My word, Kingers, you haven't been mowing the lawn today, have you?

Kingstonian - great find. Thanks.

That sort of stuff is the bread of life. Puts the culture in pop.

The key lesson (in this issue) that Shakespeare teaches us is that it is the other person who completes the thought. His plays take place in the mind of the audience. The Battle of Agincourt doesn’t happen in any convincing way on stage. At the start of “Henry V”, Shakespeare has to ask the audience to do the legwork:

Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth.

His plays were originally performed in daylight with no scenery. Towards the end of the first scene of “Hamlet”, which takes place on the battlements at night-time, Horatio sees that dawn is breaking:

But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.

Horatio comes up with this knockout line because there’s no lighting effect to do it for him; there’s nothing for the audience to hang on to other than the image. But the more dots that people are able to join up themselves, the more they see that dawn in their mind’s eye, the more powerful the experience is. The skill is knowing which are the right dots and how far apart you can space them.

If there’s a role model for this approach, of drawing the other person into the conversation so that you find that you are sharing the same thoughts, then it’s the eiron, the stock character in ancient Greek comedy whose job is to expose the pride and folly of other characters. The eiron—from whom we get the word irony—does this by feigning puzzlement and slow-wittedness, which readily invites condescension from other stock characters, notably the irascible father and the bombastic soldier, and, in the process, he shows them the stupidity of their actions.

A modern-day version of the eiron is the 1970s television detective Lieutenant Frank Columbo. An episode of “Columbo” is an example of the “inverted detective story”: the first quarter of an hour is spent watching the crime and the cover-up. Only then does Columbo shamble on, in his rumpled raincoat, one hand cupped over his eyebrow, looking for a light for his cigar. His job is to work out what the audience already knows.

A working-class Italian-American, Columbo expresses no resentment at the fact that his suspects often come from a very different walk of life. He finds their fancy homes, yachts, art collections and ambitious building projects “very impressive”. He has simply slipped in to see them while the front door was open because he’s very interested to hear what people have to say about the situation.

Last edited by fxh (2011-08-02 04:06:49)

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