Hear Beowulf and Gawain and the Green Knight Read in Their Original Old and Middle English by an MIT Medievalist

in English Language, Literature | March 30th, 2018

Many a mock­ing cri­tique floats around point­ing out that some peo­ple who tell their mul­ti­lin­gual neigh­bors to “speak Eng­lish” seem to have a lot of trou­ble with the lan­guage them­selves. I must con­fess, I find the obser­va­tion more sad than fun­ny. I’ve met many Eng­lish speak­ers who strug­gle with under­stand­ing the pecu­liar­i­ties of the lan­guage and do not know its his­to­ry. Increas­ing­ly, such things are not taught to those who don’t devote them­selves to lan­guage study.

When peo­ple do learn how the lan­guage evolved, they can be shocked that for much of its his­to­ry, Eng­lish was unrec­og­niz­able to mod­ern ears. Indeed, the study of Old Eng­lish—or Anglo-Sax­on, the lan­guage of Beowulf—sat­is­fies for­eign lan­guage require­ments in many Eng­lish depart­ments. Orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten in runic before it incor­po­rat­ed the Latin alpha­bet (and retain­ing some of those ear­ly sym­bols after­ward), this Ger­man­ic lan­guage slow­ly became more Lati­nate, and gave way among the read­ing class­es in Britain to Anglo-Nor­man, a Ger­man­ic-French cousin, for a few cen­turies after 1066.

That’s the very short ver­sion. These strains and more even­tu­al­ly com­min­gled to form Mid­dle Eng­lish, the lan­guage of Chaucer, which also sounds to mod­ern ears like anoth­er tongue, though we rec­og­nize more of it. In the video above, Medieval­ist and MIT pro­fes­sor Arthur Bahr gives us demon­stra­tions of both Old and Mid­dle Eng­lish in read­ings of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as part of his 2014 course, “Major Authors: Old Eng­lish and Beowulf.” (You can still vis­it the course site, read the syl­labus and down­load course mate­ri­als.)

Bahr reads the first 20 lines of the ancient epic poem, which begins:

Hwæt. We Gar­de­na in geardagum, 
þeod­cyninga, þrym gefrunon, 
hu ða æþelin­gas ellen freme­don. 

“Besides being the lan­guage of Rohan in the nov­els of Tolkien,” he writes, “Old Eng­lish is a lan­guage of long, cold, and lone­ly win­ters; of haunt­ing beau­ty found in unex­pect­ed places; and of unshak­able resolve in the face of insur­mount­able odds.” For all its dis­tance from us, we can still rec­og­nize quite a lot in Old Eng­lish if we lis­ten close­ly. Much of its vocab­u­lary and inflec­tions sur­vive, unchanged but for pro­nun­ci­a­tion and spelling, in mod­ern Eng­lish, includ­ing many of the language’s most basic words, like “the,” “in” and “are,” and most com­mon, like “god,” “name,” “me,” “hand,” and even “old.”

After the Viking and Nor­man inva­sions, Old Eng­lish became “the third lan­guage in its own coun­try,” notes Luke Mastin at his His­to­ry of Eng­lish site. More spo­ken than writ­ten, it “effec­tive­ly sank to the lev­el of a patois or cre­ole,” with sev­er­al dis­tinct region­al vari­ants. Eng­lish seemed at one time “in dire per­il” of dying out but “showed its resilience once again, and, two hun­dred years after the Nor­man Con­quest, it was Eng­lish not French that emerged as the lan­guage of Eng­land,” though it remained a dif­fuse col­lec­tion of dialects. As you’ll hear in Bahr’s Mid­dle Eng­lish read­ing, it was also an Eng­lish entire­ly trans­formed by the lan­guages around it, as it would be once again a few hun­dred years lat­er, when we get to the Eng­lish of Shake­speare.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Beowulf Read In the Orig­i­nal Old Eng­lish: How Many Words Do You Rec­og­nize?

1,000-Year-Old Man­u­script of Beowulf Dig­i­tized and Now Online

Sea­mus Heaney Reads His Exquis­ite Trans­la­tion of Beowulf and His Mem­o­rable 1995 Nobel Lec­ture

Hear What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like in the Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Hear 48 Hours of Lectures by Joseph Campbell on Comparative Mythology and the Hero’s Journey

in Literature, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion | March 28th, 2018

What does it mean to “grow up”? Every cul­ture has its way of defin­ing adult­hood, whether it’s sur­viv­ing an ini­ti­a­tion rit­u­al or fil­ing your first tax return. I’m only being a lit­tle facetious—people in the U.S. have long felt dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the ways we are ush­ered into adult­hood, from learn­ing how to fill out IRS forms to learn­ing how to fill out stu­dent loan and cred­it card appli­ca­tions, our cul­ture wants us to under­stand our place in the great machine. All oth­er press­ing life con­cerns are sec­ondary.

