Book Note: Fahrenheit 451

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

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I mentioned before that I was reading or re-reading many of the works of Ray Bradbury. I wasn't reading them with a specific eye to Shakespeare, but he seemed almost inevitably to make his way in.

In Fahrenheit 451, I found a fair bit more Shakespeare than I expected. But I suppose there’s quite enough radical or subversive or even offensive material in Shakespeare to make his works catch the eye of any fireman worth his salt.

For this rest of this post, I’m going to assume a basic knowledge of the plot and characters of the novel. If you’re unfamiliar with Fahrenheit 451, I’ll wait while you grab a copy and read it through. Even if you take your time (which you should), it won’t take long.

The first Shakespeare reference comes when Captain Beatty provides a brief history of the firemen as something of a pep talk to Guy Montag when he seems to be suffering from cold feet:

It's terrifying to imagine a world where a one-page Hamlet is all people think you need. But Shakespeare does inspire thought—and independent thought is certainly dangerous.

Beatty's speech constrains Montage for a while, but only for a while. Later, when Montag more or less makes up his mind to find out what uses books might have and realizes that he needs a guide or a teacher if he's to answer that question with any kind of thoroughness, he remembers a man named Faber that he met by chance one day:

Montag decides to give the professor a call to ask about, among other things, Shakespeare: 

Later, as he attempts to make a plan with Professor Faber to return the world to the state it was in before book burning took over, the professor talks about actors unable to play Shakespeare and how they might become part of a proposed underground:

Unfortunately, this vision isn't fuffilled within the covers of Fahrenheit 451.

It's not long before Beatty finds out that Montag has been hiding books.  He talks him round, and Montag hands over a book. We get an adapted  Shakespeare quote at that point (and some Donne):

The first quote is a modified version of a quote from As You Like It—it’s what Jacques says on the entrance of Touchstone and Audrey: “Here comes a pair of very strange beasts which in all tongues are called fools” (V.iv.9–10). The second quote is from the end of John Donne’s “The Triple Fool.”

A bit later, a torrent of allusions and quotations comes from Beatty (while Professor Faber listens in through an earpiece Montag is wearing):

It's hard to catch the teaspoons of Shakespeare in the midst of that firehose (sorry!) of literary allusions and quotations. We have, among other things, the Bible, Sir Philip Sidney, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Dekker. It's almost like one of T. S. Eliot's poems!

For everyone's convenience, here are the Shakespeare quotes, misquotes, and allusions:

"Nay, it is ten times true, for truth is truth / To th' end of reck'ning" is one thing Isabella says about the crimes Angelo has committed in Measure for Measure (V.i.45–46). 

"Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long" is from Launcelot Gobbo's exchange with his father in The Merchant of Venice (II.i.79).

"Oh God, he speaks only of his horse!" is a rough paraphrase of a line Portia speaks to Nerissa about one of her suitors: "he doth nothing but talk of his horse" (Merchant of Venice, I.ii.40–41). 

"The devil can cite scripture for his purpose" is what Antonio says to Bassanio about Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (I.iii.98). 

"A kind / Of excellent dumb discourse" is from The Tempest (III.iii.38–39): Alonso is speaking of some magical figures Prospero has conjured up to bring in a meal. Is the "Willie" at the end of Beatty's speech addressed to Shakespeare? Montag's first name is "Guy," not "William" after all. 

"All's well that is well in the end" might be a version of the title of the play All's Well that Ends Well or the titular line that appears twice in the play. Helena says, "All's well that ends well! still the fine's the crown; / What e'er the course, the end is the renown" (IV.iv.35–36); a little later, she says, "All's well that ends well yet, / Though time seem so adverse and means unfit" (V.i.25–26). But it could also be a skewed version of Julian of Norwich's mystical pronouncement "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."

I find it interesting that the imagined exchange between Montag and Beatty involves throwing quotes specifically from Merchant of Venice at each other.

More than that, we have an awful lot of famous quotes taken far out of context and put together in a way that is only roughly and somewhat incidentally meaningful. It underlines Montag's instinctual assumption that possession of texts is not enough—comprehension of them is another essential element.

We get one more quotation from Shakespeare in what turns out to be Beatty’s last speech.

The quote is from Julius Caesar—it's Brutus speaking to Cassius in Act IV, scene iii (lines 66 to 69, for those of you keeping score), when their backs are up against the wall and their hackles up against each other. Eventually, Cassius and Brutus reach an uneasy peace, but it's not so with Beatty and Montag. It's at this point that Montag thinks he might be able to burn right by burning one of the chief book burners of them all.

