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Oct. 21st, 2011 12:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoception63. Cymbeline (2nd)
Seemed less strange this time 'round - Shakespeare's not so much making fun of the Fletcherian boy-actor tragicomedy (more like a melodrama, in modern terms) as pushing it to its limits. The thirty straight pages of revelations at the end, all of which we're already privy to except maybe some etymological business in Jupiter's prophecy, aren't so much parody as a way to maximize the appeal of that kind of ending. It's the happiest ending ever, at lest quantitatively, and we pretty much know it will be going in. I wonder how well that works in performance? This is a sturdy play, in its fashion, linguistically fresh and quite fun, but I'm not sure it does much more than turn up all the dials in someone else's dream machine. Shakespeare was never above slumming.
Seemed less strange this time 'round - Shakespeare's not so much making fun of the Fletcherian boy-actor tragicomedy (more like a melodrama, in modern terms) as pushing it to its limits. The thirty straight pages of revelations at the end, all of which we're already privy to except maybe some etymological business in Jupiter's prophecy, aren't so much parody as a way to maximize the appeal of that kind of ending. It's the happiest ending ever, at lest quantitatively, and we pretty much know it will be going in. I wonder how well that works in performance? This is a sturdy play, in its fashion, linguistically fresh and quite fun, but I'm not sure it does much more than turn up all the dials in someone else's dream machine. Shakespeare was never above slumming.
