Primrose Road

When I saw The Shakespeare Stealer in the window at Barnes and Noble last week, I went to the store's children's section, picked up the book, sat down in the cafe with a grande vanilla-brewed coffee and started to read, believing I'd found a new "authorship" novel to make fun of on this blog.

Disappointingly (or not), I was pleasantly (that's more like it) surprised to read an historical novel about a young orphan who, because he's talented in shorthand, is forced by his master to transcribe the Globe's performance of Hamlet. Despite a few anachronisms here and there, the author seems to know his stuff about the relationship between printers and playwrights in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and actually presents what can be read as a (fictional) possibility for how the First Quarto of Hamlet came about. Apparently, Gary Blackwood has written a pair of sequels as well.

Perhaps I shouldn't have been so quick to jump to conclusions about this young adult novel. There is, after all, only one "authorship"-related kids' book that I know of, Lynne Kositsky's A Question of Will, which, despite its (positive) "laugh-out-loudness", portrays Will Shakespeare as a drunken lowlife slob.

My favorite Shakespeare book for kids, by the way, remains Hamlet for Kids, which even boasts an introduction by Kenneth Branagh. Everyone I know with a child (which is a good number of people these days) now owns a copy.

The second volume of E.K. Chambers' The Elizabethan Stage -- I've been reading it at Queens College's library because spending $700 on four books for a qualifying exam would be more ridiculous than arguing that my dad is Shakespeare -- contains some history of the Earl of Oxford's Men, a company supported first by John, the 15th Earl of Oxford, and later by our boy Edward de Vere, 16th Earl.

Granted, Chambers' book was written in 1923 and seems to put forth the idea that Western theatre can be divided into Before Proscenium Arch and Proscenium Arch Era, but it does provide a nice catalog of Elizabethan and Jacobean actors and companies. Chambers points out that there exist documents which refer to Eddie de Vere as a playwright, "one of the best for comedy amongst us" (99-102). So ... if the Earl was already recognized (somewhat) as a poet and playwright, why would he also write under a different (better?) name and style?

Further, why does this poem by Oxford remind me so much of some of the worst 'fanfic' poetry ever written?

Making fun of Oxford doesn't accomplish much (but I'm still going to do it anyway), but I do think those of us who write about and teach the Bard & Friends should note that there are way too many fairly well-designed, relatively academic-looking authorship sites out there, including those used to promote a pair of PBS/Frontline documentaries exploring the "possibilities" that Oxford or Marlowe could be Shakespeare.

While this obviously isn't the most pressing issue in the world for teachers, The Playgoer perhaps puts it best when he notes that the concept of "teach the controversy" sounds awfully familiar, and fears that "the most susceptible to these conspiracy theories will be high school English teachers, desperate to "spice up" their Shakespeare curriculum for their IPod-coma-induced charges."

Up there with the Adulterer's Bible in the History of Typos:

"A recent edition of Hamlet [appeared] with the prince musing, "To be or to be," the terrifying absence of real choice, I take it, clearly the cause of his tragedy." -- David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge UP, 2001).

My thoughts on the Branagh/HBO "As You Like It":

- The one truly interesting decision Branagh made here was to have Rosalind not even try to disguise herself. The Boston Herald's generally negative review did not pick up on this; early on, when she and Orlando speak, and she asks Orlando to call her Rosalind, it's apparent that he knows that she's Rosalind and that she knows that her "disguise" is hardly a disguise at all.

- Bryce Dallas Howard's eyes are creepy. (And they flit around too much during close-ups.)

- Was Charles the Sumo Wrestler the only reason why Branagh decided to set this film in 19th century Japan?

I've decided to delete my initial "Shakespeare Fanfic of the Week" post and combine it with this one, because a weekly look at Shakespeare fanfiction is going to wear thin quickly. So all of my thoughts on the fun-and-exciting world of Shakespeare fanfiction are compiled in this post.

(Invented compund adjective to delete from own vocabulary: "fun-and-exciting.")

Groundrules:
(1) I'm an English teacher. I don't make fun of grammar, because grammar can always be worked on, and more often than not, I'm sure even the best writers make flagrant errors when they're posting something other than a final draft.
(2) If your piece of writing is referenced in this post, please comment and I will gladly send you a piece of my writing to make fun of in a public forum.

The ideas behind "Shakespeare fanfic" (write a character's backstory, imagine what events in Shakespeare's life might have informed his plays, create a love story for a character you think 'deserves' one, re-set a play in the 21st century) inform adaptations like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Shakespeare in Love, the Ghost-in-a-Pac-Man-machine, Canadian-accented Strange Brew (IMDB's plot outline says it all), as well as the "Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares" of Richard Burt's book.