It’s lit­tle won­der, then, that gurus and cul­tur­al father fig­ures of all types have found ready audi­ences among America’s youth. Such fig­ures have left last­ing lega­cies for decades, and not all of them pos­i­tive. But one pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al from the recent past is still seen as a wise old mas­ter whose far-reach­ing influ­ence remains with us and will for the fore­see­able future. Joseph Camp­bell’s obses­sive, eru­dite books and lec­tures on world mytholo­gies and tra­di­tions have made cer­tain that ancient adult­hood rit­u­als have entered our nar­ra­tive DNA.

When Camp­bell was award­ed the Nation­al Arts Club Gold Medal in Lit­er­a­ture in 1985, psy­chol­o­gist James Hill­man stat­ed that “no one in our century—not Freud, not Thomas Mann, not Levi-Strauss—has so brought the myth­i­cal sense of the world and its eter­nal fig­ures back into our every­day con­scious­ness.” What­ev­er exam­ples Hill­man may have had in mind, we might rest our case on the fact that with­out Camp­bell there would like­ly be no Star Wars. For all its suc­cess as a mega­mar­ket­ing phe­nom­e­non, the sci-fi fran­chise has also pro­duced endur­ing­ly relat­able role mod­els, exam­ples of achiev­ing inde­pen­dence and stand­ing up to impe­ri­al­ists, even if they be your own fam­i­ly mem­bers in masks.

In the video inter­views above from 1987, Camp­bell pro­fess­es him­self no more than an “under­lin­er” who learned every­thing he knows from books. Like the con­tem­po­rary com­par­a­tive mythol­o­gist Mircea Eli­ade, Camp­bell did not con­duct his own anthro­po­log­i­cal research—he acquired a vast amount of knowl­edge by study­ing the sacred texts, arti­facts, and rit­u­als of world cul­tures. This study gave him insight into sto­ries and images that con­tin­ue to shape our world and fea­ture cen­tral­ly in huge pop cul­tur­al pro­duc­tions like The Last Jedi and Black Pan­ther.

Camp­bell describes rit­u­al entries into adult­hood that view­ers of these films will instant­ly rec­og­nize: Defeat­ing idols in masks and tak­ing on their pow­er; bur­ial enact­ments that kill the “infan­tile ego” (aca­d­e­mics, he says with a straight face, some­times nev­er leave this stage). These kinds of edge expe­ri­ences are at the very heart of the clas­sic hero’s jour­ney, an arche­type Camp­bell wrote about in his best­selling The Hero with a Thou­sand Faces and pop­u­lar­ized on PBS in The Pow­er of Myth, a series of con­ver­sa­tions with Bill Moy­ers.

In the many lec­tures just above—48 hours of audio in which Camp­bell expounds his the­o­ries of the mythological—the engag­ing, acces­si­ble writer and teacher lays out the pat­terns and sym­bols of mytholo­gies world­wide, with spe­cial focus on the hero’s jour­ney, as impor­tant to his project as dying and ris­ing god myths to James Fraz­er’s The Gold­en Bough, the inspi­ra­tion for so many mod­ernist writ­ers. Camp­bell him­self is more apt to ref­er­ence James Joyce, Carl Jung, Pablo Picas­so, or Richard Wag­n­er than sci­ence fic­tion, fan­ta­sy, or com­ic books (though he did break down Star Wars in his Moy­ers inter­views). Nonethe­less, we have him to thank for inspir­ing the likes of George Lucas and becom­ing a “patron saint of super­heroes” and space operas.

We will find some of Campbell’s meth­ods flawed and ter­mi­nol­o­gy out­dat­ed (no one uses “Ori­ent” and “Occi­dent” anymore)—and mod­ern heroes can just as well be women as men, pass­ing through the same kinds of sym­bol­ic tri­als in their ori­gin sto­ries. But Campbell’s ideas are as res­o­nant as ever, offer­ing to the wider cul­ture a coher­ent means of under­stand­ing the arche­typ­al stages of com­ing of age. As Hol­ly­wood exec­u­tive Christo­pher Vogler said in 1985, after rec­om­mend­ing The Hero with a Thou­sand Faces as a guide for screen­writ­ers, Campbell’s work “can be used to tell the sim­plest com­ic sto­ry or the most sophis­ti­cat­ed drama”—a sweep­ing vision of human cul­tur­al his­to­ry and its mean­ing for our indi­vid­ual jour­neys.

