Sticking to our Knitting?

I love Paul Moon but, seriously, this is utter nonsense. He wants us to ponder this: ‘The three questions I have slipped into conversations amongst a wide range of people have been revealing. Whenever someone has lauded Shakespeare as the greatest literary force in the English language, or words to that effect, I ask them: can they name 18 of his plays (roughly half the number he wrote); can they outline the plots of those plays; and can they describe a point of literary significance in each of them.’ The answers, Paul, are yes I can, yes I can, yes I can. So can my spouse and my thirteen year old son. So can most of my friends. In fact my son has seen – and happily digested – 22 of the 37 plays. I have acted in or directed 27, some multiple times, and seen all of them. I’ve even directed a production of all the sonnets, the songs and the dances. That show took five hours to play and did so to full houses. To suggest my audiences were bored stiff is ridiculous. They weren’t, and neither was I. I’m sad you had such awful teachers and that you can’t find the contemporary relevance of ‘Henry V’, ‘Titus Andronicus’ or ‘Julius Caesar’ or have missed Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’. I’m seriously sorry you haven’t seen Trevor Nunn’s bittersweet ‘Twelfth Night’ but ‘while there’s life there’s hope’ – Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote that and he’s a character in Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’. He was also the most prolific of the Roman philosophers, orators and statesmen. Shakespeare, jokingly, only gives him a wee few lines. I played that role in Raymond Hawthorne’s production of ‘Julius Caesar’ for Auckland Theatre Company in 1998 and in researching the part I read everything Cicero wrote. I learned heaps. Surely that alone is a good thing 😀