I think I found my new favorite rabbit hole. This voice actor does Shakespeare scenes in a southern accent and I need to see the whole damn play. Absolutely beautiful
if you’re not from the us american south, there’s some amazing nuances to this you may have missed. i can’t really describe all of them, because i’ve lived here my whole life and a lot of the body language is sort of a native tongue thing. the body language is its own language, and i am not so great at teaching language. i do know i instinctively sucked on my lower teeth at the same time as he did, and when he scratched the side of his face, i was ready to take up fucking arms with him.
but y'all. the way he said “brutus is an honourable man” - each and every time it changed just a little. it was the full condemnation Shakespeare wanted it to be. it started off slightly mock sincere. barely trying to cover the sarcasm. by the end…it wasn’t a threat, it was a promise.
christ, he’s good.
the eliding of “you all” to “y’all” while still maintaining 2 syllables is a deliberate and brilliant act of violence. “bear with me” said exactly like i’ve heard it at every funeral. the choices of breaking and re-establishing of eye contact. the balance of rehearsed and improvised tone. A+++ get this man a hollywood contract.
Get this man a starring role as Marc Antony in a southern adaptation of this show PLEASE.
This man is fantastic. 💕
The thing that just destroys me about this, though – we think of Shakespearean language as being high-cultured, and intellectual, and somewhat inaccessible. And I know people think of Southerners as being ill-educated (which…let’s be fair, most are, but not the way it’s said). But that whole speech, unaltered, is so authentically Southern. And the thing is: Leaning into that language really amps the mood, in metalanguage. I’m not really sure how to explain it except… like… “Thrice” is not a word you hear in common speech…unless you’re in the South and someone is trying to Make A Fucking Point.
Anyway. This was amazing and I want a revival of Shakespeare As Southern Gothic.
One of the lovely things about this, and one of the reasons it works so well, is that from what we can piece together of how Shakespeare was originally pronounced, it leans more towards an American southern accent than it does towards a modern British RP.
In addition, in the evolution of the English language in america, the south has retained many of the words, expressions, and cadences from the Renaissance/Elizabethan English spoken by the original British colonists.
One of the biggest examples of this is that the south still uses “O!”/“Oh!” In sentences, especially in multi-tone and multi-syllable varieties. We’ve lost that in other parts of the country (except in some specific pocket communities). But in the south on the whole? Still there. People in California or Chicago don’t generally say things like “why, oh why?” Or “oh bless your heart” or “Oh! Now why you gotta do a thing like that?!” But people from the south still do.
I teach, direct, and dramaturg Shakespeare for a living. When people are struggling with the “heightened” language, especially in “O” heavy plays like R&J and Hamlet, a frequent exercise I have them do is to run the scene once in a southern accent. You wouldn’t believe the way it opens them up and gives their contemporary brains an insight into ways to use that language without it being stiff and fake. Do the Balcony scene in a southern accent- you’ll never see it the same way again.
This guy is also doing two things that are absolutely spot-on for this speech:
First, he’s using the rhetorical figures Shakespeare gave him! The repetition of “ambition” and “Brutus is an honorable man”, the logos with which he presents his argument, the use of juxtaposition and antitheses (“poor have cried/caesar hath wept”, etc). You would not believe how many RADA/Carnegie/LAMDA/Yale trained actors blow past those, and how much of my career I spend pointing it out and making them put it back in.
Second, he’s playing the situation of the speech and character exactly right. This speech is hard not just because it’s famous, but because linguistically and rhetorically it’s a better speech than Brutus’ speech and in the context of the play, Brutus is the one who is considered a great orator. Brutus’ speech is fiery passion and grandstanding, working the crowd, etc. Anthony is not a man of speeches (“I am no orator, as Brutus is; But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man”) His toastmaster skills are not what Brutus’ are, but he speaks from his heart (his turn into verse in this scene from Brutus’ prose is brilliant) and lays out such a reasonable, logical argument that the people are moved anyway. I completely believe that in this guy’s performance. A plain, blunt, honest speaker. Exactly what Anthony should be.
TLDR: Shakespeare is my job and this is 100% a good take on this speech.
definitely one of the challenges I have with reading Shakespeare is that it sounds so weird to me. “The good is oft interr’d with their bones”?? Who talks like that?
Well,,, rednecks. Despite being Elizabethan English, none of this is really out of character for a man with that accent; southern american English has retained not only (I am told) the accent of Shakespeare, and the “Oh!” speech patterns, but also so many of the little linguistic patterns: parenthetic repetition (“so are they all - all honorable men”), speaking formally when deeply emotional, getting more and more sarcastic and passive-aggressive as time goes on, etc.
where on earth are they sneaking off to in the middle of the night?
the webcomic has no plot is an art experiment im gonna do for myself. ive done no planning, no scripting, no test pages, nothing to prepare anything for this comic we are just jumping right in!! the plan is to just yes-and my way through the story, making it up on the fly maybe with help and suggestions from you lot and see where it goes! lottie is a very tropey character so it’ll be fun to see what happens.
i always struggle to get started with long projects (and short projects lbh) so this is an attempt to shake some of that off and stop myself getting stuck in an endless project planning loop.
Perhaps people's issue with the Vader thing is that they misunderstand nature of redemption. People today (and a lot of half-baked redemption stories today too) like to think it's actually about someone who wasn't really that bad, just misguided/manipulated/traumatized doing something wrong, then fixing it and being their true self.
But actually, redemption is at its core is about an evil person becoming a good person. Redemption does not require sympathetic motives for the evil, nor for the evil person to deserve it (an oxymoron) or even for them to be able to make up for it. The foundation for redemption stories is that the redeemed person was evil.
