Marchette Chute

I’m reading Marchette Chute’s Stories from Shakespeare, which I’ve discovered late in life. These retellings compare favorably with those of Charles & Mary Lamb and Leon Garfield. Chute outdoes those authors by discussing nearly all of the plays, even those that the Lambs and Garfield won’t touch. For example, Chute writes separate chapters for each of the three dreadful parts of King Henry VI. She mentions, but avoids dwelling upon, the chief plot points and characters of that trilogy. Its ambitious nobles – and, for that matter, commoners like Joan of Arc (who, according to Shakespeare, definitely was a witch) – rise up and are mowed down at a nice clip, as in Judges or 2 Kings. But Chute is uninterested in gore: Titus Andronicus is dispatched in a little more than a page. And the misanthropic Timon of Athens gets just three and a half pages. I was eager to read a quick dismissal of Pericles, which, apparently, Shakespeare nonchalantly co-authored with a brothel keeper; and then I realized that Chute avoids that play altogether by restricting herself to those of the First Folio. Well played, Madam, well played.

When I was a child, I loved Shakespeare and Shakespearean retellings, and then I put away childish things; and now I wonder if I ought to have stayed with with my first love.

Lament

Whatever did I do to receive several emails each day from Conservative Direct (which appears to be a spamming agency)?

What robot decided I was the sort of person who’d want or need to read endless “BREAKING” allegations against “Sleepy” Joe Biden? (Not to mention his son.)

I ought to mark this as spam, but, every day, the headlines reel me in.

Some of today’s offerings (pretty mild, really):

(1) “Biden Retiring the U.S. Dollar” (in case I’d missed this bombshell the first four dozen times).

(2) “Hunter Biden Probe Will End with ‘Very Sympathetic Plea Agreement,’ Former Federal Prosecutor Predicts.”

(3) “BREAKING: Does Biden Really Have COVID or Is It an Elaborate Cover Up?” To be fair, this is where I first saw that Biden has COVID. (I’m assuming it’s not an elaborate cover-up.) I guess it’s possible to get real information if you read between the lines.

Next, the blogs and tweets of academia. Leiter rails against the woke young PhDs who are one-upping each other on Twitter. (These people really are pretty ludicrous.)

Do I have a short memory, or is public discourse at its lowest ebb since I was born? Or maybe I should say “discourses.” I was reading a postmodernist historian today who disparaged talk of the “discipline” of history in favor of talk of various “discourses” of history. (More on him some other time.) Are political “discourses” usually this insular? Are they usually this money-and-status-driven? (How do these things get measured?) Is this just par for the course, humanity-wise? In Shakespeare, old Lord Timon puts all his money into “culture,” gets zilch in return, quits Athens, and goes to live in a cave.

I would keep on ranting, but Karin wants us to go to sleep.