posted
Okay. The first thing I'd like to say today is that, had the "adapted and translated" R&J been described from the outset as a version produced for a local church-based production, I would not have even begun this discussion. Since it was not presented that way, and since I mistakenly thought the major changes in the opening scene were representative of what was done with the play as a whole - an impression furthered by posts at the beginning of the thread which noted a marked difference - I responded accordingly.
Now, I'm still defending those points I initially made because I think they are valid in general, even if not all of them are applicable to this case. So we are now largely arguing more in the abstract.
Onto Tom's comment:
quote: But -- and this is also key -- it's set in a highly Anglicized medieval Italy that not only never existed but was massively altered for Shakespeare's audience. Do you believe this ruined the play for people, when he made this decision?
Any setting or any narrative is more or less imaginary. Ursula K. LeGuin has made the point that the world of Jane Austen's novels is every bit as much a product of the imagination as Middle-Earth or her own Gethen. Shakespeare's plays are no different - they occupy imaginary worlds.
However, these imaginary worlds are constituted from reality - the reality in which the author lived. Everything about Romeo and Juliet is a product of Elizabethan sensibility.
For one thing, it is a tragedy. What is a tragedy? Our age produces very, very few of them - some would even argue none. We have plenty of stories with sad endings, but their status as genuine "tragedies" is arguable, as they often produce a sentimental reaction, or a sense that the tragic event was produced with a particular social condition, rather than a universal condition of reality. In a real tragedy, the tragic event is inevitable. The fact that a "minor accident" of timing produces it is, in fact, an indication that the universe will always find a way to frustrate mortals. R & J eroticizes death, and produces catharsis. The "feeling" of the play, a mixture of Greek/Aristotalian ideals filtered through Elizabethan understanding and its own concerns, is what produces that unmistakeable "Romeo and Juliet" feeling, in which delerious intoxication slides irrevocably into horror.
That's what the feeling is - but how is it produced? It is, of course, assembled out of langauge. The meter has powerful effect in and of itself. Additionally, Shakespeare was drunk on language, and his style - very much in keeping with his time - was meant to intoxicate and overwhelm. The wordplay was part of the visceral "thrill" of going to the theatre. Hence, characters are often ribald and raw. Some things "shock" us in the was that they would not have shocked Shakespeare's audience, but you do not restore the experience of Shakespeare's audience by removing the modern shock - that is an adjustment that cannot be made. No linearity of experience exists from one age to another. You may need to cut something from play to perform it for a particular crowd - but one should delude oneself that it is possible to compensate - in some mathematical sense - for changing sensibilities. Rather, it is better to be honest with what's happening - we prefer not to be shocked in this case. Personally, I think it is better to experience the shock - actually adding to the text for the specific purpose of producing comfort for the audience where none is intended runs the risk of altering more than just the scene in question. It begins to upset the delicate balance of characterization, poetry, etc.
For instance, two changes I have noted - in aformentioned opening scene, and Juliet's monologue at the beginning of Act 2. I give Card kudos for preserving the sense of worldplay, but in both cases the eroticized elements have been removed. Again, church-version, got it - but just as an example of how small changes can have larger overall effect, by removing the virginity/vulnerability idea in both cases, you are hewing away at the overall erotic charge of the text, which is a crucial element to the cathartic element - the tragic "feeling" - at the end. This is a play about young love, ideal but physical also, not just spiritually pure "platonic" love. Eros is ever present. Card's changes take some of that out. I'm not judging him for that - I'm just pointing out that it happens to make my larger case here.
More than anything else, I'm arguing about what one's intentions should be. Pruning a play to keep it alive, and give it power in performance, that's one thing. Pruning a play with the idea in your head that the play must be made "modern" to adjust for changing attitudes is another thing entirely, and will lead to different kinds of changes.
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quote:Our age produces very, very few of them - some would even argue none.
Hm. I wouldn't argue that we produce no tragedies. Would you? Who would?
I would agree that, with the exception of horror movies, we produce very few works that imply the hand of fate, but I don't consider that to be an essential element of tragedy.
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quote: I would agree that, with the exception of horror movies, we produce very few works that imply the hand of fate, but I don't consider that to be an essential element of tragedy.
In the classical definition of "tragedy", it is essential. That was the definition I was speaking of.
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That's part of the classical definition of tragedy as it has been understood for centuries. This is not an arbitrary designation - there are very many good reasons why "Tragedy" is one specific thing and not another.