It ought to go without saying, but I'm worried that it doesn't: Bradbury demonstrates astonishing mastery in creating Beatty, who knows a huge number of bits and pieces of what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed and who uses them to overwhelm a novice—a freshman English major—a second-hand (but not second-rate) literateur.

At the end of Fahrenheit 451, we're left hoping for those actors Professor Faber spoke of to produce, by memorial reconstruction if by no other means, the complete works of Shakespeare, without which our lives would far more dystopian than not.

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More Macbeth in The Simpsons? Yes, please! And then let's talk about whether it should be “hoist with his own petar” or “hoist with his own petard” for a good long while.

“Funeral for a Fiend.” By Michael Price. Perf. Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, Harry Shearer, Hank Azaria, Kelsey Grammer, David Hyde Pierce, John Mahoney, and Keith Olbermann. Dir. Rob Oliver. The Simpsons. Season 19, episode 8. Fox. 25 November 2007.

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Careful readers will recollect that Bardfilm covered this Simpsons episode back in 2009 (for which, q.v.). Even more careful readers will have spotted that the link to the video clip there had expired.

When it came time to fix the error, I discovered that there was quite a lot more Shakespeare in the episode than I initially realized. Since 2009, I've assumed that the entirety of the Shakespeare had to do with wrapping up the "Sideshow Bob Tries to Kill Bart Yet Again" plot. Note: Spoiler Alert. That plot is wrapped up nicely when Lisa is able to thwart Sideshow Bob by pedantically correcting his misquoted line from Shakespeare. 

That's where the clip stopped in 2009 (and, for the sake of historical continuity, that's the end of the clip I restored to the earlier post). But there's more!

First, take a look. We'll talk afterwards.

The kicker to the first segment is that Sideshow Bob misquotes Shakespeare again (and is again corrected by Lisa)—and that's funny enough. But the Shakespeare continues.

At the trial of Sideshow Bob, we're introduced to his mother, the noted Shakespearean actress. And we have a lovely interlude where Lenny wonders whether the Shakespeare play Troilus and Cressida antedates or postdates the Toyota Cressida. Since Shakespeare wrote his play c. 1601–1602 and Toyota marketed its Cressida from 1976 to 1992, the play certainly has the prior claim.

[Side Note: I used to drive a 1972 Toyota Corona Mark II in the delightfully-named "Fire Opal" color; the Toyota Cressida was the renamed version of this model. Some people called the car I drove, for reasons unknown, "The Squidmobile," but in my mind, she was always "The Peaquod."]

With this information in mind, Lisa deduces that misquoting Shakespeare was but a ruse—a first layer to Sideshow Bob's complicated plot. 

[Side Note: Another layer is that Sideshow Bob's father was a doctor with knowledge of a drug that could simulate death (no doubt the constraint of time prevented making this connection to Romeo and Juliet overt instead of implied).]

And that's it, right?

Naturally not!

In the comments section on the ShakespeareGeek post that started all this (for which, q.v.), a user named "bardofile" suggests that Sideshow Bob is not only wrong about the preposition when he says "Hoist on his own petard" but that he should also have said "petar." Lisa, bardofile says, corrects the "on" to "with" but fails to correct the "petard" to "petar." 

First, if Sideshow Bob is still scheming by deliberately misquoting Shakespeare, he's offering Lisa two chance to correct him, but she only detects one. Right?

That depends on which edition of Hamlet Miss Hoover uses in her classroom. First, the line in question is only in the Second Quarto (1604–1605). It's not in the First Quarto (1603); nor is it in the Folio (1623). 

The "Hoist with his owne petar" line in Q2

If she's using the Riverside Complete Shakespeare, she'll find "petar"—but with a footnote that defines "petar" as "petard." If she's using the Norton (based on the Oxford), she'll find "Hoised with his own petard"—the line is indented and set in italic, which indicates that it's from Q2. But there's no note as to why they've used "Hoised" where Q2 clearly has "Hoist." David Bevington's seventh edition gives us "petard." The RSC second edition has "petard" (in a separate section where passages from Q2 that are not in F are supplied). The Bedford Shakespeare (based on the New Cambridge) has "petar" with a footnote that says "or 'petard.'" A glance at my long-cherished copy of the New Cambridge (for which, q.v.) confirms that it has "petar" but reveals that it has no explanatory note about it. 

That's a quick survey of the complete editions of Shakespeare I have handy, and I expect a similar variety would be found in single editions of the play.

But where can we go to get some explanation of how we got to the point where "petar" or "petard" seems to be equally viable? If Q2 says "petar," shouldn't we all just go with that?

