Shakespeare, Medieval India, and the Lotus Sutra.

[icarus]

I'm taking Shakespeare because:

1) I'm nine classes away from finishing my English degree.
2) No one, in my opinion, deserves an English degree without studying Shakespeare.
3) Three of my classes need to be pre-1800 literature.
4) Hey, Shakespeare. Cooooool.

One thing I forgot: I love Shakespeare.

I've never read Othello and I'm sure that the close-reading at some point is going to kill me, but Shakespeare has already, in the first Act, made me want to string up Iago (yon bad guy, the worst most ESE character he's ever written), and within pages the situation is so inutterably complicated. Oh yes, yes, I loathe Shakespeare's Sonnets, they're so pure and holier-than-thou, but his plays -- blood, guts, and mayhem! Treachery. Sex. Puns. Silliness. Madness.

I really ought to have gone to see Michael Shanks play Hamlet, even if the reviews were iffy. Speaking of madness.

And Romeo still cracks me up. "Oh woe is me, the beautiful girl won't have me -- oh wow, man. Check out Juliet, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! And I've got such a hard-on I took the skin off my nose!"

Although I've jaw-crackingly hard reading assignments. I'm leaping from medieval Muslim historians (with their casual and highly biased treatment of bloodthirsty raids "we swept to glorious victory with our heavily-armed calvary against the Buddhist monk idolaters") to classical Indian text language ("Thus have I heard. We are now going to repeat 90 names in a row, with diacritics, that you can barely imagine pronouncing...") to Shakespeare.

I can't believe it. Shakespeare's my light reading this quarter. Though probably the history's going to get a little easier as we approach more modern times.

Comments

[quilt-stitcher.livejournal.com]

I took two Shakespeare course on my way to a comparative literature degree. Elizabethan and Jacobean. And I will tell you... I love Shakespeare now, but I didn't back then. I really didn't love it until years later, when I saw Branagh's "Henry V" and found it actually comprehensible. What I learned from that was that.... (hold on for amazing epiphany, lol).... that these are plays, and meant to be SEEN. Seeing it really helped it come alive for me, and after that I could read it and enjoy it ever so much more.

I really love Shakespeare now... in fact, when I got my master's degree, my thesis was an analysis of Henry V as presented in film and how different versions reflect the propaganda of the filmmaker's particular historical era. (Read: Laurence Olivier -- WWII issues, war as gloroius endeavour; Kenneth Branagh -- Vietnam issues, war as evil horror).

But man, Shakespeare is your light reading.

That is amazing.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I'm so grateful I both saw and performed Shakespeare before I had to study it. It's so much alive for me because of the Waldorf approach.

I really have got to see Kenneth Branagh's Henry V. I've been putting it off since I know I've got to put up with WG's whinging. Gah. He was bad enough during Romeo and Juliet, and that had naked boy hiney.

But man, Shakespeare is your light reading.

Let me give you a sample:

Contemporaneous with the conquest of the sind were the Arab victories over the eastern Turks of Transoxiana by Hajjaj's equally enterprising general Qutayba bin Muslim. In the north Qutayba's armies reached Shash (Tashkend) and in the south-east they penetrated deep into Kashghar, at that time part of the Chinese empire. Arab governors were appointed to administer the conquered provinces. When the Umayyad Caliph Sulayman (715-17) assumed power, Qutayba (like Muhammad bin Qasim) was disgraced, but he rebelled against his recall. He was eventually killed by his own army in 715. Proselytization in Transoxiana was more successful than in Sind. The spearhead of the proselytization movement were the sufi mystics, while the dihqans, hereditary aristocratic landholders who lived in fortified castles, responded to the call of Islam enthusiastically. The revenues remitted to the caliphate from this region were enormous, but from the ninth century their most valued contribution was the supply of Turkic slaves. Armed Turkic slaves supplanted not only the Iranians but also the Arab contingents as bodyguards and crack troops. They were loyal to none but their masters and were transferred by them like any other chattel.

From the ninth century onwards, certain enterprising leaders, backed by the Turkic slaves, began to carve out independent ruling dynasties in the eastern regions of the caliphate, paying only nominal obedience to the 'Abbasid caliphs. In Khurasan (the eastern province of Iran) and Transoxiana, Saman-Khuda, a dihqan in the Balkh district who had been converted to Islam, founded the Samanid dynasty, which ruled from 819 to 1005. Under them, Alptigin, a Turkic slave, rose to the rank of commander-in-chief of the guard (hajibu'l-hujjab) and, in the reign of the Samanid 'Abdu'l-Malik I (954-61), became the governor of Khurasan. When he was dismissed by 'Abdu'l-Malik's successor, he withdrew to Balkh, where he defeated the Samanid army in 963....

Not so bad, until you realize that every syllable has to be taken with a grain of salt. There is no proof that the sufis were all that responsible for spreading Islam, or whether they were "Hinduized" Muslims, for example, and this particular history was written in Pakistan with a particular very political spin.

Now for the Buddhists:

Thus have I heard. At one time the Buddha was dwelling in the city of the King's House (Rajagrha), on Grdhrakuta mountain, together with twelve hundred great bhiksus [mendicant monks]. All were arhants [men enlightened but not Buddhas], their outflows already exhausted, never again subject to anguish (klesa); they had achieved their own advantage and annihilated the bonds of existence, and their minds had achieved self-mastery. Their names were Ajnatakaundinya, Mahaksyapa, Uruvilvakasyapa, Gayakasyapa, Nadikasyapa, Sariputra, Great Maudgalyayana, Mahaktyayana, Aniduddha, Kapphina, Gavampati, Revata, Pilingavatsa (Pilindavatsa), Bakkula, Mahakausthila, Nanda, Sundarananda, Purno Maitrayaniputrah, Subhuti, Ananda, and Rahula -- such great arhants as these, known to the multitude. There were also another two thousand persons, including those who had more to learn and those who had not. There were Mahaprajapati, the bhiksuni [mendicant nun], together with six thousand followers. Rahula's mother Ysodhara, the bhiksuni, was also there together with her follwers. There were eighty-thousand bodhisattva-mahasattvas, all nonbacksliders in anuttarasamyaksambodhi [perfect enlightenment, that of a Buddha], all having mastered the dharanis....

Great stuff, but a trifle overwhelming. After this, Shakespeare's plays are rather direct and down-to-earth.

Icarus

[stentoriansista.livejournal.com]

Ow. Yep, the Bard's gonna be a breeze, enjoy it. I had the most appallingly awful professor for the comedies and later tragedies, and *still* adored it. Iago is so deliciously ebil.
Othello is one of my favorites, possibly just because my girlfriend was in the hospital when I had to be reading it for class, so I'd sit in the emergency room and read it aloud to her. It made the freaky hospital lighting and beeps and smells all go away.

[quilt-stitcher.livejournal.com]

LOL.

*Definitely* see Branagh's Henry V. It is by far the best adaptation of the play. He edits it rather ruthlessly -- I think only 40% of the text survives, but what is left is really easy to follow and *such* an indictment of war.