My previous blog, For the Love of Music Teachers was a paean to the neighborhood piano teacher.   Today’s rhapsody is on that most exotic specimen, the voice teacher.  Since I am a member of both pedigrees, I can say with great generosity of heart that we voice teachers are a wobbly, eccentric bunch.  We think nothing of people coming in off the street to coo, whine, make retching noises, stick out tongues and gabble in nonsense syllables. Unless you’ve actually studied voice, you have no idea what a cult it is.  You may imagine you are going to get accompaniment services because you like to sing.  It may work that way in the beginning but if your teacher is of one of the bel canto traditions, you may find yourself wading slowly into an alternate reality.  One, I might add, that is full of magic, time travel, altered states and a profound sense of mind-body alignment.

I got my first sense of how much the body allies with the voice from a teacher at Whitman College. I had been assigned to study with a bombastic bass whose idea of teaching was to thunder along with me during scales.  He had no idea what to do with me and could not understand why I wasn’t amassing vocal skills.  When he went on sabbatical I worked with a husband and wife team who came in for two semesters.  I chose to study with the woman as soon as I realized her husband had the annoying habit of non-ironically saying “by the by” every five minutes.  She introduced me to the concept of paying attention to my body by having me sing bent over so I could feel the resonance falling into my head.

Voice training is a long process that can intersect with identity crises.  The complaint I hear most often after students have managed to start singing with more of their being is, “That doesn’t sound like me.”

“Who else could it be?” I ask.

I often hear the worry that “I’m going to start sounding like an opera singer.”

Like that is a bad thing.

I try to soothe, “Oh don’t worry about that.  You would need to come twice a week for ten years and actually practice at home before you’ll ever approach sounding like an opera singer.”  This mollifies them, again non- ironically.

Another hard concept for students is the difference between actually singing with one’s own voice and imitating a favorite singer,  complete with fantasies of being on stage, looking glamorous, and feeling adored. My high school voice teacher once said to me, “Can you try it again? And maybe this time, don’t pretend you’re Julie Andrews.”  I’ve thought about that comment over the years as a parade of Christine Aguilera and Taylor Swift wannabees have whined and glottal-fried through their lessons with me.

My high school voice teacher was Pat Jacobs.  I adored her.  She was elegant.  She wore subtle silver nail varnish at a time when everyone else wore blood red.  The only remotely eccentric thing I ever saw her do was eat a single fried egg at the start of my lesson. No toast to sop it up, just a runny fried egg.  The house of another teacher was such a pig sty it wasn’t unusual to find week old pieces of runny fried egg encrusted on plates next to the toilet.

I studied for a few years at what was then the Cornish Institute of Fine Arts in Seattle with Pamela who was marking time as a teacher.  She wanted to sing in New York.  She was a beautiful singer, a beautiful woman, and always on a diet.   She assuaged her constant hunger during lessons by sucking Jolly Ranchers.  There was always a little pile of candy wrappers on the eighth octave of the piano by the end of a lesson.  Pamela was a soloist and a performer in her soul, so it was doubly sweet when she wanted everything to go well before my recital at Cornish.

There are those teachers who are in their souls only concerned about their reputation like He Who Shall Not Be Named but who figures in my memoir 99 Girdles on the Wall.  Marge Sackett rescued me from the aforementioned He and took my entire voice apart.  “I hate to have to tell you this,” she said. “But that palate is going to have to come down.”  Let’s pause in respectful silence while fans of William Vennard recover their composure.

Identity crises? My singing voice has been taken apart and put back together three times.   I’ve surfaced as a coloratura, a lyric soprano and a mezzo-soprano.  As I approach 60, and as I continue to work with my beloved Tommie Eckert, I am finally seeing all those parts integrate.  My voice is still a grand field of discovery.  My wobbly trajectory is to offer my students a share of the terrain.

Here in Seattle we implode a couple of sport’s stadiums every few years, and then ask property owners to finance a few new ones.  We vote no.  The stadiums get built and we all pay for them.  I’m a wee bit bitter.  To further delineate myself, let me disclose that I have attended exactly two basketball games in my life (one of them was women’s basketball at a time when that didn’t count as basketball), one football game, one track and field event, and no baseball or soccer games.  Coming home once from Daniel Smith (art supply store), I was caught in game traffic from an indeterminate generation of sports stadiums.  I looked at the lines of happy and excited people wearing caps and holding blankets and cushions.  I don’t know that world of tickets, fast food, noise, crowds, loyalties, and excitement.

I feel like an anomaly, although there’s no way of knowing.  For 53 years I have gone to one, often two music lessons a week.  Since the 70s I have been a proud member of that endangered species, the neighborhood music teacher.  I teach piano and singing.  I still study singing.

The private home studio.  Bookcases and cabinets full of music line the walls.  Collections of pencils are never sharp enough.  Music stands pose this way and that.  Modest recording equipment has crept on stage in the last few decades.  Stickers are more prevalent than when I was a child and even adult students like stickers.  Metronomes are sleeker and less obvious, and in my studio, a little dusty.  At least one piano is enthroned in the best lighting.

