Tuesday, August 31, 2010

10th Grade Gabe Goes All Intertextual on Measure For Measure

Gabriel Llanas

English 10

Mr. Elieff

April 22, 1994

 

Measure For Measure Intertextual Essay

 

            In order to demonstrate the wisdom of Shakespeare in his play Measure For Measure I will break off a piece of intertextual analysis up in this mug as we were asked to do for this assignment.

            The Duke in this play is a meddler who is too chicken to enforce his own laws in Vienna and leaves the responsibility to Angelo and Escalus. But then he comes back disguised as a friar and messes with everybody. He shows that Angelo is a hypocrite for being lustful even though he tried to execute Lucio for that same crime. And then the Duke himself tries to marry the most virtuous nun-in-training Isabella.

            Guys like the Duke think they know it all and can push everyone around and then act like they’re so smart and heroic. The Duke (disguised as a friar) gives some terrible advice to Lucio while he is sitting on death row for having sex with his fiancé out of wedlock and getting her pregnant. Lucio is waiting to hear how is sister did when she went to beg for his life from Angelo and the Duke tells him:

 

Be absolute for death: either death or life

Shall thereby be the sweeter. (3:1)

 

            The Duke basically goes on to say that Claudio should want to die because life sucks so much. Then at the end, he says this interesting thing:

 

Thou hast nor youth nor age,

But as it were an after-dinner’s sleep

Dreaming on both, for all thy blessed youth

Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms

Of palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich,

Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty,

To make thy riches pleasant. What’s yet in this

That bears the name of life? (3:1)

 

            The Duke is saying that when you’re young you want the riches of old age, and when you’re old, the riches are no good because you don’t have your youth. Life is pointless because you can never have everything that you want. Or as Sebastian the Crab would say: “The seaweed is always greener, in somebody else’s lake.”

            Debbie Downer in the house.

            Now check this, E-Dog. When I was in 5th grade I read the Chronicles of Narnia, and in the last book they talk about Queen Susan, who wasn’t invited to live in Aslan’s land at the end of Narnia, because she was no longer a friend of Narnia. She could not remember it. When the others would talk about it she would say, "What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.” (Lewis, The Last Battle, p. 154)

Then Polly observes:

 

"She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can." (Lewis, p. 154)

 

            Susan lives in the small overlapping time in life when your youth is at its apex and you have all the trappings you need to be happy. The Duke thinks there is no overlap, and that you are always wanting one or the other. The outlooks are nearly similar, but if the Duke really believes there is no overlap then he is doomed to melancholy.

I just got my braces off, I possess a headful of mad-wavy hair that the young ladies can’t get enough of, I may have acne and no car or driver’s license, but I don’t give a care. It’s like Bill and Ted say: “The best place to be is here, and the best time to be is now.”

            Or even better look at what Oscar Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray:

 

“You have the most marvelous youth, and youth is the one thing worth having… Someday when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly. Now, wherever you go you charm the world. Will it always be so?... Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!” (Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p.186-187)

 

            This speech leads to Dorian Gray living a life of lechery and sinful abandon that gets reflected on his magical painting while his youth is preserved on his face. Susan is kept out of what is essentially heaven in the chronicles of Narnia and Lucio who actually did break the law is saved from punishment by the Duke, who seems to have orchestrated this whole thing just so that he could appear benevolent and hook up with the virginal Isabella.

            As you may be aware I sit on Judiciary Board, and when Sasha and her roommate Karin came before the J-Board for disciplinary action, I was all up in that case. Sasha – as you know – is a grade-A hottie. The two of them had snuck off campus one weekend and gotten busted. They got off pretty easy with a dormed weekend when they could have gotten suspended, but I made a point of being the strongest advocate for fully pardoning their trespasses. So when it came time for their dormed weekend guess who was playing truth or dare up in their dorm room until lights out?

            Somewhere there’s a painting of me dissolving into monstrosity.

            I guess I don’t blame the Duke for playing everyone like he did. I mean, he’s probably just a sucker with low self-esteem who needs to flex the few muscles he has every once in a while in order to impress the ladies. So what if he’s not going to get invited to Aslan’s land. Between you and me, Mr. E, I’d rather kick it on planet Earth with the Susans and Sashas and milk these silly days for all the sweet young nectar they’re worth. Peace.

Monday, August 23, 2010

The End of Magic

All’s Well that Ends Well lives between an era of fairy tales and the age of science and rationality. Within the play there is a mystical power in virginity, and love that conquers riddles and performs feats believed impossible.

