Category Archives: Books

On Shakespeare And Words

The latest issue of The Economist reviews a book called Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary & Language Companion by David and Ben Crystal, and the review begins thusly: “Although welcome as a magnificent tool, this doorstop compendium prompts an alarming question: has Shakespeare become a foreign language to us?”

I’m wildly vacillating between two extremes. On one hand, sure, modern English-speaking people don’t know enough about their own language to understand a lot of Shakespeare, which is lamentable. On the other, you don’t need to understand every word to understand the meaning. That’s why Shakespeare’s tucked into that little slot that’s marked “Genius”.

On the other other hand (let’s move down to feet, shall we?) I anticipate this new book with glee, word-lover that I am. One of the reasons I relish Shakespeare is because he uses so many different words. His vocabulary is delightfully varied, and if he didn’t have a word for something, he made it up. A goodly portion of our modern lexicon is derived from Shakespeare’s oeuvre.

Without further ado, check the review out. I hate the fact that people feel the need for a glossary to understand what someone is saying, when if they just listened and watched they’d get the gist of it, but even a glossary is preferable to rewriting a perfectly good piece of theatre. That, in my mind, is punishable by death. My back goes up every time someone suggests rewriting a line in a Savoy opera “because modern audiences don’t know the phrase”. Tough. The piece of theatre is a piece of history. Constantly updating it means you will lose the heart of it. Look at what happened to the Bible. Sure, King James brought the Bible to more people who hadn’t had previous access to it, but he rewrote and twisted meanings left, right and centre. (Incidentally, yes, that’s the same King James for whom Macbeth was written. He really had a thing about witches, didn’t he?) Rather than pandering (look! A Shakespearean word!) to the lowest common denominator, why not educate them instead by leaving the challenging reference as is and the LCD rising as a result?

Please note that by updating I don’t mean changing the setting, or performing the work in different costume. I think Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet was brilliant, transmitting the truth of the piece to modern audiences while preserving the language – excellent proof that one doesn’t need to rewrite something to tell a story originally written in Elizabeth I’s reign. Luhrmann’s work made the point (and “o, excellent well” at that) that proved something which more high school English teachers should know by now: Shakespeare is meant to be watched, at the very least heard aloud, and not read. Updating, for me, means changing words, phrases, into what a modern interpeter thinks would be equivalent. It resembles translation in that a translator cannot translate word for word; s/he must search out equivalent idiom and translate meaning. I find it ludicrous that people think Shakespeare (let alone William Schwenk Gilbert) requires translation. Older texts such as works in Middle English? Well, we’re now getting to the point where our language has shifted so much over the last millennium that yes, an extensive glossary or a side-by-side translation is required for the lay reader when approaching works dating from 1240 CE like King Horn. Chaucer (d. 1400 CE) is iffy; but again, if read aloud, his works such as the mainstay Canterbury Tales make much more sense. Shakespeare is a mere four hundred years old. Language has not shifted so far in four centuries that a translation is required.

Is Shakespeare truly becoming more obscure, though?

It is sometimes assumed that it is only a question of time before Shakespeare becomes inaccessible. But does time come into it? As early as 1679, John Dryden was complaining that �the tongue is so much refined since Shakespeare’s time that many of his words are scarce intelligible, and his whole style is so pestered with figurative expressions that it is as affected as it is obscure.� Shakespeare’s 17th- and 18th-century adaptors blithely clarified him. In 1664, when William Davenant adapted �Macbeth�, the hero was made to say that his bloody hands would �add a tincture to/The sea.� Not until 1744 when Garrick, in part, restored the original, was Shakespeare’s �multitudinous seas incarnadine� heard again on stage. In fact, time may have helped. Modernism has made us more patient with obscurity. We rate suggestion more than clarity. When, for example, the horrified Claudio in �Measure for Measure� imagines himself dead and lying �in cold obstruction�, we relish the strange blockish mouthful before turning to the notes. -from The Economist review Fardels By Any Other Name

Indeed. Our society has this queer dual drive to honour the past (“it must be good, because it is old”, also known as nostalgia), and to remake everything in a contemporaneous fashion, bringing things up to speed to be as cutting-edge as possible. We outgrow and outstrip our own accomplishments of a mere decade ago; it’s little wonder that much of modern society considers four-hundred-year-old theatre no longer accessible. It requires time, and patience, and the willingness to luxuriate in language, something that many people have forgotten how to do in this microwave- and Internet-dominated world.

