Troilus and Cressida: Act V

V.1.37 When Shakespeare says purse, he always means something else . . .

V.i.74 I really liked this soliloquy, and wish it had taken place earlier. It gives the reader a place to file everybody.

V.i.94 Ulysses just keeps getting better as a character. Here he not only shows discernment, but virtue as well.

V.i.98 Thersites occupies an interesting place here as proxy for the audience. He executes our own voyeuristic desires.

V.ii.19 And here we are peeping at a peeper peeping at two peepers.

V.ii.109 If it is really Diomedes' appearance that has swayed Cressida, then the description of her as half of a pair of spectacles in Act IV becomes significant. Could she really be so shallow? If so, she is unique among Shakespeare's smarter heroines . . .

V.ii.133 and Thersites' meaning seems to be "Can he fool himself out of what he has seen?" Agaiin tying up the idea of mirrors and spectacles. I think I've found the idea that unlocks this play.

V.iii.1 And here's a nice complement to it: in the last scene, an opposition was set up between eyes and ears. Just as there Troilus and Cressida both in their ways wanted to stop their eyes, here Hector is on the other side of the equation.

V.iii.16 The gods are not deafer than Hector, though.

V.iii.38 Is Hector, then, the backward facing lion of act IV?

V.iii.87 Now that I have uncovered it, it is everywhere: ears can be stopped, but eyes cannot. HEctor will not hear his sister, nor his wife, but they cannot help but see the most terrible of visions.

V.iv again is Thersites our proxy

V.v.1-4exeunt pursued by a bear, so to speak. Does the action really take place offstage, between scenes? blech.

V.v.39 Or is Diomedes up to some sort of trick? Troilus does not seem "chastised" in these lines . . .

V.viii.1-4 what a lovely moment. How different Hector is from his foil!

And what a weird ending. I thought Troilus was supposed to drown at the end or something like that. Yeesh.

Troilus and Cressida Act IV

IV.i.20 An interesting image, and possibly of thematic significance. A Lion with a backward facing glare is either a complement or a foil to the mirrors discussed so much in the last act.

IV.ii 1-18 It is impossible to note the parallels between this section and Romeo and Juliet.

IV.ii.104 I'm not sure I'm buying this overdramatic side of Cressida. She has presented herself as more rational up to this point. In fact, the connection between the two eponymous lovers feels flat and far less interesting than the other dramas going on around them.

IV.iv.8-10 Her protestations ring a little hollow again here. How is it that Shakespeare has managed to make every individual character razor-clear, but the relationship itself is awkward and flat?

IV.iv.14 A pair of spectacles? In what way? Interesting.

IV.iv.59 Indeed. Does she recognize the folly of trying to be true, or feel that he has insulted by even asking that she should be otherwise?

IV.iv.104 A nice couplet, and one that gives his character a bit more depth. It even lends a little depth to this interchange.

IV.iv.126 Again with the worry that he will somehow lose Cressida's favour. What does Troilus see that we do not?

IV.v.38 This is the Cressida I like: witty and a match for any dirty old man.

IV.v.115 Stolen from Julius Caesar

IV.v.134 I just realized why this feels unfaithful to The Iliad: it's not as if Shakespeare has taken any significant liberties, but there is one significant element that he has omitted: the Olympian Gods. This moment, wherein Hector calls a truce with Ajax in light of their common blood, was originally an intervention by Zeus. How did such a significant alteration escape me until the fourth act? More importantly, how does the change affect the themes of the story?

IV.v.238 Quite so, for while all that Achilles has to offer is visible to the eye, Hector has demonstrated both courtliness and wit.

IV.v by brain must be rusty. There are still parts of this scene that feel untouched by me.

St. Teresa de Avila: Autobiography

The questions is: what did she see? Was she hallucinating, or having what William James would call a genuine religious experience? Never mind that the book was painful to get through. As she explains, "I had not read it through yet after I had written it", let alone given it any kind of edit. "Some things in it may not be very clearly explained, and there may be some repetitions" (350). An understatement, to be sure.

