The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone. Instead of growing more sensible in death, the inhabitants of the cemetery were sillier than they had been in life.
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Truth? About getting to the marrow of what Shakespeare actually meant? Then get your ass out of those antiseptic black box theaters with their climate control and their MFA-certified pretensions, and plant yourself among the dead.
Shakespeare wasn’t writing for posterity. He was writing for people who knew, really fucking knew, that they were meat on a clock. The plague wasn’t a metaphor. Death wasn’t a theatrical device. It was the guy I drank with last Thursday, now rotting in a pit.
So when Ava’s stumbling through the Fool’s soliloquy with the actual bones of the departed six feet beneath your feet, when the wind cuts through John and makes his voice crack on “That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm” when a crow interrupts his big moment and we all realize nature gives exactly zero fucks about any interpretation of iambic pentameter, that’s when something real starts to happen.
The graveyard doesn’t let you hide. Can’t phone it in. Can’t rely on blocking and lights and the comfortable remove of artifice. You’re out there, exposed, ridiculous, shouting four-hundred-year-old poetry at the sky like some beautiful lunatic, and the dead are your audience, your witnesses, your reminder that all of this, the ambition, the jealousy, the love, the revenge, ends in the same dirt.
That’s not morbid. That’s honest. And we all deserves honesty.