Summer break

 

A much longer time seems to have passed since my last post than I actually wrote it, like half a year or so, or more like a few years … I am afraid this time my blog is actually “folding in” – as I thought it would a few times, so I cannot be sure. But I have reasons to believe this time might be serious.

So, for diverse reasons the usual summer break comes in handy – especially for complicated theoretical thinking to cease entirely. In case I might want to refer to them again, I’ll set down two interesting things that happened in the fictional world before departing into my rather dreary-looking holidays or for good. They provide personal answers to a question that I was always extremely interested in and very unsure about most of the time: the key question about the relationship between fictional text and (my) reality. Plus they have both to do with “Shakespeare”. At the moment, I am neither really interested in nor delighted by them, but “Shakespeare” turned and turns out extraordinarily tenacious. When everything good is gone, there will probably still be a little “Shakespeare” sticking to my shoe. 

The first occurrence has only a marginal connection with “Shakespeare”, but without Shakespeare 2.0 I would never have undertaken something so tedious as to work myself through the whole “Decameron” from start to finish. The initial motivation was to find out some more about the stubbornly unyielding “Cymbeline”, as it was one of these stories where Shakespeare got his main plot from. And I thought it might be a good thing – having nothing REALLY interesting to do - to continue with Holinshed as the “history” behind the plays and the “Decameron” as one of the main fictional works at the time for writers to get their stories from. But the whole plan began to look like this doctoral thesis again, which makes me instantly want to say not a word more about it …

What made it immediately interesting for me, though, was that I had virtually nothing else to read and therefore read it on an empty head, so to speak, which gave it a lot of space to expand and work on my general mood and frame of mind. Gritting my teeth, I worked my way through an endless succession of lecherous clerics and cruelly betrayed husbands, not really trying to get into a frame of mind to be entertained by this kind of thing … This was the one side of two I recently learned to discern about historic fiction: the chasm that separates the minds for whom these stories were written from mine. A difference I am always guiltily conscious not to take sufficiently into account when I am dealing with “Shakespeare”. There is a reason for it that will become relevant in my second experience, but there is also a real difference in psychological depth and a genuine interest in human relationships that makes “Shakespeare” often so immediately accessible to us. Or AS OFTEN AS NOT, as I should say, which is at the bottom of the problem I have with plays like “Cymbeline” and the comedy part of “Shakespeare” in general. A lot of it just feels “medieval” to me – in the way the “Decameron” does. But the other part, the one where I am surprised by this strange kinship, or notice these sudden changes towards a modern frame of mind, was, in this case, the more disagreeable.

I don’t believe that I would have bothered to read it all but would have contented myself with random samples if I had not worked myself through the incredibly long, realistic and detailed description of Florence during the great outbreak of pestilence that serves as an introduction to the stories. A rich elite of young people, partly with amorous relationships, decides to withdraw from this scene of horror, where everybody has lost loved ones, and repair to a luxurious, beautiful country resort where they have nothing to do but to enjoy themselves, sing and dance and tell stories to provide entertainment. And this was the bit where I immediately connected - by FEELING GUILTY! Because this is what “we” WEIRD people do, being confronted with a depressing reality – like the one we are currently confronted with! (As “rich” is the relative bit in WEIRD, the country resort is not available but I could probably afford two weeks in Tuscany …) Putin starting a war in Ukraine already was as bad as it gets, but I knew something like this was inevitable for a long time. After what is just happening in the US, though - and what of course WAS happening for a long time as well, not being taken seriously by me! – I landed squarely on the point of depression. Suddenly I could see nothing but dark clouds on the horizon anymore and stopped listening to the news and podcasts, immediately switching to “Harry Potter” instead …

Strangely though, this guilty fascination and negative vibes made me more susceptible to the bits where the “Decameron” is decidedly more “modern”, more provocative and “unhinged” than “Shakespeare”. The realistic background situation made me acutely aware of a different social reality: an incredibly rich and cultured urban elite that also allowed a lot more freedom of manners and change of feeling and thinking than there was in other parts of Europe. This is something we partly understand from “Shakespeare” as well where there is a fascination with Italian culture and depravity, as in “Othello”, “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”, or “Cymbeline”, but the “Decameron” is partly more extreme. Sometimes to a point where it made my head spin. In particular, there is a totally uncompromising stance on the freedom of sexual love. Love has to win, no matter what, especially where WOMEN are concerned. This appears like such a leap from the more traditional romance in Chaucer, for example, where romantic love is the domain of young men and tends to end in tragedy or punishment. As soon as women are recognized as an equal partner in desire (and story-telling!), there is a lot more that gets freed in its wake. Even if it is mainly satire, there are things that are suddenly possible to be thought and addressed that were impossible to address before – or rather elseWHERE. My two favourites: In one of the stories women protested SUCCESSFULLY against a law made against married women without them having a say in it. Another one shows us a young woman with a husband unwilling to perform in bed who is making up for it with their young and pretty servant. When the husband discovers this, he is neither distraught nor vengeful but chuffed to have an attractive young man in his bed. Turns out – though it is not said in so many words – that the man didn’t suffer from the low sex drive often attributed to elderly husbands but is obviously gay. In the end everybody gets what they want and nobody there to take offence!

