KENT My life I never held but as a pawn
To wage against thy enemies; nor fear to lose it,
Thy safety being the motive.

The state or condition of being given or held as a pledge, or as security for the repayment of a loan; chiefly in at pawn, in pawn, †to pawn, etc. Also fig.

This is quite clearly what the Hostess of King Henry IV part II is talking about when she complains that Falstaff has been running up a tab of such proportions that she will have to “pawn both my plate and the tapestry of my dining-chambers”, even though she eventually softens up and serves him, regardless of the fact that she might have to “pawn [her] gown” to pay for it.

Returning to questions of honour, and loftier characters than the Hostess, the word “pawn” as noun or verb is everywhere: Tarquin is described “Pawning his honour to obtain his lust” in The Rape of Lucrece; the history plays are full of challenges in which the throwing of the guantlet is accompanied by the words “There is my honour’s pawn”; an Old Athenian begs for Timon’s approbation with the words “Pawn me to this your honour”; and Imogen, agreeing to keep a chest of jewels in her bedchamber (with – unbeknownst to her Iachimo – hidden inside), says, with some dramatic irony, that she will “pawn my honour for their safety”.

All this and more suggests that the correct reading of those lines from King Lear has nothing to do with chess. Rather,

KENT My life I never held but as a pawn
To wage against thy enemies; nor fear to lose it,
Thy safety being the motive.

Means: ‘I considered my life as something to be pawned, to be pledged on my honour, in order to secure thy safety’. The word “wage”, which might mislead here by evoking the language of combat too strongly, nevertheless means also, to quote the OED once more, “To deposit or give as a pledge or security”. Kent’s life is no chess piece, but rather something with a clear value in terms of both his own sense of honour and his service to Lear.

Brimstone is another word for sulphur, since sulphur is highly inflammable. The term used to be very common, and, tellingly, made it into the first English translation of the Bible. At one end of the good book, Genesis 19:24 talks about “brimstone and fire” that God rained on Sodom and Gomorrah; and, at the other end, Revelations 19:20 describes how idolators and those with the mark of the beast “were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone”.

Given these Biblical overtones, it is unsurprising to find two out of the three uses of “brimstone” in Shakespeare’s works involve oaths. Sir Toby, never one to speak with much refinement, bursts out with “Fire and brimstone!” when he overhears Malvolio’s daydreams about his employer and Toby’s sister, Olivia, for the first time. Elsewhere, Othello shouts, “Fire and brimstone!” when Desdemona unwittingly mentions how fond she is of Cassio. Given that Othello normally speaks with great polish, his slip into the same language as Sir Toby gives us a sense of how strikingly vulgar his emotional explosion must appear.

One last instance, again from Twelfth Night but this time from Sir Toby’s companion, Fabian, explaining to Sir Andrew Aguecheek that Olivia’s behaviour towards the disguised Viola/Cesario was obviously only intended to “ put fire in your heart and brimstone in your liver”. Although, as soon becomes clear, Aguecheek’s wrath is far from possessing divine proportions…

The first production destroyed the original Globe Theatre on 29 June 1613, through over-elaborate staging: at Wolsey’s banquet (1.2.49): canons fired blanks with wadding which set fire to the thatched roofing. The production could have transferred to the King’s Men’s indoor theatre at Blackfriars, location of the historical divorce trial in the play, which uses the Queen’s original words. This realistic production offended Sir Henry Wotton (who described the fire): “The King’s Players had a new play called All is True, representing some principal pieces of the Reign of Henry 8, which was set forth with many extraordinary Circumstances of Pomp and Majesty, even to the matting of the Stage; the Knights of the Order, with their Georges and Garter, the Guards with their embroidered Coats, and the like: sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous.” Supposedly, after playing Henry VIII, John Lowin passed on Shakespeare’s directions to his godson, Sir William Davenant, for a Restoration revival. This tradition, preserved by Kean, Irving, and Tree, favoured Holbein’s images of King Henry’s court; but stage dominance passed from Henry (Betterton) to Queen Katherine (Siddons) to Wolsey (Irving, Tree). Siddons intensely identified with her role, like Ashcroft (Nun, R.S.C., 1969) .

Samuel Johnson rated the dying Katherine’s scene (4.2) “above any other part of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and perhaps above any scene in any other poet, tender and pathetic, without gods, or furies, or poisons, or precipices, without the help of romantic circumstances, without improbable sallies of poetical lamentations, and without any throes of tumultuous miseries.” Though often produced for British coronations, the play suffered discrediting censure after James Spedding questioned its authorship (1850). Since then, on stylistic, not historical grounds, many scenes have been attributed to John Fletcher, Shakespeare’s successor as the King’s Men’s dramatist. Such views discouraged the play’s appreciation and production until Tyrone Guthrie’s (R.S.C.,1949). However, scholars judged Henry VIII as the best play in the BBC Shakespeare series (with Claire Bloom as Katherine; 1979).

Contributed by Hugh Macrae Richmond

York, in Henry VI part III describes how “oft Edward came to my side / With purple falchion painted to the hilt”; Anne tells Richard (currently Duke of Gloucester but future Richard III) that “Queen Margaret saw / Thy murderous falchion smoking in [her husband’s, the same Edward York is talking about] blood”; and a dying King Lear recalls that “I have seen the day, with my good biting falchion, I would have made them skip”. Elsewhere, The Rape of Lucrece accounts for half of all Shakespeare’s uses of the word, fittingly enough as ‘falchion’ is noted by the OED as often being a poetic synonym for the monosyllabic “sword”. Shakespeare’s concentration on Tarquin’s “falchion” in his long poem, however, hints at another meaning:

His falchion on a flint he softly smiteth,
That from the cold stone sparks of fire do fly;
Whereat a waxen torch forthwith he lighteth,
Which must be lode-star to his lustful eye;
And to the flame thus speaks advisedly:
‘As from this cold flint I enforced this fire,
So Lucrece must I force to my desire.’

The coordintation of Tarquin’s falchion, the sparks of its sharpening, and the fires of lust in this stanza underline a link between the Roman man’s weapon and his libido. Indeed, what is obvious here can be glimpsed in King Lear’s regret that he was no longer sufficiently strong and manly to wield a falchion in defence of Cordelia. Taking this connection between falchions and the phallus in a different direction brings us to Shakespeare’s last use of the word, and the only one from a comedy. Boyet, joining in the group mocking of Holofernes at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost, tells the poor man that his face resembles “The pommel of Caesar’s falchion”, by far the least impressive part of this weapon.

You normally find the word ‘nonce’ in phrases with ‘for’, and Shakespeare gives us two of these. The most famous by far occurs at the end of Hamlet, when Claudius reveals one of the measures he will take to ensure Laertes victory in the upcoming duel between him and Claudius’ son-in-law.

CLAUDIUS When in your motion you are hot and dry,–
As make your bouts more violent to that end,–
And that he calls for drink, I’ll have prepar’d him
A chalice for the nonce; whereon but sipping,
If he by chance escape your venom’d stuck,
Our purpose may hold there.

Here, “for the nonce” means ‘for the particular purpose’ or, more likely, ‘for the particular occasion’. Both phrases depending on the original Old English sense of nonce as ‘one’ and thus also translatable as ‘for that one purpose’ or ‘for that one occasion’. The second of Shakespeare’s uses of the word ‘nonce’ – in – illustrates this clearly, as Pointz explains how he will camouflage his and Prince Hal’s clothes, for the express purpose of surprising Falstaff and the others on Gad’s Hill even more effectively: “sirrah, I have cases of buckram for the nonce, to immask our noted outward garments.”

One final nonce, that occurring in Henry VI part I. An Auvergnat Countess has taken the British captain Talbot prisoner, and is more than a little puzzled by the way in which her captive laughs and jokes about his being only Talbot’s “shadow”, since the captain is without his soldiers.

COUNTESS This is a riddling merchant for the nonce;
He will be here, and yet he is not here:
How can these contrarieties agree?

The ‘nonce’ here is probably best glossed as the third sense of the phrase ‘for the nonce’: quite simply, ‘verily, indeed’.

As Octavius’ comments make clear, “wassail” is often not too highly regarded. Originally, the practice of wassailing involved a trip from door to door singing carols; however, this pleasant activity could easily become less cheery when the carollers requested alms and drink or, after having received their drink, then became rowdy. This is the sense of wassail most often found in Shakespeare (is Shakespeare a grinch? Again, the question seems relevant). Take this famous passage from Hamlet as an example, where “wassail” is synonymous with unruly behaviour:

HAMLET The King doth wake to-night and takes his rouse,
Keeps wassail, and the swaggering up-spring reels;
And, as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,
The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out
The triumph of his pledge.

Similarly, it is with drink and “wassail” that Lady Macbeth plans to befuddle the guards around King Duncan, thus allowing her husband a chance at regicide.

Not to finish on a dismal note, I leave you with the last two occurrences of Shakespeare’s five mentions of “wassail”. Falstaff, being rather fat, compares himself to a “wassail candle” since he, like such objects, is made of “tallow”. In Love’s Labour’s Lost Berowne, last seen talking about Christmas, also gives us a reference to wassail, describing Boyet as “wit’s pedlar, and retails his wares / At wakes, and wassails, meetings, markets, fairs [...]”.

Indeed, one may suspect that the turkey was a rare sight in London, since Shakespeare is often careful to make clear that he is talking about the bird, especially when comparison to this particular avian is used as an insult. When the welshmen, Gower and Fluellen, see Pistol in Henry V, they describe him “swelling like a turkey-cock”. When Fabian wants to capture the hoodwinked Malvolio’s state of mind, he too reaches for the Christmas bird, saying that “Contemplation makes a rare turkey-cock” out of Olivia’s steward. These two examples suggest a link between the turkey and pride, perhaps based on the ostentation of serving this delicacy at one’s table. Certainly, Gremio, reflecting on what makes him an eligible batchelor is very proud of another import, this time actually coming from the Middle East (whereas turkeys came from the New World), namely his “Turkey cushions”.

The final reference to a turkey in Shakespeare is the most banal, two salesmen in Henry IV part I, in a scene often excised, complain about their wares, and especially their far-from-festive turkeys…

2. CAR. I have a gammon of bacon and two razes of ginger, to be delivered as far as Charing-cross.
1. CAR. ‘Odsbody! the turkeys in my pannier are quite starved.

BEROWNE Why should I joy in any abortive birth?
At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled shows;
But like of each thing that in season grows;
So you, to study now it is too late,
Climb o’er the house to unlock the little gate.

Of course, though, Christmas is about more than weather, and, as Berowne’s ‘everything in its time’ argument suggests, there were a host of traditional things to do. Eat turkey (as Henry VIII was one of the first to do), munch pies and make merry until Epiphany (or Twelfth Night) marked the climax of festivities. As regards specific entertainment, Berowne, speaking of his failed plan to impress the ladies two-thirds of the way through the play, mentions one such activity:

BEROWNE I see the trick on’t: here was a consent,
Knowing aforehand of our merriment,
To dash it like a Christmas comedy.

”A Christmas comedy” refers to the many plays put on to entertain revellers in the Christmas season, and may even refer to a specific performance of The Comedy of Errors at Gray’s Inn on 28th December 1598, which, ending in uproar, did not go well at all.

My final reference to Christmas comes from another of Shakespeare’s comedies, The Taming of the Shrew, and this time reveals a rather low opinion of the festive period. A troop of actors arrive at Christopher Sly’s house in an attempt to cheer him up; surprised, he questions his servants about their intent.

SLY. Marry, I will; let them play it. Is not a commonty a Christmas gambold or a tumbling-trick?
PAGE. No, my good lord; it is more pleasing stuff.

GLOSTER. To fight on Edward’s party for the crown;
And for his meed, poor lord, he is mew’d up.
I would to God my heart were flint, like Edward’s,
Or Edward’s soft and pitiful, like mine:
I am too childish-foolish for this world.

QUEEN MARGARET.Hie thee to hell for shame and leave this world,
Thou cacodemon! there thy kingdom is.

The fact that Richard and those others on stage not only ignore this reference but go on to talk openly of how the one of Shakespeare’s most famous villains would be followed “if [he] should be our king” turn what might have been a biting interjection from the former queen into a proof of her waning power and Richard’s waxing strength. Just what, though, is a cacodemon?

Well, the word means ‘evil spirit’ and so might be adequately translated by lopping off its prefix and just using ‘demon’ (as the ‘No Fear Shakespeare’ does). ‘Demon’, in our AD society is always negative so the prefix caco-, meaning bad and found, for example, in cacophony (bad sound) and cacogastric (bad digestion), would seem to be redundant.

I’m not so sure, though. Shakespeare could have written ‘Thou art a demon’ and preserved his meter, but chose instead the pagan form, dating from the time when a demon or daimon could be good (eudaimon or agathodaimon) or bad (our cacodaimon). I think he did this to capture something superlative about Richard: as his actions in the play will prove, this character is not just diabolic, but superlatively so, evil even amongst other evils, and thus truly, as the ignored Margaret puts it, a caco-demon.

As its length would indicate, this is not intended as a scholarly study of the cultural significance of First-Folio ownership; rather, it is, as Rasmussen himself notes in his acknowledgements, a “trade book”. In this respect, there is a great deal here for the Shakespeare enthusiast if not for the Shakespeare expert, and all presented in small, bite-size chunks. Sometimes even an enthusiast might wish for a little more detail, however. My favourite chapter, that detailing Charles I’s First Folio and his annotations of the work, is remarkable for using the historical object as a window into Charles’ imprisonment and mental state, but such an approach is all too brief and lasts only for a mere two pages in a largish font. The next chapter takes us to the bar in which Quentin Tarantino filmed Kill Bill, and an excited description of how one researcher found a hair trapped in the ink of a First Folio. It is of itself a fascinating idea, but, again, lasts for only a few pages before a chapter on a botched attempt to steal a copy of this book takes its place. Despite this endless variety, Rasmussen is able to provide us with little facts at every turn, and it is a testament to his knowledge of the subject, that he is able to wear it all so lightly indeed.

I must confess that as I continued with this book, I had the guilty desire that Rasmussen would depart from what actually happened to the First Folios and begin a fictitious account. Although much of what The Shakespeare Thefts reveals confirms the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction, one can’t help but think that fiction is still often much neater and more readable than truth. So many different things have happened to so many different copies of the First Folio that it would have been impossible to impose a single narrative on them all, and the problems of this constantly moving text are to a certain extent the problems of its topic. The title of the work makes for a particularly good example: it tries to impose some order with the word “Thefts”, but many of the anecdotes told within have little to do with larceny at all. The title, perhaps revealingly, also makes me think of J.L. Carrell’s successful The Shakespeare Secret (2008), a book which does use fiction to create a riveting, coherent narrative out of the multitudinous facts of manuscript transmission.

I enjoyed this book, and after having eagerly turned all its pages, finished it in possession of several new tidbits of information that I did not possess before, such as the fact that a clause in a Japanese will has hidden a Folio from the world for thirteen years, and that the bullet lodged in one Folio stopped at Titus Andronicus. For this, I would recommend the book as a stocking-filler for a Shakespeare buff, although, even then, be prepared to find the aforesaid buff perhaps wanting a little more when he has consumed this book.

One final comment, as one of those in charge of a website devoted to making information about Shakespeare as widely accessible, as open, as possible. At several points, Rasmussen correctly emphasises the importance of the detailed descriptions that he and his team have made of each Folio, since these descriptions make those volumes “The World’s Worst Stolen Treasures”, capable of being recognised by anyone with the information he has codified. Unfortunately, the fruits of Rasmussen’s research are only available in the weighty tome that is The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue, and would, I believe, be of greater service to the scholarly community as an online database. I do not know if his publishers have such plans, but given the evident wealth of information available, it really does seem a logical step.

Further, if this database one day became open access, then everyone, their appetite whetted by Rasmussen’s little book, would be able to marvel at the strange and true accounts all jostling for space in The Shakespeare Thefts.

AUTOLYCUS Here’s one to a very doleful tune. How a usurer’s wife was brought to bed of twenty money-bags at a burden, and how she long’d to eat adders’ heads and toads carbonadoed.

Everywhere else in Shakespeare’s works, the ‘extended use’ is almost always an insulting one. Used as a verb, ‘carbonado’ means “to cut, slash or hack”, and sometimes to grill, as though one were making a Italian fish dish out of one’s adversaries. Thus Kent’s threat to Oswald in King Lear is particularly graphic about the courtier’s skinny legs:

KENT Draw, you rascal: you come with letters against the king; and take vanity the puppet’s part against the royalty of her father: draw, you rogue, or I’ll so carbonado your shanks: – draw, you rascal; come your ways!

Whilst the Clown of All’s Well that Ends Well suspects that such harsh treatment has already been given to Lafeu’s visage, which he calls a “carbonadoed face”. Given that ‘carbon’ (coal) is visible in ‘carbonadoed’ and ‘fire’ (‘feu’ in French) visible in Lafeu, the Clown is also playing on the lordling’s name here. No such subtlety for Falstaff who is simply terrified of meeting a gristly end as he blusters away on the battlefield of Henry IV part I.

FAL Well, if Percy be alive, I’ll pierce him. If he do come in my way, so; if he do not, if I come in his willingly, let him make a carbonado of me. I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath: give me life; which if I can save, so; if not, honour comes unlooked for, and there’s an end.

Two final observations on this word. First, it only ever appears in prose, hinting at both the word’s tongue-twisting qualities and its potentially lower register. Second, as a verb and as a noun, it bears the shameful ‘obs.’ in the OED. Please, therefore, kind reader, bring it out of obsolescence, and threaten to carbonado either your fishes or your foes.

On the 11th July, the Open Literature (now Open Humanities) mailing list got an email about a competition being run by the University of Bologna called ‘Inventare il Futuro’ or ‘Inventing the Future’. On the 28th October, Hvaing submitted an application on behalf of the OKF, we got an email saying that our idea had won us €3 500 of funding. Here’s how.

The Idea: Open Reading

The competition was looking for “innovative ideas involving new technologies which could contribute to improving the quality of civil and social life, helping to overcome problems linked to people’s lives.” Our proposal, entered into the ‘Cultural and Artistic Heritage’ category, proposed joining the OKF’s Public Domain Calculators and Annotator together, creating a site that allowed users more interaction with public domain texts, and those texts a greater status online. To quote from our finished application:

Combined, the annotator and the public domain calculators will power a website on which users will be able to find any public domain literary text in their jurisdiction, and either download it in a variety of formats or read it in the environment of the website. If they chose the latter option, readers will have the opportunity of searching, annotating and anthologising each text, creating their own personal response to their cultural literary heritage, which they can then share with others, both through the website and as an exportable text document.

As you can see, with thirty thousand Euros for the overall winner, we decided to think very big. The full text, including a roadmap is available online. Many thanks to Jason Kitkat and Thomas Kandler who gave up their time to proofread and suggest improvements.

The Winnings: Funding Improvements to OKF Services

The first step towards Open Reading was always to improve the two services it proposed marrying: the Annotator and the Public Domain Calculators. With this in mind we intend to use our winnings to help achieve the following goals, although more ideas are always welcome:

• Offer bounties for flow charts regarding the public domain in as yet unexamined jurisdictions.
• Contribute, perhaps, to the bounties already available for implementing flowcharts into code.
• Offer mini-rewards for the identification and assessment of new metadata databases.
• Modify the annotator store back-end to allow collections.
• Make the importation and exportation of annotations easier.

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if any of this is of interest. An Open Humanities Skype meeting will be held on 20th November 2011 at 3pm GMT.

MARIA Dumaine was at my service, and his sword:
‘No point’ quoth I; my servant straight was mute.

KATHARINE Lord Longaville said, I came o’er his heart;
And trow you what he call’d me?

PRINCESS Qualm, perhaps.

However, Katharine’s reference to Longaville’s heart hints at a rather more sinister origin to the word, a sense still active at Shakespeare’s time and which here makes the Princess’ quip considerably more cutting. In Henry VI part II, for example, Glocester seems to be affected by rather more than a feeling of compunction, as he finds himself unable to continue reading the harsh details of the proposed peace settlement with France:

GLOSTER Pardon me, gracious lord;
Some sudden qualm hath struck me at the heart
And dimm’d mine eyes, that I can read no further.

Glocester, who will die later in the trilogy from his weak heart, here suffers the first signs of illness. This is the original, sinister, meaning of qualm: in Old English it means death, plague and calamity; and by Shakespeare’s era, it meant a sudden fit of faintness or sickness (as well as the modern sense). Other, related, and long-gone meanings for qualm include the cry of a raven (a bird long associated with mortality), and the act of boiling (the result of confusion between warm/walm/qualm).

One final example completes the picture: Beatrice, having unwittingly revealed her affection for Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing is simultaneously teased and comforted by Margaret.

BEATRICE It is not seen enough, you should wear it in your cap. By my troth, I am sick.

MARGARET Get you some of this distilled Carduus Benedictus, and lay it to your heart: it is the only thing for a qualm.

Margaret’s joke only works here when you understand that “qualm” was both a misgiving and a legitimate medical syptom, and thus doubly apt for treatment by exposure to “Carduus Benedictus”, latin for ‘Blessed Thistle’ but innuendo for something much more romantic.

FORD Well met, Mistress Page. Whither go you?
MISTRESS PAGE Truly, sir, to see your wife. Is she at home?
FORD Ay; and as idle as she may hang together, for want of company. I think, if your husbands were dead, you two would marry.
MISTRESS PAGE Be sure of that,–two other husbands.
FORD Where had you this pretty weather-cock?
MISTRESS PAGE I cannot tell what the dickens his name is my husband had him of. What do you call your knight’s name, sirrah?
ROBIN Sir John Falstaff.
FORD Sir John Falstaff!
MISTRESS PAGE He, he; I can never hit on’s name. There is such a league between my good man and he! Is your wife at home indeed?
FORD Indeed she is.
MISTRESS PAGE By your leave, sir: I am sick till I see her.

The exchange is worth quoting, not just for its sly reference to lesbianism, but to give a taste of the relaxed style of this dialogue: Mistress Page is on her way to something far more interesting, but takes the time to chat with Robin and Ford. This laid-back context is worth noting, particularly when we recall that the word ‘dickens’ means, according to the OED, ‘devil’.

No-one is quite sure of the etymology of ‘dickens’, but its presence as a modest and far from violent oath, in tune with Shakespeare’s comedy, is only attested from 1599 and Thomas Haywood’s King Edward IV. The exclamation is thus predated by the surname Dickens, which goes back much earlier, as all those places named after members of the Dickens family in the States would suggest. Quite what the Dickens’ family would have made of their family name becoming a mild oath is anyone’s guess, as they could have hardly seen the most probable evolution (from ‘devil’ to ‘devil-kins’ to ‘dickens’) coming.

One final note on the word ‘dickens’, or, more specifically, on the phrase ‘what the dickens’, which has remained a part of our everyday language long after we stopped saying ‘where the dickens have you been?’ and so forth. Bernard Levin famously places it amongst those expressions we use nowadays and owe to Shakespeare, even though Shakespeare was neither its originator nor first recorder. This is an important and oft-overlooked distinction: Shakespeare may be the source of many an English colloquialism, but he is rarely its inventor. Rather, his dramatist’s ear has placed all the curious turns of English in one particularly rich and varied oeuvre, and so facilitated their continuation.

Macbeth also provides us with an example of what is now the most recognisable modern sense of the word, a forerunner or, figuratively, an omen. Moments before battle is joined at Dunsinane, he orders his soldiers to “Make all our trumpets speak; give them all breath, / Those clamorous harbingers of blood and death.” Detectable in these words, although used metaphorically, is the remains of the pomp and circumstance that joins harbingers to greatness: thus the “blood and death” he foresees will be of great magnitude, since it is important enough to send harbingers in advance of itself.

To conclude, therefore, we find two senses of this word in Shakespeare, one who searches lodging and one who announces the arrival of another; in both, the presence of harbingers is a sign of greatness, whether the situation be literal or figurative. In this way Hamlet emphasises the country-wide menace of events in Denmark by calling them “harbingers preceding still the fates”; Puck captures the stunning magic of the dawn when he notices that “yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger”; and a misled Luciana underlines the bitterness of her counsel to “Apparel vice like virtue’s harbinger”.

The name Philomela, although Ovid thought that it came from the Greek for ‘lover of song’, actually seems to mean lover of fruit, lover of apples (one thinks of Paris’s choice) and lover of sheep. These bucolic references recur in Shakespeare’s sweetest evocation of the Philomel story, the songs chanted by Titania’s fairy attendants in the woods of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Philomel, with melody,
Sing in our sweet lullaby:
Lulla, lulla, lullaby; lulla, lulla, lullaby:
Never harm, nor spell, nor charm,
Come our lovely lady nigh;
So good-night, with lullaby.

Of course, no mention of Philomel could ever be completely without menace, and, despite the fairies’ wishes, Oberon soon appears to charm his lady into humiliating infatuation with an ass. Chaucer, in Troilus and Criseyde has a roughly similar scene, when Criseyde, not long before she and Troilus consummate their love in the night, whiles away nightfall listening to the nightingale, the bird into which tradition holds Philomela was transformed, as it sings “ayein the mone shene, / […] a lay / Of love, that made hir fresh and gay”. Of course, Criseyde’s misfortunate is both further off and much more grave than the recumbant Titania’s, yet still both scenes portray the two halves of the Philomela story: the evil dealt to a woman at the hands of a man, and the beauty of the bird’s song that charms and testifies to the tragedy.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, himself hellenophile and here rephrasing a common Ancient Greek sentiment, wrote that “Most wretched men / Are cradled into poetry by wrong, / They learn in suffering what they teach in song.” The words come from his Julian and Maddalo, a poem heavy with the poet’s own introspection, yet they also play out the shape of the Philomela story: great suffering and beautiful song. Shakespeare’s sonnet 102 draws a parallel between the sonneteer and the songbird (here called ‘Philomel’), since “like her, I sometime hold my tongue: / Because I would not dull you with my song.” Being Shakespeare, this is something of a new twist: the silence of the nightingale is the interest of the amorous sonneteer; the lack of music both the promise of future, better, sounds, and the repudiation of a link between song and suffering. This contrasts with Raleigh’s poem (written in response to one by Christopher Marlowe), where the silence of the nightingale is, if anything, more terrifying than her song, being a sign of “cares to come”.

Yet Shakespeare does not shy away from this menace either: his Lucrece, herself a victim of rape, sings “her nightly sorrow” like the nightingale in The Rape of Lucrece, and then, not soon after, curses the joyful morning chorus and instead invites Philomel’s avian to warble an accompaniment to her grief. Elsewhere, Iachimo, the villain of Cymbeline, notes with glee that Imogen, the woman whose love for Posthumus he will misrepresent, read before sleeping “The tale of Tereus” and “that the leaf’s turn’d down / Where Philomel gave up”. Whether evil man or female victim, the Greek myth serves to sharpen the emotion of the scene. The danger, of course, is that things may seem too pat, the identification between Greek heroine and Shakespearean character too neat, and the art thus fatally blunting the articulation of sorrow felt or sorrows still to fall.

This point brings us to Titus Andonicus, where an early-career Shakespeare is, even more than elsewhere, interested in the limits and techniques of his writing. Specifically, the playwright seems to be measuring himself against the Latin poet Ovid, whom he would have studied at length in school and whose version of the Philomela story he would consequently know. It is to this chapter of Ovid’s Metamorphoses that a tongueless Lavinia turns to tell her family about what the young Goths have done to her; yet, as her father Titus himself remarks, Lavinia is in a state “worst than Philomel”. Titus’ brother Marcus is even clearer, bursting into an uncomfortably long speech before the mangled woman to say that her agressor “hath cut those pretty fingers off / That could have better sew’d than Philomel”, Ovid’s heroine communicating her plight in a tapestry sent to her sister Procne.

If we add all this emphasis on Lavinia suffering more than Philomela to poets’ connections between suffering and song embodied in the nightingale trope, a few observations can be made. What pushes Shakespeare’s Lavinia beyond the Ovidian pale is a particularly obvious wound: Philomela’s rape and the cutting of her tongue are not immediately visible injuries, whereas the loss of Lavinia’s hands is. In this respect Shakespeare surpasses Ovid in a dimension offered to him as a playwright and not to Ovid or other writers of poems: the actor’s physical body on the stage. Even the rudimentary stagecraft of an Elizabethan stage could bind and bloody hands, and Lavinia’s appearance on a stage without these appendages makes for a theatrical spectacle as much as a poetical one. In a very specific, dark sense of the term, Lavinia is Shakespeare’s transformation of Philomela, her metamorphosis marked right before the spectator’s eyes.

The internet and its multitudinous voices regularly remind me of that legendary property, that ethereal, mythic status held by Shakespeare and his works. In the online community, stories are borrowed from every orifice, from every nook and cranny on the information superhighway. Borrowed, acquired, improved, weakened and every other operation under the sun. There is now, at our fingertips, a vast, unprecedented repository of information, of both fact and fiction, that we draw upon for inspiration, and, more specifically, make metatheatrical comment on in contemporary performance (see the work of Rimini Protokoll for an example). The universal archive of the internet is enriched with such mammoth investment from all the peoples of the world that what I call freedom of narrative could not help but be born out of it. This freedom is rooted in the online ability to interpret, to adapt, and to debate every story, every picture and every single syllable of a sound bite; it is the internet’s most wondrous feature. No longer are we so tightly bound to a corporate or state perspective on events, should they have chosen to report them at all. Naturally bias and prejudice are is still rife, but there are, however, simply so many reputable bloggers, so many mobile phone recordings of live events and so many grassroots reporters that stories can no longer be easily quashed.

