Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley November 29th 2022

 Signed First Edition of novel published by Chatto & Windus, London, 1923

The selector of the novel, KumKum, was guided by a comment of Shashi Tharoor, the notable Indian parliamentarian, man of letters, diplomat, and former Under Secretary General of the United Nations. It seems even his wide education had not prepared him to read Antic Hay; he found it took him considerable attention and work in the library to track down the numerous allusions and references in the book to all things cultural  from books to art, and music to philosophy. He learned a lot from the furniture of Aldous Huxley’s mind and it impelled him to have as catholic an interest as Aldous Huxley in everything that belongs to the culture of humankind.

Furthermore, Priya had asked KumKum to select a ‘difficult’ book. In consequence KRG readers spent a great deal of time (those few who had the stamina) to pursue the activities of a motley cast of Londoners going about their life, loves, and obsessive activities in 1920s London. It belongs to novels of the genre that treat life in London – we have read another London novel – by Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway:
https://kochiread.blogspot.com/2021/02/virginia-woolf-mrs-dalloway-jan-29-2021.html

There is a web site www.LondonFictions.com that considers more than 80 novels celebrating London and the unique essence essence of that city of such pre-eminence in English literature. Here is the particular article dealing with Antic Hay:
https://www.londonfictions.com/aldous-huxley-antic-hay.html

It is a post-World War I London in which people have lost their moorings and the comfortable cultural pillars of orthodoxy that supported an untroubled Victorian civilisation. Here you see painters jostling with critics, sculptors trying to find space for their art in a world where the solidity of stone and marble have dissolved; social climbers making out with aspiring inventors; brilliant conversations between bespoke tailors and their exalted customers; dancehalls buzzing with the latest imported jazz bands to the music of which flighty young women in unconventional dress perform gyrations; men and women circumambulating the city aimlessly; and love, mostly of the kind where Cupid’s arrow misses the mark.

The cultural education Shashi Tharoor referred to is found in the numerous fragments of untranslated French, Italian, Latin, and German quotes. Pursuing them to their sources and meanings, and relating them to the context for the novel, affords the leisured reader some satisfaction that shee is now among the initiated. If you are a fan of opera it’s joy to come across Don Juan’s seductive thrust from the famous aria in Mozart’s Don Giovanni:

Là ci darem la mano,
Là mi dirai di sì.
Vedi, non è lontano;
Partiam, ben mio, da qui.

(There you will give me your hand,
There you will tell me 'yes’.
You see, it is not far,
Let's leave, my beloved.)

Zerlina answers she’d like to respond to the invitation, but can’t; her heart trembles. Mrs. Viveash (the Zerlina of the moment) answers to Gumbril (who fancies himself as Don Juan), with a bar from the opera:

Felice, è ver, sarei, (True, I could be happy.). 

Evocations of music abound and this one yields beauty when followed to its source, and the reader can listen from minute 2:50 onwards
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJnJjpMdT3Y

 

Don Giovanni – Come my beloved says Don Juan to Zerlina

The novel’s title and the epigraph that stands at the front of the book, are taken from the play Edward II by Christopher Marlowe:

My men like satyrs grazing on the lawns
Shall with their goat-feet dance the antic hay

There is a colourful scene in a jazz club showing the repetitive, frenetic movement in Chapter 15:

Scene from Ch 15: Theodore and Myra are dancing at a revue or cabaret club to a jazz band where the 'blackamoors' are playing jazz at a dancing club

Huxley paints a wonderful picture of the dance hall proceedings:

“What’s he to Hecuba?” The grinning blackamoors repeated the question, reiterated the answer on a tone of frightful unhappiness. The saxophone warbled on the verge of anguish. The couples revolved, marked time, stepped and stepped with an habitual precision, as though performing some ancient and profoundly significant rite. Some were in fancy dress, for this was a gala night at the cabaret. Young women disguised as callipygous Florentine pages, blue-breeched Gondoliers, black-breeched Toreadors circulated, moon-like, round the hall, clasped sometimes in the arms of Arabs, or white clowns, or more often of untravestied partners.

