Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
I am 100% convinced that “exit, pursued by a bear” is a reference to some popular 1590s meme that we’ll never be able to understand because that one play is the only surviving example of it.
Seriously, we’ll never figure it out. I’ll wager trying to understand “exit, pursued by a bear” with the text of The Winter’s Tale as our primary source is like trying to understand loss.jpg when all you have access to is a single overcompressed JPEG of a third-generation memetic mutation that mashes it up with YMCA and “gun” - there’s this whole twitching Frankensteinian mass of cultural context we just don’t have any way of getting at.
no, but this is why people do the boring archival work! because we think we do know why “exit, pursued by a bear” exists, now, and we figured it out by looking at ships manifests of the era -
it’s also why there was a revival of the unattributed and at the time probably rather out of fashion mucedorus at the globe in 1610 (the same year as the winter’s tale), and why ben jonson wrote a chariot pulled by bears into his court masque oberon, performed on new year’s day of 1611.
we think the answer is polar bears.
no, seriously! in late 1609 the explorer jonas poole captured two polar bear cubs in greenland and brought them home to england, where they were purchased by the beargarden, the go-to place in elizabethan london for bear-baiting and other ‘animal sports.’ it was at the time run by edward alleyn (yes, the actor) and his father-in-law philip henslowe (him of the admiral’s men and that diary we are all so very grateful for), and would have been very close, if not next to, the globe theatre.
of course, polar bear cubs are too little and adorable for baiting, even to the bloodthirsty tudor audience, aren’t they? so, what to do with the little bundles of fur until they’re too big to be harmless? well, if there’s anything we know about the playwrights and theatre professionals of the time, it’s that they knew how to make money and draw in audiences. and the spectacle of a too-small-to-be-dangerous-yet-but-still-real-live-and-totally-WHITE-bear? what good entertainment businessman is going to turn down that opportunity?
and, voila, we have a death-by-bear for the unfortunate antigonus, thereby freeing up paulina to be coupled off with camillo in the final scene, just as the comedic conventions of the time would expect.
you’re telling me it was an ACTUAL BEAR
every time I think to myself “history can’t possibly get any more bananas” I realize or am made to realize that I am badly mistaken
i can’t stop fucking thinking about my english prof talking about the queer historical significance of the word “sweet” as a deliberate indicator of homosexual love and how that relates to both edward ii and gaveston, as well as hamlet and horatio. so, because shakespeare was likely totally knowledgeable about codes that queer men were using (cos like duh obvs), the inclusion of “sweet prince” at the end of hamlet is in all likelihood a completely deliberate indication that hamlet and horatio were in love
i’m???? so gay for literature and history lmao
my good sweet honey lord????
@lilybaud You and I are on exactly the same page lmao
(Robin assured me this would be funny, so blame her if it’s a dud.)
Juliet: “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?”
Romeo: “Hey! I’m actually right here, under your balcony.”
Juliet: “Oh! Hey, cool, that’s… not actually what I was asking, though.”
Romeo: “But you said ‘wherefore am I’…?”
Juliet: “Well, ‘wherefore’ actually means ‘why’, so when I say, ‘wherefore art though, Romeo?’ what I’m actually saying is ‘why do you have to be a Montague?’ It’s a rhetorical question.”
Romeo: “It’s a what?”
Juliet: “…at least you’re pretty.”
First of all, I apologize for this post being a bit late. I was JUST ABOUT to upload it when the internet at my house cut out. This should not have been a surprise, given all the various technical difficulties in the US yesterday…
Anyways… today’s comic deals with one of the more interesting topics in contemporary Shakespeare studies: Original Pronunciation!
O.P. and the amazing ways in which it has been reconstructed, deserve a lot more space than six stick-figure comic panels, but hey, barbarically reducing things of great literary and scholarly merit to their bare bones is kind of my “thing”. At the very least, now you know that when Hamlet tries to rhyme “move” and “love”, it’s not actually him pretending to be mad.
The super-linguist in question is David Crystal, whose praises I repeatedly sung. In his O.P. endeavors he has been ably assisted by his son, Ben Crystal, an actor who, armed with Shakespeare’s O.P., can make the prologue of Romeo and Juliet sound sexier and more piratical than you could have ever imagined. If you don’t believe, just take a listen:
Seriously. That’s gorgeous. Here’s a longer video, featuring Papa Crystal and Ben at the Globe:
It’s easy to get snobbish about Shakespeare and to believe it works only when performed in the elegantly trained received pronunciation of an Ian McKellen or a Benedict Cumberbatch. But, as the Crystals point out, received pronunciation is even further away from Shakespeare’s original accent than American are from it.
Shakespeare can be performed in any accent. English, Welsh, Scottish, American, Canadian, Singaporean, I don’t care. His words still have immense power. However, when you hear it spoken in O.P., you really get a sense of what it must have been like for those first groundlings at the first Globe Theatre.
So, this old post has picked up about 700 new notes in the past couple days, which makes me happy because the world needs (a) more appreciation of OP, and (b) more appreciation of the Magnificent Linguistic Crystals. Here, let me add on a couple more links:
Passion in Practice - Theatre company founded by Ben Crystal, does awesome OP productions. Or at least I assume they’re awesome, but they haven’t come on tour to Michigan yet. What’s up with that, Ben?
