A ramble around some themes in Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth (work in progress)

A gradually proceeding ramble around some themes in Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth

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18 February

A ramble around some themes in Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth

NB This image from the First Folio, and the one below, is not necessarily from the Digital facsimile of the Bodleian First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, Arch. G c.7

Thanks to @bodleianlibs, we have a remarkable resource for looking at their copy of The First Folio (of 1623)... :https://t.co/FdaEHjByAg https://t.co/jMAoPuCOEA

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 18, 2017

'Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him', says Lady Macbeth, sleep-walking :

Is 'so much blood' = guilt ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 18, 2017

Being *sanguine* connected to 'spring', 'infancy', to 'enthusiastic, active and social' :https://t.co/TtTs6PJ1LPhttps://t.co/X3qf8vRNfL pic.twitter.com/4BH3tNRgOs

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 18, 2017

Yes, but 'so much blood in him' :

Is an implication that youthful energy was absent from Duncan, judging his construction 'from his face' ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 19, 2017

Maybe other matters in the play (clues, some might call them* ?) give us pause here...

Before Gaetano Donizetti and the later era of opera, it had had ‘mad scenes’ in the works of such as Hasse and Handel : are we so taken by Lady Macbeth’s madness, as the nurse and doctor overhear, that we do not question why she remarks about ‘so much blood in’ Duncan, but take it all as one guilty, bloody stuff ?


Yet that cannot be right. Having drugged the guards’ possets (Act II, Scene 2), she specifically says (having just doubted Macbeth, who has in fact ‘done the deed’, and, hearing him, assumed that the guards have awoken) Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done’t*. Yet why, at this same time, this tenderness of feeling, which but stifles a lack of it in wishing to kill instead of Macbeth (as if already doubting him) ?

[James Thurber cleverly works with this¹, but] Lady Macbeth’s thought-patterns are so quicksilver that, often enough, we may not slow them down, but take them at the very level of the face value, which the drama itself distrusts / urges us to distrust². Back at Act V, Scene 1, is where we encounter the image of washing ‘this filthy witness from your hand’, but it is hard on the heels of it, here, that she realizes that all has not gone to plan, and – only when Macbeth refuses – does she have to go again into Duncan’s chamber³ :

Why did you bring these daggers from the place ?
They must lie there. Go carry them and smear
The sleepy grooms with blood.

With Thurber's imaginative help, is #UCFF converging on Lady M.'s dad, in reconsidering The Tragedy of Macbeth ? :https://t.co/ZhE06z932w

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 20, 2017

Does this set of three lines seem, despite it all, terribly controlled - the words of someone who might have done all this before... ?

What is Duncan's age, on any reading of the play, at this time, and is it right to assume that Lady means Duncan, when she remarks who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him ?


End-notes :

¹ James Thurber makes play with this and other points in the text (in ‘The Macbeth Murder Mystery’, collected in The Thurber Carnival), but, at that level, we may not need to operate. (The piece first appeared in The New Yorker (p. 16 of the edition dated 2 October 1937), as linked here.)

² […] Where we are,
There’s daggers in men’s smiles. The near in blood,
The nearer bloody.

Donalbain (Act II, Scene 3)

³ Both seeds of the sleep-walking scene at the end of the play have now been sown, because, before returning with ‘hands of your colour’ and saying A little water clears us of this deed, she rationally seeks to dismiss what Macbeth says, first with Consider it not so deeply, and then [when his mind is still rooted in his recent experience], with :

These deeds must not be thought
After these ways. So, it will make us mad.


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Don't talk to me about social skills !

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26 December

Some talk of 'social skills', but they mean neither skills, nor anything other than the related word 'sociable' - being nice / kind / polite
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 26, 2013

Is it 'a skill' being tolerant, patient, thoughtful, caring ? A skill acting convincingly as if one were ? Social skills = alliteration rut.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 26, 2013

Some kind souls, on related tracks, gave us road rage, the rather offensive gender bender, yummy mummy, and the pink pound, for example. We may have been happy without these terms (particularly the second one), but somehow we gravitate towards them, as if they were indispensable, led on by the spell of rhyme or of the alliteration :

It takes an effort to rebel, almost as if the concept of road rage were an inevitability that we resist - if we can at all - at our peril, because we fear falling into aporia, or even aphasia : that is the label, and we must use it.

