Over at ReadySteadyBook, a review of a new Memoir of Samuel Beckett. It mentions in passing that Beckett considered writing a play based on Shakespeare's sonnet 71:
No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Then you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse.
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone.
cf this from Keats:
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm'd—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.
Please see Ellis Sharp's fully justified corrective to my lazy cutandpaste of an online version of Shakespeare's sonnet.
5 comments:
So the stage is set with a coffin and a woman (Billie Whitelaw) sitting next to it. Only the coffin speaks.
Then Billie Whitelaw leaves the stage and returns with a coffin, climbs and closes the lid. The first coffin carries on talking. The person inside is explaining the rules of various games and stopping every now and then to laugh at a word he's said.
A, sat at desk, reading though a pile of old letters – yellowed, well thumbed. Occasionally will begin speaking: “those hands of hers. Remember. The way she’d point toward the Connemara hills. Etc’ Then a knocking stage left. A goes over, opens the door. Suddenly a second voice begins speaking rapidly “..living hand…. earnest grasping, …icy silence… dreaming nights.. red life might stream again..”. A: “Enough” and slams the door. This little pattern repeats several times. Eventually A comes centre stage, speaks clearly and slowly the last lines of the Keats poem. Curtain.
Dude, Shakespeare didn't use f's instead of s's; that's just the style in which they wrote. Just as we don't say, "Shakefpeare" now, they didn't say "Shakefpeare" then. It affects lower case s's that don't come at the end of sentences, to be precise.
I read both poems as saying something very similar, in short: as invocations to the (genuine) work of mourning. If by that one takes the beautiful sense Gillian Rose gives it:
"By insisting on the right and rites of mourning, Antigone and the wife of Phocion carry out that intense work of the soul, that gradual rearangement of its boundaries, which must occur when a loved one is lost - so as to let go, to allow the other fully to depart, and hence fully to be regained beyond sorrow. To acknowledge and to re-experience the justice and the injustice of the partner's life and death is to accept the law, it is not to transgress it - mourning becomes the law."
Or invoking something similar, that is.
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