Shakespeare Weekend

We are halfway through Nicholas Rowe’s (1674-1718) The Work of Mr. William Shakespear; in Six Volumes! Published in London in 1709 by Jacob Tonson (1655–1736), this second edition holds an important place within Shakespearean publication history. The Work of Mr. William Shakespear; in Six Volumes is recognized as the first octavo edition, the first illustrated edition, the first critically edited edition, and the first to present a biography of the poet.  

This week, we explore the third volume of The Work of Mr. William Shakespear; in Six Volumes. The third volume encompasses historic plays including a Shakespearean Henriad depicting the rise of English kings. The volume is comprised of King John, King Richard II, Henry IV Part I, Henry IV Part II, King Henry V, King Henry VI Part I, and King Henry VI Part II. While the plays have recurring characters and settings, there is no evidence that they were written with the intention of being considered as a group. A full-page engraving, designed by the French Baroque artist and book illustrator François Boitard (1670-1715) and engraved by English engraver Elisha Kirkall (c.1682–1742), precedes each play. 

In addition to Rowe’s editorial decisions to divide the plays into scenes and include notes on the entrances and exits of the players, he also normalised the spelling of names and included a dramatis personae preceding each play. The only chronicled critique of Rowe’s momentous editorial endeavor is his choice in basing his text on the corrupt Fourth Folio. 

View more volumes of The Works of Mr. William Shakespear; in Six Volumes here.

View more Shakespeare Weekend posts.

-Jenna, Special Collections Graduate Intern 

I was recently thinking about how the concept of marking people’s ages by summers is a thing that exists in both English and Russian.

In English, I’m pretty sure I’ve only seen this used poetically. I can immediately think of two examples from Gilbert & Sullivan. In the Act I finale of Ruddigore, Rose enters to: “Hail the Bride of seventeen summers!” In Act I of Pirates, Ruth pleads with Frederic: “Take a maiden tender — her affection raw and green, / At very highest rating, / Has been accumulating / Summers seventeen…” Wiktionary adds that this usage is esp. for younger ages — which checks out with those examples, each emphasizing (or attempting to emphasize) a character’s youth.

In Russian, the word for “year”, год/god, takes the alternate genitive plural лет/let [lit. “summers”, declined from лето] when it’s used for counting numbers of years. So most ages are actually given in summers! I’ve definitely seen years referred to as “summers” in other contexts, too, typically in the plural (лета) and with a somewhat poetic feel. Looking at the etymology, I see Old Church Slavonic лѣто/leto means both “summer” and “year”.

Also, note words like летопись/letopis’ [chronicle, lit. “summer/year” + “write” –> “record of summers, yearly record”]. English has “annals”, which comes from Latin annales libri [books of years], without the double meaning of “summers”. (And then there’s also English “chronicle” and Russian хроника/khronika, which both trace back to Greek χρόνος/khrónos [time].)

Why mark years by summers, in particular? My guess would be it’s something to do with summer as the prime of the year, in a metaphorical framework where spring is new life and winter is death.

You mention “summers” marking age by calling attention to youth - there’s a line in the Lord of the Rings (I paraphrase) -

“Most of us have seen too many winters - or too few, like my grandson here”

It’s not quite as numerical as the G&S example, but the use of “winter” seems intended to evoke age, by contrast to the 17 summers evoking youth (even though it’s used for both an old person and a young person

There’s another line, I think also LotR, something like “the years lay heavy on him like snow”

And Legolas counts years in terms of autumns IIRC - “500 times have the leaves fallen in the Greenwood since [Edoras was built], but it seems but a little while to us”

(I haven’t looked up any of these so my wording is probably wrong, but I hope not in hugely relevant ways)

That’s a very cool counterpoint. It’s been a while since I’ve done a full read of LOTR, but now that you mention it, I feel like I’ve seen “winters” used that way elsewhere, too.

