Prospero's Books

Alas, poor Yorick

Perhaps the most recognizable image from all of Shakespeare's plays is that of Hamlet contemplating a skull--the skull of Yorick, the court jester.

Why Yorick? While rereading Hamlet for my current "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality" course, I've come to understand one possible reason. The court of Claudius, the elder Hamlet's murderer and usurper, is a court without a jester--a court without anyone who can (to quote an old Quaker phrase) "speak truth to power."

One of the ways that Claudius's Denmark is corrupt is that information flow--essential to the continued existence of any system--has been distorted or blocked. (I count at least seven instances in the play of an attempt to gather information through deceit.)

I'll bet that after Yorick's death, the elder Hamlet's court continued to include jesters. But Claudius's court does not--until young Hamlet comes home. Hamlet's "Mousetrap" play can be seen as a replacement for the jests of a court fool. When this play-within-a-play restores some information flow, showing Claudius as he really is, Claudius panics and stops the show.

Something is rotten in the state--the system--of Denmark. Hamlet tries to restore that system to health by opening communication channels again. But he's too late, and the system collapses. Systems are often defined by contrasting them with mere heaps. The heap of bodies at the end of Act V provides a perfect illustration of the difference.

The circle of Yes

My friend Bill has just forwarded to me this numerological analysis of James Joyce (which I haven't confirmed):

In Ulysses, the word yes [the last word of the book] appears 360 times, making a perfect circle.

In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the word up appears 223 times and the word down 137 times, for a total of 360.

Bill adds, "And then people wonder why Joyceans are referred to as 'the Trekkies of the profession.'"

Addition: My friend Bill (the Montane Vole) writes that credit for the numerology should go to his friend Michael. Bill adds:

A long and fascinating essay on what else such counting can reveal in works by Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett can be found as the essay titled "Lisping in Numbers" in Hugh Kenner's book Historical Fictions (San Francisco:  North Point, 1990), 151-157.

Thanks, O Vole!

Celebrating Twelfth Night under the Raj

Play Number 3 at the Stratford Festival this week was Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. I've already blogged about the functions of time and the trickster in this work, so I naturally watched the performance with those elements in mind. Actor Dana Green played very well the role of Viola as trickster.

Director Leon Rubin and designer John Pennoyer set the production in nineteenth-century India, under the British Raj. One of the play's two households, that of the countess Olivia, was made up of British characters; the other, that of the duke Orsino (played by Sanjay Talwar), was made up of Indians. The music alternated between British and Indian styles.

The twins, Viola and Sebastian, were played as English, but on separately being shipwrecked in Illyria, they both adopted Indian dress. The result was twofold. The loose costumes and turbans made the twins look much more alike (a crucial plot element) than in any other production of Twelfth Night I've seen. And in Viola's case, the cultural shift nicely reinforced the gender shift.

Shakespeare, post-Taliban

Shakespeare's universality was demonstrated again this month in Herat, Afghanistan, where an Afghan company presented Love's Labour's Lost in the Dari language. According to Jacob Baynham, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle,

. . . before an audience of 250, five women on a stage of carpets took off their veils. Ripples went through the crowd. Five years ago, under Taliban rule, Herat's women could scarcely leave their houses. But this evening's event showed that times had changed in Afghanistan. The throng was gathered to watch something that was until very recently unthinkable . . . .

Trickster Shakespeare would have loved it. Challenging fundamentalist politics and morality was something he knew about.

(Thanks to News on the Rialto for spreading the word.)

From Midsummer Madness to St. John's Day

Tonight's performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream by the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival* was entertaining, with a strong cast. Especially notable, for me, were Mindy Woodhead, who played Titania with sexual passion, and Dana Whipkey, whose Francis Flute found it within himself to play Thisbe's death scene with high and moving seriousness. The setting of the performance, in the "Meadow" at Baltimore's Evergreen House, was enchanting.

Dramaturg Robyn Quick's program notes mentioned an interesting juxtaposition of dates that I hadn't thought of before. If Midsummer Night was celebrated in England as a time of misrule and madness, it was followed immediately by the Feast of St. John the Baptist, with its theme of repentance. She cites scholar Anca Vlasopolos in noting that

this play ultimately moves from a night of misrule to the light of a holy day in which the characters are brought into harmony with each other and with the rest of society.

