English Renaissance Podcast: Shakespeare’s Sonnet #2, Read by David Hurley

Posted on February 8, 2011 by hirohurl

II.

When forty winters shall beseige thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now
Will be a totter’d weed, of small worth held:
Then being ask’d, where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use,
If thou couldst answer “This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,”
Proving his beauty by succession thine.
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

Sonnet2 by DavidHurley

I came to something of an emotional halt the first time I read this sonnet out loud in preparation for the podcast. I had expected to reach my 40th birthday in all the rude glory of the bachelor’s estate but let us say that both death and life happened while I was busy with other plans. That was nearly ten years ago now, so I began reading the sonnet from the perspective of one who is looking back, with “deep sunken eyes” and a furrowed brow upon his first 40 years. But the lines that really brought my reading to a halt were,

How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use,
If thou couldst answer “This fair child of mine…

I am sure I would not be the first father to notice that the advent of a child and the easy propensity to lacrimosity arrive in tandem.

There is a passage in the King James Version of the Bible, in the book of Genesis, chapter 22, verse 8 that I have never yet managed to get past unscathed. Isaac has asked his father, Abraham, where the lamb is for the burnt offering,

And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.

There may be no other connection between these two passages than my tears, tears for what some have not been given, and tears for what others fear to lose. Another point of separation to note is between the directness of attribution in the Genesis passage,

And Abraham said…

in comparison to the indirect and imaginary attribution of Shakespeare’s,

If thou couldst answer…

DH

The Sonnets (The New Cambridge Shakespeare)The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Belknap)

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What is “Renaissance Self-Fashioning”?

Posted on February 4, 2011 by hirohurl

Stephen Greenblatt

One of the most influential books in the field of English Renaissance studies in the last 30 years has been Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, by Stephen Greenblatt, the leading light of the school of “new historicism” and a professor of English literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

So, what is “Renaissance self fashioning“?

Greenblatt argues that while there may have actually been more room in the centuries prior to the English renaissance for up and coming young men to “fashion” themselves, the word “does not occur at all in Chaucer’s poetry” (RSF p. 2) but had taken on “special connotations” by the time Edmund Spenser was writing The Faerie Queene. In a prefatory letter addressed to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1589, Spenser seeks to explain the purpose of his poem:

SIR, knowing how doubtfully all allegories may be construed, and this booke of mine, which I have entituled the Faery Queene, being a continued allegory, or darke conceit, I have thought good, as well for avoyding of gealous opinions and misconstructions, as also for your better light in reading thereof, (being so by you commanded,) to discover unto you the general intention and meaning, which in the whole course thereof I have fashioned, without expressing of any particular purposes or by accidents therein occasioned. The generall end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline: which for that I conceived shoulde be most plausible and pleasing, being coloured with an historicall fiction, the which the most part of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter then for profite of the ensample, I chose the historye of King Arthure, as most fitte for the excellency of his person, being made famous by many mens former workes, and also furthest from the daunger of envy, and suspition of present time.

According to Greenblatt, “it is in the sixteenth century that fashion seems to come into wide currency as a way of designating the forming of a self.” (RSF, p. 2).

In his introduction to Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Stephen Greenblatt lays out “a set of governing conditions common to most instances of self-fashioning”. There are ten key points, which are:

1. The kind of person engaged in “self-fashioning” is typically a middle class man with no “ancient family tradition or hierarchical status that might have rooted personal identity in the identity of a clan or caste.”

2. “Self-fashioning involves submission to an absolute power or authority situated at least partially outside the self.”

3. These men fashion themselves “in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile,” which “must be discovered or invented in order to be attacked and destroyed.”

4. The alien presence in relation to which these men fashion themselves is perceived by their governing authority as a threat that is either “unformed or chaotic” or “false or negative” – a chaos that is a “demonic parody of order.”

5. “One man’s authority is another man’s alien.”

6. “When one authority or alien is destroyed, another takes its place.”

7. Multiple authorities and aliens exist at any given time.

8. Authority and alien are located outside the self, but they are “experienced as inward necessities, so that both submission and destruction are always already internalized.”

9. “Self-fashioning is always, though not exclusively, in language.”

10. “The power generated to attack the alien in the name of the authority is produced in excess and threatens the authority it sets out to defend. Hence self-fashioning always involves some experience of threat, some effacement or undermining, some loss of self.”

Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare

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English Renaissance Podcast: Shakespeare’s Sonnet #1, Read by David Hurley

Posted on January 25, 2011 by hirohurl

I.

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy own sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And tender churl mak’st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

ShakespeareSonnet1 by DavidHurley

This is the first of what I hope will be a series of weekly recordings of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, eventually covering all 154 of them (in about three years’ time if I keep to schedule).

To make these podcasts I’m using the Edirol R-09 by Roland for voice recordings and then importing them into Garageband on my Mac and doing the rest there.

