Go with me to my tent, where you shall see

How hardly I was drawn into this war,

How calm and gentle I proceeded still

In all my writings.

-Octavius Caesar

 

Antony and Cleopatra                   Act V, scene i       Line 75

These are the words of Octavius Caesar upon learning of the death of Antony. For starters, ‘hardly’ in this context means ‘with great difficulty’. Consider now that Caesar came all the way to Egypt to fight Antony because Antony was rebelling, sort of. Consider also that Caesar and Antony were compatriots, even friends, at one point. Caesar does not sound triumphant in this line. Contrast this with “Taking Comfort” at the severed head of Macbeth in the 8/27 post. Caesar sounds tired in this line, and in the lines that lead up to this he’s downright sad. If you listen to this scene acted out (it’s a pretty short scene and this is the end of it), which I did, you’ll really get the sadness and resignation in Caesar’s voice.

I’m not quite sure what Will is making reference to in ‘all my writings’. There are actual writings of Octavius Caesars that survived, but this is a little confusing. It’s an interesting little line and it seems to get more interesting the more I look at it. Like almost all of Will’s stuff. Somehow the tone of this line reminds me a little of Prospero at the end of The Tempest when he’s inviting Alonso and his group back to his cell. It’s a very different play, a comedy as opposed to a tragedy, but there’s just something about the tone that I find familiar. I can’t help but think that over the course of thirty-whatever plays that Will wrote that he came to the same place of human feelings many times, even if this is not what I think it is in regards to The Tempest specifically. In any event, I think that’s all I’ve got on this one for today.

                         The death of the just is like the aurora of a beautiful day which will never end.

This is a picture I took today of a grave marker on a church grounds in Southington. It’s the only marker there, and it doesn’t appear to be a cemetery, but there it was nonetheless. I was struck by the death of the just... epitaph on the stone more than anything else, and I felt it resonated somehow with the death of Mark Antony, a death that precipitated today’s Totally Random line.

Thou dost love her, because thou knowst I love her,

And for my sake even so doth she abuse me,

Suff’ring my friend for my sake to approve her;

-Narrator

Sonnet 42

And here were are, finally; Sonnets. Now if you thought reading A Lover’s Complaint was tough, well think again. You’re probably thinking ‘Wait a minute Pete, I’ve heard some of these sonnets, and they’re not so tough. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”’ Yeah, well that one’s not too bad, but unfortunately most of the other ones (there’s 154 of them in total) are not so simple. And it seems that they are mostly all connected and they keep following a theme, almost a story, and they can get pretty difficult to comprehend.

Now take this one here. I have (actually, it’s ‘had’; past tense—see the picture below) a really good book of Wills’ Sonnets with really good explanations. Keep in mind that these sonnets are all fourteen lines long. That’s pretty short. My book has footnotes for just about every line of every sonnet, and also a brief summary/explanation of each sonnet. Here’s the summary of Sonnet 42:

The poet grieves more for the loss of his young friend than for that of his mistress, but tries to persuade himself that the common ground between the young lovers is himself, and that, in loving the youth, the woman is manifesting her love for the poet with whom the youth, too, is united in love. An exercise in self-consolation, sonnet 42 explores what may be said in the manner of Sidney’s Astrophil’s attempts ‘to make myself believe that all is well’.

Got that? Yeah, that’s what I said.

Just for reference, and in case you're keeping score, that’s a quote from The Arden Shakespeare copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones. That’s about as good as I’m going to get for citing here; I hope that’s enough for you.

Anyway, the point is that these sonnets are pretty tough. I wish they were all ‘Shall I compare thee…’ but they’re not. Let’s let this one go for now. The next time we hit the sonnets (they take of 19 of the 1,252 pages of my book) we’ll perhaps get into it a little more. In the meantime, I’m off to the Giant (see picture in yesterday’s post).

And this is my Arden Shakespeare's Sonnets. If you're wondering what happened to it, I'll tell you. I was sitting in the living room reading it, and one of the dogs walked in, looked at me, and proceeded to lift his leg and pee on the cabinet. Without taking his eyes off me! Well I threw the book at him, and of course it ended up landing in the puddle. I rinsed it off and put it outside to dry. But I'm afraid my Arden Shakespeare's Sonnets isn't ever going to be the same. Oh world, thy slippery turns!

I would I were invisible, to catch the strong fellow by the leg.

-Celia

 As You Like It     Act I, scene ii        Line 206

This is a pretty easy scene to set. Orlando (one of the main characters) is going to wrestle Charles (a very minor character, but in this scene he’s the ‘strong fellow’). I think they’re wrestling for money. In any event, they’re wrestling for a crowd, and Charles is a professional wrestler while Orlando is not. Celia (the speaker) is in the crowd with her cousin Rosalind. Apparently Orlando is quite the young hunk because it seems like both Celia and Rosalind are instantly in his fan club. You’ll remember that in our 8/23 post we had Rosalind giving Orlando a chain to wear. That line was from the same page that we’re on now, but occurs after the wrestling match is over. And you might guess based on that line that it’s Rosalind who ends up with Orlando. But for now, it’s Celia who’s sending her wishes that she could help Orlando in the wrestling match.

