shakespeare – It's More Fun to Be Jack of All Trades than Master of One

Shakespeare’s Mother: The Secret Life of a Tudor Woman

Shakespeare’s Mother: The Secret Life of a Tudor Woman was partly a biography of a specific woman – Mary Arden, the mother of William Shakespeare. But there’s not really enough surviving detail about her life to get the full picture from, so the gaps were filled in with more general information about the sorts of lives women (and men) of the time lead. The presenter, Michael Wood, did a good job of stitching the two sorts of information into a coherent whole, so it didn’t feel disjointed or patchy.

Mary Arden is an interesting person to look at the life of, not just because of whose mother she is, but also because of when she lived and what sort of person she was. She lived through a time of great change – she was born around 1537 near the start of the English Reformation, and died in James VI & I’s reign having lived through the whole of the Tudor changes of religion. It’s easy to forget that these changes all took place within a lifetime. Her personal situation also changed a lot over this time, showcasing some of the increased social mobility of the era.

Mary was born the youngest daughter of a relatively well-to-do husbandman, and had seven older sisters. Her family were part of the local gentry so in marrying her John Shakespeare was moving up the social scale. John & Mary Shakespeare were a part of the growing middle class in England. John was primarily a glover, but also involved in other trades. They marry in the 1550s, and begin having children – Mary was to bear eight children in all, of whom 5 survived to adulthood. William was her third child, the first son and the first to survive infancy. The programme used this as a hook to explore the dangers of childbirth in this period for both mother & offspring, and infant mortality (and the effect it would have on the parents).

John and Mary rose in the world both socially and financially during the early years of William’s life. John is a respected member of the Corporation of Stratford upon Avon and eventually even becomes Mayor of the town. They owned land both in the town and outside – Mary had inherited her father’s land when he died. Which is particularly interesting as she was the youngest daughter – perhaps she was his favourite? Perhaps she was the best at the financial management necessary to run the farm? John Shakespeare was also involved in less respectable financial trading. He leant money at interest (strictly forbidden by the church), and also got involved in the illegal wool trade. This was a very lucrative business – all wool trading was supposed to be done through Crown approved channels at Crown approved prices, and paying duty on the trade. So there was money to be made by a middleman who avoided the official routes. Michael Wood speculated that Mary was also involved in the trading – in part because as the person who would be at the house most of the time she’d be the obvious point of contact. And in part because there are indications she was good at financial management.

The wool trading was to be the Shakespeare family’s downfall. There was a clampdown on this illegal activity, and John Shakespeare was one of those who was caught. The family were financially ruined, and spent several years living in fear of their debts being called in. John stopped attending church or the meetings of the town corporation, because those were places where his creditors might find him to demand their money. This, of course, had social consequences for the family. They also had to sell off land to pay back the debts that were called in, and even take young William out of school. The family’s fortunes only turned around after William had moved to London and begun to make a name for himself (and money!) as a playwright and actor. Once he had money he provided for his parents and so Mary lived on into a comfortable old age.

I was mostly interested in the tidbits of information about Mary herself so that’s what I’ve discussed most in this blog post, but the programme also did a good job of covering the social situation & changes of the time. For instance it looked at what the religious and social changes actually meant to the ordinary person of the time. And at some issues specific to women – childbirth in particular as I mentioned. Also how women lived in general – housework, household management etc.

“Hell and Earth” Elizabeth Bear

Hell and Earth is the second half of the story begun in Ink and Steel (post). I have unfortunately left this too long between reading and writing up (3 weeks? maybe more) so this will be briefer notes than originally intended.

This pair of books are very much two halves of a larger story – although there’s some degree of resolution at the end of Ink and Steel (and it’s not a cliff hanger), most of the plotlines don’t come to fruition until this book. But this half of the story feels more like Kit Marlowe’s story (where the first half was more Will Shakespeare’s or perhaps more balanced between the two). Over the course of Ink and Steel Bear set up her world where the land of mortals (England as ruled by Elizabeth I) is linked to the court of the Daoine Sidhe (as ruled by the Mebd). Now Elizabeth is dying, as all mortals inevitably must, which threatens the Fae due to this linkage as well as potentially plunging the mortal world into the chaos of a succession crisis. But that’s almost the B-plot, the main thrust of the story is Kit discovering what was done to him in his youth that’s left him with PTSD and symbols carved into his flesh. It wasn’t just petty sadism on the part of his tormentor, but is another way in which Kit is a tool that has been shaped to fit a long term plan to alter the stories that shape the world.

Mortality is a thread that runs through the whole book – it even opens with the discovery of Edmund Spenser dead in his home. But it’s not just mortality that keeps cropping up it’s also the aftermath and the grieving, and how the people left behind cope. Not just Elizabeth and whether & how the country and the Fae are going to survive the turmoil of her passing away. But also on a more intimate level – Will is dying, slowly but surely, as all mortals will. But Kit is not entirely mortal any more and beginning to live with the realisation that all that he loved in the mortal realm will inevitably fade away.

As with Ink and Steel (and Bear’s books in general) one of the things I like best about this world she has created is the sense of reality, even tho the plot and premise are fantastical. The characters react plausibly to the situation(s) they’re in, I have a strong sense of personality for them all. Even if I might not predict what’s going to happen next it doesn’t feel forced, rather grows organically out of the characters & their interactions.