Tragic drama came into existence as a warning and a reconciliation of society to what humanity cannot control. It is a reminder that the gods, fate, etc. are more powerful than we are, and also, paradoxically, that our outrage at what occurs is important and needs an outlet.
quote: Tragic drama came into existence as a warning and a reconciliation of society to what humanity cannot control.
As someone who neither believes in gods nor fate, I understandably find this a particularly worthless reconciliation. A cop-out, if you will. Again, it's worth appreciating for its anthropological value, along the lines of "ancient peoples sometimes wrote plays about the futility of human choice," but it seems odd to shackle an entire genre to what is, at the end of the day, only one of its historical conventions. You might as well say that comedies require marriages.
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quote: As someone who neither believes in gods nor fate, I understandably find this a particularly worthless reconciliation. A cop-out, if you will. Again, it's worth appreciating for its anthropological value, along the lines of "ancient peoples sometimes wrote plays about the futility of human choice," but it seems odd to shackle an entire genre to what is, at the end of the day, only one of its historical conventions. You might as well say that comedies require marriages.
You're joking...right? Because that argument is preposterous.
Of course you are free to believe whatever you wish. "Tragedy" as we know it was invented by the Greeks, and revived by western theatre. This is not me saying this - this is established history.
Besides, Shakespeare come right out and TELLS YOU at the beginning of the play:
quote: PROLOGUE Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. 5 From forth the fatal loins of these two foes A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life; Whole misadventured piteous overthrows Do with their death bury their parents' strife. The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love, 10 And the continuance of their parents' rage, Which, but their children's end, nought could remove, Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage; The which if you with patient ears attend, What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
He tells you that it's going to happen, that they are "marked" for death, and that this is the only way to mend the social rift. Fate! FATE!!!
Whether you believe in "the gods" is totally irelevant. I don't believe in ghosts. So "Hamlet" says nothing to me? Besides, many Greeks and Elizabethans did not take the supernatural literally - it was as much a symbolic expression of the condition of life (whose limitations must be respected). Sex was much more dangerous, possibly deadly, in Shakespeare's time than it is now - does this not result in a very real kind of "fate?"
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quote:He tells you that it's going to happen, that they are "marked" for death, and that this is the only way to mend the social rift. Fate! FATE!!!
Sure. *shrug* Why should I care? And why does that make something any more "tragic" than, say, the actual events of the play, in which the failure of the post office results in the death of three people?
Again, I'm hearing this "as it was, so shall it always be" thing from you, and I'm not sure why you feel that must be the case.
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This has nothing to do with "how I feel." I'm not going to spend any more time trying to fill in your education gaps here.
Google "Tragedy". Start with Greek tragedy, followed by Elizabethan theatre. Read Aristotle's poetics. Go to the library and learn something about the history of Western drama, and its connection to philosophy.
From my perspective this is like asking why I "feel" that gravity has something to do with the motion of the Earth around the sun.
Fate is integral to classical tragedy . The notion of events being beyond mortal control is part of the very essence of the experience. Tragedy is about our relationship to the cosmos, as seen by the ages that produced it. It's not just about a couple of kids who happen to die by accident. If their death is accidental, then it is also arbitrary, and has no dramatic meaning. Can you grasp that? Posts: 53 | Registered: Nov 2005
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Perhaps you're new enough here to not realize that I'm intimately familiar with classical literature. Please do me the favor of assuming that I have in fact had a decent education in the arts.
My point is that while Fate may have been important to classical tragedy, it is far less so to modern tragedy -- which, despite your insistence to the contrary, remains tragedy nonetheless. And Romeo and Juliet, while paying lip-service to classical tragedy, certainly fits well into the mold of modern tragedy -- in which the actions of the protagonists result in their own destruction, even without the Hand of Fate intervening. From the modern perspective, Romeo and Juliet didn't die "by accident;" neither, however, was their death fated.
Now, sure, you can make the argument that Elizabethan theater was heavily indebted to classical theater, and thus it's impossible to "properly" appreciate Shakespeare (or, and I'd actually consider this a valuable argument, Marlowe) without also keeping classical dogma in mind. But I think you're actually doing to wind up damaging the plays by locking them in that box.
Your definition of "tragedy" plays out as if it's the only one in town.
Seriously, I understand where you're coming from. But your very narrow and academic focus is, I submit, absolutely akin to pinning Shakespeare under glass.
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As I mentioned before, their death is inevitable, and is intended as such. You go into it knowing they are going to die. You are TOLD that they HAVE to die in the prologue to mend the feud. Your knowledge of their impending death hangs over every scene they have together. Lust and death are braided around one another repeatedly. The audience is not thinking "oh, gee, I wonder if they'll make it.." No, they are dead from the outset. Dead lovers walkin'. That is why the "heads of maidens/maidenhead" wordplay is more than just a joke - it establishes a theme. Sex/death - a very Elizabethan preoccupation.
