Post Your William Shakespeare Observations

Self | April 23, 2016 | PJ-Comix

[PJ-Comix]

Exactly 400 years ago on this day, William Shakespeare passed this mortal coil. His effect on the English language was YUUUUUGE. Therefore I am asking for general observations on The Bard.

p.s. PLEASE DON'T post conspiracy theories about how the true author of the Shakespeare plays was really somebody else. That stuff is old AND annoying. It was SHAKESPEARE who wrote it.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Not the KJV. Most of his plays were wrote before that was done but considering how much of what he wrote referenced the Bible he was definitely well acquainted with the Good Book.

[firebrand]

Someone once said, “I refuse to go see a Shakespeare play. They’re all just a bunch of cliches strung together.”

[Savage Beast]

I like this gruesome sonnet:

Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head,
To work my mind, when body's work's expired:
For then my thoughts, from far where I abide,
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,
Looking on darkness which the blind do see:
Save that my soul's imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night,
Makes black night beauteous and her old face new.
Lo, thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind,
For thee and for myself no quiet find.

[BlueLancer]

This version of the St. Crispin's Day speech is also very good, and extremely unexpected within the context of the movie that it was in ...

Renaissance Man

[Conservative4Ever]

Excellent point. We can read Shakespeare and the King James Bible and understand the content. Read a document from King Alfred the Great era, not so much. IMHO and I am no expert, writing, the need for writing, is to record information. Commerce would have a great influence on writing and the need to change, adapt, include new words as needed to keep up with the business demands. After the fall of Rome, in Western Europe, not too much commerce taking place. The western world was busy hanging on to what little learning it had and survival. As Western Europe evolved from the ‘dark ages’ the need for language and writing skills increased exponentially. Just my thoughts.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

If we shadows have offended Think but this, and all is mended:
"If the actors in our show made you mad, it'll be OK if you look at it this way:"

That you have but slumber'd here While these visions did appear,
"You fell asleep on your butt and dreamed the whole thing."

And this weak and idle theme No more yielding but a dream.
"There was a hole in the plot you could drive a truck through."

Gentles, do not reprehend.
"Honeys, don't blame us; you chose to watch"

If you pardon, we will mend!
"But we're sorry, and we promise our next show will be funny."

And, as I am an honest Puck,
I'm not touching that one.

If we have unearned luck, Now, to 'scape the serpent's tongue
What he said.

We will make amends ere long,
"We'll buy you foot-long hot dogs!"

Else the Puck a liar call. So good night unto you all.
"Goodnight, everybody!"

Give me your hands if we be friends,
"Applaud if you like us!"

[disndat]

This is not a word police alert but instead of "were wrote" I think you meant "were wrītan" (Olde English). ;-)

[onedoug]

What think ye on the nature of the Sonnets, overall?

I among many, think at least some of them quite naughty.

[SunkenCiv]

• To The Memory Of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare, And What He Hath Left Us by Ben Jonson

  ...While I confess thy writings to be such, As neither Man nor Muse can praise too much... Soul of the age! The applause ! delight ! the wonder of our stage! ...Thou art a monument without a tomb, And art alive still while thy book doth live And we have wits to read, and praise to give... I should commit thee surely with thy peers, And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine, Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line... And shake a stage : or when thy socks were on, Leave thee alone for the comparison... Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show To whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe. He was not of an age, but for all time ! ...For though the poet's matter nature be, His art doth give the fashion... Look how the father's face Lives in his issue, even so the race Of Shakspeare's mind and manners brightly shines In his well torned and true filed lines; In each of which he seems to shake a lance, As brandisht at the eyes of ignorance. Sweet Swan of Avon ! ...Shine forth, thou Star of Poets...

(that's all of the snips found in the old A&E Biography, and some more of my choosing)

[BenLurkin]

Brush Up Your Shakespeare
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-CSb3Xe06s

[SunkenCiv]

What is now called Henry VI, pt 3 had already become a hit, and in fact was apparently what made Shakespeare a star -- the actual box office receipts were recorded and the record has survived, and apparently that one play outsold all other contemporary plays combined. WS was actor and playwrite by 1592.

• Greenes Groatsworth of Wit, bought with a Million of Repentance by Robert Greene (published September 20, 1592)

  ...there is an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum [Johnny do-it-all], is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey...

[sneakers]

Enjoy! (After the 15 second ad)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65Cy4-rfd24

[SunkenCiv]

The local high school used to (not so much now) do a big musical production, and they did "Kiss Me, Kate" when I was, hmm, 5th? 6th grade? Anyway, high school still seemed a long way off. I've never seen another production of it. The choir director had the two singers get lost in front of the curtains, turn, see the audience, and do the number, and as I recall, it was a show-stopper. Some way or other, that choir director coaxed awe-inspiring performances out of a bunch of cornfed kids.

