All-Shakespeare Session – Apr 23, 2018

Portrait by Martin Droeshout

Four years ago KRG organised a week-long Shakespeare festival in David Hall, Fort Kochi, to commemorate the playwright's 450th birthday. The record of those events has been captured in posts on this blog. On Apr 23 this year KRG held a session of reading from his plays, poems, and songs within the plays, on the occasion of the 454th birthday.

We had the great pleasure of receiving back in our fold KRG's earliest reader still around, Indira.  She used the occasion to celebrate Shakespeare and to remember the founder, Bobby.

So too, Talitha came on a special visit from TVM for the all-Shakespeare event; here she is greeting her old friend, Geetha, who will now become a regular at KRG. Talitha promises to come whenever possible, and Satish may accompany her at a poetry event in future.

Among us Shoba has the distinct honour of enjoying the same birthday as WS. Here Kavita wishes Shoba, holding a Ginger plant bouquet that KumKum presented her.

No birthday is complete without cake. KumKum distributed sandwiches she made, along with home-made cake from Shoba, and chocolate cake brought by Talitha. Coffee was supplied by the Yacht Club.

Having savoured in depth what WS wrote, once again we realised the truth of his forecast that 

   Not marble nor the gilded monuments

   Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme 

Shoba, Geetha, Talitha, Thommo, Indira, KumKum, Kavita, Priya, Joe, Hemjit (seated)

Here we are gathered at the end.

The First Folio is the collection of plays posthumously printed in 1623 from scripts of fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell – 750 copies were printed, 233 survive today

Present: Shoba, Geetha, Talitha, Thommo, Indira, KumKum, Kavita, Priya, Joe, Hemjit 

Absent: Preeti (down with the flu), Pamela (away to USA), Zakia (busy with visiting relatives), Ankush (detained by classes) Sunil (away to Kodagu)

The next reading will be on May 18, Friday of R.K. Narayan's novel The Guide.  KumKum said the novel was a must-read and the movie was very good, starring Waheeda Rehman and Dev Anand. Thommo said most people know about it through the film, since few read books.

The Sanders portrait is reputed to be one of the only images of William Shakespeare done in his lifetime, but everyone is not on board

At the outset here is a link to John Green’s brilliant crash course on Shakespeare’s Sonnets in 12 minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDpW1sHrBaU&t=467s

Shoba was to begin the session but she could not ‘view’ the KRG Dropbox on her phone at the Club. Joe said it was absolutely necessary to download the files from the Dropbox to your device at home using your wifi beforehand, for there is no surety anywhere that net access will be possible instantly via mobile Internet while reading. Priya tried to assist and get the file downloaded from a different spot, so Geetha went first.

Indira prompted us to consider distributing the text, as before, on paper for poetry since having the text matters as much as listening to the reading. 

Geetha

Talitha shows Geetha the Clown's song from Twelfth Night

It was the famous speech from Julius Caesar where Mark Antony is allowed to address the Romans after Caesar's assassination by Brutus and companions. In it Mark Antony uses the devices of rhetoric to stir up the crowd, but he proceeds slowly and by degrees, starting from the harmless statement

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

Marlon Brando as Mark Antony in the 1953 film

And then by impugning what Brutus has said, not directly but by the use of Irony:

But Brutus says he [Caesar] was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.

Mark Antony repeats the refrain ‘Brutus is an honourable man’ with each charge laid against Caesar; this is another device of rhetoric, called Antistrophe, now added to Irony for deeper effect.

Then come Rhetorical Questions, which cleverly answer themselves:
He [Caesar] hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?

Hence, through a variety of means available to the rhetorician to argue persuasively, Mark Antony nullifies all that Brutus spoke and makes the crowd impatient to have their revenge. Let us not forget the master-stroke of Mark Antony turning away from his audience for a bit:
Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

WS was familiar with all this from his education at the grammar school in  Stratford-upon-Avon, and had practised it throughout his working life as a dramatist. In modern plays you only hear people making conversation, and if you are lucky they say something witty or outrageous, but absolutely nothing that compares with one soliloquy of WS.

For a more extended discussion, see Rhetorical Devices in Antony’s Funerary Speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.


Talitha

A brittle glory shineth in this face - As brittle as the glory is the face 

(David Tennant in Richard II)

She picked the scene known as the Mirror Scene from Richard II, a play not often read and less familiar to the public. The king is more or less being deposed before the nobles and Bolingbroke is taking over. It is a scene with plenty of drama and a seeming performer in Richard II, able to evoke sympathy for his tragic fate. The mirror is a prop he uses effectively:
Was this face the face 
That every day under his household roof 
Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face 
That, like the sun, did make beholders wink? 
Is this the face which faced so many follies, 
That was at last outfaced by Bolingbroke?

He begs one boon and then is gone, taken away to the Tower of London.

