Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Definitely a play of two halves, the second of which doesn't match the dramatic interest of the first. Basically everything after Mark Anthony's rhetorical showstopper with Caesar's body is quite dull. I find Brutus and Cassius's long quarrel scene odd and their subsequent deaths bathetic. Shakespeare does a good job balancing the different viewpoints, although I suspect that the conspirators' cries of liberty and enfranchisement would appear more suspect to an Elizabethan audience than they do now. Caesar's murder is essentially a regicide that unleashes a civil war, and eventually results in Octavian as emperor anyway, so while Brutus may have been high-minded he was certainly (and quite literally) misguided. The influence of rhetoric on politics is ultimately what the play is about – the tribunes chiding the mechanicals at the start, then Cassius drawing out Brutus as the figurehead for the conspiracy, and climaxing with Mark Antony's playing the mob like a fiddle. The latter half loses that thread a bit, which is why this reputedly balanced play feels lopsided to me.

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King Lear

King Lear by William Shakespeare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This hits different when you have two daughters who refuse to do what you tell them to do. When I was a teenager I found Lear unreasonable and the complaints of Goneril and Regan understandable. Reading it now brings out just how pointed and heartbreaking a portrayal of patriarchal love it is. Lear overbearing affection makes him myopic, and he largely brings his afflictions on his own head. Edmund’s cold attitude to his family, perhaps born of a lack of affection, provides the perfect counterpoint. He and Edgar are the co-plotters of this tragedy. The brothers are like Hamlet split in two – Edmund inheriting a ruthless intelligence and Edgar acting like a madman for the moral edification of failed fathers. In a bleak play he and Cordelia provide a grim sense of hope that a younger generation through their determination and suffering can redeem their parents.

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Dream Country

The latest edition of the London Graphic Novel Network's coverage of The Sandman is now up, and it may well be the best yet. Lots of people piling in on a range of questions, some of which are only tangentally related to Gaiman's work. As usual, I did my fair bit of arguing, a small bit of which is below. Worth reading through the whole thing though.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Tend to agree with the Shakespeare Shakespeare Shakespeare reservations, tho am disposed to be a bit kinder than Mazin on the question of whether Gaiman misses the point of Shakespeare. Seems to me Mazin is equating 'stories' with plots, when actually Gaiman may mean something a bit broader. The constituent parts of 'stories' could include plot, character, themes, language, and maybe other things as well. If anything, Gaiman's error is to ascribe a certain archetypal content and mythological force to the plays - which isn't what makes them distinctive in my view. Instead, I would flip Mazin's top two Shakespeare talents and suggest he is most innovative when it comes to character - particularly creating personalities that are open to an almost limitless variety of interpretation. His felicity w/ language is a key part of that, but I think there is a reason why he is remembered as a playwright, rather than a poet, first.

Shakespeare's competing loyalties to creativity and family strike me as less of an insight into the historical Shakespeare and more as an insight into Gaiman himself. My sense is that while Gaiman is a prodigious story-generating machine, there is always a kind of detachment to his writing - his characters are often quite flat, manipulated into the paths he sets out for them rather than having the vitality to knock the author off-track (e.g. as Falstaff did Shakespeare). I would go so far as to presume that Gaiman sometimes would find the ephemeral amalgamations of past stories he rattles off so easily ~more~ interesting (or maybe less threatening) than real people. That sounds mean, but actually I think it's a brave thing to admit, and is a tendency we're all capable of.

Dream sums up the point of the Shakespeare issue as follows: "things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot". This sound like bullshit, except the "dust and ashes" gloss on "facts" suggests he is talking about the way stories outlive people, rather than nature or the universe. Fair enough, but then we get to Facade: "mythologies take longer to die than people believe. They linger on in a kind of dream country that affects all of you". The sun turns out to be a mask hiding the stories which structure our sense of the world. The protagonist's apotheosis is triggered by the surfacing of those 'shadow-truths' behind the world of empirically-determined facts. Is Dream's country becoming Plato's realm of the forms - the hidden structure behind our changable world? Is Gaiman granting myths a kind of metaphysical power over our lives? Or is it just an internal, psychological switch in perspective that somehow physiologically unlocks the ability to commit suicide. I am more comfortable with the latter reading, tho neither is particularly satisfying. Gaiman is always more comfortable dwelling on the awesome power stories have over us, rather than why we tell them or what they might be for.

A Room Of One's Own

You fall in love with Virginia Woolf as you read this -- so funny, so wise, so humane. The argument is a simple one: only when women can afford a room of their own will they be able to write good fiction. What interests me particularly is Woolf's idea of what good fiction is. She thinks patriarchy disfigures the writing of women of talent -- the bitterness it provokes makes the author impose herself on her work. The novel becomes a piece of 'self-expression' rather than art. And what makes fiction art? The ability Shakespeare and Jane Austen had, of removing themselves from their work, and letting their characters speak for themselves.

This poses a problem for me. My two favourite novelists are James Joyce and George Eliot, and what I like about them is precisely that they put so much of themselves into the stories they write. In terms of graphic novels too, what I have most responded to is autobiographical work: Blankets, Fun Home, Maus (although I wouldn't really want to read the latter again). I'm sure that if I ever do write any kind of fiction, I would naturally gravitate towards this kind of brutally honest, redemptively embarrasing stuff. Would it be bad art as a result? For me, it is the kind of art that moves me most.