bardseyeview

Kids are growing

2010-09-14T12:22:00.001-07:00

The birth of my two sons has delayed my return to Bardseye, but their powers are waxing even as mine wane, and I should be returning to regular posting here, at the hobby of a lifetime, soon.

Obama and Richard II

2009-12-06T20:22:00.000-08:00

Mirror Mirror on the Wall (to be continued).

And Liberty Plucks Justice by the Nose

2008-06-24T18:40:00.000-07:00

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(Bardseyeview is blogging Measure 4 Measure, a Shakespeare play with striking parallels to our own times).

The plot thickens as we take the measure of the third scene of measure for measure, as we encounter the Duke himself in conference with a friar:

Duke: "No. Holy father, throw away that thought;
Believe not that the dribbling dart of love
Can pierce a complete bosom. Why I desire thee
To give me secret harbour hath a purpose
More grave and wrinkled than the aims and ends
Of burning youth."

A very cool speech, and very modern in starting with a reference to a preceding off-stage comment of the friar's occurring just before the curtain, which Globe Theater didn't have anayway, rose. The Duke is implying that the friar has just asked him if the reason behind the Duke's request for a secret harbour in the monastery was for a romantic tryst. Not at all. The Dukester's complete bosom cannot be pierced by the dribbling dart of love. If you're smirking at Shakespeare's use of dribble, note that he only means that Cupid's dart would descend weakly and without effect if aimed at him. The Duke then gets to the point:

Duke: "…I have ever lov'd the life remov'd.
And held in idle price to haunt assemblies,
Where youth, and cost, and witless bravery keeps.
I have deliver'd to Lord Angelo –
A man of stricture and firm abstinence –
My absolute power and place here in Vienna,
And he supposes me travell'd to Poland;
For so I have strew'd it in the common ear…."

The Duke's Poland trip was a ruse, though his reluctance to rule is real enough. His willingness to withdraw from public life mirrors that of Duke Senior in As You Like It, who exiled to the woods proclaims:

Duke S: " And this our life exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in teh running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing.
I would not change it."

Or King Ferdinand of Navarre in Love's Labour's Lost:

King F: "Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives
Live register'd upon our brazen tombs,"

Oh yes, and Hamlet:

Ham: "O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams."

M4M's Duke, however, has withdrawn from courtly life for a specific reason; he seeks to correct the moral laxity that has befallen his realm:

Duke: "We have strict statutes and most biting laws,
Which for this fourteen years we have let slip;
Even like an o'er grown lion in a cave
That goes not out to prey. Now, as fond fathers,
Having bound up the threatening twigs of birch,
Only to stick it in their children's sight
For terror, not for use, in time the rod
Becomes more mock'd than fear'd;"

If the Children's Services Division ever gets wind of this speech, Shakespeare would be tied up in child custody hearings until the Rapture, as my Baptist neighbors here in North Carolina put it. Spare not the rod, and spoil not the populace, is what the Duke seems to be saying, or more exactly don't threaten the rod if you're not going to use it.

The modern parallels are obvious and arise whenever a totalitarian state loses its jackbooted nerve and fails to sufficiently terrorize its subjects. The Soviet Union's crackdowns on restive Hungarians in 1956 and restive Czechs of the Prague Spring of 1968 helped hold all the Soviet satellites in check, while its namby-pamby reaction to Poland in the 1980s led to its downfall. China took heed in responding to Tiananmen Square in 1989. And of course an endless list of insufficiently oppressive dictators, from Ceausescu to Marcos to Sukarno, would agree with the Bard on this point.

Duke: "…So our decrees,
Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead,
And Liberty plucks Justice by the nose.
The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart
Goes all decorum."

In the New York City of the 1990s, Policy Chief Braxton clearly played Angelo to Mayor Giuliani's Duke, as the dynamic duo secured a famous turnaround in public safety through Braxton's "broken windows" policy of enforcing small laws in order to forestall the violation of larger ones. Braxton revived decrees that had been for far longer than fourteen years dead to infliction, allowing the criminal worms within the Big Apple liberty to pluck justice by the nose. The new policy's success bred a bruised mayoral ego over who should get credit for the improvement. (In fact James Q. Wilson deserved credit for the concept, if not its execution in New York).

More later…

A Horse Whereon the Governor Doth Ride

2008-06-23T13:09:00.000-07:00

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Shakespeare is now ready to have Claudio comment on the injustice of whorehouses being merely closed or shifted to new locations while he, a willing husband but for a legal technicality, is to be hanged:

Cla: "And the new deputy now for the Duke –
Whether it be the fault and glimpse of newness,
Or whether that the body public be
A horse whereon the governor doth ride,
Who, newly in the seat, that it may know
He can command, lets its straight feel the spur;

The obvious biblical parallel occurred 300 years ago when Rehoboam, after succeeding Solomon, responded to the people's request to lighten the heavy Solomonic tax burden by arrogantly raising the burden. Thus were the Hebrew people made a horse whereon their governor doth ride – who, newly in the seat, that they may know he can command, let them straight feel the spur.

The most striking parallel to Angelo's accession in our era would be the Ayatollah Khomeini's accession in Iran. Of course, the Iranian people after their unwanted march toward modernity offered them under the Shah (a march oddly accompanied by the ungentle prodding of his SAVAK secret service) seemed if anything to be seeking the spur of Sharia law, an utter surrender to theocracy. Today, after thirty years of such rule, we continue to hear murmurings of discontent, but for some odd reason our own government, whether ruled by people with little d's after their names or little r's, strangely refuses to encourage this.

You would think that if our own greatest hope for avoiding an eternity of nuclear blackmail at the hands of madmen was a revolt of the horse whereon the madmen doth ride, that is the Iranian people, that we would be encouraging the revolt. Is it that our own governors seek, even if ever so unconsciously, to be that much more needed, and more looked to for leadership, and more depended on by our own body public, and are for that reason, possibly in a manner unacknowledged even to themselves, negligently permitting the emergence of such a fearful world? War is the health of the state, and our state, by which I mean government, emits the rude health of steroids. Claudio goes on:

Cla: "Whether the tyranny be in his place,
Or in his eminence that fills it up,
I stagger in – but this new governor
Awakes me all the enrolled penalties
Which have, like unscoured armour, hung by th' wall
So long, that nineteen zodiacs have gone round,
And none of them been worn; and for a name
Now puts the drowsy and neglected act
Freshly on me; 'tis surely for a name."

In 2002, then New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer subpoenaed 24 crisis pregnancy centers that counseled women to maintain their pregnancies, alleging that by doing so the centers were practicing medicine without a license. Thus did this future governor awaken enrolled penalties which like unscoured armour had hung by th' wall. Later, as governor, he supported a law that would have allowed non-doctors, including dentists, social workers and "health care practitioners" to perform abortions, an ironic consummation of forty years in the evolution of abortion laws, which were supposed to put a stop to back-room abortions, not legalize them.

But irony was to be Spitzer's watchword; he would later famously resign as governor in order to avoid prosecution under the Mann Act for his serial leasing of high-end prostitutes. Of course, the threatened use of the Mann Act against the governor could itself be considered an awakening of enrolled penalties that hung by the wall like unscoured armour, except that the governor, back when he was attorney general, and seeking to be governor ("and for a name"), had himself used obscure laws for unintended and oppressive purposes. Spitzer used the 1921 Martin Act, intended to prosecute "bucket shops" that defrauded small investors in the 1920s, to prosecute Wall Street firms for their research practices. The law allowed Spitzer to seek criminal penalties without proving criminal intent.

Well, I've run far afield, but Shakespeare saw Spitzer as clearly from 400 years in the past as we are now able to see him, at last, in our rear-view mirrors. And beside Spitzer stand an army of opportunistic prosecutors, from Senator Joe McCarthy and his Iago-like Lieutenant Bobby Kennedy, using a loyalty pledge to go after communists in Hollywood, (without first asking just how much damage a communist can do in Hollywood, except perhaps to Hollywood), to Lael Rubin, the prosecutor of the trumped-up McMartin Preschool abuse cases in Manhattan Beach in the late 1990s, to John Hathorne, judge but in practice the prosecutor of the Salem witch trials in the 1690s. And of course further candidates for modern Angelos are the still too-hot-to handle Whitewater-related claims brought by Ken Starr against a dem white house and the Plame game pursued by Patrick Fitzgerald against a rep one.

Meanwhile, our original Claudio begs Lucio to tell his, Claudio's, sister, who is a nun, about his arrest:

Cla: "Acquaint her with the danger of my state;
Implore her, in my voice, that she make friends
To the strick deputy; bid her assay him.
I have great hope in that. For in her youth
There is a prone and speechless dialect
Such as move men; beside, she hath prosperous art
When she will play with reason and discourse,
And well she can persuade."

More later…

I'll Be Your Tapster Still

2008-06-22T09:22:00.000-07:00

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Claudio, for his minor lapse in judgment, is to be hanged as part of the morals campaign that Angelo feels is required following a 14-year period of laxity under the Duke's rule. Shakespeare is careful to draw a contrast between the relative innocence of Claudio and Julietta's union, and the more illicit unions, or rather couplings, that have been occurring in the bawdy houses of Vienna, which Angelo is also shutting down, even if none of their occupants are being executed. Pompey, Mistress Overdone's servant, explains this while offering comfort to his aptly-named mistress:

Mistress O: "What proclamation, man?"

Pom: "All houses in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down."
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Miss. O: "O, Why, here's a change indeed in the commonwealth! What shall become of me?"

Pom: "Come; fear not you: good counselors lack no clients; though you change your place, you need not change your trade; I'll be your tapster still; courage, there will be pity taken on you; you that have worn your eyes almost out in the service, you will be considered."

As with marriage, we rarely if ever hear discussion of the actual, useful purpose of making prostitution illegal. Criminalizing prostitution increases the value of chaste, or at least of non-promiscuous women. When the men of a society have easy and affordable access to an entire class of promiscuous women, those good female counselors will lack no clients. The obvious result will be that much less motivation for men to marry, not so long as they're getting the milk for a manageable price, and if not from their preferred cow than at least from a borrowed one.

Of course, there will always be true love, occasionally, but Claudio and Julietta prove that true lovers will be lax on formalities. As with marriage, the key is to capture excess male desire in order to secure social stability, a goal that benefits all, but is achieved only if each will sacrifice for it. Claudio himself appears to acquiesce in this rough justice as he questions his arresting officer, the Provost:

Cla: "Fellow, why dost thou show me thus to th'world?
Bear me to prison, where I am committed."

Pro: "I do it not in evil disposition,
But from Lord Angelo by special charge."

Cla: "Thus can the demi-god, Authority,
Make us pay down for our offence by weight.
The words of heaven; on whom it will, it will;
On whom it will not, so; yet still 'tis just."

More later…

The Stealth of Our Most Mutual Entertainment

2008-06-21T16:35:00.000-07:00

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Claudio is Measure 4 Measure's average Joe, a man who in the relaxed spirit of the times was at least virtuous enough to avoid the whorehouse abandon described by Mistress Overdone, even if he failed out of a kind of laziness to marry his Julietta, who is now round with his child. Under Angelo's sudden strictures, this omission becomes a hanging offense, whose purpose was, to use Napoleon's famous phrase, pour encourager les autres.

Cla: "Thus stands it with me: upon a true contract
I got possession of Julietta's bed.
You know the lady; she is fast my wife,
Save that we do the denunciation lack
Of outward order."

By contract Claudio means that by common law contract, he and Julietta should be considered married. In Shakespeare's England this situation arose if the couple affirmed their union before witnesses – basically as a private civil ceremony, not recognized by the church. Also "fast" likely meant "bound to me as" my wife, and denunciation meant they lacked only a public announcement to make it legal. Without such an announcement, their ceremony would not be recognized either by the state or the church. Hence Claudio's arrest. Basically, Shakespeare has concocted the most innocent-sounding minor lapse of legal formality he can come up with, affecting two lovers who are otherwise faithful and virtuous.

It's impossible to read this today without the issue of gay marriage arising in one's head. Shakespeare, in advocating fairness over justice, seems to be siding with true love over legal formality. Of course, his concept of true love includes constancy, or fidelity, as the sonnets repeatedly attest. One can only wonder how gay marriage might be viewed if those seeking it – especially gay men – honestly avowed to maintain fidelity in their marriages, and lived up to that vow with something close to the success of married heterosexuals; that is, at least successful enough to make society as a whole sexually restrained and functional.

The purpose of marriage, after all, is to capture male lust in order to render society stable. And Shakespeare is saying that Claudio's lust has in fact been properly captured, and even directed toward its ultimate goal. Claudio goes on:

Cla: ".......This we came not to
Only for propagation of a dower
Remaining in the coffer of her friends,
From whom we thought it meet to hide our love
Till time had made them for us. But it chances
The stealth of our most mutual entertainment
With character too gross is writ on Juliet.

More excuses, this time he explains that they didn't complete the marriage for lack of a dowry. Presumably Claudio's future baby momma Julietta was something like an orphan, and so her dowry was being held by relatives ("friends"). Claudio is saying that her folks didn't approve of the union, and that he and Julietta were trying to win them over ("Till time had made them for us."). But then of course she got pregnant, and started showing ("character too gross is writ").

Then Angelo took the reins from the Duke, learned of Claudio's situation, and condemned him to death, our encourager les autres – to encourage virtue in all others.

More later…

Purchased as many Diseases Under Her Roof

2008-06-13T19:32:00.000-07:00

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(We currently are blogging Measure 4 Measure, a Shakespeare play with striking parallels to the major issues of our era).

Lucio, an outsized, Mercutio-like character, and two others described only as "gentlemen" begin a rapid-fire comic trade of insults. The references are beyond obscure to any modern reader who isn't a tenured English literature professor of the sort who elects not to write for a general audience, but the dispute centers on which of them is more a commoner and which more a gentleman, with the implication that whoever is more a gentleman is also more likely to have the French disease, or syphilis.

As the scene progresses we begin to see that this subject, erotic excess and its somber consequences, is being offered for far more than comic relief. Shakespeare is describing a collapse of public morals, and, in the form of Angelo, a reactionary and authoritarian response.

We could be in the U.S. around 1915, watching temperance matrons campaigning – successfully, come to think of it – to outlaw alcohol, or we could be in Iran in 1975, watching the Ayatollah Khomeini return in glory to an Iranian people (well, the 50% who are Persian) who were recoiling from the Shah's attempt at modernization, or we could be watching in 1925 the libertinism of the Weimar Republic, that led of course to history's most infamous reaction.

And obviously, we could be watching in 1995 as the Taliban sweep across Afghanistan, removing ancient alien statues from their settings, removing girls from school, or as the Taliban's honored guest Al Qaida proceeded to train tens of thousands of fighters from throughout the Middle East in preparation for the most ambitious of reactions, against the supposed decadence and libertinism of the entire Western – but really modern – democratic project.

But I digress. Returning to the play, we witness the arrival of a favorite creation of mine, Mistress Overdone. Lucio refers to her as Madam Mitigation, because her occupation as a lady of the evening mitigates her customers' desires.

Luc: ""Behold, behold, where Madam Mitigation comes! I have purchased as many diseases under her roof as come to –"

2 Gent: "To what I pray?"Lucio answers, as come to judge, suggesting a larger justice at work in all this purchasing of sex. More jokes follow about venereal diseases and how they hollow out a person's bones, amidst Mistress Overdone's complaint about how her tough times have been getting for her:

Overdone: "O thus, what with the war, what with the sweat, what with the gallows, and what with poverty, I am custom-shrunk."

The sweat presumably refers to the plague, though why the Vienna of this Duke would be experiencing war, plague, a spate of hangings, and poverty is not explained. It's worth noting however that London was suffering all these things in the winter of 1603-04. So Shakespeare may be allowing himself a wink at the audience here, though the deeper parallel he seems to be offering is it may be because the fictional Vienna he is describing is itself undergoing a similar time of troubles. A time of troubles that Angelo, however, intends to rectify.

Overdone tells Lucio that a Signior Claudio, known to all as a perfectly fine fellow, has just been arrested:

Over: "Nay by I know 'tis so. I saw him arrested; saw him carried away; and which is more, within these three days his head to be chopped off."

Luc: "…Art thou sure of this?"Over: "O, I am too sure of it; and it is for getting Madam Julietta with child."

More later….

But Like a Thrifty Goddess

2008-06-11T13:19:00.000-07:00

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(Bardseyeview is blogging Measure 4 Measure, a Shakespeare play with striking parallels to our own times).

We return as the Duke, once again investing Angelo with the trappings of his own power, prepares to leave Vienna to handle some vaguely described emergency:

Duke: "Our haste from hence is of so quick condition
That it prefers itself, and leaves unquestioned
Matters of needful value. We shall write to you…"

But if Shakespeare isn't telling us yet very much about the Duke, he lets us see Angelo quite clearly, or at least he lets us see him as the oddly infatuated Duke sees him:

Duke: "Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike
As if we had them not.

Angelo is one whose virtue shines outward from himself, embodying the ideal of human conduct that heaven itself intended for us. The conclusion that Angelo is either a religious figure, or at the very least deeply formed and inspired by religion, is inescapable – as if Shakespeare's choice for his name left us with much doubt in the first place. But the Duke isn't done:

Duke: "Spirits are not finely touch'd
But to fine issues; nor nature never lends
The smallest scruple of her excellence
But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines
Herself the glory of a creditor,
Both thanks and use."

Huh? Well, Nature lent Angelo his spirit, or in this case his character and talent, with the expectation that Angelo would use these gifts for some profitable purpose – which is why Nature is cast in the role of creditor. Thanks and use? Thanks to Nature for the loan of one's gifts, and repayment with interest (use, probably related to usury) in the form, again of the proper use of those gifts. But the key point is the idea that each tiny facet and aspect of what Nature has given Angelo, and by extension each of us, was lent as past of Nature's specific design. Talent, you might say, on loan from God.

Anyway, if anything, our self-effacing Duke seems to be more impressed with Angelo than he is with himself, saying as he departs Vienna on his undisclosed ("my haste may not admit it.") mission:

Duke" "Your scope is as mine own,
So to enforce or qualify the laws
As to your soul seems good, Give me your hand;
I'll privily away. I love the people,
But do not like to stage me to their eyes;
Though it do well, I do not relish well
Their loud applause…"

How refreshing – a leader so virtuous that he avoids the glamour of publicity. Like Howard Hughes and Marlene Dietrich, he vants to be alone. At the same time, there we have that theme of the Duke's again, shirking his duties, laying them off on someone else.

Is this a common occurrence? Well, flipping through just this particular week's news headlines, we see presidential candidate McCain handling the hardship of $4.00 a gallon gas by informing the nation that he "respects the right of the states to control the waters off their coasts." But the law actually has it that the states don't own any offshore waters, at least not unless the federal government gives it to them. And this has traditionally happened only for tidelands, not ocean waters 50 to 200 miles offshore.

So does Duke McCain announce to Arnold "Angelo" Schwarzenegger and the equally Angelic Charlie Christ (the current Governator of Florida):

"Your scope is as mine own,
So to enforce or qualify the laws
As to your soul seems good."

More later.

Elected Him Our Absence to Supply

2008-06-10T12:53:00.001-07:00

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(Bardseyeview is blogging Measure 4 Measure, a Shakespeare play with striking parallels to our own times).

As Measure for Measure begins, the Duke of Vienna is sounding out his advisor Escalus on whether it was wise to elevate the authority of a fellow named Angelo:

Duke: "What figure of us think you he will bear?
For you must know, we have with special soul
Elected him our absence to supply;
Lent him our terror, drest him with our love,
And given his deputation all the organs
Of our own power. What think you of it?"

In saying what figure of us, the Duke is of course using not the editorial "we" or even the schizophrenic "we," but the royal "we." Also, more than merely elevating him, the Duke has been allowing Angelo to act as his substitute - presumably during business trips – since the Duke elected him "our absence to supply." You get the idea that the Duke is uncomfortable with the burden of his responsibilities, and is seeking to shift them onto someone else.

In fact, later on he will make this explicit. It turns out that because of the Duke's unwillingness to enforce the laws, Vienna has been having a 1960s-style flirtation with flirtation. Skipping for the moment the play's second scene for its third, we again see the Duke, still in Vienna, confiding in Friar Thomas:

Duke: "We have strict statutes and most biting laws,
The needful bits and curbs to headstrong steeds,
Which for this fourteen years we have let slip,
Even like an o'ergrown lion in a cave
That goes not out to prey….In time the rod
Becomes more mocked than feared, so our decrees,
Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead,
And liberty plucks justice by the nose."

The Duke then confesses to the Friar his reason for handing the reins over to Angelo:

Duke: "I have on Angelo imposed the office;
Who may in th'ambush of my name strike home,"

He wants Angelo to do his dirty work.

The idea is hardly new – or rather it is hardly old. Our Congress likes nothing better than to avoid decisions, from the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that effectively shrugged off the burden of voting on whether to involve the nation further in the Vietnam War, to well, to every single U.S. military involvement since then. Though we, forget, U.S. Congress was if anything stunned by President George W. Bush's insistence that it actually vote on the Iraq War, as they well knew the political dynamite they were being forced to handle.

And our net may be cast beyond U.S. shores as well.

For example, the deal so many Middle Eastern governments have made with their more extreme wings, in particular the Saudi Princes' implicit deal with their Angelo, the country's well-heeled Wahabbists, which said "make what mischief you like outside our borders, but leave our domestic arrangements alone," mirrored our Duke's relationship with his Angelo, who is indeed presented as either a religious figure, or a figure infused with a particular religious spirit that, like the Wahabbists, denies the role and influence of the body.

More later….

Therefore Let Him Pass for a Man

2007-12-10T07:34:00.000-08:00

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“By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world.”

With these words we are introduced to Portia, one of Shakespeare’s greatest feminine creation. Only a dunce could miss the parallel between her announced world-weariness and the similar ennui that Antonio announced with his first words, which were also the very first words of the play – I know not why I am so sad.

Antonio the Merchant of Venice was the man who would lend his friend Bassanio the shirt off his back if only he hadn’t put all his money into his shipping ventures, leaving him unable to do more than underwrite a loan to Bassanio from a man who values actual filthy lucre, and has actual coins in an actual purse, Shylock. Were these internal contradictions – or the bare fat that he was forced to engage in the low, unaristocratic practice of commerce – the reason for Antonio’s sadness? And what are the reasons for Portia’s lethargy?

Portia’s girlfriend Nerissa counsels Portia to count her blessings, and Portia responds:

Por: “Good sentences, and well pronounced.”
Ner: “They would be better if well followed.” Por: “If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches and poor men’s cottages prince’s palaces.”

These famous lines speak to the play’s abiding theme of commerce, saying that if people did as they knew they should, over the generations they would rise in station. That basic precept we learn in high school history about how Europe’s aristocracy feared the slow rise of commerce-oriented commoners to an eventual station above themselves seems to lurk beneath these lines.

Portia then reveals her true complaint, which centers on the odd details of her late father’s will. The old man left three chests, of gold silver and lead, and provided that only a suitor who chooses the correct chest will gain Portia’s hand and fortune. Nerissa asks:

Ner: “But what warmth is there in your affections toward any of these princely suitors that are already come?”

This question gives Shakespeare and Portia the opportunity to pander to nativist English prejudices against foreigners of all stripes, represented by the foreign suitors who have come to woo Portia. After dispensing with one from Naples (a “colt”) and one from the county Palatine “”I had rather be married to a death’s head with a bone in his mouth…”), Portia is asked about a Frenchman:

Por: “God made him, and therefore let him pass for a man.”

And later about how she likes a German:

Por: “Very vilely in the morning, when he is sober, and most vilely in the afternoon, when he is drunk.”

After this good fun, Nerissa reminds Portia of Bassanio, Antonio’s pal, who we the audience know sought to borrow money from Antonio to allow himself to appear rich while courting Portia. Portia allows that she remembers Bassanio, and remembers him “worthy of (Nerissa’s) praise.”

And so we are introduced to Portia. We are but a hair’s breadth away from meeting Shylock, who is approached by Bassanio with Antonio’s voucher, all for the purpose of falsely representing himself to Portia, so stay tuned.

Hisashiburi

2007-12-04T07:51:00.000-08:00

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Not a Shakespearean word, in fact the Japanese term for "long time no see," but since nothing that is human is foreign to Shakespeare, I use it to welcome myself back from a long absence occasioned by the birth of my and my wife's first child, Isaiah Yuuki Abrams.

"For this the foolish over-careful fathers
Have broke their sleep with thoughts,
Their brains with care, their bones with industry."

So says Henry IV. Henry is mistaken in his belief that his son, Prince Hal, thirst or hungers for the crown, when in fact the Prince hungers only for his father's approval, and for the education that he requires for his future reign.

"To you your father should be as a god;
One that composed your beauties, yea, and one
To whom you are but as a form in wax
By him imprinted, and within his power
To leave the figure, or disfigure it."

Theseus, the local prince, says this to Hermia, a young lady who defies her father's dictate concerning whom she is to marry in A Midsummer's Night Dream. Frankly, this one's a bit biblical for my taste.

As for me, I learned about the exercise of authority primarily from a series of dance classes my wife and I took before she became pregnant. The leader's role, I found, was to signal the next dance move (be it a spin, turn, or - usually in my case - continuation of whatever we were doing), then decide on what the next move will be in advance, selecting something that one's partner can handle, then communicate its signal clearly and sufficiently in advance, and then execute the move correctly with one's partner. This proved to be a confoundingly difficult, largely thankless and invisible role. But without it there would be no dancing.

Moreover, it is special pleading for Theseus, an aristocratic ruler, to argue for the unassailable nature of fathers, even if it makes intuitive sense for authority to flow, if flow more gently, from the parent to the child. As a counter-example, I met this week in an IHOP parking lot a set of parents who had been to every Best Buy in Charlotte, NC that morning, searching in vain for an available Nintendo game for their grandchild's Christmas. I hope that I would not ever pander to such expectations of my own child - though as to my grandchild, who can say?).

But wax imprints are not a model of humanity that appeals to me.

"I have done nothing but in care of thee."

Prospero says this to his daughter Miranda in The Tempest. And this strikes more at the heart of parenthood. The question of authority is secondary to the answer of love, and the sense of discovered purpose, that lies at the core of fatherhood.

Bardseyeview, in these of my child's early years, will therefore be only tenuously revived, but the Bard's view on the issues of the day will be presented where spare hours allow.

M of V #3 - A Lady Richly Left

2007-04-25T10:14:00.000-07:00

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As we return to Bassanio's conversation with Antonio, the Merchant of Venice, Bassanio is seeking the next in a long line of loans from his friend Antonio, entices him with a charming image:

Bass: "In my schooldays, when I had lost one shaft,
I shot his fellow of the selfsame flight
The selfsame way with more advised watch
To find the other forth, and by adventuring both
I oft found both……
That which I owe is lost, but if you please
To shoot another arrow that self way
Which you did shoot the first, I do not doubt,
As I will watch the aim, or to find both
Or bring your latter hazard back again…”.

In other words, he plans to double down, to throw good money after bad, and with Antonio’s money. Antonio responds that he needs no convincing. Friendship is enough to secure a loan of any amount. And Bassanio then reveals his true purpose:

Bass: "In Belmont is a lady richly left;
And she is fair and, fairer than that word,
Of wondrous virtues, (blah blah blah)…”
And many … come in quest of her.
O my Antonio, had I but the means
To hold a rival place with one of them…”.

Now we approach the heart of the matter, The type of “Christian” commerce that Shakespeare regards as worthy and deserving turns out to be a sort of silent financial partnership in a male escort service (except that compared to Bassanio's plot, escort services are honest and above board; this in fact is a conspiracy to defraud). But because i is based on friendship and not economic considerations, Shakespeare applauds this conspiracy to defraud a lonely, rich woman out of her wealth. Even an amoral modern capitalist might ask of this vision – where is the growth that should emerge from this use of capital?

Apparently nowhere. We begin to see that Shakespeare, for all his humanity, favors a static class system. For centuries, in Europe and England both, wealth had been based on land. It was in fact only the emergence of the shipping in which Venice, and later Amsterdam and London excelled that redefined wealth and its sources as a sort of dynamic casino of the seas. The Bard looks balefully on this model of the future.

Shakespeare, it occurs to me, would have approved of the careful questions found in 18th century English novels, of how many thousands of annual pounds – all based on their parents’ landholdings - this bachelor or that maid were worth, as accompaniment to the question of who should marry whom, even if that later century’s literature became mired in manners in a way that rendered it far smaller than what Shakespeare produced.

OK, back to the play, where we immediately learn that Antonio’s much-heralded friendship does not actually extend all the way to the loaning of actual money:

Ant: “Thou knowest that all my fortunes are at sea;
Neither have I money nor commodity
To raise a present sum. Therefore go forth,
Try what my credit can in Venice do;
That shall be racked even to the uttermost
To furnish thee…”.

Oh! Antonio the wise, Antonio of the diversified investment portfolio, is in fact tapped out, waiting dockside for one of his ships to come in, if he's even telling the truth to his bosom buddy at all. Recall that at the very start, Antonio gives Solario two reasons for why he's not worried about his investments. One is that he's diversified among a number of ships ("My ventures are not in one bottom trusted.") and the other is that he's not over-extended ("...nor is my whole estate upon the fortune of this present year.")

In any event, what Antonio actually offers Bassanio is to underwrite a loan from someone else. But from whom? Well, from one of those low, filthy sorts of people who actually possess filthy lucre, as opposed to the aristocratic promise of money.

A Jew.

