Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT 21-25 March 2011 (1886-1890)
Deadlywonky:
--- Quote from: pwhodges on 25 Mar 2011, 17:54 ---I live in the country of the Prime Meridian - the rest of you have got your clocks wrong.
(N.B. I will get annoyed at having to put my clock wrong next weekend - Grrr!)
--- End quote ---
and it irks right through until October doesn't it? It certainly does for me.
no one special:
--- Quote from: DSL on 23 Mar 2011, 23:24 ---Re: Shakespeare:
[...]I had a professor in college who explained Shakespeare wasn't some longhair artiste but a guy who wrote what sold in his day ... Then explained all the dirty jokes. The effect was to make me regard Shakespeare as accessible and not some rarefied incomprehensibility.
--- End quote ---
This is SO the key. God bless your professor. The reason so many people get turned off to Shakespeare is that some teachers act like his works are some holy tome that have to be kept on a pedestal. Are some of his plays the most incredible things that have ever been written in English? Yes... but that's not how you get kids interested! (Also, some of his plays [The Tempest, The Winter's Tale] are just not that great.) Shakespeare wrote stuff that people would buy and that made the family of his most famous benefactor (i.e. Queen Elizabeth I) look like saints. Dude knew where his bread was buttered. And yeah, Shakespeare was a dirty motherfucker - his plays are rife with sex jokes, poop jokes, fart jokes, more sex jokes, and even more sex jokes.
If you break down Othello into a story about a dude whose friend told him a lie about his girlfriend - hell, everyone can relate to that! And that's really all that that play's about. Once you get kids interested, then maybe they'll be open to understanding the beauty of the words, and then, who knows?
I was lucky in that I've just always been interested in words, so Shakespeare just sorta came naturally to me, and always fascinated me.
How much did it influence me? Well, I'm a professional Shakespearean actor... so, I guess, quite a bit :-D
Tergon:
Damn right. Any account I've read suggests that Shakespeare wasn't some tortured emo who stared wistfully at a vase of roses for inspiration, he was a storyteller. Flowery writing and over-the-top symbolism is all well and good but you don't become as famous as he did if you're a one-trick pony. He wrote what people liked and, well, people love a good laugh and a punch-up in between the love scenes, and Shakespeare delivered exactly that.
Romeo & Juliet includes a scene of Romeo and Mercutio basically exchanging "Do you know how I know you're gay?" jokes. Hamlet pulls a "Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies" moment just for the hell of it. No One Special just gave a fairly accurate summation of Othello being about a guy with the wrong idea about his ladyfriend. Hell, even his less popular stuff like The Tempest has its moments, like two fellas roving about a desert island pissed as parrots, linking up with the play's equivalent of Igor the Manservant (who somehow decides the drunkards are from the Moon), before the inebriated trio decide to launch a spectacularly ineffective revolution against... well, they're not quite sure, but it's against someone!
Sure, when he got his lead up, Shakespeare could spout purple prose like nobody's business, there's no question about that. It's just that he also loved fight scenes, dick jokes, and literally just making up words for the hell of it because fuck it, writing's too hard to bother about using the correct one when you can just spout gibberish and you know nobody's gonna call you on it. And if you try to read Shakespeare as anything other than a guy with a sense of humour telling a story to entertain people, you're missing out on a lot of the good stuff in his work.
akronnick:
He was also, almost always working with a really tight deadline.
The show must...
Well, you know.
Lupercal:
--- Quote from: no one special on 26 Mar 2011, 03:32 ---
--- Quote from: DSL on 23 Mar 2011, 23:24 ---Re: Shakespeare:
[...]I had a professor in college who explained Shakespeare wasn't some longhair artiste but a guy who wrote what sold in his day ... Then explained all the dirty jokes. The effect was to make me regard Shakespeare as accessible and not some rarefied incomprehensibility.
--- End quote ---
(Also, some of his plays [The Tempest, The Winter's Tale] are just not that great.)
--- End quote ---
The Winter's Tale is a fantastic play and I will fight you if you say otherwise!
Seriously, 16 year disappearance of the female protagonist, the morbid jealousy is much more eloquently expressed, and the fact that it ends "well", in the sense that it is not a tragedy but a tragi-comedy/romance/problem play puts it above some others in my opinion. Also, Leontes isn't a character that you can just out and out hate, because he is his own Iago and feeds off of his own words and ideas. Its the implosion of the character that makes it interesting. Also you've got the parallels of Bohemia and Sicillia, two season, and damn, this play is home to Exit, pursued by a bear. Great stuff.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version