You can start anywhere

Popping awake between 4 and 5 a.m. usually before the alarm, is the normal start to my day. This morning there is extra impetus--it's been raining, so I have to check the rain-barrels to make sure they aren't overflowing. Luck is with me, they are barely half-full. But as I grab a few bucketfuls to water the raspberry bushes, a passer-by in the grey pre-dawn startles me with her yelling.
    She is clearly irate at someone and hurling abuse at them, but scouting her from a safe distance (and, I'm hoping, the camouflage of trees and bushes) I see she is alone and has no cell phone to her ear. It's all in her imagination, it seems, barring the unlikelihood of a Bluetooth.
    "Fuck you, niggah!" she rants, first walking one way, then turning back, and turning again. Now I'm also hoping she isn't a hooker and planted by my house, as sometimes happens. But after a few seconds she slowly saunters away, quieter now but still muttering a bit. I pour a few more bucketfuls and head inside.
   In my office, the insane mess, primarily heaps of newspapers. I grab a page from atop a pile, idly curious as to why I kept it...

... the taxi awaits, and so does the rest of this...

And now a few few days later, another quick dip into a news heap. The "Arts and Life" section of the Edmonton Journal, June 20, 2011. Big headline on top: "MuchMusic Video Awards/ Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber rule the night." Ho hum (or is that just the creaky, jaded geezer talking?)
etc

etc

etc.

Oh, and here is another old paper, the National Post, March 27, 2010. Big picture of Bieber on p. 1, with headline: PARSING THE CHARMS OF CANADA'S JUSTIN BIEBER.

Yeah.

Next they will be swaying to his sentence structure. Cheek-by-jowl with this story is a column by Conrad Black on the pedophile scandal in the Catholic Church. Probably not news (then or now) but Black defends the church, and employs his usual grand style of discourse, sonorously intoning such weighty words as "apostacize and "belligerency"--neither accepted by my auto-correct for some reason.

Then to the bottom of the front-page, where sits a curious feature on a gentleman suffering from schizophrenia who ends up presiding over a mental hospital. Hm! Maybe the most significant piece of information in the article is that schizophrenia is still something of a mystery ailment, although I'm noting that his paranoid fears about "Chinese agent" nurses sort of match H. L. Mencken's fears that the doctor who treated him for his debilitating stroke in 1948 was actually Joseph Stalin.

Enough to make you wonder about how the brain operates, and exactly how one wonders about the wondering.

That 2005 _Shadowplay_ Review

This hapless dissection lingered unremarked in one of the many Facebook SHAKESPEARE pages as late as Nov. 2011 (where I posted it circa 2008, just to prove that social-media doesn't make a damn bit of difference in anything). But now my post seems to have become victim of an eCleanup or an iCleansing or some such scrubbing of the circuitry. Gone. So here is the mainstream-media "suppressed" (okay, basically the editor that commissioned it got cold feet) quasi-published monstrosity again, just for the record:

 Author wanders from the sublime to the ridiculous

   Was the Sphinx of Avon... Catholic? Puritan? Or what?

Shadowplay
Clare Asquith
Public Affairs, $37.95


Review by
JENS ANDERSEN

The passerby’s t-shirt is white, but darkly states: “Humpty was pushed.” I laugh, for all conspiracy theories are humdingers, from Keegstra’s Illuminati to the DaVinci Code piffle to John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire-bastardized intelligentsia.

But of all the paranoid mysteries, none surpasses the chronic question of Shakespeare’s true beliefs. Herewith, another agenda-hunter, reviving the century-old theory of his Catholicism. A tough one to prove, as Reformation zealots suppressed English Catholics, often with sickening ferocity. Evidence is thus mostly in textual intimations, the fodder of looney conjecture.

Having spent a few years poking at the religious enigma, I came to Shadowplay armed. Is Shakespeare’s bird-fable poem “The Phoenix and the Turtle” here? Yes, naturally, since recent studies plausibly make it a stealthy elegy to a dead Anglo-Catholic couple, one executed.

But Asquith skimps on details of this nice sleuth job. If only she had trimmed her 2,000 repetitions of “Old Church good, Reformation bad” she could have provided better insight into a sphinx-poem that retains some mystery.

