The only thing I can express is personal but it's the very best actor, not the reader, that best exemplifies and creates the necessary atmosphere of passion, reasoning, tensions and friendships that accompanies the very best of plays. They could not do so if the play were anything other than comprehensive....a symbiotic relationship that literally thrives on the others 'energy'. There's a lot of taste involved and at high society levels naturally those pompous enough to feel that they really should be seen, by the 'right people', to be appreciating the arts but plainly they do not or cannot. I've never understood what that is all about.. it is an all encompassing passion at the end of the day and those that feel it will certainly be aware of a great actor being able to communicate something that may well be seen to be hidden, through an evolving language, but is really so so special.
Originally posted by FMFIt wouldn't occur to me to do that, to be honest.
This thread is not about [b]reading Shakespeare. The OP is about watching a Shakespeare play "cold", without having read it before doing so., and the degree to which one understands the 400 year old diction under those circumstances.[/b]
But it's not a big stretch to imagine someone who by dint of thorough reading and attendance of performances had become sufficiently versed in Shakespeare's language to be able to follow a production hitherto neither read nor seen.
I'm not sure I agree with your objection to arguments from reading. If I can grasp the sense of an unfamiliar written passage, why should I not grasp it when spoken?
What is this 'hoax' anyway? That somebody has put it about that Shakespeare is very easy to grasp for uninitiated theatre-goers (if such people even exist anymore)? I've not come across that particular proposition before, have you?
Most people nowadays have some Shakespeare rubbed off on them by film. Of the millions who watched Romeo & Juliet, I'm sure the majority had not read the original text or any other by the same author -- just as the majority of Shakespeare's largely illiterate audiences could not have -- but I'm sure they 'got it' just the same.
That said, nobody living today could be expected to react to the plays as would a contemporary of Shakespeare's. For a start, it's difficult for us to realise that his vocabulary struck even his contemporaries as somewhat fantastic and peculiar; he coined much of what he wrote himself.
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Originally posted by Shallow BlueShakespeare also wrote "for" the royalty, in that he was careful not to drag skeletons out, or did it in oblique ways, His Henry VIII is a weak play, partly on that account. He did have a co-writer so maybe that's part of it.
I wouldn't go that far, but it's certainly true that he intentionally wrote in a loftier, more intellectual style. Not always; his sonnet on that Oxford beadle - don't remember his name, but he was known personally to Milton and his friends - is much easier. It's also meant as a joke rather than as art, or as theology. Paradise Lost is certainly meant a ...[text shortened]... ge, but for all time!" If it was mockery, it was very loving mockery.
Richard
I recommend Equivocation as a play about Shakespeare.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation_%28play%29
A comment on audiences: So many people stroll in late, it's clearly some sort of social/status event for them. At the Ashland, Oregon, Shakespeare festival, this isn't allowed. If you are late, you find the doors shut and attendants guiding you to the lobby to watch a monitor until the interval. This has spoiled me.