ALL THE WORLD'S A PAGE

Out damned spot, out I say!  Thou art not PC    



                             

He was not of an age but for all time!

We should be thankful that the greatest master of the English language, who died aged 52 four centuries ago this week - probably on the 23^rd though that’s in dispute - was not writing in the Age of Revisionism ruled by  hyper-sensitive trolls.

Many of William Shakespeare’s plays and characters would have been labelled politically incorrect and banned, pages ripped from school texts and statues of the Bard jackhammered. Fatwas would have been pronounced.

The idle iconoclasts who trawl Internet websites seeking flaws and faults would have done their best to tumble the Stratford scribbler down to their level.

Errors abound. For example, The Merchant of Venice is decidedly anti-Semitic. Shylock is the archetypal Jew burdened by all the hateful prejudices that have so harmed his race.  The character needs to be re-written as a brain surgeon, nuclear physicist or musical maestro, not a money-grubbing usurer.

 Juliet is no feminist.  Why didn’t she knee Romeo in the groin when he started soliloquising with his soggy sentimentalism? Instead of swanning around in the House of Capulet like a precocious teen in wispy wear, she should have been clad in dungarees, sweating over a hot anvil and beating swords from ploughshares.

The Moor in Othello proves the author had racism in his blood, calling the man a barbarian just because he came from Barbary  It wasn’t till 1883 that the role was taken in London by an actor who didn‘t have to use make-up to change his skin color.

Creation of the deformed Caliban in The Tempest is a vicious slur on the differently abled and should be erased from the plot, or at least given a few lines to show he’d overcome his handicaps.

Never suggest Shakespeare was an environmentalist – he had Macduff’s soldiers destroy a complete forest.  This was just so Great Birnam Wood could go to Dunsinane and fulfil a prophecy of the ‘secret, black and midnight hags’ – sorry, senior citizen ladies.

Instead of denuding the landscape, sustainable resources should have been used to disguise the army, like recyclable fibre bags. But on the upside the tactic did help defeat Macbeth whose villainy included the murder of decent Duncan, a man of high principles.

And the insults!  To be told by Prince Henry ‘peace, ye fat guts’ must have hurt the weight-challenged Falstaff.  And who’d dare now call his servant a ‘cream-faced loon’ with a ‘goose look’? An Employment Court bullying charge would most certainly follow.

Ageism?  You can’t read King Lear without noting the Stratford prodigy had it in for the oldies. Dementia is not funny.  Had the pitiful monarch retained all his marbles he’d have worked out that any daughter with a name like Goneri was not to be trusted.

The story is hardly original: Scholars have identified at least ten earlier works by others proving that Shakespeare was a plagiarist, the worst of all possible crimes for a writer. 

If he’d been given an honorary doctorate by some obscure university trying to ingratiate itself with the literary set, then meritless academics from rival campuses would now be signing on-line petitions to have the title rescinded.

Shakespeare’s output [at least 37 plays and 150 sonnets] would have had him condemned for hogging the quill.  How could any aspiring young dramatist get a leg into the business when one old hack was dominating The Globe’s playlist?

Take a close look at the texts – they’re so full of clichés any decent editor would demand rewrites or bin the copy.  Here are a few examples – ‘good as gold’, ‘brave new world’, ‘be-all and the end-all’, ‘come what may’ and ‘fancy free’. 

OK, so he coined them first but that’s cold comfort to the modern reader – something WS didn’t consider when he set out to be a wordsmith.  He should have looked into the seeds of time and known which phrase would last and which would not.

However all’s well that ends well. There’s one redeeming feature which might have earned him modern approval particularly in the theater where he also worked as an actor and director.  Although married to the older Anne Hathaway and father of three, he harbored secret love not for a lady but a lad.

‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ is for a ‘fair youth’ as are other secret sonnets published only after the poet’s death.  The LGBT community can celebrate and religious colleges delete Shakespeare from their reading lists lest students switch their sexual preferences.

This op-ed started with a quote from fellow playwright Ben Jonson so it’s apt that we end with another celebrating a genius who unveiled the Age of Enlightenment and got in first before the World Wide Web reduced us to witless consumers of the trite:

 Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe,
And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.

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(First published in The Jakarta Post 23 April 2016)

STRAIGHT FROM THE BARD

By the Way: All’s well that ends well

NEWS FLASH:  Fragments of a new Shakespearean play have just been discovered in the Jakarta archives of the British Council. 

Bearded archaeologists quivering with excitement believe the Bard mislaid the priceless palimpsest around 1601 during his tour of the Spice Islands while researching material for another work.  This was probably A Midsummer Night’s Scream, which featured several kuntilanak (malicious ghosts) and inspired their inclusion in later plays.

Literary experts agree that the ‘enchanted isle’ of the play is Java.  So it’s logical that the most celebrated writer in the English language should have taken a stopover in the Indonesian capital waiting for the next VOC three-master.

Under equatorial skies we imagine he chilled out with other worthy wordsmiths sharing a few mugs of soda gembira (happy soda) in a riverside tavern. Doubtless he found the Ciliwung reminded him of his beloved Avon.

While scholars scramble to determine the play’s provenance The Jakarta Post has been given exclusive world rights to the lontar-leaf manuscript with jottings from other writings, creating some confusion. 

The play is a tragedy, or comedy, or tragicomedy – it’s unclear. As the full folio has yet to be found there are disputes regarding the title, but it was probably called Macbowo. 

Others claim it’s really the forgotten folio known as The Merchant of Menace though left-wing academics assert it’s really As You Will Like It.

