We Are Underlings

We read Julius Caesar in my high school sophomore English class. It didn't make much of an impression on me because we just read it - much of it alone as homework - and Shakespeare needs to be seen and heard as a performance. 

When Cassius says "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings." (Julius Caesar I, ii, 140-141) I don't think it made an impression on me. The famous quotation usually does not include those four final words. 

I went on to be an English major and read a lot of Shakespeare and learned a lot about Will and his theater. It was then that I learned that Cassius was saying something that was an anachronism thrown in for the underlings watching the performance. 

Shakepeare's underlings were called groundlings. They were patrons at the Red Lion, The Rose, or the Globe theater in the early 17th century. They were too poor to pay to be able to sit on one of the three levels of the theatre. For a penny, they could stand in "the pit", also called "the yard", just below the stage, to watch the play. 

They were up close to the action but they had to stand for a few hours and were usually packed in tightly with sometimes 500 of them there. The groundlings were commoners. They were also referred to as "stinkards" (hygiene not a priority) or penny-stinkers. The name "groundlings" came into usage after Hamlet used the term around 1600 in a not very complimentary way.

Hamlet:

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 had

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, whirlwind of your passion,

you acquire and beget a temperance that may give

it smoothness. Oh, 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 dumb shows and noise.

I only recently discovered that it is not a Shakespearean invention. The word had entered the English language to mean a small type of fish with a gaping mouth. Maybe from an actor's point of view on the raised stage, the faces of these patrons might have looked like open-mouthed fish. 

I had learned in college that the groundlings were not well-behaved and the upper-class folks that were high above them were happy to be there.

Groundlings supposedly threw fruit and nuts they were eating at characters/actors they did not like. My professors also told us that Shakespeare would include characters (Falstaff et al), ghosts and jokes to keep the groundlings interested.

I guess if "all the world's a stage," then maybe we are all underlings when it comes to why we might not succeed. Don't blame Fate. Blame yourself. Take responsibility for your place in the Globe. 

The Mysteries of William Shakespeare

Fletcher

Shakespeare

The English playwright John Fletcher (born in 1579) wrote for the King’s Men who were the acting troupe that produced most of William Shakespeare’s plays. We know that Fletcher collaborated with Shakespeare on Henry VIII andThe Two Noble Kinsmen. Fletcher also wrote plays on his own but collaborated with other playwrights frequently.

There is a "lost" play titled Cardenio that is attributed to Shakespeare and Fletcher, at least it is listed that way in the Stationers' Register entry of 1653. It is another one of several mysteries about Shakespeare.

As much as has been written about him, we still don't know much about Shakespeare's life. He left no letters and no handwritten manuscripts. There are only a few contemporary accounts of him though he appears to have been quite well known. Only six signatures by him are known and all are spelled differently.

Of course, the big mystery has been around since the late 1700s. There were those who believed - and some still today - that an undereducated man from Stratford could not have been the author of all the plays attributed to William Shakespeare.

This seems to have started with Reverend James Wilmot, a clergyman who lived near Stratford who rather weakly claimed that because he could not find a single book belonging to Shakespeare in any private library within a fifty-mile radius of Stratford and no authentic anecdotes about Shakespeare the writer, that he couldn't have written all those plays.

It was decades after Shakespeare's death that people proposed that the plays were written by Fletcher or Sir Francis Bacon or Edward De Vere or Christopher Marlowe or even Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke.

My favorite mystery of William Shakespeare is one that I thought would make a great novel or movie. I actually started writing it at the end of my undergraduate days. That is the mystery of his "lost years." William Shakespeare seems to vanish from the records for more than seven years.

At 21 years old, he was married with three children and living in the small town of Stratford in England. He had some formal schooling, but certainly no university. His father was a glover (made gloves, which were an upper-class purchase and not a bad job) and held some local government offices. William gets married when he gets a girl pregnant. We know he got in trouble for poaching some game from some private land and may have been jailed for it.

Seven years later, he is known to be living in London and is a resident playwright and part-owner of a theater company. What happened to him between 21 and 28?

There is much speculation. He traveled. He studied. Somewhere. But nobody knows just what Shakespeare was doing for all those years in between. Somehow he becomes an actor and a known writer.

