Redartz: Greetings, all! Yes, the Leader has returned this week, and he's awaiting the first stout-hearted commenter to submit a discussion topic. I'm sure our vocal community will step up to the challenge !
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37 comments:
If you had a time machine where would you go?
The Jurassic or Cretaceous period. I wanna see some friggin' dinosaurs.
Ancient Egypt to see how the pyramids were built.
I would want to meet the great holy men - Jesus, Mohammed, Abraham and his descendants, the Buddha, et al. - and write down the facts… just the facts… after interviewing them.
“What do you mean 2000 years from now people
will believe that about me???”
Hiya,
Hey Charlie Horse 47 . . . funny you should ask.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq4US6jls_M
and if you want to see the full episode.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x54ogbi
Personally, if I were to have a time machine I would like to go back to 1930's Cleveland and have a long discussion about creators rights and the importance of retaining legal counsel with Siegel and Shuster.
Seeya,
pfgavigan
Maybe Paris in the 20s; I might like to look up Josephine Baker ... (or Marlene Dietrich for that matter)
Going back to medieval times is tempting, but I think the rampant filth and disease would make it much less fun than in D&D games.
If I could go back in time, I’d want to meet Snoopy.
b.t.
This is soooooo specific. . . but I'd kinda like to revisit the blizzard of 78 (I think?) in Michigan. . . that was a HECK of a snowfall!
I don't know if I'd really care to travel back to any notable or famous periods from the past. I feel like my own day-to-day existence wouldn't be particularly different. . . just with less amenities, y'know? Lord, DEFINITELY not back before AC was invented!
HB
On the lighter side of things, I would like to have met...
Einstein! Perhaps he could explain to me why E=MC2, lol. b/c I still don't get it!
Maybe a chance to meet Napoleon to see what the hell he was thinking marching to Moscow in 1812. Same with Alexander marching to India. Or, King Henry marching through France 1000 years ago and the battle of St Crispins day at Agincourt. (Did he really say all that or was Shakespeare putting words in his mouth?) What the hell motivated these guys to take on all that blood and guts?
Hmmmm, assuming here we can only make one stop. That being the case, I'd have to join Edo in the Mesozoic. But probably early Cretaceous, as I'd not want to end up witnessing the Chicxulub asteroid impact and the accompanying devastating extinction!
Travel back in time to see UK castles, before Oliver Cromwell pulled them down.
Phillip
CH47-- The speech is all Shakespeare. His history cycle (R2,1H4,2H4,H5,1H6,2H6,3H6,R3)is probably best considered "Dramatizations based on historical events"-- and often that's a pretty darned generous characterization. Heh.
And there's another scene in Henry V where a very bright, articulate common soldier (Michael Collins)unknowingly gets into a lively debate with the king about the utter pointlessness and cruelty of these endless wars that the ruling classes drag the common subjects into. Henry's defense is surprisingly unconvincing in that scene.
For all of the speech's poetry and brilliant ability to inspire one to push past their limits. . . keep in mind that England was the invading force, here. . .
HB (Too much Shakespeare over the past couple o' years!)
(Reference for the above comment: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/theater/brave-spirits-theater-shakespeare.html
(I'm the old guy with the beard in a couple of the photos)
All the above being said-- geeze, I would LOVE to be part of the company at the Globe Theater when it was at its height. . . well, and before it burned down, natch. Busy as all get-out. Churning out productions at a break-neck pace. Incredibly tight group of friends, cohorts, and colleagues-- pushing each other to do their best work, and likely not aware of how great they truly were in that moment. . .
HB
HB - I would gladly crank up my time machine to meet Shakespeare if we could find the bastard!!!
I mean was he:
Male or Female?
English, French, or Italian?
Was there a Shakespeare, LOL?
My book club had us reading a book on the gent called SHakespeare by Bill Bryson. He discussed the whole industry, for the past few hundred years, based on challenging the premise of "Who was Shakespeare" lol.
Hiya,
Hey HB, do you, or anybody else here, of course, remember Shakespeare in the Sandman comics. Those were my favorites in that series. The idea of the great dramatist appearing as a character in Morpheus's story was delicious.