This free narrative that we discover on the internet pervades the best of contemporary performance on offer today, as evidenced by the latest rise of verbatim theatre, its renaissance due to the ease with which broad sample data can now be obtained. My troupe,The Propaganda Company decided that we should examine this multiple perspective phenomenon for our next show, by utilising one of the most popular texts in the theatrical canon. Enter Lear.

A scholarly chap once said of our King Lear script that we had “barbarized” the text. I can understand his view: our text comprises only a third of the original’s lines, is encompassed in a one act structure of thirteen scenes and has no Edgar, no Cordelia and even fewer attendants. Our play is, of course, far from being the unique recipient of such accusations, and many other contemporary reworkings of the Bard’s portfolio suffer opprobrium for choosing to highlight a small moment or issue and then magnify it through the phenomenon of multiple perspectives. To be honest, I would have to say that I’ve witnessed some dreadful productions that aim to do just that, providing ample evidence for those thinking it better to leave well enough alone when dealing with a Shakespeare work.

Nevertheless, a blanket disapproval of modernisation, contemporising or whatever you’d like to call it simply misses both the importance of contemporary, internet-inspired, polyphonous retellings and, I’d argue also, the joyful breadth of the Bard’s original works. The latter, after all, themselves commented with varied levels of success and audacity on the issues that permeated Shakespeare’s own society and continued, with the aid of adaptation, to comment on other cultures from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. This was one of the reasons for us selecting King Lear: the play was infamously altered in 1681 by Nahum Tate to create a happier, pacified ending; Tate’s version then ran for over 200 years and appeared in Johnson’s Shakespeare folio. This Restoration adaptation’s durability suggests that successful and bold adaptations of narrative can and have been found; in the technology-heavy culture of the twentieth-first century, it seems to me that there is now more adaptation activity than ever before, under the influence of what I previously identified as the freedom of narrative.

It is my profound belief that modern audiences crave shorter, more focused and hard-hitting performances that smack of originality. One has only to tour the works of Bond, Pinter and Kane for many a vivid example. Originality, though, and especially with regard to Shakespeare, has to mean an original use of free narrative, an original commentary or retelling of something. Much to my surprise, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s recent and glorious Merchant of Venice (or should I say Merchant of Vegas?) was my most recent experience of the spirit of free narrative.

Turning further back in time, I watched, last October, the Polish company Song of the Goat do a version of Macbeth. Condensed into 75 minutes of explosive physical action and ritualistic stick-bashing, the show was a master class in polyphonic performance with an astounding intensity. Such bold reinterpretation, characteristic of free narrative, goes back, of course, to the 1960s, when the internet was but a glint in a military milkman’s eye. Today, however, in adaptations such as this polish Macbeth, we witness the huge emphasis placed on transformative perspectives, what contemporary theory calls the “neo-new take”. This approach applies (with varying degrees of credibility and success) new, personal and often subversive approaches that, rather than drag a play into our century, coax it forward, organically drawing out what matters to us: it is partly the product of ensemble creation processes, but I also attribute it strongly to what we see our far-flung fellows doing in online communities, commenting, arguing, tweeting.

Take our Lear as an example, presenting power as a muddy business where the daughters are reasonable and brutal, where Lear is a sage but callous hedonist and the Fool is his compassionate spin doctor. The greatest homage we pay to the online spirit of powerful independent thought is in Poor Tom who features frequently as a physically disturbed servant, subjected to wrath and love, but ultimately dictating the fate of his oppressors. Timely stuff we hope. It discourages some audience members from ever straying from traditional Shakespeare again but I don’t doubt that others warm to it, thus ensuring a future audience for the Bard’s works on the contemporary edge of things.

One final comment: Shylock would no doubt have vomited at the thought of thousands of global performances – traditional or much less so – of Shakespeare annually, all free from copyright and royalties. In a way, it’s the ultimate practice and example of shedding the shackles of fiscal oppression … at least creatively. At a time when many are drawing lines in the silicon of the internet in an attempt to protect and commercialise every byte of data, note of music, second of film and pixel of image available, the Bard, by virtue of his age, represents a delightful pocket of resistance, an alternative to this all-enclosing juggernaut of a system. Shakespeare is freely accessible online, not least on Open Shakespeare, and this hopefully leads to a proliferation of work amongst the modern groundlings that the internet makes of all of us, ensuring that the bard remains universally affective, and the source of further free narrative.

The life of a Shakespeare professor can be a lonely one: hours spent holed up in a library researching obscure theories about Hamlet’s sweat, or in a sunless office writing up lecture notes. That’s why we decided to start writing our blog, Everyday Shakespeare. We wanted to get some fresh air and have a little more fun with our favorite Renaissance man.

Before we got started, we had some decisions to make: Would we ‘out’ ourselves by using our own names (something most academic bloggers avoid for fear of looking un-professorial)? Would we talk about our kids? How often would we post? We’re both working moms, so we knew we were taking on a big challenge. We decided to give each day of the week its own gimmick so that we wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel every day. We were hoping that what was stifling in our everyday lives (Monday=soccer practice; Tuesday=PTA), might be freeing when it came to our everyday blogging lives (Tuesday=Magic Shake-Ball; Friday=Homebaked Shakespeare). With our schedule in place, and a blog workshop under our belts, we were ready to go.

We let down our hair, took a deep breath, and climbed out of the Ivory Tower. What we found was an undiscovered country populated with actors, teachers, obsessed Bardolators, and people on the fringe of the Shakespearean fringe. We found out that people wanted to talk about performances they’d seen, quotes they loved, characters they related to, what Shakespeare had to say about chickens — you name it. They joined the debate when we had Margaret of Anjou weigh in on the Tiger Mom controversy and Richard III review “Game of Thrones”. It was exhilarating and unpredictable. We couldn’t believe we’d been missing out on all this fun. We were hooked.

For us, blogging also confirmed what we’d both felt over the years as we poured over his characters and stories: Shakespeare was a guy who gets us, who understands our sleep-deprived, stressed out, carpooling existences even though we’re living in suburban Boston and he’s, well, dead. Shakespeare’s humor and wisdom about some of the most painful issues in our lives had always been a reassurance and a comfort — and a lot cheaper than therapy. Now we had an international support group! We got fabulous feedback when we talked about how Shakespeare nailed depictions of teenage bullies, marital sex, and parental guilt. People cyber-laughed at our McSweeney’s pieces, “Letters to Santa from Shakespeare’s Characters” and “willslist”, our craigslist parody where we imagined Lady Macbeth trying to hawk a bloody mattress and Hamlet looking to sell his shower caddy and Ikea dresser before jumping off the Wittenberg University bell-tower.

We like to think that Shakespeare would have approved of what we’re doing. After all, for someone like him who was determined to win over wealthy folks and groundlings alike, the far-reaching democracy of the blogosphere would have been a dream come true. Not to mention the international possibilities. Shakespeare fantasized about foreign lands, and the people he might have met there; with the internet, he could have Friended all of them.

We don’t know what Shakespeare would have tweeted, but we do know he’d have had millions of followers.

He had us at “Good morrow”.

LAERTES To his good friends thus wide I’ll ope my arms;
And, like the kind life-rendering pelican,
Repast them with my blood.

With these words, the hot-blooded lord promises cooperation with the friends of his murdered father (such as Claudius), even as he plots brutal revenge on his father’s murderer, Hamlet. The idea of the pelican wounding itself to feed and sustain its young, perhaps the result of the peculiar way in which the bird will hold its beak-pouch when regurgitating food for its infants, makes for an image of self-sacrifice that dates back to medieval texts. The self-sacrificing pelican, supposedly giving up its blood, imitates Jesus giving up his life, having offered his blood and body in the form of bread and wine to his believers at the Last Supper.

We find the Christian-avian overlap elsewhere in Shakespeare’s works: King Lear reverses the trope when he points to a noticeable lack of Christian charity in his “pelican daughters”, trying to drain him dry; elsewhere, John of Gaunt (near to death at the start of Richard II) accuses the King with another bitter reference to the “life-rendering pelican”:

GAUNT O! spare me not, my brother Edward’s son,
For that I was his father Edward’s son.
That blood already, like the pelican,
Hast thou tapp’d out, and drunkenly carous’d

Here one may draw out similarities between Richard’s improper treatment of Gaunt and the improper use made of the blood (or wine) of the pelican (or Christ). Given the strength of the association between pelicans and divinity in the medieval period, as evinced by Corpus Christi College’s heraldry, and given the fact that the historical John of Gaunt (brother to the Earl of Cambridge) died in February 1399, one may even say that this pelican, so odd to modern, secular ears, even adds a bit of period colour to this Elizabethan play

Last year, I found myself at an impasse: MA finished, PhD applications in process, an office job unrelated to my field but a pressing need to stay abreast of all matters Shakespeare for the sake of my personal and professional peace of mind. So I found myself making a choice: do I wile away the year playing time-wasting computer games, or do I push forward? Realizing for certain that Shakespeare was a topic that I was going to spend the rest of my life pursuing, I decided to jump into the fast-moving stream that is the Shakespearean discourse taking place over the internet.

I find it mind-boggling that after two short years, I have become an ‘established blogger.’ The process began when I started Why I love Shakespeare, and then decided that I did not want to restrict my musings on bibliophilia (the love of books) to Shakespeare, and started A Bibliophile’s H(e)aven. Seeking Shakespeare-loving collaborators, I have now joined the ranks of The Shakespeare Standard and Open Shakespeare, for whom I write and assist editorially.

So why the blogging addiction? Because I am a big fan of choice.

My online lifestyle began with the choice: what, in particular, will I write about? When I started with Why I Love Shakespeare, I wanted to reach out to any errant Google-er who, in the years or decades after studying Shakespeare in high school, could not understand what the ‘big deal’ was. To me, the wisdom I found between the pages of Shakespeare’s plays was a huge deal, and I wanted to share this enthusiasm with my readers by giving them pint-sized doses of what I think makes his writing so thought-provoking and relevant today.

The choice to blog about Shakespeare was a great way to work on my writing skills and keep up with the newest trends in Shakespeare criticism, but it also allowed me certain luxuries. For once, the only deadlines and business hours I operated under were my own. When I blog, I am my own boss, accountable to my readers and myself. That’s not to say I do not feel guilty when a month goes by (as it inevitably does) without a post, but it is equally important to realize that it is far too easy to type letters onto a keyboard and press ‘Post’. Within an instant, my writing is readily available for billions of people over the Internet to see – so I better only publish material that I am proud of.

While enjoying the choice to blog when I want, the blogosphere also allows me the choice to blog any way I want. For me, this means that I do not have to construct a linear narrative: if I want to talk about sonnets today and a Shakespeare film tomorrow, I can do so. With the option of labeling my posts, I have the freedom of writing about whatever inspires me at that moment. This way, my readers get a taste of the variety of ways that Shakespeare touches our lives, and if they really want, they can focus on one aspect of my blog: Reviews, Rants, Current Events, or my favorite, Arresting Images, in which I close-read small portions of Shakespeare’s texts.

What expands my readers’ choices exponentially is technology’s gift to humankind: hypertext. Hypertext allows me to accommodate a variety of different readers. Some of my readers are fellow Shakespeare scholars, and do not need further explanation when I name-drop or casually use theatre jargon. Nonetheless, many others welcome a degree of clarification, and hypertext allows these readers the choice of clicking on these concepts. With each hyperlinked word, my readers have the option of broadening their understanding of the field without being burdened by lengthy digressions or the shame of feeling patronized by a lowest-common-denominator explanation. Hypertext offers my readers a world of information at their fingertips, yet allows me to speak with the brevity that, Polonius reminds us, is the soul of wit. Even before the age of Apps and Twitter, the beauty of the Internet has always been the democracy it engenders in allowing anyone connected to hop on their own private soapbox and speak their mind. Ultimately, your decision to read my blog, or how to read my blog, is your choice, but the beauty of writing a blog is that it is always my choice to continue doing so. No grades, no deadlines, no acceptance or rejection letters, although possibly the occasional heckler. I choose to continue producing the best writing I possibly can, and the Internet itself has no choice but to listen to me. For that, I am most grateful.

Gives not the hawthorn bush a sweeter shade
To shepherds looking on their silly sheep
Than doth a rich embroider’d canopy
To kings that fear their subjects’ treachery?

Indeed, shepherds are not the only commoners to make use of the common hawthorn: the mechanicals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream turn a hawthorn bush into their “tiring house”, that part of their makeshift rehearsal space where they will go and change their clothes (‘attire’). There is something of a joke here, since the hawthorn plant forms very dense bushes indeed, and so makes for a tiring house that would be rather difficult to enter into. Orlando, in As You Like It, would certainly be aware of this density, having – according to Rosalind at least – hung “odes upon hawthorns” in her honour, despite the obvious difficulty of attaching anything to plants so tangled and boxy that Edgar, in King Lear describes the power of a winter wind as something capable of blowing through “sharp hawthorn”.

As well as all this movement through, under, onto and into hawthorn bushes, there are one or two references to their buds. The branches of this plant, when in flower, used to be carried during May Day celebrations each year, until the shift to the Gregorian calendar in 1752 meant that the hawthorn started flowering in the middle and not the start of the month. However, the link between hawthorns, May, and all that May stands for in terms of young love, was alive and well in Shakespeare’s time, when Helena, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream can bemoan such beauty in Hermia that it is more charming than all that goes on when “hawthorn buds appear”.

Last, but not least, we have the berries, and Falstaff’s contribution to this article. Declaring his love for Mrs Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor, he points out that she is not one of those “lisping hawthorn-buds that come like women in men’s apparel”, although quite what this might mean is beyond me. I shall content myself by guessing that such “hawthorn buds” stand for pathetic, weak lovers (Mercutio denounces the “lisp” of Tybalt and other “fantasticoes” in Romeo and Juliet), something that Falstaff and Mrs Ford are most certainly not.

From an early age, I’ve always loved books. In my pre-adolescent years, I loved devouring series novels and waiting for the next one to come out so I could get the next piece of the story. Now, as an adult, I love the sight of them on my shelf, I love the smell of the old book glue in the antique books I collect; I love reading them and not only learning things about myself, but so many things about the world around me.

Lately, though, as anyone would notice, the world around me is changing; no longer are books things one must lug about, or wet one’s fingers to turn the pages. Books are available everywhere in our new virtual world, via the world wide web or various e-readers. With the increased availability of books, that means there is an increased availability of knowledge; never before has a society been able to be so autodidactic. Not only can one read all forms of literature online, but also summaries, analyses, and criticism of that literature. This increased access to knowledge has created a proverbial vortex in which our lives have become mixed with the literature we love to read.

One of my literary loves is Jane Austen. I love her wit, use of irony, intrusion into her characters’ thoughts, and just the absolute faithfulness with which she presented the society in which she lived. Now, I don’t have just her novels lining my shelves; I have a hyper-concordance wherein, should I be absent from my shelf or just simply not want to flip through the book, I can search for one name or word in any one of her novels. Not only that, but there is also the Republic of Pemberley, a site that provides exhaustive information about Jane, her life and times, and her works – all at the stroke of a key. What ever did we do before the advent of this cornucopia of potential knowledge?

And then there’s Shakespeare. Oh, Will. I’ve loved him ever since I discovered in high school that I could just understand his writing without help. Unlike so many of my classmates, I got it. That doesn’t mean, though, that I’ve ever settled for my own perspective on his works. After my high school introduction, I took one class at university that lumped him in with Milton and Chaucer, another specifically focused on his tragedies. Then, after earning my degree, I went on to take a continuing education course at a different university that focused on other plays. My point is that varied perspectives enhance our understanding of all literary works. Again, we cue the world wide web with all its latent intellectual bounty. Sites like Open Shakespeare not only present his works in their entirety, but also offer critical introductions, and a Will-ophile like myself can find virtually anything necessary to learn more about Shakespeare – or to use when presenting his works to my ever virtually-evolving students.

So, what’s the point? Well, first, there is no reason not to take advantage of the virtual yet very real wealth of information at our fingertips. Second, if one is, as Lin Yutang said, to be wise and “read both books and life itself,” then we – bibliophiles and literary types, as a microcosm of a greater society – must be prepared for a paradigm shift. No longer are we wetting fingers or staining fingers with ink in order to push through to that paper or submission deadline; we are callousing fingertips and crouching over a screen that leads us all, students and teachers, to a “brave new world, / That has such people in’t!”

HAMLET [...] Sense sure you have,
Else could you not have motion; but sure that sense
Is apoplex’d; for madness would not err,
Nor sense to ecstacy was ne’er so thrall’d
But it reserv’d some quantity of choice
To serve in such a difference.

Note here that apoplexy occurs only as part of a metaphor: for Hamlet, Gertrude’s senses must have all but shut down, since such a wedding could not have occurred otherwise, in spite of all (and here comes another Greek word) the “ecstasy” she may have felt. The language of the Prince of Denmark on this topic of remarriage is full of words with classical roots and references to classical myths: one thinks of his paralleling Old Hamlet and Claudius, the former being to the latter as “Hyperion to a satyr”.

Hamlet’s description of “apoplex’d” senses may well be a sign of his hiding behind the words he learnt at university in Wittenberg; another example of the word, this time in *Coriolanus*, is far more blunt , with the word employed to describe what the play’s eponymous hero considers the dullness of peacetime.

CORIOLANUS [...] Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it’s spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men.

Coriolanus’ assessment of peace could not be further from that of Henry IV, the only character in Shakespeare’s works to die of apoplexy, and a man obsessed with maintaining the fragile equilibrium of peace installed after his rebellion and dethroning of Richard II. As Falstaff puts it, “This apoplexy [...] is a kind of lethargy, [...] a kind of sleeping in the blood, a tingling. [...] It hath it original from much grief, from study, and perturbation of the brain”. All his information, we soon learn, comes from “Galen”, quite possibly one of those books in Greek on the shelf of the young Prince of Denmark back in Wittenberg, and almost certainly present in the library of that other famous Wittenberg graduate: Dr Faustus.

It’s tempting to think that whatever you want to find out about nowadays, it’s only a click away. But with any Google search throwing up hundreds of thousands of hits, is it really that simple? I recently heard a radio discussion where it was suggested we are all “disempowered by the overload of information”, and in the academic world, it’s the same. Historian Daniel J. Cohen has said: “It is now quite clear that historians will have to grapple with abundance, not scarcity. Several million books have been digitized … and … we are confronted with a new digital …resource of almost unimaginable size”.

Cohen’s concern is over the digitization of books and manuscripts until recently only available by examining the original item, but this isn’t the only kind of project in the digital revolution. One great resource to be launched online later this year is the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700, which offers high quality descriptions, but no images. The book holdings of major libraries worldwide are now searchable online via COPAC, but it would be a mistake to think that job’s done. Although the scope is widening, only a fraction of the world’s libraries are on COPAC, and most libraries and archives contain uncatalogued materials, and have too few staff to catalogue.

Many resources for Shakespeare study are easy to find. Among texts, Folios and Quartos have been scanned, and the Internet Shakespeare Editions is producing fully-edited modern editions for the internet. Books of Shakespeare criticism have been digitized as part of mass digitization projects of texts, manuscripts and illustrations like the Google Books project or the Internet Archive. Among institutional websites the prize goes to the Folger Shakespeare Library which includes not only the Library’s catalogues but an image database, videos, and pages of outstanding articles. Modern stage production images for the Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare’s Globe are posted on their sites. It’s not a dedicated Shakespeare resource, but the ubiquitous Google search can pick up content from almost anywhere so effectively that a recent survey named Google search engines as 4 of the top 20 websites worldwide. While undeniably useful, this ease can encourage a “smash and grab” mentality which effectively decontextualises the images, video or written content.

My own experience with digital projects relates largely to the development of an online database of information about RSC productions, linking the data to catalogue records in the RSC’s Archives. This launched in 2004 as the RSC Performance Database. I was simultaneously involved in two image projects, Royal Holloway College’s Designing Shakespeare and the RSC’s Pictures and Exhibitions. The potential benefits of linking these projects together were obvious, but with each planned and funded in isolation there was no opportunity for cooperative working.

I’m going to focus on a single but very dynamic area of digital initiatives, Shakespeare on video. If you’re a student or teacher studying Shakespeare, YouTube is an obvious place to start. A search for “Shakespeare” here results in thousands of hits all by itself, without even considering the material on other video websites.

Faced with this kind of result, sites have sprung up to help filter these resources. MIT’s Global Shakespeares project “provides global, regional, and national portals to Shakespeare productions within a federated structure”, a real treasure trove containing great content. Bardfilm is a personal blog selecting and commenting on Shakespeare-related films, a fascinating collection put together by someone with a passion for the subject, though not always easy to search. Bardbox is Luke McKernan’s project, and as you’d expect from the British Library’s Moving Image curator, the site addresses issues of selection and cataloguing while also being a personal choice. Only original videos are chosen, from sites like YouTube and Vimeo. None of these sites aim to be comprehensive, and the BUFVC’s International Database of Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio is a fantastic resource which aims to fill that gap by being an “authoritative online database of Shakespeare-related content in film, television, radio and video recordings,… international in scope and hold[ing] over 7,000 records dating from the 1890s to the present day.”

While all the above offer access to information and videos themselves, there are still problems. Items are not scanned or made searchable in a consistent way, and the mass of resources that aren’t digitised are ignored. This presents a real issue with currency. The RSC’s Pictures and Exhibitions and the Victoria and Albert Museum’s PeoplePlay UK were both projects containing thousands of images, but operating on defunct platforms they have been taken down. The RSC website currently contains valuable video interviews and production clips, but will these go the same way?

What is the future for Shakespeare in the digial world? Content is certain to grow. The question “How do I find it?” can probably be solved, but only if further cataloguing is done. The other question “How do I sort out the good stuff from the rest?” is also complicated, and too large for any small group of people to answer.

One option might be to look at the sort of solutions offered by organisations like WordPress, where help is provided by the wiki-based WordPress Codex community forum. Only twenty administrators work for WordPress, but there are 115,000 self-selected members of the forum, many of whom provide content. Is a Shakespeare crowdsourcing project like this the way forward? If so, who’s going to get it started?

I take my first example from *Richard II*, not least because the word return occurs a great deal in the so-called history plays, where messengers are forever being sent to various English and French courts only to be returned again with a polite reply or, in one memorable case after a delivery of tennis balls, a declaration of war. The lines below, however, do not deal with messengers but with two quarreling Dukes, Bolingbroke and Mowbray; Richard orders them to stand down in a rare display of royal authority, even as this point marks the slow erosion of his sovereignty until he eventually resigns the crown to the returning Bolingbroke.

KING RICHARD Let them lay by their helmets and their spears,
And both return back to their chairs again:
Withdraw with us; and let the trumpets sound
While we return these dukes what we decree.

King Richard is not the only king in Shakespeare to talk of returning: Lear, who also shares Richard’s downward trajectory, has a very well-known speech about his desire not to return to his daughters’ houses. With the dethroned Lear wandering the countryside, he would resemble those messengers at the other end of the normal hierarchy, forever being sent hither and thither in the history plays, were it not for his stubborn refusal to reject all houses.

LEAR Return to her, and fifty men dismiss’d?
No, rather I abjure all roofs, and choose
To wage against the enmity o’ the air;
To be a comrade with the wolf and owl,-
Necessity’s sharp pinch!–Return with her?
Why, the hot-blooded France, that dowerless took
Our youngest born, I could as well be brought
To knee his throne, and, squire-like, pension beg
To keep base life afoot.-Return with her?
Persuade me rather to be slave and sumpter
To this detested groom.
[Pointing to Oswald.]

My last example, before I leave off for this week and prepare my own return to action at a slightly slower rate than Ariel, returning to Prospero “ere your pulse twice beat”, is taken from the *Sonnets*. These poems, charting the speaker’s emotional engagements are full of references to separation and return: my favourite, by virtue of its wonderful conclusion, is number 56.

Sweet love, renew thy force; be it not said
Thy edge should blunter be than appetite,
Which but to-day by feeding is allay’d,
To-morrow sharpened in his former might:
So, love, be thou, although to-day thou fill
Thy hungry eyes, even till they wink with fullness,
To-morrow see again, and do not kill
The spirit of love, with a perpetual dullness.
Let this sad interim like the ocean be
Which parts the shore, where two contracted new
Come daily to the banks, that when they see
Return of love, more blest may be the view;
Or call it winter, which being full of care,
Makes summer’s welcome, thrice more wished, more rare.

From Monday 12th September to Monday 10th October, Open Shakespeare will host a series of articles on the topic of ‘Shakespeare and the Internet’. When we invited contributions, the theme was deliberately kept as broad as possible in order to facilitate a wide and diverse range of responses from each of those who have written a post for us. Our contributors range from teachers and students of Shakespeare to an experimental theatre company.

Having already read the majority of the contributions, I can say now that the series fulfils its goal of offering what the Bard would call a “multitudinous” range of approaches to the topic of Shakespeare and the Internet; subjects range from why Polonius would appreciate hypertext to the problems and opportunities of online abundance. Please feel free to make use of the comments section at the bottom of each article, and to carry on in this space the points for debate that each article raises. The contributions will appear in the following order:

• Monday 12th September: Sylvia Morris, Finding Needles in Haystacks: Shakespeare and the Internet
• Monday 19th September: Heather Nolen, “The wise man reads both books and life itself”
• Monday 26th September: Erin Weinberg, Why do I blog about Shakespeare? It’s a Choice
• Monday 3rd October: Caroline Bicks and Michelle Ephraim, Good Night, Tweet Prince
• Monday 10th October: The Propaganda Company, Freedom of Narrative

Every article in this series is published under a Creative Commons 3.0 SA BY licence, meaning that it is free to redistribute and reuse, providing that you attribute it to its author (BY) and that you share-alike. As with all the other material on Open Shakespeare, we hope that publication under such a licence will encourage the diffusion and development of our contributors’ ideas.

My thanks to all those who have contributed their time and thoughts to this project, particularly Erin Weinberg, whose proof-reading skills have been extremely useful in the preparation of these pieces for publication. Depending on the success of this series, we intend to publish similar, themed posts under an open licence in the future: if you would like to participate as either a writer or an editor, please get in touch through the usual channels.

Now, to conclude, I leave you, I hope, in approximately the same state of anticipation as Leonato leaves an impatient Claudio in Much Ado about Nothing:

till Monday [...] which is hence a just seven-night; and a time too brief too, to have all things answer my mind.

MACBETH I conjure you, by that which you profess,–
Howe’er you come to know it,–answer me:
Though you untie the winds, and let them fight
Against the churches; though the yesty waves
Confound and swallow navigation up;
Though bladed corn be lodg’d, and trees blown down;
Though castles topple on their warders’ heads;
Though palaces and pyramids do slope
Their heads to their foundations; though the treasure
Of nature’s germins tumble all together,
Even till destruction sicken,–answer me
To what I ask you.

The image of buildings falling to their foundation recurs in Venus and Adonis, Coriolanus and The Winter’s Tale. Each time the power of the description turns on the fact that ‘foundation’ stands for both origin and fundamental level, making such destruction doubly total. Yet there is a more hopeful rendering of the idea to be found too. After all, foundations should also be where things begin, as Lord Bardolph is keen to impress on the rebels of Henry IV pt II:

LORD BARDOLPH. [...] in this great work,
Which is almost to pluck a kingdom down
And set another up, should we survey
The plot of situation and the model,
Consent upon a sure foundation,
Question surveyors, know our own estate,
How able such a work to undergo,
To weigh against his opposite; or else
We fortify in paper and in figures,
Using the names of men instead of men;
Like one that draws the model of a house
Beyond his power to build it; who, half through,
Gives o’er and leaves his part-created cost
A naked subject to the weeping clouds
And waste for churlish winter’s tyranny.

As many will know, the rebellion of this sequel, like that of Henry IV part I, is crushed. That said, I can still find one – albeit sentimental – example of something springing from a foundation and succeeding: Open Shakespeare itself. Given previous reflections on openness and knowledge, perhaps my thought here on the OKF should be the observation that the concept of ‘foundation’, of laying out the start of something (call it what you will: trailblazing, pathfinding, innovating…), underpins everything that this project and the OKF does. Is this in tension, though, with the hopes of creating stable, flourishing open communities? Or rather, as I personally believe, the rhetoric necessary to the establishment and motivation of such groups. The only thing certain is that when talk is no longer of founding, then the project and the OKF will have changed utterly. For now, there is much work to do: “God save the foundation”, indeed.

The term knowledge is taken to include:
– Content such as music, films, books
– Data be it scientific, historical, geographic or otherwise
– Government and other administrative information

Shakespeare might have been able to grasp this (apart from the word data), although this kind of knowledge is, admittedly and unsurprisingly, far removed from his sense of the word, which already had (and still has) a complicated history, with its roots in both the concept of knowing something through experience (savoir) and that of knowing through the senses (connaitre). For a neat marriage of the two, take the disguised Duke’s rebuke to Lucio’s profession of love for the Duke himself towards the end of Measure for Measure:

DUKE Love talks with better knowledge, and knowledge with dearer love.

Here, knowledge covers both Lucio’s blindness to the facts of the situation (i.e. that the Duke he professes to love is in fact standing, disguised as a friar, in front of him – savoir) and Lucio’s complete lack of tact (if he really did experience “love” for the Duke, he would not be shouting it in such a context – connaitre). In this respect, knowledge resembles something rather more abstract than its definition as content/data/information by the OKF would have it. Of course, such concrete, intellectual (knowledge as savoir) terms are necessary for articulating the aims and work of the foundation; when it comes to the world of Shakespeare’s plays, however, more subtle, personal flavours of knowledge emerge, blends of savoir and connaitre. The phrase “my knowledge” gets, for example, eleven airings in various plays, whilst one of the greatest speeches on ‘knowledge’ in all Shakespeare must surely be that in which Leontes, in the opening half of The Winter’s Tale, announces that he believes his wife disloyal:

LEONTES How bles’d am I
In my just censure, in my true opinion!–
Alack, for lesser knowledge!–How accurs’d
In being so blest!–There may be in the cup
A spider steep’d, and one may drink, depart,
And yet partake no venom; for his knowledge
Is not infected; but if one present
The abhorr’d ingredient to his eye, make known
How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides,
With violent hefts;–I have drunk, and seen the spider.
Camillo was his help in this, his pander:–
There is a plot against my life, my crown;
All’s true that is mistrusted:–that false villain
Whom I employ’d, was pre-employ’d by him:
He has discover’d my design, and I
Remain a pinch’d thing; yea, a very trick
For them to play at will.

