Tuesday, April 10, 2007
The Bard's jokes are no laughing matter
Guardian Unlimited: "Shakespeare's jokes: what's the point? How many times have you seen a Shakespearean fool be funny? I've watched plenty of groansome performances by actors frantically telegraphing the indecipherable wordplay, as if meaning might be communicated by mugging alone. (Note to thesps: it can't.) I wonder if these comic routines - topical gags in Jacobean idiom, often low on dramatic or poetic value, and tailored to specific actors who've been dead for four centuries - are always worth persisting with. Nowadays, these once-entertaining scenes can be harder to enjoy than the serious stuff they were designed to offset."
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2 comments:
I'll admit I see the issue with the jokes no longer understood in Shakespeare, but how much of a difference is there between that and the rest of the play? Shakespeare is Shakespeare, and it's simply not of our time. I suppose though, that jokes are harder to deal with than just simply text. Things that were found funny at that time could be irrelevant now. So instead of scrapping jokes, perhaps they can be altered in a way that stays true to the intent, but is relevant and understandable, and FUNNY today.
I agree with Sarah in saying that perhaps the alteration of the "fools" in order to be relevant today could make them more successful. Though this could probably be done with slight alterations in language in order to be clearer, I'm not so sure that the context could really be kept and that the overall accomplishment of the text would be the same.
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