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Me and Orson Welles

Clip 1 transcript | Clip 2 transcript | Clip 3 transcript

Study Clip 1 Transcript

Editions and Editing

GILES BLOCK: Whenever you're really working on Shakespeare you have to go back to basically the first folio printed in 1623. And then with most of the plays, all the editions that follow from that, from then on all through the four-hundred years are all the different editors’ versions of that first printing of most of the plays. Half the plays in fact were printed during his own lifetime in single editions which are called quartos, and they’re quite interesting too for different reasons. So when I say the original text I’m talking about the folio.

GILES BLOCK: Editors, well they do lots of things, they’ll frequently change the punctuation and for good reason, for thinking that the original punctuation is actually more helpful for actors than some modern punctuation is certainly than littering the text as some modern editors do with exclamation marks all over the place. They are very bad guides for actors I think, though maybe all right for the reader. But another little example is how a word like, yourself or ourselves, is printed as two words, myself, yourself, usually in the original folio it would be printed as two words which to me seems to take us somewhere deeper into that word. >points< Here’s an example, "the fault dear Brutus is not in our stars but in our selves that we are underlings." So there, you just get deeper into the self by saying my self rather than myself. Tiny, but it’s these tiny things which just show our connection with what we are saying. If I don’t care about what I’m saying I don’t stress anything but when I care about something then I give the emotional words some kind of welly.