How Cervantes Became Cervantes (Hint: It Took Most of a Lifetime)

A quick shoutout for .s delightful for William Egginton's new book about Cervantes.  It's a sort of a biography but it's better described as an account of how Cervantes became Cervantes (hint: it took most of a lifetime) and, more precisely, what is so distinctive about him, why we think of him as the man who invented fiction. The takeaway is that Cervantes shows us characters from the inside and the outside so we can share their inner life while observing it.  Egginton credits the insight in part to the aufhor's work in the theatre and I am thinking (though Cervantes almost certainly did not know of) William Shakespeare's more or less simultaneous career. Example, Rosalind in As You Like it--a girl dressed up as a boy telling a hearer what she would think if she were a girl (closely similar stunt in Twelfth Night, only doubled).

A particularly elegant instance is has handling of Cervantes tradition of the great narrative epics--in particular the work of Tasso and Ariosto.  Egginton recalls the scene where Don Quixote sees a cloud and thinks it is an advancing hostile army.  There are two clouds, remarks his realist companion Sancho.  Oh, goody, says the knight, we are surrounded.  Whereupon the knight describes the armies in lapidary detail--what they wear, what they carry.  Egginton's points out how the descriptions are almost an exact copy of his great narrative predecessors--with a difference.  That is: Tasso and Ariosto are telling us what the armies looked like.  Cervantes is showing us what this half-mad observer thinks they look like.  Appearance and reality, objectivity and subjective consciousness.

I love it, with one minor qualification.  Specifically, Ariosto is the eternal ironist.  He tells you the story as if true but all the time he is nudging you in the ribs as if to say "you don't really believe this, do you?"  But no matter.  Cervantes figures out how to take that unreality and make it part of the story.

Shakespeare on Death and Transfiguration

A Serious Person would write about Ebola or the Yazidis or the soon-to-be-former Colorado River.  For the moment, I'll stick to Shakespeare, as seen by one of my favorite commentators:

Prospero, Duke of Milan [in The Tempest], deprived of his dukedom and riled on an island, is restored t the end to his former place, a man so altered by his experience that henceforth, he declares, every third thought shall be his grave. Obviously, this is the pattern of As You Like It with the Forest of Arden in place of the Enchanted Isle and with the difference that the Senior Duke is in no need of regeneration. But, less obviously, this theme of the King, Prince, Duke, or other person of high estate losing his place or his inheritance only to recover it or its spiritual equivalent, after exile or suffering, in a sense in which he never possessed it before, is repeated by Shakespeare over and over. All stemming in a way from that early and undervalued study of King Henry VI, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, and parts o f Pericles, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale are built on that situation.They all, in  one way or another, contrast with and supplement Hamlet, whose hero propounds the same problem, wavers on the edge of a fresh solution, only to offer in the end the old erroneous answer. They all, in virus keys, reiterate the theme of Timon: "Nothing brings me all things."

But it is not just those who have lost worldly kingdoms in a literal sense who come to realize this truth. Shakespeare uses the same idea metaphorically. Over and over in his plays when the object valued or the person loved is taken away, an imaginative object or person, more than compensating for the loss, appears in its place.

So Harold C. Goddard in The Meaning of Shakespeare, v. 2, 288 (1951).I'm not quite sold on this yet but I do think it invites some thought.  One particular, however, strikes me as momentous.  Goddard is reminding us of how rewarding it can be to read Hamlet not only on its own terms (where it is rewarding enough) but also in the context of Shakespeare's entire career.  Hamlet appears at just about the mid-point of Shakespeare's career.  Others have noted how you can read it as summing up everything (i.e., a lot) that Shakespeare has learned up to that time, but also posing questions that he will spend the rest of his career trying to answer.

The Suzman Cleopatra

I was telling the keeper of the Chez Buce Netflix queue that my favorite Antony and Cleopatra--indeed, the only good one I had ever seen before just now--was the Jonathan Miller BBC staging with Jane LaPotaire, which some would think of a the "alternative" A&C.  This is the one where Cleo is emphatically not a sex goddess: she is an aging ex-charmer playing out the last cards in her deck.  This has always seemed exactly right to me and I've been meaning for some time to seek it out and take another look.

