Macbeth? Meet Barry. Barry—Macbeth . . . How the Dark Comedy Barry uses Shakespeare Successfully

“Chapter Five: Do Your Job.” By Ben Smith. Perf. Bill Hader, Sarah Goldberg, D'Arcy Carden, and Henry Winkler. Dir. Hiro Murai. Barry. Season 1, episode 5. HBO. 22 April 2018. DVD. Studio Distribution Services, 2018.

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Barry is a dark comedy about a hit man who decides that he'd rather pursue a career in acting. Unfortunately, he's caught up in such a complicated web of alliances and promises that he is unable to break away from his former profession.

It's not a show I can recommend wholehearted. It starts dark—darker than Harold and Maude or Better off Dead, but not as dark as Fargo. Perhaps it's on the level of What We Do in the Shadows at first. But as the episodes progress—and even more so as the seasons advance—it gets darker and darker and, for some viewers (yours truly among them), the humor suffers from diminishing returns until it's all but absent.

The language also seems to grow more frequent and coarser as the show develops. Oh, and it also gets more and more bloody and more and more violent.

With all those caveats, I'm sure you're wondering why I'm bringing Barry to Bardfilm at all. But you know the answer already, don't you? It's the Shakespeare.

More specifically, it's the Macbeth. I'd like to trace how Macbeth is used over three episodes of Barry's first season.

In "Chapter Five: Do Your Job," we explore a developing relationship between Barry and an ambitious actor named Sally. They're both part of an acting class taught by Gene Cousineau (played brilliantly by Henry Winkler). Mr. Cousineau is something of a charlatan, but he has some charisma, and he's able to get results from some of his student. Barry (played brilliantly by Bill Hader) and Sally (played brilliantly by Sarah Goldberg) have been put into a group performing a scene from Macbeth—and Sally is immediately disappointed that Natalie (played brilliantly by D'Arcy Carden) has been cast in a bigger role. Oh, and hanging over the entire enterprise is the sudden and unexplained murder of a fellow student. Barry became interested in acting when he followed a man he was hired to kill to the class. He makes the hit, but the police investigations are becoming worrisome.

In the clip below, I'm talking you into the world of the show in general and then to the student working on Act V, scene i—the sleepwalking scene. As they work, they start to talk about the significance of the scene, and that eventually touches a nerve with Barry. Let's take a look. Note: I've censored the profanity, but use caution: You may still be able to lip read some of the words.

I'm very fond of Natalie's reading of Lady Macbeth. Here's my phonetic spelling of her speech:

Out, damned spot! Out, I say! One—two—why then ’tis time to doot . . . . What, will these hands ne’er be clean? No more of that, [o] lord, no more oh that. (V.i.35–36, 43–44)

I also like just how obviously (and obliviously) ambitious Sally is. Readers who are actors doubtless have someone they know who is just like that (and it may even be themselves).

I also like the discussion afterwords. The students' argument is that the sleepwalking scene demonstrates Lady Macbeth's (and, by extension, Macbeth's) guilt. "Once you start killing, you can never go back," one student says. 

Barry takes the stance that Macbeth was just doing what Lady Macbeth told him to do, and therefore there's a possibility for redemption for Macbeth. Barry, after all, has been killing people because he's been ordered to, and he's trying to quit that job and move forward. The students protest, pushing Barry into the outburst you saw above. Forgive me for not telling you that when Barry says that he's killed people when he was ordered two, he means it on one level—his job as a hit man—but also on another—his military service. I didn't tell you so that you could have the same reactions as many of the students. Mr. Cousineau knows about Barry's military service, but most of the students only learn about it after Barry's outburst.

At the end of the scene, Barry is left considering whether Mr. Cousineau is right that he, like Macbeth, is irredeemable.

This, in my opinion, is the ideal use of Shakespeare in a modern medium. It is not tacked on and ultimately irrelevant. They're not doing a scene from Shakespeare just because they're actors and that's what actors do. They're doing a scene because they're actors and that's what actors do—but the scene is deeply revelatory of other concerns the show is addressing.

It's also deeply funny. Mr. Cousineau's inadequate thanks to Barry for his service (and Natalie's muttered "Thank you, Barry") are disturbingly hilarious.

And it's also ideal because it doesn't stop there. The next episode provides us with a bit more.

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“Chapter Six: Listen With Your Ears, React With Your Face.” By Emily Heller. Perf. Bill Hader, Sarah Goldberg, D'Arcy Carden, and Henry Winkler. Dir. Hiro Murai. Barry. Season 1, episode 5. HBO. 29 April 2018. DVD. Studio Distribution Services, 2018.

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In "Chapter Six: Listen With Your Ears, React With Your Face," work on Macbeth continues. Barry is desperate to be an actor, but he's distracted by the complicated life he's living. He's also not quite getting it.