There, that’s what’s going on and why Celia utters today’s Totally Random line. Anyone out there got any thoughts? Because I have to be honest, I’m drawing a blank. For once I am very familiar with the play and the scene. And the language is perfectly easy to understand. But I just can’t think of much to add. So where do we go from here?

This makes me think of the time I was in Composition 101 as a freshman at St. Bonaventure. One day the professor had us write an essay in class. He told us to pick any subject, absolutely anything, and write a few pages on it. Everybody else started writing away. I sat there thinking, and thinking, and thinking. Finally I started writing about the fact that I couldn’t think of anything to write about. And I wrote a couple of pages on that. I handed that in and got a decent grade.

So I can think about a fairly meaningless experience I had in 1976, but I can’t think of anything to say about Celia’s comment that she’d like to get invisible so she can help Orlando win the wrestling match. Well this isn’t going to be a very good Totally Random Daily Shakespeare post if all you get is my lame story from 1976. But it will certainly qualify as Totally Random, and with the line up above you’re getting your Daily Shakespeare. Hmmm. I guess I can get away with that for today. Come to think of it, not much different than what I got away with in 1976, is it? I guess I’d just as soon be a little bit invisible today. How about you? Ever feel like being a little bit invisible?

Today’s Totally Random line is the first one that touches on any sport, in this case wrestling. There’s a lot of fighting in Will’s plays, but very little sports. Tomorrow morning I’m going to take a crack at my favorite sport. Can you guess what it is? And by the way, this sport was invented in Scotland about a hundred years before Will was born. Hey, I wonder if it's mentioned in any of his plays?

This done, see that you take no longer days,

But send the midwife presently to me.

-Aaron

 Titus Andronicus              Act IV, scene ii     Line 166

Let’s be clear here. The ‘this done’ that the speaker is referring to is the burying of the body of the nurse he just killed. And the reason he wants them to send the midwife to him is so that he can kill her too. So we’ve picked one Totally Random line from this play (okay, there’s two lines because I wanted to finish the sentence) and it is talking about not one, but two, murders. Now this is the second time that we’ve come across Titus Andronicus and if you’ll recall, the last time we were here (I believe it was 8/29) we were dealing with a severed hand and two severed heads. At that time I was ranting about what a bizarre and violent play this is. I guess I can just continue the rant, eh?

Titus was one of the first plays that Will wrote, and of course we really have no idea what he was thinking when he went into this one. Oh the Greenblatts and the Shapiros would have you know that Will ‘could have’ been reacting to his event, or ‘may have’ been present at that event which ‘might possibly’ have shaped his way of thinking. But the reality is that we just don’t know (one of these days I’m going to get into a serious rant about how much we don’t know about Will, but not today). We don’t even know for sure when he wrote this play but it seems to be in pretty good agreement that it was one of his first. That being said, was he going for the shock and awe effect, or what? I guess I could go back and count the murders and dismemberments, but…

So I guess the moral of the story is that if you’re trying to get some teenage boys interested in Shakespeare then, sorry to say, you might want to use this play. And that comment can lead us into a really long discussion of violence in today’s society, video games, movies, etc., etc. But I’m really not prepared to go there right now.  Let’s see if we can’t just find something a bit more restful or peaceful to end today’s post on.

                                                                   This is a Tennessee sunset. Pretty, isn't it? And Peaceful.

‘ “The diamond,--why, ‘twas beautiful and hard,

Whereto his invised properties did tend;…” ’

-Narrator

 

A Lover’s Complaint                         Line 212

We are finally back to a non-play line, and what do we have? It’s A Lover’s Complaint, a poem by Will that’s 329 lines long. It tells the story of an old man coming across a young girl out in the woods sitting by a stream. The girl tells the old man the story of a young man that she fell for who then dumped her. Part of the story (including today’s Totally Random line) is the young girl quoting what the young man said to her. He had told her, among other things, that he’d been with a lot of women and that many of them gave him gifts, including precious stones. He lists out the gems and the first that he lists is diamonds, and these two lines are about these diamonds. So really all we have for today is that a diamond is as hard and as beautiful as it should be. Not very exciting.

Now I have to be honest, I did my best to read most of these 329 lines last night. You guessed right; I fell asleep. If you think Will’s plays are hard to understand, you should try this poem. And I was reading a fully annotated version. It’s just really difficult to follow. This morning I found a good summary of the poem if you’re interested.

https://www.mcgoodwin.net/pages/otherbooks/ws_loverscomplaint.html

If you read the summary first (and it’s pretty short) it of course makes Will’s words easier to understand. But you still pretty much need an annotated version. And there is a spoken version out there on the web if you’re interested. Honestly, I really wasn’t.

