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James Joyce's life of Shakespeare
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Art Neuendorffer
Jul 18, 2007, 11:47:35 AM7/18/07
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James Joyce's life of Shakespeare
annotated by Jorn Barger March 2000
http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/shakespeare.html
.
In the winter of 1912-13 in Trieste, James Joyce delivered (in English)
a series of twelve well-attended and warmly received lectures on
'Hamlet' that have unfortunately not survived. The Trieste paper
wrote (boring parts elided):
.
. "...dense yet clear concepts... noble... simple... wit and
vivacity... genuine brilliance... concise exposition of the origins
of the drama... colorful presentation of the writers in the age of
Elizabeth... outlined the character and life of Shakespeare with
particular attention to the psychological moment when he wrote Hamlet...
original and slightly bizarre talent... attractive 'causeries' [def]...
The words, the manners, and the dress of the Elizabethans stirred the
lecturer to literary and historical recollections which proved of keen
interest... he read... the attack of Voltaire on Hamlet [extract-don't
miss!] and then, suddenly, the eulogy of the same work by Georg
Brandes..." [fuller&info]
.
Since 1906 Joyce had been puzzling out how to re-stage Homer's 'Odyssey'
in modernday (ie, 1904) Dublin [parallels], and Hamlet offered a neat
semi-modern parallel to Homer's frequent use (for foreshadowing, mainly)
of the tragedy of Orestes and Agamemnon. [compared]
.
Some three years later (c1915) Joyce began writing a chapter of Ulysses
in which Stephen Dedalus analyses 'Hamlet' for an audience at the
National Library. (He finished the chapter, except for minor additions,
on 31 December 1918.) [etext]
.
Like Joyce in 1912 (we may assume), Stephen attempts to map Shakespeare
onto Hamlet's murdered father, instead of the traditional mapping onto
Hamlet. From a Homeric viewpoint, this allowed Stephen Dedalus
(Telemachus) himself to fight for his literary father's honor,
against misguided intellectual usurpers.
.
While an early draft of this chapter vanished mysteriously in 1948, a
slim notebook survives that supplies Joyce's own moderately detailed
timeline of Shakespeare's life. It's transcribed below, updated with
links to useful net resources, and annotated [eventually] with
Joycean connections.
.
Joyce's notes
.
Joyce's timeline is [gradually being] transcribed below, in unindented
boldface. Related Net.resources are linked in the indented, non-bold
sections after each of Joyce's notes. Quotes from Ulysses are labelled
with Gabler's linenumbers, unindented but not bolded.
.
1564: Plague at Stratford
.
. Plague: background, ditto
. Stratford: detailed info; England map
. Pix: onepage tour
.
Charlotte Clopton buried alive
.
. ghost story cf Juliet's fears in R&J "Shall I not, then, be stifled
in the vault?" [etext]; see 1605 below # for Clopton House's
Gunpowder-Plot connection; Shakespeare socialised there as well.
.
W.S. born
.
. [baptismal record] ditto ditto [spellings of name] ditto,
[birthplace pic] [debunking] more [schooling] ditto
.
(Jesuit)
.
. cf? "During the years that Shakespeare attended the Stratford
grammar school, at least one and possibly three headmasters stepped down
because their devotion to the catholic religion proscribed by Queen
Elizabeth. One of these masters was Simon Hunt (b. 1551), who, in 1578,
according to tradition, left Stratford to pursue his more spiritual
goal of becoming a Jesuit" [cite] [religion]
.
(M ?A. ?abort ?71)
.
. (maybe 'M H', maybe 'about', maybe 'Hubaud' (see 1605 below).
71 may imply 1571 (the year sister Anne was born) or someone
71yo in 1564 (born c1493))
.
Stratford Characters:
.
. This list of names is hard to read in my copy, but appears to
be based on the idea that 'Merry Wives of Windsor' was a parody of
Thomas Lucy and other Stratford-ites. [summary]. I haven't found
anything like these names in discussions of WS's Stratford friends [eg].
.
?Rob ?Slay,
.
Sir Thos Lucy,
.
. "engag'd him with them more than once in robbing a Park that
belong'd to Sir Thomas Lucy of Cherlecot, near Stratford." [cite] [more]
.
9.1134 "Forgot: any more than
he forgot the whipping lousy Lucy gave him."
.
?Shallow, Bardolf, John ?Paper, ??? ?Ford
.
. Shallow, Bardolf, and Ford are characters
in Merry Wives of Windsor [dp] [character names]
.
. If ?Ford could be 'Field' it would be Stratford's Richard Field,
who printed 'Venus and Adonis' [info].
.
. Etc:
. 1572 supernova
. 1576 First theater in London--Shoreditch
. 1578 Lyly's 'Euphues' launches new style [background]
. 1580: earthquake [account]
.
9.147 "What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who
has faded into impalpability through death, through absence,
through change of manners. Elizabethan London lay as far
from Stratford as corrupt Paris lies from virgin Dublin."
.
. lost years: [1586-92], review; [c1592 info]; [law training?]
.
. 1592: 20 Sept: Robert Greene's posthumous 'Groatsworth of Wit'
insults Shakespeare (first public notice). [etext] [1893 bio of RG]
Four years older than WS, achieved success in 1583.
.
9.130 "A deathsman of the soul Robert Greene called him"
.
1593: (This is the first 'real' page of the timeline, one page per year
labelled at the top center with the underlined year. Why Joyce didn't
think 1592 and earlier of any interest, I don't know!)
.
J.S. 62, M.S. 56
.
. "Shakespeare's parents were John and Mary Shakespeare, who lived in
Henley Street, Stratford. John, the son of Richard Shakespeare, was a
whittawer (a maker, worker and seller of leather goods such as purses,
belts and gloves) and a dealer in agricultural commodities." [more]
.
9.131 "Not for nothing was he a butcher's son,
wielding the sledded poleaxe and spitting in his palms."
.
Joan 24
.
. sister born 1569 [info] [chart]
.
W.S. 29
.
A.H. 37
.
. Anne Hathaway: married 28 Nov 1582 [license],
ditto, ditto, [cite] parody poem
.
9.217 "She died, Stephen retorted, sixtyseven years after she was born.
She saw him into and out of the world. She took his first embraces. She
bore his children and she laid pennies on his eyes to keep his eyelids
closed when he lay on his deathbed. ...The world believes that
Shakespeare made a mistake, he said, and got out of it as quickly
and as best he could."
.
9.250 "Is Katharine the shrew illfavoured? Hortensio calls her young and
beautiful. Do you think the writer of Antony and Cleopatra, a passionate
pilgrim, had his eyes in the back of his head that he chose the ugliest
doxy in all Warwickshire to lie withal? Good: he left her and gained the
world of men. But his boywomen are the women of a boy. Their life,
thought, speech are lent them by males. He chose badly? He was chosen,
it seems to me. If others have their will Ann hath a way. By cock, she
was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet and twentysix. The
greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis, stooping to conquer,
as prologue to the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford wench who
tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself."
.
9.1134 "Forgot: any more than he forgot the whipping lousy Lucy gave
him. And left the femme de trente ans. And why no other children born?
And his first child a girl?"
.
R.S. 19, G.S. 27, E.S. 13,
.
. brothers Richard, Gilbert, and Edmund [info] [chart]
.
S.S. 10,
.
. daughter Susanna baptised 26 May 1583 [facsimile], [cite] ditto
.
H.S. 8, J.S. 8
.
. twins born 1585 "Hamnet and Judith, named after Hamnet and Judith
Sadler, apparently lifetime friends to Shakespeare. Hamnet Sadler
was remembered in Shakespeare's will" [facsimile] [cite] ditto
.
