![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
If We Shadows Have Offended
Apr. 8th, 2010 09:40 pmI'm beginning to get the impression that my Shakespeare class is a case study in the pedantic impulses that academia can fall into if left unchecked.
This afternoon, we spent a two-hour seminar talking about the textual differences and editorial trends for Midsummer Night's Dream - or, to be more plain, we took a couple of lines at a time and compared the Quarto version, the Folio version, and the 18th/19th century editorial versions for differences in punctuation, rhyme, and stage direction, like whether a line is spoken by Bottom the Weaver or Snug the Joiner, or whether Helena is on stage for the part of the scene before she has her first line, and how that changed the interpretation or effect of the lines involved. Don't get me wrong, it was interesting stuff, and the professor told some neat anecdotes about productions she'd seen that made directing decisions off one or another of these differences that changed the the tone of the scene to great effect. But it does seem obsessive in the most exquisite way.
Still, however much time we devote to discussing, analyzing and interpreting ever mote of meaning in every line, nothing takes away from my initial response to the end of Midsummer Night's Dream, which is to feel shivers running down my spine. *sighs happily* I love ambiguously metatextual monologues. Especially ones as oddly eerie and dreamlike as Puck's.
This afternoon, we spent a two-hour seminar talking about the textual differences and editorial trends for Midsummer Night's Dream - or, to be more plain, we took a couple of lines at a time and compared the Quarto version, the Folio version, and the 18th/19th century editorial versions for differences in punctuation, rhyme, and stage direction, like whether a line is spoken by Bottom the Weaver or Snug the Joiner, or whether Helena is on stage for the part of the scene before she has her first line, and how that changed the interpretation or effect of the lines involved. Don't get me wrong, it was interesting stuff, and the professor told some neat anecdotes about productions she'd seen that made directing decisions off one or another of these differences that changed the the tone of the scene to great effect. But it does seem obsessive in the most exquisite way.
Still, however much time we devote to discussing, analyzing and interpreting ever mote of meaning in every line, nothing takes away from my initial response to the end of Midsummer Night's Dream, which is to feel shivers running down my spine. *sighs happily* I love ambiguously metatextual monologues. Especially ones as oddly eerie and dreamlike as Puck's.