Here's what I've learned thus far from skimming through a sampling of the 978 Shakespeare stories on fanfiction.net:
(1) Shakespeare's works translate remarkably easily into gay porn, but only if the writer is a sexually inexperienced teenage girl.
(2) Many plays were missing a long-lost, sparkly-eyed sister who saves the day and screws the protagonist (or antagonist). (See the clever Sparklypoo Harry Potter comic for an illustration of this principle.)
(3) Plot is secondary -- tertiary, even -- nah, who needs plot when purple-eyed Serenabelle Capulet can swoop down, remind Mercutio and Tybalt that they have always loved each other, and turn Romeo and Juliet into a comedy / 1AM Showtime movie / emo-licious short story?

The difference between many of the fanfics on the site and the adaptations/revisions I've cited in the first paragraph: self-awareness.

A few favorites:

Romeo und Julia Geschichten lügen:
My German's not quite good enough to get through this one, and the "Humor/Romance" heading suggests the author is probably trying to be ironic, but it seems to involve Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy falling in love while studying for a Shakespeare test in Muggle Studies class, and they somehow meet the "real" Romeo and Juliet.

Charmed/Macbeth Crossover:
In this story, the three witches from Charmed go back in time to prevent Macduff from entering a "time portal" and killing the modern-day "Prince of England." I think that Macbeth's frozen head wants teachers at all levels to explain the importance of close reading to their students. ::throws fireball::

Inside the Mind of Ophelia:
A look at the action of the play from ... well, inside Ophelia's head, told in "I Canst Writeth Quitely In The Style of the Bard" language. Case in point:

"I questioned, how can King Hamlet’s death be a brevity to those who loved and adored him? Is it not like the ocean water spraying upon the dry sand every minute, slipping away into the deep abyss of the great blue. Has anyone faith? Ay, no one is faithful these days. The only remorse I see is the remorse that sits upon my Prince Hamlet’s brow. Hamlet has taken his father’s death hard, a burden twice as heavy."

Besides the FEMnE (Fake Early Modern English), there's some expertly crafted dramatic irony too:

"I cannot imagine the great impact on my life if my father died. I would love to share Hamlet’s pain, but I simply cannot for I know nothing of what his pain feels like..."

Finally, this author renders Ophelia's madness as a series of stream-of-consciousness statements about silence, Laertes, and virginity: "ALAS, PURE HEARTED!" Personally, I'd have gone with Lisa Simpson's "NOBODY OUTCRAZIES OPHELIA!"

Last year, I bought a Mac because my friends and colleagues assured me that it, unlike a PC, could be counted on through my qualifying exams and dissertation. And, yes, my friends and colleagues who have Macs have found them to be very reliable.

And then there's me.

I think I've had an out-of-nowhere hard drive crash. My computer can't find the hard drive, and we've concluded that it's not a software issue. (I'm on a friend's computer right now, obviously.) I have an appointment at the "Genius Bar" on Friday afternoon and I'm hoping they'll be able to rescue at least some of what's on the hard drive.

Fortunately, I've already printed the syllabi and handouts for the upcoming term, and my qualifying exam notes live in three different places.

Hamlet's no prince. When the country he's supposed to inherit is in trouble, he goes away to school. After his father is murdered, he reads books and stages performances (his own "antic disposition" and The Mousetrap) instead of bravely avenging the murder, addressing Claudius' crime and perhaps even Gertrude's complicity. His "performance," unlike Hieronomo's in The Spanish Tragedy, doesn't do anything.

(I fear that my blog is often more empiricist than I am.)

In his asking "should I kill myself?" instead of "should I face Claudius and take my place on the throne?," Hamlet's rather ... annoying. Michael Almereyda's Hamlet is one of my favorite adaptations because Almereyda and Ethan Hawke play this annoyingness well: Hamlet's a film student who should stand up for his father, but all he can do is make films about his own life, his own situation.The translation from stage to film -- on both levels -- captures the total failure of "The Mousetrap."

The "to be or not to be" soliloquy is recited in the action section of a Blockbuster store; instead of drawing from these films the inspiration to act, Hamlet thinks about his own life and death.

Courtney Lehmann's Shakespeare Remains, which supplies a (fairly) good model for working media theory on Shakespeare without overlooking the historical conditions of Early Modern play and book production, calls the Almereyda/Hawke Hamlet's filmmaking a "search for a new technology of representation" (95). For those interested in a psychoanalytic/"hauntological" reading of the film, Lehmann's chapter on this film is worth a read. I won't get into my specific critiques of her reading, though, because that's dissertation/article material, which will not appear here.

