Last May I tried out for Romeo and Juliet at a community theater. I didn't really want to try out, as I do not love Shakespeare, but the director asked me to. I ended up with the role of Mercutio (after a little controversy) and later that summer I started doing text work for the role. It was extremely difficult. Granted, I was traveling a lot that summer and did not really have much time to sit down with it until rehearsals started. As I stumbled through the script I thought how much my teachers have always said how much of a genius Shakespeare was. The text was beautiful gibberish. I knew in a sense it was beautiful and profound, it was just above my head. It wasn't until I made some headway on the character, and not really until I got on stage, that I really started making sense of it all. It didn't hurt that my character is really dirty. Every other phrase out of Mercutio's mouth was a double entendre for "penis." Indeed, there were some words that had five different meanings, and Shakespeare purposely meant all of them!
It sounds corny and cliche, but doing this play really opened the door to Shakespeare for me. I can finally appreciate the nuances and meaning behind some of his works. A paragraph if Shakespear is worth pages of our modern English. Once I am finished with this play I will tackle some other works like Macbeth, or Merchant of Venice. I will just need some commentaries handy...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment