"Sandman" Storytelling, and Shakespeare
Mar. 19th, 2004 12:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
capri0mniOkay, these thoughts have been bubbling away in me since... well... a while ago. And I've been telling myself I'd get around to writing them up for ... a while. But when the oppotunity's come up, and I've had a moment to spare, I always found myself too tired or distracted to actually do so. I promised myself, last night, that I would write this today, so here goes:
(under cuts, 'cause it turned out a lot longer than I expected)
I got a renewed urge to write something after reading "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in Neil Gaiman's Dream Country, which I got as a Yule gift from my Secret Santa.
In that story, Gaiman has Hamnet, Shakespeare's son, traveling with his father on a country tour during the summer that the theaters were closed down. He puts Shakespeare's company in the country to perform the play, commissioned by Sandman, for the real Titania and Oberon. And, backstage, he has Hamnet speak these words:
"He's very distant, Tommy. He doesn't seem like he's really there anymore, not really. It's like he's somewhere else. Anyrhing that happens, he just makes stories out of it. I'm less real to him than any of the characters in his plays."
It is clear that this seperation from life was the price Shakespeare had to pay for the all the great stories Sandman gave him.
This theme of storytelling equalling madness, of seperation from the world, is also evident in the first story in this collection: "Calliope," where Sandman punishes a writer for kidnapping and raping the muse by driving him mad with too many stories.
It seems odd, to me, that Gaiman, who is, himself, a storyteller, would have such a dark, almost evil, view of his craft. Perhaps, for him, stories are an affliction -- a veil between the dark world of his own mind, and the bright sunny world of real people he wishes to inhabit. I don't know. I know neither the man himself nor more than a few of his tales. But based on what I've read so far, that's what it seems like.
For me, storytelling is very different. While I agree with Gaiman that storytelling is powerful and magical, I believe it is more light than darkness.
I have heard many things attributed to humans that supposedly seperate us from all the other animals: the power of speech, the power of "reason," the ability to make tools ... But, in all my 40 years of watching this world and the creatures in it (casual as those observations may be), there are only two human endeavors of which I can find no vestage in the rest of nature: Deliberately building fires, and telling stories.
The affect of controlled fires upon our lives as humans has been much commented and meditated on, so I won't add to the verbage, here.
Storytelling, however, seems to me to be treated as a bit of fluff -- a bit of playing around with all the fancy extras our language has: "Ooh! what shall we do with all the adjectives and prepositions and verbs and such? I know! Let's tell a story! that'll be fun!" But I think it went the other way around. I think that somehow, humans needed to tell stories, as much as we needed to build fires, to survive, and that we developed complex, abstract language so that we could to tell the stories we needed to.
In storytelling, whether it's a one-on-one exchange at a child's bedside at night, a troupe of traveling actors performing in the park, or a writer like Neil Gaimon telling his story through the medium of the printed page, the dynamic is always the same: The audience willingly surrenders its imagination to the storyteller from 'Once upon a time' to 'Happily ever after'. And the roles of "audience" and "storyteller" are never fixed. The one who is listening to the story today is very likely the one who will tell the story tomorrow. Though the medium of stories, we share in each other's imaginations and experiences, and gain a common collection of mental focal points to help us reach our goals. And I believe that it's that sharing of imagination, through storytelling, that gave us the edge when it came to surviving in a world of creatures stronger, faster, and toothier than we are.
Stories, I believe, connect us to this world and to each other, instead of cutting us off.
So what of Shakespeare and his son Hamnet? While it is true that he spent nearly all his time in London, while his family stayed in Stratford, it's also true that his job was in London... and his boss was the Queen. It's not like he could say: "I'm sorry, Your Majesty, but I need some mental health time off to spend with my family."
Recently, on PBS, there was a 4 part special on Shakespeare, hosted and written by Michael Wood (and that's another thing that prompted me to write this entry), and while I didn't get to see all of it, because I was away on the Gally trip, my father did, and told me about it.
What struck him profoundly was the theory Michael Wood put forth that the real subject of the "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" sonnet was not the lord to whom the book of poems was dedicated, but to his son, now dead:
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
Reading it over again, it's the lines But thy eternal summer shall not fade and Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, that convinced me this theory is correct. He's speaking to someone who has passed into the realm of eternity, and someone whom death is wanting to brag about. I'm sorry, but that just brings a lump to my throat. I'm such a sentimental fool!
And there's a scene in A Winter's Tale (that I am too tired now, to look up, sorry) that has two fathers talking about the joys and tribulations of raising children as they grow through their "phases," that is so spot-on, it sounds like someone who's writing from direct knowledge, rather than theory....
I guess my point, if I have one, is that the idea of "Shakespeare was the greatest writer that ever lived! But his homelife musta been crap." that just rubs me the wrong way. Sure, he was a great writer. But not all of his plays were the best ever written (Pericles, Prince of Tyre is pretty much universally seen as bad, And Cymbeline falls apart completely in the last scene, plausibility-wise). And I'm sure his personal and family could have been happier. But that doesn't mean there wasn't love between them. He did move back to Stratford when he retired. If you don't put people on pedestals to begin with, you won't have such an urge to knock them down....