Apparently this is another one of those Will works that has some serious academic thought that it’s not really Will’s work. What else is new.  

I did have one very striking thought when reading this poem. There is a band called the Gabe Dixon Band and they have tune called And The World Turned. The tune is about a girl standing on a rock by the water and lamenting a lost love. It kind of seemed (at least to me) that Mr. Dixon had just read this poem when he wrote that song. I found the song on YouTube if you want to take a listen. There’s a good chance that you won’t hear what I heard in terms of relation to the poem, but there it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFA9l5Ji-8g

Finally, my compilation has fifty-seven pages of non-play materials; sonnets and poems. That’s about 5%. We’ve done 72 random selections and this is our second non-play selection. That’s about 3%. So we’re not too far off and I maintain that the random selection system is working just fine, thank you. Also, this poem takes up 3 pages of my 1,252 page compilation, so there’s about a .2% chance of coming back here on any given day. That’s .2, as in 2 in 1,000 chance. That being said, we’ll probably be back here tomorrow. Ooof.

These are the guys. I saw them as the backup act for Loggins and Messina and their song reminds me of A Lover's Complaint. What do you think?

Then march to Paris, royal Charles of France,

And keep not back your powers in dalliance.

-Duke of Alencon

King Henry the Sixth Part I                          Act V, scene ii      Line 4

There are only 21 lines in this scene. It seems that the plays with the battle scenes are the ones with a lot of very short scenes. This is true of the latter part of Antony and Cleopatra when Augustus Caesar comes to Egypt for the fight. But today’s Totally Random line is not from in Egypt, it’s in France. The French and English are fighting in this play, and in this scene Charles (I’m not sure if he’s king yet, or still prince) of France is discussing the situation with some of his boys and with Joan of Arc. The scene is the plains in Anjou, and the Duke here, is telling Charles to go to Paris and muster up his forces there to fight.

So the past two days we’ve been dealing with battle scenes, or more precisely, people talking about the battles. Yesterday they were discussing the sea battle about to take place, and today they’re talking about mustering the troops in Paris. There are lot of battles fought in Will’s plays. Most of the fighting, though, takes place off stage and we find out what’s happening from the people talking about it or showing up with severed heads. Of course Will had to write it this way because there was only so much he could expect to be able to perform on a stage. I really don’t know how much battling they actually portrayed on the stage. I’m guessing that most of it was limited to a few guys swinging swords around. These were stages, after all, and I’m guessing somewhat primitive special effects. I’ve heard that back in the day the Romans were able to fill the coliseum with water and stage mock sea battles. They weren’t able to do this at the Globe theater and hence you get a lot of people talking about battles, and not so much of them acting out battles.

This is a real Roman Coliseum. It's not the big, famous one in Rome. It's a smaller one in Spain. But it's still Roman. I'll tell you, though, that we didn't see any battles taking place there. Too bad.

       Let the Egyptians

And the Phonecians go a-ducking: we

Have used to conquer, standing on the earth,

And fighting foot to foot.

-Soldier

Antony and Cleopatra                   Act III, scene vii                   Line 63

Well at least we’ve gotten away from the history plays for the day. Although this one’s not too far removed from history, just a different time and place’s history. But I believe it’s classified as a tragedy. Either way, what we have here is another uncredited cast member, this time Soldier, giving Marc Antony the very solid advice to fight on land and not sea. I’m pretty sure that when he says ‘go a-ducking’ he means act like ducks and go out on the water (in boats). I like that: Go a-ducking. Regardless, does Antony listen? Of course not. Does it turn out well for him? Of course not. You know, it’s the little guy, the uncredited guys in life who really do know what the heck they’re talking about a lot of the time. I feel like that little uncredited guy a lot. 

So I googled Marc Antony (the Roman guy, not the play, and not the singer) and of course all I got was results for Marc Antony the singer. I had to use ‘Marc Antony Roman’ to get the guy I was looking for. I was just looking to see how well Will had stuck to history on this one. And he did a pretty good job. Oh I doubt that the uncredited soldier advised Antony to fight on land. But we do know that Antony got his butt kicked in the sea battle. What a maroon!

This is an interesting play, and Will pretty much paints the picture of a fairly manipulative, kind of spoiled brat, woman and a guy who is really obsessed with her and being led by her, and by his own stupidity, to make a lot of bad decisions. I’m not sure exactly what Will was trying to say with this play. Be careful who you fall in love with? That warning could apply to Antony or Cleopatra.

Well anyway, let’s walk away from this one with the thought that you really should give a little bit of a listen to the uncredited guys and gals. Just because they’re not the stars of the show doesn’t mean they don’t know what they’re talking about.

I asked my friend to do his interpretation of the Antony’s forces at the naval battle that ensued. He takes his roles pretty seriously, don’t you think?