Talitha came on a special visit from TVM for the all-Shakespeare event 

Shoba
Shoba as a master of the French language was urged to act the part of the French princess Katharine in Act 3, Scene 4 of Henry V where she makes her acquaintance with the English language as a prelude to her promise in marriage to the English king. It all begins with the anatomy, and though Ben Jonson in the prefix to the First Folio edition gave out that WS had “small Latin and less Greek,” we find our dramatist not only had enough French to conduct a conversation, but going much further, could extract bawdy puns in that language.

Shoba

One misses a lot in WS without knowledge of his non-obvious sexual references. Consulting Shakespeare’s Bawdy by Eric Partridge, a classic of Shakespeare scholarship as Prof. Stanley Wells puts it, “will clarify passages which have been but dimly understood.”

Shoba said French was the language of the nobles after the Norman conquest and for several hundred years thereafter French was the dominant language in England, while the Anglo-Saxon peasantry spoke English. The educated spoke French.

WS is obviously having fun throughout the anatomy lesson which the French maid Alice, who has lived in England, imparts to Katharine. At the beginning it is the mispronunciation of the princess that is the source of humour,
Ainsi dis-je; de elbow, de nick, et de sin. [elbow, neck and chin]

but as the lesson progresses the princess asks the English for la robe and le pied, and Alice translates, but pronounces the English ‘gown’ and ‘foot’ in a Gallic manner; it comes out so close to the French words con and foutre (which mean ‘cunt’ and ‘fuck’) that Katharine can't help a ribald giggle, and exclaims:
De foot et de coun! O Seigneur Dieu! ce sont mots
de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique, et
non pour les dames d'honneur d'user:

(Fuck and cunt! Oh my God, these words sound so bad, degraded and obscene; they are not for the use of honourable ladies.)

Emma Thompson as Katharine in the 1989 film by Kenneth Branagh

You can watch the Henry V - Learning English Scene on youtube where Emma Thompson cracks up when it comes to the English words for le pied et la robe.

One must thank Priya who suggested this passage to Shoba.

Indira
The suicide of Bobby weighed heavily on Indira who knew him well – a commanding and tragic figure, like Othello, she said. She has since read a lot about suicide. In the plays of WS some of the most honourable people commit suicide, or contemplate suicide. There was a tradition of seppuku or ritual suicide by disembowelment in Japan during the Samurai times. Death by this method relieves the deceased of shame, disloyalty, or dishonour.

Othello: I took by the throat the circumcised dog, And smote him, thus – Anthony Hopkins sticks it to himself in the TV film of 1981

Placido Domingo as Otello, in the opera by Giuseppe Verdi with Marina Popslavskaya as Desdemona in the final act in a 2011 Royal Opera House gala, celebrating the singer’s 40th anniversary since his Covent Garden debut

In Othello (Act 5, Scene 2) the suicide takes place at the end when he is about to be arrested for the murder of Desdemona whom he suspected of infidelity. He asks leave to speak and declares
 .... speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well;

and enacting how he cut down an enemy of Venice with his sword, he stabs himself. Indira said Othello realises he has been played, made a fool of, and wants to set the record straight. He narrates that he
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe

This may refer to the Indian tribes of the new world who were not aware of the worth of precious stones  and would exchange them for glass beads; or Indian could be a corruption of Judean, referring to Judas Iscariot who sold Jesus for thirty pieces of silver.

Priya, Geetha, Talitha, & Indira at the reading

The second piece Indira chose was also about the despair that leads a person to consider suicide. In this case it is the Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins (GMH), who made some revolutionary innovations in poetry way back in Victorian times. However, because his poems were not published until well past his death, they became known only in 1918 when they were published, at least those that survived destruction. Here's a brief on Hopkins.

GMH was born to High Church Anglicans in 1844; he was therefore a Victorian poet. He won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford and was strongly influenced by the poetry of George Herbert, the metaphysical poet, much loved by our own Vikram Seth. In Hopkins’ search for authority in religion he felt the force of John Henry Newman who converted him to Roman Catholicism in 1866. He was a brilliant student, achieving a double first class in Classics and another subject.

Once he became a Jesuit, he thought it incompatible with his vocation to practise poetry which had the potential to tempt him to self-indulgence and individualism. Later, after reading Duns Scotus (1265-1308), a Catholic thinker of the Middle Ages, he was convinced that the individual things of the universe afforded the only directly apprehensible knowledge; he thus came to the idea of the ‘thisness’ of things or in his language ‘inscape.’

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889)

He worked as a parish priest, then a preacher, and later taught Latin and Greek at a college in Lancashire. In 1884 he secured an appointment as Professor of Greek and Latin at University College, Dublin, but instead of deriving happiness from the academic profession he descended into deep depression. The alleged immediate cause was having to plough through the mediocre answers of students in exams. More to the point was his sense that his prayers were no longer reaching God, and this doubt gave rise to his seven ‘Terrible Sonnets’ of which the one Indira read (Carrion Comfort) is representative.

For a fairly good treatment of his poetic themes and accomplishments, refer to Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins: Priest And Poet.

