My first thought was “oh god, not another Roman war play.”  But like every other Shakespeare play, it found a home in me. I read it and watched two different productions of it.  It’s striking how many different aspects an actor or director can choose to amplify.

The play opens with the citizens of Rome close to rioting because they are hungry.  The food they grow is either eaten by the wealthy, sold back to the farmers at exorbitant prices or it rots in storage.  Menenius, one of the upper class patricians, soothes the crowd with a humorous, sympathetic explanation of trickle-down economics.  Just as they are nodding their heads and saying “OK, that makes sense,” Coriolanus, a celebrated solider who hopes to be elected to the highest office in Rome, shows up.  He sneers,

*What’s the matter, you dissentious rogues;

That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion

Make yourselves scabs? (I, i)

Good god, I think.  I am going to hate this guy.  I am completely on the side of the citizenry.  But then it turns out that the citizenry behave much like a particular swathe does in our country.  They believe any ludicrous thing they are told if it appeals to their small-minded impatience.  They are uneducated, unreflective and stubborn.  The only thing I can’t fault the citizenry for is that they are hungry.  They have that point.

Coriolanus is an easy man to hate because he is arrogant, lacks social skills, and would certainly despise me.  But by the end of the play I felt some empathy for him.  For starters he has this Mother.  Volumnia.  She makes her first appearance with her daughter-in-law who sews meekly while Volumnia goes on for 17 lines about what a god her son is.

There was a hint about this mother-son relationship in the first dialogue of the play when one of the hungry citizens remarks on Coriolanus’ war record:

*Men can be content to say it was for his country, he did it to please his mother. . . (I, i)

Coriolanus is happy and independent on the battlefield.  He fights as though he is the only one there.  In fact he seems to find his fellow soldiers an annoyance.  And back in town in the world of relationships, civility, and diplomacy he’s a disaster.  In order to get this Counsel position he wants (and feels he is entitled to by virtue of who he is) he has to ask for votes much like our politicians do.  He has to cajole, finesse and charm the citizenry.  He whines to Menenius.

C–What must I do?

M–Speak to them in a wholesome manner

C–Bid them wash their faces and keep their teeth clean.

Coriolanus behaves so badly the citizenry reject him.  He throws a temper tantrum and threatens to sub-due them by force.  This is treasonous and the police are called in. Menenius hustles him home to Mother.  Volumnia tells him to crawl a little, to be contrite, get the position he wants and then crush the citizenry.  Do it for Mother.

*Pray be content, Mother.  I am going to the marketplace.  Chide me no more. (III. ii)

But he can’t do it. He erupts again.  Psychologically he is a boy of 10 whose mother has always indulged him, and who has taught him he is superior to rank and file human beings.  He can only function in a world where he is left alone to feel superior.  He finds that world on the battlefield and alone with Mother.

Coriolanus is exiled.  He leaves pouting “I shall be loved when I am lacked.” (IV, i)

Or when they don’t have him to kick around any more.

Then in a stunning display of immaturity, in an attitude of “I’ll show them!” he goes to the enemy and offers to fight with them against his home.  The enemy are the Volsces (pronounced like Bolshis) and their leader Aufidius is both brave and canny.  Coriolanus only recognizes the soldier.  “He is a lion I am proud to hunt” he says. (I, i)

Coriolanus dresses like a peasant and does for Aufidius, the worthy lion, what he could not bring himself to do for his own people: he begs, he is submissive.  The scene between the two of them plays like a love scene.  If I have my human development theory straight, everything would be unconsciously sexual to Coriolanus. Every experience would be intense, self-centered, sexual, and immediate.  Aufidius on the other hand could coolly assess this opportunity and think about what he wants to do with it.  He could slit Coriolanus’ throat right there. But Aufidius is smart.  He will kill Coriolanus after using his knowledge to conquer Rome.

Rome is just about to cave in to the Volsces when they realize that Coriolanus intends to raze the city, not conquer it.  Mother is called in.  Volumnia plays the martyr card and I had to smile when I read this.  It seems mothers have been doing this, oh, forever:

*Thou hast never in thy life

Showed thy dear mother any courtesy

When she, poor hen, fond of no second brood. . .

Yada yada yada                  (V, iii, italics mine)

When this doesn’t work, Volumnia goes deadly and declares she will curse her son while she is burning to death.

Coriolanus finally breaks down and briefly becomes “people who need people,” a vulnerable human being.  He acknowledges that occasionally something else might be more important than whatever he, on an impulsive whim, might want.  He says he will broker a peace.  Probably not he personally since he doesn’t have that skill set but we take his drift.

Aufidius has been quietly astonished at this family dynamic with its weird mother/wife-boy/man relationship.  Coriolanus holds out his hands and in effect says to Aufidius, “You see how I couldn’t possibly refuse her, even at the point of victory.  Could you refuse her?”

When the two men meet later, Aufidius calls Coriolanus what he is, a mamma’s boy, provoking him into another of his tiresome rages.  The scene plays like a sexual climax with the Volsces chanting, “Kill, kill, kill, kill” which they do.  The stage directions say “Aufidius stands on him.”

I pitied Corilanus in the end.  I know how a dominating and powerful parent can prevent one from growing up and individualizing. Coriolanus’s world was split.  Psychologically he could only exist by shutting out the complicated, nuanced world of other people.  His only meaningful relationship was with his mother.  The two of them lived in the toxic mess they had created together.  A line from Macbeth seems to fit here:

*The love that follows us sometimes is our trouble,

Which still we thank as love. ( Macbeth I, vi)

 

Here are more lines from Coriolanus:

*Such a nature . . . disdains the shadow which he treads on at noon (I, i)

*There is a world elsewhere. (III, iii)

 

*Chaste as the icicle (V, iii)

 

 

Pericles, Prince of Tyre takes the form of a hero’s journey—actually it takes the form of an exceptionally bad B-movie—but Shakespeare makes it work somehow.  There were a few stops along the way that left me reeling in their rawness. Right out of the gate, 25 lines in, we are told by Gower, the narrator that in Antioch is a king who took such a liking to his own daughter that

“her to incest did provoke.

