TrueLife - Floating on a Stream of Consciousness - Et Tu, Brute?

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

Today we dig into the beautiful, yet complicated world of Shakespeare with the one & only Dr. David Salomon. The wonderful works of Shakespeare http://www.davidasalomon.com/ https://davidsalomonblog.wordpress.com/ https://www.abc-clio.com/ABC-CLIOCorporate/product.aspx?pc=A5537C https://www.amazon.com/Seven-

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark. fumbling, furious through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini, check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Please and gentlemen, welcome back to Tuesday. It is a beautiful stream of consciousness that you have with David and George today. I hope everybody is, I hope the birds are sick. in the sun is shining, the wind is at your back, and you are ready to join and maybe grab a ring and float on this lazy river with David. David, how are you today, my friend?

Good. How are you doing, George? I'm fantastic. Would you be so kind as to reintroduce yourself to the few people who may not know who you are? I am the director of undergraduate research and creative activity at Christopher Newport University in Newport, Newport, New York, Virginia. been a professor of medieval English literature, religion, and culture for three decades, written a bunch of books.

My most recent book is The Seven Deadly Sins. And I love talking to George from all the way across the country and across the water here. Yeah. So before we get started, I have a shout out I want to do to my friend Hank, who's just been such an amazing person for me. He's really helped out in making this a best. better podcast and giving me some great feedback. And the reason I bring him up to you, David, is that in a recent post to me, he said how

much he enjoyed. In fact, he said that you are the favorite guest on the Trivbvre podcast. Oh, well, that's very nice. I really greatly appreciate that. Fantastic. We're jumping into some Shakespeare here today. And I wrote a little introduction. It's something along the lines of, you know, our friend William Shakespeare is arguably

the greatest writer in history. His works have been translated into every living language, even the alien language of Klingon, which is pretty fascinating. He's credited with inventing over 1,700 new

words and phrases, many of which remain in the common use to this day. He was an aspiring. He was the son. I'm sorry. He was the son. Yes, yes. And the son of a Catholic tradesman during a time of great upheaval. He apparently left the

left school at the age of 13. And we're going to get into much more of that. But let's just go ahead and jump in here, David. When I think, when I say to you, William Shakespeare, what do you think of? Oh, um, huge volumes of, of the collected works like this one, which, you know, when I, when I teach courses in Shakespeare, we, I always begin. I always be begin by talking to students about sort of contextualizing all this and understanding that if Shakespeare actually walked in the room today and noticed that we were studying these plays to the to the minutia that we're studying them, he probably would laugh his ass off. Can I say ass? Of course. He would probably laugh his ass off because he did not write these plays for PhDs in English to be studying them in the 21st century. He wrote these plays to make money. He was, as you mentioned, an aspiring actor, and the plays were written with an audience in mind,

and they were written to be entertainment and to be popular. And they were. You know, the argument that, and I like the way you put it, that he's arguably the best writer in the English language. And it is an argument. It's an argument that's an ongoing argument. In fact, many folks in Renaissance studies are pretty much an agreement that he probably isn't the greatest playwright of his era. That may go to Christopher Marlowe, who died young. But Shakespeare certainly was the most popular and remained the most popular.

And the fact that you can type Shakespeare works into Amazon and come up with unteen different. editions is testament to the fact that so much of whether or not a writer survives is dependent on whether or not the work stays in print and is available to read. And for a lot of the more minor playwrights of the same era, the Elizabethan era that Shakespeare is writing in, their works have disappeared because they've fallen out of print. It doesn't mean they weren't good. It doesn't mean they weren't better than Shakespeare. It just means they're not accessible. It's fascinating to think about how prolific he was as a writer and how unbelievable his depth of knowledge was in law, medicine, botany, politics, geography, history, religion, and even psychology.

But yet we have so few pieces of material evidence about him that we can fit everything we know into one paragraph. Yeah, it's, I mean, I suppose we should start with the question that some people are asking, which is, well, did he really write these plays? Who is this guy? Because we do know very little about him when compared to some other writers of the era and even earlier. So to settle that argument, and I'm not going to settle that argument, but to try to settle that argument for our purposes, I believe Shakespeare wrote the plays. Now, you know, the authorship question, which is what scholars call this,

goes back, oh, centuries at this point, suggestions that there are other people who wrote the plays and took the name, William Shakespeare, on as a pseudonym, or wrote them for him. And, you know, there's some credibility to that, just some interesting stuff. But a lot of it, to me, as a scholar,

ends up being sort of conspiracy theory stuff, and it seems like conferences of people who meet and all wear tinfoil hats. But I can remember showing my students once, several years ago, a video that I think it was a thing that had shown on PBS about Shakespeare, about the authorship question. And they asked a scholar who was a very renowned scholar,

A.L. Rouse, very renowned Shakespeare scholar, but one of these sort of stereotypical old scholars with the tweed jacket and the, and, you know, sitting in the big overstuffed leather chair. And they asked him, did Shakespeare write the plays? And I'll never forget his response. It was as if you had suggested to the Pope that there was no God. He said, well, of course Shakespeare wrote the plays. You know, it was like you were insulting his entire religious structure.