[Salamander]

‘’Let’s kill all the lawyers,’’

[SunkenCiv]

I’m a little surprised that this old favorite hadn’t yet been posted:

Sonnet XVIII

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
   So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

and this one, in response to the loss of his only son:

Sonnet XXXIII

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine,
With all triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out, alack, he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now.
   Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
   Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.

[Salamander]

Sons Of Anarchy was Hamlet, On Harleys

[Savage Beast]

Methinks that one naughty indeed.

[trisham]

“Luca Brasi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract.”

Here’s the amazing thing. As you can see in the above quote, the early modern english of Shakespeare is as clear in these modern times as it was in 1589.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Shakespeare being such a prolific author must have left behind a tremendous library of books, letters, rough drafts of plays, scribbled notes and writings of every description.

Having read The Millionaire and the Bard, I can answer the question. First, you must understand that in the late 1500s and through Shakespeare’s 1613 death, paper - then made from cloth, not wood pulp - was expensive and scarce. Secondly, in Shakespeare’s England there was no such thing as copyright.

Consequently there was a distinct tendency to reuse paper, on the one hand, and a distinct incentive not to publish the script of your play, on the other. Publishing your play would simply enable competing play producers to plagiarize, and you would have no legal recourse against it. Consequently none of Shakespeare’s plays, and precious little other material, were published during his lifetime. In fact, we would not now have any of his plays - and we know that we do not have them all - but for the efforts of his friends/comrades (Shakespeare was an actor as well as a playwright) to publish them. Well, that is an exaggeration; someone else not connected with Shakespeare published some of his plays, tho not all in the cannon, and not word-for-word the same as in what is known as the “first folio.” (“Folio” refers to the format in which it was printed, which was the simplest but not the cheapest way in which it could have been done).

This “first folio” was created as in effect a vanity project; his friends were not actually trying to make money but had to try to break even because it was an expensive project. They decided to go for the top end - their only hope of breaking even was to position the resulting book as a mark of serious couth (as in, the opposite of uncouth). Only 750 first folios were printed, and they were printed on expensive paper. With the result that even the first one printed, which would in modern parlance be kept perhaps as a keepsake but would be marked up and used to correct typos and such, was sold.

As might be expected, some serious attrition in that 750 number has occurred in the past 390 years or so since the folios were printed starting about ten years after his death. Relatively speaking, Shakespeare was a prophet without honor in his own country. Shakespeare came into cultural vogue in a big way in Nineteenth Century America, with the result that there came to be a public outcry in Britain over the sale of first folios to American millionaires. Said millionaires reacted by using agents to represent them, so their purchases were not public knowledge.

Of those American millionaires, one was a formerly impecunious student named Folger, who became John D. Rockefeller, Sr.’s right hand man and later chairman of Standard Oil. Folger (no relation to the coffee) became a Shakespeare fanatic as a student in Amherst College, married a woman who was like-minded, and as a couple established a relationship with an American professor of Shakespeare studies and picked his brain to learn as much as possible about Shakespeare artifacts and first folios. With that background and the resources he was raking in, the Folgers (secretly, as much as possible) basically raided England of Shakespeareiana. His wife meticulously cataloged the stuff, and they paid thousands of dollars annually just to warehouse it.

So the answer to your question,

Where is this collection at so the interested may visit?

is that

1. Shakespeare aficionados can only dream of the existence of the trove of materials which you assume exists, and

2. To the extent that a trove of Shakespeare material does exist, it is in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

Something like 225 first folios are known still to exist; the Folger has about 83 of them. None of them are for sale, but the last known purchase of a first folio was for something like $5M. Each first folio is considered unique, and to have independent research value. One of them was in a British public library - available to be borrowed! - for years.

The Folger is close to where the SCOTUS bldg was later erected; Folger secretly amassed ownership of the lots over a period of years. Just when he was about to start building, Congress moved to condemn the area for an extension of the Library of Congress. Mr. Folger wrote the Librarian of Congress giving a hint of what he had, and saying that he had spent a long time acquiring that land after considering many other sites, some abroad and none in Washington. So the government had the choice of allowing The Folger Shakespeare Library to be built (and endowed) as planned - or condemn the property and know that the greatest Shakespeare library in the world would not be in Washington, DC. The librarian of Congress - and Congress itself - took the hint.

Admission to the Folger - which includes a First Folio on display (at any given time, most are in climate-controlled vaults below) and includes a theater and artifacts of Shakespeare’s period, etc - is free. I wanna go. I’m wondering if I can take a grandchild or two . . .

[Salamander]

Where I live, Highland Southern dialect is predominant.

It has bizarre similarities to Elizabethan English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_English

Apparently Wiki has changed the original name to “Appalachian English.

Meh.

Same difference.