Falstaff's nose and the babble of green fields

Othello by Mikko Viherjuuri was not quite what I expected. It reminded me of why I don't go see plays much.

I don't get the overacting, especially when it isn't done all the way through. At times I was reminded of my favourite soapie, Days of Our Lives. If I want to see overacting, I'll watch that show. And they do it better yet!

The director explains in the programme that he had to translate the play into plain, unlyrical Finnish, because the play is notoriously "mythical" (tarunomainen) and wouldn't make much sense for most people. I don't understand his choice of term there, though I understand what he's saying.

But still, he left some key parts in the play "mythical", so as not to dampen their dramatic effect. I'm not sure what I think about those scenes. They went as over the top as Days of Our Lives, which I love to no end, so I suppose in principle I liked those parts. I guess my problem with it is simply the inconsistency.

The director also claims that de-mythifying the play has made Othello's character more believable. Not in my opinion. I couldn't understand how gullible he was. He was probably pathologically jealous and possessive is all I can think of.

I suspect it also made it harder to understand the characters because the director removed most of the monologues. That's how Shakespeare I suppose showed to the viewer how the characters' logic and thinking worked. Leave them out and you have far less to work from.

What's great though is that it made me realize how soap operas are actually keeping alive 400 years old dramatic traditions! So why are they looked down upon so much? Why won't so many people admit to watching them?

If you really think about it, it's not like they don't have depth of meaning to them. Just think about how everything happens in circles in soapies. The basic pattern is that people hook up, they fall out, they hook up again, sometimes with the same people and sometimes not.

Sometimes they die, and sometimes they come back alive. And again and again. It all reminds me of Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot. In the play, two characters wait in the same nondescript place everyday for someone called Godot, but he never arrives.

They try to entertain themselves, but their days are pretty much the same. The play really has no ending or beginning because we start from the middle of their waiting, and stop before Godot has arrived. They'll stay in their circular existence for Godot knows how long.

Just like Vladimir and Estragon are doomed to do the same thing over and over, soapie characters are doomed to their lives of neverending drama and love triangles, quadrangles, whatever. I think Shakespeare would have approved, so why don't you.

Random newsflash

I did it. I figured out how to move around the blog title and description.

Not only that, but I managed to move the post footer away from the post's body! I can put my mind to rest now.

How noble in reason, infinite in faculties; Or, what a good Shakespeare heretic makes*

No worries ‒ the earlier post today was just a hoax. This is what I've been planning to post for a while now. The upside about having to wait a week to post anything is that I'll have something in my secret reserves for the whole coming year, if things go as planned. They never do, which is exactly why plans are needed, as a partial remedy.

Even though I may not be reaching my target readership with these kind of posts, I'm going to keep up with this silly Shakespeare-related babble. I find everything about this literary icon endlessly amusing, ever since I learned about the authorship question. Oh, it's almost too juicy sometimes.

Of course, many will be bored to death with this. I realize that my posts look rather long, but why is it that text is somehow less accessible in large amounts on a computer screen, on a website (sorry, blog)? I might shrink the font size in the future, to make my rantings look nice and concise.

But it's my blog, my power, my kingdom and my horse that I'll kiddy up any way I wish to go. In the name of myself, this blog and the holy ghost of Shakespeare, whoever s/he was. Amen.

So the other day it occurred to me to search for videos related to the Shakespeare Authorship question (wholly deserving of the capital letters right) on Youtube. Nothing too original came up, except for this fine piece of someone playing Edward de Vere.

There's also the taping of the mock trial in Washington. The audience will apparently laugh at anything. Some people just listen and wait for anything to laugh at, so as not to give an impression of having no sense of humour. Silly if you ask me.

Then I ran into John Hudson's theory of Emilia Lanier as Shakespeare. Or rather, his "discovery". Finally a candidate I'd love to believe in. What if Shakespeare was a woman? Wouldn't that be so cool?

Seriously speaking, I still know too little of the issue to vouch for any certain candidate. I'm still not sure I have to. The agnostic camp may not be a whole lot of fun, but at least I know I don't have any ulterior motives behind every statement I might make.

("Edward de Vere" from aforementioned Youtube video)

Earlier this week I read a book pertaining to methods in historical study. There were many points that struck a chord in me, thinking back to writing research papers of any kind. There was something about being able to relate to the people in the past, in order to draw the right conclusions about anything they did, to do justice to them when writing about them.

When I was writing on the authorship question, this aspect puzzled me. Who exactly should I try to relate to? Shakespeare, whoever s/he was, and his/her contemporaries, or the authorship question enthusiasts? If the latter, it looks like I failed miserably. It put me off how so many of these researchers were trumpeting their respective candidate without seeming to have much of self-criticism. Once they had made up their mind about their choice of candidate, they turned on the defensive and overly assertive gear.