Helena is in love with Bertram. The problem is that he is a nobleman and she is a lowly physician’s daughter. Bertram goes to attend the king of France at court. The king is deathly ill. Helena devises a cure from medicines that her father instructed her to use and goes to the court to cure the king, her reward is that she can choose any husband for herself and the king will force him to marry her. She chooses Bertram, who resists, but marries her and promptly runs away with the intention of never consummating the marriage. He later challenges her to two tasks saying he won’t call her wife until she can get his precious family ring off his finger and get pregnant with his child. Helena is smart and tricks him into giving the ring to a hot girl named Diana, and then sleeps with him when he thinks he's sleeping with Diana. In a fairy tale ending, Bertram swears he will love her and we are maybe expected to believe that they are going to live happily ever after.

Early in the play, Helena has an argument with Parolles about virginity. She begins:

Man is enemy to virginity; how may we barricado it against him? (1:1)

Parolles responds in tirade that she is being foolish:

Loss of virginity is rational increase, and there was never virgin got till virginity was first lost. (1:1)

There is no defense for it, man is its enemy and it is natural that he will conquer virginity so that the world will be peopled with further virgins. The circle of virginity. But nearing the conclusion of their argument, we have a mysterious incomplete line. Helena says:

Not my virginity yet: [….] (1:1)

There is debate about how much of the text is lost here, because the proceeding line picks up an entirely new thought. All that is known is that something is missing, and we have no idea what it is.

So what should we make of this missing line? I'm going to jump to a conclusion that serves my present purposes and could be completely wrong. Helena is resolving not to lose her virginity yet. I would think that the missing lines unfold the plan that yet requires her virginity. Namely, she must cure the king of his ailment and marry Bertram. These are monumental tasks, and she needs virgin magic to achieve them.

After Helena cures the king, Lafew observes:


They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear. (2:3)


Helena’s virginity brought about the miracle to which Lafew refers. The idea of virginal power persists in this play at the end when the virgin girl Diana goes before the king to argue in Helena’s stead. She is the one who corners Bertram and sets up Helena's arrival as the mastermind behind this plot to win Bertram's love. Why doesn't Helena administer these arguments in disguise the way that Portia wins freedom for Antonio at the end of The Merchant of Venice? I shall tell you. It's because Helena loses her virginity to her husband in the middle of Act 4. With her virginity go her magical powers. The brilliant miracle-worker utters a mere 13 lines in her husband's presence in the lackluster final scene of the play.

Loss of virginity is the loss of magic. I remember this from something else I read.

In the last book of The Prydain Chronicles, The High King by Lloyd Alexander, Taran, Assistant Keeper of the Oracular pig HenWen, defeats the forces of Arawn, Lord of Death, and in a somber twist, the magic that had ruled their age dies out and has to go away (much like the way the elves go to the Grey Havens at the end of The Lord of the Rings).

Unfortunately for Taran, he is in love with the enchantress Princess Eilonwy who must also go away since she has magical powers. Happily it is revealed that she can wish away her magical powers by using a ring she was given in one of the earlier books. Without her magical powers she’ll be able to stay and marry Taran. Throughout the series, Eilonwy also carried around a magical golden bauble that was in part the source of her powers, much like a wand.

Here is the passage where she loses her magic:


Wondering and almost fearful, Eilonwy closed her eyes and did the enchanter’s bidding. The ring flared suddenly, but only for a moment. The girl gave a sharp cry of pain. And in Taran’s hand the light of the golden bauble winked out.

Eilonwy blinked and looked around her. “I don’t feel a bit different,” she remarked. “Are my enchantments truly gone?” (Alexander, The High King, p. 246)


I once dated a girl who, like me, had waited for a long time before having sex. She said she didn’t know why she waited so long and that one day she just looked around and was like what am I holding onto this V-card for?

I was a virgin for a long time, first because I was waiting to be in a relationship with someone I loved, then because I was too hapless and self-conscious to know how to coax someone into physical intimacy. And then I went back to my old fallback of waiting to be in love. The whole virginity-losing process could have been helped along so well if I would have just started drinking beer at an early age like a normal American.

As it happens, it all worked out and I was in love when I first had sex. The girl had warned me that sex is a strange beast. I was a bit brash, and too excited to get on with it at that point to pay her warning much heed. I loved her, I was more than ready, and I downplayed any possible fallout.


Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear. (2:3)


In the way that Eilonwy’s bauble blinks out and she doesn’t notice her enchantments are gone, sex doesn’t change you in the instant. Gradually, it unlocks so much that didn’t exist before. It shined a light on the empty spaces of my life and filled them with hope and opportunity. It was great. Until my heart got broken and it all fell apart.

You go to a very dark place when you grow close to someone, imagining a parallel future on and on to golden horizons. And then she diverges. Leaves you. You feel foolish for not having anticipated her needs. You feel like a moron for wanting her when she doesn’t want you. You feel weak when you realize how reliant your happiness was upon her presence.

Helena's heart breaks before she even attains love. But she fights back. Tricking her husband into sleeping with her, and then appears in the end trusting that he'll honor this loose promise:


I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly. (5:3)


Almost with a vengeance does she win his husbandship, which may turn out to be a bitter one.

Maybe her scarce stage-time at the end of the play is intentional. As one of his last (possibly last) comedy, All’s Well That Ends Well isn’t bright. It’s littered with the difficulties of maturation, and it comes as Shakespeare’s mind was leaning into the great tragedies, Othello among them.

Othello tiptoes so close to being a romantic comedy, Iago’s plot of convincing Othello of Desdemona’s infidelity is nearly the same as Don John’s plot to convince Claudio of Hero’s infidelity in Much Ado About Nothing. But in Iago’s universe there was no wit as fierce as his to undo his mischief. Otherwise that play might have ended well for the Moor. What subtle turns kept All's Well That Ends Well from ending in a manner most heinous?

The period is placed firmly on this comic chapter of Shakespeare’s writing with the King’s epilogue. Which makes it plain that this play, where the low class women were able to rise in ranks and in fairy tale fashion conquer men of nobility, is nothing more than a great fantasy. The actor who plays the King removes his crown and says:


The king’s a beggar, now the play is done;

All is well ended, if this suit be won,

That you express content; which we will pay,

With strife to please you, day exceeding day.

Ours be your patience then, and yours our parts;

Your gentle hands lend us, and take our hearts. (epilogue)


A play is similar to a seduction. Disbelief momentarily suspended, at the end, the crown of the seducer is removed revealing a person with flaws alike your own. They lend you their gentleness, in hands and in speech, and then take your heart. Or at least a small piece.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Got Out of My Dreams, Got into My Car

            When I was in college I was an idiot with almost no understanding of relationships or how to interact with the opposite sex. And I thought I was in love with a girl I knew from high school. For four years I shot myself in the foot every time a quirky, cute and wonderful person expressed interest in me (they found my childishness endearing when in fact it was stupidity). I was rude or awkward, curt and ridiculous. Ah, the good old days.

            Then one night I had a dream about the girl I thought I was in love with. A glorious dream filled with golden light. The kind you wake up from feeling invigorated, confident and reckless. I got into my car and drove 1200 miles to New Orleans. To a southern university where the testosterone flowed like water. I saw her across a field littered with plastic cups and other dander shed the night before when there had been a G-Love and the Special Sauce concert held there. I ran to her, and she threw her bony arms around me. My God she had a smile that could start a car.

            She was happy to see me because we had been friends, but I had no skills. And abandoning shyness for boldness made me feel like a stalker. My impromptu road trip must have appeared calculated. She had a "guy she was into" at the time. He seemed like a douche. I spent most of my time there reading Alex Garland's novel The Beach, and feeling like a tool.

            That was the last time I acted on something I learned from a dream. If I would have read sonnet 61, I would have known that all that sunshine and gold I dreamed of was the result of my unfounded adoration and had nothing to do with a psychic reciprocation of affection. 

 

61

Is it thy will thy image should keep open

My heavy eyelids to the weary night?

Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken

While shadows like to thee do mock my sight?

Is it thy spirit that thou send’st from thee

So far from home into my deeds to pry,

To find out shames and idle hours in me,

The scope and tenor of thy jealousy?

O no, thy love, though much, is not so great;

It is my love that keeps mine eye awake,

Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat,

To play the watchman ever for thy sake.

     For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,

    From me far off, with others all too near.

 

            There is much speculation and debate about who the fair young man was to whom Shakespeare addressed his sonnets. One popular theory is that it was Henry Wriothesley, The Earl of Southhampton. Henry’s relatives wanted to pressure him into getting married to a specific young woman, and they may have commissioned Shakespeare to write these sonnets to him specifically because he was already a fan of Shakespeare’s poetry. Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were both dedicated to Southhampton. This is why the first series of 17 sonnets (and several others throughout) recommend that the young man ensure that his beauty persist in the world by having a child.