Except that people who become furious on the road are furious in no different way, just because the source of their intense reaction comes from driving, and the trite phrase not only does not acknowledge the truth that a shop assistant could just as easily be beaten as a fellow motorist or other road-user, but also makes a separate species of alleged rage almost obligatory.

It certainly becomes categorizable, and so capable of tallies being kept of incidents of this new monster of road rage, whereas the public service workers, such as shop assistants or nurses or parking operatives*, have no name for the outrageous behaviour unleashed on them, and so no publicity or real recognition.


Back at these so-called social skills, this is just a snobbish label for saying both that someone is impolite or gruff, and that the fault lies with their inadequate parents and family circumstance : George has no social skills, even if it is not a ridiculous exaggeration, really damns his entire upbringing and status as a human being, for (as the motto of, amongst others, Winchester tells us) manners maketh man.

Needless to say, but George has probably deviated from doing for the speaker what the speaker expected, or has done something that the speaker (from the speaker's elevated and unfailing understanding of these things) otherwise deems inappropriate, so he deserves to be blasted as of no worth, even to his scurvy face.



Oswald

Why dost thou use me thus? I know thee not.


Kent

Fellow, I know thee.


Oswald

What dost thou know me for?


Kent

A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats, a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave, a lily-livered, action-taking knave, whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue, one-trunk-inheriting slave, one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deny'st the least syllable of thy addition.



But to end with a little Twittery :

'Henry, the truth is you ain't got no manners, and no finesse' ~ Gertrude Stein, @parisreview @stuartnuttall
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 25, 2013

'Those who can tolerate Miss Parker would find earthquake, wind and fire a pleasant change' ~ James Thurber @stuartnuttall @parisreview
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 25, 2013

'Some people are precious about who famously said first what anyone could say, so I largely attribute to Shakespeare' ~ First Folio
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 25, 2013

End-notes

* If that is what traffic wardens are now called.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Enjoyment made cheap

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6 July

Enjoy a delicious meal in our elegant new dining area ! Well, thick colds apart, they're virtual synonyms : how *not* enjoy delicious food ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 10, 2013

Language is a funny old business – some effectively say that, for want of a better term for it, laissez-faire applies, and therefore that Lewis Carroll’s Humpty-Dumpty was right :

When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.


Leave aside what attitude, policy or belief the celebrated writer may have been typifying (or, as some would say, parodying), this utterance does state the liberal position concerning what words signify, that they change with Time, and that woe betide those who do not move with them (or with it).

Except, of course, that the corollary is that, if I read Troilus and Criseyde of Chaucer, I cannot very well expect him to mean these words as, untutored, I might construe them :

There nys nat oon kan war by other be


On the other side, there are those kindly and neutrally labelled as the linguistic purists, police or even fascists, who seek to preserve meanings.


Anyway, what about this ?

Check out our range of luxury vodkas*

Enjoy two Bombs for £5**


Since I am ancient, I remember the Bowie song where he is talking about boys checking each other out, a very self-conscious reference to another culture in expressing what men do all the time, whether at the bar or the urinal, because they are so desperately insecure that some of them cannot even urinate, if another man is there.

Now, we are urged all the time to check out the video by Z, and for no other reason than it is the latest Z video, and we are enjoined – almost unceasingly – to ‘enjoy’ every paltry damn’ thing, even a coffee and a Danish pastry for £3. Word gits such as I think that I would probably be more likely to enjoy the so-called combo for £2 – or that, if more wealthy, I would still enjoy it for £5…

Enjoy a glass of perfectly chilled South African bubbly on our exclusive terrace


Oh, I bloody ask you – is everything marketing, packaging, and generally turning that ear into a silk purse ? Are we really so bloody stupid as a species that we cannot sense when we are being manipulated into some bloody posture that says how fine and how much better we are because invited by these pathetic jingles and slogans ?

