Re: Instances of Laughter and Humour in the Cassiopaean Transcripts
thorbiorn said:
2002
020223 said:
(R) Can I do some personal thing? It is about my now ex-girlfriend. I'm a little bit worried about her because she is really afraid of the dark and she doesn't want to talk about it really and I'm just really curious what the cause of it is.
A: When it becomes a sufficiently debilitating issue, she will talk about it.
Q: (JN) Is that a polite way of saying it's none of your business?
A: Perhaps the cause is the concern it engenders.
Q: (V) She's creating her own darkness? She's perpetuating her own...(J) Fear of the unknown. (R) Yes. Oh yes. Absolutely. (V) She's doing it to herself. In other words maybe it wasn't something like she was locked in a dark closet when she was a kid. (R) Actually that's what she says. (V) Oh (laughter)! :) (R) That's what she said. I just didn't believe her. It just seems so extreme that...(V) Have you met her parents? (R) Sure. (L) Would they do that? (R) No, no her kid brother locked her...(JN) Yeah I was going to say that sounds like something a brother would do. (V) My brother used to do some crappy stuff to me too (giggling). :) (R) Okay, so he chased her into the bathroom and closed the door and the light switch was on the outside. I was curious if that was really...(V) Yeah but there's more to it than just that. (R) So this seems to say that she perpetuates, she enhances that herself and until it becomes a real problem she'll have it. (L) Well it is a handy thing to have to get sympathy. (J) She's holding onto it for some reason (V) Drama, drama, drama. Very dramatic. It caused you to be dramatic towards her, didn't it? (R) Well, no, it is just, yeah, I always had to...(J) You had to leave the light on. (R) Exactly.
A: Shakespeare said it: Sound and fury signifying nothing.
Q: (L) I think we ought to check the whole quote at some point and see what all he was saying. I'm not a Shakespeare person. (V) From what work is this quote? (L) I just want you all to know I am not a Shakespeare fan so...knock it off (laughter as she speaks this to the board)! :)(V) Can you tell us what Shakespearean work this is from so it can be further...
A: Tempest.
[It's actually from Macbeth:
Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
The Tempest contains the following:
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Which conveys a similar meaning, but in different words. Obviously, the C's are not Shakespeare fans.]
Comment: The use of the word Tempest could in addition be a commentary or continuation of the answer "Sound and fury signifying nothing", since 'a tempest in a teacup' is just that. The quote from The Tempest may describe the person.
Maybe the C's are Shakespeare fans? First they introduce a quote from the Shakespeare play Macbeth, when no question directly relating to Shakespeare was being asked. And then they mention a second Shakespeare play, "The Tempest". Asking which play the first quote came from seems like a classic example of a pointless question to be bothering the C's with, since the correct answer can be so easily determined by our own research. For the C's to have answered with the correct answer, "Macbeth", would have been a waste of their resources and a neglect of our own abilities to research. So if the C's chose to give the name of a different play instead as their answer, why choose the Tempest? One suggestion has already been given above, that the original situation being discussed was like a tempest in a teacup. That is possibly a slightly strained interpretation, as "tempest in a teapot", "storm in a teacup", and variations are not themselves Shakespearean phrases, although The Tempest is the name of one of Shakespeare's plays. [_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_in_a_teapot] While "tempest in a teapot" may be one reason for their answer the Tempest, another one could be that there is something else about the Tempest that relates to the Macbeth quote.
The play "The Tempest" begins with a storm at sea, in which a ship is split apart and wrecked. This storm seems to have quite a bit of "sound and fury", as shown by these quotes:
[[Stage direction:] A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard.]
[. . .]
A plague upon this howling! They are louder than the weather or our office
[. . .]
The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch,
But that the sea, mounting to th' welkin's cheek,
Dashes the fire out.
Is it possible that this last passage could refer to deposits of burning black oily material coming from the sky? Or is just describing the sky as being very black, and the lightning as very excessive? A sky that is just black would not itself be likely to start fires; while lightning in itself could start a fire, but is not black like pitch.)
So if the storm in the first scene of the Tempest has sound and fury, does it also signify nothing? In a way it does, as there is no loss of life, only material loss of the ship. The storm was magically created by
the magician Prospero. His daughter Miranda requests him to calm the waters if he has caused the storm:
If by your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.
Prospero reassures his daughter Miranda that no harm has been done to anyone:
The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touched
The very virtue of compassion in thee,
I have with such provision in mine art
So safely ordered that there is no soul,
No, not so much perdition as an hair
Betid to any creature in the vessel
Which thou heard'st cry, which thou saw'st sink.
[The fourth line of this passage may be a little hard to make sense of. It is generally taken to have the meaning "that there is no soul
lost" or "no soul
perished"; despite the fact that the actual word "lost" or "perished" is not included. Stephen Orgel in his edition for the Oxford Shakespeare describes this omission of a word as: "an anacoluthon. The omitted verb, "perished", is implied in "perdition".]
Admittedly with Shakespeare it is a bit too easy to read many different interpretations into any particular passage, or in particular one's own favoured interpretation into certain selectively chosen passages. I still wonder though if making reference to two of Shakespeare's plays in one session without any particular prompting indicates more that the C's are perhaps Shakespeare fans, rather than that they just made a blunder and gave the wrong Shakespeare play name because they were not Shakespeare fans.