That is all.
(under cuts, 'cause it turned out a lot longer than I expected)
I got a renewed urge to write something after reading "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in Neil Gaiman's Dream Country, which I got as a Yule gift from my Secret Santa.
In that story, Gaiman has Hamnet, Shakespeare's son, traveling with his father on a country tour during the summer that the theaters were closed down. He puts Shakespeare's company in the country to perform the play, commissioned by Sandman, for the real Titania and Oberon. And, backstage, he has Hamnet speak these words:
"He's very distant, Tommy. He doesn't seem like he's really there anymore, not really. It's like he's somewhere else. Anyrhing that happens, he just makes stories out of it. I'm less real to him than any of the characters in his plays."
It is clear that this seperation from life was the price Shakespeare had to pay for the all the great stories Sandman gave him.
This theme of storytelling equalling madness, of seperation from the world, is also evident in the first story in this collection: "Calliope," where Sandman punishes a writer for kidnapping and raping the muse by driving him mad with too many stories.
It seems odd, to me, that Gaiman, who is, himself, a storyteller, would have such a dark, almost evil, view of his craft. Perhaps, for him, stories are an affliction -- a veil between the dark world of his own mind, and the bright sunny world of real people he wishes to inhabit. I don't know. I know neither the man himself nor more than a few of his tales. But based on what I've read so far, that's what it seems like.
For me, storytelling is very different. While I agree with Gaiman that storytelling is powerful and magical, I believe it is more light than darkness.
I have heard many things attributed to humans that supposedly seperate us from all the other animals: the power of speech, the power of "reason," the ability to make tools ... But, in all my 40 years of watching this world and the creatures in it (casual as those observations may be), there are only two human endeavors of which I can find no vestage in the rest of nature: Deliberately building fires, and telling stories.
The affect of controlled fires upon our lives as humans has been much commented and meditated on, so I won't add to the verbage, here.
Storytelling, however, seems to me to be treated as a bit of fluff -- a bit of playing around with all the fancy extras our language has: "Ooh! what shall we do with all the adjectives and prepositions and verbs and such? I know! Let's tell a story! that'll be fun!" But I think it went the other way around. I think that somehow, humans needed to tell stories, as much as we needed to build fires, to survive, and that we developed complex, abstract language so that we could to tell the stories we needed to.
In storytelling, whether it's a one-on-one exchange at a child's bedside at night, a troupe of traveling actors performing in the park, or a writer like Neil Gaimon telling his story through the medium of the printed page, the dynamic is always the same: The audience willingly surrenders its imagination to the storyteller from 'Once upon a time' to 'Happily ever after'. And the roles of "audience" and "storyteller" are never fixed. The one who is listening to the story today is very likely the one who will tell the story tomorrow. Though the medium of stories, we share in each other's imaginations and experiences, and gain a common collection of mental focal points to help us reach our goals. And I believe that it's that sharing of imagination, through storytelling, that gave us the edge when it came to surviving in a world of creatures stronger, faster, and toothier than we are.
Stories, I believe, connect us to this world and to each other, instead of cutting us off.
So what of Shakespeare and his son Hamnet? While it is true that he spent nearly all his time in London, while his family stayed in Stratford, it's also true that his job was in London... and his boss was the Queen. It's not like he could say: "I'm sorry, Your Majesty, but I need some mental health time off to spend with my family."
Recently, on PBS, there was a 4 part special on Shakespeare, hosted and written by Michael Wood (and that's another thing that prompted me to write this entry), and while I didn't get to see all of it, because I was away on the Gally trip, my father did, and told me about it.
What struck him profoundly was the theory Michael Wood put forth that the real subject of the "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" sonnet was not the lord to whom the book of poems was dedicated, but to his son, now dead:
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
Reading it over again, it's the lines But thy eternal summer shall not fade and Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, that convinced me this theory is correct. He's speaking to someone who has passed into the realm of eternity, and someone whom death is wanting to brag about. I'm sorry, but that just brings a lump to my throat. I'm such a sentimental fool!
And there's a scene in A Winter's Tale (that I am too tired now, to look up, sorry) that has two fathers talking about the joys and tribulations of raising children as they grow through their "phases," that is so spot-on, it sounds like someone who's writing from direct knowledge, rather than theory....
I guess my point, if I have one, is that the idea of "Shakespeare was the greatest writer that ever lived! But his homelife musta been crap." that just rubs me the wrong way. Sure, he was a great writer. But not all of his plays were the best ever written (Pericles, Prince of Tyre is pretty much universally seen as bad, And Cymbeline falls apart completely in the last scene, plausibility-wise). And I'm sure his personal and family could have been happier. But that doesn't mean there wasn't love between them. He did move back to Stratford when he retired. If you don't put people on pedestals to begin with, you won't have such an urge to knock them down....
That is all.