This looked like it would be the occasion. But somehow (the fault may well have been mine) we got our wires crosses and came up with an entirely different production--the Royal Shakespeare Company presentation with Janet (not Jane) Suzman, which neither of us had ever seen before. A lucky accident: this is a thrilling production and I'm surprised and a bit sorry for myself that I had never seen it before. 

It's a bit of a surprise in one respect: watching, I assumed that the Suzman must be later than (and influenced by) the LaPotaire.  But no: the Suzman is from 1974 and the LaPotaire from 1981.  This is an eye-opener for me (at least) in that Suzman, too, plays Cleo as an aging charmer who has to work harder and harder with the resources she has on hand.   It's not so explicit as (I remember) the Potaire, but it's certainly not Elizabeth Taylor, nor any of the array of Cleopatras who seem to think they are covering for Brigitte Bardot.

I should say a word, too, about Richard Johnson as her Antony--again, not a toyboy but a weathered old soldier full of possibilities that will no longer be explored.  I thought he got off to a shaky start but in the middle, as his world begins to fall apart around him, he really soared.  I see by Dr. Google that LaPotaire's Antony was Colin Blakely who ought to  be up to the role.  But oddly enough, right now (i.e.,not having seen it for years) I can't even bring him to mind.

Must be an old guy thing: I find myself more and more attracted to the task of reviewing old favorites, even if in new guise, rather than tackling something completely new. Now, if we can scare up a copy of the Miller/LaPotaire. ...

We're Doomed

Hast thou not seen one of our late Kings slain in the midst of his sports?  And one of his ancestors die miserably by the chocke of an hog?  Eschilus, fore-threatened by the fall of an house when he stood  most upon his guard, stricken dead by the fall of a Tortoise shell, which fell out of the talons of axxn eagle flying in the air; and another choked with the kernel of a grape?  And an Emperor die by the scratch of comb, whilst he was combing his head?  And Lepidus with hitting his foot against a door-sill?  And Aufidius with stumbling against the council-chamber door as he was going in thereat?  And Cornelius Gallus, the Praetor; Tegiliinus Captain of the Roman watch; Lodovico, son of Guido Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua--end their days between women's thighs?

--Michele de Montaigne, of course, in the essay, "That to Philosophize is to Learn How to Die," in the "Shakespeare translation" by John Florio,  from a new edition of selections issued as Shakespeare's Montaigne, by NYRB Classics, with a helpful introduction by Stephen Greenblatt, edited and modernized by Peter G. Platt.  Interesting, after a lifetime of reading Shakespeare I can deal easily with (most) Shakespearean text, but this Florio, issued around the midpoint of Shakespeare's career, can be tough going. 

The notes tell us that Henry II (of France) was "killed in a tournament," and that "his ancestor Philip, who never ruled, was killed by a pig."

Shakespeare: Oh I Think Not

We've Found Shakespeare's Dictionary!--We got it on Ebay!  So goes the headline (lightly paraphrased).  Well you never say never, but my guess is no.  Not that I've done anything like actually review the evidence, but the very idea seems to fall foul of my favorite first principle of Shakespeare scholarship: it misunderstands who Shakespeare was, and what he did.

Repeat after me, children: Shakespeare was first and last a working hoofer, intent on making money by pleasing the crowd.   From the start he seemed to know the stuff of stagecraft: how to make a scene, how to get a character on and off stage. From early on, he seemed to show a knack for poetry and the craft of dramatic writing--he got much better at it as he got older.   He seems to have had a natural ear and there is no doubt he was a great responder: to his sources (Holinshead, North, Montaigne) but also to his ragged, raucous but enthusiastic audience.

In short, the last guy you'd expect to find hanging around the library.  He didn't bother with the things he didn't bother with.  Had he been a "university wit" (as the misunderstanders said he must have been), he would have been a more disciplined, fastidious and duller writer (I read this somewhere--Jonathan Bate?).

In short, the last guy in the world to sit around annotating a dictionary.  Shakespeare was, in short, not a consumer of dictionaries but a generator of them.  He certainly sopped up words but more than that he improvised and created them.   Had he constrained himself to run off to the authorities in time of trouble, he would have missed out on the electric urgency that gives him so much of his appeal.

I see the folks at Folger share my skepticism.  Good on them, and tell them Buce said so.

