Steve Evans's Blog: The written world - Posts Tagged "troilus-and-cressida"
Digression digression
Since starting this blog my aim has been to write at least one post a week, and lately I’ve been failing conspicuously to do that. Blagh! Life outside the blogosphere has just got pretty full on for one thing, and also I’ve been thinking about things, maybe rather too much. Still, I have a plan so I thought I’d try to put a bit more of it into action with a new post, though it is only a teaser for something to come.
My next to last post was intended to be a sort of introduction to a Shakespeare play most people have never heard of, Troilus and Cressida, a play that will have a walk-on part in the book I am writing now, Kaos. Troilus and Cressida is one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays”, and perhaps the most problematic of them all. Anyone wishing to get right into this will find David Bevington’s Arden edition a lot of fun.
I have seen this play three times: once at Stratford in the mid-1980s in a version set in the Crimean War, once in Edinburgh early in this century in a version that might be described as traditional, using a Renaissance staging, and in Glasgow not long after in a wild and exciting version of gender transference with the usual male roles played by women and vice versa. Each of these had its attractions, but for me none was ultimately successful.
That is not really surprising. In order to stage a play one must know what it’s about, and it is hard to say for sure what this play – which Bevington argues was “experimental” for Shakespeare – is about. There is a great deal of conflicting possibility contained within it: Its most famous lines, spoken by Odysseus to Achilles, have been argued about for several hundred years.
But that is mere detail from my perspective. The real troubles with this play are more profound, and stretch right back to its first publication as a quarto and the folio that followed fourteen years later.
There were three versions of this: two quartos and the version in the folio. The quarto versions are identical, apart from what might ordinarily appear to be extraneous introductory material. In this case a great range of problems flows from this packaging. One of the quartos says on the title page that the play had been performed by Shakespeare’s company, but the second quarto – identical in every other respect – says that it has never been performed.
That’s not all. This second version has a strange introduction to the reader that goes on to say that there are plenty of laughs in it: that Troilus and Cressida is a comedy right up there with the best of Terence and Plautus, Roman comic authors. Given that the play is set in the Trojan War and that it involves the death of the Trojan hero Hector, this at first sight seems a stretch. And even at second sight: a central character, Achilles’ fool Thersites, is arguably one of the most bitter characters in all literature, while Pandarus, whose name is the origin of one of the words for pimp, delivers a parting shot to the audience groaning with pustules of invective. Pandarus’ farewell to the audience has been taken to suggest that Shakespeare was suffering from syphilis, and this may be true. But readers who persist with me will see a different colouring altogether to Pandarus’ performance.
Then there is the folio, where the play is an apparently late addition, sandwiched in between the history plays and the tragedies. The folio also arranges the play differently.
So when some one asks the apparently simple question, “what is this play about?”, the answer is not necessarily straightforward.
My aim is to provide a reading of Troilus and Cressida different from the others I have encountered, including Bevington’s. I would not presume to suggest that my reading will exhaust the possibilities of the play. Lots of people have had a slash at interpreting Troilus and Cressida and my version is just as likely to be full of problems and errors as any other. What I want to do is to try to follow the claim in the quarto that it is indeed a comedy, that it is possible for a production to have the audience rolling in the aisles even as Hector is unceremoniously dealt to by Achilles’ helpmates. For to my mind, this is a play about what it means to be a human being, and within that, the poor quality of the male of our species, who regards himself as the lynchpin of society when he is more the cause of all the trouble. Shakespeare is sticking it up the idea of male superiority, skewering any kind of view of chivalry as he does it. If it hurts, well, so it should seems to be the message.
To laugh at these notions, to adopt a realistic view of men whose claims to superiority over woman rest simply and fully on physical strength, catered to an audience of emerging “bourgeoisie”, men with money who’d made their money, not had it handed down to them, men whose retinues were just as real, who could look, however implausibly, forward to a society based on merit. Their view of posterity was as unglamorous as their notions of the reality of the present.
About the time the quartos were published, Shakespeare’s sonnets were also released, and it is instructive to read one of the most of famous of these fourteen line marvels in this context, number 130:
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts be dun;
If hairs be wires, why then black wires grow on her head;
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that in my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
Than any she belied with false compare.
To me this sonnet is about real love, about where it comes from and where it definitely does not. At a time when the cult of the not-long-dead Elizabeth I had seen quite ridiculous paeans to the chivalric notion of woman as perfect, as “goddess”, and of male behaviour in general, sonnet 130 stood up for real emotions in a real world and was a brave attack on the fantasy values of The Faerie Queen and any who promoted them.* The way I see Troilus and Cressida, this play is an even more ferocious attack in the same vein.
More to come! Thanks for reading.
*It is astonishing to me that the editor of the Arden edition of the sonnets, Katherine Duncan-Jones, says of this sonnet that “with utter cynicism, the speaker praises her as a ‘poor thing, but mine own’, celebrating her in swaggering terms which are ingeniously offensive both to her and to women in general”. Even taking into account “context” of the other sonnets in the sequence, it really doesn’t wash. Duncan-Jones is making this sonnet mean what she is determined for it to mean. The evidence is simply not there. And Shakespeare never wrote ‘a poor thing, but mine own’, which is a misquotation from As You Like It, by a poor man who has more kindly thoughts than Duncan-Jones allows him, and whose remark is partly a rueful reflection on his own character and suitability as a mate.
My next to last post was intended to be a sort of introduction to a Shakespeare play most people have never heard of, Troilus and Cressida, a play that will have a walk-on part in the book I am writing now, Kaos. Troilus and Cressida is one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays”, and perhaps the most problematic of them all. Anyone wishing to get right into this will find David Bevington’s Arden edition a lot of fun.
I have seen this play three times: once at Stratford in the mid-1980s in a version set in the Crimean War, once in Edinburgh early in this century in a version that might be described as traditional, using a Renaissance staging, and in Glasgow not long after in a wild and exciting version of gender transference with the usual male roles played by women and vice versa. Each of these had its attractions, but for me none was ultimately successful.
That is not really surprising. In order to stage a play one must know what it’s about, and it is hard to say for sure what this play – which Bevington argues was “experimental” for Shakespeare – is about. There is a great deal of conflicting possibility contained within it: Its most famous lines, spoken by Odysseus to Achilles, have been argued about for several hundred years.
But that is mere detail from my perspective. The real troubles with this play are more profound, and stretch right back to its first publication as a quarto and the folio that followed fourteen years later.
There were three versions of this: two quartos and the version in the folio. The quarto versions are identical, apart from what might ordinarily appear to be extraneous introductory material. In this case a great range of problems flows from this packaging. One of the quartos says on the title page that the play had been performed by Shakespeare’s company, but the second quarto – identical in every other respect – says that it has never been performed.
That’s not all. This second version has a strange introduction to the reader that goes on to say that there are plenty of laughs in it: that Troilus and Cressida is a comedy right up there with the best of Terence and Plautus, Roman comic authors. Given that the play is set in the Trojan War and that it involves the death of the Trojan hero Hector, this at first sight seems a stretch. And even at second sight: a central character, Achilles’ fool Thersites, is arguably one of the most bitter characters in all literature, while Pandarus, whose name is the origin of one of the words for pimp, delivers a parting shot to the audience groaning with pustules of invective. Pandarus’ farewell to the audience has been taken to suggest that Shakespeare was suffering from syphilis, and this may be true. But readers who persist with me will see a different colouring altogether to Pandarus’ performance.
Then there is the folio, where the play is an apparently late addition, sandwiched in between the history plays and the tragedies. The folio also arranges the play differently.
So when some one asks the apparently simple question, “what is this play about?”, the answer is not necessarily straightforward.
My aim is to provide a reading of Troilus and Cressida different from the others I have encountered, including Bevington’s. I would not presume to suggest that my reading will exhaust the possibilities of the play. Lots of people have had a slash at interpreting Troilus and Cressida and my version is just as likely to be full of problems and errors as any other. What I want to do is to try to follow the claim in the quarto that it is indeed a comedy, that it is possible for a production to have the audience rolling in the aisles even as Hector is unceremoniously dealt to by Achilles’ helpmates. For to my mind, this is a play about what it means to be a human being, and within that, the poor quality of the male of our species, who regards himself as the lynchpin of society when he is more the cause of all the trouble. Shakespeare is sticking it up the idea of male superiority, skewering any kind of view of chivalry as he does it. If it hurts, well, so it should seems to be the message.
To laugh at these notions, to adopt a realistic view of men whose claims to superiority over woman rest simply and fully on physical strength, catered to an audience of emerging “bourgeoisie”, men with money who’d made their money, not had it handed down to them, men whose retinues were just as real, who could look, however implausibly, forward to a society based on merit. Their view of posterity was as unglamorous as their notions of the reality of the present.
About the time the quartos were published, Shakespeare’s sonnets were also released, and it is instructive to read one of the most of famous of these fourteen line marvels in this context, number 130:
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts be dun;
If hairs be wires, why then black wires grow on her head;
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that in my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
Than any she belied with false compare.
To me this sonnet is about real love, about where it comes from and where it definitely does not. At a time when the cult of the not-long-dead Elizabeth I had seen quite ridiculous paeans to the chivalric notion of woman as perfect, as “goddess”, and of male behaviour in general, sonnet 130 stood up for real emotions in a real world and was a brave attack on the fantasy values of The Faerie Queen and any who promoted them.* The way I see Troilus and Cressida, this play is an even more ferocious attack in the same vein.
More to come! Thanks for reading.
*It is astonishing to me that the editor of the Arden edition of the sonnets, Katherine Duncan-Jones, says of this sonnet that “with utter cynicism, the speaker praises her as a ‘poor thing, but mine own’, celebrating her in swaggering terms which are ingeniously offensive both to her and to women in general”. Even taking into account “context” of the other sonnets in the sequence, it really doesn’t wash. Duncan-Jones is making this sonnet mean what she is determined for it to mean. The evidence is simply not there. And Shakespeare never wrote ‘a poor thing, but mine own’, which is a misquotation from As You Like It, by a poor man who has more kindly thoughts than Duncan-Jones allows him, and whose remark is partly a rueful reflection on his own character and suitability as a mate.
Eeeeeeeeeeee-k!
One of the wonderful things about the internet is the global availability of resources that once were the privilege of the few, or when not, for one reason or another hard to find. It is truly amazing what is there for the curious, the hungry, the determined. Just now I am reading, on my e-reader, Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in a 19th century edition. This is a work I have been meaning to read since I was very young, a teenager or not much older. I first saw it somewhere in hard copy, multiple volumes glaring at me off a library shelf. The edition I am reading came with the e-reader, one of a hundred titles obviously out of copyright.