My second instance of “extreme reading” is much more difficult to summarize without discussing it, but I’ll try. It was seeing “Henry V” with Kit Harrington (as Henry) in the Cinema. For once I was so chuffed that Cinema took this up again – after a two years’ break at least – but the whole production was really good as well, in my opinion, especially as it was a MODERN setting which makes the play more immediately accessible, especially for a history play, which was kind of new for me. It was what was least convincing, though, that made it end up in my blog. I don’t think that Kit Harrington was great as Henry – or as a “Shakespeare actor” – but he had an unusual relationship with his character that he based on his own experience with addiction. Some time into the play, I realized that I really, really enjoyed these negative vibes to GET OUT on the stage. It is some time ago that I was last involved with the histories – which generally are my favourites - but “Henry V” and the two parts of “Henry IV” have always been my least favourite, though there has always been a NEGATIVE fascination for which Falstaff appeared to be the natural outlet. At least I appreciated it very much how Simon Russell Beale played him in “The Hollow Crown” as a dark and devious person. This was rather different from what Kit Harrington did because Simon Russell Beale has this incredible natural understanding of CHARACTERS that only great actors have, whereas Kit Harrington, in this case, had taken a deep look into HIMSELF and allowed us to share it, which occasionally turns out equally profitable. In this case it did for me because, without really knowing it, I had an acute (negative) fascination with the dark interior dimension of life already in me and was prepared to accept – maybe for the first time – that it is not just a PART of life – that has to get “exiled” to other people or has to stay beneath the shining surface of success which “Henry V” is mostly about – but that it is a NECESSARY part, the background even for the shining surface being able to shine. It is not that some people occupy the shining surface and the others get shit – though this often is the case. As our reality consists mostly of what we MAKE of things, it is far more complex. Therefore it was a good experience – even though a disagreeable one but kind of comforting nonetheless – to get once more this complexity through “Shakespeare”. At its best it has this effect to make my personal experience appear more relevant.

So – this was easy! And now summer … (I hate my life.)

„Cymbeline“ and the ingenuity of blank verse: the sky is the limit

 So, I am still not finished with “Cymbeline” – not because I came to like the play so much but because I still don’t like it. Or, more specifically, because dealing with it unsuccessfully gave me an idea I wanted to try out.

The foremost reason that READING SHAKESPEARE became such a big thing for me that never stopped once I got into it is the initial frustration that JUST READING his plays doesn’t work. But even at the time I realized that it is just a first stage, and that the natural consequence is either to give it up or to start what I called REALLY READING, which involves a lot of activity and inventiveness on my part. As Tom Hiddleston put it – which is in one of my posts a long time before this – I am kind of in a heightened state of life when I am doing it, the one I would want to be in: more aware of myself, less simplistic and dull, more active and in control instead of being controlled. It probably isn’t any use to anyone in the world outside me, but it is an invaluable exercise for connecting with what I would WANT life to be. Kind of like the only thing I could still achieve for myself. So, this continued to be a serious thing, though I think I became too used to it, running towards the centre of a play very fast and not bothering anymore with what holds me up, what doesn’t fit my idea of it. What I needed was a different approach. Time for “Shakespeare 2.0”. 

In addition to this, my preoccupation with HISTORY changed my point of view decisively. My seemingly pointless reflections on the meaning of “history” somehow led to the bottom of why it has always been important to me:  a feeling that things are meaningless unless we understand where they come from. To fill my life with meaning, I have to go to the past. To understand my world, I have to understand how it became what it is. To understand people at all, I have to understand where we came from. This is the reason I am so pleased with Holinshed and will read on as soon as I can make time for it: his dogged, even partially ludicrous preoccupation with how every tiny thing in his world became what it was then. It is certainly the beginning of historicism – which I would have placed much later in history. In the case of Great Britain when it already WAS an empire. But the Elizabethans certainly thought of their world and age as a great one too – with very good reason! - and this is certainly an incitement for looking at history in this way. Being pleased where “we” have got makes us want to know how we got there. It probably even is a choice on my part to look on my own world like this – not as a world at the end of times which we have run down and ruined, politically and ecologically, a world on the brink of becoming a place uninhabitable for future generations. There are without doubt a lot more TANGIBLE reasons to see it like this. Instead, like Holinshed, I am looking on it as on something beautifully complex and largely unexplained, filled with possibilities I don’t even know exist. Inconsequential as this may be in the great scheme of things, it is certainly part of my “anti-ageing plan”. In my experience, ageing begins in the head – and much, much earlier than we think.

