Questions & Answers
1. What do you think “the whole world is a play house” means? What does it mean to you?
- “The whole world is a play house” (Totus mundus agit histrionem) was the motto of the Globe Theatre. It was also stated in one of Shakespeare’s plays: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”. I believe that this means that life is like a play. People “enter” and “exit” and often play multiple parts. In everyday life, people hide behind masks and act like people that they aren’t, and the stages of our lives are like different acts and scenes. We grow up, we change, and we mature like the characters in stories. We experience tragedy, pain, laughter, and comedy, as depicted in the plays that people write. Like actors, we play multiple parts. We have multiple personalities and different “faces” depending on who we are with or where we are. To me, this phrase means that life is like a play, and as long as you put on good show, people will like and appreciate it. I think that this is true, and I think that it is a bit sad. I know that I am not always honest about who I am (and neither are my friends), and historically, people have always put up fronts and made sure to please the crowd rather than being blunt, honest, and most of all, themselves.
2. Do you enjoy comedies, tragedies, or histories more? Why?
- I enjoy tragedies because I like the emotions that are evoked throughout the play. I like raw, bitter emotion and honesty. I like that in tragedies, people show who they really are. As I stated in the previous section, a lot of acting (and life) is about pretending to be someone you’re not, but I think that a lot of times in tragedies, more real emotions are brought out. A lot of people have experienced tragedy in real life, and they can bring that to their character in a role they play to make the emotion more real and believable.
3. What intrigues you most about Shakespearean theater? What questions do you still have about Shakespeare?
- One thing about Shakespearean theatre that intrigues me is the honesty in his plays. Based on the plays I’ve seen and read, Shakespeare seemed to point out things in people that they try to avoid or pretend don’t exist. It appears to me that Shakespeare wanted his plays to display real human feelings and emotions, whereas other playwrights focused on dramatizing events that happened long ago. Shakespeare invented characters that could mirror how people were acting in the world at the time, and they were like “real people”, not just actors in a far off world putting on a show that wasn’t believable.
- One thing I still wonder about Shakespeare is his inspiration for his plays. There is not much information on his personal life outside of the theatre, and I would be interested to know what prompted him to begin writing, and why he was considered one of the greatest writers of all time. What made him so different?