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Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,004
old hand
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OP
old hand
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,004 |
shanks, I have to ask you (before all frivolity becomes taboo), is your namesake the sitarist(?) popularized in the 60s, or is there another connection?Ravi Shankar and the Beatles have, unfortunately, often been suggested as the derivation of my name, but this is not the case. (Weird, I know, given that my parents were 'into' the Stones and the Beatles around the time I was born, but there you go.) My middle name is actually my paternal grandfather's. The first name was a desperate attempt on my parents' part to find an 'Indian' name that would not be mispronounced by 'the English'. It failed miserably. My sister (Sonia) had better luck in that respect...  cheer the sunshine warrior
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Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,981
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,981 |
Talking of "The Taming of the Shrew", I thought that the eighties (?) BBC adapatation with John Cleese (maybe on video somewhere) was about as acceptable as one can get with the play. It's the only time I really have sympathised with all the characters.
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Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400 |
Back in the dark ages, when i was first reading Shakespeare--in NYC HS, back when there was a dress code, and pants (heaven forbid jeans, even the boys couldn't wear jeans!) where forbidden, our HS teacher try to get us more interested in reading Hamlet by pointing out the school gave us bowlderize versions of the play (he first introduced bowlderized as a word, and then pointed out "edited" in our text book) but it only got fun when we acted it out, not when i read it at home.
it got more interesting as we compared our school text to the full text of the play, and tried to figure out, why a line or two was edited out.. when I was grown up, and Alistar Cook, on Masterpiece theater, finally explaned what "country matters" were.
So, might i suggest Jackie, that in the future, you keep out of the gutter, but sometime visit the country? it sounds so much more inviting--who wants to wallow in the gutter? but a trip to the country, yes, that would be enjoyable!
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Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,981
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,981 |
Maverick You mention suspension of disbelief which is essential in so many plays. One of the biggest challenges for modern audiences has been integrated casting where plays have been cast without regard to colour. I went to quite a few conferences on the subject in the early eighties where people expressed the view that to have a member of a family, say Juliet, who was black while the rest of her family was white was not credible. We gained some wonderful performances through this approach and it has spread to opera and ballet (which character looks like Luciano Pavarotti anyway?) to great effect. I can even cope with American accents  , although I'm not convinced by the claim that they are closer to Elizabethan language than present day English accents (although Estuary English is a little beyond the pale). I love to hear Shakespeare spoken in any dialect, it's better than not hearing it.
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Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 3,065
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 3,065 |
I definitely belong to the watch rather than read school. I think I just have an inbuilt resistance to reading plays because I loved "Gawain and the Green Knight" where the language is further removed from present day speech than Shakespeare's is. Mark you, I found "Antony and Cleopatra" nearly incomprehensible when it was on TV. Despite being reasonably well acquainted with the history it was dealing with, I had no idea what was going on most of the time. Still wept buckets at Cleopatra's death though. But then I did that in the Ancient History class at school reading Plutarch's account. So embarrassing.  Bingley
Bingley
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