Please tell me if these footnotes are out of order or I've forgotten one.
1. 'transpose them into modern settings'; a practice which, quite frankly, gets this editor's panties in a bunch. Whether it's a production of Shakesspear or Sophocles, today's theater-gor must live in dred of walking into a theater and discovering that some classic work has been giben a modernized, socially relevant setting. Oedipus gouges his eyes with a spoon at a 1950's malt shop; Macbeth napalms Banquo in Viet Nam, Julius Caesar dies in Dallas in 1963. More and more, American theater is coming to resemble a season of Quantum Leap. Oooo, it makes me angry!
2. 'Ladies and gentlemen...agrarian race'; don't bother reading that sentence over again. It's covering costume change and is absolutely meaningless.
3.'Ood ebeie mubba'; it is fairly well accepted among scholars that what Lavinia intends to say in this line is:
My bloody
mater, vouchsafe our revenge
Upon
this vile and decrepit worm
Shall
rock the heavens and unleash the clouds
To pour
upon his head this horrid justice!
However, because her tongur has been chopped out, what she actually says is:
Ood ebeie mubba.
4. 'hateful liquor'; most scholars, this editor included, are confuse by the notion of unpleasant alcoholib beverages.
5. 'head be baked'; baking human heads into meat pies was in fact a contemporary English, not a Roman practice. Although the culinary technique was dis continued in the mid - 1980s, it has left a liguistic mark: even today, we like to call English people 'pasty-faced'
6. 'bone appetit';
this is widly acknowledged by modern scholars to be absolutely the worst
joke in the entire reading.