. baptised 2 Feb (Joyce's birthday)
.
January: Richard III : Richard II
.
. III: fansite, movie, links
.
. II: links
.
February: London theatres closed : W.S on provincial tour :
?theatr closed plague
.
. [info]
.
W.S at Rose Theatre, Bankside (?run Henslowe)
.
. Rose: [website] info&pix built (and run) by Philip Henslowe in 1587.
cf Swan 1595 [interesting pic] [map] [EB-general]
.
. [Movie starts around here:] Shakespeare in Love: detailed outline,
in-jokes, critique, slam, teaching, links, webring
.
30May: death of 29yo Christopher Marlowe... staged?
[theory] [debate] [topics]
.
As You like It
.
. [staging] (mentioned again under 1599 below)
.
July: Venus and Adonis Dedicated to Southampton) : 7 editions in 7 years
.
. info&pic, old-spelling version, fansite, search, links
.
9.245 "He had a good groatsworth of wit, Stephen said, and no truant
memory. He carried a memory in his wallet as he trudged to Romeville
whistling The Girl I left behind me. If the earthquake did not time it
we should know where to place poor Wat, sitting in his form, the cry of
hounds, the studded bridle and her blue windows. That memory, Venus
and Adonis, lay in the bedchamber of every light-of-love in London."
.
July: Sonnets probably begun
.
. search, ditto, quiz, audio, settings
.
9.452 "Beware of what you wish for in youth because you will get it in
middle life. Why does he send to one who is a buonaroba, a bay where all
men ride, a maid of honour with a scandalous girlhood, a lordling to woo
for him? He was himself a lord of language and had made himself a
coistrel gentleman and he had written Romeo and Juliet. Why? Belief in
himself has been untimely killed. He was overborne in a cornfield first
(a ryefield, I should say) and he will never be a victor in his own eyes
after nor play victoriously the game of laugh and lie down. Assumed
dongiovannism will not save him. No later undoing will undo the first
undoing. The tusk of the boar has wounded him there where love lies
ableeding. If the shrew is worsted yet there remains to her woman's
invisible weapon. There is, I feel in the words, some goad of the
flesh driving him into a new passion, a darker shadow of the first,
darkening even his own understanding of himself. A like fate
awaits him and the two rages commingle in a whirlpool.
.
The soul has been before stricken mortally, a poison poured in the porch
of a sleeping ear. But those who are done to death in sleep cannot know
the manner of their quell unless their Creator endow their souls with
that knowledge in the life to come. The poisoning and the beast with two
backs that urged it King Hamlet's ghost could not know of were he not
endowed with knowledge by his creator. That is why the speech (his lean
unlovely English) is always turned elsewhere, backward. Ravisher and
ravished, what he would but would not, go with him from Lucrece's
bluecircled ivory globes to Imogen's breast, bare, with its mole
cinquespotted. He goes back, weary of the creation he has piled up to
hide him from himself, an old dog licking an old sore. But, because loss
is his gain, he passes on towards eternity in undiminished personality,
untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he has revealed.
His beaver is up. He is a ghost, a shadow now, the wind by Elsinore's
rocks or what you will, the sea's voice, a voice heard only in the heart
of him who is the substance of his shadow, the son consubstantial with
the father."
.
9.657 "Say that he is the spurned lover in the sonnets.
Once spurned twice spurned. But the court wanton spurned him
for a lord, his dearmylove.
.
As an Englishman, you mean, John sturdy Eglinton put in,
he loved a lord.
.
It seems so, Stephen said, when he wants to do for him, and for all
other and singular uneared wombs, the holy office an ostler does for
the stallion. Maybe, like Socrates, he had a midwife to mother
as he had a shrew to wife."
.
December: Titus Andronicus staged
.
1594 May: Rape of Lucrece
.
. info&pic
.
August: Merchant of Venice (?Venesyon Comedy) produced on stage
.
. [background]
.
9.748 "All events brought grist to his mill. Shylock chimes with the
jewbaiting that followed the hanging and quartering of the queen's leech
Lopez, his jew's heart being plucked forth while the sheeny was yet
alive: Hamlet and Macbeth with the coming to the throne of a Scotch
philosophaster with a turn for witchroasting. The lost armada is his
jeer in Love's Labour Lost. His pageants, the histories, sail
fullbellied on a tide of Mafeking enthusiasm. Warwickshire jesuits are
tried and we have a porter's theory of equivocation. The Sea Venture
comes home from Bermudas and the play Renan admired is written with
Patsy Caliban, our American cousin. The sugared sonnets follow Sidney's.
As for fay Elizabeth, otherwise carrotty Bess, the gross virgin who
inspired the Merry Wives of Windsor, let some meinherr from Almany grope
his life long for deephid meanings in the depths of the buckbasket."
.
November: King John (? cf. Brandes)
.
Xmas: acted before Elizabeth at Court
.
. [cite]
.
Childermas: Comedy of Errors played at Gray's Inn
.
1595 Taming of Shrew
.
9.250 "Is Katharine the shrew illfavoured?
Hortensio calls her young and beautiful."
.
All's Well that Ends Well
.
Nov: Midsummer Night's Dream
.
. guide, Lamb's, movie, links, RealAud/MP3
.
1596 9 August: Hamnet (son) dies
.
. cite
.
John Shakespeare applies for coat of arms 20 October:
College of Arms grants JS's request
.
. [original] info, [EB]
.
1597 Henry IV (2 Parts)
.
Merry Wives of Windsor
.
. [sixpences]
.
Romeo and Juliet (present form : Harris?
.
. etexts: multipage ditto
.
. staging
.
4 May: WS buys New Place for £60
.
. etext, [cite]
.
. Money equivalents: £60 = US$24,000? table
.
Xmas: Love's Labours Lost revised for production at Court
.
1598 WS lodges in Bishopsgate
.
. [cite] ditto
.
W.S. plays in Every Man in His Humour (B. Jonson) which he got accepted
.
. [cite]
.
Henry V
.
WS buys stone to repair New Place
.
. [cite] ditto
.
Two Gentlemen of Verona (last scene) revised
.
WS goes to live with mother in Henley Street
.
. [cite?]
.
15 Oct: Rich Quiney applies to WS for loan of £30
.
. [facsimile] etext
.
Famine Riots at Stratford: dearth: WS has 10 qrtrs of corn stored
.
. [facsimile] [etext] = 80 bushels
.
9.741 "And the sense of property, Stephen said. He drew Shylock out of
his own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was
himself a cornjobber and moneylender, with ten tods of corn hoarded in
the famine riots. His borrowers are no doubt those divers of worship
mentioned by Chettle Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing.
He sued a fellowplayer for the price of a few bags of malt and exacted
his pound of flesh in interest for every money lent. How else could
Aubrey's ostler and callboy get rich quick?"
.
9.788 "But a man who holds so tightly to what he calls his rights
over what he calls his debts will hold tightly also to what he calls
his rights over her whom he calls his wife. No sir smile neighbour
shall covet his ox or his wife or his manservant or his maidservant
or his jackass."
.
1599 Rich and Cuthbert Burbage demolish theater and build Globe
(?en W.S.)
.
. [cite]
.
. Globe: fansite, EB w/pix, Quicktime VR, pseudo-VR stills, map, links
.
Henry V performed
.
. [staging]
.
JS applies for leave to impale Arden arms
.
. [cite] ditto
.
Much Ado about Nothing
.
As You Like It
.
. [see 1593 above #]
.
