So I’m reading Shakespeare. And I’m watching Shakespeare.[1] In particular, I am studying the Henry IV plays and Henry V. And I notice something: all these low characters (Falstaff, Prince Hal) speak in prose, while all the high characters (Henry IV, Henry V) speak in verse. This does not come as a shock. I think that for a layperson to really appreciate Shakespeare, he must admit the poet’s defects—which are many. And perhaps his biggest defect is how much he sucks up to authority.

It is hard not to see Shakespeare’s personal story as anything but a 16th century Horatio Alger: poor young man goes to the big city and comes back home triumphant. And therefore, it is hard not to see Shakespeare as primarily a businessman rather than an artist. He apparently did not write anything the last several years of his life. It is doubtful that this is due to the high standards he had by this time, because his last few plays were garbage. Maybe the old man (My age!) just felt he didn’t have it in him any more. But doesn’t it make more sense that his fortune was secure and that it was always about the money?

One of his last plays, Cardenio is lost to us. There is probably a reason for this, like: it was not very good. It is believed to be based upon Don Quixote. So perhaps Shakespeare and Fletcher[2] can be forgiven, because as I know, Don Quixote is a damned hard book to adapt; it’s the novel version of The Illiad. But this does provide a nice contrast: Shakespeare as the landlord during his last years compared to Cervantes, who pretty much died with pen in hand.

Shakespeare Apologists

I tried to find some information on how much of the various plays were verse and how much prose. I’m sure I’ve seen this kind of information before, but I couldn’t find it online. Instead, I found the following on Cummings Study Guides:

This is the ultimate. It would make Christian apologists proud. “Yeah, it’s true that Shakespeare clearly thinks that royalty are better than common men, but there are exceptions so it isn’t true!” Let’s see the logic here. Hamlet—an enormous part—is sometimes written in prose. The same goes for a minor character in Coriolanus. Does this need comment?!

The witches in Macbeth and Caliban, son of a witch, in The Tempest are written in verse. Maybe the fact that they are not, you know, part of the normal world has something to do with this? Consider, if you will, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

It is hard for me to speak of The Merchant of Venice, because I don’t know it very well due to the fact that it is such an offensive play—far more offensive than Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. Let me only say that the evidence here is pretty unsatisfying. Are we really to believe that Shakespeare, the landlord, really thought it was the dirty world of money?

And Much Ado About Nothing? I just don’t see how a comedy written almost entirely in prose is an argument against the original claim.

The Case for Shakespeare

Let me make the case that Shakespeare wasn’t a classist asshole: he was. But everyone was. He wasn’t writing in modern America. You have to take an artist in the context of his time. I make this case to people about film all the time: Citizen Kane is not a great film because it is better than films today; it is a great film because it was head-and-shoulders better than anything in 1945. So why should Shakespeare be held to a higher standard?

Now let me demolish this argument, which I think is as strong a defense as one can make for Shakespeare: Cervantes. Miguel de Cervantes was very much a man of his time. He too was a classist. He was a Catholic. He was in no way a modern man. And yet, Don Quixote and Exemplary Novels transcend this in a way that Shakespeare’s work never did.

Still, I accept the argument I made above for Shakespeare. But I also accept the fact that Shakespeare was simply one of the best five or so playwrights in London at the end of the 16th century. I don’t think he was the best at that time and place, much less the best in the English language or (Gasp!) ever. This is what I find so frustrating about Shakespeare. There is so much to like. Hell, I memorize speeches from his plays for no reason but the joy of it. There are characters I love like Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. But there are also characters I despise like Claudio and Hero in Much Ado About Nothing. Why can’t people see this? Why are good plays by Ben Jonson and John Webster and many others so rarely performed, while bad plays of Shakespeare are finely tuned to make them palatable? I don’t know. It is all about history, I suppose. But so are the Nazis. That doesn’t mean we honor Nazism as the greatest form of governance the world has ever know![3]

[1] It is wrong to say that I, or anyone, watches Shakespeare. Each play gets so much help from editors, writers, directors, costume designers, art directors, and perhaps most of all, actors, that any Shakespeare play or movie is a collaboration, with That Bard giving less than he gets. It is perhaps also wrong to say that we read Shakespeare. Gary Taylor has pointed out that pronunciations have changed so much since the late 16th century, that when reading Shakespeare, we are reading another language. This, of course, does not stop the worshipers. Just one example about a production of Titus Andronicus from Wikipedia [Underlining is mine -FM]:

[2] I really don’t know why I mention Fletcher, because many of Shakespeare’s plays were collaborations (probably many more than we know). In general, Shakespeare gets all the credit, so I see no reason why he should not get all the blame.

