A Confederacy of Merry Wives

“When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

-Jonathon Swift

 

In college I briefly dated a girl named Claire who was obsessed with A Confederacy of Dunces.

On our first date I borrowed my roommate Bill's Oldsmobile and we tried to go to a Jamaican restaurant. The restaurant was in downtown Minneapolis, and so we tried to park in a parking garage, but Bill's window got stuck in the rolled down position. The backseat of Bill's Olds was perpetually filled with CDs, VHS tapes, books, homework, probably an old television, some Christmas presents and a case of Ramen, so we couldn’t very well leave the window rolled down, lest his stash be ransacked. 

So, instead of Jamaican food, we drove back to Macalester and she treated me to Subway using her vast collection of Subway stamps. While we ate she told me all about John Kennedy Toole and how he had committed suicide and after his death his mom had found his manuscript and sent it all over to try to get it published. Eventually it was published and won the Pulitzer. Claire had been on a tour of his childhood home and taken the Ignatius J. Reilly tour of New Orleans visiting the colorful locales described in the book. This is exactly the kind of nerdiness I adore.

This was just before Christmas and she bought me a copy of the book so that I could read it when I was in Ecuador studying abroad the next semester. I must have read it at least four times. Back to back to back to back. It was my link to the States. It was my solace and Ignatius J. Reilly, the Quixotic Falstaffian antihero, was my best friend.

Ignatius really is a lot like Falstaff. And the Jonathon Swift quote in the front of the book, from which the title is derived, reminds me especially of the production of The Merry Wives of Windsor that I attended this weekend.

Falstaff is broke and being a jolly thief and rapscallion, he comes up with a plan to get money by seducing the wives of two of Windsor’s wealthiest gentlemen to steal from them. His plan is almost immediately betrayed to Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page by two of Falstaff’s former servants. They were angry that he fired them (because he was broke) and they wanted revenge.

Ignatius, in Confederacy, is himself in search of money, and in every situation he gets himself into, the people around him laugh at him, and then they abuse him. After his humiliations Ignatius finds solace in his Big Chief Notebooks, where he expounds upon the theology and geometry lacking in the rogues and philistines he’s forced to interact with.

But Falstaff is a social being. He adores sack and the pursuit of fun and one gets the impression that his devious diversions are merely that: diversions. Here is a man, who when caught in a lie in Henry IV Part 1, exploded the lie, exaggerated it further and further until he had entertained everyone so much that they forgot he was a dishonest coward. Or they didn’t care.

This must be why some of the critics consider the Falstaff of The Merry Wives of Windsor to be a lesser manifestation (some even take the character’s inferiority as evidence that the play could not have been written by Shakespeare at all). In the final act of the play everyone gangs up on Falstaff. They trick him into meeting Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page in the woods dressed as a deer, then they fool him into thinking that he’s stumbled upon a fairy gathering. Dressed as fairies, they pinch and torture him and then, after he realizes they’ve made an ass of him, they really tear him a new one:

 

Mrs. Page: Why, Sir John, do you think, though we would have thrust virtue out of our hearts by the head and shoulders, and have given ourselves without scruple to hell, that ever the devil could have made you our delight?

Ford: What a hodge-pudding? A bag of flax?

Mrs. Page: A puff’d man?

Page: Old, cold, wither’d, and of intolerable entrails?

...

Evans: And given to fornications, and to taverns, and sack, and wine, and metheglins, and to drinkings and swearings and starings, pribbles and prabbles? (5:5)

 

To which, Falstaff sadly says:

 

You have the start of me, I am dejected… Use me as you will. (5:5)

 

When I first read this I did not read it as that pitiful, I thought he was merely conceding. “Yup, you got me. You win.” But in the performance, Falstaff played it contrite, like a puppy who was being admonished. I felt so sorry for him.

Well, screw all those self-righteous pricks in Windsor. I wish Falstaff had boned your wives and taken your money, cause at the end of this play I get the impression that he’s going to go off and amend his wicked ways. But who wants Falstaff to amend? This is Falstaff! He’s a proud, ingenuous troublemaker. It reminds me of those wretched, unauthorized Calvin and Hobbes stickers on the backs of retarded cars that show Calvin kneeling in prayer before a cross. Christ! Someone stab me in the face. As long as there is trouble to be made, I want Calvin and Falstaff making it!