            In this era it was expected that men would be sexually attracted to young men, and expressing that attraction was no more taboo than expressing a sexual attraction to a woman. Sodomy was certainly viewed as a sin, but so was adultery. It can probably be assumed that both were popular pastimes of Shakespeare's contemporaries.

            The sonnets are fascinating as an autobiographical puzzle. One outstanding characteristic of the sonnet was that it was meant to be vague, so that it would not stand as evidence of adultery or impropriety in an era when such trespasses could be prosecuted criminally. This leaves us with a maze of metaphors and loose allusions to navigate. Could Shakespeare have been in love with this effeminate young man who was reluctant to get married? Yes. It’s also possible he concocted this poetry out of his imagination in the interest of supporting himself and his estranged wife and children during the time when the playhouses were closed due to the outbreak of the plague.

            Before I left New Orleans and that girl I thought I was in love with, I gave her a copy of the 30-page short story I’d written for her. It was about a quixotic high school kid in a cape named Tobin Grasshopper and his friend Gordon Godoy who are both in love with a girl named Neriya. They decide to start writing her love poems and leaving them in her locker. She's weirded out and it gets messy when Tobin goes crazy and shoots Gordon in the middle of the school.

Please take a moment to roll your eyes.

Part Cyrano, part Wes Anderson, part utter piece of crap. It was one of the best things I’d written up to that point in my life. Not for any of the actions or pacing or plotting. Not for the characters, but for the few small lyrical snippets I’d come up with to describe the character of Neriya. That was the one emotion I really understood while I was typing away in the computer lab in the basement of the Dewitt-Wallace Library at Macalester: the admiration of beauty.

I would quote something of the story here, but the floppy disk it was recorded on has long since found its way to the bottom of a benevolent trash bin.

My point was that genuine emotions are necessary to create poetry, but they do not have to be specific to the present details. Even a crappy story I wrote at the lovelorn age of 21 demonstrates that real emotions can be applied to fiction. Surely Shakespeare, the greatest writer of all time, was capable of deceiving a young patron of the arts in order to support himself for a quick minute when the going got tough.

            But I don’t think this was the case. I think Shakespeare really was in love with the young man. I think William was gay. He clearly didn’t mind living away from his wife for most of his adult life. On the other hand he also had plenty of sex with prostitutes, so feel free to disagree.

            There’s no way for us to ever discover the truth until we develop safe time-traveling technology. But I’d rather think he was gay and was writing some of this amazing poetry from a place of actual passion and desire so that I wouldn’t feel like such an ineffectual hack when I write love letters that should be honest and beautiful, but mostly suck balls.

            Also, I know people have heterosexualized his poetry over the years by changing pronouns, and those people should be maligned for their homophobia. Unfortunately, I think I just lumped myself into this category since I totally took his poem and applied it to the affections I had for a member of the opposite sex. 

Sorry, William... unless of course you weren't gay at all. Then shame on you, you big faker. 




Friday, August 6, 2010

The Dishonest Poet: Sonnets 1-17

            I had planned on being a teacher since I was a junior in high school and I determined that it was impractical for me to become a spy. This realization is its own chapter in my life that culminated with the worst planned prank in the history of prep school malfeasance, a stolen VHS copy of Forrest Gump, and the loss of virginity (not mine) in the back of a station wagon. But in December 1999, standing in the Registrar’s office at Macalester College, about to sign up for my last semester, I realized I didn’t want to teach. I wanted to write.

My parents’ recent divorce had filled me with clichéd angst and a conventional disregard for convention. There was something domestic and permanent about becoming a teacher in the Midwest. I felt like I was marrying someone while already planning the divorce.

The problem was that during the fall semester I wrote three pretty good short stories. One about some kids who fill their house up with water, another about two old friends who try to rob a 24-hour donut shop in LaCrosse, WI, and the last was about what would happen if they changed the formula for water.

No one warned me that an English minor is the most useless thing you can get out of your college education, so I erased all the education classes from my registration and quixotically signed up for: Advanced Fiction Writing and Writing the Autobiography and Personal Essay. That spring I wrote over 200 pages of original material. All of which sucked balls.

But I loved writing fiction. Even in the autobiography class I wrote all about my evil twin brother Dante, confessing all the most embarrassing chapters of my life on his timidity and naïve mischievousness.

