Golden Ages and Pavements

There are two jumping-off points for today's intertwined musings. No, three – only the third is a concert I mean to go to in the future (next Friday  at the time of writing) , and is just a happy coincidence anyway. It is a concert given by my choir's Musical Director, who also directs (and founded) the group Siglo de Oro. The coincidence will become clear in the fullness of time.

The two are:

• An interview with the singer of  the Eagles of Death. He was saying that he wanted to perform at the reopening of the Bataclan. 
• An old Archive on Four programme, repeated last Saturday on Radio Four Extra

The first of these made me wonder how they [the band]  would start. It would be missing a trick not to resume where they had left off when the infamous killing-spree started – perhaps even in mid-song. This reminded me of a story I heard in a half-remembered lecture, about Juan del Encina.

<autobiographical_note date_range="1971-1972">

Juan del Encina

In May 1972 I was ... not quite a world authority on sixteenth-century Spanish literature, but Professor E. M. Wilson, my lecturer for that year, was. 

Juan del Encina, author of some of the seminal works in Spanish Golden Age literature, was arrested by the Holy Inquisition in the middle of a lecture. He was away for some considerable time (years, I think, but I was never much of a note-taker; I'm sure the details are somewhere on the Internet, if you‘re that way inclined).  

When he returned, his opening words were Dicebamus hesterno  die [="{As} we were saying the other day"].

<digression>
It was partly because of Professor Wilson's specialism (he had just contributed the chapter on Calderón to the standard work on Golden Age Literature first published in 1971) that the Hispanic Society chose the play mentioned here.
</digression>

</autobiographical_note>

Now for the second of those blogogenic seeds. To quote Wikipedia:

 ...Vox populi, vox Dei /vɒks ˈpɒpjuːlɪ ˌvɒks ˈdɛɪ/, "The voice of the people [is] the voice of God", is an old proverb often erroneously attributed to William of Malmesbury in the twelfth century.

(I can't say I'm entirely happy about that /ˈpɒpjuːlɪ/, but that's neither here nor there,) The work  saying 's author is anonymous, but pre-dates William of Malmesbury by centuries. And the sentiment is self-evidently ridiculous.

<digression>

It's not unlike other sayings, such as The customer is always right ([which whenever I've worked in retail...

<meta_digression possibility="0">
No, too boring. Except for the broad beans. Maybe another time.
</meta_digression>

... is emphatically not believed by the staff], that make a clear and radical statement that is manifestly untrue. 

</digression>

Part of this saying has been used to refer to the sort of interview discussed in that Archive on Four programme – vox pop. I just heard a vox pop on the radio news, featuring opinions on whether the UK should bomb Syria. The interviewer asked someone who was strongly in favour 'Will it do any good?' And, scarcely credibly, the response was "WELL IT CAN'T DO ANY HARM." ... vox Dei? Perhaps he doesn't fully understand the concept of bombing.

In France, the word for a vox pop makes no such claim. But it does, by chance, recall a trick I've noticed in other vox pops. At the end, after the interviewer's piece to camera, the camera often pans down to the pavement to show the feet walking away [in the equivalent of cowboys riding off into the sunset]. It signifies That's all folks. (I have a researcher working on this; her fairly recent lecture notes from a Media Studies degree may give this observation some authoritative backing. Maybe, though, this recurrent camera trick is just favoured by BBC South's news editor[s].)

And that pavement is suggested also in the French micro-trottoir [="microphone-pavement", not "little pavement", SILLY].

In the USA, there is another term.

... broadcast journalists almost always refer to them as the abbreviated vox pop....In U.S. broadcast journalism it is often referred to as a man on the street interview or M.O.T.S 

More

'Professional videographer, editor, and media professor David Burns', in this YouTube clip uses the PC version 'person on the street'  – maybe he's worried about tenure.

I wonder whether this 'on the street' influenced the French coining, in an attempt to avoid the borrowing of an Anglo-Saxon term (a pre-echo of La <<loi Toubon>>?).

b

PS
One other coincidence doesn't really count, as – although my choir is singing the song (an anonymous Siglo de Oro song) at the Christmas concert –  I shall be unable to join them. This is because of the traditional annual clash between my choir's Christmas concert and my daughter's windband's Christmas concert.

Update 2015.11.30.21:05 –  Misplaced para: sorry. 

Update 2015.12.03.08:50 –  A few corrections/clarifications, and added this crossword clue:

Spooner gave an uppercut to playwright for this factor in Winter's Tale. (4,5)

Update 2016.04.19..18:35 –  Crossword answer (at last) and deleted obsolete footer.

Time‘s up: WIND CHILL (not bad. TISIAS )

Methinks the Dane doth not protest enough

The other morning, in a piece about Benedict Cumberbatch, the presenter said that the role of Hamlet had more lines in it than any other tragic hero. He may have said 'than any other Shakespearean hero', in which case I beg his pardon. But the claim recalled for me my first – and only – appearance on stage in a serious vein. Thereafter, throughout the 1970s, my aim on stage was to make 'em laugh.