SPOILER ALERT. In case you haven’t read A Confederacy of Dunces, Ignatius gets away in the end. He’s rescued from imminent committal to a mental institution by Myrna Minkoff, and the two drive away from New Orleans. He’ll be out there forever criticizing banal artists and forcing stray cats into his hot dog cart’s bun warmer while his valve opens and slams shut. Ignatius is undefeatable because we never have to see him reformed on the page.

It’s a sad ending to see Falstaff outwitted by the mediocrity of the Merry Wives’ mischief, and it’s even worse to think that these characters of short consequence would ever teach a lesson to someone of such mental and physical profundity as Sir John Falstaff.

I don’t think Falstaff has to be played as pitifully as he was in the production I saw Saturday night, but Shakespeare sure didn’t leave him a lot of wiggle room… He barely speaks at all at the end of the play.

For my part, I’ll freeze Sir John as he was in his prime. Like one of those Good Ones that dies young. Leaving behind only a glimmer of genius in a single posthumously-published novel. Their lost time on Earth to be lived out in the perfection of our imaginations like so many fond memories of unrealized love.

 

When Claire and I saw each other the next fall, she had graduated and I screwed things up royally (as I frequently do when a girl likes me). But I still have the copy of Dunces that she gave me. It might be the only book in my collection that I’ve never loaned out to anyone else.

And I probably never will.

The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 1, Scene 4

Legend has it that Queen Elizabeth asked for a play about Falstaff in love and that it be ready for her to watch in fourteen days. Fourteen days from conception to presentation. Conceive, write, cast, rehearse, perform. It’s not that tall of an order, right? I mean, an opossum gives birth to baby opossums after only thirteen days of gestation… but then again opossums are marsupials, and the newborn babies crawl right into their mother’s pouch for two more months of nurturing and protection. It’s not like they go traipsing about in front of the queen.

Shakespeare wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor. Which is set in a real English city, completely outside of the historical context in which the character of Falstaff is established in Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, but somehow it still manages to be a pretty great play.

For example, let’s look at the opening line of dialogue of Act 1, Scene 4. Mistress Quickly enters with Peter Simple and calls to John Rugby.

 

Quickly: What, John Rugby!

            (Enter JOHN RUGBY)

I pray thee go to the casement, and see if you can see my master, Master Doctor Caius, coming. If he do i’ faith, and find any body in the house, here will be an old abusing of God’s patience and the King’s English. (1:4)

 

When this play was first performed there were no sets and of course no set changes, so the first line of dialogue of almost every Shakespearean scene had to establish the setting. This line tells us we’re in Dr. Caius’s House. The line also establishes who the characters are. It tells us that Mistress Quickly and John Rugby are servants who work for Doctor Caius. We know that Dr. Caius owns the house and we can surmise that English is his second language since she says he’ll abuse the King’s English. And furthermore, it anticipates a tension in the scene, since we know that if he finds anyone in the house, he’s certain to be upset. And present on stage is Peter Simple, who -- we know from a previous scene -- is a visitor.

There are modern writers who can be equally efficient and who also obscure their moments of exposition with action or humor. Shakespeare’s veil is his lyricism: “here will be an old abusing of God’s patience.” If I could turn a phrase like Shakespeare I’d butter over all the tensions in the world and set minds at ease with soft, golden words.

The scene goes on: Simple delivers his message to Mistress Quickly, asking her to speak with the lovely Anne Page and convince her to marry Simple’s master: Slender. Then Dr. Caius returns and Simple has to hide in the closet. There’s some hijinx, Dr. Caius finds him, abuses the King’s English, finds out what Simple’s purpose is and gets mad because he wants to marry the lovely Anne Page. Dr. Caius sends Simple off with a challenge to the person he believes is really behind Slender’s courtship of Anne Page. Just when things quiet down, Fenton (another suitor for the lovely Anne Page) shows up and asks Mistress Quickly to put in a good word with Anne for him.

In 165 lines we get all of this action and set up. What’s going to happen in Dr. Caius’s duel? Is Quickly going to advocate for Slender, Fenton or her boss, Dr. Caius? We already know that Slender and Dr. Caius are ridiculous, but is this new character Fenton a legitimate suitor or another bozo after Anne’s cash money? And this isn’t even the main story of the play!

Shakespeare wasn’t reinventing the wheel with this comedy and I’m sure the play was polished somewhat after it’s initial presentation, if that story of the 14 days is even true. But you have to marvel at the ingenuity of his craft. Sheesh. There’s me going out on a limb.