Focusing on history made me shift my point of view from looking at the end-product (= the reading and enjoying of text) towards the act of creation. As a text-person - somebody who experiences text as a substantial part of their reality that has to be explained – I have always been fascinated with the genesis of fictional text. I have also been conscious that – even if we COULD do this – it could never be explained by entering the central conscience behind the act of creation (= the author’s) and know everything that is in it. This theory became obsolete a long time before I was old enough to doubt it but clings on stubbornly – not least because nobody really came up with a better one. The variety of theories students of literature have to get through taught me exactly one important thing: that it is not so simple. The REALITY of text is more complex – more widespread and disorganized – and more basic at the same time than all existing theories. There is also some use in all of them because they open up different LEVELS to us on which we discern, enjoy, and create text. 

The important thing I came to dwell on recently was that, to move BEYOND my own conscience and my own reading, I had to actively take into consideration that the different elements we discern and enjoy are not entirely controlled by ONE central conscience or certain well-known principles of text making and therefore HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH ONE ANOTHER in the first place. There is a certain frustration to be overcome here, which I didn’t really want to deal with, and there is a world of UNCERTAINTY beyond the subjective level of reading. The only thing I cannot be wrong about is WHAT I READ. Metaphorically, Shakespeare 2.0 means that I am now beginning to look in a systematic way at the iceberg itself, instead of the small spit above the surface, and have no idea what might come of it. Apart from a lot more work.

This is why “Cymbeline” is still going on. For the first time, I systematically adopted a historic perspective by reading Holinshed. That is, I tried to adopt his point of view – an erudite Elizabethan frame of mind - as the one that controls the narrative. I’d say that I failed completely in this attempt, but seriously TRYING TO broadened my horizon and opened a window on the play that had been closed before. 

In particular, I gained some idea about what history might have meant to Elizabethans and to Shakespeare who, after all, rose to the top with history plays. So, reading Holinshed made me focus on the HISTORIC content and story-telling patterns in “Cymbeline”. On the other hand, I observed the “bow-legged” ROMANCE pattern kind of getting the upper hand. Though there certainly are overlapping features, it is not what WE understand by a romantic love story. It is a much more specific story-telling pattern that corresponds with a HISTORIC emotional and ideological complex I am unable to penetrate. And I came to suspect that this historical ignorance is the reason I experience it as trivial. The more so as Shakespeare, up to this point, had preferred more “realistic” and “serious” patterns of story-telling that I myself prefer. But I am probably wrong about this. The downside of dealing with text historically is that I feel like I am permanently dodging blunders. But recognizing the blunder in this case already broadened my horizon. For whatever reasons, Shakespeare seems to have looked into DIFFERENT patterns and stories towards the end of his writing career. We can’t know if he felt the experiment with the “bow legged” romance to have been entirely successful, but it was certainly an EXPERIMENT in the sense that it released different possibilities for the “human stuff” to develop. As Claudia and I noticed already on behalf of “Measure for Measure”, the tragic pattern leaves no room for forgiveness and redemption, and what touched me most about the RSC’s production of “Cymbeline” was Iachimo’s GENUINE remorse and need for forgiveness. History and tragedy usually exclude a second chance.

