Anshu Reads Stuff

Thought of You  from  Ryan J Woodward  on  Vimeo . In the foreword to  Lolita,  Nabokov lampoons those " old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of 'real' people beyond the 'true' story". Misguided as I might be, I've always wanted to know what happens after  Twelfth Night . Does Feste ever return to Olivia's? Does Malvolio continue his Puritanical reign in a different household? Can Viola's mercurial grace satisfy Orsino's fickleness? But the question that keeps buzzing around my head is this: what about Sebastian and Olivia? A couple of spares, auxiliary yet too important to leave unwed. Why not pair them? Olivia's beautiful, Sebastian notes, and —whatever her temporary madness in loving him—evidently clever enough to run a household. A lovely prize for any man in Illyria. Oh, Sebastian, a good hanging prevents not all bad marriages. Will her love outlast each time you speak to her, when she hears Cesario's voice,...

It's easy to feel sorry for Ophelia. Or, more unkindly, it's easy to feel contempt for her. It is hard to identify with her, especially when Hamlet suffuses all of her scenes—Hamlet, who's so easy to project onto that nobody can even agree on his core personality traits. It's easy to limit Ophelia to Hamlet's Ophelia. Things happen to Ophelia like things happen to a duck left among foxes. You could argue that Hamlet's equally helpless. Maybe he realizes that he's trapped in a play, for example, and he knows that he has no agency. Maybe his depression prevents him from either forgetting his father or deposing Claudius. Sure, but theoretically—physically—Hamlet could have helped himself [1]. Nobody forced him to stage the play. Nobody guided his sword through Polonius' body. I can identify with Hamlet's helplessness; even in the most miserable straits I know that I can always lift a finger to help myself. I hadn't identified with Ophelia becaus...

I've read through act 3 and act 4, scene 8. I've been away from the text for a while. Mostly because I've been busy with homework, but Act 3 put me off the story. I found it hard to care about these characters after the battle of Actium. Both Cleopatra and Antony had their petty moments and even their upswings seemed vapid. I guess I've just gotten tired of the "love makes you stupid and leads to tragic downfall" story. Othello  did that much better. Othello didn't just love Desdemona, he also loved and trusted Iago. That's what allowed Iago to magnify Othello's sliver of self-doubt into crippling insecurity. That's what makes the story interesting. Othello begins and ends the story as two starkly different people, but I can believe that one grew from the other. Antony and Cleopatra are just two people who find each other really, really attractive. They have interesting traits--Cleopatra's expressiveness and Antony's occasional magn...

I'm reading Burke for a class I'm taking, and here's what he said about the National Assembly's first try at a constitution: "On account of the ambiguity and uncertainty of unauthorized general descriptions, and of the deceit which may be practiced under them, and not from mere formality, the house of Commons would reject the most sneaking petition for the most trifling object, under that mode of signature to which you have thrown open the folding-doors of your presence chamber, and have ushered into your National Assembly, with as much ceremony and parade...as if you had been visited by the whole representative majesty of the whole English nation." come on Burke they're doing their best

I first flipped through this play when I was twelve. I decided that I didn't like Cleopatra. I wanted to read about strong women, and what kind of strong woman lounges on divans for an entire play waiting for her Antony to come back? Thomasina has a lovely line to that effect in Stoppard's Arcadia : "Everything is turned to love with her. New love, absent love, lost love – I never knew a heroine that makes such noodles of our sex. It only needs a Roman general to drop anchor outside the window and away goes the empire like a christening mug into a pawn shop. If Queen Elizabeth had been a Ptolemy history would have been quite different – we would be admiring the pyramids of Rome and the great Sphinx of Verona." I read and loved Julius Caesar a few years later, but I hated Antony. I didn't know what he saw in Caesar worth avenging. As I saw it, Julius Caesar portrays Caesar as a self-important tyrant past his prime. Either Antony overthrew the Liberatores for l...

In Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom illustrates how grossly implausible it would have been for Shylock to convert to Christianity. "No one in The Merchant of Venice is what he or she seems to be —not Portia, Antonio, Bassanio, or Jessica —and can Shakespeare allow only Shylock to maintain a consistent stance? Who in this comedy can have his or her bond?"  If anyone could have kept his bond, I would have bet on Antonio or Shylock.  As Bloom points out, the play's inhabitants are so frivolous that they appear insubstantial beside our two main characters. Portia has more wit than the rest, more colorful plumage, but certainly she does not have stronger principles. Why did she save Antonio? For the fun of it. Listen to her: " I'll hold thee any wager, / When we are both accoutred like young men, I'll prove the prettier fellow of the two...and speak of frays / Like a fine bragging youth, and tell quaint lies, How honourable ladies sought my love, / Wh...