As usual, Harold Jenkins (the editor of the Arden Shakespeare Second Series Hamlet) has something valuable to say. Here's his note:

First, we get some insight into why the Norton Shakespeare would say “hoised” instead of “hoist.” I expect we should have known that “hoised” is the simple past tense of “hoise,” the root verb from which both “hoised” and “hoist” come. But we also get the reason why Jenkins’ edition decides on “petard.” Q2 reads “petar,” but Jenkins considers that something of a typographical error. It’s there to guide us in the pronunciation of the word, but the actual noun is “petard,” and, for Jenkins, the change for a modern-spelling edition is as natural as changing “owne” in Q2 to “own.”

The most recent Arden edition (the third series version edited by Neil Taylor and Ann Thompson—the Q2 version, that is, not the one that contains the texts of Q1 and F but not of Q2) has just one thing to add:

They recap Jenkins’ reason for his choice—and then go on to point out something that Jenkins might have missed: the last word in the full line (“. . . Hoist with his own petard, an’t shall go hard . . .”) would rhyme with “petard” but not “petar.” I might point out that the editors only point out the internal rhyme without commenting on it themselves—but perhaps we’re ready to draw to a close.

Perhaps Lisa was right to point out the more obvious error rather than enter into a debate with Sideshow Bob over the relative merits of “petar” and “petard.”

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Shakespeare in FoxTrot's Encyclopedias Brown and White

Amend, Bill. Encyclopedias Brown and White. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2001.

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It's been a while since our last Friday FoxTrot. Fortuitously, Fortune's Fool we refuse to follow.

What can I say? It's the layout the requires a little fun filler here at the forefront.

But that's enough.

In Encyclopedias Brown and White, Bill Amend reunites the fighting foursome of Jason, Marcus, Phoebe, and Eileen.

There's only a bit of Shakespeare there, and it's once again in the form of a character quoting Sherlock Holmes (who was quoting Shakespeare). The line is "The game's afoot" (Henry V, III.i.32).

We're on more solid (too, too solid?) Shakespearean ground with this Macbeth-related comic in which Peter has evidently not done the required reading:

And we wrap things up with a non-specific Shakespeare reference involving Paige and her homework.

I'm having some fun of my own speculating about which play Paige is reading. It's unlikely to be Hamlet—"Who's there?" is its complete first sentence. Perhaps it's Henry V. That starts with two dense lines followed by a comma. But if we really want to give her a doozy of an opening sentence, we can imagine her reading Measure for Measure. If you have alternate suggestions, just add them to the comments!

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A Quick Line from Romeo and Juliet in a Friends Episode

“The One with the Screamer.” By Scott Silveri and Shana Goldberg-Meehan. Perf. Matt LeBlanc, Dina Meyer, and Reg Rogers. Dir. Peter Bonerz. Friends. Season 3, episode 22. NBC. 24 April 1997. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2003.

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Although our last post asserted that Bardfilm is not obsessed with completeness (tracking down all the Shakespeare in a given situation comedy, for example), that doesn't mean that we'll ignore the Shakespeare that comes our way.

For example, in a Friends episode that features Joey among his fellow actors, we get a brief quote from Romeo and Juliet. 

Here it is!  Note: Since the quote takes approximately three seconds, I've provided quite a bit of context for it. 

I appreciate how the director is quoting the line with such precision: He clearly is saying "A plague a' both your houses" instead of "A plague on both your houses." Despite the subtitles, that's exactly how the line is printed. It's likely that kind of peevish accuracy that brought him to this point.

Bonus Note: This episode aired the day after William Shakespeare's 433rd birthday!

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The Episode at IMDB

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Shakespeare Puts Joey to Sleep in Friends

“The One with the Donor.” By Andrew Reich and Ted Cohen. Perf. David Schwimmer and Matt LeBlanc. Dir. Ben Weiss. Friends. Season 9, episode 22. NBC. 8 May 2003. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2003.

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We at Bardfilm don't obsess about completeness. We don't feel the need to track down every Shakespeare allusion in, say, M*A*S*H or The Simpsons or Star Trek.

Well, we do feel that way about Star Trek, but perhaps Friends is a better example. It's a well-known show, and when a bit of Shakespeare comes to our attention, as sometimes happens when ShakespeareGeek happens to catch something randomly and decides to pass it on.

That's how we got to this late-in-the-run general reference to Shakespeare:

What play could Joey have been trying out for? If he's saying, "I mean, hey, Shakespeare, how about a chase scene once in a while?" it can't have been one of the exciting ones. Perhaps he was reading for the role of James Gurney in King John or something like that.

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Book Note: The Two Noble Kinsmen

Shakespeare, William, and John Fletcher. The Two Noble Kinsmen. Ed. Lois Potter. Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997. Arden Shakespeare.

