I'm glad I looked up Atë, mentioned in Antony's curse below. Daughter of the goddess Discordia (above) whose golden apple sparked the Trojan War, Atë is the goddess of ruinous mistakes. According to wikipedia she walks upon the heads of men rather than the earth, possibly another mistake, and like the goddess Brigid she also appears a lot online in paintings by artists who like to use all the colours. No spoilers for Act Three, but I enjoy thinking of Mark Antony as a secret Discordian, a nihilist hedonist, like Charles Manson. There was a time I would have tried to play him less nakedly phoney, but people don't really need to believe a man to follow him, they just need him to give them a role, and it's still astonishing to me how good Shakespeare was at nailing this. The inventor of Rory's Story Cubes might also be a secret Discordian, by the way, given the cubes bear not one but both of the goddess' symbols - the apple and the wheel of chaos - handy for today's opening title anyway.
Alternative titles: The Reading of the Will, or "Pardon me, Julius"
No comments:
Post a Comment