when compliments don't work

So, for various reasons recently, I've received a few compliments from gentlemen on my looks.

This is such an unexpected and unusual occurrence for me that I have serious cognitive dissonance reconciling the new information with the world as I know it to be.

"No no no, you don't understand, I'm the fat friend. The comfortable, I'll-never-want-sex-with-her, I can tell her everything, emotional punching bag, good for a laugh one. I'm not beautiful or sexy or delicious. I'm... Well... I wish I was... But I'm not.

I'm boys-yelling-from-cars-'you-fat-shit!' ugly.

I'm the recipient of reassuring-but-patronising-'there's-someone-for-everyone' comments.

I am not beautiful.

I'm beyond curvaceous, I'm just fat.

I'm hairy in all the 'wrong' places.

I have glasses.

I dress strangely.

I am not a thing of beauty and joy forever whose loveliness only increases."

Or at least, that's what I believe...

So when someone, especially someone I regard as... Gorgeous. Shining. Scrumptious. Sexy. Heavenly or just plain marvellous, compliments me...

Well...

Let's just say I feel exactly like Helena did in A Midsummer Night's Dream, when, thanks to Puck's meddling, her best friends BF and her crush who loves her best friend suddenly both start chasing her.

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, the man she loves and the man her friend loves, start complimenting her. Swearing undying love to her. And so of course, she, like me, experiences extreme cognitive dissonance, and deals with it by concluding they are mocking her.

I have to admit, it is REALLY HARD not to feel the same. I don't just disagree when someone's complimenting me. I begin to worry that for their own, strange, masochistic pleasure, they're bullshitting me...

Does anyone else have this problem?

Does anyone else feel like Helena when they receive a compliment? Anyone else tempted to scream:

Wherefore was I to this keen mockery born?
When at your hands did I deserve this scorn?

 ----------------------------------------------------

O spite! O hell! I see you are all bent
to set against me for your merriment.
If you were civil and knew courtesy,
you would not do me this much injury.
Can you not hate me, as I know you do,
but you must join in souls to mock me too?
If you were men, as men you are in show,
you would not use a gentle lady so:
to vow, and swear, and superpraise my parts,
when I am sure you hate me with your hearts.


PS. Superpraise. What a word!!!

Alzheimers

I love the way Shakespeare plays with the boundaries of reality, not just in his comedies, but in every genre he pursues.
He uses fairly traditional magic devices; sprites and fairies, potions etc. He also plays with time and myth, but one his most successful devices is the recurring motif of confused identity.

In Comedy of Errors (COE), you've got mulitple characters that look identical and thus are confused with one another (the Antipholus' and Dromios). And in other comedies and tragedies, you've got characters in disguise, which can cause a lot of confusion and angst, like in Twelfth Night. But he also uses it as a simple plot device to create situations that wouldn't have otherwise happened, like in one of my favourite ever scenes, where Henry V wanders among his soldiers on the eve of battle to test the mood and have a chat with God... It's fabulous.
But the confusion of identities in COE creates for me the same joy but also angst that other farce comedy like Mr Bean (and I reckon The Office) creates. On the one hand, the situations are hilarious and fantastic if performed well (as Rowan Atkinson does par excellence). However on the other hand, I feel the awkwardness, pain and frustration of the situation too keenly if the performance is too accurate, which makes it a painful experience to watch... Does anyone else find this kind of farce excruciating?
I really feel for the confused characters of COE, especially Adriana (who as you may remember was already anxious about her husband's love), who experiences an excruciating day of her husband apparently going totally mad and cracking onto her sister.
 
Worse still, she is accused of sending him mad by nagging! Her jealousy is blamed for his supposed mental distress! (Eh-oh, I've started copying his synonymous parallelism!) But as her sister Luciana points out, Adriana's nagging is being rather built up, she loves Antipholus, and this is how she expresses it... Her love is further exposed by her extreme reluctance to leave him with the Abbess and her desire to nurse him...
 
Anyway, leaving the nagging issue aside, it must be very distressing for your nearest and dearest not to recognise you at all, to claim they are not married to you and have no idea who you are... (Although, I can also see the fun in simply pretending not to recognise your family at all, and demanding instead that they address as you as Sir Pontington, Knight of the Realm or something. Maybe I shall pretend to be someone entirely different tomorrow...!!)
 
