"And what we have now are English professors saying that, you know, Taylor Swift is as good as Mary Shelley."

"Q: 'So I want to ask you about Philistines and how Philistines have taken over the culture. I think the phrase you used is ‘Philistine supremacy’?'

"A: 'That's right. A lot of the time, when we talk about Philistines, we mean, oh, that awful person I know who doesn't appreciate the high arts. And it's a kind of snob thing. I'm not interested in that. Everyone's a Philistine, right? I'm a Philistine. You're a Philistine.

"'The really important thing is whether the literary elite are Philistines. And what we have now are English professors saying that, you know, Taylor Swift is as good as Mary Shelley. And the guy who runs the New York Times book review section hasn't read Middlemarch and doesn't think it's a problem. And there are just so many examples like that—that sort of suggest that the elite tier has kind of given up on being elites in a way.

"'I think part of it is we had what was called prestige TV, and people wanted to write about that and talk about that.'

"Q: 'Let me play Devil’s Advocate for a moment and say, no, 'Succession' is really good. The writing is very interesting. The cinematography adds a new layer to its presentation. The storytelling's good. It gives you room to explore various themes in a way that a play doesn’t because of its runtime and multi-season arc. Tell me why that’s crazy.'

"A: 'There are two questions here. Is Succession good? And is Succession the sort of thing that merits the cultural elite giving it the kind of attention that they have? And those are separate questions.

"'Maybe Succession is good. I neither know nor care. I found it boring. I couldn't watch very much of it. Personally, I think the cinematography is hugely derivative. ... But should we be talking about it in partnership with King Lear? Should we be devoting the kind of space and the kind of critical attention that we give to it, that we also give to the great works of fiction and drama? That’s obviously a no. Even the advocates can't really make a serious case for it. And, you know, King Lear is 400 years old at this point and is acknowledged as one of the great masterpieces of the West. No one's printing out the Succession scripts and doing a close reading. ...'

"Q: 'What would you do specifically about Shakespeare?'

"A: 'So the first thing I would say is, you’re not at school and you’re not that person anymore. And there are a lot of things you did and didn’t like at school that are no longer relevant. So just move on. Put that to one side. That’s over. Shakespeare’s the best. People get a little fussy about, can we say the best, and can we have rankings? Whatever. Yes, he’s the best. He’s the heart of the English canon. He’s the best reading experience you can have. You owe it to yourself to see or read some Shakespeare in the way that you would travel to see amazing landscapes, amazing buildings, have the best food of the world, hear the best music of the world. No one thinks it’s crazy to jump on a plane for eight hours to go and do something incredible on the other side of the world. But spending three hours with this book is too scary?'"

~ from an interview with Henry Oliver on developing literary taste in an age of TV binge-watching and dumbed-down mass culture: 'How to Be a Serious Reader'

Much Ado About Something: "The welfare state of the intellect"

IT'S NOT EVERY DAY that a long-dead Elizabethan playwright hits the headlines here at home. Creative New Zealand's decision to defund (or not to defund) a high-school Shakespeare competition spiralled into a debate into what Creative New Zealand should be funding and promoting. Competition supporter Terry Sheat argued a public enquiry must be held into what and how Creative New Zealand goes about its funding choices:

If I were to mark CNZ’s funding criteria and outcomes against the duties under the legislation, I would be forced to give them a failing grade. I wouldn’t give them funding. They are not delivering to the proper scope of their mission statement. Diversity is not diversity of “New Zealand art”, it is diversity of all art in New Zealand, with freedom of artistic expression for all. That is literally in the statute.
    In the case of Shakespeare Globe Centre NZ, funding was terminated primarily if not solely because Shakespeare is, to quote CNZ’s assessment, “located within a canon of imperialism” and not “relevant to a decolonising Aotearoa in the 2020s and beyond.” Vincent O’Sullivan dismissed this as nonsense in his letter published last week in the Otago Daily Times, describing it as “a breathtaking absurdity from a government body whose brief is to promote excellence in the arts.” An editorial in Stuff said that “the CNZ assessment has exposed the obvious problems that come with interpreting art through the narrow lens of national identity and politics.”

And then before you knew it, everyone was debating Creative New Zealand's funding criteria, how it should best promote "Aotearoan art," and whether or not Shakespeare was an "imperialist."[1]

Which rather starts where the argument should end. To me, it’s not an argument about how Creative New Zealand's bureaucrats should choose whom to fund in order to promote the latest fashionable ideals; it's whether these bureaucrats should have the power (and the money) to do that at all! The problem is not how Creative New Zealand goes about handing out money, in other words: it’s that Creative New Zealand hands out any money at all.

And here the issue here isn’t primarily the amounts that the establishment elects to pays out; it’s the effect of what that money buys: which (like its more quotidian companion, the Public Interest Journalism Fund) is intellectual conformity.

You may not realise it (and the dullards at the myopic Free Speech Union almost certainly won't), but this is a free-speech issue -- but not in the way you probably think.

WERE YOU AWARE THAT there is more than one way to curtail free speech? Government organisations who censor speech or expression are one way. Government organisations who promote it, like Creative New Zealand. are another.

I’m going to repost a piece from 2006 to make this point…

This is a post about free speech.  
It is not a piece about outrageous assaults on free speech committed in Paris last month, or by government censorship offices, or by successive NZ governments keen to curtail criticism during election periods.  
    No, this is a post about a different kind of attack on free speech. One more subtle, and no less chilling. One in which artists, musicians, scriptwriters, screenwriters, television producers and television production companies are kept afloat by government cash and government grants from Creative New Zealand and Te Mangai Paho and New Zealand on Air or their proxies, or in which many scientists are kept afloat by government grants or by employment in government research projects.  
    The direct result of this is what Ayn Rand once called ‘The Establishing of an Establishment’²: not the sponsorship of creative souls to toe a government line, but a more insidious kind of greyness inciting would-be creatives to to a culturalline embodied by those doling out and reviewing these government grants.

    What's the problem, you might ask?  
Well, think about this. There is more than one kind of censorship. In fact, I'd suggest to you that there are two. The first and most straightforward method of censorship is for a government to ban speech that they don't like -- that's just what National and Labour and the Greens and Gareth Morgan want to do at elections, and I hope you lot feel disgusted enough about that to do something about it. The second form of censorship is one that Ayn Rand called "the establishing of an establishment," and it is even more insidious and no less chilling: 

Governmental repression is [not] the only way a government can destroy the intellectual life of a country... There is another way: governmental encouragement.

That's right. Rather than simply banning opponents or banning expression, this form of censorship is much more subtle: it encourages expression (or scientific research) that is deemed acceptable, and by implication discourages anyone interested in career advancement from engaging in possibly unacceptable expression or research, . 

Governmental encouragement does not order men to believe that the false is true: it merely makes them indifferent to the issue of truth or falsehood.

It makes them sensitive instead to what is deemed acceptable, and thereby lucrative -- it encourages and makes lucrative that very form of sensitivity – it invites all those lucred up by the process to band together against whoever they perceive as their ‘other’ [and no better target for that than the phoney shibboleth they call 'neo-liberalism'].  
    This is what Rand referred to as "the welfare state of the intellect," and the result is as destructive as that other, more visible welfare state: the setting up of politicians, bureaucrats and their minions (the establishment) as arbiters of thinking and taste and ideology; the freezing of the status quo; a staleness and conformity, and an unwillingness to speak out – what Frank Lloyd Wright once called “an average upon an average by averages on behalf of the average” such that in interrogating any one modern artist you would get essentially the same answers as from any other -- in short "the establishing of an establishment" to which new entrants in a field realise very quickly they are all but required to either conform or go under. 

If you talk to a typical business executive or college dean or magazine editor [or spin doctor or opposition leader], you can observe his special, modern quality: a kind of flowing or skipping evasiveness that drips or bounces automatically off any fundamental issue, a gently non-committal blandness, an ingrained cautiousness toward everything, as if an inner tape recorder were whispering: "Play it safe, don't antagonize--whom?--anybody."

If you've ever wondered where this "special, modern quality" comes from, this is perhaps one answer -- through the intellectual mediocrity advanced by this less well-known form of censorship -- a censorship of encouragement. It's a much less obvious and much more insidious method of censorship, and no less chilling for that. 