Leontes’ suspicions ultimately prove groundless, and he spends the rest of the play regretting the outcome of his jealous rage, until finally offered redemption from daughter and wife in the final act. What this speech shows above all else in the personal nature of knowledge: Leontes’ “knowledge” is so personal that it is in fact delusion, and he lives in his own terrifying world of spiders and “pinch’d” things, a stark example of the terrible consequences of isolation and suspicion. The lesson of Leontes and of other uses of the word “knowledge” in the Shakespeare corpus is clear: again and again, the bard shows us how knowledge becomes personal, how we become attached to the things and people that we know, and how sharing this attachment is important. This is also, I suppose, ultimately what lies behind both the fear of exposure and the benefits of community that are inherent in openness as the OKF understands it: those that resist the opening of data fear the release of knowledge that has become personal to them, and those that support such openness seek the chance to build communities on a personal level.

A piece of content or data is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share-alike.

Unfortunately for me, Shakespeare would have understood about half of the words in the above sentence in the same way that we do. He never uses the word “data” (despite its possession of those Latin roots so attractive to the poet elsewhere) and the concept of wider reuse and redistribution of any work is far from thinkable in a cultural era dominated by the Stationer’s Company. Instead, “open” for Shakespeare often has a rather more concrete meaning:

STEPHANO. Come on your ways: open your mouth; here is that which will give language to you, cat. Open your mouth: this will shake your shaking, I can tell you, and that soundly [gives CALIBAN a drink]: you cannot tell who’s your friend: open your chaps again.

This scene, from the inebriation of Caliban in The Tempest, is just one of many involving the verb in its sense of “moving from a closed position”, be it mouths (“chaps”), doors, or anything else on stage.

Perhaps more curious than this banal example is the use of open as an adjective, where it is sometimes associated with vulnerability. This is often also a criticism of our modern, technological sense of the word ‘open’: if everything was such, would not plagiarism and artistic penury run rampant? Of course, the devotee of openness replies that it promotes community, and that ‘open’ is hardly a synonym for unprofitable. This very website is living proof of this fact, harvesting annotations and promoting the study of Shakespeare worldwide. In our modern, internet era, the publisher, the software designer, or the artist that decides to go open finds themselves in an international community and support network, and thus in a far better position than these few hapless usages of the adjective ‘open’ in Shakespeare’s works:

1) Salisbury, contemplating the moral and political landscape in King John

Murder, as hating what himself hath done,
Doth lay it open to urge on revenge.

2) Two gentlemen concerned that walls might have ears when it comes to discussing the fate of Katherine of Aragon in King Henry VIII

We are too open here to argue this;
Let’s think in private more.

3) Anne, hoping something nasty will happen to the future king, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, in Richard III

Either, heaven, with lightning strike the murderer dead;
Or, earth, gape open wide and eat him quick,
As thou dost swallow up this good king’s blood,
Which his hell-govern’d arm hath butchered!

Peculiarly, one might add that all these Shakespearean associations of openness and vulnerability listed here involve politics and government. For more on the topic of open government in our own time, I strongly suggest a visit or at least a following of the OKF’s own Open Government Data Camp, due to take place in Poland on 21st October. I guarantee a more positive outlook on the idea than Shakespeare’s images of the “hell-govern’d arm”.

CLARENCE [...] Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks;
Ten thousand men that fishes gnaw’d upon;
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,
All scatter’d in the bottom of the sea:
Some lay in dead men’s skulls; and, in those holes
Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept,
As ’twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems,
Which woo’d the slimy bottom of the deep,
And mock’d the dead bones that lay scatter’d by.

The image of the skull in this speech, articulated in the voices of Boris Karloff, George Clooney, Tom Brokaw and Harvey Keitel by Mr Meskimen, serves in part as a memento mori (something that recalls mortality, as seen in this ), and aptly so, given Clarence’s imminent end. The seventeen other skulls in Shakespeare are often caught up in the same memento mori tradition: Hamlet and the gravedigger is the most famous example, but Surrey offers an insulting reference to the trope in Richard II when he tells Fitzwater to think on “thy father’s skull”, and Romeo and Juliet contains multiple macabre references to the cranium.

One other use of skulls, not too far removed from reminding us of our mortality, is as part of some particularly gruesome image. My favourite of them all comes in The Tempest, when Prospero describes how both the condition and cure that he imposes on Antonio, Alonso, Gonzalo, and the rest.

PROSPERO A solemnt air, and the best comforter
To an unsettled fancy, sure thy brains,
Now useless, boil’d within thy skull!

KING HENRY Woe above woe! grief more than common grief!
O that my death would stay these ruthful deeds!–
O pity, pity! gentle heaven, pity!–
The red rose and the white are on his face,
The fatal colours of our striving houses;
The one his purple blood right well resembles,
The other his pale cheeks, methinks, presenteth.
Wither one rose, and let the other flourish!
If you contend, a thousand lives must wither

For King Henry, mourning the death of a unnamed father’s son on the battlefield near Towton, “purple” is the colour of blood, and blood is the colour of one of the English roses, the ‘Red Rose of York’. In this respect, when we read the word “purple” in Shakespeare’s plays, one should think of a redder hue than what we now call purple. A rose, as they say, by any other name would smell as sweet, but, to the mind’s eye, it may well look pretty different.

In some places the meaning of the word ‘purple’ is clearer than elsewhere: blood, for example, is frequently described as ‘purple’ where we would now say ‘red’, in Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, Henry VI part II (“purple tears”), King John, Richard III, Richard II (“the purple testament of bleeding war”), Romeo and Juliet, and the Sonnets. Elsewhere, the exact colour meant by Shakespeare’s word “purple” is open to investigation. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a particularly good test case: Bottom the Weaver and wannabe actor has a “purple-in-grain beard” and is fed “purple grapes” at Titania’s behest; Oberon places a purple dye into the love potion that infatuates the lovers and Titania, and describes its source in a flower struck by “Cupid’s fiery shaft”; as for the audience member, the exact colour of any of this is obscure.

One bastion of security remains, however, in Shakespeare’s reference to the original ‘imperial purple’ (Greek porphyra), carefully manufactured from a mucus secreted by the spiny dye-murex snail, and thus a rare and status-granting tint. The sails of Cleopatra’s barge are an example of this colour’s role in ostentatious displays of power:

ENOBARBUS [...] The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
Burn’d on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them [...]

The colour of this purple can be precisely established, since the process by which it was created is still known to us. Yet for all these other mentions of the colour, some degree of ambiguity must always be present. Is this not true of other colours though? When we hear of “ivory globes circled with blue” do we all imagine the same shades on Lucrece’s chest? And how is this blue different from the “two blue windows” that the dawn opens in the sky at the start of the same play? Of course, the question of a word’s precise meaning is not limited to colour either, other descriptive terms (such as those for expression or posture) suffer from the same problem when we read the plays. It is only when we see the plays that some of this ambiguity is removed, and we learn the exact colour of Malvolio’s stockings, for example; even then, this leaves some mysteries unresolved and thus each spectator as each reader, imagining their own personal Shakespearean reds and purples in their head.

The sour taste of the crabapple reappears in King Lear, where the Fool compares Goneril’s nature to the bitter fruit, saying that “She’ll taste as like this [i.e. Reagan] as a crab does to a crab”. Petruchio, being called “a crab” by Katherine the Shrew, presumably because of his resemblance to the notoriously gnarly produce of the tree, turns the insult on its head by retorting, “Why here’s no crab, and therefore look not sour.”

The lack of aesthetic appeal to the crab-apple powers what Nathaniel – with his tongue firmly in cheek – describes as the “sweetly varied” language of Holofernes, the schoolmaster who compares the fall of a shot deer to “a crab on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth” in Love’s Labour’s Lost Whilst Holofernes speaks bastard Latin, it is a rather different question of heredity that the crab-apple points up in Henry VI pt II, when Suffolk accuses Warwick’s mother of infidelity:

SUFFOLK Blunt-witted lord, ignoble in demeanour!
If ever lady wrong’d her lord so much,
Thy mother took into her blameful bed
Some stern untutor’d churl, and noble stock
Was graft with crab-tree slip, whose fruit thou art,
And never of the Nevils’ noble race.

With all this talk of crab-apple trees and their relation to sour dispositions, ugliness, disease and marital infidelity, it comes of something of a surprise to learn that when Hamlet talks of crabs, he is in fact the only character in all Shakespeare’s works to have the crustacean in mind. That said, he famously has a rather strange idea of the creature, madly telling Polonius that he could only resemble Hamlet “if, like a crab, he could go backward”.

Details

• Where? Brettenham House, 9 Savoy Street, WC2E 7EG, London. – Meet outside ‘The Savoy Tup’ Pub, Savoy Street, at 10am to be guided to the venue.
• When? Saturday 13th August, 10am – 6pm
• What?A gathering for all those interested in the relation between technology and literature, with a specal focus on the creation of open knowledge.
• More details: http://wiki.openliterature.net/Text_Camp_2011
• Order (free) tickets: http://textcamp2011.eventbrite.com/
• Twitter: #tcamp11

Hope you can make it!

Needlework is not always a way of dismissing a woman, though: Othello praises Desdemona for being “so delicate with her needle” that it defeats all his violent thoughts, and Imogen, the heroine of Cymbeline, reconfigures needlework as a kind of female empowerment when she imagines how she would, if possible, stand “by with a needle, that [she] might prick / The goer back” in an imaginary duel between the Queen’s son and the exiles of the play.

Of course, as soon as the needle might represent female power, it becomes a topic of male banter amongst some of Shakspeare’s viler characters. Thersites insults Ajax in Troilus and Cressida by saying that he has “not so much wit [...] as will stop the eye of Helen’s needle”, and there is definitely some lewd reference here to phallic needles, eyes/holes and Helen’s supposed promiscuity. A similar configuration of tropes occurs when Tarquin stalks towards the sleeping Lucrece:

And being lighted, by the light he spies
Lucretia’s glove, wherein her needle sticks;
He takes it from the rushes where it lies,
And griping it, the neeld his finger pricks:
As who should say this glove to wanton tricks
Is not inur’d: return again in haste;
Thou see’st our mistress’ ornaments are chaste.

This time, the needle epitomises the weakness of the woman’s power to resist the Roman warrior, and grimly foretells Lucrece’s later suicide with a dagger. To conclude, one might set this tragic piece of needlework against Gower’s description of Marina in one of the choruses of Pericles: here, in this late play, suffering remains paramount but its potential as a source of strength is also evoked, all with the image of a woman wielding a needle:

when she would with sharp needle wound,
The cambric, which she made more sound
By hurting it […]

Stoop then, and wash. How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted o’er
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!

These four lines fall almost precisely at the centre of Julius Caesar, and mark a particularly vertiginous moment for the play’s audience. A great part of the dizzying effect depends on the use of two words beginning with ‘un-’. In this case the use of the prefix (as opposed to writing “not born”, for example), captures the special sense of Cassio’s speech: future states and accents have not yet come in to being, but they will. The word ‘unborn’, like all words beginning with such a prefix, unites two states: being born and not being born. Thus there is an added element of tragedy to the grief of Richard II’s childless wife, when she tells the courtier Bushy:

Some unborn sorrow, ripe in fortune’s womb,
Is coming towards me, and my inward soul
With nothing trembles; at some thing it grieves
More than with parting from my lord the king.

Many commentators take this line to refer to a stillborn heir; if so, then “unborn”, capturing both the possibility of birth and its tragic denial, is the apt and awful word for the occasion.

There are over 700 different words beginning with “un-” in Shakespeare’s works, all (excluding those with the under- prefix) of them preserving the balance of possibility and denial already seen with “unborn”. Particular examples include: Octavius arguing that one should “let determined things to destiny / Hold unbewail’d their way” in Antony and Cleopatra; both Lear and, metaphorically, Othello appearing “unbonneted”; the young prince Humphry describing “unfather’d heirs” at the end of Henry IV part II; Cymbeline fearing to appear “unkinglike”; Henry V apologising to the future Queen Katherine for his provoking or “untempering” visage; and, strangest of all, Isabella talking about “unwedgeable oak”. This last example is part of an exchange between the heroine of Measure for Measure and its villain, Angelo, where Isabella’s emotion appears in such dense and passionate speech on the topic of abused authority that it merits quotation:

[...] Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would ne’er be quiet,
For every pelting, petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder;
Nothing but thunder! Merciful Heaven,
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Split’st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak
Than the soft myrtle: but man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.

BASTARD Bell, book, and candle shall not drive me back,
When gold and silver becks me to come on. [...]

The three objects mentioned are those used in the rites of exorcism, the flamboyant villain of King John comparing himself to the devil. Strikingly similar phrasing is found in an exchange between Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus and Mephistopheles:

MEPHIST. Nay, I know not: we shall be cursed with bell, book, and candle.
FAUSTUS. How! bell, book, and candle,—candle, book, and bell,—
Forward and backward, to curse Faustus to hell!

Faustus and his demon are here, in a piece of anti-Catholic foolery, mocking the Pope’s efforts to rid them from the Vatican, as the candle, book and bell of exorcism fail utterly. Moving away from religious uses, but keeping the element of mockery, we find many mixes of candles and insults in Shakespeare’s works. Falstaff’s girth often leads to jokes about how many candles could be made by turning his fat to “tallow” in Henry IV part I and II; Demetrius criticises the presence of a “candle [...] already in snuff” to represent the mechanicals’ moonshine as the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and Leonato rails against those who stay up all night drinking by calling them “candle-wasters” in Much Ado About Nothing.

Rather more innocently, Romeo imagines himself as nothing more than a lovesick “candle-holder” at the Capulet ball, the early modern expression for what we would now call third who makes a crowd, which also survives in the French expression for the same phenomenon: “porter la chandelle”. Candles too appear with reference to love in The Merchant of Venice, which mentions the object more than any other play: Jessica fears having to “hold a candle to my shame” of running away for love, and Portia, returning to Belmont after saving Antonio, spots from afar the wax-based lights of her household:

PORTIA. That light we see is burning in my hall.
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

These lines on good deeds contrast nicely to what must be the most famous use of candles in Shakespeare’s work, the comparison between the burning of a candle and the duration of a human life. It is hardly unique to Shakespeare but is nevertheless used twice in his works, both times in the mouths of warriors. It occurs first when Clifford dies on the battlefield of Henry VI part III, and ,superlatively, when Macbeth learns of his wife’s death.

MACBETH. She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.-
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

From the seventy-two appearances of bells in Shakespeare’s texts, five different uses appear, with much blurring between them. Amongst the most frequent is the bell as the death knell: the priest promises that Ophelia will have “bell and burial” despite her apparent suicide in Hamlet; news of Hotspur’s death at the start of Henry IV part II is compared to the sound of “a sullen bell”, a phrase also used by the Sonnet-writer for his own passing (LXXI); and the song that plays as Bassanio chooses his casket in The Merchant of Venice tolls the beginning and the end of infatuation:

It is engend’red in the eyes,
With gazing fed; and fancy dies
In the cradle where it lies.
Let us all ring fancy’s knell:
I’ll begin it.–Ding, dong, bell.

There are many more examples that I leave out here. Macbeth, for example, is full of knells, or, rather, of bells that Macbeth hears as knells: the bells that ring after Duncan’s murder are, for example, “a knell / That summons thee to heaven or to hell”. Other bells in the play include the “alarum bell”, which also makes its appearance in Othello (when a drunken Cassio kills Roderigo), and in Henry VI part I (when the French prepare their attack), to name but a few examples.

Far from the battlefield or the funeral, bells also serve to mark the time. They ring the hour on the battlements of Elsinore at the start of Hamlet, and mark dinnertime in The Comedy of Errors. In one of Shakespeare’s most touching scenes, an imprisoned and deposed Richard II compares himself to a broken clock, right down to its carillon:

[...] For now hath time made me his numbering clock:
My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial’s point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours [...]

My last few examples concern other bells: the head of a flower can be called a bell (as Ariel’s bower in “a cowslip’s bell” attests), and the ram that leads a flock a “bell-wether”, after the bell he carries on his neck (thus Touchstone calls a shepherd “a bawd to a bell-wether” in As You Like It, for example).

Having run from burning theatres to animal husbandry, I conclude with one last quote involving bells, this time from King John, which I shall explain in my next piece.

BASTARD Bell, book, and candle shall not drive me back,
When gold and silver becks me to come on. [...]

Although Shylock is the villain of this play, Shakespeare departs from the Elizabethan caricature of the cruel, hated Jew, as exemplified by Marlowe’s Barabas in The Jew of Malta (1589-90). His creation is more complex, fusing humanity with unrelenting cruelty and a strict adherence to the letter of the law. In this way, the Jew-figure becomes something impossible to define, performable as the clownish, evil, red-haired Elizabethan devil (a precursor to Dickens’ Fagin), or as the sympathetic Jew of our modern, post-holocaust view. Whether his ultimately cruel punishment is his redemption or his humiliation just does not matter when a broken Shylock murmurs his last line: “I am not well.”

Despite being on a more comic trajectory, Portia, like Shylock, is also bound by strict adherence to the law. First, she faithfully submits to the terms of her father’s will, which force her to select her future husband according to their choice of gold, silver or leaden casket (a passage famously discussed by Freud in 1913). Second, once Bassanio has chosen the correct box, she displays a brilliant understanding of the law to free Antonio from Shylock on a technicality. Yet for all her brilliance in the courtroom, Portia must dress as a man there, and, again like Shylock, this rich heiress’ actions demonstrate the prejudices and limitations of Venetian society.

Set in Venice and Portia’s home in Belmont, the play moves from a fraught mix of cosmopolitan bustle and casual antisemitism to a fairytale land of riddles, music and poetry. At the play’s conclusion, all the main characters (save Shylock) enter the idyllic world of Belmont in a happy ending, which is nevertheless tainted by memories of Portia’s rejected suitors and Shylock’s earlier exit. Such ambiguity was brought out notably in a 2010 performance at New York’s Shakespeare in the Park, just one of many performances of this popular Shakespeare play, perhaps now best known through the Al Pacino film of 2004.

Originally contributed by Richard Rose Adapted for publication by James Harriman-Smith

DECIUS [...] unicorns may be betray’d with trees,
And bears with glasses, elephants with holes,
Lions with toils, and men with flatterers:
But when I tell him he hates flatterers,
He says he does, being then most flattered.
Let me work;
For I can give his humor the true bent,
And I will bring him to the Capitol.

The idea that unicorns, like other creatures, have their weaknesses, is also something brought up by Timon of Athens during a rambling debate on the topic of the humane and the bestial with the philospher Apemantus. The misanthrope counters Apemantus’ wish to be a best as follows, taking the unicorn as a climax in his argument:

If thou wert the lion, the fox would beguile thee; if thou wert the lamb, the fox would eat thee; if thou wert the fox, the lion would suspect thee, when peradventure, thou wert accused by the ass; if thou wert the ass, thy dulness would torment thee, and still thou livedst but as a breakfast to the wolf; if thou wert the wolf, thy greediness would afflict thee, and oft thou shouldst hazard thy life for thy dinner; wert thou the unicorn, pride and wrath would confound thee and make thine own self the conquest of thy fury; [...] What beast couldst thou be that were not subject to a beast?

The combination of rarity and special power that the above passages find in the unicorn is complemented by another idea in The Rape of Lucrece. As many know already, unicorns were famous for being wild and free, and only susceptible to taming by a virgin. This sexual element lurks in the background of a long speech on the wonders of time given by Shakespeare’s heroine, where it is – conspicuously – time and not virginity that triumph over the unicorns power, “To slay the tiger that doth live by slaughter, / To tame the unicorn and lion wild”. If there were any doubt over the sinister application of this example in the mouth of a vulnerable woman, one need only look elsewhere in the same passages to see that the tragedy of the unicorn (special, proud, vulnerable and desired) is the same as Lucrece’s, for Lucrece invokes time with the terrible feeling that its power will not aid her, even though it should “eat up errors by opinion bred, / Not spend the dowry of a lawful bed”.

Having explored the battlefields and courts where ‘quailing’ occurs, let us turn to a rather puzzling use of the noun in Antony and Cleopatra. Antony, having just received bad auguries from the soothsayer, contemplates the upcoming battle between his forces and those of Octavius Caesar in terms of previous, less serious, confrontations between them.

ANTONY [...] in our sports my better cunning faints
Under his chance: if we draw lots, he speeds;
His cocks do win the battle still of mine,
When it is all to nought; and his quails ever
Beat mine, inhoop’d at odds.

It seems that “quails [...] inhoop’d” is a reference to the now extinct sport of quail-fighting, which according to Johnson took place in “a broad hoop” to prevent the combatants from “quitting each other”.

My last use of quails takes us from one oft-prohibited activity, betting on duels between birds, to another: prostitution. Possibly with reference to the Anglo-Norman ‘caille’, the word quail could also mean, according to the OED, ‘prostitute’. Thus, Thersites, neer one to shy away from descriptions of disgusting bodily functions in Troilus and Cressida manages to simultaneously describe the gastronomic and sexual inclinations of Agamemnon with reference to the little birds in his vile encomium of the Grecian leader.

[...] Here’s Agamemnon, an honest fellow enough, and one that loves quails, but he has not so much brain as ear-wax [...]

If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating.

The lawfulness of magic is evoked elsewhere in Shakespeare. Othello picks up the negative connotations of the word when he, ironically, tells the Venetian senate of the “magic” that, according to them, he must have used in order to woo Desdemona. Such ironic reference to magic comes back later in the play, when the moor imagines the magical creation of the handkerchief he gave to Desdemona, whose presence in Camillo’s chamber forces Othello over the edge.

OTHELLO Tis ture: there’s magic in the web of it:
A sibyl, that had number’d in the world
The sun to course two hundred compasses,
In her prophetic fury sew’d the work;
The worms were hallow’d that did breed the silk;
And it was dy’d in mummy which the skillful
Conserv’d of maiden’s hearts.

The magic of the handkerchief is ultimately manifested in the way in which it inflames Othello’s jealousy. Something similar occurs in Hamlet, where the “magic” poison of the play-within-a-play (again overlapping theatre and sorcery) provokes the very real anger of Claudius whom it directly accuses.

In that accusation, Claudius is himself made out as the user of the “magic” poison that kills Old Hamlet, and this is but one of several examples of evil or so-called ‘black’ magic in Shakespeare’s work. Exeter, at the funeral of Henry V with which Henry VI part I opens, imagines the black magic of the French which could have “contriv’d” the end of the king; whilst in Macbeth, the evil coven of witches represents perhaps the most prominent black magic users of Shakespeare’s canon. It is after all, Hecate, the queen of the witches, who in an oft-cut speech promises:

HECATE [...] There hangs a vaporous drop profound;
I’ll catch it ere it come to ground:
And that, distill’d by magic sleights,
Shall raise such artificial sprites,
As, by strength of their illusion,
Shall draw [Macbeth] to his confusion:
He shall spurn fate, scorn death, and bear
His hopes ‘bove wisdom, grace, and fear:
And you all know, security
Is mortals’ chiefest enemy.

The order, and not the inn, is behind several other uses of the word, particularly in the histories. Talbot, the great warrior of Henry VI part I critically recalls how members of the order “of the garter were of noble birth, / Valiant and virtuous, full of haughty courage”; Richard III, on the other hand, swears “by my George, my garter, and my crown”, only to have Queen Elizabeth throw his words straight back at him:

QUEEN ELIZABETH By nothing; for this is no oath:
Thy George, profan’d, hath lost his lordly honour;
Thy garter, blemish’d, pawn’d his knightly virtue;
Thy crown, usurp’d, disgrac’d his kingly glory.
If something thou wouldst swear to be believ’d,
Swear then by something that thou has not wrong’d.

Queen Elizabeth’s distate for Richard and his unscrupulous use of what Talbot held so sacred are likely to have been shared by a character in Henry VIII, who, remarkably, is actually called “Garter” (presumably after his knighthood), and who gives a long eulogy on the newly-born “high and mighty Princess of England, Elizabeth” towards the end of the play.

As well as the knightly order, whether comically or reverentially evoked, one finds another, more sartorial use of garters. Iago demands one as a tourniquet as a way of covering his own murder of Roderigo in Othello; and Malvolio, famously humiliating himself by appearing “cross-gartered” before his mistress Olivia in Twelfth Night, is forced to admit that his costume causes some “obstruction in the blood”. By falling into the trap of the servants and Olivia’s extended family, Malvolio the butler in fact comes close to doing metaphorically what Theseus imagines the mechanicals’ scriptwriter might literally do in a Midsummer Night’s Dream, namely “hang’d himself in [a] garter”. Likewise, a disgruntled Falstaff tells Prince Hal to “hang thyself in thine own heir-apparent garters”.

A source of insults and humiliation, as well as more innocent foolery, this “narrow band of fabric fastened about the leg” is truly, as the Fool of King Lear puts it, “cruel garters” indeed.

Where’s Antonio, then?
I could not find him at the Elephant [...]

Quite why Illyria should name an inn after an exotic animal is anyone’s guess, although one should note that this occurs elsewhere in Shakespeare’s works: the inn at the centre of The Comedy of Errors is called, for example, ‘The Tiger’. Efforts to find a modern day equivalent of the elephant inn, in Montenegro, Albania or Croatia, reveal only that there exists only one mix of hospitality and African beast in the region Shakespeare called “Illyria”: the Electric Elephant Festival, in Croatia.

Leaving the comedies behind, our word hunt brings us to a set of plays placed that all take place in the classical period. Elephants were, of course, most famously used at this time by Hannibal in his attack on Rome during the Second Punic War between Carthage and Rome, but Decius (one of the conspirators against Caesar) points out that even these creatures could be beaten with “holes” in the ground. The comment comes in a speech comparing elephants to the proud and powerful Roman leader, a patter nof thought also found in Troilus and Cressida, where the Greek heroes, Achilles and Ajax, are likened to the beast: Achilles to the creature that “hath joints but none for courtesy” and Ajax to an animal that is “slow” and powerful.

One might conclude then, that all Shakespeare’s references to the elephant have little overlap with modern conceptions of the beast, influenced by tales of Indian exoticism, like Rudyard Kipling’s, or by such sympathetic portrayals as Disney’s Dumbo. Instead of this later view, elephants are taken as representative of great power, but inflexible and stupid. With this in mind, perhaps one should note the potential for a diplomatic gaff when Suleiman the elephant was presented to Archduke Maximilian II (later the Holy Roman Emperor) by King John III of Portugal in 1542. That, though, is a story for another time.

When? 13th August 2011, 10am – 6pm
Where? To be Confirmed Website: http://wiki.openliterature.net/TextCamp2011
Register: http://textcamp2011.eventbrite.com

During the day, we hope to create, discuss and maybe even publish ‘open literature’, which is to say that we will work on both texts that are in (and about) the public domain, and on the open-source tools for the analysis and appreciation of these works.

Planned activities include:

• Discussion and/or hacking of 2 231 texts recently released from Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) with the help of the Text Creation Partnership
• Coming up with ideas for and perhaps composing a web based narrative.
• Writing a guide to creative commons and related licenses as regards literary productions.
• Working out how to build an online community around a work of literature, with advice on the process of receiving edits to one’s own online work.
• And, of course, much much more…

Why not suggest your own ideas? or take a look at the wiki for the event?

Berowne, never short of witticisms, is one user of the word zany. It occurs in a speech following the failure of his and his friends’ attempts to woo the princesses, the result of all said princesses having had the chance to mischievously disguises themselves as each other. The frustrated prince, imagines the kind of person who could have ruined their fun.

BEROWNE [...] I see the trick on’t: here was a consent,
Knowing aforehand of our merriment,
To dash it like a Christmas comedy.
Some carry-tale, some please-man, some slight zany,
Some mumble-news, some trencher-knight, some Dick,
That smiles his cheek in years, and know the trick
To make my lady laugh when she’s dispos’d,
Told our intents before; which once disclos’d
The ladies did change favours, and then we,
Following the signs, woo’d but the sign of she.

Berowne’s “zany” turns out to be the Princesses’ elderly counsellor Boyet, but one can’t help but suspect that the true zanies, in the sense of ridiculous incompetents, are Berowne and his friends, who blindly “woo’d but the sign” of their beloved’s and not the ladies themselves.

A similar reversal occurs in the other use of the word, Malvolio’s attack on Feste, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew in front of his mistress Olivia near the beginning of Twelfth Night.

MALVOLIO I protest I take these wise men that crow so at these set kind of fools, no better than the fools’ zanies.

In a way, the head butler is right to spot how the activities of Sir Toby and Sir Andrew degrade them, but the audience’s sympathies are very much against poor Malvolio. Soon, the man is to become the object of ridicule himself, and so those he has called “zanies” take their revenge by tricking him into the absurd “cross-garter’d” dress of a clownish man.