In the clip below, we have two scenes. In the first, the ambitious Sally has achieved her goal of taking the role of Lady Macbeth from Natalie. But working with Barry is proving difficult. In the second scene, Sally presents an idea to Mr. Cousineau that will change everything.

In the first scene, I love Sally's "I'm acting my heart out, but my acting partner is a disaster, but what are you going to do?" look. I love Mr. Cousineau's condescending questions that are designed to get Barry to think about his scene. And I love his "Stay out of this" delivered to Sally. And I love Barry's "I—I feel like I am listening ’cause that's why I know when to say my lines." 

In the second scene, I'm very fond of Sally's ambitious plan and Mr. Cousineau's skepticism about it. We also have a wonderful seed planted: Barry will play Seyton, who has one line in the middle of Macbeth's (and Macbeth's) most famous soliloquy.

In terms of doing something with Shakespeare and not just tacking it on, this episodes Shakespeare scenes, though limited, are significant. Sally, an ambitious actor who wants to make her name in Hollywood, has just been dropped by an agent, and she's willing to do nearly anything to achieve her ambitions. Sally has been playing the role of a likewise ambitious woman—but now her ambitious leads her into the role of an (arguably) more ambitious man. The use of the material is smart and subtle.

We get even more smart, subtle Shakespeare in the next episode.

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“Chapter Seven: Loud, Fast, and Keep Going.” By Liz Sarnoff. Perf. Bill Hader, Sarah Goldberg, D'Arcy Carden, and Henry Winkler. Dir. Alec Berg. Barry. Season 1, episode 5. HBO. 6 May 2018. DVD. Studio Distribution Services, 2018.

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The culmination of all this sophisticated, significant, layered Shakespeare comes in "Chapter Seven: Loud, Fast, and Keep Going." And this clip is the one most in need of a content advisory.

Barry's non-acting life is getting increasingly complicated. Chris, an old Army buddy of Barry's, joined him in a hit (I'm oversimplifying, I know, but most of you will appreciate it, I promise you), but he's feeling a need to turn himself in. Barry is worried that Chris' doing so will implicate him—just as he finally thinks he's free of the murder profession and on his way to becoming an actor.

His other life is also making its way into the theatre. The actor he killed at the beginning of the season is now suspected of being part of the mob, and an actual member of a drug cartel was chased away from the theatre and shot by the officer investigating the actor's murder. But Barry seems even more upset at the other news Sally gives him: That she's now playing Macbeth, and Barry has a new line.

The first half of the clip below shows the difficulty Barry is having with that new line. Let me give you some context for it. It's Act V, scene v. Macbeth is in Dunsinane castle, but he's surrounded. He hears "A cry within of women" (V.v.7.s.d) and asks Seyton, "What is that noise?" (V.v.7). Seyton, having read the stage direction, says, "It is the cry of women, my good lord" (V.v.8) and exits.

I have almost forgot the taste of fears.

the time has been, my senses would have cool'd

To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair

Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir

As life were in't. I have supped full with horrors;

Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,

Cannot once start me. (V.i.9–15) 

At that point, Seyton re-enters, and Macbeth asks, "Wherefore was that cry?" (V.v.15)—note that all the Barry versions of this scene cut that line. Seyton's reply is at the core of Barry's use of Macbeth:

The Queen, my lord, is dead. (V.v.16)

Macbeth delivers this speech at that point:

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing. (V.17–28)

I told you that (as my Grandmother Jones used to say) to tell you this. All that will prepare you well for the first part of the clip below. In working through those speeches (especially Barry's "The Queen, my lord, is dead), we have a lot of humor mixed with the tension of Barry's non-acting life getting closer and closer to his theatrical life. When Sally delivers Barry's clue, Barry's on the phone with his Army buddy. When, after Sally loudly repeats his clue, he finally says, "I gotta go" and enters, he muffs his line: "My Queen, the lord . . . my lord, the Queen is dead," explaining "I just got the line" when an exasperated Sally exits. We then get a cautionary tale about how Mr. Cousineau, unfortunately on drugs at the time, was able to bring in a thirty-seven-minute Long Day's Journey into Night.

The second part of the clip takes the plot in a very dark direction indeed. 

After rehearsal, Barry meets up with his friend from their military days and, once again, tries to persuade him not to turn himself in. But Chris is adamant, though he's also reluctant to put Barry in danger.  Barry sees no other way out than to kill him and make it look like a suicide. I'm not including that scene in the clip below (apart from one brief flashback that does not show a gunshot or a corpse), but a content warning is still not out of place. 

We'll see the various actors getting ready for the performance of "Gene Cousineau Presents . . . A Festival of Shakespeare." We'll see the audience gathering, and we'll learn that an important agent is in attendance. We'll find out that Barry hasn't show up and that Sally is desperately anxious that she won't get a chance to get the agent's attention.

