My sons inform me that they’re still making kids read Shakespeare in high school. I find that odd, because the general level of scholarship in the schools that I’ve observed is so poor. They barely make the kids read any books, and what they do read is trivial at best.
What’s the point of making them read Shakespeare? I’m perfectly happy reading Shaky Bill’s stuff, and do from time to time. But it’s heavy sledding for minds unaccustomed to courtly speech and Elizabethan vocabulary. I suspect that for schools, Shakespeare is like a coffee table book that you buy to impress visitors, but never crack the spine.
Speaking of cracked spines, they should have them watch Richard III, instead of pretending to read and understand it. In this version, Bill and Larry makes something by Stephen King look like The Care Bears.
Shakespeare is the greatest writer the English language ever produced. I’m always on the edge of amazement watching the words float by when they’re delivered by the right actor. Olivier was surely that. His Hamlet has been beaten, but his Henry Vth and Richard III are unexcelled, and probably always will be. When I was looking for this video, I stumbled over Bumbershoot Cumberbund stumbling over it. Every actor for the last fifty years or so thinks alternating between whispering and mumbling makes them more theatrical, and he’s no exception. It makes them something, I’ll admit that. I’m not sure what. Not something good. When you join the FedEx of delivering lines, you can’t just drive by, slow down a little, and toss them out the window onto the lawn. They have to make it all the way to the door. It’s basically your only job, beside making faces. Almost all modern actors just don’t have the chops borne of the kind of training actors used to receive to do the job.
The scene in the video is famous, of course. The opening line, anyway. But it’s the scene after this one in the movie that refrigerates the spine. Olivier, who had to edit the play down to a manageable size, was a consummate pro at it. He made subtle changes, skillful omissions, and even added a few things. The big change is in the next scene. In the original play, the Lady Anne is following behind her father-in-law’s funeral procession, and Richard barges in and starts hitting her up for a date. In Olivier’s version, she’s walking behind her husband’s coffin. The husband Richard has killed. Yikes. And he just launches right into seducing her. It’s the creepiest thing in a play that contains a double child murder, so that’s really saying something.
You can read it if you want to. But if your head isn’t as full of Shakespeare as Olivier’s, it’s better to watch it, and see it literally come alive right in front of you.
(Thanks to reader and commenter BJM for slipping the video into my comments the other day)
Way to go, kid.
And mom and dad, too. There’s the rub. I see the hand of mom and dad in that video, and the cold, dead hands of legions of moms and dads that came before them. Teachers, too; although sometimes they’re the same people. Some teachers still try under trying circumstances.
I was sick until this morning, and abed. That’s rare. We do not send our children to the petri dish they call a school here in town, and are spared a lot of such things. But I laid there like a casualty and got my information about things in the house second-hand. I heard all sorts of things.
I was unable to make a fire, but they got made all the same, as I have a family and we do things together all the time. I could do what my wife does, and she managed to tend the furnace. The kids help out.
I got all my information like a submariner would. Shut up, away from everyone, but still hearing the sounds of familiar things. My wife would bring me ginger ale and crackers and updates. Life, boiled down to short messages, can be wonderful.
The kids were on tenterhooks because their mom told them I was ill. Kids raised properly are attuned to disruptions in routines. Kids raised in unsalubrious surroundings are inured to most everything. Everything’s in an uproar all the time so they don’t notice, or care.
My wife was teaching the little feller. There was some discussion about his older brother, who will finish high-school level homeschooling this year. He had questions about what that meant. “Your brother wants to be a musician when he is a man,” my wife said to him; “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I want to be a musician, too,” he said, though I wonder about that. He’s sort of a wunderkind in a small area of musicianship — he can do simple things almost effortlessly. But he has not shown the dogged determination that his older brother has shown at learning music. He is very young and might change his mind, and be one of those people I used to hate: people that could play music better than you could, but never had to try at it.
He wasn’t done. “I want to be a husband. I want to be a father.”
That is an astonishing thing to hear. Why should it be astonishing to hear a nine-year-old wants to grow up and be a husband and father? It shouldn’t be, but it is. If he’d uttered that in a public school, I imagine he’d be in a re-education camp by nightfall. And on the flip side, I don’t think the term “wife and mother” can be uttered in public school without a SWAT team of egalitarians being called.
My children don’t want to be musicians because they dream of drug abuse and licentiousness and a vision of being carried around on a litter chair by flunkeys. My older son was old enough to have come to my music shows and seen the real work it was. He still wanted to do it, because work doesn’t scare him. They both want to be productive citizens, useful to other productive citizens. They want to be husbands and fathers, with everything that means.
It is everything we’ve wanted for them. When the little one shows flashes of genius, I dread it. You do not want to be wonderful in this world, son. Wonderful is a big millstone in the swimming pool of life. I wanted to be normal my whole life, and during my lifetime on earth, being “normal” has gotten so strange that your mother and I are living on the edge of civilization hanging on by our fingernails.
Obscurity and a competence—that is the life that is best worth living. — Mark Twain
I want you to at least have a chance at being normal, if you want it. There are so few people committed to being useful, salubrious, and carrying on their traditions, and then having or supporting families that will rhyme down the centuries, that you’ll be wonderful enough if you manage it.
