Beware More than the Ides: Shakespeare's Trail of Bodies

Shakespeare's plays read pretty on the eye. Vivid imagery, brilliant wording, poetic turns. But those plays are meant for the ear, to be performed. Lustily, for the player to chew the scenery amid ghosts and mix-em-ups and especially his many death scenes. 

A general consensus puts Shakespeare's onstage death count at 74 characters. This is in just 38 plays, 17 of which were comedies. Many more characters shuffle off the mortal coil offstage for practical or emotional reasons. Estimates of Shakespeare's full carnage range to well over 200 characters, depending on how the count defines a killing. 

And I've counted. The tragedies, anyway. I can't get excited about the historical plays. My math is as follows: Body count equals (a) clear deaths during the play, (b) clear deaths pending at the final curtain, and (c) deaths immediately before Act I where the character pops up later as a ghost. 

It's March, so let's open with Julius Caesar. Famously, Caesar is first to meet his maker, and things get out of hand from there -- the whole point of the play.

1. 
   Julius Caesar: group stabbing;
2. Cinna the Poet: torn apart by mob;
3. Portia: suicide offstage, swallowing hot coals;
4. Cicero: executed offstage;
5. Cassius: assisted suicide, sword; 
6. Titinius: suicide, sword;
7. Young Cato: death in battle; 
8. and finally Brutus: assisted suicide, sword. 

That's a lot of suicide, but the play orbits around honor and what's honorable. The losers take the high road out. Brutus and Cassius are so concerned about honor, or status really, that they have to find somebody else to do the bloody part.

If eight deaths sound like a pile, it's middle of the Shakespearian pack. Slightly less stabby is Romeo and Juliet, at six: 

1. Mercutio: swordfight;
2. Tybalt: swordfight;
3. Lady Montague: grief, offstage;
4. Paris: swordfight, 
5. Romeo: suicide by poison;
6. and Juliet: suicide by dagger. 

Othello takes out only five and only after Iago has head-cased everyone: 

1. Roderigo: stabbing; 
2. Desdemona: smothered;
3. Emilia: stabbing;
4. Othello: suicide, dagger;
5. and Brabantio: grief, offstage.

Desdemona gets an extended I'm-not-dead-yet revival despite having been suffocated. That kind of suffering and speechifying end isn't unusual for Shakespeare, but showing her murder onstage is. He preferred to kill off his men for the crowd, usually by sword or such carving. Shakespeare wrote in and for his time. 400 years ago, the main characters were men, so following the action to the tragic end was important to the drama. 

By contrast, the women tended to die offstage. Being a man of his times, his female characters were often thematic devices for the main men. Shakespeare also wrote for patrons and royals, and he would've thought twice about offending his meal tickets. Of course, it wasn't even women playing his women back then. Lads got those parts, and a good director wouldn't risk a grand death scene on a young actor's chops.

Whatever the reasons, the lead woman dying offstage sets up the bring-out-her-body moment. Cue Hamlet. Hamlet gets a bad rap for inaction, but he's responsible, one way or another, for every death other than the father he wanted to avenge. 

1. King Hamlet: Poisoned shortly before play, a ghost;
2. Polonius: stabbed, mistaken identity; 
3. Ophelia: drowned offstage, possible suicide and duly brought on;
4. Rosencrantz: executed offstage;
5. Guildenstern: executed offstage;
6. Gertrude: poisoned by mistake;
7. Laertes: poisoned stabbing;
8. Claudius: stabbed, then poisoned;
9. and finally Hamlet: poisoned stabbing.

Poisoning is my favorite Shakespearian gimmick. Most often, he can't be bothered to specify the actual poison. It's just boom, you're poisoned. But that was a way to do it back then, which goes double for those stabbings. Were Shakespeare writing today, his swordfights would be shootouts.

King Lear edges ahead with eleven deaths, most in its grim finale: 

1. First servant: stabbed;
2. Cornwall: stabbed;
3. Oswald: stabbed;
4. Gloucester: shock of joy, offstage;
5. Regan: poisoned by jealous sister, offstage;
6. jealous sister Goneril: suicide by dagger, offstage;
7. Edmund: killed in duel;
8. Cordelia: hanging, offstage;
9. Lear: Grief and exhaustion;
10. Fool: fate unknown, presumed dead;
and 11. Kent: resolved to commit suicide. 

Speaking of grim, there's Macbeth. Its death count is whatever anyone wants it to be given the major battles, violent repression, and general mayhem. The confirmed dead is eleven. You have to believe Macbeth cleaned up his assassin situation before anyone talked, but here's the confirmed eleven. 

1. 
   Macdonwald: killed in battle offstage;
2. Thane of Cawdor: executed offstage;
3. Duncan: stabbed offstage;
4. Duncan's Guard #1: stabbed offstage;
5. Duncan's Guard #2: stabbed offstage;
6. Banquo: Stabbed in ambush;
7. Lady Macduff: stabbed;
8. Macduff's son: stabbed;
9. Lady Macbeth: suicide offstage, unspecified;
10. Young Siward: killed in battle; 
11. and Macbeth: killed in battle on or offstage, beheaded offstage.

Those deaths happen in perfect order to frame the tragic fall. For all of Macbeth's carnage, most of the killing happens offstage unless a director loves an opening battle scene. Instead, the scenes follows Macbeth between the violence and wrestling with his conscience. It starts with arguably the most important but overlooked death, Macdonwald. Macbeth disembowels the guy offstage, showing both his heroic loyalty and the killer within. When he finally goes full tyrant, the murder moves onstage, with Banquo and Macduff's family. 

Shakespeare's bloodiest tragedy, though, is way bloodier. His top massacre is Titus Andronicus, an early play that wallows in its violent excess--on purpose. The play is about brutality and how far people will take their grudges. Death count, here we go:

1. Alarbus: ritual sacrifice;
2. Mutius: stabbed, filicide;
3. Bassianus: stabbed;
4. Martius: beheaded, offstage;
5. Quintus: beheaded, offstage;
6. Tamora's Nurse: stabbed;
7. the Clown: hanged;
8. Chiron: slashed throat, ground into powder, and baked into pie served to his mother;
9. Demetrius: same;
10. Lavinia: stabbed;
11. Tamora: stabbed and fed to wild beasts;
12. Titus Andronicus: stabbed;
13. Saturnius: stabbed;
and 14. Aaron: buried up to neck and left to die. 