It is much closer to classical tragedy than modern. Sure, Shakespeare was a precursor to many things modern, and you can argue that the hand of the author is part of the "fate" in this case. But if you claim that R & J "self-destruct" then you are totally missing the point of classical tragedy. People always do it to themselves! Usually without even realizing it! Hubris does not come into play in Shakespeare, so it is markedly different from Greek tragedy. Some would say more moralists. But claiming that R & J just represents an unfortante event and nothing more is wrong, wrong, wrong. Their love/lust is so great that it can only end in annihilation.
I have never heard R & J called a "modern" tragedy. Endgame by Samuel Beckett is a modern tragedy. You are a few centuries off.
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posted
"Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night; For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night Whiter than new snow on a raven's back. Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night, Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun."
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quote:But claiming that R & J just represents an unfortante event and nothing more is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Hm. I'm not sure how you go from "it wasn't fated" to "it was just an unfortunate event." Any particular reason why you don't see a grey area there? As you observe, Shakespearean tragedy is moralistic tragedy -- as is, it's worth noting, most tragedy in the modern era, where people's problems are consequences of their own mistakes but not necessarily single, overarching Tragic Flaws. I consider it an oversimplification to say that Romeo and Juliet is a play in which excessive Eros is a "Tragic Flaw;" while passion plays a role, the reason it remains accessible to a modern audience (in a way that Greek tragedy does not) is that the motives of its leads are more realistically rooted in character, not Archetype.
My personal belief -- and I'm glad you brought this up -- was that the Elizabethans still felt a strong debt to earlier influences and incorporated elements of classical tragedy (and comedy) without sincerely believing in those elements. They got included because that's what plays were, and that's what plays did, and people appreciated having someone sum up what the play was "about" at the beginning and the end.
To be honest, I can't help wondering if you're coming off too recent a course on Theme. You're reminding me of some college classes that took themselves way too seriously. *grin*
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posted
"That one short minute gives me in her sight: Do thou but close our hands with holy words, Then love-devouring death do what he dare; It is enough I may but call her mine."
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posted
Suicide, important here, in a discussion about 'fate' also runs through the heart of Jacobean theatre, the concious choice to snuff oneself out, the final rip-cord. I thought that worth mentioning because I always enjoyed the two concious though ill-timed, star-crossed suicides in R&J and the way suicide (that lonely, depressing paradox) resonates through all kinds of theatre.
I have enjoyed this thread immensely.
In debating the accessibility of Shakespeare's folios, his actual language, we musn't forget that they are written for actors to say. Will was a genius, in my opinion, unrivalled by any writer before and after.
Martin Amis, a believer that drama is 'handily inferior' to poetry and prose: 'I find it very funny that Shakespeare was a playwright... it's one of God's best jokes.'
While I have a sneaking suspicion he may be right about the handy, dialogue-driven nature of drama, Shakespeare himself remains a brilliant, poetic teller of stories through action and dialogue. This dialogue may be battered by current ignorance, indeed just casting one's eyes over any Shakespearean text can be exhausting, but SAY IT OUT LOUD and suddenly words that you never knew the meaning of (words the cat made up, oh the beautiful arrogance of that) fall into lists of possible meanings, even feelings. Get Kevin Kline or Ken Branagh to deliver these same words OUT LOUD and acessibility ceases to be a problem. Don't forget the actors, gang.
I completely understand, and accept OSC's reasons for his edits and changes. You gotta play to your audience. Every production of R&J will sex up one thing or tone down another, it always happens, as OSC pointed out it was happening before Shakespeare adapted the story and continued after his opening night.
Understanding Shakepeare is key, is elemental to everything that's important to me.
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE for those who find it so impenetrable and tough-going: START WITH THE SONNETS. Just one, and pick your way through each word and line (take as long as you want, they are sometimes complex to unravel, sometimes not, always deeply evocative), until you come to the last couplet, then read it and re-read it until you have a handle on a possible meaning (there are unplumbable varieties of meanings in Will's words, don't try and catalogue them all, you'll go insane) and then when you have a thread on it, start SAYING IT OUT LOUD.
John Barton's televised series (c. 1970's), a Shakespeare workshop (spot a young Ben Kingsley, Patrick Stewart etc) is very good at explaining how to acess and ride the Bard's majestic, infinitely variable rhythms, all with actors, you guessed it, saying it out loud.
