http://onlytrippystuff.tumblr.com/post/7912856994/shakespeare-insult-kit

Although I must say that Anders Breivik is a rank, hell-hated joithead.

I asked a retired teacher a while back about two papers that I should write for him. He said I could do whatever I wanted, and I was so excited about that. I love getting free hands to do something, because that’s when I’m at my best.

He said I could write about anything as long as I’m interested in the topics myself. So I’m going to write about Canadian English as an emerging dialect, and secondly about the Shakespeare authorship question in America. He’s truly going to get what he asked for.

In my dream, I had an inspiration to make the papers in the form of paintings, with writing on them. I was so pumped about my idea in the dream.

Well, now that I’m awake I know it’s a ridiculous idea. But in the dream I was going to paint these ideas that I had in senior high school in arts class. It was a triptych about exolife. I loved those paintings, but my teacher lost one of them. I was so pissed.

But what if I recreated them now, in oils? It would be an opportunity to try something else aside from faces. I really think I should try it at least once.

Yes, this is a joke. I did eat cold meatballs from a package, but the most boring thing you can blog about is what you’ve eaten on any given day.

I’m so out of tune with my thoughts that it feels impossible to post anything intelligent. Try to bear with me.

I got tagged again. Thanks Amoena. I’ll see about it this month, I hope.

I just don’t know what I’m doing.

My life doesn’t seem real. I’m a walking corpse.

It’s disturbing that people can see me. I’m not convinced I’m here. All there.

Oh well. I’m finally going to visit my parents again so I’ll get to take photos of my new-ish paintings. Yipee.

He was a man, take him for all in all,

I shall not look upon his like again.

This quote from Hamlet is a little funny if you know the play. Hamlet remarks on his father, the king, that he was such a great man as to never be equalled by anyone. Hamlet mourns the fact that he’ll never see anyone like him again. As it turns out, however, he does. The king appears to him later as a ghost.

It’s actually kind of cruel from the author of the play. Have the character portray great sorrow over losing someone and deliver touching words of idolation. Then bring the deceased person back, to drive the knife in deeper.

I suppose, to Roger Stritmatter’s mind, this would be the 17th Earle of Oxenforde lamenting about his disappearance into the shadows of history. I vaguely recall that was his main interpretation of Hamlet, but I should check that some day. It’s just that I stacked away all my Shakespeare notes underneath hundreds of others, so the task of retrieval seems a little daunting right now. I guess there was some logic in putting heaps and heaps of corpus data on top of them, so I’ll go through those first. In fact, I would love to, but I won’t let myself. No play before I’ve completed my degree.

I did allow myself a small trip to the English section in the library. Only to remind myself that the only way I can ever start defining my research topic is by going through all that damn data first! Gahhh. I wouldn’t mind though, if I didn’t know I wouldn’t do anything else for a long time.

As for Mr. Strimatter, I actually find it hard to be hard on this guy. He’s among the most genius of the Shakespeare heretics, even if also one of the most vehement and overly assertive. When he accuses orthodox Shakespearians of misinterpeting Shakespeare completely in utilising Cartesian logic, you can’t help but tip your hat at him. (I wonder how he personally resisted its charms.)

We should truly take him for all heretics, all heretics in one person. He is a man the like of which we shall not look upon again when he’s gone. Before that, though, there’ll be plenty more entertainment to come.

Seriously, I’m not being sarcastic. He’s a great writer. His personal empire of hereticism is growing by the day like a newborn. A small part of me hopes I could just jump in the bandwagon and enjoy the ride.

Baltarstar Blog

This is a blog, apparently written by a Finnish person in Tampere, about the actor James Callis from Battlestar Galactica. His character is Gaius Baltar, so you get of course Baltarstar! Har har. Well, James came up with that himself so I guess it must be funny, seeing that he’s British.

The writer is very devoted to her blog and James, and I love her writing style to no end. Her sense of humour is the best part of it all. I don’t recommend this blog, however, if you’re not a fan of either James or Galactica, especially since the posts can be really long sometimes. (And apparently many people cannot read long texts.)