Moving away from this talk of bullocks, and in the direction suggested by Don Pedro’s comparison between conjug*al bonds and the farmer’s yoke, brings us to a whole host of uses of the word that turn on the idea of joining things together. Wolsey prays that Henry VIII will “yoke together […] my doing well / With my well saying”; Sicinius advises Coriolanus not to “yoke with” Brutus in his campaign for the consulship; and Henry V observes, on the capture of the conspirators, Lord Cambridge and Lord Scroop, how “Treason and murder ever kept toegether, / As two yoke-devils sworn to either’s purpose”.

From jointure, we come to the other element of yokes: dominance. Again, we can find applications to marriage: Hermia, one of the central characters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream vows to Theseus that she would, for example rather never marry than have Demetrius “whose unwished yoke / My soul consents not to give sovereignty”. Alternatively, political dominance is often expressed in terms of oxen-management: Titus Andronicus is littered with references to “the yoke of Rome”, and Northumberland in Richard II speaks revolution when he declares that “we shall shake off our slavish yoke”.

Going through all the examples of this word, a single instance really leaps out at me. It is another example of a theme that has been discussed here before, in reference to drawers and dawns, that of the burden of authority. Richard, moments before pasing from the position of Duke of Gloster to king of England, uses the phrase “the golden yoke of sovereignty” to describe kingship. The metaphor allows the Duke of Gloster both to appear humble before his interlocutors by emphasising the burden of monarchy, yet nevertheless contains the other sense of being able to impose one’s yoke upon others. Having come from the farmyard to the the palace, I shall end this article here.

PETRUCHIO. Signior Hortensio, ‘twixt such friends as we
Few words suffice; and therefore, if thou know
One rich enough to be Petruchio’s wife,
As wealth is burden of my wooing dance,
Be she as foul as was Florentius’ love,
As old as Sibyl, and as curst and shrewd
As Socrates’ Xanthippe or a worse,
She moves me not, or not removes, at least,
Affection’s edge in me, were she as rough
As are the swelling Adriatic seas:
I come to wive it wealthily in Padua;
If wealthily, then happily in Padua.

As is clear here, Xantippe represents the archetypal awful wife. She is, for Petruchio, on a par with the ugly witch that Florentius promises to marry for the answer to the riddle “what does every woman want?” in Gower’s Confession Amantis, and with the Sibyl, the immortal and deranged seer of the Aeneid who also makes an appearance in the epigraph of Eliot’s The Wasteland.

Who, though, was Xantippe? The facts are rather thin on the ground, and were probably even thinner in Shakespeare’s day, but what we do know now reveals some irony in Petruchio’s use of her name to describe his hypothetical wife, a position ultimately filled by Kate, the shrew of this play’s title. Xantippe, like Kate, was noble: the reference to horses (Greek ‘hippos’ – thus ‘Xant-hippos’) in her name indicates aristocratic blood, and her eldest son by Socrates took the name of her father, Lamprocles, and not that of Socrates’ less illustrious parent. Testimony from Plato and Xenophon suggest that Xantippe was a good wife to Socrates, albeit headstrong. It is this latter attribute that was accentuated by Plutarch (whom Shakespeare read), Aelian, and Antisthenes, ultimately leading to the stereotype of the domineering wife that Shakespeare uses here.

Returning to Plato and Xenophon’s accounts of Xantippe, we learn that Socrates chose his wife because he valued her strength of will.

I wish to deal with human beings, to associate with man in general; hence my choice of wife. I know full well, if I can tolerate her spirit, I can with ease attach myself to every human being else.

Just like Petruchio, who comes to apprecaite Kate’s strength of character over the blandness of other women, Socrates too, nearly two thousand years before, discovered the joys of marrying a supposed ‘shrew’. This is the irony behind Shakespeare’s speech.

Shakespeare’s vizards occur in a variety of circumstances. The word is used literally only once, however, when Ford goes to buy children “vizards” in The Merry Wives of Windsor. At other points, the sense is metaphorical, expressing deception, be it of oneself or of others. Macbeth advises his wife to “make our faces vizards to our hearts, / Disguising what they are” in one of his many uses of ‘covering’ metaphors, such as the wish to “scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day” a few lines later. Something like Macbeth’s deceptiveness is found by York in Queen Margaret, when he, defeated, defies and curses her near the start of Henry VI pt III.

YORK She-wolf of France, but worse than wolves of France,
Whose tongue more poisons than the adder’s tooth,
How ill-beseeming is it in thy sex
To triumph, lke an Amazonian trull,
Upon their woes whom fortune captivates!
But that thy face is, vizard-like, unchanging,
Made impudent with use of evil deeds,
I would assay proud queen, to make thee blush.

The insult here is that Queen Margaret has committed so many “evil deeds” that, a little like an Elizabethan Dorian Gray, her face has become a mask, imperviously covering her humanity.

There can be no empathy between York and Margaret, and the mask/vizard represents this by serving as a type for blocked communication. That masks should block communication and not, as one might expect, deliver a clear and uniform message, is somewhat strange, although very much the case in much of Shakespeare’s uses of the word. Take, for instance, my last example, from Troilus and Cressida, which takes the blocking, obscuring qualities of masks as part of a long metaphor on the subject of what occurs when all the marks of hierarchy (“degree”) is no longer visible (“vizarded”).

ULYSSES.
Troy, yet upon his basis, had been down,
And the great Hector’s sword had lack’d a master,
But for these instances:
The specialty of rule hath been neglected;
And look how many Grecian tents do stand
Hollow upon this plain, so many hollow factions.
When that the general is not like the hive,
To whom the foragers shall all repair,
What honey is expected? Degree being vizarded,
Th’ unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask.

My first example is drawn from Macbeth, and the drunken Porter’s discussion about drunkeness with Macduff.

MACDUFF What three things does drink especially provoke? PORTER Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes and unprovokes; it provokes the desire but takes away the performance.

Not much to be said here, except to note a small overlap between drink, urine and lechery. This too is active in my second example, this time spoken by Lucio in Measure for Measure. He is telling the disguised Duke about his new deputy, Angelo.

LUCIO Some report a sea-maid spawned him; some, that he was begot between two stock-fishes. – But it is certain that when he makes water, his urine is congealed ice; that I know to be true. And he is a motion ungenerative, that’s infallible.

Urine is, unsurprisingly, a topic of low conversation, for Lucio to be speaking thus to the ruler of Vienna (like the Porter to Macduff) is as ridiculous as it is a subversive reminder of how much respect and authority depend upon appearance. Lucio’s description of Angelo is funny, but it also represents how untenable Angelo’s public persona is, so unhuman as to be vulnerable to easy mockery along the same lines of sex and lechery that are found in the Porter’s blabbering.

Whilst Angelo’s urine marks out his unhumanity, the making of water is, for Shylock, an example of what brings all humankind together, regardless of religious orientation. In a long speech about how all people can be overcome with “affection”, he cites the analogous involuntary response that some may have to bagpipes to support his case.

[...] others, when the bagpipe sings i’the nose,
Cannot contain their urine [...]

Unfortunately for Shylock, such an argument eventually fails to hold any water.

The sense that “quondam” is a rather formal way of saying “erstwhile” or “formerly” can be traced in every one of Shakespeare’s uses of the word. However, the three other passages to be treated here also all link “quondam” with sex. Pistol promises that “I have, and will hold the quondam Quickly” in a rather physical riff on the marriage vows in Henry V; Hector, in Troilus and Cressida, bates Menelaus by telling him that Helen, his “quondam wife swears still by Venus’ glove / She’s well, but bade me not commend her to you”; and Benedick describes former ladies’ men as “quondam carpet-mongers” in Much Ado About Nothing.

This relation between “quondam” and sexual mores has been explored elsewhere. Some, for example, point to the obvious sexual reference when Chaucer’s Wife of Bath describes how men have always loved her “quoniam” to elaborate a theory about “qu-” words and their relation bawdiness (cf. the Elizabethan “quean”, for a prostitute). Elsewhere, and perhaps most interestingly, research suggests that “quondam” may lie behind the modern word ‘condom’: eighteenth-century Scots routinely replaced a “C-” at the start of English words formerly beginning with “Qu-” (thus ‘corter’ for ‘quarter’), and so could be found giving advice about birth control through the use of a “quondam”. Quite whether this can be extended back to Shakespeare’s time is still a matter of debate, although Hector’s comments about “Venus’ glove” do make for tempting evidence…

In the Merchant of Venice, a Neapolitan prince is amongst Portia’s unsuccessful suitors, not least because he “doth nothing but talk of his horse”, leading Portia to quip that she is “much afeard my lady his mother play’d false with a smith”. Neapolitan ancestry comes up in much more serious terms in Henry VI part II, when York, captured by Margaret and her Lancastrian forces, curses her in defiance as the “Outcast of Naples, England’s bloody scourge”.

Portia’s wit about sexual infidelity, and York’s violent outburst come together in Thersites description of the “Neapolitan bone-ache” that he finds on the battlefield of Troy in Troilus and Cressida. The “bone-ache” is syphilis, and marks yet another less than flattering reference to Naples in Shakespeare’s works. When Lucentio suggests that he disguise himself as “Some Neapolitan” in The Taming of the Shrew in order to deceive his beloved’s father, Biondello, he must surely have got a laugh, given that such a choice of disguise inadvertantly implies sexual decadence and disease as much as Neapolitan wealth.

Despite all these ignominious Neapolitans, there is one character in Shakespeare’s works who goes some way to redeeming the city. That character is Gonzalo, the elderly councillor mocked by the other court members in The Tempest, but revealed to have been a friend to Propsero in exile, and thus, in the magician’s words, “A noble Neapolitan”, valued all the more for his contradiction of a stereotype:

PROSPERO By Providence divine.
Some food we had and some fresh water that
A noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo,
Out of his charity, – who being then appointed
Master of this design, / did give us, with
Rich garments, linens ,stuffs, and necessaries,
Which since have steaded much: so, of his gentleness.
Knowing I lov’d my books, he furnish’d me,
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.

The simplest [definition] is that a city is a human settlement in which strangers are likely to meet. For this definition to hold true, the settlement has to have a large heterogeneous population; the population has to be packed together rather closely; market exchanges among the population must make this dense, diverse mass interact. In this milieu of strangers whose lives touch there is a problem of audience akin to the problem of audience an actor faces in the theatre.[Sennet (1974), 331-2]

The “problem of audience” is that, in a milieu of strangers, witnesses, and audiences do not know a person’s history. This means that a person or character’s identity is often dependent on their immediate interaction with their audience. Such a situation was probably even true of Shakespeare’s History and Roman plays, the vast majority of his audience having only the sketchiest idea of who their protagonists were. Many city comedies exploit this situation: the aptly named Lethe, in Middleton’s Michaelmas Term, is described as one “’Mongst strange eyes/That no more knew him than he knows himself” (1.i.148-9); much of the humour of A Trick to Catch the Old One is based on how Walkadine Hoard knows nothing of the ‘widow’; and, in The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare’s Antipholus of Syracuse must struggle in an ingenious variation on this position.

ANTIPHOLUS (of Syracuse) I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them unhappy, lose myself.
(The Comedy of Errors 1.i.35-40)

Even the briefest description of the plot of this play will reveal the intricate web of interdependency that Shakespeare weaves in Ephesus. This short soliloquy from Antipholus of Syracus neatly reiterates the starting, and already complex, position of the play. The “drop of water” and “the ocean” recall Egeon’s description of the shipwreck that sundered the family, and the possibility that Antipholus may “lose himself” is given pressing relevance by the resemblance it bears to his father Egeon’s plight who will soon be executed for being a Syracusan in Ephesus unless he can find a son to lend him a thousand marks. Furthermore, Antipholus’ brief moment of soliloquy, his sense of being “unseen” and “inquisitive” – an ideal pursued by the Duke of Measure for Measure as well – is soon shattered by the appearance of Dromio of Ephesus who, mistaking him for his master, Antipholus’ long-lost twin, informs him “The meat is cold because you come not home”(1.i.48). From here things only get more complicated, as dependencies are layered upon dependencies: at one point, a merchant requires payment from the goldsmith who requires payment from Antipholus, who, mistaken for his twin, must be found by Egeon to avoid execution. As Sennett points out, the city is more than the likelihood of meetings: these meeting are the result of economic, market forces. In The Comedy of Errors it is the multiplication of these forces, of these dependencies, that create the humour and comedy of the meetings. Furthermore, this network, unlike the vertical “degree” Ulysses propounds in Troilus and Cressida, is horizontal, levelling. In a certain sense, these dependencies give a framework in which to understand the city; the humour of The Comedy of Errors is the result of a situation wherein, because all the characters save the Duke, Egeon, and the Abbess, are operating without full knowledge of their history, the very framework that should confirm and render the city logical only serves to confuse them even more. The comic contrast is found in how Ephesus becomes, to the audience, more and more normal, more and more full of interrelations and chance encounters, even as it appears to become increasingly paranormal for the hapless protagonists. Shakespeare has evoked the everyday city and made its normality comical.

For Douglas Bruster, these interdependencies are grounded upon the objects of the play.[Bruster (1992), 64] He suggests that as theatre mimetically glossed the contemporary, urban and courtly preoccupation with commodity and materiality, objects became a focus of interest in their own right, and gained a “locative signification”. It is certainly true that the elaborate relation between Angelo the goldsmith, both Antipholuses and Dromios, Balthasar the merchant, Adriana, and the Courtesan revolves around the golden chain and its current location. Antipholus of Syracuse, for example, is defined as an oath-breaker whilst the chain is neither in his or his wife’s possession. Bruster describes this phenomenon, similar to the way that the handkerchief becomes the lynchpin of Othello’s identity as husband or cuckold, as an “uncanny facility of transference between subjective and objective”.[Bruster (1992), 67] Indeed, the cuckold and the merchant are never far apart in city drama: A Trick to Catch the Old One manages to combine them both as Walkadine Hoard is conned into both paying Witgood’s debts and marriage with Jane, the courtesan. Bruster suggests this is because cuckoldry and cozening are similarly based on the way that the possession of an object constitutes the base of the possessor’s identity. Such plays “prove that only that which can be lost (or stolen) can be possessed”.[Bruster (1992), 69] However, there is at least one episode in The Comedy of Errors that complicates this perception.

BALTHASAR […] Depart in patience,
And let us to the Tiger all to dinner,
And about evening come yourself alone
To know the reason of this strange restraint.
If by strong hand you offer to break in
Now in the stirring passage of the day,
A vulgar comment will be made of it,
And that supposed by the common rout
Against your yet ungalled estimation
That may with foul intrusion enter in
And dwell upon your grave when you are dead.
For slander lives upon succession,
For ever housed where it gets possession.
(3.i.94-106)

This is Balthasar’s counsel to Antipholus of Ephesus, who, returning from trade with his Dromio, discovers the doors of his house locked against him since his wife has admitted Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse already, believing them to be her husband and his servant. A material, economic discourse can be traced here, especially in the idea that “slander gets possession”, but the decision “that chain I will bestow – / Be it nothing but to spite my wife – / Upon my hostess there” (3.i.117-119) only follows what is first and foremost a psychological trauma. It is not the location of the chain, but the location of Antipholus of Syracuse that is important, because, here, Antipholus’ psyche and the action he takes are not shaped by material things but by a sense of being watched, of displaying oneself. Balthasar warns him that “a vulgar comment” would be made upon his forcing entrance to his house, but Antipholus then takes such a possibility and uses it to his advantage when he decides “in spite of mirth…to be merry” (3.i.108) and to “spite my wife”: just as his wife now appears unfaithful to him, so does he contemplate a display of unfaithfulness to Adriana. The balance of motives is neatly expressed by the scene’s penultimate couplet: “Since mine own doors refuse to entertain me, / I’ll knock elsewhere to see if they’ll disdain me.” (3.i.120-121) Several critics [Bruster (1992), 75] have pointed out the sexual implications that run through this dialogue, sharply focused by Antipholus’ choice to go and meet a courtesan: the barred gate a motif of refusal, and thus emasculation of Antipholus. However, there is another desire thwarted by the barring of Antipholus’ gate against him: the desire for shelter. Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space argues that, as the Milosz line “Je dis ma mere. Et c’est à toi que je pense, ô maison!” indicates, a house can function as a shelter, and that, like many human virtues, such a capacity is best seen in response to a threat.[Bachelard (1994), 45-6] Antipholus of Ephesus is certainly under threat: this, his first and surprisingly late appearance in the play, already insinuates that his importance in aesthetic terms has been appropriated by his twin; and the opening exchange with Dromio of Ephesus immediately exposes him to the paranormal world of the double. His decision to go to a place called ‘The Tiger’ for shelter from what Titus calls a “wilderness of tigers” (Titus Andronicus 3.i.54) is a neat touch. The Ephesian is not trying to hide, but countering display with display. This play makes very clear that in a city of market forces, commodities, and crowds, it is not, as Bruster suggests the possession of the material object alone that defines identity, but the displaying of that possession, being seen by the crowd to have it. Display is everything, and The Comedy of Errors concludes only when Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse are displayed alongside Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus; and Egeon is displayed and recognised by his long-lost wife, now the Abbess.

DROMIO (of Ephesus) Methinks you are my glass, and not my brother.
I see by you I am a sweet-faced youth.
Will you walk in to see their gossiping?
DROMIO (of Syracuse) Not I, sir. You are my elder.
DROMIO (of Ephesus) That’s a question. How shall we try it?
DROMIO (of Syracuse) We’ll draw cuts for the senior. Till then, lead thou first.
DROMIO (of Ephesus) Nay then, thus:
We came into the world like brother and brother,
And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another.
(5.i.417-425)

The repetition of “brother” is significant here: this moment is an early version of the reestablishment of family bonds that concludes such late plays as Pericles, and The Tempest. Such reestablishment offers a traditionalist framework to the city’s interrelations, based on the traditional unit of the family and not on the vagaries of the economy. However, this is still a moment of display, of theatre, and it is the act of display, Lysimachus introducing Pericles to long-lost Marina, that leads to the reunited family. My emphasis on display would appear to contradict Andrew Gurr’s opinion that the early modern theatre was filled with an audience, and not lots of individual spectators. How then does an audience hear ‘display’? These, the concluding lines of The Comedy of Errors, provide a possible way of doing so, because they contain several moments of verbal displaying, of blazoning. The last couplet is very clear: “hand in hand” is a plain instruction for the final tableau and the way in which such a pair of nouns recalls the similar construction of “brother and brother” gives a clear meaning, the fraternal iteration of the play’s many interdependencies. The other phrase of note, “Methinks you are my glass, and not my brother” describes, and so displays, Dromio’s appearance to the audience. Rather like the conclusion of Twelfth Night, when Viola and Sebastian (another pair of sundered siblings) meet, such a verbal trick is necessary because, for those lucky enough to see the stage, it would be as highly unlikely that the actor playing one Dromio resembled the other as the boy playing Viola reflected Sebastian. The aural, verbal effect is out of step with the visual, and, although this considerably complicates the conclusion of Twelfth Night, splitting the characters into those enjoying comic fictional bliss and those, like Malvolio and Sir Toby, left out,[Barton (1994), 91-113] The Comedy of Errors has been working on such a disjunction almost from the very start. Ben Jonson, operating on a surprising misconception regarding the use of such ‘stage-twins’, abandoned his own play of mistaken identity because he “could never find two so like others that he could persuade spectators they were one,” [Dorsch (2004), 20] with a telling use of the word ‘spectators’. The continual disjunction between aural and visual in the play is either, then, Shakespeare exploiting the presence of an audience and not spectators, or a metatheatrical level added to the farce of the play, or, as neither of these are mutually exclusive, both.

The sequence of ‘triumphs’ examined earlier all relate to a similar aural display. The heavy focus on “eye him” and “see him” in Brutus’ words from Coriolanus, Cleopatra’s fears that the crowd will “uplift us to their view”, and the order of Henry V’s chorus to “Behold” that which he is describing are all part of an aesthetic synaesthesia. It would be an oversimplification, though, to completely discount the visual aspects of early modern urban life. Almost every street would bear signs emblazoned with a symbol for easy recognition, even “theatres, like taverns and shops, were well illustrated to catch the attention of the citizens.”[Ackroyd (2000), 170] The Accession day festivities employed far more craftsmen than they did poets, although an emphasis on conspicuous display of wealth, and a continual redefinition of contemporary fashion was one of the principal effects of the court. Indeed, with each change of fashion, the playhouses themselves would acquire new costumes. According to Jones and Stallybrass, the theatres provided a useful second-hand market for expensive clothes whose circulation was limited not only by changes in fashion but in the sumptuary laws of the period as well.[Jones and Stallybrass (2000), 187] In spite of the second-hand nature of the clothes, the costumes of the actors would still have created a powerful spectacle, and, along with the dress of the wealthier members of the audience, the theatre also had the capacity to influence contemporary fashion – to be a place, as Jonson put it, “To see and be seene” (Dedication to The New Inn). Records still survive of the clothes worn by the actors, but they have been written in a most curious way: they are not described in terms of the player who owned them, but as part of the part whose costume they composed; thus we find a bill for the washing of “God’s robes”[Jones and Stallybrass (2000), 179] in amongst the theatre records. Such a note further complicates the aural-visual complication of the urban theatre of Shakespeare: these robes were undoubtedly spectacular so as to suggest the Almighty, but at the same time it is the words of the play in which the costume is used that give to the costume its significance and identity. Either way, such details, along with the fact that the purchase and maintenance of clothes constituted the largest part of a company’s spending,[Ibid. 178] gives at least an idea of to what extent Shakespeare’s drama was embedded in the city of fashion and market at its time; how the theatre was another act of display in a city already filled with them.

Gail Kern Paster, in her book on The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare, makes this point, suggesting that display and performance are means of containing the essential doubleness of the city. She locates the archetypes of such contradiction in the Bible, and in secular myths about the founding of cities. The Old Testament describes how Cain, after killing Abel, “knew his wife, and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch.” (AV Genesis 4:17). This passage sets the death of Cain against the new life of Enoch, both of which are present at the construction of the first city; the pronoun of “he builded a city” appears at first sight to relate to Enoch, a further identification of the two acts. In secular mythology, Cain’s murder of Abel and construction of the city is repeated by Romulus’ murder of Remus and the founding of Rome. The New Testament also presents a contradictory view of the city: on one hand there is the whore and city of Babylon “The woman which thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth” (Revelation 17:18), on the other New Jerusalem “And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there is no night there.” (Revelation 21:25). Paster’s point is fair enough, and relates in addition to what I said earlier on how epilogues could shape and cast their audience, and drama the environment in which it was performed. What Paster neglects to mention is the role played by display in respect to the city presented in the Bible itself. It is found in the story of Ruth.

So they two went until they came to Bethlehem. And it came to pass, when they were come to Bethlehem, that all the city was moved about them, and they said, Is this Naomi?
And she said unto them, Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.
I went out full and the LORD hath brought me home again empty: why then call ye me Naomi, seeing the LORD hath testified against me, and the Almighty hath afflicted me?
So Naomi returned, and Ruth the Moabitess, her daughter in law, with her, which returned out of the country of Moab: and they came to Bethlehem in the beginning of barley harvest.
(Ruth 1:19-22)

“Is this Naomi?” This is a biblical version of what Sennett called the “problem of audience”. Because of her time in Moab, Naomi, especially as she is now returning with the “Moabitess” Ruth, must reveal her history. She does, but even as she recounts it, she prefaces it with a change of identity so that the story that displays her recreates her as “Mara”. As before, it is the act of display that constitutes an identity in a city. Later in the Book of Ruth, display carries a slightly different significance.

And when Boaz had eaten and drunk, and his heart was merry, he went to lie down at the end of the heap of corn: and she came softly, and uncovered his feet, and laid her down.
And it came to pass at midnight, that the man was afraid, and turned himself: and, behold, a woman lay at his feet.
And he said, Who art thou? And she answered, I am Ruth thine handmaid: spread therefore thy skirt over thine handmaid; for thou art a near kinsman. And he said, Blessed be thou of the LORD, my daughter: for thou hast shewed more kindness in the latter end than at the beginning, inasmuch as thou followedst not young men, whether poor or rich.
And now, my daughter, fear not; I will do to thee all that thou requirest: for all the city of my people doth know that thou art a virtuous woman.
And now it is true that I am thy near kinsman: howbeit there is a kinsman nearer than I.
Tarry this night, and it shall be in the morning, that if he will perform unto thee the part of a kinsman, well; let him do the kinsman’s part: but if he will not do the part of a kinsman to thee, then will I do the part of a kinsman to thee, as the LORD liveth: lie down until the morning.
And she lay at his feet until the morning: and she rose up before one could know another. And he said, Let it not be known that a woman came into the floor.
Also he said, Bring the vail that thou hast upon thee, and hold it. And when she held it, he measured six measures of barley, and laid it on her: and she went into the city.
(Ruth 3:7-15)

Display is part of the construction of reputation; Balthasar warns Antipholus of Ephesus that he will stain his as yet “ungalled estimation” if he continues to make his apparent rejection so public; in this passage, Boaz is aware of this, and so says “Let it not be known that a woman came into the floor”. This is despite the fact that “all the city of my people doth know that thou art a virtuous woman”, but this should not be surprising: even a small, rural, biblical city contains strangers, and it is from these strangers that Boaz seeks to protect Ruth. This story can be glossed in Douglas Bruster’s terms: the “six measures of barley” are both the reason Ruth first comes to Boaz and an alibi for her visit (and as such a way of preserving her virtue). But the distinction is still clear: the object and the market bring Ruth to Boaz, but the unavoidable display of urban life and especially display to strangers, govern action and identity. These two unite in Boaz’s care so that Ruth is not shamed.

The Accession Day procession, when the theatre spread over the city, is an example of willing display, of panoply. To find its opposite – unwilling display – that is to say, shame, one need look no further than an anecdote of the man who famously Morris-danced from London to Norwich, the clown of the King’s Company, Will Kemp:

I rembred one of them to be a noted Cut-purse, such a one as we tye to a poast on our stage, for all people to wander at, when they are taken pilfring.[Cited by Gurr, 258]

Considering the Globe had some three thousand audience members in it, this was quite some punishment. Not to mention that recognition as a thief would severely limit one’s ability to continue with such a career. But if this was the punishment, one can only wonder at those who stood up and faced the crowd every afternoon to earn a living, sometimes even playing those punished with shame themselves, such as Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, in King Henry VI Part Two. According to Barry Russell, actors in the, comparatively modest-sized, Swan Theatre when it was first built at Stratford-upon-Avon showed signs of nervousness when performing in such an intimate and exposing space.[Bruster (1992),24] It does not seem unreasonable to suggest that the references of characters like Cleopatra to “thick breaths,/Rank of gross diet” reflect in part the actor’s own anxiety at displaying themselves in front of so many people, and, most importantly, having to control and manage them.

The playing conditions, shame and display in the city: all these notes and comments have some bearing upon one of the few other plays classed by critics, along with The Comedy of Errors, as a city play by Shakespeare: Measure for Measure. It is a commonplace [Paster (1985), 219] to associate Vincentio’s scheme with theatrical endeavour: the play’s conclusion is managed like a play within a play, and the Duke follows a Machiavellian crowd-pleasing politics that “kept the minds of his subjects in suspense and admiration, and occupied with their outcome.” [Machiavelli (1985), 88] He sets out his position moments after appointing Angelo his deputy:

DUKE […] I love the people,
But do not like to stage me to their eyes:
Though it do well I do not relish well
Their loud applause and aves vehement,
Nor do I think the man of safe discretion
That does affect it.
(Measure for Measure 1.i.67-72)

The “loud applause and aves vehement” bears some resemblance to the positive response of a theatre crowd, and the slightly contorted use of “stage me” only supports this. His disavowal of public show also echoes James I’s own dislike of appearing in public.[Gibbons (2004), 22] As with much the Duke says in this play, the insight provided by this speech is more complex than it would first appear. Given that the Duke’s actions once disguised as Friar Lodowick can all be seen as an enormous theatrical performance, his apparent separation of playhouse and polis here looks to be a rather hypocritical statement. However, the phrasing of this speech, the constructedness and ceremony of the quasi-anthimeria [OED 3.b.] of “stage”; the fact that the public display is “loud and vehement”; and the passage’s references to the bodily functions of sight, taste and hearing – all directly contrasts to the role the Duke performs over the next few scenes. For Machiavellian or benevolent reasons, he attempts to become part of the city: his performance is both an attempt to efface his identity and to influence the city around him; to control the crowd by embedding himself in it. The choice of disguise, a clergyman, should also be commented upon since clergy, players, and politicians were often compared. The speeches over Caesar’s corpse in Julius Caesar happen at an un-roman “pulpit” (3.i.236), and the large open space near St Paul’s held regular congregations. Vincentio, though, does not become a theatrical Christian preacher but a lowly friar. Although his exchange with Claudio, persuading him to “Be absolute for death” (3.i.5) is not free from the rhetoric of the sermon, especially with its repeated use of “thou”, the stage is very bare, the space intimate and the Duke’s “thou” is part of an individual purpose. When Isabella knocks, the Provost’s startled “Who’s there?” sounds blunt in spite of Isabella’s elegant “grace and good company” because the Provost, like the rest of the audience, has felt the intimate and theatrical moment of this city Duke shatter.

