The Fig of Spain and other possible Shakespearean cocktails

A Joe Peretore creation

Several evenings last summer, while I was on yet another trip to the cocktail capital of the world, my self-styled bartender friend Joe enthusiastically presented me with a series of new spirited concoctions. It's always like an episode of Iron Chef with Joe--just give him a suggestion for an ingredient and he'll go to work, shaking or stirring up a fine potable for your enjoyment. One night, he ran out of raspberry preserves for something resembling a Clover Club, so he used a spoonful of fig preserves instead. He presented it to me with a slightly crestfallen aura; he was a father whose child had no name. So I took a sip and the first thing that tripped off my tongue was "Fig of Spain." It's an gonads-inspired hand gesture/ insult from Pistol in Henry V. I explained to Joe the term's bawdy origin and a new drink was born. 

While riding city busses and trains and planes that summer, I was always browsing through a Kindle book on my iPod called "Shakespeare's Bawdy" by Eric Partridge, which explains where my brain was at the time. I've always loved colorful turns of phrase, especially ones with clever, tasteful innuendo. Shakespeare is a master of the craft of penis and fart jokes. It's something I wish we could teach kids in high school so they wouldn't be so bored or put off by his plays. If they knew how truly foul-mouthed Mercutio was, or how often Romeo and his buddies talked about snatch, teenagers would relate to Shakespeare so much better. Alas, teaching them what Hamlet meant by telling Ophelia it would "cost a groaning" to take off his edge would be frowned upon in our pretends-to-be-Puritan society. But them's the breaks. 

Flipping through Joe's cocktail recipe books and noting the witty and often risqué names most of them were given, I quickly realized that Shakespeare was an endless mine of beverage monikers. Next time I'm in Brooklyn, I'll have to get Joe to make something called a "Carnal Sting" or perhaps a "Bed Presser." I'd love to try whatever might be called "Fortune's Favours," "Country Matters," or even "Beast with Two Backs." I'll be sure to share whenever we figure one out.

So in the tradition of my dear friend Elissa's Game of Thrones craft blog (which is really awesomesauce, so if you're into it check it out), I give you the recipe for one of my most favorite cocktails ever:

The Fig Of Spain (courtesy of Joe Peretore)

2 oz Beefeater Gin

3/4 oz lemon juice

1/2 oz simple syrup

1 egg white

1 teaspoon fig preserves

Shake all ingredients until your arms fall off.

Add ice until shaker is 3/4 full.

Shake until your heart gives out.

Strain into a saucer champagne glass. 

Sip and recite Shakespeare.

The poet's pen turns them to shapes

The Doctor and the Bard

Part of my day job is to evaluate school childrens' handwriting--to see if it's either too slow, illegible, or otherwise nonexistant, so as to warrant assistive technology. Usually, a specialized pencil grip or keyboarding practice is suggested. Ironic, then, that I have some of the worst handwriting  of any adult you will encounter. Sure, if I think about it and focus on making it legible, it looks fine, but why would I do that when 99% of my written communication is through a keyboard?

Even more ironic, then, that my father always writes in a precise, but not fastidious Copperplate at all times. He even has the artistic training and inclination to sweep out fanciful cursive scripts when the occasion calls for it. He loves computer gadgetry, but collects pens and writes all his notes by hand. And of course, he's a terrible hunt-and-peck typist.

So when the subject of cursive handwriting not being taught in schools anymore came up, we gently butted heads about the usefulness of handwriting in our modern era. Cursive was good enough for Shakespeare, right? Why isn't it good enough for me?

I learned cursive in school. My handwriting is much more legible in cursive than manuscript, but damn, does it cramp my hands after a paragraph. No wonder all these kids I see at work have issues. It takes more fine motor skills and muscles to create ink-on-paper words. Of course, if we had more practice, we'd be able to do it faster and with less pain. Practice is always the thing!

In school, I remember I'd be able to memorize things better if I wrote them down myself. Up until high school, when my computer fiend father inevitably got me a Palm Pilot and a portable keyboard, I wrote things out in longhand, and indeed, it helped my studying. But in college, when everything was done on my laptop in my dorm, typing was the only way to go. I still did fine in my studies, BTW.

But this past Christmas, when my dad gifted me a fanciful lined notebook of the type he was more apt to use on a regular basis, I wasn't sure what to do with it. I felt I should fill it with something worth the time and effort of carefully writing it in a legible hand. At that point, I was halfway through my Trippingly Project. What was more worthy of such a fine notebook than all the words I was burning into my brain every week?

Even now, I've only written eleven of the 40 speeches I've memorized into this notebook. It's hard, and takes concentration, because I can't fix it once it's set down. What pressure Shakespeare must have had to get it right the first time, what with how expensive paper and ink was in his time! I'm sure he made mistakes and added shit in the margins or deleted things with a scrawl. It's more visceral to see writing on paper; it's so much more permanent a record of a writer's thoughts and mental journeys. But damn, does it hurt. 

Within the book and volume of my brain

List, list, O, LIST

While I was working through the last 41 weeks of memorization exercises, I've had this paper taped to my closet door. It's just a chronological list of all Shakespeare's plays. Every time I read a play, I highlighted it in pink. Every time I learned a speech, I added a blue dot next to it. When I reached my goal, I snipped the paper into candy-colored strips, each with a play on it, and threw them into a bag. Now, every evening, I randomly select a strip from the bag and practice it a bit before bed, then proceed to spend my morning and afternoon commute to work reciting to myself, usually with the accompaniment of some old-school, wordless M83 songs.

Some are as easy to recall as that first "To be" speech; others require more polishing, as very often the one I grab from the bag is one I haven't revisited in so many weeks. But so far, this rehash activity has proven fruitful. Just yesterday, after a few weeks of this practice, I dumped the pile of re-visited speeches onto my bed and proceeded to pick one up, recite, then pick another and another until they were all gone. It took a half hour, and I did it with only one cheat: it was to make sure Hamlet said "my uncle" and not "mine uncle" in his first soliloquy.

My fear near the end was that I'd forget some of the less favorited speeches, so doing this both confirmed and destroyed that fear, since practice really is the silver bullet when it comes to achieving any level of proficiency at anything. (Plus, I've surprised myself that I even have enough room in my mental hard drive lately, since a large percentage of RAM has been dedicated solely to squeeing over Benedict Cumberbatch again.)

Obviously, this thing is not over.

I still have a mental list of speeches I'd like to still learn:
1) Hamlet's third soliloquy
2) John of Gaunt's speech about England in Richard II
3) Berowne's epic 77-line rave about love from LLL
4) Prince Hal's plea to his father about redemption in Henry IV Part 1
5) Ophelia's "What a noble mind is here o'erthrown" speech

I wonder if any of my readers could suggest any others for my tackling pleasure?

The longer the achievement, the more apt I am to unlock them. I'm not entirely sure why. Perhaps it's just the meditative quality of a good, lengthy thought process that keeps my brain at attention for so long and serves to defrag it or something. Maybe it impresses me more deeply because it seems so intimidating when you see it on paper, but turns out to be quite natural once it's uploaded to my brain. Whatever the reason, it's always fun.

Has anyone else given this a go?

Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?

Car Park Man.

Tom Hiddleston, in an interview regarding playing Loki in (Sir Ken's!) Thor  and The Avengers, said that "every villain is a hero in his own mind." He's obviously following the old actors' adage about not judging the character(s) you play, and this is especially true when you're the "bad guy." Shakespeare is often--and correctly--accused of demonizing the non-Tudor King Richard III, in what is essentially a propagandistic move to stay in the good graces of the reigning Queen Elizabeth at the time. But Shakespeare still clearly understood that a truly effective villain is one with pathos. Without that soupçon of vulnerability and sympathy, a truly great villain is incomplete--little more than a mindless, faceless cloud of smoke. Or a polar bear. Or whatever. Fucking Lost.

And so it is with Richard (and of course, Loki, because, what else would you expect from Sir Ken?). As the audience, we are forced to consider whether Richard's deformity is a manifestation of his evil ambition, or, if he would have these ambitions at all if he were not so "rudely stamp'd." Is he so shaped due to his inherent evil or has a life of being bullied for his outward appearance hardened his heart? The  curious thing is, Richard could care less what we feel, though he presents it both ways. He certainly does not judge himself... at least not in this play. 

My favorite bits in his 3 Henry VI speech are the the ones that express his fondest dreams. The imagery he invokes is so crisp and precise that we realize the tragedy of such a poetic and clever mind employed for harm rather than charity. Standing on a promontory, gazing longingly upon a far-off goal, fighting his way through a treacherous forest of thorns, and the heavy mountain upon his back implies that his struggle is against Nature more than anything else. His watchwork mind is strained, and requires a challenge to prevent his absolute boredom. 

His ennui is transformed by the journey of his speech, as indicated by the "characters" that populate his mind. At the start, he lists the banal family members who stand between him and the crown. He disdains Edward's sinful lust while himself committing covetous thoughts. Between this mention of Edward, his brother Clarence, Henry, and the young Edward, Richard only brings to mind faceless whores and soldiers and his own unnamed mother. At the end, however, Richard reveals his larger-than-life heroes: the Homeric Greeks Nestor, Ulysses, Sinon, and Proteus. He describes their skills and achievements with an almost childish confidence that he can outstrip them all in deed and zeal. Nestor had great persuasive power, Ulysses tricked many monsters and men on his voyages, Sinon convinced the Trojans to accept the Greek-filled horse, and Proteus was immortal and took many animal forms to suit his needs. Richard reveals his ultimate aggressive arrogance in finally setting down the infamous Machiavelli as a mere student to his professorial expertise in deception. 

The relish in Richard's voice becomes so obvious by the end that it seems almost impossible to find sympathy in our hearts for this murderer and usurper. And yet, by virtue of being the most fascinating and entertaining of all the characters on stage, we guiltily cling to our worser parts and secretly cheer his calculations, if not his actions. 

I brought up Loki not only because I love Hiddles and I just watched Iron Man 3 the other day and so direly await the next Thor film. I'm asking that you trust this raging fangirl as far as is possible to trust a raging fangirl, but... the connections are apparent. There's a reason why the filmic Loki is so beloved by theatre-going audiences as a character: he's another in a long line of successfully sinister villains that serve as a magnet held to our moral compasses. I'm not saying that Shakespeare invented the archetype of an ambiguous villain, but he unerringly moulded some of the best and most enduring. Iago, Macbeth, Edmund, Shylock, Claudius, Richard, etc... they're all their own archetypes now. 

I also wished to neatly bundle up my project by stitching the end back to Sir Kenneth Branagh, whose work spurred my initial motivation to embark upon this intimidating goal. He inspired me at every moment that I felt I'd crumble, filling my ears with mellifluous words (and providing the all-important eye-candy) and passion that prevented detachment and despair. But I credit the fangirl inside me for carrying me through, proving that all these years of practiced obsession and compulsion is good for something after all. 

Stick with me, however, as I have decided that this is not, nor it cannot, be the end.

King Henry VI, Part III, Act III, Sc. II

Gloucester: Ay, Edward will use women honourably.

Would he were wasted, marrow, bones and all,

That from his loins no hopeful branch may spring,

To cross me from the golden time I look for!

And yet, between my soul's desire and me--

The lustful Edward's title buried--

Is Clarence, Henry, and his son young Edward,

And all the unlook'd for issue of their bodies,

To take their rooms, ere I can place myself:

A cold premeditation for my purpose!

Why, then, I do but dream on sovereignty;

Like one that stands upon a promontory,

And spies a far-off shore where he would tread,

Wishing his foot were equal with his eye,

And chides the sea that sunders him from thence,

Saying, he'll lade it dry to have his way:

So do I wish the crown, being so far off;

And so I chide the means that keeps me from it;

And so I say, I'll cut the causes off,

Flattering me with impossibilities.

My eye's too quick, my heart o'erweens too much,

Unless my hand and strength could equal them.

Well, say there is no kingdom then for Richard;

What other pleasure can the world afford?

I'll make my heaven in a lady's lap,

And deck my body in gay ornaments,

And witch sweet ladies with my words and looks.

O miserable thought! and more unlikely

Than to accomplish twenty golden crowns!

Why, love forswore me in my mother's womb:

And, for I should not deal in her soft laws,

She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe,

To shrink mine arm up like a wither'd shrub;

To make an envious mountain on my back,

Where sits deformity to mock my body;

To shape my legs of an unequal size;

To disproportion me in every part,

Like to a chaos, or an unlick'd bear-whelp

That carries no impression like the dam.

And am I then a man to be beloved?

O monstrous fault, to harbour such a thought!

Then, since this earth affords no joy to me,

But to command, to cheque, to o'erbear such

As are of better person than myself,

I'll make my heaven to dream upon the crown,

And, whiles I live, to account this world but hell,

Until my mis-shaped trunk that bears this head

Be round impaled with a glorious crown.

And yet I know not how to get the crown,

For many lives stand between me and home:

And I,--like one lost in a thorny wood,

That rends the thorns and is rent with the thorns,

Seeking a way and straying from the way;

Not knowing how to find the open air,

But toiling desperately to find it out,--

Torment myself to catch the English crown:

And from that torment I will free myself,

Or hew my way out with a bloody axe.

Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,

And cry 'Content' to that which grieves my heart,

And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,

And frame my face to all occasions.

I'll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall;

I'll slay more gazers than the basilisk;

I'll play the orator as well as Nestor,

Deceive more slily than Ulysses could,

And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.

I can add colours to the chameleon,

Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,

And set the murderous Machiavel to school.

Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?

Tut, were it farther off, I'll pluck it down.