El Príncipe y el Cisne: Una fábula contemporánea

Hace tiempo que existe la idea de que Shakespeare y Cervantes murieron el mismo día, 23 de abril de 1616. En rigor, median muchas dudas en esta afirmación, debido a cambios de calendario e inexactitudes de registros propios de la época.

¿Por qué, si la historia probaría aparentemente que tal coincidencia nunca existió, nos empeñamos todavía en ponerlos en relación? No los unió la vida, tampoco lo habría hecho la muerte, muchos dudan que hayan leído en efecto las obras del otro.  ¿Qué une a Shakespeare y a Cervantes y por qué seguimos hablando de ellos, incluso cuando hacemos referencia a obras muy posteriores? (La sombra del misterio de Cardenio es tan tentadora como intangigle: no hay manuscrito).

Jan Kott, un famoso crítico y teórico teatral polaco, calificó a Shakespeare en un título de sus libros como “Shakespeare, nuestro contemporáneo”. ¿Qué podría decir de nosotros un poeta muerto en Stratford-upon-Avon en 1616? Don Quijote de la Mancha se considera la primera novela moderna de habla hispana. ¿Qué antecedente de la producción literaria pudo asentar un hombre que moría en Madrid allá lejos y hace tiempo en Madrid del mismo año?

Es precisamente por esa contemporaneidad que leemos en sus obras que nos atrae, creo yo, a seguir hablando de ellas, a revisitarlas y a resignificarlas. Porque, al fin, ¿qué es más contemporáneo que Hamlet cuestionándose cómo actuar, dividido entre sus propios deseos y sus deberes, como hijo, como príncipe, como hombre, preocupado por sus actos y las consecuencias que estos pueden llegar a tener en el mundo? Al fin, ¿no es tremendamente actual en un mundo de tanto acceso cultural Alonso Quijana, viendo el mundo a través de su biblioteca, actuando en el mundo como Don Quijote de la Mancha obedeciendo a la lógica de los relatos que él considera ciertos?

Ambas obras confluyen, más allá de intentar aciertos biográficos, en traer inquietudes pasadas que se vuelven presente: la multiplicidad del alma humana, los infinitos papeles que representamos y la idea de que hay tantas realidades como percepciones e interpretaciones se hagan de ella.

Es en este gesto absolutamente moderno de reconocernos personajes del mundo, actuando nuestras escenas cotidianas, enfrentando simples molinos creyéndolos monstruos furibundos, creyendo de que no existen cosas ni buenas ni malas sino que pensarlas las vuelve de una u otra manera, que nos volvemos a reconocer en voces que se nos alejan en el tiempo pero que en la caracterización de las pasiones y las intrigas del alma humana se nos acercan.

Nos miramos en estas obras magníficas como en un espejo distorsionado por nuestra propia mirada de época. Lo maravilloso de por qué mueven tantas lenguas, echan a correr tanta tinta creo que es porque nos reconocemos y, como todo clásico, todavía tienen algo para enseñarnos sobre nosotros mismos.-

Shake-scene, eh?

“And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.” – Hamlet, (III,i)

April 23^rd. Before Shakespeare came into my life it was the day known as the anniversary of my “second birth”: the day, back in 1990 that my parents could take me out of the hospital, after having been born on March, 7^th. A date known for being the day Cervantes  allegedly died and Shakespeare was born. Not that the accuracy matters, but seeing as I am a Modern Literature undergraduate, it’s of some significance and hilarity to my parents.

I wonder, now that I'm living in 2012 A.S. (after Shakespeare), how  knowing his work, reading and watching with eagerness productions based on the plays, reading and enjoying his poems, have influenced me.

It’s funny: my main drive is to try to share my excitement, to make people approach and take pleasure from these works because they speak about something we can all relate to, as if there's a nature that can't quite be grasped but that has survived throughout the ages. But, until this week, I hadn’t been able to put into words what it meant to me to get to know them. I faced the blank page and I couldn't write a word. 

After stalling, work and other readings getting on my way, I reached this point and forced myself to write. I took the words out of my heart but soon realized that they were just… not enough.

Then I thought: Well, that was it. Shakespeare wasn’t just another subject to me: it was a turn in my career. I was reading theatre, really enjoying it, for the first time. I was being introduced to another world and I was having fun. I don’t know about human nature, because who can say exactly what that is, but learned a lot about myself. I had the voice of Hamlet and Macbeth's conscience once, for one fleeting moment we asked ourselves the same thing, and then the moment went away. I feel I share Beatrice's wicked way to handle retorts and puns, and I see much of my own vulnerability in hers. Cordelias's silences are also mine, sometimes. 

