Shakespeare :  a man of our time

By Daniel Paquet

So, it was all a dream [It has nothing to do with A Midsummer Night’s Dream].  Mike Duffy didn’t charge the tax-payers thousands of dollars for personal trips all over the country, with a fig leaf of Senate business thrown in.  He didn’t expense a personal trainer as a ‘consultant’ or charge the public for an ‘emergency’ makeup artist or funnel $65,000 of public funds through a friend’s shell companies to avoid even the kind of scrutiny that let everything else he was doing pass.  He didn’t claim travel expenses for the house in Ottawa he had been living in for decades and he didn’t secretly take $90,000 from the prime minister’s chief of staff to keep quiet about it all, or rather to lie about it all.  He has been, as a Globe and Mail headline screamed,  ‘vindicated.’  (Coyne, Andrew, Duffy free but far from clear, An Edition of National Post in the Montreal Gazette, Saturday, April 23, 2016, front page).

How Shakespeare can be contemporary to us and Duffy?   Who was, first of all, Shakespeare?

You know the official story:   William Shakespeare was an actor from Stratford-upon—Avon.  As a young man, he moved to London, ran a theatre, wrote at least 38 plays and a profusion of poems, and made enough money to retire early.  He died –four centuries ago on Saturday –leaving his ‘second best bed’ to his wife in a dry, unliterary will.  What if the official story is wrong? (…)

Over the past decade, however, an Italian Montrealer named Lamberto Massinari has been propounding a very different notion.  Tassinari is convinced that the plays of ‘Shakespeare’ were written by an Italian immigrant to London named John Florio.  Initially his theory drew little attention.  But having appeared in Italian in 2008, then English in 2009, Tassinari’s book John Florio:  The Man Who Was Shakespeare  has now been translated t by the theatre critic Michel Vaïs and published by a respected press in France.  And the French – along with some Québécois – are lapping the idea up. (Coyne, front page).

“He was a mediocre actor, ambitious in everyday life, but nobody who could have written the plays.  That’s a fable – a religion.  He didn’t even know the Bible well enough to write what’s shown in his plays.  Yet he has become a monument.”  Tassinari is a generous and thoughtful man but, it must be said, not a Shakespeare scholar.  Born in Tuscany, a philosophy graduate of the University of Florence, he moved to Montreal in 1981 and spent 25 years teaching Italian language and literature at l’Université de Montréal.  (…)

(Abley, Mark,   Revising the ‘fable’ of Shakespeare, Montreal Gazette, Saturday, April 23, 2016, page F3)

But just as we should not convict someone of a crime merely because we suspect that he did something wrong, neither should we make  the opposite mistake:  of supposing that because the evidence did not support a criminal conviction, nothing happened and nobody did anything wrong.  (Coyne, front page).  Mr. Duffy should be happy to read those lines!

“It’s easy to see why Florio, by comparison is an  attractive choice.  He was a widely travelled migrant, a highly educated man who forged his own destiny in a troubled age, a gleeful lover of language.   He was fluent in Italian, English, French, Spanish and Latin, and probably knew Greek and Hebrew. (…)  The preface to the French edition of his book was written by Daniel Bougnoux, a critic based in Grenoble in southeastern France.  So impressed was Bougnoux with Tassinari’s thesis that he quickly wrote his own book on the subject, Shakespeare:  Le choix du spectre.

“Shakeapeare was primarily an actor, a director of a theatrical company and a playwright” says François Laroque, a contributor to the book and a professor at the New Sorbonne, “besides being of course a poet of great genius.  He was not at all a linguist, a courtier, and a kind of walking encyclopedia as Tassinari would have it.  Many of his arguments are biased, misguided, and sometimes extraordinarily stupid.”

(The University of Toronto Press has issued a critical edition of Florio’s first Italian-English dictionary.  And the British scholar Saul Frampton recently suggested that Florio was the main editor of Shakespeare’s First Folio, published in 1623.  markabley@sympatico.ca ).

(Abley, Mark,   Revising the ‘fable’ of Shakespeare, Montreal Gazette, Saturday, April 23, 2016, page F3)

Canadian singer-song- writer Rufus Wainwright’s “professional involvement with Shakespeare’s sonnets is almost as long as his personal one, dating back to 2002 – when he was invited to write music to one for a benefit London’s Royal Academy for the Drama Arts.

Robert Wilson, the avant-garde American director who his (then future) husband Wiesbrodt worked with before becoming the artistic director of Toronto’s Luminato Festival… asked Wainwright to compose settings for a wide selection of the poems for a Berliner Ensemble production, he was directing called Shakespeare’s Sonnets.  (…)

“The sonnets selected are presented in no particular order and vary randomly between those addressing the so-called Fair Youth,, and speaking mostly of a serene and spiritual love, and those addressing the figure known as the Dark Lady, more turbulent  and fraught with suffering,“ Charles Isherwood wrote in The New York Times. (…)

The one performer who Wainwright wants to emphasize is not on the album by accident is Florence Welsh, the theatrical lead vocalist of Florence and the Machine who here soulfully tackles the sweet Sonnet 29  (When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men’s Eyes).