 Interesting that ‘blackamoors’ was the term in vogue at the time in London for Africans.

 One of the items from which Huxley derives much satire is the epiphany that descends on Gumbril when he thinks up inflatable rubber inserts as a way of safeguarding clients when they fall. Gumbril discusses the invention with his tailor Bojanus and decides to quit his day job, in order to develop, advertise, and sell his revolutionary pneumatic ‘Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes.’ Here is a modern fashion designer’s version, although he acknowledges no debt to Gumbril or Huxley in this 1923 novel:

Inflatable trousers – designer Harikrishnan’s methodology for inflatables was adopted from ‘morphing’, the traditional method of distorting photographs by assembling fragments of the same subject taken at different perspectives

Antic Hay turns out to be a comic dance that weaves the lives of various people living lives of no great purpose or ambition (leaving aside Gumbril and his inflatable trousers). Huxley explained his true intentions in a letter,

I will only point out that it is a book written by a member of what I may call the war-generation for others of his kind; and that it is intended to reflect – fantastically, of course, but none the less faithfully – the life and opinions of an age which has seen the violent disruption of almost all the standards, conventions and values current in the previous epoch.

Women Poets Poetry Session - October 21, 2022

Sea Poppies - The title of the poem by Hilda Dolittle

The October session of the Kochi Reading group was dedicated to women poets. A wide range of women poets were featured – we had two Malayalam poets, Sugatha Kumari and Balamani Amma, in translation; the Kannada writer Vaidehi also in translation; Warda Yassin, a British born Somali poet; Forugh Farrokhzad from Iran, Hilda Dolittle and Mary Oliver from USA and Meg Cox from UK. All the poets, except Mary Oliver, were new to the KRG readers. This opens up new vistas for those of us who enjoy reading poetry.

The reading year has reached its last stretch with only the next session in November for the novel Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley and the December session on humorous poems to kick start the Christmas celebrations. This last is the most anticipated session for the merriment it affords, not only through the poems, but by the fancy costumes and makeup readers wear for the occasion. This time hopefully we can all meet physically, instead of on Zoom. The Zoom platform has been a boon which allowed KRG to meet regularly during the almost three years of the Covid-19 pandemic; but the physical sessions we used to have at Yacht club  provided an intimacy that enhanced the literary zest. All of us will be happy to get back to regular meetings there, hopefully in 2023.

It is that time of year when we select the six novels for the coming year, so everyone is invited to put on their thinking caps on and select a great list. 

The women poets session was the first since Kumkum and Joe moved into their  beautiful apartment at DLF Riverside. Fort Kochi is poorer without these two lovely people, but Kumkum says she will be visiting often as she misses her house and the sea. We too miss the pictures of the sunset that Kumkum used to sends us on WhatsApp.

We missed three members at this session – Thomo, Geetha and Pamela. Pamela is visiting her daughters to discharge grandmother duties to welcome two beautiful angels, one in the US, and the other in Norway. But we hope to have her back with us soon.

Thomo and Geetha have set out on a Bharat Darshan in their Tata Nexon EV and will be away for sometime. They send us regular updates of their travels and we keep in touch through the marvels of modern technology. You can follow Thomo and his adventures on his Facebook handle @Thomas Chacko. As I write this, they have reached Hisar in Haryana.

Thomo and Geetha setting out from Ernakulam on their trip

Thomo at Kanyakumari – starting point of his Bharat Darshan; 

the Vivekananda Rock Memorial and Thiruvalluvar Statue are in the background.