So let's start with that. Let's say Shakespeare wrote the plays. we could do a whole argument on the fact that he didn't. But as you say, I mean, the Shakespeare that we know, very prolific, at least 37 plays, 154 sonnets, several poems. Yes, incredibly prolific. But we also have to remember that for most of his life, this was his occupation. This was his way of making money. And so, yeah, he was a writer.

But the interesting facts about Shakespeare and then talking about the plays are kind of two different things, right? I mean, we can talk about all the stuff about Shakespeare and his life and all the interesting things that we do know and the interesting things that we don't know. I mean, he wasn't, by all accounts, incredibly well educated, and yet you listed the litany of areas that he seems to have expertise in. It's kind of baffling. I mean, Ben Johnson famously wrote a poem for Shakespeare that's in the front of the first folio that notes that Shakespeare had little Latin and less Greek. But yet he seems to know everything there is to know about Greek and Roman mythology. How did he do all that? We don't know.

The gaps in his biography are long and are still, a mystery. We don't have any of the manuscripts in his own hand of the works. Nothing survives. Or I should say nothing has been discovered. I always tell students, it still could be out there somewhere. We're discovering stuff every day. But as of the moment, we don't have any manuscripts in his own hand. In fact, the only thing we have written by him is his signature. I believe we have six or eight different copies of his signature, and he spells his name differently in all of them. So that gives credence to people to say, well, the man was illiterate. How could he have written these places? He couldn't even spell his own name. And again, we got to back up and remember that this is

the early days of print. And there was no common spelling yet. Spelling was not a standardized thing when Shakespeare was writing. You wrote words out so that they could be pronounced. and if it could be pronounced and it sounded the way that it should, it really didn't matter the way you spelled it. Spelling didn't come into play until after Shakespeare really had died. And so the spelling variation question is an easy one to kind of toss aside. But he has become a myth. You know, it's tantamount to the myth of John F. Kennedy in some ways.

I mean, we say he was born and he doesn't. died on the same day. That's not really true. I mean, we celebrate that he was born and died on April 23rd, 1564 to 1616, or his dates, that he was born and died on the same day. He probably wasn't born. We don't know if he was born on April 23rd. Let me clarify. So he was baptized on April 26th. There's a of that. It was convention to baptize a baby three days after the birth. So counting back, we say, well, he must have been born April 23rd. So we don't know for certain, but there it is. We do know we die at April 23rd. The really interesting thing is that April 23rd is also the feast day of St. George, the patron saint of England. And so here you have what people would argue is the greatest writer in the English language.

language and he's born and was born and dies on the same day as the feast day of St. George, the patron state of the country. So it just adds to the myth. It's wonderful. It may be true. It may not be. It's fascinating to think of it. In so many ways, there's so much there for people who are great scholars and people that maybe are not so great scholars. But in some ways, I find it so condescending to think like, hey, how could this working person possibly write this great stuff? It almost seems like there's some animosity there. Yeah, certainly there is. I mean, and there was at the time even.

I mean, he was looked at as being, you know, what we would probably call today kind of a hack writer. Because a lot of the other playwrights of the time were Oxbridge educated. They either went to Oxford or Cambridge, and they had educations. Shakespeare did not. He attended Stratford Grammar School. That's as much as we know. He doesn't seem to have gone on from there for any other kind of advanced education. So, you know, again, where did he, how did he learn all this stuff?

We don't know. We don't have his diaries. We don't have a reading list. We don't have his library. We don't know. Now, certainly over the hundreds of years, scholars have produced volume after volume. of analogs so we can look at his plays and see what his source materials were. Because most of the plays, the material in the plays is not original. Shakespeare is taking older material and adapting it,

rewriting it, tweaking it, giving it his own spin. And for most of the plays, it's easy to go back and find the analog and say, well, this story shows up in this history book, which was published in the 1560s and that's where this comes from. But we don't have direct evidence that Shakespeare read the book, but there it is. It's a really baffling thing, but I think you're right. I mean,

there is in some ways some sort of classism that goes on and saying, well, you know, the guy was just an average Joe. How could he have done all of this? Was there, just any sort of evidence that he maybe spent some time with Marlowe and some of the other great playwrights of that particular time?

There's some overlap and some connections with some of them. A few of them he co-wrote plays with. Marlowe, I'm not sure if there's evidence that they had ever met. I'd have to ask my colleague who is a Marlowe specialist and is actually over in London right now working on a book on Marlowe. So I don't know if there's any connection there, but some other playwrights he did collaborate with and co-wrote some plays with. So, you know, we do know,

but it was mostly, it was competition. You had a bunch of theaters in London at the time, and all of them were in competition with each other to get an audience. And so they were turning out plays in order to bring an audience into the theater. And, you know, an interesting sort of side note is the issue of how you got paid for all of this. And the basic answer is not very well.

I mean, let's just use an example of Shakespeare. I mean, Shakespeare wrote for the Globe Theater. The Globe Theater is owned by somebody. He is actually writing plays and selling them to the person who owns the theater. So he no longer owns the play. So when the play is printed, if it is printed, many of them were, some of them were not. Shakespeare didn't make any money off of that. There were no copyright laws.

