Tuesday, January 20, 2015

New Shakespearean Information

The works of William Shakespeare can come off to a modern reader as some highbrow material that they hated reading in high school (and maybe college). It's not difficult to see why - we can barely understand the word order sometimes, much less why there has to be two second-person forms of address. How the crap did someone write everything in such a prolific manner and get the second-person pronouns right?

The short story is that Shakespeare was the master of stereotypes. He was writing for a theater company that put up six different shows a week, and not all of them were performed a second or third time. He had to write for his actors, because there was so little rehearsal time; unlike today, when actors have a few weeks to get inside the character's head, Shakespeare's actors had several hours of personal rehearsal time and only one or two group rehearsals total. They had to already be inside the character's head, so Shakespeare wrote characters based on the personality traits of his actors; similarly, the actors could play a prince or a pauper as long as the character had similar traits to him. One actor often played the Fool archetype, but he could do it differently than another actor. One actor played a Natural Fool, who is genuinely just stupid, and so Shakespeare wrote a bunch of Natural Fool characters throughout the plays for this one actor. When that actor left, Shakespeare needed to hire a new actor; the man he hired tended to play a Wise Fool - someone who acted stupid but who was truly insightful (think Touchstone from As You Like It).

It's hard to say whether or not Shakespeare is truly genius because of this. On one hand, the archetypal roles allowed Shakespeare to churn out dozens of plays; on the other hand, though there are some intentional parallels among the plays, there is still a formula to them.

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