<autobiographical_note date_range="1971-1972" theme="Segismundo">
In my first year I was recruited by the Cambridge University Hispanic Society ...

<disclaimer>
That site traces the Society's doings since the year 2000. I haven't been able to track down anything that keeps records for a further 30 years back...
<disclaimer>

... to act in a performance of a play by  Pedro Calderón de la Barca ...

<pronunciation_tip>
Football fans, particularly supporters of Barcelona, should note that the last part of that name has a [k] in it.
</pronunciation_tip>

...who lived from 1600 to 1681, born when Shakespeare was in his teens and outliving him by just over 65 years. 

At the time it was the custom for  the Society to stage a play in Spanish, with a fairly captive audience of A-Level students on school trips  (the play selected was always on the current A-level syllabus).

<digression>
I doubt if this would be possible now. There has been a marked decline in Modern Languages places in HE, and it would be reasonable to assume (^{Stop Press} YUP) there was a similar decline in schools (especially since the incredibly short-sighted decision to make Modern Languages optional in Year 10 (or whatever it's called now). In any case, this sort of jaunt (school trips to the theatre) is, I fear, some of the low-hanging fruit likely to be the first to go in the bean-counters' frenzy of belt-tightening.
</digression>

The play, known in English as Life is a dream, deals with ... 

<disclaimer> 

I was cast because of my size (big) rather than my command of Spanish (negligible, at the time), so my memory of plot details  is not great. If anyone would like to check the text, try here. 

</disclaimer> 

... a prince who was too big as a baby for his mother to survive the birth, so – fearing an ill omen – his father locked him in a tower (as they used to do in those days). Then, for some reason, a sleeping draught comes into it 

Made of opium superadded
To the poppy and the henbane

, and the prince  awakens  in his princely state. He runs amuck, drunk with power,.. ...another dose of sleeping draught... awakes back in durance vile., thinks he's a butterfly or something....yadda  yadda yadda.

<autobiographical_note>

Anyway, the point is, as I remember it (our director may have cut it that way) he is scarcely off the stage for three or four hours – depending on how much  is cut. And I wonder how the size of this part [some of which I can still quote] would compare with Hamlet's.

Later the same day, Mr Cumberbatch was in the news again, "pleading" with fans, to quote the CNN piece, not to film while he‘s on stage. A BBC report said  that this new version of "the Danish Play" {sorry, wrong superstition} was aimed at a new audience – people more used to going to rock concerts where there was a long tradition of bootleg taping.

The word bootleg introduces an air of petty criminality. The word has an interesting background, referring to purveyors of illicit liquor, secreting bottles in  the top of their wide-necked boots – think of a leading boy. As Etymoline says

 ...As an adjective in reference to illegal liquor, 1889, American English slang, from the trick of concealing a flask of liquor down the leg of a high boot...

<potential_digression>
Hmmm. Pantomime... Hamlet.... nope, no time.
</potential_digression>

This idea of illicitness raises the idea of breach of copyright, a hot button for that new audience, brought up with the expectation that whatever‘s online should be free. There are people who can‘t see an Intellectual Property Right without trying to breach it.  The Internet is the Wild West of the 20th and 21st centuries.

But complaining about the legality of it – which I don‘t think Cumberbatch did, though many artistes do – misses the point. In live theatre there is an  unspoken deal between the actor and the audience: You pretend I'm a Danish prince havering about avenging my father's murder, and I'll pretend you‘re not there.

Then along comes a child of the Internet brandishing an iPhone and shatters the illusion. I can't imagine exactly what goes on in an actor's imagination to maintain their side of this delicate contract of mutual willing disbelief, but I'm pretty sure buzzes and clicks and red lights don't help.

On the other hand, one shouldn't be too precious. The groundlings at Shakespeare's Globe  didn't observe the hushed niceties of a well-behaved 21st-century West End theatre audience. They shuffled aboutperambulated,  peeled  and atepartook of applespears, picked pockets, peed... They really were a mobile vulgus (or to use its modern abbreviation "mob") – they MOVED. But those Elizabethan audiences were better at making believe.

This isn't just a case of modern theatre etiquette though. Anyone who tries (pointlessly, in view of the technical shortcomings of the results) to film a live theatre performance makes it harder (I'd say impossible, but actors may be different) to maintain the actors' half of the bargain, diminishing it the experience for everyone:

ASK NOT FOR WHOM THE TWAT TWEETS... 

I just used the word "pointlessly"; but maybe I'm missing the point. The object of posting these things to YouTube or Instagram or Facebook or whatever is not to record the performance but to record  an instant in the poster's timeline (or life, to use a rather old-fashioned word). Such posts are the 21st-century equivalent of graffiti: "Kilroy was here", "I saw Cumberbatch's Hamlet[, cool  or what?]"

ASK NOT WHEREFORE THE TWAT TWEETS,

HE TWEETS FOR'S SELF

b
Update 2015.08.17.16:00 – A few alliterative tweaks in  the antePenultimate para. and clarificatory tweak in the penultimate para.

Update 2026.06.02.19:10 – Deleted old footer.