Where the King Loses It (But Gets Some of It Back)

Shakespeare's Play a Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of my favorite Shakespeare plays, now. I knew nothing at all about this play until very recently, and am surprised to learn it's as popular as it is. Never was taught in any classes I took...

But it should be. It's more fun than most of his plays, and reasonably comprehensible without much assistance--more than many.

Somewhere between romance and myth, we a king who, like Othello, doesn't believe in his wife's faithfulness (though she is absolutely faithful), and everyone suffers, especially his wife and son, but much of the harm is undone by the end, including an Ovid-like metamorphosis that repairs the worst of it. (The son and everyone on the ship remain dead, unfortunately.) Some of it is like tragedy, and fairly realistic, but the statue of his wife returning to life is pure fantasy or myth, and that's cool. It would have been fun to see performed.

The common trope of this time (from Shakespeare to Austen and almost to our time) that a noble young man in love with a beautiful girl--peasant, servant, or, as in this case, a shepherdess--is absolutely NOT to think about marrying her; but if that girl turns out to be a lost princess (which, of course, she must be, or she wouldn't be beautiful, right?) then all is well. Marry away! Nobody is bothered by the fact that nothing actually changed about the girl--if she was worth marrying as a princess, she should have been worth marrying as a shepherdess, because she was the same either way. But I can't change the minds of people long dead.

Anyway, I like a happy ending, and this one will do. If we had seen a bit more of Perdita being amazing and sweet in the middle, someone worth infuriating a king for, in act III or act IV, I would have liked it a bit better. She doesn't get enough time on stage to suit me. Still, 4 stars for the first couple acts and the last one. Good fun.

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Where Imogen's Play Is Named after Her Dad

Cymbeline by William Shakespeare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm not angling for any hot takes or anything, but Cymbeline has become my new favorite Shakespeare play. I liked it. I enjoyed reading it. I would like to see it performed.

And I'm maybe the only one.

First of all, it's a very entertaining story, based mostly on one of the tales from the Decameron, where a dude bets a guy he could seduce his love and then cheats (lies and produces stolen evidence) to prove that he did it. Then the supposedly-injured man despises his love... and after that, hijinks ensue. Lots of "kill her!" and "No, second thought, don't kill her!" and "Oh no, I hope you didn't actually kill her!" Also: lots of people in disguise and lots of secrets coming out.

A subplot is about the courtier falsely accused of treason who is banished 20 years before the start of the play; he kidnaps the two princes and raises them in the wilderness, just in time to enter the story as noble young Aragorn types.

Then there's the evil queen stirring up shit between the Britons and the Romans, along with her evil son.

Altogether, it makes a pretty good Romance-style story, one that could have been 500 pages of beautiful prose from the pen of Sir Walter Scott. And best of all--for me, because this is what I like--it's a comedy with a happy ending. Imagine Othello, but where he learns the truth BEFORE he kills Desdemona, and instead of murdered wife and murderer husband they live happily ever after. (Don't @ me. I taught that play many years in school and I contemplated changing the ending every time. Don't kill that sweet woman! Stop! Horrible ending.)

(Jesus, Grandpa! What did you read me this thing for?)

I was curious to see if others took to the play like I did, and it doesn't look like it, but it's hard to say. In numerous articles purporting to list the "best" plays in order (which is not what I was looking for, but I peeked), Cymbeline ends up in the middle, or a bit closer to the end. In the one article I found listing "most popular" plays, which actually measured whether people knew it or not, it ends up second to last, just ahead of Pericles. (Which I also liked, btw.) Neither answered the question of what people like. Most people don't know it because it's seldom used in classrooms; scholars don't rank it very high because they don't like fun things. But that doesn't really tell us what regular people (which I think I am, thank you) *would* think of the play if they saw it or read it.

I think they'd like it.

Recommended

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Where I Went and Had All the Emotions

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am and have been a Charles Dickens resister. Studied English in college; became an English teacher; read lots of books by lots of people; and had never finished a Dickens book until a few years ago. I didn't like the way he wrote and I didn't like his stories.

Until I did. And I really liked David Copperfield.

You have to have patience when you read Dickens. He has his way of getting to the point and working out the plot. If you don't have time for patience, like I didn't most of my life, it's tough going. But with more time for old books, my perspective has changed.

Dickens will give you sweet young women--here we have Agnes. She's adorable and impossible not to love. He gives you odd and creepy villains--here we have Uriah Deep, the creepy, insinuating, false manipulator, and Steerforth, who seems like a good guy but really disapoints. He gives you characters of deep moral conviction--here we have his old nurse and Mr. Peggotty. He gives you odd peripheral characters--here we have his great aunt and Mr. Dick, who are both a bit off but likable, and the Micawbers, who also have their failings but turn out to be important to the story and good friends to David. And you usually have at least one hard-working, humble young man, who in this case is the protagonist, but we also have his friend Tommy Traddles.

I was surprised to learn that some high schools use David Copperfield. As much as I like the book, that is (IMO) a bad idea. There is so much to get through (that patience I was talking about) to reach the good parts and the scenes that matter and the scenes that are any fun that most students would be exhausted with the effort before they got through it. Besides the difficulty of the style and the elevated language, there are cultural differences (for American students) that need to be explained in practically every page, and every one of those adds to the complexity that would make the instruction a bit like hacking your way through the wilderness.

Having said that--for someone approaching the novel voluntarily, with no pressure and no expectations, it can be great fun. I plan to see the Dev Patel adaptation and wanted to read the book first, and I am glad I did. I was emotionally invested, engaged with the characters, eager to see how it all turned out, and satisfied with the ending. Good stuff.

And to that young woman English major in a couple of my English classes at Queen's University in Kingston back around 1985, the one who always carried a copy of some Dickens book or another and wanted to talk about it: I wish I remembered your name so I could tell you that it was one particular image--you with a big old paperback copy of The Old Curiosity Shop, actually--that inspired me to try again until I saw something of what you saw. Here's to you, wherever you are! :)

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