But what did she see? One possibility is that she saw the literal truth: that demons really were waiting around every corner, that there was a special place in hell reserved for her if she didn't repent--although what her sins are is never clear--and that Mary, Joseph et al take a special interest in certain humans and not others, appearing to them in their glory and fixing everything right up. I don't really care whether this is true or not, because I would refuse to believe it even if it were. That is not how the universe works, it isn't it isn't.

Another possibility is that she was actually bonkers, schizophrenic of a very textbook variety. Possible, very very possible. The visions, the unseen presences, the voices, and the seizures all are easily shrugged off by medical explanations. But this is not how the universe works either, or so I am coming to believe. Hear me out:

Picture a one-dimensional creature. No, pick a two-dimensional one; it's easier. A creature that lies perfectly flat, and lives, say on the surface of a body of water. What do you look like to that creature as you dive into the water? You would be two-dimensional to it. You would look like a rapidly expanding and contracting, two-dimensional shape. In fact, you would be a two-dimensional shape to it, but you would look like a one dimensional shape, a rapidly expanding and contracting line.

Now put yourself in the position of that creature. You are a three-dimensional creature, and even though you think that everything around you is three-dimensional, you see it in two dimensions because you can only ever see one side of it at a time. People may say that you see in three dimensions, but you do not. Look how easily you are fooled by a 3D movie or a realistic painting.

If a 4D something or other fell into your pool, what would it look like? For purpose of simplicity, lets say that it was a perfectly regular (in geometric terms) 4D shape: the 4D equivalent of a sphere. It would no doubt look like a a rapidly expanding and contracting sphere appearing in the middle of nowhere and then disappearing altogether. Following this? Probably not, but that's why I write this crazy shit down here instead of sharing it over cocktails.

How would you react to that? Even if it were a perfectly regular object, even if some 4D guys happened to toss their basketball through the plane (or 3D equivalent) where you reside? You would probably ignore it, but suppose that you didn't. If you were somehow able to acknowledge it, your brain would have to engage that marvelous human capacity for making shit up. And would you make up that a 4D object had passed through your experience? Probably not, and especially not if you lived in the 16th century. You would draw from what you know, and what Teresa knew was angels and devils. In short, she saw what she was capable of understanding. If you or I were to see something of the same source, we would see what we are capable of understanding.

Which is all well and good, but in reality nothing is entirely two-dimensional. The idea of you passing through the plane occupied by a two-dimensional creature is purely hypothetical. Everything you or I know has three dimensions, even the thinnest sheet of paper. If we see something that looks two-dimensional, it is only because we can only see one side of it at a time. How likely is it that our three-dimensional model is any less theoretical?

If every plane is just a mathematical construct intersected by a variety of three dimensional objects, everything, everything in that plane is just an aspect of some three-dimensional object, an expression of that object into two-dimensional space. If a fourth dimension exists, then it follows by the same logic that every thing in a given three-dimensional space is likewise an expression of a four-dimensional object. This includes you and me. We seem to exist purely in three-dimensions, but we are in truth expressions of something four-dimensional. We are appendages of something greater.

To make matters more confusing--if less complicated--most if not all of those who have what are called religious experiences tell of their perception that we are all not only part of something greater, but that we are all expressions of the same greater something. We are the fingers and toes of God

I have been thinking a lot about this lately. Is there something bigger than I am that I can somehow tap into or experience? How do I see the things that Teresa saw? Is it only for a few, or can anybody train their senses--or rather, untrain them--to see the full scope? Stay tuned: my next big project is The Science of Mind by Ernest Holmes. I expect some revelations . . .

Three Little Maids

Baha'u'llah: The Hidden Words

For about a month at the beginning of this year, I attended a Baha'i church on Sundays. Despite my resistance to their proselytization, they managed to succeed in getting me to read this short volume. For the most part I found it slightly better than innocuous, and enjoyed some of the passages that flipped certain traditional metaphors on their heads: "Thou [the reader] art my stronghold . . . my love is in thee" and "Thou art my lamp and my light is in thee" are reflective of the view that we do not live in God's house; we are his house, and he lives in us (10,11). The book was not entirely free from religious taint, however. Sadly, the view that God is the savior of the reader and that the reader must abase him or herself, begging for succor contaminates what is otherwise a fairly pleasant book.

