Richard III - A Review

Many will nod their heads and make an acknowledging hum if ever you state that Shakespeare was the greatest play-write or poet in history, despite the fact that few have seen or even read half of his stuff. It’s become one of those facts that you don’t argue with unless you are extremely contentious and well versed, probably smugly monocled, and speaking as if you’re from 1756. Without embodying these qualities you run the risk of getting Shakespeare wrong which, given the fact that everyone knows at least a line or two, could go extremely wrong if the lines you quote and criticise are incorrect or understood backwards and noticeably so. Because of this, Shakespearean plays have become riddled with fear inducing connotations of misunderstanding. They are left alone by casual readers or play goers, just for the sake of saving face.

This, sometimes, leads to a horrible thing happening: it goes stale. The misconception leads to misdirection. People assume the stalls of theatres are filled with the monocled who go to watch the deliverance of Shakespeare only to judge the merits of the actor delivering. And so plays consistently follow text and setting, scene and direction, as if Shakespeare were behind the very curtains, calling the shots.

This is why it is such a relief to see Shakespeare shaken a bit.

My disinformation

Ed Milliband is the new Labour party leader. Lindsey Lohan has just been put back in jail. Some people won at football. Twitter and Facebook have both been attacked by hackers at some point, and the pope visited the UK. Vince Cable was told off for saying something and I'm sure Nick Clegg is somewhere doing something he's been told is imperative to the running of the country, like counting how many chocolate digestives are left in the Common's kitchen or picking a colour to paint Florence Cameron's new room. I am just catching up on all this information thanks to the fact that I have been without any useable amount of internet for a few weeks now. I've been able to use the University Library now and then, and my iPod can connect to the free WiFi around the campus, but, since I am living off campus two miles away and the the Virgin Media guys haven't been able to come to the house yet, my news and social media fix has been capped to a couple of minutes a day.

Thankfully, having no internet means my life has been not been spent in front of a burning Mac screen as I trawl through WWW's to satiate the need to fill up with information that is quite usually contrasting, wrong, misleading, or plain old lies. However, the other day I buckled to my desire to know and decided to read my news from these things called "Newspapers". The concept, as the name suggests, is that the news is put onto paper using ink. Then, people can physically pick up the "Newspaper" and give monies to an appropriate salesman/woman. This exchange allows them to remove the paper from the retail premises and walk around holding their "Newspaper" ready to read at a later time, perhaps on the train or while having coffee.

Reading this "Newspaper" I realised that buying news seemed bizarre. I was certain that all of what I was reading would be available on many free websites, possibly with links to other websites for further information, or at the very least with a google search box in the corner in which I would be able to search for it myself. Newspaper's don't have google search boxes. Or a retweet button. To tell other people that I had just found some story interesting and noteworthy with such effectiveness, I would have had to stand up in the middle of wherever I was and declared so, like a loser.

However, reading this Newspaper took about an hour, maybe more. By the time I had reached the back page, exerting far too much excess energy in the process due to all that page turning, I felt informed but strangely aware of how much more of the day there still was. I had eaten all the facts that I needed, despite the fact that I could easily stuff more inside me. If I had been on the internet, I would have devoured extra and more confusing bites of information that negated or disagreed with other bites of information and ended up stuffed, fat, and wallowing in disinformation.

Instead, I put my Newspaper in my bag so that later I could complete the free puzzles that it had provided me with, and decided to be sociable. And, I do want to make it clear, scrolling through and refreshing your Facebook live feed and liking the occasional photo or LOLing at a probably unfunny and uninteresting status update does not count as being sociable. Being sociable means going for a walk in the park with friends, flying a kite, having sing a longs, all that Mary Poppins stuff. Being sociable is old fashioned and that's just the way it is; the internet cannot replace that. And neither, I think, can it replace these Newspapers, for exactly the same reasons. 

Facebook isn't personal and a lot of it is unimportant. Facebook takes a couple hundred people you have agreed to share information with and tells you what they're doing when really everybody knows you can only really be interested in what five people, at most, are doing today. News sites and blogs do exactly the same thing.

It would be self flattery to assume that I could at all impose any sort of homework on such an early notice, but try turning your internet off for a couple of days and relying solely on old fashioned print for your updates. I promise you that you will find it not only more satisfying, but a great deal more freeing and yet still informative.

Unfortunately, thanks to not having in the internet and being sociable, I have made more friends. These friends happen to actually have the internet and so, since I am at their house now and then, I am able to hijack their connection resulting in a news sites being checked along with other random blogs, Facebook, and a blog update. The vicious cycle, or something like that.