But even in his despair GMH held fast (as Bobby asks in the sonnet Joe read) and his last words as he lay dying from typhoid in 1889 were, “I am happy, so happy.”

His good friend, the physician and fellow poet Robert Bridges (Poet Laureate from 1913 to 1930), served as his literary executor to bring his poems into print in 1918 from copies sent to him when Hopkins was alive. Hopkins’ total output is small, since he put his priestly duties above his poetry. But his influence on modern poetry is considerable.

One of the best biographies of GMH is by the Princeton professor Robert Bernard Martin, who had unrestricted use of Hopkins’ private papers. He writes about the poet’s tortuous conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism, and the struggle in later years to retain his mental balance.

Here is a thorough discussion of the sonnet Carrion Comfort by Abha Bharadwaj Sharma of the Miracle Institute of English Literature in Jaipur.

Carrion Comfort is a Petrarchan sonnet in form. The octave rhymed abba abba, is followed by a sestet cdc dcd which is typical of the Petrarchan rhyme scheme for sonnets. Here the syllable count for the lines is variable while it was generally 11 for Petrarchan sonnets. The octave consisting of two quatrains is used to set out a problem, followed by a sestet (two tercets), which yield the poetic resolution of the problem. The ninth line is critical: it creates a volta (turn in Italian), which marks a shift in the tone or mood.

The Elizabethan sonnet mostly has the form of three quatrains followed by a couplet. The couplet is a punch line which is often like an epigram.

Here are some notes:
not choose not to be. = avoid suicide, cf. Hamlet
rude on me  - rude as a verb, a usage invented by GMH, not in the OED

That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. 
(cf. Donne’s Holy Sonnets: 
Batter my heart  three-person'd God:
....
       and bend 
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.)

There's alliteration afoot in words like carrion comfort, lionlimb

It's not a sonnet that yields its meaning in a single reading, because the sequencing of words is quite unusual, and their flow is far from smooth. By design, one supposes. When one is over-wrought speech itself is an achievement. The continual pounding of stresses is GMH's idea of ‘sprung rhythm’ at work.

Thommo
The choice of Sonnet 18 to sing was masterly. Here is the video of Thommo singing Shall I compare thee to a summer's day

Thommo's music is taken from the rendition of this sonnet by David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, the English rock band. See
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/pink_floyds_david_gilmour_sings_shakespeares_sonnet_18.html

Thommo sings the sonnet 18 – Shall I compare thee to a summer's day

Is there a sonnet better known among the 154? Is there one more melodious, more lyrical, more captivating? We believe it is an older man describing the comeliness of form of a youth, so beautiful to behold that Death dares not wander in his shade. But for added surety the poet who is confident that
Not marble nor the gilded monuments 
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme;

subscribes this couplet to the sonnet extolling the youth:
   So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Ah, here we are four hundred years later recalling whoever it was (Earl of Southampton?), but only because WS wrote these imperishable 14 lines!

The Sonnets have a dedication to “Mr. W.H.” whose identity has never been conclusively settled. The best contender is William Herbert (the Earl of Pembroke). He is seen as the most likely candidate, since he was also the one to whom the First Folio of Shakespeare's works was dedicated. Henry Wriothesley (the third Earl of Southampton) with initials reversed is another likely object of the dedication. The initials T.T.  refers to Thomas Thorpe the publisher. That T.T. signed the dedication rather than the author is taken to indicate it was an unauthorised collection published in 1609, seven years before the death of WS.


Professors Stanley Wells and Jonathan Bate talk to Paul Edmondson ​of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, ​about the content and context of Shakespeare’s collection of sonnets in this video which enhances our understanding of them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqOrZItROxs 

Clinton Heylin, the author of So Long as Men Can Breathe: The Untold Story of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, suggests that the Sonnets of WS were deliberately suppressed.

Indira put forward the fact that many poets had patrons and dedicated their collection of poems to a noble person. For instance, WS dedicated his long poem Venus and Adonis, to Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, in which the poet describes the poem as “the first heir of my invention.” That is to say, he considered himself first a poet, and always a poet, before he became a dramatist. But there is no sense in this dedication that he is fawning over the dedicatee for money or preference. Indeed, he earned well from the sales of both his long poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, because they became so popular with the young educated university men.

Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis (‘Adonay’) purchased with another book for 1 shilling in June 1593 – as recorded in the diary of one Richard Stonley in June 1593 (from the Folger Shakespeare Library archives)

We know that WS died a wealthy man. Most of his income came from being managing partner in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, his theatre company. They were also paid handsomely for command performances in court.


Kavita

Kavita

Kavita chose Sonnet 27 as her first. It is a remembrance sonnet much like Sonnet 97: How like a winter hath my absence been. The poet describes that when he retires at night to bed
 ... my thoughts (from far where I abide) 
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee, 

Even the shadow of the remembered face is
 ... like a jewel hung in ghastly night, 
Makes black night beauteous and her old face new.

