"Monday-morning lines"

John Sutherland’s Guardian article on the contention that some of Shakespeare’s worst lines were written the morning after a big drunk is amusing, though it feels kind of rushed into print to fill space on a slow news day. Alhough all of the Macbeth examples were pretty well chosen, it feels as if Sutherland is basing his argument on lines pulled at random from the text; he’s making a big statement based on weakly presented evidence.

Still, he does cite Kermode and others who testify to some of the Bard’s “crap lines.” And I don’t doubt that it’s true. Running a theatre, acting, and writing plays consumed lots of time and energy, sometimes the muse snoozes, and there’s no better way to relax your mind than to leave your workroom and get snockered.

I also assume Shakespeare wrote without benefit of an editor or readers (apart from his fellow actors), and since the canonical texts were largely re-membered by his fellow players, is it beyond the bounds of belief that maybe they threw in a few lines of their own that we now attribute to the Great Man?

The article reminded me of Anthony Burgess’ book on Shakespeare, where he says that most everyone in London at that time walked around half-drunk because there was no reliably potable water supply. As a result, they drank the beer, wine, and other fermented beverages that were safer to drink than the water.

Eh–so what? In plays that are so big and sprawling, there are places for odd lines, lazy writing, strange motivation, and lapses in the plot, just as there are places for witches, ghosts, assassinations, passion, and all other things that grab an audience’s wayward attention. Shakespeare didn’t write well-made plays, he wrote great plays. We shouldn’t be surprised that Shakespeare wrote lazy lines now and then; what’s surprising is that what he tossed off “without a blot” is still so good and still lives.