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Every ten years or so, I re-read The Two Noble Kinsmen. I first read it toward the end of my graduate work. I had a vague idea of writing my dissertation on madness in female characters in Shakespeare, and the play has one notable example.

It's also likely to be Shakespeare's last play, though not his last individually-authored play. 

It's also a good play with a lot of fun material, and it's also one of the few places where Chaucer serves as a major source: The plot of The Knight's Tale is the foundation of The Two Noble Kinsmen.

The setting is a war between Athens (led by Theseus—technically, he's the same Theseus from A Midsummer Night's Dream) and Thebes. During the war, Palamon and Arcite, two close friends fighting somewhat unwillingly but still honorably for Thebes, are captured and imprisoned.

The scene between the two of them is one of my favorites in the play. They pledge eternal loyalty to each other and are happy in prison because they're together in prison. When Palamon asks, "Is there record of any two that loved / Better than we do, Arcite?" (II.ii.12–13), Arcite replies "Sure there cannot" (II.ii.13).

And then . . . enter Emilia.

Palamon sees her first and falls immediately in love with her. Arcite sees her next and falls immediately in love with her. Then they get to argue comically about whose love should have the priority. Here's that scene:

It's all great, compelling material that sorts itself out through the rest of the play.

As that develops, we learn that the Jailer's Daughter (he's unnamed, and so is she) has fallen in love with Palamon—but when he fails to return her love, she goes mad. Act IV, scene iii shows us her madness and the plan for alleviating it:

There's more good, rich material there—including a rare (for Shakespeare) reference to barley-break (about which you can learn more here).

It's not the best play in the canon, but it's still quite interesting and quite readable. The scenes I like best are usually attributed to Fletcher—which makes sense if Fletcher is the up-and-coming new dramatist and Shakespeare is the author about to retire.

I recommend reading it—though once every ten years is sufficient. But let me know if you learn of a staging of the play! I'd love to see it in production.

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Overreaction to a New York Times Crossword Puzzle Clue

Sinclair, Sarah and Rafael Musa. "The Door's Open." New York Times Crossword Puzzle. Edited by Will Shortz. Friday, January 26, 2024. "Tricky Clues" note by Deb Amlen. 

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Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkins. 2nd. ed. London: Arden, 1982.

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Note: There will be a spoiler for four-across in this post. But you can see the clue and the blank space on the image to the right. Read on at your own risk.

I haven't been doing crossword puzzles for long, but, like far more seasoned puzzle-doers, I can already complain about the clues.

As you might suspect, I particularly revel in the not-infrequent Shakespeare clues. It's nice to find a balcony or a last word Hamlet utters or the occasional fool. But then there are the less-straightforward clues—the ones that border on the controversial or at least that require more explanation.

Such is the case with the clue for 4A in a recent puzzle: "The 'handsaw' in Hamlet's 'I know a hawk from a handsaw.'" And the answer, as you can see below, is "Heron."

The most reasonable response to this is, of course, "Huh?" And the explanation in the "Tricky Clues" section doesn't really help much:

At times like these, there are worse things to do than turn to Harold Jenkins' Arden edition of Hamlet. Here's his brief note on the line:

Being Jenkins, we also have a comprehensive LN (Long Note) that tells us more:

Thank you, Harold Jenkins! The "Tricky Clues" explanation made it seem like everyone should automatically know that when Hamlet says "handsaw," he really means "heron." It's more complicated than that.

And I agree with Jenkins' general reading that no such stretching is necessary. Putting the two terms into the same class (two kinds of birds or two kinds of tools) empties the phrase of its vitality and its import. Hamlet isn't saying that he can tell two very similar things apart ("I can tell the difference between a 200-thread-count and a 220-thread-count pillowcase" or "I can tell a 40-watt bulb from a 45-watt bulb"). That would give the spies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern too great a reason to watch him even more closely. Instead, he's saying he knows the difference between a mountain and a molehill or an elephant and an earwig—something that takes no special insight or intelligence. 

It reminds me of the people who insist that when Jesus says it's as easy for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven as it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, he isn't talking about a literal needle but about a very small gate called "the needle's eye." You could just get a camel through that gate if you unloaded it and did a lot of convincing and cajoling: it would be difficult, but not impossible. Interpreting it in that way takes away its power and its humor.

"I can tell a hawk from a handsaw"—I can tell the difference between a living, breathing, feathered bird found in the wild and an inanimate object found on a carpenter's workbench—says everything by saying nothing. Let's leave it with its power and humor. The answer to 4A should be "small saw."