I wish I’d either taken a few notes or written this up sooner, as I’m sure I had more to say. It’s a series that continues to feel like it would reward paying close attention and taking notes, whilst still being a lot of fun to read on a surface level. There’s another book in the series just recently come out, which I’ve not picked up a copy of yet – I need to rectify this soon! 🙂

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Hamlet (BBC Production from 2009)

Anna lent us the DVD of the BBC’s 2009 production of Hamlet back when I’d just finished the MOOC I did on the play (post). We finally got round to watching it a few days ago! This is the production that has David Tennant as Hamlet, and Patrick Stewart as Claudius (and the ghost of dead King Hamlet). I think some of the others in the cast as names one would recognise if one knew about Shakespearean actors, but I don’t 🙂 As with many of my film reviews this is a selection of things I liked or that caught my attention rather than a coherent review per se.

I’m not sure I can remember the last time I watched a Shakespeare play or film adaption of one – at school perhaps? Which would make it 25 years ago, or thereabouts, as I dropped English after GCSE. Even despite having read Hamlet a few times during the course I did I still found the language a bit difficult to follow at times – particularly in some of the soliloquies where the meaning had a tendency to vanish in the word salad. Which isn’t helped by some of it being supposed to be nonsensical! Still, even though there were bits of it that I felt we should’ve put subtitles on for (and possibly read the footnotes in my book of the plays) most of it was OK to follow and we got the gist of the rest of it.

I liked the way they dressed the cast. When I was doing the Hamlet course there were quite a lot of other people on the course who got all up in arms about how modern-dress productions were ruining Shakespeare. (A few of the purists also seemed to hate this particular production anyway coz it’s got Doctor Who and Captain Picard in it, and so the “wrong” people were watching it for the “wrong” reasons …) I disagree, because I think if they’d put them all in Elizabethan dress then we wouldn’t’ve had any of the visual cues that the clothing is meant to convey. Whereas it was immediately obvious when people were formally dressed v. informally dressed and who was dressed appropriately or inappropriately for the scene at hand. Which is exactly what the Elizabethan dress would’ve been conveying to the original audiences – we just don’t know how to read that any more.

I also liked the way it was shot, and the use of cameras within the production. The security cameras, and the way they were used to demonstrate the ghost’s ghostliness were particularly neat. And again when Hamlet yanks one off the wall to say “now I’m alone” before one soliloquy – and yet he’s still observed because we’re still watching … That also makes a neat juxtaposition with the play-within-a-play, which they flag up rather nicely with Hamlet filming the play within the play (and the audience) and finally talking direct to camera himself. So you have the cameras that are our way of seeing this production, and then you have the cameras within the world as well.

Thinking of juxtapositions – Hamlet telling the actors how to act came across very “hypocritically teaching one’s grandma how to suck eggs” after the way Tennant-playing-Hamlet had been chewing up the scenery all the way through! Tho it does highlight one of the oddities of the play (for me) – the gap difference between Hamlet’s stated age (early 30s) and the way his behaviour comes across to me (teenage). I think I preferred the other actors’ performances – in particular the actress playing Gertrude. From reading the play I’m intrigued by Gertrude anyway – and her character does make it obvious how much this play is focussed on Hamlet junior. It’s unclear if Gertrude knew about the murder of Hamlet senior, it’s unclear if she marries Claudius out of love or self-protection (or self-promotion) or as part of the plan, it’s unclear if she knows at the end that the cup she drinks from is poisoned or not. Those are all things that each production and actress has to decide for themselves. And was Hamlet senior really such an all round nice guy and fantastic King and so on and so forth? We know Hamlet junior thinks so but no-one else seems to be all that bothered that he’s gone until he starts walking around as a ghost. You could construct a whole story where actually Hamlet senior was an abusive so-and-so who was also a bad King, and maybe it’s a good thing he’s gone – and Hamlet junior is too blinded by his idolisation of his father to see reality. And maybe you’d have to change how some of the lines of the play were delivered, but I’m not sure you’d have to alter the text.

One thing that struck both J and I is that the pacing feels very different to a modern film (perhaps not to a modern play, I wouldn’t know I haven’t seen one!). The choices Shakespeare made for what to include and what not to include sometimes seem strange. The Fortinbras sub-plot, for instance, feels superfluous to me – it’s set up almost as the A-plot with the as-you-know-Bob speech between Horatio and the guards in Act 1 scene 1, and the prominent mention of it in Act 1 scene 2. And then it just kinda vanishes – in this production there’s really just that one bit nearer the end with the army in the snow and then nothing. And in the rush to the climax there are some odd jumps: Ophelia’s death is off-stage and Laertes goes from pointing a gun at Claudius to plotting & scheming with him off-stage too.

It was fun to watch, tho. Maybe I’ll see if the library has some of the other recent BBC Shakespeare productions – tho I’d want to space them out a bit I think.

“Ink and Steel” Elizabeth Bear

Ink and Steel is the third book in Elizabeth Bear’s Promethean Age series. It’s the first part of a tightly linked duology set in Elizabethan England, with Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare as our view point characters. It opens with Marlowe’s death, but given his presence as a character in Whiskey and Water (set some 400 years later) it comes as no surprise that this isn’t the last we’ve seen of him. He’s “rescued” by one of the Queens of Faerie – Morgan – and while he is still alive, he can’t leave Faerie for long, so as far as the world of the living goes he might as well be dead. But Marlowe has no desire to give up his ties to the world just yet.

The Shakespeare strand of the story begins with him still in shock from the news of his friend’s murder, and learning that Marlowe had been part of a secret society – the Prometheus Club – sworn to protect England and her Queen. Marlowe’s plays had been a part of their protections, there was a magic in them to nudge events along in the right way. And now William Shakespeare is being asked to step into that role, and to start moving in a world of politics and intrigue. Made even more difficult by the fact that Marlowe’s murder implies a traitor within the Prometheus Club.

