Book Review: Contested Will – Who Wrote Shakespeare?

http://www.amazon.com/Contested-Will-Who-Wrote-Shakespeare/dp/B0048ELD4G

I’m sure it has become abundantly clear to anyone that has read this blog that I am a literature nerd. So you may not believe me when I say that “Contested Will,” written by Columbia University Professor James Shapiro, is a phenomenal page turner. But I’m also sure that you must innately know that any book with a Shakespeare pun in its very title must be good. And this book is no exception.

“Contested Will” looks at the origin of the Shakespeare authorship debate (whether Shakespeare himself wrote the plays, whether he was a frontman for another author, or even just a pseudonym that happened to match a current actor’s name). Shapiro mostly focuses on how this debate started, who its main contenders are, and what its implications could be for the idea of “the author.”

Here are the main arguments for and against:

Arguments against Shakespeare:

1. He was illiterate (as proven by the various spellings of his name in his own handwriting and because no books were listed in his will).
2. There is a specific knowledge of aristocratic life and other countries in his plays, yet no evidence that Shakespeare was ever educated or ever travelled.
3. There are autobiographical hints within the plays that they were not written by a boy from the country.

In Shakespeare’s corner: 

1. The authorship question was not posed until nearly 200 years after his death, making this (if true) one of the best kept secrets of all time.
2. There is a specific knowledge of the acting company written into his plays (slips in printing that show an actor’s name instead of the character’s name – highly unlikely to occur if someone was simply using Shakespeare as a mouthpiece or a pseudonym). There are also pay stubs and references (both positive and negative) to Shakespeare the man in Elizabethan and Jacobean documents.
3. It was not uncommon for someone in metropolis London to interact with people from various places, and there is no evidence that Shakespeare did not travel in the huge time-gaps in his life. We know that Shakespeare performed in the aristocratic circle, giving him the opportunity to view their ways of life. There is no evidence that anyone in Stratford was educated, not because they weren’t, but because no one started looking for the records until a century later. As for being illiterate, Shapiro points out, no one questions Thomas Dekker’s use of a huge amount of books and texts to substantiate his plays in the same period without a record of him owning books (even though Dekker was destitute and in-and-out of prison), so why question Shakespeare’s? He also comments that there were eleven different ways of spelling “half-penny” in Elizabethan England, and that there is evidence of different name spellings for every other claimant to the Bard’s throne.

While Shapiro does treat some of the more outlandish claimants with more respect than I could personally muster, I believe the real success of this book is how it shows that the authorship debate has shifted based on the changing view of “the author” since Shakespeare’s time. Shapiro does a fantastic job of connecting the different stages of the debate with the different literary theories of the time; for example, how the works of Higher Criticism (that brought down the idea of Homer as a blind poet and instead proved that the works attributed to him were likely a conglomeration of many different poets) influenced Delia Bacon’s thinking as she became the first to attack Shakespeare as “the author.” How the invention of Morse code and cyphers led many to begin reading Shakespeare’s plays as autobiographical and wrought with hidden meaning. Or how Mark Twain’s doubts stemmed from a type of Realism, as Shapiro states, “For Twain, the notion that great writing had to be drawn from life – rather than from what an author heard, read, or simply imagined – was an article of faith, at the heart of his conception of how serious writers worked.”

Shapiro, of course, concludes that Shakespeare did in fact write the plays. I commend him greatly on keeping from snickering or cringing at some of the arguments made against the Bard (although on the more elitist arguments, even I began to crave some finger-pointing). The book was so easy to read that no amount of Lit courses would be necessary to follow its arguments, and the anecdotes that Shapiro includes are priceless. If there is one non-fiction book that you ever read on Shakespeare, I hope it is this one.

And as my nerdiness for the day concludes, I will leave you with one anecdote of my own:

In 2011, I was with friends at the Boston Commons to see a performance of Othello. We were chatting with a couple seated next to us, and when I told the woman that I studied Shakespeare at university, she leaned in closer. “You know,” she said, “he didn’t actually write the plays.” “Oh?” I answered. She nodded, looking terribly serious. “Mhmm. Queen Elizabeth actually wrote them, and Shakespeare was her bastard son, so she gave them to him to publish!” I stopped talking to her after this, but I couldn’t help but notice how very much she enjoyed the play – laughing at Bianca and crying for Desdemona. And even though she didn’t believe in the Bard, I suppose he still had his victory that night.

