Shakespeare, French, and a miscellany

I am reading a book I am liking enormously. It's pretty mainstream lit crit, if it can even be called that. Literary biography, really. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt. The method -- of weighing both the hard archival evidence, which is scanty, and piecing it out with likely might-have-beens based on other contemporary archival evidence of people Shakespeare very likely knew, and then measuring both against textual evidence and especially metaphor in his plays -- I like very, very well.

And as for the language -- OH, I like the language. I always have. The first time I ever read a word of Shakespeare, which was when I was 10, on a family vacation and most likely in Québec, having another life-changing experience, that of encountering French, I was immediately drawn in. I read The Tempest, which is now not a play I like very much at all, but at age ten it gripped me, and I drew pictures of Ariel and Miranda and Prospero in my journal, the first diary I ever owned, or wrote in, the summer after I'd first found it.

Then, I must have loved the imagery, to draw it... but I can't believe I didn't also read it aloud to myself in the car, tasting the words. They're so amazing, spoken aloud. They're the verbal equivalent of physical drunkenness. Dizzying wordplay and delight in metaphor, oh, man, I love it.

One of the stranger experiences I had in that regard was when those two verbal worlds -- my desire for French and my love of well-made and fashioned English -- collided: when I worked in the Northwestern University Library, shelving ("Stack Control", we were called) on all my high school vacations, I found a whole shelf of French translations of Shakespeare. God, they were awful. Awful. Leaden and plodding and bereft of everything that makes Shakespeare amazing. The strange thing -- and maybe this only speaks of my hard-to-eradicate linguistic chauvinism... -- is that I've read English translations of, for example, Molière, and thought they were excellent. And they were verse translations of drama written in verse. I can't explain it. I tend to feel like French verse can be enjoyed for itself best in French, but to be able to enjoy it in English if it is a good translation. Not in terms of how it SOUNDS, no, but in terms of its sentiment and ideas. Not its imagery. But I've rarely seen English transformed into French that I liked very well at all. Maybe it's just also an indicator of the fact that English is my native language, however good my French has gotten.

So, this biography is really enjoyable. I like textual readings anyway, trying to imagine what elements of a life make it into fiction, or to extrapolate from fiction, biography. I am also utterly enamored of the Elizabethan period, the late Tudor period. Greenblatt does a good job of analyzing what makes it compelling and also alien, of looking at the material basis for the rise of capitalism, and also the interweaving of religion and politics. I had never considered the Catholic/Protestant struggle as a context for Shakespeare before, but it makes good sense, particularly as Greenblatt describes Shakespeare's possible brush with those politics, and quick evolution away from a personal engagement with either of them.

In other news... ugh, I have a cold, a horrible head-stuffing head cold that is making me feel cloudy and tired and out of it. Yechh.

I love this job still, by the way. Love it. It is so strange to feel pleased to be on my way to work every morning. I made the disastrous mistake of trying to teach stuff that is too coneptually difficult for elementary students last week... I reasoned that yeah, *I* hadn't been exposed to verbs in their rote-memorized form until I'd had a year of the ephemera under my belt -- colors and numbers and letters and days of the week and months of the year, etc... but that these kids are being really good at that, and quick, so why couldn't we just start with être, avoir, and aller? Ummm, no. I can't wait until the East Bay Foreign Language Project starts, this year, so I can get some ideas for how to begin incorporating grammar other than simple memorized sentences that use one form of a verb...

Is there any other news? I haven't been writing much, I know. And this is hardly a scintillating entry, though I excuse myself on account of my head. Hmmm. I'm also enjoying my college history survey class -- the section of US History to 1865 that I'm teaching online. I manage to keep up with it, week by week, and sometimes the discussions are interesting. I set them a question for a journal entry two weeks ago (when we were on the reasons for the American Revolution) that asked them to read not only their chapter but the text of the Declaration of Independence, and to consider both sides of the colonists' protests -- how was their destruction of private property (the Boston Tea Party) and violence (treatment of various tax collectors etc) viewed by the lawful authorities, as well as by the patriots? How would people who wanted political change NOW, and used similar tactics, be treated under the Patriot Act? Could such actions -- could revolution -- be justified NOW, as it was then, and as it is a right declared by Jefferson in the Declaration (which, for that reason alone is not part of the legal framework of the United States)? I got answers as varied as "this country has fallen away from God, and as Jefferson clearly invokes God all the time in the Declaration, obviously he wasn't in favor of the separation of church and state, and neither should we be... right now the United States is engaging in leading a new revolution, in Iraq" to "a revolution today in the United States would be stamped on ruthlessly just as the British attempted to crush the American rebellion, but a revolution in the United States seems more and more necessary when we look at how the government has acted in invading Iraq and in business corruption." Both of those answers have been paraphrased slightly. Both come from rural Missouri.