The Bard of Avon

[sun-star]

I think you do have to see the play to appreciate it as it was meant to be watched (especially at the Globe Theatre ), but you understand it in a different way if you have time to read and think about it. Shakespeare puts so much into a short line - sometimes you just have to stop, admire and consider what he's saying. Perhaps the first experience of a play should be as a piece of drama in a theatre, and then it can be read more closely. Of course, reading it, you can lose sight of the dramatic aspect and the plot to concentrate on language and ideas. They're all important, when they're combined.

[Dunadan]

Did you get to the Midsummer Night's production this year at the Globe?? How was it? I missed out.. damn

[Bard]

Did I saw my name pass by?

[SIZE=1]Good thing you can only post 1 message every 90 secconds!

[sun-star]

I didn't see Midsummer Night's Dream, but I saw The Tempest there a few years ago. It was such a different experience to being in a normal theatre.

[Tanoliel]

Ooh, so lucky. I went to England but just missed seeing Tempest by about two weeks. So sad it was...
I agree that delving deeper into the text gives you an even richer experience. Often watching a play I can see the interplay between two characters well, but it's only when I go back and read the script that I can really see the brilliantly crafted lines fully. So awesome.
-tano

[WiseWizard]

I just found out that our school is going to be doing the scottish play for the spring play! And there's about a 90-100% chance I'll be cast in it, and about a 70-80% chance of getting cast as the scottish king!
I find that whether I be reading, seeing, or acting Shakespeare, I am always enlivened and enriched by the masterful use of language and plot (or absurd lack of it) and feelings which the characters portray through speaking.

[Humming bird]

Alright, I love Shakespeare. I like most of his works. I am only disappointed that the students I have are to young to comprehend him.

[WiseWizard]

I think that even the youngest can still appreciate Shakespeare. I started reading his plays when I was 7 years old. I didn't really understand it, but I still loved reading it.

[Huan]

I didn't know there was a Bard thread on this board?!! Rock n' roll! I don't know what to say at the moment, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to post on a Shakespeare thread. Now that I'm done with my coursework in grad school, I have made a vow to get back to Shakespeare. For those posts on the question of who wrote the plays, that would be a man named William Shakespeare, who came to London from Stratford-upon-Avon. I just saw a show on public television about the theory that Christopher Marlowe wrote the plays. And there's that whole Earl of Oxford thing. Or Elizabeth I! I feel that the plays reveal such a man, a real man, the actual man from Stratford. Plenty of evidence to throw at the Marlovians, Oxfordians, and Baconians. In As You Like It, for example, the setting, the Forest of Arden, is named for Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden. Plenty more where that came from. Hamlet is a Shakespeare-wrote-this unto itself. Check out Stephen Dedalus' theory of Hamlet in Joyce's Ulysses.

[Elfhelm]

Hey wow, someone who can cite Joyce on a Shakespeare thread! And named after the mighty hound himself. How cool!

I do think it's true though that some of the later romances were abandoned work of other playwrights that he completed for the other theatre after his own burned down. But that all just guessing.

[Huan]

Only on the internet can one who cites Joyce and names himself for a dog in The Silmarillion be called "cool."

Elfhelm, re. the "later Romances," are you referring to The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, etc.? Do you have anything to back that up? I would probably disagree if The Tempest falls into your group, because I find that one to be very personal to the Bard himself, and not the completion of abandoned burned-Globe backstock. But of course, I'm just guessing too!

[Tanoliel]

I agree that the Tempest was very much a Shakespeare play (as opposed to something he completed for someone else).
I also saw bits and pieces of that Marlowe thing...I don't think that Kit actually WROTE the plays, but there may be some truth in their collaboration. I don't think Shakespeare wrote the plays in total isolation; very few writers can, and in the environment he was in, that would be nearly impossible, not to mention impractical.
(Oh no...I'm starting again...)

The problem with Much Ado is that EVERYONE (female) wants to be Beatrice...and most males want to be Benedict. I've changed my mind. I'm going for Don John the Bastard. YEAH!