Half-life 2.net

My favourite Half-life website. Half-life the game gets its name from the frequently radioactive environments. There are zombies and mutants too. Oh and aliens from outerspace, or from another dimension. It’s a dystopian scifi shooter, basically. It looks absolutely amazing. The people in the website forums are an original bunch.

It’s about me, Amoena

A blog about crocheting, knitting and nerdy things. Me liky.

Language Log

This is a heaven for language geeks who want to discuss all kinds of interesting/annoying phenomena in the English language and real world issues related to it. Great for splitting hairs, too. One of the writers is a co-author of one of the most important English grammar reference books, Geoffrey Pullum. I like his and Rodney Huddleston‘s analysis of the poss-ing construction. As well as the overall treatment of grammar in his and Huddleston’s book, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. It’s always the first source I go to when I’m researching something.

Hmm. Maybe I should start writing posts about my favourite grammar books. To scare away the few readers I have left.

Literary news

Pretty self-explanatory. I wish this blog was updated more often. The owner is a freelance writer.

Obiskus

This is actually Obiskus’ personal section on the Deviantart website. She recently graduated as a metal artesan or something like that. Her diploma work was a chess board with dragon pawns. She is going to apply to a jewelry-making school next (how could I know what it’s really called in English?).

I actually signed up for an account on Deviantart myself. Then I discovered how much time and effort it would take to upload even a couple of paintings and I decided to leave it be for the time being.

PHP Talk

My brother Kai started a blog too! He writes about his expertise, internet security and coding and stuff like that. It’s interesting even if you don’t understand everything he says. If you thought my posts are sometimes on the long side, you should check out his! But they’re worth it – the ending notes are so adorable. Witness:

It is also easier for me to look back into this blog later if I happen to forget something or I become suspicious about anything or I just happen to become confused because I took too many beers…

I’m going to ruin his reputation now: he’s actually a very careful drinker because he’s so health conscious. I haven’t had a sip of alcohol myself in ages because I don’t want the extra calories (if I’m going to be fat, I want to blame excess food, not drink), and I don’t like the effect it has on me. It’s just one more reason why I’m a supposedly boring person.

The Museum of Bad Art

The art on this website has been acquired at auctions and from trash. Many are actually quite nice and they can make you smile. Especially the descriptions are entertaining. This painting was the inspiration to create the website.

The motion, the chair, the sway of her breast, the subtle hues of the sky, the expression on her face — every detail combines to create this transcendent and compelling portrait, every detail cries out “masterpiece”.

###

Now that I look at my link collection, it looks rather haphazard. Yet I think they suit this blog very well, because it’s just as haphazard in its subject matters.

*”The lady doth protest too much”, says the Queen to Hamlet, criticizing a character in a play that greatly resembles herself. To protest didn’t have the same meaning in Shakespeare’s times as today; it was more like to vow, or to affirm. I definitely agree with the Queen – you shouldn’t protest as in affirm too much. Complaining is an important part of life, methinks.

Even though I may not be reaching my target readership with these kind of posts, I’m going to keep up with this silly Shakespeare-related babble. I find everything about this literary icon endlessly amusing, ever since I learned about the authorship question. Oh, it’s almost too juicy sometimes.

Of course, many will be bored to death with this. I realize that my posts look rather long, but why is it that text is somehow less accessible in large amounts on a computer screen, on a website (sorry, blog)? I might shrink the font size in the future, to make my rantings look nice and concise.

But it’s my blog, my power, my kingdom and my horse that I’ll kiddy up any way I wish to go. In the name of myself, this blog and the holy ghost of Shakespeare, whoever s/he was. Amen.

So the other day it occurred to me to search for videos related to the Shakespeare Authorship question (wholly deserving of the capital letters right) on Youtube. Nothing too original came up, except for this fine piece of someone playing Edward de Vere.

There’s also the taping of the mock trial in Washington. The audience will apparently laugh at anything. Some people just listen and wait for anything to laugh at, so as not to give an impression of having no sense of humour. Silly if you ask me.

