I’ve been trying to think how I could top last week’s Shakespeare Anagram, where I took Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech and anagrammed it into adapted versions of five other Hamlet speeches. I decided to attempt to anagram one entire scene from Shakespeare into an adapted version of another scene from Shakespeare.

I thought it best to use two scenes with the same characters, so that the letters in the speech prefixes would even out, and of course I needed to find two scenes of roughly equal length. I went for two scenes between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, the one just before the murder of Duncan and the one right after. (I’ll call the two scenes Beforekill and Afterkill, which I think has a clarity that calling them I.vii. and II.ii. lacks.)

Well, I did not get very far. In fact, I didn’t get past the very first step, which is to do a letter inventory. It turns out that Beforekill has over 30 more instances of the letter W than Afterkill has. This is a lot, considering that the scenes themselves are only about 90 lines long a piece. So, unless I want to add a bunch of web addresses, it’s probably not going to work. There are only so many times you can work “How now!” into conversation before it gets tedious.

It’s not a length issue, as Afterkill is rich in Rs and Ss, letters that you would expect to appear frequently in a given passage. Also, Afterkill has quite a few extra Ys than Beforekill and, oddly, about 20 more Gs! So why such a big W disparity in the other direction?

Part of it is a deliberate use on Shakespeare’s part of W alliteration in Beforekill, as in “which would be worn now” or “will I with wine and wassail,” but I think it’s more than that.

W is the letter of question words. When? Which? Why? How? Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are debating and planning the murder and are challenging each other with questions. W also the first letter of We. They are in this together. “If we should fail?” “We fail.”

After the murder, it’s all about Get this and Go there and Give me the daGGers. The soft W is used for coaxing and hedging. The hard G is used for scrambling and panicking. Awesome.

So there won’t be any full-scene anagrams, at least not right now. But I enjoyed discovering the reason why not, and thought you might enjoy it too.

We did a reading of As You Like It yesterday, and the question of the best marriage in Shakespeare came up again.

Here’s what I had to say last year in response to Cesario, a fellow blogger who suggested that it was the Macbeths:

I’ve heard Harold Bloom express this opinion, and I get the equal partnership aspect, but I find their relationship too dysfunctional and codependent to pay them this compliment. The title “Best Marriage in Shakespeare” is a dubious honor, but I think I’d have to go with Brutus and Portia. They seem like they have a really strong relationship. The fact that it can be torn apart by the assassination is a testament to the earth-shattering significance of that event. We won’t count the marriages at the end of the comedies, because who knows how they’ll fare?

But now, I turn the question over to you.

What’s the best marriage in Shakespeare?

P.S. Cesario is currently annotating the text of Hamlet, scene by scene, on her blog. Check it out.

This blog just reached 10,000 hits. Huzzah! Huzzah! That’s 20,000 eyeballs! I guess it’s time to break out the cake and SiteMeter counter.

For the record, the 10,000th hit came in at 1:22pm today via a link from an English teacher’s webpage at Xavier High School, right here in New York City. The teacher is a former graduate student of mine. So here’s a big shout out to Mr. Cambras and his 9th and 10th grade students who I see are studying Romeo & Juliet, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth. (…and some other good stuff, too.) Welcome to all.

If this blog teaches you nothing else, it’s that studying great works of literature will allow you to take the letters from passages in those great works of literature, mix them around, and form new pieces of writing that kind of relate back to the original passage. And if you do that, then eventually 10,000 people will come to see them.

I was reading recently about how Shakespeare dealt with suicide differently if he was writing about Christian characters. In Christianity, suicide is always considered a sin, while in Ancient Rome, it could be considered a noble act under certain circumstances. Shakespeare, chameleon that he was, would treat the suicide based on the culture that he was writing about.

When I first read this, it rang true for me. Hamlet laments that he wishes “that the Everlasting had not fix’d / His canon ’gainst self-slaughter!” Macbeth asks “Why should I play the Roman fool, and die/ On mine own sword?” Meanwhile, characters like Brutus and Cleopatra get heroic suicide scenes.

But the more I think about it, the less sure I am that this holds up across the canon. Off the top of my head, I can think of about four or five (arguably six) Christian characters in Shakespeare who kill themselves. There may be others as well. So I guess the Question of the Week is in two parts:

How many Shakespearean characters can you name who are Christian and commit suicide?

Do you think Shakespeare treats his non-Christian suicides differently than he treats these suicides?

I subscribe to a service called “SiteMeter” which allows me to see a limited amount of information about my visitors. One thing that I can see is if someone finds my site via a Google search. Recently, I’ve had a number of hits from people looking to find out about living descendants of King Henry VIII. My site isn’t really about that, but I thought I’d provide an answer anyway, as a public service.

There are no living descendants of King Henry VIII.

Henry’s father, King Henry VII, had four offspring who lived past childhood: Arthur, Margaret, Henry, and Mary. Arthur was always expected to be the next king, but he died in 1502. When Henry VII died in 1509, the kingdom was passed to his younger son, crowned Henry VIII.

