A Bard for Every Age

(I’m still in medias res on all the source material for future posts I summarized back on Saturday. Ah, the tragic costs of having to attend to one’s job and family obligations!* But the obligations of NaBloPoMo continue through the end of the weekend, so I’ll be digging into the memory-banks tonight.)

I’m remembering a moment when I was very strongly reminded of how tempting it is for us to reverse engineer modern concepts of life onto historical figures — like the time I saw 20-some undergraduates get totally caught up in the mythology of Shakespeare in Love.

Verona Teens Texting

I have a number of halfway-things and thoughts that will eventually turn into posts. For example, I’ve begun re-reading King Lear for the ShakesMOOC, and I’m also about a third of the way through the second of those two Midsummer graphic novels I checked out from the library. And one of these weekends I’ll actually follow through on my vague plan to start regularly watching Shakespearean performances and films every week. But all of these ideas are only half-baked cookie dough. I have not yet begun watching relevant DVDs, I want to get to the end of the graphic novel before writing about it, and even though I’m not waiting till the end of Lear to write anything about it, I do want to get a bit further in and gather my thoughts a wee bit before taking it on. Tonight, I’m just following an idle thought that hit me last night as I was drifting off to sleep. I was remembering this “Facebook recap” of the Red Wedding episode of Game of Thrones (I’m assuming the episode has been out long enough that I don’t need to go overboard with spoiler warnings?), and I realized that there had to be some sort of analogous version of Romeo and Juliet somewhere out in the wild, wild web. Come on, it’s a perfect notion: young teenage love, the obsession with social media. What’s not to enjoy? So I went looking. As it turns out, there are (were?) several versions. But most of them seem to have expired.

Demetrius in Divorce Court

Today, I’m doing the transition from Midsummer to Much Ado that the EdX class commenced this past Wednesday. So I’m still a touch behind the game, but at least I’m gaining on ’em, as it were.

I know there’s a certain claim embedded in the hubris of having a blog specifically focused on William Shakespeare — this huge symbol of Anglophilic culture, genius, artistic expression, what-have-you. Even though I’ve never falsely presented myself as an actual professional scholar on the topic, the decision to have a self-publishing forum to talk about this high culture figure does imply that I think I’m sufficiently well-informed on the topic that I “have something to say” about it.

With all that baggage, I know there’s a risk that, in making the admission I’m about to make, I may very well be proving that I’m much too stupid to be writing a Shakespeare blog.  But here it is anyway:

For the life of me, I simply cannot distinguish between false and true love in Midsummer Night’s Dream. I just can’t.

The Balcony that Wasn’t

A recent article by Lois Leveen in The Atlantic does a masterful job of appropriately detaching the often-married concepts of “Romeo and Juliet” and “balcony.” Careful readers may well have noticed that the word “balcony” actually never appears in the play itself, and there’s nothing to indicate that R&J II.ii  (the scene usually doing business as “the balcony scene”) is located anywhere more unusual than Juliet’s window in the Capulet palazzo.

But the disconnect between balconies and “the balcony scene” actually goes deeper than that. According to the history the Leveen documents, the word “balcony” (well, “balcone”) doesn’t appear in English until two years after Shakespeare’s death. Even the first descriptions of this architectural feature — wordy descriptions of “pleasant little tarrasse[s], that jutteth or butteth out from the maine building[s]” — seem to post-date the play by a decade or so.

So yeah: it’s hard to plan a balcony scene when the balcony is a thing that doesn’t even remotely exist in the realm of imagined possibility