Quick nameless update

So, I went to see The Tempest on Friday. The play takes place simultaneously over two days and over three hours, and over the course of the play, Miranda and Ferdinand meet and fall in love. Miranda has never seen a man before. Whilst Ferdinand admits that there were other women he was attracted to before Miranda (like Romeo before Juliet). And there is no indication whatsoever in this comedy to say that Shakespeare is intending the audience to disapprove of this relationship. It's treated pretty much entirely positively. I won't go into this too deeply, but I thought I'd mention it, since it pretty much reenforces the argument I made last time.

What else? Um... The leader of UKIP is a bloody moron, but that's nothing new. And I'm pretty sure that anyone who says that immigration is bad for the economy hasn't really looked into the actual economic arguments. Because um... it is really pretty clear cut.

There is a Tumblr on which I was interviewed: http://asexualistic.tumblr.com/. It has cute pictures! It was about 1AM when I did said interview, and I was kinda tired, so it's not the most coherent I've ever been, but still.

I was oing to do a full post but... I just kinda don't want to at the moment. It keeps getting all bitter and angry for no good reason. So I'll just leave it at that*.

*Oh, and I'll include this footnote. Because otherwise it's not really a proper post.

Time's out of joint

Let’s talk about Shakespeare. There are a lot of crazy theories about the man. Some people think he was the Earl of Oxford, for example. That’s utterly ridiculous. Obviously, he was a time traveller.

OK, that might sound a little silly. But it’s a lot less silly than you might think compared to a lot of the other theories. What evidence is there that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare? Two centuries after his death, people decided that someone middle class couldn’t possibly have written something so brilliant. So they’d have to find a much nicer, more upper class, person, who could have done it, due to their superior breeding. That’s it, really. On the other hand, there’s the fact that there are mistakes specifically traceable to things in Shakespeare’s own background (mistakes which, say, the Earl of Oxford, would never have made), the fact that the man was actually pretty well educated (he was pretty much middle class), we know more about the man’s life than about most other writers from the time, the fact that the man co-wrote several plays without, apparently, managing to tip anyone off that he wasn’t what he said he was, and the fact that he was mentioned repeatedly during his life as a genius author, and the fact that his social class was actually mentioned by his contemporaries, in case anyone thought that the ‘Shakespeare’ thingy was just a pseudonym. I could continue, but the point probably stands. If people who knew him for two decades didn’t notice that he was actually someone else, I cast doubt on the idea that it should be obvious to someone who lived more than two centuries after he died.

Given all that evidence, I don’t think it’s much more idiotic to claim that he was a time-traveller than to think that the man was any of the other idiotic options we’ve been given about him. But there is actually some evidence for the man being a time-traveller. Namely, he had no understanding whatsoever of the concept of time. The obvious example here is Hamlet – the conversation between Hamlet and his father’s ghost. During this, they walk a little way along the castle walls, and manage to have a conversation of a little under seven hundred words. Why does this matter? Because it apparently takes them about six hours. The ghost arrives around midnight, and leaves with the dawn. Clearly, the man had no understanding of time on the micro level.

So what about the macro level, then? Well, here I’m going to look at Othello. Mostly, because it’s a play I know pretty well. In Othello, one of the reasons some people have condemned Othello is because of how incredibly fast Othello turns from love of his wife to utter loathing of her. If, they say, he is so quick to condemn his love. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, after all. But at the same time, a lot of Othello works because there’s never really any chance to just sit down and think things through. Or for Othello and Desdemona just to sit down and talk about things. Othello takes place over a few days, right? Act one must take place over the course of a single day, then they leave straight away, the festival in act two has to start the same day they arrive, by act three the day after that, Othello wants Cassio dead within three days, and it really seems that the play takes place over less than a week. Except that in that time, Cassio apparently starts a relationship with Bianca, it becomes serious, he leaves her for a week, and she gets angry with him. So that’s about two weeks. At least. This timeline also fits a lot better with the communications between Othello and Ludovico than the idea of a play of less than a week does – at this time, it took some time to travel between Venice and Cyprus, and Shakespeare doesn’t seem to have much truck with this idea. Almost as though he were  from a time when it didn’t take so long.

OK, no, I don’t really believe that Shakespere was a time traveller. So what is my point? Well, there’s a rather popular little theory that Romeo and Juliet isn’t a love story because of the timeline. They’re too hasty, they fall in love too fast, it would never have lasted, blah, blah. You might be able to guess what I think about that idea. I don’t think Shakespeare really subscribed to the notion that falling in love takes time. In The Taming of the Shrew, the relationship between Bianca and Lucentio is hardly extended, and on Lucentio’s side falling in love based entirely on appearance is apparently entirely fine, and encounters no real problems whatsoever. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, within four days, all the love problems get sorted out, and Demetrius falls in love with someone couldn’t stand just a few days before. Also, the cycle of the moon apparently takes about two days or so. So that’s another bit of time he was a little confused about. Although if we can take a week of Shakespeare to be actually a couple of months, that could actually explain quite a lot. I could go on thinking of examples, but I think I’ve made my point. The evidence is that Shakespeare didn’t really see time spent getting to know one another. Midsummer Night’s Dream is a pretty good parallel here, where the loving couple is completely fine, and, really, Demetrius should just stop being so stubborn, and fall in love with the person who loves him back, rather than pursuing the one who doesn’t (as with how Paris shouldn’t be pursuing Juliet, and how Romeo should give up on Rosaline).

The fact is, Shakespeare was not, I think, writing to be analysed. He was writing plays to be watched – and this is not to say that his plays are in any way shallow, or that there aren’t deep things in them, or that they shouldn’t be analysed. The point is, if there’s a conflict between what you feel  one of his plays is about when you’re watching it, and what you conclude it must’ve been about when you study it later, you should actually probably be trusting the play. Shakespeare’s was, really, quite good at what he did, and with the exception of values dissonance like in Taming of the Shrew, if he creates an emotion, I think it’s probably because he wants to.

And I don’t think he was really worried about the timeline, either. Shakespeare is, in my judgement, a writer. He is not a historian of the fictional. The story is a lot more important than sitting down and thinking ‘does this make logical sense?’. I’ll probably talk about this more if/when I get to Lord Dunsany*, but the events of the play feel true, and they make for a truly engaging and enjoyable play. They don’t have to be representations of things which could actually happen.

*Quickly, though, if you have time, you should read The King of Elfland’s Daughter. It is a very good book, and it’s really not too long. This has been my mandatory footnote for this post.