Yay for Will.
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posted
Eros and death is the heart and blood of the play.
No, they are not "tragic flaws" as in Oedipus. But they are inescapable conditions of life. Rooted in character, sure, but the characters are "accessible" because they encapsulate a universal aspect of love.
quote: My personal belief -- and I'm glad you brought this up -- was that the Elizabethans still felt a strong debt to earlier influences and incorporated elements of classical tragedy (and comedy) without sincerely believing in those elements. They got included because that's what plays were, and that's what plays did, and people appreciated having someone sum up what the play was "about" at the beginning and the end.
I'll buy that halfway. Theatre was young in Shakespeare's time.
quote: You're reminding me of some college classes that took themselves way too seriously. *grin*
I think you enjoy goading me on. Posts: 53 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
Dude, KidB, you don't need to quote the play to me. I'm familiar with the use of foreshadowing.
I just don't get how you go from "their deaths are foreshadowed extensively" to "without thinking of their deaths as fated, the tragedy becomes meaningless."
Note that there ARE works of literature that I DO think function in this way. Many Hindu pieces are quite explicit about man's submission to Fate, and many older Greek dramas use characters purely as archetypes to exhibit this "reality."
But what makes Shakespeare better than either is that he does not, in general, fall into this lazy trap.
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That's not just "foreshadowing." That's the moral of the play. That's what it's about!
"These violent delights have violent ends And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, Which as they kiss consume: the sweetest honey Is loathsome in his own deliciousness And in the taste confounds the appetite: Therefore love moderately; long love doth so; Too swift arrives as tardy as too slowPosts: 53 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
The moral? I think it is time for bedtime amigo. I always thought Will very adept at giving his characters morals and not his stories. That way the audience asks itself what is MY moral opinion of what just happened. Play's should never tell people what to feel, it should bring something out of them. The best plays are the ones where the audience are still arguing in the car on the way home as to exactly what the play was 'about'. Your defence however, KidB, has been admirable, modern, spot on, oh and entertaining.
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posted
Shakespeare acted by professional actors can be a nearly ecstatic experience. Shakespeare acted by amature actors has the ghastly appeal of a mangled car on the side of the road surrounded by emergency workers: it's a horrorshow that you can't help but watch, though you hate yourself for watching it.
To quote Romeo after he slew Tybalt: PWND!!!1
Ahhhh, the poetry of it.
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quote:Shakespeare acted by professional actors can be a nearly ecstatic experience. Shakespeare acted by amature actors has the ghastly appeal of a mangled car on the side of the road surrounded by emergency workers: it's a horrorshow that you can't help but watch, though you hate yourself for watching it.
Nobody should be allowed to play the violin until they have mastered it.
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quote: Shakespeare acted by professional actors can be a nearly ecstatic experience. Shakespeare acted by amature actors has the ghastly appeal of a mangled car on the side of the road surrounded by emergency workers: it's a horrorshow that you can't help but watch, though you hate yourself for watching it.
Nobody should be allowed to play the violin until they have mastered it.
spake the disharmonious.
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quote: [QUOTE] I would agree that, with the exception of horror movies, we produce very few works that imply the hand of fate, but I don't consider that to be an essential element of tragedy. [
What are you smoking?
Our literature, theatre, and movies are made up of almost nothing else. Name any movie and I'll tell you that movie's take on fate. We relish, and we revel in the ironic turns and funny twists that bring events along to a fitting conclusion. What movie have you seen lately where you didn't get the sense that what was MEANT to happen, was indeed happening?
The whole point of dramatic irony is that when a set of circumstances goes against what the audience knows to be the fate of the characters, we are aware of it, and it makes us respond sympathetically.
I would argue that we are constantly gills-deep in implications about the hand of fate.
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posted
Tom, the whole idea is that you know the character is fated to succeed, or fated to die. When the villain gets his just deserts, I think we definetly chalk that up to the hands of fate.
edit: and by the way tom, using you logic, nothing in a peice of literature is ANYTHING except a manipulation by the author, everything is "convention," this is pretty cynical if that's what you meant.
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posted
To play Devil Tom's advocate, he might be trying to argue for a distinction between "character as fate" and "fate as fate," the former of which he considers "modern." Put another way, "modern" drama posits that characters individual traits are the subject of individual destinies, rather than archetypes subject to universal destinies.
Tom is also claiming that Shakespeare, while owing a debt to precedent - drama based on archetype - nontheless moves towards modern individualism in his work.
