NP Misc. "it's about work"

[alice wellintown]

The Mechanicals are played by/as clown actors; the distinction of
player and worker is not quite clear as they appear in plays within
plays as, for example, that most famous troupe of amateurs in MSND, or
those most famous of all clowns, the grave diggers in Hamlet. That in
comedies and tragedies these meachanicals (a play, certainly on the
monitions of Horace gainst deus ex machina) are given parts too long
and too profound (an irony Shakespeare inserts into Hamlet, as Hamlet
warns against clowns and then is outwitted by an absolute one), as in
Romances, is not lost on the American Romancers who, as they honor the
kingly commons have no need to set the world back on his aristocratic
joint.   Many productions drop one of the grave diggers from Hamlet,
not a good idea as the play on words in this scene is essential to our
understanding of the play. Hamlet's complaint about the lower classes
knocking lawyers about, or stepping hard on the heels of courtiers is
given pause by the dust that stops a bunghole and the skull of one
with infinite jest. Love and Labor were never given a part democratic
though, the mechanics of theatre and the politics of the globe, while
allowed a seat in that distracted renaissance world, were set to play
the Bottom.

On Sat, Dec 25, 2010 at 2:48 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> one Elizabethan word for 'common workman', laborer, late 1500s so rooted in the
> Middle Ages was
>
> a "mechanical"...............Henry VI, part 2
>
> (One can see, perhaps, the etymology in the repetitiousness of hard work)
>
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