Henry VIII had four known living offspring from four different women. His first wife, Catherine of Arragon, gave him a daughter, Mary (born 1516). He had an illegitimate son, Henry FitzRoy (born 1519), with his mistress Elizabeth Blount. His second wife, Ann Boleyn, had a daughter Elizabeth (born 1533). His third wife, Jane Seymour, had a son, Edward (born 1537). Henry VIII would have three more wives, but no more children to carry on his line. And as we shall see, none of his four branches would bear fruit.

Henry FitzRoy died in 1536, while his father was still alive.

When Henry VIII died in 1547, young Edward became King Edward VI, but died in 1553 with no heir. He was 15 years old. That was the end of Henry’s Y chromosome. But what about the daughters?

There was a brief reign by Lady Jane Grey (not a descendant of Henry VIII, but a granddaughter of his sister Mary) and then Henry VIII’s daughter Mary took the throne as Queen Mary I of England. You may know her as Bloody Mary.

(Don’t confuse either Mary with Mary Queen of Scots, who was yet a third Mary. She is a descendant of Henry VIII’s sister Margaret. We’ll come back to her in a bit.)

Mary I of England died in 1558 with no offspring, leaving the country in the capable hands of her sister Elizabeth. During the 45-year-long reign of Queen Elizabeth I, we saw a new Golden Age which included the rise of Shakespeare and Sir Francis Bacon. But alas, we saw no heir. Elizabeth died in 1603, ending her father’s biological legacy forever.

The crown then passed to the son of Mary Queen of Scots, who was James VI of Scotland at the time. He became King James I of England. And Shakespeare quickly began work on Macbeth. Note that the British monarchy even today can be traced back to King Henry VII, the father of King Henry VIII.

But King Henry VIII himself has no known living descendants.

I hope this was helpful for at least some of you. For the rest of you, expect a new Conundrum tomorrow.

Via News on the Rialto we find an article about comic book versions of Shakespeare’s plays with updated simplified language:

Shakespeare’s plays are being rewritten as comic strips for pupils who find his poetry boring, it emerged today.

Thousands of teenagers are to study cartoon versions of famous plays such as Macbeth which reduce finely-crafted passages to snappy phrases.

The publishers hope the comics - illustrated by artists who have worked on the Spiderman series - will inspire disaffected readers with a love of the Bard’s plays.

No disrespect to Spiderman, but this won’t instill anyone with a love for anything, and certainly not the Bard’s plays. Shakespeare writes using the language of poetry, which means that every word choice is significant. The interplay, music, and structure of the language is fundamental in Shakespeare’s development of plot, character, and theme. You can’t just use your Spidey sense to paraphrase this stuff and call it Shakespeare.

The Shakespeare Geek demonstrates why.

I actually like the idea of comic book versions of Shakespeare plays, as long as they use the original language. You can even abbreviate the language in comic book form. But once you take away the language, you are no longer reading Shakespeare. It’s not even dumbed-down Shakespeare. You may as well just read something else.

For example, you may wish to read these comic books that deal with delicate problems for children. It seems that even Spiderman has a secret.

That’s what you get for messing with Shakespeare.

I’ve been meaning to respond to this for some time:

Besides, in Rosse’s speech, the true hero of the battle in Fife is unnamed, referred to only as “Bellona’s bridegroom.”

But, wait - Fife. Fife is an important place in the play. Why? Because Macduff is the Thane of Fife.

Which means that it is Macduff who has captured Cawdor, turned back the Norwayan king, and won not only the battle but a huge sum of ransom from the enemy forces.

He’s talking about Macbeth, and if you read the scene in question, you’ll see two men, each of whom describes a battle. The first was fought by Macbeth. The second was fought by “Bellona’s bridegroom,” a reference to Mars, the Roman god of war. The question is - Is Bellona’s bridegroom meant to refer to Macbeth? Conventional wisdom says yes, but the Master of Verona says no, and his argument is worth reading. But let’s take a closer look.

I can see where, looking strictly at the text, you can make a case that Bellona’s bridegroom can’t be Macbeth. But assuming it’s Macduff is a bit of an overreach, and I think it would be a good time to revisit the distinction between a strong production concept and a close textual analysis. It seems to me there are three possibilities:

1. The two men are describing the same battle. It would not be unusual for Shakespeare, having written two accounts of the same battle, to have used them both. If Macdonwald is the Thane of Cawdor and the Norwayan lord refers to Norway himself, the two descriptions could be of the same battle. This seems unlikely, but I wanted to throw it out there all the same.

2. The two men are describing different battles, and Bellona’s bridegroom is Macbeth. This is troubling, for the reasons described by the Master of Verona. Also, Bellona’s bridegroom is described as having personally confronted Cawdor, and in the next scene, Macbeth seems unaware that anything is amiss with the wayward Thane:

By Sinel’s death I know I am Thane of Glamis;
But how of Cawdor? the Thane of Cawdor lives,
A prosperous gentleman;

So if Bellona’s bridegroom really is Macbeth, whether we have one battle or two, Shakespeare’s got some ’splainin’ to do.

