Oddly enough, King John is nearly the least interesting character in it. He doesn’t really come into his own until Acts IV and V, when things are going seriously downhill for him. But I suppose that’s par for the course in Shakespeare. It is our disintegrations that most interest the Bard.

In the BBC production, the show was stolen by Mary Morris (Queen Elinor), Claire Bloom (Constance) and the guy who plays Philip Faulconbridge, also known as Richard, “the Bastard.”  In fact, in terms of roles he’s the most interesting guy in the play. He’s kind of a running jester/cynic/commentator on what’s going on, although his cynicism gradually gives way to actual sense of purpose. He’s the only person in the whole play who develops as a character.

Mary Morris did a great job as Elinor, coming across as self-possessed and ambitious, and a bit scary–not above using seduction if the occasion calls for it. (Some really strange scenes there between her and the Bastard, who becomes, in effect, her knight). Shakespeare has a knack for writing impressive older women.

So the play was fascinating and frustrating by turns. The best parts and best lines went to characters who just vanish between one Act and the next. Through all of Act III Elinor and Constance rail at each other (and its a thing of beauty), then suddenly, they’re gone. Died, off stage, erased from the story. And suddenly too, the Dauphin–when introduced one might think a wet blanket had more personality than he–suddenly he’s front and center, leading invasions into England, sneering at all and sundry.

I know alot of my complaints are based on a modern sense of narrative and character development, but really, the whole story is so fractured, it’s hard to think about it in its entirety. I keep focusing on small scenes and actions instead. Lovely little bits like Hubert’s description of the civil unrest–of a tailor, in such haste to tell the news to his friend the smith that he put his shoes on the wrong feet before he ran out into the street:

I saw a smith stand with his hammer, thus,
The whilst his iron did on the anvil cool,
With open mouth swallowing a tailor’s news;
Who, with his shears and measure in his hand,
Standing on slippers, which his nimble haste
Had falsely thrust upon contrary feet,
Told of a many thousand warlike French
That were embattailed and rank’d in Kent

I love stuff like that in Shakespeare. It makes you realize that he must have absorbed life like a sponge. Nothing seems too small to be unworthy of notice or comment.

King John, then, is a drama where the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. In this play, the men are mostly foolish, the women mostly wise, and the children all are sacrifices.

Conversation

The tree said to the sunlight:
How is it I do not grow tired?

The sun said to the evergreen:
You are what I turn into

When I want to touch the earth.

The Soul Tree ended up as an Okra Pick from Southern indie booksellers, despite its list price of $49.95. (We used soy ink and environmentally-friendly printing methods, said the author, because we couldn’t do a book celebrating nature and destroy it in the process). But what I like about the poems is their immediacy, against the eternal feeling of mountains and old trees.

Some of the plays, however, are proving elusive. As it turns out, Pericles is not high up on anyone’s list of Shakespeare-that-must-be-performed. So to help keep my resolution, I procured for myself a copy of the Arkangel Shakespeare, a massive box of full audio productions of each play on CD.  And I’m going through them one by one, approximately in order of when they were written.

I’ve already written about some of them:

Henry VI, parts i, ii, and iii

Richard III

Richard III may well be my favorite Shakespeare play, my distressing introduction notwithstanding.

But now I am onto A Comedy of Errors, which after Richard seems positively fluffy.  And I made several discoveries:

First, in the Arkangel production David Tennant plays Antipholus of Syracuse, and even just listening to the performance, without actually seeing it, it was awfully hard not to think “That’s the Doctor!”  For a few scenes I amused myself with wondering where they would put the TARDIS in the set.

More importantly, though, was the discovery that Comedy of Errors relies heavily on visual cues and mistaken impressions and what my friend Lev calls “smart staging.”  I had already had trouble deciphering the fight scenes in the Henry VI plays, so you can imagine my confusion here.

Nevertheless, the play had its moments–the point where Dromio (of Syracuse) is describing to his master the “beauties” of a kitchen wench that is convinced they are to be married is pretty hilarious:

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE

Then she bears some breadth?

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE

No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip:
she is spherical, like a globe; I could find out
countries in her.

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE

In what part of her body stands Ireland?

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE

Marry, in her buttocks: I found it out by the bogs.