Bad child, worse father! To entice his own

to evil should be done by none.”

Enter Pericles who is obviously not apprised of the situation. All he knows is that the daughter of the King of Antioch is available.  He learns there is a riddle to solve and the prize is the daughter.  Mounted on the wall are the heads of all the suitors who couldn’t solve the riddle but Pericles gives it a go.

The riddle is stupid and obvious.  The answer is father-daughter incest.  Pericles understands immediately that solving the riddle is as dangerous as not solving it. As the King says in an aside “He must not live to trumpet my infamy.” As titillating as all this is, it’s the last of our concern with Antioch.

Pericles flees, is shipwrecked and washes up on shore at Pentapolis where he marries Thaisa, the King’s daughter.  He receives word that he’s needed back in Tyre.  Pregnant Thaisa goes with him and dies in childbirth.  She is given a burial at sea and the baby, Marina, is left at Tharsus with Cleon and Dionyza for the time being.

The coffin containing Thaisa washes up at Ephesus where (as we know from The Comedy of Errors) all sorts of magic and occult practitioners offer their services.  One of them brings Thaisa back to life and she takes up as the high priestess at Diana’s temple.

Gower comes out and tells us sixteen years have passed.

Cleon and Dionyza have not been the greatest choice as foster parents.  They’ve been kind to Marina but now that she is 16, Dionyza contracts a little touch of the Texas cheerleader’s mom and feels that Marina is outshining her own daughter.  She orders her to be killed.  But before this can happen, Marina is abducted by pirates and sold to a brothel in Mytilene.

The scenes in the brothel are raw.  There’s a pander (who we all know about from Troilus and Cressida) and his bawd (that would be the madam) and their servant who goes by the name of Boult.  The numbers are down in the brothel because the women are “so pitifully sodden” from being “stewed in the sweating tubs” as a treatment for venereal disease.  A client has died because his “little baggage. . . pooped him; she made him roast meat for worms,” all of which is to say she infected him with venereal disease.

Into this cesspool comes Marina, the virgin.  Pander, Bawd, and Boult salivate over the price they will get from her first client while Marina waits in terror.  But Marina manages to dazzle or shame everyone who comes near her and thus remains “pure.”  The last to be dazzled is the Governor of Mytilene who rescues her from the stew.

Finally here comes Pericles, looking for his daughter.  Besides losing his wife, he’s been shipwrecked several times and who knows what all has been going on in Tyre.  Told his daughter was abducted by pirates, he has gone into a complete funk.  He’s depressed and apathetic.  Marina is brought to work her magic on him, and the two work out that they are father and daughter.

The governor of Mytilene wants to marry Marina.  Before they can do that, they must make a sacrifice at the altar of Diana at Ephesus and we know who is running that show.  And so the whole family is united.

As a story of loss and restoration, Pericles didn’t move me like The Winter’s Tale did.  It felt dis-jointed and contained story lines that got lost and weren’t restored.  There is some thought that Shakespeare didn’t write the entire play and it read that way.  Mid-way through it got tighter and livelier so that even a novice like me noticed it.

After the brothel scene I was most fascinated with the short scenes at Ephesus.  I grew up a kid drenched in Bible stories from Sunday School.  We heard all about the evil at Ephesus and the abomination that was Diana.  Between Pericles and The Comedy of Errors, Ephesus sounds like rather a fun place to be, not to mention a safer place to be stranded than my childhood Sunday Schools classes.

Lines:

*passions of the mind (I, ii)

 

*One sorrow never comes but brings as heir

That may succeed as his inheritor. (I, iv)

 

*due diligence (III, chorus)

 

*O you gods!

Why do you make us love your goodly gifts

And snatch them straight away? (III, i)

 

*What world is this? (III, ii)

 

*foul play (IV, iii)

 

*needful thing (V, iii)

 

 

 

 

There are women’s names in only three of Shakespeare’s titles: Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Troilus and Cressida.  I think this play should be called Imogen.  Cymbeline, the king is a dolt whereas his daughter Imogen shimmers with courage, imagination and integrity.  It’s a long play which tries to encompass the doings of the Roman Empire with the doings of Celtic Britain which is a bit of a trick since they happened in different centuries.  But it’s the Imogen story that most interested me.

Imogen has married Posthumus (so called because he was born after his father died) and her father Cymbeline is furious.  He intended her to marry his step-son, a clod named Clotus, son of his current Queen whose hobby is to mix deadly poisons and try them out on small animals. In his rage, Cymbeline banishes Posthumus and imprisons Imogen.  Before they part Posthumus gives Imogen a bracelet and she gives him a ring.

In exile, Posthumus gets into a locker room exchange with some other frat boys. As he boasts about his wife’s virtue, he inflames the desire of a villainous character named Iachimo who bets Posthumus he can bag Imogen. Posthumus puts up his wedding ring, Iachimo leaves for Britain and I almost throw my Pelican Shakespeare out my bay window.  I am so sick of this “proof of women’s virtue” crap especially since it’s still going on 400 years later and in our “modern” society.

There’s a truly creepy scene where during the night Iachimo steps out of a trunk that has been delivered to Imogen’s room.  He takes note of the room’s décor before examining Imogen while she sleeps.  While he notes a mole on her left breast, I throw up.  He removes her marriage bracelet.

The next morning while Cymbeline is setting up a forced marriage ceremony to Clotus, Imogen escapes with the help of Pisanio, a sympathetic servant the Queen has been trying to poison.  Pisanio has received two letters from Posthumus. The one addressed to Imogen tells her to meet him at Milford Haven in Wales.  The one address to Pisanio tells him to kill Imogen.  Pisanio shows both letters to Imogen and together they figure out a plan.

