Willow's Magpie Contest

SONG: “BEAUTIFUL CREAMER”
(To the tune of Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer”)



Beautiful creamer, pour in my cup.
I need lots of coffee to really wake up.
Sounds of the rude world are heard in the street;
There’s ache in my head and pain in my feet.
So pour, old friend creamer, queen of my song,
But not all that much cream; I like it strong!
This morning you’re used, as you should be, for cream,
But later today – well, I have a dream.
After you’re empty I’ll fill you with beer.
Bright future for you: a whole new career!

Laid-Back Shakespeare #3

Here's today's Shakespeare trivia. I'll call this: "Will's Kids."



William Shakespeare had three children: his first-born was a girl. It was on Sunday, the 26th of May, 1583, that Will’s daughter Susanna was christened.

She may well have been the apple of his eye. After her death her epitaph said she was “Witty above her sex,” and a local writer, years later, described her in this wise: “Something of Shakespeare was in her.”

Less than two years later Anne Hathaway Shakespeare gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. So Will’s family was complete. He hadn’t yet made it to the age of twenty-one and he had acquired a wife and three kids.

(By the way, the picture above is not of the Shakespeare children; as you may have guessed, there is no picture of them. This is as close as I could come to one.)

Susanna may have been a lively, witty girl, but she settled down. She married John Hall, the most successful doctor in town. She would have had to settle down because Hall was a solid, no-nonsense Puritan.

Which makes all the more strange the events of 1613.

There was a local neerdowell in town, one John Lane, who had been in all kinds of trouble: he had been sued for riot and drunkenness and for having libeled various aldermen. You couldn’t go around libeling aldermen. Well, this character Lane told folks that the respectable Mrs. Susanna Hall had “the running of the reins (kidneys),” which was his indelicate way of claiming that she had gonorrhea.

He went further; he also claimed that she had been “naught” with a local hatter, Ralph Smith. “Naught,” in that time and in that context didn’t mean “nothing.” It meant “had screwed around with.”

Lively Susanna fought back. She sued Lane for slander.

In some ways, Stratford was a small town. Rumors of a scandalous nature were quick to circulate; it was important to quash them immediately. Susanna quashed effectively. John Lane didn’t show up at the trial and as a result he was excommunicated.

That may not seem like much to us, but in that society it was solid punishment. At any rate, Susanna had her reputation restored. At the back of my mind as I read of this event I had to wonder: was Susanna angry because someone thought she would have extra-marital sex, or that someone thought she would have extra-marital sex with a hatter? :-)

Will’s other two kids, the twins, were named Judith and Hamnet.

Judith had the misfortune to marry a guy pretty much like John Lane: Thomas Quiney. Will Shakespeare didn’t like this son-in-law at all. He had made another woman pregnant while courting Judith, which caused problems because soon after the marriage the woman died, along with her infant – a huge scandal. Quiney was brought before the court for “whoredom and uncleanness.” The marriage was off to a great start.

Will’s only son was named Hamnet. The natural conclusion would be that this name had something to do with the play “Hamlet,” but it seems that it didn’t. The boy (and his twin sister) were named after Will’s close, life-long friends, Hamnet and Judith Sadler.

It’s a sad fact that the playwright’s only son died at the age of eleven. How did Will react to his son’s death? He may have expressed his feelings when he wrote these powerful lines.

“Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts.”

The 50-Franc Brouhaha

Years ago, I had a wonderful assignment from the Cognac Producers of France.



I was to produce a promotional film on their part of the country, the Charente region, which had been making and distributing cognac for a couple of centuries.
A few decades ago the financial situation in France was quite different from what it is today; things were very cheap. Also, no one had ever heard of a Euro.



A prominent part of that region is the city of Royan, a beach resort, so I decided to use that place as my base of operations. Since it was summer, this allowed me to bring my wife and two kids; I went off to work in the morning and they got to spend the day at the beach.



Ah, those halcyon days and nights…

To get back to business, wherever I went on film assignments, I tried to hire local talent. There was always need for a young person or two, high-school age, to help carry stuff around, etc. I was never quite sure what I should pay such folks.

I was told in Royan that ten dollars a day would be adequate for such unskilled labor, so I hired a kid for that amount. The second day on the job he told me his father wanted to talk to me.

I had felt all along that ten bucks a day was not really enough; now I was going to get a lecture from this boy’s father about rich Americans refusing to pay a decent wage to French labor.

I went to the boy’s home; his father was seated in the living-room, waiting for me with a grim look on his face. Seated next to him were several other gentlemen who later turned out to be his neighbors and friends who were there to offer their moral support in what they evidently regarded as a difficult situation.

I hadn’t realized that my ten clams a day was going to turn into such a federal case. I began by explaining that if the amount of money was the problem…

Of course the amount of money was the problem! answered the dad. Ten dollars then was 50 francs. It was unheard-of for an unskilled teenager to be paid 50 francs a day, so everyone in that neighborhood thought there must be something immoral, something degenerate, going on, and they had held a special neighborhood meeting to discuss it.