Since then I have found and acquired some really rare titles, got them down onto my adobe digital editions package and from there to my e-reader, which is a Kobo. I’d like to share some of them: the first folio of the works of William Shakespeare. There are not many physical copies of this particular title around, and I don’t even recall ever seeing a facsimile edition. Yet a few flicks through the net, there it is, download and shazam! It’s on my Kobo.
Then there is the quarto* of Troilus and Cressida, a curious play by the Bard. Ditto…hanging in there on my e-reader as it has been digitalised and put up on the net by a helpful soul.
Recently I was gobsmacked to find most of a collected works edition of the writings of Irish/English politician and political philosopher Edmund Burke up there too, for free. Turned out the volume containing the one I wanted, was not there, and I had to find another version. But I did, and it’s there, Kobo-ised.
This is truly a revolution in learning. It may be restricted to older material in terms of being free, but that is not especially important. If it is new and costs and you want it enough, you’ll pay. And a lot of free newer stuff that is non-fiction anyway also seems to appear, whacked up on the net by their authors or authorised people who just want to share whatever the magic is.
Not everything fits on a Kobo, but it can fit on the PC and maybe on a tablet or an iPad. Here is something that has really thrown a spark across my jumper leads, causing my hair to stand on end and goosebumps to cover my body:
There is something called the Voynich Manuscript. It was acquired from Jesuits owning a palace outside Rome in 1912 by an antiquarian styling himself W M Voynich. It is an illustrated manuscript, possibly some kind of herbal, and has been dated around 1400-1500. The thing is, this manuscript is written in a script that is unlike any other known, and despite hard work by people who are really good at codes, it has never been cracked.
I read about this on the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-env...
The Voynich manuscript is now on my PC, in my adobe digital editions package, and there is a long thread of what it is about from those who think they’ve figured it out. It seems “translators” have rendered it as the history of the Czech land, in Macedonian, some other language the first five books of the New Testament, etc…the best, in the quick squiz I had was that it was a herbal by a disciple of or himself, Paracelsus, written in a code to discourage the unworthy (the authorities too!).
But that is not all! The thick plottens!* The Voynich concerned was a Pole whose real name was Michał Habdank-Wojnicz, and who married an Irish woman named Ethel Lilian Boole. As E L Voynich she wrote one of the allegedly great revolutionary novels, The Gadfly. R Bruce Lockhart, a man for whom the truth was ever elastic, reckoned the hero of the novel was based on the early career of Sidney Reilly (“Ace of Spies”) who had an affair with Ethel in Italy and told her his story as a revolutionary would, especially if he was keen to get her into bed.
Before meeting Ethel, W M Voynich was a revolutionary in Poland, then part of the Russian empire. His wealthy family did not prevent his being sent to Siberia for his role in a plot to free two other revolutionaries in 1886. The plot failed, they were executed, and Voynich managed to escape from Siberia and do a runner to safety, washing up in London.
The rest may or may not be history. Voynich ran into Ethel, they got married, she wrote The Gadfly which made pots of dough, and he stopped being a revolutionary and settled down as an antiquarian bookseller with shops in London and New York. The couple apparently moved to New York where he died in 1930 while she carried on till the 1960s, dying at the tender age of 96.
Now, all of that is safely lodged in my PC or easily cribbed from the net, and what I say is that put together, it is pretty amazing. Here I sit, quite a long way from anywhere, and I can not only find all this stuff out, but if I want to, I can have a crack at deciphering this manuscript myself, as anyone else can who cares to have a go.
Or, I can put the whole lot into my literary pipe, smoke it, and see if there is a story, or a novel, or part of one, lurking in there…there may be you know?
Thanks for reading.
* I have seen a quarto of a Shakespeare play, in a display case in a gallery/museum in Edinburgh, Scotland. It looked very much like a rudimentary Penguin paperback.
** I am congratulating Spooner on being who he was.
Since then I have found and acquired some really rare titles, got them down onto my adobe digital editions package and from there to my e-reader, which is a Kobo. I’d like to share some of them: the first folio of the works of William Shakespeare. There are not many physical copies of this particular title around, and I don’t even recall ever seeing a facsimile edition. Yet a few flicks through the net, there it is, download and shazam! It’s on my Kobo.
Then there is the quarto* of Troilus and Cressida, a curious play by the Bard. Ditto…hanging in there on my e-reader as it has been digitalised and put up on the net by a helpful soul.
Recently I was gobsmacked to find most of a collected works edition of the writings of Irish/English politician and political philosopher Edmund Burke up there too, for free. Turned out the volume containing the one I wanted, was not there, and I had to find another version. But I did, and it’s there, Kobo-ised.
This is truly a revolution in learning. It may be restricted to older material in terms of being free, but that is not especially important. If it is new and costs and you want it enough, you’ll pay. And a lot of free newer stuff that is non-fiction anyway also seems to appear, whacked up on the net by their authors or authorised people who just want to share whatever the magic is.
Not everything fits on a Kobo, but it can fit on the PC and maybe on a tablet or an iPad. Here is something that has really thrown a spark across my jumper leads, causing my hair to stand on end and goosebumps to cover my body:
There is something called the Voynich Manuscript. It was acquired from Jesuits owning a palace outside Rome in 1912 by an antiquarian styling himself W M Voynich. It is an illustrated manuscript, possibly some kind of herbal, and has been dated around 1400-1500. The thing is, this manuscript is written in a script that is unlike any other known, and despite hard work by people who are really good at codes, it has never been cracked.
I read about this on the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-env...
The Voynich manuscript is now on my PC, in my adobe digital editions package, and there is a long thread of what it is about from those who think they’ve figured it out. It seems “translators” have rendered it as the history of the Czech land, in Macedonian, some other language the first five books of the New Testament, etc…the best, in the quick squiz I had was that it was a herbal by a disciple of or himself, Paracelsus, written in a code to discourage the unworthy (the authorities too!).
But that is not all! The thick plottens!* The Voynich concerned was a Pole whose real name was Michał Habdank-Wojnicz, and who married an Irish woman named Ethel Lilian Boole. As E L Voynich she wrote one of the allegedly great revolutionary novels, The Gadfly. R Bruce Lockhart, a man for whom the truth was ever elastic, reckoned the hero of the novel was based on the early career of Sidney Reilly (“Ace of Spies”) who had an affair with Ethel in Italy and told her his story as a revolutionary would, especially if he was keen to get her into bed.
Before meeting Ethel, W M Voynich was a revolutionary in Poland, then part of the Russian empire. His wealthy family did not prevent his being sent to Siberia for his role in a plot to free two other revolutionaries in 1886. The plot failed, they were executed, and Voynich managed to escape from Siberia and do a runner to safety, washing up in London.
The rest may or may not be history. Voynich ran into Ethel, they got married, she wrote The Gadfly which made pots of dough, and he stopped being a revolutionary and settled down as an antiquarian bookseller with shops in London and New York. The couple apparently moved to New York where he died in 1930 while she carried on till the 1960s, dying at the tender age of 96.
Now, all of that is safely lodged in my PC or easily cribbed from the net, and what I say is that put together, it is pretty amazing. Here I sit, quite a long way from anywhere, and I can not only find all this stuff out, but if I want to, I can have a crack at deciphering this manuscript myself, as anyone else can who cares to have a go.
Or, I can put the whole lot into my literary pipe, smoke it, and see if there is a story, or a novel, or part of one, lurking in there…there may be you know?
Thanks for reading.
* I have seen a quarto of a Shakespeare play, in a display case in a gallery/museum in Edinburgh, Scotland. It looked very much like a rudimentary Penguin paperback.
** I am congratulating Spooner on being who he was.
Meet "The Struggler"!
After celebrating having a blog that lasted an entire year, producing the next post has turned out to be a struggle, so much so that I think I could be a comic book character with a lycra suit I could never quite get into or take off, yet as I pull and twist, hop from one foot to another, wriggle and writhe, somehow save civilisation, only to be landed with a lawsuit for trampling someone’s flower bed…Yes, things are grim.
The troubles I am having! There are several reasons. One is that I somehow have got bogged down in my “reading programme” and that is interfering with my writing. My plan has been for quite some time to write a post about Troilus and Cressida and how I reckon that it just may be that the Shakespeare industry has got this play wrong. Since that is an ambitious undertaking I want to reread the play first, but while doing that I started reading Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on my e-reader and it has suddenly taken over.
Reading is not what it used to be. The internet allows us to be provoked by what we are reading, sit down at the PC, and check something out. Gibbon’s masterwork has sent me scurrying to the keyboard time and again to find out things. And my goodness me! The things there are to find out! Just the great man’s biography is amazing – try it on Wikipedia. Wow!
Moreover, this is not just some tiny wee book that prompts my queries. It is a monster, and a landmark in historiography and literature…six volumes, and none of them, so far as I can tell on my e-reader, is small. I have just moved into volume two, wherein Gibbon is trying to explain why it was that the Romans persecuted the Christians, when they started to do it, and what came after…and in doing this, he casts doubt on much of the received “wisdom” and knowledge of shall we say Christian lore. And of course since Gibbon was writing in the 18th century, that means more roaming the net to see what scholarship since has turned up.
Gibbon’s work was banned in several places, largely it seems because of the chapter I am presently reading – the edition I’ve got from “Project Gutenburg” is a 19th century one done by a minister who can’t help putting in outraged notes of his own and other editors*, so I don’t really want to put it down just yet. But it is obvious that if I want to do the other things I want to do, I should have a break at some stage soon.
But for those who might be interested, it is more than worth the time and effort to get through what has turned out to be one of the great reading experiences of my life. As well as the scholarship involved, it is very well written, the kind of writing that is genuinely a pleasure, yes a physical pleasure, to read. Gibbon’s refined irony is wonderful.
Now, the post I want to write on Troilus and Cressida is a sort of addendum to the novel I have just published, Kaos. In it the play has a role of its own, and the post I would like to write justifies that role for anyone curious enough to want to know about it.
But that’s not all. Kaos is the 7th novel I’ve put up on the net, and I’d like to see it sell a few more copies – say, a quarter of a million or so more, just plucking a number out of the air. While I have been contemplating how to do this, blogs I follow have leapt obligingly into the breach to tell wannabes like myself how to market our stuff. Some have even, for reasons I do not entirely understand, also tried to teach us how to write.
And those blogs have prompted more reflection, on what I reckon are fundamental issues of life and art. I’ve wrestled with a few posts on these issues before deciding to park them and write this one.
There is more too…about writing, the focus of this blog. I’d like to go into some of the things that have occurred to me while I was writing Kaos that if “personal” are also generic, I think, to the craft and art of writing.
So there is a fair swack of posts stored up waiting…to be thought through, researched as and when necessary, and then written and posted.
And while that is happening I just know there will be more things popping into my fevered mind; the queue will lengthen. And yes, outside of this is life! At the mo I am clearing up a large pile of apple tree prunings that need to be chopped up and sawn so they can be stacked and when dry fed lovingly into my wood burner. The trees that were pruned had not been cared for, at all, for many years – one, I think, for more than a century – and some of the branches are huge.
