queerbychoice | Shakespeare's Biographies of My Ancestors

I stayed up late last night reading Shakespeare's comedy Cymbeline online, and then tonight I read the history King John. Since I'm a direct descendant of the real Cymbeline, king of the Cattuvellauni in the 1st century A.D. (provided you trust that every single baby down the entire line of descent since the 1st century was really fathered by the man the mother claimed), by way of Cymbeline's younger son Arviragus (also a character in Cymbeline - an extremely boring character, since his entire character development consists solely in being absolutely perfect in every imaginable way) and a direct descendant of King John by way of his son King Henry III (Prince Henry in the play King John), I sort of felt I ought to bother reading the plays about my ancestors - though I still haven't read Julius Caesar yet and I'm supposedly directly descended Caesar's great-nephew, Caesar Augustus (who, incidentally, declares war on Cymbeline in the play Cymbeline). They're all from basically the same family line - Cymbeline's and Caesar's families intermarried to make peace, and a thousand or so years later King John emerged as the descendant of both of them, and nearly another thousand years later here am I, bearing approximately one 4,294,967,300th of King John's DNA and one 302,231,454,903,657,300,000,000th of Cymbeline's and Caesar Augustus's DNA. (I'm not making up these numbers; I don't feel like counting the exact number of generations but I figured an average of four generations per century and raised 2 to the power of that number of generations to find the approximate number of ancestors I'm directly descended from that many generations back.)

Anyway, while reading these plays about my ancestors I had a shocking realization: Shakespeare was a terrible writer. On what do I base this judgment? Well, it's like this: history has recorded that Prince Henry had just turned nine years old barely a month before his father, King John, died. Now let's consider the lines that Shakespeare puts into this nine-year-old child prodigy's mouth at his father's deathbed:

PRINCE HENRY: O vanity of sickness! fierce extremes
In their continuance will not feel themselves.
Death, having prey'd upon the outward parts,
Leaves them invisible, and his siege is now
Against the mind, the which he pricks and wounds
With many legions of strange fantasies,
Which, in their throng and press to that last hold,
Confound themselves. 'Tis strange that death
should sing.
I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan,
Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death,
And from the organ-pipe of frailty sings
His soul and body to their lasting rest."

Honestly, I'm trying to make allowances here for the changing languages of different eras and the exceptional education of a prince - but what kind of nine year old spouts lines like "I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan" at his father's deathbed?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

henry would not be played as a nine year old in the average production of Cymbeline. shakespeare's "histories" are not meant to be tutorial or accurate. historical fact is a starting point, an inspiration, but the work is fiction.

that aside, much of Cymbeline is in blank verse... nobody speaks like that, whatever the age. realism is a narrow and relatively recent aesthetic. setting a more "elevated" language in motion, animating beauty, is equally valid and, often, more to my liking.

all that being said, Cymbeline is often considered pretty much unstageable... though two recently acclaimed productions would tend to contradict that. this late in shakespeare's career (this play is generally categorized as a "romance" by the way, not a history) shakespeare was really fucking with form, breaking out of some of the more formal structures he'd adhered to earlier. sometimes this works well, other times it doesn't.

the final scene of Cymbeline is crammed with all kinds of stuff that made me think, "if i were shakespeare's creative writing tutor i'd give him a bad grade on this." like Cymbeline's sons, they were kidnapped at the ages of one and three and raised twenty years by Belarius, who never told them they were princes . . . they get reunited with Cymbeline in the final scene, but you get nothing of the emotional adjustment that would entail on all sides. if i were fictionalizing those lives, i would - like almost any modern author, i think - include the subsequent adjustment of the princes to princehood as a major and very important part of the story, perhaps the most important of all.

by the way, i was curious as to whether you've ever played one of my ancestors. ever acted in a production of King John or Julius Caesar or Cymbeline at all?

no; i kind of like King John but haven't acted in it. Julius Caeseri've worked on a little in classes but never a full production. the friendship scenes between Brutus and Cassius are really beautiful, i think: the play's emotional core.

another thing to consider is that some of "Shakespeare's Plays" have relatively low actual Shakespeare content. Alot of them, including a number of the later works, were written to a large degree by other writers, such as John Fletcher, second string writer for the King's Men. It wasn't unlike the Hollywood screenplay system where a project gets passed around in a game of scriptwriting hot potato, and in the end, the most marketable writer gets the credit, or they take a crappy old script and throw it at some poor sap of a writer to try to breathe some life into the Exquisite Corpse.

First, I think it's terribly cool that you're a direct descendant of people who are, in the (paraphrased) words of the immortal Lennon, bigger than Jesus. It's even cooler that I know you, albeit the cyber-incarnation of you. =D

Second, I've always been of the opinion that Shakespeare's a bit overrated. Your friend above me makes quite a few good points, but to go deeper, I think Bardolatry (the idol worship of Willie) has run entirely too rampant in the centuries following his life, especially in the schools. I knew who Shakespeare was before any other author (save the ones I learned about in Sunday school), and my high school english curriculum was saturated with his plays, poems, etc. Meanwhile, other brilliant authors, such as Milton, Chris Marlowe and John Donne, were left practically unheard of until I made the effort to read their works (most of which happened in college). It's sad...and it affects all areas of the arts. Mozart was writing symphonies at the age of 6, but how many children do you know who can name any of his works?

while i'm not sure i agree that he has been critically overrated, i do think others have been unfairly neglected (though i'm not sure i'd count Milton; i think Milton's importance is more historical than poetic....) that's the frustrating nature of the canon, though: SOMEBODY has to be considered essential reading; it's the starting point for cultural conversation.

I do agree that someone should be considered essential. And don't get me wrong, I think Shakespeare is worthy of being essential...but I think there are others that should be, as well, at least in the school system I grew up in. The two mainstays of my pre-college education were Shakespeare and Robert Frost. Shame...in a perfect world, we'd know a whole lot more about writers other than the surface artists...

On a funnier note, the Bard-centric website shakespeare.com (http://www.shakespeare.com) just did a poll in which 72% of the participants said Shakespeare was under-appreciated, while only 8% said he was over-rated. Not surprising... ;)

ick; frost?

You see why I'm so bitter about my early literary exposure...
;)
I don't think I've ever recovered...to this day, if I hear any part of "The Road Not Taken," I start to twitch and convulse.

I'm much more accepting of Shakespeare than Frost, by the way. =)

On a barely related note, they're going to be releasing an album of Shakespeare's sonnets set to music. I forget who's in on the project, but I seem to remember Des'ree's name being mentioned.

Well, where in Shakespeare do you hear lines such as:

"Cor, guv'nor! My old man's snuffing it and make no mistake!
Leaving me an orphan, so he is.
And me in line for the throne, an' all."

Not exactly Shakespeare's style, is it?

Shakespeare's Biographies of My Ancestors

no subject

no subject

Re:

no subject

no subject

no subject

Re:

Re:

Re:

no subject

no subject