This production honored that interpretation by ending the play not just with trickster Puck's epilogue but also with a song by the whole cast--fairies, "mechanicals," and nobles alike--surrounding, and threading through, the outdoor audience, with glowing lanterns.

(*As I've done before in discussing the BSF, I'll disclose that my daughter, Casey, is its development director.)

God's design specs

At Salon.com, Sara Miles and Paul Fromberg have written a stirring article, "It's a girl!," celebrating the election yesterday of Katharine Jefferts Schori (a former oceanographer, by the way) as presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. Among their lovely sentences are these:

The "kingdom of God" -- a phrase used by Jesus and often equated by Christians with the church -- is like a weed growing in the tidy garden of human culture. It grows as it will, unbidden and frequently unwanted; its growth is always to God's design specs, not those of tradition-bound churches.

God's dog: more than a palindrome

Fred Alan Wolf, in his book The Spiritual Universe (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), writes that the trickster "comes to us as the shadow, that strange and complex set of traits we all have but hate to admit to" (220). He continues:

Since the soul within each individual often appears as the trickster, does anything like this occur to a society or perhaps to the world as a whole? In Native American traditions, such as the Navaho Nation's, the trickster appears during particular tribal rituals. The trickster/shaman dances and often acts the fool to remind the tribe to take an appropriate social action, usually one the tribe has been ignoring out of fear. Once the trickster has appeared, the people laugh and realize their collective folly.

. . . . The Coyote, although it weighs only about thirty pounds, is feared and distrusted by sheep ranchers in the United States and other countries. Yet it is considered to be God's dog by the native American peoples. They believe that to kill and skin the coyote releases its spirit and further upsets the balance of nature. To them it is as if we are killing a messenger from God. Perhaps we are.

The coyote is the trickster—the wolf we don't fear and the dog we can't trust—but has elements of both dog and wolf. The animal is bold and foolish, cautious and fearless, blending chaos and harmony. To some the coyote-trickster, existing in reality and myth, plays it both ways—calling both heads and tails when the coin is flipped. The coyote teaches us it is a mature elder and a reckless child. It is a clown, a force of nature, and a messenger (229-30).

Pasiphae and the bull

In a post today, the Pop Occulture blog cites a Reuters story on a modern incarnation of the myth of Pasiphae. In the myth, Pasiphae, wife of King Minos, has Daedalus build her a wooden cow in which she can conceal herself and be impregnated by a prized bull. The result of this mating is the Minotaur.

The Reuters story reports on a simulated cow, built over a go-kart, used to collect semen for artificial insemination.

Time, thou must untangle this

In his little book on Jung (see What I've Been Reading), Anthony Stevens quotes Jung on the function of time in the therapy process:

The psychoanalyst thinks he must see his patient for an hour a day for months on end; I manage in difficult cases with three or four sittings a week. As a rule I content myself with two, and once the patient has got going, he is reduced to one. . . . In addition, I break off the threatment every ten weeks or so. . . . In such a procedure time can take effect as a healing factor (132-33).

Jung's optimism about the healing power of time reminds me of the contrast between the ways Shakespeare's tragic and comic heroes view time. For Hamlet, "the time is out of joint" (Hamlet 1, 5, 206), and for Macbeth, time's arrow points only toward meaninglessness:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death (Macbeth 5, 5, 20-24).

In the comedy Twelfth Night, Viola—one of Shakespeare's delightful cross-dressing trickster heroines—takes a very different view of time:

What will become of this? As I am man,
My state is desperate for my master's love.
As I am woman (now alas the day!),
What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe?
O Time, thou must untangle this, not I;
It is too hard a knot for me t' untie (2, 2, 34-38).

Share in Grail for sale on eBay

Two "seasoned Grail hunters" are selling, on British eBay, a 2 percent share in the Holy Grail, should they find it.

(If it turns out to be a cup or dish of some kind, the shareholder also is entitled to a drink from it.)

Bidding closes May 13.

(Thanks to The Daily Grail for letting us in on this!)