Update on Shakespeare webinars and Faerie Queene class

I've been unavoidably delayed in preparing these classes owing to an unexpected family difficulty which has been occupying all my attention lately. When I have them ready, I'll issue a new coupon code so you'll still be able to get the expected discount. So sorry about the delay, and I appreciate your patience and understanding! 

As always, if you need to contact me directly, you may do so at mrscumbee@gmail.com.

Canonical hours and The Tempest

The Tempest is so interesting. It’s the only one of Shakespeare’s plays where he invented the plot instead of using one from history, myth, or romance. Instead, it’s inspired by tales of ancient voyages, like Aeneid and Jason and the Argonauts, but also by contemporary accounts of voyages to the New World. The characters are based on stock characters from the popular improv theater commedia dell’arte, only the story isn’t improv because Prospero is directing the whole thing. 

Also, it’s one of only two where Shakespeare observes the Aristotelian unities of time and place, which means that the time it takes to act the story on stage is the same as the amount of time that passes for the characters within the story.

In Act 1, scene 2, we meet Ariel for the first time when Prospero calls to him to come and give a report of the work he’s done that day, carrying out Prospero’s orders regarding the storm and bringing the ship’s passengers to land. Ariel has been having a great time doing all that, and gives an animated account of the storm, the wreck, and the passengers’ behavior.

But then Propsero mentions the time -- it’s almost three p.m. -- and says, “The time ’twixt six and now / Must by us both be spent most preciously.” In other words, there’s more work to be done.

Three p.m. is the canonical hour of Nones, the ninth hour after sunrise. It’s the hour at which Jesus died on the cross. It’s the time in the afternoon when the day is drawing to a close, but your work isn’t necessarily done yet, and you’re tired. It’s the hour of temptation. Since it’s connected to death (both Jesus’ death and the approaching death of the day with its memento mori) it’s also the hour for growing in wisdom and maturity, and it’s the hour of forgiveness -- both seeking and giving.

As soon as Prospero mentions more work, Ariel becomes fractious, complaining about the work, and reminding Prospero of his promise to set him free soon. Prospero scolds Ariel, who repents and obeys quickly and enthusiastically the rest of the play.

From here on out, all the characters in this play will face trials and temptations, will be reminded of their sins, will need to seek or offer forgiveness.

Miranda may be the one exception to that -- I’ll need to be watching her as I read the rest of the play with my class.

The Divine Comedy and The Tempest

One of the fun things about having several books going at once is that it makes it easier for you see connections between them.

This morning I was reading Dorothy Sayers’ commentary on her translation of Purgatory. She describes the difference between the retributive punishment the characters undergo in Inferno as being very similar to the remedial punishments suffered by those on Mount Purgatory. The difference, she says, lies not in the nature of the suffering, but in the character of the sufferer. In Inferno, the people there have chosen their sin to the very end and so have no remorse – they do not accept the justice of their punishment, so the punishment can do them no good. On the contrary, those in Purgatory are there because they sincerely want to do the will of God and to be with him. They accept justice and “welcome the torment, as a sick man welcomes the pain of surgery” (p. 16). And they don’t just accept the suffering – they “count it all joy.”

Now, I’m a Protestant and don’t believe in Purgatory as a real state after death, but that doesn’t stop us from appreciating the story and from seeing what this means as an allegory of the soul. If we love and seek God, then the suffering we encounter in life is part of the refiner’s fire, and is for our good.

Then, this afternoon, I was rereading The Tempest to prepare for a co-op class I’ll begin teaching soon. In Act 2, a group of shipwrecked men are wandering around trying to find the rest of their companions. To one of these four men, Gonzalo, the island they find themselves on is a Paradise, or can easily be made one, but to the other three it’s “Uninhabitable and almost inaccessible,” with air that stinks of a swamp. The main difference between these men? Gonzalo is a faithful friend and counsellor, where his companions are all traitors and usurpers, “three men of sin,” as they’re called later in the play.

