Sonic the playwright
4mon 17d ago by feddit.uk/u/flamingos in curatedtumblr@sh.itjust.works from files.catbox.moe
And Baby Boomers are more likely to recognize Big Bird. These are colorful anthropomorphic animals that were ubiquitous during our childhood, while Shakespeare is just some balding dude with a thin mustache and a big collar.
They believe Big Bird is a domestic terrorist. Of course they recognize him.
They are also less likely to recognise Julius Caesar. And guess what - they both dead and not exactly on the top of the news.
There have been like 110 billions humans ever, and only a single blue anthropomorphic hedgehog.
They could read one play and solve both of those issues!
Is it common to remember faces of long dead people?
And they all had a wig back then anyway.
My high school English class room had a large poster of him on the wall. I will never forget.
Sonic is designed to be highly recognisable and interacting with Sonic media necessary means you see Sonic a whole lot, even seeing just a few adverts for the franchise is already enough to make you remember it. Shakespeare's looks are known only on the basis of a couple of portraits, most of which are probably not even based on Shakespeare's looks directly, and they're all completely irrelevant for interacting with Shakespeare's work.
And considering there has been debate for years if Shakespeare was real....
Maybe Shakespeare was...
Not amongst serious people though. Shakespeare's life is well documented but rather dull. He just happened to be a terrific observer of human behaviour
Tbh if anything that debate probably contributed to Shakespeare's (and his images') prominence in popular culture rather than reduced it.
Getting a time machine so I can catch Shakespeare up on 35 years of Sonic lore so he can write 16 different kinds of fire ass plays of varying genres.
Looking forward to Shadow soliloquies
This isn't even about Shakspear's plays, it's about his physical appearance.
Not exactly a useful metric.
Shakespeare doesn't even recognize a Sega Genesis, even though it does what Nintendon't!
Needs must I hie with great haste!
Gotta go fast
Which is more recognizable 🤔
Wait, this is about physical appearance?
Shakespeare comes from a time before cameras, obviously. But, not only that, there were no portraits of him painted in his lifetime. And to add to the confusion, there were no physical descriptions made of him during his lifetime. The only information we have on what he looked like come from about a decade after his death. One is an engraving, the other is a (IMO) low quality bust from his funerary monument. In addition, Shakespeare is such a generic-looking guy of his time that there are portraits of other people that were misidentified as being portraits of Shakespeare because they feature slim white guys with goatees in a ruffle collar.
Compare that to Sonic. He's a character that was designed to stand out visually, and one where the company that makes Sonic games is still, to this day, generating new media with photos and videos of him.
So, if an actual portrait of Shakespeare were discovered and shown to Shakespeare experts, I think even then there's a decent chance they'd more easily recognize Sonic. After all, a "Shakespeare expert" isn't an expert on what he looked like. They're an expert on his writing.
considering that shakespear's plays were written in early modern English- which is basically an entirely different language than we speak today... the vast majoriity of people alive today would never actually recognize one.
A translation of one, sure. but nope. they probably wouldn't even understand it.
Nah fam, you just ain't had it done right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6CLdCl9TB0
Saw him do this live and he was predictably incredible
Wow. That was… really good. I’m glad you shared it!
I was lucky long ago in high school. Our lit teacher forbid us to read Shakespeare outside the classroom. Instead, we read along as we listened to the RSC's recordings of the play at the same time.
That’s my point.
That’s not Early Modern English. Confusingly, Earky Modern is a precursor to the language we speak today.
It’s close enough a language that we can kinda muddle through it, we can translate it and most will never realize they did more than change some spelling, but most people have still never see it performed in the original- mostly because we would be muddling through missing things
I think a lot of people would change their minds about Shakespeare if you explain some of the dirty jokes to them.
That is my one GenX/Millenial complaint. We used to have a common literary background up until just into 2000, at least in the US. We all read Shakespeare and Chaucer. Beowulf, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird. We all had a similar base to start from.
Then I saw a short on YouTube where a 40 something man said to his wife "No, sir. I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir." So many comments of people being totally lost as his statement seemed out of nowhere and when people read explanations they still didn't get it. It perfectly fit the situation AND it was not scripted as the wife was trying to show him being an ass (in a teasing way).
