I’m back to reading Bloom again — this Shakespeare thing is a great break from editing projects and the Wheel of Fortune, Employment version — and I just finished his chapter on Romeo and Juliet. Relevant to Bloom’s title, he states that Romeo, Juliet, the Nurse, and Mercutio are some of Shakespeare’s earliest “exuberantly realized characters”, and goes on in that vein for awhile.

I have recently held that Romeo and Juliet could equally have been a comedy as a tragedy. Until Tybalt’s death, everything in the play is reversible, or attributable only to chance; even with the deaths of Tybalt and Mercutio, there is still a chance for a happy ending. Bloom agrees with me, to a point:

With just a few alterations, Shakespeare could have transformed Romeo and Juliet into a play as cheerful as A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The young lovers, escaped to Mantua or Padua, would not have been victims of Verona, or of bad timing, or of cosmological contraries asserting their sway. Yet this travesty would have been intolerable for us, and for Shakespeare….

It is that very possibility that makes the play so magnetic. It could work out well, but it just doesn’t.

Bloom also quotes Hazlitt, describing Act II, Scene ii (”O swear not by the moon, th’inconstant moon”), in a sentence that I think describes the larger play as well:

[Shakespeare] has founded the passion of the two lovers not in the pleasures they had experienced, but on all the pleasures they had not experienced.

Part of the tragedy is that they’ve only had a taste of the deep love that they could have. They barely know what they’re missing, but the audience knows exactly. Bloom says of a later scene (”Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day”) that “Romeo and Juliet’s aubade is so disturbing precisely because they are not courtly love sophisticates working through a stylized ritual.” Had the play been about such sophisticates, the tragedy would not have cut so deeply, may not have endured as long as it has. Shakespeare has turned the world and the very stars against these young and innocent lovers, while such sophisticates live to woo another day. Romeo and Juliet have been married for mere days, have loved each other once, before they die. It’s absolutely heartrending.

I don’t think Shakespeare started writing the play as a comedy and changed his mind halfway through. I think he meant it as a tragedy the whole time, unless he went back and edited heavily to make those drastic changes and add in all the little unfortunate circumstances and near misses. (Bloom asserts that Shakespeare did so with Hamlet, that the “Ur-Hamlet” was written by Shakespeare himself as an earlier draft of the play we now have as Hamlet.) But I do think that the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet hinges on the possibility of a happy ending, and the fact that such an ending is denied.

Writing about Shakespeare usually requires quoting Shakespeare. There’s the time-honored way of doing it, citing which edition one is using (my preferred version is the Norton Shakespeare) in a footnote or a reference list or a works-cited section. But this is the 21st century and I’m running a Shakespeare blog, so I like to be able to link readers to the text and make the context visible with a mouse click. It’s no replacement for owning a physical book, but it works for the medium.

According to a recent Google blog post, Google’s Book Search now has the Complete Works online and searchable. Here’s the front page and here’s a sample page from Macbeth showing the “Tomorrow” speech.

I’m still not sure how I feel about Google Book Search as a whole. For the Shakespeare project, they seem to be using old (read: public domain) editions — this is the Clarendon Press edition of Macbeth, published in 1878. It has endnotes and few textual glosses, and I know there’s more recent scholarship about the play. Less modern spellings are sometimes retained: searching the play for the word “tomorrow” yielded no results, but I got them when I searched “to-morrow”. Parts of pages have been cut off in the scanning process, too, and not every page is readable.

MIT’s Complete Works is a better resource, at least for my purposes. It too uses public-domain editions, but the text is HTML and therefore always readable. Readers also have the option of viewing the play scene by scene or the entire play on one page. There isn’t a search feature, but I work around that by viewing the entire play and using my browser’s Find function (Ctrl+F in Firefox). The problem of spelling remains, and there are absolutely zero notes or glosses, but the ability to link to a scene rather than a page is indispensable — especially since many Shakespeare scholars cite act, scene, and line rather than page number. The Google Books version doesn’t have that refinement.

I’m not sure why Google Books bothered, actually. Their version is kind of a pain. If you absolutely need notes and can’t get your hands on a physical version of the play, give it a whirl — but Folger editions (with notes on facing pages) are $5 paperbacks at your local Barnes & Noble, and that version is a good hundred years newer.

A question came up elsewhere online: what sort of play is Titus Andronicus? With all the blood-spurting and the murder and the rape and Lavinia turning pages with the bloody stumps at the ends of her arms?