This is only my third recording so I’m still learning the ropes as it were. The echo effect on this recording was an accidental result of my “fiddling with the controls” – but I quite like the haunting quality of the echo and might just keep it for the rest of the sonnets. I’d welcome your feedback, though, so feel free to post your comments below this post.

As for the reading itself, I found myself wondering whether the word “content” should be read with the stress on the first syllable,

Within thine own bud buriest thy còntent,

meaning that the young man is burying himself within himself. However, if you attempt to read it that way you will find that the line refuses to scan and that you are forced to stress the second syllable, contènt. That, in turn, forces you to realize that the poet’s complaint is not so much that the young man, in his solipsistic self regard, has achieved a state of inner contentment, but that he is burying that which can make him happy within himself.

That reading is confirmed by Alexander Schmidt’s Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary:

Content, subst. 3) that which is the condition of happiness or satisfaction, a) that which to attain would make one happy; desire, wish, will: within thine own bud buriest thy c. Sonn. I, 11.

In The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets Helen Vendler, discussing the profusion of images of profusion within the sonnet, writes:

Since its aesthetic display is intended to invoke profusion, the poem enacts its own reproach to the niggardliness it describes;

if you would be content, go forth and multiply, it seems to say, and sets the example by providing us with an ample store of key words that will “multiply” across the rest of the sonnets. Listen out for them in the next few recordings of the sonnets.

DH

The Sonnets (The New Cambridge Shakespeare)The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Belknap)

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Nietzsche On The Morality Of Shakespearian Drama

Posted on December 11, 2010 by hirohurl

In his fourth book, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, Nietzsche seeks to unmask the fictions and delusions of European values and of European morality in particular. The book was written up from a series of notebooks that he worked on when out walking. It is divided into 575 sections arranged into five books.

Shakespeare is mentioned in three of the sections, and most fully in section 240, “On the Morality of the Stage,” in which Nietzsche homes in on the growth in stature of Macbeth after the murder of Duncan. Nietzsche attacks the idea that Shakespeare is “preaching against” the murderous pursuit of ambition in his representation of Macbeth as a tragic hero:

Whoever thinks that Shakespeare‘s theater has a moral effect, and that the sight of Macbeth irresistibly repels one from the evil of ambition, is in error: and he is again in error if he thinks Shakespeare himself felt as he feels. He who is really possessed by raging ambition beholds this its image with joy; and if the hero perishes by his passion this precisely is the sharpest spice in the hot draught of this joy. Can the poet have felt otherwise? How royally, and not at all like a rogue, does his ambitious man pursue his course from the moment of his great crime! Only from then on does he exercise “demonic” attraction and excite similar natures to emulation—demonic means here: in defiance against life and advantage for the sake of a drive and idea. Do you suppose that Tristan and Isolde are preaching against adultery when they both perish by it? This would be to stand the poets on their head: they, and especially Shakespeare, are enamored of the passions as such and not least of their death-welcoming moods—those moods in which the heart adheres to life no more firmly than does a drop of water to a glass. It is not the guilt and its evil outcome they have at heart, Shakespeare as little as Sophocles (in Ajax, Philoctetes, Oedipus): as easy as it would have been in these instances to make guilt the lever of the drama, just as surely has this been avoided. The tragic poet has just as little desire to take sides against life with his image of life! He cries rather: “it is the stimulant of stimulants, this exciting, changing, dangerous, gloomy and often sun-drenched existence! It is an adventure to live—espouse what party in it you will, it will always retain this character!”— He speaks thus out of a restless, vigorous age which is half-drunk and stupefied by its excess of blood and energy—out of a wickeder age than ours is: which is why we need first to adjust and justify the goal of a Shakespearean drama, that is to say, not to understand it.

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Shakespeare’s Philosophy [Kindle Edition]

Posted on December 6, 2010 by hirohurl

Shakespeare's Philosophy

Adapted From Publishers Weekly

Shakespeare‘s famous statement, “All the world’s a stage/ And all the men and women merely players” expresses a common notion of the self that is shared by many philosophers. So begins Colin McGinn‘s project of tracing Shakespeare’s philosophy through six of his great plays, while arguing at the same time that it is reasonable to regard Shakespeare as a philosopher.

McGinn examines Shakespeare in relation to Hume, Wittgenstein and such major philosophical questions as “being and nothingness,” “causation,” “language,” “meaning,”  and “the nature of knowledge.” McGinn makes a credible case that the Essays of Montaigne as well as scepticism and naturalism had a clear influence on Shakespeare‘s writings, bringing unexpected freshness to familiar topics of study.

Most enjoyable is the delight that McGinn takes in rediscovering Shakespeare‘s characters, such as the tragic Cordelia and the indecisive Hamlet. McGinn‘s gift, aside from his clear and beautiful (more…)

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