1. Talking with my counselor this week, we discovered that I may underestimate my own productivity. I’m not sure about that myself, but I’m starting to track it. Supposedly, the act of tracking behavior alone tends to lead to improvement, sort of a Heisenberg-Maximized-Potential Principle.

2. A couple weeks ago some idiot ran into my (new) car when it was parked outside the grocery store. Didn’t leave a note, of course, just a good deal of white paint on my door. The car is still perfectly functional, praise God, but needs a new door. Found out this week that there’s a parts shortage and that if I want a new door, it might have to wait until August. A used door is available, but those are more expensive (yeah, what you are thinking is what I said) and the insurance company is balking a bit at that. So, we’re going to wait and see if something becomes available this month.

When people talk about the joys of living in society, I don’t think this is what they have in mind.

3. Re-read The Merchant of Venice this week. I think this Shakespeare fellow might make a name for himself if keeps up this kind of work; it’s really a lot of fun. There’s a fair amount going on, but all interconnected and strung along on a theme of greed and generosity. Antonio, the titular merchant, lends at gratis, while his archenemy Shylock the Jew lends at usury. Antonio hazards all to help his friend Bassanio, who then has to run the riddle of three caskets, gold, silver, and lead to win the hand of the fair Portia, then seems doomed to pay the bond of a pound of flesh until Portia shows up in disguise to save the day by first warning Shylock to choose mercy, then using his own demand for exact justice against him by apply the exact terms of the bond. At the same time, Bassanio (and his chatty buddy Gratiano, who’s hooked up with Portia’s maid) make some rather overly free protestations of what they would sacrifice to save Antonio, so the ladies catch them out in a trick over a set of rings to teach them a lesson.

4. A core device is the lottery of the three caskets that all of Portia’s suitors have to go through to win her hand: the gold box promises “Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire,” The silver promises “Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves,” and the lead warns “Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath.” Two promises and a warning. The correct choice, of course, being the one that considers, not what he will gain by marriage, but what he must give and hazard, who recognizes the heavy weight and sacrifice demanded. “What many men desire,” according to the gold casket, is outward appearance and the show of wealth:

‘All that glisters is not gold;
Often have you heard that told:
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold: ⁠
Gilded tombs do worms infold.
Had you been as wise as bold,
Young in limbs, in judgment old,
Your answer had not been inscroll’d: ⁠
Fare you well; your suit is cold.’

and “as much as he deserves” is to be called a fool for his vanity:

‘The fire seven times tried this:
Seven times tried that judgment is ⁠
That did never choose amiss.
Some there be that shadows kiss;
Such have but a shadow’s bliss:
There be fools alive, I wis,
Silver’d o’er; and so was this.
Take what wife you will to bed,
I will ever be your head:
So be gone, sir: you are sped.’ ⁠

Pride and greed are sent away, while only he who is willing to give is rewarded:

‘You that choose not by the view,
Chance as fair and choose as true!
Since this fortune falls to you,
Be content and seek no new.
If you be well pleas’d with this
And hold your fortune for your bliss, ⁠
Turn you where your lady is
And claim her with a loving kiss.’

5. We also, of course, get one of the Bard’s great villains in Shylock. These days the whole play tends to be boiled down to a tired talk of anti-semitism, and while that’s certainly present it’s not so simple as that. Shylock’s definitely a bad guy – he’s a usurer and tries his level best to find a way to legally murder his rival – but he’s a sympathetic bad guy. You understand where he’s coming from, and his calling-out of the Christian characters is generally pretty fair, even if he himself doesn’t rise any higher and seems to have no conception of mercy or forgiveness (which, thematically, fits perfectly with his being a Jew, of the old law. Shakespeare usually lands this sort of thematic completeness with a dead-eye; it’s one of the reasons he’s so effective).

He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we ⁠will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

6. Others have commented on it before, but the ‘heroine disguises herself as a man’ trope recurs with almost hilarious frequency in the Bard’s plays. That used to be a much more common trope in general, now that I think about it: The Black Arrow, The Lord of the Rings, Swiss Family Robinson (the film at least), Seven Samurai, Dragonslayer, of course Mulan, etc. But apart from the Mulan remake (by the way, seen clips; there’s no way anyone would buy that), I can’t think of a time it’s been played straight since the Lord of the Rings films. Might be missing something, of course, but it seems to me to be something of a dead trope.

Of course, in times and cultures where men and women dressed distinctly (that is, what we call ‘civilized’ times) it was, I suppose, much easier to pull off. The clothes themselves and the short or concealed hair would naturally trigger a ‘man’ response. With both sexes mostly dressing in equally shabby fashion with little to distinguish them, there’s not much point in weeds-swapping (this must be a challenge for modern-dress performances, come to think of it).

7. I kind of think the Bard missed a trick, where he should have had a scene where the pompous Puritan fool (a less common, but prevalent trope in his plays) confidently accuses a genuine slim-legged, fair-faced page-boy of being a woman…while missing the actual heroine disguised a slim-legged, fair-faced page-boy.

“I shall disguise myself in man’s weeds!”
“M’lady, that cannot be thy solution to everything.”