This surely is fervent longing. It reminds one of a Sanskrit poem by Rajashekara from the collection Sanskrit Court Poetry, translated by David H. Ingalls of Harvard, which Joe recited in 2006 at KRG:
Ah, cursed moon, touch not even in jest

my wasted body, burning with the heat

of separation from my dear one,

for when your rays fall on me,

though fair as ripened lotus stalks

they hurt like burning brands.

In Sonnet 27 we hear the anguish of separation. In Sonnet 104 the poet reckons with the ravages of Time and recalls ardently when he first met the object of his love three years ago, the word ‘three’ repeated for effect across all the seasons which came and went. However,
your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,

Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton – the Grafton portrait

It is the poet’s first meeting he recalls to assert no ravaging has taken place in his eyes; will the object of his love continue as before, forever? The three may be a literal three or a symbolic three. If it was the Earl of Southampton, he would have been eighteen when they met and twenty-one at the time of writing.

Concluding the sonnet the extravagant claim is made to future generations, that the height of beauty (his lover) was dead before they were born.

Joe
WS was a consummate sonneteer, unequalled in his best sonnets. Joe recited one he loves, Sonnet 138. All the gifts of WS are on display. There are puns, as well as words carrying slightly different meanings that will be discovered on slow reading, with care. In this connection there is the story of the painter Edgar Degas discussing his difficulty trying his hand at poetry with Stéphane Mallarmé, the French symbolist poet. He complained: “It isn’t ideas I am short of, I’ve got enough of them.” Mallarmé replied: “But Degas it’s not with ideas one makes poems, it’s with words.”

What you get with WS is wonderful ideas, wrought with the magic of words plucked out of his vast store, and used wittily, so that the structure of the form he rarely deviates from, is like an elegance that adds to the radiance of his wit. His wit was what people remembered most about him:

the sweete, wittie soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends,
(Francis Meres in his overview of contemporary literature in 1598, Palladis Tamia)

O could he have but drawn his wit
As well in brass, as he has hit
His face; the print would then surpass
All that was ever writ in brass:
(Ben Jonson in the preface to the First Folio edition of the Plays, 1623, commenting on the Droeshout engraving of WS on the frontispiece).

His plays are full of his wit. The marvel is that even when he is writing thrilling love scenes as in the first exchange of words between Romeo and Juliet in Act 1, known as the Holy Palmer’s Kiss, it is the blaze of wit as much as the raiment of words that exhilarates. That exchange is a sonnet, created as a duet, and I find myself rendered breathless, when I recall Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting touching palms in Franco Zeffirelli’s magnificent film of 1968.

Holy Palmer's Kiss – Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting touching palms in Franco Zeffirelli’s magnificent film of 1968

So here in Sonnet 138 too WS has a drama in mind of two beings, one older, perhaps eminent, and a young woman who is drawn to him. There is no blaze of lust, but a slow combustion and a gradual accommodation and appreciation, but at its root lies an unspoken dissimulation. And that is what WS takes apart to reveal what is going on in the relationship. At some point in the poem we no longer recognise whether it is the man’s side or the woman’s side being set out:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppress’d.

Joe

Sonnet 138 is one of the two sonnets that appeared in an earlier edition, The Passionate Pilgrim (most certainly an unauthorised collection), which contained twenty poems attributed to Shakespeare by the publisher W. Jaggard in 1599.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passionate_Pilgrim

Today we accept only five of these as coming from Shakespeare’s hand; the rest are by a miscellany of others.

What is interesting to readers is to compare the version of Sonnet 138 as we know it from the 1609 edition printed by Thomas Thorpe with this earlier bootlegged copy. Judge the earlier version from the The Passionate Pilgrim transcribed here below:

When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her (though I know she lies),
That she might think me some untutored youth,
Unskilful in the world's false forgeries.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although I know my years be past the best,
I, smiling, credit her false-speaking tongue,
Outfacing faults in love with love's ill rest.
But wherefore says my love that she is young?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love's best habit's in a soothing tongue,
And age, in love, loves not to have years told.
     Therefore I'll lie with love, and love with me,
     Since that our faults in love thus smothered be.
(https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Passionate_Pilgrim)

In how many ways is the later version superior? Consider the following:
– Although I know my years be past the best, REPLACED BY
  Although she knows my days are past the best, 

– I, smiling, credit her false-speaking tongue, REPLACED BY
  Simply I credit her false speaking tongue:

– Outfacing faults in love with love's ill rest. REPLACED BY
   On both sides thus is simple truth suppress'd.

– O, love's best habit's in a soothing tongue, REPLACED BY
   O, love's best habit is in seeming trust,

– The final couplet is incomparably superior:
    Therefore I'll lie with love, and love with me,
    Since that our faults in love thus smothered be.
REPLACED BY
   Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
   And in our faults by lies we flatter'd be.

It is as though two different poets had written the same poem. One more clumsy, lacking in wit, making no attempt at the devices of sonnets (alliteration, puns, words discovered to have two near meanings both providing a sense, etc.) More than anything, it is the tone of the poem that undergoes a complete change, from negative and hesitant, to one of calm lucidity mixed with humour and a desire to accept the relationship and take it further.

