Monday, November 07, 2005

Shakespeare Spinning

Ok so I was ALL excited to hear that there was going to be a modern version of Much Ado About Nothing on BBC1 and I'm watching and enjoying it but... well... it's just not Shakespeare is it? Ok so it's the PLOT and some of the ideas of the original play but... the words... I mean that's pretty much the vital element of a Shakespearean play yes?

I mean where are great interchanges like this:

DON PEDRO
Come, lady, come; you have lost the heart of
Signior Benedick.

BEATRICE
Indeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile; and I gave
him use for it, a double heart for his single one:
marry, once before he won it of me with false dice,
therefore your grace may well say I have lost it.


It may be the story which is superb but have we come to this that we can't even manage to have the original because it's too complicated?

Nevertheless was still sighing in the scene when Beatrice and Benedick almost admit their love (maybe because it had PROPER Shakespeare! Oh that a lovely man would read me something like this:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
Sonnet 116

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