Then we'll see Barry on his way to the theatre after having murdered his friend and made it look like a suicide. When he finally arrives at the theatre, he's completely out of it ("I'm supposed to wear a costume?"), but he almost listens when Sally begs him to "just give me something to work with" when he delivers his one line.

Backstage, waiting for his cue, Barry is muttering his line to himself. As usual, it's incorrect, but it's not as incorrect as it could be: He's saying "My lord, the Queen is dead" instead of "The Queen, my lord, is dead" (V.v.16). But as he's doing that, his brain is full of images of his Army friend and his Army friend's happy family and his Army friend's wife happily answering an ordinary phone call and getting the news that her husband has committed suicide. And his imagination of the funeral. And the phone call. And the wife collapsing in grief.

Then Barry enters and delivers his one line.

I wanted to prepare you for most of that (especially the troubling images that run through Barry's mind backstage). But I wanted you to experience some of it for yourself. I didn't mention the "Alapse, Poor Yorick" bit or the "I'm the agent who will demonstrate that he's impressed by looking up from his cell phone. That's also why I didn't mention the dream sequence where Barry imagines one version of his delivering the line. That version is pretty much devoid of subtext. Everything is delivered as straight as possible (including an overdone American Actor Doing The British Accent). And Barry seems quite pleased with his performance.

It's there as a foil to the actual performance. When Barry delivers his line, his mind is full of how someone might react to the sudden news of the death of a dearly-beloved spouse. I've never seen the line delivered with much more than "Here's some bad news so that you can deliver the "Tomorrow and" speech. But here, there's genuine anguish in the line. And that one line—"It's only one line, Barry"—unlocks a deeper, more meaningful delivery of the "Tomorrow" speech.

Then there's that terrific moment of dark humor where Sally says, "Whatever you did tonight to get to that place, that's your new process, okay? All you have to do is do that every time." And we're left with a Barry who is thinking over the process that got him to deliver that line in that way.

Barry uses Macbeth to find extraordinary depth in both its characters and in Shakespeare. Since the show is about actors, it could all have been on the "Alapse, poor Yorick" side. Instead, Shakespeare is brilliantly layered over and under the concerns of the show, expanding what can be done with Shakespeare in surprising and significant ways. 

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The Show at IMDB.

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Book Note: Mrs. Caliban

Ingalls, Rachel. Mrs. Caliban. 1983. New York: New Directions, 2017.

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I can't recall precisely how this book came to my attention, but it's likely to have been in a list of Shakespeare-related fiction. But the title was irresistible—Mrs. Caliban promises much—and I gave it a try.

In terms of the Shakespearean content, I was disappointed. But the novel itself is intriguing. I teach a course called "Humor Lit." and this would fit right in. Simon Critchley, who wrote a very approachable book entitled On Humor, would have much to say about the disquieting, disorienting humor of Mrs. Caliban.

The novel tells the story of Mrs. Dorothy [No Last Name Given], a woman living a somewhat stereotypical suburban life in the 1960s or 1970s. In her grief over her son's recent death and her own even-more-recent miscarriage, in her bewilderment and pain at an affair she suspects her husband of carrying on, and in her boredom with her routine existance, she starts to go off the rails a bit. She seems to hear voices coming from the radio—voices that are directed at her personally but that no one else can hear.

Among these are some strange news alerts about the escape of the subject of a scientific study—a huge, amphibious monster called "Aquarius the Monsterman." But these reports seems to be accurate (as far as they go). It's left ambiguous whether we're moving further into our protagnoist's delusions or if the novel is presenting this as reality.

Either way, that's where we find the most direct connection to Shakespeare. Aquarius comes into Dorothy's kitchen while she's preparing a meal for her husband and his guests. We'll pick up there:

Dorothy protects Larry—in fact, they almost immediately start a romantic (in every sense of the word) relationship. I think this is where the title comes into play. Although many on-line sources assume that Dorothy's married name is Mrs. Dorothy Caliban, the word "Caliban" appears nowhere in the novel. She's never referred to as Mrs. [Anything]—just as Dorothy. But her allegiances are clearly wholly with Larry from the beginning of their romantic relationship. 

In The Tempest, Caliban makes a point of one thing he has learned from Prospero since Prospero usurped him (as Caliban thinks) as rule of the island: "You taught me language" (I.ii.363). But he also mentions the use he intends to put to that acquired skill: "And my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse" (I.iii.363–64).

Larry was also taught human speech, but with a pedagogy that is unlikely to receive PTA approval:

There's nothing more particularly Tempest-like in the rest of the novel. Dorothy is unhappy in her marriage to a man whom she suspects of having an affair and who is extremely inattentive, but she falls in love with Larry, a being somewhat like Caliban from Shakespeare's play. But even without more extensive ties to Shakespeare, the novel is well worth reading.