Now that I think about it, the strong rhetoric is probably partly due to the publicity that the question has received. In addition to multitudes of books by professionals and amateurs (here meaning simply someone without a scholarly background), there are also websites galore that can be accessed by anyone, anywhere, any time. In public, you obviously have to make your statement without hesitation if you want to get it through to people. They'll have none of this hedging that is so natural and even imperative in the scientific way of writing.

Another interesting point in the book was something about certainty with your research results. It reminded me of what was said in a book on the history of childhood. Something along the lines that childhood historians often wake up in cold sweat in the dark of the night when realizing how thin a line separates their work from fiction.

(What came up with "hysteria + rhetoric" on Google Image search)

I wonder if there isn't something of this kind of hysteria present in the rhetoric of the authorship scholars and researchers. If you're going to spend years on studying an author's work, you don't want to be held in an eternal state of suspense as to who it is you're studying, even if it doesn't always matter in literary analysis.

It could also be the case that these brits and americans simply write differently from what I'm used to reading. It's strange, though, since I rarely read anything in any other language than English. You'd think I was used to it by now. It must be related to the genre of writing, i.e. books aimed at a popular audience, as well as internet websites.

So don't be fooled by Hudson's less than convincing case on that video. Calling the Stratford Shakespeare "Shaksper" would make anyone sound a little cuckoo. His website is more impressive (takes a while to load, be warned).

Besides, "there are just too many coincidences here"! Wow, I was instantly won over by that particular statement! She was a known feminist, a Jew, used De Pisan as a source as did Shakespeare and ‒ gasp ‒ was mistress to Henry Carey, who was the patron of the acting company Lord Chamberlain's Men, which performed Shakespeare's plays among others. It boggles the mind!

As sugar at the bottom, she even included the names of important people in her life in the plays, in the form of clever puns. To show to the posterity that it was her who wrote them. It can't get any more obvious than that.


It's the cumulative argument all over again. A large number of coincidences sharing one common denominator must by laws of nature entail truthfulness of the original premise! It's like horoscopes: the parameters are so loosely defined that they'll fit any person to a tempting degree.

(Was Emilia Lanier Shakespeare - the most brilliant hermafroditic literary genius in the world?)

Emilia Lanier was not a complete stranger to me. Earlier, she's been identified as the "Dark Lady" of the sonnets. For instance, Michael Wood (2003, In Search of Shakespeare) reckoned that Shakespeare might have had an affair with this woman when living in London, away from his wife and children in Stratford.

Maybe she's the one who gave Shakespeare syphilis (again proposed by mr. Wood), so as a result the 40-something Shakespeare described himself as old and decrepit in the sonnets. Wouldn't that explain everything so neatly? In your face, Oxfordian heretics!

Hudson connects Lanier with Shakespeare because of her background in music, among other things. Her family performed in court. And what d'you know: Shakespeare's plays are "the most musical" in England! Witness "nearly 2000 musical references" and "300 different musical terms" - clearly proof that Shakespeare the author must have been a professional musician, or connected to such people.

Obviously I don't dare to argue on this with Hudson, who holds a certificate in a Shakespeare Institute, who reviews for a Shakespeare journal, and who is writing a thesis on a Shakespeare play. He must know the plays far better than I ever could.

Yet I can't help wondering, how come is it that I keep bumping into these fabulous figures and almost incredible assessments of the nature and vocabulary of Shakespeare's plays. It all makes the (wo)man sound completely inhuman in his boundless abilities and knowledge of everything there is to know in the world.

Taking a wild guess, if I had a look at the list of the references and terms, I would probably find perhaps 50 quotes of the word "music", or some musical instrument. Surely, if you refer to music and musical instruments a lot, it means you must be musically talented. Right?

Music, lute, piano, violin, string, chord, note, minor, major, melody. What if I added a string of musical terms at the end of each of my posts? Or better, sprinkled them here and there to spice up my language? If some day some future historian for some reason created a corpus of my posts and started searching for musical terms, they could conclude that I was a very musical person. There could simply be no other explanation.

*Ever wonder why 19th century novels nearly always seem to have subtitles starting with "or, [yada yada yada]"? I have. Did the authors have trouble making up their minds about the title, or were they just trying to be as informative as possible?

(The first picture shamelessly ripped from the Youtube video; the second picture from John Hudson's website.)

Marred

I strained my transverse abdominal muscle. I think. It's not the rectus abdominis, but it could also be either of the obliques. It hurts to inhale. I didn't think it would be possible to strain your abs, since they so rarely even become sore, no matter how much you try to punish them. It's the most difficult muscle group to work out, because they get used to exercising so easily.

And all because I was so disappointed with the aerobics class yesterday. It was supposed to be the only one during the week that actually can improve my fitness, but the instructor was ill again and her replacement was less than adequate. Most aerobics instructors seem to think that female university students are in a rotten shape, so the classes don't give much of a challenge.

So I go home after spending 1,5 hours on doing practically nothing worthwhile and I have to do a full workout at home myself. Resulting in said trauma on my poor abdomen. I didn't have time to go jogging anymore, which pisses me off immensely. I'm really deprived exercise-wise, and it tends to lead to sky high aggression levels.