And and and! These are trivial personal concerns. Life is more important than that. The Struggler…he’s got his teeth on the sleeve of the suit and thinks just maybe he’ll be able to make it fit right so he can go out there and save…save…save…save a vulnerable maiden from the clutches of a rank intruder whose many bad qualities begin with his body odour before moving sublimely on to his breath…but wait a minute, Struggler! That’s me you’re wrestling with…get your teeth off my suit!…
*Principally Francois Guizot. We shall meet M Guizot in one of those coming posts.
The troubles I am having! There are several reasons. One is that I somehow have got bogged down in my “reading programme” and that is interfering with my writing. My plan has been for quite some time to write a post about Troilus and Cressida and how I reckon that it just may be that the Shakespeare industry has got this play wrong. Since that is an ambitious undertaking I want to reread the play first, but while doing that I started reading Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on my e-reader and it has suddenly taken over.
Reading is not what it used to be. The internet allows us to be provoked by what we are reading, sit down at the PC, and check something out. Gibbon’s masterwork has sent me scurrying to the keyboard time and again to find out things. And my goodness me! The things there are to find out! Just the great man’s biography is amazing – try it on Wikipedia. Wow!
Moreover, this is not just some tiny wee book that prompts my queries. It is a monster, and a landmark in historiography and literature…six volumes, and none of them, so far as I can tell on my e-reader, is small. I have just moved into volume two, wherein Gibbon is trying to explain why it was that the Romans persecuted the Christians, when they started to do it, and what came after…and in doing this, he casts doubt on much of the received “wisdom” and knowledge of shall we say Christian lore. And of course since Gibbon was writing in the 18th century, that means more roaming the net to see what scholarship since has turned up.
Gibbon’s work was banned in several places, largely it seems because of the chapter I am presently reading – the edition I’ve got from “Project Gutenburg” is a 19th century one done by a minister who can’t help putting in outraged notes of his own and other editors*, so I don’t really want to put it down just yet. But it is obvious that if I want to do the other things I want to do, I should have a break at some stage soon.
But for those who might be interested, it is more than worth the time and effort to get through what has turned out to be one of the great reading experiences of my life. As well as the scholarship involved, it is very well written, the kind of writing that is genuinely a pleasure, yes a physical pleasure, to read. Gibbon’s refined irony is wonderful.
Now, the post I want to write on Troilus and Cressida is a sort of addendum to the novel I have just published, Kaos. In it the play has a role of its own, and the post I would like to write justifies that role for anyone curious enough to want to know about it.
But that’s not all. Kaos is the 7th novel I’ve put up on the net, and I’d like to see it sell a few more copies – say, a quarter of a million or so more, just plucking a number out of the air. While I have been contemplating how to do this, blogs I follow have leapt obligingly into the breach to tell wannabes like myself how to market our stuff. Some have even, for reasons I do not entirely understand, also tried to teach us how to write.
And those blogs have prompted more reflection, on what I reckon are fundamental issues of life and art. I’ve wrestled with a few posts on these issues before deciding to park them and write this one.
There is more too…about writing, the focus of this blog. I’d like to go into some of the things that have occurred to me while I was writing Kaos that if “personal” are also generic, I think, to the craft and art of writing.
So there is a fair swack of posts stored up waiting…to be thought through, researched as and when necessary, and then written and posted.
And while that is happening I just know there will be more things popping into my fevered mind; the queue will lengthen. And yes, outside of this is life! At the mo I am clearing up a large pile of apple tree prunings that need to be chopped up and sawn so they can be stacked and when dry fed lovingly into my wood burner. The trees that were pruned had not been cared for, at all, for many years – one, I think, for more than a century – and some of the branches are huge.
And and and! These are trivial personal concerns. Life is more important than that. The Struggler…he’s got his teeth on the sleeve of the suit and thinks just maybe he’ll be able to make it fit right so he can go out there and save…save…save…save a vulnerable maiden from the clutches of a rank intruder whose many bad qualities begin with his body odour before moving sublimely on to his breath…but wait a minute, Struggler! That’s me you’re wrestling with…get your teeth off my suit!…
*Principally Francois Guizot. We shall meet M Guizot in one of those coming posts.
Writing Kaos
Kaos is the ninth novel I’ve written and the seventh I’ve “e-published”. Two others remain in the bottom drawer so to speak. As I wrote, it kept occurring to me that other writers, and those curious about writing, might be interested in the process as one writer has done it. It’s not really my idea that people will go on to read the book though of course more readers are always welcome. There will not be any “spoilers” but this is about writing, not marketing – “telling not selling”.
The novel I wrote before Kaos was The Russian Idea. It had been in my mind for a long time to do a novel revolving around the thinking of the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev*, and circumstances allowed me the time and ideas to work up a plot and write it.
The Russian Idea is not nearly so good a novel as I would have liked it to be. For one thing, it is too “intellectual” or more woundingly, “pseudo-intellectual”. All my novels from the first have been so-called novels of ideas cloaked in the garb of thrillers, but this one had too many ideas not well-clothed enough – or perhaps, given the genre, not ill-clothed enough. To me it is still not a bad book, but it is not my best by any means.
Even so it had something in its structure and in its basic theme that I rather liked. Moreover, Berdyaev was heavily influenced. as I am, by the 19th century Russian novelist and wild man Fyodor Dostoevsky, and in the course of research on Berdyaev, I ended up rereading a lot of Dostoevsky as well as Berdyaev’s book on him.
Something like a revolution has gone on in Dostoevsky studies since I first read his great novels longer ago than I really want to admit. New translations** have piled onto each other as new generations bid to make the Russian accessible as he meant to be in his own time. His strange “feuilleton” A Writer’s Diary*** has been half-translated with claims that if true make it far in advance of its time. As I reread the great novels, read a volume of a five part biography, some specialised religious material**** and read the Diary my appreciation of Dostoevsky was more than renewed; it was broadened and deepened. Much better translations revealed aspects to Dostoevsky’s writing that had previously been poorly shown, if at all. Berdyaev became – as he himself said – a follower of the novelist, in a prophetic Christian tradition few non-Russians would have imagined him to inhabit.
The Russian Idea turned into a homage to Dostoevsky as well as Berdyaev.
One of the things I admire about Dostoevsky was that he wrote thrillers. Like Shakespeare he explored great themes with great writing in a popular genre. As Shakespeare took the popular forms of writing in his time and made them something more than his peers, Dostoevsky took a popular form of fiction and made it more than his contemporaries.
The Idiot, Brothers Karamazov, Demons…three of his last four novels are enduring masterpieces all the more compelling for their dark themes. While I was writing The Russian Idea I had them in the back of my mind.
Unsatisfied with The Russian Idea, I nonetheless kept the basic approach of that book for Kaos, with Demons my guide. I wanted to write a book that began one way, and turned inside out, as Demons does: the first section of Demons is often hilarious, with a gentle mockery that makes it seem a comedy of manners. By the end, as one of the editors writes in the Penguin edition, “this is a scary book”.
Well, I have my own things to say. I’m not Dostoevsky either in outlook or talent, but as I was writing Kaos I kept that transitional approach in mind, that things should turn “inside out”. They do, if in a different way, and I am much happier with the result.
Yet the impulse for writing Kaos lay as much in Shakespeare as in Doestoevsky, in the Bard’s strange play Troilus and Cressida^. In one sense “T & C” has a walk-on part in Kaos, but in another its underlying theme is the larger theme of Kaos, which is – ahem! Pay attention now! – a study in gender politics whose multiple foci shift as the novel shifts. Oh, dear!
Of course the stuff of writing – plot, characterisation, dialogue, description, and so on, the meat if you like, may look far removed from this. There are heaps of “how-to” writing guides that will sell you the hows and tos, and lately a number of blogs I follow have patiently explained various aspects of the technical facets of writing. Each is worthy in its own right, but all are and can be no more than elaborations of Raymond Chandler’s three word short course: “Analyse, and emulate”. My aim, of having a serious purpose in a frivolous genre, comes from reading on both levels. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Len Deighton, Ross Macdonald^^, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie…and the greats, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Euripides etc as you can find in the earlier posts of this blog. There are others, and I’ll perhaps approach them in time.
The idea has always been to offer a “good read” with some food for thought for anyone who wants it, and for me Kaos manages that. The more successful I am, the less the reader will notice.
Well, there you go. Hopefully you found this interesting, dear reader. If you didn’t – my apologies, with thanks for getting through it.
* Most of this unusual man’s works are in print in hard copy and his shorter works are on the net. A book about the Catholic Worker movement, which he strongly influenced, was published in the 1970s: William D Miller’s A harsh and dreadful love.
** Every Dostoevsky lover is likely to have her or his favourite. My preference has been the Penguins – for Demons, the Maguire translation put out by Penguin.
*** The editor of the English translation keeps calling the diary a “project”. See an online dictionary for a definition of feuilleton.
**** The rare book by Nicholas Zernov, Three Russian prophets, is still in print. Dostoevsky is the middle prophet, sandwiched in between Khomiakov and Soloviev. The chapter on Dostoevsky is extremely good.
^ As in an earlier post, my plan is to treat Troilus and Cressida separately.
^^ These are the so-called hard boiled school. Hammett is the master, Chandler his pupil who added some qualities of dialogue. Len Deighton’s early novels took these and made them a part of espionage fiction; Macdonald added nothing but was a success. Allingham and Christie worked in the earlier “puzzle” style for the most part but added something for me.
The novel I wrote before Kaos was The Russian Idea. It had been in my mind for a long time to do a novel revolving around the thinking of the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev*, and circumstances allowed me the time and ideas to work up a plot and write it.
The Russian Idea is not nearly so good a novel as I would have liked it to be. For one thing, it is too “intellectual” or more woundingly, “pseudo-intellectual”. All my novels from the first have been so-called novels of ideas cloaked in the garb of thrillers, but this one had too many ideas not well-clothed enough – or perhaps, given the genre, not ill-clothed enough. To me it is still not a bad book, but it is not my best by any means.
Even so it had something in its structure and in its basic theme that I rather liked. Moreover, Berdyaev was heavily influenced. as I am, by the 19th century Russian novelist and wild man Fyodor Dostoevsky, and in the course of research on Berdyaev, I ended up rereading a lot of Dostoevsky as well as Berdyaev’s book on him.
Something like a revolution has gone on in Dostoevsky studies since I first read his great novels longer ago than I really want to admit. New translations** have piled onto each other as new generations bid to make the Russian accessible as he meant to be in his own time. His strange “feuilleton” A Writer’s Diary*** has been half-translated with claims that if true make it far in advance of its time. As I reread the great novels, read a volume of a five part biography, some specialised religious material**** and read the Diary my appreciation of Dostoevsky was more than renewed; it was broadened and deepened. Much better translations revealed aspects to Dostoevsky’s writing that had previously been poorly shown, if at all. Berdyaev became – as he himself said – a follower of the novelist, in a prophetic Christian tradition few non-Russians would have imagined him to inhabit.
