Fear no more the heat o' the sun

Imogen's long-lost bros obviously haven't seen a lady in a long while.

Who the hell is Cymbeline? He's a curmudgeonly old king of Britain with an ice queen of a wife, and he soooo doesn't deserve first billing, much less the titular role of one of Shakespeare's most tragically underrated plays. It's his whip-smart nerd of a daughter, Imogen, who carries this story of forbidden love, betrayal, long lost family, and yet more cross-dressing.

Imogen is probably my favorite female character in all the plays. She's headstrong and beautiful, clever and sharp, and she tends to fall asleep in bed while reading. She's an outspoken geek girl of her time and she holds her own amongst all the confused men in her life.

The detailed and pretzel-like plot in no way diminishes the play's enjoyability, but I take no joy in trying to sum it up within the confines of a pithy blog post. For this speech, this is all one needs to know:

Against her father's will, Imogen elopes with the love of her life, the oddly-named Posthumus (which is semi-prophetical, since Imogen only gets to be with him after she "dies") instead of marrying her evil step-mother's clotpole of a son, Cloten. Posthumous runs off to Rome to escape Cymbeline's wary eye. Imogen is locked up by her parents, but when she gets a fake letter telling her that her husband is in Milford-Haven, she resolves to sneak out, dress as a boy named Fidele, and find him. She meets two young men--Guderius (aka Polydore) and Arviragus (aka Cadwal) who are actually her missing brothers, but the trio are none the wiser. Imogen takes a potion to cure her ills, but she pulls a Juliet and she appears to be dead, and her brothers weep over the loss of their lovable new adopted sibling. 

Over her "dead" body, Imogen's brothers sing this obsequy, which is one of the most beautiful and touching pieces of poetry in all of Shakespeare. I'd be honoured to have this read at my funeral, FYI.

Cymbeline, Act IV, Sc. II
GUIDERIUS: Fear no more the heat o' the sun, 
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done, 
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. 
ARVIRAGUS: Fear no more the frown o' the great, 
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke:
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic, must 
All follow this, and come to dust. 
Gui. Fear no more the lightning-flash, 
Arv. Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Gui. Fear not slander, censure rash; 
Arv. Thou hast finished joy and moan;
Both. All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust. 
Gui. No exerciser harm thee! 
Arv. Nor no witchcraft charm thee! 
Gui. Ghost unlaid forbear thee! 
Arv. Nothing ill come near thee! 
Both. Quiet consummation have; 
And renowned be thy grave!

Why, I have not another tear to shed

Family dismemberment. For reals.

Titus Andronicus is everyone's favorite bloodbath, am I right? I mean, Macbeth's got a load of dead bodies and blood, Hamlet's got quite the body count, and all the histories have beheadings and what-not, but only Titus has the benefit of an eminently unforgettable Julie Taymor treatment (let's just pretend The Tempest never happened... I have no idea what went wrong there, but it was almost everything). I felt thoroughly debauched by my first viewing of Titus in college, and I only picked this speech because it contained references to everything I remember most about the movie: hands and heads and love and war.

The thing about Titus is that while he's another power-driven Roman army bloke like Coriolanus or Antony, he is more likable because he is even more flawed. He's an old, proud grouch, but not without reason; 21 of his 25 sons have died in war. He makes bad decisions in the name of family honor (namely, he goes along with the tyrannical moron Saturninus' election as next Emperor of Rome and husband to his daughter, Lavinia, even though Bassanius is the better candidate on both fronts). He kills his son Mutius when he objects to his ideas. He shows no mercy for Tamora (Queen of the Goths) and her sons, which leads the lascivious boys to later rape and disfigure Lavinia.

Despite all this, Titus still has our sympathy, because he suffers through his mistakes, shows his regrets, and loves his young son Lucius and unfortunate daughter very much. Yes, he pretty much loses it in the end--playing a homicidal Emeril Lagasse won't get him a show on Food Network--but his twisted means of culinary revenge is one worthy of Hannibal Lecter. 

Titus Andronicus, Act III, Sc. I
Titus: Why, I have not another tear to shed: 
Besides, this sorrow is an enemy, 
And would usurp upon my watery eyes 
And make them blind with tributary tears: 
Then which way shall I find Revenge's cave? 
For these two heads do seem to speak to me, 
And threat me I shall never come to bliss 
Till all these mischiefs be return'd again 
Even in their throats that have committed them. 
Come, let me see what task I have to do. 
You heavy people, circle me about, 
That I may turn me to each one of you, 
And swear unto my soul to right your wrongs. 
The vow is made. Come, brother, take a head; 
And in this hand the other I will bear. 
Lavinia, thou shalt be employ'd:
Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth. 
As for thee, boy, go get thee from my sight; 
Thou art an exile, and thou must not stay:  
Hie to the Goths, and raise an army there: 
And, if you love me, as I think you do, 
Let's kiss and part, for we have much to do.