Take that, Game of Thrones.

Stabbings and poisonings were his old reliables, but Shakespeare had a full arsenal when it came to dispatching characters. Guilt and served as pie, as examples seen above. A few others:

• 
  Snakebite;
• Heavy sweat;
• Indigestion;
• Dismemberment and tossed into fire;
• And the topper of toppers, bear. 

Poetic turns or not, it's a mistake to read Shakespeare as stilted or stuffy. He was putting on a show, blood, guts and all. It's endless amusement for a literature nerd, almost as fun as watching actors land those deaths in the footlights. 

Shakespeare, the bedroom, and Liz as prophet

Rootling in my virtual files for material old enough to recycle, I found the following post from my first group mystery blog, Poe's Deadly Daughters, which I wrote with fellow authors Sandra Parshall, Julia Buckley, Darlene Ryan not yet aka Sofie Kelly, and others. On rereading, it struck me as still a propos, even prophetic in its time.

June 24, 2010

English, the Language of New Words

My husband, who has limitless intellectual curiosity, informed me the other day that Shakespeare added 1,700 new words to the English language, including “bedroom.” Googling for confirmation, I found that figure came from a Dutch techie named Joel Laumans. Other online sources put the figure at 2,000 and even 3,000. Laumans explains that many of the new words were not pure original constructs, but the result of Shakespeare’s willingness to juggle parts of speech, turning nouns and adjectives into verbs and so on.

I nearly drowned in the deep end of Google, as one can so easily do while surfing the Net, checking out this claim. The Random House Dictionary puts the first use of “bedroom” around 1580-90, while the earliest performances of Shakespeare’s plays took place in roughly 1590. My husband suggested that the use of a room dedicated to sleeping was an innovation at that time. I had no trouble believing this when he said it. I know that privacy in the bedroom is a modern concept. Royalty in Queen Elizabeth I’s time had scads of people present when they got up and dressed, and the poor shared quarters out of necessity—as indeed they still do. We take the function of our rooms for granted. But when I lived in West Africa in the 1960s, even sophisticated urban locals kept the refrigerator in the living room, where everyone could see they had one (and handy for serving cold drinks to visitors as well), though that had changed by the time I visited again in the 1980s. It was a grand theory, but my husband was wrong. The Online Etymology Dictionary, which puts “bedroom” in the 1610s, points out that it replaced the earlier “bedchamber."

Laumans’s other examples range from “addiction” to “zany.” Random House puts “addiction” at 1595-1605, right in Shakespeare’s period, though the Online Etymology Dictionary points out that the original usage referred to a “penchant” rather than “enslavement,” from the Latin addictionem, a “devotion.” “Zany” comes from the Italian dialect zanni, a second-banana buffoon in the commedia dell’arte. I didn’t find any date or attribution of its use in English to Shakespeare in the online dictionaries.

English in particular, perhaps partly thanks to Shakespeare, lends itself to the creation of new words. We have beat out the French, who codified their language in the 17th and 18th centuries and have been fighting to keep it stable ever since, as the global lingua franca for just that reason. We say “restaurant,” “boutique,” and “savoir faire.” But they say le weekend, le brunch, and le Walkman. Also le blog, googler ("to google"), and surfer sur ("to surf on") Internet. [In 2025, as I have written on other occasions, the French have given up. English is the new lingua franca, and they say okay, cool, and shit with the rest of us.]

As an old English major, I can still rejoice in Shakespeare’s linguistic exuberance. My husband googled the playwright’s language in the first place because we had just watched the movie Shakespeare in Love for the umpteenth time, enjoying the in-jokes and how brilliantly writers Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman caught the Shakespearean voice. The other reason the topic is so fascinating is that we are currently living in a period when the invention of fresh language rivals that of Elizabethan times. In my high school math class, a “googol” was merely a big number: one with a helluva lot of zeroes after it. A “weblog,” didn’t exist, so it couldn’t be abbreviated to “blog.”

“Surf” was certainly a word. Yes, we had oceans in the 1950s, and they featured what Random House calls “the swell of the sea that breaks upon a shore” or “the mass or line of foamy water caused by the breaking of the sea upon a shore.” The noun had even been turned into a verb, “to float on the crest of a wave toward shore.” But now we channel surf and surf the Web. It’s an apt metaphor, because [here comes the prophecy] these days we seem to be rushing toward an unknown shore, much like that in the final image of Shakespeare in Love. It’s exciting and scary, because it seems equally likely, at least to me, that this shore could turn out to be planet-wide destruction on which our species breaks or further proliferation of technology that leads us toward a destiny in the stars.

HVI2, or Heads, You Lose

 

I subscribe to BritBox and I have worked my way through most of the mystery series I enjoyed (Jonathan Creek, No Offense, MacDonald and Dodds, Cadfael, New Tricks, mostly) so I have been giving lit-er-a-choor a try.

Britbox offers the entire canon of Shakespeare as interpreted by the BBC. I am working my way through the plays I have never seen or read (an embarassingly large number) and watching each one until I get bored or too puzzled by the language. (They make the subtitles too damn small.)

The Trout

For example, I tried watching Henry VI, Part 1, and gave it up quickly. Not even a guest appearance by  Joan of Arc could keep me tuned in.

But I made it through Henry VI, Part 2, no trouble.  I noticed that Wikipedia says Part 2 is usually considered the best of the trilogy.  We will see how I feel about Part 3.

Some random thoughts.  There are few Shakespearean characters I have wanted to give a good punch in the kisser as much as Henry VI.  What a boring, pious, pompous little trout.  No wonder his wife wants nothing to do with him.

But speaking of Queen Margaret, I had a really writerly moment during one of her speeches.  She watches hubby walking away with another fella she dislikes, Warwick, and says: "There's two of you; the devil make a third!"  First I thought: Billy the Bard sure knew his way around a curse, didn't he? Then I thought: What a great title! The Devil Make a Third.

privateproertynotrespassblogspot.com

A quick search taught me that one author had already figured it out.  Douglas Fields Bailey wrote a novel by that name in 1948.  As I understand it, the book is about a rural man who makes it to wealth by any means necessary - a not uncommon theme of the time.   The book was reprinted for the Library of Alabama Classics series in 1989.  There is an entire website dedicated to the book, run, as near as I can tell, by Robert Register.  

