Primates and Above in the Witches Brew

• Witches’ mummy
• Liver of blaspheming Jew
• Nose of Turk
• Tartar’s lips
• Finger of birth-strangled babe
• Baboon’s blood

War on Material

“The content should do nothing, the form everything; for the wholeness of Man is affected by form alone, and only individual powers by content. However sublime and comprehensive it may be, the content always has the restrictive action upon the spirit, and only from the form is true aesthetic freedom to be expected. Therefore, the real artistic secret of the master consists in his annihilating the material by means of the form.”

Schiller, quoted in Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare’s Freedom. (See letter XXII here, a different translation: “In a really beautiful work of art….”

Enhanced Interrogations

Torture in King Lear is conducted directly by rulers. Before Cornwall even gets his hands on Gloucester, he declares his intention to injure him, quite apart from the outcome of the process of interrogation:

Though well we may not pass upon his life

Without the form of justice, yet our power

Shall do a courtesy to our wrath, which men 

May blame, but not control (3.7.24-27)

What is at once horrible and familiar about this declaration is its nauseating blend of legalism, sadism, and public relations, as if Cornwall were already thinking about how he will excuse the fact that there were regrettable excesses in his otherwise legal treatment of the prisoner. 

from Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare’s Freedom - incredible reading of Gloucester’s blinding, post-Iraq. “Shakespeare’s audience was far less squeamish about the torture of traitors than we are - or than we Americans were until recently.” 

Just because you are a character…

For Shakespeare there was no such thing as the characterless self. His doubts were rooted in his practice; that is, they were inseparable from his power as a playwright. A conception of the moral self as characterless was not for Shakespeare a philosophical blunder so much as an undoing or denial of his life’s work. 

from Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare’s Freedom

A blue dress

At a dinner in 1998 honoring Robert Pinsky, President Clinton gave a speech in which he recalled his first encounter with poetry came in school when his teacher made him memorize certain passages of Macbeth. This was, he remarked wryly, not the most auspicious beginning for a life in politics.

After the speeches, I joined the line waiting to shake his hand. When my turn came, a strange impulse came over me. This was a moment when rumors of the Lewinsky affair were circulating but before the whole thing had blown up. “Mr President,” I said, sticking out my hand, “don’t you think that Macbeth is a great play about an immensely ambitious man who feels compelled to do things that he knows are politically and morally disastrous?”

Clinton looked at me for a moment, still holding my hand, and said, “I think Macbeth is a great play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object.”

from Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare’s Freedom.

S&M

Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do: and the reason why lovers are not so punished is that the lunacy is so ordinary the whippers are in love too. 

As You Like It (3.2)

List of Prisoners

First, here’s young Master Rash. Then is there here one Master Caper. Then have we here young Dizzy, and young Master Deepvow, and Master Copperspur and Master Starve-lackey the rapier and dagger man, and young Drophair that killed lusty Pudding, and Master Forthright the tilter, and brave Master Shoe-tie the great traveller, and wild Half-can that stabbed Pots.

Measure for Measure (4.3.3-15)

The first mention of a Bridge & Tunnel crowd?

There’s a trim rabble let in,” jeers one character in Shakespeare’s 1613 play, Henry VIII: “are all these Your faithful friends o’ th’ Suburbs?”

Quoted in Borderland, John R. Stilgoe. 

Emilia on Men

‘Tis not a year or two shows us a man. 

They are all but stomachs and we all but food: 

They eat us hungerly, and when they are full

They belch us. 

Emilia (Iago’s wife) on men. Othello 3.4

Or, maybe there was another reason

Cordelia is really a silly little bitch. There are so many “No”-girls in Shakespeare’s last plays. He must have acquired a special actress who could play that sort of role.

-Auden, from The Table Talk of W.H. Auden