For instance, one of its lines, “grace in all simplicity,”is almost a Puritan slap at ornate Catholic ceremony. What’s with that? Asquith quotes the line and its neighbors, intuiting, “Shakespeare is here confronting for the first time the possibility that the spirit of the Catholic resistance would be extinguished”

A mighty conjectural leap! The line, “Truth and beauty buried be” is her only visible evidence. But now another possibility jolts me: this line’s double meaning is imperative: Shakespeare is quietly telling Truth (scripture-based Protestantism) and Beauty (ceremonial Catholicism) to “buried be” (i.e. bury their differences?--and in the poem’s final triad, pray for the dead, whether “true or fair”–a very significant “or” methinks).

Such analysis follows Asquith’s two critical methods of choice, testing the Bard’s writing with a keyword-code (e.g. “beauty,” “fair” and “gazer” indicating Catholic), and assuming “allegory” in his plays (i.e. veiled parallels behind stories and characters). But while these tools do resolve some cryptic bits, as a panacea they fail.

Her attempt to make Julius Caesar a Christ-figure in a play promoting papal authority, for instance, is a knee-slapper. Proud Caesar equals humble foot-washing Jesus?? Well, you see, Caesar’s 23 reported wounds are upped to 33, the years Jesus lived. Shakespeare prankish, maybe? Nah.

Still, hidden meanings have a respectable vintage. As scholar David Bevington notes, Elizabethans generally assumed that plays commented sneakily on current events, and often they did. But 19th-century poet Swinburne illustrated the downside, lampooning the habit of finding Robert Cecil, sly fixer for Elizabeth I, everywhere in the plays, arguing Juliet was a Cecil-figure, the sheer ludicrousness of this being proof of Shakespeare’s masterful concealment.

But Asquith’s pratfalls into “Fluellenism” (a term honoring the bonehead academic in Henry V who made dubious parallels an art) are balanced by pause-giving items: the details of an Anglo-Catholic execution in the “dovehouse”aside in Romeo and Juliet, Catholic Viscountess Montague lurking in A Winter’s Tale; and above all, many a perplexity cleared up by keyword coding, particularly in the Sonnets and early plays.

But Asquith uses her tools clumsily. She detects wavering Catholic Lord Strange in Sonnet 89, for instance, but doesn’t connect the persecuted “gazers” in Sonnet 96. She virtually ignores Protestant hero Falstaff (as does last year’s pro-Catholic tome The Secret Shakespeare).

Worse, twisting Hamlet to fit Catholic allegory reveals a gap in her references: Shakespeare’s Christian Dimension (1994, ed. Battenhouse). Its critics painstakingly delineate Hamlet not as her tragic hero but a vicious schmuck (and when will stage productions move beyond costuming atrocities to reflect such advances in understanding?)

The flaws will leave Shadowplay beneath most scholars, while its esoteric topic sinks it for most general readers. Still, for noting that poet Edmund Spenser was once banished to Ireland for calling Cecil’s father William a fox (a link to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, where sly Ulysses --say his name backwards-- is called a “dog-fox”), for this gift I give Asquith my own discovery: Shakespeare’s stealthy references to the morality plays in the Macro manuscript, a medieval relic likely rescued by Catholics. All these connections clearly show Shakespeare’s familiarity with what Orwell called “ecclesiastic Trotskyism.”

But was he thus Catholic? Or Puritan?--as Rev. T. Carter suggests, finding that Shakespeare’s father helped remove Catholic images from Stratford’s church, and was listed as a Puritan recusant by church-establishment spies.

For myself, the question is moot. Everything I have teased out of Shakespeare reveals an ecumenical above all, a conclusion that jolted home again when my headbanging against “The Phoenix and the Turtle” finally unriddled the poem’s subtext: that the horrific infighting between Protestant and Catholic destroys the loving essence of Christianity.

Check yourself if you doubt me. After 400 years Shakespeare still yields surprises.


Cabbie Jens Andersen devoutly wishes some publisher shared his fascination with the religious undertones of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.

   *   *   *
The review shows a few glitches, which I choose to leave in: e.g. the Catholic-theory is actually 200+ years old, and those "recent studies" cited were in fact a single Asquith paper (!) as I later discovered rummaging through my heap of scholarly bumf. Oh, and now I see that the review was already uploaded to my blog in 2008. So color me forgetful and red-faced. But hey, it remains cutting-edge. And note that I DELIBERATELY emphasized my clumsy, erratic groping in trying to solve the poem. I suspect most critics gnawing at a tough assignment work the same way, if they would dare admit it. =]