You can access the 48 hours of Joseph Camp­bell lec­tures above, or direct­ly on Spo­ti­fy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Joseph Camp­bell and Bill Moy­ers Break Down Star Wars as an Epic, Uni­ver­sal Myth

A 12-Hour East­ern Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty Playlist: Fea­tures Lec­tures & Read­ings by Joseph Camp­bell, Christo­pher Ish­er­wood, the Dalai Lama & Oth­ers

The Com­plete Star Wars “Fil­mu­men­tary”: A 6‑Hour, Fan-Made Star Wars Doc­u­men­tary, with Behind-the-Scenes Footage & Com­men­tary

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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When Ira Aldridge Became the First Black Actor to Perform Shakespeare in England (1824)

in Literature, Theatre | March 22nd, 2018

The ways that Oth­el­lo, Aaron the Moor from Titus Andron­i­cus, and Shy­lock from The Mer­chant of Venice—Shakespeare’s “explic­it­ly racial­ized char­ac­ters,” as George Wash­ing­ton University’s Ayan­na Thomp­son puts it—have been inter­pret­ed over the cen­turies may have less to do with the author’s inten­tions and more with con­tem­po­rary ideas about race, the actors cast in the roles, and the direc­to­r­i­al choic­es made in a pro­duc­tion. To a great degree, these char­ac­ters have been played as though their iden­ti­ties were like the cos­tumes put on by actors who dark­ened their faces or wore stereo­typ­i­cal mark­ers of eth­nic or reli­gious Judaism (includ­ing “an obnox­ious­ly large nose”).

Such por­tray­als risk turn­ing com­plex char­ac­ters into car­i­ca­tures, val­i­dat­ing much of what we might see as overt and implic­it racism in the text. But there are those, Thomp­son says, who think such roles are actu­al­ly “about racial imper­son­ation.” Oth­el­lo, for exam­ple, is “a role writ­ten by a white man, intend­ed for a white actor in black make­up.”

For cen­turies, that is what most audi­ences ful­ly expect­ed to see. The tra­di­tion con­tin­ued in Britain until the 19th cen­tu­ry, when the Shake­speare­an col­or line, so to speak, was first crossed by Ira Aldridge, an Amer­i­can actor born in New York City in 1807.

“Edu­cat­ed at the African Free School,” notes the Fol­ger Shake­speare Library, Aldridge “was able to see Shake­speare plays at the Park The­atre and the African Grove The­atre.” He took on roles like Romeo with the African Com­pa­ny, but “New York was gen­er­al­ly not a wel­com­ing place for black actors… some white the­ater­go­ers even attempt­ed to pre­vent black com­pa­nies from per­form­ing Shake­speare at all.” As Tony Howard, an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of War­wick, tells PRI, “he was beat­en up in the streets.” And so Aldridge left for Eng­land in 1824, where he played Oth­el­lo at the The­atre Roy­al, Covent-Gar­den, at only 17 years old, the first black actor to play a Shake­speare­an role in Britain.

He lat­er began per­form­ing under the name Keene, “a homonym,” notes the site Black His­to­ry 365, “for the then pop­u­lar British actor, Edmund Kean.” Aldridge’s big break came after he met Kean and his son Charles, also an actor, in 1831, and both became sup­port­ers of his career. When the elder Kean col­lapsed onstage in 1833, then died, Aldridge took over his role as Oth­el­lo at Lon­don’s Roy­al­ty The­atre in two per­for­mances. “Crit­ics object­ed,” the Fol­ger writes, “to his race, his youth, and his inex­pe­ri­ence.” As Howard tells it, this char­ac­ter­i­za­tion is a gross under­state­ment:

There were those who said this is a very inter­est­ing and extra­or­di­nary young actor. And the fact that he’s a black actor makes it more inter­est­ing and fas­ci­nat­ing. But for many peo­ple, it was an insult because this is still a soci­ety where there is a great deal of slav­ery in the British Empire. And in order to com­bat the idea of increas­ing abo­li­tion, per­form­ers like Ira had to be stopped. And so there was a great deal of vio­lent aggres­sion. Not phys­i­cal vio­lence this time, but vio­lence in the press.

Some of that ver­bal vio­lence includ­ed com­par­ing Aldridge to “per­form­ing hors­es” and “per­form­ing dogs.” Many Lon­don crit­ics saw his entry on the Shake­speare­an stage as an affront to Eng­lish lit­er­ary tra­di­tion. Per­form­ing the bard’s works was “a kind of vio­la­tion,” Howard sum­ma­rizes, “he has no right to do that, not even to play Oth­el­lo.”

Pho­to via the Fol­ger Library

From his begin­nings in Coven­try to his expe­ri­ence in Lon­don, Aldridge made the once-black­face role his own, per­haps increas­ing­ly draw­ing “on his own expe­ri­ence and his own feel­ing.” He also por­trayed Aaron in Titus, and as he per­se­vered through neg­a­tive press and prej­u­dice, he took on oth­er star­ring roles, includ­ing Richard III, Shy­lock, Iago, King Lear, and Mac­beth. He “toured the Eng­lish provinces exten­sive­ly,” the BBC writes, “and stayed in Coven­try for a few months, dur­ing which time he gave a num­ber of speech­es on the evils of slav­ery. When he left, peo­ple inspired by his speech­es went to the coun­ty hall and peti­tioned for its abo­li­tion.”

