Analysis Tip from Tom Stoppard

As I said in an earlier post I have done considerable work in analyzing “Hamlet” and “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.”  After what we talked about it class today, I really think I would like to polish it up and post about it when we finish covering the learning outcome for breadth in a few weeks.  I am glad that we are reading several plays rather rapidly at the offset since this will help to satisfy that requirement and I can already see how doing this is gearing me up for a future more thorough analysis.   I sort of think of it as an intense training exercise.  I am posting this video now because I don’t want to forget about it, as I will need it later on, and because so many other students in the class have expressed ideas in production.  

I really like what Stoppard says in this clip about the need for definite control of the order of events in the play.  His emphasis on this as a strategy for crafting a successful scene helps me to form a clearer idea for how I would like to perform analysis of plays, and films.  This crept into my mind since i recently finished watching the film of Richard the III.  It is a short clip and I think you’ll find it useful especially if you are one of those planning a production.

Consider the Audience

A Reading Audience

While the script is fantastic for Richard the III I realized while I was reading it through that I was having a bit of a hard time keeping up with the many characters.  It seemed like everyone was dying off just as you got to know them!  In an effort then to help me keep track I thought I would watch a film adaptation.  I jumped out on a limb and watched the 1995 version.  There were some parts that I could see getting bad before I got there so I would just look away, but it is Richard the III so it simply couldn’t be a pleasant story. 

A Film Audience

As I said, I decided to do this in the first place to try and get a better feel for the flow of the play and so I was following along with my book while I watched the movie.  It was interesting to see how the film played with timing the events.  Often segments that did not appear till the next scene would be interspersed with moments from the prior scene.  This made it difficult to follow at times, but I always found my bearings again and continued.  Another aesthetic choice was to shorten the dialogue.  For example in Act 4 scene 4 when King Richard is manipulating Queen Elizabeth to convince her to let him marry her daughter half of his main persuasive argument, lines 296-316, are simply removed.  This choice plays well to this screening of the film, giving it a much faster pace, and facilitating rapid shifts from event to event (building the tension of the coup and sustaining that tension as Richards power was challenged).

A Modern Play Audience

Given that a modern 2000’s audience has grown in a world full of instant messaging, fast food, and instant information, I wonder how much more of this play would need to be cut to keep a modern audience entertained?  Would it need to be shortened?  Do people who aren’t there for a class assignment really want to sit through a 2+ hour play?  I wish there was a performance of this going on nearby; I’d like to examine that.  

Cross Characterization

As I am reading through “Richard the III” I can’t help but notice a simple connection in characterization that exists between this play and “Hamlet.”  Throughout the later the audience is fascinated by the psychological depth of Hamlet.  For example, in act 2 scene 2 he curses:

“Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!...

  I a dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak

  Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,

  And can say nothing – no, not for a king

  Upon whose property and most dear life

  A damned defeat was made.  Am I a coward?”

Similarly, in “Richard the III” the audience is at once repulsed, and allured by the king-to-be.  Look at his opening soliloquy:

           “Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,

 Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time

 Into this breathing world scarce half made up,

And that so lamely and unfashionable

That dogs bark at me as I halt by them-…

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover

            To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

            I am determined to prove a villain

            And hate the idle pleasures of these days.”

There is a similarity among these self aware characters that makes them more accessible to the audience.  While a given individual might not correlate with the death-plotting of these characters, by making them self aware the audience is able to relate to their sense of brooding, their questioning nature that muses over the finite principles of life.  These two of Shakespeare’s psychological characters in this way attach themselves to the dark side of human nature in the audience, which even if detested, or overcome through saintly living, is still recognizable in some degree in the audience.  What other similarities I will find by cross analyzing the plays?  This is fun!

Ranting Against Academic Sources

I have been working on a post that does a deep analysis of “Hamlet” and “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” but have nearly given up on it altogether.  I have the bulk of the analysis done, nevertheless there is a key article that I want to cite which ties the analysis together perfectly.  Sadly, this article of wonders is a peer reviewed academic article.  In laymen’s terms this means that the article was written by a university scholar, and then reviewed by an established panel to ensure that the article was academically correct, and “important.”  In my words, this means that you can’t view it unless you pay for a subscription to the academic website that hosts the article, or are lucky enough to attend a university that pays this cost for you.  (Hooray school!) Unfortunately, in my situation said document simply will not properly load.  I managed to load it once and read it, and have since been unable to recreate the cosmic circumstance that provided the portal of access needed to read this academic article of amazement (if you can’t tell I’m a little bitter). 

Acta non Verba

I started this post with the Latin phrase that means “Action not Words.”  I chose this title because of what I discovered on my recent exploits.  Today I drove back to Provo Utah from a nearly week-long excursion to see my best friend get married.  On the trip back, being heavily loaded with work to do, I made my friend drive for half the trip and read almost the entire first act of The Tragedy of King Richard the III.  She is not much of a rhetorician so it was interesting to see how she reacted to hearing old English.  I didn’t bother to attempt to explain the meaning behind obscure words, rather the more I noticed that she was not paying attention the more animated I became.  It was interesting to see the play really ‘come to life’ this way, and draws my attention to the reasoning behind WHY Shakespeare needs to be viewed or heard to be best understood.  The rhetorical structure of the play lends itself to the public audience more easily than to the private audience by virtue of its climax/resolution structure.  The scene for instance presents a problem and then begins the process of complicating the problem, or resolving it, but almost without fail the movement in Shakespeare’s plays is forward.  If you look at this play in particular, Richards’ dark plans grow more heinous as the scene progresses and the ebb and flow of the conversation among the characters peaks around the same moment of potential plot growth. This is a fascinating observation that I intend to explore further as I review the remainder of the play this week and as I move on to other plays in the weeks to follow.