The Russian Idea turned into a homage to Dostoevsky as well as Berdyaev.
One of the things I admire about Dostoevsky was that he wrote thrillers. Like Shakespeare he explored great themes with great writing in a popular genre. As Shakespeare took the popular forms of writing in his time and made them something more than his peers, Dostoevsky took a popular form of fiction and made it more than his contemporaries.
The Idiot, Brothers Karamazov, Demons…three of his last four novels are enduring masterpieces all the more compelling for their dark themes. While I was writing The Russian Idea I had them in the back of my mind.
Unsatisfied with The Russian Idea, I nonetheless kept the basic approach of that book for Kaos, with Demons my guide. I wanted to write a book that began one way, and turned inside out, as Demons does: the first section of Demons is often hilarious, with a gentle mockery that makes it seem a comedy of manners. By the end, as one of the editors writes in the Penguin edition, “this is a scary book”.
Well, I have my own things to say. I’m not Dostoevsky either in outlook or talent, but as I was writing Kaos I kept that transitional approach in mind, that things should turn “inside out”. They do, if in a different way, and I am much happier with the result.
Yet the impulse for writing Kaos lay as much in Shakespeare as in Doestoevsky, in the Bard’s strange play Troilus and Cressida^. In one sense “T & C” has a walk-on part in Kaos, but in another its underlying theme is the larger theme of Kaos, which is – ahem! Pay attention now! – a study in gender politics whose multiple foci shift as the novel shifts. Oh, dear!
Of course the stuff of writing – plot, characterisation, dialogue, description, and so on, the meat if you like, may look far removed from this. There are heaps of “how-to” writing guides that will sell you the hows and tos, and lately a number of blogs I follow have patiently explained various aspects of the technical facets of writing. Each is worthy in its own right, but all are and can be no more than elaborations of Raymond Chandler’s three word short course: “Analyse, and emulate”. My aim, of having a serious purpose in a frivolous genre, comes from reading on both levels. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Len Deighton, Ross Macdonald^^, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie…and the greats, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Euripides etc as you can find in the earlier posts of this blog. There are others, and I’ll perhaps approach them in time.
The idea has always been to offer a “good read” with some food for thought for anyone who wants it, and for me Kaos manages that. The more successful I am, the less the reader will notice.
Well, there you go. Hopefully you found this interesting, dear reader. If you didn’t – my apologies, with thanks for getting through it.
* Most of this unusual man’s works are in print in hard copy and his shorter works are on the net. A book about the Catholic Worker movement, which he strongly influenced, was published in the 1970s: William D Miller’s A harsh and dreadful love.
** Every Dostoevsky lover is likely to have her or his favourite. My preference has been the Penguins – for Demons, the Maguire translation put out by Penguin.
*** The editor of the English translation keeps calling the diary a “project”. See an online dictionary for a definition of feuilleton.
**** The rare book by Nicholas Zernov, Three Russian prophets, is still in print. Dostoevsky is the middle prophet, sandwiched in between Khomiakov and Soloviev. The chapter on Dostoevsky is extremely good.
^ As in an earlier post, my plan is to treat Troilus and Cressida separately.
^^ These are the so-called hard boiled school. Hammett is the master, Chandler his pupil who added some qualities of dialogue. Len Deighton’s early novels took these and made them a part of espionage fiction; Macdonald added nothing but was a success. Allingham and Christie worked in the earlier “puzzle” style for the most part but added something for me.
Postscript as preface*
Anonymous is a film about the non-question “who wrote Shakespeare?” that has generated nuclear catastrophes of heat but very little if any light. Readers interested may pop over to the blog Interesting Literature and search for "Shakespeare Beyond Doubt". I have been following the Interesting Literature blog for a while and the number of comments on the post far outnumbers any other in my experience. It shows how much interest there is in Shakespeare, I guess, but also how excited people can get about anything, especially if they are conspiracy theorists.
I took a small part in this pseudo-controversy and then opted out: the “Oxfordians” who think Earl of Oxford Edward de Vere really wrote Shakespeare’s work are so pugnacious and so willfully ignorant it is not worth trying to engage with them. I’m not a Shakespeare scholar but a Shakespeare lover, but no Shakespeare lover needs to be a scholar to know through a wealth of external and internal evidence that any theory that says that Will didn’t write his plays and poems is (as Sir Peter Hall says) “bonkers”.
To me this non-question is frustrating partly because loony-tune ideas like this work against any Shakespeare lover contributing to the understanding of Shakespeare’s work that enlarges our understanding of life, which is why we read and watch, and yes, play. Yet I am surely not alone in thinking that Shakespeare lovers have a great deal to offer in this way. Each of us has her or his own understanding; it is part of Shakespeare’s greatness that our response has the potential to add to the understanding of others.
So when Shakespeare scholars encounter rubbish like the de Vere “theory” and patronise its adherents, it’s understandable but painful too. The “Oxfordians” as they like to style themselves are missing out on what it really means to love Shakespeare** so it’s hardly surprising that those who know who wrote the plays and poems turn up their noses at them.
The scholars being human will find it hard to resist the temptation of tarring all Shakespeare lovers with the same brush, however, and that makes me uneasy, especially as I prepare, little by little, my post on Troilus and Cressida. Yes, I know I have been promising this for a long time, and it hasn’t surfaced…but I’ve started! The loose ends are slowly but surely tying me into knots, but my plan, to transform The Struggler into Houdini, is on course. Kind of.
There are, and probably always will be, unknowables about Shakespeare. For example: Prospero of The Tempest is usually taken to be modelled on Englishman John Dee and that is certainly possible. But I reckon that he is (at least partly) modelled on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and I wrote that theory into my novel Savonarola’s Bones***. But failing the discovery of some nice little notebook of Shakespeare’s that says, “Prospero: Pico” that’s actually never going to be known, any more than it is actually known that Prospero: Dee. The Dee hypothesis has logical force as Dee was a contemporary of Shakespeare, while Pico was not.
To me this question is a completely different one from the non-question of “who wrote the plays” because it raises issues about Shakespeare the man, about his religion (if any), the philosophical schools he may have been involved in, and more, and thus ultimately of what he was on about. It is part of the fascination of this great man that four centuries after he wrote we can continue to be intrigued – but by him, not a rude interloper from the upper echelons of Elizabethan society.
* With apologies to the spirit of Harley Granville-Barker
** Does this mean that the “Shakespeare lover” in her or his turn is also patronising those who think de Vere the author? Well, in my case it does: as some of those engaged in the culture war on the Interesting Literature blog have pointed out in many ways, to insist on de Vere fundamentally misses the point of too much of the “canon”. My post on Troilus and Cressida, when and if it arrives, will deal with that in more detail. If you are an “Oxfordian” please just regard me as incurable and turn your attention to the jousters on the Interesting Literature blog. Thank you.
*** So buy it and find out! Selling not telling!
I took a small part in this pseudo-controversy and then opted out: the “Oxfordians” who think Earl of Oxford Edward de Vere really wrote Shakespeare’s work are so pugnacious and so willfully ignorant it is not worth trying to engage with them. I’m not a Shakespeare scholar but a Shakespeare lover, but no Shakespeare lover needs to be a scholar to know through a wealth of external and internal evidence that any theory that says that Will didn’t write his plays and poems is (as Sir Peter Hall says) “bonkers”.
To me this non-question is frustrating partly because loony-tune ideas like this work against any Shakespeare lover contributing to the understanding of Shakespeare’s work that enlarges our understanding of life, which is why we read and watch, and yes, play. Yet I am surely not alone in thinking that Shakespeare lovers have a great deal to offer in this way. Each of us has her or his own understanding; it is part of Shakespeare’s greatness that our response has the potential to add to the understanding of others.
So when Shakespeare scholars encounter rubbish like the de Vere “theory” and patronise its adherents, it’s understandable but painful too. The “Oxfordians” as they like to style themselves are missing out on what it really means to love Shakespeare** so it’s hardly surprising that those who know who wrote the plays and poems turn up their noses at them.
The scholars being human will find it hard to resist the temptation of tarring all Shakespeare lovers with the same brush, however, and that makes me uneasy, especially as I prepare, little by little, my post on Troilus and Cressida. Yes, I know I have been promising this for a long time, and it hasn’t surfaced…but I’ve started! The loose ends are slowly but surely tying me into knots, but my plan, to transform The Struggler into Houdini, is on course. Kind of.
There are, and probably always will be, unknowables about Shakespeare. For example: Prospero of The Tempest is usually taken to be modelled on Englishman John Dee and that is certainly possible. But I reckon that he is (at least partly) modelled on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and I wrote that theory into my novel Savonarola’s Bones***. But failing the discovery of some nice little notebook of Shakespeare’s that says, “Prospero: Pico” that’s actually never going to be known, any more than it is actually known that Prospero: Dee. The Dee hypothesis has logical force as Dee was a contemporary of Shakespeare, while Pico was not.
To me this question is a completely different one from the non-question of “who wrote the plays” because it raises issues about Shakespeare the man, about his religion (if any), the philosophical schools he may have been involved in, and more, and thus ultimately of what he was on about. It is part of the fascination of this great man that four centuries after he wrote we can continue to be intrigued – but by him, not a rude interloper from the upper echelons of Elizabethan society.
* With apologies to the spirit of Harley Granville-Barker
** Does this mean that the “Shakespeare lover” in her or his turn is also patronising those who think de Vere the author? Well, in my case it does: as some of those engaged in the culture war on the Interesting Literature blog have pointed out in many ways, to insist on de Vere fundamentally misses the point of too much of the “canon”. My post on Troilus and Cressida, when and if it arrives, will deal with that in more detail. If you are an “Oxfordian” please just regard me as incurable and turn your attention to the jousters on the Interesting Literature blog. Thank you.
*** So buy it and find out! Selling not telling!
Snowflakes of the mind = dandruff
This blog is about writing, and this is the fifty-second post. I think. There have been more false starts for this one than any previous post, and I was beginning to think that writer’s block had descended with a gigantic crash on my poor head, scattering my wits in a shower of inconsequence.
What’s been happening since the last one that I’ve managed to get up on the net is that I have been been reading a lot of background stuff and doing a lot of thinking for my new book, which is slowly coming together in my mind. At the same time I’ve been trying to finish a post on Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida I promised you, dear reader, and myself, after finishing my previous book, Kaos.
The two are related. Kaos prompted me to look further into one of the key themes of that book, carrying over from earlier ones. But rather than opening terrific vistas for my serene gaze, I’ve kept tying myself into knots. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It means thinking something difficult through to the point that it is no longer difficult, even if the solution is Alexandrian, perhaps especially!