By the end of the 1840s, how­ev­er, Aldridge felt he had gone as far as he could go in Eng­land and left to tour the Con­ti­nent in what had become his sig­na­ture role, Oth­el­lo. While first tour­ing with an Eng­lish com­pa­ny, he “lat­er began to work with local the­ater troupes,” the Fol­ger writes, “per­form­ing in Eng­lish while the rest of the cast would per­form in Ger­man, Swedish, etc. Despite the lan­guage bar­ri­er, Aldridge’s per­for­mances in Europe were high­ly acclaimed, a tes­ta­ment to his act­ing skills.” (See a play­bill fur­ther up from a Bonn per­for­mance.) After win­ning great fame in Europe and Rus­sia, the actor returned in tri­umph to Lon­don in 1855, and this time was very well-received.

Aldridge died in 1867. And though he was the sub­ject of many por­traits of the period—like that by James North­cote at the top of the post, por­tray­ing the 19-year-old Aldridge as Oth­el­lo, and this 1830 paint­ing by Hen­ry Per­ronet Brig­gs—he was “large­ly for­got­ten by the­ater his­to­ri­ans.” (See him above in an 1858 draw­ing by Ukran­ian artist Taras Shevchenko.) But his lega­cy has been revived in recent years. Aldridge was the sub­ject of two recent plays, Black Oth­el­lo, by Cecil­ia Siden­bladh, and Red Vel­vet by Loli­ta Chakrabar­ti. And last year, he was hon­ored in Coven­try by a plaque on the site of the the­ater where he first achieved fame.

While he suc­ceed­ed in becom­ing an all-around great Shake­speare­an actor, Aldridge’s lega­cy rests espe­cial­ly in the way he helped trans­form roles per­formed as “racial imper­son­ation” for a few hun­dred years into the prove­nance of tal­ent­ed black actors who bring new depth, com­plex­i­ty, and authen­tic­i­ty to char­ac­ters often played as stock eth­nic vil­lains. While white actors like Orson Welles and Lawrence Olivi­er con­tin­ued to play Oth­el­lo well into the 20th cen­tu­ry, these days such cast­ing can be seen as “ridicu­lous,” as Hugh Muir writes at The Guardian, espe­cial­ly if that actor “blacks up” for the role.

via the British Library

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Shakespeare’s Eng­lish Sound­ed Like, and How We Know It

3,000 Illus­tra­tions of Shakespeare’s Com­plete Works from Vic­to­ri­an Eng­land, Neat­ly Pre­sent­ed in a New Dig­i­tal Archive

Young Orson Welles Directs “Voodoo Mac­beth,” the First Shake­speare Pro­duc­tion With An All-Black Cast: Footage from 1936

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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H.P. Lovecraft Writes “Waste Paper: A Poem of Profound Insignificance,” a Devastating Parody of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1923)

in Literature, Poetry | March 15th, 2018

Image by Lucius B. Trues­dell and Lady Mor­rell, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Howard Phillips Love­craft, as his ever-grow­ing fan base knows, sel­dom spared his char­ac­ters — or at least their san­i­ty — from the vast, unspeak­able hor­rors lurk­ing beneath his imag­ined real­i­ty. Not that he showed much more mer­cy as a crit­ic either, as his assess­ment of “The Waste Land” (1922) reveals. Though now near-uni­ver­sal­ly respect­ed, T.S. Eliot’s best-known poem failed to impress Love­craft, who, in his jour­nal The Con­ser­v­a­tive, wrote in 1923 that

We here behold a prac­ti­cal­ly mean­ing­less col­lec­tion of phras­es, learned allu­sions, quo­ta­tions, slang, and scraps in gen­er­al; offered to the pub­lic (whether or not as a hoax) as some­thing jus­ti­fied by our mod­ern mind with its recent com­pre­hen­sion of its own chaot­ic triv­i­al­i­ty and dis­or­gan­i­sa­tion. And we behold that pub­lic, or a con­sid­er­able part of it, receiv­ing this hilar­i­ous melange as some­thing vital and typ­i­cal; as “a poem of pro­found sig­nif­i­cance”, to quote its spon­sors.

Eliot’s work, Love­craft argued, sim­ply could­n’t hold up in the mod­ern world, where “man has sud­den­ly dis­cov­ered that all his high sen­ti­ments, val­ues, and aspi­ra­tions are mere illu­sions caused by phys­i­o­log­i­cal process­es with­in him­self, and of no sig­nif­i­cance what­so­ev­er in an infi­nite and pur­pose­less cos­mos.” Sci­ence, in his view, has made non­sense of tra­di­tion and “a rag-bag of unre­lat­ed odds and ends” of the soul. A poet like Eliot, it seems, “does not know what to do about it; but com­pro­mis­es on a lit­er­a­ture of analy­sis, chaos, and iron­ic con­trast.”