Shakespeare uses it like that sometimes! The example that sprung to mind right away is (unsurprisingly) from Richard II:

Earlier in the play, Richard banishes Bolingbroke “till twice five summers have enriched our fields,” but Bolingbroke imagines his exile in terms of winters (“Four lagging winters and four wanton springs / End in a word: such is the breath of kings”) and later on John of Gaunt picks up the same imagery (“What is six winters? They are quickly gone”). Which I’d never really noticed, so thanks for making me think of it!

Elsewhere, Sonnet 2 asks the fair youth to imagine himself “When forty winters shall besiege thy brow…” Shakespeare doesn’t seem to describe age in terms of summer that much, but Capulet in Romeo and Juliet does so when he tells Paris that Juliet is too young to marry: “Let two more summers wither in their pride / Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride.” Perhaps also relevant here is that Juliet is actually a summer baby—her birthday is established to be on Lammas Eve, July 31. 

When I was revisiting 3 Henry VI a few days ago to prepare the scene-by-scene for Social Shakespeare, this passage from scene II.vi jumped out at me:

I’m used to the soul being matter-of-factly “she” in some languages with grammatical gender, but this feels marked in my English. It’s the sort of thing I might sometimes deliberately do in poetry for a particular kind of effect. I got curious: how often does Shakespeare do it?

I did a quick keyword search on Open Source Shakespeare and skimmed the results for cases of a character’s soul being referred to with 3rd-person pronouns. I found 17 instances across his works: 8 where the soul is “she”, 9 where the soul is “it”. That’s not a huge dataset, but still kind of cool that it’s almost an even split. Usage varies within the same play, and even within the same scene! Also worth noting that all 17 instances were in versified dialogue. The two options seem to coexist fluidly in roughly the same register.

Full set of instances under the cut. Text copied as it appears in the Open Source Shakespeare corpus (but I cross-referenced Folger to get scene-specific line numbers for the plays).

Keep reading

And then there’s

Which just feels weird.

Oh yes, I’ve always found that really striking, too! Feels like a subversion. I have a couple posts where I looked into how people have translated that part into Russian, given that it goes against the grammatical genders of “brain” and “soul”. (Some reverted it to masculine brain and feminine soul, some avoided gendering. Modest Tchaikovsky got clever, and used дух instead of душа.)

1. In Russian, summer is grammatically neuter (лето) and the rest of the seasons are feminine (весна, осень, зима).

2. In Italian, spring and summer are feminine (primavera, estate), while autumn and winter are masculine (autunno, inverno).

3. In Spanish, spring is feminine (primavera) and the rest of the seasons are masculine (verano, otoño, invierno).

4. In German, spring can be masculine or neuter (Frühling or Frühjahr), and the rest of the seasons are masculine (Sommer, Herbst, Winter).

5. In French, all the seasons are grammatically masculine (printemps, été, automne, hiver).

I’ve seen autumn and winter personified as women in Russian poetry, and I wonder how that gets handled when translating into some of these other languages here. It’s easy enough in English — I can just use “she” when pronouns are needed.

I remember when I looked into Russian translations of the Pomfret soliloquy from Richard II a while back, to see how a language where “mind” and “brain” are grammatically masculine and “soul” is feminine handles this passage:

Disappointingly, two of the three translations I found straight-up switched the mother/father roles to match the grammatical genders of “mind”/“brain” and “soul”, eliminating what I think is a very striking subversion of tropes in the original. (The third one avoided explicit mentions of mother/father roles, which is an approach I can sympathize with, but it still hides the subversion.)

So I was looking at this old paper about roles Shakespeare may have played in his own plays, and while it’s over 20 years old (side note: WHY DOES AUTOCORRECT KEEP CAPITALIZING “OLD”) and the SHAXICON database has been kind of tarnished by the fact that the guy who compiled it was very publicly wrong about Shakespeare’s putative authorship of an anonymous poem, the conclusions here about roles Shakespeare played are at least plausible and as a result I HAVE SO MANY FEELINGS ABOUT THE IDEA THAT SHAKESPEARE MAY HAVE PLAYED GAUNT, THE GARDENER, AND THE GROOM IN RICHARD II

Oh man, that is a wonderful doubling! And I like the additional meta implications of all of them being played by the playwright himself.