Sometimes when I walk in the door of my music teacher’s house, it occurs to me that many people have never experienced this alternative reality:  The privilege of opening the door to a private home and walking into a quiet space, quiet except for the end of the lesson before you.  When my time begins, the quiet room turns into a sacred space and for an hour, I intersect with the magic of music.  I like the womby-ness of the home music studio.  It signifies that something precious is being nurtured.

The neighborhood piano studio of my childhood, however, has, I think, sounded its final cadence.  Here’s an excerpt from my memoir, 99 Girdles on the Wall:

I learned to play the piano the same way I had learned to read: I watched my brother.  Alex practiced “C-D-E, make a boat, round and round and round it floats” in his Leila Fletcher Piano Course Book One, the orange book.  I looked at the written music and saw what Alex’s fingers were doing.  I tried it and never looked back.  I started formal lessons when I was four.

We practiced on a 1903 upright Haddorf piano which had belonged to my grandmother Louise Knott, and had been used for a time in the Whitman College conservatory in Walla Walla.  The piano’s beautiful soul lived in a plain, sturdy cabinet.  It is with me still.

We took piano lessons at the Lavinia Jennings Music Studio which was located in the front room of Lavinia Jennings house. I always rang the bell to enter Lavinia Jennings Music Studio; every other music teacher who taught music in her home has told me to walk in.  I rang the bell and heard the thump, thump, thump of her brown pumps as she came to open the door, dressed to the nines in one of two different teaching outfits.

One was a double-breasted green jumper worn with a frilly white blouse buttoned up to her chin, the other was a straight brown skirt and plain white blouse opened to her supra-sternal notch with a tiny cross supervising its eroticism.  It was her hair, however, that fascinated.  I had not yet seen the movie Gone With the Wind, but Mrs. Jennings’ hair gave me a reference point for Miss Pittypat.  Hers was a birthday cake of curls piled a foot high with masses of bobby pins sticking out like candles.  Every week I checked to see if any bobby pins were about to spring loose.

I sat in her dining room and looked at the one book available for waiting students, a cartoon book called Misery Loves Company.   When I used the bathroom, I sneaked a look at other parts of the house.  The kitchen gleamed with clean.  There was a guest bedroom and an enticing staircase to the upstairs.  I longed to see what was upstairs.

Once when I was in the bathroom, I noticed the medicine cabinet was open a crack.   I pulled it a few inches further to get a better look at the riot inside.  The door made a loud cranky sound.

“Elena.” Thump thump thump.  Mrs. Jennings rounded the corner and bumped into me shooting out of the bathroom.  “What are you doing in the medicine cabinet?”

“Nothing,” I looked straight at her and said honestly, “It was already open.”

She closed the medicine cabinet firmly and followed me out to the front room.

When it was time for my lesson, Mrs. Jennings handed me the fountain pen she kept in a pen holder on the edge of the piano.  I signed and dated my page in her ledger.  By the end of each year, I had written my name 40 times, line after line.

When it came round to my first recital with Mrs. Jennings, she told me it would be held in the studio.

“Where is the studio?”  I looked around.  I thought it was in her back yard or maybe in town somewhere.

Mrs. Jennings looked at me as though I had suddenly become half-witted.  “Right here.” she said.  “This is the studio.”

“But it’s your front room.”

“It’s. The. Studio.”

In early spring, a stack of sheet music two inches thick sat on her piano.  Mrs. Jennings selected two pieces for me to play in the spring recital.  I never had a choice about what I played and I hated the recital music.

About a month before the recital, Mrs. Jennings asked the girls for the color of their dresses and she meticulously made note.  The day of the recital, we went into the guest bedroom to find a big box of white boutonnières for the boys and colorful corsages to match the girl’s dresses.  In the world of small town children’s piano recitals, the corsages were a classy note.

On the day of the recital, the performers sat in the order listed on the program, twenty of us lined up as though to be shot.  We sat in Mrs. Jennings’ impeccable kitchen –as far as I could tell, she and her husband, Sumner, never ate actual food –and sweated out the wait for our performance.  I desperately wanted something in my mouth but I had never so much as smelled dinner cooking or seen the remains of breakfast in this house.  Only once was there a bowl of shining green apples, but they turned out to be wax.

The parents sat on rows of folding chairs in the front room.  While the house heaved with sweat and nerves, my father occupied himself by writing comments in the margins of the programs, critiquing the performances.  My mother kept her knees together and monitored who was and wasn’t doing the same.

*                  *                  *

I don’t run my studio like Lavinia Jennings.  My students choose their own music.  They don’t sweat out recitals.  I teach barefoot half the year.  I feel especially fortunate that many of my students are high school age boys.  They apparently feel that while sports may take up most of their week, it’s not going to take up their whole lives.  And they are very patient when I don’t know a goalie from a basket.