I originally wanted to pay homage to his wisdom and skill. Now, as the end is near, all I have to say is "thank you". I see now that, though it's his anniversary, the gift is for us. One gift that will last as long as there’s someone to enact the miracle: to make us live a thousand lives in one.

Other Happy Birthday Shakepeare posts can be found at http://www.happybirthdayshakespeare.com/, don't miss them!

Sticks and Stones – What’s in a Name, Indeed.

I remember a literary theory class, one of my professors said paraphrasing Barthes' Writing Degree Zero "How do we manage to say that which can’t be expressed with words? We can think that, in a way, language must be forced to say something that, apparently, it does not want to say".

Let’s think about Benedict's words to Beatrice: “Thou hast frightened the word out of its right sense, so forceful is thy wit”. Let’s think of puns, so witty, so deliriously fun to read, you can almost imagine them flying across the air like fireworks, between both enemies and lovers.

Shakespeare's plays are plagued with puns and, of course, this is one of the sources of endless study and reflection. And, indeed, let’s take a look at what dreams (in this case) are mostly made of literally: words. What is in a word?

Juliet asks herself, "what’s in a name?”: true, here the word "name" strongly suggests “family name”, it makes us think more about linage and the old resentments between Capulets and Montagues, but Juliet’s reflection does not end there. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. There is nothing whatsoever in the appearance of the rose or in its structure that motivates the name.

Enunciating is also a political matter: Lear divides his kingdom between his daughters based on how they articulate their love for him. “Nothing will come of nothing”, he tells Cordelia, the one who is the briefest and the truest of them all. Her silence is the most articulated expression of her love for her father.

Words may be tricky themselves, but it is true that it is not just what we say that is meaningful: what we do not say and the way we say things “speak volumes” as well. Enunciation, acts of speech, silences, all is significant and especially if we think that these are scenes in a play intended for the stage. That is a level of significance that we, as readers, cannot measure and depends on the production of the play, but I think it is important to acknowledge it.

Honour may be a word and, as Falstaff says, is air. But words can hurt as much as a bullet (Henry not only alienates Falstaff from his company, he says “I know thee not, old man” and from that moment on Sir John will not live to be the same again), can condemn a man (Macbeth is lead by their ambiguity and his personal interpretation of the witches’ predictions to his doom), can declare war, vanish subjects and proclaim a new king. Words structure ways of thinking and in that respect, also action. Words are tied to bodies. They may seem, indeed, air, but it is interesting to see that ultimately their consequences are flesh and blood.

Shakespeare in Buenos Aires

El domingo 19 de febrero de 2012 finalizó en Buenos Aires el 2do. Festival Shakespeare, después de una semana que ofreció una variedad de propuestas de todo tipo: espectáculos, talleres, clases magistrales, y hasta una bicicleteada shakesperiana que recorrió la ciudad con distintas paradas en donde se podía leer y representar, para los osados que se atrevieran, las obras del Bardo.

Contamos con la presencia de Penny Cherns del LAMDA y del Profesor Stanley Gontarski, Phd. quienes expusieron sobre “Hamlet” en una mesa redonda de la que participaron directores y académicos locales, para ayudarnos a profundizar nuestro conocimiento sobre la obra de Shakespeare, al mismo tiempo que intentamos combinar el lenguaje poético con los movimientos corporales y el manejo de la voz en el escenario, en " Macbeth” y "Medida por medida" en actividades prácticas, concentrándonos en determinadas escenas de estas complejas obras.

Asistí a dos conferencias y debo admitir que me sorprendieron gratamente. Asistieron entusiastas de toda la ciudad y de otras latitudes para discutir alrededor del fuego shakesperiano, como si la mención de su nombre los hubiera convocado: futuros actores y actrices, académicos, profesores de inglés, estudiantes, gente que pasaba y quería saber qué causaba tal alboroto. Incluso me encontré con la Presidenta de la Fundación Shakespeare en Argentina, lo cual fue una grata sorpresa.

Al escribir estas líneas me pregunto cuál fue en definitiva el objetivo del Festival. La respuesta surge naturalmente: la necesidad de compartir la pasión por la obra de un autor que necesitamos pensar en su dimensión humana, desmitificarlo y disfrutarlo, y entender que sus personajes son, en síntesis, tan humanos como nosotros.

Cada tanto oigo decir que Shakespeare es aburrido. Siento como si todos los que participamos de los encuentros respondiéramos al unísono "No, Shakespeare es fascinante, reflexivo, sagaz y divertido. Puede ser sutil y agudo, con un humor ocurrente y sombrío, con una fascinación morbosa. Pero nunca es aburrido. En absoluto."

A Case of Identity

6^th of January: the day of Epiphany after the Twelve Days of Christmas. Also the day of the Twelfth Night festival, the day of misrule and the world turned upside down in medieval and Tudor England.

Coincidentally, it also happens to be the date marked as the birthday of the universally famous consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes.

Facts, at first unrelated, brew in my mind, mixed and collided into the second entry of this blog: Shakespeare and the possibility of (one)self. I thought it would be fun to play the sleuth and, on a more serious note, delve into very complex and troubled waters: what defines the self – if such thing indeed can be defined, pinned down and reduced to its essence, be confined in a definition?

Twelfth Night is, in my opinion, one of the plays in which the concept of “role” is put in the spotlight and the possibility of knowing, grasping a meaning is endangered in many levels.

Christopher Ravenscroft and Frances Barber in Twelfth Night (Thames Shakespeare Collection), 1988.

It’s playing continuously with the concept of essence and questioning non stop if there’s anything that we can discover and, in a way, trust. There’s plenty of sexual roles that seem to be inverted – several times – and social identity questioned, even language seems to be corrupt, twisted and malleable. (“I am indeed not her fool, but her corrupter of words.” – Twelfth Night; Act III, scene i).

So, the apparent ‘nature’ of things is questioned in all of its extension. What is the nature of words, men and women, but what does natural mean?

We could argue, with good reason, that the puzzle is never solved; the ending leaves many loose threads, very much on purpose and with very interesting consequences to the play’s interpretation as a permanent interrogation and endangering of the status quo. On this point, I'd like to recommend Dr. Emma Smith’s lecture on Twelfth Night (which is part of her Approaching Shakespeare podcasts programme for the University of Oxford).

My own personal epiphany that came to pass the last 6^th of January was a more human one, one might say. Wit urges me to tease and say: the day that's celebrated the revelation of God the son as a human being in Jesus Christ (the union of the soul with a body), the day also marked as a celebration of misrule, isn't it fit to reflect on how the body and the spirit might (or might not necessarily) correspond?

Everyday we face questions of who we are, how we are seen, what is our place, how are we supposed to behave? What is the thing that matters: is it what we are or what we do?

It might not be a classic whodunnit mystery, but it’s certainly one (awfully big?) adventure with a lot yet to be discovered. There's little that's 'elementary' and a long road ahead. It remains to be seen what we might make of that.

Quoth the Pythons, "Get on with it!"

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” ~ Ira Glass.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been playing around with the idea of creating this blog and I finally got around to doing it. Of course, once it was created I realized that I'd be the one to write it. That was an entirely different matter. I found myself incapable of finishing the draft of the greeting note. Even now that it’s finally published, I can't imagine what it will be like to write the actual entries.

To tell you the truth, I’m scared. I'm scared of being disappointed at my own work, at what I can create. Having read such marvellous articles with great insights into Shakespeare's work, frankly, I don't quite see what I can bring to the party yet (that'd be a very serious Party of Knowledge, mind you).I'm fighting that feeling, though. As Mr. Glass says - as I read it - the only way to stop feeling frustrated is doing something about it. Write it out. Fight the blank page.

By unleashing my insecurities I'm trying to get to the core of my identity as a writer, as a (dare I say it?) future scholar, as someone whose enthusiasm has transcended the boundaries of reading and wants to experience writing about it.

This is meant to be a blog with Shakespeare at its centre, but I expect it to derive to other areas of literature as well. Despite this first entry, it's not meant to be a self-help blog for writers, but I thought it would be interesting to voice what I've being carrying with me all this time. Thus, by questioning and attempting to answer myself (and yourselves!), maybe by accident and only for a moment I would be so lucky as to extract, in Virginia Woolf's words, a nugget of pure truth.

So there's fear, doubt, hope, contradiction, ambition and profound love: the humanity of the blogger. I really can't see another way to start a Shakespearean blog.

It will not be an easy road, nor a straight one, filled with setbacks and self-set traps. Though the journey of discovering ourselves, let alone Shakespeare, is not as easy as playing a pipe, I greet you: Welcome to The Heart of my Mystery.