The Shakespeare thread
 

Last month was the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. So, there's lots of commemorative stuffs going on this year. I've been intending to start a thread for ages, but somehow haven't.

So - here is a thread for all things Shakespeare.

First off - a really fascinating talk. This guy rocks. He really opens it up and makes sense of the bard. He's one of the people behind the OP (original pronunication) performances at the Globe. Fabulous actor, and a really great speaker and academic. Accessible and funny. Changed my understanding completely.
Guy's a fucking genius. And the two actors he has workshopping scenes do a great job. The way it all comes together is so organic it's gorgeous.

Shakespeare wrote down tales used by traveling troubadours forever, in a gobblygook that nobody except Shakespeare nerds can understand. Cloud tried to extoll the awesomeness of Shakespeare and I'm still not buying it. :headshake

Then watch the talk - because it will make much more sense. Trust me, just give it a go. It's a really interesting talk and he is a really interesting speaker. You don't have to get into Shakespeare to understand why it worked.

Forget everything you thought you knew about Shakespeare - this talk blows it out of the water.

Also: No - he adapted existing tales for the stage. Or looked to historical events as the basis for plays. Like screenplays take stories and make them breathe on the screen. As much as I love reading Shakespeare - he was never meant to be read as literature. He was a Spielberg, or a Tarantino, or an Oliver Stone. When he adapted a troubadour's tale, he was taking a one dimensional thing and making it multidimensional - filling it out with characters and scenes, and speech and spectacle. You may not like what he wrote - but it's kind of silly to dismiss him for doing what some of our greatest screenwriters and directors still do today.

Also worth remembering that what is 'gobbledegook' to the modern ear would have been readily understood by an audience 400 years ago. It may exist in a highbrow place now, but it was down and dirty for the common man back in the day.

[eta]

Sorry to harp on but there's anther point I want to make: the idea that Shakespeare was somehow not really inventive, or creatively lazy, or 'just' redoing old stories seems to me to be based on modern expectations of storytelling,. But the way we understand stories now, and what we expect of storytellers, would be wholly anachronistic for Shakespeare's time. That kind of inventiveness, where a story is crafted wholly from new cloth, pulled fully from the author's imagination without reference to older tales or traditions is very modern and would have seemed very peculiar 400 years ago - that's not what people expected from storytellers. That kind of storytelling only really started to take place with the development of the novel as a story form.

It's still gobbygook to anyone reading it now. It may as well have been written in German or Welch for all practical purposes. An hour and a half about Shakespeare? Ain't nobody got time for that.

Well i wasn't expecting you to watch the whole thing :P Not unless you started and it drew you in.

Everything is interesting Bruce - look closer



:p
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also, I added a bit to my post whilst you were posting:)


Here's a little clip to give a flavour of the talk and his style of presentation:

Oh I love that poem!

It sucked, but not me in. He said himself, it was written to be performed, not read. Well, it wasn't meant to be listened to by someone else reading it either. Also, between the accent and poor sound quality he was hard to understand. Twenty one minutes, at youtube, full screen, was all I could take.

haha. Ok, fair enough :) Thanks for giving it a go

I thought he was brilliant.

What blew me away was his explanation of iambic pentameter - I've never really got that before - I got the beauty of the poetry, and the rhythm - but the way the beats are used passed me by. The way that rhythm actually works as stage direction - such as Romeo and Juliet finishing each other's sentences - or the way missing beats create pauses. And then the idea that, instead of each player declaiming separately, may actually have been players talking over each other in a more naturalistic fashion was fascinating. His analagy of Shakespeare using and subverting tjhose conventions, like a jazz musician was lovely.

Whne he got the two actors to demonstrate, it really brought it home to me, how that would have worked on stage, turning something quite dry into something very lifelike and effective.

Leaving aside the issue of content, I think the problem is mainly that the guy is just a boring public speaker; he sucks the energy out of the room. I bet if Kate Tempest was presenting it, or Richard Herring, it would be much more accessible.

I call it the Boaty McBoatface principle.

His lecture reminds me a bit of this:

Wow, you thought he was a boring speaker? I loved his style and energy. he reminded me of my favourite lecturer at uni. Funny how something can really hit for one person and totally miss for another.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess he had you at "Shakespeare"

:p: ;)

hehehe. Oh, no, I have seen some desperately boring talks about Shakespeare. I genuinely like his presentation styele. Like I say, he reminds me of one my favourite lecturers at uni - the one who got me interested in military history

BBC's new Shakespeare sitcom - with David Mitchell as the bard:

I don't know if the gag would be sustainable for a whole sitcom, but I do love me some David Mitchell.