Every year on November 2, I create an altar of pictures and memorabilia of family and friends who have died, many of whom I wrote about in my book, 99 Girdles on the Wall:My parents, my Aunt Frances,  Meghan, Dennis, Hazel, John.  I sit at the piano and sing two songs during this week of Dias de los Muertos: Schubert’s “Litanei” and Richard Strauss’ “Allerseelen.”  The songs usually start me crying, but more importantly, they involve me in remembering.

This year I am adding to the ritual.  Into this dark quarter of the year have come Shakespeare and Sonnet 18, which begins “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” My former student, Jocelyn, who recently had a part in an episode of The Middle (http://abc.go.com/watch/the-middle/SH5539541/VD55240148/the-hose), chose to read it at her grandmother’s funeral.  Her mother Nina (rhymes with Dinah) asked me–now that I am a Shakespeare devotee–what I thought about this sonnet as a funeral piece:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,

Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,

When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

I might begin by saying that people write books and papers and get into vicious arguments about who Shakespeare addressed his sonnets to but I don’t particularly care.  What matters to me is to find something compelling or something that will make me laugh.  This sonnet begins like a comic bit.  Too, too Oscar Wilde, don’t you know? Shall I compare thee to, oh, I don’t know, a piece of toast, a glass of wine?  How about a summer’s day?  So it starts out lightly.

Shakespeare immediately begins to list all the ways his loved one cannot be compared to a summer’s day: more lovely, more temperate, and besides there are storms in summer.  Then after all that, summer is short, sometimes it’s too hot, and sometimes the sun doesn’t shine at all. So far I don’t see where he’s going with this, especially when he says, “thy eternal summer shall not fade.”

Here’s why Death won’t be bragging about having Shakespeare’s loved one wandering around his premises:

 When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

 English major alert, others can skip this paragraph: There’s a technical problem to be solved in the sonnet: how does this person line up with a summer’s day.  Shakespeare solves the puzzle of the sonnet with words, and at the same time he acknowledges the power of words with a nod to his own ability with language.

What I take from the last two lines has to do with memory and language.  Sonnet 18 is just a bunch of words on a page.  It only has meaning when a human being takes it up and reads it and is moved by it.  The meaning we take from the sonnet keeps it alive.  Remembering those people in my life who have died keeps them alive.  What I remember of them is what remains alive.  As long as I breathe, as long as I can see, the people on my All Souls altar remain with me.

Let me say up front that a sonnet is nothing to be afraid of.  Sonnets were the Sudoku and the crossword puzzles of their day, that is to say, of the late 16^th century.  People enjoyed writing them and figuring them out at whatever level they were capable. If sonnets were featured in the New York Times, I wouldn’t get far with the Sunday version but in the spirit of a dilettante, I do the ones I can.

Billy Collins (U.S. poet laureate 2001-2003) in a poem called “Sonnet” reduces the intimidation factor as only a good professor can:

All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
and after this one just a dozen
to launch a little ship on love’s storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos must be played
and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
one for every station of the cross.
But hang on here while we make the turn
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.

OK, he does throw in an added complication in that there are Italian (Petrarchan) sonnets and Elizabethans ones and they differ somewhat.  But like the man implies, an Elizabethan sonnet is 14 lines of iambic pentameter with 3 quatrains, a couplet, and a strict rhyme scheme.  The Italian sonnet makes a turn (a kind of plot twist) after line eight. The Elizabethan final couplet often, but not always, serves as a punch-line or plot twist or in some way presents the whole point of the exercise.

There’s usually something interesting to find when I separate the parts of a sonnet.  This is part of the appeal for me: a sonnet is a game or a puzzle to figure out.  Embedded in a sonnet are puns and elaborate metaphors, similes, and hyperbole that build the meaning.  It isn’t just what the poet says, it’s how he says it and how many hidden objects, so to speak, I can find.  Like the Elizabethans I enjoy mining a sonnet for the clues left by the poet. This much I learned in college.  I decided to see what my education was worth 35 years later by picking a sonnet at random seeing what I could make of it.  My finger landed on #129.  I read it and could make nothing of it:

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

I mean nothing.

I had started listening to a wonderful CD called When Love Speaks which features actors and musicians performing the sonnets and songs from Shakespeare.  I played it over and over in the car as I drove, at first identifying the voices: John Gielgud, Kenneth Branagh, Gemma Jones, Judi Dench, and letting the words wash over me.

I started paying attention when I heard Ralph Fiennes read Sonnet #129.  When he gets to the third line he starts talking faster and faster, piling the words up on top of each other in a frenzy.  I thought, “Lust in action. Oh.”  I looked at the first two lines again (not while I was driving, mind you, that wasn’t me you honked at) and read them this way: “Lust in action is a shameful expense of spirit.”  Then the poem began to open up.

The way Fiennes recites the sonnet is an expression of how lust behaves: madly, wildly, past reason.  The iambic pentameter is interrupted as words tumble over each other, falling out of meter.  The line “Had, having, and in quest to have” came out like the one-track feeling of–-ok, this is what I thought of—a binge.  People can lust after different things.