Do you know what a Catch-22 is? If not then you are missing common phrases you would have learned in english class had you attended up to the year 2000.
I work with a 35 year old woman who keeps saying "catch one two" instead of "catch twenty two" despite numerous corrections from multiple people. 😞
I am Cinna the Poet!
Shakespeare gotta improve his inflation game.
Shakespeare the hedgehog
Wait, does anybody knows how he looks? I thought his identiy isnt fully uncovered?
Sonic yeah I’ve seen him. Seen Shakespeare in Hamnet too but don’t think he looks like the pictures.
To be fair, overhyped bawdy plays from hundreds of years ago are boring AF nowadays.
No they aren't. They're the baseline for a superabundance of modern cinema and theater.
Romeo x Juliet is the cornerstone of a thousand romance novels and heist thrillers. Hamlet is the backbone of modern horror. Julius Caeser is every political drama. The Tempest, every disaster movie. Comic books draw on them. Musically draw on them.
Every graduate of Julliard has performed in a dozen Shakespeare plays. Every British comedian can recite a few works by heart. The periodic remake still consistently fills theaters.
Shakespeare is the most playgerized man in history.
Its not like those are all original ideas though. Romeo and Juliet is the poem "The tragical history of Romeus and Juliet" just tweaked into a play.
Sure. Half of Shakespeare's work is adoption or embellishments on Greek myth and British folklore.
But we get a blockbuster every year or three that's just King Lear with the serial numbers filed off
And that's good.
It would be time to stop with this stupid cult of personality that never brings anything other than fascism and sects.
But corporate mascots designed to maximise franchise profitability are so much better?
Yes, yes they are. Because it's much less likely that people will use Sonic as a national symbol of cultural superiority.
eh. I'm not taking that bet.
people are dumb.
There are entire works of fiction dedicated to just that (eg captain america). US law enforcement using the punisher symbol is another.
What interesting thinking. Let me just check something.
It's ok to kill puppies, because otherwise they might be adopted by fascist dog owners and trained to attack antifascists and minorities.
I'm not seeing how the Shakespeare > fascism pipeline is supposed to work here, much less how it's a greater threat than "megacorps controlling culture" > fascism
Cult of personality -> fascism
Shakespeare for example has been a very typical symbol of british "pride" which is one of the main roots of fascism.
But yeah, sure, it's not the worst one. The problem here is this fascination that people have for historical figures, where it doesn't matter whether you know the work of Shakespeare, what matters is that you know him and how he looks, as the post shows.
Why do you think Trump supporters have no clue what he actually did does ? They don't care because they follow the person, not the act.
When you start worshipping people, you never end up in a good place.
That seems like an awfully broad application of the term "cult of personality". Usually that term implies the personality in question influencing people's actions either with or similarly to political power. People just think that Shakespeare made excellent plays and poems
I also don't think it's reasonable to say that people are only enamoured with the idea of him as an exceptional writer that is English when there is still widespread study and performance of his work; people are clearly still engaging with the actual work, not just the image of him
But yeah, sure, it's not the worst one
Okay but you explicitly said "good" not to a post about people not recognising Shakespeare, but one about more people recognising Sonic than Shakespeare
You can appreciate art without worshipping anyone. In fact, a deeper understanding of art will also teach you about the flaws and the humanity of the creators. Also, the best defence against fascism is education, which art is an indispensable part of.
Yes, but this isn't what the post is about.
Here it's about knowing who Shakespeare is, and actually even worse, knowing how he looked.
There's no mention of Hamlet or Macbeth, there's no mention of art in any kind, to the point where the artist is being compared to a character (ultimately, art).
People don't give a crap about the art of Shakespeare, they just have to know him because he's famous and supposedly a genius or whatever, so you need to know his name and his face. There's no art in that, and no education either because knowing the name and face of a dead guy never brought any form of knowledge.
Shakespeare isn't an artist. He is an icon, a holy figure, an absolute reference that became close to a deity in people's perception, similar Mozart, Einstein, etc. Heck, how many people know Einstein and his face, compared to how many know his works?
This is where fascism hides. If you can consider anyone to be godlike without even knowing what they did, it's easy for you to do the same with a Hitler or a Trump. You believe blindly because it is a cult of personality.
Yeah, here's a big secret: people are interested in people. I don't understand why that triggers you so much.