A Rhyming Planet

After the demise of Blockbuster, I signed up with Lovefilm. Kubrick, Godard, Woody Allen, Ken Loach, and films about Renoir and Genghis Khan are all in my queue. Plus a lot of stuff starring Gérard Depardieu.

I've just watched Joss Whedon's Much Ado about Nothing. I can't bear those criticisms about how Shakespeare can't be adapted to present-day settings. Or any historical settings. Of course he can! He's so timeless and universal that possible translations and variations are endless. The 1993 Kenneth Branagh film is not sacrosanct — much as I like it.

This black-and-white movie took a while to get into, and you had to listen hard, but it was worth it. As in any Shakespeare adaptation, it's the soaringly beautiful and witty language that shines through most of all. And Much Ado never disappoints. Though how could Shakespeare ever disappoint?

When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.

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Now tell me, for which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in love with me?

For them all together . . .

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I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow, than a man swear he loves me.

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I would my horse had the speed of your tongue and so good a continuer.

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She speaks poniards, and every word stabs: if her breath were as terrible as her terminations, there were no living near her; she would infect to the north star.

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I was not born under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo in festival terms.

This is a most entertaining film/play, full of luscious witticisms, scintillating badinage and lyrical gems. I could have filled many blog posts with equally effervescent quotations.

First Lines

The first few lines of a poem are important ones. They have to arouse our interest and curiosity so that we want to read on. This introductory line or two may shock, and grab us by the throat; alternatively, it may seduce and captivate us in more subtle and gentle ways.

Some favourite first lines come immediately to mind. How about the stunning start to Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

Let us go then, you and I,

When evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table . . .

Like a patient etherised upon a table! This must be one of the most original and daring similes in any poem ever written.

I've always loved the sonnets of Shakespeare and the poems of Keats. Who could resist: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate . . . or When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past . . . or  My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense as though of hemlock I had drunk . . . or Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun . . . 

The opening to Coleridge's Kubla Khan thrilled me from an early age: In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree:  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran  / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea . . .

I defy anyone not to read further when Patrick Kavanagh writes: On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew / That her dark hair would weave a snare that I would one day rue . . .

Adrian Mitchell has wonderful, attention-grabbing first lines, including this one from To Whom It May Concern: I was run over by the truth one day . . .

Finally, has anyone composed a more sensational and apocalyptic beginning to a poem than this: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by / madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn / looking for an angry fix, / angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly / connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night . . .

These are, of course, the first few lines of Allen Ginsberg's Howl.

I would be fascinated to know any of your own favourite poetic first lines . . .

Tempest

Bob Dylan and his band live in Bologna, 2006. (Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

One minute before the day of the release of Bob Dylan's thirty-fifth studio album, Tempest, listening to the Internet-available taster track and first single, Duquesne Whistle, becomes a sacred act.

Believe in the holy contour of life. JACK KEROUAC Belief And Technique For Modern Prose

Hell is empty, and all the devils are here. SHAKESPEARE The Tempest

We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep. SHAKESPEARE The Tempest

You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse. SHAKESPEARE The Tempest

I long to hear the story of your life, which must / Take the ear strangely. SHAKESPEARE The Tempest

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, / That has such people in it! SHAKESPEARE The Tempest

This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine. SHAKESPEARE The Tempest

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. / Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments / Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices... SHAKESPEARE The Tempest

Now I will believe / That there are unicorns... SHAKESPEARE The Tempest 

He not busy being born is busy dying. BOB DYLAN It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

Shakespeare In A Nutshell

I don't know about you, but I like to familiarise myself a little with the plot and the characters before going to see a Shakespeare play. Two of the ways I do this is by reading beforehand a potted version of the play in either Charles and Mary Lambs' Tales From Shakespeare or James Muirden's Shakespeare In A Nutshell. Compare and contrast!

Hamlet, Prince Of Denmark

Gertrude, queen of Denmark, becoming a widow by the sudden death of King Hamlet, in less than two months after his death married his brother Claudius, which was noted by all people at the time for a strange act of indiscretion, or unfeelingness, or worse: for this Claudius did no ways resemble her late husband in the qualities of his person or his mind, but was as contemptible in outward appearance, as he was base and unworthy in disposition; and suspicions did not fail to arise in the minds of some, that he had privately made away with his brother, the late king, with the view of marrying his widow, and ascending the throne of Denmark, to the exclusion of young Hamlet, the son of the buried king, and lawful successor to the throne...

Charles and Mary Lamb Tales From Shakespeare

Hamlet, Prince Of Denmark

Prince Hamlet's suffering from stress.
The reason isn't hard to guess:
Four weeks after his father died
A second marriage knot was tied
To join his freshly widowed mother
With Claudius, her husband's brother.
At Elsinore, by Denmark Sound,
The dead king's spirit wanders round,
Upsetting sentries at their post,
So they've complained about the ghost
To sceptical Horatio,
Who sees it, and lets Hamlet know.
The phantom warns the gob-smacked son:
'Your uncle is the guilty one.
During my after-dinner snooze
(Occasioned by excess of booze)
He seized his chance to sneak up near
And pour some poison in my ear.
Now stop your dithering about,
And go and sort the fellow out...'

