Mood: ‘So Small’ by Thomas Bergersen
‘Words, Words, Words’ & “Acting” Them Out
We are probably all aware of who Ian McKellen is these days, what with ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘Hobbit’ movies and his popularity since. Today, I happened across a video on YouTube from one of the several Royal Shakespeare Company’s late ‘70s and early 80s specials they did were Mr. McKellen speaks on the ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ soliloquy from Shakespeare’s ‘MacBeth’. It is the inspiration for this blog, and you really should give it a listen to so that you may understand where I am coming from in the following words:
It was a bit of serendipity to happen across it, as I tend to take my writing mostly seriously. I enjoy inserting a few puns and semi-obscure references in them, for instance for the writing to be completely technical, if I may use the word. But I take the use of words under deep consideration; I do not want to sound like other authors, and want to get the same meanings and feelings across differently, if at all possible. With the millions of writers there have been throughout History, I know this is highly unlikely, but there it is.
This is not to say I am anything like a Shakespeare, mind you, but there are a few things that Mr. McKellen says at the beginning of this that sparked an understanding in me that comes from my writings and my small career acting on stage. Specifically he states that ‘the actor becomes the playwrite and character simultaneously’ and that ‘can only be done having total awareness of the complexities of [the writer]’. Now, I would substitute ‘the character’ for ‘the writer’ to be specific, but when writing one’s own starry, one is the writer and character in One.
As Mr. McKellen advances through his dissection of the ‘Tomorrow’ speech, he certainly points out the subject of Time and how Shakespeare begins with tomorrow (future) moves back into ‘all our yesterdays’ (past) and forward into ‘sound and fury, signifying nothing’ (death, the ‘end of Time’). To my mind a correct ‘assumption’ of technical writing, mostly probably because it rather follows the way I reveal the full story in my book! 😁
The very interesting thing, to me, about the video is that there is a clip of the same speech that Mr. McKellen performed on a televised ‘MacBeth’ which, in my opinion, sucks. Admittedly, this comes at the cusp of the time when Shakespeare was leaving being performed in the ‘classic’ way of wavering, bombastic voicing (listen to Gielgud and the like) and moving into more realistic cadences and portrayal.
Having seen many performances of the soliloquy, and as an aside, I will say it is funny to me just how many actors put a pause is ‘Signifying……nothing.’
What, Me Worry?
Mad as it sounds, this Ian McKellen video came up at a very auspicious time. As I wrote in my last blog, I’ve at a slight loggerhead in the writing of my book in how to proceed with the dichotomy of Feudal marriage and today’s views of the institution. I really haven’t written much of it since, still trying to navigate those waters. I think today, the 15th of July 2023, after the viewing of this video and the writing of this blog, there will be some good forward momentum in that writing. There is an element of ‘fuck it, just write and revise later’, along with the desire to simply get the visceral feelings across to counterpoint the eventual resolution.
I mean, how else can we get feeling and such across in any writing if not based on Life and living it, yes? As a final thought, especially when writing anything that one wants to reach people on a secular level, we must write in an understandable prose. this is not to say using ‘ur’ for ‘you are’ and such, nor using more ‘high brow’ words either. No, but this I mean in a way that most of us can understand without having to read twice.
Arthur expressed it better than I could. So there.
I should get to that further writing, now, so I hope all who really read these blogs and don’t just hit ‘Like’ are doing well (yeah, alright, even those who just hit ‘Like’, too!) and are sucking the marrow out of Life!