Best lines: Titus Andronicus

The reason why no one seems to notice Tamora nowadays is that for pure evil, she is eclipsed by Aaron the Moor – “Moor” meaning “black guy.” He gets all the good lines, and it’s wonderful to see him not regret his evil deeds, but to regret not having done more of them:

LUCIUS. Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?

AARON. Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day- and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse-
Wherein I did not some notorious ill;

As kill a man, or else devise his death;
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it;
Accuse some innocent, and forswear myself;
Set deadly enmity between two friends;
Make poor men's cattle break their necks;

Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.

Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' door
Even when their sorrows almost was forgot,
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters
'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly;
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.
What a guy! You gotta love him.

Titus Andronicus

Everyone hates, is fascinated by and is scared by Titus Andronicus.

It’s so brutal and amateurish that it shouldn’t be from Shakespeare, but it is. No one wants to believe it, so they try to explain it away. Bloom thinks he was trying to out-Marlowe Marlowe, what with all the blood and the splashy unmotivated violence for effect, but he is underestimating his own hero.

This is my thinking:

Maybe he wasn’t quite Shakespeare yet. Maybe he was still fumbling around, looking for the way he wanted to write. Maybe someone said: “Will, you gotta have a shocker every five minutes. To keep these people watching.” Or: “Will, you’re holding back, you’re not going all the way. You’re too timid. Go to the limit and go one step beyond. Don’t worry about whether it makes sense, don’t wait for a logical opportunity within the story, just slap another rape on it, another murder, more blood, send another severed hand flying through the air: Go over the top.”
This is Shakespeare’s over-the-top play, and maybe that’s why I like it. It’s full of stuff that makes no sense and is clearly just there for effect.

Throughout the play Titus complains that everyone is unjust to him and his beloved family, yet in the very beginning he butchers his own son completely out of the blue (not quite, actually: Titus is demonstrating in a big flashy way his loyalty to the emperor and to Rome and his sense of honor after his son insults the emperor). Then, after getting revenge on the people who raped and mutilated his daughter, he butchers her, too. It’s like that the whole time. Surreal, like a serial killer’s drug dream of ancient Rome.

Hell, it works for me. By inserting some kind of bizarre, horrible blood-letting every five minutes or so, he sure does keep me awake. I had to think of the TV series 24, which pounds you with one twist after the other, most of them related to violence. It has a similar feel. I really liked “24”. I felt like someone was trying – successfully – to mess with my brain, and I let him do it. I also let Shakespeare do it. I’m not afraid of my inner voyeur, and there is something adventurous about being led down a road that takes such crazy turns.

But there is still method to his madness.

What's It All About # 1
One way of looking at it is that Titus is about the sacking of Rome by the barbarian tribes of Europe. The hordes of barbarians didn’t have to overrun the gates, the Romans let them in.

It starts out with Titus returning from conquering the Goths with Tamora the Goth queen as his prisoner. About five minutes later Tamora is Empress of Rome and all of a sudden everyone is playing her game.

The Romans did admire and fear the barbarians just as we today admire and fear the things that may eventually destroy us. How that is happening – a loss of liberal values, for example, or a loss of civil rights on the other hand – depends on your political view. No matter: now as then, faced with a strong enemy, a kind of Stockholm Syndrome ensues, and soon our enemy is controlling us, just when we think we have defeated him.

What makes it all possible is Rome's inner weakness. Outwardly powerful, as demonstrated by Titus' victories, it is inwardly corrupted by intrigues, egocentrism and decadence. Though you can’t see it yet from the outside, it is ripe for plunder. Everything that happens in Titus happens only because the Romans themselves encourage it.

You can also see it as a rape story: The Rape of Lucrece taken one step further. The rapist in this case is Titus and him victim is Tamora, whose country Titus rapes. When Titus's competitor Saturninus spots the proud, sexy Tamora in chains, he marries her, lusting perhaps after a piece of that great barbarian … freedom, strength, pride and vitality, which he as an over-civilized decadent Roman lacks. She sees her chance to take her revenge on Titus and basically rape Rome just as Rome raped her people.