The [US] Constitution forbids a governmental establishment of religion, properly regarding it as a violation of individual rights. Since a man's beliefs are protected from the intrusion of force, the same principle should protect his reasoned convictions and forbid governmental establishments in the field of thought.

Think about it.

NOW, IT SOUNDS LIKE good news that the Shakespeare funding has been reinstated, for which everyone and his leather codpiece are praising the Prime Minister's intervention

And I applaud the establishment luvvies and others who came out in defence of one of my favourite playwrights. Good for them.

I'm also happy that for a week or so we've been discussing his work. 

But why should you or I other folk be forced to pay, for the most part, for theatre (or art) you don't like. Especially when this process of bureaucratically-selected funding -- bureaucrats choosing what to fund based on what best fits the government's fashionable cultural concerns -- constitutes the self-same censorship of encouragement New Zealand is presently enjoying with the Public Interest Journalism Fund.

By my own literary and theatrical standards, it looks like the restatement this week was a small win. From the larger standpoint however, the amounts involved are but a tiny pimple one the huge arse of the government-promoted cultural establishment.

If we understand how that whole arts and literary establishment has become so comfortably established, we might feel more uneasy not just about the way this sausage is sliced - but that it's there to be sliced at all.

* * * * * 

1. You would have thought one look at Henry V would answer that one.
2. Cresswell (1996), reposted with the generous permission of Dave Perkins.
3. From "The Establishing of an Establishment," republished in her book Philosophy: Who Needs It?, from which the otherwise unreferenced quotes above derive.
Highly recommended if you want to get to grips with this subtle form of censorship.

[Pics from The Spinoff]

How COVID gives us insight into one of Shakespeare's greatest plays

The great plot twist in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is all but buried to a modern audience. Only now, says author Ben Cohen, only now in our own time of pandemic can we understand that Shakespeare was writing -- and his audience were watching -- in a time bathed in plague. And as Ben Cohen explains to Russ Roberts on his EconLog podcast, that made all the difference:

Russ Roberts: Well, let's turn to Shakespeare.... So, Shakespeare has a really good year in, I think, 1605, right? He publishes--he writes King Lear, MacBeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. ...

Ben Cohen: ... [W]hat changed in 1605 and 1606 that allowed Shakespeare to get hot, it was not just Shakespeare: it was the world around him.  

What changed is that it was a plague year. The plague was sort of Shakespeare's secret weapon, in many ways. The plague was this constant force in Shakespeare's life, which I didn't realise until writing this book. I mean, he probably should have died from plague when he was an infant. His parents had already lost children to the plague when the plagues swept through Stratford-upon-Avon when he was very, very young, and it killed sort of indiscriminately.

So, the fact that he lived was a matter of chance. He baked the plague into Romeo and Juliet. I mean, the plague is really what turns the most famous love story ever into a tragedy, which, I'm sort of embarrassed to admit that I did not realize when I read the play in eighth grade and I did not realize when I majored in English in college--one of those faults is probably much worse than the other.

And, then, the plague is what allows him to get hot in 1605 and 1606--for many reasons. It puts theater-goers into a state of mind where they want to see his plays again. It closes certain playhouses. In a very macabre way, it sort of kills off his competition a little bit.

But, he is able to take advantage of these very unlikely circumstances....

Russ Roberts: So, let's digress for a minute, just because it's too much fun to talk about Romeo and Juliet ... And, we forget that when it was performed the first time, nobody knew how it ended. So, when Juliet takes a potion that's going to put her to sleep, and make her look like she's dead, Romeo finds her, thinks she is dead, kills himself. She wakes up, sees that he's dead and kills herself instead of them being reunited. And that's the spoiler alert.

And when the crowd sees this on stage first time, the gasp of shock and horror and realisation of how this is going to turn after they're all wanting it to go a different directions, it's so--it's so powerful.

Ben Cohen: It's so interesting, though, because when she does take the potion, you could easily see it becoming a comedy, right? Where they have this crazy twist that leads to them running away--

Russ Roberts: Yeah, run off to Rio, start a new life. Yeah, it's going to be great.

