Charlie Rose

SharkswithfrikingLazers  05/08/2012 02:48 AM Report

Well done. Great ending:

http://youtu.be/OxoUUbMii7Q

Shows "The Three Little Pigs" as if done by Shakespeare with an American ending.

However, incorrectly stated--Shakespeare did NOT have not a working vocabulary of 54,000 words--perhaps half of that.

"Anti-Stratfordians also question how Shakespeare, with no record of the education and cultured background displayed in the works bearing his name, could have acquired the extensive vocabulary found in the plays and poems. The author's vocabulary is calculated to be between 17,500 and 29,000 words.[43]"

The low figure of 17,500 is that of Manfred Scheler. The upper figure 29,000, from Marvin Spevack, is true only if all word forms (cat and cats counted as two different words, for example), compound words, emendations, variants, proper names, foreign words, onomatopoeic words, and deliberate malapropisms are included.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_authorship_question#Education_and_literacy

Charlie, you probably would have found the Bard too talkative if he was trying to use all those words.

Solsticeking  12/29/2011 12:44 PM Report

Dateline Berkeley:

12_29_2011

Hi Charley, thank you for being you and doing what you do, so well! I have seen two of your Billy Shakespeare studies; last night was Macbeth & Lear, two of my all time favorite plays (by any playwrite) and thoroughly enjoyed how you put it together and the guests you had at the table. Until you interviewed K.B. I was not particularly interested in what he had to offer. I thank you for bringing out the best in him and educating me to some of the finer points of old Billy's work. I have a question for you; will you be introducing the work of Kurasawa to the program? His interpretations of both Macbeth "Throne of Blood" and King Lear "Ran" are (in my humble opinion) fantastic interpretations of Billy's work. I feel that Akira' Japan and Billy' England were very similar environments. The contrast and comparison of Akira Kurasawa and William Shakespeare is a wonderful way to emphasize the universality of the original work. Just sayin'

Sincerely,

Erich Frisch

ShalomFreedman  11/29/2011 02:49 AM Report

With all due respect to Charlie Rose , David Kastan and Nick Schifrin I believe that a fundamental misconception underlies this small segment. Shakespeare can be read in countless ways. One of them can be taking simplistic moral lessons which accord with our own prior opinions. believe something like this was done here with the 'Revenge is self- defeating' message repeated here.

First of all, there is the questionable character of the general message itself. Is Revenge always self- defeating or is in some cases quite satisfying? Does it even have in some cases something to do with 'Justice'?

Secondly, the connecting oF 'Titus' with the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan has nothing to do with Shakespeare and everything to do with again the prior prejudice, the moral message Charlie Rose and his guests seemed to want to preach. i.e. Not so good to hunt out those Taliban in Afghanistan

Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, Shakespeare is among other reasons for the ages because of the greatness and beauty of his language, because of his creation of human character and illumination of life- situation. But his political and moral messages are not unambiguous and certainly are not an ethic for determing present day decisions.

tabs  11/28/2011 11:03 PM Report

Consider that a poor, uneducated farm boy from Illinois was a student of Shakespeare. That poor, uneducated, farm boy turned out to be the greatest of US Presidents,Abraham Lincoln. So what was it that Lincoln gleaned from the pages of Shakespeare's plays? Perhaps it was a sophistication of statecraft and how emotion shapes the actions of the powerful and thus events.

REMant  11/28/2011 01:32 PM Report

There's a huge, detailed article about Titus Andronicus on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titus_Andronicus). It is said to be Will's first tragedy, and deals with the ancien regime's "culture" of honor or jealousy, as discussed by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. It does not deal with envy, nor hate, and has no contact with the sentimentality used by liberals to denounce it. Barbarism has nothing to do with it. Thus I thought these guests missed the point entirely, as apparently, Bloom. No doubt the Japanese understand it, as well as some inner-city gangs, while the Victorians didn't for this very reason. It might be that Shakespeare mocks it, even deplores it, and, as in Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice, intends to disparage such attitudes, but I don't know the play well enough to say, nor have I seen anyone else argue that point. All such fiction, however, intends to instruct vicariously, from Greek tragedy to 18th and 19th c melodrama, and novels, as well, so it would would be hard to deny that in this case, but it would be here not a question of sentiment, but as in Greek tragedy whether the jealousy is truly honorable, i.e., virtuous according to law, or merely self-interested. The gods punished hubris, not honor or vengeance. The sin is self-righteousness, not the presence or absence of benevolence.

St Paul in Romans wrestles with this in many places, in Romans citing the passage in Deuteronomy where God will come to the aid of the afflicted and that we should not repay evil with evil, echoing Leviticus that we should love our fellows as ourselves. He says repeating the Gospels that we should overcome evil by good, and submit to government which is from God, the latter echoing Socrates. He DOES NOT say, however, we should turn the other cheek, but even there the meaning can be disputed, and a strong case made that the Gospels mean only what the OT says, not suffer in silence.

Similarly, we often hear it said we shouldn't take the law into our own hands. Locke says government was instituted among men precisely to prevent men from being judges in their own cases, and that, too, is the import of the Declaration of Independence, which says to SECURE life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness governments are instituted among men. The king was accused of injustice, not of doing things the colonists didn't like, to which the British replied in kind that the colonies were duly represented in parliament and the king, himself, hadn't got anything to do with it. They did not claim to do what they liked anymore than we, and the entire controversy, at least on paper, was based on questions of right. Even dictators attempt to rule through law, not by fiat, for instance by holding show trials.

When ppl like Pound and Holmes argued this was not the case historically and made it all a question of "values" they undermined centuries of understanding, just as those who likewise began denying God's authority and even existence - unless it was merely to claim, as the impious too often do, that all affliction was owed recompense (which Paul took on, as well, when he asked if we should do evil so that good will come), or those who developed theories of Social Darwinism. Such "historical" reasoning comes down to plain skepticism and claims of benevolence are as potentially dishonorable as any other.