Afterthought:  My goodbuddy Carlton reminds me that there was a stir a while back about Shakespeare's Bible.  No, wait, Edward DeVere's Bible--he being, of course, the true author of the plays that the bumpkin never could have composed on his own (snark)  Haven't heard much of that one lately, I'd say. 

Fn:  Happy 350th 450th (heh!), Will.  It's tomorrow, isn't it? Oh, you say we don't know that one either?

A Caravaggio Roundup

My friend Michael catches a typo in my latest Caravaggio post.  His prize is a set of curated links to Underbelly's best Caravaggio posts--a prize which I  now degrade by sharing them all with you:

Top Five. 

Top Two.

Shakespeare.

Stillness.

Still blows my mind that Shakespeare, Caravaggio and Cervantes would all have been flourishing around 1600.  Well: Cervantes was on his uppers but his pivotal moment--the completion of part I of Don Quixote--was just five years away.

As they Say, "The Fella Wears His Own Hat"

R.A. Foakes explores a nice point of millinery in discussing Shakespeare's play about the King who would and would not surrender the attributes of his office:

Some have thought that when Lear offers a coronet to Cornwall and Albany at 1.1.140, he takes one from his own head, but Shakespeare and his audience well knew the difference between crowns and coronets: crowns typically had raised sides, were "archée," that is, had between four and eight arches over the circlet, and were topped with an emblem sym

bolic of the power belonging to kings.  Coronets (the word is a diminutive of 'crown') were circlets worn by princes and dukes.  It makes dramatic sense if Lear wears such a crown at the beginning of the play, and gives a coronet intended for Cordelia to Cornwall and Albany; he acts imperiously all through the scene, and if he continues to wear a crown until his exist this would highlight visually the irony of his actions in giving away his power yet seeking to retain his royal prerogatives, 'The name, and all th'addition to a king'.(1.1.137).

--R. A. Foakes, "Introduction" 14-15 to King Lear, The Arden Shakespearem (3d Ser.)  (2004).  

*I tried to find a nice picture of a "coronet," but they kept sending me to the 1966 Dodge, or the ladies' magazine, or to a "cornet," which isn't the same thing at all.

 

G. Wilson Knight is Feeling Cranky this Morning

The critic G. Wilson Knight goes looking for the root of Shakespeare's art in the soil of contemporary Elizabeth society and somehow stumbles on the bones of Matthew Arnold:

We see [Shakespeare's] contemporaries for the most part as busy hack writers of untidy genius, sharing a particular sense of the tragic mood: this sense, such as it is, merging into the mere sense of what the public wanted. They confuse us by the fact that what at first appears to be their 'philosophy of life' sometimes turns out to be only a felicitous but shameless lifting of a passage from almost any author, as those of Chapman from Erasmus. This, indeed, is a habit which Shakespeare shares; he has his Montaigne, his Seneca, and his Machiavelli, or his Anti-Machiavel like the others. And they adapted, collaborated, and overlaid each other   to the limits of confusion. Nevertheless, they do seem, the best of Shakespeare's contemporaries, to have more or less faint or distinct patterns. (I was tempted to use the word 'secret' as an alternative to 'pattern', but that I remembered the unlucky example of Matthew Arnold, who said much about the 'secret of Jesus', a secret which having been revealed only and finally to Arnold himself, turned out to be a pretty poor secret after all.) In Marlowe, surely, we feel the search for one; in Chapman a kind of blundering upon one; in Jonson the one dear and distinct, slight but much more serious than it looks, pattern. There is something in the Revenger's Tragedy, but one play does not make a pattern; and Middleton completely baffles me; and as for Ford and Shirley, I suspect them of belonging to that class of poets not unknown to any age, which has all of the superficial qualities, and none of the internal organs, of poetry.

Knight, G. Wilson (2001-05-18). The Wheel of Fire

 (Routledge Classics) . Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition..

 

Insofar as it seems to apply to Shakespeare himself, this may be too severe.  Forgetting about Matthew Arnold, whose "secret" remains undisclosed to me, later  critics have found more coherence in Shakespeare's thought.  See, e.g., Colin McGinn, Shakespeare's Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind Shakespeare's Plays.

What I Learned This Week: Shakespearean One-Liners

Over dinner the other night, our friend Becky dismissed an absent presence as "fit to be sent on errands."

Cute, said I.  Where'd you get it.

Oh, Shakespeare, said Becky.