But, what I didn't realise, which I learned from your book ... is that that plot twist that he doesn't know that she's faking the potion and that it's a coma, not death, and she's going to wake up, he was supposed to get a message about that. And the reason he doesn't get the message is? 

Ben Cohen: Because the messenger who is sent gets stuck in quarantine... 

And so, the reason why Romeo doesn't know that Juliet has taken this potion and that she is simply sleeping and not actually dead is because this whole harebrained scheme had not been explained to him because he never gets the letter.

So, if you think about it, it's really a bonkers plot line. The flyer says, 'I will--Juliet, take this sleeping potion, it will knock you out. Your family will think you're dead. When they think you're dead, Romeo is going to come back and he's going to sweep you away and take you and live happily ever after.'

Now, this is the stuff that like you wouldn't even see on a reality show or some terrible soap opera now. And yet, it's our most famous love story.

And so, why does it fall apart? She takes the sleeping potion, right? She gets knocked out. Her family thinks she's dead. Romeo comes back and sees her in the open crypt. All of the crazy stuff actually turns out--where the whole scheme falls apart--is simply on getting a letter to Romeo. And it falls apart because the plague is sweeping through and the messenger gets stuck in quarantine.

So, all of this is the plague.

Russ Roberts: And, as you point out, which I thought was a brilliant insight--it's four lines where the guy says to the other guy, 'Oh, did you get that message to Romeo?' 'Oh, no I couldn't get it to him. Sorry.'

Ben Cohen: But, the subtext was so clear back then. You don't hit the audience over the head.

Now, 400 years later, you kind of do, right? I think I write in the book that it's the same as if someone now were to tweet something and end it with "Sad!" We all know what that's a reference to.

But, if someone is reading that tweet 400 years from now, God forbid, they might not understand that we are making an allusion to the way that the President of the United States tweets--

And so nobody in the theater would have wanted to hear about the plague. It's like being on a cruise ship and watching Titanic. I mean, you understand the risk and you don't want to think about that. But they all understood what was happening. We just don't understand what was happening, now....

Russ Roberts: But, I think that point, which is so fabulous that you don't need a two-page, 10-minute dialogue about the letter not getting there, because everybody in the crowd has experienced horrible things because of the quarantine--they all are very aware of it. And so, this is just a standard real life plausible thing.

Looking back on it before this COVID tragedy, we would have said, 'Oh, that's weird. Why didn't he make it clearer?' Because: they didn't need to then.

Ben Cohen: Or, why didn't the messengers just leave the quarantine house? Right? Could it really have been that bad?

And yet, that scene now feels oddly resonant in the same way that people in 1606 would have understood: of course he's not leaving the quarantined house. I mean, we all understand that now. Like, yeah: you're not going out to deliver a letter to somebody ... that was a plague, and it was a lot worse.

If you go down to the woods today, you might hear a bit of te reo #PopUpGlobe

Pic by Stuff

In Shakespeare's outrageous comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream batshit crazy things happen to serious young things who have escaped the city's strictures for the unfamiliar and faintly dangerous delights of the forest, wherein they are made sport of by those who have born and grew up there: by a race of fairies invisible to the erstwhile city-dwellers whose puckish ways, however, are not.

They, and every receptive audience for the Dream (if the director is doing it right), are always in for a big surprise.

So too, it has been reported, were many of the audience for the Auckland Pop-Up Globe's production over the weekend -- surprised to discover that the fairies, the original inhabitants of the play's strange lands, were represented in this production by two Maori warriors and a wahine speaking in te reo. According to the Herald, who have clearly been simply trawling Facebook to muster controversy where there is none:

Online reviews left about the Pop-up Globe performance said the move was 'disrespectful' and 'bastardising' Shakespeare and confusing for audiences. Other theatre goers have made their equally damning views direct to the venue's management...
One person wrote on social media the use of Te Reo in A Midsummer Night's Dream "spoilt what otherwise was a thoroughly entertaining and professional production." In a Facebook review, another disgruntled theatre goer said the decision to have the fairies speak in Maori meant only two people at his count could understand what was being said.

