Friday, May 16, 2008
Lear reprised
Second visit last night, this time with BH. A dull, cool evening but we did have seats in the front row and we did not have a column. Less helicopters than last time, but about the same number of aeroplanes. Audience in the pit young and a lot of them appeared to be paying more attention to each other than to the play. Also an irritating tendency to laugh at the wrong places. BH thought that this was really nervous adolescent sniggering at something vaguely threatening but not understood. Slightly put out by the smell of pies from said pit - the idea being, it seems, to promote authentic slovenly behaviour from the groundlings. It will take a few more visits to get used to it. Kent and Gloucester remained unconvincing as old comrades in arms of the king. As noted last time, more like retired grocers.
Noticed some differant emphases and readings. For example, in the use of the word base by Edmund - which brought to mind the use of the same word in Richard II - which I remember, it being my O-level text. OED gives several pages to base and also explains that any connection with Edmund's bastardy is accidental. It seems that bastard is a conflation of 'bast' - a mule saddle also used as a bed by muleteers - and the perjorative suffix 'ard'. It seems that muleteers in antiquity were well known for their ex-wedlock generative powers, giving rise to the old French bastard, now corrupted to the new French batard. Perhaps with the growth of the middle classes and social mobility generally, the posh of the early seventeenth century were very concerned not to be thought base so the word carried a lot of emotional baggage. From whence it's cropping up in plays.
All of which led to pondering on a new MPhil topic on my way from Cheam today. By Lear's day, in England anyway, all generals were either kings or senior aristos: that is what they were for. The separate concept of a general did not really exist - in a way it had done in Roman times. Presumably the concept came back with the rise of the mid-century professional armies - and came to maturity when sucessful generals like Marlborough became dukes because they were good generals, not generals because they were good dukes. I am sure one could spin much out of this.
Talking of which, noticed two pieces in the DT recently which each managed to spin a very little information out over half a page. One was about trees and one was about diet and one suspects that both were based on reading the first paragraph of an entry in Wikipedia or of some leaflet from Ag&Fish. Quite a useful skill for a journalist. Sprog 2 tells me that the density of facts in the Financial Times is much higher, making it a poor read when sitting in the train having been in the pub for hours.
Be all that as it may, I think the review of Lear in this week's TLS is about where I am on that subject. I will try again in a month or so - which will be a first time that I have been to the same show more than twice. Films, of course, is rather differant. I imagine that I have been to, or at least seen, lots of films more than two times. Is it just that films are cheaper and easier?
Noticed some differant emphases and readings. For example, in the use of the word base by Edmund - which brought to mind the use of the same word in Richard II - which I remember, it being my O-level text. OED gives several pages to base and also explains that any connection with Edmund's bastardy is accidental. It seems that bastard is a conflation of 'bast' - a mule saddle also used as a bed by muleteers - and the perjorative suffix 'ard'. It seems that muleteers in antiquity were well known for their ex-wedlock generative powers, giving rise to the old French bastard, now corrupted to the new French batard. Perhaps with the growth of the middle classes and social mobility generally, the posh of the early seventeenth century were very concerned not to be thought base so the word carried a lot of emotional baggage. From whence it's cropping up in plays.
All of which led to pondering on a new MPhil topic on my way from Cheam today. By Lear's day, in England anyway, all generals were either kings or senior aristos: that is what they were for. The separate concept of a general did not really exist - in a way it had done in Roman times. Presumably the concept came back with the rise of the mid-century professional armies - and came to maturity when sucessful generals like Marlborough became dukes because they were good generals, not generals because they were good dukes. I am sure one could spin much out of this.
Talking of which, noticed two pieces in the DT recently which each managed to spin a very little information out over half a page. One was about trees and one was about diet and one suspects that both were based on reading the first paragraph of an entry in Wikipedia or of some leaflet from Ag&Fish. Quite a useful skill for a journalist. Sprog 2 tells me that the density of facts in the Financial Times is much higher, making it a poor read when sitting in the train having been in the pub for hours.
Be all that as it may, I think the review of Lear in this week's TLS is about where I am on that subject. I will try again in a month or so - which will be a first time that I have been to the same show more than twice. Films, of course, is rather differant. I imagine that I have been to, or at least seen, lots of films more than two times. Is it just that films are cheaper and easier?
# posted by Jim @ 4:18 AM 