9.623 "Twenty years he lived in London and, during part of that time,
he drew a salary equal to that of the lord chancellor of Ireland. His
life was rich. His art, more than the art of feudalism as Walt Whitman
called it, is the art of surfeit. Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack,
honeysauces, sugar of roses, marchpane, gooseberried pigeons,
ringocandies. Sir Walter Raleigh, when they arrested him, had half a
million francs on his back including a pair of fancy stays. The
gombeenwoman Eliza Tudor had underlinen enough to vie with her of Sheba.
Twenty years he dallied there between conjugial love and its chaste
delights and scortatory love and its foul pleasures. You know
Manningham's story of the burgher's wife who bade Dick Burbage to her
bed after she had seen him in Richard III and how Shakespeare,
overhearing, without more ado about nothing, took the cow by the horns
and, when Burbage came knocking at the gate, answered from the capon's
blankets: William the conqueror came before Richard III. And the gay
lakin, mistress Fitton, mount and cry O, and his dainty birdsnies, lady
Penelope Rich, a clean quality woman is suited for a player, and the
punks of the bankside, a penny a time.
.
The height of fine society. And sir William Davenant of oxford's mother
with her cup of canary for any cockcanary.
.
And Harry of six wives' daughter. And other lady friends from neighbour
seats as Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet, sings. But all those twenty
years what do you suppose poor Penelope in Stratford was doing behind
the diamond panes?"
.
1600 March: WS sues John Clayton (London) for £7
.
. [cite] ditto
.
Twelfth Night written
.
. Gabriel Harvey connection?
.
1601 J.S. 70, M.A. 64, W.S. 37, A.H. 45, G.S. 35, R.S. 27,
E.S. 21, S.S. 18, J.S. 16
.
9.879 "As for his family, Stephen said, his mother's name lives in the
forest of Arden. Her death brought from him the scene with Volumnia in
Coriolanus. His boyson's death is the deathscene of young Arthur in King
John. Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare. Who the girls in
The Tempest, in Pericles, in Winter's Tale are we know. Who Cleopatra,
fleshpot of Egypt, and Cressid and Venus are we may guess."
.
9.894 "He had three brothers, Gilbert, Edmund, Richard. Gilbert in his
old age told some cavaliers he got a pass for nowt from Maister Gatherer
one time mass he did and he seen his brud Maister Wull the playwriter up
in Lunnon in a wrastling play wud a man on's back. The playhouse sausage
filled Gilbert's soul. He is nowhere: but an Edmund and a Richard are
recorded in the works of sweet William.
.
In his trinity of black Wills, the villain shakebags, Iago, Richard
Crookback, Edmund in King Lear, two bear the wicked uncles' names. Nay,
that last play was written or being written while his brother Edmund lay
dying in Southwark.
.
He has hidden his own name, a fair name, William, in the plays, a super
here, a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set his face in a dark
corner of his canvas. He has revealed it in the sonnets where there is
Will in overplus. Like John o'Gaunt his name is dear to him, as dear as
the coat and crest he toadied for, on a bend sable a spear or steeled
argent, honorificabilitudinitatibus, dearer than his glory of greatest
shakescene in the country. What's in a name? That is what we ask
ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.
A star, a daystar, a firedrake, rose at his birth. It shone by day in
the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in the night, and by night it
shone over delta in Cassiopeia, the recumbent constellation which is the
signature of his initial among the stars. His eyes watched it, lowlying
on the horizon, eastward of the bear, as he walked by the slumberous
summer fields at midnight returning from Shottery and from her arms.
.
Don't tell them he was nine years old when it was quenched.
.
And from her arms.
.
Wait to be wooed and won.
.
A star by night, Stephen said. A pillar of the cloud by day.
.
In asking you to remember those two noble kinsmen nuncle Richie and
nuncle Edmund, Stephen answered, I feel I am asking too much perhaps.
A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.
.
You will say those names were already in the chronicles from which he
took the stuff of his plays. Why did he take them rather than others?
Richard, a whoreson crookback, misbegotten, makes love to a widowed
Ann (what's in a name?), woos and wins her, a whoreson merry widow.
Richard the conqueror, third brother, came after William the conquered.
The other four acts of that play hang limply from that first. Of
all his kings Richard is the only king unshielded by Shakespeare's
reverence, the angel of the world. Why is the underplot of King Lear
in which Edmund figures lifted out of Sidney's Arcadia and
spatchcocked on to a Celtic legend older than history?
.
Why? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or
the usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to
Shakespeare, what the poor are not, always with him. The note of
banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds
uninterruptedly from The Two Gentlemen of Verona onward till Prospero
breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his
book. It doubles itself in the middle of his life, reflects itself in
another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe.
It repeats itself again when he is near the grave, when his married
daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adultery. But it
was the original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his will
and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words are those of
my lords bishops of Maynooth. An original sin and, like original sin,
committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is between
the lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his tombstone
under which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not withered it.
Beauty and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite variety
everywhere in the world he has created, in Much Ado about Nothing,
twice in As You Like It, in The Tempest, in Hamlet, in Measure
for Measure - and in all the other plays which I have not read.
.
He is, Stephen said. The boy of act one is the mature man of act five.
All in all. In Cymbeline, in Othello he is bawd and cuckold. He acts
and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like Jose
he kills the real Carmen. His unremitting intellect is the
hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall suffer.
.
Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said. He returns after
a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has
always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of
life ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The
motion is ended. Gravediggers bury Hamlet pre and Hamlet fils. A king
and a prince at last in death, with incidental music. And, what though
murdered and betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for, Dane or
Dubliner, sorrow for the dead is the only husband from whom they refuse
to be divorced. If you like the epilogue look long on it: prosperous
Prospero, the good man rewarded, Lizzie, grandpa's lump of love, and
nuncle Richie, the bad man taken off by poetic justice to the place
where the bad niggers go. Strong curtain. He found in the world without
as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck says:
If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his
doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend.
Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves,
meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows,
brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote
the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and
the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most
Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all
in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too
but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are
no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel,
being a wife unto himself."
.
1602 1 May: WS buys 107 acre land
. from Wm and Jno Combe for £320, delivered to Gilbert
.
July 26: Hamlet (lately acted) entered at Stationers' Hall
.
. Britannica, study guide, links, map, background, source-Saxo,
ditto, ditto, ditto, 1603 facsimile, 1604, 1623, ditto, compare multi,
promptbook, Lamb's, pix, resources, course, study guide, homework,
movies, links, links
.
. essays: links, Goethe, Ophelia, delay, balance, Nabokovian,
. lecture, tribal parodies: Broadway, Chandler, Seuss, Klingon
.
9.132 "Nine lives are taken off for his father's one. Our Father
who art in purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don't hesitate to shoot.
The bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the
concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne."
.
9.147 "What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has
faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change
of manners. Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as corrupt
Paris lies from virgin Dublin. Who is the ghost from limbo patrum,
returning to the world that has forgotten him? Who is King Hamlet?
.
It is this hour of a day in mid June, Stephen said, begging with a
swift glance their hearing. The flag is up on the playhouse by the
bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden.
Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their sausages among the
groundlings.
.
Shakespeare has left the huguenot's house in Silver street and walks
by the swanmews along the riverbank. But he does not stay to feed
the pen chivying her game of cygnets towards the rushes.
The swan of Avon has other thoughts.
.
The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the
castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is
the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare
who has studied Hamlet all the years of his life which were not vanity
in order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to
Burbage, the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of
cerecloth, calling him by a name: 'Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit,'
bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince,
young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has
died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever. Is it possible
that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in the vesture
of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words to his own
son's name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been prince
Hamlet's twin), is it possible, I want to know, or probable that he
did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises:
you are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother
is the guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?"