The plot then follows both of them as they try to fit into their new roles & worlds – separately and together. Kit was always supposed to survive (not that he knows it at first) but he wasn’t supposed to end up bound to a Faerie Queen, and a lot of his story is about him figuring out why Morgan “rescued” him and what she wants with him. And that’s the plot thread that comes to a resolution to provide a climax to this book – Shakespeare’s dealing with the aftermath of Marlowe’s murder out in the human world is mostly not tied up.

I like Bear’s Shakespeare. I like the other characters too, but having been learning a bit more about the historical character recently it was neat to see how she weaves her imaginings in with the known facts. Particularly good was the way that Shakespeare’s relationship with his wife is fleshed out – Anne is a character as well, and even though you always see her through Shakespeare’s eyes you get a feel for the woman’s character. And also for the relationship between the two in all its complexity. Bear makes one reason that Shakespeare spends so much time in London and not in Stratford with Anne a reason of love – in this story Anne nearly died when giving birth to the twins, and so Will doesn’t want to risk getting her pregnant again. Of course in the 16th Century there aren’t contraceptives or abortions, the only way to avoid children is to not have sex. He stays away so that he won’t give into temptation, and she knows this and hates it (and its necessity) too. But he also stays away because he’s got a good life in London, and because the theatre is as important to him as his family.

The setting feels realistic, rather than modern people slapped down in “ye olden days”. The characters don’t have modern attitudes, even the sympathetic ones say or do things that would feel out of place now but just right in context. Particularly attitudes towards women – who are mostly secondary characters in the story (rather than viewpoint characters) but are a lot more central to events than the men whose eyes we see through really appreciate. Attitudes to sexuality are also full of things that are seen as hopelessly bigoted today. Part of Shakespeare’s character arc during the book has him discovering that his prejudices about women, and about non-hetrosexuals, aren’t as founded in reality as he might think. It’s not just attitudes that evoke the people of a different era – the dialogue is Elizabethan-lite. It’s not an accurate representation of how people would’ve spoken at the time, but it’s full of little turns of phrase that evoke the era. For example: “Richard, you come hand in hand with fortune tonight. You did perchance bring wine?”. And Shakespeare’s lines are full of wordplay and being clever with words, not in an obtrusive way but just enough to make you believe he’s the man who wrote the plays.

In terms of the overall series this and its sequel are the other half of the backstory for the events of Whiskey and Water – this is about Kit Marlowe and Faerie and Hell. It’s also something of an origin story for the Prometheans, who are not (all) the antagonists in this book. In Elizabethan England they are not just one society, they’ve split into two with different interpretations of their goal to protect the realm & Queen. And different methods they’re willing to use. I think the Prometheans of the 20th Century novels grow out of the Prometheans that Shakespeare is part of, not the ones he’s working against. Although I’m not entirely sure about that. But that means that the organisation that’s on the antagonist side in books 1 & 2 is on the protagonist side in books 3 & 4. And I like the way that this story is not the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, instead it’s more complicated and more of a matter of perspective.

As well as sacrifice and choices which run as themes through the whole series this book also has a lot of time being out of joint which feels significant. A lot of the communication is asynchronous – by letters only sporadically delivered/collected. And time runs differently in Faerie, so Kit and Will can never be quite sure how long has passed for the other one. I’m not sure what the deeper significance is, but it definitely feels like something I’m intended to notice.

This book is a return to the heights of Blood & Iron for me – a combination of my favourite historical era and the Fair Folk.

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Shakespeare and His World (Course on Future Learn)

Shakespeare and His World was a 10 week course on Future Learn which finished just a couple of weeks ago. The course was run by Warwick University and presented by Jonathan Bate (with Jennifer Waghorn as moderator). And in the 10 weeks it covered a huge amount of ground! Each week focussed on a particular theme and there were 6 or 7 video lectures, each of which featured an object from Shakespeare’s time – most of these were from the collections of the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust, and most of the videos were filmed there. And eight of the weeks featured a particular Shakespeare play, which also illustrated the weekly theme. We were looking at both what the plays told us about the time they were written in, and what contemporary events & things influenced the writing of the plays. As well as this we also looked a little at the plays as plays rather than historical items – their themes & characters and so on. Obviously in the time available all of this was covered at a fairly superficial level – an overview rather than anything in depth, but there were normally links to places to find out more about the featured objects and some ideas for further investigating the plays.

Week 1 was an introductory week which looked at what we know of Shakespeare’s life story and also set him in context as an Elizabethan playwright and poet. We also read Venus and Adonis, one of Shakespeare’s poems. The second week was the first one with a play, The Merry Wives of Windsor. The theme was Shakespeare’s time in Stratford, in particular his schooling, and this was a good play to illustrate it because although the town in the play is Windsor there’s internal evidence that suggests Shakespeare was actually basing it on Stratford. And he made use of the sorts of people he would’ve known growing up to provide characters for the play – in particular there’s a small part for a schoolboy called Will which is generally assumed to be an author-insert.

Week 3 used A Midsummer Night’s Dream to focus on the theatre in Elizabethan England – chosen because of the play within a play sequence. Week 4 was about war, using Henry V as the illustrative play. Bate made the point in this week that Shakespeare was a war poet for the first half of his career – England was at war with Spain in this period – so Henry V isn’t just looking back to former glories but is also saying something about contemporary events in particular the defeat of the Armada. Week 5 moved on to look at finance, using the Merchant of Venice. As well as the obvious use of Shylock the moneylender to think about how Elizabethan money & finances worked, we also looked at how Shakespeare often used Venice as a mirror for London. And of course we also covered Elizabethan attitudes to Jews, as well as looking at how Shylock has been portrayed through the ages since the play was written. Shakespeare himself seems to be making a more nuanced point than some later stagings of the play.

I’m afraid this is turning into a bit of a laundry list, but I’m trying not to go into too much detail otherwise this post will go on forever!

