To This Great Stage of Fools: Born April 10th

Apr10

William Hazlitt, b. 1778. Journalist, essayist, Shakespearean scholar. He wrote many books, Characters of Shakespeare and A View of the English Stage.

Matthew Calbraith Perry, b. 1794. US Navy commodore who negotiated the first treaty between the United States and Japan in 1854. The 1986 Newbery Honor book, Commodore Perry in the land of the Shogun by Rhoda Blumberg, is a great introduction to this historical episode.

Lew Wallace, b. 1827. Civil War general, Governor of New Mexico Territory, Ambassador to Turkey, and author of Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ. We’ve never done it, but wouldn’t Ben Hur be a great family read aloud book for the Easter season? We have watched Ben Hur with Charlton Heston at Easter time before. Long, but worth the time.

William Booth, b. 1829. He and his wife Catherine founded the Salvation Army, a Christian ministry to feed, clothe, and evangelize the poor.

Joseph Pulitzer, b. 1847, d.1911. Hungarian American journalist and newspaper publisher. He left in his will an endowment to create the Columbia School of Journalism, and Columbia began in 1917 to award annual prizes for journalism, letters, fiction, drama, and education. I looked at this list of Pulitzer-prize winning novels and counted the ones I’ve read: 12 out of 80. (8 years say No Award. I wonder why.) My reading looks fairly shabby when compared to this particular list. Which of the books on the list have you read and which would you recommend? I would say that from my list of twelve, I enjoyed all but two. (Neither Hemingway nor Steinbeck is my cup of tea.)

1921 The Age of Innocence Edith Wharton
1925 So Big Edna Ferber
1928 The Bridge of San Luis Rey Thornton Wilder
1932 The Good Earth Pearl S. Buck
1937 Gone With The Wind Margaret Mitchell
1939 The Yearling Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
1940 The Grapes Of Wrath John Steinbeck
1952 The Caine Mutiny Herman B. Wouk
1953 The Old Man And The Sea Ernest Hemingway
1961 To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee
1975 The Killer Angels Michael Shaara
2005 Gilead Marilynne Robinson

Of Cats, and Poles, and Poetry, and Mysterious Adventurers

Apr6

Robert E. Peary reached the North Pole on April 6, 1909 along with his assistant, Matthew Henson, and four Eskimo guides. Henson and two of the guides were actually the first to reach the Pole, and Peary arrived forty-five minutes later and confirmed that they were in the right place.

This week is The Week of the Young Child (April 2-8, 2006). The Queen of Carrots has some advice on Poems To Say All Day Long. She writes, “The first introduction to poetry I can remember is the poems my mother would recite at suitable times. These are poems I find myself reciting to my little ones (both still under two) when the occasion arises.”
Meanwhile, Camille at Book Moot ponders Poetry and the Very Young. Do you consider a bookcase to be essential furniture in the nursery? Yeah, me too

I don’t usually do cat-blogging. I don’t have a cat. I like cats that belong to someone else. Nevertheless, for today and for this poem I’m making an exception to the rule.

Macavity
Your poem for today:

Macavity’s a Mystery Cat: he’s called the Hidden Paw–
For he’s the master criminal who can defy the Law.
He’s the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad’s despair:
For when they reach the scene of crime–Macavity’s not there!

Macavity, Macavity, there’s no on like Macavity,
He’s broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.
His powers of levitation would make a fakir stare,
And when you reach the scene of crime–Macavity’s not there!
You may seek him in the basement, you may look up in the air–
But I tell you once and once again, Macavity’s not there!

Macavity’s a ginger cat, he’s very tall and thin;
You would know him if you saw him, for his eyes are sunken in.
His brow is deeply lined with thought, his head is highly doomed;
His coat is dusty from neglect, his whiskers are uncombed.
He sways his head from side to side, with movements like a snake;
And when you think he’s half asleep, he’s always wide awake.

Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity,
For he’s a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity.
You may meet him in a by-street, you may see him in the square–
But when a crime’s discovered, then Macavity’s not there!

He’s outwardly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.)
And his footprints are not found in any file of Scotland Yard’s.
And when the larder’s looted, or the jewel-case is rifled,
Or when the milk is missing, or another Peke’s been stifled,
Or the greenhouse glass is broken, and the trellis past repair–
Ay, there’s the wonder of the thing! Macavity’s not there!

And when the Foreign Office finds a Treaty’s gone astray,
Or the Admiralty lose some plans and drawings by the way,
There may be a scap of paper in the hall or on the stair–
But it’s useless of investigate–Macavity’s not there!
And when the loss has been disclosed, the Secret Service say:
“It must have been Macavity!”–but he’s a mile away.
You’ll be sure to find him resting, or a-licking of his thumbs,
Or engaged in doing complicated long division sums.

Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macacity,
There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.
He always has an alibit, or one or two to spare:
And whatever time the deed took place–MACAVITY WASN’T THERE!
And they say that all the Cats whose wicked deeds are widely known
(I might mention Mungojerrie, I might mention Griddlebone)
Are nothing more than agents for the Cat who all the time
Just controls their operations: the Napoleon of Crime!

