffering Holofernes!

My Oxfordian friend has long championed an inutterably dreary didactic poem by Anthony Munday (1580), which she insists is by Edward de Vere. Weightless Books has just published it as A New Shakespearean Poem.

*headdesk*

First Rylance, Jacobi, and Redgrave, and now my beloved Small Beer.  I weep.

At her request, I did a careful close reading of the damned thing and her commentary last year and sent critical notes.

Really, it can't be De Vere's.  For one thing, it's too competent.  (All right, that's flip.)  But seriously, this poet's use of rhyme-words is quite different from Oxford's.  They don't speak the same English.  As far as I'm concerned, that's *tilt*.  Game over.

And it's so blindingly not Shakespeare.

Here are a few of my notes, both on the poem and her arguments.  Let them stand as my review.

*****
You say, "Shakespeare writes often and movingly on honor and revenge."

I'd be wary of arguing from topics.  This is much as if you said, "Look, this must be a Vermeer!  There's a table in it!"

All of these topics are threadbare conventional.  Much depends on what the poet does with them:

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

That, of course, is Falstaff (Henry IV, Part I, written by 1597), and the first speech that sprang to mind, as well it might be.  No sense here "that honor is a necessity."

Shakespeare took the Ur-Hamlet, with its "ghost which cried so miserably at the theatre, like an oyster-wife, Hamlet, revenge!" and made something rather better of it.

A note on falconry:  everyone did it.  Archeological digs in the 17th-century stratum of Cripplegate, one of Shakespeare's old London neighborhoods, turned up the skeleton of a female peregrine falcon ("in a stone-lined cesspit off Oat Lane ... the most spectacular and prestigious bird"), as well the remains of a goshawk and three sparrowhawks.  Not saying any of these were Shakespeare's, but he could have seen sport with them any day, all round him.

*****

This is not a formal stylistic analysis; only my impression of the text, my “intuitive calculus,” as Craig and Kinney would say.

Overwhelmingly, this feels old-fashioned, backward turning:  as if it were Pat Boone and Shakespeare the Beatles.  A vivid didacticism can exist (take Histrio-mastix), but this is hobbled with moralities.  And there is bombast for the sake of rhyme:  “But to be short, as once I said before  / I say again.”  Perhaps its author would do better in another form—a lyric or an interlude; s/he is wildly uneven.  (When you say “the poet speaks from male experience,” remember Silverberg on Tiptree.  Oxfordians think far too much of experience, too little of imagination.)

Where is the invention?  The wit?  The onrush of ideas?  Shakespeare “had an excellent Phantsie; brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein hee flow'd with that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stop'd.”  This halts.  It perseverates.  Despite some flickers of real energy (“As bow may break, string crack, and feathers fall”), it plods.

Where is the figurative language?  Shakespeare excelled in seeing likenesses in things unlike.  As Jonson said, he overflowed rhetorically.  But here in 1200 lines I find half a dozen threadbare metaphors, most passed into the common speech, stock phrases out of sermons:  “our life, still fading as a flower”; “feathers in the wind / Which every tempest tosseth to and fro”; “in Music drowned”; “to paint a fable”; “down his feathers fall”; “seek no medicine for the soul’s annoy”; “we wander to and fro / From virtue’s line, and light in sinful snare.”  One distich is simple paraphrase:  “But scripture says the rich to Heaven on high / Go like a Camel through a Needle’s eye.”  The least clichéd simile is “dredgeth like a water dog.”

Where is the music?

I’m sorry.  If this is Shakespeare, I’m Genghis Khan.

The author, whoever he is, takes pleasure in activity.  If he must be indoors, he likes Music and Dancing.  His passages on Hawking, Fowling, Fencing, Tennis, Shooting, Fishing have a verve and a particularity that his verses on scholarly pursuits all lack.   He has none of Shakespeare’s loving observation of the countryside itself, but he does like to sport in it.  Dutifully, he pays lip service to learning, as a gentleman ought, but his verses on Studies, Physic, Philosophy are vague and perfunctory.  (Law at least he disdains:  “To make wrong right, and right not worth a straw.”)  They’ve none of the liveliness that bodily exercise inspires.  What does a Lawyer do that he so enjoys it?  “Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks?”  You won’t read it here.

He has damn all to say about Astronomy, despite the heading.  Isn’t that odd?  Given Oxford’s supposed study with John Dee?

Plays are not among his pleasures.

None of this will alter your belief, I fear.  I have spent some time with this text, and my conclusions are honest.   I am sorry if they pain you.

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Pareidolia

I can see the Man in the Moon. Most people can; most know him for an illusion, a trick of the human mind’s gift for patterning. “Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish.” The rational among us know it’s vapor. Oxfordians see Oxford's shadow everywhere in Shakespeare's work. Sadly, they believe their cloudscapes as they would a revelation, as a message from the moon.

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"A source, a source, my kingdom for a source."

Latest links:

"Stylish claptrap ... A source, a source, my kingdom for a source."


"...a desecration..."

NPR (Bob Edelstein)

And so, like vermin, facts here are banished
Logic dispelled, plain motives all vanished

Newark Star-Ledger (and good for him!)

"Elizabethan kitsch ... Imagine Blackadder made on an epic scale but strained of most of the humour ..."

Independent

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