I always forget about Twain’s Shakespeare riffing in the middle of Huckleberry Finn, when Huck and Jim meet up with the two irrepressible con-men hoopleheads known as the king and the duke. These two decide that their next con job will be to bill themselves as the famous (and dead) real-life Shakespearean actors David Garrick and Edmund Kean, and then put on a show and swindle a few audiences out of their ticket money. The duke suggests that for the encores, the king can do some Hamlet.
“I’ll answer by doing the Highland fling or the sailor’s hornpipe; and you — well, let me see — oh, I’ve got it — you can do Hamlet’s soliloquy.”
“Hamlet’s which?”
“Hamlet’s soliloquy, you know; the most celebrated thing in Shakespeare. Ah, it’s sublime, sublime! Always fetches the house. I haven’t got it in the book — I’ve only got one volume — but I reckon I can piece it out from memory. I’ll just walk up and down a minute, and see if I can call it back from recollection’s vaults.”
I confess that I find the line Hamlet’s which? unbearably funny, simple as it is. But then Twain hits us with the duke’s marvelous explosion of abject Bard butchery:
To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,
But that the fear of something after death
Murders the innocent sleep,
Great nature’s second course,
And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
Than fly to others that we know not of.
There’s the respect must give us pause:
Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The law’s delay, and the quietus which his pangs might take,
In the dead waste and middle of the night, when churchyards yawn
In customary suits of solemn black,
But that the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns,
Breathes forth contagion on the world,
And thus the native hue of resolution, like the poor cat i’ the adage,
Is sicklied o’er with care,
And all the clouds that lowered o’er our housetops,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. But soft you, the fair Ophelia:
Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,
But get thee to a nunnery — go!
I need to read Huck again.
Last week while trapped in the coffeeshop I read that the Royal Shakespeare Company is releasing a Complete Works of Shakespeare based entirely on the First Folio — i.e. without the usual editorial insertions, changes, and conflations from the various other versions of the plays that exist in the Quartos or the subsequent Folios.
This Shakespeare-text-wrangling stuff is a whole world of English-major geekery I’ve only recently started paying attention to. For years I’ve kind of blipped over the fact that many of the Shakespeare plays as we know them now are piecemeal versions that’ve been reconstructed by editors, in different and often controversial ways according to which edition you buy — Oxford, Arden, Norton, Riverside, Pelican, etc.
Some editors strive to get closer to what Shakespeare actually wrote (working from earlier copies of the plays); others are more interested in how the plays were actually performed (working from later copies that may have derived from theater promptbooks); others try to include as much of Shakespeare’s text as possible (combining different versions of plays together into “extended edition” plays that Shakespeare never intended). Some editors believe that Shakespeare constantly revised his own plays, and so the later versions are to be preferred; other editors feel that the later versions bear the work of other hands, and are not to be trusted.
This can be pretty dry stuff. But there are occasional beats of levity. In the coffeeshop I read a long PDF essay called “The Case for the Folio”, in which Jonathan Bate, the new Complete Works’s editor, brings up an example of textual troubles in Hamlet’s first soliloquy — the one that begins “O that this too too sullied flesh would melt” (or perhaps solid flesh or sallied flesh, depending on your edition). In this speech, there’s a notorious variation in one of the early texts, one I can imagine many dusty generations of Shakespeare scholars snickering over in their libraries: At the end of the lines “Or that the Everlasting had not fixed / His canon ’gainst self-slaughter”, the Second Quarto substitutes the phrase seale slaughter. Bate waggishly explains:
… ‘seale slaughter’ is manifestly a printer’s error. The ‘canon’ of the Almighty — which is to say, ecclesiastical law as shaped by the Bible — says nothing about the clubbing of baby seals. It is self-slaughter, suicide, that is condemned. No occurrence of ‘seale slaughter’ is to be found anywhere in the printed writing of the age of Shakespeare. The emendation can be made with confidence.
Our internet is back on. The technician goon’s diagnosis: Someone put a splitter on our cable line up on the roof, and did an incompetent job of it, thus killing our signal instead of simply getting half our signal for free. In this case, someone pretty clearly means the new tenants who moved in upstairs two weeks ago. This means war.
Working from a coffeeshop this week. Cable internet at home has been dead since Monday, service goon can’t show up until Friday — the wheels of tech support turn slowly here. So this week I spend all day working from a strange chair, staring into the day-job laptop with a large potted palm peeking over my shoulder, surrounded by a rotating cast of suits and weirdos and baying toddlers, buying cups of tea and coffee to justify my all-day abuse of the free Wi-Fi. Then 100% internetless evenings.
