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comment by lil
lil  ·  2997 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 20th Quotes Than Which No Greater Can Be Conceived

Fintan O'Toole: Shakespeare is Hard, but so is Life

    The plays of William Shakespeare were written on the playing fields of Eton. Or, at least, the plays of Shakespeare as they have been taught in school, were. In the form in which most people first encounter them, Hamlet or Macbeth, King Lear or Othello are made to seem as if they have very little to do with the theatre, with the seventeenth century, with a man trying to create new rituals for a world that was changing at a frightening pace, and everything to do with building character, with the nineteenth century, with teaching us lessons about how we should behave.

    They are the mental equivalent of a cold shower; shocking. awful, but in some obscure way good for you, bracing you for the terrors of life and keeping your mind off bad thoughts about politics, society and the way the world changes. They are an ordeal after which you're supposed to feel better, a kind of mental muesli that cleans out the system and purges the soul. And, like muesli, they are boring, fruity and full of indigestible roughage.





wasoxygen  ·  2996 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Did you hear that the First Folio is on tour?

I discovered this while reading an article in Wikipedia about literary cruxes, words or phrases in old texts that are unclear to modern scholars. For example, Falstaff is described in the First Folio with the words

    ...his nose was sharp as a pen, and 'a Table of green fields

The intended words are believed to be "and 'a [he] babbl'd of green fields," but other phrases remain mysterious.

Also discovered during that rabbit hole: Foul papers.

lil  ·  2996 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I didn't know that about the First Folio tour or all the goings on at the Folger.

I spent the last while clicking around the Folger website... thx. The Foul papers gives the line from the witches in MacBeth a new twist:

ALL

Fair is foul, and foul is fair:

Hover through the fog and filthy air.

b_b  ·  2997 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Is O'Toole saying that we're seeing Shakespeare's tragedies not as they were originally intended? If so, how could they be presented differently?

lil  ·  2996 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yes, he is saying that.

He's arguing that the way Shakespeare was and is being taught has nothing to do with the complexity of an engaged artist trying to express the complexity of his own times (and thereby all other societies in dynamic alterations) --- He says that Shakespeare as it is studied in high school, and perhaps the majority of the Shakespeare productions are being reduced to a

don't-rock-the-boat Victorian ideology.

He believes most of us have encountered Shakespeare for the first time in school through the distorting theories of Victorians who wished most of all to tame the radical critique of the plays to sustain the colonial agenda of Empire -- and that, as he says in the quotation, the plays -- especially the tragedies -- are much more than that.

As for how they could be presented differently -- good question. I have a friend who bit-torrented all the available Shakespeare he could find. One of these was a PBS version of Macbeth with Patrick Stewart (Star Trek the next gen) playing Macbeth and -- oh look:

http://www.pbs.org/video/1604122998/

here it is all two hours and 41 minutes.

This was DEFINITELY anti-Imperialist putting Macbeth into a WW 1 landscape. Something is really unhinged from the usual in this production.

I just loved it.

I think he really gets the truth of what Shakespeare was all about! XoJ