CSotD: Spanning the Globe to Bring You Constant Varieties
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While Dave Kellett has been working on the cartoonist documentary discussed yesterday, he has also continued to produce "Sheldon," which vacillates between highly literate humor and silly pug-and/or-lizard jokes, which is one of its strengths.
That is, both the highly literate and the silly return to the site regularly to see what he's got going on. This week, the material has been aimed at the former audience, having just regaled the latter with an arc about Flaco the lizard capturing and relocating a colony of bats.
(There is, of course, no disconnect between high literacy and a love of the silly. The Pythons were all from Cambridge or Oxford, the heart of the National Lampoon crew were Ivy Leaguers, Isaac Asimov was noted for his scatalogical limericks, Machiavelli wrote commedia and Thomas More's Utopia has passages that are laugh-out-loud funny.)
Kellett and I share an alma mater, but our majors were different and the age gap is such that I doubt he studied Shakespeare under the same fellow I did. (In fact, while looking for a link to his excellent collection of literary strips, I discovered that his professor was not a "fellow" at all, unless in the academic sense.)
While some professors seek notoreity by doubting the Bard's existence or at least his authenticity, apparently we both had the sort who attempt to shake students out of their mystic reverence for the cultural icon and remember what the guy did for a living.
Hence the current arc, "Self-Aware Shakespeare."
This particular gag strikes a chord with me because one of the things my professor stressed, as we read Hamlet, was that ghosts were not a fantastical abstraction to the original audience for the play, which meant that they could watch it as a straight drama — and kind of a scary one — rather than something distant and clearly fictional.
One layer of Kellett's gag is the conceit that King James himself was even more fascinated with witches than was the general public, and we speculated in class about the degree to which Shakespeare's historical plays, most of them written under Elizabeth, were purposely geared to reflect that monarch's own thoughts about her predecessors. Certainly Shakespeare was aware of James's interests and preferences as well.
Not only was patronage a good and necessary thing, but Walter Raleigh was a pretty good poet and yet we see where pissing off Her Majesty got him. It was worthwhile catering to the monarch's taste.
James, who would have disliked Raleigh on health grounds even if his cousin hadn't lopped off the fellow's head, was notably literate himself and — Kellett isn't making this part up — an active patron of Shakespeare's work. While Shakespeare couldn't have foreseen his ultimate legacy, he must have been a bit self-aware anyway, just based on that.
Come to think of it, ol' Jamie has some cause to be puffed up as well, given that, not only is his boy Shakespeare still in print, but he's got another little patronage project that still sells pretty well.
But reverence for legacy should not obscure the actual content. These things last because they are good, but they aren't wines and they don't get better simply by becoming older, nor do centuries of fulsome praise change them.
In light of which, our professor also asked us why Shakespeare had written the gravedigger scene in Hamlet and, after we had all pontificated at length about the need for comic relief and so forth and so on, he pointed out that Shakespeare had a couple of clowns in his company and needed to give them something to do.
Well, yes, that, too.
It's a commonplace to say that, if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be writing for television, but I don't know that he would. Maybe the buffoons doing the Punch-and-Judy show in the market square would be cranking out "Two And A Half Gentlemen of Verona," but Shakespeare had his sights set higher than that.
He might, however, be producing a prequel to Hamlet and about to release "The Taming of the Shrew III" and re-writing MacBeth to indicate that Duncan had drawn his dagger first.
Patronage ain't what it used to be, and gold is where you find it.
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