Week 6 used Macbeth to look at witches and medicine. Because of studying the play at school around 25 years ago I was expecting the bits about witches, but I hadn’t really thought about what the play tells us about medicine of the time before. Sadly the discussion section for this week (about similarities and differences between modern & 16th Century medicine) got over-run by people enthusing over herbal remedies being better than “all those chemicals” and misplaced nostalgia so I stopped reading it before my blood pressure rose too much. The seventh week used Othello to look at the interactions between Christendom and the Islamic world. Again Shakespeare is more nuanced than some later stagings of the play – the villain of the play, after all, is Iago who is a white Christian (although notably with a Spanish name). Othello the Moor is basically a good man who is led astray by Iago’s playing on his insecurities.

The eighth week looked at what Classical culture meant to the people of Shakespeare time, and also to look at how “the East” was regarded. The illustrative play chosen was Anthony and Cleopatra which obviously gives us an image of orderly moral Rome vs the opulent decadence of Egypt. And it was also a play designed to appeal to James VI & I by implying he occupies the place of Augustus in his own time, seen in the play as unifier and peacemaker. Week 9 was the last week with a play – fittingly this was The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last solo authored play. This was used to illustrate the “Brave New World” of the Americas that the Stuart age was beginning to successfully colonise. And also to think about how the art of the theatre was similar to the art of magic in The Tempest so Prospero’s final speech retiring from his art can be seen as Shakespeare’s final speech too. And the last week was a brisk trot through Shakespeare’s legacy looking at how he grew from being regarded as one of the Elizabethan playwrights into “the Greatest Playwright of All TIme”.

I’m glad the information, including videoes & links, is still available on Future Learn for those of us that did the course – I’m not sure I got everything out of the course that I could and some weeks I definitely skimped on due to lack of time. Even tho by the end I was thinking it had out stayed its welcome a bit (8 plays in 8 weeks is a lot to read and contemplate) I’m glad I did it 🙂

In Our Time: The Tempest

On Sunday we listened to the In Our Time programme about Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, which was discussed by Jonathan Bate (Worcester College, Oxford), Erin Sullivan (University of Birmingham) and Katherine Duncan-Jones (Somerville College, Oxford). This was the last play written solely by Shakespeare, around 1610, and is also the only one where he made the plot up entirely from scratch. The action almost entirely takes place on an island (perhaps in the Mediterranean, perhaps in the Atlantic, it’s not specified). Prospero was Duke of Milan, but his position has been usurped by his younger brother and so Prospero and his daughter Miranda have gone into exile on this island. The island is uninhabited except for the spirit Ariel and Caliban, the deformed/monstrous son of the deceased witch Sycorax (who was previously banished to the island). The opening scene shows Prospero’s brother and a boatload of people from Naples (including the King) caught in a storm (raised by Prospero) and being shipwrecked on the island. The plot revolves around Miranda and one of the nobles falling in love, Caliban in rebellion against Prospero’s authoritarian rule over the island and Prospero and his brother reconciling (eventually).

After Bate gave a summary of the plot the programme moved on to looking at the ways that Shakespeare’s life and the politics and issues of the day influenced the play. Parallels are often drawn between Prospero (using his magic to manipulate and direct all the others on the island) and Shakespeare (using his art of playwriting to manage and direct the action on stage, and to shape the imagination of the audience). This parallel is increased by the last section of the play where Prospero talks about giving up his art and retiring. As this is Shakespeare’s last solo-authored play this can be seen as Shakespeare talking about his own retirement. Another way that Shakespeare’s own circumstances inform the writing of this particular play is that later in his career he and his acting company bought an indoor theatre. This meant that more lighting effects and sound effects were possible than in the outdoor theatres. And it’s easier to do special effects like having someone fly when you’re in a room where you can fix a hoist to the ceiling.

One obvious way that the political situation of the time informs the play is that Shakespeare’s company were frequently called upon to perform plays at court; even more often after James took the throne than in Elizabeth’s time. The plays he wrote therefore needed to be entertaining to the King, and to pander to his interests and enthusiasms. One of the things that King James VI & I was particularly interested in was magic, and he believed that there was both black magic (that of witches) and good magic. In the play Sycorax (who never appears but is referred to) is an embodiment of evil magic, and Prospero’s magic is presented as good magic. However Shakespeare leaves the question of whether there’s any real difference between the two open for the audience to think about. Family and dynastic marriages were also of interest to James (and to his wife) – they had children, unlike James’s predecessor on the throne, and had to think about marriages for them. So the plot thread with Miranda, and Prospero’s orchestration of her romance with Ferdinand, would appeal to the royals.

For all that Shakespeare made up the plot of this play, it’s still informed by stories or events he’d heard of. For instance the whole set-up of a ruler usurped by a brother going into exile to study magic comes from a real life event. One of the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire had had that happen – but it seems he was quite happy with that state of affairs, and devoted the rest of his life to magic rather than trying to regain his throne. Obviously in The Tempest Prospero isn’t happy, and this may be another way of appealing to James (who firmly believed in the divine right of kings). Another real life event that underpins Shakespeare’s story was the shipwreck of a ship going to Virginia in Bermuda. (This same event is important in Pocahontas’s life as her future English husband was on that very ship – the In Our Time about her aired the week after this one, but we listened to it a few weeks ago (post)).

