Cordelia Redux

The burden of knowledge my daughter says, is upon the writer and not the reader. Sometimes the burden is described as follows: "As we accumulate more knowledge, more knowledge must be known before new contributors can contribute." Here is it is simply that the reader must know who Cordelia is to appreciate the words.

So I explain...

The youngest and favorite daughter of King Lear is Cordelia, who struggles to find kind words to say about her father. William Shakespeare made a play out of it, which is correctly called a tragedy. Its first known performance was on St. Stephen's Day, December 26th, in 1606.

Cordelia Redux 

My lord and father, 

I am the last to speak, with the least to say 

Sad am I, I cannot heave 

My heart into my mouth, I love your majesty 

I love my father more, according to my bond, 

Not more nor less, I confess

Like any good daughter, I would love and be silent 

Leave me to my duty, I have no need to boast 

That the truth is so untender 

To obey and love and honor 

And nothing can I add

Dear Dad,
Okay, It is sad, but

Every daughter does what she should do

Nothing more nor less need be said

To obey and love and honor is the past

The truth is

I have no time to stay

I need the keys, the car, some cash

I’ve got to dash

Cordelia, a painting by William Frederick Yeames

Witches

MACBETH Act I, Scene I

          A desert place.

Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches

First Witch

When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

Second Witch

When the hurlyburly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.

Third Witch

That will be ere the set of sun.

First Witch

Where the place?

Second Witch

Upon the heath.

Third Witch There to meet with Macbeth.

Macbeth and Banquo Encountering the Three Witches on the Heath,
Musee d'Orsay, by Théodore Chassériau, 1855. The Atheneum.

The old man's son is in college now. He is home for the summer having survived his first year away from home. Asked what he learned, the son replies, "All stories, my English teacher taught, can only be understood in the context of the time in which the story is written." He continues, "The other questions that must be asked are, 'Who is the author writing for?' and 'What is his purpose in writing?'"

Good points, the old man thinks.

Macbeth has always had an attraction for fans of William Shakespeare. Written between 1603 and 1607, the play tells the story of a brave Scottish general, Macbeth, who is told by a trio of witches that one day he will become King of Scotland.

Do these witches have some magical powers that allow them to foretell the future?

In the forty years prior to writing the play, some eight thousand women were burned as witches in Scotland. In 1597, King James VI of Scotland published Daemonologie, blaming witches for love or hate, disease, storms, and the power to kill. In 1603, King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England, and, one supposes the question of witches was fresh in the minds of James' new English subjects. Not that Elizabeth I, who preceded James, was innocent of superstition, but she only executed eighty-one women for the crime of witchcraft during her reign. Perhaps she was distracted by weightier matters of state than the hysterics of accusers and the rantings of old women who were tortured into confessing crimes they did not commit.

William Shakespeare wrote Macbeth no doubt to curry favor with the new king. The conscience of Shakespeare's play turns out to be Banquo, a relative of the future king. Banquo is present with Macbeth at the meeting with the three witches. He is promised by the witches, not the crown, but the future crown. This promise surely put Macbeth to wonder about Banquo's loyalty, and thus, Macbeth, after murdering the king, subsequently murders Banquo. Banquo continues on in the play as a ghost and as father of Fleance and ancestor to the future King James I.

After the performance of the play, Shakespeare's troupe became The King's Company and Shakespeare and company were on their way to fame and fortune.

Shakespeare was an unqualified success because he wrote in an age of superstition. The mass of spectators who paid a penny to stand and watch a performance, which included witches and ghosts, regicide and suicide, battles, and blood and gore, got their money's worth. And those who paid three-penny's worth for a seat, were richly treated to more thoughtful prose.

Fear and Conscience

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all...

Hamlet, Act III, scene i (58–90).

Poor Hamlet, his uncle murders his father, the King, and marries his mother, the Queen. Hamlet beset by his father's ghost frets on what course of action he should take. Hamlet soliloquizes - "To be or not to be, ..." what makes action impossible. 'Tis “conscience [that] does make cowards of us all . . . thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”

Shakespeare's Hamlet was concerned with the question of morality. Can the murder of his uncle appease the murder of his father? What then is to become of his mother? What part in the deed does she play?