The reason the Duke gives Angelo and Escalus for his dislike of being staged to public eyes deserves further examination. Simply put, the Duke does not trust the judgment of one that “affects” (that is to say ‘loves’ and ‘shows an affectation’) the “loud applause and aves vehement”; whether this caused a titter of metatheatrical laughter or not depends on the performance but it should be noted that the possibility at least is there. Either way, this seems to be an honest statement of Vincentio’s feelings, when he next appears and delivers his pseudo-soliloquy (“You will demand of me why I do this” 1.iii.18) to the Friar, he admits that he has “ever loved the life removed / And held in idle price to haunt assemblies / Where youth and cost witless bravery keeps.” (9-11). Even with the Duke’s habitually contorted syntax the distaste is evident: “idle price” evokes both a sense of ‘little worth’ and of ‘costly slothfulness’ that is developed in “witless bravery”. The next thing the Friar is told is that all power has been “delivered to Lord Angelo” (12) and the contrast between Angelo and such gallants is clear. Yet by the conclusion of this one-way dialogue it becomes evident that Angelo and the gallants share one trait at least: their conspicuousness. The scene’s concluding, and oft quoted couplet, “Hence shall we see, / If power change purpose, what our seemers be” (54-5) looks back to those gallants of the Duke’s earlier discourse as well as to the test of the deputy by using the neologistic “seemers” as opposed to Angelo’s actual name; this ambiguity here is also a self-mandate for Duke to observe elsewhere in Vienna. Finally, the musicality of this couplet has a special significance: “we”, “see”, seemers”, and “be” are all linked by their use of the long ‘e’ sound. This confirms my earlier point on the Duke’s peculiar, self-effacing performance: “we”, used in Vincentio’s opening speech as the royal ‘we’ (for example, “we have with special soul / Elected him” 1.i.17) now carries with it a sense of shared spectatorship and so, in its ambivalence, reflects the Duke’s own position. Shared spectatorship (“we see”) is then behind the sequence that alters “seemer” to the bare existence of to “be”. Overall, the couplet whets the audience’s appetite for what is to come. Unfortunately this is too neat an analysis, and, at the “moated grange” of “dejected Mariana” (3.i.247-248), the only time the scene is set outside the city, we hear why.

DUKE Oh place and greatness, millions of false eyes
Are stuck upon thee; volumes of report
Run with these false and most contrarious quest
Upon thy doings; thousands escapes of wit
Make thee the father of their idle dream
And rack thee in their fancies.
(4.ii.56-61)

Note first the return of “eyes”, always a popular image in Shakespeare and here, as in Brutus and Cleopatra’s speeches quoted above, once again capable of taking on a metatheatrical resonance as the six thousand or so eyeballs belonging to the groundlings and the galleries of the amphitheatre playhouse swivelled onto the actor. In addition, these are “false eyes”: the Duke can no longer easily identify himself as a watcher as he is beginning to realise the danger such a relationship entails. William Warburton, in 1747, thought this speech should be placed elsewhere, whereas A.P. Rossiter thought that this speech should be augmented by the Duke’s tetrametric couplets on “He who the sword of heaven will bear / Must be as holy, as severe” (3.ii.223-44). But this speech works fine as it is: its brevity recalls the form of the earlier moment of self-realisation that follows the Duke’s exposure to Lucio, and even perpetuates the earlier insight that “back-wounding calumny / The whitest virtue strikes” (3.ii.159-60). These two short speeches problematise the Duke’s position as a watcher, as a member of the crowd. Not only are the eyes “false” but they “are stuck” upon “place and greatness”: the construction of “are stuck” gives no clear sense of agency, and instead only a generalised present tense, it suggests both that the “false eyes” have stuck themselves to “place and greatness” and that they have been stuck to it. Again, this follows the shape of the Duke’s paradoxical position: the attraction of authority is seen as something both constructed by authority and, as it were, an instinctive lure. Dominating both senses is the other meaning of “stuck”: the eyes are not only fixed upon “place and greatness” but trapped there. This irrevocable nature is important to the Duke’s hendiadys of “place and greatness”: although it sounds proverbial, the trope also suggests a detailed distinction, an equality of emphasis derived from personal knowledge; thus the rhetorical phrase works as a comment in general and as one on both Angelo and Vincentio. Rather like the disguised Henry V giving “a little touch of Harry in the night” (4 Chorus 47), the Duke is stuck with the fact that he is the Duke. Although he attempts to be part of the crowd, such a performance only reveals the performance necessary to being a leader; by acting the spectator he observes his own acting and the forces that control such display. To do so requires a theatrical city, and Vienna certainly is.

Vienna shares several similarities with Ephesus. The characters of Vienna are also interdependent: they are not bound by trade or blood, but instead linked through sexual appetite. There is a hint of this in The Comedy of Errors, the role of the courtesan to Antipholus’ household as well as Dromio’s steadfast avoidance of the kitchen maid’s “Netherlands”, but Measure for Measure goes much further. Sexual relations link every character in the play, be it the comradely question of “which of thy hips has the most profound sciatica?”[30] (1.ii.47-8) or the Provost taking care of “the groaning Juliet” (2.ii.16). This interdependency is accentuated by the fact that Vienna, like Ephesus, is a distorted city: in the same way that being from Syracuse merits death or ransom in Ephesus and so the ultimate emphasis is placed upon questions of identity from the play’s beginning, so does Angelo’s reinstatement of the death penalty for fornication give Measure for Measure one central, ramifying concern. This, with the aid of some critical theory, provides a valuable insight into Shakespeare and the city. In the early twentieth century, a movement loosely known as Russian Formalism began with the central idea that art worked by making the familiar strange so as to break the blinkered, habitual way of considering the world and show it anew. Art was made strange, or ‘defamiliarised’ (a translation of the Russian ostrenie), by the devices employed by the artist. The relevance to Shakespeare should be clear: Vienna and Ephesus are both defamiliarised urban environments, made strange by peculiarly draconian laws that serve as a means of building interdependencies between the characters of the play. One of the criticisms of Russian Formalism, voiced by Roman Jakobson, was that the process of defamiliarisation requires some kind of limitation as well since without it one would be unable to perceive the original for the applied strangeness, the city for the death penalties. Vienna and Ephesus provide this limitation through their contemporaneous qualities: the aforementioned description of Dromio’s Nell plays upon conventional Elizabethan national stereotypes.

ANTIPHOLUS (of Syracuse) Where France?
DROMIO (of Syracuse) In her forehead armed and reverted, making war against her heir.
ANTIPHOLUS (of Syracuse) Where England?
DROMIO (of Syracuse) I looked for her chalky cliffs, but I could find no whiteness in them. But I guess it stood in her chin, by the salt rheum that ran between France and it.
(Comedy of Errors 3.ii.109-15)

Here, The War of the Three Henries may be behind Dromio’s description of France “making war against her heir”,[Dorsch (2004), 38] and the “salt rheum”, as well as representing the English Channel, makes a typical joke on the various venereal diseases associated with the French, salt baths being an early modern treatment for such diseases. They are mentioned in terms of the similarity such tubs bore to the powdering and preservation of beef in Measure for Measure as well: Mistress Overdone, in Pompey’s words “hath eaten up all her beef, and she is herself in the tub” (3.ii.50-51). Angelo’s other edict, that “All houses [i.e. Brothels] in the suburbs of Vienna must be knocked down” (1.ii.80), resembles a proclamation of James I on 16th September 1603 that called for the pulling down of houses in the suburbs as a protection against the spread of plague.[Gibbons (2004), 88] Finally, the Duke’s ‘return’ to Vienna has been said to resemble the Accession Day of James I, taking place in early 1604. [Ibid. 21]

The final scene of Measure for Measure, the public performance of the Duke’s return to Vienna would seem to contradict my argument that Vincentio, by performing the spectator in a theatrical city, seeks to achieve an insight into the dynamics of authority. As I noted at the beginning of this discussion, this event unfolds like a play within a play, before the eyes of not only the Jacobean audience but the majority of the characters in the play as well. I would maintain, though, that the Duke does not deviate from his position as a spectator for the majority of it, and when he does do so it is because he is then able to assume authority. The real performer, staged to the city’s eyes, is Angelo. And, just as Boaz acted to protect Ruth from the shame that display in a city can inflict, so is the deputy exposed in what, to the once reclusive Duke’s way of thinking, must be the most tortuous of punishments. One way of considering Measure for Measure is, in Freudian terms, as a kind of mass repression. Pompey’s dialogue with Escalus makes this very clear by contrasting natural libido and imposed, legal restriction.

ESCALUS How would you live, Pompey? By being a bawd? What do you think of the trade, Pompey? Is it a lawful trade?
POMPEY If the law would allow it, sir.
ESCALUS But the law will not allow it, Pompey; nor it shall not be allowed in Vienna.
POMPEY Does your worship mean to geld and splay all the youth in the city?
(2.i.192-9)

By the final stages of the play the success of this repression is very ambiguous. On one hand, neither Pompey Mistress Overdone nor the two Gentlemen are present at the denouement; on the other, the prison has become a concentrated den of iniquity filled with “Mistress Overdone’s…old customers”, and Angelo confesses to fornication. What can be said, though, is that repression has been brought out into the open in a series of sudden, dramatic, and shaming coups de théâtre. It is easy to forget, but, up until this point, Angelo has never appeared in so very public circumstances: unable to bear Pompey’s stalling any more, he abruptly leaves the relatively small-scale proceedings of Froth and Elbow; and although the Provost does report that, as regards Claudio’s hope of reprieve, “upon the very siege of justice / Lord Angelo hath to the public ear / Professed the contrary.” (4.ii.85-7), this too implies none of the ceremony of the play’s conclusion, focusing on the bureaucratic “public ear” and not the “false eyes” of public spectacle. Even on the level of the play’s imagery, Angelo has also been distinguished as rather inward, as containing things within him. In his tortured soliloquy following Isabella’s first petition, he figures his current predicament as a crisis of urban redevelopment.

ANGELO …Can it be that modesty may more betray our sense
Than woman’s lightness? Having waste ground enough
Shall we desire to raise the sanctuary
And pitch our evils there? Of fie, fie, fie, fie,
What dost thou or what art thou Angelo?
(2.ii.174-177)

The relentless use of the rhetorical question (erotema) forcibly conveys the dividedness of Angelo as much as it establishes the extent of his self-containment. Containment is also the most striking aspect of Isabella’s description of the garden where Angelo expects to have sex with her. “Cicummured with brick”, “with a vineyard backed”, having “a planched gate” that requires “a bigger key”, and further secured with “a little door / Which from the vineyard to garden leads” (4.i.25-30): a symbolic interpretation of the garden as Angelo’s repressed libido is very tempting, and to some degree supported by traditional associations of gardens and sexuality. Thus Angelo, entering the city with the Duke, is on the verge of being physically and psychologically exposed.

DUKE Oh, your desert speaks loud, and I should wrong it
To lock it in the wards of covert bosom
When it deserves with characters of brass
A forted residence ’gainst the tooth of time
And razure of oblivion. Give me your hand
And let the subject see, to make them know
That outward courtesies would fain proclaim
Favours that keep within.
(5.i.9-16)

Like many of the Duke’s speeches in this scene, these words have a certain bendiness to them since the audience are as aware as Vincentio that forms of public display are also forms of public exposure. “Favours” is a particularly charged word, serving as a nexus between the accoutrements of rank and patronage, and sexual liaison. It should also be noted that the Duke, although prominent, is already staging Angelo, here in an emblematic hand-holding with himself and Escalus, and then far more explicitly when he replies to Isabella’s petition by telling her that “Here is Lord Angelo shall give you justice” and, with the usual irony, to “Reveal yourself to him.” (5.i.27-28) The ramifications of Angelo’s exposure should be considered in terms of the Duke’s own distaste and distrust of those who relish loud applause and aves vehement. The Duke and Angelo are very close in this scene: as Angelo’s own neuroticism, hypocrisy and asceticism are brought to trial, so too does the Duke work through his own psychological difficulties, shielded in part by the very public position in which he has placed Angelo. The conclusion of this process is Lucio’s discovery of Vincentio since, just as the twins of The Comedy of Errors were displayed alongside one another to restore order to the play, now the Duke’s deception is revealed to the characters and his exploitation of “the problem of audience” at an end. He is no longer a spectator, but is in total control because he is still sharply aware of the dynamics of audience.

DUKE [To Isabella] If he be like your brother, for his sake
Is he pardoned, and for your lovely sake
Give me your hand, and say you will be mine,
He is my brother too. But fitter time for that.
By this Lord Angelo perceives he’s safe;
Methinks I see a quickening in his eye.
Well, Angelo, your evil quits you well.
Look that you love your wife: her worth, worth yours.
I find an apt remission in myself; […] (5.i.483-91)

The Provost, cued by the Duke, has presented the hooded Claudio as though he were a different prisoner, one “Who should have died when Claudio lost his head, / As like almost to Claudio as himself” (481-2). This turn of phrase not only keeps Isabella in suspense right up until her brother is ‘unmufffled’, it also suggests that Claudio may be slightly changed, perhaps even reformed. The discovery of Claudio is also a clear repetition of Lucio pulling off the Duke’s disguise, with the effect that the phrase “If he be like your brother”, as well as describing the reformed Claudio, could also describe the similarly hoodless Vincentio. The suggestion is very subtle, but it is the first step of an identification that continues in “He is my brother too” and culminates in the proposal of marriage. Not only is the Duke in control, but he is subtly part of his audience as well. Isabella’s silence is not surprising: forgiving Angelo, and finding Claudio to be alive have left her stunned, and the Duke knows this, not withdrawing his proposal but giving her “fitter time for that”. Even when focused on Isabella, the Duke is now so profoundly part and power of the scene: he has spotted “a quickening” in Lord Angelo‘s eye. The timing of Angelo’s reaction suggests that the Deputy is himself aware of how closely his fate is linked to the Duke; the “this” of “By this Lord Angelo perceives he’s safe” can be both Vincentio’s proposal and the survival of Claudio: both are indicative of the Duke’s power and mercy that bodes well for the chastised official. To a certain extent, Angelo is correct, since the Duke, after this final piece of early modern ‘aural display’ demanded by the dramaturgy, does pardon Angelo. The “apt remission in myself” is both the Duke publicly admitting how he, by playing the spectator and manipulator, is complicit, as well as the moment at which mercy is distinguished from leniency. By finding an “apt remission” in himself Vincentio metes out judgment having been informed by experience and by an understanding of the dynamics of audience in the city; his kindness is not the kindness of an unthinking, reclusive leniency any more.

DUKE [...] Dear Isabel
I have a motion much imports your good,
Whereto, if you’ll a willing ear incline,
What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine.
So bring us to our palace, where we’ll show
What’s yet behind that’s meet you all should know.
(5.i.530-1)

Here is another moment of oft-remarked silence from Isabella, but she need not speak. Although the Duke is offering marriage, he does it almost hypothetically, and does not yet expect an immediate reply: it is up to her to choose “if you’ll a willing ear incline” (emphasis mine). This delay and the concluding couplet’s promise of further revelations withheld from the audience are the final iteration of the Duke’s new, extremely powerful position. Vincentio is now the cynosure he once dreaded, but he strikes a remarkable balance: he displays his intention of marriage, and of making further revelations, but then denies these events from both the audience of the theatre and the urban characters of the play (Pompey is working in the prison, Lucio to be married by force, and Mistress Overdone mysteriously absent). This anticipation leaves all the audiences in his power, and the Duke with a measure of control over the forces of display that have been so active throughout the play. With no wit to leap forward, Volpone-like, and offer an alternative view of the play, there is no better representation of the Duke’s new power, no longer isolated ruler nor half a member of the crowd, than his walking away from that great crowd, the three thousand pairs of eyes, the breaths that smelt “brown bread and garlic” (3.ii.156) of the theatre audience.

Both The Comedy of Errors and Measure for Measure present two distinct yet related ways in which Shakespeare explores the city, and, on top of this, explores the ways in which the city can be given meaning, and partly defined. Distortion, defamiliarisation, and display are part of these explorations; but so is an engagement with both an economic, market-orientated discourse and with a psychological awareness of the pressures of urban life. Both psychological and economic representation rely upon a strong level of interdependency between characters, in part provided by the plot, in part provided by the type of city that Shakespeare has built. Vienna and Ephesus are built from London, and they are built in London upon the stage of its theatre or its court; they offer a view on the city around them, even as they draw power from the playing conditions of the time. In his relationship to the city Shakespeare powerfully exploits what Bacon eloquently called “a great secret in nature” in The proficiencie and advancement of learning, divine and humane.

The action of the theatre, though modern states esteem it merely ludicrous unless it be satirical and biting, was carefully watched by the ancients, so that it might improve mankind in virtue; and indeed many wise men and great philosophers have thought it to the mind as the bow to the fiddle; and certain it is, though a great secret in nature, that the minds of men in company are more open to affections and impressions than when alone. [Bacon (1605, cited by Gurr (2004), v]

LUCENTIO Mistress, what’s your opinion of your sister?
BIANCA That, being mad herself, she’s madly mated.
GREMIO I wattant him, Petruchio is Kated.

This exchange occurs at the end of Act III, when Petruchio, declaring that Kate is “my good, my chattels … / My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything” takes off with his wife from their own marriage celebration, leaving Bianca and the others in some consternation behind them. Brian Morris, who edited the play in 1981, hears an echo of Much Ado About Nothing in the sentiment that “Petruchio is Kated”, imagining “Kate” to be taken as some kind of disease in the same way that Beatrice fears that Claudio has “caught the Benedick”. Another possibility, entirely of my own invention, is the similarity between ‘Kate’ and ‘cates’, the latter referring to a choice food or delicacy, with the punning sense here that Petruchio does not want a marriage feast, but would rather enjoy his Kate/cates elsewhere.

Either way, this single word is rich with meaning, and is perhaps best understood as a sly joke on the similarities between Kate and Petruchio, which ultimately lead to one of the warmest relationships in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. With this in mind, perhaps “kated” should, like some of the playwright’s better-known neologisms, take up its place in our everyday speech, describing the moment when someone meets their match in matrimony. Now is an apt time for such an undertaking: after all, an obvious example in 2011 would be “Prince William is Kated”.

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Rather less common nowadays than the sense of a jump over, away, or to something, is the meaning of “jumping” as “coinciding”. Shakespeare uses it frequently. In The Taming of the Shrew, the devious Trantio tells his fellow marriage-conspirator, Lucentio, that “Both our inventions meet and jump in one”; Viola, in Twelfth Night, recognises her brother because the elements of his story, “place, time, fortune, do cohere and jump / That I am Viola”; and the Prince of Arragon, suitor to Portio in Merchant of Venice, proves his egoism by choosing the golden cask and declaring that “I will not jump with common spirits”.

This sense of coincidence and similarity in “jump” is also found in its adjectival/adverbial usage, meaning “coinciding, exactly agreeing; even; exact, precise”. On the battlements of Elsinore, Marcellus tells Horatio that the Ghost has appeared “twice before, and jump at this dead hour”; and Iago plots to bring Othello “jump when he may Casio find / Soliciting his wife”.

Other uses of the word include: the sense of ‘chance’, as Caesar, facing down Antony’s Egyptian army, declares that “our fortune lies / Upon this jump”; and to surprise-attack, or set upon, as Coriolanus calls upon those in his public audience “That love the fundamental part of state / More than you doubt the change on’t; that prefer / A noble life before a long, and wish / To jump a body with dangerous physic / That’s sure of death without it.” However, perhaps the most memorable use of the word jump comes in what now passes as one of the bawdiest speeches in Shakespeare’s oeuvre: a rustic servant describing the not-so-innocent wares of Autolycus the courtier-peddlar in The Winter’s Tale, with a rhyme between “jump” and “thump”:

SERVANT He hath songs for man or woman of al sizes; no milliner can so fit his customers with gloves: he has the prettiest love-songs for maids; so without bawdry, which is strange; with such delicate burdens of ‘dildos’ and ‘fadings’, ‘jump her and thump her’ [...]

It is the blackness of ebony that most interests Shakespeare. In Twelfth Night Feste the clown (disguised as Sir Topas the priest) tortures the imprisoned Malvolio with a nonsensical description of the steward’s surroundings.

FESTE Say’st thou that the house is dark?
MALVOLIO As hell, Sir Topas.
FESTE Why it hath bay windows transparent as barricadoes, and the clerestories toward the north are as lustrous as ebony; and yet complain’st thou of obstruction?

The joke of course is that Feste accurately describes the “barricadoes” and ebon darkness of the prison, only to draw the conclusion that the “barricadoes” are “transparent” and the ebon “clerestories” (church windows) are “lustrous”. In reply to this, Malvolio can only insist that “I am not mad, Sir Topas. I say to you this house is dark.”

The uncomfortable comedy of Feste torturing Malvolio is far removed from the use made of “ebony” in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Here the word is used by the King of Navarre to describe Berowne’s beloved Rosaline.

KING By heaven, thy love is black as ebony!
BEROWNE Is ebony like her? O word divine!
A wife of such wood were felicity.
O, who can give an oath? Where is a book?
That I may swear beauty doth beauty lack
If that she learn not of her eye to look.
No face is fair that is not so full of black.

Whereas Feste was busy contorting his language to befuddle Malvolio, Berowne’s ornamental punning is aiming straight for courtly wit. To understand him, it is necessary to recall both the value of ebony and the fact that blackness might also be shameful (cf. Malvolio’s “[black] As hell” above, or Gertrude’s “black and grained spots” of guilt in Hamlet). Consequently, the King’s “black as ebony” pulls two ways: beautiful as ebony yet ugly as blackness. Berowne takes this doubleness as improvises upon it, emphasising the beauty of darkness, and particular of Rosaline’s dark eyes. Elsewhere in Shakespeare’s works similar reconstruction of blackness takes place: the dark lady of the Sonnets is praised, for example, with the comment that “now is black beauty’s successive heir”. Shakespeare’s near contemporary, Philip Sidney, also praised dark beauties, focussing like Berowne on the beloved’s eyes. Stella in Astrophil and Stella (1592) is thus possessed of eyes “in beamy black”.

Overall then, blackness is the dominate feature of ebony when it appears in Shakespeare’s works, with the added complexity occuring when Berowne uses its beautiful, ornamental properties to challenge (like Sidney) other preconceptions about blackness in the period. I should probably mention Othello at this point, but would rather avoid a lengthy article.

CHORUS…But now behold,
In the quick forge and working-house of thought,
How London doth pour out her citizens.
The mayor and all his brethren in best sort,
Like to the senators of th’antique Rome
With the plebeians swarming at their heels,
Go forth and fetch their conquering Caesar in;
As, by a lower but as loving likelihood,
Were now the General of our gracious Empress,
Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit
To welcome him! Much more, and much more cause,
Did they this Harry. Now in London place him.
(King Henry V, 5 Chorus 22-35)
[Note: a variety of critical editions have been used for the plays cited in this essay. Please refer to bibliography.]

Before its obvious contemporary political resonance is discussed, it is necessary to examine the language of this passage in detail. Despite the urgency and excitement of “now behold”, the Chorus delays the mention of “London” with a metaphorical description of the imaginative process. Like many of the Chorus’ speeches that beg the audience to “piece out our imperfections with your thoughts” (Prologue 23), the language of “quick forge and working-house of thought” suggests the constructedness of theatrical endeavour and, perhaps, of kingship itself. However, the metaphor “quick forge and working-house of thought” also takes for its vehicle the workshops and industries of Elizabethan London. Incidentally, so does “piece out” by calling up the work of a tailor.[cf. OED “piece out”: ‘To enlarge or complete by the addition of a piece; to eke out or extend with extra pieces’; and “piece”: 1. trans. a. ‘To mend, make whole, or complete by adding a piece or pieces; to patch.’] As in the labour spent constructing the triumphal arches, and fake scenery of the Accession Day pageant, so is this constructedness an urban effort. From this position things grow more complex: the first simile equates Elizabethan London with Rome, Henry V with Caesar. Such an equation is not uncommon: as the title of Roy Strong’s painting made clear, the Accession Day procession used the Roman military triumph as a model; London and Rome (and Troy) were habitually linked as part of the translatio imperii;[That is to say, the belief that imperial power moved westward through the ages.] and, furthermore, Henry V was written in the same year as Julius Caesar and it is not unreasonable to expect some cross pollination. The second simile is a rarity in Shakespeare’s opus: it is not only a contemporary reference, but a reference to a contemporary hope: that the Earl of Essex would return triumphant from his attempts to quash the Irish rebellions. The passage goes out of its way to avoid any hints of treason: Essex is “the General of our gracious Empress”, no Caesar nor Henry V; and the royal welcome of “this Harry” is with “much more cause”. Nevertheless, such blunt denial, as close to the edge of dramatic illusion as only a choric figure can be, suggests that such equation contained a risky contemporary political resonance that had to be avoided. But this chorus’ purpose is not to make a political statement anyway: the last sentence is as clear as it can be when it tells the audience to “Now in London place him”, and what is truly remarkable about this passage is the way in which a city is evoked as a constant across time. Or, more precisely, the relationship of a large group of people to a single figure, to a single piece of display, is considered as something unchanging in this presentation of the city.

“Now in London place him” is not the last sentence of the Chorus’ speech, though; by the end of the description Henry V is “back return again to France”, and the plot moves on from that position. The fact that the Chorus continues smoothly from such a resonant description of contemporary London helps to counteract the way in which a metatheatrical reference to the current urban milieu normally occurs at the conclusion of a play, and thus limits the ‘episodic’ feel of a play already sharply demarcated into acts. Much can be discerned about the relationship between drama and the city, which provided space for its theatre and the money of its audience, by examining a few of those moments at the end of the play when the theatre opens up to the city around it and the city folk watching it, where the world of the play and of the theatre appear to come into alignment. Perhaps the best example is the conclusion of Jonson’s Volpone:

1st AVVOCATO […] Away with them!
Let all that see these vices thus rewarded
Take heart, and love to study ’em. Mischiefs feed
Like beasts till they be fat, and then they bleed.

[Exeunt all. Volpone re-enters]

VOLPONE The seasoning of a play is the applause.
Now, though the fox be punished by the laws,
He yet doth hope there is no suffering due
For any fact which he hath done ’gainst you;
If there be, censure him – here he doubtful stands.
If not, fare jovially, and clap your hands.
(Volpone, 5xii148-57)

The stage direction is editorial, but, regardless of who is on stage, the effect is very clear indeed. The couplet of the 1st Avvocato, with its clear masculine endings, sounds like the conclusion to the play, and the applause may even have started when Volpone comes forward to speak. If so, this would add an extra level of irony to “The seasoning of the play is the applause” since this line already plays upon the animal imagery of the 1st Avvocato: once the lawyer has (metaphorically) slaughtered the “beast”, Volpone steps forward to ask the audience to “season” it. In a play infused with the influence of animal fables (Volpone himself owes no small debt to the French Reynard the Fox), a culinary conclusion is very apt. This may amuse the audience but the real force of the epilogue is the way in which Volpone makes an alternate tribunal out of the audience. The city of the play has condemned the wily Fox, but the character’s final trick is, as the Chorus of Henry V does, to walk the line between the place represented on stage and the place of the theatre to achieve a different kind of pardon. Volpone’s words tell his audience the meaning of their applause, and, perhaps, briefly offer a window into the dynamics of the city itself that, at tribunal, or at play, seeks and is validated by an audience. Of course, Jonson’s play is far from unique in this: the declaration of Face that he “puts myself / On you” (5.v.163-4) at the conclusion of the highly metatheatrical Alchemist has much the same effect. So too is the ending of Eastward Ho! a useful example: because the play parodies ‘city comedy’, its inclusion of such an ending helps to link an urban awareness and concluding metatheatre even more strongly; furthermore, the occasion it characters make reference to is none other than the Accession Day pageantry.

QUICKSILVER …See if the streets and the fronts of the houses be not stuck with people, and the windows filled with ladies, as on the solemn day of the pageant.
(Eastward Ho! Epilogue 5-6)

Shakespeare too, at the end of both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest also takes the opportunity an epilogue offers to collapse illusion to have characters beg “indulgence” or to “be friends”. But the best example of them all has to be the conclusion of King Henry VIII. Now known as a collaborative effort between Shakespeare and Fletcher, its last few scenes represent a sustained evocation of the city and its people that concludes with Cranmer’s famous ‘prophecy’ of both Elizabeth I, and he “Who from the sacred ashes of her honour/Shall star-like rise as great in fame as she was, /And so stand fixed” (5.iv.45-7), James I. The sequence of scenes is important: the action before Cranmer’s prophecy is focused on the Porter and his Man, and is filled with a sense of the city’s closeness. The Porter’s first line, “You’ll leave your noise anon, ye rascals. Do you take the court for Parish Garden? Ye rude slaves, leave your gaping” (5.iii.1-3) not only acts as an implicit stage direction for some off-stage noise to represent crowds outside the court, but actually makes reference to some other, more literally ‘off stage’ noises. A glance at a map of seventeenth century London shows the proximity of the Globe and Paris(h) Garden, both situated on the Bankside, and the latter’s bull- and bear-baiting drew crowds and noise easily audible at the Globe. Later references to “Paul’s” (14), “Moorfields” (31), “youths that thunder at a playhouse” (57), and the Porter’s order for “You i’th’chamblet, get up o’th’rail,” (86-7)["Chamblet" or 'camlet': expensive material made from silk and hair, worn by wealthier playgoers; “rail”: probably a low railing that went round the stage. – McMullan, 426] perpetuate the city’s presence and bring it even closer. Every time the city is articulated it is shaped: rhetorical magic creates the fiction on stage, but also reminds the audience of where they are. When Cranmer delivers the prophecy, he does so from this position so that he speaks both fictional, climactic revelation, and contemporary commentary and praise. This play, even more than the other conclusions open to the audience, offers a direct comment on contemporary theatre and society. The play’s own epilogue, probably Fletcher’s, that follows seems weak in comparison to this larger concluding movement.