M of V #2 - Too Much Respect Upon the World

2007-04-24T16:29:00.000-07:00

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As Merchant’s first scene proceeds, we see Shakespeare begin to peer more closely into its obvious theme of commerce. In response to Salero’s accusation that Antonio is sad because his fortunes are tied to the fate of his ships, Antonio responds:

Ant: “My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
Nor to one place; nor is my whole estate
Upon the fortune of this present year.
Therefore my merchandise makes me not sad.”

Fair enough. Antonio presents Shakespeare’s idea of a wise merchant. He diversifies! And he keeps some of his wealth in cash (presumably gold or silver, of course, which the Bard will also look at in this play). As will become obvious in time, Shakespeare is seeking to draw a line between this virtuous form of commerce – commerce in goods – and Shylock’s venal, low-brow and of course Jewish trafficking in usury – commerce in money, which we today call banking.

Shakespeare would take one look at today’s modern world and say, “How Jewish!” before turning away in disgust at his lost caste system. I can only hope, however, that if he stayed to take a further look, and saw the explosion of humanism permitted by our modern freedoms, including our modern financial freedom, he would reconsider. For humanity is what Shakespeare was and is all about; it’s the reason I feel no choice but to absorb the anti-Semitic insult of Merchant and stick with him. The reason I’m blogging the play.

Ah, the play. Salero and Antonio are interrupted by Gratiano (not Rocky), who alike upbraids Antonio for being excessively somber:

Grat: “You look not well, Signior, Antonio,
You have too much respect upon the world.
They lose it that do buy it with much care.”

Ant: “I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano –
A stage where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.”

Gratiano invites Antonio to dinner, to cheer him up, and then leaves him with his friend Bassanio. And at last the plot thickens:

Bass: “”Tis not unknown to you, Antonio,
How much I have disabled mine estate
By something showing a more swelling port
Than my faint means would grant continuance.
………………………..To you, Antonio,
I owe the most, in money and in love…”

Antonio has been loaning his friend money, and the sole purpose of these loans was to allow Bassanio to show himself richer than he was. Bassanio then tells Antonio he has a plan for repayment, and Antonio, sight unseen, promises to bankroll it:

Ant: “My purse, my person, my extremest means
Lie all unlocked to your occasions.”

Can you spell e-n-a-b-l-e-r? (And please tune in tomorrow to see exactly what Bassanio is asking Antonio to enable).

M of V #1 - I Know not Why I am so Sad

2007-04-17T15:41:00.000-07:00

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The Merchant of Venice begins with a lament by Antonio, the play’s Merchant.
Antonio attempts to explain to his friend Salero an undiagnosable sadness from which he is suffering:

Ant: “In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.
It wearies me, you say it wearies you
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff ‘tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn….”

Salero answers:

Sal: “Your mind is tossing on the ocean,
There where your argosies with portly sail,
Like signors and rich burghers on the flood,
Or as it were the pageants of the sea,
Do overpeer the petty traffickers
That curtsy to them…”

Sadness is in fact a theme in the play. According to Salero, Antonio is sad because his happiness, serenity and peace of mind are held hostage to the health of his investment portfolio, something many middle class, or “middle class” Moderns can relate to, except that Antonio’s investment is in shipping, and in his era months or years passed before word from the local port would inform the merchant that he was now rich, or continued silence would confirm to him and his creditors that he was ruined - hence the concept of one’s ship coming in. (Salero in fact is wrong both about the cause of Antonio’s sadness, and as to Antonio’s fortunes being hostage to his shipping interests).

In any case, the situation allows Shakespeare to allow Salero to imagine himself as a shipping merchant:

Sal: “My wind cooling my broth
Would blow me to an ague when I thought
What harm a wind too great might do at sea.
I should not see the sandy hourglass run
But I should think of shallows and of flats…
….Should I go to church
And see the holy edifice of stone
And not bethink me straight of dangerous rocks
Which, touching but my gentle vessel’s side,
Would scatter all her spices on the stream,
Enrobe the roaring waters with my silks.
And, in a word, but even now worth this,
And now worth nothing?...”

Such lovely passages as these, laced even more richly through this play than many of Shakespeare’s others, break the heart of a Jewish Shakespeare-lover like myself, since,as we shall soon see, glowering o’er the entire text is the Jew-hatred that is nestled at its core. It is not masochism, though, but a sheer desire to stare the Bard’s ugly error in the face, that drives me to blog the Merchant in its entirety, and welcome along for the ride.

The Bard on Troop Strength in Baghdad

2007-01-11T13:12:00.000-08:00

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President Bush addressed the American people last night to take responsibility for the continuing bloodshed in Iraq, and to announce a new policy involving increased troop strength in Baghdad devoted to the pacification of that benighted city. This time, the President seems to be asserting, we mean business; we mean to enforce our will:

Duke: “We have strict statutes and most biting laws…
Which for this fourteen years we have let slip;
E’en like an o’ergrown lion in a cave
That goes not out to prey…”

Well, for three years in the President’s case, and not fourteen, has the U.S. military been bedeviled by insufficient troop strength and hobbled by oddly Vietnamesque rules of engagement that did not permit robust assertion of its authority, with the result that furtive groups of young men, known full well by the military to be IED-planting teams, can be spotted at night but not engaged unless seen with a bomb in their hands.

Duke: “….so our decrees,
Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead;
And Liberty plucks Justice by the nose,
The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart
Goes all decorum.”

Happily, the President also announced that the rules of engagement will be changed, allowing out troops to unsheathe their might. It seems, though, that three years was much too long a time to recognize the need for this change in strategy. Three thousand honored dead call to our political leaders for clearer leadership. Timidity over casualties in the short term will only lead to greater casualties overall, or to the collapse of will and retreat that has ever been longed for by the Democratic Party.

Here Lady Percy, Hotspur’s widow, scolds her father-in-law, Northumberland, for failing to provide requested reinforcements to his own son Hotspur (also know as Percy, and Harry – aristocrats held multiple names back then) to aid in his rebellion against the falsely installed Henry IV:

Lady Percy: “The time was, Father, when you broke your word,
When your own Percy, when my dear heart’s Harry,
Threw many a northward look to see his father
Bring up his powers; but he did long in vain.
Who then persuaded you to stay at home?”

It may seem churlish to criticize the initiator of the overthrow of Saddam and the rebuilding of Iraq for insufficient zeal, and I do appreciate the President’s muscular assertion of our military against the Islamists, and note in more than passing that the Democratic alternative – defeat, humiliation, and the bowing of American independence before the UN – remains not only worse, but unthinkable.

But in war it is not enough to take the right side; one must win. And the former hobbling of our military, even if it occurred as the result of following the advice of timid pentagon generals who were averse to urban-patrol counter-insurgency efforts, is what has placed us in the currently precarious position. Our soldiers deserve better. In that respect, Lady Percy’s hot words fall on our civilian leaders and timid generals today no less than on her father-in-law then:

“Lady Percy: “…Him did you leave,
Second to none, unseconded by you,
To look upon the hideous god of war
In disadvantage, to abide a field
Where nothing but the sound of Hotspur’s name
Did seem defensible. So you left him…”.

Of course, American patriots read this criticism of an imperfect war strategy with sorrow, while American liberals read this criticism with a glee borne of their hope for American defeat. And as for what may become of the long-suffering Iraqi people in the aftermath of such a defeat; well, nothing could be further from a liberal’s thoughts.

Romeo & Juliet & the AP & Reuters

2007-01-09T14:47:00.000-08:00

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Bardseye returns today from a second baby-related hiatus (our little Shakespearean thrives; his powers daily grow) to marry a slice of Romeo and Juliet to the captivating conflict in Iraq.

As the gentle reader will recall, for killing Paris (not the city, which hardly needs to be murdered given its current cultural suicide, but rather Juliet’s undesired fiancé) Romeo was banished to Mantua. His servant Balthasar rode hence in Act V with news of events in Verona, news which put quite a crimp in Romeo’s oddly happy mood:

Rom: “If I may trust the flattering truth of sleep,
My dreams presage some joyful news at hand.
My bosom’s lord sits lightly in his throne,
And all this day an unaccustomed spirit
Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts.”

Enter Romeo’s man, Balthasar.

“News from Verona! How now, Balthasar?
Dost thou not bring me letters from the friar?
How doth my lady?.…”

Bal: “Her body sleeps in Capels’ monument,
And her immortal part with angels lives.
I saw her laid low in her kindred’s vault,
And presently took post to tell it you.
O, pardon me for bringing these ill news.”

Obviously, Shakespeare was warning us in this passage about the Associated Press, our modern-day Balthasar, who rides – too soon! – from Baghdad with front page news of mosques destroyed and civilians set fire to in the streets, news that is later, in quieter pages folded well inside, and just like Balthasar’s news of Juliet’s death, discredited.

Blog readers will already be aware that the sole source for the atrocity described above, and nearly the sole source for sixty news stories detailing Shia attacks on Sunni civilians, is a Baghdad police captain whose existence the AP was for some weeks unable to confirm. He has since been confirmed as a real person, but his sixty stories have not fared as well. The destroyed mosques are standing; no confirmation for the bodies burned in the street – an act that even in today’s Baghdad could be expected to stand out. (Whoops - the latest information now is that the AP story confirming the captain's identity was itself discredited; his existence remains still unconfirmed).

First Senator: “This cannot be,
By no assay of reason: ‘tis a pageant,
To keep us in false gaze.”

Othello, Act I, scene iii

The kafuffle over the captain, however it may be resolved, has revealed a fearful reliance of Western news organizations (whose reporters fear to tread outside the protected green zone) on local Iraqi stringers, who tend to be partisan, and whose reports tend to remain unconfirmed. The longstanding anti-American track record of the major wire services, AP and Reuters, required of news consumers another layer of suspicion.

Meanwhile, the war in Iraq remains a complex, fascinating struggle, one where the US has achieved signal successes alongside the more loudly amplified failures. From Al Qaida’s standpoint, the public relations effort is critical; with outright military success unlikely, their strategy must focus on demoralizing the US voter and taxpayer in order to cause the American effort to be called off by the civilians back home. The willingness AP and Reuters to print whatever their Iraqi stringers tell them is therefore extremely useful to Al Qaida.

It’s worth remembering that Balthasar’s false report is what caused Romeo and Juliet to grasp defeat from the jaws of romantic victory.

Rom: “…Eyes, look your last!
Arms, take your last embrace! And, lips, O you
The doors of breath seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death!”

Obviously, Al Qaida for serious, fascist reasons, and the AP and Reuters for frivolous reasons (hip nihilism; fashionable anti-Americanism) would both like to see the same happen in the fight for the freedom and dignity of the long-benighted Iraqi people.

Henry IV - To be so Pestered with a Popinjay

2006-11-10T20:19:00.000-08:00

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Bardseye is currently palpating the oddly persistent parallels of the Henry IV plays with the events of our times. Joining late? scroll down or use the archives from October, 06 onward.

When we left off, Hotspur, a member of the Percy family that put Henry IV bloodily and uneasily on the throne, is describing for the king a prancing and unmartial royal messenger. This messenger had arrived on the battlefield, just after Hotspur had put down a rebellion, to convey the king’s order that Hotspur deliver his prisoners to the king. Hotspur explains why he reacted so badly to the arrival of this message-bearer:

Hot: “With many holiday and lady terms
He questioned me, amongst the rest demanded
My prisoners in Your Majesty’s behalf,
I then, all smarting with my wounds being cold,
To be so pestered with a popinjay,
Out of my grief and my impatience
Answered neglectingly I know not what,
He should, or he should not; for he made me mad
To see him shine so brisk, and smell so sweet,
And talk so like a waiting-gentlewoman
Of guns and drums and wounds – God save the mark! –

Clearly, on this day in early November, 2006, it makes sense to cast the American people themselves in the role of the royal messenger. After all, they have just delivered their message in the recent US election, expressing their dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war in Iraq by voting out of office the Republican congress.

This new pacifist America, a sweet-smelling popinjay, steps daintily over corpses both Iraqi and American to deliver a peremptory and insulting note to those who fight, bleed and die for that very popinjay’s freedoms. Even so, the US military, for whom Hotspur in his wounded dignity speaks, professes its loyalty to royal (but we would translate that to democratic and civilian) control:

Hot: “And I beseech you, let not his report
Come current for an accusation
Betwixt my love and your high majesty.”

After this speech, a royal counselor named Blunt intercedes, advising the king that Hotspur’s - the American military's - explanation is reasonable. The king – in whose role we are casting the American electorate, is having none of this:

King: “Why, yet he does deny his prisoners,
But with proviso and exception
That we at our own charge shall ransom straight
His brother-in-law, the foolish Mortimer,
......Shall our coffers then
Be emptied to redeem a traitor home?
Shall we buy treason…?
No, on the barren mountains let him starve!”

A little explanation is in order. The king refers to the fact that Hotspur is conditioning his transfer of the prisoners on the king’s agreement to ransom Hotspur's brother-in-law Mortimer. Mortimer was taken prisoner by “that great magician, damned Glendower, whose daughter, as we hear, [Mortimer] hath lately married.” It appears that Mortimer has made himself comfortable in Scotland, marrying his jailor’s daughter.

Now then, just what hallucinatory parallel can Bardseye muster for this rather specific set of events?

Well, obviously, Mortimer represents the American military’s honor. Mortimer - our military's honor - is held hostage in Iraq (Scotland, in the play) and can only be ransomed by the sovereign American people (that is, by the English sovereign, in the play). Alas, both the American people, who just voted in a pacifist democrat congressional majority, and Henry IV, king of England, are unwilling to make the trade. In the noble enterprise of the pacification of Scotland – that is, the noble enterprise of the liberation of Iraq – defeat is to be grasped from the jaws of victory. In 1991 we betrayed the Shia. This time we are preparing to betray the Sunnis. A new American idea of fairness? No wonder Hotspur is outraged:

King: “Send us your prisoners, or you will hear of it.

Hot: “An if the devil come and roar for them
I will not send them….”.

To be continued….

Betwixt the Wind and His Nobility

2006-11-05T18:38:00.000-08:00

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Bardseye is currently palpating the oddly persistent parallels of the Henry IV plays with the events of our times.

We cast the play as follows:

Prince Hal (a youthful prince struggling to
do good but subject to temptation): America

Falstaff (a charming rogue who seeks to
mis-educate the Prince): Western Europe

(Falstaff's understudies: The UN and the New York Times)

Joining late? scroll down or use the archives from October, 06 onward.

Shakespeare departs from Prince Hal’s internal struggles to return to affairs of state. Hal's father, Henry IV, is engaged in some diplomatic mopping-up operations following the quelling of rebellions in Wales and Scotland. The King is bristling at the expectations of the Percy family, whose scion Worcester exhibits an equal prickliness.

King: “You tread upon my patience. But be sure
I will from henceforth rather be myself,
Mighty and to be feared,…”

Wor: “Our house, my sovereign liege, little deserves
The scourge of greatness to be used on it –
And that same greatness too which our own hands
Have holp to make so portly.”

Portly here means potent, not fat, and yes, he said holp, meaning helped. The Percys basically put Henry IV on the throne, and no royal likes to be reminded of his former dependency:

King: “Worcester, get thee gone, for I do see
Danger and disobedience in thine eye.
O sir, your presence is too bold and peremptory…”.

No sooner does the king’s relationship with Worcester begin to disintegrate, but the aptly named Hotspur, also a Percy, responds to a royal summons to explain why he refused to fork over to the king’s representative some prisoners he took in quelling the latest rebellion.

Hot: “My liege, I did deny no prisoners.
But I remember when the fight was done,
When I was dry with rage and extreme toil,
Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword,
Came there a certain lord, neat and trimly dressed,
Fresh as a bridegroom, and his chin new reaped
Showed like stubble land at harvest home.
He was perfumed like a milliner,…”

Clearly, the martial Hotspur in this scene represents our military, coated in sweat and grime and up to its elbows in the blood of Islamist terrorists and other enemies of democracy. And who is it that confronts the US Hotspur military in the very heat of battle – what soft-palmed, perfumed paper-pushing message boy from the very heart of government? Why it’s the Senate Intelligence Committee. Or perhaps the six retired generals out of 4700 who in a time of war publicly called for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. Or, most apt of course, it is the Democrat party, calling for our soldiers to march backwards over the bodies of their own 2800 dead in retreat from Iraq, in full sight of the world and all its calculating despots, without completing the stabilization of the world’s first Arab democracy. The military, speaking through Hotspur in its outraged honor, continues:

Hot: “And twixt his finger and his thumb he held
A pouncet box, which ever and anon
He gave his nose and took ‘t away again,
Who therewith angry, when it next came there,
Took it in snuff; and still he smiled and talked,
And as the soldiers bore dead bodies by
He called them untaught knaves, unmannerly,
To bring a slovenly unhandsome corpse
Betwixt the wind and his nobility.”

To be continued...

The Foul and Ugly Mists

2006-11-03T18:54:00.000-08:00

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Bardseye is currently palpating the oddly persistent parallels of the Henry IV plays with the events of our times.

We cast the play as follows:

Prince Hal (a youthful prince struggling to
do good but subject to temptation): America

Falstaff (a charming rogue who seeks to
mis-educate the Prince): Western Europe

(Falstaff's understudies: The UN and the New York Times)

Joining late? scroll down or use the archives from October, 06 onward.

When we left off, Prince Hal (that is, America) was alone on stage. He had spent the 1990’s ignoring his weighty responsibilities as the leader of the free world (for Hal, we translate that to England around 1400). Instead America has been cavorting with Falstaff, letting Falstaff steal money from pilgrims and traders, and then stealing the stolen money from Falstaff himself. In this, Falstaff most resembled Europe and Russia as they stole Oil-For-Food money throughout those same 1990’s, money intended for the desperately poor of Iraq, and yet stolen under the very auspices of the UN charged with the poor’s protection. Hal stole the stolen money back when he uncovered that self-same multi-billion dollar scandal in the aftermath of his invasion of France - whoops, that is, America did so following its invasion of Iraq.

Hal senses that England doesn’t take him seriously as the heir-apparent of his nation. Just as American prestige waned in the years following Vietnam, the un-avenged hostage-taking in Iran of 1979, the succession of unanswered terrorist attacks on American targets spanning the two decades following. Hal and America speak:

Hal: “Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted he may be more wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.”

Well, if we are looking for the foul and ugly mists of vapors that do seem to strangle us, we are spoiled for choices. But I’ll plump for the Kyoto Treaty, a silly little diversion intended to tie down the great Gulliver of America with a thousand little Lilliputian strings of environmental regulation. Although this was last decade’s European ruse, it’s worth noting that the signatories, who only and ever intended the treaty to curtail American growth once a liberal US administration committed to it, have all now long since failed and for the most part given up on ever meeting its carbon-reducing goals.

So, will we drown in the spillover of melting icecaps as a result? If so, we’ll drown even if we adopt Kyoto, since fully implementing its provisions would result in only the tiniest reduction in expected global warming. No, technology is the dragon we are riding. Kyoto seeks to kill the dragon. Bardseye votes to tame it for ethical and moral ends. If there is global warming, and if it turns into a problem, only technology will fix it. Kyoto will destroy the economic growth that permits technology to advance, killing the goose before it lays the golden egg.

Wheew! Let’s return to Prince Hal, channeling 21st century America:

Hal: “If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work.”

Are you listening, Bill Clinton?

“But when they seldom come, they wished-for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.”

This speech I suppose presents America’s best sense of itself as seeking redemption from its own waywardness. Our arguably late entry into World War II, our half-victory, and therefore half-defeat in Korea, condemning the North to a half century of increasing horror, our abandonment of the people of South Vietnam in 1975, after the great victory of the Tet Offensive was portrayed as a massive defeat by the American media, our abandonment of the Iraqi Shia in 1991, and the list goes on. Amidst these failures of our national purpose (and, ahem, that would be the spreading of liberty), are of course a balancing, an-overbalancing scale of successes. But the world beyond our shores does indeed have cause to wonder, at those moments when we rouse ourselves to our national purpose, if we will falsify men’s hopes, or if our reformation, glittering o’er our faults, shall show more goodly and attract more eyes….

To be continued….

As Secure a Sleep

2006-10-21T20:24:00.000-07:00

Bardseye is currently doing the Henry IV play series, which contains oddly persistent parallels with the events of our times. As always, we cast the major players of our era in Shakespearean roles, as follows:

Prince Hal (a youthful prince struggling to
do good but subject to temptation): America

Falstaff (a charming rogue who seeks to
mis-educate the Prince): Western Europe

(Falstaff's understudies: The UN and the New York Times)

Joining late? scroll down or use the archives from October, 06 onward.

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As Secure As Sleep

Hal: “Where shall we take a purse tomorrow, Jack?”

Fal: “Zounds, where thou wilt, lad, I’ll make one.
An I do not, call me a villain and baffle me.”

Now that the Prince has caught Falstaff out on his willingness to commit robbery at the next opportunity, that next opportunity arises. Poins, an associate of Falstaff’s, arrives to inform Falstaff of a group of pilgrims and traders, who by the nature of their vocations must carry ready money. Poins has cased out the group’s itinerary, and knows when best to waylay them (vizards means masks):

Poins: “But my lads, my lads, tomorrow morning,
by four o’clock early, at Gad’s Hill, there are pilgrims
going to Canterbury with rich offerings and traders
riding to London with fat purses. I have vizards for
you all; you have horses for yourselves….We may
do it as secure as sleep….”

The Prince hesitates, at first begging off (“Who, I rob? I a thief? Not I, by my faith.”), and then consenting (“Well then, once in my days I’ll be a madcap.”) and finally reverting to refusal (Well, come what will, I’ll tarry at home.”) The idea of warning Falstaff and Poins off of their plan never occurs to him.

Poins asks Falstaff to leave so that he can change the Prince’s mind. Alone with him, he suggests the Prince agree to participate, hide until the robbery is over, and then, masked, descend on Falstaff and rob him of his ill-gotten loot. To this the Prince readily agrees.

Poins: “…we will set forth before or after them and
appoint them a place of meeting, wherein it is at our
pleasure to fail; and then will they adventure upon
the exploit themselves, which they shall have no
sooner achieved but we’ll set upon them.”

By hiding their horses, and changing their masks and clothes, Poins and the Prince expect to successfully rob Falstaff, to rob the thief. In this they resemble no institution so much as the New York Times, which has in recent months published leaked documents (that is, documents stolen from their legitimate purpose), revealing here a secret terrorist surveillance program that had tracked the evil monsters’ communications, and there a secret but otherwise perfectly legal terrorist bank transfer surveillance program. Most recently the Times published excerpts of the national intelligence estimate, which was leaked, criminally and treasonously, by Larry Hanauer, a democrat staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in order to embarrass the administration in an election season.

Just as the Times reckons that the government will shy from prosecuting the paper for what in truth amounts to treason, Poins reckons that stealing from Falstaff will pose little difficulty:

Poins: “I know them to be as true-bred cowards as
ever turned back;…if he fights longer than he sees
reason, I’ll forwear arms…”.

The national intelligence estimate, by the way, is a sort of anthology of opinion among the myriad intelligence agencies whose hidebound bureaucracy has so consistently disappointed the nation, starting from its failure in the late 1970’s to contemplate the possibility that the Shah of Iran might fall, or in the late 1980’s that the Soviet Union might, or the existence of Sadman Insane’s nuclear program (discovered after sanctions were imposed following the first Gulf War), or the collapse of Sadman’s WMD program following imposition of a decade’s worth of those sanctions. This last intelligence failure led of course to the famous egg-on-America’s face that so delighted the world’s Falstaffs, even as America proceeded in Iraq to end an ongoing holocaust, liberate a nation, and at least attempt to set up the world’s first Arab democracy.

At least in Shakespeare, if not in today’s Times, the Prince, who steals from the thief, regrets his madcap action, and understands the call of his nation upon him:

Prince: “I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humor of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted he may be more wondered at…”.

To be continued…..

Henry IV - 'Tis no Sin for a Man to Labor

2006-10-14T18:30:00.000-07:00

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Bardseye is currently doing the Henry IV play series, which contains oddly persistent parallels with the events of our times. As always, we cast the major players of our era in Shakespearean roles, as follows:

Prince Hal (a youthful prince struggling
to do good but subject to temptation): America
(Prince Hal's understudy: All freedom-valuing democracies)

Falstaff (a charming rogue who seeks
to mis-educate the Prince): Western Europe
(Falstaff's understudy: The United Nations)

And if you’re joining late, scroll down to the first Henry post, or use the archives from October, 06 onward.

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'Tis No Sin For A Man To Labor...

Fal: “I prithee, sweet wag, shall there be gallows standing
in England when thou art king? And resolution thus fubbed
as it is with the rusty curb of old father Antic the law?
Do not thou, when thou art king, hang a thief.”

Hal: “No, thou shalt.

Fal: “Shall I? O rare! By the Lord, I’ll be a brave judge.”

To translate, Falstaff (that is, Old Europe), advises Hal (the U.S.) to tear down the gallows once he becomes king. And sure enough, Old Europe does indeed seek to eliminate capital punishment, even as it indicts American soldiers for war crimes and withholds consent to invade Iraq. Falstaff/Europe's honorable reason for withholding this consent? To conceal Old Europe's corrupt involvement in Saddam’s Oil For Food scheme, that would be discovered by the invasion. Falstaffian, larger-than-life comedy indeed.

Hal answers (“No, thou shalt”) that when he becomes king, he will command Falstaff himself to be the realm’s hangman. Falstaff is charmed.

Fal: “Before I knew thee, Hal, I knew nothing; and now am I,
if a man should speak truly, little better than one of the wicked.
I must give over this life, and I will give it over. By the Lord,
an I do not I am a villain. I’ll be damned for never a king’s son
in Christendom.”

Here Falstaff (that is, Old Europe) says that before it knew Hal (that is, before it experienced democracy), it was little better than one of the wicked – a phrase used by the Puritans. Clearly Falstaff is speaking about Europe’s expansionist, hegemonic and colonial history, conducted for the most part under monarchical reigns. All those centuries of bloodletting between its borders, followed by further centuries of bloodletting beyond them. The gunboats up and down China’s rivers, the subduing of Africa, the cut-throat squabbling over the Americas.

The self-hatred that lies at the heart of modern European identity is palpable. When you know that you have sinned so much, too much, then for some it becomes time not for repentance, but to pray rather that eternal justice itself will not be brought to bear. To pray against prayer. In Bardseye's opinion, that’s the real reason Old Europe has lost its religion. Hal answers Falstaff’s false profession of faith with a falsity of his own:

Hal: “Where shall we take a purse tomorrow, Jack?”

Fal: “Zounds, where thou wilt, lad, I’ll make one. An I do not,
Call me a villain and baffle me.”

That is: “Where shall commit robbery, Falstaff?” “Anywhere you like. If I don’t join you, call be a villain.”

So much for the redemptive power of Old Europe’s conversion to democracy. Bureaucratic kleptocracy remains its true form of government, as Falstaff suggests. And Hal properly scolds him for it:

Hal” I see a good amendment of life in thee – from praying
to purse taking.”

Fal: “Why, Hal, ‘tis my vocation, Hal. ‘Tis no sin for a man
to labor in his vocation.”

To be continued….

Henry IV - Casting Today's Falstaff

2006-10-12T18:51:00.000-07:00

Henry IV - Our Era's Shakespeare Play

2006-10-10T20:13:00.000-07:00

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Earlier this year Bardseye did Hamlet - all of it, scene by scene (see archives for January ’06 – March ’06). Now, because of its oddly persistent parallels with the events of out times, we take on an unusual selection, the Henry IV series. (And if you’re joining late, scroll down to the first Henry post, or use the archives from October, 06 onward).

The royal crown sat as uneasily on Henry IV’s head in 1400 as, in 2001, the presidential crown, disputed for five weeks following the election, rested on G.W. Bush’s. Though in Henry’s case, it was not a disputed election but the murder of Richard II – a murder in which Henry was himself complicit - that brought him to power. Henry expressed his guilt over his illegitimate accession at the close of Shakespeare's prequel to this play, Richard II:

Henry: “…though I did wish him dead
I hate the murderer, love him murdered.
The guilt of conscience take thou for thy labor,
…..
I’ll make a voyage to the Holy Land
To wash this blood off from my guilty hand…”.

Now, in the next installment of Shakespeare’s eight-play history series, Henry resolves to seek for atonement in a holy crusade to liberate Jerusalem from the Al Qaida of the day:

Henry: “As far as to the sepulcher of Christ –
Whose soldier now, under whose blessed cross
We are impressed and engaged to fight –
Forthwith a power of English shall we levy,
Whose arms were molded in their mother’s womb
To chase these pagans in those holy fields
Over whose acres walked those blessed feet
Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed
For our advantage on the bitter cross.”

In other words, “Let’s roll!”

Those who oppose today’s war against Islam will conclude that Henry IV’s guilt-driven motivation parallels a personal motivation lurking behind G.W. Bush’s decision to topple Sadman Insane (“He tried to kill my dad!”) . Personally, Bardseye finds the interruption of a holocaust, whether done by Clinton in Bosnia or Bush in Iraq, to be a moving event, an advance in the very worth and quality of humanity, on a par with the rejection of human slavery achieved by modern societies in the 19th century. But Henry's pointing of a Western army at the heart of the Islamic world is a parallel to today worth watching as the play develops.

Beyond personal guilt, Henry IV did indeed have domestic reasons for his foreign quest – his proposed crusade was an attempt to knit England back together after the civil conflicts that had led to his accession. In truth, the civil wars continued to rage - just as the culture war within the US rages today, coloring the nation’s stance toward foreign adventure. You see, in the hallucinatory crucible of this midnight blog, it all ties together.