Not a perfect parallel, but it helped me make sense of what’s going on in that scene and another one that follows later, when the three men have a horrific vision, where Gonzalo sees and enjoys a banquet. The last time I read The Tempest I thought Gonzalo must be a lunatic.

Layers of meaning

I originally wrote the post below in April of 2019, but this past week I reread Macbeth for a class I’m teaching in Medieval cosmology and something new occurred to me this time through.

The story of the woman with the lap full of chestnuts can be looked at it from a different angle. A witch came to her wanting to take her blessings, and the woman, recognizing the evil creature, told the witch to leave, and she left. The witch attacked the husband’s ship, but she couldn’t do any permanent harm:

Though his bark cannot be lost,
Yet it shall be tempest-tossed.

Evil influences can be refused. Macbeth and his lady could have rejected their evil impulses, but they chose not to.

And in Medieval and Renaissance literature, those two meanings (this one, and the one in the post below) can both be true at the same time. In his Anatomy of Criticism, Northrup Frye calls this the “principle of manifold or ‘polysemous’ meaning.”

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

First impressions of Shakespeare's Macbeth, Act I, Scenes 1-5

That’s an awfully boring title, isn’t it? I couldn’t think of anything clever. :-p

The kids and I are reading Macbeth for our Medieval and Renaissance Literature class with Angelina Stanford, and I had some random things I wanted to write down before I forgot them, so here they are.

The Weird Sisters, Henry Fuseli, c. 1783

First Witch:
A sailor’s wife had chestnuts in her lap
And munched and munched and munched. “Give me,” quoth I.
“Aroint thee, witch,” the rump-fed runnion cries.
Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ th’ Tiger;
But in a sieve I’ll thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail,
I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.

This sailor must be must be quite a man, given the trip he’s on, the ship he masters, and the fact that the Witch says she can’t sink his ship. She can, however, curse the husband of this foolish woman.

I’m saying she’s foolish because here she is with her lap full of blessings gobbling them so greedily that she won’t even share when an old woman asks for some.

If you know anything about fairy tales, you know that’s a huge mistake, a mistake of wicked stepmother proportions.

The chestnuts caught my attention though because so often the chestnut tree is used in literature as a symbol of happiness and prosperity. If you know anything about Macbeth, you know that this most definitely isn’t a story about happiness and prosperity.

Let me go back to the beginning.

The Tragedy of Macbeth opens with the stage direction, “Thunder and lightening. Enter three Witches.” These three make a plan to meet with Macbeth before the day is over (to tell him he will be king, as we later learn), and saying, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” they exit, and Scene 1 ends.

Given that the story begins with upheaval in nature, I’m going to assume that whatever disorder that set off this tragedy has already happened.

They reappear in Scene 3: “Thunder. Enter the three Witches.” The First Witch tells of her encounter with the sailor’s wife, which Asimov says has nothing at all to do with the play—it’s just there to please King James I, who “considered himself a particular expert on the matter of witchcraft,” and had “written a book called Demonology, in which he advocated . . . the severest measures against witches.” [Isaac Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare: The English Plays, page 151]

Asimov, you’re a genius and I love you dearly, but you completely missed the boat on this one. Shakespeare wasn’t just a suck-up. He was an artist and he knew exactly what he was doing here.

(Before going on, I want to point out that these three are elsewhere in the play called the weyward/weird/wyrd sisters, so I think we’re supposed to think of them as being similar to the Fates of classical mythology, or the Norns of Norse mythology, priestesses who told the future.)

Now back to the chestnuts. Chestnuts provide a lot of nutrition and calories in a tiny little package, so they’ve always symbolised things like prosperity and fertility. Because they fall in such abundance during the harvest season, they also symbolise foresight and long life. Here’s something new I learned: They also symbolise the ability to receive ancient wisdom.