Sometimes his name barely appears on the title page because he had no stake to it anymore. It's also the explanation for why there are different versions of some of the plays. Because a lot of them were printed based on a particular actor. So in other words, you would do a production of, oh, I don't know, let's pick Hamlet. And then the guy who played one of the sentrymen at the beginning of the play goes off and goes to one of the printers in London and says, you know, here I know the script and he narrates it and it gets written down. And so there are going to be errors there. And one of the interesting things is that there is an error in the quarto edition. of Hamlet, where in one of the Quartos, the opening night guardsmen are referred to as

Guard 1 and Guard 2, but in later editions, they have names. And so you can sort of tell who is responsible for, you know, the guy who played Benvolio is not going to, you know, have his name left out and just have himself be called Guard 1. You know, he's Francisco and I want to be named. So the printing is really kind of interesting. And this, all leads up, of course, to after Shakespeare dies in 1623, when Hemings and Condell get together and compile the addition of Shakespeare that becomes known as the first tolio, which is one of the most valuable books that anyone can own and celebrated, you know, is about to celebrate, well, what are we, 2023, so 400 years.

and you can see copies of it at various libraries throughout the U.S. because it is available. And it's a neat thing to see. It has the very recognizable woodcut of Shakespeare on the title page and all of the other additional materials in the front, including that poem by Ben Johnson. But they put it together in 1623 and it's homage to him. Here's all of his work.

It was really the first time that, one of the first times, I should say, that works were collected in that way of an author. I put together in one volume for sale. Now, of course, that's par for the course. But it is what eventually then kept Shakespeare in the public eye. I mean, throughout the 18th century, especially, Shakespeare was very popular. And additions of Shakespeare just are all over the place. They're published left and right. and that is what keeps them in front of people's eyes.

You know, the work's got to be in print. Yeah. There's no such thing as bad publicity. You know, as long as you have your name out there, regardless if you're a hero or a villain, you know, you're out there. And often those things change back and forth. I'm curious as to, you know, it seemed like a pretty tumultuous time with the rise of Protestantism and Catholicism and the,

changing of the queen. And what do you think that that is something that, I think that's something that affected his father, according to what I read. Yeah. There's a lot of, there's question about whether Shakespeare was a Catholic. We don't know for sure. There are elements of both Catholicism and Protestantism

that kind of pop up in different plays. He wrote his early work under Queen Elizabeth. And then later on, his later works, most notably Macbeth, once James was on the throne. And, you know, I've always been very interested in the religious elements in there because that's what I study. And it is quite interesting. I mean, you know, one of the things that I find most intriguing is, I mean, I teach Hamlet

a lot. I love that play. I think it's his masterpiece because it has elements of everything in it, comedy and tragedy. And the interesting thing about it is when I talk with students about the ethical dilemma that Hamlet has, so his father's ghost has come back to him at the beginning of the play to tell him that his uncle was responsible for killing him. And now his uncle is on the throne and has remarried Hamlet's mother. Basic plot. And Hamlet has to take revenge.

The ghost has told him, revenge my death. And so he knows that he has to kill Claudius, his uncle, really from very early in the play. And he fails to do it even though he has many opportunities. And I think what is really interesting about the play and interesting about Hamlet's character is he represents in many ways us. He really is struggling between what he feels compelled and he feels. and he feels that he is responsible to do to avenge his father's death. His father's appeared to him from the afterlife and said, I can't rest until you avenge my death.

And Hamlet knowing that murder's wrong. And so he's constantly split between, you know, what is it going to mean in the afterlife? What is it going to be like in the afterlife? and what does it mean if I actually do commit this murder and kill him? Because it's incredibly powerful to watch as this character really goes back and forth. And he is, the word that is most representative of Hamlet throughout the play is the word doubt. He doubts.

And doubt doesn't have the necessarily the negative connotation that it does for us. doubt in Elizabeth in English means question. He questions. He questions everything, right? To be or not to be. It's a question. He questions everything. And for many critics over the years, that they were, point to his questioning as his downfall. That's his tragic flaw, that he questions everything instead of being an actor and putting things into action, he thinks too much. I find that very intriguing because I just I think that's the human condition right we have a conscience and he has a confidence and even though he is stark raven pissed

about what's happened to his father and that his uncle has remarried his mother he cannot bring himself to commit murder because he knows that's wrong and he's worried about or what it's going to mean to his soul in the afterlife. It's so beautiful in so many ways. Because when I think of, you know, thank you for translating the language from what we think it is today to an understanding of what it was at that time. It's so much can get lost in translation.

But back to the idea of beauty, it's this idea of questioning, at least to me, that makes life worthwhile. Yeah. Right? Yeah, no, definitely. I mean, I think the quest, you know, going back to medieval literature, the quest, the search, and the fact that we never stop. You know, and that uncovered just the other day in the news, right?

So speaking of medieval literature, Jeffrey Chaucer, the author of Canterbury Tales, we for a long time had assumed, based on some evidence from some documents that he had been accused of rape. And just the last week at a conference, some scholars presented some new evidence that contradicts that and basically says, no, it's not true. And it's pretty compelling evidence that people pretty much agree with. So it's about the question, it's about never stopping to look for things. I remember, it must have been back in the 90s, I guess, a couple of Americans got a grant to go over to, to Stratford to use some fairly sophisticated X-ray equipment to x-ray the bust of Shakespeare that's sitting in the church in Stratford because they were convinced that the manuscripts were inside the bust. So they went over and they x-rayed the bust that of course, the only that's inside the

bust is dust. It's not any scripts. But it's this constant, you know, we believe, you know, they're out there somewhere, right? Someone's going to discover them. And so I think you're right. You know, as I say, I mean, I just think that that's the human condition, right, the quest. The quest for knowledge, the quest for love, the quest for truth. And I think, you know, all of that is wrapped up in a character like Hamlet. Do you think, like I try to put myself, I like to imagine what it might have been like to be sitting at the Globe theater. It's one thing to read a brilliant writer.

