Saturday 7 October 2017

Stratford

Tomorrow, we will visit Stratford. Previous blog references to Shakespeare include:

A Midsummer Tempest
A Midsummer Night's Dream
The Tempest
Hamlet
Macbeth
Iambic Pentameter
Fairy Gold 

These search results overlap, of course. Anything relevant that comes up tomorrow will be added to the blog.

19 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And I like how, in THE LONG WAY HOME, Poul Anderson "translated" some of Hamlet's famous "to be or not to be" dialogue into the language used by the people of the Technarchy five thousand years from now. By then the name of the play's author had been long forgotten.

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
That is also relevant. Are you able to quote any of the translated dialogue?
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Yes, here is what I found in Chapter VIII of THE LONG WAY HOME, a bit of the "Hamlet" known to the people of the Technarchy 5000 years from now:

"Existence or nullity--thus the problem:
Whether more free-born mentally to endure
The blast and bolts of adverse chance occurrence,
Or to shoot through a universe of troubles,
And counteracting, annul them?"

Very different, but still recognizably "Hamlet"!

Sean

Sean M. Brooks said...

Darn! I should have used "monologue," not "dialogue" in referring to that famous bit of "Hamlet" and its "translation." It would have been a more accurate word to use.

Sean

David Birr said...

Paul and Sean:
Lois McMaster Bujold has written a number of stories involving a colony world, Barrayar, cut off from the mainstream of Terran-descended civilization for several centuries, but then regaining contact. It's mentioned that the colonists — mostly derived from English, Russian, French, and Greek, but with a few other national minorities — maintained a tradition of Shakespeare's plays, orally whenever they couldn't manage written. They did this so "successfully" that it was later found they'd "preserved" two or three of the Bard's works the entire rest of humanity had never heard of!

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, DAVID!

Interesting! And I can well believe some oral traditions can preserve works which had otherwise been lost. In his book JESUS AND HIS TIMES, Henri Daniel-Rops discussed how, before books became so ubiquitous, many people's memories were far better than is the norm today. Because a trained and retentive memory was more necessary in past times.

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
I have heard it said that the Bible and Shakespeare could be reproduced from memory alone.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I can believe that! A trained "memorizer" could probably memorize large parts of the Bible. And the skalds and other poets in Anderson's Scandinavian stories were also trained to remember verbatim many poems.

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
there are people with photographic memories, actors who have learned lots of Shakespeare and Evangelicals who reread the Bible non-stop.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

True, we still have people today who can recite from memory large blocks of material, whether plays or the Scriptures.

Sean

David Birr said...

Ummmm, the way I understood Bujold's anecdote, and which I THOUGHT the quote marks around "successfully" and "preserved" conveyed, was that due to distorted memories the Barrayarans CREATED two or three "Shakespearean" plays that SHAKESPEARE never heard of.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, DAVID!

Darn, I misunderstood you. I thought you were saying the Barrayarans preserved by memory the texts of several of Shakespeare's undoubted works.

Sean

David Birr said...

Sean:
No; when I said "the rest of humanity had never heard of" these plays, I meant NEVER. EVER. Especially in Shakespeare's time.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, DAVID!

That's what I thought you were saying. Plays MISTAKENLY attributed to Shakespeare.

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
Shakespearean monologues are "soliloquies."
Paul.

Jim Baerg said...

Another amusing thing Bujold did with Shakespeare was a scene in which her main character Miles was being interogated using the truth serum 'Fast Penta'. He found he had an atypical reaction to the drug & he was able to avoid giving useful information if he could get onto poetry he had memorized. Neither he nor the interrogators could get him onto something else until he had finished reciting the poem.
One of the interrogators mutters "at this rate we will be here all winter", and Miles says "Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer..." and carries on through the whole of Richard III.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Jim!

Now that was an interesting a prisoner could try using to avoid giving information to his enemies.

And I should get back into reading Shakespeare again, perhaps one of his history plays.

Ad astra! Sean

Jim Baerg said...

"were also trained to remember verbatim many poems"

Poetry is easier to memorize.
Rhythm (and rhyme) means there is a pattern that the words have to fit, so if one is uncertain about some detail that pattern helps one remember what should come next.

Kind of related.
I was talking with a friend about fusion reactions and went through the CNO cycle that fuses hydrogen to helium in some stars (mostly larger than the sun, it happens in the sun a bit but there it is mostly the proton-proton chain). She was a bit surprised at me remembering the details & I said, any nucleus with more protons than neutrons will be unstable & one of the protons will change to a neutron plus a positron. So she said, oh there is a pattern that makes it easier to remember.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Jim!

Yes, many different kinds of patterns are used as mnemonic devices. Like the examples you cited.

Ad astra! Sean