Book Review: The Weird Sisters

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0425244148

Everyone likes an obscure reference to Shakespeare. Well, maybe not everyone, but I certainly like an obscure reference to Shakespeare now and then. So when I saw a book entitled The Weird Sisters – a reference to the witches from Macbeth – on sale for $3 AU, I knew I had to buy it.

Before I go further, and purely for amusement, here are some other strange titles absconded from the Bard’s texts:

• Ophelia’s Revenge – oh how I hope this is a ghost-haunting girl-style. Scene: dinner party where Banquo’s ghost torments Macbeth? No no, dinner party where Ophelia’s ghost torments Hamlet and guests by adding salt to the cakes and completely ruining the flower displays (no rosemary or pansies for you!).
• Mr. Shakespeare’s Bastard – the story of Will’s wily ways producing an illegitimate daughter who retells her life’s tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, [and, of course] tragical-comical-historical-pastoral.
• William Shakespeare’s Star Wars – I could not make this up if I wanted to.

Now, back to The Weird Sisters, written by Eleanor Brown and published in 2011. This is the story of three sisters (good so far), isolated in the country (still on track), who aren’t witches (humph). Their names are taken from a variety of plays: Rosalind, the oldest, unfortunately does not involve herself in cross-dressing; Bianca, the middle, is pretty and fit, which really leaves it a toss-up as to whether she is the desirable sister from Taming of the Shrew or the prostitute from Othello, although I’m sure the former was intended; and Cordelia, the youngest, who does not cause her father bouts of insanity, probably because he is already crazy enough to give his daughters these names.

Although the three sisters have been drifting around the country, they are called back to their small Ohio home when their father tells them that their mother has breast cancer. In a true Shakespeare professor fashion, he writes this note to inform them: “Come, let us go; and pray to all the gods/For our beloved mother in her pains.” Converging again after years apart, the sisters attempt to cope with the scratches the world has given them while reconciling themselves with each other.

While the Shakespeare references are heavy handed, the exaggerated female flaws –  that I believed went out of fashion in the 1600s – were the most frustrating for me in this book. Here is a scene when Bianca (Bean) notices the “wattle” underneath her mother’s chin:

Bean ran her own fingers nervously under her chin, which thankfully, was still firmly hugging her jawline. When had this happened? When had our mother gotten so old? Was it just because she was sick? Or was this happening to all of us, without our noticing?  A rush of fevered guilt swept over her and she gripped the edge of the countertop, willing herself not to faint.

Really? Really? You’re going to faint over a little chicken wattle? If you’re that worried, I promise it’s nothing a plastic surgeon in Orange County can’t fix.

Jokes aside, and I do have a few more I’ve censored from here, this book was a quick read and not nearly the worst at handling such an intimidating name-drop. Brown’s treatment of the relationship between the mother and daughters is nuanced and, surprisingly, one of the most realistic I’ve read in a while. The subplots, because it cannot be Shakespearean without a few good subplots, are predictable but rather amusing none-the-less. Could it have survived without all of the meaningless Shakespeare references? Absolutely. Should it have? Probably… but then I couldn’t have made half as many pretentious jokes as I did, and really, isn’t that the point of a book?

Book Review: The Crying of Lot 49

You might think that because this is the shortest of Thomas Pynchon’s novellas, its little fists would have less of an effect on your face. This is an untrue assumption.

“The Crying of Lot 49” is a philosophical muddle of theories that lead nowhere and paranoia that leads everywhere. It can only be described as a book that confuses and astounds with one of the most magnificent crescendos I’ve seen in modern literature.

Sound chaotic? That’s because it is. This book follows Oedipa Maas (read into the name what you will) on a journey to discover whether the US Postal Service isn’t quite as benign as we all think.

Sound strange? That’s because it is. While the story line is far clearer than other Pynchon novels, this book is still a melting pot of genres that looks to detect meaning through a fantasy that may actually be reality; a hazy meditation on communication focusing intently on a muted trumpet.