Imogen dresses as a boy and Pisanio gives her a “tonic” that the Queen has given him.  He doesn’t know the Queen intended it as poison.  But the Queen doesn’t know that the herbalist she has been working with is on to her and he has given her a recipe to induce sleep, not death.  In Wales, Imogen is befriended by Belarius and his two sons.  She takes the “tonic” and falls into a deep sleep.  Meantime Cloten, the clod, has dressed himself as Posthumus and has followed her to Wales.  He tries to intimidate one of Belarius’ sons by pulling rank, “Know’st me not by my clothes?” The son lops off his head. So I guess not.

Now comes the most sublime song in all of Shakespeare. (My favorite setting of it is the one by Roger Quilter).  The sons entomb Imogen, believing her to be dead, and sing:

 

Fear no more the heat o’ the Sun,

Nor the furious Winters rages,

Thou thy worldly task hast don,

Home art gon, and tane thy wages.

Golden Lads, and Girls all must,

As Chimney-Sweepers come to dust.

 

Fear no more the frown o’ th Great,

Thou art past the Tyrants stroak,

Care no more to clothe and eat,

To thee the Reed is as the Oak:

The Scepter, Learning, Physick must,

All follow this and come to dust.

 

Fear no more the Lightning flash.

Nor th’ all-dreaded Thunderstone

Fear not Slander, Censure rash.

Thou hast finished joy and moan.

All Lovers young all Lovers must,

Consign to thee and come to dust.

 

No Exorcisor harm thee,

Nor no witch-craft charm thee.

Ghost unlaid forbear thee.

Nothing ill come near thee.

Quiet consummation have,

And renowned be thy grave.

 

Their father insists they add the headless body of Cloten to the tomb because he is dressed like nobility. Imogen wakes from her deep sleep and thinks the body next to her is Posthumus.

In order to tie up the plot I would have to bring in the secondary political plot, which didn’t interest me.  I just hoped it would go away.  Isaac Asimov who can usually be relied upon to elucidate the historical bits seems to want to throw his Pelican Shakespeare out the window because he can’t get over that ancient Britain is in a different century than early modern Italy.  But in the end, all is revealed.  Belarius turns out to be a former courtier who Cymbeline, in a snit, had banished.  The two sons turn out to be sons of Cymbeline who Belarius, also in a snit, took with him when he went into exile.  Both Posthumus and Iachimo repent their sophomoric, unconscionable behavior (I think they get off lightly) and the Queen conveniently poisons herself.

Besides the wonderful song quoted above, here are more lines:

 

*Lest the bargain should catch cold and starve (I, iv)

 

*Hark! Hark! The lark at heaven’s gate sings (I, iii)

 

*The game is up. (III, iv)

 

*What is it to be false? (III, iv)

 

*I have not slept one wink. (III, iv)

 

*Society is no comfort to one not sociable. (IV, ii)

 

*Fortune brings in some boats that are not steer’d. (IV, iii)

 

*Sir I would advise you to shift a shirt; the violence of action hath made you reek as a sacrifice.  Where air comes out, air come in; there’s none abroad so wholesome as that you vent. (I, ii)

 

 

 

 

 

A fuss about a trifle?  I don’t think so.  Marjorie Garber in Shakespeare After All lists some of the possible ways of looking at the word nothing.  She points out that a zero is something of a paradox.  It’s also a full circle or in other words, everything.  And she informs us that “nothing” was Elizabethan slang for the female sexual organs, the penis being presumably “something.”   The female genitalia are more subtle, they’re hidden.   There’s a lot of ado in this play about things that are hidden.

The characters hide behind language and truth is obfuscated by words.  Beatrice and Benedick try to hide their attraction to each other by insults, sarcasm and apparent hate.  Though Dogberry knows the truth of the plot against Hero and Claudio, his mangling of the language almost loses his case.  Because Hero and Claudio need others to speak for them, their own agency is hidden, putting them at the mercy of what other people say.

The most obvious big ado is about whether or not Hero is a virgin on her wedding day.  The ado is about “nothing” because it involves Hero’s genitalia and it’s about nothing because nothing has happened except that a lot of men started talking about her.  I’ll add one more gratuitous nothing: Nothing is so over-rated as virginity.

It’s amazing how fast everyone believes the accusation and the “proof” that Hero and Borachio (Borachio!) have been having it on the night before the wedding.  Even Hero’s own father.  I want to shake him and scream, “Have you even met your daughter?” She is so shy she can’t bear to refer to her own wedding night.

It’s like all the men are idiots except for Benedick.  He is in love with Beatrice and her opinion sways him; but it’s to his credit that he’s in love with such a fiery, engaging, witty, impudent grown-up.  I should mention the priest.  Priests need a good word when it’s warranted.  He believes Hero and Beatrice.  He shows some Solomon-like wisdom is proposing to put it about that Hero has died in order to see what hidden facts that flushes out.

The truth of the framing of Hero is hidden in Dogberry’s mind but between his malapropisms and his anxiety to be “writ down an ass,” it almost doesn’t get revealed.

I have always liked this play.  The fun of it will always be the sparring and the love between Beatrice and Benedick.

 

*Beatrice: I wonder that you will still be talking, Signoir Benedick:  Nobody marks you.

Benedick: What! My dear Lady Disdain, are you yet living? (I, i)

 

*Benedick, the married man. (I, i)

 

*As merry as the day is long (II, i)

 

*It keeps on the windy side of care (II, i)

 

*He that hath a beard is more than a youth; and he that hath no beard is less than a man; and he that is no more than a youth is not for me; and he that is less than a man, I am not for him. (II, i)

 

*There was a star danced and under that was I born. (II, i)

 

*I will tell you my drift. (II, i)

 

*Bait the hook well, this fish will bite (II, iii)

 

*When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live til I were married. (II, iii)

 

*He hath a heart as sound as a bell and his tongue is the clapper; for what his heart thinks his tongue speaks. (III, ii)

 

*Thou wilt be condemned to everlasting redemption for this (IV, ii)

 

*O that he were here to write me down an ass! (IV, ii)

 

*For there was never yet philosophers that could endure the toothache patiently (V, i)

 

*I was not born under a rhyming planet (V, ii)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How about those Macbeths, huh?  They seem like a fun couple.  Actually, as I think other people have noted, they have the best marriage in all of Shakespeare.  They love each other, they have great passion for each other, they understand each other, and they do things together.  It’s this last that’s the problem.  They get a little carried away with murdering people together.  The play is a stunning study of the effects of guilt. You go away with your jaw dropped open, your eyes glazed over, and the eerie feeling that the story really isn’t over.

