Friday, May 22, 2015

You Dragons

Dug out a couple of books about Shakespeare and looked up CYMBELINE in them. Edith Sitwell, in her "Notebook on William Shakespeare," quotes this: "To the Truncke againe, and shut the spring of it./ Swift, swift, you Dragons of the night, that dawning/ May bare the Raven's eye! I lodge in fear;/ Though this is a heavenly Angell, Hell is heere." I should have mentioned that when Lee asked me for memorable lines. See, Ethan Hawke is like, "Hey, uh, I almost forgot, can you hold a package for me for a few days?" (I paraphrase.) and Dakota Johnson from 50 SHADES OF GREY is like, "Sure!" (I paraphrase again.) So that's no package! It's a steamer trunk, and Ethan Hawke is hiding in it in his underpants, and when Dakota Johnson from 50 SHADES OF GREY goes to sleep he pops out and takes selfies with her. I don't recall if he said the part about "dragons of the night" but I do know he said, "Though this is a heavenly angel, hell is here." And "hell is here" struck me at the time. To be fair to CYMBELINE! And Ethan Hawke. Looked in a Frank Kermode volume and didn't get much (well, I didn't try very hard) except for a casual and tantalizing aside about "the astrologer Simon Forman" who saw the original production and (which has nothing to do with CYMBELINE) later "died, as he had precisely predicted, on 12 September 1613."