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PlayShakespeare.com: The Ultimate Free Shakespeare Resource
PlayShakespeare.com: The Ultimate Free Shakespeare Resource
PlayShakespeare.com: The Ultimate Free Shakespeare Resource
  Monday, 25 June 2007
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Just to let you know some of us wander into performances at times - I am doing a 'one man' show (Shakey and You) on Thursday - in the Garage and Courtyard Theatre here in Timisoara - his best known bits done with a difference (an attempted antidote to too much scholastic study).

My very first "To Be' on stage!

Excited or what?

:twisted: :twisted:
That's great! I just performed a solo show back in December (a one-man version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol) and I know how much hard work it is. It was a two-hour show and was nearly 60 pages of text to memorize!

It looks like I'll be taking it to Vienna, Bratislava & Prague this winter.
16 years ago
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#1990
Just have to say how good the online texts are - the Hamlet 'to be' is as clear as a bell and makes the supposed difficulties of meaning disappear!
16 years ago
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#1991
Went well - apart from a flat landing on my head before we started - and a raging headache all the way through.

Strange perfoming in a courtyard, in daylight!

Great feel to some of the speeches though - some insights into 'To be' and other speeches through the performing of them this way (to be revealed, slowly).

Also got a job reading the new Harry Potter at midnight the day of its publication!
16 years ago
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#1992
A snippet or three from me in action:

http://www.babelcenter.ro/shakey.html
That's great!

I wanted to see you in some kind of Elizabethan garb or possibly something you could play with as you shift from one character or point to another.
16 years ago
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#1994
Yeah, that's great stuff! Extremely funny - is there gonna be, like, a DVD of this stuff?

I think some of your glossings are just one interpretation among many, but the comic relief factor is through the roof! :-)
16 years ago
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#1995
A couple of points - thank you for the kind comments.

What is on line misses the pieces I just performed and didn't go through (several, excepts from 'The Dream' for example, were just for "entertainment";).

Chose 'Modern' on purpose. I thought there was enough playing with myself - ah, maybe that's the problem!

My glosses are perfect! Especially as, like all theatre, they exist only on the night and are gone.
16 years ago
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#1996
My glosses are perfect! Especially as, like all theatre, they exist only on the night and are gone.
Perhaps not "perfect" - that's a difficult level to achieve with the Bard ;o) - nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed your theater and give you vast points for your panache and hope next time you have a larger and more responsive audience - were they all English speakers?

Btw, is there really a problem with "contumely"?

Regards, Charles
16 years ago
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#1997
I'm the only Native speaker in the House! The theatre was actually packed - over 50 people in there (it is called, The Courtyard Theatre - for a good reason).

The "perfect" thing is really about the event being 'one-off' and it meant what it meant - the explanations were part of the performance and the meanings I gave were my meanings. The meanings given to the texts "as spoken" by the audience would, of course, be different. There is no 'correctness' intended in the explanations - more 'tonight' I want it to mean this.

Arrogant I may be (well, am) but much of what I was up to that night was to bring 'performance' back into the texts, and enjoyment too.

(I'm not taking the hough by the way - just re-reading what I wrote and realising I haven't explained myself very well.)
16 years ago
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#1998
I certainly do not think you or your presentation arrogant, rather, very much in the spirit of Shakespeare and what I envision to have been the performance style of his age - so please, no defense of your theatrical behavior is necessary.

On the other hand (and this is not about your usage - definitional or metaphorical) you made a point about no one understanding the meaning of "contumely" and while I don't have an OED handy, it is my belief, fortified by an on-line dictionary, that it means (or meant, the word is archaic): Rude language or behaviour; scorn, insult.

Regards, Charles
16 years ago
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#1999
Yeah, it basically means "insolent". And "fardels" means "burdens". But I think akfarrer said as he did in the spirit of good fun, and in acknowledgement of the fact that hardly any ordinary (that is, not immensely Shakespeare literate) people know these words.
16 years ago
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#2000
... in acknowledgement of the fact that hardly any ordinary (that is, not immensely Shakespeare literate) people know these words.
Yes, of course, that is what he must have meant - just as he used the Q2 "despised love" instead of the F's "disprized love" because who ever heard of the latter?

Regards, Charles
16 years ago
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#2001
No, just plain wrong about contumely - thought it was one of those words coined by Shaksper and seems to have an older derivation (although I think its first recorded use IS in Hamlet).

Fardels is deff. a Shakey coined (or first recorded) use. Definitions of it are based on its use here in Hamlet.

But Sorenson is also right in pointing to my 'good fun' intent - so many of the audience struggle trying to understand every word that I wanted them to realise even the 'experts' don't know everything and, more importantly, you don't need to know to enjoy it.
16 years ago
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#2002
Well, I have an Oxford Concise English Dictionary, and "contumely" is listed as coming from Middle English through the French "contumelie" and the Latin "contumelia", meaning either "disgrace" or "insolent or reproachful language or treatment". Of course, the latter sounds pretty much exactly like a contextual inference from Shakespeare's use of it...

"Fardel" is not in the OCED; one would have to resort to the complete OED for that. But I have to say that I doubt it is an original Shakespearean coinage. First recorded use, possibly. But it doesn't sound to me like a word WS would just make up, without expecting his audience to know it.

But in any case, WS made up new versions of many existing, old or Greco-Latin words; he was quite a wizard regarding word usage and word form. He played on double-meanings to the max, by using variant spellings and foreign (usually Greek or Latin) words, also sometimes creating new terms (the word "compromise", for instance, should be a Shakespeare coinage).

If anybody can match Shakespeare in terms of word usage, it's Chaucer. His Canterbury Tales are so complex that it can no longer be properly appreciated, because he made so many references to local slang and dialects that scarcely exist anymore. But fortunately linguistics can still find many of them out - even if it is very hard work indeed! :-)
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