So far, we have seen a few of those moments where the interface between Shakespeare and others’ plays and the city is at its clearest. At such points, the drama attempts to gloss the society, the city, or at least the audience of city folk, around it. This is only a small sample of Shakespeare’s approaches to the city; Anne Barton has written that the plays “are filled with evasions of the urban”, but, as should already be apparent, this is not quite right. The epilogues of The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and others would all be directly addressed to an audience of city-dwellers, be they groundlings or gallants (as well as to a court audience, and, if touring, a provincial one); the noise of the “Parish Garden” could be heard in a theatre built into the city; and even Henry V, which admittedly has a very limited portrayal of actual urban events, still approaches the city in its choruses and the reminiscing of the troops before Agincourt. What would be more accurate is to say that Shakespeare approaches the urban by a roundabout route, and thus does not ‘evade’ it. To return to my earlier references to the triumphal tradition behind the Accession Day parades or the penultimate chorus of Henry V, this roundabout route to the urban is present in several other similar descriptions, all to be found in Shakespeare’s Roman Plays.

Julius Caesar is known for its anachronistic mentioning of clocks and tunics, and there is the same mix of Elizabethan “chimney-tops” and Roman generals in Murellus’ chastising description of the citizens’ previous festivities:

MURELLUS …Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft
Have you climbed up to walls and battlements,
To towers and windows, yea, to chimney tops,
Your infants in your arms, and there have sat
The livelong day, with patient expectation,
To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome.
(Julius Caesar 1.i.36-41)

Although this is quite a clear description, it should be noted that Murellus is describing something that happened in the past. Here the Rome of Pompey’s triumph is used to gloss the Rome of Caesar’s return; but, at the same time, the Rome of Caesar is seen through an Elizabethan overlay of “chimney tops”. This may result, as references to “cobblers”, and “base mechanicals” in this scene certainly do, from North’s Elizabethan translation of Plutarch. What is important, though, is the way in which Murellus’ strange, composite Rome is inextricably part of his argument, and of the play’s development. A similar use of the city occurs in Anthony and Cleopatra:

CLEOPATRA Now, Iras, what think’st thou?
Thou an Egyptian puppet shall be shown
In Rome as well as I. Mechanic slaves
With greasy aprons, rules and hammers shall
Uplift us to the view. In their thick breaths,
Rank of gross diet, shall we be enclouded
And forced to drink their vapour.
(Antony and Cleopatra 5.ii.206-12)

Once more, the city is presented hypothetically, and as part of an argument. It is also distinctly Elizabethan in flavour: Cleopatra goes on to say how “scald rhymers [will]/Ballad us out o’tune” and “quick comedians”, including “Some squeaking Cleopatra boy” (214-9), will portray her and Antony. Of course, this is exactly what the Elizabethan theatre has been doing for the last two hours. Rather like the peculiarly self-aware characters of Troilus and Cressida, Cleopatra sees her future and it is in a city: she can escape Rome, but London and the pervasive Elizabethan milieu can never be completely evaded. The (literal) distaste and contempt that inflects Cleopatra’s imagery of “gross diet” and being “forced to drink their vapour”, resembles Brutus’ withering description of Coriolanus’ triumphal return from Corioles:

BRUTUS […] Your prattling nurse
Into a rapture lets her baby cry
While she chats him. The kitchen malkin pins
Her richest lockram ’bout her reechy neck,
Clambering the walls to eye him. Stalls, bulks, windows
Are smothered up, leads filled, and ridges horsed
With variable complexions, all agreeing
In earnestness to see him.
(Coriolanus 2.i.179-87)

The triplet of “chats him”, “eye him”, “see him”, contributes as much as “reechy” and “smothered” to a sense of commonness that Brutus (rather ironically, given his being one of the people’s tribunes) seeks to attribute to Coriolanus. As in the other two examples, the “leads”, “lockram”, and “malkin” (a shortened version of Matilda, printed as a proper name, ‘Malkin’ in the First Folio) all create the same bifocal effect of Rome in Elizabethan terms. Or, rather, Jacobean, since passages of Brutus’ description echo two accounts of James I’s accession day parade: Dekker’s The Magnificent Entertainment and Jonson’s Ben Jonson His Part of King James his Royall and Magnificent Entertainement through his Honorable Cittie of London.[David George, Notes &Queries, 241 (June 1966): 164] The Tribune’s words also manage to find a middle ground between Cleopatra’s hypothetical experience and Murellus’ evocation of past triumph: for although Brutus is ostensibly describing something that just happened, the triumph that the audience has seen on stage consists only of Cominius, Lartius, Coriolanus, Captains, Soldiers, and a Herald (2.i.134SD). This is not to say Brutus is lying: he is simply telling Sicinius and the audience what has been going on offstage, elsewhere in Rome; alternatively, as with the Porter of Henry VIII, he could also be describing a rather different offstage. The “reechy” crowds so eager to see Coriolanus could have been present earlier in the play: they could have been the groundlings themselves.

It is hard to conceive the difference between the early modern theatres, especially amphitheatres like the Globe, and the modern stage. Andrew Gurr has pointed out several differences. The first of them is his distinction between “early audiences” and “modern spectators” [Gurr (2004), 1]; that is to say a collective mass of listeners, and a group of individual spectators. One reason for this difference is that, what with many gallants wearing elaborate headgear or smoking vast quantities of tobacco, the early modern theatregoer would not have been able to see very well at all. This was not for lack of trying: ‘auditors’ all but surrounded the stage so that, if you did manage to see past the plumes and puffs, the view would be both of actor and of the audience members behind him, along with itinerant tradesmen, prostitutes and thieves. An obvious result of this is that what Coleridge called the “willing suspension of disbelief” was exceptionally difficult in such a theatre. Not just sight, but touch, smell, hearing, and (should you have bought an apple as refreshment) taste constantly and intrusively reminded the auditor of where they were. There were also no on-site toilets. In such an environment, then, there was only one illusion that could be produced with ease, and that was the illusion of the city itself. Shakespeare’s plays do not evade the urban, instead their illusions must respond to and profit from the presence of city. The city is intrusive, and not just in the Roman plays, which, as has been noted, partake of a clear intellectual and traditional link between Rome and London, England and the world of Homer, Ovid, and Virgil. Anne Barton notes that even As You Like It has Duke Senior call deer the “native burghers of this desert city” (2.i.23), and Jaques (according to the First Lord) call cows “you fat and greasy citizens” (2.i.55) [Barton (1994), 331]. These intrusions are part of the chaos of the city, its novelty and uncertainty; and it can be said that the Accession Day pageant did not complicate the city by making it into a stage, but simplified it instead. The Chorus’, Brutus’, Cleopatra’s, and Marcellus’ conceptions of the city are all so clear as to be part of a wider expression, whether of the fear of shame, the sense of greatness, or otherwise. The city of the pageant and other special occasions was uncomplicated, but this is not to say that Shakespeare was unaware of the complexity and strangeness of the normal, everyday city in which he lived. It is to that city and Shakespeare’s relation to it that I will now turn.

About halfway through the day I noticed that little had been said about social media: I mentioned twitter in my presentation about Open Shakespeare, but Facebook (even in a discussion devoted to ‘social media and user-generated content’) was largely absent. Thinking about why this might be, I imagine several reasons: first, a lack of understanding about quite how important facebook now is in internet usage; second, the absence of experience in managing a successful facebook-based fan network; and, in relation to this, third, the peculiar language of ‘likes’ and so on specific to Facebook, and the difficulty of communicating what may be an original artistic project in the standardised vocabulary of such a platform. For a more developed reflection about this point, do have a look at Patrick Hussey’s thoughts on ‘community managers’.

Although people weren’t talking about social media, they were talking about the annotator used on Open Shakespeare. Everyone was agreed that it would almost certainly grow very big, yet also that, before it did, a few things needed to be put in place, namely:

• Versioning: i.e. a freely annotatable text, from which annotations gradually moved to a more established version.
• Login: crucial to filtering annotations
• Tagging: for filtering; already in place, but needs to be simplified

If we want to extend the annotator beyond Shakespeare, and really increase its use, one delegate pointed out how well adapted science fiction would be to the tool. First, science fiction readers tend to be more tech savvy; second, science fiction (like fantasy) often teaches its readers about its world as they read, thus providing information for retrospective annotation without too much additional research (as opposed to Shakespeare, who often demands a grip of sixteenth/seventeenth century England); finally, perhaps one of the most famous science fiction writers of all time, H P Lovecraft, is almost completely in the public domain…

Last but not least in this rag-tag post, a point about some of the other things I heard during the day. Andrew Nairne, Director of the Arts at the Arts Council, spoke about how £20m had been allocated for digital/artistic collaborations, for which the NESTA scheme serves as a pilot. He spoke of “digital” as an “operating context” (so both a context in which to operate, and one, I presume, that operates upon the content delivered through it), yet also underlined the ability of technology to serve the arts, “accelerating and enhancing”. Last but not least, he and several others, pointed to the utility of adopting a “gaming” model for online art, partly, I feel, in an effort to overcome one of the many instinctive fears of arts organisations, whose presence resounded through the beautifully modern NESTA suite from time to time throughout the day.

It is the blackness of ebony that most interests Shakespeare. In Twelfth Night Feste the clown (disguised as Sir Topas the priest) tortures the imprisoned Malvolio with a nonsensical description of the steward’s surroundings.

FESTE Say’st thou that the house is dark?
MALVOLIO As hell, Sir Topas.
FESTE Why it hath bay windows transparent as barricadoes, and the clerestories toward the north are as lustrous as ebony; and yet complain’st thou of obstruction?

The joke of course is that Feste accurately describes the “barricadoes” and ebon darkness of the prison, only to draw the conclusion that the “barricadoes” are “transparent” and the ebon “clerestories” (church windows) are “lustrous”. In reply to this, Malvolio can only insist that “I am not mad, Sir Topas. I say to you this house is dark.”

The uncomfortable comedy of Feste torturing Malvolio is far removed from the use made of “ebony” in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Here the word is used by the King of Navarre to describe Berowne’s beloved Rosaline.

KING By heaven, thy love is black as ebony!
BEROWNE Is ebony like her? O word divine!
A wife of such wood were felicity.
O, who can give an oath? Where is a book?
That I may swear beauty doth beauty lack
If that she learn not of her eye to look.
No face is fair that is not so full of black.

Whereas Feste was busy contorting his language to befuddle Malvolio, Berowne’s ornamental punning is aiming straight for courtly wit. To understand him, it is necessary to recall both the value of ebony and the fact that blackness might also be shameful (cf. Malvolio’s “[black] As hell” above, or Gertrude’s “black and grained spots” of guilt in Hamlet). Consequently, the King’s “black as ebony” pulls two ways: beautiful as ebony yet ugly as blackness. Berowne takes this doubleness and improvises upon it, emphasising the beauty of darkness, and particular of Rosaline’s dark eyes. Elsewhere in Shakespeare’s works similar reconstruction of blackness takes place: the dark lady of the Sonnets is praised, for example, with the comment that “now is black beauty’s successive heir”. Shakespeare’s near contemporary, Philip Sidney, also praised dark beauties, focussing like Berowne on the beloved’s eyes. Stella in Astrophil and Stella (1592) is thus possessed of eyes “in beamy black”.

Overall then, blackness is the dominate feature of ebony when it appears in Shakespeare’s works, with the added complexity occuring when Berowne uses its beautiful, ornamental properties to challenge (like Sidney) other preconceptions about blackness in the period. I should probably mention Othello at this point, but would rather avoid a lengthy article.

What could he see but mightily he noted?
What did he note but strongly he desir’d?
What he beheld, on that he firmly doted,
And in his will his wilful eye he tir’d.
With more than admiration he admir’d
Her azure veins, her alabaster skin,
Her coral lips, her snow-white dimpled chin.

In contrast to Venus and Adonis, this portrayal of Lucrece is rather disturbing, made through the eyes of Tarquin, her future rapist. The reference to alabaster in the final line, along with coral and azure (originally another name for lapis lazuli), all contribute to render Lucrece an object and an ornament in Tarquin’s view, something to be possessed. Calcite alabaster has two specific properties that may also be relevant here: it resists water, but can be marked with a knife (Lucrece, of course, after many tears eventally commits suicide with just such an implement); and it was once used for windows. The translucent properties of alabaster are perhaps active here since a central theme of the poem is Lucrece’s sense of her own vulnerability, her feeling that her violation is plain for all those who “[pry] through my window” to see.

Sinking deeper into the menacing possibilities of alabaster, we come to Othello, who vows that “I’ll not shed [Desdemona’s] blood; / Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, / And smooth as monumental alabaster”. He keeps his promise, but still suffocates his beloved at the play’s conclusion. The “monumental alabaster” differs from other uses of the mineral in relation to ornament, and is typical of Othello’s tendancy to aggrandise (see Wilson-Knight on “the Othello music” for a long description of this). Alabaster was used on monuments as well as ornaments, namely tombs and effigies, because of the ease with which it might be carved. When Othello speaks of “monumental alabaster”, a macabre note is sounded.

There is a darker appearance of the word, than even Othello’s, however: it comes in Richard III and Tyrrel’s soliloquy describing how the two young princes were murdered at the king’s orders. “Thus…girdling one another / Within their alabaster innoent arms / …We smothered / The most replenished sweer work of nature.” These lines unite the ornamental littleness of alabaster (the children’s fragility), its whiteness and translucency (their innocence), and its macabre usages (their murder).

To conclude, I turn to the fifth, final and cheeriest usage of alabaster in the canon. Gratiano’s speech to his friend Antonio about his passionate nature, and his subsequent rejection of alabaster and all that it represents in The Merchant of Venice. His lines set him apart in the play, distinct from Antonio’s anxieties and Shylock’s macabre plots, themselves the true analogues of alabaster. After all, Antonio’s ships may well have been carrying the precious mineral.

GRATIANO Let me play the fool;
With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come;
And let my liver rather heat with wine
Than my heart cool with mortifying groans.
Why should a man whose blood is warm within
Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster,
Sleep when he wakes, and creep into the jaundice
By being peevish?

…there is an upstart Crow, beautiful with our feathers, that his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke vierse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceite the onely Shake-scene in a countrey..”

There is much to be discussed here, but – noting only that “Johannes fac totum” means something like ‘Jack-of-all-trades’ (‘Johnny-do-it-all’) – I shall concentrate specifically on the now famous description of Shakespeare as an “upstart Crow”. In particular, I shall reveal how Shakespeare himself uses the word, both to illuminate Greene’s insult and, as ever, to explore the myriad-mindedness of our playwright.

There are fifty uses of the word “crow” in the plays and poems, but not all of them refer to the bird. For example, neither Friar Lawrence nor Antipholus of Ephesus make use of avian assistance to break down, respectively, the door of the Capulet monument or that of their own house, but rather demand what we now call a ‘crow-bar’, so named for its resemblance either to the bird’s beak or talons.

When the crow does appear in Shakespeare’s writing, it is not to its beak nor its talons but, as with Greene, to its feathers that reference is often made. Punning, for example, on the senses of crow as bird and bar, Dromio asks his master if he wants “A crow without feather” to break down the door of his house in Ephesus. Elsewhere, the blackness of the crows’ plumage is made to carry a whole range of meaning: its “sable” places it amongst the “mourners” of the Phoenix and the Turtle, and Autolycus sells “Cypreis black as e’er was crow” to the rustics of The Winter’s Tale. “Our feathers” that Greene accuses Shakespeare of stealing, are thus to be taken as something that covers a colouring strongly associated with not just death and mourning, but more nastily, both ugliness (for Romeo, Juliet is a beautiful dove amongst crows) and corruption (the rapist Tarquin is compared to a “crow” in Lucrece).

Corruption and blackness is not just limited to moral depravity, but also disease: the crow’s colour fits its larcenous activities, and Shakespeare repeatedly portrays the crow as a battlefield scavenger. York boasts that he has made Clifford “prey for carrion kites and crows” in Henry VI part II, Grandpré describes the birds hovering over the English forces at Agincourt in Henry V, and Pandarus invokes them on the battlefield of Troy in Troilus and Cressida. Although such a portrayal of the crow as scavenger fits Greene’s purposes in calling Shakespeare an “upstart Crow”, aligning him with both the repulsive and the unromantic elements of martial society, the fact that Greene claims that Shakespeare has stolen his and others’ feathers also portrays Greene as one of the crows’ habitual targets, namely carrion. Of course, this is not to Greene’s purpose, but the extension of the metaphor seems a neat defence of the bard if not the bird.

It is in The Merchant of Venice that Shakespeare uses the bird for more moral ends, illustrating this time Portia’s support for a judgment that takes into account all mitigating circumstances. Such a use of the crow, although dependent on less flattering representations for the power of its reversal, is nevertheless proof of Shakespeare’s inventiveness. These lines take the symbolism of the crow, evident elsewhere in the plays and poems, and viciously employed by Greene, and then add to it in a new and unexpected way: the point that the crow is only criticised when heard (“attended”) is, one is tempted to say, a response to Greene, whose angry slur is also praise of Shakespeare, since it proves his rise through the cultural echelons of his day.

PORTIA The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark
When neither is attended; and I think
The nightingale, if she should sing by day,
When every goose is cackling, would be thought
No better a musician than the wren.
How many things by season season’d are
To their right praise and true perfection!

Rufus Pollock provided the opening address, pointing out how the convergence of the two phenomena of greater data availability and advanced computing power had created the perfect conditions for openness to flourish. He announced one such flourishing in the form of datacatalogs.org, which came online at the start of the conference. His next point was to argue that the focus of activities in the community was moving from making data accessible to providing tools for and building communities around that data. Of course, the quantity problem is only half solved (a later speaker pointed out the small quantities of open government data in Asia, for example), but was still at a point where data cycles (ecosystems of community, tools and data) could be founded. This last point fits neatly with Open Shakespeare, since the project is slowly forming just such a cycle: early editions of Shakespeare’s plays are open data, and a small community is either building tools (like the annotator) or using them to create more content about Shakespeare’s works, which in turn offers new programming challenges and so completes the circle.

Glyn Moody’s keynote talk, immediately following Rufus’, approached the topic of Open Knowledge from a different angle, by analysing the current situation in terms of a new abundance which placed pressure on systems, such as the UK’s copyright law, designed for eighteenth-century conditions of scarcity. Although Moody did not mention it, Shakespeare himself was something of a forerunner in this domain: the “fourteen years plus fourteen more” model of copyright established in 1710 was the result of bookseller lobbying, not least that of Jacob Tonson, eager to protect his monopoly on the works of Shakespeare and others (notably Milton, and Dryden’s translations of Virgil). Having sketched out his model of abundance and scarcity, Moody concluded with the provocative question of how open projects would function without copyright, pointing out that many in fact depend upon restrictive legislation as their raison d’être. The only answer that I can give is that open projects would perhaps continue as the first models of communities where exchange and collaboration are well established (as in Open Shakespeare), that is to say, continuing as, in other words, those “data cycles” and “ecosystems” that Pollock had described as the successors to the victories of open data availability.

Later on in the conference, in the second track of talks, a panel on ‘Data Journalism: What Next?’ provided considerable food for thought on the topic of communities, much of it served up by the Guardian’s Simon Rogers. It was he, for example, that questioned the merits of crowd-sourcing, arguing that it did not provide objective data, since its contributors could be extremely biased, an MP participating, for instance, in the crowd-sourced analysis of his own expenses. This point was backed up by Stefan Candea, with both he and Simon Rogers emphasising the important labour that remained for the journalist when it came to looking over crowd-sourced responses and shaping them into a story. A neat example of this was the Guardian’s exploration of Sarah Palin’s emails, where users were directed to a random email and then asked to signal anything of interest. Although not flawless (one imagines a Palin aide slaving away to hide significant correspondence), its randomness nevertheless provided an even coverage of the files. This randomness might be an important tool for Open Shakespeare’s own crowd-sourcing of annotations, as a way of directing users to annotate less-appreciated works. As regards the verifiability of these annotations, Open Shakespeare has the problematic luxury of considering subjective opinion on the Bard’s art as valid as objective facts about it, since these opinions map the contours of contemporary attitudes to Shakespeare. Further, the intense subjectivity of responses to art means that such subjective annotations do not suffer from the problem of verifiability, because no such critical response has ever been verifiable (for those interested, this line of argument is behind Kant’s description of “universal subjective validity” in his Critique of the Power of Judgment).

It is on this idea of subjective annotation, the generation of subjective data, that I would like to bring this summary to a close. The conference was on Open Knowledge, but it is significant that I found the adjective to have been discussed far more often than the noun. Open Shakespeare’s annotation system, the tool that generates its data cycle, provides both verifiable information (“mirth in funeral” is an example of “synoeciosis” in Hamlet) and subjective opinion (“Words, words, words” is, for one user, “one of the most human lines in the play”). Is the second still data? I would argue that it is, but it is of a kind rarely discussed in Berlin. After all, what are we to do with it in order to integrate it back into the system of open data? Such opinion does not atomise easily, just as Shakespeare’s own words resist, with their context and their double meanings, computerised analysis. We can count the instances of the word “prune”, but it takes an article on the subject to bring out the humour from the information generated by the open-source tool. That article itself is data and can be itself the launch pad for new responses, but it moves the axis of the cycle away from developers’ tools and their data and towards the perspective of the user and, more broadly, that of the community. Rufus Pollock was right to argue for the existence of ecosystems of open data, but the case of Open Shakespeare shows that they can only be fully functional if all three elements are given their full weight: tools, data, and users together.

If one word could sum up the work of May and June, it would be ‘users’. These two months have seen our online presence, especially on twitter, grow: over four hundred and twenty annotations have now been written, and we have been followed by, amongst others, a Tory MP and the artistic director of the Boston Actors’ Shakespeare Project. In order to provide a regular stream of new content for our followers, weekly articles on Shakespeare’s words have been posted over the last eight weeks, those on “dawn” and “drawer” attracting the most interest.

There is no single word with which to encompass our plans for the future. A study of how people use the website, and especially the annotator, is currently underway, the conclusions of which will soon be presented at OKCON 2011, and – if all goes well – in journal format also. One recommendation will be to establish ready-made categories for annotations, in order to make organisation of the comments much easier. Whilst studying the data, it also occurred to me that the website could be extended with the incorporation of famous past annotations, such as those comments made by Johnson and Pope when they each edited Shakespeare’s works in the eighteenth century.

Of course, we need not only incorporate the annotations of Johnson and Pope into Open Shakespeare: we could also expand Open Shakespeare to Open Literature and include their creative work too. Indeed, just such an expansion is likely to take place over the summer, and we would love to hear about any ideas people have for Open Literature: whether, for example, there is a particular (out of copyright) author you would like to see uploaded soon or whether you simply have some thoughts about the layout of it all. As ever, you can get in touch through the website, post to the open literature mailing list, or best of all, add to the new Open Literature Wiki.

Before we discuss these passages, I would like my reader to imagine a prune. In Elizabethan times, this subspecies of plum was served dried as a delicacy. Small, round, and wrinkly, it seems to have been considered reminiscent of a testicle. Pompey, describing the quite possibly fictitious visit of constable Elbow’s wife to a house of ill repute, says that “she came in great with child; and longing – saving your honour’s reverence – for stew’d prunes”. The prunes in question, on which Pompey dwells so fulsomely as to drive a frustrated Angelo from the court, are a transparent reference to male sexual favours, underlined by the use of “stew’d”, a culinary term synonymous with low-life and immorality.

The simple shepherd, although in conversation with the far from pure Autolycus (famous now as an early purveyor of the “dildo”) is not quite so lewd as Pompey when it comes to fruit. Whereas Pompey details how Mrs Elbow supposedly sat “cracking the stones of the foresaid prunes”, the shepherd innocently thinks about the feast’s need for “four pound of prunes, and as many raisins o’the sun”. Note that these are fresh prunes (in contrast to the sun-dried grapes), and thus, one imagines, less prone to insalubrious insinuations.

My last reference to prunes is given to us by Falstaff, a frequent figure in these articles, not least because of his great appetite for food and drink. Participating in the ‘Pompey’ tradition, the old knight tells the Hostess that “There’s no more faith in thee than in a stew’d prune”, where “stew’d prune” is the fruity synonym of ‘prostitute’. In Henry IV part II, the same equivalence lies behind Doll’s tyrade against Pistol, when she, in the presence of Falstaff and others, accuses the hot-blooded captain of living “upon moldy stewed prunes and dried cakes”. Of course, only one of these nouns actually refers to a foodstuff, and so Doll’s phrase provides a final example of how objects answering one bodily need may represent the satiation of another, and thus a whole network of moral judgments founded on the humble “prunus domestica”.

MERCUTIO Thou art like one of these fellows that, when he enters the confines of a tavern, claps me his sword upon the table, and says ‘God send me no need of thee!’ and by the operation of the second cup draws him on the drawer, when indeed there is no need.

The ‘drawer’, of course, refers to the barman, the ‘tapster’, who – as the OED puts it – “draws liquor for customers”. Mercutio’s banter with Benvolio puns on the differing situations of drawing a sword and drawing a pint: strangely, his is the only use of the word that does not occur in a scene with Falstaff, another character very able to distinguish between swords and beverages. That said, it is not Falstaff who speaks about drawers in these scenes, but rather his royal companion, Prince Hal.

PRINCE. I have sounded the very base-string of humility. Sirrah, I am sworn brother to a leash of drawers; and can call them all by their Christian names, as, Tom, Dick, and Francis. They take it already upon their salvation, that though I be but Prince of Wales, yet I am the king of courtesy; and tell me flatly I am no proud Jack, like Falstaff, but a corinthian, a lad of mettle, a good boy,–by the Lord, so they call me;–and, when I am King of England, I shall command all the good lads in Eastcheap.

For Hal, the drawer is more than an unremarkable figure useful for a pun but nor more like he is for Mercutio. Instead, the drawer represents another world, that the young prince enters into with both a wry smile and an eye on his future role as king. This speech occurs early in Henry IV Part I, and is paralleled by another episode in Part II where Hal and Poins disguise themselves as Drawers to trick Falstaff. This comic venture then becomes more serious when Hal becomes King Henry and, on the eve of Agincourt, once more alters his dress and blends in with the common people, culminating with his dawn meditation on “ceremony”. That great speech has its roots here in the tavern, where the prince’s fascination with the many echelons of society, the trappings of a profession and the “Tom, Dick and Francis” beneath them, begins with “a leash of drawers”.

The little episode between Kent and Oswald functions by betraying the hope and freshness that a new morning represents. Their brawl is yet another sign of the erosion of Lear’s power. In contrast to this, the disguised Duke Vincentio – another leader who delegates his power, albeit more successfully than Lear – reassures the Provost, with a statesman’s eye for symbolism, that “As near the dawning .. as it is, / You shall hear more ere morning”. This intimation is part of a sequence of night-time scenes in Measure for Measure, during which the disguised Duke unravels the orders of his corrupt deputy, Angelo, and so saves Claudio from execution for adultery, even as he prepares his own reappearance in Vienna. Frequent references to the fact that “it is almost clear dawn” rush the audience through a sequence of scenes that culminate with the final Duke’s dispensation of justice “like power divine”.

From dawn, to sun, to God, the same sequence of thoughts runs through another leader who disguises himself: Henry V. Wrapped in a common soldier’s garb, he reprises a theme of his sleepless father’s in Henry IV pt II, musing on “Ceremony” before the battle of Agincourt. Just as his father contrasted the poor “ship-boy’s” capacity to sleep in a storm when “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown”, Henry V imagines the slave

…Who with a body fill’d and vacant mind
Gets him to rest, cramm’d with distressful bread,
Never sees horrid night, the child of hell,
But, like a lackey, from the rise to set
Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night
Sleeps in Elysium; next day after dawn,
Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse,
And follows so the ever-running year,
With profitable labour, to his grave…

Hyperion was one of the Greek titans, ultimately associated with the sun in Greek mythology, and here by Shakespeare. This personification of the sun as Hyperion also makes both sun and titan similar to King Henry, who will simself soon be helped “to his horse” by a servant. Hyperion, as a titan, was cast down by the younger Gods (the Olympians, led by Zeus against Chronos), and one cannot help but wonder whether the King’s comparison between himself and the sun-titan does not also carry a hint of night-time anxiety. After all, his father was “uneasy” under a crown that he took from a weak Richard II.

There are other dawns in Shakespeare’s works, but I will not analyse them in such detail as these three mornings. Many of these other examples are sinister: Titus Andronicus, in words that become very ironic indeed, praises the morning of the hunt which will finish with his daughter raped and mutilated; Marcellus, trying to work out why the Ghost disappeared at the start of Hamlet, describes the cockerel’s role at “dawning”; and, finally, Iachimo, having stolen Imogen’s bracelet, crawls back into the trunk to await the dawn and the fulfilment of his plot in Cymbeline.

Sinister or not, all these examples are part of one of the most complex stage illusions of Shakespeare’s works: the compression of time. Criticised for this by later neoclassicists like Rymer, his use of little words like dawn or night, or phrases like “The clock hath stricken three” (a very anachronistic moment in Julius Caesar), alert us to shifts of time as much as other phrases alert us to shifts of place. With these words, though, comes more than additional detail, but an atmosphere. After all, Iachimo’s nascent plot is all the more powerful for proceeding just before dawn, and Henry V’s battleside worries soon dissipate with the coming light. Later, facing down a French messenger, the young King delivers a celestial threat, which operates not on the pale light of morning, but the stifling warmth of midday.

A many of our bodies shall no doubt
Find native graves; upon the which, I trust,
Shall witness live in brass of this day’s work:
And those that leave their valiant bones in France,
Dying like men, though buried in your dunghills,
They shall be famed; for there the sun shall greet them,
And draw their honours reeking up to heaven;
Leaving their earthly parts to choke your clime,
The smell whereof shall breed a plague in France.

A rather less innocent mix of garlics and osculation is made in Measure for Measure by the “fantastic” of the play, Lucio. When speaking to a friar who, unbeknownst to him, is actually the disguised Duke Vincentio, Lucio offers a lewd, unsubstantiated account of Vincentio’s doings:

The duke, I say to thee again, would eat mutton on Fridays. He’s not past it; yet, and, I say to thee, he would mouth with a beggar though she smelt brown bread and garlic. Say that I said so.–Farewell.