Colonialism is also an important theme in the play, and it’s one that’s only grown in importance in modern times. The island is “uninhabited” – which means except for Caliban. Even by the standards of the time Caliban should’ve had rights to the land by virtue of having been born there, but Prospero still feels he has the right to rule the land because he’s more important than Caliban (I paraphrase heavily here). Caliban is described initially as monstrous and deformed, and there’s some reference to how if they could get him back to Naples they could display him in a fair and make a lot of money. That’s actually a reference to what really happened to some poor Inuit person, brought back to London and displayed as a fairground attraction (he didn’t take long to die, apparently). This was an era when explorers were discovering the strange (to Europeans) flora and fauna of the Americas, and it was thought that there might be not-quite-human people out there too, over whom obviously the “superior” Europeans would rule. But there were more enlightened viewpoints even at the time – the experts talked about an essay called “Of Cannibals” by Montaigne which argues that just because the customs of other people are different doesn’t mean they are wrong. It’s worth noting that Caliban is almost an anagram of Cannibal, and is also similar to Cariban (which is what people called Carribeans at the time). Caliban isn’t just depicted as monstrous, however. He’s portrayed as a sympathetic character, and Duncan-Jones was saying that the best lines and best poetry in the play are given to Caliban. Shakespeare is again not coming down on one side or the other – he’s giving the audience something to think or argue about.

The play fell out of favour after Shakespeare’s time. In particular after the Civil Wars it was rewritten as more of a rom-com called An Enchanted Isle. Partly this was because it was seen as an “old” play, so needed reworking for the new fashions. And partly because there are various speeches in the play that think about different ways the world could be ruled – and that would be quite a raw and touchy subject for the time. In the 19th Century the play was rediscovered and across the course of the 20th Century it increasingly appealed to a post-colonial audience. The experts talked a bit about more modern reimaginings of the play including one where Ariel is coded as Martin Luther King and Caliban as Malcom X (Prospero, obviously, remains the authoritarian white man).

The Tempest isn’t one of the plays I knew much about before listening to this programme, it was interesting to learn more (I don’t get to it in the Shakespeare MOOC I’m doing for another couple of weeks).

Monday Link Salad

This week I start my next Future Learn course – Shakespeare and His World.

I’m starting to quite look forward to Evolve (the new game from the guys who did the original L4D) … hopefully it doesn’t disappoint when it finally gets here 🙂

The Writ of Years is a delightfully creepy fairytale-esque short story.

I’m catching up (slowly, slowly) with reading at tor.com – Jo Walton’s post on if there’s a right age to read particular books caught my eye. I’m in agreement with Walton, I think. Even though I re-read less these days than I did as a kid, it’s odd to think that reading a book “too early” would do anything but mean you missed a bunch of stuff that you’d notice on a future read through (or fail to comprehend it entirely but understand it later).

More book stuff: I’ve set myself up an account on WWEnd which curates a list of authors & books who’ve won SFF awards or been on “must read” type lists. You can set what you’ve read and it gives you stats (like I’ve read 47% of all Hugo award winning books), they also encourage people to rate & review books. I’m about halfway through their list of authors marking what I’ve read that I remember (although only rating stuff I’ve read recently). (I was going to link to my account, but I can’t seem to find a way to directly link to it, oh well.)

Mass groups of whale fossils found in Chile – probably the result of at least four different mass strandings caused by a group of whales eating toxic algae then their dead bodies being washed up on shore.

10 Facts about Ichneumonidae describes these parasitic wasps near the start of the article as “think chestburster from Alien, but for insects.”.

Less creepily here’s 37 photos from history ranging from the moving to the “wtf?” (particularly the baby cage for ensuring your infant offspring get sufficient sunlight and fresh air if you live in an apartment block). Thanks to J for that link 🙂

I think I’ve seen this before, but it’s pretty striking – due to different streetlight lightbulbs you can still see the East/West divide in Berlin.

The only new TV programme I’m setting to record this week is When Albums Ruled the World next Monday – but the BBC’s schedule page was a little broken this morning and I’ve not been able to look at what’s showing on Saturday & Sunday.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Course on Future Learn)

As you might’ve noticed from the piece of whimsy I posted a few weeks ago I’ve been doing a course on Hamlet with Future Learn. This is my first foray into the world of massive online courses, and also the first non-science course I’ve done since 1990. All in all I think it was rather successful – I learnt stuff, I enjoyed it and I only had a couple of moments where I thought to myself “ah, yes, this is why I did science instead” 😉

The course described itself as follows:

This course introduces the many ways in which Hamlet can be enjoyed and understood. Six weekly videos discuss the play’s fortunes in print, and its own representations of writing and theatre; its place in the Elizabethan theatrical repertory; its representation of melancholia and interiority; its fortunes on the modern stage; its appeal to actors; and its philosophy.

And had no pre-requisites other than an ability to read Hamlet, so that seemed a good one to jump in on. I’m not quite sure I got what I was expecting – part of which is down to me: I’d expected more about the text or play itself, and the course was more about the meta level of how it’s been performed since. Which it does say in the description really, so my failure there. However it was also very focussed on Hamlet the character, rather than the play in a broader sense and I really don’t think that Hamlet is the only interesting thing in the play even based on my own meagre knowledge.

The technical set-up for the course is that each week had a list of steps, say a dozen of them. Some of these would be short video lectures and some would be articles (or links to external content). And there were also discussion steps, and assignments. You could add comments to all but the assignment steps (which were more formally peer reviewed). So each video and article would have a few comments which I looked at or not depending on how interested I was. And the discussions would have a few hundred comments (mostly on topic) and I made sure I always commented on these and read a reasonable number of them – basically made sure I participated (otherwise what was the point of doing a course rather than read a book). The final step was always a short multiple choice quiz meant to primarily be a review of the week (but see the end of this post).

The first week of the course was an introduction to the course itself, and to the text of the play. I’d not realised before that there were three versions of Hamlet that survive from the 17th Century. There’s the First Quarto, which has different names for people and feels like it’s a “pirate” copy poorly transcribed from notes taken in a performance or from an actor’s memory. The Second Quarto is much better quality (in terms of the flow of the lines and so on) and has all the right names for people – it’s pretty much unstageably long though, as it would take 4 hours to do it all. And finally there’s the Folio version, which is a cut down version of the Second Quarto one. We were encouraged during this week to think about which of the versions of the text might count as “the real one”, and whether any particular performance might consititute the definitive version. And also whether the play as performance or the play as text was the more important.

