[Prestidigitweeze]

Edit: It seems that people are getting rather excited about perceived slights (your lonesome included). This has accelerated to the point that my use of the phrase "your friend" now seems to carry the sting of sarcasm. Truthfully, I only meant to say "your friend" in the rhetorical sense: This person you seem to agree with or happen to be quoting. It wasn't intended to imply forum nepotism (which sounds pathetic anyway). I have a proposal: Instead of assuming the worst about one another's responses, let's assume we're dealing with rather nice people who don't wish to belittle one another but happen to disagree. I take some measure of responsibility for things accelerating to that level, so perhaps it's time I address it and try to change my mode.

How so - is a script not a writing? Does it not involve noting? And if Shakespeare makes an extended pun, shall I not extend [it] clear outside the play?

You can't expect to have your opponent unpack your argument and make it for you. It seems to me your wordplay, however welcome, is obscuring the point you're making -- which is depressing, as wordplay's fun and might have enhanced your point.

I would not expect a reader to understand my references in shorthand even if that person shared those references. It would be like expecting you to know my pet names for my cats because you happened to know pet cats.

If you're saying that scriptwriting and play writing = writing = noting (with a pun on nothing), and that all such aspects lead to the Rome of the room in which the scene's performed, then, no, I'm not convinced you're really telling your joke or poem (though I appreciate the euphony). I'm not sure that "that noting" really refers to the same noting/nothing.

As you probably know, the joke in Shakespeare has to do with writing music, as his jokes often do. The music of the writing and the larger structure, the peal of parallels, are what carry him through the plays:-- music that can find its most resonant cathedral in the silence of one's skull.

"Rome" was pronounced "Room" in Shakespeare's day. Learned that, IIRC, in a broadcast involving a snippet of Mark Rylance's (?) production of an original language version of one of the plays. The original language being more like Irish English than Anglo English. The point being that you hear this.

Point taken.

I could research your references in that paragraph and perhaps find ways to call them into question, but that wouldn't be honest, it could be misleading and it isn't my problem with that bit. It isn't the references themselves, which are often hard-won and do matter. Culture is not a quiz to pass or fail but a dimension to be entered.

The point being that you hear this.

I think we agree on the benefits of actually hearing Shakespeare. Our disagreement lies, I think, in where we choose to hear him.


I replied:

That is a very unusual definition of literature, and it is not borne out by the ideas of many playwrights.

To which you replied:

What playwright writes and does not envision the performance?

It is a mistake to assume that what is meant to be performed cannot be literature. Literature, too, can be intended for performance.

Music that is extremely rich harmonically loses something when its block chords are performed too quickly. Shakespeare is so rich poetically and semantically that no slowing of the tempo can make the levels sufficiently apparent that reading becomes unnecessary.

I hear and recognize your argument that visual and sonic clues enhance the play and provide levels of depth not apparent on the page. But I've answered that already and, besides, that isn't the part of the play with which the student must wrestle.

People talk about writing as if it's pointless to teach if students might miss things. But the best writing is full of things the student might not catch the fourth or fifth time. Who understands Finnegan's Wake the first time they read it, or even the Proteus Chapter of Ulysses even with the annotated Norton version by their side? The culture that spawned such things lies buried neck-deep in what has superseded it, and everyone must create a context for these strange beings we call old books. Odd, that a popular Elizabethan playwright, that even Chaucer and Rabelais, must now be studied like difficult poets. But that is the culture we've inherited, and those writers now offer alternate worlds to the ones in which we live. They are science fiction for the intellect and tongue, and the exercise of reading and understanding them pays off in a new awareness of complexity. One is more awake, more alive, for having read them.

A script intended to be performed is incomplete without that performance.

Rather, a script treated as an outline that can be followed verbatim when necessary. It has become a safety net, since the modern myth is that every director can write.

Surely a performance is not literature. So how can something which is more than the script not be literature, while the script, subsumed in the performance, is?

Shakespeare performed is not "more" than Shakespeare written. They are different facets of the same experience, but only one of those facets is meant for the scrutiny of study.

How is it that students frequently study the sonnets at the same time as the plays? How is it that the poetry, the compression of the sonnets is one with that of the plays? Joyce wrote a glassine play -- Exiles -- and very little else that was after Dubliners. Clearly, he made a distinction between his play and his more difficult work (though all were considered literature by him). Whereas Shakespeare's language is equally poetic in his plays. Even more reason that he should be studied.

Chekov's plays are literature and he thought of them that way -- read his letters. And yet they were meant to be performed.

So how can something which is more than the script not be literature, while the script, subsumed in the performance, is?

Once and for all: play and script are not synonyms. I don't accept that idea because, in my view, it doesn't work. Similarities alone do not make twins.

Notice that the assumption here is that the "real play" is the written play.

I believe the OP's point is that the students truly are being given Shakespeare in the form of a post-production "script" -- a text that has been sliced up, truncated, updated, condensed, Urban-Dictionary'd and otherwise made into something less complex and more familiar. Correct me if I'm dung, but your idea seems to be that to watch a performance of Shakespeare in any form -- simplified, whittled down, caricatured, even bastardized by the former Lion King director until a trained Shakespearean actor becomes so demoralized that he announces he's walking away from his profession -- to see *any* performed version is to be truer to Shakespeare than to read the text. (If that's not an accurate interpretation, feel free to correct me.)

Again, I would argue that that is no way to teach the work. Scholars would disagree, but so, in my experience, would actors. I have yet to meet an actor who didn't revere the act of reading the plays, And I've known too many novelists who make a point of reading through all or certain of the plays regularly to think the correlation could possibly be tangential or pnemonic.