So, we have a prosperous woman (that she’s “rump-fed” tells us this) enjoying the bounty of nature, who refuses an old woman’s request for food, resulting in her husband being cursed. In Scene 5, we meet Lady Macbeth, who is as unnatural a woman as it’s possible to be.

I don’t have any conclusions exactly, mostly questions and guesses. Was Macbeth already corrupted before he met the Weird Sisters? I tend to think so, since good people don’t jump head-first into evil. CS Lewis talks about this regarding Mark Studdock’s descent in That Hideous Strength. Macbeth does briefly seem to accept that if he’s meant to be king, it’ll happen without his taking action. But Lady Macbeth must have long since fallen since she’s so quick to push her husband into evil action in order to bring about the prophecy.

First impressions of Shakespeare's Macbeth, Act I, Scenes 1-5

That’s an awfully boring title, isn’t it? I couldn’t think of anything clever. :-p

The kids and I are reading Macbeth for our Medieval and Renaissance Literature class with Angelina Stanford, and I had some random things I wanted to write down before I forgot them, so here they are.

The Weird Sisters, Henry Fuseli, c. 1783

First Witch:
A sailor’s wife had chestnuts in her lap
And munched and munched and munched. “Give me,” quoth I.
“Aroint thee, witch,” the rump-fed runnion cries.
Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ th’ Tiger;
But in a sieve I’ll thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail,
I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.

This sailor must be must be quite a man, given the trip he’s on, the ship he masters, and the fact that the Witch says she can’t sink his ship. She can, however, curse the husband of this foolish woman.

I’m saying she’s foolish because here she is with her lap full of blessings gobbling them so greedily that she won’t even share when an old woman asks for some.

If you know anything about fairy tales, you know that’s a huge mistake, a mistake of wicked stepmother proportions.

The chestnuts caught my attention though because so often the chestnut tree is used in literature as a symbol of happiness and prosperity. If you know anything about Macbeth, you know that this most definitely isn’t a story about happiness and prosperity.

Let me go back to the beginning.

The Tragedy of Macbeth opens with the stage direction, “Thunder and lightening. Enter three Witches.” These three make a plan to meet with Macbeth before the day is over (to tell him he will be king, as we later learn), and saying, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” they exit, and Scene 1 ends.

Given that the story begins with upheaval in nature, I’m going to assume that whatever disorder that set off this tragedy has already happened.

They reappear in Scene 3: “Thunder. Enter the three Witches.” The First Witch tells of her encounter with the sailor’s wife, which Asimov says has nothing at all to do with the play—it’s just there to please King James I, who “considered himself a particular expert on the matter of witchcraft,” and had “written a book called Demonology, in which he advocated . . . the severest measures against witches.” [Isaac Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare: The English Plays, page 151]

Asimov, you’re a genius and I love you dearly, but you completely missed the boat on this one. Shakespeare wasn’t just a suck-up. He was an artist and he knew exactly what he was doing here.

(Before going on, I want to point out that these three are elsewhere in the play called the weyward/weird/wyrd sisters, so I think we’re supposed to think of them as being similar to the Fates of classical mythology, or the Norns of Norse mythology, priestesses who told the future.)

Now back to the chestnuts. Chestnuts provide a lot of nutrition and calories in a tiny little package, so they’ve always symbolised things like prosperity and fertility. Because they fall in such abundance during the harvest season, they also symbolise foresight and long life. Here’s something new I learned: They also symbolise the ability to receive ancient wisdom.

So, we have a prosperous woman (that she’s “rump-fed” tells us this) enjoying the bounty of nature, who refuses an old woman’s request for food, resulting in her husband being cursed. In Scene 5, we meet Lady Macbeth, who is as unnatural a woman as it’s possible to be.

