Authors Intentions

I don't think shakespeare ever intended for his work to be "reinterpreted". He and his actors were probably more interested in just making sure that everyone could hear what they were saying. Also it is likely with only a few days of rehearsal before a new play was performed that the actors were more interested in learning their lines than bothering to invest any great meanings into it. Shakespeare would then have to help his actors and his audience to understand the emotion of the character and would do this through the use of verse. If the play was good enough to enter into a companies rep, new actors would have been trained to play the roles as whoever they were taking over from would have. As was standard practice in most companies but perhaps most visable in Commedia Dell'Arte. This continued to be standard practice almost until the 1930's. We see it begin to disappear from historical sources about the same time as the rise of the director. I'm not saying for a moment that the writers intention is law and that we musn't deviate from it or find other meanings in it but I find it arrogant in the extreme not to acknowledge in some way the motivation that the playwright had for producing the play in the first place. Also I might point out that if you chooseto ignore my intention in writing this then it was pointless writing it in the first place. Or to interpret Jess ignoring her intention. The statment above assumes that paying strict attention to what the writer of a play wants immediately saps all the fun from it and that fun can't be had with a play where the staging is very strict. That plays that are diliberately ambiguous are also much better plays and that shakespeare is always necessarily filled with double meanings Oh and he also intentionally left it open to interpretation... which I might point out is a paradoxical statement. Then again Heiner Muller did say "If you don't disagree with Brecht in some way, you are betraying him"