Why I am writing this blog

Why I am writing this blog

Of course the only sensible reason for writing a blog that practically nobody will ever read must be therapeutic. And it is. The main reason is that I missed the experience of writing after I had been writing for a year, continually, and by this discovered what the meaning of happiness is for me. And writing a diary is a poor substitute for it, whereas writing a blog might be really interesting. Not only because there won’t be any boring things in it I don’t really care about, (like: my life?), but because what I have just written is not quite true. I might have two “potential” readers already: the person who gave me the idea of writing a blog, and the person who showed me how to do it. (Well, be it their comfort: I won’t write too much, or rather too often. Certainly it won’t be a weekly blog or something like that because you can only do so much reading of the kind I am interested in.) In any case it is an exciting and, as yet, disconcerting alternative to writing a diary because it gets “published”. Which means there is always the possibility that somebody MIGHT read it, and you don’t know who this person is. And of course there is an “unrealistic” reason for writing this blog as well: to find out if there are other people like me. People that have a similar kind of experience about reading, or Shakespeare, or both.

What this blog will be about

I called my blog “Reading Shakespeare” because it will be about reading, in the first place, and a lot of it will be about reading Shakespeare which has become a first-rate experience for me during the last one and a half years. (In fact it became kind of a life-saving experience when there was suddenly nothing to write about anymore.) It is NOT a blog about Shakespeare, which would be the most superfluous thing I can imagine. And not least because I don’t know anything about Shakespeare, apart from general things that everybody knows, or maybe some odd bits I remember from uni twenty-five to thirty years ago. And I have no intention to change this. I might even say I don’t care about “Shakespeare” at all, and I shall explain why, giving an example: I just heard a German stage director say on a “talk-show” that Shakespeare had no children BECAUSE he was gay. Well, serves me right for watching German television, but this might have been the stupidest thing I have ever heard anybody say about Shakespeare. Apart from the fact that there are probably three children accounted for, but I might be misinformed there. (And this certainly DOESN’T prove that Shakespeare WASN’T gay!) Hard to tell anyway about somebody in whose case there is strong evidence that he never existed … Just an example of the kind of bullshit you have to wade through if you want to find reliable information about Shakespeare. And what use is the information that Shakespeare was gay, or that he had three children, or that he never existed, to understand “his” work better. Exactly none at all, at least for me. Of course there is a historical context of this work, and it would be useful to have a comprehensive knowledge of it, as well as to understand all the strange words I still don’t understand. But what I am interested in, and like to do more than anything in the world, is an entirely different kind of “research”. In the department of serious human occupations it might come closest to what writers and directors do when they undertake to adapt a work of literature for the screen. Or what actors do when they are doing their “research” on a complex character that is unlike what we see in the ordinary kind of “mainstream” film or tv series. (Which explains my obsession with actors that had always been there, but that I came to understand and “use” only recently.)