It's another thing to see that person's words acted out by the best people of their time. And I think it's different to see something live, to be part. I feel like you're actually part of a ritualistic ceremony. Oh, very much. And especially at the places like the Globe and the Rose and the other theaters in London at the time because they were small. And so you, and if anybody has been to the Globe reconstruction in London, which is fair. accurate. You can see how small. It was small. It was crowded. And they did not have the kinds of accoutrement that we think of in a theater now. There's no curtain. There are no lights.

There's no, you know, microphones. And so you've got a, and the playwrights knew this. So they built this in. So, you know, you read Shakespeare's plays and you say, you know, my God, somebody comes on and why do they have to say who he is? It's like, well, because they didn't hand out a play bill, because most of your audience probably can't read anyway, and why are you going to do that? But also, I mean, you know, you need to identify who these characters are when they come on stage. Add to that the fact that some people played, actors played more than one character in a play.

So when they came on, okay, who's that? But no curtain, no lights, so it had to be performed during the daytime. If the weather got bad, they wouldn't perform. So like a baseball game, it would get called on account of inclement weather. But it was also very crowded and very odoriferous, especially in the summer. People would bring their dogs and bring food. And you could imagine that down there in the pit where the cheap seats were, which is, the groundlings, they call them.

They don't get a seat. They're standing there on the ground in the pit. It was probably pretty damn stinky. And also maybe difficult to hear, which is why oftentimes lines will be repeated. So, I mean, you see that in Hamlet, where a character will say something, and then the next character will repeat

the last five words of the previous line, almost in mimicry, but it's there for a reason, but it's also there because you might not have heard that. You know, and good examples when Hamlet first sees the ghost, and the ghost says that he was killed by his uncle, and Shakespeare, his father says,

your uncle and Hamlet says, my uncle, you know, repeating it. You got to make sure people hear, right? So yes, it was a very different experience from today. You can experience something like it if you go to the globe in London today because they still do Shakespeare there and they do it the same way. So there's no microphones, no lighting, and it's during the day. And so you can have that experience.

And you can go if you're in London and get pretty cheap tickets to get in. The groundling seats, which are those ones that are down in the pit, last time I looked, I think they were about 10 pounds. So, you know, that's not bad. It's cheaper than an American movie. Yeah. My gosh, we went to the movies the other day. And after we bought our snacks, I think we spent $100.

It was ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah, so it's very different experience, to be sure. And also remember that at the time of Shakespeare, all the actors on stage would have been males. Females were not allowed on stage, not allowed to perform on stage. If anyone has seen Shakespeare in love, Tom Stoppard's a really great film. You'll see that that deals with that very issue. So a lot of the female parts were actually written for boys.

So you would get them on there before their voices had changed. It gives a different idea to Romeo and Juliet seeing it in the... Yeah. Yep. Yeah, it's so fascinating. to think the way in which information can be disseminated as well. I think there was a troop called the Kingsmen that would go around on behalf of the queen and sort of, I don't know if it's propaganda, but it may be a message that's wanted out.

It's weird to think that that was a method in which information was dispersed. Well, they were patronized by the crown. So early on in Shakespeare's career, it was Lord Chamberlain's men. and then once Elizabeth died and James took the throne, they changed it to the king's men. And they were basically patronized by the throne. And so, I mean, it's pretty clear that Shakespeare wrote the play Macbeth for King James, who was very interested in magic and demonology and things like that.

We know that Midsummer Night's Dream was probably written for a wedding. So, you know, there are, there's evidence for some of these things, but certainly, you know, you take into account not only who your audience is, but who's paying the bills. Right. You know. And so that, that comes into play to be sure. Yeah. I'm curious, George, to hear your first experience with Shakespeare, because I'll tell you about mine then. Okay.

Let's trade. Okay, fair enough. Mine, oh, gosh. I think I saw some sort of play or I think that we did a scene of Romeo and Juliet when I was in middle school. And I wish I could go back and see it because it's probably really funny. There's kids up there like just looking up at a window and doing their best to remember a few words. But that was my first aspect. Like, and, you know, I was in the audience.

I remember seeing it because all the kids would go to the auditorium. Hey, we're going to go watch the eighth graders now. And, you know, there was just a small group of people that were in drama. In fact, you know what it might have been? Back when I was in middle school, you had what you had, you had an exploration. And you had wood shop, metal shop, home act. And I think drama was in there. So you would go and get a little flavor from all these things.

And the drama teacher would take, you know, the two best kids from each period or whatever. and make something of them and that's who did it. And yeah, I remember it was on Fridays at like before lunchtime, you would go and watch or an auditorium or something they called it. But, you know, it was, and they had some cool costumes. And I think that there was, it might have been Trisha McEwen, like a really cute young girl that was doing her. But, you know, that was kind of my intro to it.

