[HN Gopher] Now Be Still: Dispatching Shakespeare's Bodies
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       Now Be Still: Dispatching Shakespeare's Bodies
        
       Author : pepys
       Score  : 15 points
       Date   : 2022-09-08 01:13 UTC (21 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.laphamsquarterly.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.laphamsquarterly.org)
        
       | jfengel wrote:
       | A series of coincidences became an inside joke, and now a friend
       | of mine and I are very often tasked with removing bodies from the
       | stage. In one production, I had no other role. I showed up just
       | long enough to drag a body offstage.
       | 
       | The stage directions in the Folio edition are rarely
       | Shakespeare's own. He tended to encode stage directions in the
       | text itself (like "I'll lug the guts into the neighbor room" when
       | Hamlet kills Polonius). Which sometimes makes it tricky to figure
       | out how he intended a body to get offstage. Today we can just
       | turn off the lights and let the actor walk away, but that wasn't
       | an option for him.
       | 
       | There are a million clever ways to do it, especially since we're
       | not beholden to those non-canonical stage directions (or, for
       | that matter, the canonical text, which is not copyrighted).
        
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       (page generated 2022-09-08 23:03 UTC)