3. The two men are describing different battles, and Bellona’s bridegroom is not Macbeth. This makes sense dramatically, if the purpose of the scene was to show how Macbeth becomes the Thane of Cawdor. The description of the second battle shows how the title of Cawdor becomes available and the first battle demonstrates Macbeth’s deserving of it. It also would explain how Macbeth is unaware of Cawdor’s defeat. But then who is Bellona’s bridegroom? I like the idea that it’s Macduff, and it may have been Shakespeare’s intention, but it’s not in the text. Neither is there any textual strife between Macduff and Duncan. But it’s a brilliant production concept, and I think it would work well on stage.

So none of the solutions turn out to be particularly satisfying. My guess (and a guess it is) is that there were two battles and Bellona’s bridegroom is Macbeth. I think Shakespeare just didn’t notice or didn’t care about the errors and inconsistencies. Those who wish to argue that a genius of Shakespeare’s caliber would never make such an error need only to look at the opening moments of the original version of the scene in question, where Shakespeare clearly indicates a “bleeding Captain” in the stage directions, but when Duncan asks “What bloody man is this?”, Malcolm replies:

This is the Sergeant…

Clearly, we are putting way more thought into this than Shakespeare did.

Via the Shakespeare Geek, I see where Teller from Penn & Teller is doing Macbeth. It’s opening in New Jersey in mid-January, and will be at the Folger in Washington throughout March.

I hope I get a chance to check that out!

I wanted to clear up that my post last week, Lies Like Truth, was criticizing the article in the Scotsman and not necessarily the academics being cited. If, in fact, they are making the claim that the article says they are, they are included in my critique, but I suspect the article doesn’t do justice to their positions. If I had to guess, and this is only conjecture, I would say that they are simply stating that the version of history told by Shakespeare first appears in Wyntoun. No big deal. The only reason it’s worth mentioning is that they were about to say so on a radio special. But that wouldn’t make a good story for the Scotsman, and thus this whole business of being “lifted, almost word for word in places” rears its ugly head.

Case in point: here’s another story from DailyIndia.com and NewKerala.com from Asian News International that seems to have been “lifted, almost word for word in places” from the original story in the Scotsman. Look at the two stories side by side and the ANI piece, appearing the next day, reads like a high school student clumsily paraphrasing from an encyclopedia. But upon closer inspection, the ANI article makes some bold statements that the Scotsman was careful only to imply, despite the fact that the Scotsman article was clearly its one and only source.

For example, the Scotsman plants the idea of the authorship question like so:

In a radio programme to be aired today, Scots historian Fiona Watson and literary expert Molly Rourke claim the story of Macbeth was penned by a Scottish monk on St Serf’s Island in the middle of Loch Leven 400 years before William Shakespeare even drew breath.

Shift around the letters, and the ANI version becomes:

Scots historian Fiona Watson and literary expert Molly Rourke are claiming that the credit for ‘Macbeth’ doesn’t belong to the Bard of Avon, but to a Scottish monk named Andrew de Wyntoun from St Serf’s Island in the middle of Loch Leven who wrote the play 400 years before Shakespeare was even born.

So we go from the idea that Wyntoun penned the story of Macbeth (the man), which is true, to the idea that Wyntoun wrote Macbeth (the play) instead of Shakespeare. Quite a leap. I can only imagine, but I hope I’m right, that Watson and Rourke would be horrified to see these claims attached to their names.

Even the title of the ANI article is dodgy:

Did a Scottish monk write Macbeth instead of Shakespeare?

Oh, I can answer that one.

No!

The Shakespeare Geek points us towards a blog called The Master of Verona and a post he has about Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow” speech. He suggests that Macbeth may be reading a suicide note written by Lady Macbeth, possibly written while she was asleep. I love the idea, and he gives strong textual support to make his case. I would look at this more as a bold directoral choice, rather than an argument that this is the way the text demands it must be, but that seems to be largely where he’s coming from as well.

If you look at that scene from the Folio (via the wonderful Furness Collection at the University of Pennyslvania), you may notice that Seyton doesn’t have an exit. Editors generally have provided him with one. But in the original, there is a cry of women, Macbeth has a speech, he asks Seyton “Wherefore was that cry?”, and Seyton responds “The Queen, my lord, is dead.” How does he know? I’ve heard the argument that Seyton is a dark, supernatural being (with a deliberate play on his name), but he’s always struck me as too minor of a character to carry this much import. This reading would add another interpretation. Someone has brought Seyton the suicide note while Macbeth is talking. Then, he hands Macbeth the note as he says his line.

Fun stuff. And I’ve been looking through this guy’s archives. His last post is some Shakespeare limericks. Earlier on, he gets snippy with Slings & Arrows because he takes issue with the character’s interpretations of the Shakespeare. And even earlier he casts the kids in South Park in King Lear and all-Muppet productions of both Lear and Much Ado.

Oh, I so have a new blog to read.