There are also many novels called Devil Makes Three and some of the authors might have been thinking of Queen Margaret (as I'm sure we all do from time to time).  

The most interesting part of the play for me was the Jack Cade section, based on the largest rebellion in England in the 15th century.  Shakespeare sees it as a highly anti-intellectual event, with simple literacy being a capital offense.  It is here that Dick the Butcher gives us what I think is the play's most famous, much quoted, line:  "The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers."

Jack Cade, against Woke Education

The play also made me wonder whether the Globe Theatre had a propmaster whose specialty was severed heads.  There are four, count 'em, four, hacked-off noggins in  HVI2.  There are others in Macbeth and Titus Andronicus, among other of Billy's little skits.. I found an interesting article by Michael J. Hirrel discussing the chop-chops in Elizabethan plays and he pointed out something that never occurred to me. Shakespeare's audience would have been quite used to seeing severed heads in real life.  So it is reasonable to assume that someone went to a lot of trouble to make the props realistic and each one unique.

Personally, I'd rather be a writer.  So far, no severed heads adorn my work.

Elizabethan Noir

MGM

My current read is The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare's seminal play about greed and revenge. The play is often criticized for its anti-Semitic tone and rightfully so. The characters' main beef with ruthless money lender Skylock is he's a Jew. And yet, Will seems to be giving Elizabethan England a well-deserved punch in the eye for it. After all, this is where the line, "Tickle us, do we not laugh; prick us, do we not bleed? Wrong us, shall we not revenge?" (And I cannot not hear that in Christopher Plummer's voice.) It's Shakespeare's way of saying, "Well, if you treat me like a monster, don't be surprised if I become one."

But Shylock is by no means a hero. The prejudice against him fuels his rage, but at only five scenes in, I've only seen him in one. That's actually a brilliant piece of writing. (Well, it is Shakespeare. Even his duds are impressive. Except Edward III, and he was likely the script doctor on that one. "Why didn't I give this to Marlowe to fix. Joan of Kent? Zounds!") Shylock is such a presence that he shifts the center of gravity in every scene he's in. I'm just reading this, not watching Plummer or Patrick Stewart or Al Pacino play him, and he immediately grabs one's attention, a malevolence rivaling Shakespeare's Richard III in the play of the same name. 

But we know Shakespeare for two types of plays: Histories and comedies. His comedies are hit or miss, and I admit, I don't really connect with those very much. They are probably best seen performed rather than read. The histories, more often than not, are what grab my attention. But Shakespeare wrote in a transitional period, moving from poems to prose, from the epic to the everyday. Had Shakespeare lived two centuries later, might he have adapted Tom Jones (current Audible listen), complete with all the bawdiness he held back on in the days of Elizabeth and King James I? (Yeah. The Bible guy. Who clearly never read it. That's a rant for a different forum.)

Henry V and Julius Caesar and Richard III, however, are epic figures, heroes and villains (and sometimes both) who operate on Olympian levels. But what of The Merchant of Venice? It's the titular merchant, Antonio, who takes out a loan for his friend, Bassanio, then defaults on it. The penalty is, legally, "a pound of flesh." 

Wait a minute. You take out a loan and, instead of debtors prison or the lender taking all your stuff, as usually happens, he gets a literal piece of you? That sounds a lot like...

A loan shark. Now, I've known an actual loan shark, as in he worked for one of the Five Families back in the day. You hear stories of leg-breaking, but more often, an actual loan shark would prefer breaking things and intimidation. Your broken leg impedes your ability to earn the vig. However, Shylock is, to put it mildly, a bit of a jerk. There's animosity between Shylock and Antonio, and it goes beyond the prejudice Shakespeare saddles his characters with. Shylock hates Antonio's guts, and helping himself to a pound of those guts drives that home. Antonio knows this and takes the loan intending to pay it back and rub Shylock's nose in it. Antonio is not a nice guy, nor is he Shakespeare's standard hero. Like Shylock, he's ruthless.

So, does that mean The Merchant of Venice is noir?

In some ways. Typically, in noir, the protagonist is screwed and comes either to a bad end or winds up diminished. (If Shylock had his way, Antonio would be diminished by a pound.) But the First Folio listed Merchant as a comedy. Why? Because the fair Portia and her friend Nerissa pose as lawyers and con Shylock in a move worthy of Tom Cruise in the movie version of The Firm. (I still like that better than what Grisham wrote, if only for the look on Paul Sorvino's face when he realizes the kid he came to whack just outmaneuvered his own law firm.) So the comedy aspect, in terms of the classical definition of a comedy, fits. 

But this is really, really dark. Antonio's scheme to put one over on Shylock backfires. We already know Shylock is a vengeful, angry man. So while his methods are abhorrent, you have to recall the old Chris Rock line, "I'm not saying I approve, but I understand!" Kind of like watching a Hannibal Lector movie and wonder when he'll just eat some annoying character. (They were legion in Hannibal.)

But Antonio is the arrogant rich man. Shylock is the ruthless money lender. The mob even named the slang for loan shark after him. Head-to-head, it's almost an episode of Penguin or Tulsa King.

Fooling the Professors; Schooling the Professors

 

I recently came across the strange story of an unusual brand of criminal - a literary forger.  He committed his crimes almost two centuries ago and yet, oddly enough, you may be familiar with some of his work.

John Payne Collier* (1789-1883) was an English  journalist and drama critic, with a somewhat erratic career.  His incorrect report on a speech by a member of Parliament had him chastised by the House of Commons.  It took him eighteen years to be called to the bar because of a book he wrote criticizing lawyers.  

With that promising start he dove into scholarship on Shakespeare.  His critics found much to complain about in his work but generally found it valuable.  In 1847 he became secretary to the Royal Commission on the British Museum.

Five years later he claimed to have discovered a copy of the Second Folio, the 1632 collection of Shakespeare's plays.  His copy was called the Perkins Folio because of a name inscribed on the title page.  Any copy of that book would be considered important but this one was full of handwritten annotations and corrections, apparently in a seventeenth century hand. A remarkable find!