(Gaunt doubled as the Bishop in the production I saw last summer, which didn’t have the same resonance. I think Bushy and Green were the gardeners? And then Bushy/Bagot/Green were the murderers, which was even more interesting. How often does that get done?)

I have a question

Why does Romeo and Juliet rhyme so much even though it’s a tragedy? I can’t think of another Shakespeare tragedy off the top of my head that rhymes.

This reminds me… I started prepping a statistical analysis of rhyme in R&J a while back and never quite finished it.

I had just done something similar with Richard II, because the huge amount of rhyme in that play was one of the first things to jump out at me on first exposure. So I was surprised when this chart (thanks, @shredsandpatches!) showed me that R&J has a similar amount of rhyme to R2! I had just been in a production of R&J, but somehow the R2 rhymes seemed more noticeable. Why?

Maybe part of it’s just that the characters I played in R&J didn’t speak any rhymes. But I also suspect I’ll find the R&J rhymes more densely clustered in a few scenes (especially near the beginning), compared to the distribution of the R2 rhymes. I like to think of R&J as a comedy that goes off the rails, with a sort of pivot point at Mercutio’s death halfway through. I’ll be curious to see how my rhyme analysis compares to that reading. You’ve piqued my curiosity again. Maybe I’ll find time to finish that analysis and write it up this weekend…

I’m gonna miss teaching this play.

#also i realize the wording of the continuum kinda suggests hal is undead 

I will never forget that as long as I live.

Also I misread Henry IV as Henry II, I didn’t see the V right at first.

Hey, Michael Boyd’s version of the Henry VIs opened with Zombie Henry V staggering across the stage into his grave! THERE IS PRECEDENT.

…I need to know more about zombie!Henry V. Was that played for comedy or horror? It just sounds completely at odds with all my mental images of the opening scene of H6P1.

The ghosts were a recurring theme across that particular cycle, beginning with the very final lines of Richard II, where recently stabbed Richard appeared on the balcony above Henry IV on the throne. He also followed Rumour through 2 Henry IV before disappearing at the end of that play. H5 was, so far as I remember, ghost-free, but Henry appeared at the opening of 1 Henry VI wearing his coronation regalia and vomiting blood (good times) before pitching forward into his coffin and cueing Bedford’s opening lines.

And once you were into the Henry VIs, there was a full-on army of ghosts that just moved from play to play, haunting various characters and culminating in Richard III’s nightmare, and it was utterly amazing.

That production is the reason I was able to finish my doctoral thesis without completely losing my mind. (That, and writing fanfic. Long story.)

Recurring ghosts sounds like a fascinating way to add extra connections between the histories! I would love to have seen that cycle.

The 2013 RSC Richard II (which I’m guessing is from a different histories cycle? because I’m not aware of a related minor tetralogy set) also had ghost!Richard on a balcony at the end, and I found that super effective.

Has Dowland’s “Flow, my tears” ever been used as the music in the Pomfret scene? I was mostly familiar with instrumental versions until just recently. Then I looked at a score and saw this:

That setting of “And tears… and sighs… and groans” immediately reminded me of Richard’s meditation on time: “So sighs and tears and groans/Show minutes, times, and hours.” (R2, V.v.58-9) And really, the entire text of the song fits his situation very nicely at this point in the play.

I know it would be anachronistic – historical events depicted in Richard II were the very tail-end of the 14th century, while Dowland was 16th-17th century. Probably also best to just use an instrumental version, so it wouldn’t distract from the spoken monologue. But the tune is suitably plaintive, and the (hidden) thematic connection in the lyrics is exactly the sort of sneaky little detail I’d want to slip in if I were somehow directing a production.

