A friend of mine is moving, and I’m helping her go through some things; from her old Shakespeare class notes, I picked up a couple of articles printed from JSTOR’s archive of Shakespeare Quarterly.

One of the articles is Eric Rasmussen’s “Fathers and Sons in Hamlet“. The content is interesting; the length is what caught me off guard. It’s four short paragraphs, two footnotes, less than 350 words. I didn’t know one could publish such short articles. It could have been a blog post!

I could have written such a blog post, was my next thought. Had I Rasmussen’s acuity, anyway, to see “five pairs of murdered fathers and revenger sons” and that Hamlet “achieves a perfect balance: a subplot in which a son revenges his murdered father (Laertes-Polonius) is counterpoised against a subplot in which a son does not (Fortinbras); meanwhile, a classical allusion to revenge (Pyrrhus) is set against a classical allusion to the lack of revenge (Brutus).” (p. 463, SQ, Winter 1984) I registered Polonius’ comment that he “did enact Julius Caesar”, but I didn’t connect it to Brutus. The revenge/lack of revenge subplots flew right by me.

This, also, is why I am not a famous Shakespearean scholar, and Rasmussen is. Notably, he is editing a semicolon-less new Complete Works for the RSC, about which I am very excited, and according to that last PDF link, he is General Textual Editor for the Internet Shakespeare Editions Project, which I didn’t know existed but is getting a sidebar link so I can visit often.

The fascinating things one learns by following breadcrumbs!

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.

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 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.

I have a love-hate relationship with the venerable Bloom. I like his writing style. It’s easily readable, but erudite; he uses the proper word at the proper time, without showing off or dumbing down. The sheer mass of his work, as a writer and editor, implies that I should have a basic familiarity with his critical perspective. I want to know who he is and what drives him. You don’t crank out that many books without passion.

But he’s a Freudian. Is any literary critic seriously Freudian anymore? Especially in Shakespeare? I thought most Shakespeare critics were New Historicists or some other postmodern thing. At least Jungian.

And from the little I’ve read so far in Invention of the Human, he thinks Hamlet is, to coin a phrase, the shit. I mean, Hamlet’s a great play, but it’s not the be-all and end-all of Shakespeare. And Hamlet’s a great character, but let’s face it, he spends half the play moping.

Bloom and I are going to have a lot to discuss.