The reporter does not say how many in total were included in that count, but she is at pains to link "the debate about the use of Te Reo Maori" in the production at the Globe with "the debate about the use of Te Reo Maori" elsewhere which, she says, "has flared several times in recent months ... [including] former National Party leader Don Brash clashing with RNZ's Kim Hill on her Saturday morning show over the public broadcaster's use of Maori greetings on air."

Linking the two "debates" seems to be both unhelpful and disingenuous. Because as every theatre-goer knows, it is possible to destroy a play with errant direction even if you support the director's intentions.

But as everyone leaving the play on Saturday night in tears of laughter could attest, this is not a play that has been destroyed. Far from it. In this setting, and with this directorial choice, the play comes alive.

As it happens, I too was at the show on Saturday night, and I was one of those wiping my eyes of tears when I left (and my Saturday-night-best of blood, but that, dear readers, is another story). And far from being surprised by the speaking of a strange tongue for 20% of the time, I was fully prepared for it -- indeed, I was coming back for a second time having enjoyed the first performance so much. And I will be back again for more before this season ends.

Because, what the reporter fails to point out is one very salient fact: this is a damned fine show! It is truly world class. The performances are stellar, the setting is superb, and the choice to use tangata whenua to represent the forest's native fairy folk is as thematically sound as it is dramatically stunning. Who better to represent the original forest folk than our original forest folk? And that choice being made, why wouldn't you ask them to speak in that original language? If it adds an air of unreality, then that is precisely what the Dream should do!

But there is much of it we can't understand? And so what -- there is much in Shakespeare's own English that is difficult for many to parse, and we don't usually play the Bard with subtitles. And there is much more of Shakespeare's original text that is cut in every production in order to reduce the show time -- a chainsaw being taken to the text that in some cases will see it reduced by as much as half!

But, comes the response, courtesy of the Herald's Facebook trawl, "This [is] silly because the fairies revealed key plot points." And indeed they do -- and apparently the Herald's erstwhile online reviewer is unfamiliar with the art of mime, which these actors speaking te reo use superbly to tell the story. The spells they cast over the various players could not be more clear if they were telegraphed; and if the reasons for their playfulness are not always clear, let me assure you that they are far more so than in many an opera sung in an unfamiliar European tongue. There are enough signposts in this Dream to understand where we are being led, both by mime and by the familiar-enough words of te reo each of us do know that pepper the text.

And as the play's director and Pop-Up Globe founder Miles Gregory explains (the man without whom, it should be remembered, this exciting theatre concept would not even exist),

 having the fairies speak Te Reo was a long-held dream because in Shakespeare's original work the fairies were written as communicating in a language unfamiliar to the other characters. "So to me, having the fairies speak another language enhances the storytelling and provides a fresh and exciting take on a play that is extremely well known."

And so it is, and so it does. That the storytelling is done in such a setting by such consummate performers only adds to the excitement.

Reuben Butler's Puck (played as a Maori warrior you truly believe could girdle the globe) is outstanding, he steals the show (as every good Puck should); Jason Te Kare's Oberon provides deft support; and if Edward Peni's Titania is more statuesque than seductive, then (s)he comes into her own when seduced herself by Nick Bottom's ass. (If you don't know, then you really must come along and find out!)

For me, the bitching, and the reportage about it, are just so much colourless carping. As an amused Puck says after watching the hilarious knock-down drag-out fight that climaxes Act III,

"Pakeha!" 

On Saturday night, that one beautifully-timed word brought the house down.
.

How copyright helped make Shakespeare popular

 

Title page of First Folio, 1623. Copper engraving by Martin Droeshout.

A little-known fact: Nearly half-a-century after his death, Shakespeare was hardly a thing at all. His plays were hardly given; his popularity, if any, on a par with playwrights now barely known, and deservedly so. What changed things, you’ll be surprised to hear, was the very thing needed to underpin investment in his works. In a word: copyright.

Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate explains:

The crucial historical moment for the development of the editing of Shakespeare’s texts was the passing of the first proper Copyright Act in 1709 (coming into force in 1710). For the first time, copyright became vested in the author. If I am a publisher and I know that Shakespeare is good box office and people are going to read him, I’m going to want an edition of him on my list. But my problem, of course, is that Shakespeare is not around to assign me his copyright. So what I do is commission someone to produce an edition of Shakespeare, and I get the copyright of that edition. This is exactly what happened in the early eighteenth century – and is still happening today. The entrepreneurial publisher Jacob Tonson saw that the old folios of Shakespeare’s collected works were looking outdated, making the time propitious for a modern edition with the printing errors corrected, the act and scene numbers regularized, the spelling modernized, some explanatory notes inserted, and a lively introduction provided. He commissioned the poet and dramatist Nicholas Rowe to undertake this work, but kept the copyright vested in the publishing house. If anybody else wanted to do a Shakespeare, they would have to find a different way of editing him. The initial term of copyright was quite a short period: twenty-one years for all works already in print at the time of the statute’s enactment and fourteen years for all works published subsequently. So throughout the eighteenth century, every twenty years or so, Tonson and his successors – it was a family publishing firm – would commission someone else to do a new edition of Shakespeare, and in particular put in a new introduction, thus allowing them to update their copyright. By assigning contracts to successive leading figures in the literary world, such as Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, the house of Tonson kept their control of the mainstream text of Shakespeare.
   However, other people began to edit Shakespeare, in order to win a slice of the market, so decade by decade there was an ever-greater proliferation of editions, each presenting Shakespeare in subtly different ways and choosing different textual variants. Adding together ‘Complete Works’ and ‘Individual Plays’, there have been thousands of editions of Shakespeare. And, roughly speaking, every twenty years or so since Rowe’s of 1709, there has been a new Collected Works that embodies, to a greater or lesser extent, a rethinking of the principles and practices of Shakespearean editing. This is the feedback loop taken to an extreme: whereas fine dramatists such as Thomas Heywood and John Marston have had collected editions just once apiece, in the late nineteenth century, the market has demanded (or at least withstood) multiple recyclings of Shakespeare’s text. In publishing, as in the theatre, availability is one of the things that keeps him going. Because of that availability and that capacity for adaptability, there are a huge number of Shakespeares circulating and competing in the culture of Britain, the United States and (to a slightly lesser but still highly significant degree) the rest of the world. [My book] ‘The Genius of Shakespeare’ tells the story of how this has been the case for a very long time.

PS: The story comes from Bates’s excellent book The Genius of Shakespeare, which I was put onto by Marsha Enright. (Thanks Marsha.)

[Pic by Wikimedia Commons]

.

Allow The Bard to insult you

 

Shakespeare wasn’t just a master dramatist, he was a master too of the Ancient Art of Insults—a Fine Art now all but dead.

To mark the fabulous Pop-Up Globe’s extended season, here’s a selection of his bellicose wit form his finest plays

It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I'll beat thee, but I should infect my hands.

I must tell you friendly in your ear, sell when you can, you are not for all markets.

Tempt not too much the hatred of my spirit, for I am sick when I do look on thee.

She hath more hair than wit, and more faults than hairs, and more wealth than faults.

Thy sin’s not accidental, but a trade.

Thine face is not worth sunburning.

Your virginity breeds mites, much like a cheese.

Thou are pigeon-liver’d and lack gall.

You speak an infinite deal of nothing.

Away, you three-inch fool.

A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen as you are toss’d with.

Thou art a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver'd, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mungril bitch.

I do wish thou were a dog, that I might love thee something.

You are now sailed into the north of my ladies opinion, where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard.

A most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality.

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

Drunkenness is his best virtue, for he will be swine drunk, and in his sleep he does little harm, save to his bedclothes about him.

That trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with pudding in his belly, that reverend vice, that grey Iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years?

Thy tongue outvenoms all the worms of Nile.

There’s no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune.

Methink’st thou art a general offence and every man should beat thee.

If thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them.

Thine forward voice, now, is to speak well of thine friend; thine backward voice is to utter foul speeches and to detract.

I do desire we may be better strangers.

Thou art a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood.

Thou art like a toad; ugly and venomous.

You should be women and yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so.

Thou art unfit for any place but hell.