.
9.666 "Two deeds are rank in that ghost's mind: a broken vow and
the dullbrained yokel on whom her favour has declined, deceased
husband's brother. Sweet Ann, I take it, was hot in the blood.
Once a wooer, twice a wooer."
.
9.828 "A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a
necessary evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his
father's death. If you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable
daughters, with thirtyfive years of life, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra
vita, with fifty of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from
Wittenberg then you must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the
lustful queen. No. The corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the
night. From hour to hour it rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of
fatherhood, having devised that mystical estate upon his son.
Boccaccio's Calandrino was the first and last man who felt himself with
child. Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to
man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only
begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which
the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is
founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro
and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood.
Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true
thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father
of any son that any son should love him or he any son?
.
They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal
annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities,
hardly record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters,
lesbic sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with
grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The son
unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection, increases
care. He is a new male: his growth is his father's decline, his youth
his father's envy, his friend his father's enemy.
.
What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.
.
Sabellius, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the
field, held that the Father was Himself His Own Son. The bulldog of
Aquin, with whom no word shall be impossible, refutes him. Well: if
the father who has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a
father be a son? When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet
of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote Hamlet he was not the
father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt
himself the father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather,
the father of his unborn grandson who, by the same token, never was
born, for nature, as Mr Magee understands her, abhors perfection."
.
28 September: WS buys from Walt.
?Gabley cottage and garden at Chapel Lane
.
. [etext] [cite]
.
1603 7 Febr: Troilus and Cressida, already acted, licensed as book
.
19 May: James I gives WS. Co. license
.
. etext [cite]
.
1604 15 March: WS with 8 actors walks in James' formal entry
.
. [facsimile] etext
.
July: WS sues (Stratford) Ph. Rogers £1-19-10
.
. etext [cite]
.
1 Nov. Othello played before James.
.
26 Dec: Measure for Measure
.
1605
.
1605-6. Gunpowder Plot trials. Rookwood lived at Clopton House
.
. fansite [background] [Cath] transcript
.
. Ambrose Rookwood "In order to be closer to the center of operations,
he rented Clopton Hall, near Stratford-upon-Avon, and moved his
household there." [bio] [house]
.
26 July: WS buys for £440 31 yrs of 92 years lease of 1/2 Stratford
tithes from Rph Hubaud
.
. [cite] ditto
.
Macbeth begun
.
. [backgrounds]
.
1606: Henry Garnet, jesuit equivocator, executed
.
. [bio] [Cath] wrote "A Treatise on Equivocation"
.
. equivocation is a major theme in Macbeth: "Faith, here's an
equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale;
who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate
to heaven" [notes]
.
April: Macbeth staged
.
. [background] [cf Gunpowder Plot]
.
26 Dec: King Lear staged at Whitehall
.
. Lamb's, facsimile, links
.
. Also: profanity discouraged [cite]
.
1607 Pericles staged
.
9.334 "Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said,
there must have been first a sundering.
.
Christfox in leather trews, hiding, a runaway in blighted treeforks,
from hue and cry. Knowing no vixen, walking lonely in the chase.
Women he won to him, tender people, a whore of Babylon, ladies of
justices, bully tapsters' wives. Fox and geese. And in New Place
a slack dishonoured body that once was comely, once as sweet,
as fresh as cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all, bare,
frighted of the narrow grave and unforgiven.
.
If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over
the hell of time of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida,
look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart
of a man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses,
Pericles, prince of Tyre?
.
A child, a girl, placed in his arms, Marina.
.
Good Bacon: gone musty. Shakespeare Bacon's wild oats. Cypherjugglers
going the highroads. SEEKers on the great quest. What town, good
masters? Mummed in names: A. E., eon: Magee, John Eglinton. East of
the sun, west of the moon: Tir na n-og. Booted the twain and staved.
.
Mr Brandes accepts it, Stephen said,
as the first play of the closing period.
.
Marina, Stephen said, a child of storm, Miranda, a wonder, Perdita,
that which was lost. What was lost is given back to him: his
daughter's child. My dearest wife, Pericles says, was like this maid.
Will any man love the daughter if he has not loved the mother?
.
Will he not see reborn in her, with the memory
of his own youth added, another image?
.
His own image to a man with that queer thing genius is the standard of
all experience, material and moral. Such an appeal will touch him. The
images of other males of his blood will repel him. He will see in them
grotesque attempts of nature to foretell or to repeat himself."
.
Dec 29: Edmund Shakespeare dies (London)
.
. info
.
. Also: act-intervals introduced [cite]
.
1608 WS sues John Addenbrooke
.
. [cite] ditto
.
Pericles printed (?5 editions 8/ ?11)
.
Feb Elizabeth Hall born
.
1609 15 Febr: WS obtains judgment against Addenbrooke £7-5.
A absconds. WS sues ?bail
.
. [cites]
.
1610 April: WS buys from Wm Combe 20 more acres
.
. [cite] ditto
.
1611 King James Bible: Psalm 46 theory
.
15 May : Winter's Tale (Globe)
. [modern review]
.
11 Sept: WS gives money to promote bill to repair roads
. [facsimile] [cite]
.
1612. [no entries]
.
1614 Oct. WS obtains from Combe's agent deed to indemnify him
against loss if common fields were enclosed
.
. [cite] ditto
.
1616 April 23 died
.
-- 25 buried. grave
.
Will facsimile, etext, cites, signatures debunk
.
9.671 "The burden of proof is with you not with me, he said frowning.
If you deny that in the fifth scene of Hamlet he has branded her with
infamy tell me why there is no mention of her during the thirtyfour
years between the day she married him and the day she buried him. All
those women saw their men down and under: Mary, her goodman John, Ann,
her poor dear Willun, when he went and died on her, raging that he was
the first to go, Joan, her four brothers, Judith, her husband and all
her sons, Susan, her husband too, while Susan's daughter, Elizabeth, to
use granddaddy's words, wed her second, having killed her first. O, yes,
mention there is. In the years when he was living richly in royal London
to pay a debt she had to borrow forty shillings from her father's
shepherd. Explain you then. Explain the swansong too wherein he has
commended her to posterity.
.
To whom thus Eglinton: You mean the will. But that has been explained,
I believe, by jurists. She was entitled to her widow's dower At common
law. His legal knowledge was great Our judges tell us. Him Satan fleers,
.
Mocker: And therefore he left out her name From the first draft but he
did not leave out The presents for his granddaughter, for his daughters,
For his sister, for his old cronies in Stratford And in London.
And therefore when he was urged, As I believe, to name her
He left her his Secondbest Bed.
.
Pretty countryfolk had few chattels then, John Eglinton observed,
as they have still if our peasant plays are true to type.
.
He was a rich country gentleman, Stephen said, with a coat of arms
and landed estate at Stratford and a house in Ireland yard,
a capitalist shareholder, a bill promoter, a tithefarmer.
Why did he not leave her his best bed if he wished
her to snore away the rest of her nights in peace?
.
He died dead drunk, Buck Mulligan capped.
A quart of ale is a dish for a king."
.
9.800 "She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed,
the mobled queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was
as rare as a motorcar is now and that its carvings were the wonder of
seven parishes. In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed
with her at New Place and drank a quart of sack the town council paid
for but in which bed he slept it skills not to ask) and heard she had
a soul. She read or had read to her his chapbooks preferring them to
the Merry Wives and, loosing her nightly waters on the jordan, she
thought over Hooks and Eyes for Believers' Breeches and The Most
Spiritual Snuffbox to Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze. Venus has
twisted her lips in prayer. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience.