Then I ran into John Hudson’s theory of Emilia Lanier as Shakespeare. Or rather, his “discovery”. Finally a candidate I’d love to believe in. What if Shakespeare was a woman? Wouldn’t that be so cool?

Seriously speaking, I still know too little of the issue to vouch for any certain candidate. I’m still not sure I have to. The agnostic camp may not be a whole lot of fun, but at least I know I don’t have any ulterior motives behind every statement I might make.

(“Edward de Vere” from aforementioned Youtube video)

Earlier this week I  read a book pertaining to methods in historical study. There were many points that struck a chord in me, thinking back to writing research papers of any kind. There was something about being able to relate to the people in the past, in order to draw the right conclusions about anything they did, to do justice to them when writing about them.

When I was writing on the authorship question, this aspect puzzled me. Who exactly should I try to relate to? Shakespeare, whoever s/he was, and his/her contemporaries, or the authorship question enthusiasts? If the latter, it looks like I failed miserably. It put me off how so many of these researchers were trumpeting their respective candidate without seeming to have much of self-criticism. Once they had made up their mind about their choice of candidate, they turned on the defensive and overly assertive gear.

Now that I think about it, the strong rhetoric is probably partly due to the publicity that the question has received. In addition to multitudes of books by professionals and amateurs (here meaning simply someone without a scholarly background), there are also websites galore that can be accessed by anyone, anywhere, any time. In public, you obviously have to make your statement without hesitation if you want to get it through to people. They’ll have none of this hedging that is so natural and even imperative in the scientific way of writing.

Another interesting point in the book was something about certainty with your research results. It reminded me of what was said in a book on the history of childhood. Something along the lines that childhood historians often wake up in cold sweat in the dark of the night when realizing how thin a line separates their work from fiction.

(What came up with “hysteria + rhetoric” on Google Image search)

I wonder if there isn’t something of this kind of hysteria present in the rhetoric of the authorship scholars and researchers. If you’re going to spend years on studying an author’s work, you don’t want to be held in an eternal state of suspense as to who it is you’re studying, even if it doesn’t always matter in literary analysis.

It could also be the case that these brits and americans simply write differently from what I’m used to reading. It’s strange, though, since I rarely read anything in any other language than English. You’d think I was used to it by now. It must be related to the genre of writing, i.e. books aimed at a popular audience, as well as internet websites.

So don’t be fooled by Hudson’s less than convincing case on that video. Calling the Stratford Shakespeare “Shaksper” would make anyone sound a little cuckoo. His website is more impressive (takes a while to load, be warned).

Besides, “there are just too many coincidences here”! Wow, I was instantly won over by that particular statement! She was a known feminist, a Jew, used De Pisan as a source as did Shakespeare and ‒ gasp ‒ was mistress to Henry Carey,  who was the patron of the acting company Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which performed Shakespeare’s plays among others. It boggles the mind!

As sugar at the bottom, she even included the names of important people in her life in the plays, in the form of clever puns. To show to the posterity that it was her who wrote them. It can’t get any more obvious than that.

It’s the cumulative argument all over again. A large number of coincidences sharing one common denominator must by laws of nature entail truthfulness of the original premise! It’s like horoscopes: the parameters are so loosely defined that they’ll fit any person to a tempting degree.

(Was Emilia Lanier Shakespeare – the most brilliant hermafroditic literary genius in the world?)

Emilia Lanier was not a complete stranger to me. Earlier, she’s been identified as the “Dark Lady” of the sonnets. For instance, Michael Wood (2003, In Search of Shakespeare) reckoned that Shakespeare might have had an affair with this woman when living in London, away from his wife and children in Stratford.

Maybe she’s the one who gave Shakespeare syphilis (again proposed by mr. Wood), so as a result the 40-something Shakespeare described himself as old and decrepit in the sonnets. Wouldn’t that explain everything so neatly? In your face, Oxfordian heretics!

Hudson connects Lanier with Shakespeare because of her background in music, among other things. Her family performed in court. And what d’you know: Shakespeare’s plays are “the most musical” in England! Witness “nearly 2000 musical references” and “300 different musical terms” – clearly proof that Shakespeare the author must have been a professional musician, or connected to such people.

