The Ides of March are come.

Ay, Caesar, but not gone.

It's the most magical time of the year. Happy stabbings!

I want to embed this video but can't figure out how so posting the link instead.

Enjoy the Ides everyone, and practice safe stabbing.

Comments

[Daedalus Aegle]

I actually reread Julius Caesar recently, along with some other Shakespeare plays. Even though I fancy myself an advanced reader and a fan of Billy Shakes, I still always struggled to follow along the with the conversation from one page to the next. Until this time, this time it flowed smoothly and was quite wonderful. I finally understand why people love Falstaff.

After Julius Caesar I also read the sequel, Antony and Cleopatra, a play I had only read once before way back during uni and hadn't gotten that much out of. This time I loved it. But after reading the play I looked at the introduction and was bemused to note that it spends a lot of time discussing the critical history of the play, and how that history was for a long time dominated by complaints that it doesn't follow the classical three unities.

That's the idea attributed to Aristotle that theater plays should maintain unity of time, place, and action. Like Oedipus Rex, Aristotle's perfect drama, plays should unfold in a single location, over a short span of time, focused on a single event. Antony and Cleopatra, meanwhile, jumps all over the Mediterranean, covers decades of time, and multiple wars.

The lesson I take from this is that the three unities are kinda bullshit actually, Antony and Cleopatra is amazing. If your complaint about a work is just "this doesn't follow the rules I've been taught", but you can't say that the work itself is bad, then maybe it's your rules that are bad and pointless actually. And this suits me fine since I already think the Poetics is bad and wrong, that Aristotle was wrong about a ton of things and I see no reason he can't have been wrong about literature as well.

But history's critics, obsessed with The Rules and with the legacy of antiquity, were so annoyed at Shakespeare for doing for his own thing, flourishing and thriving, that they complained about it for centuries. And as testament to the fact that nothing ever changes and everything is fanfic, the 17th-century playwright John Dryden wrote a literal fixfic: his play All for Love exists to correct Shakespeare's mistakes, takes the source of Antony and Cleopatra but cuts it down to just the day of the couple's death, to maintain the three unities. It is, according to the introduction of my edition of A&C, a good play in its own way. But it aint Antony and Cleopatra, and it aint Billy Shakes.

camo.fimfiction.net/WnHJAJCng0o45HT4XBtb9EHVg1edGR8M-JRw8kQ5rxw?url=https%3A%2F%2F64.media.tumblr.com%2Fe07d37890e79e380b596791881f309be%2Ftumblr_n81yx7Jl4j1sg5uvro1_640.jpg

[Mitch H]

I've never actually read the Poetics. Does he touch on the religious aspect of Athenian theater at all? The original purpose of said theater is so removed from how we interact with it as modern audiences that I have to wonder if that's not some of the cross-purposes?

[Daedalus Aegle]

5772471
I don't think he does, at least I don't remember it. His analysis is very focused on story structure. My issue with the Poetics is that I have read many of the surviving Greek tragedies, and his description of them just doesn't ring true to me at all. From where I'm sitting, Aristotle is a critic talking about what he thinks makes for the best story, rather than what's actually true of the text. Speaking as a writer, I don't think anything he says about how stories work makes any sense. I am not convinced he actually spoke to any playwrights and asked them about their process.

And all of that would be fine, except that Aristotle is one of the most influential figures in all of European intellectual history, and for the next two thousand years his ideas were uncritically taught as true. So even if he was completely wrong on the facts, countless generations of writers that came after him nonetheless worked according to his ideas.

[iisaw]

5772476
"ipse dixit" held back so many things....

[Mitch H]

I'll note that it's sort of interesting that Charlton Heston of all people recorded a truly interesting and well-colored version of Antony's 'I come to bury Caesar' speech. I've seen people mooting Damian Lewis's performance:

But honestly? In combination to Heston's sly and muscular delivery, it's weak and... mannered.

There's something very long-Fifties about Julius Caesar. A cultural confidence and a thrusting character, wherein Elizabethan and post-war American art share a common straight-forward and strong-thewed cynicism. Are they subtle and careful? No. Nor are they well-thought-out nor are they tailored or considered. As I said, thrusting.

[Mitch H]

Heston's Antony is a bastard, but he's full of confidence, rage and purpose. A monument of political purpose and what they used to call virtù.

[Daedalus Aegle]

5772519
I like the 1953 movie with Marlon Brando as Mark Antony:

[Impossible Numbers]

Et tu, Lettuce?