The Intertunnel is like my submarine, too. I get pinged, literally and figuratively, all the time. I feel the water temperature by putting my hand on the hull. Leslie from out west is kind enough to read, and comment, and buy furniture, and send the boys some shekels for their music videos. She is one of the many people I call my Interfriends: People I don’t know, and most likely will never meet, but they’re my friends. They know about me and mine, and I know something about them and theirs. If everyone that corresponds with me here were my actual instead of virtual neighbors, I’d live in the most interesting and pleasant town on earth. Leslie sent me a picture of her now grown, formerly homeschooled daughter’s work. She makes cakes. But saying she makes cakes is like saying Da Vinci was a housepainter. So I get to say something I’ve been dying to say since I was a little kid watching TV in the sixties: Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we have a really big shoe.
My little son especially thought this was the bee’s knees. “It’s a shoe with a big upheel!” He makes up more, and better words than Chaucer.
Leslie’s daughter is grown up, and I’d tell you she’s beautiful but I’m an old man and not supposed to notice such things, so I won’t mention it; and her parents tried, and obviously succeeded in producing a fully actualized person, ready and willing to be a good and productive (and inventive) citizen, and maybe someday produce her version of the same thing all over again.
We are a merry band here at the Cottage, busy being normal. We know we’re not alone, because we hear the thrumming on our bulkheads. We know you’re out there. There are plenty of people still trying to be decent citizens, and produce some more, by hook or by crook. We need a secret handshake or something.
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers –and sisters.
I used to buy old Skinner auction pamphlets to look for furniture to copy. They had really nicely printed stuff back in the 70s and 80s. Back then, something resembling antique furniture was still being sold at auctions. The definition of what an antique is has morphed over time. It used to mean furniture that wasn’t made in a formal factory setting. Pre-Civil War, basically.
The problem was, it didn’t really exist out in the wild anymore. All of it was in collections or museums or being extinguished inexpertly by a fireman, and auction houses had nothing much to sell. So they changed the definition, informally, mind you, to anything 100 years old or so. The flea markets just soldiered on with “anything that looks vaguely old.” It’s still common for antique stores to leave all their furniture wares outside to get ruined so it looks older than it is. The patina on your antiques is probably as forced as any I make in a bucket in my workshop. And since I actually make furniture by hand, my brand-new stuff is closer to a real antique than most of what’s in an antiques store, which is mostly just humdrum homegoods from some dead, unmourned aunt’s ranch house.
But time does winnow. It’s slapdash, of course. Hard to say if Shakespeare was all that. Maybe he was the third best playwright in the greater Avon area, but the rest of the guys forgot to go to the Stratford Kinko’s and left the originals near an outhouse the day after the all-you-can-eat blood pudding special at the Pig&Pox Inn. But the sloped sides on the funnel of time do make some things more interesting, don’t they?
“St. Dennistoun Mortuary” is a coin-operated automaton, attributed to John Dennison, c. 1900. The mahogany cabinet and glazed viewing area displays a Greek Revival mortuary building with double doors and grieving mourners out front. When a coin is inserted, doors open and the room is lighted revealing four morticians and four poor souls on embalming tables. The morticians move as if busily at work on their grisly task and mourners standing outside bob their heads as if sobbing in grief. This automaton will be offered as Lot 207 at auction on June 2, 2012 at Skinner Auctioneers & Appraisers in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Estimate $4,000-6,000
And for all I know, that’s the fourteenth-best song about a mortuary. But I doubt it.
I recently saw (again) the 1944 version of The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France.
It’s a charming piece of work. Laurence Olivier is famous enough, I guess, but not as notable for his real talent as he might be. Shakespeare drops like ripe apples from his mouth.
The movie makes a mockery of so many who have tried fantastical juxtapositions of real and cartoonish in movies since then. It’s filmed like watching a Bayeux Tapestry or a child’s storybook get up and dance around, and throws in a view from backstage, too, to show just how far down the rabbit hole they can take us.
It’s fun to imagine a British audience, worn out with years of blitzes and the terrors of telegrams, sitting rapt in the theater and seeing their island race triumph in a tight spot. There’s a great scene where Olivier is backstage, and looks a little round-shouldered and wan, and coughs a bit in an offhand way, and then strides out onto the stage in front of the Globe Theatre crowd, and is immediately transformed by the words and the moment into the majesty of Henry Vth. Olivier knew that the play’s the thing that makes a man great, not the other way around.
Old Bill knew how to put words in women’s mouths, too; another art long since lost to the playwright. Catherine is made more charming than any sovereign could hope to resist in the blink of a French eye in her garden. Do you need to know French to get it? I don’t think so. Flummoxing up “bilbo,” a flexible sword, for “elbow” is a nice touch. I can’t remember if it’s written into the text or a happy accident.
The women are feminine but decide all in their sphere and the men kill one another over insults and geopolitics alike, and your countrymen are your brothers that you’d defend to the death against all comers. In hours, roughly, how long until Shakespeare is banned in public school?
Tag: shakespeare
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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