But it all makes me wonder if anyone in Billy's time lived long enough to develop Alzheimers...? Not that you have to be old to get it of course, but it would seem it helps...
 
So even though the comedy is absolutely hilarious (I particularly recommend Act Three, Scene Two to all, Belgium will become for you a far naughtier locale than you ever thought it could be ;-), there is a tinge of sadness to it all for me...
 
And thus I leave Bill's 'first' comedy, highly amused and thoughtful (exactly the way I like it) and move on to history with the First Part of Henry the Sixth. Huzzah!
 
How delightful it is to tick something off a list, even though it's not the assignments I should have completed or the study I should have done by now ;-)
 
But I shall leave you all with one delicious word from COE to ponder - distemperatures.
 
Ohhhh yeaaaahhhh.

Comedy of Errors

Seeing as the whole point of this blog is for me to actually read some Shakespeare, not just read about him, I figured I should stop procrastinating, get down and dirty and get into it.

So I "solved" the whole chronology problem by deciding to go with the table in the front of my Collins that was included in the introduction to the 1951 edition. I figure it'll stay with me as I cart the book around, and I can tick the plays, poems and sonnets off in pencil and feel very smug, which I look forward to.

The table said I should begin with the Comedy of Errors, so I have, and let me tell you, my brain took a while to clunk into gear at first.

I know that for many of you, reading Billy the Bard is an experience equivalent to drowning. No expression, no description, no image, no plain dialogue makes any sense to you at all, and so after a page, you're asphixiating slowly in a flood of phrases, eyes sliding closed, brain blacking out, hand's grasping wildly at all persons near you to force them to explain. And then, you stop struggling, your face grows increasingly pale, and you slip down into your chair in the back of English class, succumbing to the sweet sweet relief of death. For in death, you think, you won't have to read any more Shakespeare!

Well surprisingly, for those who suspect my love of the Bard is based solely on a snooty capacity to understand what he's talking about, I too share that experience of drowning-whilst-reading-unassisted.

When I come back to the Bard after a long absence, it is a little like riding a bicycle. All the muscle memory does eventually kick back in, but at the beginning, it's all very wobbly. After a while, I can begin confidently to increase speed and difficulty, begin racing up hills and down again, swooping joyfully all over the place, but just like all of us, I couldn't ride a bike immediately, I needed lessons, and training wheels, and a helmet, and adult supervision.

And for some us, all that much needed preparation was done pretty poorly in school, partly because some of our teachers couldn't ride the bike themselves, leaving them and us nowhere, and partly because some of us hadn't really read much of anything at all by the time we needed to tackle Shakespeare, and that makes the whole enterprise difficult in itself. It's like an immensely fat kid going from no exercise a day to a 10k run instantaneously - it's going to hurt, a lot, and may end in cardiac arrest. There needs to be a warm up, and some training.

(P.S. I will note here and now and forevermore. I am allowed to make whatever gentle fat jokes I like, for I am fat myself, and have heard them all. We fat people (mostly) understand one another, but if a fat person would like to register a complaint, please do, and I shall consider toning it down. You skinny people can just shut it :-)

One of the things about Shakespeare that most confuses those who now have to struggle with him in the 21st Century is that his was the language of the common people of his time, and yet it seems so inscrutable to us now... Even my Collins edition comes with a 2,500 entry glossary, (which I only just discovered!) "explaining the meaning of obsolete words and phrases" for the dumbfounded reader. We obviously all need help!

And I think that's ok. It's fine. It's completely appropriate that with all the shifts in language and meaning, with all the new things we've needed words for, and all the old things we don't even know of any more, it's understandable that a person can't simply pick up Shakespeare and understand all.

But let the language wash over you a little. Not in dunking breakers, but in gentle slap-slap-slaps to your semi-submerged face, and you begin to understand a little. After a while, you find you're grasping aspects of the plot, and as the scene changes, all of a sudden, you think you've figured out basically what's going on!

What joy! What rapture!

Now all of a sudden there's two pages of dialogue you don't understand at all, oh no! The blackness begins to creep in at the edges again, and your egg-beaters are powering away under the surface to remain upright and floating...

But then that character from that scene you did basically understand comes staggering on into this one, and you see the action again and know what's going on!

It's fantastic! It's funny! It's all beginning to make sense!

It's Shakespeare.