Right Angle: Backstage (05-05-2020)

I love Jabberwocky! It always reminds me of a silly poem my grandfather would recite to make me and my brother laugh when we were kids. You can sing it to half of O, Suzanna, too.

It doesn’t involve nonsense words, but every line contains an element that contradicts itself, and it ends in the second half with a phenomenal series of puns:

It was midnight on the ocean
Not a streetcar was in sight.
The sun was shining brightly
And it rained all day that night.

It was a summer night in winter
And the rain was snowing fast
While a barefoot boy with shoes on
Stood sitting in the grass.

The rain was pouring down,
The moon was shining bright,
And everything that you could see
Was hidden out of sight.

The cows were making cowlicks
The bells were ringing wet
The bumblebees were making bums
And smoking cigarettes

It was evening, and the rising sun
Was setting in the West.
The little fishies in the trees
Were huddled in their nests.

The man behind the counter
Was a lady old and gray
Who used to peddle shoestrings
On the road to Mandalay

He stepped into a stable
And came out a little hoarse
So he jumped upon his golfstick
And he rode around the course

“Good evening sir,” the woman said
Her eyes were dry with tears
As she put her head between her feet
And stood that way for years

Her children, six, were orphans,
Except one tiny tot;
He lived inside a big, old house
Upon a vacant lot

While the organ peeled potatoes
Lard was rendered by the choir.
While the Sexton wrung the dishrag
Someone set the church on fire.

“Holy smoke!” the preacher shouted.
In the rain he lost his hair.
Now his head resembles Heaven,
For there is no parting there.

I just taught the Scottish Play to my AP class. There’s so much more there than most people realize.

Nature goes haywire in the kingdom because M and Lady M don’t commit a crime, they commit a sin. Crime is what happens when your actions reject man’s order. Sin is what happens when your actions reject the divine order.

They each reject their own nature (Lady M most explicitly…”unsex me here … That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose … Come to my woman’s breasts, And take my milk for gall”)

Her rejection of her feminine nature (and the androgyny of the witches) makes for interesting discussions of “nature” vis-à-vis modern sensibilities regarding trans people, to say the least.

On top of it, Shakespeare encodes elements of his moderately concealed Catholicism throughout (he does the same with Hamlet) when he has M walk the audience through the fact that he is about to satisfy all three requirements for mortal sin, and even when he comes to regret what he has done, he has no remedy because there is no sacrament of confession available to him in the play (Claudius has the same thing happen to him). It’s a lightly concealed subversion of the claims of the Established Church.

The play is regarded as so twisted it cannot be named because nature is subverted in so many places throughout.

Then, to top it all off, we must remember the context of its premiere. Lady M can be seen as a criticism of Elizabeth I, and the play (one of his later plays) was performed for the first time for her successor, James I, in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot and the king’s reneging on his promises of tolerance for Catholics. It’s a play about the murder of a Scottish king played before a Scottish king in the wake of a massive murder plot…and it’s told through the eyes of the murderer!