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.