It feels quite strange to have Troilus and Cressida exercising such a profound influence on me as a writer and as a person. Many people do not even know this play exists, but for me it’s right up there with Shakespeare’s other major works, and if I’d like to do some sort of homage to the bard by dealing with it in a non-fiction format, every re-reading* sends me reeling. Ha.
The play first really grabbed me when I was testing a book on Shakespeare by poet Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the goddess of complete being. This is a wild book, lauded to the skies and dismissed in equal measure. Since there are so many unknowables about Shakespeare down to the sequence of writing of the plays** I decided to read them in the order Hughes reckoned, and hit on Troilus.
Hughes’ idea was that in a sequence of his plays Shakespeare explored a “tragic equation” about men specifically, who adopted or rejected the feminine in their natures with explosive results, finally to resolve this dilemma in The Tempest.
Well, I’m not sure about any of that, but this idea is definitely provocative, and if Hughes nor anyone else could really prove the authorship sequence, he made a plausible case, and reading them in his order buttressed many of the points in his larger argument.
Hughes was careful to say that whatever the merits of his vision of Shakespeare’s exploration of this tragic equation, it did not and could not exhaust the merits of Shakespeare’s work. Just so with Troilus and Cressida. Every time I have seen it, and read it, there has been more and different in it than I’d previously realised. Nothing I or anyone else can say will explain all that matters of this “amazing” play.*** That’s part of what greatness means – the wells of genius never run dry.
What spurred me to write of the play in Kaos, then, has been given more fuel for an even bigger bonfire of this particular vanity. As I have been frustrated and irritated by my failings in working up this post new material throws itself across the path of my imagination. A lot of this is new/old material, reaching back to the ancients, but there is plenty of the modern too.^ The new book is going to be a new book in a range of ways, and if it takes time to digest all that I need to do to make it work, well, fine.
Meanwhile that post on the play still glows incandescent in more than one draft on this site. It needs to come out. It will.
Thanks for reading.
*I’ve also seen it three times: once in Stratford in the mid-1980s, when I did not understand it, and twice in Scotland in the early years of this century.
**And more – the sonnets were published in 1609 but there are many views about when they were each written, and rewritten to come into the corpus as they were published. Meanwhile there is a great deal in Hughes’ book not even glanced at in this post. Anyone interested should give it a go.
***As judged not just by me but by the editor of by far the best edition, David Bevington.
^To me modern is post-1900 or thereabouts. You choose your own date; I don’t mind.
What’s been happening since the last one that I’ve managed to get up on the net is that I have been been reading a lot of background stuff and doing a lot of thinking for my new book, which is slowly coming together in my mind. At the same time I’ve been trying to finish a post on Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida I promised you, dear reader, and myself, after finishing my previous book, Kaos.
The two are related. Kaos prompted me to look further into one of the key themes of that book, carrying over from earlier ones. But rather than opening terrific vistas for my serene gaze, I’ve kept tying myself into knots. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It means thinking something difficult through to the point that it is no longer difficult, even if the solution is Alexandrian, perhaps especially!
It feels quite strange to have Troilus and Cressida exercising such a profound influence on me as a writer and as a person. Many people do not even know this play exists, but for me it’s right up there with Shakespeare’s other major works, and if I’d like to do some sort of homage to the bard by dealing with it in a non-fiction format, every re-reading* sends me reeling. Ha.
The play first really grabbed me when I was testing a book on Shakespeare by poet Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the goddess of complete being. This is a wild book, lauded to the skies and dismissed in equal measure. Since there are so many unknowables about Shakespeare down to the sequence of writing of the plays** I decided to read them in the order Hughes reckoned, and hit on Troilus.
Hughes’ idea was that in a sequence of his plays Shakespeare explored a “tragic equation” about men specifically, who adopted or rejected the feminine in their natures with explosive results, finally to resolve this dilemma in The Tempest.
Well, I’m not sure about any of that, but this idea is definitely provocative, and if Hughes nor anyone else could really prove the authorship sequence, he made a plausible case, and reading them in his order buttressed many of the points in his larger argument.
Hughes was careful to say that whatever the merits of his vision of Shakespeare’s exploration of this tragic equation, it did not and could not exhaust the merits of Shakespeare’s work. Just so with Troilus and Cressida. Every time I have seen it, and read it, there has been more and different in it than I’d previously realised. Nothing I or anyone else can say will explain all that matters of this “amazing” play.*** That’s part of what greatness means – the wells of genius never run dry.
What spurred me to write of the play in Kaos, then, has been given more fuel for an even bigger bonfire of this particular vanity. As I have been frustrated and irritated by my failings in working up this post new material throws itself across the path of my imagination. A lot of this is new/old material, reaching back to the ancients, but there is plenty of the modern too.^ The new book is going to be a new book in a range of ways, and if it takes time to digest all that I need to do to make it work, well, fine.
Meanwhile that post on the play still glows incandescent in more than one draft on this site. It needs to come out. It will.
Thanks for reading.
*I’ve also seen it three times: once in Stratford in the mid-1980s, when I did not understand it, and twice in Scotland in the early years of this century.
**And more – the sonnets were published in 1609 but there are many views about when they were each written, and rewritten to come into the corpus as they were published. Meanwhile there is a great deal in Hughes’ book not even glanced at in this post. Anyone interested should give it a go.
***As judged not just by me but by the editor of by far the best edition, David Bevington.
^To me modern is post-1900 or thereabouts. You choose your own date; I don’t mind.
Toiling with Troilus
Troilus and Cressida* is my nominee for the most amazing of all Shakespeare’s plays, and that’s saying a lot. In text and in performance, Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice, All’s Well that Ends Well, Twelfth Night and many more would spring to educated people’s minds before this strange Trojan War epic.
Yet Troilus and Cressida outpaces them all in the race to be most puzzling. So far as I know, no other play apart from Titus Andronicus** – not only by Shakespeare but by anybody – has been claimed to be both a tragedy and a comedy, as well as spots in between. There are even more puzzles about the play, perhaps more than about any other of Shakespeare’s works, and they raise issues that go far beyond what we may style as literary criticism.
Many of these uncertainties are the sort that bedevil Shakespeare scholarship generally – and that help make burrowing into the works of the master so exciting. It is not clear when the play was originally written, though it is generally accepted to have been around 1600. There are two and a half versions – two almost identical quartos published in 1609, and the 1623 Folio text, all with wee posers for the excitable, such as myself. Whether the quarto(s) or the Folio is the “authoritative” version is moot.
There is more. Many words in the English language are found first in Shakespeare. Troilus and Cressida has a number he used only in this play, and there are others that have never been used by anyone else, ever.***
All these and more factors may help to explain why the play is not better known.
The quartos are a good place to start. They were published in quick succession in 1609, the same year Shakespeare’s sonnets were first printed. The theatres were closed in that year due to the plague and Shakespeare may have been trying to make some money from his writing.
The first quarto claimed the play had been performed by his company, the King’s Men, but it was quickly replaced by a new edition, alike in every respect but for the title page and a preface, from “a never writer” to the “ever reader”.
The preface is a source of endless fascination. It contradicts the earlier version by saying it has never been performed – “never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar”, and then goes on to say that what had been a “history” was now a comedy, “passing full of the palm comical”. Shakespeare is compared to the Roman comic playwrights Plautus and Terence.
Moreover as addressed to the “ever reader” it may be that Shakespeare rejigged an earlier version of the play (and that may have been performed) to make it more suitable for reading. In any case, as with other plays published at the time, it was sold as something to be read, not as a script to be performed.
I think this matters for a number of reasons, perhaps the most important being that the presumed difficulties of the play may very well stem from its form as a dramatic script but infused with complexities and nuance that can only be appreciated at leisure, by an “ever reader”, or even, an “eternal reader”. Even when staged in “intimate” settings like Blackfriars theatre instead of the larger Globe playhouse, Troilus and Cressida is so full of subtle innuendo, complex philosophising, and sexual and other multiple entendres that no viewer could hope to gain a full appreciation at a sitting or reading. Certainly I have seen it three times and have read it at least half a dozen times, three in the most recent Arden edition, and think there is more there yet.
Never Writer’s big point, that the play is a comedy, is major. After all, this is a play set in a war, whose outcome is known to everyone. Lovers torn apart jostle for prominence with the death of the Trojans’ most famous warrior, with the weeping sores of venereal disease seeping through the lines to infect the whole. Get a rib-tickler out of that and you’d have to be – Shakespeare.
It is a tall order without doubt. But it is doable, and I am not alone in thinking it.^
What makes it doable is the underlying intent, what Shakespeare was trying to achieve – according, of course, to me. Ultimately that is what draws me to the play, as ultimately I am drawn to Shakespeare’s work in “the whole of all its parts”.
It seems to me Shakespeare was attacking the courtly ethos associated with the late Elizabethan monarchy, peeling away the layers of false gentility to reveal the ugly inside of what were, once seen the right way, self-evidently hypocritical values. Unless it is the venomous fool Thersites, no one among the major characters emerges unscathed.
There is external evidence that Shakespeare took a dim view of these values at the time. In sonnet 130, he contrasts the romantic view of love with his own realistic one:
“I grant I never saw a goddess go/My mistress when she walks treads on the ground./And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare/As any she belied with false compare”. This is loving not despite a lover’s “blemishes” but in their fullness. Troilus’ love-sick puppy does not stand up well to this grown man’s emotions.
Troilus and Cressida extends this suspicion of the standards of chivalric, “courtly” behaviour to encompass its most extreme practice: warfare. There is really nothing else at stake in the war than “honour”: the Greeks could go home empty-handed, and the Trojans could turn Helen over to them, and the loss for either would be face, and nothing else. To stand on the rightness of their cause has already, when the play begins, cost untold lives on both sides, with the Trojans risking everything: their city, their culture, the lives of everyone there, men, women, children, the old and frail. For the Greeks, the risks are less in that “just” the lives of those on the field of battle are at risk, but as the play opens the battlefield is strewn with the ghosts of warriors fallen in the pursuit of a woman who is happy where she is, thank you very much.
The conclusion, made plain in both camps during the play, is that they fight not because they have to, but because they want to. The element of tragedy is self-evident in this, given that no audience would be unaware of the final outcome.
Yet it is also laughable. These are not men, but children at play with deadly consequences. Critical scenes in the play that might be thought to be hard to raise a laugh, really could: Hector’s death, for example, after he pursued and killed a Greek for his armour, dragging the unnamed victim home and stopping for a rest, surrounded by Achilles’ warriors known as Myrmidons – descended if you will from ants! – to be slain by Achilles as a sadistic child might pull wings off flies. Tragic from one view, but losing one’s life for soldier bling…an audience in Shakespeare’s day could have found this funny, and so in ours.