And it was cool. I remember, I remember liking it, but it was a long time ago. Yeah, see, mine was different. So, I mean, As I've mentioned before, I mean, I was not a reader of fiction when I was a kid. I read a lot of nonfiction, science, history, but I did not read fiction until really I got into college when I saw the light bulb turn on for English as a major. And I was 10 years old. I was in Hebrew school being trained by a rabbi.

in preparation for my bar mitzvah, one-on-one, because I was the only student at the school. And for some reason, he felt, I think he had taken on the role of a mentor. He really saw himself as mentoring me. And he brought me his set of the Folger Shakespeare Library, which is a, this was the little, little paperback editions of Shakespeare,

and he must have given me probably about 20 of them. I remember them they were yellowed and they were old, but these are the Folger Shakespeare Library editions, which are still in print today. They're facing page, so one page has the Shakespeare text, the other page has glosses about words and explaining what words mean,

kind of translating them for you. And he gave me these, and I mean, I remember, appreciating them, but I didn't understand them. I remember trying to read one of them, I think. I didn't understand what the heck was. I was lost and put them on a shelf. And then in high school, was exposed to, you know, the traditional high school Shakespeare where I think we read Julius Caesar, which they don't read anymore, and Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Night's Dream. And then I believe King Lear, maybe Macbeth. I struggled. I struggled. I didn't understand the language.

I really got hung up on the language. I just could not understand the language. And it was not until I got to college when I took a course called Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, that the light bulb went on for some reason. We read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. We read four plays by Shakespeare. I can still remember which ones and then all of Milton's Paradise lost and that is what completely shifted my life and made me into an English major. I don't know why all of a sudden the light bulb went on. I must have been 18, 19. I guess it was just the right time and place in my life and I understood it. And, you know, it's funny because I can appreciate it when people look at Shakespeare and say, you know, I don't understand what he's talking about. Why do you just say that?

You know, what's all this? Right? And I get that because I felt the same way. But I think part of the trick is, I think as you mentioned before, these plays were written to be performed. They were not written to be read on the page. So we actually do it a big disservice when all we do is read it on the page. But if you read it out loud, it starts to make more sense. Because the lines make more sense.

You can see the lines that run on and the rhymes where there is rhymes, you hear it. But if you're just reading it on a flat page, you miss a lot of it. And so these plays were written to be heard. They really were. And so they are about what they sound like. and now we've got Audible and all these other things you can download, you know, recordings of the plays. And I mean, I still, to this day, even,

if I'm going to teach or read a play that I'm unfamiliar with, I will get a good video version recording of the play and watch it with the text. Because sometimes the little nuances, they don't make any sense on the page. But when you see him on stage, it's like, oh, now I get it. Right. I mean, like, there's a line in, I keep coming back to Hamlet, sorry.

There's a line in Hamlet when, again, when the ghost appears, and Hamlet wants the two sentrymen to swear on his sword that they won't reveal that Hamlet has seen the ghost. And he's running around on the stage, making them swear. and at one point he says oh there's the ghost says swear and Hamlet says Hickett Ubiquet which is Latin for here and everywhere

he's moving around on the stage wherever he goes the ghost is there but if you read that on the page you don't necessarily pick that up you see it acted on the stage it's like oh now I get it yeah you know in some like I didn't think about this until you just had mentioned what you did and thank you for sharing that story

It makes me a little bit upset that all of this was stripped out of the education of kids. Think about how much better of an understanding you could get. If you, I hate to say the word force, but you might have to force these kids. You're going to play this role. I want you to play this role. Here's who you are. Now you get to not only read and act out, but participate in it. And, oh, I see, I'm here and I'm everywhere.

I'm chasing this ghost, you know, however silly the ghost may seem that you can put on stage, Like at least the kid gets an opportunity to live the story. And it makes me so sad to think that literature and these ideas of education have been stripped from the human condition in some ways. Especially Shakespeare. Yeah. It seems to have been one of the latest to go. Yeah. And a lot of the curricula, which are becoming more and more focused on teaching nonfiction and moving away from teaching literature.

I'm always amazed when I ask students, you know, have you read this and you know, what I would think of a standard high school reading? No, never heard of it. Most recently, it's in the last couple of days. There's been a big controversy in New Zealand about getting rid of Shakespeare from the curriculum over there, arguing that he is, it's all about colonialism and he's really, it's, and it's, it brings up the whole argument about presentism, which we've talked. talked about before, right, about looking at this text, which is 400 years old, through the lens of today. Now, granted, it's the only lens we've got, but it's unfair, I think, to cancel, to use a common now word, to cancel Shakespeare, because we say, oh, well, it's all about colonialism and that's bad.

Yeah, it is. He didn't know that. Yeah. You know, and he was writing it was a different, different world. And following, they were looking at the Greek tragedies, but like Seneca or they're just, they're doing the same thing, but just reinventing the same thing. Yeah. It seems odd that we would just get rid of all. Let's just get rid of all of it. Well, then there's nothing left.

Everything is a replica of something from the past. Yeah. And it just, it's a shame because I think that, and I say this is somebody who did not like reading literature in high school. I know. I think that, you know, reading literature, it really does engage a young, imagination in ways that other disciplines and other work can't really do, if done right, if done right. You know, I mean, we see, you know, so there's the ongoing discussion about, well, if we teach Shakespeare, you know, there are all these now modernized additions of Shakespeare that you can get, right?

