Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

This was a fun little project, although not quite done. The cross stitch design is Oddpothecary by Noctiflora Designs, from the Just Cross Stitch Halloween issue from 2024. I did redesign two of them, changing bat wing to wool and frog bones to toes to better fit the quotation from MacBeth.

Meanwhile, A Somerset Halloween featured a cute project from Patty Thurlby, using altered Altoid tins to hold fun little Halloween treats. The tins were supposed to be covered in gold leaf, but that was a fiasco -- neither my local craft store nor Michaels had real gold leaf, so I used a fake version from the latter. I then tried applying it with double-sided tape, tacky glue, and the glue recommended for gold foil, but each failed in a different way 🙄. I eventually painted the lids in black and the rest in a metallic copper. I backed the cross stitch with heavy-duty fusible interfacing and trimmed them (I should have made a template first), then glued them to the lids. I then glued a bit of yarn around the edges of the fabric. Maybe I'll add a second cord around the top. Or dimensional paint; that could be cute.

 

The insides of the tins are unaltered; I want to decoupage some spooky paper images, but my paper craft stuff is stored away at the moment. I shredded bits of yarn for the wool and found a package of eye cabochons for the eyes, but  I haven't yet come up with a thing to be the frog toes.

It's not quite the look I was envisioning, but overall I'm pleased.

Macbeth by Jo Nesbo

Jo Nesbo's Macbeth was the second novel I read of the Hogarth Shakespeare series. This book was quite a bit heftier than Vinegar Girl; Nesbo turns the tragedy into a crime noir story, and sets it in an unnamed town (probably Glasgow) in the early 1970s amongst police officers and drug dealers at war for control of the city.  Drugs -- specifically, two formulas with the street names "brew" and "power" made by three female chemists -- account for the supernatural elements of the play, and gangs replace the Norwegian and Irish invaders.

The advantage of turning Shakespeare's plays into novels is the opportunity to flesh out the characters' backgrounds, motives, and so on, an advantage Nesbo fully uses. Lady's obsession with blood and babies is a consequence of her harrowing past. Less effectively, Banquo is loyal to Macbeth despite his misgivings because he was a surrogate father to him. But the bulk of the narrative is devoted to Macbeth's and Duff's relationship; their shared past in an orphanage and later the police force explains both their friendship and their eventual determination to destroy each other.

Crime noir is not my favorite kind of fiction, but what kept me reading (in addition, of course, to Shakespeare's storytelling) was Nesbo's way of humanizing the characters. When the novel opens, pretty much every one of them had done questionable, or even downright evil, things, yet Nesbo gives each one chance after chance to be brave and do the right thing. Some don't, some do, some do after a lot of waffling, so the tragedy plays out as expected. But by showing the role choices -- both active and passive -- have in what happens, Nesbo manages to achieve a kind of hopefulness in the narrative despite the bloody end. People do terrible things, but they can choose to do good the next day. Redemption is always available, if one is willing to accept it.

Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

The Hogarth Shakespeare project consists of modern retellings of the plays; Vinegar Girl is Anne Tyler's riff on The Taming of the Shrew. Tyler's Kate -- smart, prickly, insecure, a little odd, and kind of a jerk sometimes -- is not your typical "sassy" young woman. Pyotr is a dorky, equally odd Russian scientist working with Kate's father, in need of a wife right away because his visa is about to expire. Watching the two of them slowly grow to understand each other was entertaining and touching.

The other characters are good, too; Bunny is vain and bratty, but smarter than people give her credit for. She becomes a surprising advocate for her sister, although she ultimately doesn't understand why Kate goes through with the marriage (uh, spoiler!). Their father is an extremely absentminded scientist who loves his oldest daughter but doesn't understand why she doesn't leap at the chance of fraudulent marriage to a weirdo. Amusingly, his primary motive for the marriage is selfish -- he doesn't want to lose the best assistant he's ever had, right before his big breakthrough -- and only belatedly does he realize that he will therefore lose Kate's heretofore unappreciated housekeeping services. And Pyotr's landlady, her aide, and Kate's aunt all stole the few scenes they were in.