I don't believe you, said I, and I am pretty good at my Shakespeare one-liners.  

But a brief house call from Dr. Google demonstrated that she was correct. It is indeed Shakespeare, and not just Shakespeare--it is Marc Antony, colluding with his co-triumvir Octavian to determine who shall live, who shall die in the maelstrom that follows Caesar's assassination.  And not just Antony but Antony completely in character, with his jokey cruelty and his preening contempt for a supposed ally. For it is this Antony who has just dispatched Lepidus, the supposed third of the triumvirs, to fetch Caesar's will:

This is a slight unmeritable man,
Meet to be sent on errands.

Link.

Anniversary: Jack Cade--No Wait, Listen...

The 463d anniversary of Jack Cade's rebellion, the prompt for the most famous lawyer jape of all time, infra.  And as good a time as any to record that it's really a compliment.

Cade:
I thank you, good people—there shall be no money; all shall eat
and drink on my score, and I will apparel them all in one livery,
that they may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord.
Dick:
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

Bada boom.  So Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 2, Act 4, scene 2, 71–77, and lawyers have been to catch up with it ever since.  I do think they could use a more effective publicist, though.

Happy 449 Christening Day, Will!

[Somehow I didn't post this on the 24th.]  Wups, missed Shakespeare's 449th yesterday.  I suppose (but I have not looked) that there is a Facebook page where I could stop by with a quick woo hoo.  In lieu, I offer up a favorite sonnet, #138:

When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor'd youth,
Unlearned in the world's false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppress'd.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love's best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told:

Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter'd be.

 Afterthought:  But maybe I didn't miss it.   The choice of the 23d is, after all, merely conventional--we know he was baptized on the 26th, and we back-engineer from there.  So, maybe happy birthday after all, Will.

Richard III: I Don't Suppose I'm the First...

Of the late King Richard III, buried Hoffa-style under a bunch of concrete, John writes:

 I suppose after being in a parking lot for the last few decades, being reburied in a church is an improvement--but didn't he deserve a better place than an obscure shire church?

Which prompts:

Or I'll be buried in the king's highway,
Some way of common trade, where subjects' feet
May hourly trample on their sovereign's head;
For on my heart they tread now whilst I live;
And buried once, why not upon my head?

--William Shakespeare, King Richard II, Act III Sc. 3.

 

Ms.K Endorses Goddard on Shakespeare

You remember H. C. Goddard?  I wrote an appreciative squib about his Shakespeare commentaries a year ago September.  Comes now one Sue K (unknown to me) with a far more interesting bit of background about Goddard and his work.  It will profit you to go read it even if it is a bit belated.

Of course Ms. K's generally positive view though I will add an afterthought, meant to reflect ill on neither Goddard nor me.  Specifically: although I've had the book(s) for something like 16 months so far, I haven't finished it yet.  I don't think this is nearly as shameful as it may sound.  The point is that this is a book to be imbibed slowly and savored, not scarfed down with a gulp.  It's a bedside book: I read a few pages every few days.  I think about them for a few days and then sometimes, I read the same pages again.  I'm jumping around from play to play almost at random though I guess I have done about half the book so far.  I'm delighted that I have so much to look forward to and I will only be sorry when it ends (the last book that made me feel this way was War and Peace).

Shakespeare and the Demands of Kingship

Idling through Harold Goddard's admirable essays on Shakespeare, I happened on one I don't think I had read before: his discussion of King John, Grant that KJ might be a lesser Shakespearean effort; still, even the least of Shakespeare is better than the best of almost anybody else. And Goddard, as always, has something interesting to contribute.  The play, Goddard asserts, "is built around a theme that Shakespeare never thereafter lost sight of.  The theme is close to the heart of nearly all the other History Plays, both English and Roman; it is essential to Hamlet; it culminates in King Lear; it echoes through  The Tempest."

What  theme?  For the moment, Goddard ducks the issue: "this is not the place to back up these assertions in detail."  But I think he get his point. The theme, I suspect he might say, is the nature of kingship, and in particular the implications of placing the crown into the hands of a man who is Not Up to the Job.  John himself, of course--"like a bewildered  child in the night," as Goddard says. But also Henry VI, central to (if hardly the protagonist of) the three plays that may mark the beginning of Shakespeare's career.  And also a more interesting man in a better play: Richard II, per Goddard, "the most subtle psychological analysis that Shakespeare had made up to this point."  The remarkable fact is that Richard, unlike Henry or John, is not a cipher as a human being.  Richard is a poet, a man of arresting imagination, but  he never learns how to escape his own imagination to grasp the realities of power.

