Orson Scott Card rewrites Shakespeare

[PANTS!]

Yeah that's what it really boils down to here. His writing is / became shitty.

Trouble is since he pours so much politics into his books, when you accuse him of writing one dimensional characters, it's easy to see that as an attack on the politics that character is baciscally put into the story to embody.

[pandamonium]

Yeah that's what it really boils down to here. His writing is / became shitty.

Trouble is since he pours so much politics into his books, when you accuse him of writing one dimensional characters, it's easy to see that as an attack on the politics that character is baciscally put into the story to embody.

Then he needs to make it more obvious that's what he's doing. There have been successful writers who've used one-dimensional characters effectively. Just not Card.

I think I'm just bitter because I can see a lot of potential in the Maker series, and without the Mormon idiocy, it'd be pretty awesome.

[Anders]

I think I see the problem, Panda. You are an unmarried woman over 20 who reads. Get a man to complete you, get into the kitchen, and get started on multiplying and populating the Earth. The only books a woman should read are cookbooks.

[pandamonium]

I think I see the problem, Panda. You are an unmarried woman over 20 who reads. Get a man to complete you, get into the kitchen, and get started on multiplying and populating the Earth. The only books a woman should read are cookbooks.

I BANE U FORM TEH BORDS.

[Bunsen]

I BANE U FORM TEH BORDS.

There we go.  That's more like the kind of literacy one would expect... from a woman.

[Skeptress]

I suggest the Charles and Mary Lamb editions.

Man, that is one fucked up family.  A woman who stabbed her mother to death in a fit, and the brother who was forced to witness the events.

Great writers, though.

I had no idea.

[Skeptress]

It seems to me that we might rather lose our contempt for Bowdler’s attempt to make Shakespeare watchable to the audience of his time, and realize that the standards of taste and decorum change from age to age, and it is not at all unreasonable to make such temporary changes in the script as will allow a play to continue to find an audience—as long as the original remains available, so it can be restored to public view when tastes change again.

But.. Shakespeare is so very tame compared to modern anything that has sex in it... Does Card live in the 50s?

In this adaptation, Hamlet was never close to his father. The prince is unfazed and emotionally indifferent to the old king's death, feels no sense of betrayal when his mother speedily remarries, and thinks that Claudius will make a perfectly good monarch. Hamlet is also secure in his religious faith, with absolute and unshakable beliefs about the nature of death and the afterlife. He isn't particularly hung up on Ophelia, either. Throughout the novella, Prince Hamlet displays the emotional depth of a blank sheet of paper

.

W.T.F.   

ETA: If you want Shakespeare made more comprehensible I suggest the Charles and Mary Lamb editions.  Very high quality.  Read that then take on the original if it makes you more comfortable.

Also, isn't the whole existential thing kind of a key part of Hamlet? I haven't read or seen the play, so I don't know... but "To be or not to be" is pretty emo.

The key is that Card sees Hamlet as having "unshakable" beliefs.  Hamlet had no idea whether it was better to struggle and live or give-up and die.  He was tortured by living but tortured by the thought of what may lie beyond death. 

[amysrevenge]

I like Ender's Game, therefore

[Halleyscomet]

I like Ender's Game, therefore

Mark Twain was a racist asshat when it came to Native Americans. Does that mean Huck Finn should be discarded?

[amysrevenge]

Mark Twain was a racist asshat when it came to Native Americans. Does that mean Huck Finn should be discarded?

Nah, but it means I enjoy it more if I pretend I didn't know that.

[Johnny Slick]

Mark Twain's viewpoint doesn't make Huck Finn not readable but it might mitigate his portrayal of the "Injun" in Tom Sawyer.  But sure, lots of historical writers held viewpoints which would be pretty abhorrent today and it doesn't make their work unreadable.

[Halleyscomet]

Mark Twain's viewpoint doesn't make Huck Finn not readable but it might mitigate his portrayal of the "Injun" in Tom Sawyer.  But sure, lots of historical writers held viewpoints which would be pretty abhorrent today and it doesn't make their work unreadable.

I think it adds some fascinating insights into Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer and Roughing It. The last work is the one with the most racist content about Native Americans.

Part of what we learn from Twain's selective racism is how people influence each other. The characters in all three books were based on real people that Twain knew. Twain's autobiographies say more about it, but the thumbnail is there was a real slave, beloved by the neighborhood children, when Twain was growing up. Twain's experiences with this man basted his racism to atoms. A real world criminal who happened to have one Native American parent cemented Twain's racism towards Native Americans as firmly as it it were carved into the bedrock. In both cases, the racism of one man was profoundly influenced by the behavior of another.

This poses some disturbing questions about Card's childhood. In other writing Card equates homosexuality with pedophilia. His lackluster, disingenuous "defense" of his Hamlet rewrite is a clumsy effort to sidestep this issue. Why does Card have such animosity towards homosexuals and why is he so determined to connect it to pedophilia? Could this be mere cultural and religious conditioning, or is there a deeper, more personal cause? The shower scene in "Ender's Game" has the feel of a real incident that befell a child. In the book there's a clumsy victory for the hero, where he accidentally kills his assailant. This is a common fantasy for rape victims. The trauma is relived, but with a different outcome. Could Card be trying to tell us something about his own childhood? Having been raped by a pedophile when he was a youth himself would certainly cement a young man's hatred.

Was Orson Scott Card really molested when he was a child, or is he merely trying to give that impression with his writing?

And what of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? In Card's version, Being raped as children turned both men into homosexuals. Could Card himself be struggling with homosexual desires, desperately trying to blame them upon the traumatic events of his own past?

[Johnny Slick]

FWIW Card also wrote a chilling and very good short story called, I think, "Euripides In The Fourth-Floor Lavatory". It's also about divine justice meted out to a pedophile. I really, really don't generally enjoy the whole "let's find things that happened in an author's life and then attribute them to his work" game, as in an ideal world there should be nothing outside of the text itself, but sure, it would not surprise me if something was done to him or someone he knew as a child.

[PANTS!]

Well Card is from my hometown. And he would show up at conventions for a while. Or occasionally I would see him around town. And while I can not speak for him in any way, nor doni know nothing for a fact. But he certainly pings the gaydar like a fleet of aircraft carriers.

I always assumed he was gay until I read his screed in the Rhino Times. The local conservative rag.

Anyway, anecdotes and all. Take em for what it's worth.

[WC]

It all comes full circle to the Mormons, dun't it? In Roughing It, Twain travels through Mormon Territory and documents polyg SLC. Fascinating stuff.