Shakespeare, what's it called? No Sweat Shakespeare. where somebody has basically rewritten the plays in contemporary English. And if we do nothing today, let me do this. Shakespeare did not write in old English.

He actually wrote in modern English. Shakespearean English is early modern English. Old English you would not recognize. Old English is Beowulf. Okay, if I read a line from Beowulf, you would not understand it. So Shakespeare did not write in old English. But there are these additions of Shakespeare in contemporary English.

And it's like, well, you know, I get that. And you want students to understand the story and the meaning of the text, but they're also in the process then losing the beauty of the language, which admittedly, yeah, it's a little difficult. It's a little difficult. But, you know, what, wah, wah. you know, put on your big boy pants and get to it here. You know, I don't think that we should be just dismissing things that are, oh, it's too hard.

I can't read that. I mean, that's why you have the Folger editions that have the facing page. I think those are great. I recommend those all the time, especially to somebody new to Shakespeare. They're wonderful. Yeah, and I think if you can begin to encounter the situations in which, she writes about at a young age. Those things are going to pop in your head later in life.

I see what's happening here. Or, wow, this is a lot like that. You know, it's fascinating to think what can be put in your mind that can help you later in life. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, there are scenes from some of the plays which certainly, you know, stick with me on an ongoing basis.

And I keep coming back to, you know, and some of it, some of it humorously, some of it not. I mean, you know, there's a line from Polonius where he accuses Hamlet and Ophelia, accuses their love of being hot love on the wing. And I always joke and say, that's going to be the name of the wing joint I open up. Hot love on the wing. I think it's a great name for a wing place. Yeah. I'm a vegetarian, but hey, you know. Like, you know, it begs the question, like, what do you think was going through Hamlet's mind when he was knowing things were wrong. Like where did he get his ethics from?

Like he probably had a pretty good upbringing. But what do you think was going through his mind when he was? We don't know. You know, I mean, and that's one of the, it's interesting that you bring that up because that's one of the ongoing debates in Hamlet studies. And there is a whole sub-genre called Hamlet Studies where people just study that play.

And famously, Hamlet was accused of, having an Oedipus complex. He wanted to kill his father because he wanted to sleep with his mother. And this is, of course, right out of Freud and his student, Ernst Jones, who wrote a famous book called Hamlet and Oedipus about that very issue. And it was really played up in the Lawrence Olivier film version of the 1940s, which was really the first great film of the play. but he played up that angle.

And the problem with the theory is that in Ernst Jones' book, Hamlet and Oedipus, he starts off by talking about Hamlet's childhood. We don't know anything about childhood. The play doesn't give us any flashbacks. We have no idea what his upbringing was like. We only know where he's at now. And we can understand his ethics from what he says, what he tells us, particularly in his soliloquies,

And his really just deep, deep thought process. I mean, the guy is just, you know, the first time we see him on stage, he's all dressed in black because he's mourning the death of his father, which he just is having a really hard time getting over. He was not home for that. He was away at school. He was called home for the funeral. and he's been home now and now the new king has been coronated at the opening of the play and Hamlet wants to go back to school and his mother and his uncle don't want him to and that's when we first see him and you know it his it's not just about his illusions to literature and

history and mythology in his speeches, but it's just about the beauty of just his language. I mean, he's a poet. Right. He really is a poet. And the way that he thinks is the mind of a poet and a philosopher. And for me, as I say, you know, the sort of the quintessential human being who is looking for a kind of stillness that we talked about with the mystics. That's what he wants.

He doesn't want to be king. He's not interested in that. He's interested in studying. He wants to go back to school. He agrees not to because his mother asks him not to. And it's then in the next scene that he sees the ghost of his father and is set on his path. Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up about him being a poet.

I think we've talked about it before. And we do talk about the mystic tradition and communication. all these ways of, you know, sometimes communication being the logos or seeing God or having one of these experiences. And I think that the language, I think that the ability for him to communicate is almost divine. It's almost like that's the, that type of communicator is like a bridge between the divine and the rest of us. It's almost like when you're so absorbed in something you hear, you see, all your senses are being commanded by listening to something like that. It takes us to a place that is unlike any place we've been to.

Maybe that is why he is so celebrated is that it's this last, it's almost like the last time we had, it almost must be like something like the people that would go and speak to Homeric verses to people that were illiterate because they were these poets and they've memorized these, you know, incredible lengthy poems. it's this last grasp of something that is in our souls. It's something that was given to us.

It's been handed down from time to time. It's like the last piece of that, it seems like. Well, and the really incredible thing, of course, is that Shakespeare then articulates that through the character, right? He gives the character words to articulate that to us. Right. So, you know, I mean, arguably some of the most incredible speeches in all of

Hamlet or Hamlet's and all of Shakespeare or Hamlet's soliloquies. We're hearing what goes on in his mind, what he's thinking. And it's incredible because it reflects the

just the conflict that he's got within himself. You know, I know I'm supposed to do this, but I also know it's wrong. Right. And I mean, even questions at one point, you know, Am I a coward? Like thinking, you know, I've had the opportunity to do this and I haven't done it.