What of those who are amoral, those who have no conscience? For them, the Old Man thinks that fear itself makes us cowards. It is the fear of uncertainty. What consequences do our actions engender? "Ay, there is the rub," for who knows what may come.

The Old Man is not alone to be amazed by Shakespeare's wisdom. Wisdom suggests experience. Maybe the idea for the words are created in The George Inn, 77 Borough High Street, Borough, London, one of London's oldest pubs and situated near the London Bridge. It is the Winter of 1599, Shakespeare is sitting at a table with his best friend Richard Burbage for whom he wrote many of the parts of his plays including Hamlet. The two of them have a decision to make, their theater lease is up and a new location has been found across the river. But they lack the funds to purchase the lumber for a new theater. One of them poses the suggestion, that they dismantle the theater that they currently lease, one that they built with their own funds and haul the lumber across the Thames over the ice and though the snow to the new location.

Does fear of the law, uncertainty of the legality of their act, cross their minds. Surely, it does. Fortified in the choice by a pint of bitter, was it William Shakespeare or Richard Burbage who said, "Fie on the consequences, let's do it." They did and the Globe Theater was built.

The Old Man must make a decision, indeed he makes many decisions every day whose consequences may be uncertain. This decision seems a simple one, for The Old Man is updating the web pages for Traditions Furniture. Simple as it may seem, the Old Man knows that the coding involved is extensive. Multiple pages will be added. New links and new images will be uploaded. Mistakes can be costly. Google, the monolithic god that determines search placement may not smile on the new changes.

Still, like Hamlet, the Old Man must march ahead, for to not act is to act. It is to choose the same course of action in a world that moves on. By not acting, we fall behind.

Check out the changes on Traditions Furniture and tell the Old Man if he was right.

The Cranky Old Man is reading  A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, 1599, by James Shapiro.

The season is Summer. Summer in England in 1599 is a year of uncertainty. England is embroiled in a war in Ireland that is not going well, Spain threatens a repeat of the Spanish Armada, and the Queen, now old and frail, is uncertain in what to do.

Shakespeare has been plagiarized. A new book of poems, The Passionate Pilgrim, supposedly written by Shakespeare, has come out. The book is a commercial success, but Shakespeare does not share in the profits. He is certainly the author of some of the poems, but not all. The law being what it is in 1599, does not offer protection to the author for his works. Shakespeare, understood the vagaries of the law for he commented in 1591, "The first thing we do," said the character in Shakespeare's Henry VI, is "kill all the lawyers."

One of Shakespeare's plagiarized poems is When My Love Swears. At this point, Shakespeare had kept most of his poems for private distribution among friends. The commercial success of the plagiarized version caused him to re-issue the poem with some nuanced changes.

William Shakespeare -  When My Love Swears

When my love swears that she is made of truth
 I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor'd youth,
Unlearned in the world's false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,

Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppress'd.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love's best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told:

Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter'd be.

Shakespeare's changes are subtle. Line six changes "I know" to "she knows" suggesting a psychological understanding of the female mind. The following line is changed from " I, smiling" to "Simply" again implying a wisdom of the ways of lovers that only comes with experience. This follows with a revision of multiple lies to just one lie apiece each lover shares. Finally, Shakespeare changes the last line from "Since that our faults in love thus smothered be," to the simpler and less judgmental, "And in our faults by lies we flattered be."

Love is forgiving. It is not to be condemning or judgmental. We may lie in our efforts not to offend, but we must remember that at the end of the day, "I'll lie with her and she with me."

William Shakespeare was 35 in 1599. His revision of the sonnet took place some time between 1599 and 1609, when he was 45. Either way, Shakespeare was wise beyond his years in understanding the dynamics of love. The poem, written years earlier, is changed in perspective by the older, wiser Shakespeare to reflect an understanding that relationships are, after all, a matter of compromise and respect.

And a few scattered lies.