That's his argument as I understand it. But is seems an odd argument to make about R & J, two of the most overtly archetypical characters in all of Shakespeare's work. Unlike, say Hamlet, whose individualism is obvious, R & J deviate not one whit from the "young love" archetype. Everything they say and do embodies love/lust/youth as a concept, taken to it's utmost extreme - there is nothing unique or individual about their personalities at all. Most of the secondary characters are more individuated that the very archetypical young lovers.
Shakespeare, after all, did not include a prologue in every one of his plays. In fact, I believe most are without one. Putting one at the beginning of R & J was therefore an artistic choice, meant to emphasize the notion of ill-fated lovers.
"Foreshadowing" is not what happens in Elizabethan drama - that's for Hemingway novels and film noir.
No, the poignancy of R&J derives greatly from the certainty of the outcome of their love.
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posted
Our perspective is WAY too skewed to interpret Shakespeare's intentions. Because of course, ALL of his characters were turned into archetypes by the hands of thousands of later writers; perhaps the majority of all English writers to follow.
Was he trying to escape archetypes that were stultifying and dull in the plays of his time... I'll buy that, if only because we know that what resulted from his work was anything but dull.
However what was yesterday's cream is today's stinky old cheese, and we see everything Shakespeare does (quite unfortunately for us) through the vail of a thousand inferior immitations. Every original idea in Shakespeare has been so thoroughly plundered by the best and the very worst (watch plan 9 outer space , if you don't believe me) that everything in his plays now seems fateful.
Given the evolution of that last paragraph, I am reversing myself and agreeing with Tom. Wierd, but it happens to us all.
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posted
Except...many of Shakespeare's characters were already archetypes before Shakespeare even wrote about them, and many of his plots retreads of familiar storylines. His originality is in the language, the poetry, the dramatic nuance, and the ideas to which his characters give voice.
And...we may not be able to discern Shakespeare's intentions, but I think we can certainly discern the play's intentions, if you get my meaning. Eh?
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Forthwith, without and with nuance, the play would render to no mean interpretation - save one common theme.
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posted
I think the translation is great. Despite what KidB and others might think, we do NOT speak the same language as people in Shakespeare's day. Language changes daily--that is simply the nature of language.
Shakespeare was not intended to be a chore, and for most people struggling to understand the written play in a foreign language (albeit, not as foreign as most languages, since there are many similarities) is a chore. If you find that sort of experience fun and fulfilling, more power to you, but everyone doesn't have to be a literature-buff.
The question here is certainly not a replacement of original shakespeare in our classrooms with a translation. The original language IS still similar enough to be studied. In another hundred years or maybe more, though, when the language changes even more, I would be in favor of such a substitution. High schools typically don't study original Chaucer, but they do study original Shakespeare. Colleges and Graduate schools do study original Chaucer, however, and someday Shakespeare might need to be treated in the same way.
When I was in High School, I loved the version of Romeo and Juliet with Claire Danes. Purists must have hated that movie, but it kept the original language and I was able to understand certain parts I never "got" by reading it, simply by watching the action. I think all people deserve the chance to understand and ENJOY Shakespeare's plays in their own language (in THEIR version of the language), and I also think that part of what makes Shakespeare so great that it is translatable and its worth is in more than individual words.
This is not an Either/Or situation.
And by the way, I don't find the thought tragic that someday (that 100 or more years in the future scenario I imagined above--not anytime soon) many people/students would not be exposed to original Shakespeare. I also don't find it tragic that many French and German and Spanish speakers never read Shakespeare in its original language either. Somehow, I was able to enjoy a translated version of Candide.
I find the idea just as distasteful that only the King James Version of the Bible is acceptable for reading. (For serious study, yes, the KJV is invaluable--but so is the original Greek/Hebrew and a good dictionary.) English-speakers are the only ones (that I know of) that have largely been denied a Bible in their own language through guilt from members in their church simply because they think that older is automatically better. Other language speakers don't have that problem.
(Edit: I know that there are MANY translations and paraphrases of the Bible in English that are widely-read and widely-popular. I was talking about a controversy common in many churches, including mine, in which people state that only the KJV is acceptable--sometimes only said by members, but sometimes the idea comes from higher up in the churches.)
Saying that English speakers must only read Shakespeare in the original language is as ludicrous as saying that anyone who wants to read Shakespeare must learn English first.
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Again, it's worth appreciating for its anthropological value, along the lines of "ancient peoples sometimes wrote plays about the futility of human choice," but it seems odd to shackle an entire genre to what is, at the end of the day, only one of its historical conventions. You might as well say that comedies require marriages.
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