Does one become tempted (as marketingspeak has it), or think what crap is being dressed up as a snobby treat ?
For me, the turning-point was being told that I should Enjoy ! -not the meal, but some unspecified thing, or just generally ? Formally speaking, the verb was transitive, and I could not just ‘enjoy’ in the same way that I can ‘live’, where I can legitimately say I have lived here all my life, but, equally, I have lived a good life, with a direct object, if I so choose.
Do waiting or serving staff still say that ? I don’t know, but I can happily believe that the tendency / habit / fashion just died off.

My preferences apart, I am just interested by this word ‘enjoy’, which I take to be a misunderstanding of what the verb, and of what ‘enjoyment’, meant to other ages – not a casual and trite encouragement to eat and / or drink something*** :


1. ‘To take delight or pleasure in’ – now, there’s a challenge to mediocrity !
Can I really be delighted by that Danish pastry that they bought in by the dozen to serve with coffee ? – isn’t taking pleasure in something other than simply enjoying everything put before one ?


2. ‘To have the use or benefit of’ – a different sense that leads to


3. ‘To experience’, i.e. ‘to enjoy poor health’, which would seem to connote the opposite of meaning 1, if poor health can be enjoyed.


The verb comes to us from Old French enjoier (‘to give joy to’) or enjoïr (‘to enjoy’), via Middle English, and ultimately from Latin gaudēre - a word on which I have commented elsewhere…


The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology**** gives us an obsolete sense, from the fourteenth century, of ‘to be joyful’.

Then, in the fifteenth century, to possess or experience with joy’, and a reflexive meaning of ‘to enjoy oneself’ in the seventeenth century (following se (ré)jouir).

In between, the noun ‘enjoyment’ emerged, in the sixteenth century. We find it in Shakespeare, although sometimes tinged with meaning 2 (above) : quotations to come.


And now, when I am having ordinary meat and drink, am I really meant to enjoy it as such ? Easily save myself, then, £29.95 on a four-course lunch from a good restaurant…


Post-script

The word 'cheap', as in Cheapside, is all to do with buying and selling - the German word kaufen means 'to buy' (and Grimm's Law explains how one becomes the other).

So I say that enjoyment has been sold short...



End-notes

* What about Take a look at ? Doesn’t checking out happen at the supermarket till ?

** What about Get ? How do I know that I will enjoy them ?

*** I quote from The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, Eighth Edition (1990).

**** Edited by C. T Onions (1966).




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Definately indefinite

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29 October

I cannot claim to have read every word written by William Shakespeare, or even every play acknowledged to be his (or to have his hand in it), but I do not recollect the word definitely.

Easily enough remedied, as I have two nineteenth-century concordances upstairs, but my suspicion is that, although the word definite might just about have been Jacobean, the longer word came later...

But, with editions of Shakespeare that very often harmonize and modernize his spellings, since it is notorious that there is scarcely a pair of his signatures that are the same or where he even spells his name consistently, it is hard to know what - if he ever wrote the word - he would have written.

Would it stand as definate and definately? At the moment, I can definitively say that Shakespeare did / did not use the words...


Bartlett's The Shakespeare Phrase-Book does not list either word, but it - and the other one - is of a non-exhaustive kind, unlike more modern ones.



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Shall I compare thee...?

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3 July

I was writing this in Beverley, thinking myself so original, only to realize that the Internet is full of such parodies, and even with the same opening-line:

Shall I compare thee to a pile of trash?
Thou art more dirty and recyclable:
Rough Trade doth heat the stirring pangs of Lust,
And Clubbing's hours give all too short a night.


More some time...


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Down the Elephant and Castle for a lark

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28 June

Well, I probably have many reasons to be grateful to Wikipedia®, some of which cannot be wisely publicized, but I am very pleased by this:

A common misconception is that the term "elephant and castle" is a corruption of "la Infanta de Castilla"


Not the sort of misconception that you would have because you dreamt it up, in the way that someone did a few well-touted (pseudo)statistics (such as inspiration v. perspiration and how much is in the words), but only because some factotum droned on, prefacing the whiffle by Of course as if it were all self evident, and wanted to get you to believe it. On some basis, there would be those who did, and who might then have passed it on to chums, family and colleagues with It's not really, you know.