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Shakespeare in FoxTrot's His Code Name Was The Fox

Amend, Bill. His Code Name Was The Fox. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2002.

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I've written about one comic from this volume before (for which, q.v.), but that was 2012, and this is 2024. I didn't have specific bibliographic information for the comic at that point, and I also didn't have the other Shakespeare-related comic in the volume.

But now, thanks to FoxTrot Fridays at Bardfilm, we can revisit it with that helpful additional material.

First, the comic I already covered:

Ha, ha!  Great stuff that.

And we also have Paige putting all her previous Shakespeare experience to good work—or at least trying to do so:

Come back on a nearby Friday for Shakespeare-related comic from the next chronological volume of FoxTrot!

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Book Note: Fahrenheit 451

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

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I mentioned before that I was reading or re-reading many of the works of Ray Bradbury. I wasn't reading them with a specific eye to Shakespeare, but he seemed almost inevitably to make his way in.

In Fahrenheit 451, I found a fair bit more Shakespeare than I expected. But I suppose there’s quite enough radical or subversive or even offensive material in Shakespeare to make his works catch the eye of any fireman worth his salt.

For this rest of this post, I’m going to assume a basic knowledge of the plot and characters of the novel. If you’re unfamiliar with Fahrenheit 451, I’ll wait while you grab a copy and read it through. Even if you take your time (which you should), it won’t take long.

The first Shakespeare reference comes when Captain Beatty provides a brief history of the firemen as something of a pep talk to Guy Montag when he seems to be suffering from cold feet:

It's terrifying to imagine a world where a one-page Hamlet is all people think you need. But Shakespeare does inspire thought—and independent thought is certainly dangerous.

Beatty's speech constrains Montage for a while, but only for a while. Later, when Montag more or less makes up his mind to find out what uses books might have and realizes that he needs a guide or a teacher if he's to answer that question with any kind of thoroughness, he remembers a man named Faber that he met by chance one day:

Montag decides to give the professor a call to ask about, among other things, Shakespeare: 

Later, as he attempts to make a plan with Professor Faber to return the world to the state it was in before book burning took over, the professor talks about actors unable to play Shakespeare and how they might become part of a proposed underground:

Unfortunately, this vision isn't fuffilled within the covers of Fahrenheit 451.

It's not long before Beatty finds out that Montag has been hiding books.  He talks him round, and Montag hands over a book. We get an adapted  Shakespeare quote at that point (and some Donne):

The first quote is a modified version of a quote from As You Like It—it’s what Jacques says on the entrance of Touchstone and Audrey: “Here comes a pair of very strange beasts which in all tongues are called fools” (V.iv.9–10). The second quote is from the end of John Donne’s “The Triple Fool.”

A bit later, a torrent of allusions and quotations comes from Beatty (while Professor Faber listens in through an earpiece Montag is wearing):

It's hard to catch the teaspoons of Shakespeare in the midst of that firehose (sorry!) of literary allusions and quotations. We have, among other things, the Bible, Sir Philip Sidney, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Dekker. It's almost like one of T. S. Eliot's poems!

For everyone's convenience, here are the Shakespeare quotes, misquotes, and allusions:

"Nay, it is ten times true, for truth is truth / To th' end of reck'ning" is one thing Isabella says about the crimes Angelo has committed in Measure for Measure (V.i.45–46). 

"Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long" is from Launcelot Gobbo's exchange with his father in The Merchant of Venice (II.i.79).

"Oh God, he speaks only of his horse!" is a rough paraphrase of a line Portia speaks to Nerissa about one of her suitors: "he doth nothing but talk of his horse" (Merchant of Venice, I.ii.40–41). 

"The devil can cite scripture for his purpose" is what Antonio says to Bassanio about Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (I.iii.98). 

"A kind / Of excellent dumb discourse" is from The Tempest (III.iii.38–39): Alonso is speaking of some magical figures Prospero has conjured up to bring in a meal. Is the "Willie" at the end of Beatty's speech addressed to Shakespeare? Montag's first name is "Guy," not "William" after all. 

"All's well that is well in the end" might be a version of the title of the play All's Well that Ends Well or the titular line that appears twice in the play. Helena says, "All's well that ends well! still the fine's the crown; / What e'er the course, the end is the renown" (IV.iv.35–36); a little later, she says, "All's well that ends well yet, / Though time seem so adverse and means unfit" (V.i.25–26). But it could also be a skewed version of Julian of Norwich's mystical pronouncement "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."

I find it interesting that the imagined exchange between Montag and Beatty involves throwing quotes specifically from Merchant of Venice at each other.

More than that, we have an awful lot of famous quotes taken far out of context and put together in a way that is only roughly and somewhat incidentally meaningful. It underlines Montag's instinctual assumption that possession of texts is not enough—comprehension of them is another essential element.