[3] Might as well cut to the chase and end with Godwin’s Law.

I’ve been thinking about Falstaff for a couple of weeks now, as is evidenced by my trolling around over at Shakespeare Geek. So I’ve been hitting The Book (my old and rather bad Complete Works of That Bard), trying to make some sense of Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight. In particular, there is a scene after Henry turns away from Falstaff, in which Henry says, “Enlarge the man committed yesterday.” At this, one of the king’s advisers asks, “Falstaff?” That was a bit of surprise, but I wasn’t sure if it wasn’t just because I hadn’t been paying attention.

King Henry’s line is from a speech in Henry V, where he uses it to trap (sort of) Richard Earl of Cambridge, Henry Lord Scroop of Masham, and Sir Thomas Grey:

Going back to Kenneth Branagh’s filmed version of Henry V, I watched and listened carefully: was he talking about Falstaff? No. But that hardly means anything. I knew from experience that Branagh had cut the hell out of the play and added some of Henry IV Part 1 and Part 2—quite awkwardly, I think, which is too bad because Robbie Coltrane is really wonderful as Falstaff (better than Welles).

So I went to the text itself, and the truth is that it could be. Henry gives the speech in Act 2, Scene 2 and we don’t find out that Falstaff is dead until Act 2, Scene 3. So it could be Falstaff he is talking about. But it doesn’t matter. And it probably isn’t. In fact, it is probably the case that there was no one “that railed against our person.” The scene uses it only as a ruse.

Thus we come to Welles’ brilliance as a storyteller. There is a real problem with Henry V: after two Henry IV plays, he is clearly a dick. Welles manages to fix this problem by taking this little speech entirely out of context, to show that Henry really does still care about Falstaff. It is interesting that in My Own Private Idaho, Gus Van Sant uses the two funeral scenes to do the same thing. As much as I like Van Sant, I doubt he would have come up with this on his own. Welles was a great director (film and theater) almost from birth and this is a perfect example of his greatness.

Tune in Tomorrow

Tomorrow, I will write about something else that has been bugging me about Falstaff. And even more so: That Bard.

Update

Make that “today” because it is already tomorrow.

I had Google AdSense for four months, through most of December. In all that time, I made almost no money from it. That was fine, I understand that Frankly Curious only gets about 150 unique visitors per day and not all of these are actual people. I wasn’t expecting to make any real money, but I wanted to have the system set up. What a mistake.

Halfway through December, I (like many others) received an email from Google telling me that I had been kicked out of the program because of “invalid clicks.” I appealed. And even though it took upwards of two weeks to get into the program, they denied my appeal within one day. What’s more, Google will not explain what was wrong with my site—even in the vaguest of terms. Given that we are talking about only a couple of dollars after months, I do not get it to this day.

So I put up ads for Amazon. This is a temporary measure. With Amazon Associates, people who click on the links must actually buy something. And then, I get 4% of the price of the item (not counting Amazon’s horrible shipping charges). Like I said: a temporary measure.

In the first twenty days of January (After Christmas, right?), I have made twice from Amazon Associates what I made in four months from AdSense. So I assume that Google kicking me out of the program was a crock. I wouldn’t take Google AdSense back now if they begged (which they won’t).

But I still like Google. No other search engine has this site so well indexed, even though according to Alexa, only 8% of the traffic here comes from search engines. (I have readers? Shocking.)

Ten years ago, I went to see Al Green in San Jose. It was a very annoying concert. Green finished less than half of his songs. He would start on something, go for a few bars, and then stop the band and say, “I don’t want to do that one.” It happened so often, that I decided that he had some form of early Alzheimer’s Disease. Nothing else explained it.

But then, I heard there was a video of Al Green doing Let’s Stay Together live with David Gilmour on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross on BBC TV. I had to see that. It was just a year and a half ago. I figured maybe Green would just stand at the mic and bob his head, kind of like Syd Barrett towards the end. Who better to back him up but Gilmour? Here’s the clip; watch it; it’s great.

So I guess the Reverend doesn’t have Alzheimer’s Disease after all. It is just when playing before 5,000 people in San Jose, he doesn’t (as they say in the business) “put out.” In other words, he’s just an asshole.

This is something I hear a lot, “But isn’t it wrong to start a sentence with a conjunction?” (When I read it, there is no conjunction at the beginning of that sentence.) And I always reply, “You learned that in grammar school, didn’t you?” And they always respond in the affirmative.