Look­ing on even this hatch­et job, Love­craft must have felt he’d failed to slay the beast, and so he com­posed a par­o­dy of “The Waste Land” enti­tled “Waste Paper” in late 1922 or ear­ly 1923. This “Poem of Pro­found Insignif­i­cance,” which Love­craft schol­ar S.T. Joshi calls the writer’s “best satir­i­cal poem,” begins thus:

Out of the reach­es of illim­itable light
The blaz­ing plan­et grew, and forc’d to life
Unend­ing cycles of pro­gres­sive strife
And strange muta­tions of undy­ing light
And bore­some books, than hell’s own self more trite
And thoughts repeat­ed and become a blight,
And cheap rum-hounds with moon­shine hootch made tight,
And quite con­trite to see the flight of fright so bright

You can read the whole thing, includ­ing its prob­a­bly apoc­ryphal half-epi­graph from the Greek poet Gly­con, at the H.P. Love­craft Archive. “In many parts of this quite lengthy poem,” Joshi writes, “he has quite faith­ful­ly par­o­died the insu­lar­i­ty of mod­ern poet­ry — its abil­i­ty to be under­stood only by a small coterie of read­ers who are aware of inti­mate facts about the poet.”

Love­craft also tried his hand at non-par­o­d­ic poet­ry, though his­to­ry remem­bers him much less for that than for strik­ing a more pri­mal chord with his sui gener­is “weird fic­tion,” whose para­me­ters he was deter­min­ing at the same time he was sav­aging his con­tem­po­rary Eliot. And though sci­en­tif­ic progress has marched much far­ther on since the 1920s, espe­cial­ly as regards the under­stand­ing of the human mind and what­ev­er now pass­es for a soul, both men’s bod­ies of work have only gained in res­o­nance.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

H.P. Lovecraft’s Clas­sic Hor­ror Sto­ries Free Online: Down­load Audio Books, eBooks & More

H.P. Lovecraft’s Mon­ster Draw­ings: Cthul­hu & Oth­er Crea­tures from the “Bound­less and Hideous Unknown”

H.P. Love­craft Gives Five Tips for Writ­ing a Hor­ror Sto­ry, or Any Piece of “Weird Fic­tion”

Love­craft: Fear of the Unknown (Free Doc­u­men­tary)

T.S. Eliot Reads His Mod­ernist Mas­ter­pieces “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Hear 55 Hours of Shakespeare’s Plays: The Tragedies, Comedies & Histories Performed by Vanessa Redgrave, Sir John Gielgud, Ralph Fiennes & Many More

in Literature, Theatre | March 12th, 2018

The so-called “Great Vow­el Shift” was a very unusu­al occur­rence. Dur­ing the peri­od between around 1500 to around 1700, the Eng­lish lan­guage “lost the pur­er vow­el sounds of most Euro­pean lan­guages, as well as the pho­net­ic pair­ing between long and short vow­el sounds,” writes the site The His­to­ry of Eng­lish. Such rad­i­cal lin­guis­tic change seems a “sud­den and dra­mat­ic shift” his­tor­i­cal­ly, and “a pecu­liar­ly Eng­lish phe­nom­e­non…. con­tem­po­rary and neigh­bor­ing lan­guages like French, Ger­man and Span­ish were entire­ly unaf­fect­ed.” Over a peri­od of around 200 years, in oth­er words, Eng­lish com­plete­ly mor­phed from Chaucer’s melod­ic, near­ly incom­pre­hen­si­ble Mid­dle Eng­lish into the sounds we hear in Dami­an Lewis’s speech as Antony in Julius Cae­sar, above.

Shakespeare’s Eng­lish sound­ed like nei­ther of these, but some­what like both. Eng­lish became more dis­tinc­tive pre­cise­ly dur­ing the time it became more cos­mopoli­tan, philo­soph­i­cal, and, even­tu­al­ly, glob­al.

It was a peri­od of “a large intake of loan­words from the Romance lan­guages of Europe…, which required a dif­fer­ent kind of pronunciation”—and of a great flood of Lati­nate words from sci­en­tif­ic, legal, and med­ical dis­course. “Latin loan­words in Old and Mid­dle Eng­lish are a mere trick­le,” writes Charles Bar­ber in The Eng­lish Lan­guage, “but in Ear­ly Mod­ern Eng­lish,” Shakespeare’s Eliz­a­bethan Eng­lish, “the trick­le becomes a riv­er, and by 1600 it is a del­uge.”

The Eng­lish Renais­sance sits smack in the mid­dle of the Great Vow­el Shift, its lit­er­ary pro­duc­tions reflect­ing a riotous and thrilling con­flu­ence of speech, a wild field of lin­guis­tic play and exper­i­men­ta­tion, nov­el­ty, inge­nu­ity, and con­tro­ver­sy. The schol­ars and writ­ers of the time were them­selves very aware of these changes. One “Eliz­a­bethan head­mas­ter,” notes Bar­ber, “com­ment­ed in 1582 on the large num­ber of for­eign words being bor­rowed dai­ly by the Eng­lish lan­guage.” (Empha­sis mine.)