The thought that there might have been a biographical reason behind such changes crops up – going on in life you’d be more interested in second chances? – but, in my experience, doesn’t lead to anything. The main reason for not touching the biographical level is still that I have always been preoccupied with the text, not the person. Drawing conclusions about the person from the text doesn’t interest me, and the other way round doesn’t really work. At least not with Shakespeare. But for all that, if I had a Tardis, after the tenth century Icelanders, Elizabethan London and the Globe Theatre would certainly be my second historical destination. Reading Cornwell’s “Fools and Mortals”, I realized why. It was because, for the first time, I thought: He might be right! - His depiction of Shakespeare’s character is anything but flattering, but I preferred it infinitely to how I had seen him represented so far – mostly for comical effect - as a batty, ridiculously vain or unworldly poet. Like Cornwell, I appear to think that the key to Shakespeare’s personality lies in thinking of him as a PROFESSIONAL person, not a private one. It appears that I have subconsciously imagined him as somebody who was sharp as a needle, highly competitive and endowed with a great sense for business and making money – which all successful artists need to have! Somebody who was always right just because he WAS right, and this is why other people followed his lead. He might have had a scathing sense of humour, but somehow I doubt that he was as such an entertaining and accommodating person. I don’t think that he was arrogant, though, or kept himself to himself. He just had this much higher standard of excellence … As I am going on, I am really amazed about how detailed and opinionated my ideas about Shakespeare’s character are. They are also unfounded and probably useless, but I obviously don’t think so. I cannot help having such detailed ideas about somebody with who’s MIND I have been spending such an insane amount of time. And – like other equally unfounded theories – they make me notice things. I don’t know why, but they seem to illuminate the level of the play I got into next. The one I labelled right at the beginning of my blog as STRUCTURE AND BEAUTY. (I still like the label.) Maybe to contemplate the standard of excellence behind it makes me, kind of, live up to it. It’s known to have happened … 😉    

My general plan was to “dig up” as many levels of the play as I could, and my idea how to begin was to read the programme of the RSC’s recent production which Claudia had brought from London. At a cursory glance, they appeared to have unearthed some really important stuff about this play. I still haven’t read it, though, because I got stopped right at the beginning where the play was described from a poetic point of view as “conventional” as well es “experimental”. They didn’t elaborate, but when I am finally getting to what I should have done a long time ago, it is usually from a bad conscience. I couldn’t judge any of this, or discern any of this. I wouldn’t know how. I was frustrated, especially because I am aware that not what makes me read Shakespeare but what makes me KEEP ON READING even when there is nothing interesting going on is the BLANK VERSE. This sound silly, but I know it is not. I even have the extreme theory that acting on the level you see with English actors is only possible because of Shakespeare. Or, in a sense, is an invention of Shakespeare’s. I struggle to explain what I mean, but I understand it every time I see something of the kind I described in my last post. It is this over-exactness and professional approach on behalf of something so “natural” and spontaneous as empathy and emotions. I am convinced that Shakespeare’s use of the blank verse is at the bottom of this because it enables the actors as well as the audience to “navigate” successfully and kind of “stay on top of” really complicated text. - Besides, I think that at the time a much bigger part of the theatre experience went through the ear. Even though I am aware that this impression might be due to the other parts being lost, my chronic example of the “poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is HEARD no more” from “Macbeth” makes me cling to it. To be heard appeared to be crucial. The greatness of the actor manifested itself in his ability to make the audience LISTEN to him. Apart from that, to put things in verse tends to make them appear more important and memorable.

I knew all this, from experience, but literally knew nothing ABOUT IT. So, I decided on something ambitious. Ambitious because, to my knowledge, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I had done a bit of verse analysis at uni, and I had always WANTED to do more with poetry, but I never really did. I still knew what a blank verse is, though. Iambic pentameter:  -  ´_    -  ´_    -  ´_    -  ´_    -  ´_. Didn’t have to look that up. Weirdly, it turned out to be all I needed. Another thing I always suspected about geniuses: contrary to legend, they tend to be very pragmatic people. 

I have no idea if anything about using the blank verse at all or in any specific way is an innovation of Shakespeare’s. But, going through the chores of actually drawing out entire scenes from the first act and comparing the basic meter with the natural speech rhythm and stresses, then going on extrapolating on the experience until the third scene of act 3 – where, in a manner of speaking, the penny dropped – was not just incredibly time consuming and partially frustrating. In the end it also gave me a much clearer idea about WHY Shakespeare’s use of the blank verse is so ingenious and successful. It is not, though, what we are SUPPOSED to do with verse! I got bored and frustrated countless times, certain I couldn’t do it after all, but every time I wanted to give up some kind of PATTERN appeared. Something that seemed to DEVIATE from the blank verse in a SYSTEMATIC way. And, going on, I found more patterns. This was what made me stay with it so long because I had to prove my point.

Strictly speaking, I haven’t proved it. But I happen to have learned “Macbeth” by heart, and my clear impression is that the use of the blank verse in both plays is really different. To say that it is more uniform and conventional doesn’t sound great on behalf of “Macbeth”, but in fact it has nothing to do with quality. I’d say that, as long as we don’t notice the iambic rhythm CONSCIOUSLY, everything is fine. From an aesthetic point of view, “Macbeth” seems more expert and elegant, but it appears that, in “Cymbeline”, Shakespeare actively tried to stretch the iambic pentameter to its limits. 