It's almost a commonplace to see Richard as a prefiguring of Hamlet, and I think Goddard insight offers the key:   Gielgud called Hamlet "a great ruh-nay-sance prince," and he is all of that.  But he shies away from kingship and brings unspeakable misfortune down on the heads of himself and so many others.

Here I want to press beyond Goddard. In some superb lectures, Peter Saccio argues that the Henry IV plays are studies in the nature of kingship.  Young  Prince Hal finds himself presented with various models of kingship: young Harry Percy, impulsive and a man of action but unable to control his own passions; Falstaff, the the great cosmic sink of pleasure and irresponsibility--and Hal's own father, Henry IV, effective enough to grasp a crown but still querulous and insecure.  Hal rejects them all;  indeed it is not much of a stretch to say that both Harry and Falstaff die at Hal's hand.  He fashions a model of kingship all his own--perhaps the only fully convincing kingship in all of Shakespeare.

We can go further: in Antony and Cleopatra, we see Antony bathed in lust and luxury; we may forget that he came within a hair's breadth of the throne; we may forget it, but the man who bested him did not.  It is Octavian, soon to be unchallenged emperor in his own right, who remembers Antony in his moment of steadfastness and resilience:

Thou didst drink
The stale of horses and the gilded puddle
Which beasts would cough at. ...
Yea, like the stag, when snow the pasture sheets,
The barks of trees thou browsèd.

And everybody who did Shakespeare in high school will remember that Antony could beguile a crowd in a style of which his peer Brutus was utterly incapable.

And I think Goddard is right to include Lear: vulnerable, petulant, bewildered Lear who doesn't seem to understand the relationship between the realities of power and the trappings. Which may be enough to bring us back to Richard II and, also to his gardener, the man charged with keeping order in his kingly estate:

O, what pity is it,
That he who had not so trimm'd and dress'd his land
As we this garden!   ...
Had he done so, himself  had borne the crown,
Which waste of idle hours hath quite thrown down.

[Almost alone among common folk kn Shakespeare, this yokel speaks in blank verse.]  Shakespeare cares about kingship, and the responsibilities of rule, and the terrible consequences of men who are not up to to the job.  Comparisons with current events are left as an exercise to the student.

Breaking the Form

Sometimes the sentiment is so strong it busts clean out of the form:

Yea, like the stag, when snow the pasture sheets,
The barks of trees thou browsed'st.

--Antony and Cleopatra I.4

See what a rent the envious Casca made:

 --Julius Caesar, III.2

...graves at my command
 Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art.

--Tempest, V.1

--The trick of that voice I do well remember:
Is 't not the king?

--Ay, every inch a king.

--King Lear, IV.6

Inch-thick, knee-deep, o'er head and
ears a fork'd one!

--Winters' Tale, I.2

Bloody, bawdy villain! 
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!

--Hamlet, II,2 

Was Shakespeare Italian? Another Look

It's not my intention to turn this into an all-Shakespeare blog, but Ken beguiles me with a question: was Shakespeare Italian?  No, that's too flippant.  Rather, did Shakespeare visit Italy, spend time there?  Else where and how did he get all that Italian material for his plays?


As to the first--did he visit Italy? I've already given my answer: Sure.  Maybe. I don't think so, but who knows, whatever. As to the second--where and how did he get all those Italian materials?  I suppose the answer here comes in two parts.  One, Shakespeare was the world's greatest literary pillager.  Almost everything he does is a rework of something else--invariably better by orders of magnitude, but still a response, a reaction to the work of another (think "I see possibilities here").  And two: this is, after all, the Renaissance we're talking about here, and in the nature of things the Renaissance begins in Italy.  England in Shakespeare's time was awash in Italian themes, Italian works, Italian culture for export at retail,  and it cannot be surprising that the great responder found himself responding. Robin Kirkpatrick says:

Shakespeare  makes reference to Italy in at least fourteen of his pays, choosing Italian settings, or employing story-lines from ultimately Italian sources.  The range of references would be much increased if one admitted the evidence of echoes, allusions and analogy.  Plainly, Shakespeare shared with his contemporaries and immediate forebears a fascination with Italy.