Our resident poet, Joe penned these few lines in honour of our intrepid travellers: 

Bon Voyage to Thomo and Geetha

Like Shankaracharya

From Kalady to Kashmir 

Venture Thomo and Geetha

From Kanyakumari to Umling La without fear,

Part pilgrimage, part tourism,

Part dare, part adventure,

Plotting their route by an algorithm,

Through EV charging points well-measured,

Impelled by an avid quest,

To establish new records

For distance, time, height and the rest,

Traversing modern highways forwards

Even to ancient roads,

Filling their eager hearts

With the Discovery of India ! 

On the Beach by Nevil Shute Sep 22, 2022

 

The cover of the book owned by Saras’ father

The Kochi Reading Group's book selection for September was the apocalyptic novel On The Beach by Nevil Shute. Published in 1957, the novel presents a group of people in Melbourne waiting for a deadly radiation to reach them from the Northern Hemisphere. Two movies were made based on the book, one in 1959 directed by Stanley Kramer starring Gregory Peck as the Commander of the US submarine, Dwight Towers, and Ava Gardner as Moira Davidsson, the love interest. Again filmed in 2000 with the date of the action changed to 2006.

The book evoked strong feelings in all KRG members. KumKum called it “boring” and complained initially to Priya and Thommo about their book selection – though to be fair to her, she felt the book became interesting as she read on. There was also  vehement criticism of the book by Joe especially pertaining to the technical aspects of the command and control of nuclear weapons. When you read Joe's commentary on his reading selection, you will get a very succinct understanding of why such a situation is unlikely to happen in this present time. The rest of the group fell somewhere in between, where many felt that the scenario was quite possible and wondered about the eerie coincidence of the Russia-Ukaraine war going on right now and the similarities with the Covid Pandemic in 2020.

The book was first published as a four-part serial in the Sunday Graphic in April 1957. The term “on the beach” is a Royal Navy term meaning "“retired from service.”

The title also refers to T. S. Elliot's poem The Hollow Men, which includes the lines:

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river.

Later printings of the novel included the above lines of Eliot's poem along with the closing lines on the title page under the author's name 

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Thomo in his introduction of the author said that while he was reading the book he happened to listen to Carl Sagan, the famous cosmologist, who said the same thing: that in the event of a nuclear catastrophe, the world would not come to an end, we would die but the world would carry on as before. Life as we know it would disappear. Priya felt that the author was trying to caution people.

Poster of the 1959 film starring Gregory Peck as Captain Dwight and Ava Gardner as Moira

Thomo and Geetha saw the 2000 movie based on the book and said that it was set in a later time than the 1961 in the book. In the 2000 movie, scientist John Osborne crashes his Ferrari to end his life, differing significantly from the book where dies of carbon monoxide poisoning, starting his car and sitting in the closed garage. Thomo felt that if he had made the movie, he would have shown Osborne crashing his car in the race, which he felt was an appropriate way to die for a race-car enthusiast.

                      Poster of the film made in 2000

Romantic Poetry Session – August 18, 2022

Amelia Opie painted by her husband John Opie

The Romantic Poetry session is one that all KRG members look forward to, for it is a perfect time in Kerala to read poetry with a cup of tea or have hot pakoras with coffee – your favourite romantic poet is to hand and the rain is pattering outside.

All the big names of the Romantic Period – Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, Southey, Byron and Blake – were selected. Shobha chose to spring a surprise on us with Polish poet Adam Mickiewisz, reciting excerpts from his epic poem Pan Tadeusz, a sort of a Polish Romeo and Juliet story about two warring families. The portion Shobha read was a description of the breakfast laid out in the Soplica household. The description had the KRG members in splits and a few stomachs were rumbling and the delights being described! The epic, which is compulsory reading in Polish schools has been made into film twice – in 1928 and 1999.

Pan Tadeusz, the1999 film

Another surprise was Priya’s selection of The Orphan Boy’s Tale by Amelia Opie, née Alderson, a poet and radical novelist who was a staunch abolitionist in Norwich, England. She has not been read before in KRG and was a welcome change.