The first quatrain of #129 is written in present tense, the second is in past tense, and the third encompasses past, present and future.  The couplet at first reminded of that line in Romans: “For I do not that good thing which I would: but that evil I do, which I would not.” (Tyndale trans.) But Shakespeare isn’t moralizing.  He isn’t saying that lust is evil and to be avoided.  He lays out the panoply of hellish and heavenly feelings that accompany lust: savage, rude, cruel, joy, bliss, a dream; and he connects them with the repetition of the word extreme.  All this he holds in balance as essentially human.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is about it for me, for now, for this sonnet.  I’ll think about it off and on and come back to it.  I’ll have conversations about it if I can find someone who’s interested.  If you are one of those people, please talk to me!

I need to call Regence Blue Shield to ask a question about my health insurance coverage but I am putting it off.  I have just barely recovered from asking them a question last week.  While I didn’t exactly ask, it was a question– Why the fuck didn’t I get notice that my premium was going up?—but I was screaming at the time.  I have these episodes over insurance every now and again but it had been years since I was hysterical at a customer service cretin at Regence because I have an insurance broker who is supposed to be running interference for me.

I am self-employed. Sometimes there is a thin line between hysteria and exhilaration.

It’s exhilarating having ideas I’m excited about.  It’s satisfying to be free to make plans and to see things happen.   It’s harder having my boss, custodian, bookkeeper, and human resource person always there in my own face, so to speak.  I have to be the big idea person and the detail oriented one.  These two parts of me continually vie for attention.

I came out of my leisurely, soul-nurturing summer of reading and writing about Shakespeare (My Revels Now Are Ended ) and sprung into a fall, so to speak. My church choir was to start the first week in October, The OK Chorale the second week, and my first watercolor class –Fall Colors in Skies and Trees—the third week.

I had already done the preliminary thinking, fussing, and freaking out about the music for both choirs. Church choir: plan schedule, choose music, call the people who don’t look at e-mail, and take copies to the alto that only comes to the rehearsal before we sing at a service.  The OK Chorale: choose music, balance sacred with secular, lively with expressive, traditional carols with chimneys, trees and sleigh bells. Chanukah.  God help me, a decent Chanukah song is hard to find.  I have about four that I like so I rotate them until a new one shows up.  I had a new one this year–Ocho Candelikas– and I was thrilled to arrange it for my group.

This would ordinarily be all I would do in a fall quarter and it would be enough.  But in addition to choirs and watercolor class, I had agreed to be on the Fund Raising Committee at church.  I have a vested interest in them being able to pay me. In any case when we mapped out the year, this is what I agreed to: Two watercolor afternoons, a Christmas caroling party, a vocal solo recital in the spring, organizing a festival of music, helping with a trunk sale and a Christmas gift wrapping service, singing in the Harp and Bells concert which was moved from December to January which meant I couldn’t repeat Christmas music that I already know.  It all sounded like so much fun.  I had forgotten about four Christmas craft bazaars I had signed on to do in November and December.

Wiser people than me learn not to over-commit themselves.  I am already nostalgic for days past when I was bored and depressed.  Or at the very least, the pace of the 17^th century sounds lovely.  Everything at the speed of feet, hooves or boat.

The choirs started.  I spent the next weekend going over my plans for the watercolor class, checking supplies and painting more examples of Fall Colors in Skies and Trees. The class, which was to start on a Wednesday, had filled up.  If the sun shone in the morning it would be warm enough to paint in my sun-room.  If not, I would fit everyone in my front room/music studio. I couldn’t set up tables until the sun had declared itself on Wednesday morning.

Tuesday I had time to worry about the evening’s presidential pissing contest and to feel dismay about the commitments I had made for the next three months.  I can do this, I thought.  I’ve been around for a long time. There’s nothing here I haven’t done before.  I only talk this way when I’m on the edge.  Then I opened the letter from Regence.

In smarmy language they told me they had not gotten my premium yet—the one that is on auto-pay—and they are sure it was just an oversight on my part but they do need to get my premium or they will cut me off at the knees.

I have a long, horrible history with health insurance companies and I get hot along the hairline and short of breath whenever I get a letter from them.  I was already saying “What the fuck?” to myself when I dialed Regence’s number so that when I started shrieking, I’m not surprised that that’s what came out.

Customer service people -I refuse to say customer care because they don’t care-are better trained than the last time I yelled at them.  The woman on the other end of the line was admirably polite and even re-assuring except that I was not in the market to be reassured. Snapping and snarking –I spent 25 years in therapy to learn to not behave this way—I found out what I needed to do so they wouldn’t screw me out of my annual physical and I hung up.

Then I called my (ex) insurance broker.  Why had I not been notified about a rate increase?  Well, he didn’t have my file to hand.  Oh, why was that?  He had moved to California.  So you just left the state and didn’t inform any of your clients?  Well he wasn’t in the individual insurance market any longer.  And you didn’t tell your clients?  He starts to explain why there is a rate increase in individual insurance.  I cut him off.  I know why.  It’s so the executives can wring another few drops of blood out of us in exchange for their fucking worthless insurance.