Macbeth is a familiar play to me because my father used to go around the house quoting lines from it long before I knew where he was getting them.  I assumed they were all from the Pirates of Penzance.

Whenever he and I were at a mall or the library– someplace where we were going to split up and meet later—he would say to me “When shall we three meet again?” (I, i) It’s the first line of Macbeth when we are introduced to the three witches.

Another was “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it.” (I, iv)  This is said about the death of a traitor in the first act.  My father referred it to various politicians.

The line that bears some resemblance to one from the Pirates of Penzance is, “Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once!” (III, iv)  He used to say that to my mother.

And finally, on occasion when we were getting ready to do something or go somewhere, he would erupt with “Lay on, Macduff!” (V, viii)

Macbeth has been a favorite quoting grounds for psychotherapists as befitting a play about guilt:

*Present fears are less than horrible imaginings (I, iii)

*The love that follows us sometimes is our trouble,

Which still we thank as love. (I, vi)

 

*Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak

Whispers the o’er fraught heart and bids it break. (IV, iii)

 

*Macbeth: Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?

 

Doctor:  Therein the patient must minister to himself. (V, iii)

 

A long time ago I memorized the “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech but I was always confused by the first line: “She should have died hereafter.” I think it was Ian McKellan in a DVD commentary who pointed out that if you read the word should as the subjunctive would it makes more sense and, if possible, lends even more power to the speech: She was going to die sometime. There was always going to be a time when she would die:

 

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. (V, v)

 

The witches in Macbeth are the prototype for today’s Halloween characters.  I could go all feminist here–as I have in so many of these blog posts–and point out how defaming Shakespeare’s characterization is to herbalists, to witches, to intuitives, and to women.  But I won’t because they are such fun.  In any case, they aren’t witches, they are the “weird sisters” or the Wyrds, the Fates.   So there’s the whole discussion of what exactly is Fate?  Is it outside of us or inside us or an amalgamation of the two?

The cesspool in the weird sisters’ pot is not unlike what’s going on in Macbeth’s head.  But are the weird sisters casting spells or are they an external enactment of some recipe of Macbeth’s internal ingredients?

Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays.  It hurls itself with deadly aim right into the heart of the audience.  Here are lines I haven’t already quoted:

 

*Fair is foul and foul is fair (I, i)

 

*The weird sisters, hand in hand,

Posters of the sea and land,

Thus do go about, about. (I, iii)

 

*So foul and fair a day I have not seen. (I, iii)

 

*Strange images of death (I, iii)

 

*Come what, come may,

Time and the hour runs thro the roughest day (I, iii)

 

*. . . the milk of human kindness. (I, v)

 

*. . .  the be-all and end-all. (I, vii)

 

*. . .vaulting ambition (I, vii)

 

*. . .screw your courage to the sticking point. (I, vii)

 

*The moon is down; I have not heard the clock. (II, i)

 

*Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care. (II, ii)

 

*Tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil. (II, ii)

 

*We have scorched the snake, not killed it. (III, ii)

 

*I am in blood. (III, iv)

 

*Double, double, toil and trouble

Fire burn and cauldron bubble (IV, i)

 

*. . .  eye of newt and toe of frog. . . (IV, i)

 

*By the pricking of my thumbs

Something wicked this way comes. (IV, i)

 

*One fell swoop (IV, iii)

 

*Out damned spot! Out, I say! (V, i)

 

*What’s done cannot be undone. (V, i)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven.

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name. (V, i)

 

I’ve loved this line since I first heard it in high school. Giving “to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.”  I felt like an “airy nothing” when I was a kid.  Becoming a person is like writing a poem. It’s like being the dreamer who dreams the dream. Even if we’ve been burdened with an oppressive religious education, eventually we get to write (right) ourselves and to decide what it means to be who we are.

Having said that, I’ll move on to the strata of this play: There are the aristocrats, Theseus (who says the line I just quoted) and Hippolyta who are to be married on Midsummer’s Day.  There is “Helymitria,” my term for the interchangeable bright young upper class things Hermia, Helena, Demetrius, and Lysander.  Oberon and Titania are the King and Queen of an unseen (by mortals) world of fairies.  Robin Goodfellow–Puck for short—is Oberon’s all-round mischief-maker and messenger, a Mercury figure.

And finally my favorites: the “Hard-handed men that work in Athens, which never labored in their minds until now.”(V, i)  Anyone who performs or who works with performers will recognize this bunch. In my music studio, I organize bi-monthly recitals for my adult singing students called “Terrified Adults and Spotlight Whores Sunday Afternoon Musicales.”  In the play, we’ve got Bottom, the Spotlight Whore and Snug, the Terrified Adult.  The rest of their players are aspiring to either position.  We’ve got the sincerely officious pedant, Peter Quince.  In my analogy I guess that would be me.

The gang is rehearsing a play called “A tedious brief of young Pyramus and his love for Thisby; a very tragical mirth.”  They’ve entered themselves in a competition to entertain Theseus and Hippolyta after their wedding ceremony.  All of them nearly wet their pants when they learn they have been chosen to perform.  What performer, amateur or professional, doesn’t recognize this?

