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There's some excellent craftsmanship in modern television, but very few solo performances in the Shakespeare league.
Everything is obvious in retrospect: pythagoras, pennicillin, quantum theory, the jet engine, the D minor fugue (maybe not so obvious - it's still a showstopper!), communism... but the test of genius is "would you have thought of it?" and clearly, millions of people just as intelligent as us, didn't.
Having thought about this a bit more, while differences in speed of thinking are not directly going to limit intelligence (in that you can still get to all the same places by travelling more slowly, provided that you live long enough),
I am not happy about the idea that some people are more intelligent than others. Well, clearly they can be in some cases, but the wide spread of intelligence as measured by IQ tests is highly artificial - it is usually a measure of thinking speed against the clock rather than of fundamental ability, or else it is a measure of how many learned methods of solving problems an individual has learned how to apply.Far more significant is effective intelligence, and that concerns how well or badly people apply their actual intelligence. Many people are unable to apply their intelligence correctly because they are emotionally attached to incorrect beliefs which get in the way of their thinking. In other cases they aren't so emotionally attached to incorrect beliefs, but simply never take the trouble to check to see if there are errors there at deeper levels in their model of reality, so they can spend their entire lives building all manner of intelligent ideas upon a faulty foundation that leads to all their brilliant work being wrong.
I will read Henry VIII next then. I assume the great quality is there in the text somewhere and isn't merely added to it by brilliant actors.
I thought this article was kind of interesting, even though there are lots of valid criticisms of both IQ tests and personality tests. Never the less, I was surprised at some of the things that did and didn't correlate with IQ, or even negatively correlated. Primarily, various aspects of "openess of experience" were the most significant correlates, which I think is compatible with what you say above. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2014/04/21/how-does-iq-relate-to-personality/
Quote from: David Cooper on 17/05/2014 19:37:21I will read Henry VIII next then. I assume the great quality is there in the text somewhere and isn't merely added to it by brilliant actors.It wasn't written to be read! It was written for professional actors on an open stage. You might as well read the Beatles' sheet music and conclude that it's just a lot of dots on paper, or stare at the plans for a racing car or the choreography of a boxing match. Some things need to be done by professionals, in context, if they are to be entertaining.
So I'm right then - it isn't in the text, but in the performance, and the performance is coloured by the beliefs of the performers and determines their level of enthusiasm, and their enthusiasm is then picked up by the audience who are also in the mood to be inspired because of the name of the writer of the play.
So, the thing to do now is try to devise an experiment (or set of experiments) to put this to the test. I will work on this when I have more time, but it should be fascinating to see what the results say. What I have in mind is to write a new play with the same name as one of Shakespeare's (though with a very different plot) and then create a second version of the fake play modified until it's as dull and plodding as the real thing. The three versions will then be used in the experiments.
Quote from: David Cooper on 18/05/2014 20:17:08So I'm right then - it isn't in the text, but in the performance, and the performance is coloured by the beliefs of the performers and determines their level of enthusiasm, and their enthusiasm is then picked up by the audience who are also in the mood to be inspired because of the name of the writer of the play. No, you are wrong. Shakespeare's plays were written for an audience who had never heard of him, and mostly went to the theatre to get drunk and pick up prostitutes. Seen in that context, they are remarkable for the depth and breadth of character, their initial popularity, and their pungent use of language in coining phrases that remain in everyday use.
The performance, however good, is nothing without the writing: a dozen professional musicians won't produce the Royal Fireworks unless they have the score in front of them, and very few non-musicians can "get" the music just by looking at the score. By your measure, Handel was just a bloke who put dots on paper, but I think you'll agree that it's a damn good piece of music and very few composers have done any better. That said, a crap performance of the Royal Fireworks, or an inappropriate one (say in a lift) won't make many people recognise the genius behind it - it's just noise.