Rereading

I'm rereading Othello for the three hundred and thirty-second time (kidding--you know I don't like to count), and there's always something new. This time through I thought more about whether I could direct a production of the play in which Othello and Desdemona never get to consummate their marriage. It would explain how quickly he dismisses Cassio from the service--he's called out of bed before he completes the act, and by the time he finishes with all the paperwork, it's morning (Cassio says to Iago in III,i "the day had broke before we parted"). It would certainly explain why he grows increasingly inarticulate as the play progresses. And it explains the repeated "put out the light" line in a way I don't think I've yet seen it delivered.

I like to reread, and it's not for lack of attention the first time around. The first time I read Jane Eyre I was 14, and it would have been a shame if I hadn't gotten reacquainted with her at least once when I had passed the age she is when she declares "Reader, I married him." The story is more disturbing if you're old enough to have seriously considered getting involved with someone merely because it seemed the right thing to do, rather than because you were head over heels in love with him.

We never get rid of a book at my house. Well, hardly ever. I have sometimes cleaned out a few outdated "how-to" books, like guidebooks for places we've been and child development manuals (What To Expect When You're Expecting went to the library or Goodwill years ago). My guideline for buying books is that I buy them when I think I'll want to reread them. If I like a library book, it goes on my wish list of books to own, so I can dip back in whenever I feel like it. I could never be like the sausage-maker grandfather who pulled out each page as he read it and sailed it out the window of his truck. Although there is a certain alluring freedom in that image.

If you're not in the habit of rereading your books, why do you keep them? Or do you?

Shakespeare Meme

Just got back from my vacation from the virtual world and saw some interesting questions about Shakespeare over at A Guy's Moleskine Notebook. The one that compels me to spread the meme is the question about whether Shakespeare is "important." Well, duh. But I don't mean "important" in the sense that we all admit--even brag about--knowing the plays. Shakespeare is important in the way any good writer is important; because the issues he raises are ones that many people struggle with, and so the plays show us sides of human nature that we don't always see in our own lives. What's more important than expanding your view of the world?

Here are the rest of the questions:

What was your first introduction to William Shakespeare? Was it love or hate?

My father, who taught in the theater department of a state university, took me to see all the plays they did each year, and so I saw Shakespeare's plays before I could be required to read them or think of them as "difficult" or "boring." They were way more interesting than, for instance, some of George Bernard Shaw's talkier plays (Misalliance) when I was very young.

Which Shakespeare plays have you been required to read?

I think I was required to read Romeo and Juliet in High School. (I already loved Zefferelli's movie version, which I saw when I was 9 or 10, younger than Olivia Hussey, who played Juliet at the age of 15.) In my sophomore year of High School, when I was 15, I was required to read Julius Caesar, but didn't find it interesting, and since I could evidently do well on the test without reading it, I never did. In fact, I finished a PhD in English Literature without ever reading it. Just this year I went to see it at Otterbein, and it was a good production, set in the future. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Do you think Shakespeare is important? Do you feel you are a “better” person for having read the bard?

The less we revere Shakespeare and ask dutiful but ultimately silly questions like does reading him make us a better person, the more we can love the plays. They're fun. And why read them? SEE them! The sonnets are worth reading, but I wouldn't recommend them to anyone as a kind of self-help book!

Do you have a favorite Shakespeare play?

Yes, as I've said before, I'm completely fascinated by Othello. I'm also very fond of Antony and Cleopatra, and wish there were more productions of it.

How do you feel about contemporary takes on Shakespeare? Adaptations of Shakespeare’s works with a more modern feel? (For example, the new line of Manga Shakespeare graphic novels, or novels like Something Rotten, Something Wicked, Enter Three Witches, Ophelia, etc.) Do you have a favorite you’d recommend?

Most "adaptations" aren't that good, if you ask me. Jane Smiley could have written something better than A Thousand Acres, and reading that The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is a version of Hamlet doesn't make me want to rush out and find the book. If modern writers actually did what Shakespeare did, which was to base his plays loosely on several different stories while adding his own twists, that would be more exciting than adapting only one story. But, as Harold Bloom observes, The Anxiety of Influence is too prevalent in the 20th--and so far the 21st--century.

What’s your favorite movie version of a Shakespeare play?

I think I'd have to say that it's Oliver Parker's version of Othello, with Kenneth Branagh as Iago and Laurence Fishburne as Othello. But I am very fond of Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing, too, with Emma Thompson.

Stage (and screen) Beauty

I've been teaching Othello at the college I commute to. As you know, it's my favorite Shakespeare tragedy. And I've been getting ready for a presentation to the Board of Trustees about the Writing Center (student tutoring service) that I run at the local college. And I still haven't finished grading that third pile of papers. So I haven't been reading much at all.