The only misstep is the speech Kate gives towards the end, defending Pyotr in particular and men in general. Not only did I disagree with the content (yes, it's wrong and damaging that men are taught to suppress most of their emotions, but no that doesn't mean men have it tougher than women), it seemed out of character for someone who otherwise tends to keep her own counsel.

My advice? Skip the speech and enjoy the rest of this delightful book.

The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips

The Tragedy of Arthur is complicated.  It's about a character named ... Arthur Phillips, a writer and the son of a conman, struggling with his relationship to his father who may have forged an entire Shakespearean play called ... The Tragedy of Arthur.  The first half of the novel purports to be the introduction to the high-profile release of the play, and the second half is the play itself -- an actual, five-act Elizabethan-style play about King Arthur, a downright enjoyable pastiche that at its best captures the feel and wit of Shakespeare.

So how similar are Fictional Arthur and Real Arthur?  They've written the same books, lived in the same places, had some of the same experiences.  The events of the novel are true, except where they are not.  But the fictional Arthur is an unreliable narrator, and as his "introduction" progresses, he admits he may have made things up, or embellished them, or maybe told them straight.  This ambiguity fits in with the story of the play itself -- it sure seems likely, given his father's past, that the play is a fake, but it seems just as likely that it would have been impossible to pull it off.

But then, that's not the point of the novel.  It's about fathers and sons, and the interplay between creation and deception, fiction and fraud.  Arthur's father justifies his crimes because he created something and brought wonder to the world.  If he has to fudge a bit, pretend the painting is by someone famous, that the crop circles were made by aliens, that just enhances the creation and makes it more likely that people would enjoy it.  He would not agree that "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

His father is blind to a crucial point, however.  In the Catholic blogosphere there has been a lot of debate recently about whether it is ever permissible to lie, even for the best of reasons.  A common retort by those who advocate lying is that fiction is lying too, and are we going to accuse every writer and actor of sinning? The difference, of course, is that people watching a play or reading a novel consent to the "lie" -- they know coming in that it's all made up.  That's what the father doesn't see (or is willfully blind to), that his "clients" are really victims, who are expecting not only wonder and creation but also authenticity.  They don't know that what he's doing is made up.

We, on the other hand, know that this book is a novel; it even says "fiction" on the back over the barcode.  So it doesn't really matter if Fictional Arthur's denouement is "true," or how much of his life story is that of Real Arthur's.  Fittingly enough, that also turns out to be the resolution of the play's authorship mystery -- Fictional Arthur uses the introduction to present his father's character and give his reasons for believing the play is a fraud, but he allows his sister to explain why she believes it is legitimate, and he dutifully puts forth the results of all the tests by linguists, scholars, and scientists.  The play is published with this introduction, and people can choose to believe in it or not, or just suspend belief entirely and go along for the ride.  And what a ride it is.

A word about the cover of my edition.  What better image to represent an intricate, "devious," post-modern "tour de force" about writers and frauds than that of two adorable blond tots playing dress-up on a beach, gauzy white light illuminating their cherubic faces?  I have a sneaking suspicion that this cover was picked out of a misguided attempt to snag more women readers.  I'd be offended, but it's just so silly.

The Shakespeare Wars

This book was an intense and rewarding read. I picked it up as a corrective to the idiocy that was Anonymous and its hype, because it covers the real, meaty issues about Shakespeare -- the interplay of the different texts, the vicious debates over spelling and language and meaning, the arguments over why, exactly, Shakespeare's works are so compelling. Rosenbaum is ideally suited to the task -- an academic outsider (a journalist) who is highly literate and educated, he is also profoundly passionate about Shakespeare. His writing is casual, engaging, and snarky, and he has little patience for those he thinks have foolish or very wrong ideas (to his credit, he will also openly acknowledge his own mistakes).