It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god."
----------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
James Joyce's life of Shakespeare
annotated by Jorn Barger March 2000
http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/shakespeare.html
.
In the winter of 1912-13 in Trieste, James Joyce delivered (in English)
a series of twelve well-attended and warmly received lectures on
'Hamlet' that have unfortunately not survived. The Trieste paper
wrote (boring parts elided):
.
. "...dense yet clear concepts... noble... simple... wit and
vivacity... genuine brilliance... concise exposition of the origins
of the drama... colorful presentation of the writers in the age of
Elizabeth... outlined the character and life of Shakespeare with
particular attention to the psychological moment when he wrote Hamlet...
original and slightly bizarre talent... attractive 'causeries' [def]...
The words, the manners, and the dress of the Elizabethans stirred the
lecturer to literary and historical recollections which proved of keen
interest... he read... the attack of Voltaire on Hamlet [extract-don't
miss!] and then, suddenly, the eulogy of the same work by Georg
Brandes..." [fuller&info]
.
Since 1906 Joyce had been puzzling out how to re-stage Homer's 'Odyssey'
in modernday (ie, 1904) Dublin [parallels], and Hamlet offered a neat
semi-modern parallel to Homer's frequent use (for foreshadowing, mainly)
of the tragedy of Orestes and Agamemnon. [compared]
.
Some three years later (c1915) Joyce began writing a chapter of Ulysses
in which Stephen Dedalus analyses 'Hamlet' for an audience at the
National Library. (He finished the chapter, except for minor additions,
on 31 December 1918.) [etext]
.
Like Joyce in 1912 (we may assume), Stephen attempts to map Shakespeare
onto Hamlet's murdered father, instead of the traditional mapping onto
Hamlet. From a Homeric viewpoint, this allowed Stephen Dedalus
(Telemachus) himself to fight for his literary father's honor,
against misguided intellectual usurpers.
.
While an early draft of this chapter vanished mysteriously in 1948, a
slim notebook survives that supplies Joyce's own moderately detailed
timeline of Shakespeare's life. It's transcribed below, updated with
links to useful net resources, and annotated [eventually] with
Joycean connections.
.
Joyce's notes
.
Joyce's timeline is [gradually being] transcribed below, in unindented
boldface. Related Net.resources are linked in the indented, non-bold
sections after each of Joyce's notes. Quotes from Ulysses are labelled
with Gabler's linenumbers, unindented but not bolded.
.
1564: Plague at Stratford
.
. Plague: background, ditto
. Stratford: detailed info; England map
. Pix: onepage tour
.
Charlotte Clopton buried alive
.
. ghost story cf Juliet's fears in R&J "Shall I not, then, be stifled
in the vault?" [etext]; see 1605 below # for Clopton House's
Gunpowder-Plot connection; Shakespeare socialised there as well.
.
W.S. born
.
. [baptismal record] ditto ditto [spellings of name] ditto,
[birthplace pic] [debunking] more [schooling] ditto
.
(Jesuit)
.
. cf? "During the years that Shakespeare attended the Stratford
grammar school, at least one and possibly three headmasters stepped down
because their devotion to the catholic religion proscribed by Queen
Elizabeth. One of these masters was Simon Hunt (b. 1551), who, in 1578,
according to tradition, left Stratford to pursue his more spiritual
goal of becoming a Jesuit" [cite] [religion]
.
(M ?A. ?abort ?71)
.
. (maybe 'M H', maybe 'about', maybe 'Hubaud' (see 1605 below).
71 may imply 1571 (the year sister Anne was born) or someone
71yo in 1564 (born c1493))
.
Stratford Characters:
.
. This list of names is hard to read in my copy, but appears to
be based on the idea that 'Merry Wives of Windsor' was a parody of
Thomas Lucy and other Stratford-ites. [summary]. I haven't found
anything like these names in discussions of WS's Stratford friends [eg].
.
?Rob ?Slay,
.
Sir Thos Lucy,
.
. "engag'd him with them more than once in robbing a Park that
belong'd to Sir Thomas Lucy of Cherlecot, near Stratford." [cite] [more]
.
9.1134 "Forgot: any more than
he forgot the whipping lousy Lucy gave him."
.
?Shallow, Bardolf, John ?Paper, ??? ?Ford
.
. Shallow, Bardolf, and Ford are characters
in Merry Wives of Windsor [dp] [character names]
.
. If ?Ford could be 'Field' it would be Stratford's Richard Field,
who printed 'Venus and Adonis' [info].
.
. Etc:
. 1572 supernova
. 1576 First theater in London--Shoreditch
. 1578 Lyly's 'Euphues' launches new style [background]
. 1580: earthquake [account]
.
9.147 "What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who
has faded into impalpability through death, through absence,
through change of manners. Elizabethan London lay as far
from Stratford as corrupt Paris lies from virgin Dublin."
.
. lost years: [1586-92], review; [c1592 info]; [law training?]
.
. 1592: 20 Sept: Robert Greene's posthumous 'Groatsworth of Wit'
insults Shakespeare (first public notice). [etext] [1893 bio of RG]
Four years older than WS, achieved success in 1583.
.
9.130 "A deathsman of the soul Robert Greene called him"
.
1593: (This is the first 'real' page of the timeline, one page per year
labelled at the top center with the underlined year. Why Joyce didn't
think 1592 and earlier of any interest, I don't know!)
.
J.S. 62, M.S. 56
.
. "Shakespeare's parents were John and Mary Shakespeare, who lived in
Henley Street, Stratford. John, the son of Richard Shakespeare, was a
whittawer (a maker, worker and seller of leather goods such as purses,
belts and gloves) and a dealer in agricultural commodities." [more]
.
9.131 "Not for nothing was he a butcher's son,
wielding the sledded poleaxe and spitting in his palms."
.
Joan 24
.
. sister born 1569 [info] [chart]
.
W.S. 29
.
A.H. 37
.
. Anne Hathaway: married 28 Nov 1582 [license],
ditto, ditto, [cite] parody poem
.
9.217 "She died, Stephen retorted, sixtyseven years after she was born.
She saw him into and out of the world. She took his first embraces. She
bore his children and she laid pennies on his eyes to keep his eyelids
closed when he lay on his deathbed. ...The world believes that
Shakespeare made a mistake, he said, and got out of it as quickly
and as best he could."
.
9.250 "Is Katharine the shrew illfavoured? Hortensio calls her young and
beautiful. Do you think the writer of Antony and Cleopatra, a passionate
pilgrim, had his eyes in the back of his head that he chose the ugliest
doxy in all Warwickshire to lie withal? Good: he left her and gained the
world of men. But his boywomen are the women of a boy. Their life,
thought, speech are lent them by males. He chose badly? He was chosen,
it seems to me. If others have their will Ann hath a way. By cock, she
was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet and twentysix. The
greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis, stooping to conquer,
as prologue to the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford wench who
tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself."
.
9.1134 "Forgot: any more than he forgot the whipping lousy Lucy gave
him. And left the femme de trente ans. And why no other children born?
And his first child a girl?"
.
R.S. 19, G.S. 27, E.S. 13,
.
. brothers Richard, Gilbert, and Edmund [info] [chart]
.
S.S. 10,
.
. daughter Susanna baptised 26 May 1583 [facsimile], [cite] ditto
.
H.S. 8, J.S. 8
.
. twins born 1585 "Hamnet and Judith, named after Hamnet and Judith
Sadler, apparently lifetime friends to Shakespeare. Hamnet Sadler
was remembered in Shakespeare's will" [facsimile] [cite] ditto
.