Lost in Translation?

While searching for critical reviews and strategies for understanding Shakespeare I came across this nicely organized site called www.enotes.com which I found useful.  I particularly liked the clarity in the segment explaining methods for understanding the language of Shakespeare.  Check it out.  This website is also one that will list a side-by-side modern translation with the original text, and appears to have several plays that can be seen thus.  I found particularly useful the explanation of the double entendre as it is a concept that drenches the text of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” which is a derivative work of Hamlet by Tom Stoppard.  More on this to come…

Personal Learning Plan

Through my review of Shakespeare I want to learn, synthesize, and appropriate the method of writing found in his works.  To gain this understanding and to manifest it I will read a few of his plays from each genre (Tragedy, Romance, Comedy, History) and utilize specific tools of Renaissance learning to recreate certain passages of the plays.  My end goal for the next few months is to create my own play utilizing the methods that Shakespeare employed to create his plays.

Hamlet is for the Dogs?

If you didn't get a chance to, I suggest checking out Johnny's blog where he enacts the confrontation between Laertes and Hamlet using his pet dogs.  It's worth the two minutes and thirty seconds of your life that it takes.

A posse ad esse

I started this post with a Latin Phrase that roughly translated means “from possibility to actuality.”  I still think of Latin as a power Language, and at the least intriguing, but this particular phrase encompasses the dilemma that I will address.  In my last post I posed questions about the plagiarisms of Shakespeare.  In my class we began discussing that, and my professor pointed out that while Shakespeare did clearly take many of his ideas from other works, many of the ideas were taken from works written in other languages.  As a by-product of his Renaissance education Shakespeare was skilled at analyzing which specific aspects of a work, even when in a language like Latin, made the work into a success.  Honestly, I covet this ability and think that it ought to be the focus of modern English education much more often than it is, but I digress.  Shakespeare utilized this model to heist the concepts he found most effective and to re-imagine them in his own way; in this way Shakespeare took a possibility and molded it into actuality.  For instance, the story of Hamlet closely follows that of Saxo Grammaticus’s Hisotria Danica, yet in my review of it I noticed that where Saxo’s work turned graphic, Shakespeare erred on the side of caution.

Finding out the protagonists intentions:

Hamlet = Ophelia                                 Danica = a Harlot

Killing Polonius:

Hamlet = stabbed                                 Danica = cut into pieces and dropped in the sewer

The End:

Hamlet = a duel and poison                  Danica = a Holocaust, and a vengeful second wife

The more tempered approach utilized by Shakespeare has had a longer lasting appeal, which really does say volumes about the limitations of creative expression.  Returning to my focus, while core features of the stories are the same, or similar, the interpretation of the events is different.  Interestingly, in looking up the definition of plagiarism the Encyclopedia Britannica defined it thus:
     The act of taking the writings of another person and passing them off as one’s own.
But also contained an intriguing closing comment that stated:

     If only thoughts are duplicated, expressed in different words, there is no breach of contract.

So, in this context is Shakespeare really a plagiarist? Or was he simply a really good reader, both of texts and audiences?

sources

Shakespeare is considered a fantastic plagiarist.  Substantial evidence shows that most of his concepts were taken from other works.  What about his plagiarism makes his efforts so successful?  What about plagiarism has changed so much from his time to ours?  What makes his reinterpretations of ancient, and sometimes not so ancient, text so alluring?  Yesterday and today I have spent a lot of time looking at the source works from which he may have derived his story ideas.  More to come soon…

Hamlet and tragic heroes

We are starting the course by reading the play Hamlet.  I really enjoy Hamlet because of the superb examples of the psychological character.  Writing a tragedy is really nothing new, but, in my opinion, it is the ability of Shakespeare to allow his audience to peer into the internal workings of his characters that really makes the play so universal.  At the same time this makes me wonder, if Hamlet were not so complex on the interior would the play still be as marvelous?  What is it about a tragic character that seems to fascinate humanity?  Are we really that morbid at the core?  Because I like to hear it rather than read it, I am attaching here a video clip form Youtube where Kenneth Barnagh recites Hamlet’s first soliloquy.  It is really well done.

...by way of introduction

Audere est facere – Latin for: To dare is to do.

Hello,

  My name is Bryan and I am currently taking a course where we will be studying Shakespeare.  As part of the course I intend to document my learning experience and share those insights with the world through this blog.  I will make regular weekly contributions as I learn and research Shakespeare, his life, and his plays.  As there has been so much research done on the subject, I will be attempting to streamline those sources that appear to offer strong supportive evidence for their claims, rather than simply posting “status updates.”  Because of the proliferation of information on Shakespeare I chose to underscore my blog with that quote from Nietzsche.  As I study I will refine a more specific project that I will fashion as an illustration of my synthesized learning, which will include the academic research and the imitation of his art forms.  Now off to the search for knowledge.