Saturday, January 12, 2013

Day 12: Thank heavens for Ben Crystal!

So back in October 2012 I reviewed a book called Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard, by Ben Crystal, on my blog, Cozy Little Book Journal. It was amazing! By far the best book I've ever read about reading Shakespeare. The things I remember most--and have been thinking about constantly as I've been reading--are these:


1. "Thou/Thy/Thine" and "You/Your/Yours" were not interchangeable and were not used randomly. 

"You/Your/Yours" was the more formal second-person pronoun, similar to "vous" in French , while "thou/thy/thine" was the more intimate address, similar to "tu" in French (this is counter-intuitive for us now because nobody says "thou" anymore unless they're trying to sound fancy). So if Shakespeare had a character address someone as "you," it meant that the person they were addressing was a superior, an elder, a deity or nobleman, or possibly that they were very far away. It could sometimes mean that the person was addressing more than one person collectively (not always though) or they could simply be speaking quite formally. If they use "thou," however, we can assume that the character is addressing someone they consider an equal or inferior, someone with whom they have an intimate personal relationship, and that the person is physically near them on the stage. 


Noticing these things in the text can really help decipher the relationships between the characters speaking, particularly if one addresses the other as "thou" but the other answers back with "you." 

Also, if a character switches from addressing someone as "thou" to "you" (or vice versa) there's always a good reason. Like in Macbeth, Lady Macbeth refers to her husband as "thou" throughout the first act of the play, until the moment he says he doesn't want to kill Duncan. From that moment on, she refers to him only as "you." 

That's straight up cold right there.

2. Shakespeare wrote his plays for actors, not for readers. If something looks funny to us on the page, don't disregard it (or change it!) without first considering whether it serves a purpose as a stage direction.

An example of "stage direction writing" is when characters share a line, or rather their individual (short) lines together make one line of iambic pentameter. So it looks funny when a character's line starts halfway across the page, but that's to indicate that what their saying completes the iambic pentameter (meter? foot? I forget) of the other person's line. In other words, there is no pause between what the other person said and what they're saying. If one person had a short line (like a word or two) and the next person's line doesn't start half-way across the page, then that means there's a pause between what the first person said and what the second person said, a pause that is long enough to complete the pentameter of the first person's line. 

Holy hell! Why didn't I learn that in school?

So, in made-up, non-Shakespeare dialogue example, say I wrote these lines as a play:
Mary: I'm going to read Shakespeare!Mike:                                                        All of it?Mary: Yes.Mike:         Wow! That's so amazing! Good for you!
So in this example, Mary's and Mike's first two lines, together, make up a ten-syllable pentameter (though not a very pretty one, and not really iambic, but whatever), as do their second two lines. In other words, Mike spoke his lines right after Mary without any silent pauses. He sounds enthusiastic for Mary's new project. Yay!

If I wrote it like this however:
Mary: I'm going to read Shakespeare!Mike:                                                       All of it?Mary: Yes.Mike: Wow! That's so amazing! Good for you!
It's the same, right? Not exactly. In this case, the second pair of lines is different. Mary says "Yes," which is only one syllable, and Mike's line isn't indented, indicating that his line completes her pentameter. Which means we should assume that Mary's line has ten syllables all by itself, one word and 9 beats of silence, before Mike starts his line. Which means Mike is staring blankly and not saying anything for 9 beats of silence before saying anything. When he finally does speak, even though he's saying the same words, we can assume the tone might be somewhat more sarcastic. 

Cool, right?

3. Shakespeare's audiences were still afraid of witches.

And not just a little. Like, you could be killed for that shit. And loads of people believed that witches were real, potentially lethal threats to their safety (though, presumably, not the people who were actually being accused of witchcraft). So when witches and sorcerers appeared on stage in Shakespeare's time, it might not have been received like Harry Potter or Gandalf. As Ben Crystal points out, it might have been a little more like an American audience watching a terrorist cell assemble a bomb on stage in 2002. Not so damn funny.


Anyway, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It's like that scene in The Office (US) when Jim and Pam spend a night at Shrute Farms and then rave, "Chair-making never seemed so possible!" After reading Shakespeare on Toast, reading all of Shakespeare's plays never seemed so possible!

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