What has also killed Shakespeare in the twentieth-century is bad, bad theatre. Dreadful interpretations. Actors still being trained to strike a pose and declaim, as opposed to speaking the emotion implicit in the script. Poorly done theatre in an age where TV and movies distribute a permanent product to billions of people in almost no time at all has had an adverse affect on how historical theatre is perceived. A fleeting, brilliant piece of live theatre has more power and depth to it, yet because it is fleeting less people are exposed to it, changed by it. Twentieth and twenty-first century media has made possible the sharing of exquisitely crafted art, but it has also made possible the sharing of so much crap. Unfortunately, there’s more of the latter, overwhelming the art by sheer numbers.

Is there hope? You bet. So long as the world doesn’t decide to go the way of Ray Bradbury’s dystopic utopia in Fahrenheit 451 and destroy literature because each author says something different, thereby dividing the people who cannot rest peacefully is they do not all share the same unchallenged opinion. Personally, I’m hoping for a renaissance in the arts sometime soon. Then again, I’m one of those who thinks holding a tangible, bound book in my hands is infinitely preferable to scrolling through an e-book. Someday, I’ll probably become outdated too, and need to be brought up to speed – contemporised, for the lack of a better term. Until then, however, I’ll honour original works in their original forms as best I can.

Gnash

I had a truly horrible rehearsal on Wednesday night.

I’d even practiced that morning. I’d gone through the evil Minuet & Trio from Beethoven’s First Symphony and some of the nasty shifts from the first movement too, and I was feeling pretty good about myself.

Then I got to rehearsal and we began with the Rossini overture, and the substitute director took it at a really fast clip. I lost it. I ended up just sitting and staring at the music, unable to grab an anchor point to pick up again and be in the same place as everyone else.

It got worse: we then moved to the Bizet. (Remember? The tenor clef? The treble clef?) Any progess I’d made on this piece left me, bags and all. They even slammed the door.

It was around this point that I realised the next concert is only four weeks away.

Then we moved to the Beethoven, which should have been my best performance of the night. I was so rattled by this point, though, that I spent a lot of time feeling rather nauseous, staring at the score again, miserable.

I have absolutely no emotional connection to this music. The Mozart symphony we’re doing is easy for me, because it’s so beautiful, so lyrical. These other pieces are technically challenging and very difficult to make sound easy, which is important. Music should sound effortless. Since I have no emotional connection to them (other than the sinking feeling I get when I look at them, which is probably classified by a large percentage of the population as “negative”!) it’s hard to make them sound pretty, let alone care about getting the notes right.

So, I bought a new set of earphones, and batteries for my Walkman, and I’ll just listen to it all over and over until I can sing it in my sleep. That will help.

I was really down Wednesday night when I went home, and Thursday morning wasn’t much better. On the way to work, though, I heard a terrific recording of the overture to Mozart’s Don Giovanni by Tafelmusik on CBC Radio Two, and suddenly, I was reminded why I play the cello, why I joined the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra, and why music is so important to me. When I got to work, I dashed off a quick e-mail to the show’s host Tom Allen, thanking him for helping me out. He e-mailed me later in the day to say that he was “glad to hear your musical cloud has lifted” and telling me to “keep the faith”.

I’m looking forward to working on my music this summer. It’s a pity that my concert will be over just as my time off begins, so I won’t be able to devote the time I’d like to preparing for it, but I’ll choose a piece to really polish up to feel good about before orchestra starts up again next fall.

Music is such a gloriously emotional thing, and it brings such a variety of people together to perform and experience it. I don’t know who invented it, but I think I’d like to shake their hand.