I thought a modern writer would have pretty free reign to describe those lost years without much fear of being told it was untrue. Unproven, yes, but no one knows what really happened.

A 2016-17 American dramatic television series called Will about Shakespeare in his early twenties covers some of my unfinished script. It portrays Will as a struggling playwright who tires of making gloves in Stratford and so goes to London and sell a play he had been working on called Edward III to a troupe at a theatre owned by James Burbage.

He quickly falls in love with Burbage's daughter, Alice, who is also interested in writing and acting. The series had a lot about Will's Catholicism, which was forbidden and which he had to keep secret. The series probably was an expensive production and only lasted one season.

The lost play, Cardenio, was a topic I chose for one of my honors Shakespeare papers in college. It seemed a more manageable mystery to tackle in a few pages than the other topic which certainly is book-length.

The plot of Cardenio is not known, but from what I found the best guess is that it was taken from an episode in Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote. It is not a major section or character in Cervantes' book. It is a story recounted to Don Quixote about Cardenio, a young man who has been driven mad by love. His story has many of the elements of other Shakespeare plays including a duke, marriage forced and thwarted, a woman disguised as a man, a hidden letter, a possible lover's suicide that didn't happen and an escape into the forest.

A translation of the First Part of Don Quixote which contains Cardenio's story was published in 1612 and would have been available to Fletcher and Shakespeare. Playwrights of the day were known to have borrowed basic plots from other authors and reshaped them to the tastes of their audience.

There are records of the play having been performed, but no accounts of the performances or plot. Some scholars suggest that because of Shakespeare's popularity his name may have been attached to the play for promotional purposes and he may have had little or no involvement in the writing. I suggested in my college paper that he may have been the equivalent of today's film "executive producer." Fletcher based several of his later plays on works by Cervantes, so perhaps he read the book and suggested using some of the plot to Shakespeare.

The way that Don Quixote and Sancho discover Cardenio sounds like something the playwrights could use. They find a bag of gold coins and some papers including a sonnet about the poet's tragic romance. The pair searches for the bag's owner and find Cardenio, who is described as a strange bare-footed madman character who leaps about from rock to rock like a mountain goat and whose clothes are in shreds. Cardenio delivers a mad rant about Don Fernando and his own love for beautiful Luscinda.

The story continues after this meeting because Luscinda runs away from her new husband, the Duke and "all's well that ends well" because Don Fernando repents and apologizes to a forgiving Cardenio who is reunited with Luscinda.

Fletcher collaborated with Shakespeare on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. He wrote on his own The Woman's Prize or the Tamer Tamed, which is a sequel to Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.

After Shakespeare's death, Fletcher appears to have slipped into the exclusive arrangement with the King's Men that Shakespeare had maintained, writing only for that company. But Fletcher only lived nine years after the death of Shakespeare. He was one of many victims of the plague epidemic. By then, he had achieved a similar level of fame to Shakespeare, but his name and fame faded and by the 18th century. Fletcher and most of his contemporary playwrights' fame was then eclipsed by Shakespeare.

A Winter Walk

Henry David Thoreau advised in his journal that we should “Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”

I am a fan of winter walks and I especially like going out after a snowfall. The woods are whitewashed clean, and the snow muffles sounds. I like to follow the tracks of animals who have walked there before me that day.

Adam Gopnik's book Winter: Five Windows on the Season  is a meditation on the season via artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists, and thinkers, who have created our modern idea of winter. It goes to unlikely places, such as thinking about how snow science leads to existential questions of God and our place in the world.

Do I love the winter season? No, it is my least favorite season. (Autumn is my favorite.) I often say that i want to retire to a place without winter, or at least with a much milder winter than my New Jersey ones. But I suspect i would miss winter after a time.

The Brain Pickings blog had a post about Thoreau finding inner warmth in this cold season, but here is a section from his journal that isn't about going for a walk in the snowy woods.