Newsflash: Shakespeare was a great writer. 

In Other Shakespearean News...

My blogging has suffered this past week due to a couple of distractions. I absorbed Jim Henson's The Storyteller on Netflix streaming and so I went to the library and checked out a plethora of books of fairy tales which are mostly awesome. I also had food poisoning and then decided to put on Kung Fu Hamlet in June at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. 

I still managed to read The Merry Wives of Windsor, which was a nice accompaniment to the fairy tales since Act V is all about duping Falstaff into believing that he is being attacked by fairies. But I'm not posting about The Merry Wives just yet.

I decided that in addition to reading all Shakespeare's plays this year, I should try to see as many of them on stage as I possibly can. And of course that means I want to read any of the plays I'm planning on seeing before I go, so that I can be a superior audience member. And by superior I mean snooty.

So far these are the productions I know about:

1. The Merry Wives of Windsor set in the Old West at the Lyric Theater in LA, I will be attending on Saturday January 23.

2. Hamlet from the Porters of Hellsgate, I'm not sure yet when or if I'll be able to make any performances of this one.

3. Much Ado about Nothing by A Noise Within on Friday March 5th

4. Titus Andronicus... but I'm still waiting on performance dates and all for this one.

So please let me know if you hear of any Shakespeare productions in and around LA. I'm especially interested in going to see some really bad high school productions of Romeo and Juliet or a Midsummer Night's Dream. That would bring me great joy.

Onto something totally different now. 

I was helping my sister Cassie with an essay last weekend and she was making some analogy, saying that a Theater director was like a General and had to understand what it was to be a soldier before he could be leader of soldiers. I told her it was too bad that she hadn't read Henry V cause she could have pulled some great quotes about "we happy few, we band of brothers" and she said... well, here's exactly how the exchange went:

me: well

  

  this might be fake

  since you haven't read it

  but you could quote shakespeare

  Henry V

  is a general

  but he leads his men

  he's in the battle

 cassie: I've seen the show, does that count?

 me: you've seen henry V??!?!

  where?

 cassie: yeah, new york

 me: really?

5:47 PM cassie: yup

 me: tell me what happens

  and I'll give you the quotes

 cassie: well, it was really boring

 me: ugh

 cassie: haha

  okay, this is what I got

  there was a war

  and there was this lady from..france or something and couldn't understand henry

5:48 PM but they were engaged

  lots of henry's men died

  the end

 me: HAHAHA

 cassie: hahah

  is that even right?

 me: Yes

5:49 PM cassie: sweet

Despite her nearly perfect summary of the play, Cassie decided against using the Henry V quote. I think she thought it would be academically disingenuous or too obvious to employ a Shakespeare quote in an essay about theater. 

When I was writing essays in high school, the internet was barely accessible, and when I was in college web resources were still scattered and unreliable. But if you're writing an essay these days, it's easy to find impressive quotes and summaries of great pieces of literature without actually reading or comprehending books or whatever the source material is.

 

Nearly all of human culture has been reduced by the internet to Educational McNuggets that we swallow one after another after another. And we start to feel full, but then you go to the bathroom, and all those McNuggets pass out of your system without leaving behind nutrients or vitamins or proteins.  Cause they're not good for you. They're not made of real chicken. They're delicious and they come with great sauce, but that's a poor diet for your brain.

So kudos to Cassie for passing on my attempt to dress her essay in golden breading and BBQ Sauce. I probably wouldn't have done the same if I were in college today.

A proper response to The Merry Wives is coming... as is more information on Kung Fu Hamlet.

Until then, watch The Storyteller if you have the time. You'll love it.

To Kill a Fly: Titus Andronicus

The Diamond Way Buddhist Center, on Lake Street a couple blocks east of Lake Calhoun in Uptown Minneapolis, is a great place for a cookout.

At least it used to be. I haven’t been to one in a long time, but my brother used to live there and I used to live a half mile away. Many were the summer nights we’d grill up some beer-boiled brats, eat couscous and drink Grainbelt Premium as joggers, bikers and inline skaters pilgrimaged past us to exercise around Lake Calhoun in the green and gold Minnesota twilight.

The Minnesota and Wisconsin Buddhists are a great bunch of people. When my older sister Katie first became one I thought it was weird and new age-y… but fun too. And then my older brother Ian became one after he ran head-first into a stop sign while chasing a Frisbee outside the Buddhist Center in Madison and I began learning more about it.