My favorite moment of that spring semester was the day when they brought some mildly successful poet to talk to all of our classes, she was getting recognition at a literary event that evening at the school and she talked about writing poetry and we read some of her poetry and it was all terrible (except for one or two of the poems we read that she had collaborated with her 7-year-old son to write – I’m not kidding). But I was not overly hubristic, and was perfectly willing to accept that I might have absolutely no barometer for judging poetry.

She came to our advanced fiction class and she started talking about how she could never write fiction because she could never be dishonest with her writing. And I snapped. She had just called fiction writers liars. She just called me a liar. And if there is one thing I am not (was not) it is a liar.

“I think poetry is honest, and I don’t think I could ever write anything that was made up.”

“Writing fiction isn’t just making things up,” I said. “It’s finding truth in fictional events.”

“But the events are fictional and there’s something dishonest about that.”

            “So, everything you’ve ever written is true and we’re all liars?”

Diane Glancy, our professor, stepped in before I could inform her that her 7-year-old son was a way better poet than her. But the damage was done. From that moment on I would hate poetry with all of my heart.

This has made the reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets the least-anticipated undertaking of my Year of Reading Shakespeare.

 

17

 

Who will believe my verse in time to come,

If it were filled with your most high deserts?

Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb,

Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts:

If I could write the beauty of your eyes,

And in fresh numbers number all your graces,

The age to come would say, “This poet lies;

Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.”

So should my papers (yellowed with their age)

Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,

And your true rights be termed a poet’s rage,

And stretched metre of an antique song;

    But were some child of yours alive that time,

   You should live twice: in it, and in my rhyme.

 

            The first 17 poems are all weird. They’re about trying to convince some young man to procreate. I mean look at this one. It’s great at first. Shakespeare says if he could capture the young man’s physical beauty in words then everyone would call him a liar in the future. But if the young man had a child, then there would be genetic proof that his words were honest.

            Weird.

            For one thing, Shakes, kids don’t always look like their parents, sometimes they look way different and goofy. But my favorite part here is the fear he has that in the future someone will say: “This poet lies.”

            William Shakespeare’s words are so exaggerative and complimentary, they are so evocative and opulent that no one human could ever achieve the prettiness they describe.

            So yes, William, I say this poet lies. This poet embellishes and prettifies and intentionally misleads. And it’s all good. Honesty ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

            It behooves the written word to write the world better than it is. How else is it supposed to compete with television?

Monday, August 2, 2010

Troilus and Cressida and Nintendo

There was an old Nintendo video game called Trojan. I borrowed it from my friend Rocky, we probably traded for Contra or Metroid, which were the two best games in my collection for a long time. The final boss in Trojan was Achilles. As I was fighting him, I couldn't help but think how stupid it was that you didn't have to stab him in the heel to kill him. Even then I was a stickler for mythological accuracy.

There was also a video game called Kid Icarus, about a boy with wings, more like cupid than like Daedelus’s son. I never even played that one.

I’ve always been pretty good at video games. There was a Saturday once when I was a kid when I rode my bike to the Power House, which was the first place in Kenosha you could rent video games, I rented Ninja Gaiden 3: The Ancient Ship of Doom, took it home and cleared it in a single sitting. I rode back an hour or two later and they let me trade it for something else (Solomon’s Key maybe?). To this day I’d be willing to challenge anyone to a playoff of Bionic Commando, which I can clear in just over 30 minutes.

My whole life I’ve wanted my video game prowess to take me somewhere. The way Alex Rogan gets called up to space to defend the frontier against the Kodan Armada in The Last Starfighter. If only our virtual glory could translate to tangible glory that would endure for generations.

The Trojan War and its glories survive today in epic poems, video games, books of mythology and Brad Pitt movies, but I swear to God, until the moment when I cracked open my Riverside Shakespeare and started reading the introduction, I had no idea that Troilus and Cressida was a story of the Trojan War.

It is aptly labeled one of Shakespeare’s problem plays. There is no record of it ever having been performed at the Globe, It may have only been performed twice in Shakespeare's lifetime. It has been classified by different people as a history, a comedy, a satire, and a romance. It’s a sad, cynical, lyrical and incomplete account of the Trojan War that shifts focus from the story of the sundered lovers Troilus and Cressida to musings on the pointlessness of war, the inconstancy of fame and concludes with the inglorious murder of an unarmed Hector by a wrathful Achilles and his gang.

Troilus and Cressida were the clichéd tragic lovers of Shakespeare’s time (the way Romeo and Juliet are now). They fall in love, make all sorts of vows, but then Cressida’s father defects to the Greek camp and he makes them trade a Trojan prisoner for Cressida. She is sent to the Greeks, and promptly falls in love with one of them, betraying Troilus.