This is more of a venue for arguments like "damn, Hamlet's annoying." Remember!

A quick note: I'm not going to be able to catch Branagh's latest tonight at 9 because of a handful of tutoring commitments and my cliched inability to program my VCR/DVD player, but I will watch and review early next week.

A review of a production of Hamlet at San Diego's Old Globe Theatre takes issue with the director's choice to show Ophelia as visibly pregnant. Reviewer Jeff Smith writes:

More disturbing, Ophelia, it turns out, is pregnant. Previous stagings, wanting an explicit motivation for her madness/suicide, have done this. But it goes against the text and her protestations of virtue. Worse, that she's pregnant makes her (and Hamlet) a liar. Ophelia's one of the few characters in Hamlet who isn't two-faced, who isn't given to "ambiguous giving out." (Actor Michael Pennington says, "She isn't so much mad as unacceptably sane.") If we can't trust Ophelia's words, then something's really rotten in the state of Denmark.

My question: is there really anything in the text of Hamlet that indicates that we must trust Ophelia and Hamlet? Isn't the idea that we have to be able to trust even a deeply flawed "protagonist" specific to psychological realism? There actually is a droplet of textual support for Ophelia's pregnancy, too: see Painter and Parker's essay in Notes and Queries [41 (1994): 42-44] for a discussion of the possibility that Shakespeare's audiences would have recognized that the flowers Ophelia distributes were believed to be abortifacients.

Alas, Mark Anderson has mobilized this theory for the Oxfordian "argument." Referencing a different review of the same production, Anderson writes:

Slightly glossed over in this review (and we're always grateful for ink, of course) is the fact that this interpretation of the Danish tragedy didn't just come out of nowhere. It was wholly biographically motivated. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the reason the author of Hamlet inserted those references to Ophelia's pregnancy and flirtation with abortion is that is exactly what happened in his troubled first marriage. When Edward de Vere was traveling on the Continent in 1575, we now know that his wife, in her second trimester, asked Queen Elizabeth's physician to terminate her pregnancy.

It's difficult for me to argue that biographical criticism just doesn't hold water without opening myself up to the "that's just the traditional point of view" criticism leveled against "Stratfordians." Irvin Matus explains the circularity of the Oxfordians' use of biographical evidence in his essay on The Oxfordian Hamlet:

For instance, we are told that when de Vere was 12, his father "died under mysterious circumstances." The real mystery here is what his source is for this claim. The only one I can think of is Hamlet -- the prince's father died of foul play, Hamlet is Oxford, ergo: Oxford's father must have died of foul play too. But John de Vere made a will on July 28, 1562, and died six days later, which suggests that the cause of death was illness, and I can find no contemporary evidence that suggests otherwise.

There's much more discussion of this type of circular logic in the essay, and Matus also wisely reminds readers that while Shakespeare may have complicated the Hamlet story, he certainly did not invent it.

While plays (and novels!) can and do point to cultural phenomena, and can tell us a lot about the social and political anxieties prevalent in the period in which they were produced, they are not detective stories that ask us to decode characters' -- or worse, authors' -- motivations. Perhaps people are sometimes uncomfortable with how shockingly uncomplicated literature can be.

You're a twelve year-old boy, your parents have been fighting a custody battle over you for several years, your father has converted to Judaism and has now taken your mother to court because he wants you to be circumcised. While the procedure is not, in most cases, dangerous (though there's always a risk of infection), it is going to be painful, and it's not like you're eight days old and too young to remember the pain.

Better still, the American Jewish Congress is adamantly supporting Dad. From The Jewish Daily Forward:

“Are parents only authorized to make decisions that a secular decision-maker would make?” asked Marc Stern, general counsel for the American Jewish Congress, which is filing a friend-of-the-court brief in support of James Boldt. “We have to win this case, and win it big, in my view” Stern said.

“Our position is that the custodial parent can take into account religious interests in determining what’s in the interest of the child,” Stern added.

The Forward does note that the boy himself has not yet testified; if the thought of circumcision does indeed frighten him, and if he has chosen not to convert, I believe the court's decision should be clear. Of course, if he has chosen to convert, then he has the right to choose circumcision for himself. But what's important in this specific case is what the child chooses, not what the parents choose.

No, twelve year olds don't always know what's best for them. But it's rather upsetting that so many Jewish organizations (with the exception of the ADL) are supporting the father here. This isn't about Jewish rights; it's about the right of a child who (probably) doesn't want to have an elective surgery.