Charlie Rose

SharkswithfrikingLazers  05/08/2012 02:45 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.

REMant  04/13/2012 12:33 PM Report

There have been a number of one-man Shakespeare shows tho, including a previous one by Mr Callow, himself, and, of course, similar conceptions foisted on Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Lincoln, Charles Dickens, Einstein, Golda Meier, Hemingway...

The world as a stage may come from Petronius, a gay Roman courtier, believed author of the Satyricon, which deals with Epicureans in search of free meals, this scene's setting. (http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195389661/obo-9780195389661-0040.xml;jsess ionid=83198095693C4103A1A580672092E29D) The Globe is believed to have used a similar expression in advertising.

The seven ages speech, itself, should not be taken very seriously. The excellent Internet Shakespeare Editions website (maintained by the University of Victoria in British Columbia) says:

"As You Like It specializes in literary satire. It is the most self-conscious of these three plays [the other two, Much Ado and Twelfth Night written at the same time] about such news items in the contemporary literary scene as the vogue of pastoral romance, the current craze for classical-style satire, the trendy 'humors' psychology and the fashionable pose of being melancholic, the affected mannerisms of the well-born traveler, the newfangled custom of picking one's teeth, the elaborate Italianate code for conducting duels, the conventional antithetical debate of court versus country, romantic platitudes about being in love 'forever and a day' and still more. The large cast of characters is designed to represent and satirize as many of these fashionable topics as possible." (See the rest of the informative introduction here: http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/Texts/AYL/intro/GenIntro/default/ and the huge list of classical literary allusions.)

Melancholy Jacques may be making reference to one Timothy Bright, who in A Treatise of Melancholie in 1586 had written:

"The seven ages of man [resemble] the seven planets, whereof our infancy is compared to the Moon, in which we seem only to live and grow, as plants; the second age to Mercury, wherein we are taught and instructed; our third age to Venus, the days of love, desire and vanity; the fourth to the Sun, the strong, flourishing and beautiful age of man's life; the fifth to Mars, in which we seek honour and victory, and in which our thoughts travel to ambitious ends; the sixth age is ascribed to Jupiter, in which we begin to take account of our times, judge of ourselves and grow to the perfection of our understanding; the last, and seventh, to Saturn, wherein our days are sad and overcast, and in which we find, by dear and lamentable experience and by the loss which can never be repaired, that of all our vain passions and affections past the sorrow only abides." (http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/life/lifesubj+1.html)

If there's a personal connection it would likely be in the interplay between court and country throughout this and several other of the plays, which, tho, may also be seen as a commentary on primitivism. As with the tragedies, I think it bears further study. The assumption, and by ppl who really ought to know better, is frequently of an upstairs and downstairs to English society at this time, clearly belied by the growth of London and the new monarchy if nothing else, and neither Will's learning or ascension ought be surprising. Indeed, one could hypothesize both attitude and reality came in with the Whigs. For a good description of the economy and society of the time, directed particularly at the question of usury, see R H Tawney's Historical Introduction to Sir Thomas Wilson's 1572 A Discourse Upon Usury http://www.cesc.net/adobeweb/scholars/tawney/tawney.pdf (There is a Wilson bio here: http://www.people.vcu.edu/~nsharp/wilsbio1.htm)

I'd be surprised to find grammar schools which didn't include Latin. And personally I think Hamlet has nothing at all to do with Hamnet, except that they may be an alternate spellings, and I'm not unhappily alone, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamnet_Shakespeare

BTW, actors may be uncertain of their identity, but they can't be about their memory. That's one for Kandel.