You Lost Me William...

So I've been on two kicks this whole semester with Shakespeare. The first concerned how characters set up and perceive their reality, and the second is with nature. Now I love all of the nature references in Shakespeare, because I love nature, I mean the focus on my major is the natural world. This being said I love all the insights and knowledge that Shakespeare has of the natural world and I can relate to all of them quite easily. That is until Act V of King Lear. Yes, I met my match in Shakespearean nature lingo with this line of Lear's:

"She's dead as earth."

This is of course speaking of his faithful daughter but the simile just doesn't make sense to me. Because, well, earth or (as I'm taking it for this post) soil/dirt is really quite alive in many ways! See even when major disasters come through the earth rebounds. It is in the soil that life springs from. Earth, dirt, soil whatever you want to call it, is the foundation for life.

Confused by my logic? Let my try to be clearer. When a disaster such as a fire goes through an area or ecosystem almost everything is wiped out. Animals flee the area if they aren't killed and vegetation burns to a crisp (just watch the fire in Bambi if you don't believe me). Then there is nothing, just the earth/soil and the charred remains. While this may seem like a bad thing, in many ecosystems it is actually needed. For in the soil life begins to stir.

Soil contains bacteria, microorganisms, nutrients, small animals and seeds (hello, life!). Plants such as the aspen tree actually depend on fire for their survival. When a fire comes through an area containing aspen, sure all the big aspen are decimated but their root system senses the heat and when the flames are gone the roots send up green shoots called suckers. These are brand new trees! The aspen has grown so dependent on fire that it is now almost virtually the only way it can reproduce.

Now that's a little off topic but it's important. If there wasn't soil/earth this life couldn't first of all be preserved because there would be no substrate, but secondly it couldn't come back. Because soil in in some way seemingly invincible the life that plants such as the aspen store in the soil is saved and then continues.

Many other plants store on their seeds in the earth and then depend on it to grow out of and provide the nutrients necessary to grow. When the plants grow you enter the food chain. Plants are eaten by herbivores which are then in turn eaten by carnivores! This also is true in the ocean! The seafloor often contains eggs of animals as well as in shallow areas it grows aquatic plants and provides the foundation for coral.

The whole biosphere is dependent on the existence on soil or earth!!! That is why Lear's statement "dead as earth" is so confusing to me! Shakespeare has me stumped!

Unless I guess, Shakespeare is trying to say that Cordelia may appear dead and of no use but her previous life and now current death has provided spiritual life in many ways. People see the errors of their ways and learn. We as readers also see how we can be and can then improve ourselves and our lives....but I just don't know about that...it seems like a stretch.

Any ideas? (And I'm sorry this sounds like a lecture, but I guess that's just how it came out.)

Gertrude Reading

Just a quick update. I read over the script and so I now I know my lines, well I've read them. I'm really hoping to go over it again and just get more comfortable with them. I just want to get to know Gertrude more if you know what I mean.

Overall I think we did really well with our script cut. I think we managed our goal of keeping the plot true while having key components.

I've also just realized how little time in school/class we actually have left! It's crazy but I think we should be able to get through the recording all right it will definitely just take a lot of dedication.

Yep! Those are just my thoughts for now. Sorry I forgot to post on Tuesday!

Recording, Day 1!

So we have our script and yesterday we read through half of it! I think our cut might be slightly longer than an hour but I still think its good.

I really like recording. It was a little frustrating at first when the technology kept acting up but we figured it out when some help.

Amy's going to put up some of the recordings we did but we're probably going to redo all of them. I think it was really good practice though to go over some reading and get a hang of how recording is going to go.

Over Thanksgiving we're going to go over my lines so I'll try to do some research on Gertrude and how people have portrayed her. I think it is harder though to portray a personality on audio. But I'm going to look at my lines and see what motivations are behind her lines. Why does she say what she says? Why is it important? (Obviously it is because Shakespeare put it in there and we kept it in our cut!)

