On a roll

Two posts within minutes of each other; guess I've got nothing better to do.

Anyway, I clicked on my "view full profile" thing, and glanced at the picture that I chose as my profile pic: Me, writing in my journal, in front of the birthplace of William Shakespeare in Stratford-Upon-Avon. I knew it was cheesy and typical of my to post a picture of myself physically writing on a blogging website, but I guess I have a tendency to be cheesy and typical at times. I love that picture, though. I remember how badly I felt the need to write something, anything in front of that house, and I know that's cheesy, too, but get over it. I love Shakespeare. After a semester spent on pretty much nothing but Shakespeare, my awareness of his brilliance has only been heightened. I know there a billions of theories out there about the improbability of that caliber of genius existing in a poor tradesman's song with limited schooling, but I don't care about them. I love the idea of Shakespeare. And I love the ideas of Shakespeare's. And I think I would be content to spend the rest of my life performing Shakespeare (fingers crossed: for the Royal Shakespeare Company...someday...) I love that he's so brilliant, he gives you everything you need to know in the words, if you know how to read them. I get so tired of all this naturalistic, subtext-soaked LaBute/Mamet elipses bullshit sometimes. Yes, it's good theatre, I understand, but you have to work too hard for that text. You could argue for days about objectives and tactics and the subconscious. Shakespeare didn't call for subconscious, he wrote asides. The audiences of his time weren't smart enough to get subtext, and, honestly, most audiences of our time aren't smart enough to get it either. So you end up working your ass off for nothing. Shakespeare simplified everything, and I know that sounds crazy because people spend so much time COMPLICATING Shakespeare. It's really cut-and-dry. I firmly believe that. And the beauty of it is, you don't HAVE to hear/understand every single word of every single line of every couplet of every speech of every scene so help you God, if they actors do their jobs, you understand. I fell in love with the histories in Stratford. The Histories, for God's sake, because they were so compelling. I don't know what sparked this rant, I just felt the need to declare my love of Shakespeare to the great "out there" since he's no longer around for me to tell him face-to-face.