An irony

[capri0mni]

Popular opinion:

Get you a sweetheart who breaks out with the most beautiful poetry every time they see you, or at the very least, has the perfect Shakespeare quote for every occasion.

Shakespeare:

Actually... get you a sweetheart who is so in love with you that they get tongue-tied into silence the minute they think of you, and if they are inspired to try and write poems about you, their metaphors are all mixed, and their scansion is a mess -- because the very idea of you is too big for words. And anyway, they care more about you than showing off how clever they are.

Comments

[siliconshaman]

Get you a sweetheart who does both.. who is so tongue tied that they cannot put you into words, and looks at you with awestruck shy blushes.. until they do bust out the poetry and then they speak with suck heart-felt passion that the very sky and earth doth pause in order to better listen, and once they tidal surge of words abates, the very air sighs in fond gentleness.

[capri0mni]

...If I can find one! ;-)

[siliconshaman]

Aye, there's the rub... [no innuendo intended!]

[capri0mni]

Well, you're dealing with an asexual... I probably would not have noticed the need for innuendo if you hadn't pointed it out.

---

Mostly, I was thinking of the irony that the works by Shakespeare that get deemed most important -- and thus, get the most stage time and spilled ink -- are the ones with the most lyrical writing, and quotable soliloquies.

But Shakespeare himself insinuates that the most important ideas can't talked about fluently.

[siliconshaman]

Fair enough, I was just making sure. [I hang out on reddit sometimes, if there's a way to misconstrue what is said, someone there will find it.]

It is notable that for all the Bard has written on the subject of love.. not one word has ever been mentioned of his wife... methinks the bard did find himself at a loss on that subject.

[capri0mni]

Well, there is Sonnet 145, in which the poet writes about an outburst of anger from the woman he loves:

Those lips that Love's own hand did make
Breathed forth the sound that said 'I hate,'
To me that languish'd for her sake:
But when she saw my woeful state,
Straight in her heart did mercy come,
Chiding that tongue that ever sweet
Was used in giving gentle doom,
And taught it thus anew to greet:
'I hate' she alter'd with an end,
That follow'd it as gentle day
Doth follow night, who like a fiend
From heaven to hell is flown away;
'I hate' from hate away she threw,
And saved my life, saying -- 'not you.'

(Reminder: Shakespeare's wife was named Anne Hathaway. And in Shakespeare's day, "Hathaway" and "Hate away" are perfect puns. The last line could also be read as "Anne saved my life...")

And it has also been noted that the happiest depiction of marriage in his canon are the Macbeths -- not exactly the best role models, generally speaking -- but I think it's telling that the moment their marriage starts falling apart is toward the end of the play, when they start keeping secrets from each other (When Macbeth sees the ghost of Banquo, and tries to cover up his reaction in front of Lady Macbeth). So as long as you're not trying to advance your career through murder, Shakespeare's implied advice on a happy marriage is pretty sound.

And although it's not central to the plot (there's only about a dozen lines of dialog on the subject) the marriage between Lord Antigonus and Lady Paulina in The Winter's Tale is depicted as a happy one. Unfortunately, they try to stand up to a dictator driven mad by sexual jealousy for his own wife, and Antigonus must obey the king, or watch Lady Paulina be executed. So he obeys... and gets eaten alive by a bear.

(I think The Winter's Tale is just as much a self-insert story as The Tempest, but has never gotten the same level of attention from scholars because it's got women's cooties all over it. And because it doesn't have as much ink spilled over it, it doesn't get performed nearly as much... and the cycle perpetuates)

[siliconshaman]

I think your analysis is probably right, given his fondness of word play and hidden bits. But that's as close as it gets to him openly mentioning her.

Twelfth night and Winters Tale are two of my favourites, and yes, it doesn't get the attention it deserves.

[capri0mni]

It took 21 years after my mother's death for me to get to a place where I could write a poem explicitly about our relationship. It's coming up on 12 years since my father's death, and I still haven't got to that place for him... yet.

If I should A) die tomorrow, and B) be fortunate enough to have my work rediscovered and debated in classrooms, centuries hence, I can easily imagine people drawing the conclusion that my relationship with my father must have been distant and strained, since he doesn't appear in any of my writing. But the reality couldn't be further from the truth. So I'm wary of speculating on private lives based on work meant for public consumption.

I was lucky enough to be in the audience for a performance of The Winter's Tale in 1980 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (my English teacher scored discount tickets for a group rate) -- one of the few performances mentioned in Wikipedia. It was standing room only, and we were farthest from the stage (but thanks to my chair, I didn't have to stand)... We hadn't studied the play in class, beforehand, so I knew nothing about the plot or how it was going to turn out (which may be why I'm so fiercely defensive of the play, today: I saw it as closely as possible to the way it was originally intended to be seen).

Three things stuck with me for years, before I went back and listened to/read the play again as an adult:

The scene with Mamillius and his mother's ladies-in-waiting: when he got one of the ladies to "confess" that she had blue eyebrows, and thinking that was the funniest thing ever, I realized that Shakespeare got a six-year-old's sense of humor down pat.

When Leontes threatened to burn Paulina at the stake, and Paulina shoots back: "I care not."

At the end of the play, when Paulina suggested that the kingdom's next ruler be chosen by merit, instead of by "blood" -- at a time when the monarch (who very well could have been in the audience) was still believed to rule by Divine Right... That struck me as Ballsy as Hell.

[siliconshaman]

'suck heart felt passion'

oy.. you can tell I was in need of a nap when I wrote that!

[capri0mni]

Just call it an illustration of my point!

;-)

[siliconshaman]

Point taken...

[jesse_the_k]

I have nothing meaningful to add, but I am delighted to be schooled in Shakespeare, as you do it so enthusiastically and scornlessly.

(Sadly my Shakespearean experience has mainly been, 'you mean you don't know that?')

[capri0mni]

Unfortunately, I can't seem to search XKCD by theme -- but a while ago (a couple years?) he had a comic about how everyone discovers something for the first time, so it's pointless to look down on people for not knowing something yet, instead of: "Boy! are you in for a treat!"

One of the most famous examples of the point I'm trying to make here is Benedick, trying to write a poem to Beatrice, in Much Ado:

a whole bookful of these quondam carpet-mangers,
whose names yet run smoothly in the even road of a
blank verse, why, they were never so truly turned
over and over as my poor self in love. Marry, I
cannot show it in rhyme; I have tried: I can find
out no rhyme to 'lady' but 'baby,'* an innocent
rhyme; for 'scorn,' 'horn,' a hard rhyme; for,
'school,' 'fool,' a babbling rhyme; very ominous
endings: no, I was not born under a rhyming planet,
nor I cannot woo in festival terms.

*I would never have the heart to go back in time and warn Shakespeare about the future of love songs...

Meanwhile, my favorite Shakespeare scholar is also a young (ish) Shakespearean actor, who's created a theater company dedicated to figuring out and employing Elizabethan theater techniques. Here's a 17-minute presentation he did for a TED-X event in Norway, last year, and his enthusiasm and passion for this exceeds even mine. So I think you may like it.

[pedanther]

Here's the XKCD comic Capriuni mentioned: https://xkcd.com/1053/

[capri0mni]

Thank you!

XKCD's archive is great -- if you remember the title of the comic you're looking for.