Yep that's the plan!

Veterinarians and Lear

Now this post is actually ties into Amanda's but I just so happens she and I had similar epiphanies!

So I'm reading a book called All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot right now and I absolutely love it. It's about a vet of the British countryside in the 1930s (it's his personal experiences). Because of my major and my passion for animals and interest in medicine I find this book fascinating and hilarious. I love the stories of his late night calls, the strange occurrences and his interactions with quirky people. And that is where this book surprisingly ties into King Lear!

James Herriot is working one day when he is called to the house of a wealthy gentleman.

He was a big, floridly handsome man who had made millions in the Tyneside shipyards....I had taken an instant liking to him; I had expected a tough tycoon and had found a warm, friendly, curiously vulnerable man, obviously worried sick about his dog.

Okay so this part isn't especially King Learish becuase obviously it doesn't describe Lear, BUT this next part is almost spot on.

Julia, a scaled-down model of her mother, drifted about the room with the aimless, bored look of a spoiled child.

When her father accidently spills come whisky, and later when they leave for town,

Julia struck her forehead with her hand and raised her eyes to heaven....Julia stared coldly at her father; her lip curled slightly.

Doesn't this description just remind you of the cruelty of Goneril of Reagan? But wait! It getseven more like King Lear's, only with a different family. See when Herriot goes to his next call he is confronted with the total opposite of the Tavener family. The next family was poor.

They lived in a house

Crouching in the lee of a group of stunted, wind-bent tress, its massive stones crumbling under severe weathering.

However the man who lives there is happy with his wife, and his children. Herriot noticed this as he treats a sick pig and then as he leaves the residence he noted something remarkable about their 18 year old daughter.

I was taking my leave when I saw Jeannie... pumping vigorously at the tyre of her bicycle...."Going somewhere?" I asked...."I'm going to to t'village...I'm going to get a bottle of Guinness for dad....Dad's been up all night waiting for a heifer to calve - he's tired out....It'll be a surprise for him."

What makes this so remarkable is that the village was two miles away at the bottom of a steep hill! But this young girl didn't seem to care. She loved her dad so much that she was willing to do that task, though simple and hard, for him to cheer him up after a long hard day. James Herriot was struck by this and this next comment is what really made me think of King Lear.

I couldn't stop my mind from roaming between the two houses I had visited; between the gracious mansion by the river and the crumbling farmhouse I had just left; from Henry Tanever with his beautiful clothes...to Tim Alton with his worn chest-high trousers...[and] his daily grind to stay alive.

But I kept coming back to the daughters; to the contempt in Julia Tavener's eyes when see looked at her father and the shining tenderness in Jennie Alton's.

Wow! I read that and I was like, that's Lear's life but in two different families. There are daughters that despise their father and then one that truly loves him and is willing to sacrifice all for him. It's really sad and beautiful in my opinion to see a real life example of family relationships that Shakespeare is portraying. It'll be interesting to see how the play ends and what people realize what they really want out of life. In my opinion Herriot has the right idea and sums it all up nicely.

It wasn't so easy to work out as it seemed; in fact it became increasingly difficult to decided who was getting the most out of their different lives. But as I guided the car over the last few years of the track and pulled on to the smooth tarmac of the road it came to me with unexpected clarity. Taking it all in all, if I had the choice to make, I'd settle for the Guinness.

Hamlet: Script Cut!

Just as a quick final project update, I cut my portion of the script and it was actually more difficult than I thought it would be. It is hard to decide what lines carry the most weight and how you can skip lines and yet still have the scene flow. Anyways I think it worked and here is a link to our script!

Birds, Birds, Birds!

I have noticed so many bird references in King Lear. Seriously it's nuts! There's at least 2 references in every Act! Anyways I posted once on a bird reference already, but I just want to put up a few more. I mean its interesting to see them scattered in the play, but I also really like the meaning behind each of them!