. baptised 2 Feb (Joyce's birthday)
.
January: Richard III : Richard II
.
. III: fansite, movie, links
.
. II: links
.
February: London theatres closed : W.S on provincial tour :
?theatr closed plague
.
. [info]
.
W.S at Rose Theatre, Bankside (?run Henslowe)
.
. Rose: [website] info&pix built (and run) by Philip Henslowe in 1587.
cf Swan 1595 [interesting pic] [map] [EB-general]
.
. [Movie starts around here:] Shakespeare in Love: detailed outline,
in-jokes, critique, slam, teaching, links, webring
.
30May: death of 29yo Christopher Marlowe... staged?
[theory] [debate] [topics]
.
As You like It
.
. [staging] (mentioned again under 1599 below)
.
July: Venus and Adonis Dedicated to Southampton) : 7 editions in 7 years
.
. info&pic, old-spelling version, fansite, search, links
.
9.245 "He had a good groatsworth of wit, Stephen said, and no truant
memory. He carried a memory in his wallet as he trudged to Romeville
whistling The Girl I left behind me. If the earthquake did not time it
we should know where to place poor Wat, sitting in his form, the cry of
hounds, the studded bridle and her blue windows. That memory, Venus
and Adonis, lay in the bedchamber of every light-of-love in London."
.
July: Sonnets probably begun
.
. search, ditto, quiz, audio, settings
.
9.452 "Beware of what you wish for in youth because you will get it in
middle life. Why does he send to one who is a buonaroba, a bay where all
men ride, a maid of honour with a scandalous girlhood, a lordling to woo
for him? He was himself a lord of language and had made himself a
coistrel gentleman and he had written Romeo and Juliet. Why? Belief in
himself has been untimely killed. He was overborne in a cornfield first
(a ryefield, I should say) and he will never be a victor in his own eyes
after nor play victoriously the game of laugh and lie down. Assumed
dongiovannism will not save him. No later undoing will undo the first
undoing. The tusk of the boar has wounded him there where love lies
ableeding. If the shrew is worsted yet there remains to her woman's
invisible weapon. There is, I feel in the words, some goad of the
flesh driving him into a new passion, a darker shadow of the first,
darkening even his own understanding of himself. A like fate
awaits him and the two rages commingle in a whirlpool.
.
The soul has been before stricken mortally, a poison poured in the porch
of a sleeping ear. But those who are done to death in sleep cannot know
the manner of their quell unless their Creator endow their souls with
that knowledge in the life to come. The poisoning and the beast with two
backs that urged it King Hamlet's ghost could not know of were he not
endowed with knowledge by his creator. That is why the speech (his lean
unlovely English) is always turned elsewhere, backward. Ravisher and
ravished, what he would but would not, go with him from Lucrece's
bluecircled ivory globes to Imogen's breast, bare, with its mole
cinquespotted. He goes back, weary of the creation he has piled up to
hide him from himself, an old dog licking an old sore. But, because loss
is his gain, he passes on towards eternity in undiminished personality,
untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he has revealed.
His beaver is up. He is a ghost, a shadow now, the wind by Elsinore's
rocks or what you will, the sea's voice, a voice heard only in the heart
of him who is the substance of his shadow, the son consubstantial with
the father."
.
9.657 "Say that he is the spurned lover in the sonnets.
Once spurned twice spurned. But the court wanton spurned him
for a lord, his dearmylove.
.
As an Englishman, you mean, John sturdy Eglinton put in,
he loved a lord.
.
It seems so, Stephen said, when he wants to do for him, and for all
other and singular uneared wombs, the holy office an ostler does for
the stallion. Maybe, like Socrates, he had a midwife to mother
as he had a shrew to wife."
.
December: Titus Andronicus staged
.
1594 May: Rape of Lucrece
.
. info&pic
.
August: Merchant of Venice (?Venesyon Comedy) produced on stage
.
. [background]
.
9.748 "All events brought grist to his mill. Shylock chimes with the
jewbaiting that followed the hanging and quartering of the queen's leech
Lopez, his jew's heart being plucked forth while the sheeny was yet
alive: Hamlet and Macbeth with the coming to the throne of a Scotch
philosophaster with a turn for witchroasting. The lost armada is his
jeer in Love's Labour Lost. His pageants, the histories, sail
fullbellied on a tide of Mafeking enthusiasm. Warwickshire jesuits are
tried and we have a porter's theory of equivocation. The Sea Venture
comes home from Bermudas and the play Renan admired is written with
Patsy Caliban, our American cousin. The sugared sonnets follow Sidney's.
As for fay Elizabeth, otherwise carrotty Bess, the gross virgin who
inspired the Merry Wives of Windsor, let some meinherr from Almany grope
his life long for deephid meanings in the depths of the buckbasket."
.
November: King John (? cf. Brandes)
.
Xmas: acted before Elizabeth at Court
.
. [cite]
.
Childermas: Comedy of Errors played at Gray's Inn
.
1595 Taming of Shrew
.
9.250 "Is Katharine the shrew illfavoured?
Hortensio calls her young and beautiful."
.
All's Well that Ends Well
.
Nov: Midsummer Night's Dream
.
. guide, Lamb's, movie, links, RealAud/MP3
.
1596 9 August: Hamnet (son) dies
.
. cite
.
John Shakespeare applies for coat of arms 20 October:
College of Arms grants JS's request
.
. [original] info, [EB]
.
1597 Henry IV (2 Parts)
.
Merry Wives of Windsor
.
. [sixpences]
.
Romeo and Juliet (present form : Harris?
.
. etexts: multipage ditto
.
. staging
.
4 May: WS buys New Place for £60
.
. etext, [cite]
.
. Money equivalents: £60 = US$24,000? table
.
Xmas: Love's Labours Lost revised for production at Court
.
1598 WS lodges in Bishopsgate
.
. [cite] ditto
.
W.S. plays in Every Man in His Humour (B. Jonson) which he got accepted
.
. [cite]
.
Henry V
.
WS buys stone to repair New Place
.
. [cite] ditto
.
Two Gentlemen of Verona (last scene) revised
.
WS goes to live with mother in Henley Street
.
. [cite?]
.
15 Oct: Rich Quiney applies to WS for loan of £30
.
. [facsimile] etext
.
Famine Riots at Stratford: dearth: WS has 10 qrtrs of corn stored
.
. [facsimile] [etext] = 80 bushels
.
9.741 "And the sense of property, Stephen said. He drew Shylock out of
his own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was
himself a cornjobber and moneylender, with ten tods of corn hoarded in
the famine riots. His borrowers are no doubt those divers of worship
mentioned by Chettle Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing.
He sued a fellowplayer for the price of a few bags of malt and exacted
his pound of flesh in interest for every money lent. How else could
Aubrey's ostler and callboy get rich quick?"
.
9.788 "But a man who holds so tightly to what he calls his rights
over what he calls his debts will hold tightly also to what he calls
his rights over her whom he calls his wife. No sir smile neighbour
shall covet his ox or his wife or his manservant or his maidservant
or his jackass."
.
1599 Rich and Cuthbert Burbage demolish theater and build Globe
(?en W.S.)
.
. [cite]
.
. Globe: fansite, EB w/pix, Quicktime VR, pseudo-VR stills, map, links
.
Henry V performed
.
. [staging]
.
JS applies for leave to impale Arden arms
.
. [cite] ditto
.
Much Ado about Nothing
.
As You Like It
.
. [see 1593 above #]
.