At the end of their story Troilus has his brains battered out during some battle, but this play ends before that even happens. I learned about it from As You Like It when Rosalind delivers her speech about how no one ever died for love (see my previous blogpost).

The message of the play seems to be that the Trojan War felt as futile to the soldiers fighting it as Vietnam. In fact, the Trojan War might be more retarded than all of America’s wars put together. As Thersites says:


All the argument is a whore and a cuckold, a good quarrel to draw emulous factions and bleed to death upon. (2:3)


In Shakespeare's time Helen of Troy had been overly romanticized by Christopher Marlowe in Dr. Faustus, as you'll remember from Shakspeare in Love:


Was this the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?


But Shakespeare’s discussion of her kidnapping here is a philosophical debate about when enough blood has been shed that it becomes ridiculous, unnecessary and perilous to continue fighting. If a kidnapped queen isn’t worth fighting for, is anything?

What I see here for the first time is Shakespeare’s inability to romanticize something for the stage. If you'll allow me to completely imagine the circumstances surrounding the writing of this play, I would hypothesize that he felt commercial pressure to write another tragic love story and delved into the familiar topic of the Trojan War only to find it was far too distasteful to romanticize.

He was perfectly capable of penning works of nationalism and propaganda like Henry V, to laud the glory of English military prowess, but he found the prospect of glorifying the unnecessary warmongering of 7 years stalemate over a kidnapping to be entirely distasteful.

In the play Six Degrees of Separation there's an awesome speech about painters losing their work:


"I thought, dreamt, remembered how easy it is for a painter to lose a painting. He paints and paints, works on a canvas for months, and then one day he loses it - loses the structure, loses the sense of it. You lose the painting."


The same goes for writers and the ease by which they can lose a script or a story. Sometimes you get lost in a topic. Sometimes the world you’re entering is too messy for wise fiction and in order to tell the story in an interesting way, you need to simplify it so much that the complexity the subject demands is impossible to achieve. Shakespeare's theater was called The Globe, but it was merely a stage, and not all things in life can be effectively addressed in microcosm.

Imagine if you saw Romeo and Juliet today, and if the play was riddled with labored discussions of the futility of the feud. If Tybalt was a whiner, too proud to act, and the play ended with the death of Mercutio. That’s about the level of closure we get with Troilus and Cressida.

Ulysses has the most ironic speech of the play, when he basically lays out Andy Warhol’s thesis that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. Achilles wonders why all of the Greeks are cheering for Ajax to fight Hector instead of Achilles and Ulysses tells him:


Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,

A great-siz’d monster of ingratitudes.

Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devour’d

As fast as they are made, forgot as soon

As done…

For Time is like a fashionable host

That slightly shakes his parting guest by th’ hand,

And with his arms outstretch’d as he would fly,

Grasps the comer…

Then marvel not, thou great and complete man,

That all the Greeks begin to worship Ajax;

Since things in motion sooner catch the eye

Than what stirs not. (3:3)


The whole speech is a set up. Ulysses and the other Generals have pretended not to care about Achilles in order to motivate him to fight (at the start of the play he had been lounging around in his tent for months). Of course, the irony of the speech is that time does remember some people. It remembered Ulysses, Hector and Achilles. It remembers Shakespeare.

Given the tone and the difficulty of this play, I might also conject that this is Shakespeare tiring of history. Tiring of past glories and advocating the practice of time to move ahead. We romanticize the past, and effort to regain the glories it teaches us are due to the executors of bold and clever warfare.

But that’s just a projection on my part. I have wisely left my video game glories behind. They were quiet victories anyway, occasionally more enthusiastic if my brother or sister were there to witness the defeat of Dr. Wiley, tossing Bowser into a pit of lava, or blasting Mother Brain into oblivion. They were clean glories too. No actual bloodshed, no philosophical discussions of the merits of participating. No PTSD or perilous odysseys home in the epilogue.

I wonder if the Trojans and the Greeks would have traded all the future scribblings about their exploits for a quiet life. To sip coffee and read books on summery terraces like I'm doing now. Would they have preferred imaginary heroism to the real, messy deal?

I’m with the bard on this one. Better to write about battles than be there for them. Unless the battle is against 8-bit-processed, pixilated villains wielding axes and hammers and poisonous boomerangs. But even those battles are best left to the nimble thumbs of the young.




Now that I watch this ending, maybe you did have to hit him in the foot to kill him. Still, it's not specifically his heel, so whatever.