Act One

• "The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long,/That it had it head bit off by it young." - This one I actually already went into great depth talking about already (see above link), so...yeah.

• "Detested kite!" - The kite being spoken of here is not the children's toy. No a kite is actually a bird that is found in many parts of the world. What you many not know is that kite's typically eat carrion, so in many ways they can be compared to vultures. This line is also addressed to Goneril, after Lear has discovered part of her sinister nature. Just another way Shakespeare portrays the relationship on a deeper level!

Act Two

• "Renegade, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks/With every gale and vary of their masters." - Now I actually got more insight on this one from my Dover Thrift Edition of the play. In the footnotes it told me that a halcyon is another name for a kingfisher. See it was a common belief that if a kingfisher had a cord tied around it's neck and was then suspended, that it's beak would face the direction that the wind is coming from. I honestly have no idea how this could have come about because there is no scientific proof to support this but it does make an interesting point. By using this comparison Kent is talking about how those people around him are very flaky and easily persuaded by anyone who comes their way! They simply want to follow and support those who will bring them the most profit in the end, even if it means betraying their current employers.

• "Winter's not gone yet if wild geese fly that way."

• • • • 
        
    "Oh Regan, she hath tied/Sharp-tooth'd unkindness, like a vulture here." - In the script it has Lear point to his heart right after this line. In some ways I wonder if Lear is trying to say that after discovering his daughter's true natures that his heart has died and they are mercilessly feeding on it. They are showing no mercy to his aching soul, and instead they keep battering it. (Just a thought)

• 
  

• "To be a comrade with with wolf and owl."

Act Three

• "Judicious punishment! 't was this flesh begot/Those pelican daughters." - Not going to lie, when I read this one I was really confused. I couldn't figure out what this meant. But once again my footnotes helped me out. According to Medieval legends and myths, the pelican would stab itself when food was scare and thus allow its young to drink its blood. Some other sources say that the pelican young would stab the mother with there own beaks. However this is only a myth. Pelicans do not in fact drink the blood of their parents, but once again this common misconception adds much to Lear's new view of his daughters. I think is is one point where he finally sees just how little his daughters care for him and just how much have been using him. He sees the reality of their nature and how they are like the cuckoo and the pelican. They only want him for what he has to materially give them, and if he dies in the process they could care less.

• "The foul fiend haunts poor Tom in the voice of a nightingale." - I don't understand this one at all simply because the song of nightingale is actually quite beautiful! Any ideas?

Well there you go! All the bird references I have found so far in King Lear! I'll admit I love them. I think in general they really add to the vibrancy of the story. But it might just be the nature lover in me. It also makes me really excited for my Ornithology class this upcoming semester!

Hamlet Listening and Speaking

So in preparation for Thursday I looked up some audio-book and performance recordings of Hamlet. I looked here and simply listened to the first 7 recordings just to get an idea of variety. These are a few things that I found that we might want to consider:

• Narration - a few of the productions had a narrator who explained what was happening up to this point and then even said when characters entered and such. If we decide we want a narrator I don't think we should take it that far, but instead do sound effects of people moving. ---- An interesting note, one of the productions started off as though we were actually in the Globe Theater watching the production...not sure how I feel about that still.
• Voice - there were different voices for different characters and as we discussed this is highly effective.
• Sound Effects
• Explanations - one version actually had explanations of what words and phrases meant, personally I didn't really like it and it was distracting from the plot.

On another note I tried a cold reading of just a few different lines of Gertrude's. Here's a taste!

Word Overkill!

One thing that I have noticed over and over and over and over and over, in this text is that Shakespeare likes to beat ideas to death when he tries to convey anger of his characters. This is something that pops out from the very beginning, I mean we see it in Act I scene 2 when Edmund comes out.

Now we talked about this is class a little bit, but I just want to quickly hit it. Edmund is upset about his illegitimate birth and he rants and rants about it.

"Why brand they us/With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?"

(notice the alliteration as well) and then.....