For an excellent exegesis of Sonnet 138 watch Trevor Nunn, Artistic Director of the  Royal Shakespeare Company, conduct actor David Suchet through its subtleties in a master class:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YLhu_f4Pwg

For further reading, see the essay available for access on JSTOR online only by subscription at http://www.jstor.org/stable/2872791
Loves of Comfort and Despair: A Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnet 138
Author: Edward A. Snow
Source: ELH (English Literary History), Vol. 47, No. 3 (Autumn, 1980), pp. 462-483

Also The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton by Richard Strier, p. 85-91:
https://books.google.co.in/books?id=sAFfIVPc4mQC

The second sonnet Joe recited, #147, lays bare the severity of the addiction to sexual desire. The poet likens it to a disease that is prolonged by feeding on the very thing that causes it. He knows that
My reason, the physician to my love,

forbids him, yet he cannot help it:
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,

In the fever pitch of his passion the sonnet ends:
   For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,
   Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

This is one of the few references to ‘dark’ in the sonnets, describing the object of the poet's love.

We have an opposition between reason and desire (sexual desire); desire runs away with him and makes him ill but he feeds on the very stuff like an addict. Reason cannot proscribe his passion, but he realises death may lie at the end of his sickly passion.

The sonnet ends with the affirmation of a truth; proving he attains clarity even in his madness.

It is part of the mystery of the sonnets that one may never know whether this is confessional poetry in the modern sense, or merely a very excellent poet with a wonderful imagination, ripe with experience, putting words to the emotions that animate his characters (the youth, the poet, the dark lady, the rival poet, etc.) – just as in the Plays. How marvellous that WS never gave a recorded interview, never left a diary of his personal thoughts, never had a twitter handle to broadcast his opinions on sundry trivia, never wrote a blog. There is not even a personal letter in his hand that survives. However, 90 documents relating to Shakespeare have been registered with the UNESCO International Memory of the World. There is a collaborative website called Shakespeare Documented which is an online exhibition documenting Shakespeare in his own time with high-resolution images.

The third and last sonnet starts with the opening line of Sonnet 71:
No longer mourn for me when I am dead;

But the rest is Joe recalling the suicide of KRG’s founder, Bobby; trying to make sense of it and bid him farewell. Joe was reminded while writing this sonnet of the injunction in the Jewish Mishnah (a somewhat different one is there in the Gospel of Matthew 7:1):
Nor shall you judge your companion until you stand in his place.

Hemjit
The speech by Portia as the trial of Shylock begins in Act 4, Scene 1 of The Merchant of Venice (MOV) is often set as an elocution piece in schools. Portia dressed as a judge is urging that justice in human affairs must be moderated with mercy or else
 ... none of us
Should see salvation

She uses words to dissuade Shylock from pursuing his absolute right for
 ... earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.

Hemjit

We know in the end Shylock will be outwitted by a technicality of the law. In this court of justice, as in daily affairs on the Rialto in Venice, the odds are stacked against him. As a Jew he was not only severely circumscribed in what activities he could engage in, but he was openly abused and looked down upon. As he tells Antonio
You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
And all for use of that which is mine own.

Al Pacino as Shylock in one of the juiciest and most unsavoury roles in the canon

Notes:
Indira argued that MOV is anti-Semitic and propagates the established prejudices of the time in the way Shylock is characterised. Joe argued to the contrary that in this as in other matters WS is wider in his conception of humans and abler in presenting both sides of the case, even when it comes to characters who are projected as villains. Talitha too saw no anti-Semitism.

This strikes one very much when viewing the 2004 film, in which Al Pacino's interpretation provides a larger-than-life Shylock, perhaps tragic, but towering. Although he has only ~300 lines in the play, WS has given Shylock the best lines. Not the wimp, Bassanio, not the sanctimonious Antonio, not even the pretty Portia masquerading as the judge, attract dramatic attention as Shylock does. His thundering speech “Hath not a Jew eyes, hands…?” carries the day and demolishes the very basis of all types prejudice, namely, considering the other as less than human.

Sir Antony Sher of the Royal Shakespeare Company, himself a Jew, holds this view:
“If you're Jewish, you can't avoid being interested in Shylock: it's a terrific part in a very difficult play. Shakespeare writes him in three dimensions: the great "Hath not a Jew eyes" speech is a wonderful cry of pain from an oppressed man, but when he flips, and becomes unreasonable in the trial scene, the man who has been persecuted becomes the persecutor.

… The opening scene with Antonio, where Shylock has to be polite to this person who despises him and whom he despises, reminded me of growing up in apartheid South Africa, the way black people would have to hold in their true feelings when dealing with their white “masters”. In rehearsal, we used apartheid as an example of violent prejudice. Although I had encountered mild anti-Semitism in my own life, I found apartheid much stronger than anything I had experienced as a Jew.