Mounting or reading this play as a comedy exposes these values to trenchant ridicule underscored in the character of Thersites, whose all but endless trashing of the pretensions of both camps, and shrewd perceptions of the underlying macho and sexual motivations involved, is a slap in the face not just to Greeks and Trojans, but to men who share their values.
And there are plenty of those around.
This year is the centenary of the beginning of what is variously called the First World War, World War I and the Great War. The parallels with the Trojan War are not exact, by any means. Nonetheless, for all its outrage and political undertones, the assassination of an Austrian archduke by Serbian radicals need not have begun a conflagration that would go on to consume the lives of millions upon millions, and did even worse as I hope to show.
The archduke’s murder unleashed the same passions that made peace impossible between the Trojans and the Greeks: men’s passions, or if you prefer, boys’ stuff, ruled on both occasions. They are not the only passions in men. But they ruled then, and can rule again.
To see these at work in the Great War Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel is widely regarded as the truest reflection of that conflict. It is also an honest account by a man who relished the fighting. The male urges laid bare in Troilus and Cressida bare their teeth in Storm of Steel.
Of course not all males allow themselves to be swept up in madness. Thersites in Troilus and Cressida was frank in his cowardice. In the Great War New Zealander Archibald Baxter’s refusal to serve led him to the front lines in France as authorities sought to break him and his comrades through beatings and torture. His account, We Will Not Cease, shows heroism of another sort.
Baxter’s beliefs can only be said to be a guide to the future in a general way: that men need not give way to the urges that lead individuals to violence and societies to wholesale slaughter. Resistance to aggression can be the only option. The Second World War was just like that: Hitler was determined on war from shortly after the end of the Great War, when few if any even knew he existed, and no amount of persuasion or acquiescence would have avoided it, as events proved. Not only the passions of men, but the sway of policy made “Hitler’s war” unique among the wars of so-called civilised states. While we solemnly intone the futility of the Great War in the near future, remembering what came after won’t hurt.
All of this, right down to our world today, relates to men, to their attitudes, passions and power. Women only feature as symbols and objects, or as victims. The world of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is in that sense the same as the world of 1914, and nearly the same as the world of today.
But just nearly the same. Those who read this blog regularly, and those who read my fiction, will know that my work is meant partly to chart what I feel is an epochal shift in western society, and by extension eventually all society. That sees women moving to replace men as decision-makers in all aspects of social life: business, services, politics. What some might see as a rise to equality I see as a necessary victory over the passions that have ruled us for too long. What is important is not women “coming to be equals” but men losing their place on top.
This is not about “gender”, but about values, however much they may be bound up with gender, and Archibald Baxter and men like him have shown it. Men generally have been able to indulge their violent inclinations for a very long time because of the reality of their physical strength^^; the industrial revolution and the many implements of destruction spawned by it have undermined and will finally destroy that advantage. The strength of “womanhood” and the values implied by it are now being ushered into the forefront of social life.
Real, physical women are not the same as these values. It is not surprising that many if not all of the women to arrive in positions of political power clawed their way to the top by being more male than men. It was not Margaret Thatcher’s handbag that was relevant but her willingness to swing it.
Yet this process and the broad outlines of its outcome are unmistakeable. Woman is coming to rule, politically and socially. “Equality” really means “supremacy”, and negation is the reason: male values are too dangerous. The sabre-rattling that led to the Great War cost millions of lives; the same attitudes today threaten global catastrophe, and even when this is avoided can cause needless distress and harm to hundreds of millions of people.
All this may seem a long way from Troilus and Cressida and in a sense it is. Shakespeare in his day could only mock male values. The women in this play are not agents of their own destiny but are victims of the whims of their male rulers. Cressida has long been portrayed as a “slut” but it seems to me shows intelligence and wit in adapting – and quickly – to her circumstances after being totally betrayed by the man she loved. The parallel with Helen is ironic. Cressida must go to the Greeks as a matter of principle while Helen must stay for the same reason. Both are no more than tokens, symbols, not fully human.
At any rate Shakespeare could hardly have foreseen a time when women’s estate would change. The single example of his age, Elizabeth, was taken – as she was – to be a great exception, all the more as she was hailed as a virgin. John Knox, the Scottish reformer, railed against her and the notion that women should rule men as he regarded it as anti-Biblical and anti-Christian.
What Shakespeare could do was to expose the sexual basis of much male behaviour, not just that directed at women. The amount of sexual innuendo in Troilus and Cressida is astonishing for a work peopled mostly by men, and suggests that sexual prowess and sexual competitiveness are significant factors in male behaviour not only toward women but toward other men. It is a commonplace that women in our time dress for other women at least as much as for men, but a recent study into dancing suggests men dance in the same way – parading themselves in front of other men as well as women, to dominate or ward off competition, not merely to seduce their opposites.
Pandarus, deathly ill with “Neapolitan bone ache” (syphilis) farewells the audience at the very end of the play promising to “bequeath you my diseases”. What Shakespeare meant by this parting shot is not entirely clear. Some think he himself had syphilis and not surprisingly wasn’t happy about it. Whether that is true or not, it seems to me to be more an indictment not of the rutting but the strutting style of masculinity so ridiculed by Thersites in the play, as men view sex as a form of power, and their conquests as chaff. Early in the play, as Cressida contemplates yielding to Troilus, she articulates her weakness: her only strength is in withholding her favours; once she has granted them, she is totally captive to her seducer – and so it proves. Sex as power is a sickness in keeping with and an element in the notion of war as a blood sport. Though he is clearly a lover and not a fighter, Pandarus facilitates the ethos and must guiltily succumb.
We no longer live in such times. But the consequences of change in sexual attitudes are far from clearly articulated in decision-making in political life.
The great risk is that “women as men”, as satirised in the dystopian novel Regiment of Women by Thomas Berger, will turn out to be the rule. I don’t think it will, though it is absurd also to say that women as individuals are each and all superior to men. It is about values and there is a change going on among we poor males too. And even so evil will grab hard any purchase it can find, as the ambivalent ending of Kaos acknowledges.
In our time – right now! – we still see politics as a boys’ game in full cry. Stresses and strains on the international stage give macho impulses their head – what should be a last resort is the first, what is a symbol only is a cause, what is a restricted field of disagreement is an invitation for the “nuclear option”. We are not yet out of the shadow of the world mocked by Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida. There is still time to change it from a comedy to a tragedy.
Thanks for getting through this.
*The best edition by far as I’ve noted in previous posts is David Bevington’s third series Arden. There is such a thing as an editorial masterpiece, and this is it. I have not given a precis of the play – readers should consult Wiki or Bevington.
**Titus has been claimed to be a send-up of contemporary revenge tragedies. Jonathan Bate’s Arden edition persuasively argues against farce.
***See Bevington’s note on the text.
^It would be interesting to see the play done in repertory with itself – as a comedy one night, a tragedy or tragicomedy the next. See Bevington p426.
^^See Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex.
Yet Troilus and Cressida outpaces them all in the race to be most puzzling. So far as I know, no other play apart from Titus Andronicus** – not only by Shakespeare but by anybody – has been claimed to be both a tragedy and a comedy, as well as spots in between. There are even more puzzles about the play, perhaps more than about any other of Shakespeare’s works, and they raise issues that go far beyond what we may style as literary criticism.
Many of these uncertainties are the sort that bedevil Shakespeare scholarship generally – and that help make burrowing into the works of the master so exciting. It is not clear when the play was originally written, though it is generally accepted to have been around 1600. There are two and a half versions – two almost identical quartos published in 1609, and the 1623 Folio text, all with wee posers for the excitable, such as myself. Whether the quarto(s) or the Folio is the “authoritative” version is moot.
There is more. Many words in the English language are found first in Shakespeare. Troilus and Cressida has a number he used only in this play, and there are others that have never been used by anyone else, ever.***
All these and more factors may help to explain why the play is not better known.
The quartos are a good place to start. They were published in quick succession in 1609, the same year Shakespeare’s sonnets were first printed. The theatres were closed in that year due to the plague and Shakespeare may have been trying to make some money from his writing.
The first quarto claimed the play had been performed by his company, the King’s Men, but it was quickly replaced by a new edition, alike in every respect but for the title page and a preface, from “a never writer” to the “ever reader”.
The preface is a source of endless fascination. It contradicts the earlier version by saying it has never been performed – “never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar”, and then goes on to say that what had been a “history” was now a comedy, “passing full of the palm comical”. Shakespeare is compared to the Roman comic playwrights Plautus and Terence.
Moreover as addressed to the “ever reader” it may be that Shakespeare rejigged an earlier version of the play (and that may have been performed) to make it more suitable for reading. In any case, as with other plays published at the time, it was sold as something to be read, not as a script to be performed.
I think this matters for a number of reasons, perhaps the most important being that the presumed difficulties of the play may very well stem from its form as a dramatic script but infused with complexities and nuance that can only be appreciated at leisure, by an “ever reader”, or even, an “eternal reader”. Even when staged in “intimate” settings like Blackfriars theatre instead of the larger Globe playhouse, Troilus and Cressida is so full of subtle innuendo, complex philosophising, and sexual and other multiple entendres that no viewer could hope to gain a full appreciation at a sitting or reading. Certainly I have seen it three times and have read it at least half a dozen times, three in the most recent Arden edition, and think there is more there yet.
Never Writer’s big point, that the play is a comedy, is major. After all, this is a play set in a war, whose outcome is known to everyone. Lovers torn apart jostle for prominence with the death of the Trojans’ most famous warrior, with the weeping sores of venereal disease seeping through the lines to infect the whole. Get a rib-tickler out of that and you’d have to be – Shakespeare.
It is a tall order without doubt. But it is doable, and I am not alone in thinking it.^
What makes it doable is the underlying intent, what Shakespeare was trying to achieve – according, of course, to me. Ultimately that is what draws me to the play, as ultimately I am drawn to Shakespeare’s work in “the whole of all its parts”.
It seems to me Shakespeare was attacking the courtly ethos associated with the late Elizabethan monarchy, peeling away the layers of false gentility to reveal the ugly inside of what were, once seen the right way, self-evidently hypocritical values. Unless it is the venomous fool Thersites, no one among the major characters emerges unscathed.
There is external evidence that Shakespeare took a dim view of these values at the time. In sonnet 130, he contrasts the romantic view of love with his own realistic one:
“I grant I never saw a goddess go/My mistress when she walks treads on the ground./And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare/As any she belied with false compare”. This is loving not despite a lover’s “blemishes” but in their fullness. Troilus’ love-sick puppy does not stand up well to this grown man’s emotions.