We spend the weekend taking in the scenery, the sunshine, and the sandwiches of Charlottesville, Virginia. A town that I may or may not have quote-unquote “lived” in for almost nine years before fleeing from in mid-2004. The weather is ridiculously pleasant. It continues to defy geographical intuition that it takes a mere eight or nine hours to drive from southern Ontario to central Virginia. Our itinerary is brief and flexible and scribbled on a brown paper envelope. We enjoy one dinner and three hearty grits-accompanied breakfasts at a certain cozy diner; we wind our car along Skyline Drive high up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, stopping on stone-walled overlooks to be stirred by the view and the high-altitude quiet; I devour a particular southwestern-style grilled sub in reverential silence as my taste buds quake in ecstasy; we descend into the subterranean, skylight-lit new Special Collections library at the University of Virginia that opened after I moved away; we peer across the table at each other over dessert and drinks at a familiar darkened, downstairs bistro bar. I fail to be overwhelmed by fond sentimental memories of C-ville life, much to my non-disappointment. We buy books and foreign junk-shop postcards and a bottle of Virginia wine I supposedly used to like. We visit relatives and contemplate antiques and keep noticing UVA students wearing orange and maroon to show temporary support for their ordinarily despised sports rivals at Virginia Tech; it seems odd to remember that the shootings there happened only a few days earlier. I find that my mental road map of C-ville is still mostly intact, though a few downtown parking lots have transformed into buildings and a few country fields have sprouted massive shopping centers. We manage to hit most of the stops on the envelope plus a few spurs-of-the-moment, and then beat it out of town a number of dollars lighter. I am cured of my desire to return for at least another three years.
A pre-road-trip repeat: Two stanzas from Anne Sexton:
I sit at my desk
each night with no place to go,
opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo,
the whole U.S.,
its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones,
through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.
Tomorrow we drive a long way south. Monday, back north.
Lorrie Moore sometimes scares me. From “Willing”: She was trying to tease him, but it came out wrong, like a lizard with a little hat on.
Just back from getting John Banville’s The Sea at the library. Haven’t read anything by him, but for some reason I suddenly feel I need to read this book. Probably something to do with the perpetual presence in my mind of the first thing he says in an old Believer interview, when asked whether he’s able to like any of his books:
No. I hate them all. With a deep, abiding hatred. And embarrassment. I have this fantasy that I’m walking past Brentano’s or wherever and I click my fingers and all my books on the shelves go blank. The covers are still there but all the pages are blank. And then I can start again and get it right. I hate them all.
I remember reading that and doing Jack Nicholson as the Joker: I like him already!
Also gotten: London is the Best City in America by Laura Dave, despite the book’s having been regrettably tarred with slightly Chick Lit–style covers in both hardcover and paperback. I get it first of all because I’m amused by its opening two sentences:
She told herself that if he touched her one time, she wouldn’t leave. She told herself that if in his sleep tonight, he reached for her, or put his hand on her leg, his hand on her knee, his face near her face, his leg against her leg, his mouth against her back, his palm on her stomach, his arm on her hip, his hip beside her leg, his head beneath her shoulders, his cheek along her neck — she would stick it out.
… and second of all because, to be honest, I’m sort of bewildered by the name Laura Dave. The sight of this name, in fact, is what makes me open up the book in the first place, in a bookstore a few months ago. No disrespect meant to Ms. Dave, but I didn’t even think Dave was a last name. Obviously there are lots of names that double as both first and last names — see for instance all three of mine — but a last name that’s an abbreviated first name? It’s like someone having the last name Mike or Josh or Pam or Liz. Anyway, such a person intrigues me, so I must read her novel.
We attend two concert-hall jazz shows and find ourselves surrounded by unmoving old fossils. We pick up a crummy wooden Quebecois coffee table that some Torontonian Craigslister suckers us into buying. We eat sandwiches at an old-fashioned deli that somehow has no Russian dressing anywhere on the premises — I end up mixing some up myself at the table with ketchup and mayo, stirring them together on a saucer like paint on a palette. (In retrospect: I may have had better luck had I asked for Thousand Island.) We purchase a new tea kettle, after discovering last week that our existing one has been secretly feeding us rust. We hit Fat Bob’s at like 10:30pm for a late dinner of ambrosial barbecued shredded hog. We buy vaguely sci-fi silverware. We are ushered into sleep by fine spirits and stupefying silent films.
Kurt Vonnegut to the Paris Review in 1977: “There is nothing like death to say what is always such an artificial thing to say: The end.”
Last words I see before going to sleep last night: Dionisio D. Martinez, “Avant-Dernières Pensées”:
The letters are carefully packed with case histories that go off like timed explosives. I can see you waiting for each one to go off, wondering if the one you designed for me will do the trick. One summer, you say, a Portuguese fisherman received this letter and burned it. He spent the rest of his life trying to read the ashes.
For us slow readers: James Richardson: Why shouldn’t you read this the way I wrote it, with days between the lines?
The Stranger’s Paul Constant, quoting an unnamed friend (i.e. probably himself) on Cormac McCarthy’s writing in The Road: It’s like someone asked Shakespeare to write a whole book about the color gray.
This afternoon I randomly open Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books and happen upon this:
Whether the amount of distress in Germany has increased I do not know, but the number of exclamation marks certainly has. Where we formerly had merely! we now have!!!
What causes me a moment of distress is the fact that I open the book to this quote as I’m listening to streaming music on the website of the band bravely called “!!!”.
(Often pronounced chk chk chk, as their domain name suggests, but the band invites you to say it any way you like by repeating thrice any monosyllabic sound. Such as ding ding ding, or bang bang bang, or ack ack ack, or possibly vat vat vat.)
Good Friday. I don’t have the day off, but Laura does, as does apparently 99% of Hamilton — probably 99% of Canada. I walk to the Y this morning (open but on abbreviated holiday hours) and the streets downtown are empty and quiet and unbelievably eerie. Everything’s closed. No one walking around. Plus it’s gray and windy and several below freezing and intermittently snowy. Very nuclear-winter.
