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Articles on William Shakespeare in:
WOOL-GATHERER 1
‘Monsters in Cupid’s Pageant’: the tentative courtship of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.
‘Apolonius and Silla’: the stories of Barnabe Riche; Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and its source; the Elizabethan treatment of lunacy; ambiguous punctuation.
WOOL-GATHERER 3:
‘Chez Nous’: Shakespeare’s problem with an invasion of England in King Lear.
WOOL-GATHERER 4:
‘What Dramatists Found in the Underdowne’: a Greek novel by Heliodorus in translation; its impact on Elizabethan dramatists.
‘Mr Bluebeard? It’s the Locksmith here’: the tale of Mister Fox, and how it links Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Edmund Spenser and Bob & Carole Pegg.
WOOL-GATHERER 5:
‘Ay, Leeks is Good’: who was the inspiration for Fluellen in Henry V?
‘The National Debt’: political themes and undercurrents in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.
EXTRACT:
...If true (and I only submit it tentatively), this theory that the play is a covert defence of Catholic patriotism and a plea for mutual religious toleration would support the contention that Shakespeare was himself a closet Catholic, and I have never seen any intrinsic problem with this. At least the theory gives some point and poignancy, and a bracing whiff of risk, to the otherwise feeble inconsequentiality of the way he treated such messy, intransigent political material....
WOOL-GATHERER 6:
A morass of ambiguities as England is invaded by King John
WOOL-GATHERER 7:
The bed-trick in All's Well That Ends Well
The bed-trick in Measure for Measure
A severed head as a souvenir in 2 Henry VI
‘Mr Bluebeard? It’s the Locksmith here’: the tale of Mister Fox, and how it links Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Edmund Spenser and Bob & Carole Pegg.
PAMPHLET ON WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: "YOU WHAT?"
This is the first of what is planned to be a series of articles on a theme which looks like a parody of desiccated, nit-picking academic research. ‘The Use of the Second Person Pronoun in Shakespeare’: guaranteed to make the eyes glaze over? In a field which one could hardly say was underexplored, very little account seems to be taken of this abstruse topic, presumably because of its apparent aridity.
I argue, though, that it is of great interest not just to the textual analyst and the grammarian, but to anyone involved in interpreting Shakespeare for the stage. The use of ‘you’ or ‘thou’ indicates a range of subtleties in a relationship which have been lost in modern English but which other languages have retained. Of particular interest are the changes from one mode of address to the other when speakers are attempting to initiate a new intimacy or have lost their temper or are administering a snub – there are many other reasons, too.
The pamphlet ‘You What?’ introduces the topic through a passage in The Winter’s Tale and then examines in some detail the forms of address used in King Lear. Any actor who pays attention to this use of language will find Shakespeare giving directorial cues again and again. We might not pick them up ourselves, but the Elizabethan audience did, and the ‘yous’ and ‘thous’ help us to understand what is going on.
EXTRACT:
...Kent intervenes with ‘Royal Lear’. Although the adjective takes out some of the sting, it is still a serious breach of etiquette to address the king by name, but he then becomes completely reckless: ‘be Kent unmannerly, / When Lear is mad.’ Can it get worse? ‘What would’st thou do, old man?’ – yes, it can. The ‘thou’ of affection is masked by the overt insolence, but that does nothing to make his language forgivable. Having ‘thoud’ his king once, he proceeds to do it seventeen more times before leaving the stage under banishment.
Lear can hardly speak as this scolding proceeds, and no wonder – everyone will be frozen with horror, and he can barely believe his ears either. His exclamation, ‘O, vassal!’ shows his awareness of the enormity of Kent’s defiance, and, although Kent slips a last couple of ‘thous’ in at 180-1, it is likely that his attempt to deal with Lear as a human being rather than an icon has ended in the humiliation of kneeling: ‘Hear me, recreant! / On thine allegiance, hear me!’ This is the unanswerable phrase, the drawing of a line which a feudal vassal can only cross to become a rebel and a traitor; it requires instant obedience and probably an act of homage...
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D.H. Parry
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