Our production really emphasised the anti-Semitism of the Christians: they abused and spat at Shylock. I had an awful lot of other actors' saliva in my beard, and when it's your own beard you really want to shampoo it all off. So there was no question of the play itself being anti-Semitic – because you could see how badly this Jewish man was being treated. You saw him being pushed to a level of revenge that is understandable, even if it is ugly.”

Desmond Barrit, another National Theatre and RSC performer who has played Shylock says:
“I don't think it's an anti-Semitic play. It's the opposite: it's the loner against the rest of the world. Shylock is in the minority and he's being victimised. Such is the nature of the piece that, when we started rehearsing, I felt outside of everything. I felt that I was being alienated by the rest of the cast, that I wasn't being included in social activities. It was the nearest I've got to feeling everything about a character during the rehearsal period.”

You may also read a book by a Jewish author, Martin Yaffe:
Shylock and the Jewish Question by Professor Martin D. Yaffe
That Christians are not morally superior to Jews (or any one else) in the play is a truism voiced in much recent criticism, but Yaffe goes further. In what he considers Portia's endorsement of a theologically tolerant Christianity, coupled with Shylock's plea for political equality of Christians and Jews (in his "Hath not a Jew eyes" speech), Shakespeare's vision of Christian-Jewish tolerance was well ahead of its time and place (taken from the blurb on the book).

Yet another Jewish author, Aviva Dautch, writes:
“I would argue that a nuanced exploration of The Merchant of Venice confirms that Shakespeare’s writing is at its best when exposing how we are all more than one thing – speaking about principles we don’t always observe ourselves, loving those close to us while mistreating others, at times victim, at times perpetrator and, in our complexity, fully human.”
(cf. A Jewish reading of The Merchant of Venice by Aviva Dautch)

KumKum
KumKum recalled Tom Duddy, the American retired professor of literature residing in Fort Kochi, who would have loved to be at this event. The sonnets of WS give him great pleasure; he would have recited one or two from memory. Everyone here remembers his talk on the occasion of the 450th Birth Anniversary Festival:
http://kochiread.blogspot.in/2014/05/shakespeare-450th-birth-anniversary_12.html

Tom is still around in Fort Kochi, a bit diminished in energy, his eyesight somewhat worse, but coping and enjoying his stay.

The first sonnet KumKum read was No 116, Let me not to the marriage of true minds. It is popular at wedding ceremonies in the hope that Love remains ‘an ever-fixèd mark’ during the marriage, and it won't come within
the bending sickle's compass

But sonnet 116 will not keep a marriage alive, nor will following the advice purveyed to alter not when ‘it alteration finds.’ What is the magic sauce? Once Paul Newman who enjoyed a 50-year marriage with Joanne Woodward was asked this question and his answer was: “some combination of lust and respect and patience. And determination.”

Hemjit & KumKum

The second sonnet 130 is WS having a bit of fun. He overturns all the hyperboles surrounding a lover's description of the beloved, by asserting a series of ideal things his beloved is assuredly not, a negative litany of eight in fact, starting with
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun

However, in the summing up he says
   And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
   As any she belied with false compare.

You can listen to an expressive delivery of this sonnet by Ian Midlane.


Priya

Priya

Priya went last with a soliloquy by the king from Henry V, Act 4, Scene 1:
Upon the king! let us our lives, our souls,

He ponders kingship which is weighing him down:
What infinite heart's-ease
Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy!

He is ruing that with all his power and the gorgeous ceremony he can command, he cannot
 ... sleep so soundly as the wretched slave,

That he can go on for 420 words in this semi-philosophical vein, is tribute to a dire need to fill time in the play. The king is envying the common man, regretting the peace he is missing and suffering the lack of enjoyment of ordinary things. There's no drama in this passage of the play, unlike the Eve of Crispin's Day speech which Priya did on another occasion (he that hath no stomach for this fight, let him depart, Harry begins):

From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be rememberèd—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;

Now that was an epic speech to rouse men! Watch Kenneth Branagh deliver it.

Elizabethan Singers Trio
Finally here is a song from Twelfth Night sung by Talitha, Geetha, and  Thommo
O Mistress mine where are you roaming?

READINGS

Geetha
(from Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 2)
MARC ANTONY
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.


