Jo Eva > Recent Status Updates

MACBETH
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.

LADY MACDUFF
Whither should I fly?
I have done no harm. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world, where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly. Why then, alas,
Do I put up that womanly defense
To say I have done no harm?

"Terror has denigrated into tedium, and only death can follow, either for Macbeth who lacks the season of all natures or for his lady who not only walks but talks when she should sleep, and who will not die holily in her bed.” - Dennis Abrams, The Play's The Thing

BIBLE BELT

It would be too bad if Jesus
Were to come back black.
There are so many churches
Where he could not pray
In the USA
Where entrance to Negroes,
No matter how sanctified,
Is denied,
Where race, not religion,
Is glorified.
But say it—
You may be
Crucified.

WESTMORELAND
Wherefore do you so ill translate yourself
Out of the speech of peace, that bears such grace,
Into the harsh and boist’rous tongue of war,
Turning your books to graves, your ink to blood,
Your pens to lances, and your tongue divine
To a loud trumpet and a point of war?

Cannot understand why the Hostess + Doll love Falstaff so much.

FALSTAFF I can get no remedy against this consumption
of the purse. Borrowing only lingers and lingers
it out, but the disease is incurable...

A good wit will make use of anything.
I will turn diseases to commodity.

"The problem of Falstaff himself cannot be separated from the problem of the fascination he exercises over us... Half his charm resides in the fact that he is what we long to be and are not: free. Hence our delight in projecting on him our frustrated longing for emancipation. " - Dennis Abrams

FALSTAFF
"Bardolph, am I not fallen away vilely since
this last action? Do I not bate? Do I not dwindle?"

HOTSPUR to his wife LADY PERCY
This evening must I leave you, gentle Kate.
I know you wise, but yet no farther wise
Than Harry Percy’s wife; constant you are,
But yet a woman...
Whither I go, thither shall you go too.
Today will I set forth, tomorrow you.

Shakespeare has written very similar marriages in the plays I have read of his so far this year. I wonder if modelled on similar conversations had with Anne.

"Until our century, a respectable woman kept her eyes modestly averted. Shakespeare legitimizes bold mobility of the female eye and identifies it with imagination. Rosalind’s eye is truly perceptive: it both sees and understands. Shakespeare’s great heroine unites multiplicity of gender, persona, word, eye, and thought.”

https://theplaystheblog.wordpress.com...

Rosalind:
A traveler! By my faith, you have great reason to be sad. I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men’s. Then to have seen much and to have nothing is to have rich eyes and poor hands.

Jaques:
Yes, I have gained my experience.

Rosalind:
And your experience makes you sad. I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad – and to travel for it too.

Of his loyal wife, dead from suicide:

BRUTUS
Speak no more of her.

Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men groaning for burial.

- Mark Antony

Katherine:
And speak I will. I am no child, no babe.
Your betters have endured me say my mind,
And if you cannot, best you stop your ears.
My tongue will tell the anger of my heart,
Or else my heart, concealing it, will break,
And, rather than it shall, I will be free
Even to the uttermost, as I please, in words.

"...Throughout the play, the response to the intolerable is ritualized, in language and action, because ritual is the ultimate means by which man seeks to order and control his precarious and unstable world.'” - D.J. Palmer

"The good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life; ...for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy." - Aristotle

"Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle...Even democracy ruins itself by excess...it becomes disastrous because the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best rulers.

...The crowd loves flattery, it is so "hungry for honey," that at last the wiliest and most unscrupulous flatterer, calling himself the "protector of the people, rises to supreme power."

"The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would have little to do with the original European models... No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes and Christian crosses.... Around such reassuring language and symbols and in the event of some redoubtable setback to national prestige, Americans might support an enterprise of forcible national regeneration, unification, and purification."

"While a new fascism would necessarily diabolize some enemy, both internal and external, the enemy would not necessarily by Jews. An authentically popular American fascism would be pious, antiblack and, since September 11, 2001, anti-Islamic as well... The British moralist George Orwell noted in the 1930s that an authentic British fascism would come reassuringly clad in sober English dress."

Odysseus' decade-long exile has nothing on the feat of endurance it was to read this far.

"Today it is quite clear that businessmen [in fascist regimes] often objected to specific aspects of fascist economic policies, sometimes with success. But fascist economic policy responded to political priorities, and not to economic rationale. Both Mussolini and Hitler tended to think that economics was amenable to a ruler's will."

"Fascist propagandists wanted us to see the leader alone on his pinnacle, and they had remarkable success...

No dictator rules by himself. He must obtain the cooperation, or at least the acquiescence, of the decisive agencies of rule- the military, the police, the judiciary, senior civil servants - and of powerul social and economic forces...

Fascism [depends on] conservative elites to open the gates."