Shakespeare’s lan­guage rev­els in such bor­row­ing, and coin­ing, of words, while often pre­serv­ing the pro­nun­ci­a­tion and the syn­tax, of ear­li­er forms of Eng­lish from all over the UK. All oth­er argu­ments for read­ing and lis­ten­ing to Shake­speare aside—and they are too numerous—the rich­ness of the lan­guage may be the most robust for cen­turies to come. As long as there is some­thing called English—though a thou­sand years hence, our ver­sion may sound as alien as the lan­guage of Beowulf does today—Shake­speare will still rep­re­sent some of the wit­ti­est, most adven­tur­ous expres­sions of the most fer­tile and cre­ative moment in the language’s his­to­ry.

Luck­i­ly for those future Eng­lish speak­ers, writ­ers, and appre­ci­a­tors, Shake­speare has also been the most wide­ly adapt­ed, record­ed, and per­formed writer in the Eng­lish lan­guage, and there will nev­er be a short­age of his work in any for­mat. Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion Shake­speare has only recent­ly left the acad­e­my and made it to reg­u­lar per­for­mances on the stage, giv­ing us a taste of just how dif­fer­ent the ver­bal music of Ham­let and Romeo and Juli­et sound­ed to their first audi­ences. But what’s remark­able is how Shake­speare seems to work in any accent and any set­ting… almost.

As far as Amer­i­can actors go, Bran­do may have been more up to the task of play­ing Mark Antony than Charl­ton Hes­ton was, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have both, and hun­dreds more besides. I would argue that there’s no such thing as too much Shake­speare in too many dif­fer­ent voic­es. His plays needn’t be the great­est ever writ­ten to nonethe­less con­tain some of the great­est speech­es ever per­formed on any stage. That very much includes the speech­es in less­er-known tragedies like Cori­olanus, which an ensem­ble cast of Ralph Fiennes, Vanes­sa Red­grave, Bri­an Cox, Elan Eshk­eri, and Ger­ard But­ler turned into a 21st-cen­tu­ry polit­i­cal barn­burn­er of a movie.

The music and dia­logue from that 2011 film adap­ta­tion open the playlist of Shakespeare’s tragedies, fur­ther up, which also includes a per­for­mance from Sir John Giel­gud in Ham­let and a record­ed per­for­mance of Amer­i­can com­pos­er Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopa­tra, a 1966 opera with a libret­to by Fran­co Zef­firelli based exclu­sive­ly on Shakespeare’s text. This work pre­miered as “one of the great oper­at­ic dis­as­ters of all time,” accord­ing to one crit­ic who was in its first audi­ence, “at one point the sopra­no Leon­tyne Price… found her­self trapped inside a pyra­mid.” The idio­syn­crat­ic deliv­ery in these var­i­ous per­for­mances all stress the flex­i­bil­i­ty of Shakespeare’s lan­guage, which can still mes­mer­ize, even under Spinal Tap-like con­di­tions of per­for­mance anx­i­ety.

After you’ve worked your way through 18 hours of Shakespeare’s tragedies, lis­ten fur­ther up to 19 hours of Come­dies, 13 hours of His­to­ries, and, just above, to some­thing we may not have enough of—5 hours of read­ings of Shakespeare’s poet­ry, by actors like Giel­gud and Sir Antho­ny Quayle, Richard Bur­ton, Emma Top­ping, and many more. Anoth­er great vow­el shift may be com­ing, along with oth­er world his­tor­i­cal changes. These copi­ous record­ings pre­serve for the future the diverse sounds of Late Mod­ern Eng­lish, speak­ing the rich­est lit­er­ary lan­guage of its Ear­ly Mod­ern ances­tor.

If you need Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, down­load it here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 68 Hour Playlist of Shakespeare’s Plays Being Per­formed by Great Actors: Giel­gud, McK­ellen & More

Hear What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like in the Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Son­net 18

Hear Beowulf Read In the Orig­i­nal Old Eng­lish: How Many Words Do You Rec­og­nize?

Hear What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like in the Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Elton John Proves He Can Turn any Text into a Song: Watch Him Improvise with Lines from Henrik Ibsen’s Play, Peer Gynt

in Creativity, Literature, Music, Theatre | March 5th, 2018

I’m not a lyric writer. I get all my inspi­ra­tion from look­ing at the writ­ten page. — Elton John

Inspi­ra­tion is one thing. Act­ing on it is anoth­er. Sir Elton’s out­put seems to go beyond his mag­i­cal com­bi­na­tion of tal­ent, work eth­ic, and train­ing. He claims to have tak­en all of 30 min­utes to com­plete “Your Song.” In his 2005 appear­ance on Inside the Actor’s Stu­dio, excerpt­ed above, he passed his genius off as some­thing akin to a par­ty trick, call­ing on the audi­ence to pass up a book—any book—as source mate­r­i­al for an ins­ta-song.