“I came,” [Oedipa] said, “hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy.”

“Cherish it!” cried Hilarious, fiercely. “What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don’t let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”

This unruly novel is well worth a read. If you’ve never tried Pynchon before, I absolutely recommend starting here. It is not an easy book and you will not understand it the first, or second, or maybe even third time you read it (I certainly didn’t), but even understanding 1/4 of it still leaves this book a very solid 4 out of 5.

Book Review: Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson

An alchemist, a vagabond, and a blond harem slave walk into Restoration England… if you can come up with a witty conclusion for this joke, please let me know.

This, as you have no doubt guessed from the unambiguous title of my post, is a listing of the three main characters found in Neal Stephenson’s epic historical novel, Quicksilver. Weighing in at 927 pages, this is only the first book in a trilogy known as The Baroque Cycle. Factual, dense, and anachronistically amusing, Stephenson certainly does not make it easy for a reviewer to categorize this book.

Quicksilver is broken up into three separate sections: the first follows Dr. Daniel Waterhouse, son to an extremist Puritan and founding member of the Royal Society in London. Daniel’s most interesting attribute is his friendship with a ghostly and monomaniacal Isaac Newton. The second story chronicles the swashbuckling adventures of “Half-Cocked” Jack, the King of the Vagabonds in France who falls in love with the Harem slave Eliza, whom he rescues. The final plot traces Eliza’s journey from a Turkish Harem to becoming a tutor in the French court as she works for various political figures and intrigues to abolish slavery.

While this book is obviously a massive achievement and really fantastic if you ever find yourself in a trivia match based solely on 17th C English science and politics, it is, like many of its characters, slightly unhinged. The first third of the book drags under far too much historical research, giving the reader too much trivia and not enough plot. The second story is where Stephenson really shines, bringing us moments like the invention of dynamite fishing and characters like the brothers who make their living pulling down on hanging men’s legs to “ease their passing.” The third section contains the majority of Stephenson’s charm as he creates the character of Eliza, but from a literary perspective, she is certainly unlike any woman I could ever imagine existing. Her story is great, but her character completely lacks motivations for her often extreme actions.

Now, if you are a history buff, have a lot of time and patience, or have a passing fancy to learn a significant amount about science in Restoration London, read this book. If not, read the second story and call it a day.

Book Review: Griffin and Sabine

“Griffin and Sabine,” by Nick Bantock, is not your typical book. It is a picture book… for adults. An artist friend of mine (shout out to Mackenzie for her good taste!) sent me this book, and I am very glad she did. The writing was interesting and natural, the story a mystery, and the book itself a piece of art.

The main focus of this book is its aesthetic beauty, so I won’t spend too many more words on it. Instead, I’ll post some pictures from the website (property of http://www.nickbantock.com) for you to marvel at.

Just read it. You’ll love it.

Book Review: Playing in the Light

http://www.amazon.com/Playing-Light-Novel-Zoe-Wicomb/dp/1595582215

If any of you know the college scramble to sign up for courses – waiting until the exact moment when your ID number unlocks, signing up for three extra courses to decide later which prof has better ratings on ratemyprofessor.com, to thinking you’re stuck with two classes that overlap 15 minutes until someone drops out of a coveted spot after the first day of class – then you’ll understand how this book came to sit on my shelf.

Three years ago, I had the unlucky accident of being in the last group to sign up for classes at uni. I was stuck with two classes that overlapped: one of which I would perpetually leave early, the other I would perpetually arrive late. Finally, someone dropped from a different Lit course and I snuck on in, still stuck with the books I had bought for my original class, World Literature.

Playing in the Light, by Zoe Wicomb, was the only book I could not return to Barnes and Nobles. For three years, it sat on my shelf in LA – alone and forgotten. Until I moved to Melbourne. I couldn’t fathom moving without any books to read before I scouted out my first bookshop, and since I was determined to fit everything into one suitcase, I needed paperbacks.

Here is where this book walks back in. Being one of the only paperbacks I hadn’t read, and having a very interesting cover design, I decided to take this book. I’m glad I did.