The entry is an entertainining little piece, with even a Shakespearean reference, and tells you about such delights as Hannibal House (someone with a sense of humour in the planning department for Southwark? - no, I didn't mean that Hannibal!).


But forget what they tell you about the origins, and think giant chess (not necessarily in the spirit of Ron Weasley): the game was very popular in the outdoor form that we know from the seaside and the like, and this far before The Blitz, and a showman amazed onlookers with his chess-playing elephant.

Curse though I am for spoiling the story, but the elephant was just very good at following its human companion's instructions (for he was the real brains behind the outfit), and he would communicate moves to it, for execution with its trunk. The castle part came from the elephant's apparent fondness for employing the piece to get to check-mate (either that or from the sign used to advertise the attraction).


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Twitter® is old hat*

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18 May

We keep reinventing the telegram, first with text-messages, and then with what is fondly thought of as a revolution in communications, this whole Twatter Splatter, where all these messages are generated to divert from the reality that, in just tens of years, it'll all be going on, if at all, with none of the same personnel.

But the truth is simply this: back in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Shakespeare had to pitch every new idea for a play in the tweet form - give you it in just 140 characters.

The Bard could put over Hamlet like that, but Could you?**


End-notes

* But most of us haven't known, since the days of Laurence Sterne, that the term refers to the female genitals.

** Cousin Marmaduke and I have since taken up my own clannege (? = challenge?) with - I think - creditable attempts by each at a major Shakespeare tragedy on Twitter: by all means do what you like with us then, but find us there!


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Bel Ami: An unworthy vehicle for much talent (2)

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16 March

A few takes on what could be behind Bel Ami (2012) - or ahead of it...


1. That advert - a distillation from the forest outside Athens?

They talk about the back story*, but, whatever we call it, it imparts essential knowledge:

It used to be that, when the woman had used this body-spray, men around her couldn't help acting on it, spontaneously presenting her, a stranger, with blooms and the like folly. (Men's fragrances didn't really exist, save as after-shave.)

Then came the male equivalent, acceptable to use as a shower-gel, because women would be falling all over the person who had done so. Clearly, Georges was a prescient amateur molecular chemist - or, more likely, knew a female one - and contrived the manufacture of what Puck uses on Shakespeare's human and fairy lovers, a potion so powerful that it acts by being scented.

How else explain KST's, UT's, and CR's characters' instant fascination for him?!


2. The follow-up - Bed, Amies!

Despite his prodigious sex-appeal (so he says) and everything else that he has gained in life at the end of Bel Ami, Georges soon becomes world weary (like Büchner's Danton**), and will do anything for a bet.

We've already seen how, through inefficient timing, he nearly has Virginie and Clotilde in the bedroom, if not in bed, at the same time - a touch worthy of Brian Rix in his pre-Mencap days. Telling these stories to his cronies, and admitting that he stll enjoys his memories of sex with the trio of women, he is put to the challenge of achieving just that, sex with them all at the same time.

He accepts, confident of winning the bet! With his natural cunning (so evident, for example, in assuming that a widow would want to consider an offer of marriage not only from someone with nothing obvious to offer, but also a bare minute or two after she became bereaved), it will be child's play, he reckons...


NB If insufficiently convinced that those who watched Bel Ami could stomach a sequel, go straight to a hard-core version for 'the specialist market'


3. An alternative follow-up - Ami de Freud

World-weary, but interested, when he hears about psychoanalysis, to meet Freud because of his troubling dreams about the three women, Georges goes to Vienna to have a consultation - or, more likely, he pays for an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris - it doesn't matter whether it's plausible, but just that it happens:

They talk, he becomes Freud's patient, and Freud teases out that, a bit like The Fifth Element (1997) (which he has got on VHS), the three essential parts of Georges' psyche are split up amongst the three women:

* One, Clotilde, is essentially benign, and forgives his wrongs (because she cannot miss having sex with him)

* Another, Madeleine, can take or leave sex with Georges (and will put him in his place through it), because she has a longstanding lover, and then, when he is gone, nothing much can replace him

* The last, Virginie, humbles herself for love of him, and he hates her for it, feeling such disgust that he feels compelled to abuse her, orally and physically (although it is, of course, not she whom he wishes to abuse)


You, Freud tells him, will never rest until the three are reunited.