Giv­en the num­ber of stu­dent actors in the audi­ence, it’s real­ly not so sur­pris­ing that the first vol­ume to hit the stage was Hen­rik Ibsen’s 1867 verse play Peer Gynt.

Magi­cians height­en the dra­ma by demand­ing absolute silence pri­or to a dif­fi­cult trick.

John swings the oth­er way. The result­ing impro­vised tune is all the more impres­sive for his off the cuff, raunchy text-based pat­ter. It’s hard to imag­ine Ibsen play­ing so fast and loose with lines like:

Every­thing spites me with a vengeance

Sky and water and those wicked moun­tains

Fog pour­ing out of the sky to con­found him

The water hurl­ing in to drown him

The moun­tains point­ing their rocks to fall-

And those peo­ple, all of them out for the kill!

Oh no, not to die!

I mustn’t lose him. The lout!

Why’s the dev­il have to tease him?

What might Metal­li­ca or Iron Maid­en have con­jured from such mate­r­i­al? In John’s hands, it becomes a lush, emo­tion­al­ly charged bal­lad, the moun­tains and fog apt metaphors.

In his book Inside Inside, host James Lip­ton names this as one of “the two most astound­ing impro­vi­sa­tions in the his­to­ry of Inside the Actors Stu­dio.” The oth­er was Robin Williams mak­ing mer­ry with a pink pash­mi­na shawl.

In a 2012 inter­view with NPR, John went into the nature of his col­lab­o­ra­tion with his long­time word man, Bernie Taupin. Unlike oth­er lyri­cists, Taupin does not think in terms of verse and cho­rus, leav­ing it to John to free the song from a wall of text:

It’s just a blank—well, not a blank, but it’s a piece of paper. In the old days, it was hand­writ­ten. Then it got typed. Then it got faxed. Now it gets emailed. And it’s no sug­ges­tions, noth­ing. And we’ve nev­er writ­ten in the same room. I don’t know if peo­ple know that. But he gives me the lyric, and I go away and write the song, and then come back and play it to him. And I’ve nev­er lost the enjoy­ment or the thrill of play­ing him the song that I’ve just writ­ten to his lyric.

If you’d like to fin­ish what John start­ed by fur­ther musi­cal­iz­ing Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, the com­plete script can be read here. Or lis­ten to the 1946 radio adap­ta­tion star­ring Ralph Richard­son as Peer Gynt and Lau­rence Olivi­er as the Troll King and a but­ton-moul­der, below. Also above, you can watch John turn instruc­tions for using an oven (yes, that dai­ly appli­ance) into song.

via metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Elton John Sings His Clas­sic Hit ‘Your Song’ Through the Years

Tom Pet­ty Takes You Inside His Song­writ­ing Craft

Enjoy a Blue­grass Per­for­mance of Elton John’s 1972 Hit, “Rock­et Man”

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on March 20 for the sec­ond install­ment of Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain at The Tank. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Maya Angelou’s Secret to Living Your Best Life

in Life, Literature | February 28th, 2018

Humans are proud of ratio­nal­i­ty, maybe to a fault. It can come at a sig­nif­i­cant cost: the ten­den­cy to over­com­pli­cate the sim­plest of tasks, not the least being the task of life itself. Trea­tise after trea­tise, dis­course after dis­course, book after book, lec­ture after lec­ture appears over the cen­turies, promis­ing to show us how to live the good life. We strug­gle, amidst the hun­dreds of oth­er oper­a­tions we must per­form at any giv­en time, to remem­ber com­plex eth­i­cal sys­tems in the moment, to incor­po­rate new pos­tures and rou­tines.

Per­haps this is why we have mys­tics and poets, to cut through the tan­gles of log­i­cal thought, to remind us of the unchang­ing essen­tials: Rumi and Rilke, William Blake, Emi­ly Dick­in­son, and Maya Angelou, who daz­zled read­ers and audi­ences with advice both elo­quent and plain­spo­ken, tran­scen­dent and imma­nent­ly down-to-earth. Angelou’s impas­sioned, warm deliv­ery and hard-won wis­dom made her an excel­lent spokesper­son for some uni­ver­sal truths that get glossed over or explained away in the scram­ble to improve and enrich our­selves, such as the advice she gives on Oprah’s OWN net­work, above: “Just do right.”

We might recoil at the seem­ing naiveté: “who is right?,” “what is right?,” “how does any­one know what is right?,” “what if your right is my wrong?” etc. All rea­son­able ques­tions up for rea­son­able debate. But Angelou isn’t inter­est­ed here in phi­los­o­phy but in life. “Just do right” speaks to a deep­er part of us, the part we col­lo­qui­al­ly call a con­science, though maybe no such thing appears in an fMRI scan. “Just do right,” she says, and you pret­ty much know what that is. “You don’t real­ly have to ask any­body,” she says. “The truth is, right may not be expe­di­ent, it may not be prof­itable, but it will sat­is­fy your soul. It brings you the kind of pro­tec­tion that body­guards can’t give you.”

