Tag Archives: Shakespeare

The long arms of Shakespeare’s ghost

The long arms of Shakespeare’s ghost reach across the centuries into the present day, leaving distinctive fingerprints on a genre that did not even exist in his period but has become dominant in ours:  the novel.

Some modern writers rearrange situations and relationships from a Shakespearean play so that we see them through the eyes of a particular character or set of characters. Of course a dramatist can do this;  in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead a pair of minor characters from Hamlet takes centre stage. But I’m thinking especially of prose fiction, which lends itself well to this method of reshaping Shakespeare’s material because (in contrast to a theatrical presentation, which is performed through dialogue and action and spectacle) a story can be narrated from a certain point of view or from shifting points of view.

Two examples, both of them American novels derived from King Lear: Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991) is a grim mid-West prairie tale told from the perspective of the eldest of three daughters whose monstrously abusive ageing father leaves them his farm, while Christopher Moore’s extravagantly comic novel Fool (2009) re-imagines King Lear from the perspective of the court jester, who schemes to save Cordelia from being married off. Shakespeare’s pivotal character, the tragic patriarchal figure that gives the play its title, is no longer the main focus in either of those novels. Instead, the story revolves around what were originally secondary characters. Accompanying that fundamental shift in perspective there are also changes of tone, of psychological interest, and of moral attitudes.

A different kind of influence occurs when the main thing a modern fiction writer draws from a Shakespearean source is a central theme with perennial relevance. In such cases the extent to which plot or characters are modified can vary a great deal. I’m thinking here of a couple of novelistic appropriations of the most spectacularly theatrical of Shakespeare’s plays.

Marina Warner’s Indigo (1991) boldly reshapes most of the characters and story elements of The Tempest. It is set (like Shakespeare’s original) in the 17th-century, but some of it also takes place much nearer our own time. When Shakespeare wrote The Tempest England was establishing itself as a colonial power, and we can see his play as dramatising issues arising from colonisation. Prospero, having come to Sycorax’s island and subdued her, imposes his own culture on its inhabitants. Warner’s Indigo expands the character of Sycorax, Caliban’s witch mother, who in Shakespeare’s play remains offstage. By also extending the story into the 20th century, the novelist can portray the consequences of colonialism.

Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed retells The Tempest in an even freer manner while preserving  thematic parallels with the original source. The main character is Felix, a theatre director in present-day Canada. After being dismissed from his arts festival role he gets a teaching position in a prison, where over several years he regularly persuades inmates to become actors in productions of Shakespeare’s plays. By participating under his direction in the dramatised violence of Julius Caesar, Richard III and Macbeth, the prisoners are able to reflect on their own past crimes and come to terms with their incarceration. Felix himself is playing a long game: his scheme is eventually to use the prison’s Shakespeare program to inflict vengeance on his old enemies, especially on Tony, a former colleague whose treachery had led to Felix’s loss of the festival job, which Tony took over. The play through which Felix ingeniously pursues his revenge is The Tempest — where Prospero is himself creating theatrical illusions to bring retribution upon those who stole his kingdom. So Shakespeare’s original plot and Atwood’s reworking of it both focus on a protagonist who tries to control the actions of those around him. And both Shakespeare’s Prospero and Atwood’s Felix can be seen as representatives of the author manipulating his or her creative work.

Atwood’s novel belongs to a series of Shakespearean retellings commissioned by the Hogarth Press for publication in 2016 to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Other contributors to this series of loose adaptations include Howard Jacobson, who turned The Merchant of Venice into Shylock Is My Name. Jacobson’s novel has such a complicated plot, such a crowded cast of characters, and so many digressive passages of dialogue that it’s not easy to follow who’s who and what’s going on. At the centre of the story are not only a contemporary British version of Shylock, a wealthy art collector named Simon Strulovitch, but also the original Shylock, who travels through time into the present and with whom Strulovitch has intense conversations about Jewishness and other topics.