There is so much to think about in this book that I could write a dozen essays. Rosenbaum reminded me how much I love Hamlet, and how immersed I once got in debates and discussions over Hamlet's age, costuming, the brilliance that is Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Gertrude's role, and so on. Rosenbaum also vindicated my love of love for Luhrman's movie William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, and the absolutely stunning opening monologue. (Despite the fact that I never cared too much about the play. They are too young for eternal true love. There are too many misunderstandings and stupid things in the way of love. And they are too willing to die because their passion cannot be fulfilled, when there is so much more to life. I prefer my heroines tough and strong, like Jane Eyre, who is parted from Rochester not because of misunderstandings or foolish pride, but because of her integrity and moral strength. But I digress.)

I'd also love to have lunch with Rosenbaum, and ask if he ever saw the Hamlet O-groans that appeared in Frasier, of all places (starting around 1:45). Has he read Neil Gaiman's "A Mid-Summer Night's Dream" and "The Tempest", issues 19 and 75 from the Sandman comic? What does he think about the conceit of the fairies being much more capricious and amoral in "real life" than in the play, and the absolutely sinister version of Puck (something I can never not think of whenever I see any other portrayal of him)? Or the moving way Gaiman tied together Prospero and the end of Shakespeare's career with the ultimate fate of Dream? What does he really think about Oxfordians? (Snerk.)

If there could be a theme to all the disparate Shakespearean questions and puzzles Rosenbaum discusses, it would be one of ambiguity or multiplicity. Which of the two texts of King Lear is the "right" one -- the Quarto or the Folio? Which of the three Hamlets -- the "good" quarto, the "bad" quarto, or the folio? Did Shakespeare leave each play once written, or did he revise his works over time? If the latter, which then would be his final version? Did he have both literary and stage versions, or were the stage versions (shorter and with directions) products of directors and producers? What spellings and punctuations should we use (sallied/sullied/solid, shroudly/shrewdly, O/o'), and are they the result of Shakespeare's intent or decisions by later printers and typesetters? What did Shakespeare mean with particular words he chose, like "accidents/accidence" -- the primary definition (coincidence), a second one (resonance), one of his own devising, none of these, all of these at once? Are Lear's words in the Folio cause for hope or despair? How can a reader make sense of the myriad, conflicting ways one line about love in Sonnet 40 can be interpreted, let alone the rest of the poem?

The fact is, none of these questions can be answered definitively, and probably never will be. Rosenbaum repeatedly analogizes it to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, where an electron can never be pinned down precisely in both speed and location but instead occupies a penumbra of probabilities. Shakespeare's works, then, are "a wave-array of possible variations and interpretations of [] single word[s] or phrase[s]" (p. 90; see also p. 463 on). I (and many others) think this is Shakespeare's genius -- the multiplicity of meaning. The fact that you can read (or see) the plays over and over and find something new. The fact that there can be two or more perfectly valid understandings. The fact that the plays are flexible enough to allow directors and actors their own interpretations of a scene or character. What other writer can offer such sheer versatility?

I've often heard (and Rosenbaum mentions it) that we will be the last generation to be able to understand Shakespeare in its "original language"; future readers and audiences will need the works to be translated for them, much as Chaucer needs to be translated for most people, and Beowulf for everyone. Such a thing is inevitable; languages change or die, many of the great works of literature have to be translated for someone, and it certainly need not keep us from recognizing Shakespeare's genius. Yet it makes me sad to think of it, because much will inevitably be lost. Clever wordplay based on a multiplicity of meaning and similarity of sound will be gone. It will force editors to make decisions on spelling and meaning and punctuation, even more than they do now. Many of the debates Rosenbaum discusses will become available only to those few who can read "Shakespearean English" well enough to understand the stakes. That will be the true loss, not the silliness over Shakespeare's "lost" identity.