I loved the scene in the final issue, The Tempest, where William is re-reading a play he wrote and talks about the behind the scene reasons for why certain passages are included in the work, like more time for a scene change or the main actor nipping off for a beer.
One of the first things, but only one of them, that led me to think that a certain comic book artist/writer was going off his rocker was when he revealed that he was an advocate of the 'theory' that Shakespeare was simply more 'beard' than bard regarding the authorship of the plays. He holds that a certain English Lord, which one I can't remember at the moment, was writing the plays in his spare time and was simply too posh to have his name connected with anything as low as the theater.
I repeat, he was to have written these plays IN HIS SPARE TIME. Without input or revisions.
I could wax on about this, but only at the cost of an upset stomach.
But getting back to the time machine, how about bring Richard III forward in time just a bit to be an audience member during the premier performance of one of Will's History plays.
A fully armed and armored Richard III.
Seeya,
pfg
I wouldn't mind going to Studio 54 in '77, '78, see what it was actually like.
Although according to Billboard magazine all-nighters at the Wigan Casino were better. By 'eck, a time machine could settle that one way or the other.
But really, I'd rather go to the future. Napoleon, Alexander, Cromwell, building pyramids... whats so great about war and slavery? I'd rather see where we're going, how things will be after capitalism has joined feudalism in the dustbin of history.
-sean
Perhaps a more interesting question might be if you had a time machine what would you change...?
-sean
Humanbelly - Maybe Shakespeare's company weren't tight all the time. Possibly, according to a BBC show, a disagreement(bust up?) was behind the famous morris dance of Thomas Kemp (Shakespeare's clown) all the way from London to Norwich. But it's all speculation, I think.
Other members of Shakespeare's company may have been unaware of their future success, but not Shakespeare himself. According to Coleridge, Shakespeare was aware of his own genius, and totally confident of his place in history. Coleridge cites a sonnet in which Shakespeare projects his imagination into the future, when people are reading his poems with great admiration. However, Coleridge may be over-egging it a bit!
Phillip
Red, on the asteroid impact and the ensuing great extinction, i.e., the KT event, well: assuming I could observe it in safety, that's something I'd actually be really interested in seeing. And from several vantage points: in space (i.e., at about the same distance as the ISS, then slightly lower, at about the cruising altitude of most passenger jets somewhere very close to the impact point, and then maybe on the ground or at sea somewhere within a 100 mile radius from ground zero. I'm not a disaster junky by any means (I've lived a few too many destructive earthquakes to be one of those), but I still think it would be fascinating to observe the trigger for destruction on that scale.
I would go back to 1974ish to attend a Bowie concert when he was Ziggy Stardust - Or to Roswell to finally put a pin in that whole UFO story one way or the other as its "doing my head in" having every second prog on the History channel being about Roswell. Ideally f course I would go back to 1970 to see my mum, dad ,brother, my wee dog and my grandparents again when they were all young(ish).I couldn't think of a historical event to change as they re so many awful things from Hitler to 9/11 and beyond - but one that would help in the I UK (imho) is I would stop Brexit
I thought nobody would mention the future until Sean finally did! Going to the future is the first thing I'd do - I'd move forward in 50-year jumps (Red, you can have as many stops as you want!) to see how things work out. Will climate change be solved? Will our civilisation collapse? Will talking apes rule the world? Will The Simpsons ever end?
And then, like Edo and Redartz, I'd visit the ancient past of "deep time".
Thanks for all the comments by the way :D
Sean, you can't use the time machine to change ANYTHING. Haven't you heard of the "butterfly effect"??
Paul, how would you actually stop Brexit even if you had a time machine?
All this talk of meeting Shakespeare and Jesus or visiting the pyramids etc is very interesting but there's one major problem. The time machine can only move backwards and forwards in time, it can't move around the planet. So for example if HB in Maryland moved backwards in time to the 16th century he'd still be in Maryland, but in the 16th century. In order to visit the Globe Theatre HB would need to travel to London across the Atlantic by boat. And if I visited the future I'd only see the future of my local area - I wouldn't know what was happening in the rest of the world unless I was able to find out somehow. But if my town was in ruins and totally deserted with giant insects roaming around I'd probably figure that something bad had happened to the world!