Collier published a book of the annotations and later put out a new edition of Shakespeare with the Perkins version of the text.   

You've probably guessed that this didn't end well.  A scholar/friend of Collier's described the changes in the Perkins Folio as "ignorant, tasteless and wanton." By 1859 scientists had proved that the annotations were modern scribblings in the old volume. No one could prove that Collier had done the deed and he was, remarkably, allowed to continue to publish scholarship. No cancel cuture then!

His other works included dubious lecture notes  by Coleridge, forged additions to old letters, spurious annotations supposedly written by Milton, and so on.  Nonetheless he also produced scholarship the professors found useful, when he could find sources to work from.  It appears that, like not a few modern scientists, when he couldn't find the results he wanted he made them up.

I have taken most of this information from the Wikipedia article and the anonymous authors/editors there said: "No statement of his can be accepted without verification, nor any manuscript handled by him, without careful examination, but he did much useful work."

But remember  I said  that you might be familiar with some of his work.  Here's the deal:  In 1828 he published The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Punch and Judy. While the  Punch and Judy show traces its origins to the 16th century Italian comedia dell'arte, Collier's is the earliest existing script for it.  To some extent every modern "professor" (the traditional name for the P&J puppeteer) is improvising from Collier's text. 

He claimed to have  copied it down from a performance by an Italian puppet master, and maybe he did.  But he was as untrustworthy as Mr. Punch himself, so how can we know? 

 

* Not to be confused with the great and more recent John Collier.

English, Brother Tucker*! Do You Speak It?

 When most people say Old English, they're actually referring to Elizabethan English. The type found in Shakespeare and the King James Bible. The markers are the formal vs. informal second person and the attendant verb forms. "Thou," informal for "you," is rarely used these days, though the objective form, "thee" still puts in an appearance here and there. 

Miramax

 

But that's not Old English. That is merely an early form of modern English. You know. What you're reading this very moment. "Thee" and "thou" had a long, slow decline to the point where they still exist, but they often are used for effect. Some even think "thee" and "thou" are more formal. And yet the Spanish version of "thou" is tu, and my high school Spanish teacher informed us calling a total stranger tu was a great way to get slapped. Those speaking Romance languages take the separation of the familiar and the formal very seriously.

On the other hand, the late Queen Elizabeth and King Charles seem to have been annoyed by the royal "We," but questions of gender identity and the lack most languages have of a gender-neutral pronoun beyond "it" (which is awful for referring to people) has given rise to a singular "they." Some find this controversial. I find this the perfect excuse to dance on my tenth grade English teacher's grave.

But what is Old English, then? And, for that matter, Middle English?

By PHGCOM - Own work by uploader, photographed at the British Museum, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5969131

 

Old English actually refers to Anglo-Saxon, the tongue that evolved from the Germanic of the Angles and Saxons who moved in after the Romans pulled out of Britain and the Norse of the Jutes, who had a great idea. They'd leave Scandinavia and build this colony called Kent, where one day, teenage blues nerds would reinvent rock and roll. Anglo-Saxon was a Germanic language, sounding quite a bit like Dutch with a syntax resembling Yoda speak. It even used a not-entirely Roman alphabet.

My youngest stepson used to complain loudly about the silent "k" in "knight" or "knife." I used to blame the Vikings, who added more Norse to the language. Silent "k" does not make linguistic sense in the context of English rules, so it must be their fault. Right? Nope. Silent K came over from Germany with those Angles and Saxons. The Celts, who'd been in Britain since before the Romans, shrugged and started using it when they dealt with the weird Germans (and those guys over in Kent. Who are still quite Kentish.)

The best example of Anglo-Saxon is the epic poem Beowulf. It has to be translated for modern audiences because the English of Alfred the Great is not even the language of Edward III, one of the first Norman kings to actually speak English to his subjects. As I said, the alphabet is different. The syntax is different. It's really another language. But it's not. It's just the prototype for what you're reading right this moment.

The translation of Beowulf I listened to on Audible was done by a translator from Ulster. Ulsterites are in a unique position when it comes to English, steeped in two flavors of Celtic languages along with English. This particular translator also spoke Irish. So sometimes, he used a Celtic interpretation of certain passages to translate into modern English. 

Geoff Chaucer, renaissance man
before the Renaissance

Then we come to Middle English, the language of Chaucer. And the language of Sir Thomas Malory. Chaucer we know because he was the BFF and brother-in-law of John of Gaunt, the ancestor of the current royal family. Chaucer was a regular renaissance man before there was an actual renaissance in England. (The plague had yet to wipe out a third of Europe.) Malory has been traced to one person, but might have been several.

Anglo-Saxon was the predominant language in Britain for 700 years, from the withdrawal of the Romans to the Norman Conquest. Strange folk those Normans. They were Vikings. But not the Vikings of Sweden, Denmark, or Norway, nor the funny-talking English of the Danelaw, in central Britain. No, these Vikings had settled in France, started speaking French, and had radical ideas like banning serfdom and writing things down. From William the Conqueror (a much better regnal nickname than William the Bastard, which he was called as Duke of Normandy) to the final days of the Plantagenets, the court spoke French. The Church spoke French. Business was conducted in French. Anglo-Saxon faded because French was more compatible with Latin, then lingua franca. (Ironically, the term refers to French, a Latin-based language.) So English had to adapt.

If you go slowly, you can probably read the original text of The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer's sprawling series of tales from a cross-section of English society. (And I really want to pour a glass of wine over Prioress's head, but I was born around the time the Beatles because a studio-only band.) I said almost read it. The words, when read aloud, are somewhat familiar, but the spellings are almost phonetic. It still requires a translation, but it's almost word-for-word. 

Flash forward a century to Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, and not only is the original text readable, it looks like Shakespeare trying for forge a few entries into The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer lived near the end of the twelfth century. Malory retold the Arthurian legend (actually, the Norman appropriation of a Saxon forgery of a Welsh legend about a guy who likely was a Roman) around 1485, according to William Caxton's note at the end. That's only seven years before Columbus took a wrong turn at Hispanola and declared Haiti to be Indonesia. (The Carib tribe found this a bit confusing as they'd never heard of the East Indies. The East Indians found this hilarious.)