Antipholus finds this a great joke, and goes on to name all the countries, to which Dromio responds with some awful insult against the lady’s looks for each.  America, “…embellished with/ rubies, carbuncles, sapphires, declining their rich/aspect to the hot breath of Spain; who sent whole/ armadoes of caracks to be ballast…” is to be found on the poor woman’s nose. I’m sure by the end of the bit Shakespeare’s audiences were howling.  (You can read the full exchange here)

I did get to see an actual production of the play, put on by our Youth Shakespeare Company for our local outdoor “Shakespeare on the Green” festival. Everyone in the company is under 18. The actors playing the two Dromios were around 12. This took some getting used to–especially since the actors playing the two Antipholus’ were closer to 16 or 17. (And the girl playing the ugly kitchen maid was at least this old). So the physical comedy was a little strange. And the play had been edited slightly to get rid of some of the more salacious inuendos (including the entire exchange above), which did little to alleviate the oddity of the scenes in any case. But perhaps it was in keeping. Certianly in Shakespeare’s time many of the parts–especially the female parts–would have been played by young pretty boys.

In any case, I was glad to actually see the performance, and to have a visual in my mind for when I listened, for the second time, to the audio.  After becoming so involved with Richard III, Comedy of Errors was perhaps doomed to pale. But the ready wit, and the clever, playful language was still very much in evidence. I was not moved, but I was certainly entertained.

He, or rather his wife, actually once inspired me to write a poem–an impulse that is about as rare in me as the moon traveling with Jupiter and Venus is in the night sky. So here, in honor of Jack Alford, is the poem:

What’s beautiful

Mary Lou stands, round-shouldered,
frail fingers tearing
bits of bread and tossing
them as far as bits of bread
can be tossed.

Gulls sail down white-winged
alighting only long enough
to snatch a crust and lift away–
as if the ground flung them
back into the air.

Beauty is not in the waves of white birds
wings bright in the sunlight
of a perfect morning.
Their beating wings and open beaks
frighten her.

Beauty is in her tremulous hands,
holding out scraps and crusts.
In the good money she spends
on bread she won’t eat
to feed birds she doesn’t like

because Jack–after sixty years
of providing for her–is laid flat
from knee surgery, drowning
his pain in glass after glass of scotch.
Because he likes to feed birds
and can’t.

When he can walk, he’d walk
to the ends of the earth for her.
And beauty is in her quick, forced tosses,
the frightened way she snatches
back her hand and ducks
under the wings, flinches
under their cries, stands
at the ends of the earth
for him.

And what a surprise and delight. This book is no mere attempt to corral language and bend it to Johnson’s will. It is like a million jumping off points for philosophical argument and debate. How did I miss this? The cheap Penguin classics copy of the Dictionary–horribly abridged and therefore all the more tantalizing and titillating–is now my constant companion. And when I need a distraction I find myself opening it to random words:

IN’JURY: 1. Hurt without justice.

I find myself thinking that “justice” –its presence or lack–is no longer so obviously an aspect of the word.

Then there are the words that have been lost, and sadly so:

To QUOB [a low word] To move as the embrio does in the womb; to move as the heart does when throbbing.

(I’m mourning the loss of this word)

To GRU’BBLE. To feel in the dark.

For which Johnson’s example is this, from Dryden:

Thou hast a colour;
Now let me rowl and grubble thee:
Blinkd men say white feels smooth, and
black feels rough:
Thou has a ruffed skin; I do not like
thee.

And then there are the words whose meanings have altered until they are almost foreign to us:

NICE: adj. 1. Accurate in judgement to minute exactness; superfluously exact. It is often used to express culpable delicacy.

There are eight different definitions ranging from delicate and refined to squeamish and fastidious.  But the one definition that is NOT present is “kind” or “sweet” or “civil.”

Of the Empire

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and the the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

This is a particularly beguiling “math for the masses” book, but it is really more about how ideas make life better. It is a little funny how the authors’ moral derived from the calculation of the circumference of a circle is that “your head CAN go farther than your feet!”

The book covers everything from statistics to finite algebra and non-Euclidian geometry, (from which we learn we must “Pull your mind out of those muddy old ruts and adapt yourself to a continually CHANGING world!”) But what really gets me about the book, aside from its light, irreverent tone, is that it was first published in 1942 in a special, super-sturdy G.I. edition. Apparently for soldiers to cart around in their back pockets and read. I am trying, and failing, to imagine a publisher with a math book conceiving of such a marketing strategy today.

Really, I find myself utterly charmed.

For several moments he devotes his energies towards trying to see his own reflection, and it is no surprise that after awhile he finds that he has ended up in the mirror, on the other side.The White King, we are given to understand, is the culprit responsible for this sudden change in existence.

As fantasia goes (the author, both the back of the book and Wikipedia assures, was the first to coin the term “magical realism”) it is more allegorical than most—more so even than Alice and her Looking Glass adventures. And the narrator—who, let us remember, was the kind of child a parent felt obligated to lock away in a room—is more than usually judgemental about the place he finds himself, and the people he meets there.

