Category Archives: Birthdays

Niccolo Machiavelli

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machiavelli

Today is Marchiavelli‘s birthday (1469 – 1527).

Frye in Fools of Time:

In Shakespeare’s day there was no permanently successful example of popular sovereignty.  Machiavelli had drawn the conclusion that there are two forms of government: popular governments, which were unstable, and what we should call dictatorships, the stability of which depended upon the cunning and force of the prince.  This analysis, of course, horrified the idealists of the sixteenth century who were trying to rationalize the government of the prince with arguments about the “general good”, and so Machiavelli became, by way of attacks on him, a conventional bogey of Elizabethan drama.  From the view of tragic structure, what Machiavelli was doing was destroying the integrity of tragedy by obliterating the difference between the order-figure and the rebel-figure.  Machiavelli comes to speak in the prologue of The Jew of Malta, and there he asks: “What right had Caesar to the Empire?” — in itself surely a fair enough question, and which expresses the central question in the tragedy of order. (Fools of Time, 20)

Ella Fitzgerald

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXb2a0WQek4

Today is the great Ella Fitzgerald‘s birthday (1917 – 1996).

One sample won’t do it.  Above is her 1956 version of “Blue Moon,” and it proves a point: when Ella sings the most familiar of standards, you hear it like it’s the first time.  That voice.  Always that voice.

After the jump, some rare footage and live performances.  And, yes, of course, a couple of duets with Louis Armstrong.

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William Shakespeare

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SANDERS2s

Today is traditionally regarded as Shakespeare‘s birthday (1564 -1616).

Frye didn’t live to see the discovery of the Sanders portrait, above, but did mischievously observe of the Droeshout engraving (by way of dismissing the significance of biography as any sort of key to interpretation) that it is the portrait of a man “who is clearly an idiot.”

Frye has so much to say about Shakespeare that just about any number of quotes would do here.  I was lucky enough to be among the last generation of students to take Frye’s undergraduate Shakespeare course, and I remember very well the thrill it gave me to hear him say things like this:

In every play Shakespeare wrote, the hero or central character is the theatre itself.  His characters are so vivid that we often think of them as detachable from the play, like real people.  So such questions as, “is Falstaff really a coward?” have been discussed since the eighteenth century.  But if we ask what Falstaff is, the answer is that he isn’t: he’s a character in a play, has no existence outside that play, and what is real about him is his function in the play.  He has a variety of such functions — vice, braggart parasite, jester — and one of the things he has to do is certainly to behave at times like a stage coward.  But Falstaff, like the actor who plays him, is only what he appears to be; and what he really really is, even if he could exist, wouldn’t exist. (On Shakespeare, 4)

A clip from Peter Brook‘s great film adaptation of King Lear after the jump.

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Henry Fielding

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fielding

Today is Henry Fielding‘s birthday (1707 – 1754).

Here’s Frye on Jonathan Wild in Notebook 36:

Jonathan Wild has suggested three main ideas.  First, Wild is an ironic pharmakos, treated explicitly as a counterpart to “greatness.”  What happens to him ought to happen to all “great” men: Wild is obviously criminal only because society is still too strong for him: he’s a hero, a Caesar or Alexander, in an ironic context.  Second, the book is satire & comic rather than tragic irony, because Fielding’s norms are unmistakable: passages that would represent a complete breakdown  of the ironic pretense (e.g. the description of Bagshot) if they appeared in, say, Flaubert, are in decorum here, where the tone is the militant counterpart of irony, the satiric descent of fantasy on a moral canto fermo.  Third, the Mrs. Heartfree episode, which is typical of romance when the central figure is female & instead of killing dragons she fends off fucks.  Cf. Spenser’s Florimell & Morris’s Birdalone.  One might call it a quest of the perilous cunt.  Very sharp counterpoint between the realism of JW [Jonathan Wild] & his whorish bride & this corny romanticism in which Mrs. H. gets through a dozen assaults unplumbed & returns “unsullied” to her husband.  A good deal is said about Providence: Providence & Fortune are the existential projections of comic & tragic forms respectively.  (CW, 23, 249)

Charlotte Bronte

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charlottebronte

Today is Charlotte Bronte‘s birthday (1816 – 1855).