How can we have a poetry session without Thommo’s songs! He chose Thomas More’s The Minstrel Boy, sung to the tune of an old Irish melody. Since Moore was an Irish poet and a lyricist of the Romantic period, it was most appropriate.

The opening bars of 'The Minstrel Boy', as found in the Gibson-Massie collection of the Irish Melodies at Queen's University Belfast

Joe read to us excerpts from John Keats letters where he sets out his philosophy about poetry. With Kumkum, you can be sure it would be John Keats; Devika and Pamela also chose Keats, making him the most popular poet of the session. 

This session of KRG poetry reading covered a wide range – of poetry, song and letters, of five of the “big six” among the male romantic poets, a female poet as well as a Polish poet, making it a very interesting evening.

Pre-Birthday Celebration visit to our Grande Dame KumKum by Shobha and Arundhaty on August 13th

How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn July 21, 2022

 

How Green Was My Valley, first edition cover 1939

How Green Was My Valley (HGWMV) was quite a phenomenon as a novel in 1939, and later as a film directed by John Ford in 1941. The novel kept the author, Richard Llewellyn, in clover. He who once worked as a dishwasher in Claridges Hotel, later lived in a suite at the same hotel after his commercial success.

He claimed to be Welsh, a miner’s son, but inquiry has shown he was born in London to an innkeeper and had no first-hand experience of the life of coal miners. His real name was Vivian Lloyd. What knowledge he had of Welsh miners came from a family who ran a bookshop in London. Their three sons would regale Llewellyn with stories of their father's experiences in a Welsh coal mine. More remarkable even is the fact that it was written in India while the author was stationed there with the British military just before WWII.

Richard Llewellyn did his research, as novelists are meant to do. These days critics look askance at authors or musicians appropriating from cultures other than their own. But this may be shortchanging the imaginative artist who can be from anywhere, but with sufficient gathering of knowledge and study can enter into a different time, a different culture and dwell so long in imagination there that it becomes their own. 

The village highlighted in How Green Was My Valley may have been based on Gilfach Goch in southern Wales

Th novel does romanticise the miserable lives which real miners led in those times in the pits, but that is an author’s prerogative to spin a story with imaginative recreation. The factual errors and the varnishing that the author wilfully wrote to make the novel more appealing is documented in this article in The Guardian. 

Clearly the story as told attracted the public even if the Welsh miners did not recognise themselves in the novel. It not only charmed the readers who have kept it in print, but it also became a multiple Oscar winning film in 1941. The novel has been translated into scores of languages. The film starred Maureen O'Hara (as Angharad) and a young Roddy McDowell as Huw, and was filmed in Malibu, California. It won six Oscars and was adapted twice for BBC television. A musical was also made.

Maureen O'Hara as Angharad, Walter Pidgeon as the pastor, Mr. Gruffydd

In the modern context of Climate Change, coal is the worst fossil fuel that causes global warming. Where it once was the major source of power generation in UK, new policies such as European Union’s directives for clean air have succeeded in limiting coal to a few percent in terms of power generation in UK. It is as good as dead there although it thrives in markets like India where the percentage of power generation from coal was ~80% in 2021, in China ~64%, and in the United States ~20%.

A brooch, set with a garnet, on a lover's knot of gold – the present that Huw gave Bron

Some of the readers noted the bucolic scenes of nature painted in words by Richard Llewellyn. They make good reading. But all the romances in the novel are ill-fated and presage the unhappy ending. Three sequels followed but none had the success of HGWMV. 

Several of the readers were familiar with the novel from their youth, but reading it again decades later made the poignancy of the story and the complexity of the inner lives of the characters stand out. There was humour too and everyone enjoyed the readings and discussions … many thanks to Shobha and Zakia who selected the novel.