The most fun I've had in the land of fiction has been going through all the film versions of Othello that I own and borrow from libraries, and I've rediscovered a movie that wasn't as big a commercial success as it deserved. It's entitled Stage Beauty, and it stars Billy Crudup and Claire Danes. The story centers around productions of Othello, and the final scene is an (anachronistic) entirely passionate and satisfying conclusion to the story and to the play within it. That's a good trick, wouldn't you say?

My favorite version of Othello has to be the severely edited Kenneth Branagh/Oliver Parker one that came out in 1995. But I also like Janet Suzman's 2000 South African cast, and Tim Blake Nelson's and Geoffrey Sax's 2001 screenplay versions.

Do you have a favorite movie based on a Shakespeare play?

Against Reading

I'm hardly ever against reading, except when it comes to plays. If there is a play that's better read than performed, then probably we should invent a new genre category for it and call it by any other name.

Last night was the final performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream at Eleanor's high school. She played Snout, who is also Wall. So I was prejudiced in favor of enjoying the group of players, but they were as funny as any group of players I've ever seen. Wall had very active eyebrows and played the part, well, broadly. Snug/Lion fell off of the end of the bench a lot. Peter Quince, a very short guy, threatened the much larger Bottom with his walking cane, Starveling/Moonshine was pointedly skeptical about how much use she was as a character, and Flute/Thisby was played to perfection by a pretty 14-year-old boy, slight of stature, whose voice was actually in the process of changing during the weekend of performances.

In a departure from the tradition of children's/adolescent theater in which A Midsummer Night's Dream is done so frequently because there's less for parents to object to than in other Shakespeare plays, this production had Puck dressed and voiced as a satyr, reminiscent of Stanley Tucci's movie role. Puck took obvious delight in causing mischief, and his prancing presence always livened up the stage. While Oberon and Theseus were a little stiff, as adolescent boys are apt to be in the part, Titania and her fairies were lively and noisy. Even the lovers, who have some speeches that can be deadly dull, livened up their performances with physical humor and convincing stage fights.

It was the least tedious high school play I've seen in a long time, and seeing it reminded me of how much more fun it is to see a play than to read it.

Morning has broken

We're in the second week of our adjustment to daylight savings time, so you think I'd be getting used to waking up and going out in the dark again (just when it was starting to get light about the time I wake up). But it's raining this morning, so it's even more dark than usual.

As I was driving home in the dark from driving my kids to school, I found myself thinking about Jonathan Swift's poem "Description of the Morning" and Philip Larkin's "Aubade," with their sneering references to the traditional feeling of waking up in the morning to a new, fresh start (like Oliver in the musical, at the window of his luxurious bedroom in the morning after he has been rescued from Fagin). Any reluctance to face the day in traditional aubades is a reluctance to leave the warm bed with your lover still in it, like in Romeo and Juliet's "lark or nightingale" scene or John Donne's poem "The Sun Rising." But in "Description of the Morning," the servant-girl "Betty from her master's bed had flown,/ And softly stole to discompose her own," and Larkin's speaker is rising to regret "the love not given."

This kind of feeling seems to me to be appropriate on the day that the Disney movie Enchanted comes out on DVD. Instead of Cinderella singing to the mice and the birds, the princess in Enchanted has to sing to the animals available to her--rats, pigeons, and cockroaches.

Well, today you have to get up and put on whatever clothes you can stand to wear again (unless you can whip up something made from curtains), because already

telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Weapons

Sandy Mack once told me that he thought there was a Shakespeare play for every era. I think the play for this era is Othello. It's got passion without thought.
There are good movie versions of the play, Oliver Parker's with Kenneth Branagh and Janet Suzman's, and there are wonderful movies based on it or involving issues from it, like O and Stage Beauty. But I have never seen a performance that highlighted one of my favorite speeches in the play, one spoken by Othello after the extent of Iago's treachery has become clear to him:
I have seen the day
That with this little arm and this good sword
I have made my way through more impediments
Than twenty times your stop. But O vain boast!
Who can control his fate? 'Tis not so now.
Be not afraid, though you do see me weaponed.
Here is my journey's end, here is my butt,
And very seamark of my utmost sail.
Do you go back dismayed? 'Tis a lost fear.
Man but a rush against Othello's breast,
And he retires.
Finally the guy realizes that he has been missing something in the way he sees the world, that the way to conquer "impediments" is not always to obliterate them.
It reminds me of the scene in the movie version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when Arthur, Zaphod and Trillian find the point of view gun, a big gun that forces the targeted person to see the shooter's point of view, and they turn it on Trillian, who says in a tone of deep disgust "It won't work on me. I'm already a woman."