The interesting thing is how she manages to go from victim to doer. She doesn’t do it by moaning and groaning all the time. He shows the Romans her strength, and Rome, which has no real strength, is turned on.

Lavinia, Titus's pure, virtuous, idealized and over-civilized daughter, is the opposite – she does nothing but suffer, and in the end dies at Titus's own hand. Why Titus murders her in the end in unclear, but you can figure it out yourself: Either he is a chauvinist creep who sees a violated daughter as a breach to his honor, or he is simply putting her out of her misery, or he is disgusted by her unwillingness to rise above her victimhood.
Once Tamora comes to power, Titus, the original conqueror/rapist, is put on the defensive. Now it’s his turn to be raped by Tamora in a similar way. He sees how it feels, and the challenge now is: Can he rise above it and prove to be Tamora’s worthy opponent?

If you look at it this way, you have in Tamora the first of Shakespeare's great female characters – as strong, smart, powerful and bloody as the men. Tamora reminds me a lot of Kriemhild in the Nibelungenlied. Ah, but what doesn't remind me of Kriemhild in the Nibelungenlied?


What's It All About # 2

You can also see it as the education of Titus, who starts out a Great Man of Rome with all the virtues befitting such a station – loyalty, statesmanship, honor (he sacrifices/kills his own son when the boy insults the Emperor). But soon he must learn that the virtues of a society or merely a façade perpetrated by the ruling class to control their underlings; that Rome is really only selfishness and betrayal and greed and hatred.

He was duped, as we all are, into believing the propaganda of the ruling set and thus serving them. But when he sees that he is only and always will only be a dumb pawn in another violent game that he was never meant for him to win, he stumbles, almost falls, but finds the strength to get revenge. Which, by the way, is not a bad thing, but in fact the only valid move he can make in this game.

There is a point in the story where he says,

"Marcus, we are but shrubs, no cedars we,
no big-bon'd men fram'd of the Cyclops' size;
but metal, Marcus, steel to the very back… “ (Act 4, Scene 3)
It comes at a point when his suffering is so great and his madness coming on that you think he can't stand another blow. But now he crosses that point and discovers there is strength there, corrupted and bent by suffering, but the steel is still there, and he is strong enough to continue and toward revenge.

It’s all true, of course: Virtue is a tool used by those in power to control others, revenge is a language they understand, victimhood is neither the end to anything nor in any way admirable, and when you think you can’t take it anymore, quite possibly you can.

The Passionate Pilgrim

None of the poems in “The Passionate Pilgrim” are good.

Most likely, Shakespeare wrote only five of them, though the publisher back then claimed he wrote all. There are 20 total, the authors of the others are sometimes known, other times not.

The best poem in the little collection is not Shakespeare’s and it’s not much of a poem. It’s very simple and straight-forward, more like song lyrics than poetry, but it really moves along in a simple and affecting way. That guy had potential. Too bad he never got famous. Oh, wait, he did: Apparently, it was Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s great competitor:

Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield…

But if you compare them the other poems (and assuming Shakespeare really only did write five of them), you see a difference. Shakespeare is more assured than the others and more importantly, his words carry more weight. The others are flouncing around, it’s all shepherds and Adonis and love and lying in the grass. Shakespeare gives you the feeling that he is going beyond that. In the best cases, he plays with logic in a paradoxical way.

Here’s a presumably non-Shakespeare beginning (Poem Nr. 4):

Sweet Cytherea, sitting by a brook
With young Adonis, lovely, fresh and green…

Here’s Shakespeare (Poem Nr. 1 / Sonnet 138):

When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies…

It’s not just images or pretty scenes of love, immediately there’s intellectual connection.

Also, he nails the endings. He knows that it’s the end that more impresses the reader, and it’s strange that the other poets sometimes don’t seem to get that (oddly enough).

Here’s Nr. 4 again (the poem is about Cytherea trying to seduce the beautiful but inexperienced Adonis – he, being stupid, resists):

Then fell she on her back, fair queen, and toward:
He rose and ran way; ah fool too froward!

I like his foolishness, but it just end it with a little comment thrown at his back while he beats it is a let-down.

Here’s Sonnet 138:

Therefore I’ll lie with love, and love with me,
Since that our faults in love thus smother’d b e.