They need a wall for their play because Pyramus and Thisby carry on their love affair through a chink in the wall that separates them:

 

Snout: You can never bring in a wall. What say you, Bottom?
Bottom: Some man or other must present Wall. And let him have some plaster, or some loam, or some roughcast about him to signify wall. And let him hold his fingers thus, and through that cranny shall Pyramus and Thisbe whisper.

 

I love this!  This is what makes amateur theatricals, in many ways, so much more alive than productions with a huge budget. When you don’t have a lot of money you need a lot of imagination.  As Theseus says: “The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them.” (V, i)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream continually asks the question, “Are you sure that we are awake?” (IV, i) and continually presents levels of dreaming and waking, imagination and concreteness. Here are more of its lines:

 

*. . . chanting faint hymns to the cold, fruitless moon (I, i)

 

*The course of true love never did run smooth (I, i)

 

*Things base and vile, holding no quantity

Love can transpose to form dignity

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind. (I, i)

 

*You may do it extempore, for it is nothing but roaring. (I, ii)

(This is Peter Quince’s reassurance to Snug that he will be ok in the part of the lion)

 

*Every mother’s son (I, ii)

 

*I must go and seek some dewdrops here,

And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear. (II, i)

 

*Lord what fools these mortals be! (IV, ii)

 

 

After my sojourn in the rotten state of Denmark, the innocent foils and fights of a country village were a little hard settle into. I read the play and thought, Ok what did I miss?  The BBC did a wonderful job with this play.  Prunella Scales, Judy Davis, Elizabeth Spriggs, Ben Kingsley, Alan Bennett, and Ron Cook brought it to life.  After watching these old pros, I read the play again and had a good time with it. It prefigures not only Restoration comedy but television comedies like “Keeping Up Appearances.”  All the zany characters are here.

Sir John Falstaff is one of the characters. There seems to be a general lamenting among the commentators that he is not the brilliant Falstaff of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2. Yes, he is.  The lovable, incorrigible, lord of misrule who said funny things is also an irresponsible, alcoholic, arrested adolescent who is incapable of love or intimacy.   But Falstaff isn’t my favorite in any play.  Is it a guy thing? Because I’m with Mistress Ford when she says, “What tempest threw this whale with so many tuns of oil in his belly ashore at Windsor?” (II, i)

In any case, the play is not about him.  It’s about the merry wives: Mistress Ford and Mistress Page.  John Falstaff needs money. He thinks he can (literally) screw some out of Mrs Page and Mrs Ford. To this end he sends each of them a love letter. Class act that he is, he copies out the exact letter twice but changes the names in the salutation.  The women are onto him before they even finish reading the letters.

Mrs. Quickly is the “she-mercury” for just about everyone. She runs messages between all the plotters and planners. (Quickly, get it?)  She also pimps for nearly everyone.  She has a courtesy title and is full of malapropisms:

*She’s a fartuous a civil modest wife (II, ii)

*Her husband has a marvelous infection to the little page (II, ii)

Mrs. Quickly arranges for Falstaff to meet Mrs. Ford at her home during hours when her husband is away.  Falstaff’s associates, Pistol and Nym, unrepentant petty criminals, think Falstaff’s plan is too low even for them.  They tell the husbands.  Master Page doesn’t expect his wife to fall for it but Master Ford, a “very jealousy man,” is suspicious of that his wife might, for no good reason, I might add.  He has the same disease as Othello but this play doesn’t have any creepy murder scenes.

Mr. Ford disguises himself as someone he calls Mr. Brook (Ford/Brook. Get it?) who pays a call on Falstaff and flatters (but also pays) the old fool into setting up an assignation for him and his own wife, Mrs. Ford.  Falstaff tells Mr. Brook about his appointment with Mrs. Ford.

Falstaff’s page tattles to Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page. The women hatch a plot. When Mr. Brook shows up for the assignation the wives are smuggling Falstaff out in a load of dirty laundry with instructions to dump everything in a ditch.  In this exchange following the dumping of Falstaff, Mistress Quickly means to use the word direction.

*Falstaff:  Mistress Ford? I have had ford enough; I was thrown into the ford; I have my belly full of ford.

Mistress Quickly: Alas . . . that was not her fault.  She does so take on with her men—they mistook their erection.

Falstaff: So did I mine. . . (III, v)

At the next attempt at an assignation, the women dress Falstaff in women’s clothes and shove him out the door while the suspicious Mr. Ford is pawing through the dirty laundry.  Finally they persuade Falstaff to go the old oak tree at night as Herne, the Hunter, the subject of a local myth, and keep an assignation with Mrs. Ford.  They dress him up and put horns on his head.  Now the old fool imagines himself “a Windsor stag,” and Zeus disguised as a bull.  Mistress Quickly dresses the children of the town like fairies, ouphs and witches and sends them out to torment Sir John at the old oak tree where he’s trying to get into Mrs. Ford’s pants.

A second plot has involved the wooing of the Page’s daughter, Anne. Anne has no interest in the three men trying to court her.  Her choice is one Master Fenton.  Mistress Quickly has been pimping for all four of them.  They all think they have a chance with Anne but she is planning to run off with Master Fenton the evening of the denouement at the old oak tree. Everyone ends up dancing, singing and tormenting John Falstaff who finally concedes, “I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass.” (V, v)

Here’s how the play ends:

“Let us every one go home

And laugh this sport o’er by a country fire,

Sir John and all.” (V, v)

 

Here are some lines I liked along the way:

 

*She has brown hair and speaks small like a woman. (I, i)

 

*Thou art the Mars of malcontent. (I, iii)

 

*Here will be an old abusing of God’s patience and the King’s English. (I, iv)

 

*I’ll exhibit a bill in parliament for the putting down of men. (II, i)

 

*Thou hast some crotchets in thy head now. (II, i)

 

*The world’s mine oyster

Which I with sword will open. (II, ii)

 

*Falstaff: Of what quality was your love?