The plot centers on a zealous soldier believing he has rights to the crown and will stop at nothing to achieve his goal. His climb to the top of the food chain starts, appropriately enough, with three old ladies stirring a boiling cauldron of road kill.  Their predictions set the tone for what’s to follow:

Double, double toil and trouble,
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble,

Fair is foul and foul is fair.

The next scene provides a character insight, with the villain astride a charger soliloquising:

I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent,                                                              But only vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself                                                      And falls on th’ other.

Macbowo knows he’s not the only one with plans above his station, so seeks advice from the weird Ibu-Ibu.  They tell him:

Be bloody, bold, and resolute; laugh to scorn
The power of man.

Great news for a grandee. Yet despite taking these warming words to heart, Macbowo’s paranoia persists, as seen in these staffing orders:

Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.
Yon (name indecipherable) has a lean and hungry look,
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.

Later we find a few lines from the unnamed famished thinker pondering on a response to his rival’s campaign tactics:

To be, or not to be--that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them.

A major gap in the script follows, but it seems safe to conclude that Macbowo insists a great wrong has been done despite all evidence otherwise.  So he appeals to a court where he’s confronted by a smart lawyer:

Though justice be thy plea, consider this—

That in the course of justice none of us

Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy,

And that same prayer doth teach us all to render

The deeds of mercy.

He loses, and from now on its downhill. Macbowo’s mates depart. Wifeless he suffers nightmares:

Then comes my fit again; I had else been perfect                                                          

Whole as the marble, founded as the rock,                                                                    

As broad and general as the casing air                                                                       

But now I’m cabin’d, cribb’d, confined, bound in                                                     

To saucy doubts and fears

The last page we have includes a reflection:

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.

Clearly this isn’t the final Act; work continues to unearth the rest of the manuscript. We hope to bring you this by 20 October. Duncan Graham

(First published in The Jakarta Post 12 October 2014)

SINETRON AND SHAKESPEARE

Where there’s a Will, there’s a sinetron Duncan Graham

If you consider sinetrons (soap operas) much ado about nothing, the most base Indonesian art form loitering at the depths where tectonic plates jostle for space, then this BTW is about to change your mind.

Lend me your tears, for I come not to bury sinetrons, but to praise them.

My extensive research shows that sinetrons have style and substance. They embrace the wit and wisdom of our times, expose emotions, drive visions, reveal truths. Watch closely and you’ll notice they’re really high culture, up there with Shakespeare.

The prolific penman from Stratford-on-Avon had a way (or as he was wont to say at home, Hathaway) with plots. And so does Raam Punjabi, the producer from Jakarta-on-Ciliwung and boss of PT Multivision Plus, custodian of this republic’s rich tele-literature and clearly a Shakespearean scholar of note. Mainly large currencies,

Take the use of soliloquies. The Bard employed this technique to avoid scene building and shifting and it’s an equally handy cost saver for a budget shoot. The tousle-haired lad who ponders on the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as the Prince of Demak, astonished at the arrival of Islam in his hometown, has other things on his mind. He’s just learned that his family is more dysfunctional than the House of Windsor. Better to muse aloud than employ set designers.

Black magic practitioners are the unstable staple of a good sinetron. On the small screen they’re usually men with bad teeth and rank hair and a fondness for goat-skull arrangements. But just like the three hags from the highlands they make vile brews, rabbit on over their steaming road-kill menu and unleash fearsome threats we know will come to pass, like night the day.

Scenes in cemeteries are a dead giveaway of the plagiarism, with a grove of frangipani sheltering the mist-shrouded tombstones the tropic equivalent of a blasted heath. Bringing on the banshees is a masterful piece of theater equally effective on SCTV as it was in the Globe where the God-fearing Elizabethans were as partial to a haunting as any modern Javanese.

Treason, treachery and trauma – but what about love? Muhammad Montague and Sri Capulet are faithful remakes of the timeless theme. In Indonesia these involve teenage trysts set in the local high school, a furnace of raw emotions where trigonometry means plotting a three-way affair.

Mr Punjabi knows well that though the path of true love never did run smooth it does lead to his bank.

Who hasn’t thrilled at the sequence where the red-lipped, rouge-cheeked nymph in her seam-straining white shirt and black skirtlet flits and flirts from class to class on level two?

Missed it? No worries, you can catch it tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

Meanwhile her beau with a showroom-fresh Mercedes CLK 350 coupe parked among the clapped-out Yamahas gets a glimpse of her long black locks as she steals a glance over the wall of cancerous concrete.

Don’t tell me this clip doesn’t have a direct lineage to Mr WS’s static balcony scene.

The world’s finest wordsmith was flexible enough to add bawdiness to his plots, a bit of light relief for the folk in the pits. Sinetrons follow suit with comedies of errors, using dishevelled security guards as the knockabout buffoons, indifferent to the needs of the anti-hero desperately seeking to break into his mother-in-law’s house and drip caustic soda into her happy soda.

Not that she doesn’t deserve the crimson phial treatment. These brutal, scheming maid-monstering matrons are determined to thwart young love. They make the mad Scotswoman’s ambitions for her weak-kneed soldier hubby a toddler’s bedtime story.

But all’s well that ends well. The villains in the best sinetrons realise that using shabu-shabu as an elixir isn’t so smart (a message that’s lost on some actors if the gossip tabloids are right). Overnight their tattoos vanish and they awake from their midsummer night’s dream with neat haircuts and no interest in a cold Bintang or a winning hand at cards. So they return to mum, the mosque and the patient virgin in the headscarf.

So don’t knock Indonesia’s sinetrons. There’s method in their madness. Remember – the play’s the thing.

(First published in the Sunday Post 7 september 08)

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