Frye in Notebook 44 on Shirley:

[182]  [Charlotte Brontë’s] Shirley: full of characters spouting ideologies, including naturally the author’s own.  Toryism, radicalism, rationalized laissez faire, the sexist ideology Charlotte Bronte knew so much about; economic miseries of Orders in Council; the understandable but mistaken tactics of the Luddites, all dated back to 1812 from the 1840’s to provide the hindsight of the Chartist parallels.  Other books studying these topics directly might have more & better organized information, but if written in ideological language, however detached or partisan, would have to treat all individuals as case histories.  What makes Shirley & other works of fiction irreplaceable is the assimilation of all this to the primary concerns of food (i.e. jobs), sexual love, work & play.

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Thomas Middleton

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middleton

Today is playwright Thomas Middleton‘s birthday (1580 – 1627).  I once joked to a prof that if there’d been no Shakespeare, we’d be reading Middleton by default.  Not meaning to diss the birthday boy but, the impressive output notwithstanding, we got the better end of the deal.

Frye in Notebook 9:

One, or two, reasons why this is not an age of great tragedy are improved methods of contraception and of police investigation.  In The Changeling two people are arrested for murder on the ground that they left town the day after the murder took place: one needs ghosts of victims & confessions by the guilty to improve the quality of detection.  (CW 20, 256-7)

Trailer for a current English production of The Changeling after the jump.

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Jacques Lacan

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URsYj-TVFjc

Lacan on the unconscious (French with English subtitles)

On this date Jacques Lacan was born (1901 – 1981).

A telling citation of Lacan in Notebook 52:

The Jewish Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday, which is Venus’ day: white goddess modulating into black bride.  I’m sure the Tempest masque and the exclusion of Venus from it are connected, what with the insistence on preserving Miranda’s virginity.  Lacan is wrong: it isn’t just the phallus that’s lost, but since the Fall every sexual union has had, or been, a screw loose.  Yeats’s poem on Solomon and Sheba is the one to consult. (CW 6, 454)

Samuel Beckett

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdTjRumkT9k

Beckett’s Play, Part 1 (Part 2 after the jump)

On this date Samuel Beckett was born (1906 -1989).

Frye in “City at the End of Things” in The Modern Century says this about Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

There are two contemporary plays which seem to sum up with peculiar vividness and forcefulness the malaise that I have described as the alienation of progress.  One is Becket”s Waiting for Godot [the other is Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?].  The main theme of this play is the paralysis of activity that is brought about by the dislocation of life in time, where there is no present, only a faint memory of the past, and an expectation of a future with no power to move towards it.  Of the two characters whose dialogue forms most of the play, one calls himself Adam; at another time they identify themselves as Cain and Abel; at other times, vaguely and helplessly, themselves crucified, with Christ. “Have we no rights?” one asks.  “We got rid of them” the other says — distinctly, according to the stage direction.  And even more explicitly: “at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us.”  They spend the whole action of the play waiting for a certain Godot to arrive: he never comes, they deny that they are “tied” to him, but they have no will to break away.  All that turns up is a Satanic figure called Pozzo, with a clown tied to him in a parody of their own state.  On his second appearance, Pozzo is bind, a condition which detaches him even further from time, for, he says, “the blind have no notion of time” (CW 11, 25-26).

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Joseph Haydn

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nk4Fk9jMujs

The Seasons, “Winter”

Today is Haydn‘s birthday (1732 – 1809).

Frye in Notebook 18:

Haydn is a genius of the idyllic unfallen world: it can’t be just accident that the Creation & the Seasons sum him up.  Incidentally, the spinning song in the latter is amazingly sinister: the spinning wheel of the fates. The words superficially cosy & domestic, have Vala overtones he caught, though there’s no passion or fatality as in Schubert’s Goethe song. (CW, 23, 296)