Dai Bando and Cyfartha Lewis are appointed to teach Huw how to box

Poetry Session – June 30, 2022

Nabaneeta Dev Sen

Two of the poets presented were in translation, one from Bangla and the other from French. The Bangla poet Nabaneeta Dev Sen who wrote a small number of her poems in English, left a useful guide for translators in her essay Translating Between Cultures: Translation and Its Discontents. Her questions to guide translators were these:

– Should one prioritise the content or the spirit of the poem?
– Should the translation remain faithful to the text, or is a freer version required?
– How should the quirks of an author’s unconventional syntax be rendered into the target language?
– What to do with cultural and linguistic details like rituals, gestures, dialectal colloquialisms and idioms?
– Should footnotes be used to explain allusions to history, mythology, and prior literature?
– If the original poem has a formal structure such as meter and rhyme, is it necessary to retain that and if so, at what cost?
– Should divisions such as line breaks and stanzas be followed?

The ideal is that translations should not read as translations, but as “poems, a new voice perfect in their own right, transcending the barriers …” (Wendy Doniger)

 While Nabaneeta Dev Sen had the close collaboration of her daughter to create the translations, in Victor Hugo’s case (poem A Sunset chosen by Zakia from the collection Feuilles d'Automne or Leaves of Autumn), the translator was the original poet and mystic, Francis Thompson, well-known for his poem The Hound of Heaven:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears

 We had two Welsh poets represented, Alun Lewis the war poet who wrote two small poetry collections and two short books of prose which have stood the test of time. He was dead at 28 in a brutal war he despised but which he joined, ignoring a long history of mental depression and a strong pacifist bent.  He said: “I’m not going to kill. Be killed perhaps, instead.”

 Geetha’s choice was an eloquent rendering of Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas, the more famous hard-drinking poet of Wales who was considered too Welsh to be English in England, and had the simultaneous misfortune of being too English for the Welsh. Everybody remembers him for his villanelle Do not go gentle into that good night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

To reciprocate Joe’s choice of a Bangla poet, KumKum chose a Malayali poet, though one who wrote all his poems in English, having been brought up outside Kerala. Apart from writing poems, the best experience in his life was getting married to a wonderful doctor, Kavery Nambisan, from Kodagu (Coorg) who is a literary person, in addition to spending a life of service as a doctor in remote areas.

Kavery Nambisan who works in rural hospitals has written seven books novels and children's books

Thomo was true to form in choosing a lyricist and song-writer, the front man of the Led Zeppelin rock band. He sang for us one of the famous numbers, Stairway to Heaven, which delighted everyone. But having to go off on a rescue mission to a wedding, he could not be present. Readers must be thankful he sent a recording which is permanently theirs to listen to from a link below within this blog post.

Arundhaty chose a poet, Suniti Namjoshi, who is in the forefront of the feminist movement, but began her professional life as an officer in the Indian Administrative Service before pursuing higher studies abroad. She wrote poems and stories and became a noted academic in Canada, USA and UK. The poem chosen was somewhat dark:

… a poet lives
like any other creature, talks perhaps
more than is normal, her doom no brighter,
nor her death less dismal than any other.

We had Devika reciting an elegy for Africa (a continent of countries she loves) by one of its famous sons from Sierra Leone who overcame racism and prejudice to contribute at the highest level of academia, medical science and poetry – Davidson Nicol. Africa, he describes, as a continent for loving:

… the hibiscus blooms in shameless scarlet
and the bougainvillea in mauve passion
entwines itself around strong branches
the palm trees stand like tall proud moral women
shaking their plaited locks against the
cool suggestive evening breeze;

Shoba recited an astrophysical poem by Marie Howe, inspired by black holes and the singularity (infinity) Einstein found as one possible solution to his famous equations of Gravitation in 1916. Black holes were made popular by Stephen Hawking (to whom the poem is dedicated), although it was the physicist John Wheeler who first used the term in 1967. The poem is titled Singularity and written in the form of an interior monologue, reflecting on the origin of the universe and humans.