Could it have been used in the Mark Rylance Globe production? I remember recognising all the music in that one, but it’s been a long while and I’ve forgotten the specifics of the soundtrack.

No, that was Playford’s “On the Cold Ground” (which I love) :)

Ooh, I wasn’t familiar with that! It’s pretty.

Is it more common to have an ensemble (like this) or a lone musician (like the 2013 RSC production)? I’m also curious: are there any established fan theories about who’s playing the music in-universe?

I’ve heard both, but a single musician seems to be more common (definitely easier to stage). I like to think it’s the groom 😊

(I’ve read about productions that have implied that, but never seen one.)

I love the idea of it being the groom. Poignant, and relatively easy to convey to the audience (have him slipping a wooden flute back into his bag as he enters; bonus points if Richard notices it and reacts in some way). Plus, it fits really nicely with the end of the soliloquy, since the groom’s visit is an unexpected act of pity/kindness.

A recorder or other simple flute feels the most realistic to me – lightweight, not a fussy instrument, and audible from a pretty good distance. (It’s more of a stretch to imagine someone spontaneously pulling, say, a viol out of their bag and then starting to play it right outside Richard’s cell.)

If there’s a whole ensemble playing, I think my reaction as an audience member would be somewhere between “time for willing suspension of disbelief!” and “maybe he’s hallucinating the music?”

In fairness, hallucinating the music would be entirely in keeping with Mark Rylance’s Richard… ;)

But yeah, I like solo recorders for the Pomfret scene as well – it’s such a haunting sound. The text does refer to “a disordered string,” which suggests it was probably some sort of string instrument originally, but whatever, the audience won’t notice (I guess one could change it to “strain” or something if one was picky). Arden editor Charles Forker suggests it may have been a lute, which is definitely plausible given the frequency of lute music in Elizabethan drama; he describes an RSC production (the 1986 one starring Jeremy Irons) in which the audience saw when the groom left the stage that he had a lute strapped to his back, although this wouldn’t be class appropriate in real life! Obviously a viol is even less plausible in universe (and also not class appropriate for the groom if he’s the musician), but a smaller stringed instrument like a rebec or a gittern would certainly work. The 1978 BBC version (with Derek Jacobi) uses a harp, which I don’t really like, especially since it sounds like a modern harp, and the 1989 ESC version (with Michael Pennington) uses a fiddle that actually does sound rather off-key and is very effective.

Here’s Sting singing Flow My Tears.

I can see the song being used at court, maybe softly in the background while BB&G try to distract the Queen, or drifting downstairs into Richard’s dungeon from the higher levels of Pomfret Castle. Even connecting it to Aumerle might feel right - I can see him singing to Richard during the Flint Castle scene.

Nice – I really like the way he sings the last verse in particular.

Related to your suggestions of how to use it in other scenes: What if the Pomfret music is a recurring motif, but we don’t really get to hear it properly until V.v? 

@shredsandpatches, that’s a huge range of instruments! An off-key fiddle seems like it would be effective in a similar way to a recorder. I just really like the idea of it being a humble instrument that someone might carry with them while traveling.

Re: “time broke in a disordered string” Huh, I was assuming that referred to the line of the music. When I’ve taught music lessons, I’ve always used an analogy of stringing beads on a thread to help my students understand phrasing – to help them visualize the idea that there should be an underlying structure instead of just a bunch of disjoint notes (loose beads). So I immediately thought of the Pomfret musician’s tempo issues as a messy and oddly-shaped line of phrasing!

Has Dowland’s “Flow, my tears” ever been used as the music in the Pomfret scene? I was mostly familiar with instrumental versions until just recently. Then I looked at a score and saw this:

That setting of “And tears… and sighs… and groans” immediately reminded me of Richard’s meditation on time: “So sighs and tears and groans/Show minutes, times, and hours.” (R2, V.v.58-9) And really, the entire text of the song fits his situation very nicely at this point in the play.