My favourite example for the kind of process I have in mind has to do with Shakespeare as well, but it will take a lot of explaining and will be kind of long, I am afraid. It is about Richard Armitage playing the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield in the “Hobbit” trilogy. Which is a stellar achievement in “understanding” dwarves – but, although many people might have noticed how great the acting is, only few (and probably not even the actor himself!) would have noticed THAT. I did, because I had become an “expert” on Tolkien’s “dwarves” (to be distinguished from “dwarfs” in a “real world” or fairy-tale context!) during the preceding twelve years. Largely unknown to myself, and mainly by reading the “Sagas of the Icelanders” which are from the same historical context Tolkien “took” his dwarves “from”. And I had been fascinated by the “Tolkien” films from the beginning, mostly because the characters in these films are so incredibly “believable” and, at the same time, so much “more” than I had expected them to be that they are the main reason, in my opinion, why Middle-earth “feels” like a real world. I had noticed this in the “Lord of the Rings” films, but watching “The Hobbit” I became aware for the first time how much “larger than life” you have to make these characters to make them “work” in that way. Of course it is a joint effort, and the make-up and clothing departments might bear as much responsibility for the outcome as the actors. In case of the characters that are closest to the characters in the books - like Gandalf, Galadriel, or Bilbo Baggins - it appears like fifty percent of the work is done already, and you get the impression that they would have “felt right” even if the acting hadn’t been that exceptional. But in all three cases it was, so it is hard to tell. Whereas Richard Armitage started with a big “handicap” as one of the two dwarves “they” could never make look like dwarves. Or rather they wouldn’t when they realized they didn’t want to destroy these faces. The other dwarf that didn’t look like a dwarf was Aidan Turner as Kili, in fact the two actors cast as dwarves who have “classically” beautiful features. And it appears to have been impossible to get anything positively “dwarvish” out of them. Whereas people with “great” but not classically beautiful faces, like Ken Stott or Graham McTavish, could easily be made into very beautiful dwarves just by adding a big nose and a beard! - The difference in the case of Richard Armitage and Aidan Turner is that Kili doesn’t “feel” like a dwarf for one minute of all the three films, whereas Thorin IS a dwarf the moment he steps through the door of Bag-end at the beginning of “An Unexpected Journey”. And I think this is even the moment when the great hidden world of the dwarves, with all their stubborn pride, their beautiful achievements and tragic history, enters the scene “for real”. This is exactly where you see what difference the acting makes! – And I think Richard Armitage was very aware of the “handicap” and knew that it was HIS job to make Thorin feel a lot older and much more “dwarvish” than he looked. The first step was probably to “build” a voice that was really extraordinary and obviously took some time and a lot of work, and before he “had” that voice he didn’t feel very comfortable “being” Thorin. It reminded me of what Ray Winstone (probably my absolute favourite actor before Hollywood “got” him) said in an interview about playing Henry VIII. Unlike Richard Armitage he isn’t THAT keen on talking about his work, and, being asked what had been his worst experience playing Henry VIII, answered briefly: “The first fifteen days”. Ouch! I thought. That would have been the first fifteen days of SHOOTING! Before he really “had” his character. And I suppose Richard Armitage’s “first fifteen days” were rather longer. But in both cases it might have been one of the reasons why the result turned out so extraordinary. I cannot go into detail about Thorin, but there were three tiny moments in the first film that utterly convinced me. Where I thought: That’s it. I have been RIGHT!!! I have known all this time how dwarves think and feel, and I have been right. And where I first realized that I had gone a long way myself already, finding the dwarves. Looking for the dead dwarves from Moria in “The Lord of the Rings”, the appendix, the “Silmarillion”, and, finally, the “Sagas of the Icelanders”, only my efforts couldn’t come to fruition until I finally SAW Thorin Oakenshield in “An Unexpected Journey”. And realized that our conception of what a dwarf is was a hundred percent identical. Although the journey there was probably very different. Of course there were some texts both of us would have read, as “The Hobbit” and the appendix to “The Lord of the Rings”. But to bring the dwarves completely “to life”, find their human (or rather “dwarvish”) content, something that would bring them closer to our own “experience”, both of us obviously needed something else still. In my case it was the “Sagas of the Icelanders” which are actually about real people living in Iceland in the early Middle-ages. And there is just this kind of human content, personal drama, and interesting predicaments that make you feel close to these characters from an archaic context similar to the one of Tolkien’s dwarves. In the case of Richard Armitage the world he “went to” investigating Thorin was obviously Shakespeare’s. Which I didn’t understand at all at the time but do now, partly, having read Shakespeare continually for one year and a half. Because if you are looking for human content of the “non-bullshit” kind there is certainly no better place to be. And in particular for an actor who needs some kind of “reference” to imagine a strange character like a dwarf and play him. Because, unlike some of the other of Tolkien’s “alien” characters, a dwarf didn’t really “exist” before he played him. (No offence to John Rhys-Davies who made a very beautiful and impressive dwarf as Gimli, but, as to the “dwarvish content”, they got it dead wrong!)

Great! I hadn’t even realized what a stellar example this is before I wrote it down. Not only because it is about actors, dwarves, Shakespeare, and the “Sagas of the Icelanders”, which might be everything I became obsessed with in the last ten years or so. (With the possible exception of Jane Austen, but it was impossible to fit her in there! And there won’t be much more about dwarves, I promise!) And not even because it proves that, in times of need, you’ll find what you are looking for in “Shakespeare”, but because it is such a great example that what these people do we admire for their extraordinary work is partly something we all do occasionally, or even quite often, mostly unknown to us. And it is called READING. And, for me, it consists in using MY OWN imagination and experience to get at the things I care about – in a film, a book, the story an actor is telling about his character, and, not least, my own thoughts, feelings and reactions doing this. And one of the most important things is even not to KNOW too much – in particular: not to think that I know ANYTHING already because, in this case, I am reading only what I already know. And that’s boring. That’s the reason why I don’t read five hundred page novels stuffed with detail I don’t care about and things about people I already know but Shakespeare where I get a surprise at almost every turn I take.

And, what my beautiful example shows as well: we don’t need a lot of “information” about a certain text to understand what we are reading because there is always a lot of content there already. Biographical of course, but, more important, other stories we have read, other characters we have “been” in our imagination, other worlds we have discovered. There is always “treasure”, you just have to find it. And this will probably be the next part of my blog: how I found treasure “in Shakespeare” for the first time.