By now I was screaming again.  He hung up on me.

I went on a six hour crying jag.  It was one of those eruptions that was so extreme it seemed unfair to dump myself on a mere friend. I stood sobbing and hiccuping at my phone list, going over the names of my friends, trying to gauge at what point in my hysteria one of them might be able to handle hearing from me.

When things were finally under control, I thought, Oh my god, what happened? I can’t do this.  I need to go back on anti-depressants.  But no, it wasn’t that at all.  It was just over-stimulation at a time of year when I tend to be energetic anyway.

Local Dilettante Studio (classes and lesson in art, music, and words for people who have fallen through the cracks: www. elenalouiserichmond.com) is running smoothly and I haven’t yelled at a single student or friend.  I don’t need to when I’ve got Regence.

I started the project of reading the works of Shakespeare in late June, 2012, as a whim, really.  I thought one of two things would come of it.  Either I would peter out after a half dozen plays or I would take years to get through them all.  I was not prepared to become so engrossed, so enchanted, so possessed  that I would read every play at least once and watch every production I could lay my hands on by mid-September.  It was a magical way to spend the summer, more refreshing and mind-changing than a long vacation.

Now I feel rather bereft.  Such an immersion in this mind that we call Shakespeare made me feel like I had spent the summer with a grandfather I didn’t know I had.   This wise old guy who made me laugh and cry with his stories and who comforted my existential angst.

I retained my love of some of the plays I had read in college: Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth, The Tempest.  I added to my list: The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure, Henry VI parts one, two, and three, Henry V, Othello, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale.

 I became fond of minor characters:

Jack Cade in Henry VI part two

Sir Anthony Aguecheek in Twelfth Night

Mistress Quickly in The Merry Wives of Windsor

Lucio in Measure for Measure

Philip (the Bastard) Faulconbridge in King John

Hotspur in Henry IV part one

Capulet (Juliet’s father) in Romeo and Juliet

Emilia in Othello

Paulina in The Winter’s Tale

I loved characters that I don’t think I was meant to love:

Edmund in King Lear

Joan de Pucelle in Henry VI part one

Thersites in Troilus and Cressida

I hated characters I don’t think I was meant to hate:

Isabella in Measure for Measure,

Falstaff in Henry IV parts one and two

I loved Dogberry and Bottom and all the fools: Touchstone (As You Like It), Feste (Twelfth Night), Lear’s Fool who is called “fool” by everyone in the play and “Lear’s fool” by people who write about the play.

For three months I lived at the beginning of the 17^th century.  I got used to Shakespeare’s language and vocabulary, and to cadences as slow as the Elizabethan pace of life.  It was hard to read other writing.  I said “How now?” to my friends and went around my house thinking “Good, my lord.”

I closed the book on The Tempest, and came back to present time unwillingly.  School started, my studio rumbled back into operation (www.elenalouiserichmond.com), and did you know there was an election going on? It’s October.  The cold and the dark are encroaching, and after my summer of Shakespeare, I feel like I’ve gotten on the freeway before I was quite awake.

During such an agitating election campaign it’s comforting to think that 400 years ago people behaved the same way as they do now and for the same reasons.  Four hundred years of “gaudy, blabbing and remorseful days have crept into the bosom of the sea” (Henry VI, Part two) since Shakespeare lived, and Western Civ is still here.

I still have 154 Shakespeare sonnets to look forward to!

The Tempest is Shakespeare’s final play.  He’d written the histories, the comedies and the tragedies.  Then he wrote four romances–more what we would call fantasies—that slowly warmed up to this farewell to the stage and no doubt to the life he’d led in London.  Like a lot of us have discovered in our later years, the world that formed us breaks apart.  This theme threads through The Tempest.

When I think about The Tempest I always think of Caliban.  I remember a professor pointing out that the little song Caliban sings: “Ban, ban Caliban” is a suggestion that in his own way, this odd creature is trying to make poetry.  Caliban is earthy, a not-noble savage.  He was roaming about the island when Prospero, fleeing an intrigue at his court, arrived with his small daughter Miranda.  Prospero enslaved Caliban to do grunt work and to keep him away from Miranda.  Caliban deeply resents the curtailment of his life, but he has gotten a glimmer of something bigger than himself during his long association with and imprisonment by Prospero.  He expresses this in a lovely speech in which I notice he has no trouble using language:

Be not afeared: the isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about my ears; and sometimes voices

That if I then had waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming.

The clouds methought would open and show riches

Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked,

I cried to dream again. (III, ii)

Levels of awareness in The Tempest are suggested by how the characters use language.  From his study of the occult Prospero has discovered how to harness the magic and power of words.   He uses words to create a storm and cause a ship to run aground on the island he and Miranda have inhabited for twelve years.  The play opens with the storm. On the ship are Prospero’s enemies: His brother Antonio who usurped Prospero’s dukedom while Prospero studied the Hermetic mysteries.   Antonio and assorted aristocrats are up on the ship deck interfering with the very capable captain and boatswain, attempting to manage the ship in the storm.  They use language in an attempt to assert their ruling position in the world.