Quite why brown bread and garlic should be associated is a mystery to me, and perhaps material for another article. Of equal interest here, though, is the link between garlic and the poor. One finds the same association in Coriolanus, whose eponymous hero doesn’t quite have to ask beggars for their votes, but he does have to meet many a plebian and is afterwards flattered by Menenius for his ability to stand “The breath of garlic-eaters”.

Last but not least, we have a mystified Hotspur, who, having spent some time with Glendower and his fantastic stories of “dreamer Merlin” and “skimble-skamble stuff” declares that,

… I had rather live
With cheese and garlic in a windmill, far,
Than feed on cates and have hi talk to me
In any summer-house in Christendom.

“Cates” was an Elizabethan word for delicacies (delicates), and the fact the proud and noble Hotspur would prefer the peasant’s garlic over Glendower and sweets is strong language indeed. In fact, he would not only take garlic, but also cheese into the bargain as well, and become positively French to avoid the Welsh lord’s ramblings.

On which note, I end my own ramblings, with the disclaimer that all attribution of garlic and cheese to the French is entirely of my own whimsical fabrication, and has no roots whatsoever in the language of Shakespeare.

Onion appears five times in Shakespeare’s works, and all but one reference deals with their capacity to make the chef’s eyes water. Lafeu’s, “Mine eyes smell onions; I shall weep anon” is perhaps the simplest of all such uses of the bulb (I would have typed vegetable, but such a categorisation is apparently quite contentious). Other characters, when speaking about onions’ lacrimose properties, display a peculiar tendency to associate them with women. After all, as Lear puts it “women’s weapons” are “water drops”. The eunuch in Antony and Cleopatra talks of the tear-inducing alium twice. Here, as Antony discusses the forthcoming war against Octavius, he declares:

ENOBARBUS. What mean you, sir,
To give them this discomfort? Look, they weep;
And I, an ass, am onion-ey’d: for shame,
Transform us not to women.

Similarly, a Lord in The Taming of the Shrew advises on how to acquire the woman’s gift of crying with the aid of an onion:

LORD … And if the boy have not a woman’s gift
To rain a shower of commanded tears,
An onion will do well for such a shift,
Which, in a napkin being close convey’d,
Shall in despite enforce a watery eye.
See this dispatch’d with all the haste thou canst;
Anon I’ll give thee more instructions.

Peculiarly, all the references to onions in Shakespeare’s works, whether they deal with crying or women or neither of these, are made by men. My last example is no exception, and is taken from Bottom’s advice to his fellow Rude Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is thankfully free from the misogyny of lord and eunuch, and instead displays a touching regard for the lord and ladies’ sense of smell.

BOTTOM … In any case, let Thisbe have clean linen; and let not him that plays the lion pare his nails, for they shall hang out for the lion’s claws. And, most dear actors, eat no onions nor garlick, for we are to utter sweet breath; and I do not doubt but to hear them say it is a sweet comedy. No more words: away! go; away!

Thanks to these lines, when it comes to the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe at the play’s conclusion, one thing of which we can now be sure is that the eyes of the assembled gentry are weeping tears of laughter, and not, as Lafeu puts it ‘smelling Onions’.

Our modus operandi is the same as ever: all the instructions are here.

Following on from the first annotation sprint, we will be annotating Hamlet

On Saturday 19th March we’re holding the second Open Shakespeare Annotation Sprint — participate and help change criticism forever! We’ll be getting together online and in-person to collaborate on critically annotating a complete Shakespeare play with all our work being open.

All of Shakespeare’s texts are, of course, in the public domain, and therefore already open. However, most editions of Shakespeare that people actually use (and purchase) are ‘critical’ editions, that is texts together with notes and annotations that explain or analyze the text, and, for these critical editions no open version yet exists. On the 19th March we will continue to change all that!

Using the annotator tool we now have a way to work collaboratively online to add and develop these ‘critical’ additions and the aim of the sprint is to fully annotate one complete play. Anyone can get involved, from lay-Shakespeare-lover to English professor, all you’ll need is a web-browser and an interest in the Bard!

• When: Saturday Mar 19th 2011, 11am-7pm GMT
  • May extend either side depending on location of participants
• Where: online and in-person
  • In-person meet-up details coming soon!
• Planning etherpad: http://literature.okfnpad.org/annotation-sprint
  • Please add your name here if you plan to participate so we can coordinate
  • Facebook event
• Event page: http://www.openshakespeare.org/2011/02/26/announcing-annotation-sprint-ii
• Requirements: a standards-compliant web browser (Firefox or Chrome recommended — not IE)

Using specially-designed annotation software we intend to print an edition of Shakespeare unlike any other, incorporating glosses, textual notes and other information written by anyone able to connect to the website.

Work begins with a full-day annotation sprint on Saturday 19th March, which will take online as well as at in-person meetups. Anyone can organize a meetup and we’re organizing one in Cambridge, England – more details forthcoming (if you’d like to hold your own please just add it to the etherpad linked above).

Annotation Sprint

Overall, a success, but could certainly benefit from an extended period of build-up and publicity.
A radio report on the event can be found here: http://www.camfm.co.uk/player/player.php?epid=754
TCS (The Cambridge Student Newspaper) published an article on us too, available as a pdf here: http://www.tcs.cam.ac.uk/download/TCSVolume12Lent_Issue5.pdf

Software

A new programmer will be working on the annotation tool, aiming to implement tagging.
Other useful features could include: line reference, filtering…

Website

New word of the day logo!

British Library

RP and JHS will be speaking at the British Library on Thursday 24th February. Do get in touch with anything you’d like us to speak about.

Until 11:30am you can: Vote for the play to be annotated

Any feedback, or thoughts? Use the etherpad to leave your thoughts about the event.

How to Participate

Step 0: Check your browser

To participate in the annotation sprint, you will need a recent version of Firefox or Chrome or Safari.

Step One: Login to Open Shakespeare [optional]

[optional]: you don’t need to login — but if you don’t your contributions will be anonymous.

To login you’ll need to obtain an OpenID if you don’t have one. Here’s how:

1. Visit https://www.myopenid.com/

2. Click on the button ‘Sign up for an OpenID’

3. Follow their instructions to create an OpenID by which you will be known when annotating

Now you’ve got an OpenID you can login:

1. Go to our login page

2. Click on the ‘OpenID’ button

3. Copy and paste, or type out your OpenID, which looks like a web address

Step Two: Start Annotating!

1. Go to our works page and click on ‘annotate’ beneath the chosen play

2. All the instructions are written on the side of the page in the ‘Annotation: Howto’ column

The votes are in! We are annotating Hamlet

This weekend we’re holding the first Open Shakespeare Annotation Sprint — participate and help change criticism forever! We’ll be getting together online and in-person to collaborate on critically annotating a complete Shakespeare play with all our work being open.

All of Shakespeare’s texts are, of course, in the public domain, and therefore already open. However, most editions of Shakespeare people actually use (and purchase) are ‘critical’ editions, that is texts together with notes and annotations that explain or analyze the text, and, for these critical editions no open version yet exists. This weekend we’re aiming to change that!

Using the annotator tool we now have a way to work collaboratively online to add and develop these ‘critical’ additions and the aim of the sprint is to fully annotate one complete play. Anyone can get involved, from lay-Shakespeare-lover to English professor, all you’ll need is a web-browser and an interest in Bard, and even if you can’t make it, you can [vote right now on which play we should work on][vote]!

• When: Saturday Feb 5th 2011, 11am-6pm GMT
  • May extend either side depending on location of participants
  • May do a second day on Sunday (depending on coffee and enthusiasm)!
• Where: online and in-person
  • E.g. in-person meetup at University of Cambridge English Faculty
• Planning etherpad: http://literature.okfnpad.org/annotation-sprint
  • Please add your name here if you plan to participate so we can coordinate
  • Facebook event
• Event page: http://openshakespeare.org/2011/02/01/announcing-annotation-sprint
• Requirements: a standards-compliant web browser (Firefox or Chrome recommended — not IE)
  * [Vote for text to annotate (doodle)][vote]

[vote]: http://www.doodle.com/6rghbkbyb5tcin3r
Using specially-designed annotation software we intend to print an edition of Shakespeare unlike any other, incorporating glosses, textual notes and other information written by anyone able to connect to the website.

Work begins with a full-day annotation sprint on Saturday 5th February, which will take online as well as at in-person meetups. Anyone can organize a meetup and we’re organizing one at University of Cambridge English Faculty (if you’d like to hold your own please just add it to the etherpad linked above).

Unfortunately for the finally triumphant Yorkists, Richard Duke of Gloucester has already become alienated from their cause by the disloyalty of his brother George Duke of Clarence, and by the sexual vagaries of his other brother, King Edward IV. The king’s foolish marriage to a commoner wrecks plans for a more diplomatic alliance with the Duke of Burgundy. Richard’s enormous soliloquy (III.ii. 124-94) about his alienation and ambition to rule is a tour de force evoking a whole new Machiavellian personality which is to dominate the next play in the tetralogy, Richard III. The role will be considered among Shakespeare’s most memorable characters. Indeed, such virtuoso parts of Richard’s role in Part 3 are often transposed to the start of Richard III to reinforce that play’s fascination.

Editors continue to debate the exact relationship of the quarto and folio texts, and the sequence of composition of the three parts now entitled ‘Henry VI’. Critical debates about Part 3‘s sustained brutality often suggest that it exploits popular bad taste, but it has been increasingly revived since Peter Hall’s and John Barton’s production of it as part of their sequence of seven history plays (1963 and 1964): by Terry Hands (1977), Michael Bogdanov (1986), Adrian Noble (1988), Katie Mitchell (1994), Edward Hall (2000) and Michael Boyd (2000, 2006).

Contributed by Hugh Macrae Richmond

RP, JHS, VCF

Under Discussion

• Should we translate Open Shakespeare into French?
• Issue tracker: https://bitbucket.org/okfn/shakespeare/issues?status=new&status=open
• Do we want a Q&A site for Shakespeare (or just literature-related) questions and answers …

Actions

Annotation

RP: Fix the annotation login
RP: Set up annotation tags
JHS: Organise an ‘annotation sprint’ for one play to happen in the next few weeks: emails and draft basic details

Introductions

• JHS: Pass word documents through google docs to wordpress to test text encoding problems
• JHS: advertise final few introductions on twitter and mailing lists
• RP: Fix 1H6 bug
• VCF: Write introduction to The Comedy of Errors

Other Media

• JHS: Write Berkeley for information about copyright on their archive, with a view to using images as play logos
• VCF: Contact friend specialised in Shakespeare and film
• JHS: Organise publicdomain artwork competition?

Other Projects

• RP: Migrate blog.openshakespeare.org into the okfn.org multisite …
• VCF: Word of the Day
• JHS: inaugurate Essays section with Macbeth work, launch an appeal for more contributions
• JB: Write to school contacts for annotation trial in schools

The full Quarto title covers major elements of the plot but does not identify the central relationship between the weak, if well-meaning King Henry VI and his extraordinarily dynamic French Queen Margaret of Anjou, whose concerns govern much of the action: particularly her competition for court influence with Duke Humphrey and his wife Eleanor, both of whom she destroys with the aid of her lover the Earl of Suffolk, only to lose him by murder on his way to exile. Following the chronicles of Hall and Holinshed, the play’s ultimate political concern is the king’s failure to control the rise of Richard, Duke of York, whose family’s claims to the throne, usurped by the Lancastrians, are justified by primogeniture and the incompetent king’s loss of France. The play ends with the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses at the Battle of St. Albans, won by followers of the White Rose of York.

The play was clearly designed as the first of a two-play sequence but there are many striking episodes in the progression of Queen Margaret’s tense conspiracy with the Earl of Suffolk, which involves the witchcraft conjuration that destroys Duchess Eleanor as prelude to the discrediting and murder of her husband, Duke Humphrey. Involvement in this plot evokes the hysterical death scene of the Machiavellian Cardinal of Winchester. The sardonic anti-establishment activities of the rebel Cade are disruptions sponsored by the Yorkists. All are phases in a conflicted society’s progress towards self-destruction. However, for centuries the play survived in fragments and adaptations, emerging separately only in the mid-nineteenth century, but still reinforced later as a part of combined performances with Parts 1 and 3 in the twentieth century. Its full recognition was greatly aided by its inclusion in The Wars of the Roses staged by Hall and Barton to celebrate the fourth centennial of Shakespeare’s birth, with Peggy Ashcroft brilliantly exploiting the mercurial role of Queen Margaret as its supreme creation.

Contributed by Hugh Macrae Richmond

Editions Used by Open Shakespeare

Every work on the Open Shakespeare website has three possible texts, and it is worth explaining their provenance here in detail:

GUTENBURG FOLIO – These are drawn from Project Gutenberg, with the editorial prefaces removed. Nothing else has been changed. The Gutenberg scanner claims that the text “is as close as I can come in ASCII to the printed text,” however it is important to record here several features of his methodology.
- Some spelling “mistakes” have been corrected according to a dictionary created from the spellings of the Geneva Bible and Shakespeare’s First Folio.
- Typos and abbreviations have also been “corrected”
- “Elongated S’s have been changed to small s’s and the conjoined ae have been changed to ae.”
- The actual text itself is composite, made from “30 different First Folio editions’ best pages”

GUTENBERG – Again taken from Project Gutenberg, this time from a more fully edited edition, with a cleaner layout, and the inclusion of 18th century stage directions. Open Shakespeare, as is usual for us, has removed all the prefatory material but kept the edited text as is. Unfortunately, nothing is disclosed about the process of editing or the source texts used except for the single phrase “This etext was prepared by the PG Shakespeare Team, a team of about twenty Project Gutenberg volunteers.”

MOBY – This text comes from the most widely available online edition of Shakespeare, of whose advantages and shortcomings there is a useful summary on the Open Source Shakespeare website.

Other Online Editions: ISE and Wordhoard

ISE

The principle website for online editions of Shakespeare is ISE (Internet Shakespeare Editions) where the following are offered, taking their entry for Hamlet as an example:

TEXT EDITIONS – These cover modern spelling and unmodified spelling versions based on the first folio and quarto 1 and 2, all of which have been edited. In the case of Hamlet this editing has been done by David Bevington, a scholar of some note. For other editions, the editors are less well known, and in many cases there has not yet been a peer review.

FACSIMILES – This is perhaps the real strength of ISE: several different First Folios have been scanned, and the results are very impressive. They also have facsimiles of the 1603 and 1604 quartos of Hamlet.

ANNOTATED EDITIONS – One of these does not yet exist for Hamlet, but David Bevington has again produced a useful peer-reviewed edition of As You Like It, on which one can toggle his annotations and record of collations.

COPYRIGHT – Everything on the ISE is under a variety of copyrights. The copyright for the edited texts uis owned by the editor, and the images that make up the facsimiles have a rather ambiguous copyright situation, depending on their source. Although, ISE state, “All items published on the site of the Internet Shakespeare Editions…may in all cases…be used for educational, non-profit purposes”, quite where an Open License website like our own fits in is deeply ambiguous, since material published on our website could feasibly be used for commercial purposes.

Wordhoard

Provided by Northwestern University, this website provides a set of texts worthy to serve as definitive online editions of Shakespeare. Along with other authors’ works, one can download two versions of Shakespeare’s writings: one encoded in TEI, the other linguistically annotated – which is to say every word in the text is associated with a lemma and part of speech.

For me, the most exciting part of this project is the way in which these lemmatized texts can be manipulated. Northwestern University gives one example: a short program written to answer the question ‘Does Shakespeare use mostly the same vocabulary in each of his works, or does he use different vocabulary?’. I recommend visiting the website for the answer, and for a wealth of other little bits of information about Shakespeare’s vocabulary.

The copyright position of the wordhoard project is complicated. However, the website’s stance is far more ‘open’ than that of the ISE, so collaboration between Wordhoard and Open Shakespeare may be a possibility in the future.

Perhaps Shakespeare, only partly involved in the composition of these plays, claimed a greater role than other contributors – possibly Greene and Nashe. Composite authorship invites critical uneasiness about the scripts, reinforced by Part 1‘s harshness to Joan of Arc. While based on chronicles of Henry VI’s reign by Hall and Holinshed, the plays are not unified by this ineffective king, who succeeded his father as an infant, though his incompetence leads to the loss of England’s French possessions and the Wars of the Roses. After the funeral of Henry V the self-destructive English factions in Part 1 put themselves at risk, partly from the energies of three Frenchwomen: the Countess of Auvergne, who is out-witted by Talbot; Jeanne la Pucelle, who defeats and kills him only to be captured and executed herself; and Margaret of Anjou, who introduces a new amatory interest by Act V as the intended spouse of Henry VI. Jeanne d’Arc called herself “la pucelle” (the virgin), which permits puns on this phonetically as “puzel” (whore) as part of hostile presentation. In the script she conjures up devils, and lies freely, as well as exhorting the French powerfully. Yet, feminists to the contrary, hers is the most incisive, complex and paradoxical character in the play, She comes close to being a tragic figure comparable to Lady Macbeth, despite the script’s nationalist overtones.

Though not favored by critics, the play contains iconic scenes, such as the Temple Garden one (II.iv), where factions choose roses providing heraldry for the Wars of the Roses: white for Yorkists, red for Lancastrians. The play revels in action in the French wars: duels showing the actors’ fighting skills. Latterly the play has vindicated its stage-worthiness, often in the three-play series, as with Benson’s Stratford performances of 1906. The script provoked Bernard Shaw’s recension with similar characters in St. Joan (1924). Much modified, Part 1 featured in the notable Barton-Hall series celebrating the fourth centenary of Shakespeare’s birth at Stratford (1964). Its multiple authorship does not preclude stage effectiveness.

Contributed by Hugh Macrae Richmond

Art any more than a steward? Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

“Cakes and ale” is an example of the rhetorical device of hendiadys, the use of two concrete nouns to stand in for a wider abstract concept: here, having a good time. (“Slings and arrows” is the other famous Shakespearean example of hendiadys.) The device’s tendency to stick in the head is shown by the fact that Shakespeare uses it again at the very end of his career, when the Porter in Henry VIII complains:

Belong to the gallows, and be hang’d, ye rogue! Is this a place to roar in?… Do you look for ale and cakes here, you rude rascals?

The OED cites Sir Toby as one of the earliest examples of cake being used “figuratively in obvious allusion to its estimation (esp. by children) as a ‘good thing’” – it’s a sign that the word was now firmly accepted in England as referring specifically to sweet pastry, as opposed to any sort of small, flat loaf. It’s not surprising that a mind like Shakespeare’s began to use this connotation of sweetness as a basis for innuendo. In Henry IV Part II, Doll adds some sauce to the word ‘cake’ by connecting it with another type of food served in brothels:

He a captain! hang him, rogue! he lives upon mouldy stewed prunes and dried cakes.

And, at the opening of Troilus and Cressida, the bawdy Pandarus insists that Troilus needs to be as patient and hard-working while wooing Cressida as he would be while baking (not that the Trojan War left much time for the latter):

…here’s yet in the word ‘hereafter’ the kneading, the making of the cake, the heating of the oven, and the baking; nay, you must stay the cooling too, or you may chance to burn your lips.

Eat, drink and be merry indeed…

Perhaps what’s so scary about these instances of tragic laughter is that, in plays where power is bound up in the characters’ ability to manipulate language, seeing them resort to the inarticulacy of laughing is a terrifying sign of slipping out of control. Also not insignificant is the similarity between ‘Ha, ha, ha’ and ‘Sa, sa, sa’, a fencing term (from the French: ‘ca, ca, ca’ ) uttered during the sword’s thrust. In the contemporary The Revenger’s Tragedy, the protagonist Vindice (who has earlier come out with a rather forced laugh while disguised as Piato) shouts this as he finally stabs a victim.

FALSTAFF My doe with the black scut! Let the sky rain potatoes; let it thunder to the tune of ‘greensleeves’; hail kissing-comfits and snow eringoes; let there come a tempest of provocation, I will shelter me here.

A world away from Falstaff’s ejaculation, but still part of the many imprecations hurled to the heavens in Shakespeare is the famous speech of King Lear’s where meteorological and psychological phenomena are dangerously confused:

LEAR Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children…

This speech serves also to demonstrate the metaphorical uses to which the rain can be. Later in this very rainy play, Lear speaks of “woman’s weapons, water drops”, and the conflation of tears and rain is to be found throughout Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Titus Andronicus, himself another tortured patriarch, is fond of the trope, as is the Duke of Gloucester (future Richard III) when he tries to woo Anne with a series of affecting scenes.

Sometimes the comparison of tears to rain is extended to other properties of precipitation. Demetrius in Titus demonstrates his geological knowledge when he advises his mother to make her heart like unto an “unrelenting flint to drops of rain” before the tearful Lavinia. Sonnet CXXXV urges the Dark Lady to be bountiful through reference to the hydrogen cycle between airborne rain and accommodating ocean. Finally, Lady Percy, in Henry IV pt II, vows to so weep over her husband’s grave that she will nourish new growth there.

With that last, fairly positive, example, this catalogue shall finish. Before I conclude, it is worth remembering that the (impoverished) majority of the Globe’s audience would be exposed to the elements, as would the actors, so that Shakespeare’s lines on the weather may have sometimes had an unexpected resonance. Even today, it is hard not to wryly smile at Feste’s song when it is performed on a waterlogged outdoor stage. Yet I will remain positive, and conclude by citing perhaps the most poignant description of the rain in all of Shakespeare, one that draws its force from the peculiarly ambiguous moment it describes, halfway between clear skies and grey:

GENTLEMAN Not to a rage: patience and sorrow strove
Who should express her goodliest. You have seen
Sunshine and rain at once: her smiles and tears
Were like, a better day: those happy smilets
That play’d on her ripe lip seem’d not to know
What guests were in her eyes; which parted thence
As pearls from diamonds dropp’d.–In brief, sorrow
Would be a rarity most belov’d, if all
Could so become it.

PARIS Younger than she are happy mothers made.

Now, let us leave this line from Paris’ argument with the Capulet about his marriage chances, and head back two thousand years to Ancient Greece, and three goddesses called Thallo, Arxo, and Carpo. These three goddesses were collectively called the Horai, the plural of the word ‘Hora’, which is best translated by our English word, ‘Hour’. This should not be too surprising, given the resemblance between the Attic word and our own. What is important here, though, is not the word ‘hour’ but the word ‘happy’.

The Horai had many roles in the long and tangled course of Greek mythology, but they are consistently representative of times of life and of growth. From this, the ‘Horai’ become those goddesses who represent many things which make humans happy: Thallo means ‘one who brings blossoms’ (youth); Auxo, ‘one who brings increase’ (wealth); and Carpo, ‘one who brings food’. In the Greek tradition, happiness and timing are inextricably linked.

Skipping forward a few thousand years, and across a few thousand kilometres brings us to another example of the link between time and emotional state. In French, the word for ‘hour’, and occasionally ‘time’, is ‘heure’. Put that word next to the French for happiness, ‘bonheur’, or for ‘happy’, ‘heureux’, and the resemblance is obvious. Now, back to the debate between Lord Capulet and Paris:

CAPULET But saying o’er what I have said before:
My child is yet a stranger in the world,
She hath not seen the change of fourteen years;
Let two more summers wither in their pride
Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride.
PARIS Younger than she are happy mothers made.

It is a debate, of course, about both time and happiness. Capulet’s language looks back to the fertility roles of the original Hours/Horai with his use of “summer”, “ripe”, and even “wither”. Meanwhile, Paris’ reply picks up all these themes and the parental concerns behind them with the apparently simple “happy”. Juliet will, in Paris’ eyes, be both a contented mother and one made a mother at a good time.

Thus concludes our journey through Ancient Greek mythology, French happiness, parental concern, and juvenile eagerness. All to resurrect an ambiguity that is more common than one might think. After all, one notes a certain similarity between ‘happy’ and ‘happen’. To finish then, here is a small smorgasbord of such ambiguous moments where emotion and timing are inextricably linked:

Two Gentlemen of Verona

VALENTINE My lord, I will be thankful
To any happy messenger from thence…

Richard III

ANNE God give your graces both
A happy and a joyful time of day!

Henry VI pt.3

KING EDWARD The harder match’d, the greater victory;
My mind presageth happy gain and conquest.

Henry V

HENRY V And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered,
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

While his aristocratic assertiveness infuriates the Roman Tribunes, representatives of proletarian values, it serves Rome well in his defeat of its Volscian enemies from the rival city of Corioles, a victory that earns Coriolanus his name. However, this success intensifies the Tribunes’ fears: they subvert the election of Coriolanus as Consul, leading to his sentence of exile as an enemy of Rome. When, in revenge, he leads the Coriolans against Rome, he resists the pleas of friends to make peace, but finally negotiates a reconciliation, after his mother’s entreaty, only to be murdered by the resentful Coriolan general, Aufidius, whose leadership he has usurped.

The play fits reasonably well into the formal mould of neoclassical tragedy in topic and values, so it was not ignored in the eighteenth century though heavily adapted, which led to celebrated productions by John Philip Kemble, with his sister Sarah Siddons as Volumnia, beginning in 1789. An alternative, modern approach was developed by psychoanalytic criticism, pursuing an Oedipal fixation on dominant mothers such as Volumnia (perhaps why T. S. Eliot favoured it over Hamlet). Modern political extremism and cynical manipulation have made the play’s focus on exploitive politics more relevant, as with Brecht’s interest in recreating the script. None of these approaches greatly endears the play to current audiences. In Peter Hall’s notable production at Stratford in 1959, Laurence Olivier managed to inject sardonic humor into the contemptuous comments of Coriolanus, but this wry note left his highly emotional treason and final self-sacrifice out of tune for such a skeptical mind.

However, examined objectively, the play shows that Coriolanus usually fails to carry through his obtuse views, submitting (for example) to the rigors of election, only to be falsely accused of treason and exiled. Similarly, at the play’s climax he reluctantly resolves his dilemma of divided loyalties by enforcing compromise on both adversaries, knowing full well that by making peace he may expose himself to fatal hostility from aggressors on either side. To attribute his achievement to mere mother-fixation destroys tragic interest in the play, with its typical Shakespeare hero who intuits a higher moral order too late to save his own life. Modern productions often attempt a more sympathetic approach, for example, by stressing a youthful idealism in the hero, like the deft modernization of him by Toby Stephens as a Bonaparte figure in a revolutionary age, in the brilliantly successful RSC production in 1994, directed by David Thacker. The script’s brutality and absolutism plausibly fitted a Revolutionary Age, gaining modern relevance as well as colorful costumes and sets.

Contributed by Hugh Macrae Richmond

This plot line is catalyst for a theme of greater audience interest: the complex evolution of the affair between Benedick (Claudio’s friend) and Beatrice (Hero’s cousin). This pair is at odds after their antecedent relationship was broken off by Benedick’s obtuseness – and Beatrice displays her resentment in a witty war with her ex-lover. Their companions intervene with a plot of staged over-hearings to convince each that the other’s love is merely repressed. These over-hearings govern the play’s punning title, for “nothing” is a homonym of “noting” – and also an Elizabethan term for female genitalia. While others accept Hero’s guilt, Beatrice and Benedick join to defend her. After Claudio’s devotion to her revives, they wryly admit their own recommitment: Benedick’s becoming “engaged” to Beatrice (4.3.331 in Riverside) anticipates our modern premarital contract.

This paradoxical progression of the love/hate relationship of Beatrice and Benedick delights audiences: Leonard Digges versifies for the 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s Poems: “let but Beatrice / And Benedick be seen, lo in a trice / The Cockpit, galleries, boxes, all are full.” Later vividly dueling pairs include John Gielgud with Peggy Ashcroft, and Kenneth Branagh with Emma Thompson. Critics often censure what they consider “the main plot” concerning Hero and Claudio for weak characters and melodramatic effects, but the feigned deaths of beloveds recur in Shakespeare, from Juliet to Hermione. Plausibly Hero resists Beatrice’s domination via a plot analogous to that against herself, while Claudio resembles misled lovers Romeo and Bertram.

The exchanges of Beatrice and Benedick match courtly battles of the sexes in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron (Fourth Tale), Castiglione’s Courtier, and those between Shakespeare’s own couples, from Berowne and Rosaline to Antony and Cleopatra. Beatrice seems a proto-feminist in defying the patriarchal Spanish rulers of Sicily, who victimize dutiful women like Hero. Macabre Don John resembles the historical Bastard Don John of Austria (half-brother of King Philip II) who also resided in Messina, after defeating the Turkish fleet at Lepanto (1571). He notoriously planned to offset his bastardy by raising an Armada to conquer and rule Britain, and then marry Mary, Queen of Scots. Later love/hate pairings akin to Beatrice and Benedick include Mirabell and Millamant in Congreve’s The Way of the World, Elizabeth and Darcy in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Martha and George in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Contributed by Hugh Macrae Richmond

Now, the whales. Nine of them no less, although none of them are presented on the stage. Two of the occurrences are, in fact, about a whale in the sky. I refer of course, to the increasingly ludicrous menagerie that Polonius and Hamlet see in the shape of clouds:

HAMLET Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
POLONIUS By the mass, and ’tis like a camel indeed.
HAMLET Methinks it is like a weasel.
POLONIUS It is backed like a weasel.
HAMLET Or like a whale.
POLONIUS Very like a whale.

Brief aside for keen Shakespeare naturalists: here are two of the six appearances of the word ‘weasel’, and, similarly, two out of six Shakespearean camels.