I was never really interested in practicing myself, mostly because I don’t really dig meditation. Plus this whole reincarnation thing is a little troubling to me. Not in principal, but in practice.

Once I was over at the Center for a barbecue and they were having an ant problem in the kitchen. A couple people were scooping the ants out of the kitchen and carrying them outside. I was tempted to just crush all the ants for them, but I think that would not have been appreciated.

Some things deserve mercy, and I certainly don’t advocate burning ants with a magnifying glass for fun… not anymore anyway. But bugs? Ants? Flies? Do you really need to worry about killing them?

How merciful can a body be?

What if you’re a Roman General whose daughter has been raped and had her hands cut off and her tongue cut out and your two sons were framed for murder and decapitated and you were tricked into cutting your own hand off? What about being merciful then?

Titus Andronicus – much like Russell Crowe’s Gladiator – wins great military victories for Rome over the Goths, and then is offered the empery:

Titus Andronicus, the people of Rome,

Whose friend in justice thou hast ever been,

Send thee by me, their tribune and their trust,

This palliament of white and spotless hue,

…

Be candidatus then and put it on,

And help to set a head on headless Rome. (1:1)

But Titus refuses:

Give me a staff of honour for mine age,

But not a sceptre to control the world. (1:1)

Saturninus, as the eldest son of the former emperor, is elevated in his place and then the trouble starts.

Titus has his sons kill the eldest son of Tamora, the Queen of the Goths, who has come with all his family as prisoners. They murder him despite Tamora’s plea for mercy:

But must my sons be slaughtered in the streets

For valiant doings in their country’s cause?

…

Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods?

Draw near them then in being merciful.

Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge (1:1)

But they are not merciful, and the bloodshed begins.

Saturninus then wants to take Titus’s daughter, Lavinia, for his wife. But Saturninus’s bro, Bassianus is betrothed to her. To protect their sister, Titus’s four living sons (he has already lost 21 sons to warfare) steal her away, and seeing this affront to Rome, Titus kills his own son, Mutius, to try to get her back for the new emperor.

They bring her back, married to Bassianus and Saturninus is pissed, but he decides to take Tamora, queen of the Goths and enemy of Rome as his wife. Seems like a pretty bad idea, right? It is.

Tamora, her two remaining sons, and her lover, Aaron, orchestrate vengeance on Titus. They murder Bassianus, frame it on Titus’ sons who are beheaded. They rape Lavinia, cut out her tongue, then chop off her hands and make terrible puns about it. They get Titus to chop off his own hand, and he goes crazy.

In Act 3 scene 2, Titus’s brother Marcus kills a fly, and Titus reprimands him thus:

Out on thee, murderer. Thou kill’st my heart.

Mine eyes are cloyed with view of tyranny;

A deed of death done on the innocent

Becomes not Titus’ brother. Get thee gone;

I see thou art not for my company.

…

Poor harmless fly,

That with his pretty buzzing melody

Came here to make us merry, and thou hast killed him. (3:2)

In his madness, Titus regrets his lack of absolute mercy. He sees that any murder done needlessly is an evil.

All this trouble could have been avoided if only Titus had listened to Alan Thicke, the wise father on Growing Pains, who lectured Ben on how quickly vengeance can escalate in the episode “First Blood” (Season 1 ep. 14). Ben gets in a fight with his hockey coach’s son, and Alan Thicke goes down to talk to the coach who winds up punching him in the stomach. Alan Thicke backs down from the fight like a big chicken, and tells Ben how if he had punched the coach back, then the coach would have come over and shot him and eventually the feud would have escalated until the hockey coach’s grandma runs over Kirk Cameron with a tank. But sadly it doesn’t come to that. Ben learns a valuable lesson and Kirk Cameron lives to have 6 home-schooled children and star in the Left Behind movies.

But Titus’s flirtation with this idea of mercy is a momentary lapse. He soon answers the call of revenge. He murders his daughter, kills Tamora’s sons, cooks them and feeds them to her, then stabs her before getting killed himself. Oh woops, I forgot to say spoiler alert.

Titus was onto something in that moment where he defends a poor fly’s life. Maybe the only way to allow there to be justice and happiness in the world is to be absolute with mercy. In Aaron we have a character of pure evil and malintention, the opposite of merciful. After he is captured he compares his dastardly deeds to the simple evil of killing a fly:

Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things

As willingly as one would kill a fly,

And nothing grieves me heartily indeed

But that I cannot do ten thousand more. (5:1)

The lesson is: be merciful in thy deeds. Killing nary a humming fly, nor a train of ants disrupting a good old-fashioned, Midwestern, Buddhist cookout. For karma is causality, and the chain of dominos that ends with you cooking two people and serving them to someone else in a bowl of chili stands precarious and ready to be triggered by even the slightest moral tremor.

This is me at Lake Calhoun on New Year's Eve.

It was 4 degrees, there were people jogging around the lake

and as you can see there is an insane guy getting ready to Para-snowboard.

11th Grade Gabe on Twelfth Night During his Disciplinary Probation

Gabe Llanas

English 11

Ms. Stewart

1/05/95

Malvolio Got Did Wrong

Ms. Stewart, after reading this you’ll see that Malvolio got did wrong up in this play. He was a dedicated and hard-working servant to the Countess Olivia, and when he dared to dream that she might be in love with him, he gets it all shoved back in his face and embarrassed and even PUNISHED for expressing his harmless little crush. Brutal.

You got these spoiled bullies Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Sir Toby Belch raising a ruckus while Malvolio’s mistress, the lovely Olivia, is trying to mourn. And Malvolio comes in to quiet these fools down:

My masters are you mad? ... Do you make an alehouse of my lady’s house, that you squeak out your coziers’ catches without any mitigation or remorse of voice? Is there no respect of place, persons nor time in you? (2:3)

And what happens to the dedicated servant? Maria, Olivia’s waiting woman, decides to play a prank on loyal Malvolio by convincing him that Olivia is in love with him.

I will drop in his way some obscure epistles of love ... I can write very like my lady your niece (2:3)

Observe him, for the love of mockery, for I know this letter will make a contemplative idiot of him. (2:5)

So they drop this note, and Malvolio, already smitten and dreaming of his lady’s love (“To be Count Malvolio.” [2:5]) is swept up in the dream of it all. The letter says that Olivia loves to see him cross-gartered in yellow stockings and always smiling.

Jove, I thank thee! I will smile. I will do everything that thou wilt have me. (2:5)

Malvolio tries so desperately to impress her that she thinks he’s crazy and has him locked up for a madman!

Now let’s say hypothetically, that maybe someone who was of a lesser rank than you, Ms. Stewart, perceived some “epistles of love” in the way you smiled at him or her, and caressed his or her arm when you congratulated him or her on a well-written essay. And this innocent, hormone-laden gentleperson then expressed their harmless admiration of you in a cross-gartered essay (which he worked very hard on) then say he or she was oh, I don’t know… DORMED for two weekends by the Dean of Students, now that wouldn’t be right, would it?

I mean, if life is a romantic comedy, then some people are the Violas and everyone falls in love with them. And some people are the Orsino’s and they pine and then wind up happy because of dumb luck. And some people are the Sir Tobies who drink and make merry and find love in a lighthearted companion. But some of us are Malvolios and even though we long to fit in, we’re just a little different. A little weird. We take quiet hours in the dorm a little too seriously and we don’t have the money to fill our wardrobe with clothes from the Gap so we wear shirts and ties that our mom bought us at Wal-Mart. Some people come to Illyria on scholarship and are looking fool-heartedly for anyway to join the party in a permanent fashion.

So, I’m just saying, before one goes turning people in to the Dean for a little wishful and borderline inappropriate thinking, maybe one should consider that the play is called: Twelfth Night OR What You Will and in Shakespeare’s day, the word “will” meant “wish.” And every other character in the play gets what they wish for: Viola gets Orsino, Sebastian gets to find out that his sister is still alive, Olivia gets to marry someone who looks like Cesario… why should Malvolio not get his wishes fulfilled too?

Rejection hurts. Some sexy, gorgeous English teachers probably don’t ever have to experience that, but the Fool seems to understand it, when he sings to Orsino:

Fly away, fly away, breath,

I am slain by a fair cruel maid. (2:4)

I know Malvolio can't take a joke and declares his intention to get revenge on everyone in the sequel, Thirteenth Night, but some Malvolios are more rational and learn the hard lesson about un-reciprocated love from Olivia:

Love sought is good, but given unsought is better. (3:1)

No more soughting love for me. Besides, Dr. Wheeler told me I’d get suspended if I wrote another inappropriate reading response and that could screw my chances of getting into Yale.