Good point on BREXIT Colin I never thought of how to actually stop it. Ditto on the time machine not moving geographically.
Good to read you don't know how to stop Brexit, Paul - we wouldn't want any meddling time travelers erasing the new border in the Irish Sea...
Colin, how do you know time travel can't change things? Wasn't the whole point of A Sound Of Thunder that it could?
Also, your imaginary time machine might not be able to move in space but mine does. Which is just as well considering the earth doesn't stay in the same place.
-sean
Never occurred to me to go forward... Then I'd have to go backwards again to figure out how we got there, lol.
I would go forward as far as it takes to understand why there is a universe(s) and get answers to all the great questions in physics: what was the universe before the singularity? Why did it decide to "explode" (big bang), why is the matter unequally distributed, why is the universe relatively flat and not a big sphere, what is the universe expanding into... you get it!
Sean, I didn't mean you COULDN'T change anything only that you SHOULDN'T because it might have all kinds of terrible unintended consequences. For all we know somebody already meddled with the past and that's why Boris Johnson is Prime-Minister...
Phillip: I do kinda think dust-ups like that are part & parcel of being a tight company (although not necessarily a requirement). Folks have been working closely together for so long that the relationships stop being co-worker/colleague, and become more like family, where social veneers get discarded, and little annoyances can turn into big events. And. . . theater-folk may be a trifle prone to leaning into the drama of these things as well, I daresay. I imagine it's a lot like being on tour. . . without the moving-around part. And great citing regarding Shakespeare's sense-of-self. I'd buy that, yes-- Tough to imagine someone writing with such authority, abandon, and at such length w/out their absolutely having faith in every flippin' word-!
PFG: Was it Sir Francis Bacon? He was one of those "This guy was REALLY Shakespeare" candidates. What I've gleaned from the company I've spent the last couple of years with is that a) Yes, Shakespeare was responsible for the bulk of the works attributed to him, but that b) He and his writer pals collaborated with each other quite a bit. So that maybe a play is by "Shakespeare (with contributions by Philip Marlowe)", say. I'm not scholar enough to know which ones fall under that heading, tbh. But as with ANY area of interest, there are vociferously-opposed camps: ya got yer Stratfordians (Shakespeare wrote the works of Shakespeare. Period); and ya got yer Anti-Stratfordians (Shakespeare himself was a fiction/never wrote anything/was a conglomerate, etc). And it is just as snarky as Marvel vs DC rancor. . . heh. . .
HB
HB - have you done / read any works by Marlowe? Is is worth if for a layman like Charlie?
Ah, I love these discussions...
Colin, glad to hear that we can go forward as well. It would be tempting to do time jumps of, say, every 50 years just to assess the changes. But then it would also be intriguing to advance some 5 billion years, and see what happened after the sun went nova. Or just visit 2076 for the Tri-Centennial of the USA. You know, just to see if Chaykin's " American Flagg" was very prophetic...
Charlie-- in the summer/fall of last year (2020), after everyone's theaters had shut down, there was a TIDAL WAVE of Zoom-readings being done by classical companies. I had a small role in Marlowe's EDWARD The SECOND, and while the play is certainly good within its genre and class-- and refreshingly forthright in its sincere portrayal of a deeply romantic relationship between two men-- I daresay it's a bit of a slog for someone just sitting down to give it a read. Most of Marlowe's other works are quite well-known too, and tend to pop up in History of Drama anthologies- but I'm not personally familiar with them. If you are able to enjoy reading Shakespeare, though, you could definitely get that same kick out of Marlowe, I bet.
The three Henry VI plays are the ones he is now sometimes credited as being co-author with Bill Shakespeare. And I've gotta say it out loud-- the first time I read through them, my reaction was, "Why on earth would ANYONE do these dreadful plays??? They are a series of flippin' train-wrecks!!!" I have since come around to a more favorable opinion. . .
HB (NOBODY'S Classics scholar-- believe me!)
