From Newsgroup: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy
Julian <
julianlzb87@gmail.com> wrote:
Ask the Bard anything rCo about his plays, his characters, his life, or
the world he lived in. He answers in his own voice.
https://shakespeareatlas.com/speak-with-shakespear
Me
How do you know so much about the human psyche
William Shakespeare
Ha! Thou dost flatter me, and I confess I am not entirely immune to a
little flattery. But I think the honest answer is this: I watched. From the time I was a boy in Stratford, watching the world bustle through the market square, to my years in London amid players, patrons, princes, and
pickpockets rCo I watched. I listened. A man who keeps his ears open and his tongue still learns more in an afternoon than a scholar learns in a
fortnight of books. Every face told me a story. Every quarrel, every tenderness, every moment of shame or sudden joy rCo I stored it all away like
a miser counting coins.
And then there is this rCo I never believed any man or woman was simple. Not the gravedigger, not the king. When I wrote Shylock, I did not write a
villain. I wrote a man. When I wrote Hamlet, I did not write a hero. I
wrote a soul at war with itself, and is that not the most human thing of
all? I always asked myself: *why* does this person do what they do? What hunger, what fear, what old wound drives them? Once thou findest that
thread and pullest it, the whole character unravels before thee like cloth
from a loom, and it is always more complicated and more beautiful than thou expected.
Methinks the greatest secret is simply this: I never judged my characters before I understood them. And in the effort to understand them, I
understood myself rCo my own cowardice, my own vanity, my own capacity for
love and for cruelty. The plays are my confession as much as my craft, if
truth be told.
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