Quote:
Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
To those who argue that Shakespeare shouldn't be read at all because he is a playwright and is therefore meant only to be seen:
By that logic, virtually all plays are meant only to be seen, and that is an absurdly limiting distinction between drama and literature. Better to say that one doesn't like reading Shakespeare than make such a dishonest argument.
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Sorry, pal. People aren't "dishonest" merely because you don't agree with them. Actually, what's "dishonest" is to say people are making an argument that they are not actually making. Like "Shakespeare shouldn't be read at all..."
Quote:
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Make no mistake: Shakespeare, Marlowe and Webster were poets as well as dramatists. Seeing the play is but one part of the experience. The language is symphonic; listening to a recording is yet another experience. Reading the plays is perhaps the richest way of all to experience them: In the mind, which is both stage for the action and resonating chamber for the poetry. Its wide spotlight can tighten to a penlight's beam trained on each metaphor or epithet -- trained like an appraiser's loupe on a phrase like a perfectly cut jewel.
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Seeing the play
is the
total experience. Shakespeare made plays. He wrote scripts as a means to that end. He - or someone - also directed the performances. Others acted.
Now, you can disassemble the play into constituent parts, and analyze them.
You can focus on the words (assuming, of course, you have the right words and not some scrivener's error or some other actor/playwright's interpolation) and improve your appreciation of the performance, or enjoy them in their own write. You can make much ado about that noting. All roads led to Room in those days, though that's not evident from the words on the page.
Or you can learn a bit about how actors performed in Shakespeare's time, and consider the implications of boys playing women's parts, and indulge in a little imagined homoerotic tension. And, of course, country matters are more clear when articulated in a particular way, with a gesture - neither thing being on the page, and perhaps unknown to the reader, even in annotation.
Or you can think about stage directions (which aren't written, putting aside the bear) and wonder about the significance of the torches in Julius Caesar in connection with what the audience saw, given the absence of electric lights. Of course, the plays are amended by every director. I'll bet most of them do a better job than a reader's mind. My brother-in-law is a movie director and has demonstrated this to me on occasion.
If all you do is read the plays, you only get hold of part of the elephant. The performance is the whole beast. You may (in fact, you will) see the elephant, as performed, more clearly by having read the play, but when push comes to shove, the play actually IS the thing.
(As for the difference between theatre & literature, I suggest that literature requires no enactment to be complete. Shakespeare's plays cry out for enactment. If they had not been performed for lo these many centuries, I doubt that they would still be taught, at least in high school. There are elements of literature embedded in the script, of course, but no completion without performance. Shakespeare obviously knew how his performers would enlarge - in fact, finish writing - his plays.)