All of a sudden, everything is wrapped up and the thought is also somehow new – a conclusion that surprises and satisfies.

Shakespeare mastered 1) the art of challenging and surprising the reader and 2) the art of the ending.

Weirdest line

(in Lucrece, but maybe in Shakespeare so far):

For men have marble, women waxen, minds.

As the Shakespeares of today say: WTF?

The Rape of Lucrece

It seemed to me when I read the long poem “The Rape of Lucrece,” that something completely different was happening than what had happened in Shakespeare’s works so far (assuming the chronology of his works is right).

Lucrece is about a mythical/historical event from pre-Republic Rome in which the beautiful Lucrece ist raped by the ruler of Rome, Tarquin, then she kills herself and after her body is paraded through the streets the people rise up, kill Tarquin and establish the republic.

It sounds really boring. I have a hard time imagining an interesting rape, except maybe as porn. I mean, you know what’s going to happen. The only way to make it interesting is if suddenly the rapist and victim turn out to be someone they didn’t think they were – the victim turns out to be the president’s wife who’s snuck out of the White House to meet a love, and now the Rapist is in big trouble. Or as a comedy: the rape takes place in some kind of funny place where the rapist is continually struggling to open a lawn chair or tripping over toys left lying around by children or something like that.

Shakespeare does the same thing – the post-modernist thing – he did in “Venus and Adonis”, which was to slow time and go off on every possible digression he can find. Between the time that Tarquin, who is a guest in Lecrece’s house, gets out of bed and goes to her room and rapes her, the narration goes all over the place and it becomes a rumination on motivation, rationality and animal desire:

Tarquin wonders how he can do this, knowing he’s taking a huge political and personal risk, knowing he’s not going to think it was worth it in the morning, but still this animal desire, so overpowering in the night, cannot be denied.

Good line:

The sweets we wish for turn to loathed sours
Even in the moment that we call them ours

He’s not a psychopath, he’s everyman, who, late at night returning home alone and lonely, passes a whorehouse and tells himself: Don’t go in there, it’s a waste of money, it’s a waste of time, you don’t need this, in the morning you will regret it, but he keeps circling the block until finally he gives up and goes in.

The discussion during the rape and Lucrece’s actions and ruminations afterward are similar – self-aware and self-reflective, but not in a psychological way, more in a universal way. Shakespeare grasps at these big, abstract ideas: What is time? He even puts in a detailed art-historical description and critique of a painting, and Lucrece wonders how outward appearances can so well disguise inward character.

The amazing thing is: This isn’t just a pot-boiler, like “Venus and Adonis” is an erotic pot-boiler, it’s intellectually satisfying, it makes you think about a series of abstract ideas that nonetheless are applicable to you.

No one screams and goes nuts. Lucrece doesn’t do what rape victims in TV shows do today, “I just closed my eyes and went to a better place”. That’s one the great advantages to pre-Freudian writing: You can use action as a platform for ideas or whatever you want. Nowadays the only use of rape in literature is to create shock and pity, and I’m so tired of that. Victims always have to be victims, evil deed-doers always have to by sick psychopaths. Everyone needs therapy, everyone’s a victim, everyone’s always suffering.

You could argue that Shakespeare is not treating rape as the horrible thing it really is, the need for control, the breaking of a human soul, etc., and I would say: fine with me. I’m tired of that. I get the point already that rape is bad and hurts. Frankly, I can figure out that rape is horrible just by imagining it, I don’t need a psychologist to pop up and explain: “It’s not about sex, it’s about control.”

I want to hear something new, I want to hear what the writer has to say, about anything, really. As long as it’s intelligent and engaging. I really like the feeling that there is a restless, coherent brain behind the prose I am reading, and that he’s talking to me and not just parading schoolbook emotions past my eyes.

Fickle, false and full of fraud

I just misquoted Venus’s last words to my girlfriend:

“Fickle, false and full of fraud.”

“What’s that?”

“Women.”

“And what about men? Good, gullible and goofy?”

Venus and Adonis

“Venus and Adonis” is real work to read. It’s one long string of love clichés without anything really happening and on top of that there’s something unpleasant about it: I couldn’t avoid the feeling that I was reading a love poem written by a frustrated female high school teacher to one of her boy students with peach fuzz on his lip.