The second week was a bit disappointing for me. It was billed as being about the Elizabethan audiences for the play, and the context the play was written in. However it felt very shallow, with most content being provided by a link to the Shakespearean London Theatres Project (which was interesting, but it felt a bit like cheating for them to point us there rather than provide content themselves). And the bulk of the time I spent on that week was taken up with trying to plough through The Spanish Tragedy, which is a play by Thomas Kyd who may’ve written a version of Hamlet before Shakespeare did. We were encouraged to discuss the reactions of Elizabethan audiences to Hamlet (and to write a review as if we were there, hence my little bit of whimsy) – sadly if you followed the steps linearly that discussion happened before we got the links to ShaLT and information on the audiences. The other discussion that week was on what we thought Kyd’s Hamlet might’ve been like, and what if anything we thought might’ve been surprising about Shakespeare’s Hamlet to audiences that knew the earlier play. My conclusions were that Kyd’s Hamlet would probably’ve been more straightforward and more like an action film, but Shakespeare’s Hamlet is one that gives you something to discuss afterwards. And it’s the plays/books/films/stories that you discuss or want to talk about that you remember.

The third week picked back up in quality, and was the start of a three week exploration of Hamlet’s psychology which felt like the core of the course. This week focused first on the theories of the mind of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. We learnt about the four humours, and what Hamlet meant when he talked of himself as a melancholic. Towards the end of the week Freud’s ideas were introduced, and we were told a bit about how Hamlet has been used as a fictional case study by several psychologists. In the discussions we were encouraged to think about what (if anything) is wrong with Hamlet and whether or not he was faking his madness. We were also invited to talk about how much sense it makes to use Hamlet as a case study for psychological theories that were constructed centuries after Shakespeare died. I was astonished how divisive this subject was. Some people couldn’t move past a literal viewpoint: “you can’t psychoanalyse or diagnose a fiction person because they don’t exist”. Which just strikes me as orthogonal to the point. Obviously you can’t really diagnose them with anything, but thinking about the theories in relation to the character can tell you something about the character and also about the theory. In both directions it’s a tool for shining light on something in a way you might not’ve considered before.

Week four moved on to thinking about modern stagings of the play, with an emphasis on how the Oedipal interpretation of Hamlet’s relationship with his mother came to dominate 20th Century stagings of the play. Even if the production doesn’t interpret it that way, there’s still always a bed in the closet scene (which is just Hamlet and Gertrude) and it’s choosing to not be Oedipal about it rather than just not being so, if that makes sense. There was an assignment during this week, for peer review, that asked us to look at a particular scene that’s only in the First Quarto and we had to decide if we would include it if we were staging the play. The scene itself has Gertrude receiving news of Hamlet surviving the attempted murder on Claudius’s instructions (which happens off stage). This changes the feel of the end of the play – she knows more, and she’s unambiguously on Hamlet’s side after this scene. I rather enjoyed thinking about this assignment, and I would’ve liked more of the course to be like this. I decided that I wouldn’t want the scene included, because I felt it was a bit out of character for how I see Gertrude – to me it reads almost like Hamlet’s wishes for how his mother would react. It’s full of things like “For murderous minds are always jealous.” which I could see Hamlet saying about Claudius, but not Gertrude (who I see as somewhat more pragmatic and possibly even aware of Claudius’s initial murder of Hamlet Sr.). I’d quite like to read a story of the events in Hamlet from Gertrude’s point of view, I bet they’d look quite different.

The fifth week was the one where I had my “oh yes, this is why I did science” moment. The focus of the week was on an interview with Jonathan Slinger who played Hamlet recently, recorded when he was about halfway through the run. And we were invited to consider such weighty questions as whether or not the role of Hamlet was seeping into his interview persona. And I really don’t care. The other half of the week was another theory of Hamlet’s psyche – Slinger’s director had a view that Hamlet had bipolar disorder, and Slinger played him as someone who didn’t know they had it rather than knowingly. My exasperation with this bit was because part of the discussion after this was about “would tragedy have been averted if Hamlet had been diagnosed and medicated?”. Perhaps? But then it would’ve been a boring play, so that just felt like a daft question. Not an illuminating question like considering if bipolar disorder fits as a diagnosis could be (and to be fair we were invited to discuss that too) but just rather daft. Also bipolar disorder doesn’t mean “crazy person” and the questions and discussion thread veered rather closer to that than I was comfortable with. The assignment for the week was comparing the “different versions of Hamlet we’ve seen” to say which best fit Hamlet’s own advice to actors in Act 3 Scene 2. Which is difficult to do when you’ve not seen one full production let alone more … I wasn’t the only person commenting on that in the weekly feedback section. I did do my little 500 word essay on the subject and peer review a couple, but really all I learnt from that was that I can successfully waffle for 500 words even when I don’t have much to say. Looking at the length of posts I write here on a regular basis, that doesn’t come as much of a surprise to me (nor anyone else, I’d guess)!

