Jon wrote: >Do you really think that the actor playing Ophelia was walking on, doing >his/her lines, and also playing a properly full lute piece? Don't go too >much by what is written in retrospect. A lute player wouldn't "strum", of >course. but an actor might pretend to play (as has often been done in our >day). I stand by my assumption as a probability, but not as a fact. I don't >say the lute is inappropriate to the stage, I say that in Shakespeare "the >play's the thing". All his works play at different levels. He plays to the >"groundlings" and those in the boxes. He slips in bawdy bits among his >deeper thoughts. He wasn't playing to a "dress circle" of the educated, he >was playing to all the populace.
Here's my acting experience coming to the fore again. I was once in a production of Man of La Mancha wherein I played guitar on stage while singing Little Bird. I didn't fake the guitar part or play air guitar while the guitarist in the orchestra played. But for the rest of the songs we sang we had a full orchestra to play. They didn't have that luxury in Shakespeare's time. So it is very possible that the actor playing Ophelia did in fact play a lute piece fully and properly. >The plays were modified in performance, and although it is purely conjecture >I would guess that the melodies of the songs were also. This doesn't take >from Shakespeare's genious, it merely says that his works were in progress >in performance. The best assumption one can make of his time, and many >things previous, is that people haven't changed that much. The groundlings >were probably a bit racous, and the dress circle inattentive. Else we would >attribute a far more intellectual life to them than we have. I think you have too little faith in the intellectuality of the populace, upper and lower, in Elizabethan England. Certainly the upper class were very well educated, and music played (as it were) a great part in that education. Remember too that Shakespeare was commissioned by the Royal Court and as such he did not present "works in progress" but finished works. Also, the music composers of the day were commissioned by the Court, and as such any of their music used in a play of Will's would also not be a "work in progress". Regards, Craig
