Flowery Shakespeare
John Sutherland on Shakespeare stuff. Harold Bloom, for instance. I like early Bloom, but I really hated his Shakespeare book.
…the Falstaffian Harold Bloom with Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998). Before the Bard, Bloom argues, we were only semi-human. We didn’t know how to express those feelings that separate us from the brutes (so much for Dante and Chaucer).
Not to mention Homer, Euripides, Seneca, Montaigne, and quite a few other people. But one can go too far in the deflationary direction too.
Stanley Wells is the acknowledged dean of the reviser school….[Shxpr] was a “working man of the theatre” – arguably (but not in every respect) superior to Dekker, Middleton, Jonson et al, and no different in kind…If you brought Stanley Wells’ Shakespeare to the present in H.G. Wells’ time machine and asked him “what are you doing, Will?” he would never have said “inventing the human, dear fellow”. He would have said: “turning an honest penny. And, by the way, can I interest you in buying a few tons of malt which I’ve just bought on spec?”
He wouldn’t have said either (as Sutherland is pointing out). The inventing the human thing is very silly, but so is the turning an honest penny thing. If he had been merely turning an honest penny and nothing more, there are thousands of lines he would have written quite differently. The plays are riddled with vocabulary, images, thoughts, effects, speeches, fireworks, that he didn’t need just to get bums on seats or feet in the pit. They are full and overflowing with excess. It is quite possible that he could have made even more money if he had written more simply: then he probably could have written more plays. He wouldn’t have written ‘Troilus and Cressida’ at all; ‘Hamlet’ would have been half the length; ‘Lear’ would have had the happy ending Nahum Tate gave it; the Sonnets wouldn’t exist; and so on. Yes he liked making money, but that’s not all he liked.
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of Prices shall outlive this powerful rhyme …….
I love that line.
Mind you, I tend to render it Princes, not Prices. Your version sounds a little like a Wal-Mart ad. snicker
He was a dab hand at first lines, Will was.
My favorite opening lines:
“If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it…”
(Orsino, from Twelfth Night)
How about: “Who’s there?”
(Hamlet) (Get it?)
Of course I could have googled it, but I did it the old fashioned way, and discovered that the line GT quoted is from Sonnet 55. (FYI)
“How about: “Who’s there?”
(Hamlet) (Get it?)”
Oh, you bet. I’ve been known to drone for hours about that particular first line.
(I saw a Hamlet a couple of weeks ago that threw away the whole first scene and thus of course that line. Aaaarrgggh.)
Other good ones –
Nay in truth I know not why I am so sad.
Nay but this dotage of our general’s o’erflows the measure.
Perhaps two other quotes, from two other places, hopefully without typos this tiome, will illustrate our ongoing problems – Stratford Bill always does seem toi have a word or two for it …..
“The times are out of joint”
“The nine-mens morris is filled up with mud”
OK. I’ll stoop to it.
“How now, Ophelia?” (Hamlet, of course)
Someone had to.
Yeah, but Hamlet has all the best lines.
Mind you the plays would be a lot better if they weren’t so full of quotations…
Really – talk about unoriginal. Hamlet especially is just one cliché after another. To the manner born, to thine own self be true, the readiness is all; blah blah blah. Couldn’t the guy think up his own phrases?