Middle English arose during the Norman Conquest and became the language of peasants and merchants who didn't give a fig about their French overlords. Since, by the time of Edward III, England had few French possessions, his sons and grandsons decided an English monarch should speak, yanno, English. Chaucer codified a lot of written English, so you can blame him for the confusing "-ough" construction, a tough construct that can be understood with thorough thought. "Should," "would," "could?" Yep. That's Middle English, too. Thanks, Geoff!

But Malory's collection and retelling of Arthurian tales was published around the time some Welsh guy with a dubious claim to the throne named Henry Tudor ruled England. (And Wales. The Welsh found this hilarious.) Your eyes might cross, but you can actually read Le Morte d'Arthur in the original text. The spellings are Middle English, but aloud, it sounds more like Shakespeare. And why wouldn't it? King Hank would begat Henry VIII who would begat Elizabeth, who would hand off the throne to her cousin James. Modern English is emerging. Not there yet, but it's coming. Publishers still update the language because English from a century prior to The Tempest still challenges the modern reader.

Unlike Anglo-Saxon, Middle English's day was only 500 years long. 

Then came Shakespeare. Credit a few other writers, including Marlowe, Francis Bacon, and so on, for joining Wil in codifying English. A few apocryphal accounts suggest English varied from town to town. But Wil's plays, along with Marlowe's and a few others', were performed widely. So, as folios and quartos became available via the printing press, English started to sound roughly the same with standard spellings taking root.

Of course, even then, it was not fate accompli. The informal "thee" and "thou" disappeared (though still spoken in parts of Yorkshire and Appalachia.) Americans changed the words "happyness" and "busyness" to "happiness" and "business." Writing from Washington, William Pitt the Younger, and Thomas Paine suggest spelling was more a guideline than a set of rules. In the late nineteenth century, a movement tried to simplify spelling, which changed "plough" to "plow" and "all ready" to "already." The movement, in my humble opinion, died out too soon, but Mark Twain now gets an edit when he isn't writing in dialog since he, like many of his day, disdained formal spelling rules. (But he had a hypocritical attitude toward adjectives.) 

The point is, of course, English is an ever-evolving language. From a Germanic tongue with some Latin suggestions and the odd bit of Welsh or Cornish to a mashup of Anglo-Saxon reshaped by French, absorbing more Latin, and making up its own rules today's language, English, as many like to say, is not so much one language, but seven welded together and roving in a pack to mug other languages in a back alley. Originally, English was written in runes. The runes are gone, but now memes are creeping in. You only have to show a picture of a woman screaming at a cat to understand the gist before even reading the text.

What's next. 

^Apologies to Quentin Tarantino, but I can't use the original line in this forum.

Formulas Aren't Just for Chemistry

O'Neil De Noux's Random Thoughts of Nov. 4 brought up author Frank Yerby, which brought back a lot of memories, reading all the books my mother hid in the back of the closet.  My mother had both "The Foxes of Harrow" and "The Devil's Laughter". (Which are probably the best) I read them both on the sly, and went on to read a lot more.  Mostly disappointing.  (In fact, "An Odour of Sanctity" easily ranks among the worst novels ever written, and that includes the complete works of L. Ron Hubbard and Ayn Rand.)  Still, back in the early 60s, they ranked among the hottest non-porn books you could read, along with Ian Fleming and Jacqueline Susann.    

Besides prurience, one of the things that I learned from reading Yerby was that they had a formula to them.  I know, shocking, right?  And here I'd been reading Nancy Drew books by the wagonload.  But Yerby's were - well, today I realize how sexist the damn things were, with a dash of S/M thrown in here there and everyfreakingwhere - but so obviously formulaic...  Almost all of them revolved around a male protagonist, who was super-alpha male without being extremely tall, handsome and muscular. Indeed, like the James Bond girls in the all of Fleming's novels, he's often damaged - in "The Devil's Laughter", his nose has been severely broken; in another novel he has a permanent limp, etc.  But every man who sees him recognizes - and tells other men! - "that is much, much man", and every woman who sees him wants him, even if she hates him for it.  (She hates him because he'll cure her of her frigidity, which is every incel's dream, revealed 60 years ago.)  

Speaking of the women, Yerby men all fall for and sleep with at least three women in the course of the novel: the Pure One, the Evil One, and the Damaged One.  

Spoiler alert: he ends up with the Pure One, who has been always waiting for him, just him.  And the Evil One always gets her comeuppance.  And the Damaged One generally dies or goes mad.  

Once I figured out the formula, I could tell you within the first three chapters what the outcome would be. But isn't that the point of all romance novels?  (BTW, if you want to read Frank Yerby novels today, you can go to the Open Library and borrow them.)

Formulas, of course, have a long historical provenance.  And the rule of three is EVERYWHERE:  The traditional plot structure of most of Shakespeare's romantic comedies contrasts three courtships:  the major, "noble" lovers whose courtship is of a high, romantic nature (Rosalind and Orlando), and then a middling one (Silvius and Phoebe, or Celia and Oliver), which alternates romanticism and reality, and the finally a plebian, comic one (Audrey and Touchstone). That's of course, from As You Like It, but you can see the same pattern in most of the others, even (at the end) The Taming of the Shrew.  (Kate & Petruchio, Bianca and Lucentio, Hortensio & his widow.)

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice contrasts Elizabeth Bennett and Darcy, Jane Bennett and Mr. Bingley, and Charlotte Lucas and Rev. Mr. Collins.

And Anthony Trollope did this all the time.  (As you know by know, I'm a huge  Trollope fan.)  A classic example is Can You Forgive Her?, where the three courtships are complicated by two suitors for each lady:  aristocratic match (Plantagenet Palliser & Lady Glencora, who's in love with the ne'er do well Burgo Fitzgerald), middle match (Alice Vavasor & John Grey & her villainous cousin George Vavasor), plebian comic match (Mrs. Greenow and her two suitors, Squire Cheeseacre and Captain Bellfield.)  

BTW:  Mrs. Greenow is the reincarnation of the Wife of Bath, and the novel is worth reading just for her.  