Who’s the author? What famous musical is based upon the cat poems of this author?

The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Kay Penman

Mar25

Too much description of intimate details in and out of the marriage bed that I would rather not have known. Too much adultery described too salaciously. Quite a bit of violence, again with gory details. Melodrama. Justification of actions that cannot be justified. Way too long (882 pages).

However, I can forgive the author and recommend this novel, with those reservations, because this book about the lives of Edward IV and Richard III of England got the important stuff right. I could tell from the beginning of the book, page 1, that Richard would be the hero of the story, that he would be good, although imperfect. I knew that Ms. Penman’s Richard would never steal his brother’s crown because he was greedy for power. Nor would he ever murder his two boy nephews, his brother’s sons, after keeping them imprisoned in the Tower. Although Ms. Penman indicts a different villain in the murders than did Josephine Tey in her book Daughter of Time, the book that first convinced me that Richard III was innocent of the murders that history has accused him of perpetrating, Penman agrees with Tey on the main point: Richard wasn’t the villain. He was loyal, brave, and tragic. He was a good guy in spite of his blind spots.

The novel also gives a vivid picture of fifteenth century England, the political intrigue and the battles of the War of the Roses, and the lives of the Yorkist kings, Edward IV and his brother, Richard III. If some of the details would have been better omitted, other details about how people lived and how they thought and who was related to whom were fascinating. I read that Richard’s and Edward’s brother, Edmund, was killed while still a teenager in the same battle in which their father, Richard of York, died. I was reminded that Richard loved and married his cousin, Anne Neville, daughter of Warwick the Kingmaker and widow of the Lancastrian candidate for the throne Edward of Lancaster. Did you know that Richard III was accused, after Anne’s death, of desiring to marry his niece, Elizabeth Woodville, the daughter of his deceased bother, Edward IV, and that Elizabeth Woodville went on to marry Henry Tudor, the pretender who took the throne from Richard? All the switching sides, cross and double-cross, that went on during the War of the Roses and during the reigns of Edward IV and Richard III, is amazing to read about. I thought politics was a blood sport nowadays, but it’s nothing compared to fifteenth century intrigue and diplomacy and treachery.

And The Sunne in Splendor was a good book in spite of its faults.

Oh, yes, and Shakespeare was a better writer, but a poor historian, dependent on flawed sources.

And Richard was most likely not humpbacked either.

Women to Know and Learn From

Mar2

Here are a few of the women we’ll be talking about and reading about this month:

Eve, Adam’s wife
Sarah, Abraham’s wife
Rebekah, Isaac’s wife
Deborah, judge in Israel
Ruth, wife of Boaz
Esther, queen of Persia
Mary, mother of Jesus
Jane Austen
Pricilla Mullins, reading A Light Kindled: The Story of Pricilla Mullins by Tracy M. Leininger
Anne Bradstreet
Abigail Adams
Sacagawea, reading The land Beyond the Setting Sun: The Story of Sacagawea by Tracy M. Leininger
Dolley Madison, reading Unfading Beauty: The Story of Dolley Madison by Tracy M. Leininger.
Narcissa Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Louisa May Alcott, reading Louisa May and Mr. Thoreau’s Flute by Julie Dunlap and Marybeth Lorbiecki
Clara Barton
Mary Slessor
Beatrix Potter
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Mary McLeod Bethune
Lottie Moon
Fanny Crosby
Mary Cassatt, reading Mary Cassatt by Mike Venezia, from the series Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Artists.
Nan Harper, reading Nothing Can Separate Us: The Story Nan Harper by Tracy Leininger
Tasha Tudor
Corrie and Betsie Ten Boom
Joni Eareckson Tada

I listed mostly Americans because we’re studying US history this year.
Also we’ll be reading My Great Aunt Arizona by Gloria Houston, Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie by Peter and Connie Roop, The Josefina Story Quilt by Eleanor Coerr, New Life, New Land: Women of Early Texas by Ann Fears Crawford, Bless the Lord: The 103rd Psalm illustrated by Johanna Bluedorn, and whatever else I find at the library. I may add to this post later as I come across other resources.

Historical Fiction

Feb22

Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more. Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L’Amour

Historical novels were my primary source of information about history as a child, and I actually won an award for my history knowledge in high school. The school thought I got the information and insight into history from my American history teacher, but really almost everything I know and remember about history, I learned by reading fiction.

Some favorites:

Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes. Set in Boston during the American Revolution, this book tells the story of Johnny, an apprentice silversmith, who learns about pride and patriotism as he participates in the events that were shaking Boston in 1775.

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. What do I really know about the French Revolution that I didn’t learn from Mr. Dickens? Not much. I just finished re-reading this book for the British Literature discussion group I’m leading at our homeschool co-op, and I must say that it’s just as good as it was when I read it in ninth grade.