E.M. Forster: A Room With a View

I enjoyed my first meeting of a book club to which my sister invited me this month. For one thing, the books are chosen not only for their literary merit but also for the significant merit of being short. Knowing that I was going to be meeting with a group of English majors and teachers, I couldn't help but write a paper in my head as I read. The title is "Looking Over", and here is the gist.

I often judge the merit of writers on the care with which they choose their titles. Great Expectations and Vanity Fair are examples of titles that unlock the meaning of a book before the first page is even turned. Forster similarly conveys his meaning with the title of this novel, indicating preemptively that the central idea is one of enclosure, and a way out of it.

The book is filled with images of boundaries, and not surprisingly curtains and windows are chief among them. As early as the fourth page of chapter one, Miss Honeychurch "Hastened after her cousin, who had already disappeared through the curtains--curtains which smote one in the face and seemed heavy with more than cloth" (7). Forster conveys his meaning perfectly: there are more than simple physical boundaries between the young lovers of the story. An idea that recurs in the service of this theme is that of looking across something--George across the table, then across the spot where a man is murdered and finally, most significantly, "not across anything" (39). It is at this moment that the invisible boundary between George and Lucy first is breached, and something as simple as the tossing of some tourist cards into to river becomes an epiphany.

The other characters in the book reveal something about themselves through their treatment of boundaries as well. The fact that "The drawing room curtains at Windy Corner had been pulled to meet, for the carpet was new and deserved protection from the August sun" shows Mrs. Honeychurch's view of the issue, and does much to explain why she frowns upon Lucy's marriage at the end. Cecil's explanation to Lucy "that you feel more at home with me in a room" reveals something about each of them, for Lucy rightly feels that Cecil "is the sort that no one can know intimately" (99, 161). No wonder, then, that she can only be with him when the world, of which the young Mr. Emerson is a significant part, is closed out

When Lucy finally finds her metaphorical "room with a view" in George, and as they look together out of the literal open window in the final chapter, it is clear that the boundaries keeping Lucy boxed in before were not merely social ones, just as the boundaries that Mr. Emerson was without were not. It is clear by the end that Lucy had managed to escape not only from the walls that society puts around us, but from the walls that we put around ourselves, those that keep our true spirit in the dark, those that can only be aired out by such windows as music, nature and, yes, love.

I shall add, although it would not go into any paper that I felt compelled to write, that the descriptions of Florence took be back there mentally to a trip that I took with my family--especially the church of Santa Croce, and that my father is a nice doppleganger to Mr. Emerson. His tendency to transgress social boundaries was delightfully coined "social rape" by my brother, who is occasionally not a dullard.

W.S. Gilbert: Princess Ida

I was compelled to read this as preparation for performing in it this coming Summer. Of course, Gilbert is not always the deepest of literary figures, but the more I read it, the more I appreciate that his interpretation of Tennyson's "The Princess" gels nicely with my own. See earlier in this blog the idea of sets of three that I think unlocks the latter. Gilbert's lyrics are subtly peppered with reinforcements of that theme, and I grin knowingly to myself often when I recall that I am the only one in the cast who has probably read the original.

Troilus and Cressida Act III

III.i Another one? This particular play seems to have a superfluity of comic relief/fool characters.

III.i.57 Nell? Really?

III.i.113 Beauty be damned. Helen is the wit that launched a thousand ships!

III.ii.14 I can just picture Pandarus rolling his eyes here.

III.ii.18-19 the "imaginary relish" seems to be exactly Troilus' speciality.

III.ii.39 Fitting that Troilus sees Cressida as something not to be looked at directly, or too clearly.

III.ii.72-77 Eyes become a theme here, appertaining to the above note.

III.ii.190 Yes, prophet he was, but not here: in III.ii.20

III.iii.1-16 God, what a windbag!

III.iii.20 and anal retentive about his pentameter too.

III.iii.47-8 "Pride hath no other glass to show itself but pride"--It's a measure of Shakespeare's epigrammatic mastery that it takes something this awesome for me to even bother quoting it. If I noted every memorable line, I would not be a man, but amanuensis . . .

III.iii.77 exactly as Ulysses said.

III.iii.99 One mention of reflections in a scene is an epigram. Two is a coincidence. three makes a theme.

III.iii This scene felt a little wordy, and I'm not certain that I got everything out of it that was there . . .