We get one more quotation from Shakespeare in what turns out to be Beatty’s last speech.

The quote is from Julius Caesar—it's Brutus speaking to Cassius in Act IV, scene iii (lines 66 to 69, for those of you keeping score), when their backs are up against the wall and their hackles up against each other. Eventually, Cassius and Brutus reach an uneasy peace, but it's not so with Beatty and Montag. It's at this point that Montag thinks he might be able to burn right by burning one of the chief book burners of them all.

It ought to go without saying, but I'm worried that it doesn't: Bradbury demonstrates astonishing mastery in creating Beatty, who knows a huge number of bits and pieces of what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed and who uses them to overwhelm a novice—a freshman English major—a second-hand (but not second-rate) literateur.

At the end of Fahrenheit 451, we're left hoping for those actors Professor Faber spoke of to produce, by memorial reconstruction if by no other means, the complete works of Shakespeare, without which our lives would far more dystopian than not.

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More Macbeth in The Simpsons? Yes, please! And then let's talk about whether it should be “hoist with his own petar” or “hoist with his own petard” for a good long while.

“Funeral for a Fiend.” By Michael Price. Perf. Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, Harry Shearer, Hank Azaria, Kelsey Grammer, David Hyde Pierce, John Mahoney, and Keith Olbermann. Dir. Rob Oliver. The Simpsons. Season 19, episode 8. Fox. 25 November 2007.

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Careful readers will recollect that Bardfilm covered this Simpsons episode back in 2009 (for which, q.v.). Even more careful readers will have spotted that the link to the video clip there had expired.

When it came time to fix the error, I discovered that there was quite a lot more Shakespeare in the episode than I initially realized. Since 2009, I've assumed that the entirety of the Shakespeare had to do with wrapping up the "Sideshow Bob Tries to Kill Bart Yet Again" plot. Note: Spoiler Alert. That plot is wrapped up nicely when Lisa is able to thwart Sideshow Bob by pedantically correcting his misquoted line from Shakespeare. 

That's where the clip stopped in 2009 (and, for the sake of historical continuity, that's the end of the clip I restored to the earlier post). But there's more!

First, take a look. We'll talk afterwards.

The kicker to the first segment is that Sideshow Bob misquotes Shakespeare again (and is again corrected by Lisa)—and that's funny enough. But the Shakespeare continues.

At the trial of Sideshow Bob, we're introduced to his mother, the noted Shakespearean actress. And we have a lovely interlude where Lenny wonders whether the Shakespeare play Troilus and Cressida antedates or postdates the Toyota Cressida. Since Shakespeare wrote his play c. 1601–1602 and Toyota marketed its Cressida from 1976 to 1992, the play certainly has the prior claim.

[Side Note: I used to drive a 1972 Toyota Corona Mark II in the delightfully-named "Fire Opal" color; the Toyota Cressida was the renamed version of this model. Some people called the car I drove, for reasons unknown, "The Squidmobile," but in my mind, she was always "The Peaquod."]

With this information in mind, Lisa deduces that misquoting Shakespeare was but a ruse—a first layer to Sideshow Bob's complicated plot. 

[Side Note: Another layer is that Sideshow Bob's father was a doctor with knowledge of a drug that could simulate death (no doubt the constraint of time prevented making this connection to Romeo and Juliet overt instead of implied).]

And that's it, right?

Naturally not!

In the comments section on the ShakespeareGeek post that started all this (for which, q.v.), a user named "bardofile" suggests that Sideshow Bob is not only wrong about the preposition when he says "Hoist on his own petard" but that he should also have said "petar." Lisa, bardofile says, corrects the "on" to "with" but fails to correct the "petard" to "petar." 

First, if Sideshow Bob is still scheming by deliberately misquoting Shakespeare, he's offering Lisa two chance to correct him, but she only detects one. Right?

That depends on which edition of Hamlet Miss Hoover uses in her classroom. First, the line in question is only in the Second Quarto (1604–1605). It's not in the First Quarto (1603); nor is it in the Folio (1623). 

The "Hoist with his owne petar" line in Q2

If she's using the Riverside Complete Shakespeare, she'll find "petar"—but with a footnote that defines "petar" as "petard." If she's using the Norton (based on the Oxford), she'll find "Hoised with his own petard"—the line is indented and set in italic, which indicates that it's from Q2. But there's no note as to why they've used "Hoised" where Q2 clearly has "Hoist." David Bevington's seventh edition gives us "petard." The RSC second edition has "petard" (in a separate section where passages from Q2 that are not in F are supplied). The Bedford Shakespeare (based on the New Cambridge) has "petar" with a footnote that says "or 'petard.'" A glance at my long-cherished copy of the New Cambridge (for which, q.v.) confirms that it has "petar" but reveals that it has no explanatory note about it. 