James Muirden Shakespeare In A Nutshell

(Click here for the daily Turnstone quote.)

The Poet's Eye, The Poet's Pen

Shakespeare: the Chandos portrait.

I’m not a big TV viewer, preferring to read or listen to the radio in the evenings. However, the current BBC2 Shakespeare season is umissable.  Simon Schama’s been accused of dumbing down history for TV, but I found the two episodes of Simon Schama’s Shakespeare — This England and Hollow Crowns — utterly compelling. And now we’re half-way through a sparkling tetralogy of Shakespeare history plays: Richard II, Henry IV Part One, Henry IV Part Two, and Henry V. Sam Mendes is executive producer, and there’s a very fine cast of actors including Ben Whishaw as Richard II, Jeremy Irons as Henry IV, Tom Hiddleston as Prince Hal, and Simon Russell Beale as Falstaff.

I was lucky at school. School has a habit of putting kids off Shakespeare, but it had the opposite effect on me. We studied Henry V in class. We saw The Tempest at the Nottingham Playhouse and A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Leicester Haymarket. I was smitten. I’d never read or heard anything like this before. The strange but ravishing language, the bold but brilliant metaphors, the rousing speeches, the lyrical soliloquies!

Later I saw Julius Caesar and Macbeth at Stratford and Antony and Cleopatra at London's Globe Theatre. I’ve seen an amateur production of King Henry IV Parts One and Two in Norwich which I had to slip away from as it was so dire. I’ve seen an open air Comedy Of Errors somewhere in Buckinghamshire which was blighted by heavy rain showers and electrical failure. In the days when BBC Radio used to broadcast a lot of Shakespeare, I heard Hamlet and The Merchant Of Venice and Troilus and Cressida. And I’ve watched many TV and movie adaptations over the years: Polanski’s Macbeth, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, Lawrence Olivier playing Othello, Hamlet and Henry V, Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson in Much Ado About Nothing.

Along the way I've also managed to add to the list King Lear, Twelfth Night, The Taming Of The Shrew and The Winter's Tale (which contains the most famous stage direction of all time: Exit, pursued by a bear), but I can't remember when or where I saw them. There are so many plays I don't know and haven't seen: Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Love's Labours Lost, Measure For Measure, Pericles, Timon of Athens, Titus Andronicus . . . and so it goes on. Shakespeare is a project not just for one lifetime but for many lifetimes, and even then you would barely have scratched the surface of his genius.

Why do we still read and go to see Shakespeare's plays so many centuries after they were first performed? Firstly, I think, it's the language. Shakespeare revitalised the English language, originating a huge number of imaginative words, phrases and expressions that are still in common use today: The course of true love never did run smooth, Neither a borrower nor a lender be, The world's mine oyster, To thine own self be true, Salad days, In my mind's eye and a thousand more. He wrote with a flair for invention, for poetic metaphor and lyrical expression, that remains unparalleled.

Secondly, Shakespeare had such a penetrating insight into our characters, motivations and relationships, our hopes and desires, vanities and ambitions, foibles and absurdities, that no writer ever since has been able to equal his understanding of human psychology. There's simply everything, the whole world, in his plays, which take place in a wide variety of settings and with an incredibly broad range of characters — from peasants to kings.

The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; 

And as imagination bodies forth 

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing 

A local habitation and a name. 

Such tricks hath strong imagination,

That if it would but apprehend some joy, 

It comprehends some bringer of that joy; 

Or in the night, imagining some fear, 

How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

SHAKESPEARE A Midsummer Night's Dream

(Click here for the daily Turnstone quote.)

A Camino Sonnet

It's too late now. There is no turning back.
I am no saint. But sinner's near the mark,
Counting my errors on this endless track,
Counting my failures in this endless dark.
The world is too much with us, someone said,
Nasty, brutish and short, it's been portrayed,
A daily grind to earn our daily bread,
A pitiable, heartless, sad parade.
Surely there's something more than grief and strife?
Some gleam of grace, some glimmer of shook foil,
Some chink of light, a glimpse of some bright life,
Before we shuffle off this mortal coil?
There's no success like failure. Through the hail
And rain I quest, the better for to fail.

The italicized quotes in my sonnet come from William Wordsworth, Thomas Hobbes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Shakespeare and Bob Dylan respectively. The last line refers to Samuel Beckett's famous remark: Ever tried. Ever failed. No Matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Though at first glance this sonnet may seem despairing, it's really about searching and questing; and I think there's some redemptive hope in the last two lines.

(Posted from Puebla de Sanabria, on the Camino Sanabrés, Spain.)