Despite their various differences, the examples mentioned so far all adapt a story drawn from one of Shakespeare’s plays. But the long arms of Shakespeare’s ghost sometimes stretch beyond that kind of transposition. Modern fiction may give us an independently invented narrative line, with original characters that have no direct Shakespearean source, and yet make reference to the Bard’s writings (his plays and/or his lyric poetry) in ways that give depth and resonance to the tale. My own latest novel belongs (or at least aspires to belong) to this category. Here is Paul Genoni’s comment:

A good place to start in discussing A Thousand Tongues is with the novel’s two epigraphs, the first of which is derived from a soliloquy delivered by the King in Shakespeare’s Richard III : ‘My conscience hath a thousand several tongues /And every tongue brings in a several tale…’ It is accompanied by an epigraph from Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time, a novel that deals with composer Dimitri Shostakovich’s struggles with his conscience in Stalinist Russia. In the epigraphic quote, Barnes suggests that conscience ‘no longer has an evolutionary function, and so has been bred out’, and that ‘within the modern tyrant’s skin … there is no cave of conscience to be found’.
These two epigraphs declare that A Thousand Tongues is a novel about conscience, the multitudinous and complex ways in which it can be manifested, the ‘slings and arrows’ it sends our way, and the role it might have in the contemporary world. The Shakespeare quote obviously provides the novel with its title, and also carries further weight within the text, where it recurs several times and performs as something of a leitmotif in the life of Gavin Staines. In this novel of many characters, both historical and contemporary, it is Staines who remains the gravitational centre around whom other characters, and their stories, circle.

Paul Genoni’s remarks (excerpted from a longer review) provide a framework for considering my novel’s relationship to certain Shakespearean texts and themes.

I’ve explained elsewhere how the initial creative impulse came from my encounter with a particular place, Dartmoor’s Prison Museum, and the meditations to which that gave rise. As the reflective process developed, I saw opportunities for incorporating several links to Shakespeare’s writings into my story in a thematically relevant way.

The idea of imprisonment often recurs in Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Think of Hamlet’s line “Denmark’s a prison”; or of Richard III, locking up the young princes in the tower; or of Richard II, jailed by his successor, Henry IV; or of the many characters in The Tempest for whom the island is a kind of jail; or of the sonnet that exclaims “Prison my heart…” and then develops this image in detail.

Two of my novel’s main characters are incarcerated in Dartmoor’s prison. One of them is Gavin Staines, mentioned above as a “gravitational centre” of the story. I’ve placed him among the conscientious objectors — more than 1000 — who were held there during World War I. Staines is uncompromising in his stance against military service but secretly burdened by a previous failure of conscience. I imagined a role for him before the war as a young teacher of literature at Queen’s College in London. Queen’s College was a notable independent school for teenage girls, some of whom were socially self-confident, intellectually precocious and emotionally adventurous. We know this from letters and diaries of some who were students there in the Edwardian era, most notably the writer Katherine Mansfield. A feature of the education offered at Queen’s was its provision of lectures courses by visiting academics. What might this environment have been like for a young man teaching poetry there? That question exemplifies how a story can emerge:  the creative process is stimulated when a writer poses “What ifs”… For instance, what if a certain sonnet by Shakespeare became troublesome for a young teacher and one of his female students?

Love is too young to know what conscience is;
Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?

When the war comes and conscription is brought in, Staines registers as a conscientious objector and is eventually sent to Dartmoor. Many of the Dartmoor “conchies” were well-educated men (journalists, teachers, artists…) and they proved resourceful in entertaining themselves during the long cold evenings. Archival records show that they often put on concerts, with items such as verse recitations and stage performances — including Shakespearean plays. One of the conchie characters I invented is Humphrey Latimer, a flamboyant chap with a background as an actor and a passion for the rich language of Elizabethan drama. During one of the concerts, he delivers Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy, “To be…” etc.

Glancing around as Latimer gave his rendition of that vacillating speech, Staines could see it was causing some disquiet. These men had resolved to suffer slings and arrows rather than take up arms; but to many of them the sea of troubles must still seem endless. Some perhaps remained privately unsure whether their refusal to fight had come from courage or something less. ‘Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all’ – uneasy, tense, they shifted in their seats when they heard those bitter words.

Curious about Staines and intuiting that his aloof manner hides some secret, Latimer keeps probing. As they belong to the same work gang, Latimer has frequent opportunities to try squeezing information out of him, especially after discovering how Staines was employed before the war. Latimer uses their shared interest in Shakespeare as a means of indirect enquiry into what makes this oddly reserved man tick.

