reality shows are the new Shakespearean plays

"If only life were like 'The idiot' or 'The Brothers Karamazov,' and everybody went about turning out their inmost hearts at the tops of their voices!" -- Galsworthy (133)

I have something of a headache after watching Kenneth Branagh's HAMLET, reading both the words at the bottom of the screen and watching the action above.

Funny, but I didn't realize until now how HAMLET compares to the quote above. It is the fact that Shakespeare's characters so often speak their mind (and at that, in very heated decimals) about their feelings or thoughts at any particular moment, usually when no one is about, that makes his plays a bit difficult to translate from stage to screen. Perhaps no Shakespeare play can be correctly produced for the screen without those moments when one thinks -- "Well, this does not quite work." Soliloquies are a bit jarring. Even, I would hazard, when seen on stage. None of us stop what we are doing at work or home in the middle of the day and exclaim out loud some very long and well rhymed speech.

Exposing ones heart. I was thinking this form seen so literally in Shakespeare's play was dead. Perhaps movies express through action more than words what a character is feeling, but in real life we still have that need to explain ourselves and to be heard. Certainly, the reality shows of today thrive on self-expression. Big Brother and The Real World, two of the first, in which people are forced into what become overly dramatised social situations with others and then enter a small room, with only a camera, to talk, essential to themselves, about others, and their thoughts and feelings.

So there we have it. Reality shows are the new Shakespearean plays.

"O horrible, O horrible, most horrible!"