The sixth and final week returned to more of a highpoint. The theme this week was the soliloquy “To be or not to be”. We’d had a practical exercise at the end of week 5 to read it out loud ourselves, and this week started with Pippa Nixon (who played Ophelia in the same production that Slinger played Hamlet) reading the soliloquy. We were then asked to think about the meaning of it (and to paraphrase it ourselves, quite a fun exercise) and in particular to discuss how it fit within the Christian context of the time it was written and how it transcends that context. I would’ve liked more of this sort of consideration of the text in the whole course. The second half of the week was thinking about women playing Hamlet – Pippa Nixon talked about how she’d like to play Hamlet, and how she thought the changing of the central family relationships to a father-daughter and a mother-daughter one would change our perceptions of the play. There wasn’t a discussion section for this which I think was probably just as well – I read a few of the comments on the video & article sections and some of them made me roll my eyes quite hard (and there were even comments that can be paraphrased as “but if Hamlet’s a girl then you have to make Ophelia a man otherwise how can they have a relationship??”). I do think it’d be interesting to see a female Hamlet done straight – just changing the pronouns and no other textual alterations. And see how that changes how you see the character, or doesn’t change it. In the same way that staging the play with different dress can interestingly change the feel of it (from clips I’ve seen, anyway).

Overall this was an interesting course, even if I’d’ve preferred a slightly different one! It was run by a team from the Institute of Shakespeare Studies at Birmingham University, and I thought that most of the material was well thought out and well presented. They also responded very well to any criticism. For instance at first there were no places to leave feedback, but after people started to say things in one of the discussions each week had a dedicated feedback section added. And not only that, but if something came up that was easily fixable on the fly it was done – the quizzes at the end of each week included material not in the course which was disconcerting and confusing to several of us at first. But it was by design and the description of the quiz was changed to make it clear that we weren’t supposed to know all the answers, it was a) for fun and b) supposed to point you to other things you could think about.

This Week’s TV Including Dogs, Shakespeare, Evolutionary Vertebrates, Greek Drama & Jewish History

The Wonder of Dogs

More about dogs – this episode concentrated on their senses & intelligence. This included demonstrations of how good their hearing, smell & eyesight is (in particular that a dog’s field of view is much wider than a human’s). They also talked about the sorts of behaviours that dogs have been bred for – using gun dogs as the primary example. The desired behaviour has changed over time, as gun tech & hunting styles changed. So at first it was pointers (who found and pointed to the game) then spaniels (to bounce around and flush the game out) and finally retrievers like labradors (to bring the game back to the hunter). And they demonstrated how training is needed as well as the innate behaviour using one of Kate Humble’s dogs – who is a herding breed, but who wasn’t a very useful sheepdog after only one lesson (although very enthusiastic).

They also had a bit on how intelligent dogs are, including a German group who are studying dog intelligence by getting them to push pictures to get treats. They’re offered a choice of a dog picture & a landscape picture each time, and they learn that dog pictures get treats. Which is quite an abstract level of thought – it’s not one dog v. one landscape, it’s a variety of pictures of a variety of scenes & dogs. I wanted to know if dogs could tell the difference between, say, cats & dogs for getting treats.

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Shakespeare in Italy

This is a two part series about Shakespeare’s connections with Italy that we’ve had on the PVR for ages. It’s languished there in part because I find the presenter, Francesco da Mosto, irritating (irrational on my part, I’m sure, his style just sets my teeth on edge). But despite that it was still interesting enough to watch the second part.

This episode was about Shakespeare using Italian places (and stories) to tell stories about love. The plays he talked about were Taming of the Shrew (marriage for money not love), Romeo & Juliet (obviously, tragic love), Much Ado About Nothing (rom com) and Othello (love turned to jealousy). Along the way he visited various places mentioned in the plays, and talked about the Italian stories they were based on. He also discussed how Shakespeare might’ve visited Italy – there’s no record of him doing so but there’s also 7 years where he’s missing from any records. So perhaps. Of note, tho, is that the British Museum Shakespeare exhibition that we went to last year (post) was sure that Shakespeare didn’t visit Italy but instead talked to people who had. And there was also a somewhat nutty theory put forward by a town in Sicily that Shakespeare was actually Sicilian – some playwright or poet whose name translates to Shake Spear who goes to London. I’m not sure if or how they tried to reconcile this with the Shakespeare who exists in records prior to this Italian’s arrival …

The second part was looking at how Shakespeare set plays in Italy to give himself a layer of plausible deniability when writing about politically sensitive subjects. So he talked about The Merchant of Venice as being (among other things) about law & the rule of law. And Julius Caesar, set not just in Rome but in long ago Rome, is a commentary on tyrants and if it’s ever justified to assassinate them – a particularly touchy subject at the time, as there were many assassination attempts on Queen Elizabeth and the England of the time was very repressive. Italy was also the country of the future – da Mosto made much of how the Renaissance was in full swing in Italy but England was lagging behind. Anthony & Cleopatra was an example of a play where Shakespeare was exploring new ideas to come out of Italy – in this case how a ruler should act and da Mosto said it owed much to Machiavelli. The final play he talked about was The Tempest – based in part on a well known alchemist or sorcerer in Naples at around that time. Again a touchy subject – James I was paranoid about witchcraft – but it was also the way of the future (in that alchemy leads to science in a while).

I’m a bit conflicted about this series – it was an interesting subject, but I still found the presenter irritating.

David Attenborough’s Rise of the Animals: Triumph of the Vertebrates

This is a new two part David Attenborough series, all about the evolution of vertebrates. The first part, From the Seas to the Skies, covered the first vertebrates and the major developments leading to the evolution of fish, amphibians, reptiles (including dinosaurs) & birds. It was a rather good mix of fossils, modern animals and cgi reconstructions of ancient animals. I was particularly fond of the tiktaalik taking it’s first waddly steps across the land. The gliding feathered dinosaurs were also neat. I don’t think I learnt anything new in terms of concepts or the overall story, but there were several new details – like the tiktaalik as the first animal to get onto land (I’m sure I learnt about lungfish escaping predators in the past), or the Chinese fossil beds that pre-date the Burgess Shale ones that I knew about (and contain the first known chordate, ancestor of modern vertebrates).