One View Of England

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise;
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war;
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

From Shakespeare's King Richard II Act 2 Scene 1

Beware The Ides Of March

I seem to have survived the Ides of March today relatively unscathed. I hope it's the same for all of you. Julius Caesar however was not so lucky:

Caesar. The ides of March are come.
Soothsayer. Ay, Caesar; but not gone.

Shakespeare's Caesar seems quite phlegmatic about death a short time before his assassination:

Caesar. Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.

The conspirators stab Caesar, Brutus being the last to plunge in the knife, Brutus - Caesar's angel and his best loved senator:

Caesar: Et tu, Brute? - Then fall, Caesar!

Marc Antony laments Caesar's death:

Antony. O mighty Caesar! dost thou lie so low?
Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils,
Shrunk to this little measure?

There follows a battle of words between Brutus and Marc Antony which Antony wins hands down. Antony's speeches before the crowds in the Roman Forum are some of Shakespeare's greatest speeches - masterpieces of rhetoric, models of subtle insinuation and audience manipulation:

Antony. Friends, Romans, countrymen. lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar. not to praise him.

Antony. If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.
You all do know this mantle: I remember
The first time ever Caesar put it on...

He keeps repeating that Brutus is an honourable man - the ironic repetitions casting doubt on the literal truth of this.

Antony wins over the hearts and minds of the Roman people, and the final outcome is curtains for Brutus - the noblest Roman of them all, as Antony ambiguously calls him at the end of the play.

One of the many great things about this drama is Shakespeare's complex portrayal of Brutus as patriot, misguided idealist and murderer.

(I was lucky enough to see a production of Julius Caesar performed by the RSC at Stratford in 2006.)

Patriotism: The Last Refuge?

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel SAMUEL JOHNSON

They say that patriotism is the last refuge/To which a scoundrel clings/Steal a little and they throw you in jail/Steal a lot and they make you king BOB DYLAN Sweetheart Like You from Infidels

Today, 23 April, is St George's Day and Shakespeare's birthday. On such a day it seems the natural thing to turn to Shakespeare's King Henry The Fifth. However, instead of the rousing and patriotic speeches of O For A Muse Of Fire or Now All The Youth Of England Are On Fire or Once More Unto The Breach, Dear Friends, Once More, I feel more like quoting the realism and grim humour of the low-born camp followers rather than the manipulative nationalism of the nobility. Cynic that I am.

Pistol: Come let's away. My love, give me thy lips./Look to my chattels and my moveables;/Let senses rule. The word is 'Pitch and Pay'./Trust none;/For oaths are straws, men's faiths are wafer-cakes,/And Holdfast is the only dog, my duck./Therefore, Caveto be thy counsellor./Go, clear thy crystals. Yoke-fellows in arms,/Let us to France, like horse-leeches, my boys,/To suck, to suck, the very blood to suck.

Caveto means "Take Care" and clear thy crystals means "wipe your eyes".

This Reading Life (2)

The sage-like figure of Goethe looms over German literature like Shakespeare does over ours. This from his Italian Journey...

...knowing that life, taken as a whole, is like the Roman Carnival: unpredictable, unsatisfactory and problematic. I hope that this carefree crowd of maskers will make them [my readers] remember how valuable is every moment of joy, however fleeting and trivial it may seem to be.

Similarly, Tolstoy is the writer who towers over Russian literature. I've read Anna Karenina, but I'm ashamed to say I have yet to read War And Peace. I see I haven't noted down the origin of this Tolstoyan quotation...

Admit that human life can be guided by reason and all possibility of life is annihilated.

And while we're on Russian literature, Anton Chekhov, who penned some of the most sublime plays and short stories ever written, observed...

Every person lives his real, most interesting life under cover of secrecy.

The opening sentences of the Prologue to Bertrand Russell's Autobiography reverberate in the mind long after the book has been put down...

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I must have been subconsciously following Mark Twain's advice when I walked the Camino towards the end of last year...

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

And finally two quotes about the power of language, and its potential force for good. The first from John Berger...

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannnot be hostile to man.

Developing this theme, the distinguished academic and Bob Dylan critic Christopher Ricks writes in his fascinating, deep and detailed book Dylan's Visions Of Sin...

Words trust, and they can keep faith. They are built upon faith, the faith that people will tell the truth - or at any rate that people may betray themselves when they are failing to do so... A language is a body of agreement, and acts of trust. A word is not a matter of fact, or matter of opinion, it is a social contract. Like all contracts, its life is a pledge and a faith. (And, like all contracts, it can be dishonest, suspect.) Songs and poems likewise keep faith alive. They "strengthen the things that remain" - words of the Book of Revelation...

As Dylan aficionados will know, Dylan quotes these Biblical words in his song When You Gonna Wake Up from the album Slow Train Coming. Unlike many, I never did turn against Dylan during his evangelical, religious phase - and some very good songs did come out of this period, for instance Precious Angel...

I've really enjoyed leafing through my old notebooks of quotations. I hope some of the sentiments struck a chord with some of you. Perhaps I'll do the same again some time...