Com­pas­sion, a clean con­science, a good rep­u­ta­tion: this is the stuff of the good life, dis­tilled down to its essence, at the heart of Greek, Roman, African, Chi­nese, Indi­an, Native Amer­i­can, and every oth­er world phi­los­o­phy and reli­gion. We may find no more a suc­cinct uni­ver­sal encour­age­ment, and warn­ing, than in Angelou’s advice:

Try to live your life in a way that you will not regret years of use­less virtue and iner­tia and timid­i­ty…. You make your own choic­es… pick up the bat­tle and make it a bet­ter world, just where you are.

This wis­dom requires no high the­o­ry and is avail­able to every­one free of charge—find out how you can make things bet­ter in your com­mu­ni­ty, stop ago­niz­ing over pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and mon­ey, and “just do right” right where you are. If this sounds too easy or too hard, lis­ten to Angelou describe in brief what it takes in the clip above, and why “courage is the most impor­tant of the virtues.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Maya Angelou Reads Her Poem “On the Pulse of Morn­ing” (1993) 

Maya Angelou Tells Studs Terkel How She Learned to Count Cards & Hus­tle in a New Ani­mat­ed Video

What is the Good Life? Pla­to, Aris­to­tle, Niet­zsche, & Kant’s Ideas in 4 Ani­mat­ed Videos

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Hear Rick Wakeman’s Musical Adaptation of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, “One of Prog Rock’s Crowning Achievements”

in Literature, Music | February 27th, 2018

So unfash­ion­able for so long, pro­gres­sive rock has late­ly come in for a re-eval­u­a­tion. The qual­i­ties that cur­rent music crit­ics have come to appre­ci­ate — often the very same ones that both­ered so many of their col­leagues in the 1970s — include its tech­ni­cal vir­tu­os­i­ty, its com­po­si­tion­al inven­tive­ness, its sheer per­for­ma­tive unabashed­ness, and its will­ing­ness to draw from oth­er forms of art, espe­cial­ly lit­er­a­ture. Or lit­er­a­ture of a cer­tain kind, any­way: hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured prog-rock adap­ta­tions of Isaac Asi­mov’s I, Robot by the Alan Par­sons Project, George Orwell’s 1984 by Rick Wake­man, and H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds by Jeff Wayne, today we give you Jules Verne’s Jour­ney to the Cen­tre of the Earth as adapt­ed by Wake­man in 1974.

You can lis­ten to the album, which All Music Guide’s Mike DeGagne calls “one of pro­gres­sive rock­’s crown­ing achieve­ments,” on Spo­ti­fy (and if you don’t have Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, you can down­load it here). “With the help of the Lon­don Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra and the Eng­lish Cham­ber Choir, Rick Wake­man turns this clas­sic Jules Verne tale into an excit­ing and sus­pense­ful instru­men­tal nar­ra­tive,” using not just his own Ham­mond organ and Moog syn­the­siz­er but Blow-Up star David Hem­mings’ recita­tion of Verne’s words as well.

“Record­ed at Lon­don’s Roy­al Fes­ti­val Hall, the tale of a group of explor­ers who wan­der into the fan­tas­tic liv­ing world that exists in the Earth­’s core is told musi­cal­ly through Wake­man’s syn­the­sized the­atrics and enriched by the haunt­ing vocals of a cham­ber choir.”

Wake­man’s Jour­ney to the Cen­tre of the Earth demon­strates what not just Verne’s sub­ter­ranean explor­ers but all the best prog-rock­ers have in spades: ambi­tion. And though the work evi­dences deep famil­iar­i­ty with the nov­el on Wake­man’s part, you need­n’t have read a page of Verne — nor of the recent books attempt­ing to bring prog-rock to respectabil­i­ty — to enjoy it.  You don’t even need to take it seri­ous­ly, as one All Music Guide user-review­er, present as a wide-eyed teenag­er at the Roy­al Fes­ti­val Record­ing, adds: “It was all very avant garde and I felt quite sophis­ti­cat­ed as a 16-year-old attend­ing the show with smart kids who use to sit around crossed legged on the floor lis­ten­ing to Dark Side Of The Moon.” For him, the album now pro­vides “a view back to the oh so earnest days of grandiose prog-rock and for that rea­son alone it can be seen as some­thing it nev­er was at the time… fun!”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Prog-Rock Adap­ta­tion of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds: The 1978 Rock Opera That Sold 15 Mil­lion Copies World­wide

Rick Wakeman’s Prog-Rock Opera Adap­ta­tion of George Orwell’s 1984

Hear The Alan Par­son Project’s Prog-Rock Inter­pre­ta­tion of Isaac Asimov’s, I Robot (1977)

The Great Leonard Nimoy Reads H.G. Wells’ Sem­i­nal Sci-Fi Nov­el The War of the Worlds

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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