In the next scene we meet Prospero, Miranda and Ariel.  Ariel is an air nymph who had been imprisoned in a tree (by Caliban’s mother, the witch Sycorax but you don’t have to remember that, I just like to say Sycorax).  Prospero freed Ariel from the tree but indentured him as his servant until Prospero has accomplished his grand plan of righting his family’s wrong.   Ariel is thought in action, he carries the energy of language.  Prospero says his words, Ariel makes them happen.

Gradually we meet everyone on the ship.  Prospero and Ariel have arranged for them to wash up on different parts of the island in isolated groups. The usurping Duke and various aristocracy are thrown together on one part of the island.  Ferdinand, a royal son, has been isolated so he can slowly be led to Miranda and into the transforming power of love.  A butler and a jester pop up together, and find Caliban who thinks the two of them are gods. This trio provides drunken comedic intervals while they make plans to rule the island.

The storm is a metaphor for a world that is being shaken up: the world of the play’s various characters, the Elizabethan world view of the time, Shakespeare’s life, perhaps; and more importantly, our own world, the one we carry around inside our head.  We have our own stories about the way things are.  Myself, I can’t be reminded often enough that I create my own narrative.  It helps when the reminder goes something like this:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.  We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep. (IV, i)

More lines from The Tempest:

*no harm done (I, ii)

*the dark backward and abysm of time (I, ii)

*Good wombs have borne bad sons. (I, ii)

*Hell is empty and all the devils are here. (I, ii)

*Come unto these yellow sands (I, ii)

*Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.  (I, ii)

*Look, he’s winding up the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike. (II, i)

*This is a strange repose, to be asleep with eyes wide open. (II, i)

*What’s past is prologue (II, i)

*Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. (II, ii)

*A born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick. (IV, i)

*Where the bee sucks, there suck I;

In a cow-slip’s bell I lie;

There I couch when owls do cry.

On the bat’s back I do fly

After summer merrily.

Merrily, merrily shall I live now

Under the blossom that hangs on the bough. (V, i)

*O brave new world that has such people in’t! (V, i)

Seattle GreenStage did a Shakespeare in the Park production of Henry VIII this summer.  Most folks aren’t aware Shakespeare wrote a Henry VIII.  I thought the same thing.  When I started reading it this summer, I saw that I had read it in college.  Or at least underlined a bunch of stuff in the preface.  I read it again before I went to see the production.  It was a warm sunny afternoon with a cool breeze and I fell asleep for the entirety of my favorite part of the play.  I fell asleep just as Katherine was entering for her trial and woke up just as she was leaving.  Darn.

For my money, this is Katherine’s play (or Catherine of Aragon as we might remember from school).  At her first appearance, she pleads with the king on behalf of his subjects to lower their taxes while casting reproachful glance at Cardinal Wolsey, the man responsible for the taxes.  Henry’s attitude is that his subjects exist to provide him with the means to play, make war, and do whatever he wants to do.  Cardinal Wolsey, himself wealthy and fond of luxury, is dedicated to making sure the king, and himself by association, can continue to live luxuriously–much like the wealthy do today in our country.

The next time we see Katherine, she is on trial.  Though she has carried four or five babies to term, all the males have died.  Henry has overheard the suggestion that this was God’s judgment on him because Katherine was his brother’s widow when he married her and somewhere in the bowels of the Old Testament there’s an injunction against that.  He’s working this idea at the same time that he’s working Anne Bullen  (or Anne Boleyn).

A lot of the story is imparted to the audience by means of people commenting and gossiping in town and in court.  Here’s Lord Chamberlain and Lord Suffolk:

*C–It seems the marriage with his brother’s wife has crept too near his conscience.

S–No, his conscience has crept too near another lady.

In his determination to have a male heir, Henry plans to have his 20 year marriage pronounced unlawful, a marriage that had evidently been quite warm and happy until he started fretting about his heir.  He gets Wolsey to arrange everything for him. And this is how we end up at the trial, which sounds like something our congressional clown show in Washington D.C. might come up with.  I won’t say which political party.  Here is the king and Wolsey and some slimy operative Wolsey has pulled in from the Vatican. Katherine has no counsel, not a political advocate from her home in Spain, not even another woman in the room.

She comes in, speaks eloquently to the king and ignores Wolsey.  When Wolsey addresses her, she tells him that he has always been her enemy –“it is you have blown this coal betwixt my lord and me” (II, iv)–and she will not allow him to be her judge.  Just in case he’s in any doubt about what she really thinks of him, she adds, “your heart is full of arrogancy, spleen, and pride.”   She demands that her appeal go to the Pope.

Then she walks out of court.

There’s a buzzing:

“‘Tis not well. She’s going away.”

“Call her back.”

“Katherine, Queen of England, come into the court.”

“Madame, you are called back.”