That's a quick survey of the complete editions of Shakespeare I have handy, and I expect a similar variety would be found in single editions of the play.

But where can we go to get some explanation of how we got to the point where "petar" or "petard" seems to be equally viable? If Q2 says "petar," shouldn't we all just go with that?

As usual, Harold Jenkins (the editor of the Arden Shakespeare Second Series Hamlet) has something valuable to say. Here's his note:

First, we get some insight into why the Norton Shakespeare would say “hoised” instead of “hoist.” I expect we should have known that “hoised” is the simple past tense of “hoise,” the root verb from which both “hoised” and “hoist” come. But we also get the reason why Jenkins’ edition decides on “petard.” Q2 reads “petar,” but Jenkins considers that something of a typographical error. It’s there to guide us in the pronunciation of the word, but the actual noun is “petard,” and, for Jenkins, the change for a modern-spelling edition is as natural as changing “owne” in Q2 to “own.”

The most recent Arden edition (the third series version edited by Neil Taylor and Ann Thompson—the Q2 version, that is, not the one that contains the texts of Q1 and F but not of Q2) has just one thing to add:

They recap Jenkins’ reason for his choice—and then go on to point out something that Jenkins might have missed: the last word in the full line (“. . . Hoist with his own petard, an’t shall go hard . . .”) would rhyme with “petard” but not “petar.” I might point out that the editors only point out the internal rhyme without commenting on it themselves—but perhaps we’re ready to draw to a close.

Perhaps Lisa was right to point out the more obvious error rather than enter into a debate with Sideshow Bob over the relative merits of “petar” and “petard.”

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Links: The Film at IMDB.

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Shakespeare in FoxTrot's Encyclopedias Brown and White

Amend, Bill. Encyclopedias Brown and White. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2001.

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It's been a while since our last Friday FoxTrot. Fortuitously, Fortune's Fool we refuse to follow.

What can I say? It's the layout the requires a little fun filler here at the forefront.

But that's enough.

In Encyclopedias Brown and White, Bill Amend reunites the fighting foursome of Jason, Marcus, Phoebe, and Eileen.

There's only a bit of Shakespeare there, and it's once again in the form of a character quoting Sherlock Holmes (who was quoting Shakespeare). The line is "The game's afoot" (Henry V, III.i.32).

We're on more solid (too, too solid?) Shakespearean ground with this Macbeth-related comic in which Peter has evidently not done the required reading:

And we wrap things up with a non-specific Shakespeare reference involving Paige and her homework.

I'm having some fun of my own speculating about which play Paige is reading. It's unlikely to be Hamlet—"Who's there?" is its complete first sentence. Perhaps it's Henry V. That starts with two dense lines followed by a comma. But if we really want to give her a doozy of an opening sentence, we can imagine her reading Measure for Measure. If you have alternate suggestions, just add them to the comments!

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A Quick Line from Romeo and Juliet in a Friends Episode

“The One with the Screamer.” By Scott Silveri and Shana Goldberg-Meehan. Perf. Matt LeBlanc, Dina Meyer, and Reg Rogers. Dir. Peter Bonerz. Friends. Season 3, episode 22. NBC. 24 April 1997. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2003.

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Although our last post asserted that Bardfilm is not obsessed with completeness (tracking down all the Shakespeare in a given situation comedy, for example), that doesn't mean that we'll ignore the Shakespeare that comes our way.

For example, in a Friends episode that features Joey among his fellow actors, we get a brief quote from Romeo and Juliet. 

Here it is!  Note: Since the quote takes approximately three seconds, I've provided quite a bit of context for it. 

I appreciate how the director is quoting the line with such precision: He clearly is saying "A plague a' both your houses" instead of "A plague on both your houses." Despite the subtitles, that's exactly how the line is printed. It's likely that kind of peevish accuracy that brought him to this point.

Bonus Note: This episode aired the day after William Shakespeare's 433rd birthday!

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The Episode at IMDB

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Shakespeare Puts Joey to Sleep in Friends

“The One with the Donor.” By Andrew Reich and Ted Cohen. Perf. David Schwimmer and Matt LeBlanc. Dir. Ben Weiss. Friends. Season 9, episode 22. NBC. 8 May 2003. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2003.

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We at Bardfilm don't obsess about completeness. We don't feel the need to track down every Shakespeare allusion in, say, M*A*S*H or The Simpsons or Star Trek.

Well, we do feel that way about Star Trek, but perhaps Friends is a better example. It's a well-known show, and when a bit of Shakespeare comes to our attention, as sometimes happens when ShakespeareGeek happens to catch something randomly and decides to pass it on.

That's how we got to this late-in-the-run general reference to Shakespeare:

What play could Joey have been trying out for? If he's saying, "I mean, hey, Shakespeare, how about a chase scene once in a while?" it can't have been one of the exciting ones. Perhaps he was reading for the role of James Gurney in King John or something like that.

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Links: The Episode at IMDB.

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Book Note: The Two Noble Kinsmen

Shakespeare, William, and John Fletcher. The Two Noble Kinsmen. Ed. Lois Potter. Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997. Arden Shakespeare.

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Every ten years or so, I re-read The Two Noble Kinsmen. I first read it toward the end of my graduate work. I had a vague idea of writing my dissertation on madness in female characters in Shakespeare, and the play has one notable example.

It's also likely to be Shakespeare's last play, though not his last individually-authored play. 

It's also a good play with a lot of fun material, and it's also one of the few places where Chaucer serves as a major source: The plot of The Knight's Tale is the foundation of The Two Noble Kinsmen.

The setting is a war between Athens (led by Theseus—technically, he's the same Theseus from A Midsummer Night's Dream) and Thebes. During the war, Palamon and Arcite, two close friends fighting somewhat unwillingly but still honorably for Thebes, are captured and imprisoned.

The scene between the two of them is one of my favorites in the play. They pledge eternal loyalty to each other and are happy in prison because they're together in prison. When Palamon asks, "Is there record of any two that loved / Better than we do, Arcite?" (II.ii.12–13), Arcite replies "Sure there cannot" (II.ii.13).

And then . . . enter Emilia.

Palamon sees her first and falls immediately in love with her. Arcite sees her next and falls immediately in love with her. Then they get to argue comically about whose love should have the priority. Here's that scene:

It's all great, compelling material that sorts itself out through the rest of the play.

As that develops, we learn that the Jailer's Daughter (he's unnamed, and so is she) has fallen in love with Palamon—but when he fails to return her love, she goes mad. Act IV, scene iii shows us her madness and the plan for alleviating it:

There's more good, rich material there—including a rare (for Shakespeare) reference to barley-break (about which you can learn more here).

It's not the best play in the canon, but it's still quite interesting and quite readable. The scenes I like best are usually attributed to Fletcher—which makes sense if Fletcher is the up-and-coming new dramatist and Shakespeare is the author about to retire.

I recommend reading it—though once every ten years is sufficient. But let me know if you learn of a staging of the play! I'd love to see it in production.

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Overreaction to a New York Times Crossword Puzzle Clue

Sinclair, Sarah and Rafael Musa. "The Door's Open." New York Times Crossword Puzzle. Edited by Will Shortz. Friday, January 26, 2024. "Tricky Clues" note by Deb Amlen. 

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Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkins. 2nd. ed. London: Arden, 1982.

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Note: There will be a spoiler for four-across in this post. But you can see the clue and the blank space on the image to the right. Read on at your own risk.

I haven't been doing crossword puzzles for long, but, like far more seasoned puzzle-doers, I can already complain about the clues.

As you might suspect, I particularly revel in the not-infrequent Shakespeare clues. It's nice to find a balcony or a last word Hamlet utters or the occasional fool. But then there are the less-straightforward clues—the ones that border on the controversial or at least that require more explanation.

Such is the case with the clue for 4A in a recent puzzle: "The 'handsaw' in Hamlet's 'I know a hawk from a handsaw.'" And the answer, as you can see below, is "Heron."

The most reasonable response to this is, of course, "Huh?" And the explanation in the "Tricky Clues" section doesn't really help much:

At times like these, there are worse things to do than turn to Harold Jenkins' Arden edition of Hamlet. Here's his brief note on the line:

Being Jenkins, we also have a comprehensive LN (Long Note) that tells us more:

Thank you, Harold Jenkins! The "Tricky Clues" explanation made it seem like everyone should automatically know that when Hamlet says "handsaw," he really means "heron." It's more complicated than that.

And I agree with Jenkins' general reading that no such stretching is necessary. Putting the two terms into the same class (two kinds of birds or two kinds of tools) empties the phrase of its vitality and its import. Hamlet isn't saying that he can tell two very similar things apart ("I can tell the difference between a 200-thread-count and a 220-thread-count pillowcase" or "I can tell a 40-watt bulb from a 45-watt bulb"). That would give the spies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern too great a reason to watch him even more closely. Instead, he's saying he knows the difference between a mountain and a molehill or an elephant and an earwig—something that takes no special insight or intelligence. 

It reminds me of the people who insist that when Jesus says it's as easy for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven as it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, he isn't talking about a literal needle but about a very small gate called "the needle's eye." You could just get a camel through that gate if you unloaded it and did a lot of convincing and cajoling: it would be difficult, but not impossible. Interpreting it in that way takes away its power and its humor.

"I can tell a hawk from a handsaw"—I can tell the difference between a living, breathing, feathered bird found in the wild and an inanimate object found on a carpenter's workbench—says everything by saying nothing. Let's leave it with its power and humor. The answer to 4A should be "small saw."