9.623 "Twenty years he lived in London and, during part of that time,
he drew a salary equal to that of the lord chancellor of Ireland. His
life was rich. His art, more than the art of feudalism as Walt Whitman
called it, is the art of surfeit. Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack,
honeysauces, sugar of roses, marchpane, gooseberried pigeons,
ringocandies. Sir Walter Raleigh, when they arrested him, had half a
million francs on his back including a pair of fancy stays. The
gombeenwoman Eliza Tudor had underlinen enough to vie with her of Sheba.
Twenty years he dallied there between conjugial love and its chaste
delights and scortatory love and its foul pleasures. You know
Manningham's story of the burgher's wife who bade Dick Burbage to her
bed after she had seen him in Richard III and how Shakespeare,
overhearing, without more ado about nothing, took the cow by the horns
and, when Burbage came knocking at the gate, answered from the capon's
blankets: William the conqueror came before Richard III. And the gay
lakin, mistress Fitton, mount and cry O, and his dainty birdsnies, lady
Penelope Rich, a clean quality woman is suited for a player, and the
punks of the bankside, a penny a time.
.
The height of fine society. And sir William Davenant of oxford's mother
with her cup of canary for any cockcanary.
.
And Harry of six wives' daughter. And other lady friends from neighbour
seats as Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet, sings. But all those twenty
years what do you suppose poor Penelope in Stratford was doing behind
the diamond panes?"
.
1600 March: WS sues John Clayton (London) for £7
.
. [cite] ditto
.
Twelfth Night written
.
. Gabriel Harvey connection?
.
1601 J.S. 70, M.A. 64, W.S. 37, A.H. 45, G.S. 35, R.S. 27,
E.S. 21, S.S. 18, J.S. 16
.
9.879 "As for his family, Stephen said, his mother's name lives in the
forest of Arden. Her death brought from him the scene with Volumnia in
Coriolanus. His boyson's death is the deathscene of young Arthur in King
John. Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare. Who the girls in
The Tempest, in Pericles, in Winter's Tale are we know. Who Cleopatra,
fleshpot of Egypt, and Cressid and Venus are we may guess."
.
9.894 "He had three brothers, Gilbert, Edmund, Richard. Gilbert in his
old age told some cavaliers he got a pass for nowt from Maister Gatherer
one time mass he did and he seen his brud Maister Wull the playwriter up
in Lunnon in a wrastling play wud a man on's back. The playhouse sausage
filled Gilbert's soul. He is nowhere: but an Edmund and a Richard are
recorded in the works of sweet William.
.
In his trinity of black Wills, the villain shakebags, Iago, Richard
Crookback, Edmund in King Lear, two bear the wicked uncles' names. Nay,
that last play was written or being written while his brother Edmund lay
dying in Southwark.
.
He has hidden his own name, a fair name, William, in the plays, a super
here, a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set his face in a dark
corner of his canvas. He has revealed it in the sonnets where there is
Will in overplus. Like John o'Gaunt his name is dear to him, as dear as
the coat and crest he toadied for, on a bend sable a spear or steeled
argent, honorificabilitudinitatibus, dearer than his glory of greatest
shakescene in the country. What's in a name? That is what we ask
ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.
A star, a daystar, a firedrake, rose at his birth. It shone by day in
the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in the night, and by night it
shone over delta in Cassiopeia, the recumbent constellation which is the
signature of his initial among the stars. His eyes watched it, lowlying
on the horizon, eastward of the bear, as he walked by the slumberous
summer fields at midnight returning from Shottery and from her arms.
.
Don't tell them he was nine years old when it was quenched.
.
And from her arms.
.
Wait to be wooed and won.
.
A star by night, Stephen said. A pillar of the cloud by day.
.
In asking you to remember those two noble kinsmen nuncle Richie and
nuncle Edmund, Stephen answered, I feel I am asking too much perhaps.
A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.
.
You will say those names were already in the chronicles from which he
took the stuff of his plays. Why did he take them rather than others?
Richard, a whoreson crookback, misbegotten, makes love to a widowed
Ann (what's in a name?), woos and wins her, a whoreson merry widow.
Richard the conqueror, third brother, came after William the conquered.
The other four acts of that play hang limply from that first. Of
all his kings Richard is the only king unshielded by Shakespeare's
reverence, the angel of the world. Why is the underplot of King Lear
in which Edmund figures lifted out of Sidney's Arcadia and
spatchcocked on to a Celtic legend older than history?
.
Why? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or
the usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to
Shakespeare, what the poor are not, always with him. The note of
banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds
uninterruptedly from The Two Gentlemen of Verona onward till Prospero
breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his
book. It doubles itself in the middle of his life, reflects itself in
another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe.
It repeats itself again when he is near the grave, when his married
daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adultery. But it
was the original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his will
and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words are those of
my lords bishops of Maynooth. An original sin and, like original sin,
committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is between
the lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his tombstone
under which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not withered it.
Beauty and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite variety
everywhere in the world he has created, in Much Ado about Nothing,
twice in As You Like It, in The Tempest, in Hamlet, in Measure
for Measure - and in all the other plays which I have not read.
.
He is, Stephen said. The boy of act one is the mature man of act five.
All in all. In Cymbeline, in Othello he is bawd and cuckold. He acts
and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like Jose
he kills the real Carmen. His unremitting intellect is the
hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall suffer.
.
Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said. He returns after
a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has
always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of
life ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The
motion is ended. Gravediggers bury Hamlet pre and Hamlet fils. A king
and a prince at last in death, with incidental music. And, what though
murdered and betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for, Dane or
Dubliner, sorrow for the dead is the only husband from whom they refuse
to be divorced. If you like the epilogue look long on it: prosperous
Prospero, the good man rewarded, Lizzie, grandpa's lump of love, and
nuncle Richie, the bad man taken off by poetic justice to the place
where the bad niggers go. Strong curtain. He found in the world without
as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck says:
If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his
doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend.
Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves,
meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows,
brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote
the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and
the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most
Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all
in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too
but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are
no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel,
being a wife unto himself."
.
1602 1 May: WS buys 107 acre land
. from Wm and Jno Combe for £320, delivered to Gilbert
.
July 26: Hamlet (lately acted) entered at Stationers' Hall
.
. Britannica, study guide, links, map, background, source-Saxo,
ditto, ditto, ditto, 1603 facsimile, 1604, 1623, ditto, compare multi,
promptbook, Lamb's, pix, resources, course, study guide, homework,
movies, links, links
.
. essays: links, Goethe, Ophelia, delay, balance, Nabokovian,
. lecture, tribal parodies: Broadway, Chandler, Seuss, Klingon
.
9.132 "Nine lives are taken off for his father's one. Our Father
who art in purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don't hesitate to shoot.
The bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the
concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne."
.
9.147 "What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has
faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change
of manners. Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as corrupt
Paris lies from virgin Dublin. Who is the ghost from limbo patrum,
returning to the world that has forgotten him? Who is King Hamlet?
.
It is this hour of a day in mid June, Stephen said, begging with a
swift glance their hearing. The flag is up on the playhouse by the
bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden.
Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their sausages among the
groundlings.
.
Shakespeare has left the huguenot's house in Silver street and walks
by the swanmews along the riverbank. But he does not stay to feed
the pen chivying her game of cygnets towards the rushes.
The swan of Avon has other thoughts.
.
The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the
castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is
the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare
who has studied Hamlet all the years of his life which were not vanity
in order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to
Burbage, the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of
cerecloth, calling him by a name: 'Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit,'
bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince,
young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has
died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever. Is it possible
that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in the vesture
of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words to his own
son's name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been prince
Hamlet's twin), is it possible, I want to know, or probable that he
did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises:
you are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother
is the guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?"
.
