Ron Silliman (http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/) has a most interesting
meditation on the NEA program to bring Shakespeare to the American masses
and its possibly unpredictable effects, given that two American writers
deeply influenced by WS are Melville and Olson. Dang it, he's right...
Though I hadn't made the Olson connection - Silliman's idea of soliloquy
rather than "dramatic monologue" in Olson (maybe in a lot of modern poetry)
seems particularly apt.
"So much of Olson reads as tho it were written to be shouted out over a
heath, or else to be whispered to an audience, a stage whisper capable of
reaching hundreds of ears at once. It is not so much dramatic monolog tho
Maximus is a persona as it is soliloquy. Olsonšs sense of how a sentence
interacts with the line something I suspect an entire generation or two
has internalized so deeply we donšt even recognize it has always struck me
as coming right out of Shakespeare, far more than from Melville or Pound.
This feel for the materiality of the relationship between the two is
apparent, right there on the surface, in Olson, & through his influence it
radiates outward. I can hear echoes in Creeley, in Duncan or Levertov, in
OšHara & Whalen & even in Ginsberg. And it ripples again, just a little more
faintly, through every one of us influenced by any of them.
"So the idea of all these people reading, seeing, hearing Shakespeare is, I
suspect, much more of a wild card than the NEAšs leaders may comprehend.
Because where it wonšt lead is back to is either the homogenous retro-utopia
of so many a Congressmanšs dream nor to the same ol š stuff the School of
Quietude has been shoveling. Inseminating Shakespeare into the American
literary landscape is far more apt to generate a bunch of wild men & wyrd
sisters instead. As Olson himself most certainly was."
I've been seeing a fair bit of WS lately (not only the stuff on my theatre
blog, though I won't forget that Hamlet in the shop front, which was just
wonderful...) Whenever I watch a good production - bad productions don't
count - I come out so vitalised and stimulated. Oddly, only last week I
watched the dvd of the RSC Macbeth Ron mentions, with Judi Dench and Ian
McKellan. It also features one of my favourite actors, Bob Peck as Macduff.
One of the darkest slants on Macbeth that you can imagine - Macduff comes
out at the end having killed Macbeth, holding the daggers in the same way
that Macbeth did from killing Duncan - and you realise that he's as crazy as
Macbeth was. Now that's bleak; the world may seem to be righted, but you
realise it isn't at all.
Harold Bloom is erudite, of course, but I find him a bore on Shakespeare;
well, I try to read him, but my attention peters out. Maybe it's too narrow
a stream of water in all that rich delta of words. I like Kermode better;
and Jan Kott is wonderful on WS in the mid-20C, and particularly its radical
applications as a critique of power which was I think a big influence on the
RSC. But now I'm really blithering.
Interesting blog comments too - someone claims Shakespeare was a Lutheran,
especially in Hamlet. Hmm. (Reminds me of the joke in Long Day's Journey
into Night that Shakespeare was an Irish Catholic). Considering how Hamlet
turns out, I wouldn't want WS as an advocate.
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
|