Mojo, The Bard, & Me

By this we gather

You have tript since.

-Hermione

A The Winter’s Tale        Act I, scene ii      Line 77 

And which of us has not tript since? This is Hermione, Leontes’s wife, speaking to Leontes’s friend Polixenes. Polixenes was telling her about growing up with Leontes and how innocent they were as kids, and wishing they had been able to stay that innocent. This provokes Hermione’s question. To be clear, by tript (tripped) she means strayed from the path of innocence. It seems like a bit of a silly question. Again, which of us as adults has not lost our innocence of childhood?

The Winter’s Tale is another of Will’s later plays, but one that he’s credited with doing on his own. It’s also the next play on my list to read. I’ve got an annotated, used paperback copy that I picked up somewhere or other, and I’ve got the arkangel Shakespeare audio version that I burned from the library cd. So this is a good point to talk about listening to Shakespeare, and the Arkangel Shakespeare in particular.

The best way to appreciate Shakespeare is to see a play (as opposed to reading it). In fact, just plain reading it can be downright impossible. But the second best way to appreciate it is to listen to it being performed while reading it. It's surprising how much more understandable the text is when you're hearing it performed. The audio, acted out version enables you to understand stuff that you'd have no idea what it meant. So they put together this series called Arkangel Shakespeare where they got Shakespearean actors to do an audio version of 38 of his plays. I bought a few of the cd's before I realized my local library had the whole set. So now I borrow and burn. That doesn't count as having tript, does it?