How? asks Georges.

Proceed as scenario for Bed, Amies!, because, as everything is to do with sex, he can never be free until he gets all three women in bed at once...


End-notes

* If I knew who 'they' were, I'd be intrigued to find out from them what, then, is the front story, the side story, the up story...

** Another Georges. The 1983 film is not unworthy, methinks.


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Great books that bored me (and I didn't finish)

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20 January

So, maybe, they weren't so great...

At any rate, whilst looking for Sir Gawain, to see what the so-called Pearl poet said about the word 'mirth' - as I seem to recall a feast (probably Christmas) when the Green Knight makes his dramatic entrance, on horseback, and challenge - to shed light on the posting Merry birthday!, I spotted the Penguin volumes of Goethe's Faust, and suddenly found a strange linguistic connection with something else that I gave up on:

Faust
Proust


When, in the 1980s, Penguin (again) brought out its three-volume new translation of Proust's Temps Perdu (even the title's too long!), I cautiously bought just the first volume, and wisely so, as I didn't get beyond around p. 153 and all that flannel about Swann (excuse the repeated double 'n'), which left me not caring to know any more about any of it (let alone some prized lines about the power of a cake to spark off memories, which, without reading, I struggle to see as any great insight, if maybe an example of synaesthesia)*.

So what, other than the letter-combinations (above) those works have in common is their length (and falling into parts as a result) - I had read Part I of Faust, but withdrew from Part 2, because I simply wasn't interested in what betrayals and debaucheries Faust could, under devilish encouragement, commit - and whether I could stay the course. Trying to be dutiful, when I found the task distasteful, I did plough through the whole (i.e. both parts) of Marlowe's play Tamburlaine the Great, another catalogue of cruelty and depravity, during the first week of my degree course, but took next to nothing - save a greater dislike for Marlowe - from doing it.

And I have too further confessions, one of which I will excuse on the basis that (as with the Marlowe, though who knows when that - or a substantially unabridged version of it - was last performed**) it is meant to be seen performed, not read as a text, and the other that endless stories where a jealous husband (usually unreasonably and sustainedly jealous, so as to make Leontes seem the model of trust) repeatedly tests a wife by putting temptation in her way were (a) just padding to the long-stalled plot and, to me, (b) not of interest anyway.

For those who haven't already guessed, I refer to the following works, and am guided by a carefully placed slip of paper in each, which indicates where I stopped:


Shakespeare's Henry the Sixth Parts One to Three - another attempt to be dutiful, I stalled partway through Act Three, Scene Two, of Part Two, and should have taken the opportunity, when the RSC did marathon sessions of it, to encompass it;


Cervantes' Don Quixote - I didn't even make it to The Second Part (giving out at the end of Chapter XXXV in The First Part).


In conclusion, I have two copies in tranlsation - don't ask why! - of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, which, it should be known, is a three-volume work, so some may know how to place their stake, if offered the chance of odds on whether I'll ever read it all...


* The great, and perhaps a little overlooked, Paul Jennings wrote very humorously about his similar aspirations to be an educated man and, amongst other things, have read Temps Perdu - I didn't just find my copy of the jokily called attempt at anthologizing his Oddly collections, which (my recollection is) were themselves anthologies of (the best of) what he had published in something like The Observer, The Jenguin Pennings (yet another Penguin!), but, if it doesn't contain this piece about Swann, where the fictive narrator, at least, too foundered, it is still a very good introduction. Copies don't seem cheap though, according to Amazon®.


** More often than I could imagine, according to the entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamburlaine_%28play%29#Performance_history.


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