…ok, so it’s for everyone’s ears, but anyway, it came to me while I was being pretentious and riffing off Willie S. and stuff that his plays = Super Mario Brothers, and let me explain that to you:
There are certain video games whose characters we empathized with when we were small, even though they were represented by lumps of inhuman-looking pixellated blocks. This affection lingers; witness the popularity of emulators.
I was reading the “Speak the speech I pray you as I spoke it to you” monologue, where Hamlet says it should be “trippingly on the tongue” and you shouldn’t saw the air with your hand, and all that. And his very need to say that, combined with Shakespeare’s weirdo love of writing his lines in structured verse, indicates this ain’t no Method Acting; what you’d see on stage came off as unnaturally then as it does when you see Shakespeare’s plays put on today.
Why do we cling to these doll-babies of artifice? Maybe it’s because humans can make symbols at all, and like Pygmalion, we are gifted (or cursed) with the ability to fall in love with them. Maybe we just have a hyperactive need to generalize, I don’t know.
whoo boy, it’s late.
Post a Comment