[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by Harmon

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.

What's demonstrably untrue is your assertion that the only argument being made is the one you decide has been made. Several arguments have been advanced here in favor of seeing versus reading the plays. Some of those have been boolean.

This might amaze you, but those arguments are not necessarily reducible to yours.

However, I thought it unnecessary and possibly rude to call people out by name simply to dispute their ideas. Clearly, you do not feel the same way.

It's also condescending of you to use the word "pal" to put your perceived rivals in their place. You seem to be trying to degrade the emotional tone of a conversation about Shakespeare for reasons known only to you.

That said, let's return to the actual topic.

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Seeing the play is the total experience. Shakespeare made plays. He wrote scripts as a means to that end.

It is reductive to decide that the experience of a play is purely a matter of seeing it acted, or to reduce the text of a play to a script intended to be filmed. Certain rare scripts are so beautifully written that they do deserve to be read and reread like novels. But screenplays are often provisional and incomplete, since so much depends on the rewrites of actors and directors, and on the visual narrative style of the director, since cameras not only show us the action, as a theatrical performance does, but tell us how to see it, swiveling and panning and drawing back according to the director's point of view. They also play with our sense of time far more than performers do through editing and pacing that is not contained within the script. There is constant background music; there are montages. No, a script isn't quite the same critter as a play any more than theater is film.

Besides which, insisting that any watered-down acted version of Shakespeare is more Shakespeare than the actual texts says more about one's reading habits than -- pardon the neologism -- formatical correctness.

Seeing the play is the total experience.

Plays with levels of archaic language must be studied to be understood. Seeing Shakespeare can be a great experience, but it is hardly the "total" experience. It is but one part of the experience. There is no substitute for reading him carefully and learning to understand the language. Look at the long history of poets and writers who claim Shakespeare's influence -- accomplished and indelible writers who are not known for drama nor, in many cases, who wrote any plays at all. What were they gleaning from Shakespeare if not his sense of language and structure? Dickens might -- and I say might -- have focused on characters, but Alexander Pope was clearly concerned with the writing itself.

Now, you can disassemble the play into constituent parts, and analyze them.

What's ironic is that every example you've given is dependent on prior study, and to study is to return to the text. Some of it can be gleaned from documentaries, but everything you've mentioned is found in a comprehensively annotated and researched edition such as The Riverside Shakespeare.

You might argue that essays and annotations can occasionally incorporate superseded information and disproved assumptions, but that is not a problem with reading itself, nor do films and theatrical performances necessarily reflect the latest information about Shakespeare. It is an artifact of the reality that scholarship evolves and history is constantly being researched.

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)

Which is best done by reading a complete and authoritative version of a play and not trusting that whatever parties have edited the play for film or performance has been faithful.

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.

"In his own write," if so intended, is a joke of John Lennon's. Odd to see it here. Much ado about "noting"? I'd assume you were making the same joke Shakespeare did throughout that play if you hadn't followed it with the malapropism "all roads lead to Room." But perhaps you're making a pun about the size of the stage.

Normally, wordplay has some sort of trajectory, in which case the cramped quarters where people might be "noting" things leads to "Room." But then "in their own write" doesn't fit as an aspect of a performance even as a possible pomo description of performance variables as active rewriting.

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.

Which, again, is most efficiently and exhaustively done by studying the plays, the annotations and the historical background. You're making a very good case for the importance of reading Shakespeare.

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.

By "country matters," you might mean the ways in which dialects, visual cues such as flags, customs, pageantries and even gestures are associated during the performance with distinct and recognizable places.

What you forget is that readers fill most of that in with their imaginations -- the sound of people from other places, the look of this or that court, etc. The imagination is a muscle that needs to be exercised, and in a non-linear, briefly-attentive multimedia society like ours, it is in danger of atrophying without writers like Shakespeare.

You might ask: But what about things the reader doesn't know enough about to imagine? There, again, reading is the answer. Whatever is not filled in by Shakespeare's own words can be gleaned by the words that surround his, and far more lastingly than during the course of a single performance: The annotations, the introductions, the study materials with which most teachers and professors are likely to provide you.

Some playwrights write less and imply a myriad of interpretations, leaving it to the actors to imply more than is apparent. But Shakespeare's directions are clear in the very lines the actors speak, which means they are clear to readers as well: In that way, his plays are quite self-contained.

This doesn't mean that actors' jobs are already done, nor does it mean that, say, King Lear is emptied of ambiguities. Unlike the States, sadly, England which has a national theater, and actors there are not adverse to studying Shakespeare throughout their lives. Clearly this would be fruitless if Shakespeare's plays weren't meant to be performed. But let's not be boolean. The best way to study Shakespeare is to read him, but it is not necessarily the best way to enjoy him. Few performances I've seen have come close to the transports of reading him (and with that, many actors would agree). But that does not mean everyone has to feel the same way, nor does it mean that less enjoyable versions must be unenjoyable.

If all you do is read the plays, you only get hold of part of the elephant.

Let me remind you of something you said earlier: "What's 'dishonest' is to say people are making an argument that they are not actually making."

I would argue that far more of the unadulterated is available to the reader than the spectator -- especially the spectator who watches a flick rather than a performance -- but that doesn't mean I'm arguing that people shouldn't see the plays. No one has said that "all [they] do is read the plays." The teachers and professors I've known personally have assigned the plays to be read but also assigned or recommended video'd performances to compliment them. Some have even supplemented reading with the Olivier films.

The person who reads the plays will be far better equipped to understand them and more conversant in their complexities than someone who only watches them. The person who does both but studies the plays carefully on the page has the best of both worlds.

"(As for the difference between theatre & literature, I suggest that literature requires no enactment to be complete."

That is a very unusual definition of literature, and it is not borne out by the ideas of many playwrights. If Samuel Beckett is not literature, then I can't imagine who is.