“Playing in the Light” is a book about paradoxes. It is set in a 1990s South Africa that has moved past Apartheid, but that doesn’t know what the implications of their country’s new politics means in everyday life. It is about a travel agent who doesn’t like traveling. About a white child who is really “black.” About a story being told only to find out that the teller never actually knew the story.

This was a well written, beautifully simple book about a subject that had only ever existed in history books for me. I really enjoyed Wicomb’s writing, and think that her use of “light” throughout the book was masterful. At its heart, like many books before and I’m sure quite a few books after, this is a story about what heritage (specifically racial heritage) means:

“If the whiteness they pursue is cool and haughty and blank, history is uncool, reaches out gawkily for affinities, asserts itself boldly, threatens to mark, to break through and stain the primed white canvas that is their life.”

While I did enjoy this book, it was not without issues. At one point, we are given an entire chapter written from the perspective of the long-dead mother filled with information that no other character has and which has little to do with their development because of that. The ending was meant to be profound, I’m sure, but after the beauty of the previous prose, it was just choppy and stunted.

If you like literature, I would recommend this book. If you want a fun read, skip it.

ESSAY HELP:

Freshman essay: What does race mean in a modern world? What makes someone a certain race?

Sophomore essay: Analyze the importance of travel in the novel. Why is it necessary that Marion leaves Cape Town at the climax of the book?

Junior essay: How did the politics of the past manifest themselves in the “present-day” of Wicomb’s 1990s Cape Town? Is the political world of the novel an accurate representation of historical post-Apartheid South Africa?

Senior essay: Analyze race relations between Wicomb’s “Playing in the Light” and her previous novel “David’s Story.” What does “light” as a signifier do to change the treatment of race in these two books?

The Art of Hearing Heartbeats

There is an art to bookshops. They cannot be too clean (otherwise they have no charm), nor too chaotic (otherwise you can’t find anything). In Boston, there is a lovely bookshop called Trident Booksellers on Newbury St. Not only will this bookshop quench your thirst for knowledge, but it will quench your thirst for delicious – and highly caffeinated – coffee.

Among the shelves of books and books while wandering with a friend, I indulged in the wonderful pastime of judging a book by its cover. Never underestimate the usefulness of this. If you’ve heard of the name on the cover, and don’t remember anyone sneering too much about it, judge it by its cover and give it a chance. If you fancy the illustration or the typeset, honor the designer and judge it by that.

Now, between the cover and title of this particular book, I simply couldn’t resist.

http://www.booktopia.com.au/the-art-of-hearing-heartbeats-jan-philipp-sendker/prod9781590514634.html?gclid=CKLA07Ty07UCFUZcpQodnH8Akg

The metallics of the cover design don’t come through in this photo, but it is a book to grab anyone’s attention. And I’m glad it did.

Spanning from New York to Burma, this book weaves back and forth between folk lore and reality in a bid to find what heritage means. Last year, I wrote a blog post about The Tiger’s Wife, and I can’t help but compare the two. It seems there is a modern fascination with the female, voiceless heroine in search of a lost, never too well-known paternal figure. If anyone can venture a guess on why this is, please, let me know. All I can conclude is that it does make a wonderful subject for a book.

While I think ultimately I preferred “The Tiger’s Wife,” The Art of Hearing Heartbeats was absolutely worth a read, if only for the lovely phrases and stories to match the beautiful title:

I will tell you: it’s love. Love makes us beautiful. Do you know a single person who loves and is loved, who is loved unconditionally and who, at the same time, is ugly? There’s no need to ponder the question. There is no such person.    

Wuthering Heights

Did you know, when you google image search Wuthering Heights, you get a ton of pictures of Natalie Portman? Mysteries of the modern world…

The second bridge on the classics march has been crossed. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is finished, but its ghost will wander the moors and crossroads of my mind for some time… maybe on a pony called Minnie….

I’ve been reading too much gothic literature.

Wuthering Heights is not a book you enjoy. This does not make it bad. A professor of mine once told me that, while King Lear was probably Shakespeare’s best play, he had never met a person who actually liked it. I believe the same principle holds true with Wuthering Heights.