But the book is eerie and haunting (and as such doesn’t feel much like a children’s story).  I wrote a more complete review here

Perhaps the birds were always here and I just wasn’t looking, but in the evenings they are more easily noticed, as the background noise of human activity dies away. Most of the houses are lit with the flickering, uncertain light of televisions as we walk by—the dog, with his nose to the ground seeing nothing, and I, with my eyes peering into the trees, feeling as though I were seeing everything for the first time.

Sometimes life seems oddly serendipitous. It wasn’t long after Ray (the dog) and I started our evening walks that I was given a copy of Joyce Hinnefeld’s debut novel, In Hovering Flight. It is the kind of book designed to appeal to me—about poetry and painting and birds and artists. But I long ago decided that subject was not as important to me as style—interesting tidbits of information no longer excuses uncertain and mediocre writing. So while I was interested in learning, for example, the proper way to write in a field notebook if you are a bird watcher, or that John James Audubon may have invented the Cuvier’s Kinglet he describes in one of his many journals, it would not have been enough to capture my attention—even with the mention of Audubon, a person I am interested in for many reasons, one of which is actually hanging on the wall behind my head. The style of the section called “field notebooks” however? Oh, that captured my attention immediately. It was quite as beautiful as the walks I took with my dog. Reading it makes me feel just like as if I’m standing on the small sandy rise down the street(soon to be a housing development but it was once a Civil War bunker, so it is a place that knows about battles) —looking down towards the sound, enjoying the wind and resisting the tugging of the dog and just watching the sky for flying creatures:

“Scarlet loved even the great blue herons, which became increasingly common in that protected area nea the Delaware as she grew into her teens, their harsh, ugly screeches piercing their mornings and evenings on the screened porch where they ate their meals. She would never forget the sight of one rising from the creek each morning, the spring when she was twelve, as she let the screen door slam behind her on her way to catch the bus to school. That rush of wins and then the silent, massive span above her head, darkening the sky—every time, it made her catch her breath. And she tried to find a way to describe its rising each day on the bus, playing with words in her head: “giant, silent feathered airplane,” blue-gray cloud with wings.” Tom, to her ongoing embarrassment, kept her spiral-bound notebooks from those years—notebooks full of phrases like these but rather lacking in homework assignments.

“Herons make you reach for words, she told her father…”

In Hovering Flight is a novel about mothers and daughters, poets and painters, and passion—the kind of passion that in an earlier era would have been named a “calling.” Addie is an artist and poet who paints birds. Ted is her biologist husband who thinks teaches science using poetry. Scarlet is their daughter, named for the one bird her mother never managed to capture on canvas. (If she had been a boy, she would have been named Tanager).

“He remembered his first year in Samoa and the yard covered in fallen papayas – the bright yellow skin turning dark, the fruit opening its many folds and exposing its sensuous, fleshy inside, smelling of saliva – and how he and Fanny had turned away without saying a word, as if they had unwittingly come upon a private and lewd spectacle.”

I don’t think it was the background smell of the over-ripe bananas on my kitchen counter that made me stop at this passage and think “I’m going to like this book,” but I read it, and I knew I was there—there for the rest of the story, wherever it went.

This is a literary mystery—meaning there is a murder, but the resolution of the crime is secondary to the effect the act of violence has on the surrounding society and the characters in the novel—specifically, Stevenson, who is Robert Louis Stevenson, the author.

R.L. Stevenson is someone for whom I’ve always had a secret, guilty fondness; secret and guilty in the face of the scorn a very hoipolloi ex-boyfriend used to heap scorn upon me for my pedestrian tastes. (He was a fan of William Faulkner and William Burroughs and other such Williams).

Why did I fall into the novel so quickly, so completely? Partly because of the heat, no doubt. My brain felt as sluggish as the writer’s in the book, as susceptible to fantasms as Stevenson seems to be. (There is more than a hint of Jekyll and Hyde in the plot) But really, I think it’s because Alberto Manguel’s re-imagination of the author and his last days on a faraway, hot lush island is so vivid, it took me right back to the first time I ever read an R.L. Stevenson story—Treasure Island. This contemporary little novella managed to evoke an important readerly moment– I mark Treasure Island as the first book that ever scared me. It was Long John Silver that first taught me the villains of stories are usually more interesting that the heroes. Even now the refrain is echoing in my head with each description riotous color and fetid, intemperate scene in the book; a parrot’s voice screeching in the back of my mind “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”