What's wrong with me? It's just incredible. And I think you're right. I mean, it is, it almost seems like a glimpse of the divine. Yeah. Getting some kind of, of a mediator here who's articulating that for us. It's almost like he's speaking the words in your mind that you've said to yourself from time to time, which makes this connection possible.

Like, you know, you're goosebumps thinking about. that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, I can't remember who it was. I want to say it was a Scottish writer in the 19th century. I can't remember now at the top of my head. He actually said, he said, we are Hamlet. We are. Yeah.

I mean, he was arguing that that's what's so great about the play is we're Hamlet. That Shakespeare was able to show us ourselves, right? And it's the old, you know, theory about art being, you know, holding a mirror up to nature. Right. I mean, he's showing us ourselves. Yeah. I think that maybe that is, that's it. It's, it's that moment in a good book.

That's a book. There you go. Yeah, it seems to me what he may be explaining, at least in my point of view, is that moment you're in a good book, that moment you're out of play. but that moment you forget who you are and you become that person. Like, is there a, how much if there's a German word for that? There's a German word for that.

There's a German word for everything. And if there's not, they'll make one for you. That's so true, man. Yeah. No, I think, you're right. I mean,

it, it is that, that moment when you just, you're in your, you know, it's people who talk about getting, quote unquote, getting lost in a book,

right? And getting lost in a book is the point where the characters become real, right? They're no longer these fictitious figures. But you, I mean, I have in my mind, I mean, Hamlet is never physically described in the play. But I have in my own mind how I envision him what he looks like. Now, it's going to be different probably for every reader. And that's fine, right? That's fine.

That's you and you communing with the text. But I mean, you know, I know people, my wife will talk about, you know, she'll read a novel and, you know, if a character dies, I mean, she cries sometimes. You get so invested in them. They become, they transcend the page. Right. Right. And the greatest writers are able to do that. And I would say, I mean, Shakespeare is incredibly able to do that over and over and over again, you know, from Romeo and Juliet, which,

is one of his earliest plays, all the way through to King Lear, which is one of his later plays. You know, those characters just are real. Now, some people will say, oh, Romino and Juliet is so simplistic and facile. Yeah, he's a young playwright. He's adapting material from the Italian. And, you know, is it some work of, you know, it's not the Iliad, Romeo and Juliet, but It's a good play. It has flaws. But what doesn't? I mean, you know, and folks will look at some of this and forget that writers,

anybody, really, I mean, never mind writers, the heck with writers, us, that we mature in our thinking and our art over the course of our lives. So something that I believed when I was 25, I probably don't believe today when I'm 58, right? I mean, my life has changed and my view of things has changed and my understanding and maybe my philosophy of things has changed. And my students oftentimes, they'll have a hard time with Young, somebody that we like to talk about.

Yeah. I want to come to this because they'll read something that Young wrote when he was early in his career. And then later on in the course, we'll read something else about the same topic that he wrote later in his career and it seems to contradict it. It's like, yes, thinking changed. Something yours? Yeah. Yeah.

And I think maybe some people that take that aspect of it being facile, some of the greatest times I have are moments of contemplation when I look back at a previous time in my life. And I go, oh, I can't believe I thought that. But then I'll just rethink about it. And it's such a rich memory. And there's still stuff you can learn. Like, why did I think that?

Oh, I thought that because of these circumstances. Oh, my, wow, what about those? Like, it's still such a rich ground to mine. Some of those are the best times to go back and revisit. And even if they are silly, what a great time to go back and laugh at yourself and understand how far you've come. Like, those are beautiful times. Well, and it's an indication of your personal growth, your intellectual growth, right?

I mean, as a scholar and as a teacher, I love the fact that I can pick up a copy of a book that I actually read when I was in college and I use that same copy to teach from today. and to see the notes that I had written in it, you know, 40 years ago when I knew nothing, you know, and compared to now. And it is a kind of a, you know, chuckle at yourself kind of thing. And I like that because I also, I tend to share when things like that happen with my students, because I want them to understand. Yeah. You're not going to understand it all right away at this moment. But it may, you may, you know, 10 years from now, you may look.

back on this and say, oh, now I get it. Right? And those are the moments. I mean, that's what we thrive on in education, right? It's not that you're going to learn everything and understand it all tomorrow for the test. It's call me in 10 years and tell me what you think. Right. And too often, unfortunately, especially in American education, we don't focus on that.

We're so focused on immediate assessment that we're not taking into consideration the fact that it's you're you're not really ready to to really fully digest this yet but file it away somewhere and as you develop and mature it will come into focus and then you'll get it and you know i i like to know about that and to do that kind of follow up with students i mean it's one of the one of the few really good reasons to have facebook um right i mean i'm connected with so many of my former students on Facebook who can still, you know, communicate with me and talk to me and, and they remember things and to tell me that they remember X, Y, or Z. And it's just, that makes it as a, as an instructor, as an educator for me. I mean, I'm still in contact with,

with students that I taught when I was in graduate school in the dark ages, you know. Those students now, one of them is a principal at a high school in Connecticut, hard to believe. I would imagine that you have inspired the lives of lots of people in your classroom and probably even ones that haven't reached out to you. But that has to be an incredibly rewarding moment. And especially in times like this, it's nice to know. I've had a couple people reach out to me that I used to work with a long time ago when I was helping out and doing some things. And it's so interesting how that call or that email sometimes find you in one. of your darkest places and just shines a light and makes everything brighter around you,

you know? Yeah. Yeah, which is also reason to remember that, you know, saying something to somebody may have that effect, right? And I think too often we don't say things like that and tell people how important they are and how much they mean. And, you know, when it comes to experiences and particularly, of course, in education, but even other experiences, right? So to relay, you know, that I remember when we did this and, you know, that's a really fond memory for me. But I think that that does, it brightens a person's day. I mean, you telling me that, you know, people, people love the podcast when we're on talking together. Yeah.