If I’ve got one quibble is that the language used emphasises progress too much. I’m probably over-sensitive to this, tho. But I do think it’s important that there’s no inevitability about the evolution of any species or group, and that there’s no progress – modern lampreys aren’t “primitive” for instance, they’re well suited to the places they live. Lacking most of the features we think of as common to the vertebrates (like jaws, fins or limbs) doesn’t make them worse it just makes them different. But it’s very hard to avoid because when talking about these things it’s easiest and clearest to tell a story, which leads to language that implies progression and purpose. So in this programme Attenborough talks about problems needing to be solved before vertebrates could move onto the land. Which makes me wince because there wasn’t any working towards a goal involved.

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Ancient Greece: The Greatest Show on Earth

This is a recent series from Michael Scott, about the development of drama & theatre in Ancient Greece. The first episode looked at how the development of drama as an artform is intertwined with the development of democracy. Both have their roots in Athens, in the 5th & 6th Centuries BC and at the smaller local level debates & plays would even happen in the same assembly spaces. Greeks had three sorts of plays, two of which we still have. These were tragedy, comedy & satyr plays – the last were bawdy, farcical plays which were used as a sort of palate cleanser after a cycle of tragedies. Tragedies in a modern sense are stories with a sad ending, but Scott said Greek ones were more about posing questions about situations. One of the experts he spoke to characterised tragedies as setting up problems caused by bad luck or bad decisions, and suggesting how they might be dealt with while getting the audience to think about what would they do in this or similar situations. Plays were often based on myths, but the stories told were topical and relevant to recent politics domestically & abroad. And the audience for the plays would be the same men who would then vote on how Athens was run & how it reacted to events. Scott was saying that this close link between the subjects of plays and the real life decisions that were being made meant that plays can be seen as educating the Athenians about democracy and as a part of how democracy evolved. Comedies were also important in this process – they weren’t just funny stories, they were generally pointedly aimed at particular political figures. Who would be right there watching thinly veiled versions of themselves be publicly mocked. Scott said this was part of how the boundaries on what was & wasn’t appropriate behaviour were enforced.

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The Story of the Jews

The last episode of Simon Schama’s series about Jewish history looked at the formation & history of the modern state of Israel. He started with the Holocaust and the plight of the Jewish refugees during & after that horror. He talked about how even those fighting against Germany in the war were not willing to do much for the Jews – lots of sympathetic noises not much if any actual support. And how this led to more Zionism in the Jewish population – if no-one else will aid you or want you, then you are even more in need of a homeland of your own. And then Schama moved back to trace the steps towards the formation of the modern Israel – starting with the Zionist movement in the early 20th Century getting the British Empire on board with granting the Jews a homeland within Palestine. Apparently in the early days post WWI there were even some glimmers of hope that a future Israel and the existing Arab nations might co-exist in some form of peace. Sadly, as we now know, this was not to be – the influx of Jews post-WWII being a contributing factor, with the British Empire’s poor handling of the situation pre & post war also being important. (Promising the same real estate to two groups of people as “their own nation” isn’t ever going to end well …). Schama then discussed the history of Israel since independence, and how over time (and after two wars, more persecution of Jews in Arab nations & violence and terrorist attacks on Israelis in Israel) the politics & sentiment inside Israel has calcified into hatred & mistrust of Arabs. Schama talked to someone involved in the Settler movement, who was disturbing in his starry-eyed rhetoric about how the Jews were entitled to the land up to the biblical borders by God given right. And Schama visited the wall built to keep the Palestinians out of Israel, or at least only allow them through under strict observation.

I found this series thought provoking & well worth watching, although frequently grimly depressing. As well as the subject matter itself it was an interesting reminder that so much of the stuff we watch is from our own perspective – this very much wasn’t, it was Simon Schama’s take on Jewish history from the perspective of a member of the culture whose history it was.

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“Venice in Shakespeare’s Time” Hilary Williams (British Museum Friends Open Evening 5/12/12)

As well as the lecture we also went to a gallery talk at the Open Evening – these are where a curator takes you around some objects of interest in a gallery for 45 minutes or so. The theme of this one tied in with the Shakespeare exhibition, and was in some ways an extension of the central room of the exhibition. Shakespeare set several of his plays in Venice and (as discussed in both the exhibition and this talk) this was for several reasons, including the fact that it allowed him to portray situations that might’ve got him in trouble if he’d set them in England. Venice was also widely known as an exotic, tolerant place where luxurious goods came from. During the gallery talk she showed us various pieces of ceramics & glassware that had come from Venice around the time of Shakespeare or just before. Shakespeare himself is thought never to’ve gone to Venice, but he would’ve known about the place both from reading published works about it, and through objects like the ones she showed us which he would’ve seen in the houses of the aristocracy.

One of the things it seems hard to remember is how exotic good quality glass was at the time. The glassware of Venice was famous throughout Europe, and to have a Venetian glass salt cellar or marriage cup really showed how high status & wealthy you were. The glassmakers of Venice were apparently forbidden to leave the city, so that the recipe for their glass remained a secret only known to Venice.

As well as showing us several objects & setting them in their cultural context she also read us a story from an old guidebook to Venice – which labelled a house as where a man had murdered his wife. I’ve unfortunately forgotten the names, but the name of the family was reminiscent of “Moor” although they were not Moorish, and the name of the wife was similar to Desdemona. So it’s possible that Shakespeare didn’t just get an exotic stage set from his reading about Venice, but perhaps also the start of one of his plot lines.

An interesting talk 🙂

And for a bonus picture – here are the Christmas decorations at the British Museum. They even say something sensible in the hieroglyphs – something like “Beautiful birthday of God’s child”.