Troilus and Cressida extends this suspicion of the standards of chivalric, “courtly” behaviour to encompass its most extreme practice: warfare. There is really nothing else at stake in the war than “honour”: the Greeks could go home empty-handed, and the Trojans could turn Helen over to them, and the loss for either would be face, and nothing else. To stand on the rightness of their cause has already, when the play begins, cost untold lives on both sides, with the Trojans risking everything: their city, their culture, the lives of everyone there, men, women, children, the old and frail. For the Greeks, the risks are less in that “just” the lives of those on the field of battle are at risk, but as the play opens the battlefield is strewn with the ghosts of warriors fallen in the pursuit of a woman who is happy where she is, thank you very much.
The conclusion, made plain in both camps during the play, is that they fight not because they have to, but because they want to. The element of tragedy is self-evident in this, given that no audience would be unaware of the final outcome.
Yet it is also laughable. These are not men, but children at play with deadly consequences. Critical scenes in the play that might be thought to be hard to raise a laugh, really could: Hector’s death, for example, after he pursued and killed a Greek for his armour, dragging the unnamed victim home and stopping for a rest, surrounded by Achilles’ warriors known as Myrmidons – descended if you will from ants! – to be slain by Achilles as a sadistic child might pull wings off flies. Tragic from one view, but losing one’s life for soldier bling…an audience in Shakespeare’s day could have found this funny, and so in ours.
Mounting or reading this play as a comedy exposes these values to trenchant ridicule underscored in the character of Thersites, whose all but endless trashing of the pretensions of both camps, and shrewd perceptions of the underlying macho and sexual motivations involved, is a slap in the face not just to Greeks and Trojans, but to men who share their values.
And there are plenty of those around.
This year is the centenary of the beginning of what is variously called the First World War, World War I and the Great War. The parallels with the Trojan War are not exact, by any means. Nonetheless, for all its outrage and political undertones, the assassination of an Austrian archduke by Serbian radicals need not have begun a conflagration that would go on to consume the lives of millions upon millions, and did even worse as I hope to show.
The archduke’s murder unleashed the same passions that made peace impossible between the Trojans and the Greeks: men’s passions, or if you prefer, boys’ stuff, ruled on both occasions. They are not the only passions in men. But they ruled then, and can rule again.
To see these at work in the Great War Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel is widely regarded as the truest reflection of that conflict. It is also an honest account by a man who relished the fighting. The male urges laid bare in Troilus and Cressida bare their teeth in Storm of Steel.
Of course not all males allow themselves to be swept up in madness. Thersites in Troilus and Cressida was frank in his cowardice. In the Great War New Zealander Archibald Baxter’s refusal to serve led him to the front lines in France as authorities sought to break him and his comrades through beatings and torture. His account, We Will Not Cease, shows heroism of another sort.
Baxter’s beliefs can only be said to be a guide to the future in a general way: that men need not give way to the urges that lead individuals to violence and societies to wholesale slaughter. Resistance to aggression can be the only option. The Second World War was just like that: Hitler was determined on war from shortly after the end of the Great War, when few if any even knew he existed, and no amount of persuasion or acquiescence would have avoided it, as events proved. Not only the passions of men, but the sway of policy made “Hitler’s war” unique among the wars of so-called civilised states. While we solemnly intone the futility of the Great War in the near future, remembering what came after won’t hurt.
All of this, right down to our world today, relates to men, to their attitudes, passions and power. Women only feature as symbols and objects, or as victims. The world of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is in that sense the same as the world of 1914, and nearly the same as the world of today.
But just nearly the same. Those who read this blog regularly, and those who read my fiction, will know that my work is meant partly to chart what I feel is an epochal shift in western society, and by extension eventually all society. That sees women moving to replace men as decision-makers in all aspects of social life: business, services, politics. What some might see as a rise to equality I see as a necessary victory over the passions that have ruled us for too long. What is important is not women “coming to be equals” but men losing their place on top.
This is not about “gender”, but about values, however much they may be bound up with gender, and Archibald Baxter and men like him have shown it. Men generally have been able to indulge their violent inclinations for a very long time because of the reality of their physical strength^^; the industrial revolution and the many implements of destruction spawned by it have undermined and will finally destroy that advantage. The strength of “womanhood” and the values implied by it are now being ushered into the forefront of social life.
Real, physical women are not the same as these values. It is not surprising that many if not all of the women to arrive in positions of political power clawed their way to the top by being more male than men. It was not Margaret Thatcher’s handbag that was relevant but her willingness to swing it.
Yet this process and the broad outlines of its outcome are unmistakeable. Woman is coming to rule, politically and socially. “Equality” really means “supremacy”, and negation is the reason: male values are too dangerous. The sabre-rattling that led to the Great War cost millions of lives; the same attitudes today threaten global catastrophe, and even when this is avoided can cause needless distress and harm to hundreds of millions of people.
All this may seem a long way from Troilus and Cressida and in a sense it is. Shakespeare in his day could only mock male values. The women in this play are not agents of their own destiny but are victims of the whims of their male rulers. Cressida has long been portrayed as a “slut” but it seems to me shows intelligence and wit in adapting – and quickly – to her circumstances after being totally betrayed by the man she loved. The parallel with Helen is ironic. Cressida must go to the Greeks as a matter of principle while Helen must stay for the same reason. Both are no more than tokens, symbols, not fully human.
At any rate Shakespeare could hardly have foreseen a time when women’s estate would change. The single example of his age, Elizabeth, was taken – as she was – to be a great exception, all the more as she was hailed as a virgin. John Knox, the Scottish reformer, railed against her and the notion that women should rule men as he regarded it as anti-Biblical and anti-Christian.
What Shakespeare could do was to expose the sexual basis of much male behaviour, not just that directed at women. The amount of sexual innuendo in Troilus and Cressida is astonishing for a work peopled mostly by men, and suggests that sexual prowess and sexual competitiveness are significant factors in male behaviour not only toward women but toward other men. It is a commonplace that women in our time dress for other women at least as much as for men, but a recent study into dancing suggests men dance in the same way – parading themselves in front of other men as well as women, to dominate or ward off competition, not merely to seduce their opposites.
Pandarus, deathly ill with “Neapolitan bone ache” (syphilis) farewells the audience at the very end of the play promising to “bequeath you my diseases”. What Shakespeare meant by this parting shot is not entirely clear. Some think he himself had syphilis and not surprisingly wasn’t happy about it. Whether that is true or not, it seems to me to be more an indictment not of the rutting but the strutting style of masculinity so ridiculed by Thersites in the play, as men view sex as a form of power, and their conquests as chaff. Early in the play, as Cressida contemplates yielding to Troilus, she articulates her weakness: her only strength is in withholding her favours; once she has granted them, she is totally captive to her seducer – and so it proves. Sex as power is a sickness in keeping with and an element in the notion of war as a blood sport. Though he is clearly a lover and not a fighter, Pandarus facilitates the ethos and must guiltily succumb.
We no longer live in such times. But the consequences of change in sexual attitudes are far from clearly articulated in decision-making in political life.
The great risk is that “women as men”, as satirised in the dystopian novel Regiment of Women by Thomas Berger, will turn out to be the rule. I don’t think it will, though it is absurd also to say that women as individuals are each and all superior to men. It is about values and there is a change going on among we poor males too. And even so evil will grab hard any purchase it can find, as the ambivalent ending of Kaos acknowledges.
In our time – right now! – we still see politics as a boys’ game in full cry. Stresses and strains on the international stage give macho impulses their head – what should be a last resort is the first, what is a symbol only is a cause, what is a restricted field of disagreement is an invitation for the “nuclear option”. We are not yet out of the shadow of the world mocked by Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida. There is still time to change it from a comedy to a tragedy.
Thanks for getting through this.
*The best edition by far as I’ve noted in previous posts is David Bevington’s third series Arden. There is such a thing as an editorial masterpiece, and this is it. I have not given a precis of the play – readers should consult Wiki or Bevington.
**Titus has been claimed to be a send-up of contemporary revenge tragedies. Jonathan Bate’s Arden edition persuasively argues against farce.
***See Bevington’s note on the text.
^It would be interesting to see the play done in repertory with itself – as a comedy one night, a tragedy or tragicomedy the next. See Bevington p426.
^^See Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex.
Unmanageability – a guide for advanced practitioners, taken from Shakespeare
Dear reader: If you don’t know by now that next April marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, well – you actually do!
It will be a wonderful occasion – after all those years, and the countless words spilt on innumerable pages, real and surreal, he remains the greatest writer ever, and that is saying a lot. Not everything he wrote had the golden touch of his best but in a relatively short life, he produced so much outstanding literature it is difficult to credit, though it is true.
It is also true that there is a lot that is unknown about Shakespeare. That has allowed people who should know better to create fabulous alternative authors, from Bacon to other nobles otherwise unheard of. Not too long ago the film Anonymous put just such a case. Trying to be as generous of spirit as possible, that is complete rubbish.
Shakespeare wrote some of his plays with others, but it did not take long for him to be regarded as the senior partner in that kind of enterprise. He had a gift that was just astonishing, even to his peers. It is also true that theatrical practice at the time meant companies “woodshedded” their productions. Shakespeare as an actor as well as playwright would have taken a full part in these and no doubt there would have been changes to lines and scenes as a result. Plays were more of a collaborative enterprise then than they typically are today. That is a very far cry from a secret author cunningly slipping scripts to an otherwise undistinguished actor and entrepreneur.
Shakespeare’s work seems inexhaustibly multifaceted. A few of his plays have been portrayed as both comedies and tragedies, and I’ve written a blog post about this (“Toiling with Troilus”), but more nuanced interpretations of his work allows for remarkably wide-ranging productions. Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet creda\ibly set the famous romance in modern Venice, California’s gang turf (to be fair, Bernstein’s West Side Story did the same on New York streets without crediting the Bard). Productions change their historical garb with remarkable ease, and make their cases to be understood and appreciated.
Even so, there are those who don’t like him.
Recently I had a brief conversation with a dramatist and actor who found him “too wordy”. Wow! It reminded me of the joke about someone who saw a production of Hamlet and was bored – “It’s full of cliches”.
An Irish critic titled a book on the plays Shakespeare is hard – but so is life. What was easy for readers and viewers to comprehend in Shakespeare’s lifetime now needs guidance to fully appreciate. But to suggest he is boring is just wrong. Part of the reason for the bard’s success was that he did it all – actor, theatre impresario, writer – so knew how to put “bums on seats” in competition with other attractions seeking punters’ pennies – bear-baiting for example. The groundlings – illterate kids and the like – needed excitement and Shakespeare gave it to them. The literate wanted more, and they got it too. But for us, changes in our spoken and written language and in theatre convention really mean using critical editions, and then our brains, to get what is there to be got.
There really is a very great deal. In “Toiling with Troilus” I’ve tried to show my appreciation of Troilus and Cressida, a play even many educated people have never heard of. This time I’d like to wander around Hamlet, arguably the world’s best-known dramatic work, and in its “existentialist” cloth, as fresh and relevant as when actors first trod the boards reciting the lines.