Ford: Like a fair house built on another man’s ground, so that I have lost my edifice by mistaking the place where I erected it. (II, ii)

 

*I cannot tell what the dickens his name is. (III, ii)

 

*A woman would run through fire and water for such a kind heart. (III, iv)

 

*As good luck would have it. (III, v)

 

*Have I laid my brain in the sun and dried it? (V,v)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If I collected a fraction of the available analyses on Hamlet I could organize a Bite of Hamlet the size of a small town.  Hamlet hamlet.  Every block would feature a different flavor and some of us could spend the rest of our lives wandering through the Mandela of ideas, trends, arguments, and responses this play has elicited.  Here are some of mine:

I didn’t use to understand why everyone says Polonius is such a bore.  Now I understand why I couldn’t see it before.  It was because he has that one really great line:

*This above all, to thine own self be true,

And it must follow as the night the day

That thou canst not then be false to any man. (I, iii)

It’s wonderful line. It’s a line to tape on the bathroom mirror so I see it every day.  When I was younger I couldn’t reconcile such a meddling old fuss-pot with such wisdom.  I needed my villains and my heroes to be separate.  Shakespeare has so many levels that if someone needs fundamentals, she can find them.  If she can tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty, there’s comfort available for the discomfort of doing so.

My most personal response to Hamlet came at a time when I was deeply depressed.  Reading his most famous speech, I stopped at the line, “. . . the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to.”  Energy and empathy from 400 years ago rushed through the words.  I wasn’t alone on the road.  Someone was there who understood, even called it “natural.” As I am reading all the plays this summer I find there is almost nothing Shakespeare didn’t understand about what it feels like to be alive.

This reading I was drawn to the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia but I had a lack of empathy for Ophelia that surprised me.  I felt impatient with her.  Apparently Hamlet did, too.  He is a frightened young person, trying to keep his wits about him, and trying to separate from his parents.  Ophelia’s fragility rattles him.  There was time when I felt as crazy as Ophelia, and when I attempted what she accomplished.  I know what it’s like to have a meddling, critical, controlling parent.  I know how infantilizing that is, and how much paralysis and fear it breeds in a developing young woman.  Hamlet knows what Polonius is like, knows the power he holds over his daughter.  But his own immediate crisis is so great that he wants Ophelia to be a steadying person, not to be the person she is.

Hamlet is thinking hard.  He doesn’t want to be sidetracked with Ophelia’s angst.  Ophelia is unhappy and bewildered.  She will soon spin out and not be able to think at all.   Like Hamlet I have thought about suicide.  Thinking about it is what saves one from following through.  Ophelia can’t think.  When Hamlet erupts the two of them are split off from each other.  Cutting off connection and feeling may pull one back from the brink of suicide, but it’s a survival measure that doesn’t make for good decisions about how to live.  To deny either connection or individuation dis-empowers both.

Reading Hamlet gets me thinking about death.  I want to stare death in the face and go down fighting if that’s what’s required.  But if I take my last breath in this world and float into the next, I hope both thinking and feeling states are there.  The readiness is all.

A point about Hamlet and Ophelia that I wanted to clear up is the extent of their relationship. I thought I had “ocular proof” of it being sexual until I realized I had misread a line.  Ophelia is reading her “orisons,” her prayer book, when Hamlet asks her to remember all his sins in her orisons.  Except this was how I read the line:

“Nymph, in thy orifices be all my sins remembered.”

I thought my line sounded better.  It even sounded Shakespearean. I bet I’m not the first to make that slip.

Which reminds me of another slip, a very poignant one.  My beloved high school English teacher Carlye LaBell, had Alzheimers late in her life.  Out for brunch with her family, she studied the menu.  “Omelette,” she said.  “I don’t know what that is but I think I used to teach it.”

Sit down with a cup of tea and put your feet up.  Here are lines from Hamlet:

*How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

. . . ‘tis an unweeded garden

That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely. (I, ii)

 

*. . .frailty thy name is woman. (I, ii)

 

*Neither a borrower or a lender be. (I, iii)

 

*. . .to the manner born. . .

. . . it is a custom more honored in the breach than the observance. (I, iv)

 

*Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. (I, iv)

 

*Murder most foul. (I, v)

 

*There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in our philosophy. (I, v)

 

*Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth. (II, i)

 

*Brevity is the soul of wit. (II, ii)

 

*More matter, with less art. (II, ii)

 

*Though this be madness, yet there is method in it. (II, ii)

 

*. . . the indifferent children of the earth. (II, ii)

 

*There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. (II, ii)

 

*What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god; the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. (II, ii)

 

*I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw (II, ii)

 

*The play’s the thing

Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king (II, ii)

 

*To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. . .
. . . who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all. . .  (III, i)

 

*Get thee to a nunnery. (III, i)

 

*Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it,
as many of your players do, I had as lief the
town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air
too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently;
for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say,
the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget
a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it
offends me to the soul to hear a robustious
periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to
very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who
for the most part are capable of nothing but
inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have such
a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant; it
out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.  (III, ii)

 

*‘Tis now the very witching time of night

When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out

Contagion to the world. (III, ii)

 

*The lady doth protest too much methinks. (III, ii)

 

*You would play upon me, you would

Seem to know my stops,

You would pluck out the heart of my mystery. (III, ii)

 

*A king of shreds and patches (III, iv)

 

*Hoist with his own petard (III, iv)

 

*. . . cruel to be kind ( III, iv)

 

*How should I know your true love know

From another one?

By his cockle hat and staff

And his sandals shoon. (IV, v)

 

*The say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. (IV, v)

 

*Tomorrow is St Valentine’s Day

All in the morning betime

And I a maid at your window

To be your Valentine (IV, v)

 

*There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. . .

there’s pansies, that’s for thought. . .

there’s fennel. . . columbines.

there’s rue. . . we may call it herb o’ grace on Sundays. . .

there’s a daisy. . . (IV, v)

 

*For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy. . . (IV, v)

 

*And will ‘a not come again?

And will ‘a not come again?

