[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

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.

You know, I kind of think you're illustrating Harmon's point about

Originally Posted by Harmon

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.

"Country matters" is a sex joke from Hamlet. He's talking to Ophelia, and asks if he should lie in her lap. When she says no, he says he meant to lay his "head" in her lap (interpret that as you like it) and asks if she thought he was speaking of "country matters" (read that out loud, knowing what you know now) and then after her reply, makes a remark about lying between maids' legs in case the audience didn't get it the first couple of times.

For all your advocacy of emphasizing the simple reading of the plays* as the overriding primary experience, and all your erudition in identifying the other allusions referenced in that post, you seem to have not picked up this fairly basic bit of works-great-on-stage wordplay.

Incidentally, I first saw this demonstrated via Slings and Arrows, a Canadian TV series about the tribulations of a faux-Stratford Festival Shakespearean theatre town each season as it puts on new plays, which is, by the way, excellent entertainment (the living room sword-fight! the nude glow-in-the-dark paint exercise!).

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

If Samuel Beckett is not literature, then I can't imagine who is.

Every time I see his name, I'm tempted to declaim "Will nobody rid me of this turbulent playwright?" And then write a parody I, Godot musical to the tune of the Alan Parsons Project album.

Also, I think there was someone way upthread who asked about what people saw in the graphic novel adaptations? I can't find it now and have some errands to run this afternoon, but I picked up a couple of the GN Shakespeare adaptations from the library.

I'll scan a couple of sample pages when I've got some more free time to demonstrate how they often work quite well by providing pictures to enhance the words (nearly always direct, if selective, actual line reproductions, in case anyone was wondering) in a different, but complementary way to how stage productions and films do it.

* This bit I cheerfully back up, provided it's an annotated version, because at this point in the language shift you need the annotations. But I think the more media you experience something through, the potentially better your understanding gets as you see it from different viewpoints through new "eyes", so to speak.