And you don't have to tell me that, you know. Yeah, well, it makes me happy. And I want to share it with you because it's it's it's it's it's it's it's something that combines like in one way. I'm trying to communicate to people the threads or the this network that I see being built. And here's people like, hey, we enjoy this. And I'm like, I enjoy it. David Solomon enjoys it. Like it's this collective awesomness that that is being built.

I wonder if. What do you think Shakespeare would say if he could see like obviously there were times when he could see the reactions of the crowd. What, what, how do you, like this is kind of a crazy question, but yeah, I wonder how he felt seeing the fruits of his labor. I don't know if he was, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if he was pleased with his success. I mean, he did have success while he was alive. You know, he, he was a, he was a commuter. because he went back and forth from Stratford to London. And, you know, we just don't know so much about his life

that it's just hard to understand what was going on day by day and day to day. I mean, he had three children with his wife, Anne Hathaway, not the actress. And a boy, Amnett, who died early on, we think is part of the reason, possibly for the name Hamlet in the play. And then there were two twins who did survive. But oddly enough, there are no descendants. I believe one of his daughters, I think, had a daughter, but she either died or only had daughters.

I forget, but there were actually, there were no descendants, which is really an oddity, especially for the time, because people had tended to have large families. But they did not. They did not. Well, I got, as we're getting ready to land this plane here, I have a comment that I want to put on the screen here.

This comes from our friend Benjamin George. Any thoughts on Shakespeare being Sir Francis Bacon? I think Francis Bacon was happy being Francis Bacon, and Shakespeare was that being being Shakespeare. I do not think they are the same person. But that's just my thoughts, as you say, Ben. I don't necessarily have all the evidence to back that up because I'm not a scholar of the authorship question. But I don't believe, I believe that there's a more likely case to be made that he is, oh, what's the guy's name?

There's a society named for him that it's another one of the guys who they say may be Shakespeare. But no, I don't think he was, I don't think bacon was Shakespeare. I think bacon was bacon. I think there was some sort of, there's countless theories, however, but I think some of them say that it was a sort of aristocratic individual who wanted to kind of help the people understand what was happening in the times or something like that. I think we're overstepping how magnanimous would have been. Right, right. that a lot of the people from that upper class would have cared less what the commoners thought.

Absolutely. I guess that's one part of Shakespeare because there's not so much that we know about him. For me, it's nice to say something like he was one of us. And when you said, we are all Hamlet. It allows me to think of someone. Here's a person that got up, did what they did. They love what they did. And they didn't need to have all kinds of accolades.

They were this person that you can and you get to be the you get to write history's last or Hamlet or you get to write Shakespeare's last chapter in your own mind of what you think about them. So I enjoy that. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And let me leave you with some. Please. I'm sorry, I got my notes out to tell you a couple of things. So the one is about the language. So you noted this earlier. Shakespeare introduced probably 3,000 words to the English language that we have because of him. His vocabulary itself ranged from 17,000 to 29,000 words,

which doesn't mean anything to anybody until I say that's at least double the number of words used by an average person. So that's a lot of words. He used 7,000 words only once in his works. So one time he used that word and a lot of influence on the language, a lot of influence on our language. But there are also all sorts of interesting things. I had a student years ago who did a project on flowers in Shakespeare's plays. And she planted a Shakespeare garden on campus with the flowers. There are birds that we have in the United States, which we only have because of Shakespeare,

because there was a Shakespeare lover in the 1890s who decided he was going to bring examples of all the birds that were mentioned in Shakespeare's plays to the U.S., one of them being Starlings. So the reason why we have Starlings in the U.S., he brought Starlings to Central Park. He was a New Yorker, and that's why we have them. So, you know, interesting things like that. The first portrait that was bought by the National Portrait Gallery is the famous Chanos portrait of Shakespeare, the one with the earring. that everybody recognizes. So it's just all sorts of rich, juicy stuff. Yeah, it's amazing.

Dave, I'm so thankful that you got to spend some time with me again on this Tuesday. And this is a lot of fun. Maybe next week we'll dive into Hamlet and get into some deep stuff in there. Absolutely, that would be fun. For now, where can people find you? What are you coming up and what are you excited about? So my website is David A. Solomon, S-A-O-M-O-N.com. And you can find my books there, my blog, my speaking stuff, my consulting,

working on a new blog post on the topic of wonder. So that should be done probably within about a week. And excited about the fact that I hope finally here in Virginia, it's becoming fall. and the temperatures are getting a little bit cooler, although I certainly wouldn't want the cold that some of the country is having right now. There's a big cold snap in the middle of the country. So happy that fall is almost here, and looking forward to that.

Well, fantastic. Thanks again for today. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for spending time with us. So thank you to everybody. I hope you have a great day and read some Shakespeare. Aloha.