Oh no, he is dead,

Go to thy deathbed;

He never will come again. (IV, v)

 

*There lives within the very flame of love

A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it. (IV, vii)

 

*Long purples. . . our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them. (IV, vii)

 

*Alas poor Yorick! I knew him Horatio. (V, i)

 

*Sweets to the sweet. (V, i) (I’m not sure how many people realize this is Gertrude’s line as she throws flowers into Ophelia’s grave.)

 

*The quick and the dead (V, i)

 

*The cat will mew, the dog will have his day (V, i)

 

*There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will (V, ii)

 

*There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.  If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come.  The readiness is all. (V, ii)

 

*Now cracks a noble heart.  Good night, sweet Prince,

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. (V, ii)

 

*Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. (V, ii)

 

I read somewhere that people either take to Othello or they hate it.  I took to it.  The plot is as improbable as an opera but no one sees an opera for the plot.  Beyond this particular plot is a human dilemma that I expect we are all familiar with: Jealousy and its cousin envy.  I see Othello as jealous and Iago as envious. Even one of these emotions is dangerous enough, but both of them firing up the minds of people not given to self reflection is disastrous.

The complete title of the play is Othello, the Moor of Venice. Moor is shorthand for African.  There’s no specification for what part of Africa.  Othello is a celebrated and beloved general in the Venetian army and at the opening of the play he has just eloped with Desdemona, a Venetian woman.  Though the story is Othello’s tragedy, this play belongs to his ensign, Iago.  One of Othello’s early lines is “I must be found.” One of Iago’s is “I am not what I am.” (I, i).  We’ll see how that works out.

The play opens with Iago complaining that Cassio, a “mere arithmetician” has been chosen as Othello’s lieutenant and he, Iago is his “ancient,” his ensign.  He envies Cassio’s position. Iago also has it in his head that Othello has “done my office betwixt my sheets,” which is truly insane because there is a suggestion that both Othello and Iago are impotent.  Immediately the army is called to fight in Cyprus and Desdemona goes with them and her new husband. Iago begins to orchestrate a symphony of lies designed to insinuate into Othello the notion that Desdemona is having an affair with Cassio.

In Cyprus, there is an immediate victory and the soldier’s victory party gets out of control.  Cassio, who tends to get stupid after one drink, is egged on by Iago with potent liquor until he gets past stupid and starts a huge brawl.  Othello breaks up the fight like a father at a pajama party and discharges Cassio from the army.  Iago encourages Cassio to ask Desdemona to take up his case with Othello.  When Desdemona and Cassio are in conversation, Iago calls attention to them:

IAGO Ha! I like not that.

OTHELLO What dost thou say?

IAGO Nothing, my lord: or if–I know not what.

OTHELLO Was not that Cassio parted from my wife?

IAGO Cassio, my lord! No, sure, I cannot think it,
That he would steal away so guilty-like,
Seeing you coming.

OTHELLO I do believe ’twas he. . .

IAGO Did Michael Cassio, when you woo’d my lady,
Know of your love?

OTHELLO He did, from first to last: why dost thou ask?

IAGO But for a satisfaction of my thought;
No further harm.

OTHELLO Why of thy thought, Iago?

IAGO I did not think he had been acquainted with her.

OTHELLO O, yes; and went between us very oft.

IAGO Indeed!

OTHELLO Indeed! ay, indeed: discern’st thou aught in that?
Is he not honest?

IAGO Honest, my lord!

OTHELLO Honest! ay, honest.

IAGO My lord, for aught I know.

OTHELLO What dost thou think?

IAGO Think, my lord!

OTHELLO Think, my lord!
By heaven, he echoes me,
As if there were some monster in his thought
Too hideous to be shown. Thou dost mean something:
I heard thee say even now, thou likedst not that,
When Cassio left my wife: what didst not like?
. . .Show me thy thought.

This is how it starts.  I found the slow planting of suspicions in Othello’s mind chilling both on the page and in the three different productions I watched.  It worked for me every time.  Because the truth is that most of us are not far from jealous and envious thoughts. It doesn’t take much.

*Trifles light as air
Are to the jealous confirmation strong
As proofs of holy writ. (III, iii)

And as Emilia, Iago’s wife says,

*They are not ever jealous for the cause,
But jealous for they’re jealous. ‘Tis a monster
Begot upon itself, born on itself.  (IV, iii)

After the initial seed is planted there’s the business with the handkerchief.  Iago has asked Emilia several times to pinch Desdemona’s handkerchief and though it’s not clear why he wants it, we can be sure it’s not to have it copied to make a set for Desdemona as a marriage gift.  Emilia, who was one of my favorite characters, has got her own problems with Iago.  Here is her assessment of her marriage:

*Tis not a year or two shows us a man.
They are all but stomachs and we all but food;
They eat us hungrily, and when they are full,
They belch us.  (III, iv)

When Desdemona drops the handkerchief, I gather Emilia picks it up hoping to gain some attention and favor with Iago. If there was ever a moment to holler in the theater, this is it: “Don’t pick up the handkerchief!”  Because the rest of the play hinges on the symbol of and the fantasies around that handkerchief beginning with  Iago planting it in Cassio’s closet and spinning the story that Desdemona has given it to Cassio.

By the time Iago’s plan is fully baked, he has agreed to murder Cassio “for” Othello and Othello has determined to kill Desdemona.  The scene in the bedroom where Othello smothers his wife is hard to read and hard to watch.  At the same time, it’s engrossing, horrifying, fascinating, and sad.

Emilia interrupts the murder and puts together the mischief of the handkerchief. She convinces Othello of how mis-guided he has been.  Desdemona, true to the end, dies claiming to have taken her own life. By now Iago, Cassio and a bunch of officials are on the scene. Iago kills Emilia and Othello kills himself.  They both die alongside Desdemona.

In five acts, Iago is described by nearly everyone in the play as honest, right down into the last scene.  By my count there were thirteen instances.  That’s too many to be credible.  But Iago told us right from the start, “I am not what I am.”

