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Showing posts from March, 2016

Guest Blog: We've all got it coming

Guest Blog: We've all got it coming by Brian Staveley Sophocles and Aeschylus didn’t worry about spoilers. In part, of course, this was because classical Athenians had been too busy tinkering with their triremes to invent Twitter or Facebook, but even if young Themistocles had rushed into the agora immediately following a performance screaming, “Clytemnestra and Aegisthus killed Agamemnon!” his fellow citizens wouldn’t have much cared. They already knew who killed Agamemnon. The drive-by spoiler, a la Harry Potter, was impossible in antiquity. Likewise, if you were an Elizabethan showing up to the Globe to see Richard III , you could be pretty sure that the eponymous character wouldn’t end the play by leaping into his convertible, cranking Dire Straits on the radio, and driving off into the sunset. Richard was always going to die. The question, for those original audiences, was not whether but how .   Modern storytelling, particularly the m