I’ve been approached by Classical Actors Ensemble to serve as a poetic liasion for the Kickstarter campaign they’re running for their Spring 2014 Repertory of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet and Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.
What this means in practice is that if you back the project at the level of Crown Sonnet or above, you will be commissioning a sonnet written by me (in addition to a bunch of pretty nifty rewards). Here’s a sample of that would look like:
You’ll be able to address the sonnet you commission to anyone of your choosing or specify a particular subject. It could be a grand romantic gesture or a sentimental token. Want to star in the sonnet yourself? Create an amazing gift? Make your guy or gal swoon? Immortalize your cat in verse? Whatever you want, a custom sonnet is guaranteed to be unforgettable.
The kickstarter only has a couple more days to run, but if you’ve ever thought yourself, “I really wish I could pay Justin Alexander to write a sonnet for me,” then this is really an opportunity that you can’t afford to miss.
(I’ll also be at the Donor’s Reception which you’d receive as a Crown Sonnet backer, so if you’re local to Minneapolis and wanted to meet me… Ta-da. That’s literally a privilege which money can apparently buy. Although, realistically, there are probably other ways to make that happen.)
Shakespearean scholarship tends to accrue a lot of weird bullshit: When you’ve got thousands of PhD candidates desperately looking around for original and unique thesis material there’s a mass tendency to just throw stuff at the wall and hope that something sticks. Unfortunately, some of the stuff that sticks is basically a scholastic urban legend: Dramatic, catchy ideas that are nevertheless without any basis in reality whatsoever.
For example, the recent theatrical release of Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing has prompted quite a few mainstream articles talking about the double meaning of the title. “Nothing” and “noting” were homophones in Elizabethan England, which means that the title is effectively a pun — the play is both about “nothing” (i.e., about things which are not true) and “noting” (i.e., spying and eavesdropping). But the claim is also frequently made that “nothing” is a double entendre which meant “vagina” in Shakespeare’s day (i.e., “no thing” or that there is literally nothing between a woman’s legs). Thus the title of the play can be understood to also mean Much Ado About Pussy.
The problem is that, as far as I can tell, it’s not true.
The modern tradition of asserting that “nothing” means “vagina” in Shakespeare appears to date back to Stephen Booth’s 1977 edition of the Sonnets. But Booth doesn’t appear to give any evidence that “nothing” was actually used that way in Elizabethan slang. His claim is based almost entirely around “wouldn’t it be nifty if this sonnet said ‘pussy’ instead of ‘nothing’?” (He also maintains that “all” means “penis” because it sounds like “awl” which looks like a penis. And that “hell” also means vagina because… well, just because.)
This little “factoid” has become popular because it’s so delightfully dirty and you can use it over and over and over again. (Shakespeare uses the word “nothing” more than 500 times in his works.) But it doesn’t seem to have any basis in fact. (If someone can actually cite a primary Elizabethan reference to “nothing” being commonly used as slang for “vagina”, I’ll happily stand corrected.)
It reminds me of the claim that “nunnery” means “whorehouse” in Shakespeare, so that when Hamlet tells Ophelia to go to the nunnery he’s really telling her to become a whore. No. He isn’t. The only Elizabethan references to “nunnery” meaning “whorehouse” are in a comedy where a whorehouse being referred to as a nunnery is a joke specifically because a nunnery isn’t a whorehouse.
Claiming that this means “nunnery” was common slang for “whorehouse” is like watching Monty Python and claiming that “go”, “selling”, “sport”, “cricket”, “games”, and “photography” are all common slang words for sex.
Be aware: The City Pages review has some pretty healthy spoilers.
Our pay-what-you-can performance is tonight: Show up and you can pay whatever you want for a ticket. We also run Thursday through Saturday next weekend.
7:30 pm – Thursdays thru Sundays
October 20th thru November 3rd
Gremlin Theater
2400 University Ave. West
St. Paul, MN
I mention this because I’m playing the role of Jonathan Wild, the Thief-Taker General of 18th-century London. He’s the delightfully devious villain of the piece: The crown pays him a generous bounty for every thief he brings to the gallows. Problem? The program is too successful and he’s running out of thieves. Solution? Blackmail thieves into recruiting new members for their gangs and then get them to betray the new members after one or two jobs.
7:30 pm – Thursdays thru Sundays
October 20th thru November 3rd
Gremlin Theater
2400 University Ave. West
St. Paul, MN
“I am writing a play. It’s a comedy. There are three women’s parts, six men’s, four acts, landscapes, a view over a lake; a great deal of conversation about literature, little action, tons of love.”
– Anton Chekhov
A few years ago I wrote a translation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. That translation is now available as a DRM-free Kindle e-book. This, of course, also means that it can be read on any iPad, Android, Windows PC, Mac, or Blackberry device using the free Kindle Reading Apps for those platforms. Or transferred to any other e-reader you might care to employ with a minimum of effort.
The Seagull is the haunting tale of young love, lost dreams, and broken promise. Its unique cast of incomparable characters echoes dully in a perfect balance – each drawn and repulsed in equal measures through an enchanting and terrifying dance choreographed by Anton Chekhov, the master of Russian theater. It is that rare and precious jewel which perfectly reflects a slice of life, finding those moments which are simultaneously comic and tragic; mortal and divine; eternal and common.
This performance-tested translation captures both the comic and tragic elements of Chekhov’s stirring drama. Those wishing to find a text which is both faithful to the play’s original Russian and also capable of achieving lyric truth in English will not be disappointed: The characters speak Chekhov’s words in another tongue.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATION
Back in 2010 I also wrote a series of essays discussing the translation. If you didn’t read them back then, you might find them interesting now:
