By My Heel, You're Terminated
On the way to and from work, I've been listening to the excellent Arkangel audio productions of the works of Shakespeare on CD. They are marvelous; Julius Caesar ó hell, all of Shakespeare ó was wasted on me when I was in high school and college.
O masters, if I were disposed to stir / Your hearts and minds to mutiny and rage, / I should do Brutus wrong, and Cassius wrong, / Who, you all know, are honourable men: / I will not do them wrong; I rather choose / To wrong the dead, to wrong myself and you, / Than I will wrong such honourable men.The only problem with freshly putting all this brilliance into my head is that Shakespeareanisms are now infecting the dialog in the Vehm script. They're not even good Shakespeareanisms. But now, each scene's first pass has become the Shakespearean pass, the second pass the de-Shakespeareanizing pass, and the third pass the actual revising pass that the second pass should be. (And all this only gives me a first draft!)
Comments
Don't feel too bad -- it happened to Dryden and Pope as well; both of them edited the complete works of
Shakespeare relatively early in their careers, and look what happened.
Shakespeare's works are the embodiment of a willful meme. Depending on who you listen to, even Shakespeare himself is a man immaculately conceived by memes, given a body of ink and born into a world of parchment and voices.
Whatever. The point is: Hearing Shakespeare (even pseudo-Shakespeare) is infectious. It does weird things to your own sentence structure.
Q: "Did they really talk like that in Shakespeare's day?"
A: "For a day or two after leaving the theater, they did, at least."
"It does weird things to your own sentence structure."
Nay, pray a correction I submit: "It doth strange biddence to thy speak, I see."
Clearly, James Cams agrees. Shakespearean webcams for everyone!