Quick plot summary: a whiny rich Londoner, Mr. Lockwood, moves to Thrushcross Grange for a year. He is not a country man, and quickly falls ill for an entire winter. Any of you who have moved from a sunny clime (California) to a snowy one (Boston) feel for him, but I suggest next time he brings some rain boots and a Northface. He becomes ill after a socially awkward meeting with his neighbors and landlord at Wuthering Heights, and the story is thankfully handed over to the housekeeper, Miss Ellen Dean, as she amuses the invalid. And as we’ve learned from Downton Abbey, the help always have the best stories.

What follows is a juicy tale of three generations of the Earnshaw family destroying itself. It is a love story (apparently). Goodreads.com has it in the top 10 best love stories of all time (along with Twilight, so use grain of salt). But this is not the traditional romance of love concurring all; it is the inverse of that. Nothing can concur love in this book, and love destroys everything.

Here is the whole book in one quote from Nelly:

Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves. (63, Everyman’s Library [hardcover])

If you have a chance, read this book. You’ll enjoy the first half, and you’ll appreciate the second. Do not expect Jane Austen, do not expect the other Brontes; you will be disappointed. Do not read this directly after a breakup, it will not make you feel better. But otherwise, give it a go!

Great Expectations

The march of classic novels begins!

I don’t know if anyone reading this lives in Boston, but a week or so ago we had a wonderful glorious stupendous heat wave. It was 80 degrees in March, and I was a very happy camper. Being the lit nerd that I am, I decided that the appropriate thing to do on such a beautiful day was to sit and read in the courtyard of the Boston Public Library (aka Eden).

In such a classical setting, I decided to finish the classical novel I was reading: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I must warn you that I love Dickens. I am not on a first name basis with him as one of my close friends is (I believe when she uses He or Him in a sentence she is referring to Dickens), but I loved A Tale of Two Cities. When flustered study buddies shake me awake despite my two cups of coffee finished five minutes before, I tell them “it was a far far better rest than I had ever known.”

While I enjoyed the story of the gothic maid shut in a house where time has stopped, the pretty girl with no heart, and the thief of the marshes, it was the writing that made this book for me. Dickens is, in my humble opinion, one of the greatest wordsmiths I’ve ever read. I can forgive all of the improbabilities in his plots because his words are so… charming. Here is a perfect example:

Scattered wits take a long time picking up.

Simple, obvious, but infinitely useful. Dickens has a way of shaping  sentences so that you feel like you just learned something profound that you once knew but had quite forgotten. And for that, I thank him.

Tales of the Jazz Age

My computer crashed a few weeks ago. Although everyone always tells you to back things up, you do it once or twice and feel responsible… until your computer crashes and you lose everything from the last 6 months. This has happened to me three times now. I think I will start backing up this new computer daily.

To make myself feel better after my technological disaster, I bought a gorgeous copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age from Penguin Classics. Gold check exterior, white hardcover: beautiful. If you’re not familiar with this book, it is a series of Fitzgerald’s short stories including “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”

A friend of mine once told me that no modern short story has a hero, that our minds can only wrap themselves around characters being highly flawed if we’re only meeting them for 20 pages. I’m not so sure what this says about humanity, but it certainly seemed to hold true in this series. These stories are very Fitzgerald. His writing style is shiny and ornate, like every incident he’s describing is some sort of crown jewel, but underneath it all is rock – solid unadorned rock.

My favorite two stories in this collection were “The Four Fists” (one of the few with a happy ending) and “‘O Russet Witch!‘” (not so happy). The male figures that Fitzgerald creates are quite realistic in both of these stories, and the writing is phenomenal. One critique I would say of all of the stories in this book is that the female characters are, shall we say, lacking. There was not one girl in there who reminded me of anyone I’ve ever met in real life. 

While I wouldn’t recommend the entire collection, I definitely suggest reading the two stories mentioned above. I’ll leave you with a quote from “‘O Russet Witch‘” to enjoy:

It was a dark afternoon, threatening rain and the end of the world, and done in that particularly gloomy gray in which only New York afternoons indulge. A breeze was crying down the streets, whisking along battered newspapers and pieces of things, and little lights were pricking out all the windows – it was so desolate that one was sorry for the tops of sky-scrapers lost up there in the dark green and gray heaven.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Tales-Jazz-Age-Penguin-Classics/dp/0141197471