{"id":5356,"date":"2006-09-22T16:04:03","date_gmt":"2006-09-22T20:04:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5356"},"modified":"2015-05-23T20:34:08","modified_gmt":"2015-05-24T00:34:08","slug":"twixt-clock-and","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5356","title":{"rendered":"Twixt clock and ….."},"content":{"rendered":"

This looks like it’s going to be a fascinating exchange<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’m excited to hear Ron Rosenbaum’s response. <\/p>\n

Every single person I’ve heard of who saw Peter Brook’s Midsummer<\/i> in 1970 had a similar response to it to Rosenbaum. BOOKS have been written about that production. Never ever to be forgotten. (Here are some images from that production if you are interested: Oberon, Titania and Puck <\/a>, this one is of Hermia<\/a>, Oberon, Titania, and the sleeping lovers <\/a>) …) But to hear about that production in this context, that on some level the memory of seeing that production and the revelations it provided led Ron Rosenbaum, almost 40 years later, to write his latest book…. Incredible.<\/p>\n

Check out the Wikipedia entry on the play itself where Brook gets a whole section called “Brook and After”<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Another landmark production was that of Peter Brook in 1971. Brook swept away every tradition associated with the play, staging it in a blank white box, in which masculine fairies engaged in circus tricks such as trapeze artistry. Brook also introduced the subsequently popular idea of doubling Theseus\/Oberon and Hippolyta\/Titania, as if to suggest that the world of the fairies is a mirror version of the world of the mortals. Since Brook’s production, directors have felt free to use their imaginations freely to decide for themselves what the play’s story means, and to represent that visually on stage. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It goes on a bit more but Brook’s influence on this play cannot be over-stated. I didn’t even SEE the damn thing and I know all about that production.<\/p>\n

I can’t wait to read Shakespeare Wars<\/em> too, by the way. I love the Shakespeare controversies, the Shakespeare “wars”. I don’t have a problem with pondering authorship, pondering who did what, even accepting that I will never ever know the entire story. I’ve written about the “wars” before. I get obsessive and manic. I open up the Riverside Shakespeare<\/a>, and then I open up my copy of the first folio<\/a> – and do a line by line comparison, which is chilling, if you know what you’re looking for, and if you regard the printed word as somewhat sacred. <\/p>\n

Also – I’m an actor, which gives a whole other perspective to this whole thing. These are not just pieces of great literature. They are PLAYS meant to be PERFORMED. I do not read them in a literary way, I read them as an actor, trying to imagine how I would say this shit out loud. And when you read the plays that way, and when you double-check the published standard texts that you can buy at freakin’ Barnes & Noble with the text in the folio, you realize how much editors have inserted themselves into Shakespeare’s words, probably to “make things clear”, or because the editors are wannabe directors themselves, and they think they know HOW a line should be said. The editors have added exclamation points, and ellipses, etc. etc., all of which are EMOTIONAL punctuation marks. An exclamation point conveys an emotion. Shakespeare didn’t have to add emotion to the end of a line with an exclamation point, all of the emotion is already in the line. Say the line as he wrote it and you probably WILL feel the correct emotion. He’s that good. But editors have added all kinds of stuff to the texts, because – whatever. Just because. So if the line is, originally: “Give me your hand”, maybe an editor, thinking himself being “helpful”, will change it to “Give me your hand!”<\/p>\n

Actors notice EVERYTHING when they read a script. We are detectives. What’s the difference between an ellipses and a dash? There are 2 exclamation points at the end of this sentence. That is important. Etc. And so an actor will read “Give me your hand” much differently than “Give me your hand!” Ya know why? Cause it IS different. The exclamation point is a DIRECTION to the actor. It says, “Say it THIS way.”<\/p>\n

If you’re interested in any of this and you have a copy of Shakespeare’s plays lying around (like a Penguin copy, or any of the regular copies you can buy anywhere), take it out and compare it to the text in the first folio<\/a>, which is now online. And notice how many exclamation points have been added to the recent editions. There are more differences, and people have spent their entire lives digging through the first folio, looking for clues, because the folio is the earliest copy in existence of the works of Shakespeare. So it is thought that it is closest to what he actually meant.<\/p>\n

(Oh, let me add one contradictory thing, but that’s just all of a piece with any conversation about Shakespeare: because the folio lacks those emotional landmarks – meaning punctuation marks besides periods and commas – the plays are more difficult to read. At least silently. You realize how much your eye, as it scans along, NEEDS those landmarks to orient you, to tell you what people are feeling, to skip from one place to another. The editors “made things clear” all right and it’s just flat out easier to sit down and read the Penguin version of As You Like It<\/em> or whatever. But still: it’s good to know the folio is there, if you need it, and my copy of it is most treasured and most dog-eared.)<\/p>\n

Too many mysteries, too many unexplained things. But it’s so fun to speculate!<\/p>\n

Gotta put The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups<\/a>\"\"<\/i> on my list.<\/p>\n

Speaking of Shakespeare, I was preparing for an audition last week while Michael was staying with me. Working on the monologue from Cymbeline<\/i>. Act III, sc. 4 where Imogen receives the cold letter from her husband telling her that he has found out she has been “false to his bed” while he is in Italy. She has NOT been false to his bed and so she is shocked (shocked!) to hear his accusations (it comes in letter form). So she reads the letter and then says to herself:<\/p>\n

False to his bed! What is it to be false?
\nTo lie in watch there and to think on him?
\nTo weep ‘twixt clock and clock? if sleep
\ncharge nature,
\nTo break it with a fearful dream of him
\nAnd cry myself awake? that’s false to’s bed, is it?<\/p>\n

(See, even just looking at that I feel the need to go check my folio to see if there’s an exclamation point after ‘bed” in the first line. If you think it doesn’t matter, then you’re wrong.)<\/p>\n

I memorized the monologue while Michael read his paper. Occasionally Michael would read out loud to me from the paper, and occasionally I would proclaim parts of my monologue to him. Randomly. 20 minutes of silence would pass and suddenly I would start shouting with no warning, “FALSE TO HIS BED???” Etc. This went on for a couple of hours.<\/p>\n

During one of my random proclamations, I messed up the lines and said,<\/p>\n

To lie in watch there and to think on him?
\nTo weep ‘twixt clock and cock?<\/p>\n

Twixt clock and COCK.<\/p>\n

Which, naturally, became the big joke. We couldn’t stop saying it. We tried to work it into every sentence, until it actually made me frightened that I would slip and say it that way during the audition. I started to think that THAT was the line. Wait … what is the line again? Twixt clock and CLOCK or twixt clock and COCK?<\/p>\n

The morning Michael left I was weepy. The emotions snuck up on me (they always do, I’m slow). I walked around in tears. I had to go take a walk to try to calm down. I could not calm down. At some point, Michael called me and said, “Hey, before I go let’s meet up for coffee.” I said, acting all chipper and breezy, “Cool! When?” He said, “How about 12?” Me, acting all chipper and breezy, “12 sounds great!” Michael said, “Are you upset about something?” (I am laughing out loud. All my chipper lying was for naught!) I responded, “Oh, it’s nothing. I’ve just been weeping twixt clock and cock.”<\/p>\n

\nI’ll be checking back in on this conversation <\/a>– and I will definitely be getting the book. I’m excited.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This looks like it’s going to be a fascinating exchange. I’m excited to hear Ron Rosenbaum’s response. Every single person I’ve heard of who saw Peter Brook’s Midsummer in 1970 had a similar response to it to Rosenbaum. BOOKS have … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16],"tags":[600,218],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5356"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5356"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102911,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5356\/revisions\/102911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}