Asides

Asides

If you are not currently, I strongly recommend becoming incensed at the Shakespearean Aside. If for some reason you were overly traumatized by some early puberty evolving yeti, and you missed what an aside was in your freshman English class, please avoid the rest of this page.

Why am I disturbed by this? Because I wish they worked in real life and they simply don't. I've tried. Often during business meetings I will just turn my head to the side and blurt out "What fools! Don't they realize that I will soon rule Denmark and they will simply be left standing with their butter cookies on the beach!". People tend to scoot their cushy rolled conference room chairs toward the non-whiteboard covered walls (those are always safe because the speaker at a meeting cannot travel beyond the confines of the white-board or onto consecrated ground).

Polonius seems to be able to comment upon the insanity of Hamlet just by crouching and whispering. Try that during a date. "Methinks she doth protest TOO much!" Believe me, it doesn't work. You will get feedback though, it usually involves getting hit, words like "jerk", and an opportunity to examine how the girl looks when she is both angry and walking away.

So, being educated by the public school system, and being a victim of Prozac and Riddilin, I thought that we spent so much time learning all this Shakespeare stuff to use in real life. The sword fighting, the onomatopoeia, the classical allusion, all of these have worked in modern society. Why didn't they point out that past performance is not indicative of future results ? I mean yelling at stains doesn't work in practice, but at least it works on commercials (obscure "Out damned spot!" reference). I've found the soliloquy to be quite effective. My doctor says it's not healthy to write and perform them for myself on dark stages when I break into the theatre and do them while holding a gun and wearing a sock, but outside of that, they appear to achieve the desired result (Incidentally, my doctor also keeps trying to tell me he's not a doctor, he's a barber, but I think that he's just avoiding his heritage.)

Did you know that your barber could drive out evil spirits by cutting them out of your hair? Teutonic tribes believed this (Why is it always the Germans that start these things?) The barber's actually ruled their tribes during "fierce spiritual activity". Barber's shouldn't rule, they really shouldn't even cream rinse. Barber's also founded the first school of surgery. Most of the surgery was done to remove imps that lived in your stomach or a bird that had grown into your skull and was pecking. Most of this surgery was wildly successful for the barber, but not so much for the patient.