There is so much VARIATION that it is often confusing and frustrating - until I happened to notice a pattern, which I usually did in the end, as even the absence of a pattern sometimes becomes a pattern. There are entire scenes where the blank verse seems to vanish entirely or to get destroyed because there are so many irregular lines that the regular ones become the exception. When this happens, the conversation becomes SIGNIFICANTLY more natural – as, for example, when Imogen receives Iachimo, and they are both, for different reasons, highly strung. Or when Imogen gets into a squabble with Cloten in 2,3, a scene that ends on a discordant note with a PROSE line: His mean’st garment! Well! – As a contrast, there are the – in my experience of Shakespeare not infrequent - scenes that end with a rhymed couplet, to give closure or stress something important. There are also entire PROSE SCENES built around Cloten – as such not infrequent in “Shakespeare” – which add to the impression that diversity is the aesthetic principle here, not uniformity. The variation as such is what struck me because I found that almost every scene deviates from the previous one in the way the verse is used or, of course, not used. I also noticed that there tend to be regular lines at the beginning and the end of scenes so as not to lose the verse entirely.

As I already mentioned, the variation has often to do with the emotional state a character is in, but there are also patterns that relate to certain people. If I really was a dedicated linguist, I’d do an analysis of Imogen’s speech patterns, which appeared to me the most interesting – and confusing! - and probably of the other main characters. In some cases, it is obvious. The much greater regularity of verse in the case of Cymbeline shows another function of the verse, a basic “civilizing” effect. Without doubt it has to do with the fact that he almost always speaks “officially”, as a king, in a context where he has to be polite and weigh his words, rarely as a private person. Cloten instead speaks in prose, even in blank verse scenes, or in verse tending towards prose – which makes him stand out as somebody who makes inept commentaries and shouldn’t be opening his mouth in court, for example when Cymbeline is negotiating with the Roman envoy. These variations relating to characters were the most interesting to me because there is more than one way of making characters that appear on paper like “romance prototypes” more interesting and life-like. The way they are expressing themselves is certainly one of the most important. 

I stopped at act 3, scene 3 where I suddenly thought: “I got it. I proved it!” Until then, I had seen the blank verse mostly as a practical means of being able to process really big chunks of very complex text – to convey a mass of information on many different levels in a form that can be processed by actors and listeners likewise and still appears very close to natural language. It certainly is all of this. But its primary function is simply to provide a pattern to DEVIATE from. If there was no blank verse, there wouldn’t be this huge amount of possibilities to deviate from it which, in every tiny instance, convey INFORMATION to the ear that is used to it. In many cases very subtle information that adds incredibly to the complexity and liveliness of the text. And if I can dig up so much of it through my rather cursory and inept analysis, there is no way of assessing how much more of this kind of information I am constantly MISSING. But it still appeared to give me a much better idea of Shakespeare PRODUCING text. The bigger part of it certainly is routine and great instinct, but the scope of variety and alternating patterns indicates a high degree of poetic consciousness and ambition. This may have something to do with the political context and purpose of the play - another level I picked up from the programme and might want to get into later on.

Of course, the VERSE structure is only one part of the poetic level. At the moment it appears to me to be a really big one, but this is only because I cannot see the rest of the iceberg. To make a substantial analysis of the poetic complexity and information, there would have to be a lot of comparison with other text – Shakespeare’s own former plays and that of other authors at the time. From a bird’s-eye view, though, I’d say that there is certainly a tension – or conflicting pattern – in a tendency to extreme naturalness – for example in the way people speak – and extreme artificiality and conscious poetic endeavour. The latter appearing in the way the “artificial” romantic action pattern – as I already stated: not generally a favourite with Shakespeare! - has to be fitted in with the “realistic” historic and contemporary background. An indication of it are also the unusually crude “speaking” names of characters that are not historical, like Imogen (= “innocent”), Cloten (= as I understand related to something extremely disgusting), or Belarius (= “warlike”). I think this is something that people at the time still appreciated as poetic whereas we usually don’t. Like allegory and conceited metaphor, they MAKE US AWARE of poetic invention, and Shakespeare usually didn’t like to create this effect. There are also scenes where he appears to make fun of such “rhymesters” or conventional forms of poetry – as, in “Cymbeline”, the “pastoral” ditty Cloten provides to entertain Imogen.

For better or worse: there is certainly a lot of artistic consciousness and spirit of experimentation behind this text. Maybe even too much of a good thing for one play?