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The thing about Shakespeare's plays is that they're plays. Performance pieces. Written by an actor. Shakespeare wrote with the intent that most people would eng

The thing about Shakespeare's plays is that they're plays. Performance pieces. Written by an actor. Shakespeare wrote with the intent that most people would engage with his words by hearing them spoken by actors performing on a stage. That feels like an obvious point. But there's often a tendency, especially among literature and English professors, to approach Shakespeare with the belief that most authentic way to engage with the text is by reading it off a page. Whatever the source of that belief, it isn't grounded in the nature or history of Shakespeare's work.

mikeash 11y ago
I wonder, how often do people study films by reading the scripts? I know it happens, but it seems pretty rare.
- lawpoop 11y ago
  Certainly film students do this. But as I pointed out in another comment, Shakespeare's plays are primarily verses, as opposed to stage direction, props, or scene description. They can be looked at as poetry, as we do his sonnets. It's quite a different thing from modern films, which combine acting, cinematography, scenes, and music into a single art, cinema, that defines its own category distinct from those that came before it. The point of cinema is to "Show, don't tell" whereas plays in the tradition of Shakespeare are completely dialog-driven. In cinema, ideas are presented as a /moving image/, where in Shakespeare, they are presented in words.
lawpoop 11y ago
Keep in mind that Shakespeare wrote a number of Sonnets, so he is regarded also as a poet in addition to a playwright, which puts in squarely in the category of "writer". Since his plays were written in verse, with very little in the way of stage direction, less in props, and next to nothing in scene descriptions, it's not too far of the mark to think of the plays as poems themselves. When people read, they hear 'silent prosody', or a spoken voice, in their heads, so even when reading, they are hearing the words.

mikeash 11y ago

I wonder, how often do people study films by reading the scripts? I know it happens, but it seems pretty rare.

lawpoop 11y ago
Certainly film students do this. But as I pointed out in another comment, Shakespeare's plays are primarily verses, as opposed to stage direction, props, or scene description. They can be looked at as poetry, as we do his sonnets. It's quite a different thing from modern films, which combine acting, cinematography, scenes, and music into a single art, cinema, that defines its own category distinct from those that came before it. The point of cinema is to "Show, don't tell" whereas plays in the tradition of Shakespeare are completely dialog-driven. In cinema, ideas are presented as a /moving image/, where in Shakespeare, they are presented in words.

lawpoop 11y ago

Keep in mind that Shakespeare wrote a number of Sonnets, so he is regarded also as a poet in addition to a playwright, which puts in squarely in the category of "writer". Since his plays were written in verse, with very little in the way of stage direction, less in props, and next to nothing in scene descriptions, it's not too far of the mark to think of the plays as poems themselves. When people read, they hear 'silent prosody', or a spoken voice, in their heads, so even when reading, they are hearing the words.