It took me a moment or two to understand: at ten bucks a day I was overpaying the kid. I then told them that I was neither immoral nor degenerate, or at least not degenerate, and I had been told that 50 francs would be the right amount to pay for such work. I would be happy to reduce that to, say, 25 francs (there was a howl from the kid, who was standing in the background), if they preferred.

They seemed to be pleased that I had a wife and two children, who were with me on this project. I managed to convince them that there was no hanky-panky going on, though I can’t remember now what French term I used for “hanky-panky.”

So the 50-franc salary turned out to be okay. We all became good friends after that, and even joined in a toast – with cognac – to Franco-American relations.

Laid-Back Shakespeare #2

Here’s today’s serving of Shakespeare trivia.



There are a number of reasons why I’m forced to believe that the marriage of Will Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway was not a happy one. First off, of course, is that it was of the shotgun variety.

But there’s this, too. Usually, in the sixteenth century, when people from the provinces traveled to London and were successful in an art or profession, it was normal that they brought their family to the Big City so they all could live together.



Shakespeare never did. The above is his home, and he did travel home from time to time – it was a two-day trip – but Anne and the children stayed in Stratford. Will lived in a variety of lodgings in or around London.



Yes, he lived in London, but he didn’t write much about the city; he usually wrote about the countryside, especially about places like towns in Warwickshire where he was born and where he had been raised.

One of the most interesting examples of his life as a boarder was when he lived with a French family named Mountjoy.



The religious wars were then in full swing: the Catholics annihilated Protestants on the Continent and the English Protestants, just to show they could give as good as they got, slaughtered Catholics in England. Amazing battles, when you think of it. They were all Christians, they all believed in the same God and they were all religious, but some worshipped one way, some another, and that was all that was needed to inspire them to massacre each other.

So there were a lot of Huguenots – i.e., French Protestant refugees – in London in Shakespeare’s day.

It seems that Our Will lived with the Protestant Mountjoys like one of the family. This led to an interesting legal brouhaha in which he was involved. It gives us a fascinating glimpse into his private life in London.

The businessman Mountjoy had an apprentice named Stephen Belott, who married Mountjoy’s daughter, and it was Shakespeare who sort of arranged the marriage. So far so good.

But Belott later claimed that he never received the dowry that had been promised: he said he was supposed to get 60 pounds and also to receive an inheritance of 200 pounds on Mountjoy’s death.

What is of interest to us is that Belott claimed that all this had been told to him by William Shakespeare when he lived there.

So Will was summoned to court. He admitted he had encouraged the boy to marry the girl because Mountjoy had asked him to. (One gets the feeling as he testifies that he doesn’t want to get overly mixed up in this; he’d rather not take sides too strongly one way or another.) He told the court he didn’t remember the amount of the dowry and had never heard of the inheritance.

The court’s legal decision: both Mountjoy and Belott were criticized, but Belott was awarded a token payment.

As far as history can tell us, Mountjoy never paid it. :-)

Shakespeare knew French; it’s possible he learned a lot of it while boarding with the Mountjoy family. He uses a lot of French in the plays and there’s a wonderful scene in “Henry V” – read it if you haven’t already read it – where the French Princess, knowing she’s destined to become Mrs. Henry V, has an English lesson with her lady-in-waiting. She tries hard to learn the English words of her lesson and the clever bit is that, as she triumphantly announces that she finally knows them all, she manages to get them all a little wrong.

It’s a great scene.

Laid-Back Shakespeare

Today I’d like to begin a regular feature on this blog.

My hobby is Shakespeare. So every once in a while I’d like to write about the Bard of Avon’s life and times, the Elizabethan era, the plays, with little nuggets of information – odd, whimsical, whatever – that we might call Shakespeare trivia.



I’d like to avoid the serious approach, the heavily didactic; in other words, the boring stuff. Instead, I’d like this to be an entertaining series of posts that will be informal and relaxed, and, I hope, of interest to everyone.

(You don’t have to take notes; none of this will be on the final. :-D)

For example, here’s an odd nugget just to get the ball rolling. I’ll call it “That Whatley Girl.”

In a recent post, we were talking about young Will Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway. But there’s a mystery about that marriage that has had scholars puzzled for a couple of centuries. When the clerk of the court wrote out the license, he gave the bride’s name as “Anne Whatley.” Her name – she’s known as the Second Anne – appears there and nowhere else.

Could it be that the clerk was just careless or incompetent? That he had meant to write “Hathaway” but it had been a long day and he was tired? Because it’s a fact that the mistake, if it was a mistake, was corrected and the marriage that finally did take place was definitely between Will S. and Anne Hathaway; she was his wife and the mother of his children.