Singularity by Marie Howe

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas - 26 May, 2022

Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, original edition 1845 in 6 volumes

Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo) was published in serial fashion in the Journal des Débats starting in 1844 and was published in book form in 1846. Dumas cunningly devised the ending of each chapter so the readers would wait captivated, in expectation of what would happen next week in the adventures. 

The Count of Monte Cristo – First English edition, 1846

The Count of Monte Cristo was translated into all modern languages and has never been out of print. More than thirty films have appeared based on it. Two may be mentioned, the first starring Richard Chamberlain in 1975 is fairly faithful to the book (1h 41m):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=TUCk9jK-xsU

Richard Chamberlain as The Count of Monte Cristo and Kate Nelligan as Mercédès in the 1975 film.

The second is much longer version which appeared on TV in France as a series, featuring the formidable French actor, Gérard Depardieu starring in a 6-hour version of the unabridged novel in French with English subtitles :

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rnAWw7MAN3U

Gérard Depardieu as Edmond Dantès and Ornella Muti as Mercédès in the French TV mini-series.

This issue of Classic Comics, published in March 1942, was No. 3 in the series, cost a mere 10 cents, and featured an adaption of The Count of Monte Cristo. The cover art was by Ray Ramsey

The particular abridged translation chosen was a great success, both for its prose style, and it’s hewing to the essential storyline without distractions. 

                                              

The Count of Monte Cristo (abridged), cover of the Château d'If, the prison where Edmond Dantès was held captive – with an Introduction by Luc Sante.

The prison is situated on the Île d’If, which is a tiny island, only three kilometres from mainland France, west of the old port of Marseille. The entire island is heavily fortified; high ramparts with gun platforms surmount the cliffs, which rise steeply from the surrounding ocean. It was built in 1524-31 on the orders of King Francis 1, apparently to defend the coastline from sea-based attacks. The isolated location and dangerous offshore currents of the château made it an ideal escape proof prison much like the island of Alcatraz in modern USA. Its use as a dumping ground for political and religious detainees soon made it one of the most feared and notorious jails in France. Over 3500 Huguenots, i.e. Protestant Christians were sent to Château d’If. This novel has made it internationally famous since 1844. Dantès makes a daring escape from the castle. In reality, no inmate is known to have made it out of the prison. The modern Château d’If maintains a roughly hewn dungeon in honour of Dantes, as a tourist attraction.

As was common practice in those days prisoners were treated differently according to their class and wealth. The poorest were placed at the bottom, up to twenty or more per cell. The wealthiest were able to pay for their own private cells higher up, with windows and a fireplace.

It is evident why this novel remains a best-seller in its many translations after almost 200 years: it provides adventure, a gripping storyline, and a great variety of characters and scenes from different regions of Europe with the local flavour imparted well. Something dramatic is always happening. It has all the ingredients for success: a mysterious hero with superhuman powers; and portrayals of jealousy, cupidity, love, and revenge. 

Major characters when the story begins – Dantès, Mercédès, Caderousse, Danglars, Villefort, Fernand and the ship Pharaon (Classic Comics)

The reader will find many passages that are worthy of attentive reading, all inspired by the grand style of Alexandre Dumas; some filled with pathos, some menacing, others full of swashbuckling braggadocio, still others soft and romancing. Some of the relationships border on adoration, impossible to find in contemporary humans with their egalitarian outlook. 

Map of Monte Cristo Island and Elba, where Napoleon was imprisoned

Monte Cristo – Christ’s Mount in English – is a tiny Mediterranean island, south of Elba. Here, Dantès discovers a treasure hinted at in the instructions given by the Abbé Faria, which helps him slip into high society as a wealthy Count. 

Monte Cristo Island, viewed from the north

In real life, Dumas celebrated the success of this novel by building himself a château he named Monte Cristo, where he played host on a scale matching that of his fictional hero.

The pearls of Guzerat and the diamonds of Golconda also find mention in the novel, indicating how famously wealthy these places were!

Corsica

Corsica features as an island in the novel; Bertuccio, the servant of the Count is Corsican.

