(Paraphrased) “And then we come to the question of what to do about the rhymes, does the actor play them, or ignore them? I am sure that he should play them, because they are there in the text.”

– John Barton, Playing Shakespeare

I got a real kick out of that line.   It’s not patronizing the way he says it, but yet I think that off camera and maybe on a grumpy day you could almost hear him add “you idiot” at the end of that sentence. :)  [ I don’t know anything about the man’s real world directorial style, that’s just the way I imagine it going down. ] It’s like a neat little summary of how to play Shakespeare, however infinitely complicated you may see it.  “Hey, how should I play this scene?”  “What’s it say in the text?”  Repeat. (To be fair, this quote comes in the middle of his lesson on irony, which Barton clearly admits is *not* clear in the text, and something you have to interpret for yourself.  More on that in later posts.)

936-CALIBAN (That’s 936-225-4226 for the more numerically inclined.) I have no plans what to do with this new feature, yet.  I’m just curious what people might have to say.  Recite something? Suggest an idea?  Sing the praises of bacon(*)? Up to you. Speak the speech. (*) capitalization as intended, as I’m referring to the tasty food group, not the Shakespeare wanna be.

I’m not a big fan/follower of the Authorship question.  I prefer Occam’s Razor (the simplest solution is the most likely) so until I see compelling evidence to the contrary, it’s just not interesting to me. That’s why when I saw the name James Shapiro floating around this week, linked with the authorship question, I didn’t pay much attention. That may have been a mistake. Mr. Shapiro’s position seems to be popularizing the reasonable and realistic idea that Shakespeare always had plenty of co-authors, so perhaps we should get over ourselves about the whole “looking for an autobiography in his works” thing.  Hamlet is not about his dead son, and the Tempest is not his farewell to the stage. It seems to logically extend from there, then, that if the plays were always collaborative works, that there is no individual biography told in them, regardless of who the man was who signed the Shakespeare name.  And without that biographic hook, all of the authorship theories go out the window. 

http://gameletgame.blogspot.com/2010/03/trailer.html How did I not know about this?  The trailer tells us nothing about how the game will work, but it’s got Hamlet, Ophelia and Claudius in it.  That’s a good start! It’s being released in about two weeks, will have to check back in.  Maybe there’ll be a demo or something.

I saw Kurt Vonnegut speak at WPI sometime in the 1987-1991 range, where he gave this exact talk.  This is the one where he graphs the dramatic progress of major works of literature including Cinderella, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and Hamlet. His Y axis is basically the difference between “having a good life” and “having a bad life”, and the general dramatic plot is supposed to be “good person has bad things happen, over comes them, lives happily ever after.”

He draws Hamlet as a straight line. 

At the time, I was very upset by this.  In fact, I completely dismissed his talk because of it.  I attributed it to the rumor that he’d been out drinking with some students and was basically winging it.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of the man’s work, I’ve read everything I could get my hands on. But trying to make the point that the dramatic rise and fall of Hamlet equates to a straight line?

Now, almost 20 years later, I get it:

But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

Very nice.  That might be the longest it’s ever taken me to get the point.

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.