Back to the whales, about which there is much more to inspire than the obviously ironic emphasis on their cetacean spines. They are for example, notorious examples of large and very hungry creatures, feeding endlessly on a diet of frail and helpless plankton. They thus helpfully illustrate many a situation of exploitation. Parolles, in All’s Well comes up with this inspired equation of virgins and protozoans:

PAROLLES My meaning in’t, I protest, was very honest in the behalf of the maid; for I knew the young count to be a dangerous and lascivious boy, who is a whale to virginity, and devours up all the fry it finds.

Whilst in the rather more maritime Pericles, the hungry whale appears not once, but twice, not this time as a virgin devourer but as a “rich miser” who “plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful”, and then, free from metaphor, as a “belching” part of the ocean that Pericles fears will swallow his wife’s corpse.

‘Swallow’, ‘belch’, ‘devour’, and big-backed are not only ways of describing whales, but also of portraying people. It is Mrs Ford, in The Merry Wives of Windsor who asks, “What tempest, I trow, threw this whale, with so many tuns of oil in his belly, ashore at Windsor?” The person in question here is – who else? – Falstaff, a man well-deserving of such a gargantuan comparison.

Completely at the other end of the scale from Falstaff, we have one example from Troilus and Cressida, and one from Love’s Labour’s Lost. In the former, the whale is used to describe Hector’s non-Falstaffian valour, whilst in the latter it is the whiteness of whalebones that Berowne uses as a measure of Boyet’s brilliant teeth.

Last but not least, King Henry IV seizes upon the whale as an image that unites both body politic and the humours of his own son, the future king.

KING HENRY His temper, therefore, must be well observed:
Chide him for faults, and do it reverently,
When you perceive his blood inclined to mirth;
But, being moody, give him line and scope,
Till that his passions, like a whale on ground,
Confound themselves with working. Learn this, Thomas,
And thou shalt prove a shelter to thy friends,
A hoop of gold to bind thy brothers in,
That the united vessel of their blood,
Mingled with venom of suggestion–
As, force perforce, the age will pour it in–
Shall never leak, though it do work as strong
As aconitum or rash gunpowder.

The “hoop of gold” rather neatly returns us to the whale-watcher with whom this odyssey began: Polonius – himself, like Henry IV, an anxious father – and his most famous speech.

POLONIUS Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel.

Like the sonnets, which were begun at around the same time, Venus and Adonis charts the powerful effects of passion. Venus is “Mad in pursuit, and in possession so” (Sonnet 129) – she nimbly darts, smothers, murders, sweats and plucks, “devouring in all haste” (l. 57). When the narrator comments early in the poem, “O how quick is love” (l. 38), he refers both to love in the abstract, and to the goddess herself. Adonis, however, is more reluctant, and is given less description, rendering him passive; he appears lifeless (l. 211) and “like a lazy sprite” (l. 181).

Words here are powerful. They persuade and deny — so much so that Venus is keen to silence Adonis altogether:

Now doth she stroke his cheek, now doth he frown,
And ‘gins to chide, but soon she stops his lips;
And kissing speaks, with lustful language broken,
‘If thou wilt chide, thy lips shall never open (l. 45 – 8).

When he does speak, it is mainly in aphorism, as in lines 419 – 420: “The colt that’s back’d and burden’d being young, / Loseth his pride and never waxeth strong” (l. 419 – 20). Although his words are fewer than Venus’, they are carefully constructed and memorable, incorporating interesting comparisons and reinforcing the poem’s themes of hunting and nature.

The dense rhetorical effect of the poem’s pithy statements is heightened by many puns, such as the description of how Venus “hearkens [...] for his horn” (l. 868). Such verbal wit makes the poem comic at times, although its conclusion takes a tragic turn – Adonis is killed in a hunting accident, and an unsatisfied Venus is left mourning. Some critics claim that the ending demands unqualified pathos (John Roe, 2006), while others have been less sympathetic (Lewis, 1954). However, there has been an effort to avoid moralising or determining a single conclusion for the text and instead “demonstrat[ing] that the poem embodies a multivalency of meanings leading nowhere beyond itself” (Klause, 1988).

The poem has an important place in the canon of English literature – it is often compared to Marlowe’s unfinished Hero and Leander (1958), cited as an example of Sidney’s poetic ideals, and looked to as an inspiration for the vigour and imagination found in Coleridge’s writing. Elsewhere, the famous description of the snail “whose tender horns being hit, / Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain” (l. 1033 – 1034) gave rise to Keats’ memorable comment about a poet at once inspired and defeated by the success of Venus and Adonis: “[Shakespeare] has left nothing to say about nothing or any thing”.

Contributed by Rachel Thorpe

LADY PERCY…And thou hast talk’d
Of sallies and retires, of trenches, tents,
Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets,
Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin,
Of prisoners ransomed, and of soldiers slain,
And all the ‘currents of a heady fight.

For all its martial specificity, the word ‘tent’ is still easily understood by Shakespeare’s modern audiences, the word describing – to quote the OED – “A portable shelter or dwelling of canvas (formerly of skins or cloth), supported by means of a pole or poles, and usually extended and secured by ropes fastened to pegs which are driven into the ground”, and dating back to 1297. Yet, the OED has five separate entries for ‘tent’ as a noun, and it is certainly not that of a “portable shelter” used in Troilus and Cressida when Hectors argues that

HECTOR The wound of peace is surety,
Surety secure; but modest doubt is call’d
The beacon of the wise, the tent that searches
To th’ bottom of the worst.

Here it is instead, the medical sense of the word, where ‘tent’ is another word for a “probe” (OED). The word comes from the French ‘tenter’ (to test, or to try), and ultimately from the Latin ‘tentare’. With developments in medicine that rendered the investigative poking of a wound with a wad of cloth more or less redundant, the word fell out of use. It is, nevertheless, a particularly good word for Troilus and Cressida, a play stuffed with descriptions of the sickening horrors of war: the life in claustrophobic tents where Achilles hides himself away, and the violence that leaves many a wound in need of a tent.

One could say that, amongst all those characters that Shakespeare portrays in their tents, the Greeks are the unhappiest campers.

These pictures and videos got me thinking about something I said about Open Shakespeare’s annotation tool at OKCON, that by allowing people to digitally annotate we would collect and preserve a continuously evolving catalogue of responses to Shakespeare’s works. Shakespeare’s Staging has done something similar, but, whereas Open Shakespeare is concerned with the text, this site records the response of actors and directors to what Shakespeare wrote. Each performance is, after all, its own unique (re)presentation and interpretation of the text.

The overlap between our work is obvious, and the next step of the process seems clear. If we accept that Open Shakespeare should allow anyone to contribute and share their responses to Shakespeare, and if we decide that performance of a play is itself a response to Shakespeare, then our website should expand to allow records of performances to be included. Such records can exist in written form (I think of that Swiss doctor’s description of a performance of Julius Caesar in 1599), but also as images or videos. Each media in turn brings its own problems. A video recaptures the experience of one spectator, but is one spectator’s view representative of the whole audience’s experience? An image captures a moment, a mood, but gains its force through exclusion. Text can only appeal to the eyes and the ears via the brain.

Given the weaknesses of each medium as a record of responses to Shakespeare, the only reasonable conclusion is to adopt a composite approach. Discussion has begun on how best to do this given the current framework of Open Shakespeare, and if anyone reading this has anything to contribute, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

And because I cannot write a blog post without quoting Shakespeare, please allow me to point out one exquisite exchange between the Clown and the Countess worried about her son Bertram, lines which serve as hints for an actor’s behaviour, as much as recognition of the limitations of the written text.

> CLOWN Why, he will look upon his boot and sing; mend the ruff and sing; ask questions and sing; pick his teeth and sing. I know a man that had this trick of melancholy sold a goodly manor for a song. > > COUNTESS Let me see what he writes, and when he means to come.

Shakespeare’s Staging, and Open Shakespeare too, should let us see what Shakespeare writes in more ways than one.

The poem shares its theme with Venus and Adonis, but is a “graver labour”, lacking comedy and playfulness. Here, “Lust-breathèd Tarquin” succeeds in raping “Lucrece the chaste”, and the language is that of brutal military conquest: “She says her subjects with foul insurrection / Have battered down her consecrated wall”. A sense of conflict is also conveyed by the fact that the poem is structured around a series of stark absolutes – light and dark, male and female, guilt and innocence, purity and lust, “Beauty’s red and Virtue’s white”. Beauty is, in this poem, a dangerous thing, speaking louder than words of reason and restraint: “All orators are dumb when beauty pleadeth”. Vision, however, is privileged, and the poem’s insistence on the language of sight has been linked by Christopher Tilmouth to Renaissance concepts of shame as a sensation that occurs when sins are witnessed. Guilt, shame, sight and voyeurism are all important concerns for the critical conversations that surround the poem.

The first section of the poem gives voice to Tarquin, as he contemplates an act which he knows will ruin him. He claims that no “excuse can my invention make” to justify “so black a deed”, and yet he still chooses to sneak into Lucrece’s chamber. Once the deed is done, the narrative then gives voice instead to the reaction of the innocent victim, as she considers whether she must share the guilt for the deed. After considering at length a painting of the Trojan war, she becomes sure that her only choice is, “To clear this spot by death”. Lucrece’s suicide has baffled such commentators as St Augustine who wish to argue for her innocence, but it is this action that constitutes the concluding tragedy of the poem. Tarquin has marred “the thing that cannot be amended”; Lucrece kills herself and her husband Collantine decrees Tarquin’s “everlasting banishment”. The poem has attracted particular attention from feminist critics such as Jane Newman, who is interested in the simultaneous eloquence and powerlessness of the wronged female.

This poem seems to be closely linked with a number of Shakespeare’s other works. The setting means that it is naturally compared to the other Roman plays, most obviously Titus Andronicus (because of this play’s interest in the powerlessness of words, especially as regards the raped and mutilated Lavinia). The theme of rape also sets it alongside Venus and Adonis and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Tarquin’s fears about the moral implications of his intended action are related to the monologues in Macbeth. The description of the innocent Lucrece as she sleeps is reminiscent of the descriptions of Desdemona in Othello and Imogen in Cymbeline. Shakespeare also mentioned Lucrece in As You Like It and Twelfth Night.

Contributed by Rachel Thorpe

HENRY V When we have march’d our rackets to these balls,
We will, in France, by God’s grace, play a set
Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard…

The puns of this passage, on “racket” (the tool of tennis players, an uproar, and, perhaps even a type of catapult) and on “hazard”, suggest what remains constant between Early Modern tennis and our own version of the sport. However, historians quibble and call the earlier version of the sport, ‘real tennis’, since it was distinguished by always being played in a room off whose walls the ball was allowed to bounce. Maybe something of this is behind Pericles’ metaphor, in the play that bears his name:

PERICLES A man whom both the waters and the wind,
In that vast tennis-court, have made the ball
For them to play upon, entreats you pity him;
He asks of you, that never used to beg…

Rather like a more tragic Dromio (kicked about, you will recall, like a football), Pericles spends this play wandering, and Shakespeare uses the sporting metaphor to capture the apparently equal senses of futility and of divine order inherent in a romance. Something similar, if darker, is going on when Gloucester, in King Lear, laments that “Like flies to want boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport“. The link with ‘real tennis’ behind Pericles’ words is simply that “the vast tennis court” is at once an unlimited space in which the Greek Lord is helpless, whilst at the same time being a defined space in which certain rules are in effect, just as one may play at tennis, but only in a specific arena.

Of course, as with football, the game of tennis does not always stay within neat bounds. The remaining passages from Shakespeare show off the less salubrious side of the sport: Polonius imagines gentlemen “falling out at tennis”, whilst Hal mocks Falstaff’s off-white shirt with comparison to those of foppish tennis players. Even if there is a similar disorderliness about tennis as we find with football, one distinction is still clear: tennis is a noble’s game, its indecorum taking place among the decorous, and, after all, played by Henry VIII.

There is one quotation left, which I admit to have been saving since it my favourite oddity of the old game of tennis, that its balls were stuffed with human hair. Thus Claudio describes the loss of Benedick’s beard in the following terms:

CLAUDIO No, but the barber’s man hath been seen with him; and the old
ornament of his cheek hath already stuffed tennis-balls.

you base football player

Before sending the man sprawling. The insult tells us a few things about what the Elizabethans understood as ‘football’, which was for them a far less decorous game that the one whose World Cup begins today.

So-called Medieval 'Mob Football', courtesy of Wikipedia

With the ffotebale…[there] hath beene greate disorder in our towne of Manchester we are told, and glasse windowes broken yearlye and spoyled by a companie of lewd and disordered persons …

However, football was saved from too much persecution by the pious James I, who wrote, in his Book of Sports that Christians should play football every Sunday afternoon after worship. But was it really a game involving feet only? After all, it would be difficult to cause all that damage in Manchester, even with the skills (and temperament) of a Zidane. The other use of the word in Shakespeare’s works, does, however, suggest that the sport was beginning to focus on the relationship between ball and foot by Shakespeare’s time:

DROMIO OF EPHESUS Am I so round with you, as you with me,
That like a football you do spurn me thus?
You spurn me hence, and he will spurn me hither:
If I last in this service, you must case me in leather…

“Spurn” here means ‘to kick away‘ (this original, now obsolete, sense dates back to 1000AD, and survives in our modern ‘spur’), thus hinting at the increasing importance of the feet. Other details here are also revealing: that the ball was spherical, and thus different from the rugby ball; and that the casement was made of leather, a material still used in many footballs, if not that of the current World Cup, which is made out of ethylene-vinyl acetate and thermoplastic polyurethanes – with a latex bladder.

Footballs are not the only spherical things in The Comedy of Errors: Antipholus of Syracuse describes his search for his long-lost family as the search of one water drop for another in an ocean, and there is also the memorable description of the nymphomaniac maid in search of Dromio’s heart:

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip: she is spherical, like a globe; I could find out countries in her.
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE In what part of her body stands Ireland?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE Marry, in her buttocks: I found it out by the bogs.
…
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE Oh, sir, I did not look so low.

Although football is not mentioned here, perhaps we have in The Comedy of Errors – with its many peregrinations, its cosmopolitan references to countries all over the world, its obsession with money, its hints that footballs were to be kicked and made of leather – the beginnings of the modern game, and, in Dromio’s kitchen wench, the earliest recorded WAG.

EXPAND: there will be an Open Shakespeare Party in Emmanuel Fellows’ Garden, Cambridge at 3pm on 14th June. Be there if you can, and if you can’t visit our newly refined ‘Get Involved’ page.

WRITE: the first round of introductions will soon be completed, but we want to welcome more submissions, especially if they build upon the work of previous writers.

BLOG: the Word of the Day feature will be back with us very soon, and will hopefully expand in terms of both writers and articles. The blog itself has already had a little bit of an overhaul, and some out-of-date material will be replaced over the coming weeks.

TEACH: following suggestions made at OKCON, we are proposing the use of Open Shakespeare as a classroom aid. Through this we help to raise the profile of the project, and offer a new way for school children to collaboratively engage with Shakespeare.

These are the main points of the meeting, whose minutes are available for perusal. It remains only for me to quote Nestor, in Troilus and Cressida, and say that this post is only a hint of what’s ahead, and yet…

in such indexes, although small pricks
To their subsequent volumes, there is seen
The baby figure of the giant mass
Of things to come at large.

Sören Auer, speaking on ‘Linked Open Data’, mentioned the beneficial effect that a ‘pingback’ service had provided to the blogosphere, helping to foster conversations and build networks of opinion. This made me wonder at the benefit such a tracking service would have for Open Shakespeare: if you were told when text you had annotated was annotated by someone else, you would have the chance to both share in the new contribution as well as discuss it. The system could also cover the critical introductions and would foster a more personal involvement in the site, which can only be a good thing. There is one downside: such ‘pingback’ services are vulnerable to spam, and Sören Auer was unable to sketch out a suitable response to this threat.

Tom Morris gave a presentation on ‘Citizendium’, whose modus operandi may have something to teach us when it comes to the writing of critical introductions. On Citizendium there is a fixed front article, behind which is a more fluid draft text. Such an arrangement allows both a space for rapid alterations and heated discussion at the same time as it protects the front matter from too extreme a modification, well-meaning or otherwise.

Away from the presentation, I had long discussions about printing the Open Shakespeare Editions with Ben O’Steen. One suggestion was that the problem of incorporating the annotations into the printed text could be solved with a script similar to that which converts blog comment into a printable format. Whatever the solution, some kind of tagging and annotation management system would probably be a prerequisite.

The last idea to come from OKCON (so far…) concerned widening the audience for Open Shakespeare. Several people recommended that we try and get school children involved, since the website could be a useful teaching tool, and encourage a new engagement with Shakespeare. Again, one hesitates to open the website to such a large audience without more means of managing annotations in place…but, still, a trial with just one class and one scene of a play seems to me something we could try right away…

What’s new is that textual and historical evidence is now available that confirms this play to be from some time in the early 17th century. It contains, for example, the word “absonant”, which is found only in texts by Shakespeare…and by his successor as writer for the King’s Men, Fletcher. Thus the play is most likely a collaborative work between the two, as was perfectly normal for the period. Other Shakespeare/Fletcher collaborations include King Henry VIII, and possibly parts of Pericles.

I post this news here because such a claim was only made possible thanks to advances in technology dealing with texts. New databases of texts make searches for references to a play far faster and easier, whilst new stylometric algorithms make the most of such databases to pick up minute differences in vocabulary usage that allow an author’s DNA to be distinguished. For the curious, Shakespeare uses “thee” and “hath“, whilst Fletcher, being fifteen years his junior, uses the more modern “ye“.

Perhaps one day, The Open Shakespeare Project will contribute to such breakthroughs. Until then, we have a separate issue to deal with: do we add Cardenio / Double Falsehood to our site?

What do you think? Could you write an introduction to it?

Borrowing from the Portuguese story of Felix and Felismena, the plot focuses on two friends, Valentine and Proteus. Each leaves home and travels from Verona to Milan. Proteus leaves behind his beloved Julia, having exchanged with her rings and promises of “true constancy”. On arriving in Milan, Proteus discovers that Valentine has fallen in love with the Duke’s daughter Silvia and that they have planned to secretly elope together. Unfortunately, Proteus also falls for Silvia, declaring that “the remembrance of my former love / Is by a newer object quite forgotten”. He decides to do whatever it takes to win her for himself. The ensuing drama concerns itself with the limits of male friendship and the foolishness of lovers. The action comes to a climax in one of the most controversial scenes in the canon of Shakespeare’s writing. Many of the most famous performances have gained their notoriety because of the way that they have creatively navigated it, prompting Stanley Well’s comment that the play “has succeeded best when subjected to adaptation”. In the depths of the forest, Proteus threatens to rape Silvia, uttering the infamous line “I’ll force thee yield to my desire”. However, moments later he is reconciled to Valentine, who, despite being fully aware of what his friend has done, seems to offer him Silvia: “All that was mine in Silvia I give thee”. The play closes with Proteus and Julia happily reunited, and a decree that both they and Valentine and Silvia shall be married on the same day, sharing “one feast, one house, one mutual happiness”.

Although the popular opinion is that this is one of Shakespeare’s least accomplished plays, it has enjoyed a rich stage history. Notably, Peter Hall chose it has his first production as artistic director of the RSC in 1960, and John Barton directed another important RSC production in 1981. The play has been set in almost every imaginable era – the medieval, the renaissance, the music-hall 1930s, the rock-and-roll 1950s, the fashion-obsessed 1990s – and is not always confined to Verona and Milan. It attracted further attention after being featured in the Academy Award-winning film Shakespeare in Love (1998), despite never being explicitly named. The play is regularly admired for its spirited comedy. And for the fact that one of the characters is a dog.

Contributed by Rachel Thorpe

Although there are many fairies and spirits in Shakespeare’s works, and the occasionaly talking animal, there is a notable shortage of hobbits, let alone hobbit names. What then would ‘bilbo’ mean?

The word is quintessentially Elizabethan: its first recorded use in English is by Shakespeare in the Merry Wives of Windsor, and available examples decline rapidly after 1630, resurfacing only to add historical tone to such later works as Sir Walter Scott’s Woodstock of 1826. In all these examples, ‘bilbo’ means a type of sword, or, as an extension of this, a swashbuckling bully, one wearing of a ‘bilbo’. This is the sense of the word in The Merry Wives of Windsor, used as Falstaff describes his ignonimous concealment in a laundry basket:

FALSTAFF…I suffered the pangs of three several deaths: first, an intolerable fright to be detected with a jealous rotten bell-wether; next, to be compassed like a good bilbo in the circumference of a peck, hilt to point, heel to head; and then, to be stopped in, like a strong distillation, with stinking clothes that fretted in their own grease: think of that

The word ‘bilbo’ comes from ‘Bilbao’ or ‘Bilboa’, a town in Northern Spain that was renowned for its ironwork during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such ironwork included swords that were, according to the OED, “noted for the temper and elasticity of its blade”, but also comprised other products, one of which finds its way into a very famous speech by Hamlet.

HAMLET Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep: methought I lay
Worse than the mutinies in the bilboes. Rashly,
And prais’d be rashness for it,–let us know,
Our indiscretion sometime serves us well,
When our deep plots do fail; and that should teach us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.

“The mutinies in the bilboes” are sailors or soldiers convicted of mutiny and punished by being attached to “A long iron bar, furnished with sliding shackles to confine the ankles of prisoners, and a lock by which to fix one end of the bar to the floor or ground”. Good quality spanish iron prevented any thoughts of escape, but was pliable enough to be shaped into shackles. Hamlet mentioning the word may also suggest that his thoughts are already turning towards his duel with Laertes, which may well have been conducted with bilbo-swords.

Thus concludes our tour of Spain, ironmongery, existentialism and laundry baskets. One final thought: Tolkein, as far as I know, never revealed the origin of his hobbit’s name, but, bearing in mind that Bilbo’s destiny is shaped first by the forged ring but also by the beautifully crafted sword, Sting, he bears, one might suggest that Tolkein, well-read academic that he was, was making a crafty little reference to a scarce-noted word in Shakespeare’s works.

“I am a member of the Open Shakespeare Project (www.openshakespeare.org – not to be confused with Open Source Shakespeare) and found this article extremely interesting. I feel that your conclusion points towards many of the approaches to Shakespeare that our project incorporates, and that are part of a more ’social’ approach to Shakespeare.

It occurs to me that as well as spreading Shakespeare to a far larger audience, cheap editions of Shakespeare are also a godsend for students, who may write their thoughts all over their pages without fear of ruining something expensive. If all these scribbles were collected, a formidable body of knowledge of Shakespeare would be available, as would an evolving record of responses to this writer.

Our site has recently acquired the ability for anyone to annotate Shakespeare’s works, and soon will add the capacity to attribute, tag, sort, and hide the annotations made. With this we hope to create an ‘open’ edition of Shakespeare’s plays that would grow along similar lines to Wikipedia, harnessing the power of the internet to bring many minds to bear upon a single subject.

Such problems as found with the OSS still pose difficulties for us: we have to use Moby as a source text since all others, including (lamentably) the wordhoard text, are under copyrights that conflict with our Open license. Nevertheless, just as textual problems are flagged up in a critical edition with a footnote, so too could such problems be drawn to the reader’s attention through annotation. As Whitney Trettien’s article points out, the web comes into its own when it is an ‘expressive medium’ itself, and not one which, like the OSS, unthinkingly delivers content.

Essentially, ISE already has this kind of thinking process, displaying an editor’s annotation on each text right down to the textual variants. It even has the ability to sort such annotations. However, the problems you identify – different kinds of editing, slow progress, uneven quality – all inevitably result, I feel, from the fact that each text only has a single editor. More editors would speed progress but it is not, of course, a given that more editors would improve quality. Wikipedia is still notorious for its occasional inaccuracies.

Nevertheless, such inaccuracies can be resolved by the same process that generates them. If anyone can annotate, so anyone can also review annotation and improve it. I realise that this is a rather utopian position and that people can as easily vandalise as beautify, but I feel it to be a more tenable one than that held by the websites here. The internet allows for unprecedented levels of input as well as appreciation, and such potential is not exploited by the sites reviewed in this article.

Talking of input and appreciation brings me to one further aspect of these sites that interests me, namely how easily one can print from them. The OSS shines in this respect, but attempting to print an ISE fascimile is rather more difficult. I must also admit that printing from an annotated text at The Open Shakespeare Project is currently impossible: the tool only went live fairly recently, and the site is still very much under construction. One day we hope to harness the accumulated and peer-reviewed annotations of many to produce a printed text, and thus complete a cycle between internet and ‘real world’ Shakespeare.

Such a cycle is ignored at the peril of digital scholarship, for it is the mix of real events and online responses to them that makes Facebook so addictive. Other addictive qualities, such as the relatively small time commitment and the chance to interact with other users could be profitably replicated by internet Shakespeare projects. After all, anything capable of sustaining those involved in the long task of making productive use of Shakespeare is always welcome and need not be to the detriment academic rigour.”

Here is the author’s reply:

James: thanks very much for this thoughtful and very interesting response to the review. I’ve had a quick look at your site and think it’s very interesting. It seems to me that you really are pushing forward with a Web 2.0 approach to things, making your site a good deal more interactive than the three I review here. I like the idea of building up a ‘database’ of annotations — and you’re right, of course: textual annotation might be a way round the problems of having to use an outdated source text. I still tend to worry about Wikipedia as a model, however. I always like to tell my students stories of humourous examples of deliberate tampering with Wikipedia, as a way of warning them off using it in their research (perhaps you may know what happened to Thierry Henry’s page, after France put Ireland out of the World Cup?). Will OSP be entirely ‘user governed’, or will you have some sort of ‘top down’ quality control mechanisms? Andy

The discussion raises some interesting issues. How bitesize and user friendly is our website? To what extent should ‘Open Shakespeare’ be user-governed? Any comments and suggestions you may have will be very welcome.

There is no review of our project on the site, but I have written a long comment to the 25th paragraph of Andrew Murphy’s article, ‘Shakespeare goes digital’, outlining the advantages of our social media approach to Shakespeare in relation to the other sites he has reviewed.

Do have a look, and leave any comments of your own. I shall probably try and write something in response to the Trettien article over the next few days, given that this article also focuses on new approaches to Shakespeare.

More words of the day shall also be forthcoming. I’m rereading Shakespeare’s tragedies at the moment and have had a few ideas for articles on the use of:

Crocodile
Bilbo
Music

Let us know which ones you’d like to see!

Rather unsurprisingly, Shakespeare makes use of the parrot’s well known imitative abilities: Benedick calls Beatrice a “rare parrot teacher” for the way in which she teasingly repeats his words against him at the start of Much Ado About Nothing. Similarly drawing on the idea of repetition, Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice sighs,

How every fool can play upon the word! I think the best grace of wit will shortly turn into silence,
and discourse grow commendable in none only but
parrots. Go in, sirrah; bid them prepare for dinner.

Less obvious observations on parrots also abound….

…Their noisy responses to the rain (As You Like It) and to bagpipes (The Merchant of Venice)

…Their habitual scratching of their head (Henry IV pt II)

…And, last but not least, the association between parrots and lechery:

THERSITES. Would I could meet that rogue Diomed! I would croak like a raven; I would bode, I would bode. Patroclus will give me anything for the intelligence of this whore; the parrot will not do more for an almond than he for a commodious drab. Lechery, lechery! Still wars and lechery! Nothing else holds fashion. A burning devil take them!

The association turns on the fact that parrots enjoyed ‘nuts’, and in Elizabethan times, as now, nuts had sexual overtones. Froth is described as “cracking the stones of the foresaid prunes” in Measure for Measure, for example.

Thus concludes Shakespeare’s observations on parrots, bagpipes, and sex. More soon.

Here’s how to get annotating:

1. Click ‘read texts’ on the homepage.
2. Scroll down to find your play of choice in the list and click on ‘annotate’.
3. Find the line you wish to annotate, then highlight it, then click on the little notepad that appears.
4. In the newly-present dialogue box, type your words of wisdom.
5. Press enter to save your annotation and close the dialogue box.

Work has already begun on Hamlet, but feel free to annotate wherever you wish.

As to what you should write in an annotation, we currently have no guidelines: shorter is usually better, and, obviously, offensive comments will be removed – but apart from that, all insights and explications are very welcome.

Improvements to come include: restricting editing and deletion to the owner of each annotation, showing user information on annotations, the ability to filter annotations, and the capacity to use markdown in each comment.

To return to that line of Hamlet: the folio has ‘solid flesh’, but the first quarto has ‘sallied flesh’, and the second quarter has either ‘sallied’ or ‘sullied’. Each variant changes the way we see Hamlet.

But what does this have to do with Open Shakespeare? Well, this little example shows how important it is to have a reliable text for each play, especially now that we will be annotating and one day producing critical editions from them. Currently, we have the Gutenberg text of the first folio, although, like many other first folios, this text is actually a hodgepodge of other first folios recomposed sometime in the 18th Century. We also have the Moby Shakespeare, so called for the man who produced the most widely circulated digital version of Shakespeare’s plays – but without saying what edition he used…

Having consulted with a few professors here in Cambridge (credit where it’s due: the info about composite folios comes from Prof. Kerrigan), it appears that there is a first folio actually in Cambridge. If we could find a way of digitising it, this would be a great benefit to Open Shakespeare, establishing, if not a ‘perfect’ text (which, once the Globe and Shakespeare’s own playtexts burnt down during a performance of Henry VIII could never now be possible), at least one with some historical authority.

I have no idea how we will digitise the Cambridge folio, so any suggestions would be welcome. I heard once that a young Arthur Miller, in order to hone his play-writing skills, copied out almost all of Shakespeare’s plays by hand. So, if you’re an aspiring playwright with lots of time on your hands, do get in touch.