The wind has gently murmured through the blinds, or puffed with feathery softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like a summer zephyr lifting the leaves along, the livelong night. The meadow-mouse has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl has sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the swamp, the rabbit, the squirrel, and the fox have all been housed. The watch-dog has lain quiet on the hearth, and the cattle have stood silent in their stalls. The earth itself has slept, as it were its first, not its last sleep, save when some street-sign or wood-house door has faintly creaked upon its hinge, cheering forlorn nature at her midnight work, — the only sound awake twixt Venus and Mars, — advertising us of a remote inward warmth, a divine cheer and fellowship, where gods are met together, but where it is very bleak for men to stand. But while the earth has slumbered, all the air has been alive with feathery flakes descending, as if some northern Ceres reigned, showering her silvery grain over all the fields.

I identify with Thoreau's suggestion to walk in winter, but I also identify with curling up under a blanket inside and just observing the winter outside.

Here is Hank expanding on that winter walk:

There is nothing so sanative, so poetic, as a walk in the woods and fields even now, when I meet none abroad for pleasure. In the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it, — dining with the Governor or a member of Congress!! But alone in distant woods or fields, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful.

Poets have had much to say about winter. Mr. Shakespeare wrote:

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. 

I feel more akin to the "Winter Trees" of William Carlos Williams.

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

I'm trying to keep my own buds safe from the season and sleepily waiting for spring.

Writing Letters to Juliet Capulet

Juliet's balcony with some of her letters

Back in 2010, I saw the film Letters to Juliet. It is fluffy film with some nice views of Verona and Sienna, Italy. The plot revolves around the odd phenomenon of people writing letters to Shakespeare's most famous romantic heroine. What the film made me think about at the time was when I wrote my own letter to Juliet.

I have written letters to authors, but I must say that this was my only letter to a fictional character. When i was teaching Romeo and Juliet  I came across an article about how visitors to Verona, Italy often left letters addressed to the fictional Juliet Capulet.

People also mail her letters. They may be only addressed to  “Juliet, Verona, Italy” but they reach a destination. The Club di Giulietta is a volunteer group that answer the letters and has been doing that since the 1930s.

Was there ever a real Juliet? It seems that Shakespeare’s play was based on a similar true love story of young lovers who were separated by warring families. A historical Giulietta became a character in a narrative poem by Arthur Brooke and that is probably where Shakespeare got the idea for his version.

There are plenty of famous and popular characters of fiction, but does anyone write to them? The only other one I know of is is Sherlock Holmes.

I  asked my students to write to Juliet and some actually mailed their letters. I wrote one too and mailed it - and got an answer.

Brooke's version of Juliet was 16 years old, but Shakespeare made her just about to turn 14 (possibly to allow a young boy to play the role on stage - no females were allowed on the stage in his time – see Shakespeare in Love)  My middle school students could really identify with these young teens.

julietclub.com logo

My students had issues with the idea of the warring families. But some of my Middle-Eastern students were able to tell us about their own families' arranged marriages. Parents being opposed to your friends and prejudices against some groups was unfortunately not foreign to the students.

My letter to Juliet was written based on something that happened when I was in seventh grade. At 13, I was in love. I know now that that was not love, but back then it was absolutely real. That was my letter's topic.

I had a few innocent dates - a movie, walking home together, being at a school dance and dancing together, an embrace, a kiss. All that ended when her parents found out. Why? I wasn’t Jewish. They told her that she could not date me. I was shocked.

Unlike Juliet, she obeyed her parents. We stopped dating, but we saw each other every day at school. It was hard. It made no sense.

When I saw the Zeferelli film of Juliet that year, it all made sense. (I also developed a crush on Olivia Hussey as Juliet.) For my students, it was the Romeo + Juliet 1996 version directed by Baz Luhrmann.

In her letter to me, Juliet understood the parents decision, though she did not agree with it, and sympathized with their daughter wanting to obey her parents. She didn't recommend rebellion, but wished for better understanding amongst all.

There is a book that collects some of the letters to Juliet - Letters to Juliet: Celebrating Shakespeare’s Greatest Heroine, the Magical City of Verona, and the Power of Love.

Shakespeare on Social Media

Benvolio in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, III. i. 50-53 on our use of Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites.

"We talk here in the public haunt of men.

Either withdraw unto some private place,

And reason coldly of your grievances,

Or else depart; here all eyes gaze upon us."