Corsica  in the seas lies 90 kms west from Tuscany in Italy and 170 kms south and east from Côte d'Azur in France. It is the most mountainous island in the Mediterranean, a veritable ‘mountain in the sea.’ It is the fourth largest island in the Mediterranean, after Sicily, Sardinia and Cyprus. Mountains comprise two thirds of the island, forming a single chain. Forests make up 20 % of the island. The total surface area is 8680 square kilometres of which 3500 is dedicated to reserve parks. It is governed by France.

In this novel, the island is thematically important as Napoleon’s birthplace. The island is supposedly, the home of the Italian blood feud known as vendetta. This theme connects the Count’s complex plot and his Corsican servant Bertuccio’s simpler vengeance.

One of the bon mots in the novel occurs when Monte Cristo addresses Maximilian, the son of his former patron, M. Morrel thus:

The friends we have lost do not repose under the ground; they are buried deep in our hearts.

The original French is more poetic:

... les amis que nous avons perdus ne reposent pas dans la terre, ils sont ensevelis dans notre cœur ...

Which deserves an appropriate couplet in English:

The friends we’ve lost live in our hearts –
They do not lie in grassy parks.

Life and Works of Shakespeare Celebrated - April 29, 2022

             

The dedication by Thomas Thorpe's of Shakespeare's Sonnets 

The reading started with plays from Shakespeare, Macbeth and The Taming of the Shrew.  Macbeth is one of the shortest and most intense plays of Shakespeare with everything to make it a dramatic thriller, from blood and murder, to ambition, insanity and war. The metaphors in the blank verse are startling and one wonders that ordinary mortals could speak in such forceful tones, that elevate into pathos and poetry. There are many throwaway lines of bird lore like this from Act 1, Scene 6:

Banquo:
This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
By his loved mansionry, that the heaven’s breath
Smells wooingly here. No jutty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle.
Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,
The air is delicate.

But the scene staged by Priya and Arundhaty has Macbeth gaping in horror at the bloody ghost of the murdered Banquo during a feast at his manor. You can see enacted at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiSISGY8Yy8

Macbeth – ‘I have a strange infirmity, which is nothing To those that know me.’ – Act 3 Scene 4

Devika took up an old favourite, The Taming of the Shrew.  Recapping the final speech when Katharina the shrew has turned into Katharina the obedient wife, Devika observed that for once Shakespeare goes against the grain of his known penchant for strong independent women. In the scene Devika chose, Katharina is instructing the other ladies on the duties of a wife in Act 5, Scene 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dnd2lpe-rW4

Katharina – ‘Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper.’

Zefirelli’s 1967 film version has yet to be surpassed. It has Richard Burton as Petruchio, Elizabeth Taylor as Katharina, Michael Hordern as Baptista, and Michael York as Lucentio.

“The world’s most celebrated movie couple in the motion picture they are made for!” was how this film was advertised. This version shows the play as funny and entertaining, the way WS probably intended. The gorgeous colour in the sets and costumes is characteristic of Zefirelli, and is seen again in his production of Romeo and Juliet. The Shakespearean verse sounds quite believable as daily conversation in the actors’ mouths. This film is a great introduction to Shakespeare for anyone who hasn't seen his plays before. It is the perfect antidote for those who have been intimidated into thinking that Shakespeare is only for experts and scholars.

The Plays are central to the legend of Shakespeare’s universality. The Sonnets, however, can vie with the Plays in their smaller compass, for they are so compressed in thought and filled with vigorous speech that they merit reading several times – not just by lovers, but all who want to learn the variety of torments a human goes through in life, quite apart from the anguish of love. The Plays are wonderful. But once you get into the Sonnets it takes on the ageless quality that Shakespeare himself attested to in Sonnet 18 when he said.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The sentiments expressed are entirely contemporary and the language too. With a little familiarity that comes from frequent reading, the language also becomes contemporary — gender, sexuality, love, self-loathing, anguish, hate and everything else find their truest chronicler in WS.