There's nothing wrong with formulas when they are well done.  Formulas can be satisfying, or boring, depending on who's doing it.  But it's also a delight when you find something that starts out formulaic and then corkscrews in unexpected ways to keep you constantly awake and entertained.

And now, leaving the realm of novels, romance, courtship, we are going to move on to something completely different:  1988's The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey, an official Australian-New Zealand co-production, directed by Vincent Ward.  Here's the official synopsis from the official website:

"Griffin is nine years old. He’s haunted by fragments of a dream.

He envisages a journey. A celestial city, a great cathedral, and a figure roped to a steeple, about to fall….

It is Cumbria 1348, the year of the Black Death. A medieval mining village lives in fear of the advancing plague. Griffin’s older brother Connor returns from the outside world in a state of despair, until Griffin tells of his dream and reveals their only source of survival:

Make tribute to God. Place a spire on a distant cathedral. Do so before dawn or the village will be lost.

Griffin embarks on an extraordinary journey with Connor, Searle the pragmatist, Searle’s naive brother Ulf, Martin the philosopher and Arno the one-handed ferryman. In his vision together they tunnel through the paper thin earth to a new world, a fabled land of hellish extremes, unfamiliar as the distant future of the antipodes, 1988.

But Griffin has a chilling new premonition… for one of them, the journey will end."

To paraphrase Rob Lopresti: "Ho ho, I hear you say. A medieval sci-fi story. Got it.  To which I must reply: You don't got nothin'."

And you don't - I can assure you that, the first time you see it, no matter what you think is going to happen next, or where you think this is going, you will be wrong. But each and every twist turns out to be absolutely perfect...

Exciting. Interesting. Anything but formulaic. Wonderful.  And that's what I love.  And every time I watch it, I love it all over again.  

 

Check it out.

Meanwhile, BSP:

My latest story, "The Closing of the Lodge" is in the latest AHMM:  

My story, "Cool Papa Bell", is in Josh Pachter's Paranoia Blues;

https://downandoutbooks.com/bookstore/pachter-paranoia-blues/ 

And on Amazon HERE

An Antic Disposition

  

Romeo & Juliet and Hamlet are probably the best-known of Shakespeare’s plays, and at least the most quoted – if not misquoted, for that matter.  Romeo & Juliet is performed often, by both professional and amateur companies, because it’s pretty straightforward.  Hamlet is trickier, or has the more troublesome reputation.  The prince, too, is one of those parts any name brand Shakespearean actor is pretty much obligated to take on early, like Lear, later in life. 

Olivier’s is the one most people know; his 1948 picture is usually cited as a classic.  I wonder if I’m the only one who thinks he kind of missed the point.  Kenneth Branagh took a stab at it, but you have the unworthy suspicion Branagh is trying to knock Olivier off his perch.  I saw Richard Burton do it on stage, but unfortunately everybody in the cast was acting in a different play from everybody else – and surprisingly, the most effective performance was Alfred Drake, playing Claudius as mildly puzzled.  I don’t have a problem with Zeffirelli’s version, Mel Gibson, but they cut the play even more severely than Olivier does.  For my money, the most engaging production is the 1980 BBC Shakespeare: Derek Jacobi as Hamlet, Patrick Stewart as Claudius.  It’s the full original text, with a runtime of three and a half hours, and it’s unapologetically played as a political thriller.

Hamlet, notoriously, is open to interpretation.  The melancholy Dane, the guy who doubts himself, and hesitates.  Olivier takes for his epigraph a line from early in the play, “Oft it chances in particular men,… carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,…” and then leaves out the rogue and peasant slave soliloquy entirely.  To my mind, this has it completely backwards.  A recent production I just saw, by the Upstart Crows here in Santa Fe, edits out that same speech Olivier chooses as emblematic, but includes all of the rogue and peasant slave speech, which I think is key to the play.  “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?  What would he do, had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have?”  Hamlet, we can agree, is clearly a revenge plot.  Claudius has usurped both his brother’s throne and his marriage bed.  The prince is prompted, his word, by heaven and hell.    

It’s a misreading to suggest Hamlet can’t make up his mind.  He thinks Claudius is a rat from the get-go, and he’s furious with his mother, “to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets,” but he’s choking on his own resentment.  Even after the Ghost shows up, he second-guesses himself: “the devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape.”  The real sticking point, though, is that Claudius “popp’d in between the election and my hopes.”  Hamlet wants to be king himself, and Claudius cheated him.  In order to swing this - regicide, and a coup – Hamlet needs Claudius seen to be guilty, to be “justly served.”

If you read the whole play, front to back, or if you see a production that’s the whole thing, more or less, you notice the political machinations.  It’s not something read into the text, or grafted onto it.  It’s organic.  Watching the BBC Jacobi, or the Branagh movie (Jacobi as Claudius, all the more sinister for seeming reluctant), or the Upstart Crows, which left very little out, and moved like a rocket, with no wasted motion whatsoever, the political dimension is front and center.  Once the kid realizes he’s got a solid alibi to go after his uncle, he’s only waiting on opportunity.  But he himself understands he can’t be regarded as some cranky-pants teenager with a grudge; he has to be seen as responsible, not as settling a score, but righting a wrong.  He charges Horatio, as he’s dying, to report his cause accurately.  “Absent thee from felicity a while.”  This isn’t chump change.  The obligation is everything left to history.  How the story is told, after Hamlet leaves the stage.  He didn’t kill the guy because he screwed his mom; he killed an illegitimate king. 

There’s a terrific poem by Constantine Cavafy.  The premise is that Horatio has a dog in the fight.  After the events in question, Horatio becomes a court favorite, and if he maintains the narrative, it discredits Claudius, creates a legend around Hamlet, and legitimizes Fortinbras as heir to Denmark.  Cavafy’s an astute critic, if a bit cynical.  

What is the story, exactly?  The son of a dear father, murdered.  “A little more than kin, and less than kind,” the prince says, when Claudius calls him his cousin and his son, in the opening scene at court.  We know something’s amiss.  The question is whether Hamlet’s nuts.  The play is how he justifies crazy. 