I know it would be anachronistic – historical events depicted in Richard II were the very tail-end of the 14th century, while Dowland was 16th-17th century. Probably also best to just use an instrumental version, so it wouldn’t distract from the spoken monologue. But the tune is suitably plaintive, and the (hidden) thematic connection in the lyrics is exactly the sort of sneaky little detail I’d want to slip in if I were somehow directing a production.

Could it have been used in the Mark Rylance Globe production? I remember recognising all the music in that one, but it’s been a long while and I’ve forgotten the specifics of the soundtrack.

No, that was Playford’s “On the Cold Ground” (which I love) :)

Ooh, I wasn’t familiar with that! It’s pretty.

Is it more common to have an ensemble (like this) or a lone musician (like the 2013 RSC production)? I’m also curious: are there any established fan theories about who’s playing the music in-universe?

I’ve heard both, but a single musician seems to be more common (definitely easier to stage). I like to think it’s the groom 😊

(I’ve read about productions that have implied that, but never seen one.)

I love the idea of it being the groom. Poignant, and relatively easy to convey to the audience (have him slipping a wooden flute back into his bag as he enters; bonus points if Richard notices it and reacts in some way). Plus, it fits really nicely with the end of the soliloquy, since the groom’s visit is an unexpected act of pity/kindness.

A recorder or other simple flute feels the most realistic to me – lightweight, not a fussy instrument, and audible from a pretty good distance. (It’s more of a stretch to imagine someone spontaneously pulling, say, a viol out of their bag and then starting to play it right outside Richard’s cell.)

If there’s a whole ensemble playing, I think my reaction as an audience member would be somewhere between “time for willing suspension of disbelief!” and “maybe he’s hallucinating the music?”

Has Dowland’s “Flow, my tears” ever been used as the music in the Pomfret scene? I was mostly familiar with instrumental versions until just recently. Then I looked at a score and saw this:

That setting of “And tears… and sighs… and groans” immediately reminded me of Richard’s meditation on time: “So sighs and tears and groans/Show minutes, times, and hours.” (R2, V.v.58-9) And really, the entire text of the song fits his situation very nicely at this point in the play.

I know it would be anachronistic – historical events depicted in Richard II were the very tail-end of the 14th century, while Dowland was 16th-17th century. Probably also best to just use an instrumental version, so it wouldn’t distract from the spoken monologue. But the tune is suitably plaintive, and the (hidden) thematic connection in the lyrics is exactly the sort of sneaky little detail I’d want to slip in if I were somehow directing a production.

Could it have been used in the Mark Rylance Globe production? I remember recognising all the music in that one, but it’s been a long while and I’ve forgotten the specifics of the soundtrack.

No, that was Playford’s “On the Cold Ground” (which I love) :)

Ooh, I wasn’t familiar with that! It’s pretty.

Is it more common to have an ensemble (like this) or a lone musician (like the 2013 RSC production)? I’m also curious: are there any established fan theories about who’s playing the music in-universe?

shredsandpatches replied to your video: Has Dowland’s “Flow, my tears” ever been used as…

If you remember later, I’d be curious to know more! :)

Also, your comment about Dowland possibly being familiar with Richard II is a good point. (Since Dowland and Shakespeare were contemporaries.)

*looks up both works on Wikipedia*

Apparently, the original instrumental version of “Flow, my tears” dates to 1596, and the version with lyrics was published in 1600; Richard II was written around 1595. That’s… way closer than I was expecting, and doesn’t rule out the possibility of Dowland drawing inspiration from Shakespeare.

Richard II was first published in 1597, and went through two more editions in 1598, so there’s a slim window of time in which he could have seen or read it, although he left for Denmark in 1598. Of course, “sighs and tears and groans” is also a pretty common Elizabethan poetic figuration, so it’s just as possible that it’s a coincidence…

Yeah, most likely a coincidence. Going by publication date narrows the window further, and these lyrics are pretty typical Dowland melancholy anyway. :)