Talitha
(from Richard II, Act 4, Scene 1 – the Mirror scene)
NORTHUMBERLAND: My lord, dispatch; read o'er these articles.
KING RICHARD II: Mine eyes are full of tears, I cannot see:
And yet salt water blinds them not so much
But they can see a sort of traitors here.
Nay, if I turn mine eyes upon myself,
I find myself a traitor with the rest;
For I have given here my soul's consent
To undeck the pompous body of a king;
Made glory base and sovereignty a slave,
Proud majesty a subject, state a peasant.
NORTHUMBERLAND: My lord,--
KING RICHARD II: No lord of thine, thou haught insulting man,
Nor no man's lord; I have no name, no title,
No, not that name was given me at the font,
But 'tis usurp'd: alack the heavy day,
That I have worn so many winters out,
And know not now what name to call myself!
O that I were a mockery king of snow,
Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke,
To melt myself away in water-drops!
Good king, great king, and yet not greatly good,
An if my word be sterling yet in England,
Let it command a mirror hither straight,
That it may show me what a face I have,
Since it is bankrupt of his majesty.
HENRY BOLINGBROKE: Go some of you and fetch a looking-glass.
[Exit an attendant]
NORTHUMBERLAND: Read o'er this paper while the glass doth come.
KING RICHARD II: Fiend, thou torment'st me ere I come to hell!
HENRY BOLINGBROKE: Urge it no more, my Lord Northumberland.
NORTHUMBERLAND: The commons will not then be satisfied.
KING RICHARD II: They shall be satisfied: I'll read enough,
When I do see the very book indeed
Where all my sins are writ, and that's myself.

[Re-enter Attendant, with a glass]

Give me the glass, and therein will I read.
No deeper wrinkles yet? hath sorrow struck
So many blows upon this face of mine,
And made no deeper wounds? O flattering glass,
Like to my followers in prosperity,
Thou dost beguile me! Was this face the face
That every day under his household roof
Did keep ten thousand men? was this the face
That, like the sun, did make beholders wink?
Was this the face that faced so many follies,
And was at last out-faced by Bolingbroke?
A brittle glory shineth in this face:
As brittle as the glory is the face;

[Dashes the glass against the ground]

For there it is, crack'd in a hundred shivers.
Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport,
How soon my sorrow hath destroy'd my face.

HENRY BOLINGBROKE: The shadow of your sorrow hath destroy'd
The shadow or your face.

KING RICHARD II: Say that again.
The shadow of my sorrow! ha! let's see:
'Tis very true, my grief lies all within;
And these external manners of laments
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells with silence in the tortured soul;
There lies the substance: and I thank thee, king,
For thy great bounty, that not only givest
Me cause to wail but teachest me the way
How to lament the cause. I'll beg one boon,
And then be gone and trouble you no more.
Shall I obtain it?


Shoba
(from Henry V, Act 3, Scene 4)
KATHARINE
Alice, tu as ete en Angleterre, et tu parles bien le langage.
ALICE
Un peu, madame.
KATHARINE
Je te prie, m'enseignez: il faut que j'apprenne a
parler. Comment appelez-vous la main en Anglois?
ALICE
La main? elle est appelee de hand.
KATHARINE
De hand. Et les doigts?
ALICE
Les doigts? ma foi, j'oublie les doigts; mais je me
souviendrai. Les doigts? je pense qu'ils sont
appeles de fingres; oui, de fingres.
KATHARINE
La main, de hand; les doigts, de fingres. Je pense
que je suis le bon ecolier; j'ai gagne deux mots
d'Anglois vitement. Comment appelez-vous les ongles?
ALICE
Les ongles? nous les appelons de nails.
KATHARINE
De nails. Ecoutez; dites-moi, si je parle bien: de
hand, de fingres, et de nails.
ALICE
C'est bien dit, madame; il est fort bon Anglois.
KATHARINE
Dites-moi l'Anglois pour le bras.
ALICE
De arm, madame.
KATHARINE
Et le coude?
ALICE
De elbow.
KATHARINE
De elbow. Je m'en fais la repetition de tous les
mots que vous m'avez appris des a present.
ALICE
Il est trop difficile, madame, comme je pense.
KATHARINE
Excusez-moi, Alice; ecoutez: de hand, de fingres,
de nails, de arma, de bilbow.
ALICE
De elbow, madame.
KATHARINE
O Seigneur Dieu, je m'en oublie! de elbow. Comment
appelez-vous le col?
ALICE
De neck, madame.
KATHARINE
De nick. Et le menton?
ALICE
De chin.
KATHARINE
De sin. Le col, de nick; de menton, de sin.
ALICE
Oui. Sauf votre honneur, en verite, vous prononcez
les mots aussi droit que les natifs d'Angleterre.
KATHARINE
Je ne doute point d'apprendre, par la grace de Dieu,
et en peu de temps.
ALICE
N'avez vous pas deja oublie ce que je vous ai enseigne?
KATHARINE
Non, je reciterai a vous promptement: de hand, de
fingres, de mails--
ALICE
De nails, madame.
KATHARINE
De nails, de arm, de ilbow.
ALICE
Sauf votre honneur, de elbow.
KATHARINE
Ainsi dis-je; de elbow, de nick, et de sin. Comment
appelez-vous le pied et la robe?
ALICE
De foot, madame; et de coun.
KATHARINE
De foot et de coun! O Seigneur Dieu! ce sont mots
de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique, et
non pour les dames d'honneur d'user: je ne voudrais
prononcer ces mots devant les seigneurs de France
pour tout le monde. Foh! le foot et le coun!
Neanmoins, je reciterai une autre fois ma lecon
ensemble: de hand, de fingres, de nails, de arm, de
elbow, de nick, de sin, de foot, de coun.
ALICE
Excellent, madame!
KATHARINE
C'est assez pour une fois: allons-nous a diner.
Exeunt

Indira
1. (from Othello, Act 5, Scene 2)
OTHELLO
Soft you; a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know't.
No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice: then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought
Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gum. Set you down this;
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him, thus.