Discovering the “real” Hamlet is a detective story and no single explanation or text is ever likely to please everyone. Harold Jenkins’ wonderful Arden edition is my favourite and persuasively suggests that one printed edition, from Germany, was actually an inaccurate theft – a so-called memorial reconstruction – by one of the actors who appeared in the first production of the play. Jenkins even shows the role played by the actor who was the thief, as the man remembered the lines of the play closest to his own, and flubbed those where he was not involved. There is more in Jenkins’ absorbing account.
It is a commonplace to say that Hamlet the character was indecisive. That is not entirely fair. Hamlet was caught in a difficult situation. His father the king had died suddenly and he, the inheriting son, was deprived of the crown by his uncle, who had married his mother with unseemly haste after his father’s death. Brooding on this, he is confronted by the ghost of his father who says he’s been murdered, and insists on revenge.
Rationalist that he is, Hamlet needs to decide whether this vision is real or not, and if real, whether it might be a trick by a demon rather than a true visitation by his departed father. He cleverly lays a trap for his uncle to find out, meantime feigning madness to keep the villain guessing. Once he realises the truth, he passes up the opportunity to kill the uncle at prayer as it was believed that was a ticket to hell, and in the end only manages to exact revenge at the cost of the kingdom to the Swedes, his own life, the lives of his betrothed Ophelia, her brother Laertes and their father, the pompous Polonius.
What presses on Hamlet all this time are circumstances beyond his control. He is not helpless, but he cannot manage what comes at him.
This is a very contemporary dilemma. The so-called 12-step programmes used to recover today by sufferers of complaints ranging from alcoholism and drug addiction to food issues and more begin by sufferers saying they had admitted powerlessness in the face of their addiction “and that our lives had become unmanageable”. That first step however only introduces a stark reality of “recovery” – at no point in the remaining 11 steps does life become “manageable”. Instead it is necessary to “turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him”.
Life thus remains unmanageable by the sufferer alone. As Catholic theologian Richard Rohr emphasises, life is only managed through turning to a force greater than oneself, a “higher power”. When I jest with my friends that my tiny bubble of the universe is “completely unmanageable” my tongue is firmly in my cheek but. . .
Seen coldly, life – life, not one’s daily chores – is ultimately unmanageable for everyone. However much we might think we are taking care of everything, the reality is that everything is actually taking care of us. Whatever we think we are doing, in the end, we end. As Celine’s most famous aphorism put it, “The truth of this life is death”.* Celine endlessly mocked the perverse delusions of madly avoiding confronting the truth about our lives and ourselves.
Hamlet, something of a genius, nimble as nimble could be, is nonetheless overwhelmed by a chain of challenges that finally destroys him. As he avoids one calamity after another, he dismisses as foolishness the looming presence of the cunning son of the Swedish king, who uses an excuse to entrap and ultimately subjugate the Danes. Honoring the fallen prince fits in perfectly with the Swede’s perfidious plan.
The tragedy of Hamlet is not that he cannot bring himself to act, but that he feels unable to act – trapped in a web of circumstance that try as he might, he cannot shake loose. The famous “To be or not be” speech is a meditation in the face of this harsh reality of trying to “take arms against a sea of troubles” and end them at the price of losing his life, or surviving but enduring that sea. Hamlet wants to live, and he wants to exact revenge, but his own cunning plan comes to nothing though he manages to kill his uncle in the mist of a general slaughter.
Hamlet is a brilliantly constructed play and is full of wonderful lines that have kept their magic for more than 400 years now. Many of these are mysterious**, still the subject of conjecture, while others resonate within us for their wisdom. A good production shows that life really is unmanageable – by us. The Great Dane barks up the wrong tree by trying to handle it all himself.
Of course, it is pretty wordy. ..and full of cliches.
Thanks for reading.
*Celine used this famous phrase first in his doctoral thesis on the physician Semmelweis, who discovered the principles of antisepsis at the cost of his own life. Celine then plagiarised himself in this first novel, Journey to the end of night.
** “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.”
It will be a wonderful occasion – after all those years, and the countless words spilt on innumerable pages, real and surreal, he remains the greatest writer ever, and that is saying a lot. Not everything he wrote had the golden touch of his best but in a relatively short life, he produced so much outstanding literature it is difficult to credit, though it is true.
It is also true that there is a lot that is unknown about Shakespeare. That has allowed people who should know better to create fabulous alternative authors, from Bacon to other nobles otherwise unheard of. Not too long ago the film Anonymous put just such a case. Trying to be as generous of spirit as possible, that is complete rubbish.
Shakespeare wrote some of his plays with others, but it did not take long for him to be regarded as the senior partner in that kind of enterprise. He had a gift that was just astonishing, even to his peers. It is also true that theatrical practice at the time meant companies “woodshedded” their productions. Shakespeare as an actor as well as playwright would have taken a full part in these and no doubt there would have been changes to lines and scenes as a result. Plays were more of a collaborative enterprise then than they typically are today. That is a very far cry from a secret author cunningly slipping scripts to an otherwise undistinguished actor and entrepreneur.
Shakespeare’s work seems inexhaustibly multifaceted. A few of his plays have been portrayed as both comedies and tragedies, and I’ve written a blog post about this (“Toiling with Troilus”), but more nuanced interpretations of his work allows for remarkably wide-ranging productions. Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet creda\ibly set the famous romance in modern Venice, California’s gang turf (to be fair, Bernstein’s West Side Story did the same on New York streets without crediting the Bard). Productions change their historical garb with remarkable ease, and make their cases to be understood and appreciated.
Even so, there are those who don’t like him.
Recently I had a brief conversation with a dramatist and actor who found him “too wordy”. Wow! It reminded me of the joke about someone who saw a production of Hamlet and was bored – “It’s full of cliches”.
An Irish critic titled a book on the plays Shakespeare is hard – but so is life. What was easy for readers and viewers to comprehend in Shakespeare’s lifetime now needs guidance to fully appreciate. But to suggest he is boring is just wrong. Part of the reason for the bard’s success was that he did it all – actor, theatre impresario, writer – so knew how to put “bums on seats” in competition with other attractions seeking punters’ pennies – bear-baiting for example. The groundlings – illterate kids and the like – needed excitement and Shakespeare gave it to them. The literate wanted more, and they got it too. But for us, changes in our spoken and written language and in theatre convention really mean using critical editions, and then our brains, to get what is there to be got.
There really is a very great deal. In “Toiling with Troilus” I’ve tried to show my appreciation of Troilus and Cressida, a play even many educated people have never heard of. This time I’d like to wander around Hamlet, arguably the world’s best-known dramatic work, and in its “existentialist” cloth, as fresh and relevant as when actors first trod the boards reciting the lines.
Discovering the “real” Hamlet is a detective story and no single explanation or text is ever likely to please everyone. Harold Jenkins’ wonderful Arden edition is my favourite and persuasively suggests that one printed edition, from Germany, was actually an inaccurate theft – a so-called memorial reconstruction – by one of the actors who appeared in the first production of the play. Jenkins even shows the role played by the actor who was the thief, as the man remembered the lines of the play closest to his own, and flubbed those where he was not involved. There is more in Jenkins’ absorbing account.
It is a commonplace to say that Hamlet the character was indecisive. That is not entirely fair. Hamlet was caught in a difficult situation. His father the king had died suddenly and he, the inheriting son, was deprived of the crown by his uncle, who had married his mother with unseemly haste after his father’s death. Brooding on this, he is confronted by the ghost of his father who says he’s been murdered, and insists on revenge.
Rationalist that he is, Hamlet needs to decide whether this vision is real or not, and if real, whether it might be a trick by a demon rather than a true visitation by his departed father. He cleverly lays a trap for his uncle to find out, meantime feigning madness to keep the villain guessing. Once he realises the truth, he passes up the opportunity to kill the uncle at prayer as it was believed that was a ticket to hell, and in the end only manages to exact revenge at the cost of the kingdom to the Swedes, his own life, the lives of his betrothed Ophelia, her brother Laertes and their father, the pompous Polonius.
What presses on Hamlet all this time are circumstances beyond his control. He is not helpless, but he cannot manage what comes at him.
This is a very contemporary dilemma. The so-called 12-step programmes used to recover today by sufferers of complaints ranging from alcoholism and drug addiction to food issues and more begin by sufferers saying they had admitted powerlessness in the face of their addiction “and that our lives had become unmanageable”. That first step however only introduces a stark reality of “recovery” – at no point in the remaining 11 steps does life become “manageable”. Instead it is necessary to “turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him”.
Life thus remains unmanageable by the sufferer alone. As Catholic theologian Richard Rohr emphasises, life is only managed through turning to a force greater than oneself, a “higher power”. When I jest with my friends that my tiny bubble of the universe is “completely unmanageable” my tongue is firmly in my cheek but. . .
Seen coldly, life – life, not one’s daily chores – is ultimately unmanageable for everyone. However much we might think we are taking care of everything, the reality is that everything is actually taking care of us. Whatever we think we are doing, in the end, we end. As Celine’s most famous aphorism put it, “The truth of this life is death”.* Celine endlessly mocked the perverse delusions of madly avoiding confronting the truth about our lives and ourselves.
Hamlet, something of a genius, nimble as nimble could be, is nonetheless overwhelmed by a chain of challenges that finally destroys him. As he avoids one calamity after another, he dismisses as foolishness the looming presence of the cunning son of the Swedish king, who uses an excuse to entrap and ultimately subjugate the Danes. Honoring the fallen prince fits in perfectly with the Swede’s perfidious plan.
The tragedy of Hamlet is not that he cannot bring himself to act, but that he feels unable to act – trapped in a web of circumstance that try as he might, he cannot shake loose. The famous “To be or not be” speech is a meditation in the face of this harsh reality of trying to “take arms against a sea of troubles” and end them at the price of losing his life, or surviving but enduring that sea. Hamlet wants to live, and he wants to exact revenge, but his own cunning plan comes to nothing though he manages to kill his uncle in the mist of a general slaughter.
Hamlet is a brilliantly constructed play and is full of wonderful lines that have kept their magic for more than 400 years now. Many of these are mysterious**, still the subject of conjecture, while others resonate within us for their wisdom. A good production shows that life really is unmanageable – by us. The Great Dane barks up the wrong tree by trying to handle it all himself.
Of course, it is pretty wordy. ..and full of cliches.
Thanks for reading.
*Celine used this famous phrase first in his doctoral thesis on the physician Semmelweis, who discovered the principles of antisepsis at the cost of his own life. Celine then plagiarised himself in this first novel, Journey to the end of night.
** “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.”
The written world
This blog was originally started "just because" but as I've gone along I've realised how valuable it is to be able to think about writing, about the writers who matter to me, and to help clarify my th
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