CURRENTLY READING:
Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris, which is about a woman returning anonymously to her native village in France to open a restaurant in the house she grew up in. It’s two stories simultaneously: the modern storyline, and the story of when this main character was growing up sixty-odd years ago in German-occupied France. I’m enjoying the war storyline more; the modern story is about her weak nephew and his desperate, food-snobby wife trying to steal her mother’s recipe book to help their own ailing high-class restaurant, which the protagonist has discovered is also a kind of diary in code which her mother kept during the war. I find the modern antagonists pretty lame, although I love the recipe book/journal aspect of it. Harris uses food and wine as a metaphor for everything her characters can’t actually come out and say in all her books; it’s an interesting trope, but it’s becoming predictable.

This is the third Harris novel I’ve read; the first two were Chocolat and Blackberry Wine. So far, Chocolat is still my favourite. Jury’s still out as to where Five Quarters will fall.

Missing The Point

Just when you thought it was safe:

Michael Williams, a Republican candidate for the 5th Congressional District seat, has a novel plan to fully fund NASA: Tax science fiction.

Williams proposes a 1 percent “NASA tax” on science fiction books, science fiction comic books, space sciences books and any other space-related literature.

The tax would also apply to “space, space-related, and science fiction toys, puzzles and games,” Williams said in a listing of his platform.

Where does it end? Do we pay a science fiction tax on our Doritos because they have Episode Two likenesses emblazoned on the bags? Will they stalk the streets at Hallowe’en and slap a tax on kids wearing a collection of boxes and foil pie plates? Kids who want a telescope? Movie soundtracks? Innocent book clubs in need of refined germanium who gather to discuss zone purifiers!?

Ugh. Read the whole article and learn more about Williams’ brilliant campaign ideas, if you dare.

I don’t know whether to thank Scott or not for bringing this to my attention.

Spring!

Whoa! Somewhere along the past day and a half, this page received its three hundredth hit.

I’m stunned. In just under one month, people have stopped by by three hundred times to see what I’m rambling about. (And yes, I set my counter to ignore my own hits on the page.)

Wow.

In other news, damn it, it’s SPRING! We’ve thrown open all the windows, I’ve gone for a walk to buy orange juice and a paper, and now I’m sitting at the computer in a patch of cosy sunlight, breathing in the warm spring smells, listening to Mozart arias on the radio. Apparently it’s going up to 16 C today. Life is pretty good.

Tonight I’m leading a class on ethics, then I’m off to a good old-fashioned sleepover with four other women. There will be much chocolate in various forms, as all good sleepovers must have. The added bonus of adulthood means daiquiries too. Woo-hoo! Tomorrow morning we shall dawdle over silver dollar pancakes and waffles, then I’ve got a Star Wars game in the afternoon, and a book club soiree in the evening. Needless to say, this does not allow for seeing Men With Brooms, so we have plans to see it next Saturday that shall not be overturned!

CURRENT READING:

Typically, I’ve begun half a dozen things at once:

Witches & Neighbours by Robin Briggs is a socio-politico-cultural examination of the witch hunts in Europe, creating a historical context of the changing face of society in order to further understand the phenomenon of the hunts. Interesting.

Pilgrims of the Night by Lars B. Lindholm is a fun look at the ancestry of modern magical belief, Western mystery schools and esoteric practice. After looking at people like Thomas “Chip” Aquinas (you had to be there) and Agrippa, I’ve learned about John Dee (who had more money than sense, most of it apparently originating with the Philosopher’s Stone and his alchemical experiments) and Albertus Magnus (whose name means “Big Al”, and who was below average height).

Mutts Six: A Little Look-See and Mutts: Sunday Mornings by Patrick McDonnell. No one told me there was a new Mutts collection out!!

Teach Yourself HTML and XHTML. Yep. I’m trying to figure out how to create another table in this template so I can format it to have different fonts and colours so you can actually read it.

And, yes; I found Perdido Street Station, so that’s next…

IN THE DISC DRIVE:

Affairs of the Heart: Music of Marjan Mozetich (and if you don’t recognise it, it’s probably because it’s Canadian and modern).
Classic Yo-Yo: a collection of nifty bits of Ma’s recordings, about half of which I don’t have. The other half is good enough to have twice.
Yo-Yo Ma Plays the Music of John Williams: no, it’s not Star Wars on the cello. I never knew Williams had written a cello concerto, let alone an Elegy (expanded from a musical theme used in Seven Years in Tibet) or Three Pieces for Solo Cello.