Stabs himself

2.
Carrion Comfort 
a sonnet BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; 
Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man 
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; 
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be. 
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me 
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan 
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan, 
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee? 

   Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. 
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, 
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer. 
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród 
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year 
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God. 


Thommo
SONNET 18 (sung)
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? 
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date: 
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; 
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st; 
   So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. 


Kavita
SONNET 27
Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head, 
To work my mind, when body's work's expired:
For then my thoughts (from far where I abide) 
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee, 
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide, 
Looking on darkness which the blind do see: 
Save that my soul's imaginary sight 
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night, 
Makes black night beauteous and her old face new.
   Lo, thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind,
   For thee, and for myself, no quiet find. 

SONNET 104
To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were, when first your eye I ey'd,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold
Have from the forests shook three summers' pride, 
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn'd 
In process of the seasons have I seen, 
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah! yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand,
Steal from his figure and no pace perceiv'd;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion and mine eye may be deceiv'd:
   For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred;
   Ere you were born, was beauty's summer dead. 


Joe
SONNET 138
When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies, 
That she might think me some untutor'd youth, 
Unlearned in the world's false subtleties. 
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young, 
Although she knows my days are past the best, 
Simply I credit her false speaking tongue: 
On both sides thus is simple truth suppress'd. 
But wherefore says she not she is unjust? 
And wherefore say not I that I am old? 
O, love's best habit is in seeming trust, 
And age in love loves not to have years told: 
   Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
   And in our faults by lies we flatter'd be.

SONNET 147
My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,
At random from the truth vainly express'd;
For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

SONNET 71 — version for Bobby
No longer mourn for me when I am dead;
My life was neither long nor brief, but stopped
One morning when I lost the morbid dread
Of dying all at once as body dropped.
The joys of life were wrenched away from me,
No more the court of sport or literature
Remained to warm the heart or hear the plea,
My friends, family, lost in misadventure. 
No longer mourn – I’m on the other side
My sight is clear, I’ll see God face-to-face
You too will see me soon, judge not nor chide,
My mind is calm, I go to claim my Grace.
   To those who ask what does it mean at last,
   Remember me, your friend, keen not, hold fast.


Hemjit
(from The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1)
PORTIA
The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there.


KumKum
SONNET 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds 
Admit impediments. Love is not love 
Which alters when it alteration finds, 
Or bends with the remover to remove. 
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark 
That looks on tempests and is never shaken; 
It is the star to every wand'ring bark, 
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. 
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 
Within his bending sickle's compass come; 
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, 
But bears it out even to the edge of doom. 
   If this be error and upon me prov'd, 
   I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.


SONNET 130
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks; 
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
   And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
   As any she belied with false compare. 


Priya
(from Henry V, Act 4, Scene 1)
KING HENRY
Upon the king! let us our lives, our souls,
Our debts, our careful wives,
Our children and our sins lay on the king!
We must bear all. O hard condition,
Twin-born with greatness, subject to the breath
Of every fool, whose sense no more can feel
But his own wringing! What infinite heart's-ease
Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy!
And what have kings, that privates have not too,
Save ceremony, save general ceremony?
And what art thou, thou idle ceremony?
What kind of god art thou, that suffer'st more
Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?
What are thy rents? what are thy comings in?
O ceremony, show me but thy worth!
What is thy soul of adoration?
Art thou aught else but place, degree and form,
Creating awe and fear in other men?
Wherein thou art less happy being fear'd
Than they in fearing.
What drink'st thou oft, instead of homage sweet,
But poison'd flattery? O, be sick, great greatness,
And bid thy ceremony give thee cure!
Think'st thou the fiery fever will go out
With titles blown from adulation?
Will it give place to flexure and low bending?
Canst thou, when thou command'st the beggar's knee,
Command the health of it? No, thou proud dream,
That play'st so subtly with a king's repose;
I am a king that find thee, and I know
'Tis not the balm, the sceptre and the ball,
The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,
The intertissued robe of gold and pearl,
The farced title running 'fore the king,
The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp
That beats upon the high shore of this world,
No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,
Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave,
Who with a body fill'd and vacant mind
Gets him to rest, cramm'd with distressful bread;
Never sees horrid night, the child of hell,
But, like a lackey, from the rise to set
Sweats in the eye of Phoebus and all night
Sleeps in Elysium; next day after dawn,
Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse,
And follows so the ever-running year,
With profitable labour, to his grave:
And, but for ceremony, such a wretch,
Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep,
Had the fore-hand and vantage of a king.
The slave, a member of the country's peace,
Enjoys it; but in gross brain little wots
What watch the king keeps to maintain the peace,

Whose hours the peasant best advantages.