#i love zuko but the whole ‘zuko’s arc is how you write a redemption story’ trend set us back considerably
When I started watching Avatar I was so confused because everyone talks about the Zuko Redemption Arc and I was like??? But Zuko hasn’t done anything wrong ??? Did you mean a Heel-Face Turn?? Zuko isn’t bad he’s just pointed in the wrong direction.
(And then he finally did one (1) bad thing and I was like oh, okay, now he has fallen and can therefore be redeemed. Carry on.)
There’s posts going around about how Redemption is a fundamentally Christian idea and my thought is: correct. So either own that and go all in (eg Vader) OR don’t bother. I agree that that’s not the only type of story that’s worth telling. But with Vader, that is the story they’re telling, and that is the point of it, and the fact that they do go all in is doing it right, not doing it wrong.
Yeah exactly EXACTLY
Zuko can maybe be described as having a reformation arc. He can certainly be described as having a character arc, and having growth. But the whole essence of Zuko’s story is that he was always trying to be a good person and he just had to learn better than his father had taught him! It’s a good story, yes. It’s not a redemption story.
(Until he DOES do the one bad thing he definitely knew was bad, yes. In that context you can talk about Zuko’s redemption.)
Vader is a redemption story in its purest form! He is evil. He did evil things. Luke knows this, and Luke chooses to love him. Vader responds to that love, and makes one choice to be good and dies in that choice, and it’s enough. Redemption isn’t earned, it’s only accepted.
(Which is ALSO the fundamentally Christian nature of the concept, that gets overlooked in critiques I think. Redemption, as understood in a Christian context, isn’t something you do to yourself. You are redeemed. Through no merit of your own, by no right of your own. You get the final choice of whether or not to cooperate with your redemption, but no action or inaction on your part opens that door. Which is why it doesn’t matter how evil the redeemed person was, or how far they’re able to make amends.)
This is one of the main reasons why I went from “Jane Eyre can have Rochester in the end, as a treat” to “actually, the ending of Jane Eyre is wonderful and perfect as it is”. While I understand the way that tropes derived from Jane Eyre influence our reading of the novel, there are mainly two common readings: one, from the pov of current mores that says Rochester did nothing wrong. If anything Jane was dumb in leaving him and should have stayed as his mistress because of extenuating circumstances. Two, Rochester is irredeemable, even a monster. This latter one is often a reaction to the idea that the novel is proposing the former. But that is not the case at all. It’s not even subtle. Rochester proposes to Jane, and defies God and says it will atone, and immediately the weather changes and the chestnut tree above them is struck by lightning during the storm and split in half. I don’t think you can have a more explicit “and God said 'no, actually, this is your last warning’” unless you have like, an angel come down to deliver the message. And then in the end Rochester brings up the omen again: “I am like the old chestnut tree…”. He got punished. He chose to save Bertha’s life. He spent time alone. He accepted the wrong he did, repented, asked for forgiveness and deliverance, and was heard (Jane returned). And Jane on her part chose to forgive him.
NGL, it is a tough thing to read. We are faced with Rochester and asked “would you forgive that? Could you? Should you? Well, this is what Jane did”. It is no wonder to me that we as readers are made uncomfortable and would prefer to think there was no evil done, or that no forgiveness is possible for his evil, and avoid the question altogether. So I have to give props to Charlotte Brontë for a bold thesis on forgiveness that it is still hard for us today.
Jane Eyre is an excellent example of real, difficult forgiveness.
I’m always amazed in fandoms by how minor a character’s “crimes” are and people still want to completely absolve them.
Darcy in Pride & Prejudice is rude, it’s not a major crime and Jane Austen would never redeem a Rochester because her redemption arcs are focused on more minor flaws, but people do mental gymnastics to excuse all of Darcy’s rudeness and make him into a picture of perfection. Does this mean they can’t even forgive a man for being rude at a party? How are you supposed to ever forgive anyone and anything if you are so unforgiving that Darcy can’t be redeemed he has to be retroactively excused?
That is a scary picture of the world.
Yes yes yes!
My personal view of Mr. Rochester is that I may not much like him as a person, but his story is a blatantly moral story of sin, consequence, repentance and forgiveness. The novel is very clear that his attempted bigamy is wrong (and, on a side note, that it would have no good consequences for him or Jane if Jane had consented, because sin bears no good fruits). It’s also very clear that Jane never at all pauses in loving him, even while she is firmly set against his desires.
Darcy’s lesser flaws are also a great point @bethanydelleman, and I think the discomfort with forgiveness is SUCH a big part of fandom discomfort with redemption stories. Sometimes it manifests with wholesale “this is irredeemable” condemnation, like @thatscarletflycatcher points out with Rochester, or like happens with Vader. Sometimes it’s attempting to erase any guilt at all, like with Darcy (or again with Rochester :P). And I think it just comes down to the fundamental difficulty for us of putting “hate the sin, love the sinner” into practice.
On the one hand, if we hate what a character did, we often don’t want to admit they could be forgiven, so we pile on the condemnation. On the other hand, if we like a character, we may feel uncomfortable facing the fact that we like someone (even fictional) who genuinely did bad things and hurt other people, so instead we pile on the excuses and try to whitewash them into someone who was always “worthy” of our attachment.
But working with that discomfort and learning to tease out “this character did bad things and justly deserves condemnation” from “I love this character and want them to find happiness and receive mercy,” and to reconcile the two… that not only helps you enjoy your fiction more peacefully, it’s really really good practice for real life.
