So we’ve spent the last week or so looking at textual technical matters (rhyme, prose, meter and the like), and using these cocepts to help drive acting and directing decisions.
But what if the clues (what we find in the technical minutae) are of no help? What if the clues are… well, wrong?
Continue reading “Vowel Movement Irregularities”
OK, yesterday, we discussed the different rationales for using rhyme in the verse of the plays. Some of our purposes:
Continue reading “Why Rhyme? Part II: The Answers–Episode Two: The Answers’ Answer”
Shakespearean use of rhyme within verse serves a number of different purposes:
Continue reading “Why Rhyme? Part II: The Answers”
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This week’s podcast includes the results of a request put out to Facebook fans and blog readers for podcast topic suggestions. The result? The first of our “Women of…” issues.
Sounds like Playboy magazine, doesn’t it?
Welcome to The Bill / Shakespeare Project podcast: The Women of The Comedy of Errors edition
Continue reading “Podcast 04: Women of The Comedy of Errors”
Yesterday, we asked why Shakespeare chose to rhyme over 20% of the total lines of The Comedy of Errors (over 23% of the poetic line count).
wow, that’s an awful title…
Today, why are roughly 235 lines of the play in prose?
Continue reading “Looking for the Rational Rationale (or You can’t have your poetry until you’ve eaten your prose)”
OK, before we continue digging, a question:
Why, in a play that is mostly poetry (by my count, poetic lines make up over 86% of the total lines of the play), and mostly blank verse, UNrhymed iambic pentameter (and, again, by my count, over 75% of the poetic lines of the play are unrhymed)…
Why, then, does Shakespeare use 350+ lines of rhyming poetry in The Comedy of Errors?
more or less… I’m compulsive, but I’m not that anal…
No answers from Bill today… just leaving it all up to you in the blogosphere…
Respond, discuss, knock yourselves out… we’ll talk more about it at some future date…
Hey, Bard-o-philes…
OK, using the past two days’ entries as a launching pad (combined with a second, closer reading of the play), just what does the meter of the play tell us specifically?
In terms of pronunciation, quite a bit actually…
Continue reading “OK, So What … Does the Meter Tell Us?”
OK, so you’re a director… and you’re about to mount a production of The Comedy of Errors (or it could be a movie version)…
who would be your dream cast?
why?
And, why, gentle reader, why should you do this???
a free Bill / Shakespeare Project tee-shirt to the best/most original/most well-reasoned/funniest casting director
That’s why!
Enter by commenting to this blog entry. Contest entries due before 12 Noon (Pacific) on Friday, July 24. I’ll announce the winner in the last podcast of the month (Sunday, July 26).
Good luck!
It cracks me up, this concept of Shakespeare and time. It just doesn’t add up in some plays. We’ll get to Romeo and Juliet in May of next year, but the same kind of time mix-up applies to The Comedy of Errors.
Continue reading “What Time is It?”