And if the reader is still skeptical of Bardseye's Glendower/Al Sadr parallel, there's this:

Westmorland: “A thousand of his people butchered –
Upon whose dead corpse there was such misuse,
Such beastly shameless transformation,
By those Welshwomen done as may not be
Without much shame retold or spoken of.”

Shakespeare has the Welsh women performing the most unspeakable of the depravities. Henry learns that revolts fester both among the Sunni in Scotland and the Shia (actually a rebel named Glendower) in Wales. Henry’s Rumsfeld in these actions is Harry Percy, nicknamed Hotspur. And while we're at it, let's meet all the Percys: Hotspur is joined by his dad Harry Percy (the Earl of Northumberland), Hotspur’s uncle (the Earl of Worcester), and Hotspur’s brother-in-law Edmund Mortimer (the Earl of March - even if it’s April, ha ha). At the close of the preceding play, the Percys collectively helped Henry IV into power, conspiring with him to depose the wonderfully self-pitying Richard II.

In this play, the Percys are not exactly happy campers, since their own Mortimer has an arguably stronger claim to the throne than Henry does. Moreover, Mortimer has just been taken prisoner by Al Sadr, I mean Glendower, in Wales:

Westmorland: “But yesternight, when all athwart there came
A post from Wales loaden with heavy news,
Whose worst was that the noble Mortimer,
Leading the men of Herefordshire to fight
Against the irregular and wild Glendower
Was by the rude hand of that Welshman taken,…”.

So, to recap, we have rebels slaughtering the soldiers of nation-building, peacekeeping dominant foreign power, and mutilating their bodies. Shades of the four US soldiers whose bodies were hung over a bridge by Muqtada al Sadr’s men, to mention only one of hundreds of radical Islam’s savage depradations. That would be the same al Sadr who remains breathing and even holds some political power in the new Iraq. Quite a message to be sending to other tyrants both in the region and elsewhere. We also have hostage-taking though not yet Daniel Pearl-style beheading of hostages. We’ll have to see how Mortimer is treated by Glendower, and how Glendower, is treated by Henry.

Now then, as the play opens, the Percys have come to Henry to see their Mortimer ransomed. The King, for his part, is irritated to learn that Hotspur refuses to hand over prisoners he has himself taken during the recent hostilities.

King: “….What think you, coz,
Of this young Percy’s pride? The prisoners
Which he in this adventure hath surprised
To his own use he keeps…”.

The implicit bargain is that if the King wishes to have Hotspur obediently tender his prisoners, the King must ransom the Percy family’s Mortimer from the Welsh al Sadr Glendower. Henry is keenly aware that a ransomed Mortimer would return to England as a potential rival for the throne. A parallel to today would perhaps arise if President Bush were to retreat from Iraq, implicitly endorsing democratic party objections and possibly ushering in a Hillary Clinton, or other anti-war administration. (Question: in 1943, what would the result have been of ushering in, even assuming there had been such a thing at the time, an anti-war administration?).

To be continued….

Timon of Athens and the UN

2006-09-21T14:32:00.000-07:00

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Timon of Athens is introduced in Act One as the archetype of a generous friend. When friends of Timon ask for loans, Timon doesn’t hesitate, and the question of repayment, between friends, is one that Timon himself considers beneath the level of their friendship.

Tim: “Noble Ventidius!

Well I am not one of that feather to shake off

My friend when he must need me. I do know him

A gentleman that well deserves a help.

Which he shall have. I’ll pay the debt and free him.”

I will select the United Nations to stand in for Timon. It is worth recalling that the UN was changed utterly by the decision of President Truman to allow one vote per nation, regardless of whether that nation’s UN representative was A) truly representative, that is, chosen by a government that was chosen by the people, or B) the friend of a group of thugs with guns who held control over that nation. By permitting both A-type representatives and B-type ones to share the same dignity on the floor of the UN, its fate, in Bardseye’s view, was sealed. Here is the generous and good-hearted UN, the one that would have been created if Truman had insisted, for example, that democracies have votes – just as their peoples do – and that autocracies may attend and speak, but not vote, extending its generosity to third-world supplicants in need of aid:

Tim: “Why, I have often wished myself poorer,
that I might come nearer to you. We are born
to do benefits and what better or properer can
we call our own than the riches of our friends?
O, what a precious comfort ‘tis to have so many,
like brothers, commanding one another’s fortunes!”

Well, that all changed when the regimes became equal within the UN to truly representative governments. The Timon that emerges now, portrayed in one decade by Boutros-Boutros Gali and in the next decade be Kofi Annan, has a far less noble attitude toward the world. The world to this Timon is a place of rapacity and greed only, where no government has legitimacy, and thievery itself is the purpose of existence. This Timon, like the UN, has gold, but he sees it not as a source of assistance to those in need, but as a pirate’s treasure owed only to whoever has the strength to steal it. Timon, like Annan and today’s corrupt UN in general, finds comradeship only upon encountering two thieves intent on robbing Timon himself. Here at least are beings he can relate to. Is the UN’s con game of tricking money out of the wealth-creating democracies to hand over to corrupt, kleptocratic regimes that control and oppress their peoples any different? Timon extends his fatherly advise to the two bandits (con means offer; composture means manure):

Timon: Yet thanks I must you con
That you are thieves profess'd, that you work not
In holier shapes: for there is boundless theft
In limited professions. Rascal thieves,
Here's gold. Go, suck the subtle blood o' the grape,
Till the high fever seethe your blood to froth,
And so 'scape hanging: trust not the physician;
His antidotes are poison, and he slays
Moe than you rob: take wealth and lives together;
Do villany, do, since you protest to do't,
Like workmen. I'll example you with thievery.
The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea: the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun:
The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears: the earth's a thief,
That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen
From general excrement: each thing's a thief:
The laws, your curb and whip, in their rough power
Have uncheque'd theft. Love not yourselves: away,
Rob one another. There's more gold. Cut throats:
All that you meet are thieves: to Athens go,
Break open shops; nothing can you steal,
But thieves do lose it: steal no less for this
I give you; and gold confound you howsoe'er! Amen.

This assumption of moral ugliness, of the universality of such moral ugliness, lies at the heart of what the non-representative UN represents. A self-confident community of representative nations, of governments who know they represent and speak for their peoples and who hold properly in contempt regimes who do not, would close this institution's doors and start over.

Look to the Eastern Sky...

2006-09-16T12:04:00.002-07:00

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Just kidding, but my and my wife's first child, our son, Isaiah Yuuki Abrams, was born three weeks ago, on August 25, explaining my recent silence. If the birth was not Shakespearean, it was of Shakespearean scope for me, and I cannot resist sharing the contents of my full heart.

I assume that for the hospital staff, the delivery was unremarkable. A busy morning, with literally no room at the Inn (a portent!), every delivery room full, and a surgical delivery room eventually made available for us; a very welcome epidural, some additional tweaking to the epidural when my wife's sensitive spinal column required more drugs to be subjugated, two and a half hours of pushing that was exhausting even if relatively painless, and then a slight amount of assistance, a minute or less, from the friendly suction machine attached to Isaiah's head to help him slide home, or leave home.

Isaiah truly is a uniquely beautiful child. When we first visited the pediatrician's office the other parents were visibly dejected by the contrast. Some went as far as to pretend the children they were accompanying were not theirs - that they were "just bringing him in for a friend." Others, shamefully, approached me quietly in the hallways and offered to trade.

But separate from his beauty was his initial launching. My wife and I stayed at the hospital for two nights, with various well-meaning specialists arriving whenever we might otherwise have slept. The experience of pregnancy, even at second-hand, made me feel that Mrs. B. and I had left the planet, and then returned, with something. With, that is, this gift from beyond the curtain of eternity.

And quite accordingly, Isaiah himself seemed at first reluctant to descend to this mortal coil. He was a little dehydrated and too weak to nurse properly. The first two days at home were thus like combat. We supplemented with formula. And while newborns are supposed to lose 7-10% of their body weight before beginning to gain, the pediatrician's verdict - 10%, the far margin - indicated that we must redouble our efforts.

A lactation specialist visited our home. Contraptions were employed - a plastic nipple shield, under which a tube, feeding additional milk pumped by the mother when not nursing, was used to, again, supplement. The pediatrician smiled - a two-ounce gain! Izzy started feeding less at night and more during the day, with there remained a certain inefficiency in his sucking, leaving us with 90-minutes feeding sessions and precious little time between them.

I had lobbied for the name Isaiah having in mind the second Isaiah, who comforted the people of Israel while in exiled captivity in Babylonia, and who persuaded them that there was a purpose to their suffering, which was to soften the hearts of their oppressors. It was not intended that any such suffering attend my Isaiah, but rather that he comfort and look with a softened heart upon those (others! others!) whom I had appointed to do the suffering.

At last a pediatrician offered the opinion that Izzy was working too hard for his nourishment, burning calories in the very effort to imbibe them. It was suggested that my wife express her breast milk and then delivery it by bottle, This adjustment accomplished, the results were dramatic - an eleven-ounce gain in six days! Mrs. Bardseye began singing Japanese children's songs to Isaiah at the pediatrician's office. Tan Tan Tanuki no Kinktama wa / Kaze mo nai noni bura bura! (roughly translated - the testicles of the wild racoon dog flap in the wind whether or not the wind is blowing. Honest.)

Moreover, the 1-2 hours a night of sleep for us both over the first two weeks was replaced by a luxurious 4-5, allowing me to return to my work. And today, not only can I again prepare 1000 words of publishable text per day for various legal publishers, Japanese companies' English websites, and other outlets, but can spare a few minutes for blogging. But no TV, limited web surfing, no restaurants, no outings.

My son has Mrs. Bardseye's wide lips, a split-the-difference nose, very Buddha-esque earlobes, and almond-shaped eyes. He likes to be awake. He is crafty in avoiding the replacement of his diaper. He has a pianist's hands, and specifically those of a specialist in Rachmaninoff. And I say that even though I favor Mozart and Brahms. Further characteristics must await further development. There is a certain spooky Bardseyeness and Mrs. Bardseyeness to him at times, unprovable and possibly imagined. He pouts and rolls his eyes when sleepy liker her, he stays awake too much like me.

I know other men have done this, but it feels unique.

Oh, wait. Come to think of it, Shakespeare does speak to this, as to all things:

"What a piece of work is Isaiah Abrams! How noble in reason; how infinite in faculties. In form and moving how express and admirable. In action how like an angel. In apprehension how like a god. The beauty of the world...."

The beauty of the world.

Olmert and Antony & Cleopatra

2006-08-05T11:38:00.000-07:00

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Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in directing his country's fight with Hezbollah, now finds himself at the same crossroad where once stood Antony and Cleopatra.

As you will recall, the two lovers faced off against the Roman empire, or actually, Antony with part of the Roman army faced off against Caesar with another part. Dared by Caesar to fight by sea, Antony and Cleopatra both immediately accepted, throwing away the advantage Antony’s army held as a land-fighting force (yare means nimble on the water):

Enobarbus: “Your ships are not well manned;
Your mariners are muleteers, reapers, people
Engrossed by swift impress. In Caesar’s fleet
Are those that often have ‘gainst Pompey fought;
Their ships are yare, yours heavy. No disgrace
Shall fall you for refusing him at sea,
Being prepared for land.”

Ant: “By sea, by sea.”Eno: “Most worthy sir, you therein throw away
The absolute soldiership you have by land…”.

Ant: “I’ll fight at sea.”

Thus has Ehud Olmert, Israel’s Prime Minister and Mark Antony’s modern-day embodiment, thrown away the magnificent land-based advantages of the Israeli army in favor of the chimera, not of sea power, but in Olmert’s case of air power. The result: Israel has been playing whack-a-mole in civilian areas with Hezbollah rocket launchers. And since Hezbollah’s major strength is the moral equivalence of a Jew-hating Europe, the resulting deaths to Lebanese civilians has enabled Hezbollah to reap its intended public relations coup.

Nor has Olmert, by all indications, lent his attention exclusively to providing his military with what it needs to achieve victory. In the midst of war, Olmert announced his intention to proceed with the highly divisive policy of unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank. Can you spell t-i-m-i-n-g? Olmert proposes this idea even as young Israeli men who bitterly oppose it face death upon his vacillating orders.

Apparently, the Cleopatran siren song of international approval, the smiling embrace of Kofi Annan, Jacques Chirac and, who knows, perhaps someday Venezuela’s Chavez or even Mel Gibson himself, seem to weigh more heavily in Olmert’s mind than the need to win an existential war.

Eno (to Cleopatra): “…’tis said in Rome
That Photinus, an eunuch, and your maids,
Manage this war.”

Antony and Olmert are appealed to once more by a soldier and Canidus, Antony’s counselors, representing the Shakespearean equivalent of the blogosphere (and in particular the military-oriented “milblogs,” who reflect considerable military expertise), but to no avail:

Soldier: “By Hercules, I think I am ‘I the right.”

Can: “Soldier, thou art; but his whole action grows
Not in the power on ‘t. So our leader’s led
And we are women’s men.”

Antony’s sea campaign, like Olmert’s air campaign, is a disaster, and what’s more, in the middle of it, Cleopatra’s ship, bearing the United Nation’s flag of armed neutrality, takes flight. Ignominiously, Olmert and Antony pursue her, pursue the evanescent image of world approval, and the battle is lost. Afterwards, as a sated Hezbollah and Iran carve up the remains of Israel before a pacifist, shoulder-shrugging, world-weary world, Olmert approaches his beloved, his Kofi Annan in Egyptian dress, his Cleopatra:

Cleo: “…forgive my fearful sails.”

Ant: “Egypt, thou knewst too well
My heart was to thy rudder tied by the’ strings,
And thou shouldst tow me after. O’er my spirit
Thy full supremacy thou knew’st, and that
Thy beck might from the bidding of the gods
Command me.”

A Midsummer's Night Pregnancy

2006-08-03T11:35:00.000-07:00

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My wife is pregnant. This is our first child, and the odd wonder of what is happening refuses to wear off. Every few days brings a new ache or pain, which my wife greets with an equanimity that is beyond me. Indeed she seems to welcome the more novel discomforts as continuing proof of his growing life. Too young for counsel, our son is naturally excused from any part he may be playing in her discomfort.

We have named him (or will name him, depending on your politics) Isaiah. You will recall that the prophet Isaiah was the one who persuaded the people of Israel, when in exile, that there was a purpose to their suffering - that it was intended to soften the hearts of their oppressors.

I know, we’re still waiting.

There is a pregnancy in A Midsummer’s Night Dream. It is recounted by Titania, a goddess who is squabbling with her lord - but we would say co-deity - Oberon. Somewhat desultorily (to them), their tiff is causing ruin to the human world –

Titania: “The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain,
The plowman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard…”

The two lovers are fighting over a young human boy. Titania, who came into possession of the boy when her human servant died in childbirth, won’t yield him up to Oberon, who seeks to make the boy his “henchman.” Out of love for the remembered mother, Titania will not give up the son:

“His mother was a vot’ress of my order
And in the spiced Indian air by night
Full often hath she gossiped by my side
And sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands,
Marking the’ embarked traders on the flood,
When we have laughed to see the sails conceive
And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;
Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait,
Following – her womb then rich with my young squire –
Would imitate, and sail upon the land
To fetch me trifles, and return again
As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.
But she, being mortal, of that boy did die;
And for her sake I will not part with him.”

Like a good republican, I at first typed, “to fetch me rifles.”

In any event, the image is of a young pregnant woman and her boss - a Greek goddess – sitting on a beach somewhere in India. How did they get to India? Well, Titania is a goddess, after all. It is nighttime and they are watching trading ships. The ships’ sails “conceive and grow big-bellied with the wanton wind,” and Titania's servant weaves about on the sand, using her pregnant belly to imitate them.

“To fetch my trifles, and return again
As from a voyage rich with merchandise.”

But it is no earthly voyage that my wife is on, now just a few weeks from her home port, as she fetches the rich merchandise of new life into the world from the place of its origin; that is, somewhere behind events, where our true purpose lies.

Hezbollah and Fortenbras

2006-08-02T13:47:00.000-07:00

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Over the last six years in southern Lebanon, a visitor more versed in Shakespeare than in the politics of the Middle East would be excused in thinking he had stumbled upon a hotter duplicate of Hamlet’s Denmark. We will name our visitor to Lebanon Marcellus, and have him ask a question of his guide, Horatio:

Mar: "And why such daily cast of brazen cannon
And foreign mart for implements of war,
Why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task
Does not divide the Sunday from the week
What might be toward, that this sweaty haste
Doth make the night joint-laborer with the day?"

Why all these war preparations, pursued in sweaty haste? Horatio explains that Norway's new king, Fortenbras, intends to recover lands lost in a previous war between Hamlet's father and Fortenbras' father. Indeed, Hamlet's dad killed Fortenbras' dad in that conflict, setting the stage for a rematch.

As is now nakedly apparent, Hezbollah has no such excuse as the younger Fortenbras, in seeking to recover lands lost in a prior war. Israel left Lebanon to its own devices six years ago. Most of Lebanon thereafter proceeded to seek stability, democracy and peace. But weakened by a 15-year civil war, its new government was powerless to resist a de facto occupation by the Iranian-financed Hezbollah.

Hamlet provides an instructive parallel to this situation as well. The young Fortenbras is not actually empowered to be recovering lands from anyone. It was not he but his uncle, called Old Norway in the play, who ascended to the crown after his father was killed by Hamlet’s father in that prior war. But just as Hezbollah did not wait to acquire a parliamentary majority in Lebanon, Fortenbras could not wait to acquire power legitimately by succession. Here Horatio explains how Fortenbras…:

Hor: "Hath in the skirts of Norway here and there
Sharked up a list of lawless resolutes
For food and diet to some enterprise
That hath a stomach in 't,…".

Fortenbras has put together an army composed of criminal riff-raff, from the skirts of Norway – the hidden corners of his nation, who are fighting not for a noble cause but for food and diet; that is, out of poverty and desperation.

Well, Hezbollah’s army is similarly illegitimate, but not similarly motivated. A bizarre, fascist ideology animates its minions. Casting about in Shakespeare for a parallel to Islamic Fascist Extremism might take us to the France described in Henry VI part I, under Joan of Arc, or to the absurd imposition of religious law described in Measure for Measure. We can even find women and children individually targeted for murder in Macbeth, Richard III, and of course Titus Andronicus.

But really, an entire culture motivated to exterminating wholesale the women and children of another culture is something even Shakespeare didn’t think needed to be addressed as part of the human experience.

Antony & Cleopatra and World Domination

2006-07-13T21:06:00.000-07:00

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We’re in ancient Rome today, visiting a scene out of the Bard's Antony and Cleopatra. The Empire is being ruled by the triumvirate of Marc Antony, Octavius Ceasar and Lepidus. This play and its events are a sequel to Julius Caesar, where the same three men avenged Julius’ death and re-established order and legitimacy (give or take) within the empire.

At the end of Act II there’s a banquet where the three co-emperors and Pompey get a bit tipsy and begin discussing Egypt:

Lep: “You’ve strange serpents there.”

Ant: “Ay, Lepidus.”

Lep: “Your serpent of Egypt is bred now
of your mud by the operation of your sun.
So is your crocodile."

Pompey: “Sit – and some wine. A health to Lepidus!”

Lep: “What manner of thing is your crocodile?”

Ant: “It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as
broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as
it is, and moves with its own organs. It lives
by that which nourisheth it, and, the elements
once out of it, it transmigrates.”

Lep: “What color is it?”

Pompey (pronounced pompee) is by the way the son of an earlier emperor, also named Pompey. Indeed the Elder Pompey’s death started the ball rolling in the earlier play, Julius Caesar. Pompey the Younger, being an emperor’s son, maintains his own power center in the empire. If he wished, therefore, Pompey could call upon his father’s former followers to foment revolt. In so doing, he could conceivalby turn Rome into a hereditary empire, instead of one where the emperors are selected by the senate, or at times directly by the military. Think Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung in North Korea, or Assad the Elder and the current Baby Assad in Syria. Idiotic American liberals will add Bush the Elder and Bush the Younger, dismissing the key distinction of popular elections.

But anyway, does Pompey wish?

Menas: “Wilt thou be lord of all the world?”

Pom: “What sayest thou?”

Menas: “Wilt thou be lord of all the world. That’s twice.”

Pom: “How should that be?”

Menas: “But entertain it,
And, though thou think me poor, I am the man
Will give thee all the world.”

Pom: “Hast thou drunk well?”

Menas: “No, Pompey, I have kept me from the cup.
Thou art, if thou dar’st be, the earthly Jove.
Whate’er the ocean pales or sky inclips
Is thine, if thou wilt ha’t.”

Pom: “Show me which way.”

Menas: “These three world-sharers, these competitors,
Are in thy vessel. Let me cut the cable,
And, when we are put off, fall to their throats.
All there is thine.”

Bardseye viewers have not far to seek in substitution. Shall Menas stand for Radical Islamic theology, leading Iran’s leader/lunatic Ahmadinejad toward his dreamed of domination of the Islamic world and his devoutly-wished destruction of Israel? Shall the stubby Mr. Kim in North Korea take Chinese silence for consent and drop a nuclear weapon on Tokyo? (Bardseye has cousins in Israel and in-laws and friends in Japan, so for more than the usual number of reasons, I hope not).

Pom: “Ah, this thou shouldst have done
And not have spoke on ‘t! In me ‘tis villainy;
In thee ‘t had been good service. Thou must know,
“Tis not my profit that does lead mine homor;
Mine homor, it. Repent that e’re thy tongue
Hath so betrayed thine act. Being done unknown,
I should have found it afterwards well done,
But must condemn it now."

I will draw a few hallucinatory modern parallels for this last speech of Pompey’s – expressing regret that Menas, his homeboy, had not done the killing first and the requesting of permission later – tomorrow night, since it’s late, and I’m a decade or two behind on my beauty sleep. Till then….

Henry IV, Part 2 and Unwitting Enlistment

2006-07-07T20:09:00.000-07:00

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There is a scene in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II where the bard casts his great comic creation Falstaff as an army recruiter. The King must put down a rebellion, and Falstaff is charged with finding a few good men for the royal cause. Falstaff is holding a list of the potential recruits’ names, and in the language of the day to select one for enlistment, he will ‘prick’ the man’s name:

Fal: “Is thy name Moldy?”

Mol: “Yea, an ‘t please you.”

Fal: “’Tis the more time thou wert used….
………….Prick him.”

Mol: “I was pricked well enough before, an you
could have let me alone. My old dame will be
undone now for one to do her husbandry and her
drudgery. You need not to have pricked me.
There are other men fitter to go out than I.”

‘Pricked,” among other meanings, here means vexed or grieved. Mr. Moldy is displeased to be enlisted in the pressing and perilous campaigns of his day, preferring to remain pricked at home, performing his wife’s husbandry and drudgery. Thus do, for example, the sullen, underused manhood of France, Germany and Spain now molder at home while the flowering manhood of America, Britain, Australia and Japan risk their lives bringing democracy and freedom to Iraq.

Fal: “Shadow, whose son art thou?”

Sha: “My mother’s son, sir.”

Fal: “Thy mother’s son! Like enough, and thy
father’s shadow. So the son of the female is the
shadow of the male….Shadow will serve for
summer. Prick him (aside), for we have a number
of shadows fill up the muster book.”

“A number of shadows” refers to fictitious names enrolled on the army roster for the purpose of embezzling the royal fee paid for their enlistment. We are spoiled for choice in identifying such modern shadow-soldiers. Certainly the missing United Nations soldiers who could today be in Darfur, one of the bloodiest of the globe’s many current Islamist killing grounds. China and Russia, who continue to block UN action on the ongoing genocide in favor of trade with Sudan, must be charged as the corrupt recruiters whose acts have turned to shadow an army that could have ended a genocide. And by the way, can there be a greater or more humanitarian use of military might than to end a genocide?

In the end, the soldiers Falstaff has recruited line up to bribe a man named Bardolph to be relieved of their duty to enlist (Base means low or self-serving):

Bullcalf: [He gives money.] In very truth sir, I had
as lief be hanged, sir, as go….”

Bar: “Go to, stand aside.”

Moldy: “…My old dame…has nobody to do anything
about her when I am gone, and she is old and cannot
help herself. [He gives money.]”

Bar: “Go to, stand aside.”

Feeble: “By my troth, I care not. A man can die but
once. We owe God a death. I’ll ne’er bear a base mind.
An ‘t be my destiny, so; an ‘t be not, so. No man’s
too good to serve’s prince. And let it go which way it
will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”

Whoops! The knowing, cynical, world-weary pacifism we thought Shakespeare was endorsing has been punctured by this unlikely working class hero, Mr. Feeble, who is introduced earlier as a women’s tailor. This noble man reminds us of no one so much as of Fabrizio Quattrocchi, the Italian security guard who was taken hostage by Islamists in Iraq. The fanatic killers proceeded to videotape Quattrocchi’s murder, hoping to transmit images of his humiliation back to Italy. But instead, Quattrocchi tore off his mask as the knives approached and shouted, “Now I’ll show you how an Italian dies!”

“A man can die but once. We owe God a death.
I’ll ne’er bear a base mind.”

Quattrocchi will live eternally in Italy’s heart (provided Italy itself endures). And not only in Italy’s. Mrs. Bardseye and I are expecting our first child, a son, this August. Quattrocchi was among the names we considered for him.

King Lear and the New York Times

2006-07-05T17:38:00.000-07:00

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We find ourselves tonight in King Lear’s realm, a pagan and pre-Christian setting. As you know, the basic story begins with Lear’s abdication in favor of two of his three daughters, Regan and Goneril, whom he has unwisely chosen based on their false flattery. His third daughter, Cordelia, being too modest and sincere to so manipulate her father, was punished for her virtue and dispossessed.

The evil daughters proceed to insult and abuse their dad in every way they can think of. Lear’s friend Gloucester unwisely confides in Edmund, who is both Gloucester’s bastard son and the lover of both Regan and Goneril:

Glou: “I have received a letter this night; ‘tis dangerous
To be spoken; I have locked the letter in my closet.
These injuries the King now bears will be revenged home;
There is part of a power already footed. We must incline
to the King….If I die for ‘t, as no less is threatened me,
the King my old master must be relieved.” (Exit).

Edm: “This courtesy forbid thee shall the Duke
Instantly know, and of that letter too.
This seems a fair deserving, and must draw me
That which my father loses – no less than all.
The younger rises when the old doth fall.”

Let Lear, in all his grandeur and surprising vulnerability, represent America herself, and let Gloucester (Lear's and thus America's protector) represent those members of our intelligence services who are devoted to America’s protection, the cubby-holed analysts who seek that the “Injuries the King now bears will be revenged home.”

That sounds about right, with revenge coming in the form of a big fat bombing of Zarqawi and countless other raids, leading to the countless other enemy casualties and arrests that are taking place daily, about which our media does its best not to inform us. Yes, I know our military risk their lives to execute these raids, but intelligence is the oil that keeps the engine humming.

Alas, these Gloucesters, these loyal intelligence officers, are obliged to work cheek by jowl with countless Edmunds. These would be the sly, subversive agents of what by now has revealed itself to be an unofficial shadow government, one that has acted to sabotage our government’s policies from within (rather than work honorably to win elections for candidates with whom they agree). Nor can they be considered honorable whistleblowers, such as would go public with revelations of government practices they regard as illegal, openly attaching their names to their actions and allowing themselves to be judged.

As we all now know, Edmund revealed the banking surveillance program to the New York Times. That is, he revealed Gloucester’s letter to the Duke of Cornwall, Regan’s husband.

Edmund: “This is the letter he spoke of, which approves
him an intelligent party to the advantages of France….”

Gloucester is arrested in his own house, tied to a chair, and while masked gunmen chant “Allah Akbar!” and a video camera records every scream, the following occurs:

Corn: “Fellows, hold the chair.
Upon these eyes of thine I’ll set my foot.”

Glou: “He that will think to live till he be old,
Give me some help!”

Servants hold the chair as Cornwall grinds
Out one of Gloucester’s eyes with his boot.

“O Cruel! O you gods!”

Thus did Shakespeare, through Gloucester, pronounce judgment on the NSA or State Department leakers who revealed the (totally legal) banking surveillance program to the now-disgraced New York Times.

Julius Caesar and the War on Terror

2006-07-02T19:15:00.000-07:00

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OK, so here we have a war council attended by Brutus and Cassius, two of the conspirators who have slain Julius Caesar. The pair have assembled armies to destroy the armies raised by Mark Antony and Octavius. Antony and Octavius represent the side of the civil war that remained loyal to Caesar and his concept of a benevolent dictatorship. Brutus and Cassius represent the concept of the Republic, which Caesar had destroyed under the banner of reform.

Bru: “What do you think of marching to Phillippi presently?”

Cas: “I do not think it good.”

Bru: “Your reason?”

Cas: “’Tis better that the enemy seek us.
So shall he waste his means, weary his soldiers,
Doing himself offense, whilst we, lying still,
Are full of rest, defense, and nimbleness.”

Bru: “Good reasons must of force give way to better.
The people twixt Philippi and this ground
Do stand but in a forced affection,
For they have grudged us contribution.
The enemy, marching along by them,
By them shall make a fuller number up…”.

Cassius wants to let the enemy spend its energy in travel, while his side waits to be engaged. Brutus sees a stronger reason for marching from their camp to meet their opponents in Phillippi; to stop the people living in between from joining the enemy’s army as it approaches. Abraham Lincoln moved the union army into Virginia even before formal hostilities began for a similar reason – he knew that Virginia’s loyalties were decidedly mixed.