Even as one heat another heat expels

The original threesome (well, foursome)  rom-com

Given the absurdly male hormone-induced plot of his play, The Two Gentlemen of Verona is an aptly sarcastic title indeed. It's nought more than a pair of besties who turn into assholes the moment a hot chick arrives on the scene. Valentine is the dude who makes fun of his friend Proteus for falling in love with Julia, and then both of their eyes bug out when Silvia walks by and they proceed to fight for her affections, but that's even putting it too poetically. Proteus would have raped Silvia in the woods if Valentine hadn't been there to intervene.

They're better than Tamora's twins (from Titus Andronicus), I suppose. But not by much. Still, Shakespeare articulates the under-nourished scruples inside a young man's codpiece fairly well, don't you think?


The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act II, Sc. IV
Proteus: Even as one heat another heat expels,
Or as one nail by strength drives out another,
So the remembrance of my former love
Is by a newer object quite forgotten.
Is it mine, or Valentine's praise,
Her true perfection, or my false transgression,
That makes me reasonless to reason thus?
She is fair; and so is Julia that I love--
That I did love, for now my love is thaw'd;
Which, like a waxen image, 'gainst a fire,
Bears no impression of the thing it was.
Methinks my zeal to Valentine is cold,
And that I love him not as I was wont.
O, but I love his lady too too much,
And that's the reason I love him so little.
How shall I dote on her with more advice,
That thus without advice begin to love her!
'Tis but her picture I have yet beheld,
And that hath dazzled my reason's light;
But when I look on her perfections,
There is no reason but I shall be blind.
If I can cheque my erring love, I will;
If not, to compass her I'll use my skill.

Your most grave belly was deliberate

Judi Dench as Volumnia, Sir Ken as Coriolanus--what I wouldn't have given to have seen this.

Whether you love or loathe election politics (or politics in general), Coriolanus is for you! Like Julius Caesar, it's got universal commentary on democratic republics and all the idealism and cynicism that comes with it. But unlike its more famous cousin, Coriolanus' old men are more meddling than murdering, and the ladies are more manipulative than meek. It's gray with more realism rather than black and white with portents and dreams, which is why it ended up surprising me by becoming one of my favorite plays. This was helped by my viewing of the frankly excellent modern film adaptation recently made by Ralph Fiennes, who plays the titular character, along with Gerard Butler as his frenemy Aufidius. Definitely check that one out ;)

Now, I fall more into the "disinterested center" Jon Stewart likes to say he represents in the political sphere, but yet this story of an outraged, poor citizenry being handily swayed by Roman tribunes and senators via the noble, but socially awkward army general who refuses to be a mouthpiece or play the hypocrisy game really piqued my interest. 

Coriolanus is strong both in body and mind, despises the cowardice of the common people, and believes he deserves praise and high office for his battle achievements without having to grovel to the people he sees as animals. His arch nemesis, aka, "a lion that I [Coriolanus] am proud to hunt," is the equally renowned Aufidius, general of the Volscian army. Aufidius deeply respects Coriolanus (who keeps beating him in single combat) and is possibly the only man Coriolanus truly admires--other than himself, of course.

At his back and biting his neck is Volumnia, Coriolanus' ball-busting mother. She is proud of her son's bloody occupation and shows off his scars. She scoffs at his doting wife's wishes to see him safe at home rather than achieving glory in battle. She knows all his stops and plays him up and down, shoving him into the political ring where he can gain even more renown.

At the start of the play, we meet the good-natured and beloved Menenius, a patrician friend of Coriolanus. He doesn't have deep love for the public either, but his skills playing politics are well-honed.  With the speech I have chosen, he quashes a riot that has broken out over distribution of food in the city. It's reminiscent of language in Caesar and especially Titus Andronicus, which constantly refer to Rome as a body, whose parts don't always manage to work in sync (or get lopped off). Likening the senate to the belly, he calms his "incorporate friends"--the outlying appendages made up of commoners--by explaining the fitness of their political digestive system:

Coriolanus, Act I, Sc. I
Menenius: Your most grave belly was deliberate, 
Not rash like his accusers, and thus answer'd:
"True is it, my incorporate friends," quoth he, 
"That I receive the general food at first, 
Which you do live upon; and fit it is. 
Because I am the store-house and the shop 
Of the whole body: but, if you do remember, 
I send it through the rivers of your blood. 
Even to the court, the heart, to the seat o' the brain;
And, through the cranks and offices of man, 
The strongest nerves and most inferior veins
From me receive that natural competency 
Whereby they live: and though that all at once"--
You, my good friends, this says the belly, mark me...

"Though all at once cannot 
See what I deliver out to each. 
Yet I can make my audit up, that all 
From me do back receive the flour of all, 
And leave me but the bran."

Let's talk of graves, worms, and epitaphs

             Psst: Scrub to 1 h 6 m 45 s for the "Hollow Crown" speech

If ever Hamlet's nugget about how "A thought which quartered hath but one part wisdom/And ever three parts coward" applied to anyone (because I personally don't think it actually describes Hamlet Jr.) it's Richard II. This young monarch, who is a Class-A wanker from the start, is prone to frilly rhetorical speeches throughout this eponymous play. However, may his dollophead status never cloud our appreciation of his insights, for he has as much (or more) tendency as any other king in Shakespeare to wax truthfully about the unique discomforts of sitting upon the throne. 

Richard is a psychological nightmare. He is the rightful heir to the throne, but it is implied that he was complicit in his own uncle Gloucester's murder. He was ten when he ascended, which, on top of acne and half-descended testicles, must have been stressful. He also has this uncanny Jesus complex, and believes anyone working against him to be "thrice worse than Judas." Perhaps because his father was the famous "Black Prince" Edward, whom he could never live up to, Richard has this nagging self-esteem issue, which he barely covers with a deep belief in the divine right of Kings and the strength of his name alone. He abuses his power and hangs out with a bunch of low-lifes--Bushy, Bagot, and Green, which sounds like some second rate Flogging Molly cover band.

It's when Richard steals and liquidates the newly deceased John of Gaunt's property, gives some to his flunkies, uses the rest to fund an unpopular war in Ireland, and then returns to find that Gaunt's son, Bolingbroke, has amassed a small army of loyal followers willing to fight in Bolingbroke's name that Richard begins to fret. His peeps deliver this information and Richard loses his shit. But at the same moment, he seems to gain this poetic and wise perspective on life as a Royal. This speech alone--the so-called "Hollow Crown" speech--should be proof enough that this somewhat under-garnished play (which is written entirely in verse, BTW) is worth a close reading.

King Richard II, Act III, Sc. II

King Richard: No matter where; of comfort no man speak: 

Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs; 
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes 
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth, 
Let's choose executors and talk of wills: 
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath 
Save our deposed bodies to the ground? 
Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke's, 
And nothing can we call our own but death 
And that small model of the barren earth 
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones. 
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground 
And tell sad stories of the death of kings; 
How some have been deposed; some slain in war, 
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed; 
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd; 
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown 
That rounds the mortal temples of a king 
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits, 
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, 
Allowing him a breath, a little scene, 
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks, 
Infusing him with self and vain conceit, 
As if this flesh which walls about our life, 
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus 
Comes at the last and with a little pin 
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king! 
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood 
With solemn reverence: throw away respect, 
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty, 
For you have but mistook me all this while: 
I live with bread like you, feel want, 
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus, 
How can you say to me, I am a king?

What a sweep of vanity comes this way!

Apemantus may be a party pooper, but for good reason.

Timon is the guy who always throws the lavish, overwrought food-and-booze-laden parties for anyone who will show. He's easy to laugh with, drink with, and borrow money from... if by "borrow" you mean "take without any promise of paying him back," and he would have it no other way. I believes in the natural goodness of men's hearts, and that if he ever fell into a bad way, his friends would bail him out.

Apemantus is almost Timon's antithesis--he's a professional cynic who has no faith in men or their word. He thinks Timon is a shameless fool, and yet Apemantus tries to advise Timon about the capriciousness of his "friends" who join him for night after night of Hugh-Hefner-level shindigs. Timon's company consists of little more than ass-vacuums who think nought of sucking Timon's bank account dry.

Seeing past all this at one of Timon's famous soirees, Apemantus rants from the sidelines as a vociferous wallflower munching on some carrots while the gluttons gulp wine and gobble rich meats and cheeses. Just as the music starts and a horde of lap dancers swoop into the room, Apemantus shakes his head at the parade of corrupt debauchery before him:

Timon of Athens, Act I, Sc. II

Apemantus: Hoy-day, what a sweep of vanity comes this way!

They dance! they are mad women.
Like madness is the glory of this life.
As this pomp shows to a little oil and root.
We make ourselves fools, to disport ourselves;
And spend our flatteries, to drink those men
Upon whose age we void it up again,
With poisonous spite and envy.
Who lives that's not depraved or depraves?
Who dies, that bears not one spurn to their graves
Of their friends' gift?
I should fear those that dance before me now
Would one day stamp upon me: 't has been done;
Men shut their doors against a setting sun.

This is the excellent foppery of the world

Draco and Ursa Major, duking it out.

In the long tradition of Shakespearean villains and tricksters spouting truth, King Lear gives us Edmund: Gloucester's bastard son. He's intelligent, sexy, and utterly unscrupulous, believing he deserves no less respect (and money) than his legitimate half-brother Edgar. He succeeds in convincing his father that Edgar wishes to kill him for his lands, betraying Gloucester to Cornwall, and getting named Earl. Though a practicing douche-bag, Edmund is an effective fighter and his ambition gets him far before his fall. 

In the soliloquy I chose, Edmund mocks his father's insistence that the "late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us." Ironically(and as they always do in Shakespeare) the predictions laid out by Gloucester--that love will cool, friendships will fail, brothers will divide, and the King will rail against nature--come true. But that's the beauty of fiction, to write in vague prophecies that match up with real events.

Astrology was the mysterious science of the day, and professional astrologers were hired by the state to serve the kings and queens and provide "wisdom" written in the stars. One of my heroes, Carl Sagan, explained in the documentary series Cosmos thusly:

"Astrology developed into a strange discipline--a mixture of careful observations, mathematics and record-keeping, with fuzzy thinking and pious fraud. Nevertheless, astrology survived and flourished. Why? Because it seems to lend a cosmic significance to the routine of our daily lives. It pretends to satisfy our longing to feel personally connected with the universe. Astrology suggests a dangerous fatalism--if our lives are controlled by a set of traffic signals in the sky, why try to change anything?"

Edmund's speech provides a rant worthy of Sagan's appeal to reason.

King Lear, Act I, Sc. II

Edmund: This is the excellent foppery of the world 

that when we are sick in fortune—

often the surfeit of our own behavior—

we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, 

as if we were villains by necessity, 

fools by heavenly compulsion, 

knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, 

drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, 

and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting-on. 

An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, 

to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! 

My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail 

and my nativity was under Ursa Major, 

so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. 

Fut, I should have been that I am, 

had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. 

But I am constant as the northern star

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your pants!

An owl hoots in the public square at noon. A lioness gives birth in the streets. A man's hand burns with flame without being scorched. The dead leave their graves. No wonder Calpurnia had a nightmare the evening before the ides of March. I'd freak too if I dreamt that people were bathing in my husband's fountain of blood.

Caesar, however, is so high from the public's very public adoration of him that he spurns the soothsayer's warnings and his wife's pleas (along with speaking in the first person) and goes to the capitol with Brutus and all his senate buddies anyway.

Earlier in the play, while listening to Casca roundly freaking out over the strange portents floating around the city, Cicero says,

Indeed, it is a strange-disposed time; 

But men may construe things after their fashion, 

Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.

And Cassius says to Brutus:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, 

But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

In one way, Caesar is taking it upon himself to ignore the "stars" that are telling him to phone in sick on the ides. Unfortunately, he is also feeding into his own tragic fault: he believes himself to be a thing of the heavens, so powerful and untouchable that he fails to recognize his own human frailty. Moments before he is stabbed on the marble floor of the Capitol, Metellus Cimber, Marcus Brutus, Cassius, and Cinna beg Caesar to repeal Publius Cimber's banishment. Caesar, surrounded by these politely dissenting voices, refuses, citing himself as something as unmovable as Olympus.

Again, with the astronomical references. I love 'em.

Julius Caesar, Act III, Sc. I

Caesar: I could be well mov'd if I were as you.
If I could pray to move, prayers would move me.
But I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fix'd and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
The skies are painted with unnumb'red sparks.
They are all fire and every one doth shine,
But there’s but one in all doth hold his place.
So in the world. 'Tis furnished well with men,
And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive,
Yet in the number I do know but one
That unassailable holds on his rank,
Unshak'd of motion. And that I am he
Let me a little show it even in this:
That I was constant Cimber should be banished,
And constant do remain to keep him so.