9.666 "Two deeds are rank in that ghost's mind: a broken vow and
the dullbrained yokel on whom her favour has declined, deceased
husband's brother. Sweet Ann, I take it, was hot in the blood.
Once a wooer, twice a wooer."
.
9.828 "A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a
necessary evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his
father's death. If you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable
daughters, with thirtyfive years of life, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra
vita, with fifty of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from
Wittenberg then you must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the
lustful queen. No. The corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the
night. From hour to hour it rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of
fatherhood, having devised that mystical estate upon his son.
Boccaccio's Calandrino was the first and last man who felt himself with
child. Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to
man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only
begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which
the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is
founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro
and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood.
Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true
thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father
of any son that any son should love him or he any son?
.
They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal
annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities,
hardly record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters,
lesbic sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with
grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The son
unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection, increases
care. He is a new male: his growth is his father's decline, his youth
his father's envy, his friend his father's enemy.
.
What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.
.
Sabellius, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the
field, held that the Father was Himself His Own Son. The bulldog of
Aquin, with whom no word shall be impossible, refutes him. Well: if
the father who has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a
father be a son? When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet
of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote Hamlet he was not the
father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt
himself the father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather,
the father of his unborn grandson who, by the same token, never was
born, for nature, as Mr Magee understands her, abhors perfection."
.
28 September: WS buys from Walt.
?Gabley cottage and garden at Chapel Lane
.
. [etext] [cite]
.
1603 7 Febr: Troilus and Cressida, already acted, licensed as book
.
19 May: James I gives WS. Co. license
.
. etext [cite]
.
1604 15 March: WS with 8 actors walks in James' formal entry
.
. [facsimile] etext
.
July: WS sues (Stratford) Ph. Rogers £1-19-10
.
. etext [cite]
.
1 Nov. Othello played before James.
.
26 Dec: Measure for Measure
.
1605
.
1605-6. Gunpowder Plot trials. Rookwood lived at Clopton House
.
. fansite [background] [Cath] transcript
.
. Ambrose Rookwood "In order to be closer to the center of operations,
he rented Clopton Hall, near Stratford-upon-Avon, and moved his
household there." [bio] [house]
.
26 July: WS buys for £440 31 yrs of 92 years lease of 1/2 Stratford
tithes from Rph Hubaud
.
. [cite] ditto
.
Macbeth begun
.
. [backgrounds]
.
1606: Henry Garnet, jesuit equivocator, executed
.
. [bio] [Cath] wrote "A Treatise on Equivocation"
.
. equivocation is a major theme in Macbeth: "Faith, here's an
equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale;
who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate
to heaven" [notes]
.
April: Macbeth staged
.
. [background] [cf Gunpowder Plot]
.
26 Dec: King Lear staged at Whitehall
.
. Lamb's, facsimile, links
.
. Also: profanity discouraged [cite]
.
1607 Pericles staged
.
9.334 "Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said,
there must have been first a sundering.
.
Christfox in leather trews, hiding, a runaway in blighted treeforks,
from hue and cry. Knowing no vixen, walking lonely in the chase.
Women he won to him, tender people, a whore of Babylon, ladies of
justices, bully tapsters' wives. Fox and geese. And in New Place
a slack dishonoured body that once was comely, once as sweet,
as fresh as cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all, bare,
frighted of the narrow grave and unforgiven.
.
If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over
the hell of time of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida,
look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart
of a man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses,
Pericles, prince of Tyre?
.
A child, a girl, placed in his arms, Marina.
.
Good Bacon: gone musty. Shakespeare Bacon's wild oats. Cypherjugglers
going the highroads. SEEKers on the great quest. What town, good
masters? Mummed in names: A. E., eon: Magee, John Eglinton. East of
the sun, west of the moon: Tir na n-og. Booted the twain and staved.
.
Mr Brandes accepts it, Stephen said,
as the first play of the closing period.
.
Marina, Stephen said, a child of storm, Miranda, a wonder, Perdita,
that which was lost. What was lost is given back to him: his
daughter's child. My dearest wife, Pericles says, was like this maid.
Will any man love the daughter if he has not loved the mother?
.
Will he not see reborn in her, with the memory
of his own youth added, another image?
.
His own image to a man with that queer thing genius is the standard of
all experience, material and moral. Such an appeal will touch him. The
images of other males of his blood will repel him. He will see in them
grotesque attempts of nature to foretell or to repeat himself."
.
Dec 29: Edmund Shakespeare dies (London)
.
. info
.
. Also: act-intervals introduced [cite]
.
1608 WS sues John Addenbrooke
.
. [cite] ditto
.
Pericles printed (?5 editions 8/ ?11)
.
Feb Elizabeth Hall born
.
1609 15 Febr: WS obtains judgment against Addenbrooke £7-5.
A absconds. WS sues ?bail
.
. [cites]
.
1610 April: WS buys from Wm Combe 20 more acres
.
. [cite] ditto
.
1611 King James Bible: Psalm 46 theory
.
15 May : Winter's Tale (Globe)
. [modern review]
.
11 Sept: WS gives money to promote bill to repair roads
. [facsimile] [cite]
.
1612. [no entries]
.
1614 Oct. WS obtains from Combe's agent deed to indemnify him
against loss if common fields were enclosed
.
. [cite] ditto
.
1616 April 23 died
.
-- 25 buried. grave
.
Will facsimile, etext, cites, signatures debunk
.
9.671 "The burden of proof is with you not with me, he said frowning.
If you deny that in the fifth scene of Hamlet he has branded her with
infamy tell me why there is no mention of her during the thirtyfour
years between the day she married him and the day she buried him. All
those women saw their men down and under: Mary, her goodman John, Ann,
her poor dear Willun, when he went and died on her, raging that he was
the first to go, Joan, her four brothers, Judith, her husband and all
her sons, Susan, her husband too, while Susan's daughter, Elizabeth, to
use granddaddy's words, wed her second, having killed her first. O, yes,
mention there is. In the years when he was living richly in royal London
to pay a debt she had to borrow forty shillings from her father's
shepherd. Explain you then. Explain the swansong too wherein he has
commended her to posterity.
.
To whom thus Eglinton: You mean the will. But that has been explained,
I believe, by jurists. She was entitled to her widow's dower At common
law. His legal knowledge was great Our judges tell us. Him Satan fleers,
.
Mocker: And therefore he left out her name From the first draft but he
did not leave out The presents for his granddaughter, for his daughters,
For his sister, for his old cronies in Stratford And in London.
And therefore when he was urged, As I believe, to name her
He left her his Secondbest Bed.
.
Pretty countryfolk had few chattels then, John Eglinton observed,
as they have still if our peasant plays are true to type.
.
He was a rich country gentleman, Stephen said, with a coat of arms
and landed estate at Stratford and a house in Ireland yard,
a capitalist shareholder, a bill promoter, a tithefarmer.
Why did he not leave her his best bed if he wished
her to snore away the rest of her nights in peace?
.
He died dead drunk, Buck Mulligan capped.
A quart of ale is a dish for a king."
.
9.800 "She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed,
the mobled queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was
as rare as a motorcar is now and that its carvings were the wonder of
seven parishes. In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed
with her at New Place and drank a quart of sack the town council paid
for but in which bed he slept it skills not to ask) and heard she had
a soul. She read or had read to her his chapbooks preferring them to
the Merry Wives and, loosing her nightly waters on the jordan, she
thought over Hooks and Eyes for Believers' Breeches and The Most
Spiritual Snuffbox to Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze. Venus has
twisted her lips in prayer. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience.
It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god."
----------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
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