Shakespeare: the funny bits

Macduff. Not in the legions
Of horrid hell can come a devil more damn’d
In evils to top Macbeth.

Malcolm. I grant him bloody,
Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,
Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin
That has a name: but there’s no bottom, none,
In my voluptuousness.

I must admit that I’ve found it harder to make light of the last few plays, and not just because I’ve got a new job and other things on my mind, or because they’re tragedies. One of the most interesting things about reading Shakespeare in chronological order (or at least some estimate of it) is that you can see the playwright’s works improving, with the disappointing result that there is a lot less to make fun of in the later works.

This suggests a neat answer to one of the candidates in a silly debate which I’ve been careful to avoid so far: the Shakespeare authorship question.

If we suppose that Christopher Marlowe did not die in a tavern brawl, but rather faked his own death and fled England rather than face prosecution for being the most flaming atheist in London, and, furthermore, that once safely in Scotland, he continued writing plays and sending them to his mate William Shakespeare, who would then stage them, does it seem likely that Marlowe, who already knew how to write plays, would have started out with a snoozefest like Henry VI? Why not, say, Macbeth? It’s a cracker, and he could have worked in lots of local colour.

Borges resolves the Marlowe problem by a psychological analysis of the authors’ respective characterisations, but I believe that my answer has the virtue of simplicity.

The other popular candidate, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, seems to appeal to snobbery, via the argument that no mere glover’s son could possibly have written plays which manifest such genius and learning. We may simply observe that none of the other nineteen Earls of Oxford could, either.

Christmas trees were $89.95 in Newtown and $45 in Marrickville. There were two left, and I got a rare street park in Illawarra Road. We jumped out of the car, raced across the street and did a kind of awkward dance where we were trying to dibs one of the trees and at the same time queue the wrong way in the checkout and explain to the girl what was going on and that could we please have one of the trees, until Grace pointed out that there was no-one in the express lane, so we bought it there.

Then, when I was jamming it into the boot – it never occurs to me that the tree won’t fit in my Corolla – a very kind man named George gave me a piece of rope from his ute to tie the boot closed with, and we drove home with it bouncing slightly, to the girls’ alarm and delight.

If only we could find that butterfly that’s always flapping its wings in the Brazilian rainforest and causing hurricanes somewhere else in the world, and swat it.

Shakespeare: the funny bits

Rod. Iago!
Iago. What say’st thou, noble heart?
Rod. What will I do, thinkest thou?
Iago. Why, go to bed and sleep.
Rod. I will incontinently drown myself.
Iago. Well, if thou dost, I shall never love thee after it. Why, thou silly gentleman!

My gut feeling is that Othello isn’t a racist play in the way that The Merchant of Venice is racist or The Taming of the Shrew is sexist, but my gut feeling in this case is not necessarily to be trusted, as Othello, unlike the latter two, is a very good play. I was trying to rationalise the gut feeling by saying that Othello is unique among Shakespeare’s major parts because he actually has a job, but then I remembered that so do Shylock and Antonio. The mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and other subplot-dwellers don’t count, as they are figures of fun.

The debate over Othello’s skin colour, however, is pretty racist. The Wikipedia entry doesn’t go into the messy details but a good critical edition will contain enough exceprts from early-to-mid-20th century writers, especially the Americans, to give you the creeps. And playing him in blackface is racist and pretty stupid.

I just discovered that Google Earth has 3D buildings for Sydney.

Schools Spec always has a bunch of standout performances, in addition of course to my own daughters, and to your own children should they be participants.

But this year there was Meriana Gyory, who we’ve seen at a couple of other schools events. I don’t think there are many people who could make charming indie-pop comic singer-songwriting work in a room that big, even with the help of puppets, but she had us eating out of the palm of her hand. I’ll be surprised if she isn’t on Spicks and Specks within twelve months.

The boy’s ensemble deserves a mention too. They were getting Beatlemania-level screams from the girls in the choir.

While I’m on comic songwriting, Peter is crediting me for one of the gags in his song inspired by this week’s events, so linking to it would be an act of shameless self-promotion, if I could remember making it.

Obviously I’m biased, because of, you know, science, but I reckon Mr Turnbull is showing more leadership in this speech than Mr Howard did in his entire run as PM, if leadership is taken to include telling your people stuff they don’t want to hear.

Sydney Theatre Company, written by Lally Katz and Hilary Bell, directed by Matthew Lutton, Andrew Upton and Tom Wright, starring the Residents (not the guys with the eyeballs, the Residents)

The idea of a three-hour production of Biblical stories staged in “promenade” style – not much seating, the performance mingling with the performers for one section – brought back memories of happy-clappy 70s churchgoing, but this was a really good piece of theatre, which had me thinking of Russell Hoban and William Blake. Lally Katz’ Apocalypse Bear Trilogy was the original reason for our trip to Melbourne, but this was better. And I don’t think anyone is writing characters in fursuits the way Lally Katz is right now.

A couple of seconds after I took this photo, these guys met another bunch of furries in Federation Square. It would seem that furry culture is indeed going mainstream.

Other things to note: Andrew Upton is kind of tall, or at any rate too tall for me to see around him to find out what Cain and Abel are up to. The “begat”s part of Genesis can be interesting, by having it recited by attractive young people in their undies standing in amongst the audience. Which may be cheating. And actors with tattoos who take on nude roles are a bit like actors who insist on wearing the exact same hat for every role.

This Nation’s Saving Grace
Skips a generation
My mother pulls a face
At This Nation’s Saving Grace
And my kid’s all indignation
At her eponymation
This Nation’s Saving Grace
Skips a generation

One of my girls has become a vegetarian, for ethical reasons, and I’m finding cooking meat-free meals a lot more fun than I thought it would be, even when it doesn’t quite work.

Tonight’s tofu stir fry was enjoyed by two out of four patrons, so it wasn’t a complete disaster.

I’m aiming for two out of every three nights I cook for the girls to be completely meat-free: the third night I’ll cook a separate non-meat serving.

I’ve never been vegetarian but I find the moral arguments against meat-eating pretty hard to refute, especially when George Bernard Shaw or Brigid Brophy are doing the arguing, but I have always allowed deliciousness and habit to trump my conscience.

I did find it very hard to look at the meat section of the supermarket after I’d bought a bunch of tofu and mushrooms last week.

I should also say that I’m really proud of her, and that it’s a strange but not unwelcome feeling when one of your kids makes a lifestyle choice like this.