Because Staines is not only (by conviction) a conscientious objector but also (by vocation) a teacher of literature, it seemed to me plausible that he would contribute an essay to a pacifist magazine under the title “War and Peace: Shakespearean Voices.” In this invented article, Staines remarks that some British militarists had tried to conscript the nation’s supreme poet-dramatist as a patron in their zealous pursuit of bloody conflict on foreign soil, with Henry V as their exemplary text. Staines argues that, on the contrary, a wide range of Shakespeare’s characters, through their dialogue on aspects of war and peace, evoke the torments of conscience and “express eloquently what anyone sickened by the violence of warfare has felt.”

The other character in A Thousand Tongues who spends time in Dartmoor’s jail is a black man from an earlier generation, Joshua Dunn. Consigned to the margins of Victorian society because of his race and class, Dunn is treated with such cruelty during his years of imprisonment that he comes to the despairing conclusion that people like himself can’t afford the luxury of a conscience:

“Don’t give me a bloody sermon about scruples!’ Josh roared. “The likes of us can’t afford to have any. This place turns us into beasts. Every mongrel for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.”

Yet this repudiation of scruples is not absolute, as the reader discovers when Dunn’s story later connects with Staines’s in an indirect and ironical way.

And Shakespeare? At the very end, Staines has with him a copy of the Bard’s Complete Works, finding a bizarre purpose for it. So Shakespearean words bookend this novel, from its title and first epigraph to its final scene.

Denmark: a story-haunted place

Last month I spent a memorable week in Denmark. Not the little West Australian town of that name but the Scandinavian country, which I was visiting in person for the first time. Yet this wasn’t a first encounter with Denmark, because in my imagination I’d often travelled there on a magic carpet of stories.

For one thing, I’d read fiction by a few Danish writers. A handful of sentimental tales by Hans Christian Andersen had assuaged the growing pains of my childhood. Later, Karen Blixen, who wrote as Isak Dinesen, had beguiled me with her novel Out of Africa and her short story Babette’s Feast, both of which were converted into memorable movies. I’d also admired Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, by Peter Hoeg. In a broader non-fictional sense, ‘stories’ about aspects of Nordic identity are implicit in sombre essays I’d dipped into years ago by the 19th-century proto-existentialist Soren Kierkegaard, and in the writings of his antagonist, the famous nationalist poet, educator and politician N.F.S. Grundtvig, to whose work some Copenhagen friends had recently introduced me.

But more deep-seated were certain non-Danish sources for some of the Danish images in my head. The experience of being physically present in Denmark reminded me that two of the greatest masterworks of English literature have Danish settings and vividly express distinctive elements in the cultural history of that nation.

Kronborg Castle today, hardly changed since the 16th century.

One can’t walk around Kronborg castle in Elsinore without recalling scenes or lines from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and recognising how much the mood of that play was shaped by the upheavals of the Lutheran reformation that had begun not far south of Elsinore. (In some ways Danish culture remains profoundly Lutheran in character.) When the play opens, the young prince himself has been studying at Wittenberg University, where Martin Luther was a Professor.

The conscience-burdened self-questioning that suffuses Hamlet’s soliloquies, troubling his sense of purpose, is deeply Protestant in character. Standing in the lavishly decorated chapel, the sole part of Kronborg Castle that has survived in its original 1572 form unscathed by fire and decay, one can readily picture Claudius confessing there to the king’s murder. Several tapestries still hanging on the castle walls are original furnishings, some large enough for a ‘wretched, rash, intruding fool’ like Polonius to hide behind.

Shakespeare adapted his plot from an old Scandinavian legend recounted by the 12th-century historian Saxo Grammaticus, but the English stage version from Tudor times ensures that Elsinore’s 16th-century castle has become Hamlet’s home, contributing to the allure of Denmark as a story-haunted place.

