In Defense of Hate Disguise

"It is worth remarking as an extremely fine touch in the picture of Bottom that his literary taste is almost everywhere concerned with sound rather than sense. He begins the rehearsal with a boisterous readiness, “Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete.” “Odours, odours,” says Quince, in remonstrance, and the word is accepted in accordance with the cold and heavy rules which require an element of meaning in a poetical passage. But “Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete”, Bottom’s version, is an immeasurably finer and more resonant line. The “i” which he inserts is an inspiration of metricism."
- G.K. Chesterton, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (essay)

I was always going to give my habitual heroine a minimum of two fellow-passengers on the Gua Gua, and to make them coworkers came naturally after that. The two of them have a simple job, to sell stuff, but it's not simple stuff that they're selling--it's the concentrated essence of the seasons, but it looks a lot like ice cream and, when you get right down to it, that's all it probably is.

I made one of the two a poet as an excuse to throw all sorts of little songs and jingles into the text. The other fellow was a bit more difficult, and I didn't have a name for him until he'd been around three chapters or so, with me growing more fond of him every minute. Then, on a whim, I stuck him with the unusual monicker of "Hate Disguise"--a name, as a bemused Renee puts it, which is "part English-dubbed anime villain and part sneeze."

It's a misnomer, of course. Hate, while not bereft of bitterness, is a sort of gruff, warm, mopey fellow. Any anger his soul may possess is turned inward--as Shakespeare worded it in As You Like It, "I will chide no breather in the world but myself, against whom I know most faults." So why go with Hate Disguise? Well, the name occurred to me and it just sounded right, I can't say it any way else. The meaning was entirely wrong for the character, but what if you didn't know the language? Then "Hate Disguise" would sound like a big, warm, generous name, a name for a man who smokes cigars and then feels guilty over it, not on account of his own lungs but because he's afraid that his friends Renee Rant and Donovan Din might get a dose of secondhand smoke. That kind of guy. I read a play by Clifford Bax, The Poetasters of Ispahan, where one of the titular lyricists is looking for a decent rhyme: "What though the sense be thin?" he says. "Sound is the soul of song." (I might add that the word "poetaster", which means nothing more than "bad poet", sounds fantastic; I'd crown myself with that word over a forest full of laurel wreaths.)

So in the story Hate has some kind of a normal name before Donovan Din the poet inflicts the flagrant "Hate Disguise" on him. It's a little comment about poetic thinking and how sometimes poets make the sounds matter more than the meaning. Still, I can't help but wonder uneasily how readers will react to him, since these days the word "hate" carries such a strong connotation that it can't be regarded as simple nonsense. All the time, we hear about "hate speech," "hate crime"--things that are supposed to crush and kill the spirits of our fellow men. And people will have a hard time trusting Hate, and how much you wanna bet that my editors (if I'm ever lucky enough to have such things) force me to change his name? I wouldn't exactly blame them, but I'd have a hard time prying the name from the identity. He just is Hate, and it can't be helped; don't hate on Hate Disguise. He surprised me by turning up in a chapter with the name attached to him, and ever since then, it's just been like that.

To me, that's the thing that fascinates about Hate--the fact that he keeps turning out not like I planned him to. He was going to be a madman. Then he was going to be a smooth talker, absurdly comfortable in his skin. Then he turned out to be a daydreamy, foggy sort with an inferiority complex. But I tried to make his tongue cease to be sharp, in order to better suit this characterization, and it never did. Like many a foggy daydreamer, he's every bit as clever as his friend of the sharp focus. And you know what? I shouldn't jinx the boy by writing all of this out as if it's finality. Because I'm going to bet you that Hate's just gonna keep on evolving. I'll stay the course, and we'll see what happens.

The lesson I take from this is that I shouldn't let Renee be static, either. She's a first-person narrator, and it's easy to obsess about consistency when you're writing from a single point of view, but the truth is that people aren't consistent and there's always new sides of them, and sometimes the sides conflict. I could have one person in a room and try to inform you, over the phone, who was with me, by throwing out only descriptive terms--and you'd think that I had a crowd in there. People can't be described in three words. People are crowds and should be treated as such.

Tranio's Course of Studies

A few links to help me with the acting of Tranio, supposed Lucentio.

Mostellaria, a play by the Roman playwright Plautus; the source of Tranio's name and nature.

Supposes, the source of Shrew's subplot; English playwright George Gascoigne's adaptation of the Italian play Suppositi.

Ars Amatoria (Ovid's "The Art to Love", a favorite of both Tranio and Lucentio--here are two translations)

"Let's be no stoics nor no stocks, I pray."

This morning, after I got back from Daily Mass--which always spurs me to be productive as well as spiritual--I jotted a list down in my diary of Things that Wanted Doing. After looking it over, I realized that I didn't have as much time for pleasure-reading as I thought.

Which is actually a bit of a relief, since I've been rationing my Bertie Wooster books against a period of starvation. Yes, I know, technically they're Jeeves books, but I read them for Bertie Wooster. One of the things that makes him appealing as a character--besides his eccentric narrative style, which is really the main thing--is his utter helplessness. People, especially misguided girls, want to help him even in-story, although they do him more harm than good--forcing him to read Nietzsche to improve his mind, for example. Even Jeeves is implied to be doing what he does because he just feels sorry for the poor, hapless lad.