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Links: The puzzle in the NYTimes archives.

Click here to purchase Harold Jenkins' edition of Hamlet from amazon.com
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Book Note: Double Falsehood: Or, The Distressed Lovers

Double Falsehood: Or, The Distressed Lovers. [By Lewis Theobald at the very least.] Ed. Brean Hammond. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010.

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After reading the Arden edition of Arden of Faversham, a play written early in Shakespeare's career with some possible Shakespeare connections (for which, q.v.), I thought it time to give a try to the Arden edition of Double Falsehood, a play that might have some connections to the late part of Shakespeare's career.

By way of overview, Double Falsehood was a play produced in 1727 by Lewis Theobald, one of the famous earlier editors of Shakespeare.  A year later, Theobald printed the play. Theobald said he had three separate manuscripts of a play by Shakespeare on which he based his play. Note that this doesn't mean that any of them were in Shakespeare's hand; "manuscript" just means hand-written rather than printed. The manuscripts are no longer extant. 

The long and short of my take is that the Arden edition of Double Falsehood is, with some qualifications, a marvelously scholarly edition of a simply dreadful play.

While reading through Brean Hammond's lengthy introduction and apparatus, which runs almost forty pages longer than the text of the play it introduces, I was struck by how nearly every point had a direct or indirect connection to the possibility of Shakespeare's authorship of the play. What echos of Shakespeare can we find in Double Falsehood?  Was Theobald a forger or deluded or deceived or genuine? What did Shakespeare know and when did he know it? And so on and on and on.

I know it doesn't sound like me, but I started wanted less about Shakespeare and more about the play itself.

And then I read the play itself—or re-read, really. I had read it once before, many years ago, in a different edition, had not thought much of it, and hadn't done any more with it. On this reading, I realized just how dull and uninspiring it is. The introduction talks about connections to Shakespeare because there's not much to say about the play itself.

What the edition has to say is mostly scholarly and interesting. By way of example, here are the first few pages. Showing them to you will provide the added benefit of a better and deeper introduction to the play and its questions than I can give.

That should catch us all up pretty well. Serious questions about the three manuscripts call the authenticity of the play we have into question; nonetheless, many scholars think that Theobald's Double Falsehood is a version of an original play written by William Shakespeare in collaboration with John Fletcher.

It's also generally accepted the The Two Noble Kinsmen is a collaborative effort by Shakespeare and Fletcher. That play was itself adapted by William Davenant in 1664 under the title The Rivals. And, as my Grandmother Jones used to day, I told you that to tell you this. That's where this edition makes a strange and irrelevant turn. The argument is that, with The Two Noble Kinsmen, we have the source material (Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight's Tale), the Shakespeare / Fletcher collaboration (The Two Noble Kinsmen), and a restoration adaptation (Davenant's Rivals):

We have, the Arden edition argues, a parallel with Double Falsehood:

Three of three steps are available when we think about The Two Noble Kinsmen; only two of three are available in the consideration of Double Falsehood. Yet we can (runs this edition's argument) use the relationship between The Knight's Tale,  The Two Noble Kinsmen, and The Rivals to speculate about the relationship between Don Quixote, Cardenio, and Double Falsehood.

Not to put too fine a point on it, that seems like nonsense. Imagine that we did not have any of the texts of Hamlet. We know its source, and we know an adaptation of the play. Can we determine anything about the missing play based on those points?

I know that my chart has even fewer points of comparison than that proposed by the Arden edition. But the analogy still seems neither relevant nor useful. But it does show the way this edition is grasping at any possible straw to try to find something Shakespearean in Theobald's play. Fortunately, the introduction doesn't spend too much time on that point.

The play itself doesn't have much to recommend it, but there are still some points of interest. Early in the play, the villainous Henriquez sets out to woo the non-aristocratic Violante. His speeches capture the character of the infatuated quite well:

Note, though, the note to I.iii.27.s.d.  The twice-repeated "Hmmmmm" there shows my skepticism in an attempt to find something Romeo and Juliet-ey hear.

When the villainous Henriquez next enters, he's worried that he has raped Violante. Setting aside that there is nothing to prepare the audience for any such action, it's interesting that Henriquez tries to argue that it wasn't rape—even though he admits that "she did not consent" (II.i.37–38) and that "she did resist" (II.i.38):

I would have liked more about that in the introduction—together with some commentary on the shifts from verse to prose and back again. It's rare for a character in Shakespeare to shift in mid-speech. Could this shift (one among many) be indicative of a distinction between Theobald and his source material?

Of equal interest are Violante's speeches after the rape:

A great weight of tragedy is encapsulated in those few brief lines.

Double Falsehood is not a very successful play, but there's a fair amount of interest in its Arden edition.

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