Several posters suggested parody. Harold Bloom, in Shakespeare: Invention of the Human, suggests that Titus Andronicus in unplayable any other way. That Shakespeare is not only parodying Marlowe, he is exorcising Marlowe. That audiences wanted and still want blood and gore, so by all means, give it to them. That he would only see it acted again if Mel Brooks directed.

Bloom also places the play in the same vein as Stephen King in the modern canon. I haven’t read the play, but I wonder if there isn’t a fine line between horror and parody of horror, or that Titus Andronicus is really a horror play. I’d say that Shakespeare creates the genre, but according to Bloom, Shakespeare pulls from Seneca. (Damn Romans created everything the Greeks didn’t.)

I suppose the only way to answer this question for myself is to read the play. But given some of Bloom’s summaries, I … really don’t want to.

I’ve hopped on the Trend Bandwagon and am listening to podcasts. Surprisingly, it’s not just modern talk radio. Not every Shakespeare podcast holds my interest, but that’s just as true of other podcasts. (I do listen to every episode of The Onion Radio News.) Here’s a few reviews:

The Royal Shakespeare Company Podcast airs “Broadside Brunches”, promising “topical debates on issues raised by Shakespeare’s plays”. The episodes are recorded as a podcast and have excellent sound quality. Be sure to listen to the second and most recent episode, in which expert David Crystal demonstrates and discusses Shakespearean pronunciation. I eagerly await more of these.

The American Shakespeare Center’s podcast has two general themes so far: Blackfriars Backstage Pass, in which the actors discuss the plays they’re in (notably Richard III and Much Ado About Nothing), and Doctor Ralph Reveals All, a topical lecture by Dr. Ralph Alan Cohen (same plays). Both types were primarily for theatre audiences and secondarily recorded for the podcast, and the sound has suffered for it. I turned all my volume controls to 11 and still had trouble hearing everything. What I heard was great, though.

Seattle Shakespeare Company’s podcast provides background on plays the company is performing — again, currently Richard III and Much Ado About Nothing. Good info, good sound.

Shakespeare-upon-iPod wins for Best Podcast Name, but sadly, is an adaptation of Shakespeare By Another Name. Avoid if the Authorship Question gives you hives.

ShakespeareCast is currently playing Romeo and Juliet, as performed by students at Antioch High School. It’s what you might expect to hear, but so far it’s one of two podcasts performing the plays. The other, Reading Hamlet, is basically a woman sitting at a microphone and reading off the page, stage directions and all. I’ve heard audio books read more dramatically.

Also, Some Guy in New York discusses and reads the sonnets. The voice is a bit kooky-radio-show for my taste, but at least the sonnets are getting some love. Now playing Sonnets 1-14.

Shakespeare is just getting started in the podcast medium and I’m excited to see where the podcasts will go, though I despair of hearing professional actors perform the plays serially like ShakespeareCast is doing.

To hear samples, download an episode, or subscribe to a podcast, click over to iTunes’ Podcast Directory and search “shakespeare”.

I took myself out to Barnes & Noble today for a floofy coffee drink and the pleasure of wandering around a bookstore.

I stumbled on Greenblatt’s Will in the World, and talked myself out of buying it because I’ve recently read one biography of Shakespeare and I’m only partway into a second. I flipped through it anyway and read the preface. I also stumbled on Shakespeare by Michael Wood, and sat down with my grande java chip to read through his chapter on 1605 and the Gunpowder Plot.

As an American, I have only the dimmest understanding of the Gunpowder Plot, and much of my information comes from V for Vendetta. I also didn’t realize that, as Wood outlines, King Lear was completed after November 1605, and Macbeth was written in 1606, which I imagine felt much like 2002 did for Americans. Wood placed Macbeth in the midst of “Gunpowder Plays”, which were popular at the time, and pointed out allusions to three of the plotters in the Porter’s speech: the tailor, the equivocator, and the farmer each have contemporary references. The witches, of course, also played to James I’s obsession with witchcraft. In this light, Macbeth is an incredibly topical play. Wood also speculates that the play as we have it is only part of what Shakespeare wrote, because it’s so short and it lacks the usual parallel plot.

I didn’t buy the book and didn’t take any notes on the chapter, so that’s all the info I have on the subject. Both Will in the World and Shakespeare are now on my wish list, the former because Greenblatt wrote it and the latter for the Gunpowder Plot chapter and its glossy color pictures.