"As to the legitimate: a fine word, 'legitimate'!/Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed/And my invention thrive, Edmund the base/Shall top the legitimate."

Look at that! In just a few lines he repeats base and its synonym bastardy six times! Along with this legitimate is repeated four times! Edmund is driving the point home and basically killing it with words!

But this is not the only case! If we skip ahead to Act II scene 2 we are again confronted right off with word overkill when Kent becomes enraged with Oswald. All Kent does is call Oswald many names over and over again. He can't just use one word, he has to go overkill!

"A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave, a lily-livered action-taking knave; a whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunkinheriting slave; one that woldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch."

Talk about loaded words! He seems to throw in every possible insult he can think of in one breath! On top of this he is using those words to describe Oswald as a knave. In some ways I guess this could be viewed as a conceit, that is the running an idea over and over and basically killing it with words.

I think that Lear actually does one of the best jobs of running with a conceit. He seems to be drawn to using disease as an analogy to how his family is treating him. Here is one that I think is one of the best examples (Act II scene 4) of how Lear uses this conceit, I've noticed this throughout the play.

"But thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter;/Or rather a disease that's in my flesh,/Which I must needs call mine: thou art a boil,/A plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle,/In my corrupted blood."

Talk about powerful! This is why Shakespeare is such a powerful writer. He knows how to capture an idea, especially that of hate and anger by running over an idea until it is almost killed. But the audience gets the idea and they can feel the passion that the character feels. The passion of

Shakespeare's characters is what gives them life, and what helps us connect to the plays and understand human nature.

Parasitic Families

Hopefully your parents don't consider you to be a parasite. But this what the Fool seems to be insinuating about Goneril, and frankly he's right. (This is one of the first glimpses at what we will see in King Lear about parent-child relationships.)

The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long,

That it had it head bit off by it young. (Act 1 scene 4)

Now, I don't know how much you know about a cuckoo, that is the bird, and so I would like to enlighten you because I think this analogy really illuminates what Fool is trying to illustrate to Lear. It also really demonstrates the first glance at family relationships in this play.

The common cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests of other birds. The birds don't recognize the egg as one that is not their own. The cuckoo eggs develops a lot faster than other birds and so generally it hatches before the other bird. The newly hatched cuckoo chick then proceeds to push the other eggs out of the nest and eliminates the other competition. As it grows the other adult birds feed the cuckoo chick for 16 hours everyday. See one cuckoo chick is usually about the equivalent of feeding

10 of the regular bird's chick. This is an enormous task!! This is so much work for the birds that end up being smaller than their chick that they are unable to produce another nest full of their own chicks! The cuckoo literally takes all and gives back nothing. (And just for your enjoyment here is a video so you can see that this is real life! Sorry its a link but it decided not to embed....)

Once you know and see this, you can see why choosing to compare Goneril to a cuckoo is such a vivid description, and why it should have snapped Lear back to the reality of his relationship right away.

See, Goneril is only using Lear and is unwilling to give back anything in return. Her whole life she has been fed, protected, and cared for by Lear and the wealth that he has to supply. And much like the cuckoo chick, which has no love or concern for its providers, she has no concern for her father. She just demands, takes, demands more and then schemes to take more! She doesn't even truly love him and wants him totally out of her castle! She is treacherous, and I am sure would have taken out her other siblings, like the cuckoo does the other eggs, if a chance had been given to her before!

Like the other birds, I cannot believe Lear has not seen this before. He is so blinded by pride that he doesn't want to see what is really missing from his life and the many flaws that he has. He doesn't want to truly understand that his daughter is manipulative, cunning, smooth tongued and is planning his downfall. He is being worked over by his daughter and yet he keeps allowing it to happen, until he finally comes to see the truth. But even then he is still blinded as he decides to go see his daughter Regan, who is also like the cuckoo but he has yet to believe that. The only child who is true to him is Cordelia, and he pushed her out of his nest by himself.