Russell Brand Talks A Tempest

I have mixed feelings about Russell Brand. Sometimes he comes off as a fool and egoist. But the times I have heard him interviewed in any serious way (not TV talk show promo crapola), he impresses me.

He wrote two autobiographical books with silly titles - My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up and Booky Wook 2: This Time It's Personal - but the tales contained in them are quite engaging. 

I liked him in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but he was encased in a good film.

Shakespeare's The Tempest is my favorite of his plays. There are several movie versions of it, but none of them capture what I have seen done on the stage with it.

I have not seen Julie Taymor's new movie vision of it. The reviews I read didn't entice me. But Brand is in it, so I will have to give it at least a Netflix chance.

I came across this video that must have been shot during rehearsals or a table reading. Brand improvises like a madman and he's very good. (Alfred Molina is off to the side enjoying it all.) 

He seems 2010 and he seems 1610 as he takes his character, Trinculo (by no means a starring role in the play), through a little autobiographical rant. Trinculo is not only a character in the play, but a natural satellite of Uranus and a crater on Miranda, another natural satellite of Uranus. There must be at least one good Russell Brand joke in that information.

YouTube - The Tempest -- Russell Brand "Riff"

 

The Tempest might be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. Prospero's final speech seems to be a farewell to the stage. 

Set on a remote island, Prospero - exiled Duke of Milan and sorcerer- plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place. He conjures up a tempest to shipwreck his usurping brother Antonio and the complicit Alonso, King of Naples and sets the plot into motion.

It's a pretty original story for Shakespeare who loved to borrow older tales and adapt them to his needs. Though scholars will list inspirations like a report of the real-life shipwreck of the Sea Venture on the islands of Bermuda and Montaigne's essay "Of the Canibales" and a speech taken from Ovid's poem "Metamorphoses" as sources, I think it may be simpler than that. I think Shakespeare was hearing about and thinking about that brave new world that was out there and about to be found and settled.

Trailer for THE TEMPEST

              

Juliet

I picked up Anne Fortier’s Juliet in the library because the jacket said it was connected to Shakespeare's Juliet.

Romeo and Juliet is not my favorite of Shakespeare's plays (that's The Tempest) but it's one I have a connection to because I taught it for a number of years and know it well.

I don't know Anne Fortier as an author. She grew up in Denmark, and immigrated to the United States in 2002, and lives in Canada with her Canadian, English professor husband. So, English isn't her native language. Fortier has said that tiny Denmark (only five million people) means that nobody speaks Danish but the Danes. But Danes do learn other languages if they want to travel.

She has a Ph.D. in the History of Ideas, and co-produced the Emmy-winning documentary Fire and Ice: The Winter War of Finland and Russia.

And her Juliet?  She lives in Sienna (not Shakespeare's Verona) and her name is Julie Jacobs. She and her oddball sister, Janice, are orphaned when their Aunt who cared for them dies.She leaves the family estate to Janice, and Julie gets a passport, a key, and a family secret - that she her real name is Giulietta Tolomei, and she is a descendant that famous Juliet.

That's the Giulietta Tolomei of the family that battled the Salembenis (in Sienna) and were the real families that inspired Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

So the book travels between today and Giulietta’s 14th-century past. Things Shakespearean
do appear. Some of his lines appear (sometimes changed). There's a Friar Lorenzo and a character named Paris. Though not in the same way, Romeo kills Juliet’s cousin Tybalt (Tebaldo).

There is also a contessa, mobsters, cops and other modern characters. And there's a lot of plot and plotting with mystery, clues, surprise twists, and a love story.

The first version of the R&J story was set in Siena and was published in Italy in 1476 by a writer called Masuccio Salernitano who was writing more than 100 years after the real events. It was changed by other hands as it traveled in time, but is still recognizable as the one Shakespeare used a century later.

I'm envious that Fortier got to do research in Siena. Visiting libraries and digging through old records and family trees and city and architectural plans, sounds pretty cool to me. And she needed to know the old and new Sienna.

I agree with reviews that appreciate the Sienna aspect of the novel. The book is not so much a research or Shakespeare study as it is a modern day fiction and mystery about the past and present. A good beach read, even if it almost winter.