Othello is portrayed as suggestible.  He believes in charms and portents.  He says the handkerchief had been a present from his father to his mother and had magical qualities.  He’s a soldier, not much given to self-reflection.  We assume that he hasn’t much of an interior life but looks outside himself for truth.  But at the end of the play when he realizes the truth of Iago’s villainy, he looks down at Iago’s feet and murmurs, “but that’s a fable.”  What he expects to see are the devil’s cloven hoofs but instead he sees human feet.  Maybe he learns something about his own gullibility. “I must be found,” he says in the first act.  Maybe he’s found a piece of himself.

The last thing Iago says is “What you know, you know.”  While this can be interpreted any number of ways, I read it as an assessment of how jealousy works. We get jealous thoughts into our heads and that’s the story we are sticking with. We don’t allow any influence to change our minds even it means alleviation of our misery.

Emilia has a speech that I found remarkable and about 400 years ahead of its time.  There are still people today who don’t understand this:

*But I do think it is their husbands’ faults
If wives do fall: say that they slack their duties,
And pour our treasures into foreign laps,
Or else break out in peevish jealousies,
Throwing restraint upon us; or say they strike us,
Or scant our former having in despite;
Why, we have galls, and though we have some grace,
Yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them: they see and smell
And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
As husbands have. What is it that they do
When they change us for others? Is it sport?
I think it is: and doth affection breed it?
I think it doth: is’t frailty that thus errs?
It is so too: and have not we affections,
Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have?
Then let them use us well: else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.  (IV, iii)

Here are more great lines:

*She gave me for my pains a world of sighs (I, iii)

*To mourn a mischief that is past is gone
Is the next way to draw a new mischief on. (I, iii)

*The robbed that smiles steals something from the thief (I, iii)

*Virtue? A fig! (I, iii)

*Put money in thy purse. (I, iii)

*There are many events in the womb of time, which will be delivered (I, iii)

*Reputation, reputation, reputation!
O! I have lost my reputation! (II, iii)

*Who steals my purse steals trash; tis something, nothing;
‘Twas mine, ‘tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.  (III, iii)

*O beware, my lord, of jealousy!
It is the green-eyed monster, which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.  (III, iii)

*Hot, hot, and moist. (III, iv)

*The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,
Sing all a green willow
Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,
Sing willow, willow, willow. (IV, iii)

*It is the cause. (V, i)

*Speak of one that loved not wisely, but too well. (V, ii)

*He was great of heart. (V, ii)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had heard this play was not for the faint-hearted.  It hadn’t been performed for a hundred or so odd years when Olivier mounted a production at Stratford in 1955.  They used to tally up how many people fainted every night, the record being 22.  In the same spirit of accounting, I have tallied up the body count:

Act 1

1 stabbed body: hewn and thrown on a fire, and entrails ritually sacrificed.

1 additional fatal stabbing

 

Act II

1 fatal stabbing

1 rape (with victim laying on her husband’s dead body, see previous item)

2 hands cut off

1 tongue cut out

 

Act III

1 hand cut off

2 decapitations

 

Act IV

1 fatal stabbing

1 hanging

 

Act V

2 cut throats

2 decapitated heads baked into a pie (and fed to their mother)

3 fatal stabbings

1 multiple stabbing (also fatal)

1 dead baby (not clear how this comes about)

1 live burial

 

Apparently revenge plays were all the rage for a time with the Elizabethans and this was Shakespeare’s contribution.  Call it a pot-boiler, artists need to live after all.  The whole business starts when Titus Andronicus comes home triumphant after nine years of battling the Goths.  With him are his eldest son in a coffin, and his captives: Tamora, Queen of the Goths, her three sons and her lover, Aaron the Moor.

“Honor” demands that Titus Andronicus sacrifice one of the captives so he chooses the oldest son. Tamora pleads for her son but Titus can’t offend the gods.  This is one of the few deaths that occur offstage but we, along with the gods, do get to see the entrails brought back for the sacrifice.  And thus begins the chain of revenge.

Of all the horrible things that happen in this play, the most haunting is what happens to Titus’ daughter Lavinia.  The two remaining sons of Tamora kill Lavinia’s husband, and rape her with her head lying across her husband’s body.  Then they hack off her hands and cut out her tongue.  For the rest of the play until her own father “puts her out of her misery” at the end, she is in most of the scenes, haunting the stage.

Her uncle Marcus finds Lavinia wandering around in a state of shock.  He is a decent man but the first thing he does when he sees his niece is launch into a speech that’s 50 lines long.  When the men in the family manage to gather around Lavinia to comfort and care for her, their attentions spans are short and they soon drift off into more speeches, leaving her to sit alone.  I decided that this is partly the way shock behaves.  Even these warriors who think nothing of hacking people to pieces are at a loss when it comes to the mutilation of someone they love.

The reason given for Lavinia’s mutilation is so she can’t communicate who has raped her.  She can’t speak nor write their names.  But she finally manages to scratch their names in the sand with a stick that she guides with her mouth and the stumps of her arms.  She indicates that she was raped by directing the men’s attention to a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphosis and the story of Philomela whose tongue was cut out so she couldn’t say who raped her.  It’s still a powerful image today: women (or young altar boys) being silenced not necessarily by mutilation but by means of shame, disbelief or threats of violence.  The images in this play are hideous and grotesque but there is a sense in which some things have not changed.

There weren’t a lot of lines I wanted to remember.  Aaron the Moor has some funny comments but they need their context.

*Stage direction: Enter a messenger with two heads and a hand. (III, i)

 

*I have done a thousand dreadful things

As willingly as one would kill a fly.  (V,i)

 

*If one good deed in all my life I did,

I do repent it from my very soul. (V, iii)

 

Here’s a line I thought I might use with the next solicitor who knocks on my door. It might make them leave faster than my trying to explain what “No Solicitors” means:

*Who doth molest my contemplation? (V, ii)