Brush Up Your Shakespeare

Brush up Your Shakespeare

Amy and I are in Roanoke for a concert and educational outreach residency. Sunday, March 29 we present a recital, "Shakespeare in Song." (www.operaroanoke.org)

March 27 we led an inservice for Roanoke County English and music teachers on Shakespeare and the arts. We started that enjoyable workshop with the quiz below:

I. Match the song to the play:

1. O mistress mine! Where are you roaming?
O stay and hear; your true love’s coming,
That can sing both high and low.
Trip no further, pretty sweeting;
Journey’s end in lovers meeting,
Every wise man’s son doth know.

2. It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and hey nonino,
That o’er the green corn-field did pass
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding-a-ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

3. Come away, come away death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid.
Fly away, fly away breath,
I am slain by a fair cruel maid:
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
O prepare it.
My part of death no one so true
Did share it.

4. Who is Sylvia? What is she
That all our swains commend her?
Holy, fair, and wise is she,
The heaven such grace did lend her,
That she might admired be.

5. When daises pied and violets blue
and lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then on every tree
Mocks married men, for thus sings he,
Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!

6. Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home are gone, and ta’en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

A. As you like it
B. Two Gentlemen of Verona
C. Love’s Labours Lost
D. Cymbeline
E. Twelfth Night

II. Complete the quote: for extra credit, name its source, and extra-extra credit, the speaker!

1. We are such stuff as dreams are made on:

2. But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?

3. Now is the winter of our discontent

4. To be or not to be

5. Is this a dagger which I see before me,

III. The following quotes or phrases inspired the titles of other works.
Name the play and the new work.

1. The Sound and the Fury

2. A Heart so White

3. What dreams may come

4. Brave New World

5. The Undiscovered Country

IV. Mixed Doubles: Match the pairs of lovers

1.
X: I will swear by it that you love me,
and I will make him eat it that says I love not you.
Y: Will you not eat your word?

2.
Y: If it be love indeed, tell me how much.
X: There’s beggary in the love
that can be reckoned
Y: Celerity is never more admired
than by the negligent.
X: A good rebuke, which might have well
becomed the best of men
to taunt at slackness.

3.
X. Thus from my lips by thine
my sin is purged
Y: Then have my lips the sin
that they have took.

4.
X: What too curious dreg espies my sweet
lady in the fountain of our love?
Y: More dregs than water
if my fears have eyes.
X: Fears make devils of cherubims;
They never see truly.
Y: Blind fear that seeing reason leads,
finds safer footing than blind reason,
stumbling without fear.
To fear the worst oft cures the worse.

5.
X: Thy virtue spoke of and thy beauty
sounded yet not so deeply as to thee
belongs myself am moved to woo
thee for my wife.
Y: Moved in good time!
Let him that mov’d you hither,
remove you hence.

A. Romeo and Juliet
B. Beatrice and Benedick
C. Petruchio and Kate
D. Antony and Cleopatra
E. Troilus and Cressida

Match the adaptation to the original:

1. West Side Story
2. The Boys from Syracuse
3. Prospero’s Book
4. Scotland, PA
5. Kiss Me Kate
6. I Capuletti e Montecchi
7. The Sea and the Mirror


A. The Comedy of Errors
B. MacBeth
C. The Tempest
D. The Taming of the Shrew
E. Romeo and Juliet


Answers:
Part I: Songs
1. E; 2. A; 3. E; 4. B; 5. C; 6. D

Part II: Quotes
1. We are such stuff as dreams are made on:
and our little life is rounded with a sleep
The Tempest, Prospero

2. But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the Sun.
R & J; Romeo

3. Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York
Richard III; Richard

4. To be or not to be: that is the question
Hamlet

5. Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand?
Macbeth

Part III: Borrowed titles
1. Macbeth/Faulkner novel
2. Macbeth/Marias novel
3. Hamlet/Ward film (w/Robin Williams)
4. Tempest/Huxley novel
5. Hamlet/Star Trek film

