Now is the winter of our discontent

Dali's tribute to Sir Laurence of Olivier's Richard III

I saw this play my first year of college as a requirement of a fun summer session History of Theatre class at UF. The guy who played Richard was one of the TAs in the class, and was quite remarkable. I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would, and all the essential scenes (the wooing of Anne, the murder of Clarence, the ghosts on the field of battle) stuck out even though, at the time, I had no background information about the play whatsoever.

The first 41 lines of Richard III are possibly the most famous first 41 lines in the history of drama. I wasn't even thinking of that when I stared at the seemingly endless mass of words before me. It wasn't a terribly difficult decision to make--it is a glorious statement of a soliloquy and in a play full of memorable moments ("A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"), it still stands out as the epitome of a (flawed and twisted) heart unpacked with words.

INTIMIDATION ALERT!

Keep calm and carry on, Caity. Time to break out some technique: tap into the code of the prose, aka, iambic pentameter. By identifying the underlying rhythm of each line, I found the words stuck in my brain like song lyrics, and the task became much easier.

now IS the WINter OF our DISconTENT
made GLORious SUMmer BY this SON of YORK

Now we're cooking with lime.

Following the meter, this modern reader often tripped on syllables ("glorious" is three syllables, no?) that were probably not there 400 years ago. Therefore, something like "glorious" would be crammed into "GLOR-yus" and the difference between "supposed" and "suppos'd" became glaringly obvious after a while. I love English. It's so achingly anal sometimes.

So I tackled this bugger, and though it was a mother of a bastard while I was wrestling with it, it's now one of my favorite ones to recite aloud. Its potential for scene chewing is evident in the words, and for an untrained solo actress like me, it makes the speech that much easier to remember.

Richard III, Act I, Sc. I

Gloucester: Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreathes,
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other:
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up,
About a prophecy, which says that 'G'
Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be.
Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here
Clarence comes...

Why, all delights are vain

"Heaven... I'm in heaven..." from Branagh's 2000 film adaptation

Sir Ken is a god of some sort, obviously, but when I realized he had made Love's Labour's Lost into a bonafide Irving berlin-esque musical, I was saying "What's all this now?" Aside from the subjective opinion that Fred-and-Ginger movies are AWESOMESAUCE and Shakespeare is AMAZEBALLS, I initially thought the combination might be less than peanut butter and chocolate perfection.

I was wrong.

My dear Sir Ken made something I personally adore even more than Much Ado About Nothing (amazingly enough, since that's near perfect anyways). Now, LLL is notoriously wordy and while the monologues and dialogues are poetic and clever and beauteous to the nth degree, they can be a tad long-winded. So Ken's vision was a film that replaced the more ludicrously protracted speeches (mostly recited by the incorrigible but whip-smart Berowne) with musical numbers that could more succinctly convey the feelings of the characters in the moment. It totally worked.

There was one speech from Berowne, however, that I was looking forward to hearing Kenneth deliver but never heard because it was usurped by "I'd Rather Charleston," which, honestly, is a darling song I truly enjoy because I had a recording of Fred Astaire singing it with his sister Adele that's just insanely adorable.

That speech, wherein Berowne pleads with Navarre and his buddies about the supposed virtues of study over engaging in more carnal pursuits, amounts to what I'd call a Shakespearean tongue-twister for me. It's light and quick and meant to bewitch and beguile his friends so they don't wish to adopt the rather Spartan rules of their three years of intense study. It's fun to say as quickly as you're able and still is a challenge to deliver.

There's one other lovely speech I considered, from Act 4, Scene 3. Sir Ken, in all his talent and wisdom, decided to include an abridged version of this 77-line mouthful in the film, and begins it by tap dancing in iambic pentameter. Needless to say, this blew my mind and fangirlish ovaries to bits. I promised myself to learn it one day, but for now, I have the following under my belt:

Love's Labour's Lost, Act I, Sc. I

Berowne: Why, all delights are vain; but that most vain,

Which with pain purchased doth inherit pain:

As, painfully to pore upon a book

To seek the light of truth; while truth the while

Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look:

Light seeking light doth light of light beguile:

So, ere you find where light in darkness lies,

Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.

Study me how to please the eye indeed

By fixing it upon a fairer eye,

Who dazzling so, that eye shall be his heed

And give him light that it was blinded by.

Study is like the heaven's glorious sun

That will not be deep-search'd with saucy looks:

Small have continual plodders ever won

Save base authority from others' books

These earthly godfathers of heaven's lights

That give a name to every fixed star

Have no more profit of their shining nights

Than those that walk and wot not what they are.

Too much to know is to know nought but fame;

And every godfather can give a name.

Yea, from the table of my memory

Sir Kenneth Branagh working with John Gielgud on the set of Hamlet (1996)

Not long ago, I made up my mind that I would read EVERYTHING SHAKESPEARE EVER WROTE. After years of on-off studiousness and a final flourish of reading Sonnet 154, I celebrated my achievement by having a few pumpkin ales and reciting every Shakespeare speech I knew from memory to an empty house. This was made possible because several weeks before, as an amendment to my resolution, I had passed a personal law to learn a new speech from Shakespeare every week until I knew at least one from every play.

Halfway to my goal (and still going strong), I realized that there's not a whole lot of Suzy Q, non-theatre/non-lit scholar folks who take up memorizing tracts of Shakespeare for fun (or at least they don't blog about it). This disappointed me. I thought for sure someone would have the same idea and felt it was worthy of rumination... but not so much. This had to be amended.

All my inspiration for this can be traced thusly:

In my studies, the name Kenneth Branagh came with the wheat separated from the chaff. He was mentioned so often that I could come to one of two conclusions: this guy is a genius or a total dick. Outside of a random viewing of As You Like It and Thor, I was tragically unconscious of his extensive  work.

But then came Henry V. I thank Netflix everyday for streaming this masterwork. Sir Ken's wooing of Catherine of Valois rendered me a puddle of sighs. Then his Hamlet entered my Blu-Ray player, and I beheld this ballsy, epic undertaking of recording the entirety of my favorite on film for the first time. I was done. I was nuclear-reactor-level smitten with this man. It was inevitable, I suppose, given his passionate grasp of the material and my recent re-upped love of the plays. I floated on an inexplicably delirious intellectual high for days, nursing the brand of fawning, explosive fangirl crush that has become my trademark since I first posted on LiveJournal ten years ago.

The second time I watched Hamlet, I listened to the director's commentary. It was the most edifying four hours of movie commentary I had encountered since The Lord of the Rings. Sir Ken lit up the movie with insights. Along the way, I found myself envious of his ability to rattle off quotes to make his points. I came away thinking: "I want to be the person who can quote Shakespeare."

I was going to seriously memorize some shite.

Having already undertaken memorizing the Periodic Table from hydrogen to americium, I felt it was entirely achievable and sufficiently challenging. Memorization is a parlour trick in the end. Humans are capable of memorization feats that boggle human minds. People have long set themselves to committing holy scriptures to heart in the hopes that it will enrich their souls. Shakespeare's words are so essential to and ingrained in the English language and culture that they command no less respect than divine inspiration. That's why I've not only resolved to memorize these speeches, but to deeply analyze them within their contexts to discover clues as to how to properly recite and ruminate over them and gain understanding of the characters' thoughts.

These selected speeches have become, for me, a living canon--the soul's scripture--as accessible to me as my thoughts, and as important to me as my journey through life. It's as serious as it is comic at times, but always enriching, always nourishing, and completely worth enduring the wide-eyed looks of bemusement I get when I tell people what I'm doing.