It’s a long poem that largely consists of the goddess Venus knocking a boy hunter off a horse, trapping him in the grass and dousing him in love poetry. In the end he escapes and is killed by a boar and Venus is sad. That’s the story, but it’s really just an excuse to go endlessly on and on about love. In the first three quarters, the rhetoric doesn’t end, it’s a love poetry marathon, Venus can’t stop whispering sweet moaning things into his poor disinterested ears and drooling over him like a dirty old man over a sleeping teenager. It’s kind of embarrassing for Venus.

Rhetorically, everything Shakespeare does well later is already here, but flat: The metaphors, etc. But they are somehow loveless and pedestrian. In some sections, he just strings one love metaphor after the other as if he’s going through that thesaurus of his he had in his brain, filling space. Probably he really was filling space, too. It’s a published poem – he never published his plays – and presumably had to fit a certain amount of pages:

Even as the wind is hush’d before it raineth,
Or as the wolf doth grin before he barketh,
Or as the berry breaks before it staineth,
Or like the deadly bullet of a gun…

You want to keep going with the list:

Or as the foot is kicked before the teeth are broken,
Or as the crap is crapped before the foot steppeth in it,
Or as the thesaurus opens before the word is spoken…

Still, there are some interesting things about it.

First of all, Shakespeare picks a duality again. Right at the beginning he states the conflict: She wants love, he wants to hunt. He doesn’t bother to set it up or show why he loves the hunt and she hunts for love – he just states it so he can skip all preliminaries and get right into the thick of it.

Then there’s the comparison to the other famous version of the story, from Ovid. But that version is flat and unambitious. In Ovid, goddess and pretty boy are lovers. Shakespeare turned it into a story of unrequited love, and there is a lot of drama in this heavy-breathing goddess trying to seduce a young boy that has a lot in common with a wet noodle.

But the really interesting thing is the inner monologue, because that’s really what Venus’ rhetoric is. The kind of thing that modernists and post-modernists would do later, right down to Harold Brodkey, who could extrapolate whole pages of gush from a single motion, Shakespeare was already doing: Turning a few moments of action into a bottomless pit of feelings spewed out in endless monologue.

The action seems to go on and on, but really they’re just grappling with each other for a few moments: She grabs him, he gets away, that’s pretty much it. But every moment, every attempted kiss, is argued endlessly out with dialogue that is really inner monologue pushed to the surface, then layered again, examined and reexamined and spun around, going around in circles searching for a way into some kind of center but never finding it. Which is, come to think of it, much like what a lover does in his mind.

As far as the poetry itself goes, there are some good parts. But they are not in the gushing first section. It gets good when the woods get dark and Venus’ soul with it, and she wanders about filled with dread for no particular reason, foreseeing his death, for example, or toward the very end, when Venus gets her final monologue about the horrors of love, which I really like:

Venus speaking:

“Since thou art dead, lo here I prophesy,
Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend:
It shall be waited on with jealousy,
Find sweet beginning, but unsavory end;
Ne’er settled equally, but high or low,
That all love’s pleasure shall not match his woe.

It shall be fickle, false und full of fraud,
Bud, and be blasted, in a breathing while;
The bottom poison, and the top o’erstraw’d
With sweets that shall the truest sight beguile;
The strongest body shall it make most weak,
Strike the wise dumb, and teach the fool to speak.

It shall be sparing, and too full of riot,
Teaching decrepit age to tread the measures;
The staring ruffian shall it keep quiet,
Pluck down the rich, enrich the poor with treasures;
It shall be raging mad, and silly mild,
Make the young old, the old become a child.

It shall suspect where is no cause to fear,
It shall not fear where it should most mistrust;
It shall be merciful, and too severe,
And most deceiving when it seems most just;
Perverse it shall be, where it shows most toward;
Put fear to valour, courage to the coward.

It shall be cause of war and dire events,
And set dissension ‘twixt the son and sire;
Subject and servile to all discontents,
As dry combustions matter is to fire.
Sith in his prime death doth my love destroy,
They that love best, their loves shall not enjoy.”