Sonnets

Shakespeare’s Sonnets are concerned with ‘love’, of course, but they also reflect upon time, change, ageing, lust, absence, infidelity and the yawning gap between the ideal and reality when it comes to love. 

Sonnets 1 to 126 seem to be addressed to a young man, and the first 17 encourage the youth to marry and father children. Then the subjects diversify. Some are erotic, while others reflect upon the anguish caused by love. 

Sonnets 127 to 152 are addressed to a woman, the so-called ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespearean legend. This woman is elusive, often tyrannous, and causes the speaker great pain and shame. The two final sonnets (Sonnets 153 and 154) focus on the classical god Cupid, and playfully detail desire and longing. 

The Sonnets were probably written, and perhaps revised, between the early 1590s and about 1605. Sonnets 128 and 144 were printed in the poetry collection called The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599. They were first printed as a sequence in 1609, with a mysterious dedication to ‘Mr. W.H.’ 

The dedication has led to intense speculation: who is ‘W.H.’? Is he the young man of the sonnets? Various candidates have been proposed, such as William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, and Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. No conclusive identification has been made, and it may never be, because the poet may not even have been writing about historical individuals, but giving free rein to his imagination, founded on his lived experience. We don’t know if Shakespeare was involved in the 1609 printing of his Sonnets, because the dedication was written by the printer, not by Shakespeare.

Shakespearean sonnets are composed of 14 lines of iambic pentameters:
da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM

and most are divided into three quatrains and a concluding couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. This sonnet form and rhyme scheme, taken together, are known as the ‘Elizabethan’ sonnet. 

Sonnets arrived in England from Italy where they had a slightly different form called Petrarchan (after Francesco Petrarca 1304 – 1374). Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516/17–1547), translated Italian sonnets into English as well as composed some of his own. Many later English writers used this sonnet form, and Shakespeare seemed to have revelled in its potential for invention. The final couplet always provides a forceful and memorable conclusion to the argument. It is strange to think of a poetic form as an argument, but that is what the sonnet is in English. For it lays out a thesis and then suddenly inverts it or subverts it in what the Italians call a volta (a change in direction or reversal) after the eighth line. Sonnet 130, for instance, builds up a picture of the speaker’s mistress as defective in all the conventional standards of beauty, but the concluding couplet remarks that, while all this is true:

And yet by heaven I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare.

For further reference see: https://www.bl.uk/works/shakespeares-sonnets

Also see: https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/an-introduction-to-shakespeares-sonnets

One of the standard references for Shakespeare’s sonnets has been written by Helen Vendler, Professor Emerita at Harvard University:
The Art of Shakespeare′s Sonnets 

https://www.amazon.in/Art-Shakespeare%E2%80%B2s-Sonnets-Paper-Belknap/dp/0674637127/

Another commentary is by Don Paterson:
Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets: A New Commentary 

https://www.amazon.in/Reading-Shakespeares-Sonnets-New-Commentary/dp/0571245056/

Here below is the link to the transcript of a short lecture on what the Sonnets tell us about Shakespeare himself. It is by the distinguished Sir Stanley Wells, general editor of the Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare, honorary president of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and former director of The Shakespeare Institute:

https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/podcasts/what-was-shakespeare-really/what-sonnets-tell-about-shakespeare/

The Sonnets have been set to music by many singers and composers. Paul Kelly has set seven of them to contemporary pop song rhythms. According to him the sonnets work naturally as lyrics. The fact that they are composed of metrical lines (each with 10 syllables), and rhymed, has many parallels with modern songs. Here he is singing Sonnet 18:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj0kGzuL-cA

Sonnet 18 as a pop song by Paul Kelly from his album ‘Seven Sonnets & A Song’.

Our two readers, Thomo and Geetha, presented Sonnets 73 and 87 in song, and readers of this blog can listen to their recorded voices below.