She keeps right on going.  I punch the air.  It’s an impressive scene.

But when I got a chance to see it live, I fell asleep.

Anne Bullen becomes pregnant, the king marries Anne Bullen and his marriage to Katherine is pronounced illegitimate, in that order. Katherine goes into seclusion and eventually dies.  Cardinal Wolsey falls out of favor because not only was he unable to obtain the divorce Henry wanted, he was found to be wealthier than the king. The play ends with the birth of Elizabeth who ironically grows up to be the greatest royal of them all and she wasn’t even male.

Here are lines I liked:

*No man’s pie is freed from his ambitious finger (I, i)

*Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself (I, i)

*All hoods make not monks (III, i)

*a killing frost (III, ii)

*That comfort comes too late,

‘Tis like a pardon after execution. (IV, ii)

Here’s another one for when unwelcome solicitors come knocking at my door:

*How dare you thrust yourselves into my private meditation? (II, ii)

,

This is the play that contains the famous line “All the world’s a stage.”   It’s the beginning of a speech by a melancholy poseur named Jacques, which the text says is pronounced “Jakes.” I enjoyed saying Ja-queeze to myself because Jacques just barely avoids being a Peter Sellers character, so seriously does he take himself.  In a different play he might be a tragic figure, but in this comedy/fantasy, his self-absorption and sense of superiority are company enough for him.  When he goes off at the end to join a monastery, I wonder if the Order will be able to distinguish his posing from their own.

In any case, the Forest of Arden where most of the action takes place, is a little stage where everyone is watching everyone else.  Over and over the stage directions tell some of the characters to enter to the side where they watch and sometimes comment on what their fellow characters are up to.  If there is a director in the Forest of Arden, it would be Rosalind but I’ll get to her in a minute.

Among the forest residents are both the natives and escapees from dangerous situations in town.  So we are presented with a pastoral setting and various responses to it.  The Elizabethans were wild about pastoral poems, plays and songs.  Their shepherds sat around and wrote elegant poetry, everyone was kind and generous and lived simple, healthy lives.  Kind of a like commune without the drugs and the religious cults.

With the first flush of out-of-towners is Duke Senior who has been usurped by his younger brother. The Duke hopes to set up a utopian society and for the time being seems to have succeeded because they all sit around eating great food, drinking sack, talking philosophy and listening to music.  No mention of drugs. Towards the end of Act II as they are sitting around their utopia, Jacques holds forth:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. (II, vii)

Just as Jacques has put the final touches on his speech about the meaninglessness of life, here comes Orlando who has fled his murderous older brother, practically carrying his decrepit but loyal old servant Adam.  The contrast to Jacques is deliberate as is every other loving relationship in the forest.

The next people to show up are Rosalind and her cousin Celia, having fled the court of the usurping Duke after learning he intends to kill Rosalind.  Rosalind has disguised herself as a young man the better to help her slip out of town.

Rosalind is a rare mixture of maturity, capability, loveliness and merriness.  She is in that pantheon of Shakespeare’s women who cross-dress as young men: Viola, Portia, and Imogen.  I’ve come to the conclusion that one comment Shakespeare might be making in this mechanism is that women are often just that: mature and capable besides being merry and lovely.  But they don’t have any power unless they disguise themselves as men.  He manages to make it both an observation and an ironic commentary.

Rosalind is in love with Orlando and Orlando is in love with his image of a woman he calls Rosalind.  They rediscover each other because Orlando has been writing her bad love poetry and pinning his poems to trees all over the Forest of Arden.  So he’s kind of a puppy. Rosalind stays disguised and keeps her wits about her while she slowly brings Orlando to understand that a woman is a person, not a fantasy.  When she is satisfied that he gets this fact, one that many people in our century still haven’t figured out, she reveals herself.  She also engineers the romances of everyone else in the Forest.  When you want something done, get a woman.

Though there are many layers and other strong characters in As You Like It, in many ways, it is Rosalind’s play and she’s adorable.  In the end everyone finds their own unique meaning of life, which, in my opinion, is better than a utopia.

Here we go with lines I never realized came from this play:

*Well said, that was laid on with a trowel. (I, ii)

*O how full of briers is this working day world. (I, iii)

*Sweet are the uses of adversity. (II, i)

*True is it that we have seen better days. (II, vii)

*Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me,
And turn his merry note
Unto the sweet bird’s throat,
Come hither, come hither, come hither:
Here shall he see no enemy
But winter and rough weather. (II, v)

*Blow, blow, thou winter wind.
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.

Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
That dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp. (II, vii)

*I do so desire we may be better strangers. (III, ii)

*O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful, wonderful!  and yet again wonderful! and after that all out of whooping! (III, ii)

*Thank heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love;

For I must tell you friendly in your ear,

Sell when you can, you are not for all markets. (III, v)

*Come, woo me, woo me! (IV, i)

*Men have died from time to time,

and worms have eaten them, but

not for love (IV, i)

*One can desire too much of a good thing. (IV, i)

*For ever and a day. (IV, i)

*Men are April when they woo, December when they wed. Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives. (IV, i)

*The fool doth think he is wise,

but the wise man knows himself to be a fool. (V, i)

*It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o’er the green corn-field did pass
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding:
Sweet lovers love the spring. (V, iii)

*Bonus Bawdy*

Too late I learned that I’d been reading the plays from an edition with decorous footnotes.  The editors comment mildly “with ribald connotation” over passages that cannot be ignored but give no idea of the tremendous richness of sexual innuendo and double entendres that pervade the plays.  Now that I’ve found out what I’ve been missing I am going to have to read the plays all over again! Can you spot the double meanings in this bit from As You Like It:

And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,

And then from hour to hour we rot and rot

And thereby hangs a tale.  (II, vii)

OK, the images are of fruit hanging on a tree. Also genitalia hanging on a body.  Ripe can also mean sexually ready, sexually wanton, or marriageable. Rot can refer to constant copulation or to venereal disease.  A tale is a story, and a tail describes a non-erect penis.

The context is our friend Jacques quoting Touchstone, the fool.  Although Jacques is mocking him, Touchstone sounds an awful lot like Jacques himself.  A touchstone is a stone that is used to ascertain the precious metal content of say, a piece of gold.  And Touchstone, the fool, is a measure of other people’s wisdom and self awareness.

g

Nobody knows you when you’re down and out.

Shakespeare’s psychological insight in this play interests me more than some obvious parallels with what goes on in our political and religious discourse so I am going to stick to that and leave the cheap shots to someone else.   In the fourth act, Timon says “I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind.” (IV, iii)  This statement by definition also means that he hates himself.  At this point in the play, Timon is living in a cave and eating roots.

Here’s what got him to this bestial state:  When we first meet Timon he is a charming, personable, and generous lord who gets a rush out of being a benefactor to anyone who needs money.  He gives money to his friends and patronizes painters, poets, merchants and jewelers.  He entertains lavishly and his life is full of people.

In the second act, his own creditors come calling and Timon finally pays attention to his steward who has tried to tell him for years that he cannot give away his wealth in the careless way he likes to do.   Timon responds, “I am wealthy in my friends!”  He will ask them for help.

He sends out various servants to his “friends” whom he has supported and bailed out of trouble. The ensuing scenes read like a parable of Jesus except they are funny, which Jesus’ parables might actually have been before The Religious got a hold of them.  First of all, the servants take empty boxes which they expect Timon’s friends to fill with money but Timon’s friends at first all imagine the boxes contains gifts for them. When they realize that Timon is asking them for help, they fall all over themselves to make excuses.

The first friend says, “La, la, la, la. . .Many a time I have dined with him and come again to supper to purpose. . . him spend less. . . this is no time to lend money, especially upon bare friendship without security.”

The second friend smacks his head and says if Timon had only asked two hours earlier he would have some money for him but he has just invested it.

The third friend is outraged that he wasn’t asked first of all and if that’s all that Timon thinks of him he can find someone else to beg from.

Timon is shocked and infuriated at this.  When he calms down he invites all his friends to a feast.  They are a little wary but convince themselves that he has somehow recovered his fortune and the gravy train is about to pull into the station again.  However, the dinner turns out to be bowls of water with stones in them.  While Timon berates his guests he throws their “dinner” at them and drives them out of the house.  He goes off to live in a cave and snarl at everyone who comes to visit.  Then he dies.

This is a stripped down version of things.  There are a few men who love Timon and don’t desert him though he does abandon them.  There’s a cynical philosopher who doesn’t quite rise to the wisdom of a fool, but who has some funny lines.  The only women are a couple of bawds, which is a word I needed to get familiar with when I began reading these plays.

Timon did not become a misanthrope as a result of his friends’ rejection of him.  He already was one and for much the same reason that Coriolanus was.  Neither man allows himself to feel human because neither man allows himself to be vulnerable.  To be vulnerable means one is an ordinary human being who needs other ordinary human beings.  When we’re the rich guy on top or the one who has “more self-awareness” or who thinks she is in a position to label others as “dysfunctional,” or “sinful,” it can be a long, long fall from the pinnacle to mere humanity where we’re all in this together and we all are dysfunctional, sinful and lack self-awareness.

The outrage when one falls from the pedestal is not so much that one isn’t getting what he asked for, but that he feels exposed in his humanness, his vulnerability and his need for forgiveness.  .  . just like everyone else.  It’s not as though everyone around Timon didn’t already know he was a human being, but in the game of superiority, you only have to fool one person.  Timon’s tragedy is that he died without this awareness.

Here are lines I liked:

*Tis not enough to help the feeble up,

But to support him after. (I, i)

Why this is the world’s soul and just of the same piece

Is every flatterers’ spirit. Who can call him

His friend that dips in the same dish? (III, ii)

*Nothing emboldens sin so much as mercy. (III, v)

*We have seen better days. (IV, ii)

*Life’s uncertain voyage. (V, i)