Downfall of culture

[Father Squid]

Originally Posted by Void(null)

Small little piece of history for you. The Scottish Play is the shortest of Shakespeare's works but it was not always so. Back in the 1664 Sir William Davenant made a Musical out of it, with singing and dancing, flying witches and a great deal of spectacle. They cut out much of the dialogue to make room for all the songs and rewrote many of the characters including Lady Macbeth to be more fitting for this adaptation.

Well wouldn't you know the musical version was the only version to survive the passing of history? It wasn't until around 1750 that the Devenant adaptation fell out of favor but by that point the original version of had been lost to the passage of time...so they just cut the songs out of the Devenant version.

And this is how we have the Scotish play that we know and love today.

Really? There are still (at last count) 228 copies of Shakespeare's First Folio (constructed in 1621, printed in 1623) in existence... I'm sure the original can be pulled from there... unless that sneaky Devenant ran around and switched all the pages in those copies.....

[yerkyerk]

Originally Posted by i.n.s.a.n.e

The biggest and the most costy/commercial theaters could live without the grants, but the small ones? They are just dead..And you will see no great stage plays, or the same actors in the biggest theaters, as it is not their style (meant for both sides)..It is not like they live on the grants, but it's a part of their essential budget. If they lose it, they will have to omit something (some plays, actors, sceneries, etc.) as they won't allow it, if they omit things even more they do compared to the greater theaters, less common people will come to see the stage plays there = the theaters will have less money, and will have to end up eventually.

Well, there's the thing, if it can't stand on its own, not enough people take interest in it. Everything works like that; if I like a particular type of food, but it's too costly to produce, almost nobody else wants is and I'm not prepared to donate an excessive amount of money to keep the production of that type of food going, the supermarkets aren't going to offer it - and the state shouldn't subsidize it. It works like this in all segments of the commercial world, I don't see why cultural exhibitions should be any different. After all, if it's subsidized by grants, the entire population pays for it, but only a small part benefits from it.

I'm with Scryer on this one; while you may not like the direction culture is taking, it still is culture. There's no such thing as a downfall of culture from an objective point of view.

[Father Squid]

Originally Posted by Malpheas

You can see the remaining text largely (well not all, of course, because of it's passage in time) in a collection works called the Apocrypha. Now, I don't know the validity of it all, but that's what I recall.

Originally Posted by Llama8

My understanding was that the Council of Nicaea took the various books of the Bible & decided which would & would not be "in" the Bible, the ones being "out" would therefore be heretical, so I'm not quite sure it would be fair to say (or imply, at least that's what I took your post as meaning & appologies if you didn't mean it like that) that the Romans rewrote the Bible. 'Course I wasn't there & I've not exactly made much of a study of that time period (or the Bible), so feel free to completely ignore my post...

I'm not sure if I'd use the word rewrote... but instead go with the word translate...very few of the books of the Bible were written in Latin, so someone had to do a translation and a lot of things get lost as you from one language to the next...Another big translation occurs with the King James version which for years was the most widespread translation of the Bible - but there are a lot of others... And if you think about it, until the next Dead Sea Scrolls are found, which could contain more original text, or Apocryphal books, who knows what has been changed or left out...

[Void(null)]

Originally Posted by Father Squid

Really? There are still (at last count) 228 copies of Shakespeare's First Folio (constructed in 1621, printed in 1623) in existence... I'm sure the original can be pulled from there... unless that sneaky Devenant ran around and switched all the pages in those copies.....

That's the story I was always told. Could just be Theater myth however, we do have so many.