Kirkpatrick proceeds to explore "the results of his fascination."  He observes that "in the detail with which he reformulates his sources ....  Shakespeare's literary craftsmanship will at once be apparent.  So, too, will his appetite for experiment..."    Moving on to consider what he calls "the myth of Italy," Kirkpatrick says that "Shakespeare may be expected to have looked upon Italy as, by turns, an exotic and sophisticated other world or as a target for patriotric satire."  But he adds:

More subtly, however, his use of the myth will display an ability to represent and analyse not only character types but also types of social and political organization.  Shakespeare did not share, perhaps, Machiavelli's oitical animus.  But he does share a profound interest in the way that human beings operate in groups, and is alert to the possibillity of institutional and cultural difference."

Kirkpatrick also weighs in on the diverting, if perhaps less important, question whether Shakespeare--though he may not have visited Italy--still understood how to read the Italian language.  Conceding that we can't know, Kirkpatrick  finds it on balance rather likely:

[A]s we have seen, English authors had never found it difficult to acquire a reading knowledge of Italian.  In Shakespeare's own time, teachers of Italian ... were active in the circles which Shakespeare himself frequented, and Italian language texts ... were being printed and published in London ... .  It seems plausible .. that in composing plays such as Othello and Coriolanus he should have been able to consult Italian texts.

--Robin Kirkpatrick, English and Italian Literature from Dante to Shakespeare 277-8 ( 1995)

For Coriolanus, I think Kirkpatrick may have meant to say Cymbeline, but it's a detail.  On the general point, I'd be inclined to agree. 

Sonnets

Hey, here's a find: the inimitable Stephen Fry, reading Shakespeare's Sonnet Number 130--the one that begins "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun," and includes the oddly non-Shakespearean line, "If hair be wires, black wires grow on her head."

I've got a sentimental fondness sfor ol' 130: it was the first sonnet I ever heard aloud (perhaps the first I heard or read)-- read by Albert Liddell, Professor of English at Antioch College in the fall of 1953--maybe "Alfred," my memory is shaky and Wiki is no help. Liddell was the very model of a fubsy old English professor. He wasn't the star of the show at Antioch in those days (I suspect, not ever)--too old-fashioned and unassertive--but he was kind to me and showed me patience when I didn't deserve it.    He gave us the sonnet as our introduction to Shakespeare.  I guess you could say it worked, though in the years since, I've come across others that I think might serve him better.

I found my Fry reading at Open Culture, with a link to a new Ipad app that will deliver the complete of 154 sonnets for $13.99, from a variety of voices, famous and not so.  Apparently the whole lot is available for free grazing on line.  Here's Patrick Stewart, doing a particular favorite of mine (#29, "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes...").   And another favorite: James Shapiro reading #138, "When my love swears that she is made of truth...:"  And--but wait a minute, I'm noticing something here.  That is: I don't like to listen to those guys.  Sure, they are talented, seasoned, Shakesperean--but the more I hear, the more I realize that I'd rather hear them in my own voice: once again, imagination trumps brute reality.  Hell, I'd even like to hear Al Liddell, but I guess he too lives only in imagination.    You know what? One of these days I'm just going to have to do my own, and post them here, and let you judge whether  or not I am Shakespearean class. I think I should pluck my eyebrows first, though.  Meanwhile, here's Patrick Stewart doing something I know I cannot top: the soliloquy "B or not B?"

Ensemble

Finishing up the Chez Buce presentation of Il Barbiere di Seviglia (the "broken leg" version) we got to chatting about the peculiar challenges of ensemble work.  Think about it:  Barbiere is quintessentially an ensemble work--five (you could say six) fat parts that depend from start to finish on the performers' capacity to work with each other.

Yet think on this also: it's almost impossible for a stage personality not to be a narcissist. You go into the business in the first place because you are a self-absorbed showoff.  If you are any good--especially if you are any good--you spend more and more of your time in a warm bath of cheering and applause.    Not many can keep their head in that kind of glow.

