To be or not to be...

First of all I want to apologise for the extreme delay between entries. I had one, actually two pieces that were almost done. But they turned out rather personal, and I haven't decided yet whether to put them up or not. For reference, one was about Moulin Rouge, the Baz Luhrman Movie, the other one concerned itself with Peter Jackson's last brainchild, the final part of the Hobbit trilogy.

But while the committee of s-writing.blogspot.com is out to decide whether to put up either one or just scrap them completely, they asked me to write something up that could go live in the rapidly ending 2014, so that we would not have to end that year on such a serious downer as a six week gap would be.

This is why I present you with Shakespeare's sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

That Shakespeare wasn't a solemn wordsmith contemplating the fate of humanity from an aloof vantage Point should be clear. If your English teacher has denied you all the sex and violence the m was capable of writing about (Shakespeare, not your teacher) you should seriously consider suing him.

It's also moot to talk about how much Shakespeare contributed to the English language .He invented the word Alligator, for example. In my mind, this is by far his most important contribution.

See you later....A. mississippiensis. See?

Now, if you are like me, when thinking of Shakespeare, you think of daggers in the Night, Soliloquies and of course famously Romeo and Juliet. I want to talk about the second Point. A soliloquy is the equivalent of pressing the pause-button in a Play. It allows a Protagonist to make his inner workings visible, his very thoughts spelled out directly. This allow the audience to better understand him, to evaluate his motives and sometimes it is just a way to get us up to Speed, when a character's Actions differ from his underlying Ambition and we wouldn't notice the dichotomy otherwise. It's different from a monologue because that is addressed to someone, even if it is the audience. Here's Ian McKellen doing one:

The thing is: We think that when those plays were staged it all sounded like good old Gandalf, and that they were the pinnacle of dignity and solemnity. Not so, you guys, not so.

If you read the poem above, you will notice that the bard of Avon rhymed proved with loved. Say it out loud, is that a good rhyme? Did Bill just fail to come up with a better one? Did he loose steam at the end and just called it a day?

Eh, good enough, old chap!

What is often forgotten when reading plays is that they are meant to be acted, and acting comes from action...I think? Don't quote me on that. The point is: It's not meant to be read, it's meant to be listened to. And because there's momentum to the proceedings on stage a lot of stuff just flies under the radar. But more importantly, language has changed since then, and at the time of writing loved rhymed with proved. Which implies that the actors reciting Shakespeare sounded more like your drunken Irish uncle (Don't you dare deny it!) than Magneto.

This in turn means that it's pretty hard to enjoy works of art out of their temporal context. One more example:

And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;
And thereby hangs a tale.

Scholars now surmise that hour actually means whore and ripe means rape...and rut means rut. So it's not so much about pondering one's immortality...but something else. I made no part of that up. Work of Art indeed.

So, in conclusion we can only  strive to appreciate works in their original form. Sometimes this means losing them completely. Think of how dated the pop culture references of the first Shrek movie feel even now. Now I don't want you to throw the wash out with the water, I just want to promote a more conscious approach, and the possibility to question from time to time accepted conventions.

PS: During the writing of this entry Autocorrect tried to change a misspelled Shakespeare into Hairspray. Is thereby hanging a tale, too?