Tilting at Windmills
It was on this day in 30 BC that Queen Cleopatra of Egypt killed herself with a snake she had smuggled into her chamber where she was held captive by Octavian, formerly the political rival of her lover Mark Antony. Octavian had defeated Cleopatra and Antony at the Battle of Actium and had taken Cleopatra prisoner. When Cleopatra learned that Octavian planned to parade her as part of his triumphant return to Rome, she planned her own suicide. For centuries, it was assumed that the snake she used was an asp, but it is now thought that the snake was an
Egyptian cobra.
AVC: But your approach to Shakespeare is based in the humanity of the character rather than the more educated aspects. You don't seem to approach the plays from a classical perspective.Also, if you haven't seen Spring Forward, you should.
LS: I think education gets a bad rap. I think when you're looking at the educated aspects of Shakespeare, you'd be surprised how much goes into understanding and analyzing those plays. You have to know what you're saying, and to know what you're saying, you have to have a foundation in an arcane language, and that takes reading. And familiarizing yourself with other poetry of that period, and iambic pentameter, and verse structure. It's about music too, someone who studied music has an inlet into those plays. Plus knowing little bits of history. I mean, even understanding that people were smaller back then, and their lives were shorter, and how that affected the way they behave—their attitudes and emotions were in many ways profoundly affected by the way in which they were forced to live their lives. To understand the range of emotional behavior, you have to understand the society and the culture at least a little bit before you can present it to a contemporary audience in a clear way. Even if you're not doing a period production, you have to understand what was intended when it was written, and you have to find a way to translate that so it's conveyed when it's performed now.
When Hernán Cortés invaded Mexico, he found a society besotted with strong sensations, from blood sports to drug-level chocolate, which the Aztecs sometimes stirred with the powdered bones of their enemies. The emperor, Montezuma, claimed the right to wear the most brilliant red and imposed on his subjects a special tax to be paid in cochineal insects, from which the vibrant dye came.From "To Dye For," a review of A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (Washington Post via Arts & Letters Daily).
I sense the relief of contact, as if our skin knows truths our minds regularly forget: that we mean each other no harm, that deep down we are the same.In Me and You, characters are granted moments where they're allowed to do and say things as if they'd never had to grow that protective "thick skin" that's usually there in our day-to-day interactions.
Quixotic. adj. 1. Caught up in the romance of noble deeds and the pursuit of unreachable goals; idealistic without regard to practicality. 2. Capricious; impulsive. My other Blog (co-authored with my friend Amy) is Romancing the Tome. I actually get paid to "pen" Style Scoop, a fashion and design blog for teens.