So novelists have made up a True Romances story; it would make a good TV soap. In their scenario, Teenager Will had as his true love the beautiful Anne Whatley (they might have looked like the couple above); she was the girl he wanted to marry. He went so far as to make application for the marriage with the clerk of the court.
But the Hathaway family, not to mention his own family, told Will that was out of the question. The Hathaway Anne was visibly pregnant and he was responsible so he could just forget about that other Anne, the Whatley girl – who wasn’t even from Stratford.



So Will had to forget about his true love.

Well, that’s the story. It’s all pure speculation, but it makes for a more interesting scenario than the one about the clerk of the court who simply had a bad day and mistakenly wrote down the wrong name.

An Old Guy Buys New Pants

I’ll bet you’ve done it, too, many times.

I’m filling out a form on my computer. The form wants to know my name, address, eccentric, eccentric. No problem; I type in the required information.

What’s strange is that when I come to the bit where they ask what state I reside in, something odd happens. If they’d permit me to just type it in, as I have written everything else, I’d write “CT” for Connecticut and be well on my way to the next part of the form.

My estimate is that it would take me approximately 3/8 of a second to type “CT,” but they’re not going to allow that.

No, I must click on a special gizmo there on the screen, something that would never have existed back in those halcyon, pre-digital, pre-internet days. Clicking on this thing suddenly turns it into a long list of states – good heavens, there must be nearly fifty of ‘em – and you must search out yours on the list. Mind you, it’s not hard. I can locate CT on that list with no trouble. It’s just that an action that would have taken 3/8 of a second if they’d let me type it in takes five times longer under this new system.

Again, it’s not all that difficult; it’s just symbolic of our way of life today: things that are supposed to make things better often wind up making things – well, “worse” might be too strong a word.



For example, I worked in film production for years. I remember what an experience it was then for a movie-goer to watch a great picture like “Lawrence in Arabia” in huge, wide-screen form. The high degree of clear detail in that film was an important part of its success.

Today you can watch such magnificent productions on gizmos that have screens the size of postage stamps – forget about detail. Progress.

Another case in point.

I’m standing in line at the cashier’s desk at Sears. I have just selected something for purchase: new socks. I have been standing there for quite a while. The reason for the delay is that there’s an old guy who has been trying to buy a pair of pants and he and the cashier are in the middle of a lengthy discussion. What kind of card – credit or debit – is he using, and why is it constantly rejected when they slide it through the slot?

I refer to the gentleman as “an old guy.” Not very nice on my part – I’m not exactly in the first flush of youth myself – but I believe his age is important. It would appear that he’s an example of a typical citoyen seigneur of our time who is having problems with this new-fangled digital age.



Some years ago that elderly chap would have handed a couple of bills to the cashier, taken his pants and left the store. And I wouldn’t have been standing there for three or four hours. (I have a tendency to exaggerate.)

The debating couple have now reached a new point in their fascinating discussion: the cashier has asked to see his driver’s license. (This can’t be good, I think to myself.) Naturally, the mature fellow has one; he just can’t find it at the moment – a lot of searching through pockets goes on.

Well, long story short, when I finally emerge from the store with my new lightweight summer socks the summer has ended and there’s a feeling of winter in the air, so maybe I should go back and stand in line for a heavier pair. :-D

The Face Lift

Everyone in Hollywood is having cosmetic surgery done; why not my blog?

I’ve only been involved in this blogging thing for a couple of months, but I got tired of that old home page of mine. It had a sort of generic, almost government-issue feel to it.

So I decided to go for a face lift.

What do you think?

Blockblusters

I like the intro to the blog of The Kid in the Front Row:
“I don’t really care how much the latest superhero film took in at the box office. When I watch a film the main thing I am looking for is a good story.”

But “Super” motion pictures certainly sell. “Titanic” made more money than any other film in history, a nice round number of $1,842,879,955 worldwide. A billion eight; that’s a genuine, authentic blockbuster.



"Titanic” won all kinds of awards and prizes, and deserved them – for the special effects.

But the story was trite, formulaic and predictable; the directing was obvious and heavy-handed; the acting was broad, unsubtle and undistinguished.

But you can’t argue with that box office. A billion eight – that’s more than I make in a week!



And how about that earlier masterpiece, “Pearl Harbor”? As one reviewer put it: “It’s nothing more than 40 minutes of showoff stunts padded with more than two hours of a story that exceeds all known tolerance levels for sappiness.”

Another wrote: “Never have so many spent so much for so little.”



Now we’ve got “Avatar.” Same deal. Fantastic effects. Fantastically expensive production. Will win fantastic awards. And it’s on its way to being the most lucrative movie ever made.

But that story…?

I realize I may be holding an unpopular position, but I have to agree with the critic who wrote of “Avatar”: “Everything about the story, the setting, the dialog, and the parts that aren't purely visual, is awful.”

Or this one: “If you want to go to the movies and see nothing more than new breeds of alien creatures, weapons, plant life and spacecraft, and lots of things blowing up, then you’ll probably have a ball. But if you’re looking for something more – like a story or believable characters or artistry – I’d suggest seeking elsewhere.”

With any film, don’t you care about the story, just a little, too?