Obviously I don’t dare to argue on this with Hudson, who holds a certificate in a Shakespeare Institute, who reviews for a Shakespeare journal, and who is writing a thesis on a Shakespeare play. He must know the plays far better than I ever could.

Yet I can’t help wondering, how come is it that I keep bumping into these fabulous figures and almost incredible assessments of the nature and vocabulary of Shakespeare’s plays. It all makes the (wo)man sound completely inhuman in his boundless abilities and knowledge of everything there is to know in the world.

Taking a wild guess, if I had a look at the list of the references and terms, I would probably find perhaps 50 quotes of the word “music”, or some musical instrument. Surely, if you refer to music and musical instruments a lot, it means you must be musically talented. Right?

Music, lute, piano, violin, string, chord, note, minor, major, melody. What if I added a string of musical terms at the end of each of my posts? Or better, sprinkled them here and there to spice up my language? If some day some future historian for some reason created a corpus of my posts and started searching for musical terms, they could conclude that I was a very musical person. There could simply be no other explanation.

*Ever wonder why 19th century novels nearly always seem to have subtitles starting with “or, [yada yada yada]“? I have. Did the authors have trouble making up their minds about the title, or were they just trying to be as informative as possible?

(The first picture shamelessly ripped from the Youtube video; the second picture from John Hudson’s website.)

]]> http://www.sleepingartist.info/2008/09/20/how-noble-in-reason-infinite-in-faculties-or-what-a-good-shakespeare-heretic-makes/feed/ 2 http://www.sleepingartist.info/2008/08/30/auld-lang-syne-mr-von-schlegels-turn-of-phrase/ http://www.sleepingartist.info/2008/08/30/auld-lang-syne-mr-von-schlegels-turn-of-phrase/#comments Sat, 30 Aug 2008 17:46:12 +0000 admin http://www.sleepingartist.info/?p=128 I know it’s been only three days since my last post, but I’ll soon revert back to my one-post-per-week policy anyway. Take this as a warning that in the future it may not be worth the trouble checking back here more than twice a week, at the most. Unless you want to explore the archives and discover the less than glorious past of this blog. Actually you should, if you only like the paintings. There’s much less of these boring ramblings of mine over last winter.

Down to business it is. As I mentioned in my previous post, in Munich I bought an old German translation of Shakespeare’s King Henry IV Part 1 AND 2 (I noticed later that both were included). I was annoyed to find no mention of when the book was printed.

I could guess that it must be old, at least -ish, judging by the yellowish paper and the ribbon bookmark (those ribbons you only find in Bibles these days), let alone the very-old-and-Gothic-looking font of the German text. Strangely, the English text is in a more modern font.

The translator, August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845), a poet himself, is still considered one of the best German translators of Shakespeare, according to Wikipedia. Someone else apparently thinks that Schlegel’s translation is remarkably different from the original, for example as regards the verse style. Shakespeare often wrote in blank verse, which in his case means he wrote with an unrhymed iambic pentametre. This writer says that Schlegel transformed the blank verse into “the iambic pentametre with either male or female cadence”, i.e. 10 or 11 syllables on each line.

Now I’m not very well-versed in these technicalities of poetic composition, but is the iambic pentametre with male or female cadence really so strikingly different from the regular one, which has ten syllables on a line? Anyone care to explain this to me? But be that as it may, I can appreciate the various problems Schlegel must have had, considering how different English and German are when it comes to word order and syllabic structure.

(August Wilhelm von Schlegel)

As for my problem of dating the volume. Schlegel’s Shakespeare translations span the years 1797-1810. König Heinrich der Vierte was published in 1800. Obviously there have been reprints, through the 19th century until around the time of WWII. The later reprints, however, all seem to be collections including several plays. But I’m not sure whether that means that they were still printed as individual volumes or as a single book.