Osama Bin Laden’s continued existence probably owes itself to a similar phenomenon. The people of western Pakistan do stand but in a forced affection on our side of the War on Radical Islamic Terror (WRIT). Because Pakistan’s government, or at least its prime minister, is far friendlier to the U.S. than are its people, our pursuit of Bin Laden into Pakistan would undercut the prime minister’s authority, making him look like our puppet. Maintaining a friendly regime in Pakistan is far more important than killing one isolated and decreasingly potent terror master.

Brutus gives another reason for marching to Phillippi:

Bru: “…..You must note besides
That we have tried the utmost of our friends;
Our legions are brim full, our cause is ripe.
The enemy increaseth every day;
We, at the height, are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves
Or lose our ventures.”

We seem to be winning the WRIT these days. Zarqawi is dead, his (first) successor proceeded to die before we could learn his name. The Sunnis may be suing for peace. Iraq at least for the moment has a democratic, functioning government and growing military might. The prospect of the world’s first Arab democracy flowering right beside its neighboring autocracies, whose peoples will increasingly envy the Iraqi people’s freedoms, stands within our grasp. President Bush has indeed taken at the flood a tide in the affairs of men, which may yet lead us on to fortune.

But in the process we have indeed tried the utmost of our friends. Most of the rest of the world spurns American-style idealism in favor of a world-weary pessimism. Those governments who have quietly assisted us in the face of opposition from their own peoples have been embarrassed by the disclosure (by the American press, no less) of that cooperation – particularly in the joint surveillance of international banking transactions.

It remains to be seen whether this tide will carry us safely to shore. Our enemies do indeed increaseth every day. But who would have thought that one of the most dangerous of them to recently emerge would be neither the new Islamist regime in Somalia nor the rejuvenated Taleban, but the New York Times?

Hiatus

2006-04-22T17:54:00.000-07:00

Dear Bardeye Viewers,

I will be taking a hiatus until this July for a very happy reason. Mrs. Bardseye is pregnant with a budding Shakespearean who is due in late August. Mrs. Bardseye is experiencing some morning sickness, and under the circumstances, it hardly seems fitting to be spinning odd conjectural webs across the centuries in order to recast Hamlet as Kerry, or Lady Macbeth as Hillary, or Bill Clinton as Falstaff, or Angelina Jolie as Cleopatra, when more monumental events are at hand right at home

But like MacArthur I shall return, and as a father no less.

In the meantime, there's over a hundred essays drawing hallucinatory Shakespearean parallels to the people and issues of today - just scroll down on the right and take your pick.

Best regards,

Jeremy (Bardseyeview).

Julius Caesar & Auto-Immune Disease

2006-03-10T18:29:00.000-08:00

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A medical R&D firm, PharmaFrontiers, recently developed a "personalized" vaccine for multiple sclerosis. The company explains how it operates:

"The vaccine is designed to rein in and destroy the renegade white blood cells that attack myelin cells lining the brain and nerves of patients. To make the vaccine, we take blood from an MS patient and extract a sample of these renegade cells. The cells are then multiplied and weakened with radiation before being re-injected into the patient, whose immune system will then recognize them as damaged and attack them."

The company informs us that not only will the immune system recognize attack the altered renegade cells, it will also begin to attack healthy renegade cells, which have the same markers on their surface. In an admittedly small trial of 15 MS patients, new flare-ups were reduced by 92%.

(Bardseye viewers who suffer from or know someone suffering from this disease should refer to the cited article, and – please - not rely on a mere Shakespeare blog for medical advice).

And speaking of Shakespeare, I trust my fellow bardners are not doubtful of the bard's relevance here. Nothing is foreign to Shakespeare, not even auto-immune disorders and their 21st century cures.

We will take as our text a scene from Julius Caesar, specifically a conversation between the renegade cells who have been removed from the body for radioactive alteration; that is, among the loyalists (those fighting to avenge Caesar's assassination), who are discussing their planned return to power:

Antony: "These many, then shall die. Their names are pricked."

Octavius: "Your brother too must die. Consent you, Lepidus?"

Lepidus: "I do consent."

Oct: "Prick him down, Antony."

Lep: "Upon condition Publius shall not live,
Who is your sister's son, Mark Antony."

Ant: "He shall not live. Look, with a spot I damn him…".

The three men are targeting for death their own kin and clansmen who have given their loyalty to those renegade white blood cells, Brutus, Cassius and the other assassins, former friends and comrades-in-arms with whom they are now locked in a fatal auto-immune reaction; that is, a civil war.

Indeed, no sooner does Lepidus leave the room than Octavius and Antony begin turning on him:

Ant: "This is a slight, unmeritable man,
Meet to be sent on errands. Is it fit,
The threefold world divided, he should stand
One of the three to share it?"
.............................
Oct: "You may do your will;
But he's a tried and valiant soldier."

Ant: "So is my horse, Octavius…".

Careful Bardseye viewers will have noted that both the radioactively weakened white cells (Antony, Octavius and Lepidus) residing outside the body (just as those three soldiers have escaped Rome to raise an army), and the unweakened white cells that reside within it (Brutus and Cassius) are renegade cells, whereas in the play only Brutus and Cassius are renegades. Bardseye could argue that by planning a division of the Roman Empire among themselves without seeking the consent of the Senate, Antony and friends are just as renegade as Brutus and Cassius, even as they fight under the banner of revenge for Caesar's death and restoration. Or Bardseye could remind the reader that we are, after all, just having fun here. Anyhoo, let's see what happens when the radioactive white cells are reintroduced into the body of Rome; that is, when the civil war gets started. Here Pindarus describes Titinius, a Brutus loyalist who is charging through the battlefield on his horse (light means get off your horse):

Pin: "Titinius is enclosed round about
With horsemen, that make to him on the spur,
Yet he spurs on. Now they are almost on him.
Mow, Titinius! Now some light. O, he
Lights too. He's ta'en. And hark! They shout fro joy."

"Enclosed round." Aha! Just like renegade white cells being swarmed by the healthy immune system cells! Isn't it obvious? Is it only Bardseye who sees it? Anyhoo, this report so distresses Cassius that he orders Pindarus, his slave, to run him through with his own sword.

Cas: "Here, take now the hilts,
And when my face is covered, as 'tis now,
Guide thou the sword (Pindarus does so.)"

But wait! Just after Cassius arranges for his assisted suicide (oh – make a note for a future post), here enters Titinius. He's not dead at all! The swarming cells were friendly, not hostile, and were greeting and not killing him. But a fat lot of good that does Cassius, or Titinius himself. Anticipating Romeo and Juliet (unless this play was written later), Titinius offs himself as well, loyal toward Cassius to the end.

Thus was Rome restored, and with hope, luck and more miraculous medical research, thus may be restored to health those among us who suffer diseases like multiple sclerosis.

Measure 4 Measure & Gitmo's Guests

2006-03-07T20:52:00.000-08:00

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Shakespeare addressed the Guantanamo Bay conundrum - what do we do with this special breed of prisoner - in Measure for Measure, his grim meditation on the perils of theocracy that he camouflaged as a comedy. But let's inquire first of our Guests of Gitmo. A recent report has many of them expressing a desire not to be sent home:

"Fearing militants or even their own governments, some prisoners at Guantanamo Bay from China, Saudi Arabia and other nations do not want to go home, according to transcripts of hearings at the U.S. prison in Cuba.

"Uzbekistan, Yemen, Algeria and Syria are also among the countries to which detainees do not want to return. The inmates have told military tribunals that they or their families could be tortured or killed if they are sent back."

One of the things being measured in Measure is a prisoner's neck for the executioner's ax. Like the Gitmo prisoners, the condemned Barnadine's imprisonment has been repeatedly extended because, well, let's let Shakespeare tell it:

Duke: "What is that Barnadine who is to be executed in th' afternoon?"

Provost: "A Bohemian born, but here nursed up and bred, one that is a prisoner nine years old."

Duke: "How came it that the absent Duke had not either delivered him to his liberty or executed him? I have heard it was ever his manner to do so."

Pro: "His friends still wrought reprieves for him; and indeed his fact, till now in the government of Lord Angelo, came not to an undoubtful proof."

Barnadine gives us more Gitmo parallels than Bardseye knows what to do with. Being born in Bohemia – the old term for today's Czech Republic – but "here nursed and bred" raises citizenship issues that would be a dream come true for any ACLU attorney who might volunteer Barnadine's defense. And indeed Barnadine's nine-year imprisonment has resulted from his legally-minded friends who "wrought reprieves for him." Of course, Barnadine wasn't part of an active, mass-murdering, worldwide terrorist movement into whose hating arms he could return upon release.

By the way, that "fact (crime) …came not to an undoubtful proof" business means that until Lord Angelo took over the government, Barnadine's crime had not been proven beyond doubt. Angelo is a priest whom the Duke has temporarily entrusted with the government of Vienna, while the Duke himself, incognito, checks on his citizens, and on Angelo's theocratic administration of justice.

Shakespeare is not as weepy as the ACLU defense lawyers, settling the issue of Barnadine's guilt as quickly as he raises it. The Duke asks the Provost whether Barnadine committed the murder he is charged with:

Duke: "Is it now apparent?"

Pro: "Most manifest, and not denied by himself."

Cut to the tape of 911 call made by the Iranian-American NC State University graduate just moments after he plowed an SUV, rented for the purpose, into a flock of students, as his calm unaccented voice acknowledges to the operator with unmistakable pride that the has just done what he has done, and he asks to be arrested. Mohammud Taheri-Azar's act was on American soil, so he won't be sent to Gitmo. But was the mayhem he committed a crime or an act of war?

Duke: "Hath he borne himself penitently in prison? How seems he to be touched?"

Pro: "A man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep – careless, reckless, and fearless of what's past, present or to come; insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal."

Duke: "He wants advice."

That last comment means that he needs spiritual counseling. Well, at this point, we all do. Here's where we get to the part where Barnadine, our Shakespearean Gitmo surrogate, expresses a surprising affinity for his prison:

Pro: "He hath evermore had the liberty of the prison. Give him leave to escape hence, he would not."

Bardseye returns to the news item that began tonight's excursion:

"Inmates have told military tribunals they worry about reprisals from militants who will suspect them of cooperating with U.S. authorities in its war on terror. Others say their own governments may target them for reasons that have nothing to do with why they were taken to Guantanamo Bay in the first place.

"A Uighur told a military tribunal that he feared going back to China so much, he considered trying to convince the panel that he was guilty, according to a hearing transcript.

"'If I am sent back to China, they will torture me really bad,' said the man, whose name did not appear in the transcript. 'They will use dogs. They will pull out my nails.'

"Two of the Uighurs are appealing a federal judge’s rejection of their request to be released in the United States, where a family in the Washington suburbs has offered to take them in."

That's a hospitable family. Any other takers?

Richard III and Ugly Criminals

2006-03-06T20:26:00.000-08:00

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The Richard III presented to the world by Shakespeare suffered from certain physical imperfections which he allowed to deform his spirit. He complains in his opening speech that the recent conclusion of a war has changed the cultural atmosphere in a way that is not to the advantage of someone with his appearance:

"Grim-visaged War hath smoothed his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers numbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking glass;
I, that am rudely stamped, and want love's majesty
To trut before a wanton ambling nymph,
I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up…"

Wartime with its test of valor and manly company suited Richard much better. Now that peace can no longer be avoided he knows that the action will shift from the battlefield to the boudoir where his "unfinished" body (Lawrence Olivier played him with a club foot and a stunted hand, but each Richard is free to improvise a preferred flaw – perhaps today he would be the victim of bad plastic surgery) makes it difficult for him to compete.

A recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Colorado and Georgia State determined that ugly people commit more crimes than attractive people. (Cut to Oscar Wilde loftily opining that being ugly is in itself blah blah blah. Shakespeare's humor at 400 years of age has retained its mirth better than Wilde's at 100).

"Mocan and Tekin analyzed data from a federally sponsored survey of 15,000 high-schoolers who were interviewed in 1994 and again in 1996 and 2002.

"We find that unattractive individuals commit more crime in comparison to average-looking ones, and very attractive individuals commit less crime in comparison to those who are average-looking."

Rich: "And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them –
Why, I , in this weak piping time of peace.
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to see my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity."

Mocan and Tekin aren't sure why criminals tend to be ugly. They do note that other studies have shown that unattractive men and women are less likely to be hired, and that they earn less money, than the better-looking. They then speculate that "such inferior circumstances may steer some to crime." Richard III sees the matter differently:

Rich: "And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid……………..

Presumably because that's about all he can expect to. Ahem. Richard is no victim, but the conscious captain of his fate, staking out a niche in treachery and deception because that's the field in which he feels he can excel.

"Mocan and Tekin also report that more attractive students have better grades and more polished social skills, which means they graduate with a greater chance of staying out of trouble."

Rich: "…………..inductions dangerous
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the King
In deadly hate the one against the other…".

One of my favorite quotes in Shakespeare comes from Twelfth Night, when Antonio feels himself betrayed by Sebastian (actually he has mistaken Viola, Sebastian's sister, dressed as a man, for Sebastian, and all end's well later). Antonio curses Sebastian thus:

Ant: "In nature there's no blemish but the mind;
None can be called deformed but the unkind."

Henry VI Part I & Bennish the Nebbish

2006-03-04T18:46:00.000-08:00

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Jay Bennish, a high school geography teacher in Ohio, spent twenty minutes of class time berating the Bush administration, comparing the president to Hitler and describing the 9/11 attack as provoked:

Bennish: "(Bush) started off his speech talking about how America should be the country that dominates the world….Sounds a lot like the things that Adolph Hitler used to say."

"We're the only ones who are right. Everyone else is backwards. And it's our job to conquer the world…."

"In actuality, if you remember back to my first day, the Sept. 11 attacks were, according to Bin Laden, a direct response to our support of the nation of Israel, which they consider to be a terrorist regime….and they also did it because of what Bill Clinton (did) when he launched attacks into Afghanistan and Sudan …".

The demonization of your opponent – and Bennish's opponent seems to be the entire US government, not just Bush - was not unknown to Shakespeare. When the gains in France made under Henry V began to come undone during the reign of Henry VI, England even 200 years later (that is, at the time Shakespeare dramatized the events) could not accept that this had happened largely at the hands not only of the French but of a French woman - Joan of Arc. Playing to his audience, Shakespeare renames the Frech heroine Pucelle (whore). Here Talbot, Bedford and Burgundy sneak up on Joan, scaling ladders into her redoubt, all the while slandering her:

Tal: "Embrace we then this opportunity
As fitting best to quittance their deceit,
Contrived by art and baleful sorcery."

Bed: "Coward of France, how much he wrongs his fame,
Despairing of his own arm's fortitude,
To join with witches and the help of hell!

Bur: "Traitors have never other company,
But what's that Pucelle whom they term so pure?"

The "coward of France" is the Dauphin, who they claim has degraded himself by accepting Joan's assistance. Joan, of course, is the baleful sorcerer, the witch and the help of hell. Here is our modern-day Talbot taking aim at his multiple Joans of Arc:

Bennish: "Can you imagine? What is the world's number one single cause of death by a drug? What drug is responsible for the most deaths in the world? Cigarettes! Who is the world's largest producer of cigarettes and tobacco? The United States!"
………..
"Where does it say anything about capitalism is an economic system that will provide everyone in the world with the basic needs that they need? IS that a part of this system? Do you see how this economic system is at odds with humanity? At odds with caring and compassion? It's at odds with human rights."

Bennish's demons have now expanded beyond Bush and the government to America itself, along with its handmaiden, capitalism. Meanwhile, back in France around 1400, Joan is kicking England's army across France like a soccer ball. Talbot is unable to comprehend Joan's military success in just the way that Bennish is unable to countenance President Bush's unapologetic prosecution of the war on terror. Because Joan of Arc and Bush can hardly represent competent leadership, Bennish and Talbot seek for supernatural explanations:

Tal/Bennish: "Foul fiend of France and hag of all despite,
Encompassed with thy lustful paramours!"

Well, ok, the accusation that President Bush encompasses himself with lustful paramours was absent from Bennish's rant. Anyhoo, here York at last captures Joan in Act V:

York: "Damsel of France, I think I have thee fast,
Unchain your spirits now with spelling charms,
And try if they can gain your liberty.
A goodly prize, fit for the devil's grace!
See how the ugly witch doth bend her brows
As if, with Circe, she would change my shape!"

Something of this irrationality survives today not only in Bennish's unmoored musings about Bush, but in the entire paranoid project of the American left, that finds vast right-wing conspiracies among Republican politicians, and imputes evil genius to Karl Rove as the mastermind and to Dick Cheney as the puppeteer of the current presidency. How could a mere woman like Joan of Arc; that is a mere Texan like George W. Bush, manage three successive electoral victories for his party, and succeed in so much else (tax cuts, supreme court justice appointments, the treating of terrorists as enemies rather than criminal defendants) that is inimical to the left?

It must be sorcery, dark magic, portents and spells.

America's Friendship with India

2006-03-03T18:35:00.000-08:00

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"Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel."

Hamlet, I.iii.62

Yesterday, or today if you are in the US, President Bush addressed the people of India while a guest of that great and rising nation:

Bush: "I appreciate the opportunity to speak to the Indian people. I'm honored to bring the good wishes and the respect of the world's oldest democracy to the world's largest democracy."

India in the 21st century is a natural partner of the United States because we are brothers in the cause of human liberty. Yesterday, I visited a memorial to Mahatma Gandhi, and read the peaceful words of a fearless man. His words are familiar in my country because they helped move a generation of Americans to overcome the injustice of racial segregation. When Martin Luther King arrived in Delhi in 1959, he said to other countries, 'I may go as a tourist, but to India, I come as a pilgrim.' I come to India as a friend."

"I count myself in nothing else so happy
As in a soul remembering my good friends."

Richard II, II.iii.46

President Bush has mentioned as early as 1999, when a candidate for the presidency and a mere Texas governor, the need for closer ties between America and India. But there were obstacles to overcome. India, a majority Hindu country surrounded by Islamic nations, was at that time was pursuing a nuclear program that, however justified by its defense needs, fell afoul of the nuclear non-proliferation rules the US sought to enforce. In truth, the rules failed to recognize the distinction between democracies, which can largely be trusted to use nukes defensively, and autocracies, which can be expected to use them to blackmail free nations. India's turn away from economic statism, in addition, began only around 1991 and required more time to generate more wealth and win more adherents.

But President Bush was patient and strategic, seeing a counterweight to Chinese fascism (communists don't have stock markets – China, as a one-party state with a market economy, now qualifies as fascist) and Islamic extremism. He perhaps also saw India as a South Asian model of a pluralistic, democratic free market state encompassing a large Muslim minority. But along with all these convergent national interests, Bardseye believes that President Bush simply saw, and sees, a friend:

Bush: "In both our countries, democracy is more than a form of government, it is the central promise of our national character. We believe that every citizen deserves equal liberty and justice, because we believe that every life has equal dignity and value. We believe all societies should welcome people of every culture, ethnicity and religion. And because of this enduring commitment, the United States and India have overcome trials in our own history. We're proud to stand together among the world's great democracies.

"The partnership between the United States and India begins with democracy, but it does not end there. Our people share a devotion to family, a passion for learning, a love of the arts, and much more. The United States is the proud home of more than two million Americans of Indian descent, a figure that has more than tripled over the last 20 years. America is honored to welcome 500,000 Indian tourists and businesspeople to our country each year. And we benefit from 80,000 Indian students at our universities, more than we have from any other nation."

"If the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end."

Sonnet #30

Bush: "The advance for freedom is the great story of our time. In 1945, just two years before India achieved independence, there were fewer than two dozen democracies on Earth. Today there are more than 100, and democracies are developing and thriving from Asia to Africa, to Eastern Europe, to Latin America. The whole world can see that freedom is not an American value, or an Indian value. Freedom is a universal value, and that is because the source of freedom is a power greater than our own. Mahatma Gandhi said, "Freedom is the gift of God...and the right of every nation." Let us remember those words as we head into the 21st century."

Bardseye feels proud today to see formalized this natural friendship. India and America need engage in no compromise of their own values in dealing with each other. In dealing with India, America need feel none of the hypocrisy we feel in dealing with oil-rich autocracies in the Middle East or with a fascist Chinese regime that dictates the lives of its people. Truth be told, our friends are few, and compose a group of isolated, oddball nations; England, Singapore, Poland, Israel, Australia and New Zealand, chief among them. Today we (formally) add India, whom we should indeed grapple to our souls with hoops of steel.

Richard II and the Wiretap Dance

2006-03-02T18:44:00.000-08:00

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Howdy, bardners! (Sorry, couldn't resist).

In the year 800, King Charlemagne, having (briefly) consolidated power over much of Europe, went to Rome to sort things out there. While he was kneeling in prayer, the Pope placed a gold crown on his head, making him Holy Roman Emperor. Charlemagne was careful not to make the same mistake again. In 813, in Aachen, he had his son crowned as his successor. But this time Charlemagne himself placed the crown on his son's head, cutting out the middleman. I sense my reader asking a question:

So what?

Well, something similar is going on in the US government, where the President and Congress are each grasping at the crown of authority – authority to authorize invasions of privacy in the name of the nation's security. You know, wiretaps of those chatty Cathy terrorists (cut to a furious Bin Laden, waving his cell phone bill in an accusatory manner at Zarqawi. "Do you realize the roaming charges you ran up last month?")

But getting back to Shakespeare where we belong, we will peer in on a scene from Richard II – the non-famous Richard play, whose Richard is ignominiously deposed by the future Henry IV. Yes, nothing became Richard II's reign like the leaving of it. Here is Richard II resigning his crown to Bolingbroke (the future Henry IV):

RII: "Alack, why am I sent for to a king,
Before I have shook off the regal thoughts
Wherewith I reigned? I hardly yet have learned
To insinuate, flatter, bow, and bend my knee.
Give sorrow leave awhile to tutor me
To this submission. Yet I well remember
The favors of these men. Were they not mine?
Did thy not sometime cry, "All hail!" to me?
So Judas did to Christ……….
………………………………
To what service am I sent for hither?"

York: "…The resignation of thy state and crown
To Henry Bolingbroke."

KII: "Give me the crown.
Here, cousin, seize the crown. Here, cousin,
On this side my hand, and on that side thine,
Now is this golden crown like a deep well
That owes two buckets, filling one another,
The emptier ever dancing in the air,
The other down, unseen, and full of water,
That bucket down and full of tears am I,
Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high."

Bol: I thought you had been willing to resign."

RII: "My crown I am, but still my griefs are mine."

Not only who wields power, but how that power has been gained, and specifically with what legitimacy, matters. The Presidential election in 2000 was contested for over five weeks, with Al Gore gaining more total votes but losing in the electoral college (where each state is alloted a set number of votes with the winner of each state taking all). As a result, President Bush's legitimacy was questioned by the left side of an already polarized electorate. This limited his scope of action, and probably played a key role in some of his more moderate appointments, chief among these being his selection of Colin Powell as Secretary of State. Powell,in turn, was the chief architect of using the UN route into Iraq, and the UN route required that the US emphasize the WMD argument, which remains an albatross around Bush's neck.

Thus ripens the tainted fruit of a questioned election.

But we were talking about wiretaps in 2006. Or was it Richard II in 1399, or Shakespeare depicting him around 1595? Or was it Charlemagne in 800? Where were we, anyway?

RII: "…God save King Henry, unkinged Richard says,
And send him many years of sunshine days! –
What more remains?"

Northumberland: "No more but that you read
These accusation and these grievous crimes
Committed by your person and your followers
Against the state and profit of this land;
That, by confessing them, the souls of men
May deem that you are worthily deposed."

RII: "Must I do so?"

President Bush must be thinking the same about his wiretap program (now I remember), which Congress has offered to legalize and permit just as soon as he acknowledges its current illegality. The president is also asked to surrender his claim that the Constitution provides him with authority to wiretap terrorists as part of his executive power to wage war, and bend his knee to Congress as the source of that authority. Shakespeare might have wondered at our exalted system of balanced powers, and scoffed at the idea of commoners selecting presidents ("temporary kings," we would need to explain to him). But the enduring power struggle beneath it all he would clearly understand. In fact, he explains it to us.

******

Here's a recommendable post from Joe's Cafe.

Twelfth Night, Fools and Cartoons

2006-02-28T17:03:00.000-08:00

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In Twelfth Night, Malvolio is a sort of chief servant to Lady Olivia. Embodying a sternness and intolerance that could well serve as a proxy for Islamic Fundamentalism, Malvolio derides Feste, who is Lady Olivia's fool:

Mal: "I marvel your ladyship takes delight in such
a barren rascal. I saw him put down the other day
with an ordinary fool that has no more brain than
a stone. Look you now, he's out of his guard already.
Unless you laugh and minister occasion to him, he
is gagged…."

Feste, as a court fool or jester, had the unique right to speak his mind freely to his Ladyship, which makes it fair to label him Free Expression, just as we have labelled Malvolio Islamic Fundamentalism.

Now, as I'm sure we all agree, free expression lies at the heart, and hopefully at the still-beating heart, of our modern civilization, indeed it is one of the few remaining values about whose importance members of modern democracies, however much we may disagree on taxes, foreign policy, abortion, religion, the environment, guns and gays, can still agree.

Bardseye wishes he could say that Feste equally represents the Free Press, but ironically, and sadly, our Free Press, in its recent refusal to reprint those pesky Muhammad Cartoons, can no longer be said to represent Free Expression. Here's Feste:

Feste: "…Good Madonna, give me leave to prove
you a fool."

Olivia: "Can you do it?"

Feste: "Dexterously, good Madonna."

Olivia: "Make your proof."

Feste: "I must catechize you for it, Madonna.
Good my mouse of virtue, answer me."

Olivia: "Well, sir, for want of other idleness,
I'll bide your proof."

Feste: "Good Madonna, why mourn'st thou?"

Olivia: "Good fool, for my brother's death."

Feste: "I think his soul is in hell, Madonna."

Olivia: "I know his soul is in heaven, fool."

Feste: "The more fool, Madonna, to mourn for your
brother's soul, being in heaven. Take away the fool,
gentlemen."

Feste engages in an unbridled and fearless taunting of Olivia, even though she's his boss, in order to shock her out of her mourning for her late brother, which has persisted for seven years. The free speech he speaks can be provocative and unpleasant. Our immediate response may be to think of how much more comfortable might be a society that banned such verbal bad behavior. But as his conversation with Olivia reaches its conclusion we recognize the kindness and sympathy Feste is showing her. She is steeped in sadness, veiled (not, though, in observance of sharia law, Bardseye notes in passing) and her gifts of love and beauty are falling to waste.

Only someone with license to speak truth to power can make her mindful of what is being lost. Just as only the free expression of ideas today, including such noxious ideas as may be embodied in those Muhammad Cartoons (if indeed those ideas are noxious – who knows unless the cartoons are published for our review?), can lift the veil on our reality.

Here Olivia responds to Militant Islam's murderous worldwide rampage against free expression; that is, she responds to Malvolio's rant against Feste:

Olivia: "O, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and
taste with a distempered appetite. To be generous,
guiltless, and of free disposition is to take those things
for bird-bolts that you deem cannon bullets. There is
no slander in an allowed fool, though he do nothing
but rail, nor no railing in a known discreet man, though
he do nothing but reprove."

Yes, like Malvolio, radical Islam is indeed sick of self-love, and tastes with a distempered appetite, taking for cannon bullets a set of cartoons (for heaven's sake) that more soberly would be regarded as bird-bolts (and there's a timely reference, considering our US Vice President's recent contretemps with birdshot).

If only our newspapers and TV news shows resembled Feste, as they should, and had the courage to perform their essential function, to present to us relevant information without fear or favor.

Hamlet #27 - Good Night, Sweet Prince

2006-02-27T18:24:00.000-08:00

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(Note: Bardseye is currently doing Hamlet, and taking a break from our usual hallucinatory Shakespearean commentary on current events. If you're entering the theater late, Hamlet: Act I, Scene I started twenty or so posts ago - just scroll down and catch up!).

OK. Time to wrap up Hamlet, but it's more like mop up what with Laertes, Queen Gertrude and Hamlet himself poisoned and Claudius poisoned and stabbed. The good thing about being poisoned, though, is that it gives the dying hero the opportunity to express some parting thoughts:

Ham: "I am dead, Horatio. Wretched Queen, adieu!
You that look pale and tremble at this chance,
That are but mutes or audience to this act,
Had I but time – as this fell sergeant, Death,
Is strict in his arrest – O, I could tell you –
But let it be. Horatio, I am dead;
Thou livest. Report me and my cause…".

Hamlet is unable to resist one last kick at his mother's corpse, but then the entire play details how Hamlet's full adult maturity was snatched from his grasp by an unwanted destiny which he felt honor-bound to embrace. Had he become king, as Shakespeare's other famous prince, Prince Hal, managed to do, we can wonder whether Hamlet would have undergone a transformation similar to Hal's.

Prince Hal, wayward and pranksterish in two Shakespeare plays (Henry IV Part One and Part Two), becomes a solemn and wise leader of England in a third (Henry V). He also turns on his closest friend Falstaff for wise but heartless political reasons. We can sense that Hamlet could never do such a thing to Horatio. But then, Hamlet could never mature past his mother's fecklessness, either. For Shakespeare, the final metamorphosis to full adult authority carries an inescapable element of cold-heartedness. Hamlet escapes this fate by dying.

The remainder of Hamlet's parting speech is directed at "you that look pale and tremble…". This refers to the attendants at the Danish court on stage, but we can well imagine the actor playing Hamlet turning to the actual Elizabethan audience and including them. Hamlet abhors people who merely watch. Even as he himself becomes our foremost Man of Inaction, he calls us to action; specifically, he calls on us to resist the corruption of our souls, even at the price of death.

Horatio: "Never believe it,
I am more an antique Roman than a Dane.
Here's yet some liquor left."