[Eruviel Greenleaf]

YAY, Tano! I think Don John is the best part, myself.

Except, of course, for the nightwatchmen (ok, so i'm only saying that because i was one when we did Much Ado a few years. . .)

[Huan]

Well, assuming the conspiracy theorists are incorrect, Marlowe couldn't have collaborated with Shakespeare on any play later than Romeo and Juliet, since he was dead.

[Tanoliel]

Except for the fact that Marlowe worked for the Queen's Secret Service, so there is a large chance that his death was faked. Supposedly he was stabbed in a duel in a bar and died that way...but the reports don't really corrolate. Apparently Marlowe was sitting at the bar and then suddenly there was a fight, with no reason--he drew someone else's dagger and stabbed him, and then got killed by that man's friend. (Think I got that right. Something close to that.) But the man who killed him was a servant of the man who was Marlowe's patron...and nothing happened to him, no discipline, no consequences, which is sort of suspicious.
Hells....I am SUCH a NERD.
Although I don't think that Marlowe collaborated on all of the plays....and I also don't think he would have collaborated after his death, or "death" as the case may be. I hear he escaped from England... (I am such a nerd....I love it.)

[Huan]

I just don't think Shakespeare's plays reflect Marlowe's voice at all. They betray an influence from Marlowe, but that doesn't mean he had any hand in writing them. When I was in a rock band, I stole liberally from The Beatles and Jane's Addiction, but that doesn't mean Ringo Starr or Stephen Perkins actually showed up at our rehearsals to give me pointers in my drumming. The dates and the material written by whichever dates just don't add up. Marlowe was the star of his time, at which point from Shakespeare we have several comedies, which he could do quite well right off the bat, while Marlowe demonstrates little talent as much of a comedian, and the Henry VI plays, which are FAR inferior to anything Marlowe ever accomplished. Beyond 1593, Shakespeare's plays demonstrate a feeling for true humanity that Marlowe never achieved. Sure, Marlowe wrote some great lines, but his characters were never as REAL as Shakespeare's. I prefer the theory that Marlowe's death left a vacuum for Shakespeare to enter and utterly surpass what had gone before. I think it comparable to Buddy Holly's death: it made space for John Lennon. This is a callous way to look at history perhaps, but perhaps I am callous.

[Tanoliel]

No, no, makes sense.
I got a book for my last birthday that it seems as if you would like very much: Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom. It talks about that same thing: how Will's characters are the first so human characters in plays. V. good.

[Huan]

I like The Invention of the Human for the most part, but I disagree with Bloom that no literary figures are truly human before Shakespeare's. At the very least, Homer's characters are as vividly human. Chaucer's too.

[Elfhelm]

No I don't place The Tempest in that. Parts of a Winter's Tale and Cymbeline seem like ... either the Bard was experimenting with spoken lines or they were written by someone else and he wrote the parts that sound like him. err... it would probably take a lot of effort to detail that supposition.

I think the Marlowe theory is that "shake spear" was his pen name when he was selling his plays to other companies, and after trouble with the law, possibly threatened to be exposed as a homosexual, he faked his death, moved to Italy and lived by selling plays by mail. I find it far-fetched. They try to support it with a lot of "lost in Italy" references.

I don't know how they can respond to Joyce's much more plausible explanation. If Marlowe was pretending to be a guy named Shakespeare, then how come a plague in London took the lives of some children named Shakespeare and then this Italian Marlowe suddenly stopped writing histories and started writing tragedies?

[Tanoliel]

Originally posted by Huan
I like The Invention of the Human for the most part, but I disagree with Bloom that no literary figures are truly human before Shakespeare's. At the very least, Homer's characters are as vividly human. Chaucer's too.

I don't think he was the first, either....I haven't read Chaucer (bad me bad me bad me), nor Homer for a very long time, but there are human characters before Shakespeare. He was the best of his time, though.