(no subject)

[proximoception]

22. Richard II
23. Selected Poems of Apollinaire, tr. Oliver Bernard
24. Selections from Paroles, Prevert/Ferlinghetti
25. Twenty Prose Poems, Baudelaire/Hamburger

Just being silly now - latter three are among the shortest books I own. There's a character in one of the movies titled Kicking and Screaming who vows to read all the great short classics of Western literature.

Didn't like Richard 2 much this time till his jailhouse speech, which is phenomenal. I'm reading as a fan and not critic these days, but I guess the main point of the play is that all these people talk pretty but everyone's a dick. You sort of have to wipe all the divine right of kings stuff away first, which Shakespeare is obliged to go on about but of course doesn't buy in the slightest - though underneath that the king's still sacred, his welfare still reflected in that of the nation, in the pragmatic sense that keeping your bad legitimate king will cause less violence and confusion than throwing him out. Which follows from everyone being a dick: if superstition or inertia or whatever it is that unites everyone under a king can keep the state comparatively stable, then good. If not all the dicks come out. Which may be a sound assessment of an early modern monarchy, but that isn't a topic I'm very invested in. And that's really all I got out of this one, past light amusement. Until the speech, where Shakespeare's almost as on as he is in Mercutio's or Theseus'.

I did also like "ay no no ay" punning on "I know no I" - and of course you can't help spotting all the setting up being done for the Henry & Hal plays, and yes, anticipations of Lear abound all through. It isn't bad, I'm just missing whatever I once saw in it - maybe I liked the rhymes back then. I think in general I don't feel verse as strongly as I once did, though I'm probably more aware of what it's doing. One of those Wordsworthian trade-offs that you can't help and that aren't worth it.

[Further explanation of disappointment: going back to add some tags to things, I found in an early entry I list as my favorite Shakespeare plays Othello, Love's Labor's Lost, A Winter's Tale, Richard 2, Romeo & Juliet and Hamlet. Definitely not on there now. The rest shall keep as they are.]

Comments

[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

I don't know -- I find myself thinking back to Richard II a lot. I suppose I always find monarchy topical because, really, a vast swathe of people still really love the idea of an aristocracy, and the whole edifice of rights-based ethics is a direct descendant.

Or: what for Shakespeare was a pretty specific anxiety -- what happens after Bess snuffs it? -- translates readily, for me, into more general anxiety about the abuse-prone social necessity of unearned respect.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I can buy that, if you're talking about not human but property rights (?). But there's a lot of more direct treatments of the revolution problem, like Shakespeare's own Julius Caesar which I love dearly. You've convinced me this play's a lead-up to that one - but unfortunately here the point is pretty simple and delivered in slow motion. Whereas JC dives amazingly deftly into the details of why we keep not getting this right.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I went into the rights-based issue in JC in an old paper:

http://proximoception.livejournal.com/179456.html