Shakespeare must have thought that his audience was capable of great feats of imagination. This play was originally written for the theatre of the 1600s, which means there was not much in the way of costumes and practically no scenery. I can't help but wonder how Shakespeare managed to achieve the effect of a shipwreck on the his audience with no scenery and no sound effects. Yes, I know the whole argument that Shakespeare put clues in certain character's lines to help the audience figure out the setting but honestly, if the majority of modern high school students can't catch these clues after about 10-12 years of education, how on earth did uneducated 17th century people manage it? How did Shakespeare ever keep his audiences interested?
Well, my quick answer would be that Shakespeare's audience was better accustomed to receive word figurations than our contemporary audience. If you trace the many pictures Sh. employs, you will succumb to his fantasy. But we -- especially contemporary cinema goers -- are not predisposed to listen, are we? We want to visualize visuals, not to visualize words. We're not even interested in figuring out what most words mean, especially if they are nonsense terms -- so prevalently used by the drunken buffoons of Act II.
ReplyDeleteinteresting thought...kind of a "you don't miss what you don't know about". Or maybe modern people depend more on visual pictures to communicate than words, and have therefore lost language skills that Shakespeare's audience had.
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