Part IV:Mixed doubles
1. B; 2. D; 3. A; 4. E; 5. C

Part V: Adaptations
1. E; 2. A; 3. C; 4. B; 5. D; 6. E; 7. C

It is fascinating to revisit the plays and their songs in context. Most of us know "Who is Sylvia" in one version or another. We will begin our recital with Schubert's three settings of Shakespeare in German translations, and "An Sylvia" is the opener. We are offering multiple settings of the song lyrics in the first half of the program. So the Schubert will be followed by Finzi's "Let us Garlands Bring" (a Shakespeare set written in honor of the 70th birthday of his friend, mentor, and adopted "uncle" Ralph Vaughan Williams). Finzi's "Who is Sylvia?" is as cheerful as Schubert's and since "Two Gentleman of Verona" is rarely taught or produced, one misses the Shakespearean irony of this serenade in the middle of a scene where the "Gentleman" Proteus is showing the true colors of his despicable character. The context of one of the most popular song lyrics, "It was a lover and his lass" ("As You Like It") contains a prime example of Shakespearean wit. The jester, Touchstone responds to the exiled Duke's pages, who have just sung the song:

--Truly young gentlemen, though there was no great matter
in the ditty, yet the note was untuneable.
--You are deceived, sir. We kept time.
We lost not out time.
--By my troth yes. I count it but time lost
to hear such a foolish song. God buy you,
and God mend your voices.

We will sing three very different settings of this favorite lyric: I will sing Finzi's and Amy will sing Korngold's. We will share a duet by Roger Quilter. The Finzi treats the lyric as a stand-alone song, while the duet matches the play's setting of two singers, and Korngold's music comes closest to capturing the ironic wit of the scene.

As Harold Bloom writes in his exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" we owe much of how we interpret life in this world to Shakespeare. The number of quotes that have remained common currency, the unparalleled range of characters--from Kings & Queens to lovers, fools, & families--span the gamut of human experience. The juxtaposition of tragedy and comedy, "high" characters and "low" characters seems odd until we realize real life is exactly like that. Other authors have a singular enough style to become adjectives: Proustian descriptiveness, Checkovian humanism and Dickensian realism, for example. None ranks higher than Shakespeare. And while there may be similarities between the work of say, Verdi, and Checkov, we honor Verdi with the supreme compliment of calling his characters Shakespearean. Incidentally, that last adjective is the only one of the above not underlined in red by my laptop's spellchecker.

We don't have time or space for Shakespeare's vocabulary, but ours is richer for it. Shakespeare is the ultimate teacher. In the inservice that opened with the quiz, I closed with the following excerpts, dubbed "life lessons from some of the great speeches." (For brevity's sake, I'm not reprinting the entire speeches, but the act and scenes are included after each play, for reference).

Jacque’s “7 Stages” speech from As you Like it, II.vii:
"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."

Polonius’ advice to Laertes from Hamlet; I.iii:
"And these few precepts in thy memory
Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar;"

Hamlet’s “existentialist” musings:
From II.ii:
"I have of late--but wherefore I know not--
Lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises;
and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition
that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me
like a sterile promontory;"

and from III.i:
"To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?"

Falstaff's advice for the good life, from Henry IV, pt. 2; IV.iii:
"A good sherry sack hath a two-fold operation in it.
It ascends me into the brain; dries me there all the foolish
and dull and crudy vapours which environ it; makes it
apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble fiery
and delectable shapes; which, deliver'd over to the voice,
the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit."

Cleopatra’s eulogy for Antony from A&C; V.ii:
"His face was as the heavens, and therein stuck
A sun and moon, which kept their course, and lighted
The little O, the earth.
His legs bestrid the ocean; his rear'd arm
Crested the world; his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres..."

Launce’s devotion to his dog, Crab, from Two Gentlemen of Verona; IV.iv:
"When a man's servant shall play the cur with him, look you,
it goes hard; one that I brought up of a puppy; one that I saved from drowning,
when three or four of his blind brothers and sisters went to it.
I have taught him, even as one would say precisely, "Thus would I teach a dog."

Prospero’s farewell from The Tempest; IV.i:
"Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-clapp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."