Original Pronunciation - Site run by the Crystals, including tons of great resources for people who want to learn OP.
@ahsimwithsake … I would like Shakespeare to be read to in original pronunciation for like all the days.
Anonymous: I know it's fashionable to hate shakespeare for being a white cis male shitlord but calling his work trashy just displays your ignorance. there are reasons he still gets studied in school hundreds of years later. the man basically invented the english language as we speak it today.
In my opinion, the greatest disservice anyone can do to his work is to elevate it to some kind of highbrow high art literary thing. The reason he’s studied today is that his plays endured (plus or minus some changes in fashion over the centuries), and the reason his plays endured is because they were popular, and the reason his plays were popular is because he crammed them full of stuff that people wanted; i.e., lots of jokes focusing on the less refined features of the human anatomy and the things they get up to.
Perhaps you’ve had it explained to you that Hamlet’s talk of “country matters” was an uncouth pun, and his reply in the same conversation of “nothing” was a similar reference. Did you think that was a one-off thing?
If you’re aware that “nothing” was a euphemism for the vulva in Shakespeare’s England, have you ever stopped to marvel at the sheer audacity, the sheer brass somethings that a man would have to have to name a play Much Ado About Nothing?
Translate that into modern-modern English, and you’d get something like Everybody’s Up In Arms About Pussy. Though you’d lose the pun on “nothing/noting” in doing so… yes, that’s how far from highbrow Shakespeare is. He made the title of his play a triple pun.
And yes, Much Ado is not one of the Bard’s more serious works to begin with… but then, what is? We divide Shakespeare’s plays up into tragedies and comedies based on the dramatic convention of which ones have a happy ending versus a sad one, but they are all comedies in the modern sense of “things you go to expecting to laugh”. The country/nothing lines come from Hamlet. Heck, Hamlet is hilarious throughout. Any scene with Polonius in it is guaranteed to be comedy gold.
Of course, the people who want to call Shakespeare highbrow are probably the people who quote him in all blustering sincerity when he says “to thine own self be true”… or funnier still, when they paraphrase him as saying that “brevity is the soul of wit”.
Of course, hands down, my favorite bit in Hamlet is when he’s giving instructions to the players that basically amount to William Shakespeare pre-emptively bringing up every stereotype of Serious Shakespearean Acting we have today and saying, “This. This thing. Do not do this thing.”
Anyway, let’s talk about the idea that he “invented the English language”; e.g., he created so many hundreds of new words. Okay, well, first of all, we don’t know how many he invented. We just know there are words and usages of words for which the texts of his plays are the earliest surviving example. The thing is, all those words evidently made sense to his audience.
There’s a post that goes around Tumblr listing some of the words credited to Shakespeare, and one of them is “elbow”. The commentary attached to this post basically boggles over the idea that nobody in the English world had a name for “the bendy part of an arm” until an actor gets up on stage and says “elbow”, and everybody’s like, “Oh, yeah, that’s what it is.”
Except it didn’t happen like that. The noun elbow isn’t what is attributed to Shakespeare; the verb to elbow(as in “elbowing someone aside”) is. His character took a noun and used it to describe an action. That’s not a highbrow creation of language as some sort of received wisdom handed down from authority. That’s naturalistic language use.
Even if he was the first person to describe the act of “elbowing someone”, it caught on because it worked, because it made sense to vernacular speakers of English.
So many of his words fit this model: they are butchered foreign words, they are slangy applications of English words, they are colorful metaphors or synecdoches. In short, he was writing in what we call “Buffyspeak”. If he had an unusual talent for doing it memorably, it still ultimately worked because it reflected the language of the time.
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head; I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks; I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound; I grant I never saw a goddess go My mistress when she walks treads on the ground. And yet by heaven I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.
Are you fucking kidding me? Like, no, Shakespeare wouldn’t tweet a sonnet cause 140 characters is a bit short for that. Wrong medium. But you know what he would have? A very active twitter FULL OF DICK PUNS AND YOUR MOM JOKES okay. (And probably also a blog for the sonnets and longer works, that cross-posts links to twitter anyway.)
Get out of here with that pretentious anti-technology bullshit.
He’d rock the fuck out of memes. Don’t deny it.
Exit, pursued by a doge.
much run wow
I don’t understand people who try to make Shakespeare into a pretentious thing cause he was basically an uneducated dick-joke making dude for the common masses. His historical plays are straight up fanfiction. There’s a scene in Macbeth where two guards are having a conversation as a dude pees on a wall. Get out of here with your Shakespeare snobbery.
ALL OF THIS
Also, the comment ‘Exit, pursued by a doge’ alone makes this worth reblogging :D
Heck, the line that’s based on, “Exit, pursued by bear”, only exists because Shakespeare couldn’t think of any other way to get rid of the character, so opted to have him attacked by a bear, which did not exist in the play before that moment.
He literally made a bear appear out of thin air, just to kill off a character, purely due to writer’s block.
“And then the bear gets him”
“…
…
The
The bear?”
“Yes the bear”
“Will
Will there isn’t a bear in this play
Where did the bear come from”
“A PLACE
And he exits the play pursued by it
It’s happening make me a bear costume”
“it’s happening make me a bear costume” lmao
Shakespeare even wrote Yo Mama jokes, like this delight from Titus Andronicus.
CHIRON: Thou has undone our mother. AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