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Links: The puzzle in the NYTimes archives.

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Book Note: Double Falsehood: Or, The Distressed Lovers

Double Falsehood: Or, The Distressed Lovers. [By Lewis Theobald at the very least.] Ed. Brean Hammond. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010.

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After reading the Arden edition of Arden of Faversham, a play written early in Shakespeare's career with some possible Shakespeare connections (for which, q.v.), I thought it time to give a try to the Arden edition of Double Falsehood, a play that might have some connections to the late part of Shakespeare's career.

By way of overview, Double Falsehood was a play produced in 1727 by Lewis Theobald, one of the famous earlier editors of Shakespeare.  A year later, Theobald printed the play. Theobald said he had three separate manuscripts of a play by Shakespeare on which he based his play. Note that this doesn't mean that any of them were in Shakespeare's hand; "manuscript" just means hand-written rather than printed. The manuscripts are no longer extant. 

The long and short of my take is that the Arden edition of Double Falsehood is, with some qualifications, a marvelously scholarly edition of a simply dreadful play.

While reading through Brean Hammond's lengthy introduction and apparatus, which runs almost forty pages longer than the text of the play it introduces, I was struck by how nearly every point had a direct or indirect connection to the possibility of Shakespeare's authorship of the play. What echos of Shakespeare can we find in Double Falsehood?  Was Theobald a forger or deluded or deceived or genuine? What did Shakespeare know and when did he know it? And so on and on and on.

I know it doesn't sound like me, but I started wanted less about Shakespeare and more about the play itself.

And then I read the play itself—or re-read, really. I had read it once before, many years ago, in a different edition, had not thought much of it, and hadn't done any more with it. On this reading, I realized just how dull and uninspiring it is. The introduction talks about connections to Shakespeare because there's not much to say about the play itself.

What the edition has to say is mostly scholarly and interesting. By way of example, here are the first few pages. Showing them to you will provide the added benefit of a better and deeper introduction to the play and its questions than I can give.

That should catch us all up pretty well. Serious questions about the three manuscripts call the authenticity of the play we have into question; nonetheless, many scholars think that Theobald's Double Falsehood is a version of an original play written by William Shakespeare in collaboration with John Fletcher.

It's also generally accepted the The Two Noble Kinsmen is a collaborative effort by Shakespeare and Fletcher. That play was itself adapted by William Davenant in 1664 under the title The Rivals. And, as my Grandmother Jones used to day, I told you that to tell you this. That's where this edition makes a strange and irrelevant turn. The argument is that, with The Two Noble Kinsmen, we have the source material (Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight's Tale), the Shakespeare / Fletcher collaboration (The Two Noble Kinsmen), and a restoration adaptation (Davenant's Rivals):

We have, the Arden edition argues, a parallel with Double Falsehood:

Three of three steps are available when we think about The Two Noble Kinsmen; only two of three are available in the consideration of Double Falsehood. Yet we can (runs this edition's argument) use the relationship between The Knight's Tale,  The Two Noble Kinsmen, and The Rivals to speculate about the relationship between Don Quixote, Cardenio, and Double Falsehood.

Not to put too fine a point on it, that seems like nonsense. Imagine that we did not have any of the texts of Hamlet. We know its source, and we know an adaptation of the play. Can we determine anything about the missing play based on those points?

I know that my chart has even fewer points of comparison than that proposed by the Arden edition. But the analogy still seems neither relevant nor useful. But it does show the way this edition is grasping at any possible straw to try to find something Shakespearean in Theobald's play. Fortunately, the introduction doesn't spend too much time on that point.

The play itself doesn't have much to recommend it, but there are still some points of interest. Early in the play, the villainous Henriquez sets out to woo the non-aristocratic Violante. His speeches capture the character of the infatuated quite well:

Note, though, the note to I.iii.27.s.d.  The twice-repeated "Hmmmmm" there shows my skepticism in an attempt to find something Romeo and Juliet-ey hear.

When the villainous Henriquez next enters, he's worried that he has raped Violante. Setting aside that there is nothing to prepare the audience for any such action, it's interesting that Henriquez tries to argue that it wasn't rape—even though he admits that "she did not consent" (II.i.37–38) and that "she did resist" (II.i.38):

I would have liked more about that in the introduction—together with some commentary on the shifts from verse to prose and back again. It's rare for a character in Shakespeare to shift in mid-speech. Could this shift (one among many) be indicative of a distinction between Theobald and his source material?

Of equal interest are Violante's speeches after the rape:

A great weight of tragedy is encapsulated in those few brief lines.

Double Falsehood is not a very successful play, but there's a fair amount of interest in its Arden edition.

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