(He attempts to drink from the poisoned cup. Hamlet
prevents him.)

Ham: "…If thou didst even hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story."

If there's any normal, decent person in the play we can identify with (beside the gravedigger), it's Horatio. So by speaking to him Hamlet is speaking to us - again. He requests that we live, even if life is something that remains unknowable ("Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is 't to leave betimes?") and even though death, which Hamlet terms "felicity," calls to us as a release from this "harsh world," this "prison."

And what reason does Hamlet give for Horatio, and by implication for the rest of us, to live? His reason is to "tell (his) story." Of course, by now Hamlet's story has become a cautionary tale, with the caution being against letting some blood oath or obligation tear you away from what should be a destiny of your own choosing.

Anyhoo, the sound of cannon fire (actually a military salute) announces the arrival of Fortinbras, who has been victorious against Poland, and who is on his way back to Norway. Hamlet in his dying breath foresees that "the' election lights on Fortinbras." Since everyone in the Danish royal line has been killed, an election will be needed to select the next king and Hamlet can sense that the aristocracy will choose Fortinbras as a now proven leader in war. Hamlet then dies.

(He dies.)

Hor: "Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!"

Fortinbras waltzes is, expecting to be received at court by a fellow royal, but coming instead upon a scene out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was actually a better movie than many realize. Anyway, Fortinbras says a bunch of stuff that really amounts to rolling the credits and the play ends. But one helpful final comment of Horatio's, as they're bearing all the bodies away and in the course of Horatio announcing how he'd like some time to fill everyone in on what really happened, is this:

Hor: "…So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on th' inventors' heads."

And so the curtain falls on Bardseye's View of Hamlet. Tomorrow we will return to our regularly scheduled programming - the bizarre, hallucinatory essays that jam Shakespeare and current events together in preposterous and irresistible ways, and by which your humble correspondent passes the free time of his evenings. Adieu for now.

Hamlet #26 - Venom, Do Thy Work

2006-02-25T20:12:00.000-08:00

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(Note: Bardseye is currently doing Hamlet, and taking a break from our usual hallucinatory Shakespearean commentary on current events. If you're entering the theater late, Hamlet: Act I, Scene I started twenty or so posts ago - just scroll down and catch up!).

* * * * * * *

Ham: "Come on, sir."

Laertes: "Come, my lord."

(They play. Hamlet scores a hit.)

Ham: "One."

Laertes: "No."

Ham: "Judgment."

Osric: A hit, a very palpable hit."

Hamlet and Laertes have begun their duel. It's not as fair a duel as could be hoped for. Laertes' foil is tipped with poison. The referee proved himself in an earlier scene to be as bendable as a straw in the wind. Hamlet seeks judgment, but who is to provide it?

It may seem flippant to place a mere game at the center of the final scene of our civilization's central tragedy (unless the Book of Job is our central tragedy). But fencing is a demonstration of honor, a civilized demonstration, whereby Laertes' wounded honor may be avenged without further taking of life. In a similar way, the game-like rules of war serve the civilized purpose of protecting civilians by declaring them out of bounds, and in Shakespeare's day the game-like rule of the divine right of kings protected society by placing the king's crimes beyond earthly justice, acting as a circuit breaker for an otherwise endless cycle of political violence. But in Hamlet, the rules aren't being followed:

Clau: "Stay, give me drink. Hamlet, this pearl is
thine." (He drinks, and throws a pearl in Hamlet's
cup.) "Here's to thy health. Give him the cup."

The pearl being also poisoned. The duel continues for a while, until the Queen offers Hamlet her handkerchief to wipe his brow, and then raises a goblet to drink to her son's "fortune."

Clau: "Gertrude, do not drink."

Que: "I will, my lord, I pray you pardon me." (She drinks.)

By now the fencing score is 2-0 in Hamlet's favor. Laertes whispers to the king:

Laer: "My lord, I'll hit him now."

Clau: "I do not think 't."

In other words, you numbskull, I doubt you're good enough. A nice moment of humor before Hamlet's lifeblood is mortally corrupted by a scratch:

Laer: "Have at you now!" (Laertes wounds Hamlet; then,
in scuffling, they change rapiers, and Hamlet wounds
Laertes.)

Clau: "Part them, they are incensed."

Ham: "Nay, come again."
Osric: "Look to the Queen there, ho!"

(The Queen falls.)

Laertes sees what has happened, and acknowledges, "I am justly killed with mine own treachery." Hamlet asks after his mother and the king, who knows that he has just caused his wife's death, says:

Clau: "She swoons to see them bleed."

Que: "No, no, the drink, the drink – O my dear Hamlet –
The drink, the drink! I am poisoned." (She dies.)

Well, that wasn't a good moment for Claudius. Hamlet, thinking clearly as always (asleep is to awake as awake is to Hamlet), orders the doors locked against Claudius' escape. It's worth noting at this point that Claudius, king or not, would seem to be fair game, since he has been caught red-handed trying to kill the prince of the realm. Moreover Hamlet has in his possession Claudius' royal instructions to have him, Hamlet, killed upon his arrival in England (the letters Hamlet stole from Rosecrantz and Guildenstern when sailing for England). So he could probably get away with murder, if this were that sort of play.

But what does Hamlet in is Laertes' foil, which was tipped with poison as a result of Claudius' success in corrupting Laertes:

Laer: "…Hamlet, thou art slain.
No med'cine in the world can do thee good;
In thee there is not half an hour's life.
The treacherous instrument is in thy hand,
Unbated and envenomed. The foul practice
Hath turned itself on me. Lo, here I lie,
Neer to rise again. Thy mother's poisoned.
I can no more. The King, the King's to blame."

Ham: "The point envenomed too? Then, venom,
To thy work." (He stabs the King.)

All: "Treason! Treason!"

Well, considering that Queen Elizabeth could well have been in the audience as the play was being performed, Shakespeare had better have the assembly cry "Treason!" Hamlet's act of revenge – if it still is revenge; the Ghost is long gone and by now seems hardly to be on Hamlet's mind – is committed only after Hamlet himself has one foot in the grave or, as Hamlet might see it, one foot tentatively liberated from the prison of Denmark. True, Hamlet then forces Claudius to drink the rest of the poison ("Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane, drink off this potion. Is thy union here? Follow my mother."), but with so many overlapping reasons, his act hardly seems less than natural.

To be continued….

Hamlet #25 - The Readiness is All

2006-02-24T17:45:00.000-08:00

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(Note: Bardseye is currently doing Hamlet, and taking a break from our usual hallucinatory Shakespearean commentary on current events. If you're entering the theater late, Hamlet: Act I, Scene I started twenty or so posts ago - just scroll down and catch up!).

Before veering off toward far greater things, Hamlet takes a moment to acknowledge that he was at fault in his confrontation with Laertes:

Ham: "But I am very sorry, good Horatio,
That to Laertes I forgot myself,
For by the image of my cause I see
The portraiture of his. I'll court his favors."

Shakespeare has established a very careful parallel between Hamlet and Laertes. Each has suffered the murder of a father and the ruin and death of a beloved woman – in fact the same woman for each of them. But where Hamlet is the victim of his own father's murder, he is the perpetrator of Laertes' loss. Clearly Shakespeare is not presenting a story of innocence avenged, for at least by Act V, Hamlet has as much guilty blood on his hands as Claudius. Indeed, if in Hamlet Shakespeare does not quite endorse the idea of original sin, he does endorse the idea of original guilt. And for proof, recall Hamlet's statement to Polonius, that if each person were to be treated as they deserve, "who shall scape whipping?"

The difference between Hamlet and Claudius is not that one should and the other should not escape whipping. The difference is that one has and the other has not succumbed to the corruption that Hamlet sees infecting all the world ("...fie, 'tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.")

There follows a comic exchange with a courtier named Osric, sent by Laertes to extend to Hamlet a challenge to a duel. Hamlet pokes the same sort of fun at Osric he once did at Polonius, changing his own opinion about the weather to test Osric's (weak) integrity in maintaining his opinion, just as he did with Polonius by musing over the shape of a cloud. Hamlet immediately agrees to the duel, and – with an odd sense of haste in the embrace of fate - the duel itself immediately follows.

With only three pages left to the play, and most of the dialogue tied up in sword selection and dueling etiquette and "O, I am slain!" (actually, no one says that), it is interesting to note what asides Shakespeare permits Hamlet to make with the time remaining. He has Hamlet comments to Horatio about Osric:

Ham: "…"tis a vice to know him. He hath much
land, and fertile. Let a beast be lord of beasts,
and his crib shall stand at the King's mess. "Tis
a chuff, but, as I say, spacious in the possession
of dirt."

Well, this description would probably have fit most of the nobility in Shakespeare's audience – the nobility being the only portion of his audience that mattered. So if Hamlet is being suicidal, Shakespeare is holding hands with him at the cliff's edge. A chuff, by the way, is a boor.

As the king, and Hamlet's unwanted fate, approach, he stiffens his resolve:

Ham: "There is a special providence in the fall
of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it
be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now,
yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no
man of aught he leaves knows, what is 't to leave
betimes?"

No man knows anything of what he leaves. The world we leave itself remains unknown to us. And so what is lost by leaving something we did not in the first place comprehend?

Clau: "Come, Hamlet, come and take this hand from me."

(The King puts Laertes' hand into Hamlet's)

Ham: (To Laertes)
"Give me your pardon, sir, I have done you wrong,
But pardon it as you are a gentleman,
This presence knows,
And you must needs have heard, how I am punished
With a sore distraction. What I have done
That might your nature, honor, and exception
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness.
Was 't Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet.
If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away,
And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.
Who does it, then? His madness. If 't be so,
Hamlet is of the faction that is wronged;
His madness is poor Hamlet's enemy.
Sir, in this audience
Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil
Free me so far in your most generous thoughts
That I have shot my arrow o'er the house
And hurt my brother."

"Hamlet is of the faction that is wronged? Oh, please. Again, Hamlet's case with Laertes is weak. At worst, he's busted and conjuring an insanity defense, even though he himself admitted to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that "I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw." But then R&G are now quite dead and unable to testify for the prosecution.

But that is at worst. At best, Hamlet truly regrets seeing Laertes hurt, even if he's not exactly bending his knee. After all, if the killer of Hamlet's father had stood before Hamlet, somewhere in Act I or II, and publicly admitted the act, called it madness and recanted its effects, we know Hamlet would have been satisfied. So when our uncorrupted Hamlet does precisely that to Laertes, he expects no less in return.

Laer: "I am satisfied in nature,
Whose motive in this case should stir me most
To my revenge. But in my terms of honor
I stand aloof."

But we know Laertes does not really mean this, since we saw Claudius ensnare him in his own corruption with an underhanded plot involving poisoned fencing foils and wine goblets. In parting from so compromised a world, Hamlet sees little to regret.

To be continued….

Hamlet #24 - A Divinity That Shapes...

2006-02-21T14:12:00.000-08:00

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(Note: Bardseye is currently doing Hamlet, and taking a break from our usual hallucinatory Shakespearean commentary on current events. If you're entering the theater late, Hamlet: Act I, Scene I started twenty or so posts ago - just scroll down and catch up!).

OK, before we left off (and please forgive Bardseye for a few days' absence, necessitated by work commitments), Hamlet and the gravediggers were yucking it up about Death. Next comes forth a funeral procession that is unwelcome to Hamlet in two ways; it contains Laertes, whose father Hamlet stabbed to death, and it is burying Ophelia, whose death was largely caused by Hamlet's abusive treatment. After Laertes jumps into the grave to profess his grief, Hamlet, possibly feeling upstaged, comes forward to compete in sorrow:

Ham: "What is he whose grief
Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow
Conjures the wandering stars and makes them stand
Like wonder wounded hearers. This is I
Hamlet the Dane."

Laer: "The devil take thy soul!"
………………
Ham: "I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers
Could not with all their quantity of love
Make up my sum. What will thou do for her?"

This last question is not rhetorical. Hamlet goes on to ask Laertes what he would do to show his grief, and states that he would do the same and more:

Ham: "Woo't drink up easel? Eat a crocodile?
I'll do 't. Dost come here to whine?
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
Be buried quick with her, and so will I…".

Easel is of course poison. This is perhaps not Hamlet's finest moment, but then he doesn't have a lot of cards to play against Laertes. Laertes didn’t kill Hamlet's father and sister, after all. But Shakespeare's ultimate hero is battling with unearthly foes, and it signifies not much if he sometimes comes up short against his earthly ones. The scene does point out that Hamlet is unwilling to back away from anything, not a personal destiny that leads to a heartless dead-end, and certainly not a confrontation with someone whose family he may have incidentally destroyed.

We proceed to the play's final scene, which Bardseye will nickname the gas chamber scene. It starts with Hamlet filling Horatio in on his kidnapping at sea. He was unable to sleep in his cabin, sensing something was amiss:

Ham: "Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well
When our deep plots do pall, and that should learn us
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will."

It's rare for Hamlet, and rarer for Shakespeare, to offer more than a passing hat-tip to religion - unless it becomes useful for a plot point. So it is worth noting the Bard's use of the word "divinity" here, even if his usage of it tends more toward "divination" or "destiny" than "deity." Anyhoo, Hamlet steals Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's sealed packet of royal instructions, and opens it to discover a command:

Ham: "…that on the supervise, no leisure bated,
No, not to stay the grinding of the ax,
My head should be struck off."

When Horatio expresses wonder at this, Hamlet hands him the letter itself. But if Hamlet now has the letter, what instructions were R&G left to deliver in England?:

Ham: "…I sat me down,
Devised a new commission, wrote it fair
………………..Wilt thou know
Th' effect of what I wrote?"

Hor: "Ay, my good lord."

Ham: "…that on the view and knowing of these contents
He should those bearers put to sudden death
Not shriving time allowed."

Quite a joke to play on those two Jewishly-named buffoons, huh? I'm sure the Elizbethan audience laughed. Neither Shakespeare nor Hamlet is showing his best side here, since, as bardseye viewers will recall, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had no idea that the letters they were carrying contained a death sentence for Hamlet. In Hamlet's honor-driven universe, spying behind an arras or obeying a king's command to report on the mental state of the prince are hanging offenses. Or rather, they are hardly offenses at all, for someone who has become practically heedless of the earthly playing field, and more focused on a farther one.

To be continued…

Hamlet #23 - Alas, Poor Yorick!

2006-02-16T17:33:00.000-08:00

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(Note: Bardseye is currently doing Hamlet, and taking a break from our usual hallucinatory Shakespearean commentary on current events. If you're entering the theater late, Hamlet: Act I, Scene I started twenty or so posts ago - just scroll down and catch up!).

Yet more support for the idea that in this play suicide was much on Shakespeare's mind (happily, he didn't go through with it) comes from the gravediggers' comic chat that opens Act V. The two men, called not gravediggers but clowns in the script, are talking about some woman who drowned, and whether the surrounding circumstances justify her being buried in hallowed ground:

1st Clo: "Give me leave. Here lies the water, good.
Here stands the man; good. If the man go to the water
and drown himself, it is, will he, nill he, he goes,
mark you that. But if the water come to him and
drown him, he drowns not himself. Argal, he that is
not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life."

In the end the second clown reaches this conclusion:

2nd Clo: "If this had not been a gentlewoman, she
should have been buried out of Christian burial."

The two clowns proceed to trade a series of groan-worthy puns that Bardseye will spare the reader. Hamlet, who is returning from his pirate adventure, and Horatio, who is accompanying him (recall those letters of Hamlet's), happen by. Since they have both been away from the court they are unaware of Ophelia's death. Shakespeare thinks having Hamlet chance across her grave as its being dug is a cute way of informing him. As Hamlet watches, one gravedigger throws a skull up out of the ground (cemeteries were recycled, or rather their contents were, in Merry Olde England):

Ham: "That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once…".

Hamlet gets into a conversation with the first gravedigger, who turns out to be infuriating in his literal-mindedness when Hamlet asks who he's digging the grave for:

Ham: "What man dost thou dig it for?"

1st Clo: "For no man, sir."

Ham: "What woman, then?"

1st Clo: "For none, neither."

Ham: "Who is to be buried in 't?"

1st Clo: "One that was a woman, sir, but, rest her
soul, she's dead."

Shakespeare would have been right at home in Vaudeville, and never more so than in Hamlet. What follows next is Hamlet's famous skull speech, addressed to a skull that the gravedigger has dug up. Being experienced in his trade, the gravedigger is able to identify the skull as that of Yorick, a court jester in Hamlet's youth:

Ham: "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him Horatio, a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me
on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorred in
my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung the
lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be
your gibes now? You gambols, your songs. Your flashes
of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?
Not one now, to mock your own grinning? Quite chap-
fallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber and tell her,
let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come.
make her laugh at that…".

That last part about paint means to prevaricate, or put on makeup as a way of putting up excuses. "To this favor" means that his lady, as every lady, will however vain come at last to resemble Yorick. Beyond that, Hamlet basically says the same thing he said about the first skull. Bardseye can well see how thrilling an act of stagecraft it would've been to lift a (hopefully fake) skull up before an Elizabethan audience and address it. What tends to go unnoticed in this is how un-Christian Hamlet's musings are. The possibility that Yorick's eternal soul has been redeemed by his faith and virtue in life, rendering his skull an unremarkable relic, falls outside the frame.

Being Jewish, Bardseye probably shouldn't care. In Judaism, living a moral life and maintaining a relationship with G-d through fidelity to the Torah is what is expected. In Judaism, death itself falls outside the frame. But Hamlet hardly means this either. While Hamlet is able to recognize G-d for the purpose of registering his very legitimate complaints, he is both too proud and too separated from G-d (by his murderous intentions) to look to Him for any comfort or consolation.

But after all, Hamlet isn't seeking consolation; he's seeking revenge.

To be continued….

Hamlet #22 - Garlands Did She Make

2006-02-15T21:17:00.000-08:00

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(Note: Bardseye is currently doing Hamlet, and taking a break from our usual hallucinatory Shakespearean commentary on current events. If you're entering the theater late, Hamlet: Act I, Scene I started fifteen posts ago - just scroll down and catch up!).

* * * * * * * *

Laertes is no sooner rumored to be arriving in a vengeful mood from France than he arrives in a vengeful mood from France. Directing his vengeful mood first at Claudius, he says:

Lae: "How came he dead? I'll be not juggled with.
To hell, allegiance! Vows, to the blackest devil!
Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit!"

In other words, Laertes, finding himself suddenly dealt a hand similar to Hamlet's, with a dead unavenged father, hardly hesitates to proclaim his murderous intent, if only someone would tell him who to kill. Claudius assures Laertes that he himself is "guiltless," but before he can tell him who is guilty, Shakespeare like a good workaday dramatist has Ophelia step in:

Oph: (sings):
"They bore him barefaced on the bier,
Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny,
And in his grave rained many a tear -,"

OK, she's still the same barrel of laughs she was the last time we looked in on her. Laertes of course is appalled, seeing the loss not only of his father but also of his sister's mind. He's certainly been primed to receive Claudius' counsel. But again, Shakespeare instead has Claudius only invites Laertes to return later to hear Claudius' version of events. Why? Basically, Shakespeare has in mind a major plot shift from the royal court to the traveling Hamlet, and he wants to build in a bit of suspense over on the court side of the story.

We are taken, then, to a room where Horatio is approached by two sailors who have a message for him from Hamlet. Hamlet writes:

Ham: "…ere we were two days old at sea, a pirate
of very warlike appointment gave us chase. Finding
ourselves too slow of sail, we put on a compelled
valor, and in the grapple I boarded them. On the
instant they got clear of our ship, so I alone became
their prisoner. They have dealt with me like thieves
of mercy, but they knew what they did: I am to do
a good turn for them. Let the King have the letters
I have sent, and repair thou to me with as much
speed as thou wouldst fly death. I have words to
speak in thine ear will make thee dumb….Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern hold their course for England. Of
them I have much to tell thee."

OK, so now we have a pirate story added to the mix, one in which Hamlet is separated from his two tour guides, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who were carrying a letter that instructed its recipient in England to kill Hamlet. Hamlet instead needs, apparently, to be ransomed, and seems to be asking his step-dad, whom he intends to kill, to come through for him. A full explanation for this, of course, will have to wait. We certainly have to give Shakespeare full marks for building suspense in this instance.

The Bard returns us to Laertes and the King, and this exchange might be the only place in Hamlet that seems to have more words than necessary, so Bardseye will summarize about two pages of dialogue. Reading Shakespeare So You Don't Have To! Claudius persuades Laertes to kill Hamlet. The king suggests that Laertes challenge Hamlet to a fencing match, the implication to be given Hamlet being that this is to assuage Laertes' honor. In fact, Claudius urges Laertes to tip his foil with poison so that any scratch upon Hamlet will kill him.

Lae: "I will do 't,
And for that purpose I'll anoint my sword."

And so does Laertes turn out to be his overly-sneaky father's overly-sneaky son. Just for kicks and giggles, Claudius suggests they add a poisoned refreshment for Hamlet to drink during a break. With handshakes all around, Laertes and Claudius are interrupted by Gertrude, announcing that Laertes' sister has been found drowned:

Que: "There is a willow grows askant the brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.
Thereon the pendent boughs her crownet weeds
Clamb'ring to hang, and envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaidlike awhile they bore her up,
Which time she changed snatches of old lauds,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and endued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death."

To be continued….

Hamlet #21 - Antiquity Forgot

2006-02-15T08:24:00.000-08:00

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(Note: Bardseye is currently doing Hamlet, and taking a break from our usual hallucinatory Shakespearean commentary on current events. If you're entering the theater late, Hamlet: Act I, Scene I started fifteen posts ago - just scroll down and catch up!).

Readers who find Shakespeare obscure will point to Ophelia's weirdness in Act IV scene 5 to support their position. She is indeed a bundle of non sequitors and odd snatches of poetry:

Oph: (sings):
"Young men will do 't, if they come to 't;
By Cock, they are to blame.
Quoth she, 'Before you tumbled me,
You promised me to wed.'"

Come to think of it, her language is not at all obscure. More like pornographic. And it answers as well the question of whether she slept with Hamlet. You bet she did. But as always with Shakespearean bawdiness, along with the frank pleasure the Bard takes in sensuality and erotic humor, a higher moral purpose is being served. Ophelia's excessively open sexuality has led to dire consequences. Basically, she bet on the wrong horse, a horse with too ponderous a rider (the Ghost). Had she not invested so much of herself in her love for Hamlet, she would not have been dragged down with him into madness.

Oph: "We must be patient, but I cannot choose
but weep to think they would lay him i' the cold
ground. My brother shall know if it. And so I
thank you for your good counsel. Come my coach!
Good night, ladies…".

Who's that being laid in the ground? Oh, yeah, her father, killed somewhat mistakenly by Hamlet in a tragic quail-hunting accident in southern Texas. Here we see shades not only of recent shooting accidents by vice presidents, but also of Romeo's murder of Tybalt, Juliet's cousin, which drove Juliet not to madness but to an act of desperation with similar results. When Ophelia says (to the King and Queen) that her brother shall know of it, she means Laertes at school will learn of the murder and return seeking revenge, possibly on the whole benighted royal family, which is beginning to look like the Kennedys or the Clintons in the sense of what happens to people who get too close to it.

Anyhoo, Ophelia wanders off, and Claudius next mentions that Laertes has indeed learned of his father's murder and "in secret comes from France." We may ask just how secret is a secret meant to be kept from Claudius when Claudius himself announces it. But that is Shakespeare's Kafkaesque point. Anti-NSA surveillance Bardseye readers would be justified in seeing an unmistakable subtext in Hamlet that is critical of excessive surveillance. (Bardseye himself applauds the NSA, America's far more competent version of Polonius, which has kept us free from attack for nearly four years).

Shouldn't we be getting back to Hamlet?

Here comes a messenger, with a fascinating message about Laertes:

"Mes: "Save yourself, my lord!
The ocean, overpeering of his list,
Eats not the flats with more impetuous haste
Than young Laertes, in a riotous head,
O'erbears your officers. The rabble call him lord,
And, as the world were now but to begin,
Antiquity forgot, custom not known,
The ratifiers and props of every word,
They cry, 'Choose we! Laertes shall be king!'
Caps, hands, and tongues applaud it to the clouds,
'Laertes shall be king, Laertes king!'"

Bardseye will suggest that in this intellectually provocative passage Shakespeare is in a sense anticipating democracy and showing what (little) he thinks of it. The rabble seek to choose their own leader. It is a time of crisis, with Norway threatening and Denmark's own King distracted. So the people would seem to have some sense.

But Shakespeare's comment – it seems more his than the messenger's – is "Antiquity forgot, custom not known." In other words, how stable can any popular accession be if that popularity may at any moment be withdrawn? Of course, Shakespeare hadn't heard of limited terms of office, re-election, loyal opposition, term limits, constitutional limits on executive power, and other stuff like that. So Bardseye will cut him some slack.

To be continued…..

Hamlet #20 - My Thoughts be Bloody!

2006-02-14T17:29:00.000-08:00

Hamlet #19 - The Distracted Multitude

2006-02-13T17:41:00.000-08:00

Hamlet #18 - The Worser Part of It

2006-02-12T16:57:00.000-08:00

Hamlet #17 - How Now, A Rat?

2006-02-11T11:49:00.000-08:00

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(Note: Bardseye is currently doing Hamlet, and taking a break from our usual hallucinatory Shakespearean commentary on current events. If you're entering the theater late, Hamlet: Act I, Scene I started fifteen posts ago - just scroll down and catch up!).

Ham: "Now, Mother, what's the matter?"

Que: "Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended."

Ham: "Mother, you have my father much offended."

Que: "Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue."

Ham: "Go, go , you question with a wicked tongue."

Right from the start, Gertrude attempts to require Hamlet to recognize Claudius as his father. Hamlet, emboldened perhaps by desperation, and by his outrage over her quick remarriage, is just as assertive. Seeing that he's not buying what she's selling, she switches tactics:

Que: "Have you forgot me?"

Ham: "......................No, by the rood, not so;
You are the Queen, your husband's brother's wife,
And – would it were not so! – you are my mother."

Que: "Nay, then, I'll set those to you that can speak."

Ham: "Come, come, and sit you down; you shall not budge
You go not till I set you up a glass
Where you may see the inmost part of you."

Que: "What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me? Help, ho!"

Pol (behind the arras): "What ho! Help!"

Ham (drawing): "How now, a rat? Dead for a ducat, dead!"

(He thrusts his rapier through the arras).

Hamlet has apparently grabbed his mother in order to force her to confront herself. Many productions of the play will have Hamlet holding a mirror to Gertrude's face. This request that she look at herself so frightens Gertrude that she accuses Hamlet of murderous intent, and in a sense he does seek to murder the wayward and deluded self-image she must have of herself. And just as Gertrude cries out not to be shown to herself, Polonius, hearing but not seeing, calls for help.

Hamlet thinks – to the extent he is thinking at all – that it must be Claudius behind the arras. And he would be happy to kill Claudius when in the squalid act of spying on his step-son, as he proves by stabbing whatever "rat" it is behind the Curtain #1.

Time and again in Hamlet, huge repercussions depend on strokes of bad luck or, nobility or not, low class family behavior. Hamlet's life is turned around by a murder echoing down from the prior generation. His mother's slovenly remarriage – about which he is also powerless - shames him. And not to say that he had it coming, but what business did Polonius have listening in on his chat with his mother?

Pol: "I am slain!"

Que: "O me, what hast thou done?"

Ham: "Nay, I know not. Is it the King?"

Well, ok, maybe Hamlet is not as crazy as he's acting. After all, what better way – indeed what only way – to kill the king and also retain your own freedom and right to the succession than by killing him by accident? But alas, when Hamlet uncovers the arras, he sees Polonius:

Ham: "Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!
I took thee for thy better…".

"Thy better" means your boss, Claudius.

Bleeding corpse or not, Hamlet would like to complete his conversation with his mother. And in an exchange that would be familiar (except for the corpse on the floor) to any of the tens of millions of modern families that have had to accommodate a step-parent, he begins taunting her with a comparison of her first husband's virtues and her second husband's vices:

Ham: "This was your husband. Look you now what follows;
Here is your husband, like a mildewed ear,
Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes?"

Hamlet finally starts to get to her. "Hamlet," she cries, "speak no more. Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul…". But just as he is on the verge of persuading her to foreswear her marriage, the Ghost enters, or Hamlet believes he does, and Hamlet begins speaking to him:

Ham: "A king of shreds and patches, -
Save me, and hover o'er me with your wings,
You heavenly guards! What would your gracious figure?"

Que: "Alas, he's mad!"

We have to ask what the Ghost can be thinking, since his appearance makes Hamlet look like a loon in front of his mother, weakening his ability to persuade her of what the Ghost would like to see her persuaded:

Ghost: "…This visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose
But look, amazement on thy mother sits,
O, step between her and her fighting soul…".

Well, before Hamlet can do that, he and his mother have the usual "Can't you see it?" and "No I can't" exchange common to ghost stories, and which Shakespeare copies even from himself in Macbeth:

Ham: "How is it with you, lady?"
Que: "Alas, how is 't with you,
That you do bend your eye on vacancy,
And with th' incorporal air do hold discourse?"

To be continued…

Hamlet #16 - My Offense is Rank

2006-02-10T17:54:00.000-08:00

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(Note: Bardseye is currently doing Hamlet, and taking a break from our usual hallucinatory Shakespearean commentary on current events. If you're entering the theater late, Hamlet: Act I, Scene I started twelve posts ago - just scroll down and catch up!).