Suppose, then, that Hamlet might be a classic example of the unreliable narrator.  He’s completely transparent, his thoughts spilling over, unpacking his heart with words, but is he trustworthy?  The rest is silence.

You Said What About the Bard?

Recently, someone told me what a rebel he thought he was for giving Stephen King a three-star review on Goodreads. "Look at me. A nobody. And I dared to give Stephen King a three-star review. I had to point out that I once wrote a review in a forum that Cell was utter crap. I, too, am a nobody, but as a reader, I have to be honest. And believe me, I'm going through King's entire canon, a years-long project I may wrap up next year.

Years earlier, in a chat room where a bunch of mystery types hung out, Shakespeare came up. I had recently seen The Tempest performed. Now, The Tempest is a great story that's been the template for a lot of subsequent tales, quite a few science fiction. Prospero, the exiled duke, is a terrific archetype for someone powerful cast out of society or even a mad scientist. And why not? He's both. But during the chat, I mentioned, "But I can't stand Ariel. She's like the token female." One could make that argument about Alaira in Forbidden Planet, which sets The Tempest in space, files off the serial numbers, and no one calls Leslie Nielsen "Shirley." However, Altaira, while providing the leggy eye candy many fifties movies required, is an active participant. Ariel bored the hell out of me. The response?

"That takes a lot of balls to criticize the Bard!"

Really?

First off, William Shakespeare deserves his place among English language writers. He did more to drag English into the modern era than anyone else, dragging it kicking and screaming into the modern era and away from Canterbury Tales. It also helped standardize English to the point where Pacific Rim countries use English because, as I sit here, there are at least six languages, not counting Russian, from Northern Japan to Malaysia, including several in China. Learning English is simpler. I'll leave the debates about cultural imperialism and colonialism to someone else. The point is, English, like French before it and still alongside it in some places, is an international language.

That said, Shakespeare was a writer like any other, human and prone to mistakes. He was very good at catching mistakes or, like a musician who doesn't have a modern producer interfering with his work, good at exploiting mistakes. He makes the most judicious use of anachronisms of any writer in any language, which helps make his work timeless.

But dare one criticize the Bard? Let me ask you this. How often do you see King John performed. John was a fascinating figure, a tyrant who'd be right at home among the tech moguls, autocratic leaders, and arrogant CEOs of today. But there is a consensus among scholars that Will did not execute his take on the Plantagenet's most unpopular heir very well. One even suggested they liked Mel Brooks's version from Robin Hood: Men in Tights better. Brooks is no Shakespeare. On the other hand, a collaboration between the author of MacBeth and the creator of Blazing Saddles would be hilarious. That's another topic.

The point is that yes, he has earned his place in the pantheon of English letters. So have a lot of writers. But Shakespeare occasionally wrote garbage. So has Mark Twain. And Hemingway. And there's no shortage of people lining up to lecture you on why Stephen King is overrated. Some other time, I may Jimsplain why they're wrong about King, but not today.

So, why would I criticize the Bard? How dare I? I'm the one Will worshiped. I'm the audience. I'm the reader. If he's not connecting, or he's rubbing me the wrong way (Titus Andronicus is a recently read example.), I'm going to say something.

The flip side of that is that Shakespeare's reputation is safe. No one's going to rethink their position because some minor crime writer from Ohio thought that Titus Andronicus or King John are weak plays. On the contrary, because he wrote MacBeth and Richard III and Romeo and Juliet, I can finish up Edward III. (In Will's defense, I think he was brought in to salvage that one at some point, since it was a collaboration.) But not to say anything?

We hold Philip Roth up as a man of American letters, but there is no end of criticism leveled at Operation: Shylock. Looking at King, even King will tell you there are a few books he wished he hadn't published, and I don't mean the violent, disturbing Rage (of which I have a copy.) He claims no memory of Cujo or Christine, mainly because his chemical hobbies interfered with his writing. And the aforementioned Cell was one of the first novels started after his accident. There are explanations, but it doesn't change that two of those books were ordeals to finish.

So, why not the Bard? We love him. We read and watch his plays endlessly. He attracts us whether we love Hallmark or scifi or history. Richard III is the ultimate political thriller. The Taming of the Shrew is a raunchy version of the latest Lacey Chabert offering. The Tempest manages to get remade as a scifi movie or TV episode every couple of years. So, why not come out and say when something doesn't work? Do we not learn from the mistakes of the greats the way we learn from what they get right?

Perfect Spy 'o the Time: The Macbeth Murder Mystery

It wasn’t an elaborate murder plot, nor did it go as planned. Not Macbeth’s plan, anyway. He put real thought into it, though. Ambushing his best friend Banquo outside Forres Castle required not one, not two, but three bushwhackers. What happens next is a Shakespeare whodunnit.

Macbeth (or The Scottish Play, for the superstitious) up to this point: Scotland is thunder and fog and war. The ever-hovering Weird Sisters have prodded general Macbeth's ambition with a prophecy that he'll rule Scotland. And Macbeth does, by killing his cousin and legit king, Duncan, and escaping blame with help from Lady Macbeth. But this power couple has a problem: The Weird Sisters also foretold that Banquo's heirs would assume the crown. The Weird Sisters are yet to be wrong. If Macbeth wants to hold and pass that crown, Banquo and his son Fleance's brief candles need snuffing.

Opportunity knocks at Forres Castle, Duncan's old palace. Macbeth freed up everyone's afternoon to relax before a self-congratulatory banquet that night. In actuality, he wants to catch a target alone. Banquo and Fleance, there at court, plan a conveniently lonely ride upon the heath before the banquet. It’s an odd move to leave the relative safety of the other thanes, what with Banquo--and most everyone else--not fooled by Macbeth’s bloody power grab. Banquo must feel most secure keeping himself and Fleance clear of Macbeth.

With cause. Ahead of the ambush, Macbeth tells Murderers One and Two:

…Within this hour, at most,
I will advise you where to plant yourselves;
Acquaint you with the perfect spy o' the time,
The moment on't — for't must be done tonight
And something from the palace, always thought
That I require a clearness.

— Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 1

With Banquo connected and well-respected, Macbeth needs the job to go perfectly, but he's condescending at best to his crew already onboard. This new op is who Macbeth trusts, someone who knows the local ground and Banquo's riding habits, where he must dismount and walk his horse for the stables.