I don’t have any conclusions exactly, mostly questions and guesses. Was Macbeth already corrupted before he met the Weird Sisters? I tend to think so, since good people don’t jump head-first into evil. CS Lewis talks about this regarding Mark Studdock’s descent in That Hideous Strength. Macbeth does briefly seem to accept that if he’s meant to be king, it’ll happen without his taking action. But Lady Macbeth must have long since fallen since she’s so quick to push her husband into evil action in order to bring about the prophecy.

An Experiment in Audioblogging: Shakespeare's Sonnet 30

So I got this wild idea that instead of continually telling y'all you should read poetry aloud, I'd just read it to you. I haven't figured out how to get a plain audio file onto Blogger yet, so I made the sound file, then added some images using Window's Live Movie Maker, and posted it on YouTube. It's a little under three minutes long, of which about a third is the actual poem and the rest is me yammering.

The first image, in honor of National Poetry Month, is "Poetry" by Alphonse Mucha, part of his series on the Arts.



Eldest Daughter says I should have written a script or at least a cue sheet, because my discussion is so unpolished -- but that was part of the point of doing it this way. I'm not a professional. I love poety, but I don't really know what to say about it beyond "It was nice and I liked it," which is about as sophisticated as my second-grade book reports were. I'm just a regular mom, and hey, if I can do it, you can too!


Many thanks to Dr Taylor and my classmates, Anne, Julie, and Daniel, for their insights and encouragement.

We are...

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)                                       We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. (Prospero in The Tempest, Act IV, Scene I)

Sonnet LXXIII

~ William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
                This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
                To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Historical, literary and musical tidbits Today is St. Crispin's day, on which the Battle of Agincourt was fought in 1415, the small English army roundly defeating the much larger French one. ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ Shakespeare's Henry V contains this wonderful speech by the king before going into battle.

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is nam'd. And rouse him at the name of Crispian. He that shall see this day, and live old age, Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors And say Tomorrow is Saint Crispian. Then he will strip his sleeve and show his scars, And say These wounds I had on Crispin's day. Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, But hell remember, with advantages, What feats he did that day. Then shall our names, Familiar in his mouth as household words Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered. This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remembered We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he today that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother. Be he ne'er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition; And gentleman in England now abed Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin day.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

For the Victory at Agincourt Owre kynge went forth to Normandy, With grace and myyt of chivalry; The God for hym wrouyt marvelously, Wherefore Englonde may calle, and cry Deo gratias: Deo gratias Anglia redde pro victoria. He sette a sege, the sothe for to say, To Harflue toune with ryal aray; That toune he wan, and made a fray, That Fraunce shall rywe tyl domes day. Deo gratias: Deo gratias Anglia redde pro victoria. Then went owre kynge, with alle his oste, Thorowe Fraunce for all the Frenshe boste; He spared 'for' drede of leste, ne most, Tyl he come to Agincourt coste. Deo gratias: Deo gratias Anglia redde pro victoria. Than for sothe that knyyt comely In Agincourt feld he fauyt manly Thorow grace of God most myyty He had bothe the felde, and the victory Deo gratias: Deo gratias Anglia redde pro victoria. Ther dukys, and erlys, lorde and barone, Were take, and slayne, and that wel sone, And some were ledde in to Lundone With joye, and merthe, and grete renone Deo gratias: Deo gratias Anglia redde pro victoria. Noe gratious God he save owre kynge, His peple, and all his wel wyllynge, Gef him gode lyfe, and gode endynge, That we with merth mowe savely syng Deo gratias: Deo gratias Anglia redde pro victoria.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~ Cyber Hymnal has a hymn called O Love, How Deep that is set to a tune called "Deo Gra­ci­as," The Agincourt Song, 1415. I would assume the above song to be the original words to that melody, but if it is the melody has been changed a bit to make it fit the hymn. I'd love to know whether my speculation is true, and be able to listen to the original melody, if it's different than what Cyber Hymnal has. ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ Update Cindy (Dominion Family) posted a link to Kenneth Branagh's rendition of the St. Crispin's day speech. More info at George Grant's blog.