goneril-and-regan

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Now Always Snow

like snow the Lord is all there is when all there is is snow when the soul is all there is

the snows the soul and light but still just this that there are those like death is all there is

to know that they are even here darkness is also part of light when the snows come again Oh-God-Again-The-Snows as maybe all that is to come

but there is no way to know for sure as corpses do and do not exist

--Gennadiy Aygi

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Hello, do you have a very pretty, old copy of Shakespeare's complete works? I imagine you should. If you don't, Santa should give you one. Oh, and, unrelated (I just read about this last night and thought of you among other huge fans of Shakespeare I know of) did you know there was a secret copy of Shakespeare's complete works on Robben Island that inmates including Nelson Mandela read and marked their favourite lines in? It shows the power and reach of Shakespeare's work. I love you blog. Bye!

Thank you, Anonymous! I don’t own a particularly old copy of the complete works, but I make good use of The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile. The story of the Robben Island Shakespeare is beautiful and inspiring, and it was very much on my mind following Nelson Mandela’s death. I blogged about it here just about a year ago. The Folger Library website has some wonderfully detailed information on the history of the book.

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The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicit, in a love-cause. Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club; yet he did what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have lived many a fair year, though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont and being taken with the cramp was drowned and the foolish coroners of that age found it was ‘Hero of Sestos.’ But these are all lies: men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act IV, Scene I

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The Wine of St. Martin's Day

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What’s the point of fighting the dollars when all you need is a warm bed?

Anne Sexton

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Shakespeare gives us golden apples in silver dishes. We get, indeed, the silver dishes by studying his works; but, unfortunately, we have only potatoes to put into them.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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October 25th of this year marks the centennial of twentieth-century American poet John Barryman, whose works earned him a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award,

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Sext: Have you any eyes? Do you know what a man is? Is not birth, beauty, good shape, discourse, manhood, learning, gentleness, virtue, youth, liberality, and such like, the spice and salt that season a man?

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Chaucer at the Court of Edward III

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'O heart,' as the goodly saying is, 'O heart, heavy heart, why sigh'st thou without breaking?' where he answers again, 'Because thou canst not ease thy smart by friendship nor by speaking.' There was never a truer rhyme. Let us cast away nothing, for we may live to have need of such a verse...

Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Act IV, Scene IV

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Marx speaks of the reproduction of the worker, but he speaks of it in a way that is very peculiar. For Marx, reproduction of the worker occurs through the wage, and through the acquisition by means of the wage of commodities. The worker consumes the commodities. He basically uses the paycheck to buy food and clothing, and then consumes this commodity and reproduces himself. Well, there’s no trace of any other work in the picture that Marx presents. I’ve always explained this phenomenon, arguing at the time that Marx was writing it’s a moment in the development of industrial capital where there is maximum employment of women, particularly younger women, in the factories. Perhaps Marx saw this female workforce industrialized and in the first phase of industrial development when he was writing reproductive work was extremely reduced; this is one explanation I give for his misunderstanding. But clearly, a lot more is necessary for the day-to-day and generational reproduction of the labor force. Starting with 1860, this is work that was definitively assigned to women. By the turn of the century and later with World War One, there’s a concerted production of the housewife and domestic work becomes the object of a science. It’s a science that is taught in schools to every girl, and there is an ideological campaign deployed to turn the home into a center of production and reproduction of the workforce. The argument that domestic labor is essential to the process of valorization of capital has a very strong historical foundation.

Silvia Federici x

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The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free. I choke on the taste of bread in North America, but the taste of hunger in North America is poisoning me.

Adrienne Rich

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Historically, manuscript recipe collections descend from medieval books of secrets (collections of treasured medical, alchemical, or trade recipes) written in Latin and circulated among an elite readership. The chief of feasts for Richard II who compiled a set of royal recipes in Forme of Cury (or Manner of Cookery) is credited with authoring the first receipt book in English in 1390. Culinary cookbooks later go into print with the anonymous publication of This is the Boke of Cokery in 1500, and the genre of printed cookbooks (often written by men and aimed at a female audience) and household manuals (sometimes containing medical and culinary recipes) became increasingly popular in England in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Alongside this flourishing print culture in which male-authored recipe books and household 'how-to' manuals were popular bestsellers, women circulated their recipes exclusively in manuscript until the middle of the seventeenth century.

Michelle M. Dowd, Genre and Women's Life Writing in Early Modern England

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Market Scene (1569), Pieter Aertsen

“One woman makes a din, two women a lot of trouble, three an annual market, four a quarrel, five an army, and against six the Devil himself has no weapon.”

—  from a book of proverbs, published in Antwerp, 1568

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When Viola gives Feste a coin in Twelfth Night, he begs another: 'I would play Lord Pandarus of Phrygia, sir, to bring a Cressida to this Troilus....' (III.i.51-52). Feste's remark makes explicit what is in Troilus and Cressida a perhaps surprising subtext: Shakespeare's play about the long-gone Heroic Age is obsessed with decidedly contemporary, mercantile issues of currency, trade, and valuation. More specifically, both its principal female characters are coded as public yardsticks of value who, like Malynes's publica mensura, money, are nevertheless themselves subject to revaluation in the course of foreign exchange. The play's concern with value has attracted considerable attention from scholars, who have often viewed Shakespeare as offering a proplectic Hobbesian vision of market economy. Troilus and Cressida's ruminations on value, however, couched in the contradictory terms of pathological discourse torn between exogenous and endogenous etiologies of disease, resonate much more closely with the language, concerns, and confusions of Malyne's Canker of England's Commonwealth.

Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare's England

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Troilus You have bereft me of all words, lady.

Pandarus Words pay no debts, give her deeds: but she'll bereave you o' the deeds too, if she call your activity in question.

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And suddenly; where injury of chance Puts back leave-taking, justles roughly by All time of pause, rudely beguiles our lips Of all rejoindure, forcibly prevents Our lock'd embrasures, strangles our dear vows Even in the birth of our own labouring breath: We two, that with so many thousand sighs Did buy each other, must poorly sell ourselves With the rude brevity and discharge of one. Injurious time now with a robber's haste Crams his rich thievery up, he knows not how: As many farewells as be stars in heaven, With distinct breath and consign'd kisses to them, He fumbles up into a loose adieu, And scants us with a single famish'd kiss, Distasted with the salt of broken tears.

--Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Act IV, Scene IV