Shakespeare on toast

I came to this book when reading a textbook on Middle Welsh which pointed out that the pronunciation differences between Middle Welsh and today's Welsh are minor compared to that between Shakespeare's English and today's. Oh really? A couple of minutes later I found myself hugely enjoying a student production of Night Dream and, hungry for more, watching this fascinating and captivating video on Original Pronunciation by the Messers Crystal (father and son, the latter who is the author of this book).

The Original Pronunciation work resonated very strongly with me because until then I had a strong (but weakly held) belief that Shakespeare is popular because he's popular, that is, he's to English literature what J.K. Rowlings is to adolescent fantasy writers, the Mona Lisa is to da Vinci's paintings, as hush puppies (the shoes that Gladwell goes on about in Tipping Point) are to fashion. I'm paraphrasing from Duncan Watts' exemplary book Everything is Obvious (once you know the answer), go read that as soon as possible for the juicy anti-Gladwellian details, but popularity in social situations (literature, art, even science and engineering---who here really, really thinks Java is the best language ever?) is the result of the extremely unpredictable paths taken by word of mouth, the vicissitudes of fortune (as Machiavelli might be translated), and more epistemologically relevant here, that our explanations for why something is popular (Rowlings &al.) are usually circular arguments: we give descriptions and try to pass them off as explanations. Here's a million dollar quote-inside-a-quote from Watts' book:

Although it is rarely presented as such, this kind of circular reasoning—X succeeded because X had the attributes of X—pervades commonsense explanations for why some things succeed and others fail. For example, an article on the success of the Harry Potter books explained it this way: “A Cinderella plot set in a novel type of boarding school peopled by jolly pupils already has a lot going for it. Add in some easy stereotypes illustrating meanness, gluttony, envy, or black-hearted evil to raise the tension, round off with a sound, unchallenging moral statement about the value of courage, friendship, and the power of love, and there already are some of the important ingredients necessary for a match-winning formula.” In other words, Harry Potter was successful because it had exactly the attributes of Harry Potter, and not something else. [emphasis mine]

Having studied Shakespeare for three years in high school (Romeo, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet) and watched a movie production of Romeo and two of Hamlet (thanks Mrs Roy), I knew that either (1) it was the usual story of something bad becoming popular, or (2) literature teaching methods are ineffective. However, nobody would say that something popular must be "bad" (I'd just say it doesn't have to be "good", for some relative value of "good" and "bad"). In fact, having watched a snippet of Midsummer in Original Pronunciation (I really, really cannot abide the Received Pronunciation that so-called real Shakespearean actors invariably put on, sorry Ian McKellen) and glimpsing how much more sensible and worthwhile Shakespeare is when reenacted, and with extra context of linguistic evolution, I was ready to learn more, convinced that it is very likely that Shakespeare is actually good, not just popular! (Like the Mona Lisa is certainly good, a little bit ruined by the throngs of tourists jostling about you to give their cameras a second to focus and then scampering off, but certainly good. But actually, it's not my favorite da Vinci, I was much more moved by his St John the Baptist, and absolutely floored, entranced, by his Virgin and Child with St Anne. If you are ever nearby, be sure to see those at the Louvre. You can skip the Mona Lisa.)

This all happened about a year ago, and I got to this book over the weekend.

There is very little about Original Pronunciation here, but a lot more of the broad context is sketched out: the political situation, the religious milieu (remember: Puritan England was the 17th century's equivalent of Taliban Afghanistan---where do you think American founding fathers got freedom of religion and press?), the English language, the entire notion that Shakespeare belongs to the Theatre, to actors and their work, rather than to Literature and professors (sorry Mrs Roy), and of course poetry, all these are considered and expounded.

Of all these, the most important I think is that I now know much more about acting and the importance---to actors and thus to interested audiences---of referring to the original folios for the stage directions Shakespeare encodes in the scripts. Here's the checklist Crystal provides at the end:

Is the scene in verse or prose? Or both? If both, why does it switch from one to the other?

If it’s verse, is it regular iambic pentameter, or does the metre jump around all over the place? If it’s irregular, what might that be saying about a character’s state of mind?

Are the speeches complicated or simple – i.e., are there mid-line endings, shared or short lines of metre?

If there are mid-line endings, what kind of emotions might be making the characters interrupt themselves?

If there are shared lines of metre, what does that say about the characters’ relationship?

If there are short lines of metre, what might the character be doing or thinking in the gap?

Do the characters use thou/you to each other? If they do, do they switch between the two? If they switch, why do they switch?

* Are there any characters in the scene that don’t speak? Why are they there? How does it help the story to have them there?

These are all quite thoroughly examined in the last two chapters. The biggest aids to me were the explanation of the actual work, the actual actions an actor had to go through, as well as an explanation of how important and critical rhythm (meter) is to production. For example, the playwright would write each character's script on his own scroll, with just three queue words (of other characters) before each of his sections. The actors, performing a new play a night, would probably never have read the entire script and would have absolutely no idea what it was about before or after a play (what with scene & costume changes, etc.). So Shakespeare's capitalization and punctuation, purely textual aspects of the scripts preserved in the folio, can be critical aids for a modern reader/playgoer to grasp what the actors will be trying to stress. But of course, besides the symbols of the text, the really big way these kinds of messages are conveyed is through rhythm. In verse mode, a short phrase by a character might have to be followed by a long pause before another character responds, to maintain the rhythm---or depending on the textual annotations (the indentation in this case), the subsequent statements may come immediately after the first, without a pause, again to maintain rhythm. I understood, technically, how this worked in both metric (say, Milton) and non-metrical poetry (say, Beowulf in the original Old English), but Crystal's deconstruction of these devices, and the checklist above, for a particularly frightening and dramatic scene in Macbeth brought them together very vividly for me. This was the most valuable part of what Crystal has accomplished here.

Most English literature professors and editors are incompetent. The proof of this book's pudding will be when I get my hands on a DVD of Kansas University's production of Midsummer in OP and, with script in hand, and maybe referring to the copious notes I made while reading this book, watch it a few times.