In a similar way the mighty Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf belongs to both Denmark and England. Written down a thousand years ago on the basis of previous oral transmission, it’s the earliest extant long poem in the English language, but its story has a Danish origin, incorporating people and events from 6th-century Denmark. While the eponymous hero himself is actually from the Geat tribe in what is now southern Sweden, the main narrative action begins when he comes to the aid of Hrothgar, King of the Danes, whose mead-hall Heorot is being terrorised by the monster Grendel. Archeologists have recently established that Heorot had a historical reality on the island of Zealand, where modern Copenhagen, Elsinore and Roskilde (the country’s ancient capital) are located. At Lejre (near Roskilde), the site of a royal court in pre-Viking times, the remains of a huge 6th-century feasting hall have been uncovered.

So Hamlet and Beowulf, this pair of ‘English’ literary heroes, have Danish origins. Yet the influence has not been in only one direction. The two quintessentially Danish 19th-century philosophers mentioned above were admirers of the great English works that their own culture had generated. Grundtvig, an enthusiast for Anglo-Saxon literature, translated Beowulf into Danish, and Kierkegaard made frequent reference to the hero of Hamlet as a way of meditating indirectly on his own habits of melancholy introspection.

In praise of rote learning

Hardly anyone has a good word to say for rote learning – except me. I regard it not only as an elementary basis for developing knowledge but also as a potential resource for advanced levels of reading and writing.

Learning things by rote is commonly associated with metaphors of imposing quasi-military discipline (like ‘drilling’) or inculcating subhuman responses (like ‘parroting’ or ‘repeating mechanically’). Countless people will tell you that rote learning is inimical to conceptual understanding and critical thinking. Some critics of NAPLAN tests in our schools, for instance, fulminate at the thought that rote learning could have any positive role in the acquisition of basic literacy and numeracy skills.

Perhaps there are still a few classrooms where grim teachers oppress hapless students with dreary rituals of robotic recitation, though it’s unlikely you could find many disciplinarians nowadays as harsh as those Dickensian ogres Thomas Gradgrind and Wackford Squeers. At any rate it seems there’s a widespread worry that repetitive memorisation will make monkeys out of children, and that teachers who resort to spoonfeeding – supposedly akin to instruction by rote – must be simian throwbacks. I’m reminded of the following pair of illustrations (reproduced here on the ‘fair use’ principle) in an antique Australian anthology for kids, Coles Funny Picture Book:

cfpb4         cfpb2

But setting those caricatures aside, we should ask whether it’s always harmful to memorise information systematically and rehearse it routinely until its retrieval becomes automatic.

Surely not! On the contrary, rote learning is a necessary first step in several areas of learning. It’s the simplest and most effective way for most youngsters to become confidently familiar with the alphabet, phonics, multiplication tables… And indeed repetitive utterances – rhymes, songs, chanted mnemonics – are a time-tested foundation of  first-language learning in general.

What makes rote learning seem objectionable to many people, I suppose, is the sad spectre of mere repetition without an ounce of understanding. It’s often said there’s no value in reciting anything until you’ve grasped the concept behind it. Perhaps that’s sometimes true, but does it necessarily apply to getting an infant class to learn a poem in chorus even when it contains phrases that are utterly strange to them? I don’t think so. If sing-song repetition allows young children to carry in their heads a fantastic rhyming story about The Owl and the Pussycat, it’s unimportant that they couldn’t explain what a ‘runcible spoon’ or a ‘bong tree’ looks like. I’ve heard primary school kids chant Blake’s poem ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright’ without fretting about its ‘fearful symmetry’: the concept may reveal itself to them eventually, and in the meantime the words are like a dormant magic charm.

Rote memorisation establishes mental habits that equip us to go far beyond the foundational practices of early learning. Remembering a patterned sequence of words by reciting them in a group can be like a rudimentary form of choral singing. And with maturity there may come an internalised individual practice of memorisation, as we recognise the value in becoming so familiar with certain passages of verse or prose that we know them by heart. Knowing by heart is a mode of cognition that should be cherished, not disparaged – especially in relation to the reading of literature.

If we memorise passages and keep running them through the mind, we are re-reading them, and in the process we’re allowing ourselves to pay more attention to their texture and structure. ‘A good reader,’ wrote Vladimir Nabokov in his Lectures on Literature, ‘an active and creative reader, is a re-reader.’