Yet the really shrewd ones are those who figure out that their success is actually greater if other people also succeed.  In this light, the best performances are those in which everybody makes everybody else look good.  I think everybody hit that standard in the broken-leg Barbiere, though perhaps not all to the same degree.  Joyce DiDonato you can forgive.  The crowd was ready to treat her as special because of the misbehaving bone, and there she was all alone out by the footlights in her wheelchair.  So, give her a bye.  But contrast Juan Diego Flórez. I'm a big Flórez fan, and I like just about everything he does. But he's never better than when he is engaging with somebody else--bantering, tearing his heart out or just indulging in a spot of innocent lust.

An even more interesting case is Francisco Furlanetto, who played Don Basilio. Per Wiki, he's 63 this year. He's always labored under the constraint (if it is a constraint) that he's a bass, and so he's limited to a comparatively small range of roles. My impression is that he spent a lot of years playing first-tier parts in second-tier houses. Again as with Flórez, I think he's great in just about anything. But I suspect maybe he isbest precisely when it is not his job to hog the spotlight; rather to play the critic or the
I assume these guys are both smart enough to know when they are well off. 

Not everybody gets, it, I gather. Apparently there is a whole Hollywood tradition about the place of the straight man in comedy and whether they get the recognition they deserve.

We followed up Barbiere with a viewing of Ralph Fiennes' Coriolanus.   Fiennes starred, of course; he also directed.  And somebody (I can only surmise it was he) understood that he'd look better with a strong, discerning, challenging cast who would be able to carry  their own parts, and also to get the best out of him.  Shrewd fellow, and I must say it paid off.

Afterthought: A while back I wrote about seeing a performance of Romeo and Juliet with real teens. It occurs to me now that you could see the same principle at work there. Some of those kids knew exactly what they were there for: they talked to each other. Some recited their lines as if they were in a vacuum, all alone on the stage. A rare kind of maturity, this interaction stuff. Some people never get it.

Guide to a Guide

A well-wisher has favored Chez Buce with a copy of The Shakespeare Guide to Italy, by one Richard Paul Roe, otherwise unknown to me.  Note the sequence here: this is not (or at least not primarily) a book about the influence of Italian (Renaissance) culture on Shakespeare.  Rather, it is a laboriously constructed tour guide, designed to show that Shakespeare's plays display an exact knowledge of Italy, such that he must have spent time there.
I'll begin by confessing that I haven't read it and am not likely to.  I'll grand that the proposition  is interesting and might even be right.  That is, even the most conventional Shakespearean would have to concede that there is a gap of six-eight years in the Shakespearean time line and the possibility of a trip (or trips) to Italy can't be ruled out.  He does seem to show a lot of interest in Italiana and it may be, as Roe argues, that his references have exact analogs.  Exact knowledge alone isn't enough, of course to prove he was there; else we might speculate on whether he was at Agincourt or Bosworth Field as well.

No; the real question is "why does it" (or does it not) "matter?"   I survey two  possibilities:

• One, proving Shakespeare "knew" Italy would make us think better of the plays.  I'd put this one down as a flat-out mistake.  Consider this statement: "It used to be that I didn't like Shakespeare, but now that I find his knowledge of Italy is accurate," I like him better."  In what wold would that proposition make any sense?   I can't think of one.  Similarly, imagine correcting one of Shakespeare's indisputable errors ("seacoast of Bohemia"--maybe make it read "mountains of Bohemia," keeping the rhythm. Would anybody say the play is improved thereby?  I can't imagine who.

• In short, knowledge or non-knowledge about Italy has exactly nothing to do with Shakespeare's qualities as a playwright.  But we could, of course, turn the point around.  That is, it might turn out that Roe is right about Shakespeare's geography--that he does, in fact, get every Italian detail exactly right.  Would that enhance our respect for Shakespeare as a geographer?  Well, sure.  Maybe it turns out that instead of (or in addition to) being the new Sophocles, he is also the new Strabo?   Would  I then admire him for his feats of geography?  Sure, I might.  But once again, his feats of geography are unrelated top his achivements as a playwright.

So once again, it is not without interest that Shakespeare the man may have journeyed to Italy in 1586.  But the answer to that question has exactly nothing to do with the Shakespeare we know and love.

Happy 396th, Bill:

here i am ben says bill
nothing but a lousy playwright
and with anything like luck
in the breaks i might have been
a fairly decent sonnet writer
i might have been a poet
if i had kept away from the theatre 

For the whole sordid story, go here.  Or: