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?

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains

Bottom and his buddies.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who would love to see Benedict Cumberbatch's Titania and Hugh Laurie's Bottom. And I mean that in exactly the double entendre you're thinking of right now. Too bad my favorite actors aren't always followed around by cameras from the first day they are cast into high school plays. I'd also much rather see what Ben Whishaw would do with Puck than The Tempest's Ariel, but that's another post.

For now, consider Theseus, Duke of Athens, and his dilemma: a bunch of love-sick and drugged-up teenagers from his court get lost in the woods just when the faeries are in the throes of a civil war of the sexes. The kids wake from their stupor and with their fanciful recollection of their "dreams," simply confirm Theseus' worldview that faeries are bullshit. That's the speech I chose--a romantic diatribe about the idiocy of romance. He's such a hipster.


A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V, Sc. I
Theseus: More strange than true: I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

All the world's a stage

Benedict Cumberbatch's "jaguar curled inside a cello" voice is perfectly suited to at least two things in this world: rattling off impressive strands of Holmesian deductive observations and conclusions... and reciting Shakespeare. Those pipes are a gift from the Universe bestowed upon geeky anglophiles the world over. In the past year, his vocal talents have been tapped like a keg at a frat party, to the squeeing of all fangirls worth their fake British accents (such as me). SO of course, when Google made this advert showcasing both Ben's mellifluous timbre AND the epically famous (abridged) speech from As You Like It, I naturally had to memorize the fucker.

It's spoken by Jaques--a lord with an affected melancholy and a penchant for long discourses on how the world turns. He is one of the blokes who follows the exiled Duke into the Forest of Arden, where they semi-reluctantly philosophize on the superior, more "honest" life to be led within Nature's bosom, compared with the duplicitous existence to be found at court. The entire play is a commentary on the pros and cons of "the simple life" and that of the nobility, mostly played out in the woods, making it one of those popular "pastoral-comical" plays Polonius lists when the players arrive in Hamlet.

The Ages of Man was a cliché in Shakespeare's time, but the eloquence of the speech--spoken by someone little more than a jester--heightens its dramatic effectiveness and memorability. What tickles me about this speech is that, as Marjorie Garber points out in her book Shakespeare After All, the ages match up with the classical conceptions of the planets: mercurial boy, venereal lover, martial soldier, jovial justice, saturnine old man. And every age is marked by the sounds of their voices, my favorite being the lover "sighing like furnace." It's at once recognizable and absolutely truthful in its poetry.

P.S. Notice that some of the "friends" names in the advert are characters from the play! Corin, Sylvia, Celia, Audrey, Orlando, Phebe. The baby's name is William, as well. It's cute. Probably TOO cute.

As You Like It, Act II, Sc. VII

Jaques: All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.