I wonder if that's the way Tranio feels about Lucentio. Lucentio has the opposite problem--he's too scholarly and stable, he'd probably read Nietzsche for pleasure, and, bottom line, there's not enough excitement in his life. Poor fellow, maybe setting him up with Bianca will help.

At any rate, I'll see. Signing out for Shrew rehearsal now. Allie is changed into Tranio. (And Tranio is changed into Lucentio.) :)

Swamped in Shakespeare

"They are the faction. O conspiracy,

Shamest thou to show thy dangerous brow by night,

When evils are most free? O, then by day

Where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough

To mask thy monstrous visage? Seek none, conspiracy;

Hide it in smiles and affability:

For if thou path thy native semblance on,

Not Erebus itself were dim enough

To hide thee from prevention."

- Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene I

Let me just think about this:

- For several months, I've been rehearsing for the role of Tranio in the Front Lawn Player's production of The Taming of the Shrew. (Which, by the way, is some pretty multi-layered acting. The entire show is a play-within-a-play, which means I'm an actress playing an actor who plays a servant who spends the whole play pretending to be his master, Lucentio. Forgive me if I suffer from identity confusion.)

- Over the weekend I went to my first rehearsal for a parody sketch show of sorts called I Hate Shakespeare!

- And on Monday I get back together with my beloved Blackfriars to start directing Julius Caesar.

These next few months should really indulge my bardolatry.

Analyzing Tranio, part 1

[Explanation: I was recently cast as Tranio in The Taming of the Shrew. Character analysis is a hobby of mine, and Tranio, being particularly hard to pin down, is my latest victim. Let's see if I can figure out what makes him tick. More posts to come...]

"Tranio, since for the great desire I had

To see fair Padua, nursery of arts,

I am arrived for fruitful Lombardy,

The pleasant garden of great Italy,

And by my father's love and leave am armed

With his good will and thy good company."

- Lucentio, speaking the first lines of The Taming of the Shrew (if you don't count the induction)

Shrew, as actors call it, is a tricky, multi-layered menagerie of a play. Of course, everyone now knows that it's about Katerina and Petruchio, but if you were an Elizabethan theater-goer you might start out thinking it was a play about a drunken man tricked into believing himself a lord. (That's just the frame story.) And once you were past that, you'd think that it was a play about Lucentio and his faithful servant-slash-sidekick, Tranio, scheming to set Lucentio up with the beautiful and unavailable Bianca. Well, it is a play about that, too, but Lucentio and Tranio are only the subplot, and they've got a fair chance of fading into the background if the performance they're in has a particularly good Petruchio.

I don't know how common the "tame your wife" plot might have been in Elizabethan England--my guess is that it showed up in other places besides Shrew. But the subplot, like most of Shakespeare's subplots, is lifted from every source available. Tranio represents one of the most ancient and hardy breeds of stock character ever to emerge from theater; the Plautine slave, or Servus Callidus. (Definitions of the word callidus, as given by a Latin dictionary I found online: clever, dextrous, experienced, skillful, cunning, sly. All of which more or less apply to Tranio.) In fact, his name was actually stolen from a Plautus play, where it had been appended to a character of the same type. Nowadays, when we authors reach for a Shakespeare name if we want to impart some shorthand (Puck for a tricky character, for instance, or Tybalt for one with murderous intent), it's funny to think that Shakespeare himself once did the same thing.

By the way, my recent Wodehouse obsession sprang directly from being cast as Tranio. I had a vague recollection of reading part of a Jeeves story, and Tranio instantly reminded me of Jeeves. No coincidence there--and not just because Wodehouse knew his Shakespeare, but because Wodehouse knew his theater. He spent years working in drama and writing musical comedies for the stage, which leads me to believe that Bertie's man Jeeves, if not a direct descendant of Lucentio's man Tranio, is at least a near-relative.

Lucentio is, of course, less capable than Tranio. He starts out as the absent-minded scholar and seamlessly transitions into the dreamy lover as soon as Bianca sets her foot on stage. That's not to say he isn't intelligent, but he's too busy with his thoughts to help himself at any given moment. Tranio is never too busy to help Lucentio--in fact, he's never busy with anything else. "Singleness of purpose" is his motto. (I'm reminded of Jeeves again. Dialogue from a Jeeves story: "Are you busy just now?" "No, sir." "I mean, not doing anything in particular?" "No, sir. It is my practice at this hour to read some improving book; but, if you desire my services, this can easily be postponed, or, indeed, abandoned altogether.") If he's serious about his business, your trusty Servus Callidus isn't going to be doing a thing besides helping you, any more than a piece of technology would. That's Tranio--the Elizabethan equivalent of the iPhone. Can't figure out what to do from here? Tranio has an app for that.

That's not to say the Servus Callidus doesn't help himself; he'd just prefer to tie his personal plans neatly in with yours, almost as if they're an afterthought. "I am content to be Lucentio," says Tranio, disguising himself as his employer, "because so well I love Lucentio." But it's hinted that his willingness to go along with the scheme might also have something to do with the fact that being Lucentio entails wearing Lucentio's clothes, managing Lucentio's money and throwing parties at Lucentio's house. Not a bad deal, even if it's only temporary.

In a sentence: Tranio has an agenda, and he's sticking with it.

(Or, if you prefer your character analysis to rhyme: Tranio has a plan, yo.)