You are as a candle, the better burnt out.

Want to be randomly insuted as if by The Bard? Then check out the Shakespearean Insulter, based on the very fine Shakespeare Insult Kit.

RELATED POSTS:

• Political abuse
• Beer O’Clock: In praise of the eloquent insult

Shakespeare at The Globe!

 

By the way, if you want to understand where modern theatre, and even modern drama, were born – or just to have a great night/afternoon/evening out – then get ye down to a small carpark at the back of Queen Street, where the world’s first and only replica of Shakespeare’s Second Globe Theatre has just ‘popped up.’*

It’s called The Pop-Up Globe, logically: a full-scale, temporary working replica of the Second Globe Theatre wherein so many of Shakespeare’s finest plays were born and raised and worked into maturity.

“Shakespeare in the space for which it was written.”

And it’s an amazing space, so intimate that you’re part of all the action; the stage itself so vast that it all but fills the interior atrium, leaving just enough space for ‘groundlings’ to interact with the performers; the performances themselves so vital (the performers themselves being energised by the place) that you don’t want to miss even a heartbeat.

Not just enjoyable: you leave enjoying the plays in a whole new light, not as the dreary sops to propriety you might have thought from your schoolroom introduction, but as profound, earthy, entertaining wonders of drama.

So this is really not any kind of review. It’s simply unabashed praise for a great conception realised magnificently well.

You have until 24^th April to enjoy eight of The Bard’s greatest delivered in the manner he intended. There’s nothing else like it. Don’t miss out.

If you’re in Auckland, go. If you’re not in Auckland, then get here so you can go.

You only get the chance once every four-hundred years.

---

* The Globe Theatre reconstruction in London is of the First Globe, the larger theatre that burned down to be replaced by the Second, more intimate, Globe – a very different size and shape to the first one.

‘Such Sweet Thunder’ by Duke Ellington

In 1957, Duke Ellington was inspired by the works of William Shakespeare to write a suite of songs based on the bard, Such Sweet Thunder. This was the radio premiere, broadcast from the concert at Ravinia Park Festival, July 1, 1957.

0:00 Such Sweet Thunder
1:48 Sonnet For Sister Kate [solo: Quentin Jackson]
4:53 Up And Down. Up And Down [solo: Clark Terry]
8:04 Star-Crossed Lovers [solo: Johnny Hodges]
12:38 Madness In Great Ones [solo: Cat Anderson]
16:25 Half The Fun [solo: Johnny Hodges]
20:42 Circle Of Fourths [solo: Paul Gonsalves]
23:23 Jam With Sam [solos: Willie Cook, Paul Gonsalves, Britt Woodman, Russell Procope, Cat Anderson]

Writing about writing

Writer Thomas Sowell (right), author of more than thirty best-selling books and one of my very favourite quotes*, writes about writing.  It's fascinating.

From time to time, I get a letter from some aspiring young writer, asking about how to write or how to get published. My usual response is that the only way I know to become a good writer is to be a bad writer and keep on improving. However, even after you reach the point where you are writing well—and that can take many years—the battle is not over. There are still publishers to contend with. Then there are editors and, worst of all, copy-editors.

Copy-editors: those chaps who site between a writer and a reader with a blue pencil, a tin ear and a taste for "pedestrian uniformity...  Self-justifying rules and job-justifying busy work are the only visible goals of copy-editors."

Where Shakespeare wrote, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” a copy-editor would substitute: “The issue is one of existence versus non-existence.” Where Lincoln said, “Fourscore and seven years ago,” a copy-editor would change that to: “It has been 87 years since . . .” Where the Bible said, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” a copy-editor would run a blue pencil through the first three words as redundant.

Read the whole thing here [hat tip Gus Van Horn].  It's long, but delightful.
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* NB: Favourite quote follows:

Cultures are not museum pieces. They are the working machinery of everyday life. Unlike objects of aesthetic contemplation, working machinery is judged by how well it works, compared to the alternatives.

UPDATE:  Here's some recent Sowell columns you might like to browse.

Henry V: Act III, Scene I (excerpt) - Shakespeare

Courage personified:

In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height.