LADY CAROLINE:- “He must be quite respectable. One has never heard his name before in the whole course of one’s life, which speaks volumes for a man, nowadays.”
plays
“First he tells, then he shows.”
“Pinter did what Auden said a poet should do. He cleaned the gutters of the English language, so that it ever afterwards flowed more easily and more cleanly. We can also say that over his work and over his person hovers a sort of leonine, predatory spirit which is all the more powerful for being held under in a rigid discipline of form, or in a black suit…The essence of his singular appeal is that you sit down to every play he writes in certain expectation of the unexpected. In sum, this tribute from one writer to another: you never know what the hell’s coming next.”
— David Hare in Harold Pinter:A Celebration Faber and Faber 2000 p 21
“How many times have we heard the tired injunction, “Show, don’t tell”? Of all the specious screenwriting rules peddled by gurus fleecing the young, this is the most annoying of the lot, because it’s plain to anyone who’s ever bothered to watch a play or a film carefully that the best writers invariably achieve their effects by mixing showing and telling. It’s how you configure showing and telling that makes you great. In fact, it’s the amount of one you mix with the other to which we give the name “personal style”. Read one page of Shakespeare, a writer fond of interior monologue. First he tells, then he shows. And that’s how Pinter does it as well.”
– Adultery, alcohol and menace,
via i12bent
“He wrote his plays to make money. “
1. Everyone – all levels of society – went to see Shakespeare’s plays. There weren’t many other forms of entertainment: no TV; no cable; no DVDs; no videos, hand-held electronic game players, or personal CD players; no CDs; no movies; and only the rudiments of a newspaper. People went to the bear-baiting or bull-baiting ring for a thrill, they went to a public execution or two – and they went to the theatre.
2. Shakespeare wrote his sonnets to be applauded and remembered as a writer. He wrote his plays to make money. And he made lots of it.
3. He wrote 37 plays, and some of them were real dogs.
4. Shakespeare’s wife was pregnant when they got married.
5. Shakespeare and his wife had three children before he left them all in Stratford-upon-Avon for the big-time, big-city life in London.
6. Shakespeare never went to college.
7. Reading Shakespeare is hard. Shakespeare’s plays were written to be performed – acted and seen on a stage. About half of Shakespeare’s plays weren’t even published until after his death.
8. In Shakespeare’s time, a woman’s value depended solely on who her husband was, and how valuable he was.
9. Experiencing a play in the Globe Theatre in 1603 was sort of a cross between going to an Oscar de la Hoya fight and an N Sync concert.
10. In Shakespeare’s plays, you can find drunks, ghosts, teenagers running away from home, boy who gets girl, boy who loses girl, king who loses everything, woman caressing her lover’s body that is minus its head, woman caressing her lover’s head that is minus its body, weddings and celebrations, and murder by stabbing, suffocation, poison, decapitation, and drowning in a vat of wine.
– Peggy O’Brien, from the “Acknowledgments” section of The Shakespeare Book of Lists by Michael LoMonico
Paul Greer 