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. Wonderful adventure. Another source for French (and British) history.

Dragonwings by Laurence Yep. A Chinese boy and his father dream of building a flying machine in California in the early 1900’s.

Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. And all the other books in the series.

The King Must Die and The Bull From the Sea by Mary Renault. The fictionalized story of Theseus of Athens. Written for adults or young adults at least, these books have been favorites of mine for a long time—since I was a young adult.

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. Someday I’m going to take a year and just read all the Scott novels that I never read. I have read Ivanhoe, but it’s been a long time.

Imperial Woman by Pearl Buck. The story of Tzu-Hsi, last Empress of China.

I could go on and on. These are just a few (very few) of the favorite historical fiction novels that I found by scanning some of my bookshelves. I’m sure I missed some of the best ones. Mr. L’Amour mentions reading the historical fiction series by G.A. Henty. I read one of them, about William Wallace, with my children, and it was OK. I’ve read better, but I might need to try another.

One thing about good historical fiction is that even if it’s inaccurate, the reader is left with a desire to research and find out how many of the events in the book really happened and whether or not they happened as portrayed in the book. Biographies and works of historical nonfiction are good, but after reading them, the tendency is to take the author’s word that things happened just as she says they did. I’m left with not as much of a desire to research it for myself although I do sometimes want to read other points of view.

What are your favorite works of historical fiction? Who are your favorite historical fiction authors?

(I can feel a List coming on: the 100 best historical fiction books) 🙂

Shakespeare’s Pivotal Year and Age

Dec29

I recently read A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 by James Shapiro. For this nonfiction book Shapiro chose the year 1599 because, he says, it was a pivotal year in Shakespeare’s career, the year in which, at age thirty-five, he “went from being an exceptionally talented writer to being one of the greatest who ever lived.” In 1599, Shakespeare completed and staged his most complex history play, Henry V, and also wrote and produced Julius Caesar and As You Like It. He also was revising Hamlet as the year came to an end, and it was probably first produced in 1600.

Shapiro deals up front with the many “probabilities” in writing about Shakespeare in the preface to his book:

When writing about an age that predated newspapers and photographic evidence, plausibility, not certitude, is as close as one can come to what happened. Rather than awkwardly littering the pages that follow with one hedge after another–“perhaps,” “maybe,” “it’s most likely,” “probably,” or the most desperate of them all, “surely”–I’d like to offer one global qualification here. This is necessarily my reconstruction of what happened to Shakespeare in the course of this year, and when I do qualify a claim, it signals that the evidence is inconclusive or the argument highly speculative.

Did you know that The Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare’s company, tore down their former landlord’s theater in December 1598 and used the materials to build the Globe Theater? They spent a great deal of time afterward in court defending their actions against a lawsuit brought by that landlord, Giles Allen.

Did you know that 1599 was the year of the Fall of Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth’s favorite, whom she sent to Ireland to quell a rebellion? Essex failed and returned to England without the queen’s permission, incurring her wrath. He later led an unsuccessful rebellion of his own, and the first hint of Essex’s overweening pride is the historical background against which Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar, a story of rebellion, ambition, and pride going before a fall.

Did you know that the last part of The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot echoes Brutus in Julius Caesar?

Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.

(I imagine that this is a revelation to no one else, but I’m a little slow.)

Did you know that Shakespeare was “probably” influenced by Montaigne’s essays and others that were just beginning to be written and published in the late 1500’s to write Hamlet’s soliloquies?

Have you ever heard of hendiadys? “Hendiadys literally means ‘one by means of two.’ a single idea conveyed through a pairing of nouns linked by ‘and.'” Some examples from Hamlet:

“Angels and ministers of grace defend us!”
“the book and volume of my brain”
“a fantasy and trick of fame”
“the abstract and brief chronicles of the the time”

There are sixty-six hendiadys in Hamlet, more than in any other of Shakespeare’s plays. Almost no other English writer uses hendiadys extensively. I tried to do it in the title to this post, but it’s not as easy to do well as it might sound. You have to pick out near-synonyms that both complement and qualify one another.

Have you ever compared Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Don Quixote? Both were mad, or feigned madness. Both had a friend, a sort of a straight man, who didn’t understand their dilemma. Both were caught between the age of chivalry and the renaissance. Both saw ghosts and phantoms. Both were unable to relate to a real woman. Don Quixote created his own ideal lady; Hamlet goaded his Ophelia into insanity and death. Shakespeare collaborated on a play late in his career, around 1612, called Cardenio that was taken from a story in Don Quixote. At the time of the writing of Hamlet, Don Quixote had not yet been translated into English. Are the similarities in the two characters coincidental or a reflection of the times? Of course, Don Quixote is a much more comic and more hopeful character, but both he and Hamlet die in the end.

I learned all these things and chased down several of these rabbit trails while reading A Year in the Life of WIlliam Shakespeare: 1599. Highly recommended for literary history buffs and Shakespeare fans.

Semicolon