Next I tried to find information on the publisher, Der Tempel Verlag. It was founded in 1909, so my book can’t be more than almost a hundred years old – not much, eh? Apart from these tiny parsels of information, google really isn’t almighty when it comes to finding bibliographical information. I don’t mean just old books, but even more recent ones are surprisingly non-existent in the virtual world of search engines. Yet things, or even people, aren’t supposed to be important if you can’t google them. Fiddlesticks,* I say!

My final resort was the university library’s online search engine(s). It’s a real drag to go through all sorts of collections on god knows how many different portals, because for each search it takes so long to process. The end result still zilch. I’m slightly disheartened now with my less than resourceful detective skills.

Something good came out of all this though: I stumbled upon a website which has pictures and transcriptions of American diaries from late 19th to early 20th century: www.writtenbyhand.com. Perhaps not eligible for including in a corpus, but interesting nevertheless.

(Picture from Written by Hand Manuscript Americana)

Speaking of corpora, it occurred to me that there might be a possibility of compiling an Edward de Verean corpus for the purposes of comparing his language with Shakespeare’s. I definitely need to look into it, since it would make for such an exhilarating research project. I know some websites with transcriptions of his personal letters, draft interrogatories (whatever those are) and memoranda, so all I need to do is find out if they’re up for grabs or not.

I do know of one linguistic comparison between these authors, aided by a computer, using statistical methods: Was Oxford Shakespeare? A Computer-aided Analysis. Needless to say, these guys with all their knowledge of statistics still err somewhat in other methodological issues. They assume too much, take so much for granted, and any complexities that don’t quite fit are pummeled flat. All in a day’s work for anti- or pro-Shakespeareans alike!

*Another Shakespearean term, from no other than 1 Henry IV! Says Falstaff, “Heigh, heigh, the Deuill rides vpon a Fiddlesticke: what’s the matter?” Of course, not quite in the same sense as in present-day use.

I was rather disheartened when I tried to find accounts of the matter which actually would have tried to remain objective. I’m still on a hunt for an author who’s genuinely trying to find the truth, rather than trying to defend his or her respective candidate as the true Shakespeare.

But maybe I’m looking at it the wrong way. Maybe you’re not supposed to be objective. Maybe the only reason why anyone would be interested in the matter is that they actually care about who the author is.

Be that as it may, personally I still believe that you don’t have to have a “favourite” candidate in order to be interested in the question. All this “bitter trench warfare”, as it’s been called, is entertaining and amusing in its own right.

I admit that my notion of “entertaining and amusing” may differ from the more generic meaning of those words. For instance, I couldn’t resist a chuckle when I read the description of the Oxfordian Richard Whalen’s 1994 book, Shakespeare – Who was he?. (There’s an imaginative title for a book if I ever saw one.)

Let me quote whoever wrote the description:

Most intriguing are the many direct parallels between Oxford’s life and Shakespeare’s works, especially in Hamlet, the most autobiographical of the plays.

To elucidate the terminology for everyone: Oxfordians believe that Edward de Vere (1550-1604), the 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare. Their candidate is usually called Oxford, though the man himself preferred to sign his letters as Oxenford. At least we know he had a sense of humour, or it’s just another manifestation of the flexibility of Elizabethan spelling. Which is also one issue I must touch upon in the future.

So Hamlet, “the most autobiographical” of Shakespeare’s plays. The “direct” parallels between the play and the earl’s life are used as an argument on his behalf, because – here comes the gist of it – the play is the most autobiographical of them all.

Of course, whether a work is autobiographical or not can only be determined if you know who the author is. Please, please correct me if I’m wrong on this one! If I’m not, I’ve just found another ridiculous circular argument from the Oxfordian camp. (Not that the “orthodox” Shakespearians haven’t excelled in that area for their part.)

To drive home the point of this post: even with a quick 5-minute search on the authorship question, you’re bound to run into irrational, silly or just plain stupid arguments.

In countering the inevitably ensuing frustration from all that, my weapon is to make light of it. But even my sense of humour has its limits.

I was going to present a rough draft of all the issues that I’m going to cover in my forthcoming series on the authorship question. Turns out that instead, I was once again amused slash annoyed by an Oxfordian statement, and consequently thrown off course. This is going to be an interesting journey, I can tell.