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| Blood, Love and Rhetoric? What's up with that? |
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| Well, it's a passage from Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. First, it was an EXCELLENT play. Then, it was a pretty darned good movie. And, I recently read someone (scroll down to the third review, by "Poolman") posit that it was also the ultimate bit of FanFiction ~ you know, taking some throwaway characters from a canon piece of work and writing a story around them, making them a bit more three-dimensional, giving additional facets to the main story, and carrying on with some of its themes. It's a decent argument! The speech is by the Player King, the head of an itinerant troupe of Tragedians, to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as they are on the road to Elsinore (and attempting to figure out how and why). The Player offers R&G some entertainment: Player ...We're more of the blood, love and rhetoric school Guil Well, I'll leave the choice to you.... Player They're hardly divisible, sir ~ well, I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can't do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory ~ they're all blood you see. Guil Is that what people want? Player It's what we do.... It rather recalls a similar interchange from The Gift: Giles (reading) "The blood flows, the gates will open. The gates will close when it flows no more." When Dawn is dead. Xander Why blood? Why Dawn's blood? I mean, why couldn't it be like a, a lymph ritual? Spike 'Cause it's always got to be blood. Xander We're not actually discussing dinner right now. Spike Blood is life, lackbrain. It's what we do.... So, it seemed like a fitting name. And, the more thought I've given it, the more appropriate it seems -- Whedon's a pretty Stoppard-esque kinda guy. Playing with the language, yuk-yuk one minute and the place of man in the universe the next. And, ultimately, his stock and trade is tragedy... Deaths and disclosures, universal and particular, denouements both unexpected and inexorable, transvestite melodrama on all levels including the suggestive. We transport you into a world of intrigue and illusion...clowns, if you like, murderers ~ we can do you ghosts and battles on the skirmish level, heroes, villains, tormented lovers ~ set pieces in the poetic vein; we can do you rapiers or rape or both, by all means, faithless wives and ravished virgins ~ flagrante delicto at a price.... ~ The Player And so, now that I've elevated your expectations far beyond my meagre capability of fulfillment,... |
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