I don’t know what these teachers are thinking, but I have a guess. Before we get to that, however, remember that grammar school teachers say a lot of things that are wrong. I believe that the rule against starting sentences with a conjunction is to avoid writing like this:

Don’t write like that. But don’t worry about starting a sentence with a conjunction, either.

[1] Much better is the creepily cheery poem:

Recently, I published an article Bad Blog Quoting, where I complained about how some bloggers—Brad DeLong in particular—create articles that are simply quotes without any value added. They could, as Mark Thoma often does (and as often does not), just provide the link. I still think this is a bad idea. For example, yesterday, DeLong posted William Hazlitt’s Political Essays: The Character of Mr. Burke, a 2,000 word essay, in its entirety. It is well worth reading, by the way. However, a link and a synopsis would have been better. Yet there is another side of the story.

Yesterday, I found out that the ventriloquist Nina Conti was the daughter of actor Tom Conti. All I really wanted to do was put up some hilarious video with Nina and Monk—the missing link that proves depression is our natural state. But I couldn’t just do that. Posting videos alone is just the same as quoting. Of course, I could just have added something like, “I just found out that Nina Conti is the daughter of delightful Scottish actor Tom Conti. Here she is performing with Monk.” That thought even occurred to me. But unfortunately, we just don’t do things like that around here. It’s against the style guide! (But not, apparently for Curiously Clever which consistently does whatever the hell it wants.)

So I wrote an article about the Best Actor category of the 1983 Academy Awards: Nina Conti Not Nominated for Oscar. Why? Because her father was nominated that year. Also, I got my wires crossed, thinking that Tom Conti was nominated in 1980, which would allow me to rant about how much better John Hurt and Robert Duvall were than the winner: Robert De Niro. Even without this, however, there is the kernel of a good article here. All I had to do was spend an hour or two on it. You can see it in the article as it stands: not only was Nina Conti’s father nominated for an Oscar, but she starred in For Your Consideration, which is about the ridiculousness of Oscar hysteria. As it stands, it is all kernel and no article.

So Brad DeLong has a point. Not that I plan to changed a damn thing. And to prove it, here’s another video of Nina Conti, looking kind of pregnant.

I remember an amazing year for the Best Actor category of the Academy Awards: 1983. There were four actors nominated from the UK and one from the US. And, of course, the American actor won. But that’s not important. There were three English actors: Michael Caine (Educating Rita), Tom Courtenay (The Dresser), and Albert Finney (The Dresser). One from Scotland: Tom Conti (Reuben, Reuben). And the one from America was Robert Duvall (Tender Mercies).

Caine is the curious one on this list, because I can’t remember ever thinking he was particularly good. That isn’t to say I don’t like him; there are lots of good Caine movies: Zulu, The Italian Job, and Sleuth[1] come easily to mind. But is he really all that good? I doubt it. But the only proof I can provide is that he’s won two Best Supporting Actor Oscars: the first for his insipid performance in Hannah and Her Sisters, and the second for The Cider House Rules—apparently for finally being able to do an American accent in an American film. Certainly, Caine’s acting in Educating Rita was nothing special. He has an annoying tendency to over-play drunks. Enough already!

Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney show off just what the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art can do with a lot of talent. (Caine didn’t go.) Their performances in The Dresser are as riveting today as they were when I saw them almost 30 years ago on the big screen. But that’s the thing about great acting, there isn’t a lot to say about it.

Much the same can be said for 1983’s winner: Robert Duvall. He’s more or less untrained, but in America, that’s generally a good thing given the pernicious effect of the Actors Studio on the likes of Robert De Niro[2] (even if there are Actors Studio graduates I like, such as Eli Wallach). However, I hardly think that his work on Tender Mercies is even close to his best work. Whatever.

I’ve left Tom Conti to the end, not because his performance was great or that he is a particularly good actor—he is not. Like Michael Caine, I enjoy watching Conti on film. He was trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, but he doesn’t seem to have much depth. In Reuben, Reuben his performance is nuanced, but again like Caine, his drunkenness is over-played, if not nearly so badly.

The reason I’ve left Conti to the end is that I’ve just found out that he is the father of Nina Conti, the wonderful ventriloquist in the mostly awful For Your Consideration—the film that shows what a sham the Academy Awards are. Nina Conti’s stand-up doesn’t have any more depth than her father’s acting, but it isn’t supposed to. The main thing is that, like her father but more so, she is funny.

[1] I’m referring to the 1972 version with Laurence Olivier. I have nothing for or against the 2007 version, except that I haven’t yet seen it.

[2] De Niro is a very good actor, but limited. He is the perfect example of what a lot of talent added to Lee Strasberg’s ideas can do. Imagine if De Niro had been trained in England.