If the coming winter is the same as the last time, I'll be able to continue jogging after new year's, so that's kind of positive, even though I love the snow and I missed it last winter.

If there's snow, I could of course go skiing, but going skiing in the nearest Kauppi woods would only make me angry. Skiing Finns are simply unbearably annoying, and since Kauppi is their natural habitat, it would be inevitable to meet many of them. So no.

I'm considering starting swimming this year. If only it didn't cost so damn much.

A Myth that I have to believe in

(If you think this post looks a bit on the long side, you're hallusinating.)

It's that time of year again. Grab a pencil and paper and try to make sense of the syllabi, trying desperately to cram everything into the timetable. Frankly, I'm kind of fed up with it all. It's not that the courses aren't interesting, I've just had it up to here with this student life, going to lectures and everything else just as meaningless. What I really want is a) get a job or b) start my research for real. I can't do all three at the same time. I can be efficient and energetic and hardworking, but only when I'm doing something tangible, like writing.

To make it more annoying, the most interesting courses always overlap. I really wanted to take the art history course on "Love and evil", but at least I can take the one on 19th century Finnish art. There's also going to be a Shakespeare recital by the Arts department, sonnet 116. It's an offspring from a collaboration, "Art and Disease", between the departments of Arts and Medicine, strangely enough.

I ended up reading more about the programme. They have themes like artists and their illnesses, art as therapy, doctors as artists. They mention that Kalle Achté has claimed in the Kanava magazine that depression and hypomania can increase creativity.

It's certainly a cliché that artists are mentally and sometimes also physically tormented, and channel their illbeing into wonderful art. Yet intuitively thinking, there must be at least a grain of truth to it. If you've ever painted or drawn or done anything else creative, you'll know how you need to be completely focused.

The process is immersive, all your thoughts are directed at thinking of what you're going to do and how. There is no outside world during that time, though of course it can remind you of itself in a less than perfect environment. So creating art is naturally very relaxing in the sense that you're forced to forget all your worries. Which can be therapeutic, I guess. What the doctor ordered, not so often.

Personally, I'm not sure if an anguished or depressed state of mind is necessarily useful. Being depressed basically shuts down your brain and you become this zombie that is unable to react to or do anything. If you're angry or angsty, on the other hand, it can spell doom for your brush if you channel that energy into aggressive strokes.

Being excited and happy, however, seems to enable the best results. So hypomania, why not? Just pray you'll have it if you're a professional artist, hmm?

As much as I hate all these romanticized myths about any profession, be it artist, scientist, doctor, I'm slowly beginning to appreciate the conventional, stereotypical views on art and artists. I haven't quite found my golden middle road between dismissing art theory as hopelessly relativistic, self-interested and autoerotic rubbish on the one hand, and devouring and absorbing it completely as something most divine and sublime on the other.

I seem to be treading the muddy soil somewhere along the way across the noman's land, twists and turns aplenty. I make occasional jabs at intertextual, psychological and other kinds of nonsensical interpretations, but always make sure to keep my bearings by glancing back at the beacon of purely visual aesthetical pleasure.

My personality tends towards extremes, but I truly believe in moderation. Yet I wonder if art isn't a playground to allow for excess, to revel in it. By the looks of it, you'd think so today. But was it always like that? Did cave paintings try to create discussion in the society, to break familiar lines of thinking? Or how about still lives, aren't they just about the most controversial thing you've ever seen?

Much of art is still created for the purpose of hanging it up on your living room wall. Few people buy art that is disturbing or unsettling. Artists need to eat too, and since the more conventional art forms and styles sell better, they're here to stay.

I often think back to a visit to Juhani Honkanen's atelier years ago. I didn't care much for his scenery paintings. Your run-of-the-mill, garden-variety landscapes of Finnish woods, thunder clouds on the sky, dark pines and firs towering over the viewer, the random heather bush on the side. To quote the Joker: why so serious? I don't understand why much of the nature scenery has to be so sombre and gloomy, what with all the impending storms on the sky.

I prefer his abstract and surreal paintings, even though I can't usually stand surreal art (which in my opinion is quasi-creative expression at its most contrived, repressed, stifled and boring). He's quite decent at portraits as well, especially the more adventurous ones. But guess what? At the exhibition, he'd only sold many of the sceneries, but none of the abstract or surreal ones.

I don't blame people for not wanting to see pictures of naked people swimming through a starry sky when they're eating their morning cereal. I wouldn't. Only I couldn't understand why the abstract art didn't sell. Few people today are so visually challenged as to not be able to appreciate abstract art at some basic, purely aesthetical level.

Whatever the reason, by way of summary: art and its message lose sight of each other as soon as a work of art is sold to a private person. The message withers away, and in comes comfort and normalcy. So does art have to create imbalance, to unsettle? Does conventional, aesthetically purely instrumental art gnaw away at the foundations of "serious" art, simply by being commercially more viable?

I hope not. Art with a message is usually more fun.