I hate reading old-timey books and stories, especially English ones, where they talk about what I suspect are meant to
be common household items, yet you have no idea what they are. It could just be that English folks have different names for
virtualy every single item found in your household, or it could be that every item they mention is just obsolete because the
stories were written 100 years ago. Most likely it's both. It still annoys the crap out of me though, especially when I am
reading Beatrix Potter to a six year old and having to explain what all these items and terms mean:
My fake exerpt from a Beatrix Potter book:
"Cocky Rooster lived in an old flatboard clatch by the Pelham, with bright red livelies all round about the fortnights,
where every morning faux weavers hawked their bright-eyed chummies by the ginger porches and the kidney hangings from the
night before, and stout washer-women (like your mum and her mum before her) flogged their pinafores round the maypole, as
I'm sure you all know what a soil can get on a pinafore by tea time!"
To make it worse, they always act like of course you know exactly what they're talking about because you see these things
everyday. In reality, all you can say for sure is that you know what a rooster is. And hope to God she means an actual rooster
and it's not just some term that English folks use for something else entirely.
It may be just that we read these stories to our kids to prepare them for Shakespeare. Because as everyone knows, when
you read Shakespeare, it's not just the nouns that don't make sense.
My fake exerpt from Shakespeare:
"Hark, and well met Merry Fame, anon! As Mab doth ride her addled shell, and soon, and soon, and soon again! Fair
Mercutio, again! And want such Merry Fame!"
Now if you're reading this part for a class or something, then most likely the text will include extensive notes to explain
what it means. Which not only helps, but is totally necessary to even understand it a little bit. That Mab is a fairy queen
who rides an eggshell chariot, and "Merry Fame" somehow makes reference to a cylindrical fruit that Egyptian Pharoahs fed
to blind slaves to improve their hearing. Which we would all so totally get if we didn't have the notes. Or actually watched
it performed, which some folks still do. I mean, the memorize huge blocks of text and then recite it like it actually does
mean something, and then have other people tell them that they're brilliant.
Not to disparage Shakespeare, as I'm sure he was a brilliant man. 800 years ago.But Galileo was brilliant too, and we
don't spend a lot of time studying his work o reading it out loud: We kind of just accept that the world is round and move
on.
The first Shakespeare I ever read was A Mid-Summer Night's Dream, one of his comedies. At least they call them
comedies, although I think the word meant something different 800 years ago, at least I don't think it had anything to do
with actually being funny. What I remember of it is four actors putting on a play, and a fairy named Puck making everyone
fall in love with one another. Wacky Hijinks (or what passed for wackyt hijinks back then) ensue. Don't be fooled by the words
"fairy" and "love", though: There is no gay stuff. At one point someone's head turns into a donkey head or something.
For those of you having to study all this at school, almost all of these plot elements can be found in an episode of
The Munsters, except instead of a fairy named Puck, it's Grandpa Munster that makes everyone fall in love with each
other. At some point I'm pretty sure there's a sequence where everyone's running around the house chasing each other in the
way that they do in old sitcoms where they speed up the film and everyone is moving impossibly fast (think Gilligan catching
his pants on fire and you've got the idea). This is almost always funny, and I'm wondering now if Shakespeare had had the
technology, would he have included such a sequence in A Mid-Summer Night's Dream? Or is it really true that his so-called
comedies just weren't supposed to be funny?
Anyway, just like Galileo told everyone that the world was round and everyone else just copied that idea, so did Shakespeare's
plays get copied over and over. Some time ago I wrote about how The Lion King was exactly the story of Hamlet,
and I'm also fairly certain that if you take all the second- and third-season Klingon episodes of Star Trek: The Next
Generation and watch them back-to-back, you can ace your test on MacBeth.
In a similar way, almost any opera would make a decent episode of Scooby Doo, if you substitute the swan or
the ring or the flute with a talking dog.
Another really hard one to understand is Charles Dickens. I tried to read A Tale of Two Cities last year, just
because I'd never read it before, but it was really hard to follow. It sucks that there's no movie about it. I think Dickens'
work endures because it's all sad and depressing. Dickens stories were always about orphans who had to live in the street
and cut off parts of their bodies to sell to rich people to use as dog food. And unlike the 800 year old comedy that no one
gets anymore, that stuff will always be depressing.