In an article for English in Australia some years back, I wrote about an example from my own reading experience in secondary school: while studying The Tempest, I’d committed to memory a long passage from that play – a speech in Act 5 where Prospero evokes his power over nature only to renounce it. We weren’t required to learn these lines but I liked the sound of them enough to do so of my own accord. It’s the passage that begins:

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves / And ye that on the sands with printless foot / Do chase the ebbing Neptune…

Many years later those words rose up from some murky cerebral recess as I was reading The Prelude, Wordsworth’s huge autobiographical poem (I think of it as his monsterpiece), and came across these lines:

Ye powers of earth, ye genii of the springs, / And ye that have your voices in the clouds, / And ye that are familiars of the lakes / And standing pools…

It dawned on me that what the little verbal echoes hint at is a fundamental relationship between the two texts. Wordsworth conducts parts of his account of ‘the growth of a poet’s mind’ (that’s The Prelude‘s subtitle) in the form of an oblique conversation with the Shakespearean play, just as other parts of the poem rework imagery from Milton’s Paradise Lost. His allusions to Prospero’s world – which I’d never have noticed if I hadn’t memorised that passage long before – have much more than a decorative function in The Prelude. They serve as a metaphorical framework that allows Wordsworth to draw out some latent implications of The Tempest, and restate them in relation to his own cultural situation. I’ve written in detail about this intertextual linkage in a chapter of my book Narrative Exchanges, so I won’t go on about it any further here. But for me that moment of recognition when I saw Shakespeare’s lines hovering behind Wordsworth’s was a satisfying reminder of the potential value of learning by heart – underpinned by early rote habits.

Recently I’ve come across a couple of essays by readers who share my view that rote learning can be beneficial. One is an article by Justin Snider in The Huffington Post; the other is a blog post by Erica Meltzer. If you’re not convinced by what I’ve said on this topic, perhaps you’ll find their observations more cogent.

Anyway, I’d be interested to know whether any of you who read my blog attach as much value as I do to learning things by heart.

What do spring and poetry have in common?

That question isn’t the start of a joke or a riddle. It just came to mind idly a few days ago when I was wandering in Wireless Hill Park, admiring the wildflowers, and in a momentary hallucination it seemed to me that a clump of kangaroo paws embodied a flock of florid, scrawny parrots. It was as if they’d materialised from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, that ancient mythological poem in which rain-soaked mushrooms can turn abruptly into humans,  humans into birds or trees, and so on.

It struck me that springtime shares something fundamental with poetry: both are processes of transmutation. Just as spawn can metamorphose into tadpoles and then into frogs,  or naiads into dragonflies, or bulbs into irises, so too a poem can draw imagery from the physical world and render it into figurative language.

200px-Kangaroo_paws_darling_rangeFROM BIRD TO PLANT

Season of sudden metamorphoses –

it’s on again! So many things

shape-shifting, switching, swift to change.

No transformed creatures more bizarre than these:

kangaroopaw

a crowd of mutant crested cockatoos,

their bodies thinned to skinny stalks,

their heads a splash of gaudy pigments,

faces all flushed, with startling green hairdos.

 

This is also a season for pairing up, a time when previously flighty individuals are more liable to become a twosome, like the couple of nest-building honeyeaters outside my window right now, or the ‘lover and his lass’ in the springtime song from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. And poetry, in its own way, performs a kind of matching and mating as well: it brings objects, perceptions, feelings, images and sounds into new conjunctions. I wrote the following poem about this several years ago. I think of it as a sonnet, though it doesn’t follow a traditional rhyming pattern and the symmetrical balance of its two stanzas differs from the usual octet/sestet sequence.

SEPTEMBER WEDDING

First light cracks. Before the sun can touch

the upper surfaces, a ticking starts

in the green blood of hidden green canals

as plaited fibres wake to creak and flex.

Networking messages are on the move

toward the air front. Leaves get ready to lift

and face the great gold magnet. Let it roll!

 

The watchers feel bliss flutter, billow out –

a self-unfurling sudden as the spill

of buds from branches on a time-lapse film.

Spring’s things go bright with flagwag. Twigs perk up,

stretching akimbo. Seasonal semaphore

sends warm regards. This couple will turn over

leaves that seem new enough to live forever.