Enter Third Murderer. It's Third Murderer who positions the bushwhack while First and Second complain about Macbeth’s obvious lack of faith. They have no idea who this new accomplice is, nor is Third Murderer volunteering a name. It’s Third Murderer who spots Banquo, but Fleance scarpers off unwhacked into the heath. Third Murderer notices that, too.

Macbeth never identifies this perfect spy o’ the time. Third Murder just murders thirdly. The simplest theory: Read no critical meaning into this. Often, Shakespearian parts were tossed in to reposition the stage post-scene. But Third Murderer stalks the enduring 1623 script so trusted but so anonymous as if a clue. After all, if the production needed an extra hand to clear the heath, Macbeth could've hire a trio.

Henry Fuseli

And the play does need a trio. In Macbeth as in life, what's bad comes in threes. Ghostly knocks, incantations, murders on stage (Duncan, Banquo, Macduff’s son). Three was the unluckiest number in Shakespeare’s England. Third Murderer perfecting yet another unholy trinity amps the supernatural unease.

Third Murder perfects something more important: dramatic structure. Up to Fleance's scarpering, everything clicks for Macbeth. He won fame, avoided justice, taken the crown, and consolidated power. After Fleance scarpers, Macbeth suffers desertion and defeat. His hand-picked asset proves imperfect or at least inexpert– Macbeth's pivotal miscalculation and core to the play's message: Rulers turned tyrants will inevitably self-destruct.

Who, then, might be our imperfect spy o' the time?

LENNOX

The thane Lennox tracks after whoever is king. Lennox stays at court longest among the thanes, long after the most forthright have defected to the opposition cause. After Banquo's murder, Macbeth brings Lennox along for a final consultation with the Weird Sisters.

Lennox didn't, however, have motive. He may keep hanging around the palace, but not as a friend to Macbeth. Lennox is repeatedly sarcastic about Macbeth's suspicious rise and Scotland's trail of too-convenient deaths. Soon enough, Lennox joins the rebellion. It's unlikely he seeks or finds welcome there if he third-murdered Banquo.

ROSS

© Wikipedia

Joel Coen's 2021 movie re-fashions the thane Ross as Third Murderer. It's not the first such interpretation. Ross, a cousin both to Macbeth and poor Duncan, is a wheeler-dealer, in on court gossip and happy to run errands for the crown. The Coen movie fashions Ross into a ruthless king-maker. The botched murder of Fleance intentionally furthers his own ambitions.

A cool take– that doesn't quite jive. In the First Folio (admittedly compiled some 17 years after Macbeth was first staged), Ross breaks with Macbeth early. Ross warns Lady Macduff to flee, at some risk to himself, and Ross tells Macduff about his family's assassination. Ross helps secure English forces to unseat Macbeth. Why murder for a tyrant while tipping everyone else to the body trail?

A DUBIOUS ASSOCIATE

Macbeth was a successful warrior thane prior to the Weird Sisters' appearance. He would've had a network of useful associates and willing mercenaries. Third Murderer as a random agent moves the play along, but Macbeth is also about specific choices leading to specific fates. Even First and Second Murderer get a scene to choose their dark path of revenge for perceived insults off Banquo. It's too loose a thread if Third Murderer is just a mercenary.

SEYTON THE ARMORER GUY

The Scottish-English alliance creeping up forest-style on Macbeth also vow to punish his "cruel ministers." The play shows one such official around for the final battle: Macbeth's attendant and armorer, Seyton. He is introduced late--at the Act V climax--and with little ado. He seems there mostly to provide Macbeth updates on the crumbling situation. But Seyton is all-in with Team Macbeth. His rise to captain might've been launched as a trusted bushwhacker.

A CONJURING

Scotland grows full of eerie happenings as the Weird Sisters run amok. It would've hardly been past the Sisters to place a malevolent entity at Macbeth's disposal. Or perhaps Scotland's hauntings reach a critical mass and conjure their own demons. It's all possible in Macbeth's story world, and such an entity would've seen that fated characters met fated ends: death for Banquo, escape for Fleance, doom for Macbeth. Still, Macbeth had a known someone in mind for third murdering. A random ghoul doesn't inspire the requisite trust.

LADY MACBETH

John Singer Sargent,
1889 (Tate Gallery)

To here, Lady Macbeth has been clinical and composed about murder. This woman turned to direst cruelty is, at last, someone Macbeth could believe reliable at so great a task.

Directly before the bushwhacking attempt, though, she is at Forres Castle with Macbeth, who hints that it's a shame what might happen to Banquo. Macbeth leaves her with plausible deniability, and he's not interested in discussing her emerging reticence for bloodshed. We next see her entering the banquet with the royal entourage. By all evidence, she stuck to the castle and kept, ahem, her hands clean.

Then, there's theme. Macbeth is overt about gender roles. Lady Macbeth vows to “unsex” herself when she helps murder Duncan. The Weird Sisters are feared doubly for how they defy expectations of womanhood. Even if somehow First and Second Murderers didn't recognize the dang queen as Macbeth's perfect spy o' the time, they would’ve noticed something feminine or unsexed about this new partner.

MACBETH

By this point, Macbeth keeps his own counsel. He came to the throne by violence, and violence to hold power is fine by him. More than anyone, he knows old pal's Banquo’s habits and formidable skills in a fight. A direct part in Banquo's death would further explain Macbeth's sanity break when Banquo's ghost appears--only to Macbeth--at the feast.

But Macbeth, too, arrives at the feast on time and unruffled. If he did slip away and return under the wire, he has to feign surprise when First Murderer reports Fleance's feet-don't-fail-me-now escape. Like Lady Macbeth, though, it’s farfetched to imagine First and Second Murderer not recognizing the king even disguised. They don’t, either overtly or by inference, and as a practical matter, First Murderer wouldn't risk reporting to Macbeth what the boss witnessed in person.

SHAKESPEARE

That's right. The Bard pulled it off. He wrote in Third Murderer with such brilliant vagueness that production options were wide open.In a play about ambition and abuse of power, the suspect list is half the cast. It’s a testament to Macbeth's power that five centuries later we're still sifting through the couldadunnits.