I have had that song from "East Hastings" in my head for TWO DAYS.
...Which is to say, I finally finished watching Slings & Arrows. Season three was definitely my favorite.
But...I don't like Ellen. I just don't. I think she's selfish and vain, without even being canny enough to make that selfish vanity worth watching. Which makes most of the emotional crisis points one-sided for me, and I'm never on her side.
Anyway, the whole thing got me thinking about King Lear.
The show brought up the commonplace that Lear's experience is universal, that everyone gets old. But--and maybe this is because I'm also trying to think about how I might revise a class paper I wrote on As You Like It, or because I'm experiencing my usual "comedies yay!" reaction to things--I don't really see it that way. Yes, everyone gets old, god willing. But I think that in our rush to valorize Lear's experience as universal, we forget that it's the choices he made that put him in that position. He isn't alone and abandoned because that's the automatic, inevitable state of things--he's alone and abandoned because he chose to listen to falsehood instead of truth, because he banished everyone who cared for him. And that's tragic, sure, but is it universal? Or, put another way--why have we chosen to represent his experience of old age as the typical one, rather than that of someone like Adam in AYLI--who is old, cast out of his home, and yet still cared for by Orlando? (I mean, dude, his name is Adam. How much more representative can you get???)
You know, the last time I did this rant, it was *also* partly prompted by AYLI, but...I'm just a bit tired of the assumption--made into declarations in many instances, including the Shakespeare class I just taught for--that it's tragedy and only tragedy that teaches us about what life really is, because it makes us aware of our mortality. Well, that's great, but what are we supposed to do while we're actually *alive*? There's this slightly smug attitude sometimes about preferring tragedy, because comedy is "contrived" and "frivolous" and "everything ends happily." Like that's easy.
Even in a book like Susan Snyder's The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedy, we get tragedy as "real experience" and comedy as "less at home" with that real experience, because every life ends in death, and comedy avoids death, ignores it. Except...well, it doesn't. For every Sebastian, there's a brother who doesn't come back to life. Comedy knows the ultimate score; men have died, even if its heroines try to soften that impact by saying "from time to time." And everything is surrounded by the wind and the rain. There's this image of comedy as effortless and easy, and the only way to make it worth talking about is to talk about how comedy fails--how people are excluded from the final happy dance; how its pairings are contrived and unrealistic. I don't see the second as true, not in every case (yes, I am talking about Twelfth Night here--but only because people keep baiting me with this description!). And as for the first--I don't see that as failure, but as honesty. Comedy isn't easy, it isn't effortless; I suggest that every once in a while, we could look at things from the other side: not how comedy fails and is therefore useless to us as a way of looking at the world, but instead, in a world that's clearly hostile to the impulses of comedy, how remarkable it is that even partial harmony is achieved for some little space. Because the denizens of Shakespearean comedy are aware of its fragility. We're not saying anything, in bashing comedy, that they don't already tell us. They just choose to look, for a little while, in the other direction, at other possibilities. "No, sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born."
But...I don't like Ellen. I just don't. I think she's selfish and vain, without even being canny enough to make that selfish vanity worth watching. Which makes most of the emotional crisis points one-sided for me, and I'm never on her side.
Anyway, the whole thing got me thinking about King Lear.
The show brought up the commonplace that Lear's experience is universal, that everyone gets old. But--and maybe this is because I'm also trying to think about how I might revise a class paper I wrote on As You Like It, or because I'm experiencing my usual "comedies yay!" reaction to things--I don't really see it that way. Yes, everyone gets old, god willing. But I think that in our rush to valorize Lear's experience as universal, we forget that it's the choices he made that put him in that position. He isn't alone and abandoned because that's the automatic, inevitable state of things--he's alone and abandoned because he chose to listen to falsehood instead of truth, because he banished everyone who cared for him. And that's tragic, sure, but is it universal? Or, put another way--why have we chosen to represent his experience of old age as the typical one, rather than that of someone like Adam in AYLI--who is old, cast out of his home, and yet still cared for by Orlando? (I mean, dude, his name is Adam. How much more representative can you get???)
You know, the last time I did this rant, it was *also* partly prompted by AYLI, but...I'm just a bit tired of the assumption--made into declarations in many instances, including the Shakespeare class I just taught for--that it's tragedy and only tragedy that teaches us about what life really is, because it makes us aware of our mortality. Well, that's great, but what are we supposed to do while we're actually *alive*? There's this slightly smug attitude sometimes about preferring tragedy, because comedy is "contrived" and "frivolous" and "everything ends happily." Like that's easy.
Even in a book like Susan Snyder's The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedy, we get tragedy as "real experience" and comedy as "less at home" with that real experience, because every life ends in death, and comedy avoids death, ignores it. Except...well, it doesn't. For every Sebastian, there's a brother who doesn't come back to life. Comedy knows the ultimate score; men have died, even if its heroines try to soften that impact by saying "from time to time." And everything is surrounded by the wind and the rain. There's this image of comedy as effortless and easy, and the only way to make it worth talking about is to talk about how comedy fails--how people are excluded from the final happy dance; how its pairings are contrived and unrealistic. I don't see the second as true, not in every case (yes, I am talking about Twelfth Night here--but only because people keep baiting me with this description!). And as for the first--I don't see that as failure, but as honesty. Comedy isn't easy, it isn't effortless; I suggest that every once in a while, we could look at things from the other side: not how comedy fails and is therefore useless to us as a way of looking at the world, but instead, in a world that's clearly hostile to the impulses of comedy, how remarkable it is that even partial harmony is achieved for some little space. Because the denizens of Shakespearean comedy are aware of its fragility. We're not saying anything, in bashing comedy, that they don't already tell us. They just choose to look, for a little while, in the other direction, at other possibilities. "No, sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born."