Hamlet, agitated by fresh evidence of his uncle's guilt, and planning to have it out with his mother for jumping into holy bedlock with the guy, says, "Let me be cruel, not unnatural." Bardseye suggests Shakespeare may be allowing Hamlet to plagiarize Brutus in Julius Caesar, who when planning Caesar's assassination said, "Let's be sacrificers but not butchers." Similar, non? Anyhoo, before Shakespeare gives us the ultimate Freudian mother/son confrontation, he shows us Claudius in his office, himself agitated after the Players' play:

Clau: "I like him not, nor stands it safe with us
To let his madness range. Therefore prepare you,
I your commission will forthwith dispatch,
And he to England shall along with you…"

Thus does Claudius plan to rid himself of this meddlesome nephew by sending him to England in the company of his two boyhood chums, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Shakespeare paints these two characters as openly playing both sides, admitting to Hamlet that his uncle is using them as spies, and then fulfilling in a playfully sinister, Kafkaesque fashion their spying obligations when with Uncle Claudius.

Meanwhile Polonius, never happier than when he is hiding behind an arras – the equivalent of a folding screen (or byoobu, in Japanese, but I digress), arrives to tell the King that:

Pol: "…he's going to his mother's closet,
Behind the arras I'll convey myself
To hear the process…".

Polonius leaves and the King, alone on stage and sensing without knowing (just as Hamlet lacks the final proof that he desperately desires) that his murder of the former king is behind all that is happening, unburdens himself:

Clau: "O, my offense is rank! It smells to heaven,
It hath the primal eldest curse upon 't,
A brother's murder. Pray can I not
Though inclination be as sharp as will;
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent,
And like a man to double business bound
I stand in pause where I shall first begin,"

The double business includes his self preservation, which tends in one direction, and the impulse to atone for his guilt, which tends in another. Shakespeare, perhaps writing under a deadline, then allows Claudius to rip off Lady Macbeth:

Clau: "…What if this cursed hand
Were thicker than itself with brother's blood,
Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens
To wash it white as snow?"

Claudius then acknowledged that he can not seek forgiveness for the murder so long as he is "still possessed of those effects for which I did the murder," chief among them his crown and his Queen. He sees clearly his "wretched state," summarized in the cool title of a Clint Eastwood movie - "The Unforgiven."

Ah, but our scriptwriter has inserted a clever twist as the observed of all observers (Ophelia's phrase for Hamlet, you'll recall) reveals himself to be this time not observed but observing. Hamlet emerges from the shadows ('a means he; scanned means considered):

Ham: "Now might I do it pat, now 'a is a-praying,
And now I'll do 't. (He draws his sword.) And so 'a
Goes to heaven,
And so I am revenged. That would be scanned;
A villain kills my father, and for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge,
'A took my father grossly, full of bread,
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May…".

In other words, Hamlet doesn't want to kill Claudius right after he has cleansed his soul of his crime, since this may send him to heaven. Hamlet would prefer to kill Claudius "when he is drunk, asleep or in his rage, or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed."

Yes, to our modern ears, Hamlet is beginning to give in to his own stereotype; indecisive, voting for murder before voting against it, or like Dr. Evil, leaving Austin Powers dangling above hungry sharks instead of just shooting him.

But if all Hamlet feels he has left is the manner in which he's going to kill Claudius, he might as well, as is said of another king, in this case Burger King, have it his way.

Hamlet #15 - Very Like a Whale

2006-02-08T17:37:00.000-08:00

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(Note: Bardseye is currently doing Hamlet, and taking a break from our usual hallucinatory Shakespearean commentary on current events. If you're entering the theater late, Hamlet: Act I, Scene I started twelve posts ago - just scroll down and catch up!).

Oph: "The King rises."

Ham: "What, frighted with false fire?"

Queen: "How fares my lord?"

Pol: "Give o'er the play."

(Exit all but Hamlet and Horatio)
………………………….
Ham: "O good Horatio. I'll take the ghost's word
for a thousand pound. Didst perceive?"

Hor: "Very well, my lord."

The king, Claudius, has arisen in the middle of the play, just as the Players were reenacting the murder of a king in the manner described by Hamlet Sr.'s Ghost. This is now enough evidence to persuade Hamlet of his uncle's guilt. And how does Hamlet react?

Ham: "Aha! Come, some music! Come, the recorders:
'For if the King like not the comedy,
Why they, belike, he likes it not perdy.'"
Come, some music."

Guild: "Good my lord, vouchsafe me a word with you."

Ham: "Sir, a whole history."Guild: "The King, sir –"

Ham: "Ay, sir, what of him?"

Hamlet is giddy and seemingly out of control. Underneath, we sense a molten outrage at war with a great, expansive and generous nature. An nature he recognizes that he will have to abandon. Guildenstern has been sent by the Queen with a message for this whirling Hamlet:

Guild: "Good my lord, put your discourse into
some frame and start not so wildly…"

Ham: "I am tame, sir. Pronounce."Guild: "The Queen….hath sent me to you."

Ham: "You are welcome."Guild: "Nay, good my lord….If it shall please you
To make me a wholesome answer, I will do your
Mother's commandment….".

Ham: "Sir, I cannot."

Ros: "What, my lord?"

Ham: "Make you a wholesome answer, my wit's
diseased…".

When Guildenstern persists in his request that Hamlet reveal the cause of his "distemper," Hamlet asks Guildenstern to play a recorder. Guildenstern refuses, saying he lacks the skill, prompting this:

Ham: "You would play upon me, you would seem
to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart
of my mystery, you would sound me from my
lowest notes to the top of my compass, and there
is much music, much excellent music, in this little
organ…".

Presumably because Hamlet has not been brought to the Queen fast enough, Polonius shows up to repeat the request. Of course, Polonius is not one of Hamlet's favorite people:

Ham: "Do you see yonder cloud that almost in the
shape of a camel?"

Pol: "By the Mass and 'tis, like a camel indeed."

Ham: "Methinks it is like a weasel."

Pol: "It is backed like a weasel."

Ham: "Or like a whale."

Pol: "Very like a whale."

Ham: "Then I will come to my mother by and by…".

Exasperated, everyone leaves except Hamlet and, hopefully, the audience in the Globe Theater. It is a tribute to English society around the years 1600 that they responded, or be willing to try to respond, to a play of such strangeness, psychology and depth. While we moderns may rightfully commend ourselves for our advances in science, technology and equal rights, it's hard to resist the conclusion that we have moved backwards in the seriousness and adult nature of our arts. Whoops! A digression.

Anyhoo, Mom's angry, though it is fair to ask why. All Hamlet appears guilty of is excessive high spirits during a play. Queen Gertrude does not know that it was Hamlet who inserted the lines that preyed on the King's guilty conscience – if that even can be considered a fault, since an innocent Claudius's conscience would not have been preyed upon. But soft, for Hamlet is about to round off this hallucinatory scene (you will need to know that Nero killed his mother Agrippina) with a soliloquy:

Ham: ""Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on. Soft, now to my mother,
O heart, lose not thy nature! Let not ever
The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom.
Let me be cruel, not unnatural;
I will speak daggers to her, but use none.
My tongue and soul in this be hypocrites…".

To be continued…..

Hamlet #14 - Doth Protest Too Much

2006-02-06T17:21:00.000-08:00

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(Note: Bardseye is currently doing Hamlet, and taking a break from our usual hallucinatory Shakespearean commentary on current events. If you're entering the theater late, Hamlet: Act I, Scene I started twelve posts ago - just scroll down and catch up!).

* * * * * * * * *

Queen: "Come hither, my dear Hamlet, sit by me."

Hamlet: "No, good mother, here's metal more attractive."

Pol (to the King): "O, ho, do you mark that?"

Ham: "Lady, shall I sit in your lap?"

(Lying down at Ophelia's feet).

Oph: "No, my lord."

Ham: "I mean, my head upon your lap?"

Oph: "Ay, my lord."

Ham: "Do you think I meant country matters?"

"Country matters" was an Elizabethan expression for sex. Bardseye would blush far too painfully to disclose the exact etymology, or word history, of this phrase. It's just too filthy. Email me or leave an inquiring comment and I'll tell you. But, you know, not in front of the kids.

Oph: "I think nothing, my lord."

Ham: "There's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs."

Oph: "What is, my lord?"

Ham: "Nothing."

Oph: "You are merry, my lord."

Ham: "Who, I?"

Oph: "Ay, my lord."

Ham: "O God, your only jig maker. What should a
man do but be merry? For look you how cheerfully
my mother looks, and my father died within 's two
hours."

Whoops! Is Hamlet becoming one of those guys who brings up the details of his last doctor's visit, or worse yet the resentment he feels towards his mother, when on a date? The short answer is yes. The slightly longer answer is that Shakespeare is showing how Hamlet's family drama is corroding his relationship with Ophelia, and his ability to trust and respect women generally.

The dirty jokes Hamlet tells are undeniably funny, but Shakespeare connects them to his increasing mania and desperation. Hamlet now feels tightening around him the cursed destiny imposed by his father's Ghost, even as his capacity for personal happiness is blighted by the low conduct of his mother. But something too much of Bardseye in this:

The trumpets sound…..

Enter a King and a Queen, the Queen embracing him
and he her. …He lies him down upon a bank of flowers.
……. Anon comes in another man, takes off his crown,
kisses it, pours poison in the sleeper's ears….. The Queen
returns, finds the King dead…..The poisoner woos the
Queen with gifts…..in the end she accepts love."
…………………..

Obviously, the players are re-enacting the murder of Hamlet Senior as alleged by the Ghost, somewhat in the way a cable TV station reenacted the Michael Jackson trial each evening as it was occurring. Of course, we recall that Hamlet added lines, not directions for a pantomime, in order to catch the conscience of the King. In Kenneth Branagh's exemplary movie version of Hamlet, he has those lines performed by Charlton Heston, acclaimed movie star and former president of the National Rifle Association.

Heston is portraying the 1st Player, who is portraying a Player King, whose inserted lines portray King Claudius' murder (not that the 1st Player knows this). The majority of Heston's character's speech is that of a dying Player King persuading his Queen to love again after his death. Shakespeare mimics a more austere form of classical poetry for this speech. This style is done half tongue-in-cheek, but at the same time includes some of Shakespeare's most compelling verse (aye means ever):

Pl. King: "The world is not for aye, nor 'tis not strange
That even our loves should with our fortunes change;
For 'tis a question left us yet to prove,
Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love.
……………………..
But, orderly to end where I begun,
Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own,
So think thou wilt no second husband wed,
But die thy thoughts when thy first lord is dead."

The Player Queen protests her undying loyalty to her dying husband, of course, before leaving him to enjoy – wait for it – a nap. In the audience (the one on stage), Hamlet turns to his mother:

Ham: "Madam, how like you this play?

Queen: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."

Ham: "O, but she'll keep her word!"

Hamlet goes on to explain the action in detail, impressing Ophelia with his enthusiasm fo the theater:

Oph: "You are keen, my lord, you are keen."

Ham: "It would cost you a groaning to take off
mine edge."

Bardseye finds himself yet again blushing to acknowledge that Hamlet's comment is exactly as dirty as it sounds. Yes, it is true that Bardseye could skip the dirty bits and spare himself and his readers a good deal of blushing in our shared stroll through Hamlet.

But where would the fun be in that?

To be continued…..

Hamlet #13 - Speak the Speech

2006-02-03T17:42:00.000-08:00

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(Note: Bardseye is currently doing Hamlet, and taking a break from our usual hallucinatory Shakespearean commentary on current events. If you're entering the theater late, Hamlet: Act I, Scene I started ten posts ago - just scroll down and catch up!).

* * * * * * * * * *

Oph: "O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!
………………………….
The glass of fashion and the mold of form,
The observed of all observers, quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched
That sucked the honey of his music vows
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason
Like sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh…".

Shakespeare needs to impress on the audience that Hamlet wasn't always, to use his own words, "mad north-north-west." Ophelia is in the best position to do this, since she knew him so well, and perhaps intimately, before his circumstances began to so weigh on him.

We need next to recall that the king and Polonius, in the Bard's rather Kafkaesque Denmark, were watching Hamlet and Ophelia's exchange. The king emerges, perhaps with ruffled dignity, from his hiding place:

Clau: "………There's something in his soul,
O'er which his melancholy sits on brood,
And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose
Will be some danger; which for to prevent,
I have in quick determination
Thus set it down, he shall with speed to England
For the demand of our neglected tribute…".

Pol: "It shall do well…".

And so our detective story becomes a double one, as Claudius, seeing volatility and sensing danger from Hamlet (even if he cannot know the cause) begins to self-protectively distance himself from him.

We are just about midway through the play, and Shakespeare may have concluded that he has taxed his audience quite enough, and that they, and we, need a break. And so he gives us a big dose of the other Hamlet, the large-hearted and generous one, here eagerly extending his hospitality, and along with it a makeshift acting lesson, to the players, those visitors to the court who by their occupation can temporarily escape their identities as Hamlet can only dream of:

Ham: "Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced
it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it,
as many of our players do, I had as life the town crier
spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with
your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent,
tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion,
you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give
it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a
robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters,
to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who
for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable
dumb shows and noise…".

The groundlings were the commoners ushered into a portion of the Globe Theater that lacked chairs. To this day the English working class (the very concept of class, as well, being English) enjoy watching soccer, which they misname football, while standing. Bardseye assumes they have internalized the mistreatment of their ancestors at the Globe. One can imagine the original groundlings' "robustious" response to being directly insulted by Hamlet as "capable of nothing but dumb-shows and noise."

1st Player: "I warrant your honor."

Ham: "Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion
be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the
action, with this special observance; that you overstep not
the modesty of nature…".

He goes on like this basically forever, interrupted only when audience for the Players' play, and our play-within-a-play, begin showing up. Horatio is among them. Aching for friendship, Hamlet takes him aside:

Ham: "Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice
And could of men distinguish her election,
Sh' hath sealed thee for herself, for thou hast been
As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing,
A man that Fortune's buffets and reward
Hast ta'en with equal thanks; and blest are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well commeddled
That they are not a pipe to Fortune's finger
To sound what stop she pleases. Give me that man
Who is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee. – Something too much of this. –"

Even Hamlet knows he has gone a bit overboard, but he is starving for honest company, which every other character in the play has in one way or another fallen short of providing him. He goes on to confide in Horatio that he has inserted lines in the play which mimic the murder, or alleged murder, of which the Ghost described being the victim. Hamlet wants Horatio to be an unbiased arbitrator in observing Claudius' reaction when this scene is played, before he will regard the case against Claudius as sufficient to act upon.

To be continued….

Hamlet #12 - Get Thee to a Nunnery

2006-02-02T20:13:00.000-08:00

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(Note: Bardseye is currently doing Hamlet, and taking a break from our usual hallucinatory Shakespearean commentary on current events. If you're entering the theater late, Hamlet: Act I, Scene I started ten posts ago - just scroll down and catch up!).

* * * * * * * * *

Hamlet has just finished expressing in timeless prose his eloquent argument in favor of, well, despair. If we choose to be, rather than not to be, we will only (to quote Emperor Hirohito) endure the unendurable, an dour motive is only a sense of dread over the undiscovered country of death. This dread puzzles the will as the native hue of our (well, his, Hamlet's) resolve is sicklied o'er by the pale cast of thought – specifically the thought that if he does what he would do - kill the king - he will die for it.

Hamlet then turns to Ophelia with the most gracious comment a man might make to a woman: In thy orisons – in your prayers - be all sins remembered.

Oph: "Good my lord,
How does your honor for this many a day?"

Ham: "I humbly thank you, well, well, well."

Oph: My lord, I have remembrances of yours,
That I have longed long to redeliver.
I pray you, now receive them."

(She offers tokens).

Ham: "No, not I, I never gave you aught."

Oph: "My honored lord, you know right well you did,
And with them words of so sweet breath composed
As made the things more rich. Their perfume lost,
Take these again, for to the noble mind
Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.
There, my lord."

How many million breakups could have used language of this grace and dignity when it came time to return - their perfume lost - rings, letters, compromising photos? Exactly what unkindness Hamlet visited on Ophelia is unclear, aside from his disheveled, wordless encounter with her described in Act II, scene 1. We could pass off this lack of motive for her returning his gifts by concluding that she's just one of those girls who won't cut a guy a little slack. But given all the heavy-handed influence landing on her head from her father and the King himself, it seems more likely that she's been reduced to doing their bidding. You can almost see the strings. And so can Hamlet:

Ham: "Ha, ha! Are you honest?"

Oph: "My lord?"

Hamlet proceeds to express his opinion that beauty will transform a woman's honesty into "a bawd" (a compromised woman), but that honesty will rarely transform a woman's beauty into "his likeness," the likeness of honesty. He then says:

Ham: "…I did love you once."

Oph: "Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so."

Ham: "You should not have believed me, for virtue
cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish
of it."

Our old stock means our fallen, sinful human condition, that virtue can only partially graft (the old meaning of inoculate) itself onto. This entire heartbreaking scene reads to Bardseye like a photographic negative of a love scene from Romeo and Juliet.

Ham: "I loved you not."

Oph: "I was the more deceived."

Ham: "Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou
be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent
honest, but yet I could accuse myself of such
things that it were better my mother had not borne
me; I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with
more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to
put them in, imagination to give them shape, or
time to act them in. What should such fellows as
I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are
arrant knaves all, believe none of us. Go thy ways
to a nunnery..."

Ophelia does not say, as she might, why are you telling me all this, if you just told me that you never loved me? And we are left to wonder why a man so bent on honesty would apparently lie to his recent ex-girlfriend. But Hamlet responds honestly only to those who are themselves honest, and so far that short list includes only Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (and even those last two were merely honest about being dishonest). In one sense, he is acting as any jilted young man would act, humiliated by the return of his love letters. But Hamlet draws broader conclusions from the situation, seeing an inevitable marbling of dishonesty in the prime sirloin of all human conduct (great image, bardseye!); his own, Ophelia's and certainly Polonius':

Ham: "Where's your father?"

Oph: "At home, my lord."

Ham: "Let the doors be shut upon him, that he
may play the fool nowhere but in 's own house.
Farewell."

Hamlet next rails against marriage in general, again advising Ophelia to enter a nunnery, and thereby end the eternal recurrence of human heartbreak which is all Hamlet can make of the future:

Ham: "I say we will have no more marriage.
Those that are married already - all but one -
shall live...".

Hamlet seems to mean Claudius as the "one" that shall not live. But in fact, things will work out a bit differently.

To be continued...

Hamlet #11 - To Be, or Not to Be

2006-02-01T18:33:00.000-08:00

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(Note: Bardseye is currently doing Hamlet, and taking a break from our usual hallucinatory Shakespearean commentary on current events. If you're entering the theater late, Hamlet: Act I, Scene I started eight posts ago - just scroll down and catch up!).

* * * * * * * * * *

Act Three opens with Claudius interrogating Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the two boyhood or college friends of Hamlet's. R&G have already confessed to Hamlet that they were sent for by Claudius,. This didn't prevent our large-hearted if inwardly despairing hero from confiding in them, even though he must've known the two would later report to the king:

Clau: "And can you by no drift of conference
Get from him why he puts on this confusion…"

Ros: "He does confess he feels himself distracted,
But from what cause 'a will by no means speak."
………………………………
Queen: "Did you assay him to any pastime?"

Ros: "Madam, it so fell out that certain players
We o'erraught on the way. Of these we told him.
And there did seem in him a kind of joy
To hear of it…".

Like parents learning that their trench coat-wearing adolescent son has taken an interest in model rocketry, the King and Queen are pleased to see Hamlet responding to the theater. But Claudius can't stop spying, and asks Ophelia to stay and everyone else to leave so that he can spy on Hamlet and his former girlfriend. (The idea of permitting Ophelia to say she didn't mean it and take him back, though, doesn't seem to occur to anyone):

Queen: "And for your part, Ophelia, I do wish
That your good beauties be the happy cause
Of Hamlet's wildness. So shall I hope your virtues
Will bring him to his wonted ways again."

Oph: "Madam, I wish it may."

(And wonted here means usual). Before leaving, Polonius, preferring falsity as always (and despite being the man who said, "To thine own self be true"), instructs his daughter to pretend to be reading a book in order to "color your loneliness." He goes on to say that with "pious action we do sugar o'er the devil himself." And this little throwaway line prompts a sudden aside – a comment made to the audience but not to any other character - from Claudius:

Clau: (aside) "O, 'tis true!
How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!
The harlot's cheek, beautied with plastering art,
Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it
Than is my deed to my most painted word.
O heavy burden!"

With this key passage Shakespeare informs the reader that the king really did do it. He killed his own brother by pouring poison into his ear when he was resting in his garden. A quiet nap turned into a dirt nap. Claudius says that his deed now feels to him like a prostitute's ugly cheek, and his "painted" (false) words feel to him like the make-up slathered on that harlot's ugly cheek ("plastering art"). Why Claudius assumes all harlots' cheeks are ugly escapes Bardseye, unless he is referring metaphorically to the moral ugliness of prostitution.

We may wish to speculate over why Shakespeare waits until the start of Act III to tell us this, or indeed why he decides to tell us at all. Bardseye's feeling is that Shakespeare is focusing far more on Hamlet than on the king, and that he tells us now in order to remove a distraction.

Shakespeare believes in the legitimacy of royal descent, which is destroyed by Claudius' regicide, and which therefore would justify Hamlet's killing of Claudius – morally if not legally. But again, Shakespeare's main interest in is Hamlet himself, and in the psychology of someone - well, someone extraordinary - who is haunted even after his father's death by that father's call to revenge. Telling us Claudius' stage-whispered confession just helps the audience put aside our own speculation as to whether Claudius really did it or not, allowing us to better focus on how Hamlet handles the same question.

Anyhoo, the King and Polonius withdraw behind yet another screen, leaving Ophelia on stage. Hamlet wanders in. At first he seems not to see her, and given what's on his mind, it's easy to see why he might not:

Ham: To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep –
No more – and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of disprized love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. – Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia. Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered."

* * * * * * * * * * *
"To be" speech glossary:

The rub – an obstacle (literally, an obstacle in a game of bowls)
Coil – turmoil
Contumely – insolent abuse
Disprized – unvalued
Quietus – quitting of life
Bodkin – dagger
Fardels – burdens
Bourn – frontier
Orisons - prayers

To be continued.....

Hamlet #10 - The Play's the Thing

2006-01-31T17:20:00.000-08:00

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(Note: Bardseye is currently doing Hamlet, and taking a break from our usual hallucinatory Shakespearean commentary on current events. If you're entering the theater late, Hamlet: Act I, Scene I started eight posts ago - just scroll down and catch up!).

* * * * * * * * * *

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, struggling to cheer Hamlet up, mention to him that a troupe of traveling players is coming to town, actually to court. Hamlet is delighted that the Elizabethan equivalent of the circus is coming:

Ham: "Gentlemen, you are welcome to Elsinore.
…..You are welcome. But my uncle-father and
aunt-mother are deceived,"

Guild: "In what, my dear lord?"

Ham: "I am but mad north-north-west. When the
wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw."

Having telegraphed that he is (usually) merely playing at insanity, he begins doing just that with Polonius, who arrives to greet the players.

Pol: "The actors are come hither, my lord."

Ham: "Buzz, buzz!"

Pol: "Upon my honor -"

But Hamlet stops toying with the king's minister as soon as the players walk in, as though dropping one toy to pick up another. Although this second toy he treats with greater care:

Ham: "…Come, give us a taste of your quality.
Come, a passionate speech."

1st Player: "What speech, my lord?"

Ham: "…I heard thee speak me a speech once, but
it was never acted…..'Twas Aeneas' tale to Dido,
and thereabout of it especially when he speaks of
Priam's slaughter, If it live in your memory, begin
at this line; let me see, let me see…".

In the ancient Greek tale of the Aeneid, the slaughter of Priam, the Trojan king, is performed by Pyrrus, who is Achilles' avenging son. Ah. An avenging son. Hint, hint. The player gives the speech at great length and to Hamlet's delight, though not to Polonius':

Pol: "This is too long."

Ham: "It shall to the barber's with your beard, -
Prithee, say on. He's for a jug or a tale of bawdry,
or he sleeps. Say on…".

The players say on for quite a while, and Hamlet then encourages Polonius to make sure they are "well bestowed," or well taken care of:

Ham: "Let them be well used, for they are the
abstract and brief chronicles of the time. After
your death you were better have a bad epitaph
than their ill report while you live."

Pol: "My lord, I will use them according to their
desert." (meaning what they deserve)

Ham: ",,,Use every man after his desert, and who
Shall 'scape whipping? Use them after your own
Honor and dignity. The less they deserve, the
More merit is in your bounty. Take them in."

The players begin sauntering off to prepare for the following night's presentation, as does the hopeless Polonius, who has shown himself to be dead to art and to any fine thing that appeals to the soul. Hamlet takes one player aside and asks if he could "study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines which I would set down and insert" in the script of the intended play. The player agrees, and at the end of this scene, described at the end of this post, we learn what 12 of 16 lines Hamlet will write and why.

But for now, Hamlet is alone. He reflects on the sample performance he just enjoyed, and on how an actor can conjure whole worlds and "drown the stage with tears," and yet Hamlet himself…"

Ham: "…can say nothing – no, not for a king
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damned defeat was made. Am I a coward?
………………..
Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murdered,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must like a whore unpack my heart with words…"

But though he is sick of his own hesitation, Hamlet needs – or says he needs – something more than the prompting of his father's ghost to persuade him to murder Claudius:

Ham: "…I'll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle. I'll observe his looks,
I'll tent him to the quick. If 'a do blench,
I know my course. The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil, and the devil hath power
T' assume a pleasing shape………..….
…………………………. I'll have grounds
More relative than this. The play's the thing
Wherein to catch the conscience of the King."

To be continued……

Hamlet #9 - What a Piece of Work is Man!

2006-01-30T17:54:00.000-08:00

Hamlet #8 - Madness, Yet there's Method

2006-01-29T16:26:00.000-08:00

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(Note: Bardseye is currently doing Hamlet, and taking a break from our usual hallucinatory Shakespearean commentary on current events. If you're entering the theater late, Hamlet: Act I, Scene I started seven posts ago - just scroll down and catch up!)

* * * * * * *

When we left off, Polonius was sucking up to his boss Claudius and her wife Gertrude, King and Queen, even as he proclaimed that Gertrude's son Hamlet was mad, the cause being his own daughter Ophelia's rejection of him. On this last point Polonius is not done repeating himself:

Pol: "And my young mistress thus I did bespeak:
'Lord Hamlet is a prince out of thy star,
This must not be.' And then I prescripts gave her,
That she should lock herself from his resort,
……………………..
And he, repelled – a short tale to make –
Fell into a sadness, then into a fast,
Thence to a watch, thence into a weakness
Thence to a lightness, and by this declension
Into the madness wherein now he raves…".

As always with Polonius and Claudius, when confronting a problem, the solution is surveillance:

Clau: "How may we try it further?"

Pol: "You know sometimes he walks four hours together
Here in the lobby."

Clau: So he does indeed."

Pol: "At such a time I'll loose my daughter to him,
Be you and I behind an arras then,
Mark the encounter….".

Even as the plan is hatched Hamlet, as though baiting those who would bait him, saunters by - ("Enter Hamlet, reading a book") – and Polonius ushers the King and Queen off to their hiding place:

Pol: "How does my good lord Hamlet?"

Ham: "Well, God-a-mercy."

Pol: "Do you know me, my lord?"

Ham: "Excellent well, you are a fishmonger."

Pol: "Not I, my lord."

Ham: "Then I would you were so honest a man."
……………………...
Have you a daughter?"

Pol: "I have, my lord."

Ham: "Let her not walk I' the sun. Conception is
a blessing, but as your daughter may conceive,
friend, look to 't."

Hamlet warns Polonius not to let his daughter get pregnant, even though Hamlet himself is the man who might, uh, bring this about. But once Hamlet has hinted at a recognition of Polonius' daughter - even as he either fails or pretends to fail to recognize Polonius himself - he moves beyond the issues that involve only himself (Ophelia; the Ghost's request) and gives us first a bit of vaudeville, and then a critique of Literature:

Pol: "What do you read, my lord?"

Ham: "Words, words, words."

Pol: "What is the matter, my lord?"

Ham: "Between who?" (Bah dah Boom! - bardseye)

Pol: "I mean, the matter that you read, my lord."

Ham: "Slanders, sir, for the satirical rogue says
here that old men have gray beards, that their
faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging, thick
amber and plum-tree gum, and that they have
a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak
hams. All which, sir, though I most powerfully
and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty
to have it thus set down, for yourself, sir, shall
grow old as I am, if like a crab you could go
backward."

Pol: (aside) "Though this be madness, yet there's
method in it."

Most new Hamlet readers let their eyes slide over these weird speeches, preferring to stumble from one famous scene to the next as though feeling for familiar furniture on the way to the bathroom in the dark. At the risk of stubbing our toes, let's look at this weirdness.

Hamlet is reading a satirical story, whose writer (the rogue) is ridiculing old people. Hamlet admits that everything the writer writes is true, "yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down." But how can an accurate if unkind description of the elderly be "not honesty"? Hamlet seems to be hinting that truth separated from compassion is in some sense dishonest (perhaps about our human nature).

The strangeness continues with Hamlet's next statement, that "yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am, if like a crab you could go backward." Substitute "young" for "old" and this would make sense, with Polonius moving backwards into youth. But Hamlet calls himself old and Polonius – what? If Polonius is young, going backwards would only make him younger.

But if Hamlet has grown old through weariness and the pain of seeing things clearly, then Polonius, going backwards to reverse the long progress of his moral corruption, would arrive at a state as painful, if also as pure, as Hamlet's, a state that seems to have rendered Hamlet "old" before his time.