The two met one day while Wainwright was with his daughter in the swimming pool in the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard.  “She walked in, in this incredible bathing suit with her long red hair, and dove into the pool. (…)

Wainwright, however, thought only of Shakespeare.  “She has this very Elizabethan look and could be a character from A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” he says. (…)

When he was 12… Wainwright appeared in a production of Dream.  “I played Bottom,” he says, “which is hilarious.” (…)

 (Nestruck, J. Kelly, The taming of the Sonnets, The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Saturday, April 23, 2016, Globe Arts, page 1).  Follow me on Twitter:  @nestruck

If there were no rules to prohibit what Duffy was up to, there should have been, and if the senator’s sense of what is appropriate personal conduct is ‘anything that is not expressly forbidden’ then he is entitled to stay out of jail, and he is entitled to his expenses, and he is even entitled to sit in the Senate.  (…)

People in public life are forever trying to persuade us to accept ‘not criminal’ as the required standard of behaviour.  Yet it is in public life, above all, that we must not accept it. (…)

As our leaders, what is more, they should surely be expected to exceed those standards:  to set an example of what is right, not what is blindingly, obviously wrong. (…)

Moreover, while the Conservatives may be said to have paid the price at the ballot box, that does not begin to answer all the questions raised by this affair, from what Stephen Harper knew when to where the  ethics  commissioners were to why no one other than  Duffy was charged. (…)

A sitting legislator was paid a large sum of money under the table by the prime minister’s chief of staff to collaborate in deceiving the public about a matter embarrassing to the government, a matter that was being investigated by the legislature.  If that is not illegal, it bloody well should be.   (National Post, page NP3).

Now can we link the Duffy’s affair with A midsummer Night Dream.  Well, at this time, Shakespeare was confronted to a system which was still feudal.  The king (Stephen Harper?!) had the upper hand.  Fortunately, a current Canadian prime minister such as the former leader of the Conservative Party, cannot act so freely.  Eventually, the Opposition in the street, in the House of Commons (and the Senate more or less) or in the press, may intervene to chase him from his higher functions.  In our case, Shakespeare plays with his characters.  But the authority remains in the hands of the king (whatever he is, as a as the almighty God (?!) or a Human soul).  He is doubled-check by fantasists (Puck), and they induce some personages to behave in an erratic way, the Queen – in particular- with her “one night stand” or love affair with Bottom (the ass) being in reality the spokesperson of the craftsmen for the royal celebration.

Fortunately, Shakespeare is trumpeting that a new class is emerging from the chaos and the lack of real freedoms:  for the working people, or the craftsmen (artisans).  They are simple folk, but proud of themselves.  That is the reason why they propose with happiness to play, as a gift a role in the wedding amongst the royal court.  Of course, it is a gorgeous buffoonery.

It reminds me of my early teenager youth.  I was then a student at the Collège de Lévis (in the suburb of Québec City).  Our theater’s teachers proposed to a group of students (boys and girls) to stage A Midsummer Night’s Dream).  We were then discovering just everything about life, especially:   love.   So, we did not see the play as a cliché exposure or a glance at the royal kingdom, rather than the conflicts of different types of people. That is why the Duffy’s case strikes me so much; how is it possible for people like him to hold position in nowadays while acting as representative of some sort of ‘capitalist power’.

De facto, we (in my alma mater) did not even understood that so far Shakespeare was expressing in his own way these philosophical questions such as: (Man and Nature, Man and his Creations, etc.), points of view already rose by philosophers including David Hume and further years on by Bertrand Russell, or even Diderot… for that matter.   It was not yet the time for a new revolution in England (the time of Cromwell was well over and people seemed to accept their lot). 

I had somehow a glimpse of thought about it.  Why?  Well, my father was a construction worker and all of those questions were often brought into discussions at home.  Naturally, in   Shakespeare’s defence the play was a comedy.   He had to defend himself from the bigots and reactionaries of all sorts living around and in the Court.  This might rally the King himself.

“Yet in their zeal to disprove the official story, doubters like Tassinari are prone to overstate their case.  He claims that the Stratford man came ‘from a family of illiterates, in a village without culture, with a brief and rudimentary education.’ But at the local grammar school that Shakespeare almost certainly attended, reading Latin classics was central to the curriculum.”(Abley, page F3).

Thus, for the French-Canadian public, Le Songe d’une nuit d’été (as it is known in Molière’s   French language), could be called a comedy, a love affair, or the precursor of a revolutionary    play staging the early working people, be they bourgeois or serfs.

Reference:  Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Signet Classic, Toronto, 1986, 162 pages

Communist Newa   www.dpaquet1871.blogspot.com