Hiya,
Hey HB, I don't remember which Lord the writer/artist thought was the true author. But don't worry. Sooner or later, everyone with the slightest hint of blue blood will be put forward as a candidate. My main source of amusement is that almost all of the alternate advocates have either limited to no credentials in Shakespearean studies or have absolutely no understanding about how plays develop as an almost organic structure in the theatrical environment.
Can you imagine Lord Flimflam walking into The Globe, plopping down the finalized script for Measure For Measure and telling all involved not to change a word.
Well, maybe for Pericles, Prince of Tyre. But not for Measure For Measure.
Hey Charlie. Marlowe plays are better performed than read, in my opinion. But then that's true of a lot of works.
Anyway, found another video link concerning the business manager of the Old Globe Theater and a somewhat peeved playwright having a bit of an exchange concerning their current production. Do watch and please enjoy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvaUwagX_uU
Seeya,
pfg
Humanbelly - That makes a lot of sense. I was thinking about Shakespeare's company from the outside in. You were looking at it from the inside out!
Phillip
PFG-- OMG. . . see, I betcha that sketch is, like, BARELY straying from the truth in so many ways-- Ha-- Atkinson's (as Richard Burbage?) comment about a 5-hour runtime might be a trifle stretchy, though. . . even for Hamlet, yikes! I'm given to understand that them-there Early Modern Period actors TORE through them-there performances. . . Don't sneeze, or you'll miss a soliloquy. . .
And Philip- there is an extraordinary play called EQUIVOCATION that conveys that sense of being "inside" the Burbage company (Lord Chamberlain's Men/The King's Men). Where you see that interpersonal dynamics are kind of universal, regardless of the venue they're be observed in. . .
Geeze, this has been an unusually brazen thread-hijack, even by my standards. . . And on a topic that I have MARGINAL expertise in, compared to the folks that I hang around with. . . ! (Maybe next time I'll jump in and start us off on a total-GILLIGAN'S ISLAND thread-! RIGHT in my comfort zone!)
HB
These days, everybody is an expert on anything whether they know about the subject or have worked in the subject matter or not. Last week we were experts on vaccines. This weeks we are experts on Afghanistan foreign-policy. Next week it will be who was Shakespeare. LOL!
Hiya,
Yeah, we tended to drift off the original subject a bit there. But that's the Marvelous (sorry, couldn't resist) aspect of this site. Something starts off in one direction and before you know it you're in a gravel quarry somewhere in Wales (couldn't resist that either.)
When I was in college I was lucky enough to approach Shakespeare from three different directions. In the English Department we were fortunate enough to have several classes in Elizabethan literature, one that dealt with the stage inclusive. There we got a fair share of Marlowe and Jonson along with Shaky.
In the Theater Department there was a similar class, but with more of an emphasis on production and performance. There I almost convinced them to produce John Barrymore's version of Macbeth. He always maintained that the true Alpha role of the work was Lady Macbeth and, of course, saw himself in the role. We had a couple of actors who would have been good, but during the auditions an actress showed up who turned out to be great.
And then, in the Scene Shop, under the tutelage of Gene Wilson, Set Designer Extraordinaire, who explained why you never let the English Department and the Theater Department join forces to present the Ultimate version of Hamlet. When he was at Yale it was maintained that the only true and good way to do plays, especially Shakespeare, was in an academic setting. There, it was argued, that the works could be presented in all their true majesty without all those nasty compromises that commercial production were wont to practice.
Perfect costumes actually fashioned in the methods of the day.
Period version of English.
And full sets for each and every scene.
Damn thing was eight hours long and nobody could understand it.
Yup, off the original topic. But fun.
Who knows. Maybe someday I'll have the chance to relate the true origin of the expression, When The Shit Hits The Fan.
Gene knew where that one came from.
One last video for anybody who truly wants to understand theater and I'll see you all later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRkn2gPHbX8
pfg
I've just fact checked the comment I made, and the actor from Shakespeare's company, who morris danced from London to Norwich, was named William Kempe NOT Thomas Kemp! My mind somehow conflated his name with a certain ghost story by Penelope Lively! (Post)Middle-aged brain fog triumphs again!
Phillip
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