Well, Bardseye's interpretation may be a stretch, but Shakespeare invites each reader to come up with their own sense of what these and other of the eeriest words of Hamlet are intended to convey. What does seem clear is that Hamlet is able to see the hopelessness of his situation without flinching, if not always without complaining.

And Hamlet's situation is hopeless. Fidelity to his father's memory requires him to kill a king, an unforgivable act even for a prince, unforgivable whether or not Claudius did in fact kill Hamlet's father - since kings then answered only to G-d for their crimes. And besides Horatio, Hamlet sees no honest and honorable men around him who would at least understand such an act and Hamlet's grief over losing what he will lose by performing it.

Pol: "Will you walk out of the air, my lord?"

Ham: "Into my grave."

Pol: "Indeed, that's out of the air."

To be continued....

Hamlet #7 - Doubt that the Stars are Fire

2006-01-28T15:43:00.000-08:00

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(Note: Bardseye is currently doing Hamlet, and taking a break from our usual hallucinatory Shakespearean commentary on current events. If you're entering the theater late, Hamlet: Act I, Scene I started six posts ago - just scroll down and catch up!)

* * * * * * * * *

Shakespeare has now laid out on the chessboard of his imagination the pieces of his Hamlet Game. We have the anguished, hypersensitive Hamlet, the innocent and somewhat passive Ophelia, Polonius the lover of intrigue and indirection, the upright but absent Laertes, the disconsolate Ghost, the presumptuous-toward-Hamlet and accused-by-the-Ghost King Claudius, and the king's overly-dexterous new wife Gertrude. With the pieces lined up on the board, Shakespeare begins that series of scenes of haunting strangeness and disorienting depth that make up the heart of the play.

We begin with Claudius welcoming Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two pawns in the story given appropriately court jester-like names. Claudius has summoned these two boyhood friends of Hamlet to - well, let Claudius tell it:

Clau: "…..rest here in our court
Some little time, so by your companies
To draw him on to pleasure, and to gather
So much as from occasion you may glean,
Whether aught to us unknown afflicts him thus
That, opened, lies within our remedy."
………………………….
Ros: "Both your Majesties,
Might, by the sovereign power you have of us,
Put your dread pleasure more into command
Than to entreaty."

Guild: "But we both obey…"

Clau: "Thanks, Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern."

Gert: "Thanks, Guildenstern and gently Rosencrantz."

In other words, the king can't keep straight which one is which, and the queen corrects him. Similar jokes will follow this benighted pair throughout the play, all the way to their graves. But for the time being court business follows, important because Shakespeare wants to show the larger effects which the family squabble of the play will have on the outer world.

Denmark's ambassadors to Norway return from there with news. You will recall that the king of Norway, an old guy usually referred to as Old Norway, took over his throne after his brother was knocked off by the elder Hamlet (recently promoted to Ghost). While Old Norway is interested in peace, his nephew Fortinbras, the dead Norwegian king's son, is not. The ambassadors inform Claudius that Old Norway…:

Volt: "……sent out to suppress
His nephew's levies, which to him appeared
To be a preparation 'gainst the Polack,
But, better looked into, he truly found
It was against Your Highness, Whereat grieved
That so his sickness, age, and impotence
Was falsely borne in hand, sends out arrests
On Fortinbras, which he, in brief, obeys,
Receives rebuke from Norway, and in fine
Makes vow before his uncle never more
To give th' assay of arms against Your Majesty.
Whereon old Norway, overcome with joy,
Gives him three thousand crowns in annual fee…".

Hello? Sounds like we're at the United Nations, crying tears of joy over the latest promise from Iran, North Korea or the Palestinians to stop all they've been doing and, to quote Austin Powers, behave.

Anyoo, Fortinbras, having already put together his own independent militia (think Al Sadr, think Hamas, think Muslim Brotherhood) has now played his uncle (and the word uncle starts with U.N. – coincidence? I think not) to the tune of 3000 crowns a year.

These high matters of state are suddenly interrupted by Polonius rushing in to announce in his wordy matter (while at the same time assuring the King that "brevity is the soul of wit") that…

Pol: "…your noble son is mad…."

Queen: "More matter, with less art."

Pol: "Madam, I swear I use no art at all.
That he's mad, 'tis true, 'tis true 'tis pity,
And pity 'tis 'tis true – a foolish figure,
But farewell it, for I will use no art."

Polonius eventually gets to the point, producing with a voyeuristic flourish a letter he got from Ophelia that she got from Hamlet, for all the adults to read and analyze:

Pol: "(He reads the letter) 'To the celestial and my
soul's idol, the most beautified Ophelia' – That's an
ill phrase, a vile phrase; 'beautified' is a vile phrase.
But you shall hear. Thus (he reads): In her excellent
white bosom, these, etc.'"

Queen: "Came this from Hamlet to her?"
Pol: "Good madam, stay awhile, I will be faithful. (He reads):

'Doubt that the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love.

O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers. I have
not art to reckon my groans. But that I love thee
best, O most best, believe it.'"

When Hamlet says 'numbers,' he is referring to the sullen drudgery of constructing a love poem that rhymes and scans with poetic meter. His always-pressing need for the truth – in this case for Ophelia to know the truth - drives him not to poetry but to prose. This is the opposite of what usually happens in Shakespeare, where a character's deepest expression requires verse to contain it. But while Hamlet may speak Shakespeare's highest poetry, he is only a run-of-the-mill poet when he writes his own.

To be continued....

Hamlet #6 - What Forgeries You Please

2006-01-27T16:05:00.000-08:00

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(Note: Bardseye is currently doing Hamlet, and taking a break from our usual hallucinatory Shakespearean commentary on current events. If you're entering the theater late, Hamlet: Act I, Scene I started four posts ago - just scroll down and catch up.)

* * * * * * *

As Act II begins (already!), the curtain rises on a thickening plot as we peek in on Polonius hiring a spy. Polonius wants the spy to surveil Polonius' his son Laertes at his school in France, or more likely at the bars surrounding his school.

Pol: "By this encompassment and drift of question
That they do know my son, come you more nearer
Tan your particular demands will touch it
Take you, as 'twere, some distant knowledge of him,
…………..Do you mark this, Reynaldo?"

Rey: "Ay, very well my lord."

Pol: "'…you may say…he's very wild,
Addicted so and so,' and there put on him
What forgeries you please – marry none so rank
As may dishonor him, take heed of that,
But, sir, such wanton, wild, and usual slips
As are companions noted and most known
To you and liberty."

So Polonius has not only hired a spy, but is directing that spy to slander his son among his new acquaintances. An additional irony in this exchange is that we have the client Polonius instructing the spy Reynaldo in spying, and Shakespeare's main purpose may be to show what manner of man Polonius is and whether he deserves – later – to be stabbed by Hamlet through an arras (a screen made of fabric; a sort of tapestry hung in the middle of the room). But let's get back to Philip Marlowe/Reynaldo in his detective's agency, who wants to know just how slandered Polonius wants his son to be (drabbing means whoring):

Rey: "As gaming, my lord."

Pol: "Ay, or drinking, fencing, swearing,
Quarreling, drabbing – you may go so far."

Rey: "My lord, that would dishonor him."

Pol: "Faith, no, as you may season it in the charge…."

Rey: "But, my good lord – "

Pol: Wherefore should you do this?"

Rey: "Ay, my lord, I would know that."

Pol: "Marry, sir, here's my drift…"

Polonius proceeds to drift for quite a while, twice prompting Reynaldo to the verbal equivalent of shifting in his chair in impatience, and once actually forgetting what he was trying to say and needing Reynaldo to remind him. But eventually Polonius says that he believes these slanders of Laertes will loosen the tongues of Reynaldo's conversational companions, who will either confirm or deny that Laertes is as Reynaldo describes him:

Pol: "……………See you now,
Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth;
And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,
……..
By indirections find directions out."

Hamlet will soon engage in his own share of sleuthing, driven to it by rather than in spite of his conscience, and it will be interesting to contrast his methods to Polonius'. Bardseye will allow our readers to decide which - between Hamlet and Polonius - is guilty of illegal wiretapping in flagrant disregard of Congress, and which has constitutional authority to pursue a reasonable security measure in time of war. In the meantime, Reynaldo leaves and Ophelia enters:

Oph: "O my lord, I have been so affrighted."

Ophelia proceeds to describe a scene familiar to any lovelorn lass burdened with a troubled beau. Hamlet has visited her looking not his best:

Oph: "No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled,
Ungartered, and down-gyvved to his ankle,
Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other
And with a look so piteous…
…………………
At last, a little shaking of mine arm
And thrice his head thus waving up and down,
He raised a sigh so piteous and profound
As it did seem to shatter all his bulk
And end his being…".

With yet a bit more interrogation, his specialty, Polonius eventually asks his daughter if she has given Hamlet "any hard words of late."

Oph: "No, my good lord, but as you did command
I did repel his letter and denied
His access to me."

Pol: "That hath made him mad.
I am sorry that with better heed and judgment
I had not quoted him. I feared he did but trifle
And meant to wrack thee. But beshrew my jealousy!"

Ophelia has only done what her father ordered her to do. As for Hamlet, he didn't know Polonius was behind it. His love for Ophelia, and for his late father, has been as real as is his grief, confusion and outrage now over Ophelia's sudden rejection and his mother's sudden remarriage. Not to mention what that Ghost keeps whispering in his ear.

To be continued....

Hamlet #5 - In the Porches of My Ears!

2006-01-26T17:21:00.000-08:00

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(Note: Bardseye is currently doing Hamlet, and taking a break from our usual hallucinatory Shakespearean commentary on current events. If you're entering the theater late, Hamlet: Act I, Scene I started four posts ago - just scroll down and catch up.)

Hamlet and Horatio are shivering in the cold, sharing the frozen monotony of the guards on their night shift. A flourish of trumpets sounds in the castle behind them. Hamlet, using a bunch of frustratingly antiquated words (wassail; upspring; Rhenish down) explains that the king is partying through the night:

Hor: "Is it a custom?"

Ham: "Ay, marry, is 't.
But to my mind, though I am native here
And to the manner born, it is a custom
More honored in the breach than the observance…".

If Shakespeare sometimes uses phrases that have by now become long-familiar, and here two in the same sentence (to the manner born; more honored in the breach), it is usually because he invented them. Hamlet proceeds to describe how the character of a generally virtuous person, if he indulges a moderately-sized fault in his nature, may "take corruption from that particular fault."

Ham: "…..The dram of evil
Doth all the noble substance often dout…".

Yes, these occasional defunct words in Shakespeare (dout means blot out), are a stumbling block. But speed bumps don't keep us from visiting shopping malls. And neither should a few words that might as well be Klingon keep us from the Bard. Anyhoo, the Ghost shows up and here's what Hamlet says to him:

"Ham: "Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou com'st in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee. I'll call thee Hamlet,
King, father, royal dane. O, answer me!...".

Even by the end of the play, the question of whether the Ghost brought airs from heaven or blasts from hell goes unanswered. What he did bring was – to quote the heroine from Kill Bill – unfinished business:

Gho: "I am thy father's spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away….".

Ham: "OK. Fine. Whatever. Get to the point. It's cold out here."

Bardseye is just kidding. Let's continue:

Gho: "If thou didst ever thy dear father love – "

Ham: "O God!"

Gho: "Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder."

Ham: "Murder?"

Gho: "What are you, deaf? I just said that."

Again, just kidding. Let's continue:

Gho: "Murder most foul…
……………..Sleeping within my orchard,
My custom always of the afternoon,
Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole,
With juice of cursed hebona in a vial,
And in the porches of my ears did pour
The leprous distilment, whose effect
Holds such an enmity with blood of man
………………………
Thus was I, by a brother's hand
Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched,
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
………………………
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head.
O horrible! O, horrible, most horrible!
If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not.
Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damned incest."

Bardseye recalls the first time he read this speech, at perhaps too tender an age, when for a moment I thought the Ghost was saying that Claudius killed more birds than anyone else, since he didst "murder most foul." (Foul - Fowl? Get it? Actually it's an old joke). Anyhoo, laugh all we like, this and other language from Hamlet, once you have read it once, simply does not leave you. In my case, the phrases, "porches of my ears" and "with all my imperfections on my head," have remained with me from the moment I read them, evoked whenever poisoning or confession would come up in other contexts.

That last criticism that the Ghost lays at his living brother, for killing him without giving him a chance to confess his sins (presumably, it would have been more gentlemanly for Claudius to slaughter the elder Hamlet as he leaves the confessional) will come up again later. For now, Hamlet orders the guards and Horatio to swear they will tell no one what they have seen. Then, like sportscasters as the credits roll after the Super Bowl (less than a fortnight to go!), Hamlet and Horatio do a wrap-up:

Hor: "O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!"

Ham: "It's been Pittsburgh's year all along!"

No, again, just kidding. Bardseye does not know what has gotten into him tonight.

Ham: "And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
…………………
The time is out of joint. O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right!"

Those last two lines, in Bardseye's view, are as close as any come to summarizing the heart of the play.

To be continued….

Hamlet #4 - To Thine Own Self Be True!

2006-01-25T19:37:00.000-08:00

Hor: "My lord, I came to see your father's funeral."

Ham: "I prithee, do not mock me, fellow student,
I think it was to see my mother's wedding."

Hor: "Indeed my lord, it followed hard upon."

Ham: "Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral baked meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.
Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven
Or ever I had seen that day, Horatio!"

Our scene has begun with some famous lines expressing Hamlet's pained sarcasm over the odd, over-hasty marriage that hovers above his thoughts. Hamlet goes on:

Ham: "My father – Methinks I see my father."

Hor: "Where, my lord?"

Ham: "In my mind's eye, Horatio."

Hor: "I saw him once. 'A was a goodly king."

Ham: "A was a man, Take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again."

Hor: "My lord, I thought I saw him yesternight."

"'A" is a casual way to say "he," by the way. It's worth noting that, for all Hamlet's love for his father, he is able to seem him clearly ("He was a man, take him for all in all"). Hamlet's clear-sightedness is more a burden than a blessing when you consider what it is that he is given to see. Anyhoo, with Horatio's sober report of a supernatural occurrence ("I thought I saw him yesternight") the play's story is now set in motion. Hamlet agrees to join the watch that night:

Ham: If it assume my noble father's person,
I'll speak to it though hell itself should gape
And bid me hold my peace…."

Now that Shakespeare has generated a little suspense, he generates anticipation by giving us not Hamlet and the Ghost but Ophelia and her brother Laertes. They are brother and sister, the children of the royal counselor Polonius, and Ophelia is additionally the object of Hamlet's romantic attention. As we meet Polonius' children Laertes, like any number of exchange students each September, is packing up - in his case for France - and saying goodbye to his family. Somewhat like his father later on, Laertes admonishes his sister to be careful about getting too close to Hamlet:

Laer: "Then weigh what loss your honor may sustain
If with too credent ear you list his songs.
Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open
To his unmastered importunity,
Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister…".

Oph: "I shall the effect of this good lesson keep
As watchman to my heart…."

But Ophelia hardly forgets to return the compliment to her brother, who after all is a young and single man journeying to France:

Oph: "…But good my brother,
Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven,
Whiles like a puffed and reckless libertine
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads…".

This sibling ribaldry ends when dad – Polonius – arrives to offer his own parting advise in yet another now-famous speech:

Pol: "Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulleth edge of husbandry.
This above all, to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man…".

This excerpt is less than a third of the total speech, which is charming throughout, and would do honor to any good father addressing his son, or daughter. But in Shakespeare fine words are hardly the warrant of a fine man, and it will be useful to note whether Polonius will later remain true to his own advise.

With Laertes embarked, Polonius lays into his daughter for getting too chummy with Hamlet:

Pol: "Affection? Pooh! You speak like a green girl,
Unsifted in such perilous circumstance.
Do you believe his tenders, as you call them?"

Oph: "I do not know, my lord, what I should think."

Pol: "Marry, I will teach you. Think yourself a baby
That you have ta'en these tenders for true pay
Which are not sterling….
…………………….
I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth
Have you so slander any moment leisure
As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet…".

Oph: "I shall obey, my lord."

So as Polonius informs his daughter that he will not only teach her, but teach her what to think, and as Hamlet stands oppressed by the feminine example of his mother's (to use Hamlet's own word) dexterity in marrying his uncle, we are left to wonder at what these two lovers will be left to make of the world, and of each other.

To be continued…

Hamlet #3 - Incestuous Sheets!

2006-01-24T16:07:00.000-08:00

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Hamlet's mom, who has just married his uncle, asks Hamlet why he seems so particularly sad about his father's death:

Ham: "Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not "seems."
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
………
But I have that within which passes show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe."

(Suits here means presentations).

The reality of Hamlet's grief, and of Hamlet generally, and how that reality plays out for someone surrounded by so many smooth survivalists, is a major theme of the play. In reply, Claudius starts out with an oily compliment of how "sweet and commendable" is Hamlet's demonstration of grief, but he goes on to criticize Hamlet's sorrow as unseemly in its excess:

Clau: …but to persevere
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness. 'Tis unmanly grief,
It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,
A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,
………..
Fie, 'tis a fault to heaven
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
………..
………..We pray you, throw to earth
This unprevailing woe and think of us
As of a father; ………..
……………………….your intent
in going back to school in Wittenberg,
It is most retrograde to our desire..".

Ger: "Let not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet.
I pray you, stay with us, go not to Wittenberg."

Ham: "I shall in all my best obey you, madam."

Clau: "Why, 'tis a loving and a fair reply."

Any number of adolescents or young adults, facing off with a step-parent over lingering loyalty and regard for the parent who has been lost, will recognize this exchange. Claudius manages to combine an insult to Hamlet's manhood - for his unmanly grief - with a presumptuous assertion of himself as a substitute father, all the while presenting himself as Mr. Reasonable, before bringing in the big gun of Hamlet's mother to seal the deal. Hamlet's quiet desire to go lick his wounds in Wittenberg (a suitably German city, dour and philosophical) is efficiently crushed.

Claudius, Gertrude and the attending courtiers depart, leaving Hamlet alone on stage to mumble to himself – or exclaim to the heavens – the first of his many famous soliloquies:

Ham: "O, that this too too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God, God,
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on 't, ah fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely….".

The "To be or not to be" speech is not the only time Hamlet addresses suicide – he does so right from the start. Adolescent (or slightly post-adolescent) angst and hyper-sensitivity is central to Hamlet's nature. The world is an unweeded garden that grows to seed. Untended, it has been taken over by things rank and gross in nature. Lust might be one example - such as the lust for one's brother's wife, and another might be the lust for power. But let's let Hamlet himself reveal what's bugging him:

Ham: "….That it should come to this!
But two months dead – nay, not so much, not two.
So excellent a king, that was to this
Hyperion to a satyr, so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth,
Must I remember! Why, she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on, and yet within a month –
Let me not think on 't. Frailty, thy name is woman!

The violence that this hasty, imprudent marriage has done to Hamlet's mind is very real. He not only loses respect for his mother (and of course his uncle), but begins to doubt his mother's prior love for his father. Hamlet's ability to trust in any woman's love is compromised as a result, and his later mistreatment of Ophelia is the corrupted harvest that will follow.

Ham: "….O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not, it cannot come to good."

True enough.

To be continued…
- - - - - -
P.S.: Bardseye will of course interrupt our Hamlet tour whenever events in the public sphere prove too outrageous to resist Shakespearean commentary. But for the time being I have decided to enjoy a break from producing the daily enjambment of Shakespeare and the news that has become my practice. I will certainly return to it, refreshed, after polishing off Hamlet. Bardseyeview is, for me, the hobby of a lifetime.

Hamlet #2 - A Little More Than Kin.

2006-01-23T18:37:00.000-08:00

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Clau: "Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother's death
The memory be green, and that it us befitted
To bear our hearts in grief and our whole kingdom
To be contracted in one brow of woe,
Yet…".

So King Claudius begins the second scene of the play. Claudius is holding court and speaks regally for the nation, acknowledging the grief all feel for Hamlet's death. Of course the Hamlet he is referrring to is our young Hamlet's father, the former king of Denmark, and Claudius' brother. The man whose ghost we met in scene 1. And note how the young Fortenbras' father over in Norway was also named Fortenbras. These repeated names, (and later, repeated murders and wars) will add to the play a sense of eternal recurrence running down the generations, one of the qualities of tragedy; a failure to progress.

Claudius' fine phrase, "our whole kingdom / to be contracted in one brow of woe," is not the end of his sentiment:

Clau: "Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature
That we with wisest sorrow think on him
Together with remembrance of ourselves."

Discretion, or reason, struggles against our grief and despair, and the resulting alloy, a "wisest sorrow," instructs us to think of the departed "together with remembrance of ourselves." Claudius urges us to keep one eye always on the here and now.

Clau: "Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
Th' imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we, as 'twere with a defeated joy –
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with a dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole –
Taken to wife."

How's that? Claudius' description of how, in the midst of grief, he has gone about marrying his late brother's wife sounds so smooth and reasonable that we tend to overlook what he is describing. Gertrude is no Old Testament widow, doomed to poverty if not adopted by marriage into her late husband's family. In fact, Claudius has had to win a certain amount of official approval to pursue the marriage:

Clau: "….Nor have we herein barred
Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone
With this affair along."

It's not clear whose better wisdoms were being consulted - presumably the nobility and the church - but considering it was the king who was asking, who would dare refuse? We are left with a newly installed king choosing to marry his brother's widow during the very moment of the nation's grief. A sort of Jackie Kennedy marrying Aristotle Onassis, but even earlier, not two months after JFK's assassination.

The suggestion of a pre-existing love affair between Claudius and Gertrude, or of his long-simmering desire for her, extending back to when she was married to his brother, is inescapable. And if that is what is true, than Claudius' language ("…with a defeated joy – with an auspicious and a dropping eye,…") begins to feel quite false; diplomatic to the point of deception.

In good kingly fashion, Claudius proceeds to discuss the young Fortenbras' war preparations in Norway, and Claudius' own muscular response to them.

And we are now ready to meet Hamlet. Claudius treats his brother's son as one more piece of business to be handled along with, in fact after, handling Laertes, the son of his advisor Polonius. Laertes appears before the king to ask permission to go study in France. Claudius readily grants the request; age granting young manhood the full enjoyment of its youth:

Clau: "Take thy fair hour, Laertes. Time be thine,
And thy best graces spend it at thy will!"

Later in this scene we will see Hamlet's similar request to travel - to Wittenburg - in order to study be refused by Claudius. And now, finally, the new King turns to his nephew Hamlet:

Clau: "But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son –"

Ham: "A little more than kin and less than kind."

Clau: "How is it that the clouds still hang on you?"

Ham: "Not so, my lord. I am too much in the sun."

A little more than kin because Claudius is both Hamlet's uncle and his step-father, and because he refers to Hamlet a bit presumptuously as his son. And less than kind for marrying Hamlet's mother under such questionable circumstances. Too much in the sun means too much in royal (that is, Claudius') favor - here Hamlet is merely being courteous. Just as his mother Gertrude appears now to be merely maternal:

Ger: "Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off,
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark,
Do not forever with thy veiled lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust.
Thou know'st 'tis common, all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity."

Ham: "Ay, madam, it is common."

Hamlet is not really being spiteful, his argument is less with his mother than with the human condition itself. The commonness of accepting death, of allowing oneself to merely pass through nature to eternity as though through some oddly scenic digestive system, is simply insufficient for our Hamlet.

To be continued...

Hamlet #1 - Sweaty Haste

2006-01-22T16:27:00.000-08:00

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Hamlet opens at night, in fact at midnight, as two Danish border guards explain to Horatio, Hamlet's trusted friend and the only completely virtuous character in the play, what they have seen in recent nights:

Marcellus: "Horatio says 'tis but our fantasy,
And will not let belief take hold of him
Touching this dreaded sight twice seen of us.
Therefore I have entreated him along
With us to watch the minutes of this night…".

Of course you can't watch minutes, since time is as invisible as Horatio thinks the ghost is, but if you raise those kinds of objections, you'll miss the fun Shakespeare has to offer. With the bard, minutes are visible, ideas can be touched, colors tasted, and ghosts can walk the night:

Mar: "Peace! Break thee off! Look where it comes again!"
…………..
Hor: "What art thou that usurp'st this time of night,
Together with that fair and warlike form
In which the majesty of buried Denmark
Did sometime march? By heaven, I charge thee, speak!"

Horatio accuses the ghost of usurping the night. True, the night can't exactly be usurped, but its quiet can be stolen by a noisy ghost, and it's more fun to stretch for a word like usurp than settle for mere accuracy. Moreover, later we will learn that the entire play is about how Hamlet's uncle may have usurped the throne of Denmark by killing his own brother, Hamlet's father, who resembles the ghost, or whom the ghost resembles. So Shakespeare does have his additional reasons for saying usurp'st.

Horatio adds that the ghost is usurping not only the night, but "the fair and warlike form / in which the majesty of buried Denmark / did sometime march." He could have just said, you look like the dead king. But that would lose for us the importance of that dead king, Hamlet Senior, who Horatio describes as having embodied the majesty of the country, now lost.

The ghost disappears and Horatio decides to tell Hamlet what he has seen, but Shakespeare needs to do a little backfilling first, so he has Marcellus ask Horatio why the number of border guards has been increased recently, and…:

Mar: "And why such daily cast of brazen cannon
And foreign mart for implements of war,
Why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task
Does not divide the Sunday from the week
What might be toward, that this sweaty haste
Doth make the night joint-laborer with the day?"

What's with all these war preparations, pursued 24/7 and in sweaty haste? Horatio explains that Fortenbras, son of the slain king of Norway, is putting together an army to recover lands that Hamlet's father won, or won back, from Norway in a prior war, a war in which Hamlet's father slew Fortenbras' father, setting the stage for a recurrence, or a rematch.

Please note that Norway went to its slain king's brother "Old Norway," not his son Fortenbras, and Denmark went to its dead king's brother Claudius, not his son Hamlet. The uncles rule while the sons - well, each follows a different course. Here's some irresistible language Horatio uses to explain how this young Fortenbras…:

Hor: "Hath in the skirts of Norway here and there
Sharked up a list of lawless resolutes
For food and diet to some enterprise
That hath a stomach in 't,…".

Fortenbras has put together an army composed of criminal riff-raff, drawn from the "skirts" of Norway – the hidden corners of his nation; men who are fighting not for a noble cause but for food and diet; that is, out of poverty and desperation.

Amidst this atmosphere of external threat, the appearance of the late king's ghost bodes ill, and Shakespeare has the educated Horatio draw a parallel to the events preceding the fall of Julius Caesar, when signs and portents of his coming murder were visible in Rome:

Hor: "A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets;
As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun, and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse…".

A nice little Halloween effect. That moist star by the way is in fact the moon, which influences Neptune's empire through the tides. The ghost comes again, and is just about to speak when the cock crows, signaling dawn:

Ber: "It was about to speak when the cock crew."

Hor: "And then it started like a guilty thing
Upon a fearful summons…".

Hamlet, the play, extends its fearful summons to you, fair bardseye viewer, as in the coming weeks, whenever current events fail to inspire, your humble hierophant (explainer of mysteries – a very cool word), will pursue this guided tour of that master of misery, that earl of equivocation, that ambassador of ambiguity, the Prince of Denmark.

Here's a link to the recommendable Joe's Cafe.

The Tempest, Islam and the West

2006-01-21T05:49:00.000-08:00

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The first bad guy in the Tempest, actually a gal, remains off-stage. Sycorax, which sounds like a bad trademark idea, is a foul witch, indeed a witch so foul that she had been banished from her native land to the forgotten island where the play takes place. And banished not from any native land but from Algiers. Whatever one has to do to get banished from Algiers, Sycorax did (actually "mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible / to enter human hearing.")

She arrived on the island pregnant and gave birth to Caliban, a character Shakespeare turns into a watchword for beastliness. Here's an exchange between Caliban and Prospero, the Duke of Milan, also exiled onto the island with his daughter Miranda:

Pros: "….I have used thee,
Filth as thou art, with humane care, and lodged thee
In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate
The honour of my child."

Cal: "Oho! Oho! Would 't had been done!
Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else
This isle with Calibans."

Now, recalling Arthur C. Clarke's dictum – any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic – it becomes obvious what Shakespeare is really talking about. Prospero is meant to stand for western civilization, and his magic book represents western technology. And Sycorax, of course - why am I the only person who sees it? - represents radical Islam, unless all of Islam is radical (an open question). We can divine Shakespeare's intent by noting that Sycorax had a god of her own, Setebos:

Cal: "I must obey. His art is of such power
It would control my dam's god, Setebos,
And make a vassal of him."

Well, Setebos is of course Allah, as interpreted by the Prophet. Caliban regards Prospero's (the West's) advanced technology as so powerful that it could control not only his potent mother Sycorax (Radical Islam, or we can just say Osama) but even her god Setebos (The Prophet's Allah). It is obvious that Sycorax would have coveted Prospero's magic book and its ultimate magical power (a nuclear bomb).

But Prospero uses his book - modern technology - only for good; he may enslave Caliban (occupy Iraq and Afghanistan), but only after Caliban attempted to rape his daughter Miranda (only after 9/11, the harboring of the Taliban and the flouting of UN sanctions by Sadman Insane).

See how clear it all becomes?

Caliban's mother, if not Caliban himself, had powers of witchcraft, which she herself used, just as Prospero later did, to take over the island. (Two colonial powers vie for control of a native third world nation! Can't you see it? No? Only me?) A lithe sprite named Ariel was already there, and when he refused to perform Sycorax's "abhorred commands," she froze him into a pine tree. She then died, leaving it to Prospero, when he arrived, to free Ariel from the tree (hests means behests, or commands; ministers means magical powers):

Pros: "……..Dost thou forget
From what a torment I did free thee?

Ari: "No."
………
Pros: "Thou liest, malignant thing! Hast thou forgot
The foul witch Sycorax, who with age and envy
Was grown into a hoop? Hast thou forget her?"

Ari: "No, sir."
………
Pros: "This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child
And here was left by the sailors. Thou, my slave,
As thou report'st thyself, was then her servant;
And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate
To act her earthy and abhorred commands,
Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee,
By help of her more potent ministers,
And in her most unmitigable rage,
Into a cloven pine, within which rift
Imprisoned thou didst painfully remain
A dozen years; within which space she died
And left thee there, where thou didst vent thy groans
As fast as mill wheels strike. Then was the island –
Save for the son that she did litter here,
A freckled whelp, hag-born – not honored with
A human shape."

Prospero frees the Iraqi Shia, I mean Ariel, from Sycorax/Saddam, and he frees the Afghans from the Caliban/Taliban, and what thanks does he get? The natives – that's Ariel – merely regard themselves as enslaved to new colonial masters, even though the Americans (Prospero) consider themselves liberators, not colonizers ("Thou, my slave, as thou report'st thyself,…") . True, the Prospericans need some lessons in cultural sensitivity ("Thou liest, malignant thing..."), but their efforts in freeing the natives from Sycorax, from the Soviets, from the Taliban, from Hitler, Mussolini, Saddam, Milosevic and more, could be better appreciated as well.

Alas, no good deed goes unpunished for the tolerant, freedom-loving West.

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And here's a recommendable post from the political teen.

And here's one from the recommendable Joe's cafe.

And here's one from the recommendable A Blog for All.

Hamlet and Kerry Surveyed

2006-01-19T20:50:00.000-08:00

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Bardseye's First Survey...

…has been completed, and bardseye's collective viewers (not a great number of you, but pleasingly more than I would have expected after a mere 2½ months) have made your selections. As promised, bardseye will now proceed to prepare a post for each.

Let's begin with Senator Kerry, who won honors as our present-day Hamlet, sending Bardseye scurrying to the Prince of Denmark's script for support. Kerry's most Hamlet-esque qualities would at first appear to be his straddling of both sides of two wars; first Vietnam, where he posed as both a war hero and a war protester, and Iraq, where he claimed to have voted both for the senate war resolution and against it (bourne means frontier):

Ham: …the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourne
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action."

Well, what distinguishes Kerry from Hamlet is that Kerry suffered less from a puzzled will than a puzzled intellect. He was after all willing not only to act, but to act both for and against each of the two major wars of the last two generations. But we can still say that his campaign was an enterprise of great pith and moment, and his failure to spend $15 million of campaign funds available to him suggests indeed that he allowed its currents turned awry and lose the name of action.

Warming to the subject, bardseye will suggest the King and Laertes for the role of the Swift Boat Veterans, those former comrades of Kerry's who turned against him in the campaign, airing advertisements that questioned the veracity of his wartime claims. Here the King explains to Laertes (whose father Hamlet killed) how he could poison Hamlet during an upcoming fencing match:

King: …He, being remiss,
Most generous, and free from all contriving,
Wil not peruse the foils, so that with ease,
Or with a little shuffling, you may choose
A sword unbated, and in a pass of practice
Requite him for your father.

Lae: "I will do 't…"

But is Senator Kerry, or any senator, "most generous, and free from all contriving"? Hamlet's inescapable nobility separates him from comparison from any sullen, earthbound politician. If Kerry and Hamlet are united in anything it is in their ambition, and here Hamlet, knowing his own destiny to be thwarted by his father's ghost; that is, by his family issues, casts an envious eye toward Fortenbras, the young King of Norway, whose army Hamlet comes across as it prepares to attack, for no particularly large reason, Poland. (Makes mouths…event means scoffs at the unforeseeable outcome):

Ham: "Witness this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puffed
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell…".

Even for an eggshell. Even for a cause as small as that, in other words, for glory's sake and no other. And indeed, for what cause or concept did Kerry campaign, beyond the advertisement of himself? But alas, this casts Kerry not as Hamlet but as Fortenbras.

Well, I gave it the old college try, in fulfillment of my promise to you my readers, but that's about the closest bardseye can drag the ignoble fence-straddling Kerry toward the transcendent and truly anguished Hamlet.

The Tempest and the Plantation

2006-01-18T20:28:00.000-08:00

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In the Tempest, Caliban is a beastly savage who had the run of a small island before Prospero showed up with his daughter Miranda. Prospero, treated in the play as a wise and conciliatory wielder of magic, nevertheless enslaves Caliban. Here's how they greet each other (dam means mother; fen means marsh, considered a source of disease and infection):

Pros: "Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself
Upon thy wicked dam, come forth!"

Cal: "As wicked dew as e're my mother brushed
With raven's feather from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both! A southwest blow on ye
And blister you all o'er!"

Pros: "For this, be sure, tonight thou shalt have cramps
Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up. Urchins
Shall forth at vast of night that they may work
All exercise on thee. Thou shalt be pinched
As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging
Than bees that made 'em."

And thus does Prospero with such magical powers enslave Caliban, turning him literally into a hewer of wood and drawer of water. And speaking of slavery, in a speech in Harlem on Martin Luther King Day, Senator Clinton compared the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to a plantation where dissenting voices are squelched.

Clint: "The House has been run like a plantation,
and you know what I’m talking about. It has been
run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view
has had a chance to present legislation, to make an
argument, to be heard.”

Bardseye viewers, even Hillary-inclined left-leaning ones, must question if the senator believed what she was saying or was merely pandering to her primarily African-American audience. The Democratic Party has been able to rely on receiving upwards of 90% of the black vote for the past two generations, ever since President Johnson championed the legislation that ended the legal subjugation of blacks in America. It is little remembered, however, that in 1964, a higher percentage of republicans than democrats voted for that famous civil rights legislation in the House of Representatives. Here Caliban, who represents not blacks but the Democratic Party's increasingly patronizing, racist image of blacks, complains to Senator Clinton, I mean to Prospero, of his treatment:

Cal: "This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou tak'st from me. When thou cam'st first,
Thou strok'st me and made much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in 't, and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night. And then I loved thee
And showed thee all the qualities o' th' isle,
The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile.
Cursed be I that did so!..."

It remains to be seen if today's African-Americans have grown tired of being treated by the Democratic party as though they were Calibans and not citizens; Calibans chained to failing schools rather than citizens free to take a voucher to any school they choose; Calibans locked into violent Democratic Party dominated inner city neighborhoods instead of citizens who can rely on law enforcement and protection the way republicans of any color can in the suburbs. Caliban regrets voting for President Clinton and Senator Clinton; that is, showing them "the qualities o' th' isle." Cursed be I that I did so, he says. Here's what he goes on to say, and how Senator Clinton, I mean Prospero, answers:

Cal: "Cursed by I that did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o' th' island.

Pros: "Thou most lying slave…"

We'll see if African-Americans vote against their own enslavement on the Democratic Party
plantation in future elections.

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Here's a post from the recommendable basil's blog.

And here's a post from the recommendable Jo's Cafe

And here's a link to the Carnival of Satire

Romeo and Juliet and the U of Penn

2006-01-17T13:08:00.000-08:00

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Two University of Pennsylvania students purposefully inserted themselves into the confined space beside a dormitory windowpane and proceeded (children, turn aside) to fornicate, their act visible to all who passed. The brazen pair did this on at least three separate occasions. They were of course photographed by anyone who had a camera, and one student uploaded his photographs on the internet. The university's flummoxed administration, after a month-long investigation, charged the internet uploader with sexual harassment.

Bardseye gives U of Penn credit for trying to uphold moral standards, but not for succeeding. The university was quickly forced to drop the charges, once it was brought to their attention that publishing so public an act is hardly harassment. Can bardseye viewers guess who wasn't charged? Why, the public fornicators, of course.

R: If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
J: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.
R: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
J: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
R: O,then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
J: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.
R: Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take.
(He kisses her.)

I have squished Romeo and Juliet's lines together to make more obvious to bardeye's viewers that their combined exchange adds up to a perfect sonnet.

A sonnet (Review for Newer Shakespeareans!) is a 14 line poem that follows an ABAB rhyme scheme – hand/this/ stand/kiss - that is repeated three times (3 x 4 = 12), followed by a concluding couplet - sake/take - (12 + 2 = 14). In Shakespeare's sonnets every line is written in iambic (duhDUM) pentameter (duh DUM times 5, or duhDUM duhDUM duhDUM duhDUM duhDUM – the standard meter for much, probably most of Shakespeare's writing. And while you should be aware of them, you shouldn't overemphasize the duhDUMs as you read).

Anyhoo, what's happening in the dormitory window of the Globe Theater's stage, is that R & J have just met, and they have made bold to place their palms against each other. Romeo says his unworthy hand is profaning the holy shrine of her hand, not that this stops him. He offers to make up for doing so by kissing her. Smooth. Juliet says, nothing like it, saints offer their hands to pilgrims to be touched, and the palms brought back by pilgrims returning from the Holy Land (palmers – a pun!), if touched to each other, would equal a symbolically holy kiss.

So, which form of romance more appeals to us, the University of Pennsylvania's or Shakespeare's? The question answers itself.

Note how the bard is careful to infuse his ultimate romance with an air of holiness, of sanctity. Along with some healthy masculine initiative in proceeding to first base:

R: ……. let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
J: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.
R: Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take.

Lips pray, and do so for the purpose of maintaining faith against the threat of despair, Romeo says. Juliet reminds him that saints (and remember they have decided that her palm is a saint's and his a pilgrim's) do not "move," meaning they don't take the initiative the way Romeo obviously wants to, but instead they grant grace, or intercede with G-d, in answer only to prayers. Romeo says, well, since you're the saint, you should move not, while my pilgrim's prayer (to kiss Juliet, of course) is answered.

And so do Romeo and Juliet leave the University of Pennsylvania fornicators in the dust, or rather in the window.

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Here's a recommended link to the Carnival of Satire.

Hamlet and the Border Redux

2006-01-14T20:56:00.000-08:00

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Work commitments continue this weekend to keep Bardseye from his Shakespearean pleasures, but that is no reason for you to suffer, as I extend another timeless Best Hits post to bardseye viewers:

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We face on our border with Mexico much of what Hamlet's royal family faced with Norway.

Borders are never easy to maintain. The news reports following Katrina included a brief mention that our border guards had been pulled from the Mexican border to assist with the recovery efforts. Congressional authorization for increased guard strength has only partially been executed by our president.

Since he's from Texas, President Bush is undoubtedly familiar with the personal virtues of our Mexican neighbors – by all accounts hard-working, religious and family-oriented - and so he may be reluctant to force their removal. Presidente Fox of Mexico, and the Mexican nation at large, are certain to follow American policy closely, measuring options. After all, Mexico cannot look on so much territory which was once Mexican without a wistful sense of longing. A longing that Fortenbras, the young and headstrong leader of Norway, understood.

In Hamlet, Fortenbras seeks to reclaim the lands lost to Denmark in an earlier war, occurring before the play begins. King Claudius, Hamlet's uncle, step-father and king, summarizes:

"Now follows that you know, young Fortenbras,
Holding a weak supposal of our worth,
Or thinking by our late dear brother's death
Our state to be disjoint and out of frame,
Colleagued with the dream of his advantage,
He hath not failed to pester us with message,
Importing the surrender of those lands
Lost by his father…".

A weak supposal of our worth. For Fortenbras, let's substitute the broad stream of Mexican society as it regards our society from across a thin strip of neighborly fencing. Mexican society must indeed have formed a weak supposal of our worth if we will use so little to protect so much. Nor is there lacking in Mexico the sense of resentment over lands thought taken and sought to be restored. Horatio explains Mexican, I mean Norwegian, sentiment in Act I, Scene I:

"…Our last king,
Whose image even but now appear'd to us,
Was, as you know, by Fortenbras of Norway,
Thereto pricked on by a most emulate pride,
Dar'd to the combat; in which our valiant Hamlet, -
For so this side of our known world esteem'd him, -
Did slay this Fortenbras;"

It's easy to forget that Hamlet's father killed Fortenbras' father in a prior war. It's easy to forget how the swath of land from Texas to California was once listed on maps as part of Mexico. And it's easy to forget that no matter how virtuous individual Mexicans may be, they remain saturated in a broad culture of poverty and corruption that we cannot expect them to leave behind as they import themselves into America, and that this culture has led them to a fully understandable desperation. Horatio explains:

"…Now sir, young Fortenbras,
of unimproved mettle hot and full,
Hath in the skirts of Norway, here and there,
Shark'd up a list of landless resolutes,
For food and diet, to some enterprise
That has a stomach in't..."

These "landless resolutes, for food and diet" travel thousands of miles to Denmark, I mean America, because their own government over centuries has preferred corruption to growth. These are the most ambitious and most misused of Mexicans, the ones paying graft rather than receiving it, the ones who would push for change within Mexico if they couldn't get out.

Even under Claudius, Denmark's response was better than ours. Horatio's speech about Norway is in answer to Marcellus' question about why he and Bernardo and Francisco have been assigned additional watch duties:

"Why this same strict and most observant watch,
So nightly toils the subject of the land…?"

Things break down later, of course. Denmark's government becomes distracted over domestic, indeed very domestic, concerns. Gertrude's fecklessness, Hamlet's doomed but good faith attempts to confirm his suspicions of his father's murder, the Miers nomination, the leaking of a possibly covert CIA agent's name. The list goes on.

Decades of distraction have opened portions, in fact all, of our country to essentially uncontrolled entry. Our past allegiance to the concept of assimilation, for ourselves and other new Americans, has been weakened by concepts of multi-culturalism. And even though our constitution does not require it, our laws generously permit the children of illegal immigrants automatic citizenship.

Our imaginations flee from the prospect of a Trail-of-Tears forced march back to Mexico. But what will the social reaction be during the next economic downturn, when the labor of these non-citizens becomes not only unneeded, but unwelcome? We are responsible today if we fail to avoid such a predictable reactionary surge before it happens.

Fortenbras found himself in charge at the end of the play, having sensed such weakness, represented by Hamlet's collapse of will:

"O that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew…"

That's not exactly leadership.

Religion and Domestic Peace

2006-01-13T08:21:00.000-08:00

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Bardseye is blessed, but also swamped, with work and domestic responsibilities today. Happily, one advantage of this blog's long-form essay-like presentations is that the occasional effort will stand the test of time and bear repeating. And thus it is that Bardseye makes bold to present to you (again) this effort:

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Let me begin at my health club, where this morning an elderly lady, completing her physical therapy, joked about how she had been made late the week before because she had come in from the parking lot without her cane (having in her improving health forgotten it), and had had to return to her car for it.

"I wake at 4:30, and I anoint myself, pressing olive oil to my forehead," she informed me, "in praise of the Lord, who returns my health to me."

Such scenes, which are among the joys of living in the American South, to me are nothing but moving. But of course they are the source of satire in Hollywood and in portions of the cold north in America among the same people who will sit down, somewhat against their own logic, to a Thanksgiving meal next week. But faith and its absence is no laughing matter.

We see in Europe what there is to fear from a majority culture made up of those who pray against prayer. From King John (V.iv.12):

"Welcome home again discarded faith."

Target is a retail outlet store that occupies the link in the outlet store food chain just above Walmart and just below everyone else. The Target chain has prohibited the Salvation Army, a private Christian charity organization with an unimpeachable record of service to Americans in need, from soliciting donations during the Christmas season outside Target stores. Christmas solicitations represent a major portion of fundraising for the Army, which does not engage in the more aggressive sales tactics of the American Red Cross and other groups.

"We, ignorant of ourselves,
Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers
Deny us for our good; so find we profit
By losing of our prayers."

Anthony and Cleopatra, II.i.5.

In this case it is those who pray against prayer, that is, atheists and their corporate appeasers at Target, who might be said to be begging of their own harms. For if there is one key distinction between the relative domestic tranquility America is experiencing, certainly in comparison to Europe and the Middle East, it is not really our more vibrant capitalism or even our lower taxes or the Electoral College system for selecting our President. It is in our spirituality, which is broadly Christian. Henry VIII:

"Heaven is above all yet; there sits a judge
That no king can corrupt."

Now, being Jewish, I make bold to predict that were the American majority Jewish (one can dream), it would be similarly tranquil, and yes I will offer democratic and progressive Israel, its unlucky geography aside, in support of this belief. But that is a digression. America is broadly Christian, and in the health of American Christianity resides the security of American Jews, and Muslims and atheists for that matter.

"Now, God be praised, that to believing souls
gives light in darkness, comfort in despair!"

Henry VI, Part Two, II.i.66By contrast, atheism, the religion of those who pray against prayer, and who consequently can seek nothing outside the self or the present on which to base hope or meaning, has formed in Europe the foundation of two generations of hard-hearted anti-Muslim discrimination. For while minority American atheism, aided by corporate appeasement, may target Salvation Army soldiers at Target, the majority European variety holds all belief, including Muslim belief, in contempt – and it is foolish to think that European Muslims don't know this. I will let a doomed and damned Macbeth speak for Europe:

"I had most need of blessing, and "Amen"
stuck in my throat."

Well, Muslim theology, which is supremacist, confident, self-sacrificial, and communitarian, hardly sticks in Muslim throats. Meanwhile, the European absence of each of these values, coupled with a weak-kneed appeasement of Muslim extremism, has found its climax in the recent Eurofada, whose beginning was as sudden as its end now appears unforeseeable. The Winter's Tale (II.iii.113) contains a line that today may serve to depict both European and Muslim civilization, and it is hoped never our own:

"It is a heretic that makes the fire,
Not she which burns in it."

R&J's Friar Laurence and Spielberg's Munich

2006-01-11T21:11:00.000-08:00

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We first meet Friar Laurence in Act II, scene III of Romeo and Juliet, as he is indulging his hobby of picking poisonous and medicinal herbs from his monastery garden:

Fri: "I must up-fill this osier cage of ours
With baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers.
……………….
For naught so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give,
Nor aught so good bit, strained from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime's by action dignified."

No matter how vile any living thing may be it will provide the earth some special good, and no matter how good something is, it will turn vicious if misused. It should be clear to the reader that what Shakespeare was really talking about was Steven Spielberg's latest movie, Munich.

Just as Friar Laurence injects himself into the Montague/Capulet peace process, Spielberg has acknowledged in interviews his hope that Munich will play a role in the solving the Middle East one. Bardseye has his doubts. but we wish Mr. Spielberg well. And if his plan doesn't work, perhaps a screening of Dr. Doolittle before a joint Israeli-Palestinian delegation will do the trick.

The film critic Michael Medved identified the problem with Spielberg's approach, hitting a bird's eye that bardseye can do no better than quote:

Med: "'A response to a response doesn't really solve
anything,' the director declares — indicating that he
somehow views the slaughter of unarmed athletes
by Black September terrorists as "a response." A
response to what, one might inquire? Israel's very
existence, or its determination to resist bloodthirsty
calls in 1948 and 1967 to "push all the Jews into
the sea"?

A response to a response, to a response to a response. With no calling to account on the issue of fault, and certainly no acknowledgement of the possibility of evil. In other movies Spielberg has been willing to acknowledge evil, so long as the evil beings are 1940's Nazis. But that has been at a remove of fifty years, and after the world had reached a consensus on the Third Reich. One wonders how well Spielberg's instincts would have served him in the 1930's.

Back in Verona, we next run across Friar Spielberg, I mean Laurence, as he counsels a desperate Juliet. Her Romeo has by now been banished to Mantua for killing a Palestinian who murdered an Israeli civilian in cold blood; I mean for killing Juliet's cousin Tybalt who murdered Mercutio. Meanwhile Juliet's arranged marriage to Paris has been penciled in for the coming Thursday. Here's Spielberg's, that is, Laurence's solution:

Fri: "Hold, daughter. I do spy a kind of hope,
Which craves as desperate an execution
As that is desperate which we would prevent.

Friar Spielberg hopes to bring Juliet to Romeo, and the Montagues to amity with the Capulets, and the Palestinians to peace with the Israelis, by making Juliet's family feel really sorry and really guilty about driving her to suicide. Here's our director/friar addressing the Capulets over Juliet's apparently dead body; that is, addressing the world, in his movie, over the bodies of those killed in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict:

Fri: "…Heaven and yourself
Had part in this fair maid; now heaven hath all,
And all the better is it for the maid.
Your part in her you could not keep from death,
….
And weep ye now, seeing she is advanced
Above the clouds, as high as heaven itself?"

Well, no, the Palestinians, trapped in a brutal, nearly lawless totalitarian culture, are unlikely to weep over the Israeli women and children who are the targets of Palestinian violence.

Bardseye will get right to the point. It is fundamentally immoral for Spielberg to equate the purposeful killing of unarmed athletes with the purposeful killing of the killers of those athletes. The rules of war were developed so that, if war could not be avoided, at least the civilians could be protected as it ran its course. The Palestinians' Klan-like terrorism, which the civilized world had previously ruled out of bounds even in wartime, has been granted aid and comfort by this movie.

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Bardseye Viewers are invited to take the bardseye survey. Click below to let me know who you see as today's Hamlet, today's Julius Caesar, today's Cleopatra and today's Lady Macbeth. I will write a blog post for the winning candidates for each - the Hamlet, Caesar, Cleopatra and Lady M that you select.

Click here to take survey

Coriolanus and Alito

2006-01-10T20:52:00.000-08:00

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Bardseye readers who come upon this post in future years through some google search will learn it was written during the week that Judge Alito sat before the US senate judiciary committee to respond to its members' questions as to his fitness to serve on the US Supreme Court.

In the excellent-but-obscure play Coriolanus, a Roman general of that name returns to the capital in triumph after kicking the stuffing out of the Volscians, a barbarian nation with an appropriately Star Trekky name. Coriolanus is now eligible to become a consul, but to do so he must fulfill an ancient tradition. He must stand in the public square to be ritually questioned by Roman citizens as to his fitness to serve:

Enter Coriolanus in a gown of humility, with Menenius.

3rd Citizen: "Here he comes, and in the gown of
humility. Mark his behavior. We are not to stay
all together, but to come by him where he stands
by ones, by twos, and by threes…."
…….
Men: "O sir, you are not right. Have you not known
The worthiest men have done 't?"

Cor: "What must I say?
'I pray, sir' – Plague upon 't! I cannot bring
My tongue to such a pace. 'Look, sir, my wounds!
I got them in my country's service, when
Some certain of your brethren roared and ran
From th' noise of our own drum.'"

Judge Alito, of course, is today's Coriolanus, standing in the public square to submit to ritualized questioning in conformity with an ancient practice. Here is an except of his exchange with Senator Specter, who questioned him on Casey, a Supreme Court case which is in line with Roe v. Wade in supporting abortion rights:

SPECTER: "Do you agree that Casey is a super-
precedent or a super stare decisis, as Judge Luttig
said?"

ALITO: "Well, I personally would not get into
categorizing precedents as super-precedents
or super-duper precedents or any..."

SPECTER: "Did you say super-duper?"

ALITO: "Right."

SPECTER: "Good. I like that."

ALITO: "Any sort of categorization like that sort
of reminds me of the size of the laundry detergent
in the supermarket."

(LAUGHTER)

If the issue de jour for applicants to the US Supreme Court is abortion and Roe v. Wade (abortion politics has been addressed by Bardseye here), the issue the Roman citizens have in mind to question Coriolanus about is humility:

3rd Cit: "Tell us what hath brought you to 't.

Cor: "Mine own desert."

2nd Cit: "Your own desert?"

Cor: "Ay, but not mine own desire."

3rd Cit: "How not your own desire?"

Cor: "No, sir, 'twas never my desire yet to
trouble the poor with begging."

3rd Cit: "You must think, if we give you
anything, we must hope to gain by you."

Cor: "Well then, I pray, your price o' the consulship?"

1st Cit: "The price is to ask it kindly."

Judge Alito seems willing to pay that same price this week by asking kindly enough. Though it must be said that no similar price was asked of his senatorial inquisitors. Senator Charles Schumer of New York, in particular, was tenacious in his insistence that Alito declare himself on the abortion issue:

SCHUMER: "Does the Constitution protect free
speech?"

ALITO: "Yes, Senator, the First Amendment
protects free speech."

SCHUMER: "Well, why can you give me a straight
answer on that issue but not give me a straight
answer on abortion?"

ALITO: "Because the text of the Constitution
explicitly includes the term 'free speech.'"

An interesting point. Three more days at least await Judge Alito in the far more elaborate American version of this ancient nerve-testing ritual. Coriolanus, insulted that he must go hat in hand to the very citizens he had already protected through his military valor could not last one afternoon:

Cor: "Better it is to die, better to starve,
Than crave the hire which first we do deserve.
Why in this woolvish toge should I stand here
To beg of Hob and Dick that does appear
Their needless vouches? Custom calls me to 't.
What custom will, in all things should we do 't.
The dust on antique time would lie unswept
And mountainous error be too highly heaped
For truth to o'erpeer. Rather than fool it so,
Let the high office and the honor go
To one that would do thus…."

To translate: It would be better to die or starve than to beg for a job I already deserve. Why do I have to stand in a stupid-looking toga and ask every Tom, Dick and Harry that shows up for their votes? Custom requires it, and I suppose I should follow custom. Come to think of it, if we didn't follow custom, dust would collect unswept on time itself, and our errors would accumulate into a mountain too high for the truth to see over. So instead of fooling the tradition, let someone willing to undergo it have the honor.

Shakespeare is making his case for why traditions should be followed. Rituals sweep the dust off of antique time, keeping us in line with our ancestors and their accumulated wisdom. Without the guidance of tradition, our errors would eventually accumulate to the point where they would blot out our connection to truth.

Quite a thought to pull out of an unswept sentence in a forgotten corner of one of the Bard's lesser known plays.

Hope you enjoyed!

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And here's a related post from PoliticalTeen

And here's one from Confederate Yankee

Henry V's England and Today's Islam

2006-01-09T19:53:00.000-08:00

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In the 1970's the Saudi regime and its Wahhabi clerics worked out an implicit deal. In exchange for leaving Saudi Arabia alone, Saudi money and resources would be made available for the dissemination of the Wahhabi version of Islam throughout the Islamic world. Madrassas would be built and funded, so long as their faculty were imported Wahhabis. Mosques would be built and funded, so long as their imams supported or did not oppose Wahabbism's extremist creed.

The deal bought the Saudi regime a generation of the Saudi version of domestic tranquility, such as it is. This truce was broken only recently when the mad dog terrorists began turning on their benefactors either in desperation or in a bid for greater cultural and financial blackmail, or both.

Something of what Saudi Arabia faced in the 1970's is reflected in what England faced in the early 1400's, as Shakespeare describes it in Henry V. As the play opens, the Archbishop of Canterbury is huddling with the Bishop of Ely over a tax bill proposed by the late Henry IV that if passed would confiscate church property (Temporal means used for secular purposes; esquires means gentry, one rank below knights; lazars means lepers; indigent means poor; corporal means physical) :

Ely: "But how, my lord, shall we resist it now?"

Cant: "It must be thought on. If it pass against us,
We lose the better half of our possession.
For all the temporal lands which men devout
By testament have given to the Church
Would they strip from us, being valued thus:
Full fifteen earls and fifteen hundred knights,
Six thousand and two hundred good esquires,
And, to relief of lazars and weak age
Of indigent faint souls past corporal toil,
A hundred almshouses right well supplied;
And to the coffers of the king besides
A thousand pounds by th' year. Thus runs the bill.

Ely: "That would drink deep."

Cant: "'Twould drink the cup and all."

How does the Archbishop and the church avoid this budget cutting fate? Why, by supporting Henry V's excellent military adventure in France:

Cant: "For I have made an offer to His Majesty,
Upon our spiritual convocation
And in regard of causes now in hand,
Which I have opened to his Grace at large,
As touching Farnce, to give a greater sum
Than ever at one time the clergy yet
Did to his predecessors part withal."

Ely: "How did this offer seem received, my lord?"

Cant: "With good acceptance of His Majesty…".

So the Archbishop is offering to finance Henry's war in exchange for Henry's agreement to not confiscate church property.

In Saudi Arabia the deal is similar, except that it is the state that is paying the church to export its militant ideology in exchange for domestic peace, such as it is. Apparently Wahhabism renders clerics more aggressive and expansionist than their own governments.

Here the Saudi regime, I mean Westmoreland and the Archbishop, informs its wealth-spoiled, honor-driven, hate-inspired Islamic radicals, I mean the King representing a bloodthirsty English nobility, that radical Islam, I mean an expansionist 15th century England, is spoiling for a fight:

West: "…Never king of England
Had nobles richer and more loyal subjects,
Whose hearts have left their bodies here in England
And lie pavillioned in the fields of France.

Cant: "O, let their bodies follow, my dear liege,
With blood, and sword, and fire to win your right!
In aid whereof we of the spiritualty
Will raise Your Highness such a mighty sum
As never dd theclergy at one time
Bring in to any of your ancestors."

King: "Sounds good to me!"

OK, I made up that last line, but Henry is persuaded to follow his bloodthirsty clerics, and his bloodthirsty populace, into war.

It may be sobering to note this parallel between today's radical Islamic culture and 15th century England. Both were newly wealthy, strongly nationalistic, driven by religious ideology and expansionist. Well, Bardseye would distinguish the radical Islamists for their emphasis on the slaughter of innocents - the pre-Shakespearean English settled for pillage and the occasional rape.

But otherwise, Islamic culture turns out to be not something new, but something all the more frightening in its familiarity; something old and something recurring, if not opposed.

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