{"id":11197,"date":"2008-05-31T14:40:31","date_gmt":"2008-05-31T18:40:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/05\/31\/11197.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:48:40","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:48:40","slug":"book-report-the-staging-of-rom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/05\/31\/book-report-the-staging-of-rom\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Staging of Romance in Late Shakespeare"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger has just returned The Staging of Romance in Late Shakespeare<\/a>, by our own Gentle Reader, Chris Cobb, to the Interlibrary Loan office. Now, all Gentle Readers will remember that ethical constraints ordinarily permit me only to discuss books written by friends in terms of their chances of making that friend filthy rich, enough for instance to lend me money and not worry about getting it back. This book has likely already done as much as it will ever do for Chris, just by the fact of being published; Gentle Readers may have been reading about the academic monograph over at the House Out of Focus<\/a>.
\n

Anyway, Your Humble Blogger knows next to nothing about academic monographs. I am able, barely, to read them, if the subject matter is already familiar to me. This isn’t at all a criticism of Chris or his book, which is less opaque than much of the other academic stuff I’ve read. I seem to have been able to follow it fairly well.
\n

The bulk of the book is about The Winter’s Tale<\/a>, a play I’ve never seen performed. It’s considered, I think, in the general culture, to be a weaker effort. There are good reasons for this: it fails to preserve the Unities, the initial mover of the plot involves somebody acting irrationally, the progress of the plot involves wild coincidence, the main characters at the beginning are offstage for much of the play, the climax makes no sense at all, nobody understands the title, there is not awesome and breathtaking poetic scene to sink its catchphrase into our cultural memory, and of course there’s a bear. I mean, bears are great, but a trifle difficult to stage effectively. Grrrr.
\n

One thing that Chris does in the book is make me want to watch the play. That’s got to be considered a decent-sized achievement. I mean, it’s not generally much of an achievement to make me want to see Shakespeare, but since I’m realistically going to be watching only a few plays a year (barring a visit from Chris or other Gentle Readers bearing DVDs, snacks and a time distorter) (that’s Fermata brand time distorter, accept no substitutes. Amuse your friends, astound your enemies, o’erthrow law and in one self-born hour plant and o’erwhelm custom, with the Fermata brand time distorter. Paper due at nine? Only half-an-hour for lunch? Too tired to tango after tucking in the toddler? With Fermata brand time distorters, the time is NOW! And with our new compound-interest layaway plan, the Fermata brand time distorter pays for itself in only n + k <\/i> time units! Don’t forget, get Fermata), I think Winter’s Tale<\/i> would normally fall well behind, say, the third different version of the Scottish play, or getting the version of Lear<\/i> with Lord Larry edited out, leaving Leo McKern to star as Gloucester.
\n

Sadly, another thing that Chris does in the book is make me want to watch the version of the play that takes into account his theories that resolve some of the problems of the play, or rather, take them not as problems to be avoided but assets to be exploited. That version, like all ideal versions, has the surpassing flaw of not existing. Other than that, though, it does sound a lot better than the BBC one.
\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger fails to tell a tale fit for winter, or for summer for that matter. Nor does YHB live by the churchyard. So there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11197"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18381,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11197\/revisions\/18381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}