Words by Alan Moore (again) who hates this now. Art by Brian Bolland, who doesn't.
Appropriately, Simon goes Full Shakespeare's thirteenth episode is Titus Andronicus' Act Three, featuring heaps of wailing and gnashing of teeth lightened only by a quick appearance from the most committedly evil character in English literature. There's no way it wasn't going to be knackering but still, I'm sorry my reading's not a bit more lucid, screaming iambic pentameter isn't much fun to watch. "Going mad" is such a staple of literature, and especially horror, you'd be forgiven for thinking it actually happened. Trauma can make a person feel more removed from reality but that's not the same as "going mad", and to his credit "madness" in Shakespeare was, or at last became, a quite specific idea, a liminal place whose inhabitants - those suddenly hit by trauma or depression - would react as if they've suddenly realised they're characters in a play, physically present in a work of fiction, unrecoverable by reality. So Shakespeare found the stage a useful machine for exploring grief, and even the famous tea-towel-adorning "All the World's A Stage" is spoken by a character called "the melancholy Jacques". In Elizabethan medicine, "melancholy" means "manic". It's no more a celebration than "Born In the USA".
Trigger Warnings: More mutilation, a lot of crying, and the death of a fly.
No comments:
Post a Comment