Misaimed Fandom/Theatre: Difference between revisions

** Not made better by the [[What Do You Mean It's Not for Kids?|disturbing amount of teenagers who have seen the film]] version, and do the same things fans of the musical do, except amped up to 11 because of Johnny Depp.

* [[The Zeroth Law of Trope Examples|Of course]], [[William Shakespeare]]'s works have attracted a [[Misaimed Fandom]]:

** Falstaff, a lazy fat drunk whose main purpose in the ''[[Henry IV]]'' trilogy was to show how dissipated Prince Hal really was, became so popular that Shakespeare was asked by Elizabeth I to write a comedy around him.

** Take a close look at Shylock in ''[[The Merchant of Venice]].'' An anti-Semitic caricature, or a tragic satire thereof? The characterisation of Shylock is [[Fair for Its Day|just interestingly complicated enough]] (unlike the totally monstrous caricature in ''The Jew of Malta'', for example) that it allows modern readers to re-interpret the anti-Semitism that undoubtedly was originally in the play and recast the whole thing around Shylock. Most modern productions do some editing, for instance omitting Shylock being forced to convert at the end.

** The "All the world's a stage" monologue from [[As You Like It]] has its own entire [[Misaimed Fandom]]. Jaques, the character that delivers it, is very specifically not a character that is supposed to be taken seriously.

** Same thing for "To thine own self be true" from ''[[Hamlet]]''. Though it IS good advice, only those who have bothered reading the play will remember that when uttered by the scheming Polonius, it's a source of verbal irony.

** Also, [[Macbeth]]'s "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech is a favorite of many [[Nietzsche Wannabe|Nietzsche Wannabes]] who don't realize Shakespeare used it to show how twisted and desperate the protagonist has become.

** From ''[[Twelfth Night]]'': "Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them." Some people take this quote seriously, rather than a load of crap fed to a stuck-up jerk to get him to make a fool of himself.

* In the mid-1800s, the people of Northern Italy (who at the time were under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) came to consider Giuseppe Verdi's opera ''Nabucco'' (specifically the chorus piece ''Va Pensiero'') as a manifesto in favour of Italian unification. It was nothing of the sort.

** ''Va pensiero'' is still considered an unofficial national anthem of Italy. One has to recall that in the 1800s messages had to be hidden, often quite deeply, to go under the political censors' radar, and that Verdi owed part of his early popularity to the fact that his name could be used as an acronym, allowing people to cheer "Viva Verdi!" = "Viva '''V'''ittorio '''E'''manuele, '''r'''e '''d''' ' '''I'''talia!" (Long live Victor Emanuel, king of Italy).

* In the original production of Tennessee Williams' ''[[A Streetcar Named Desire]]'', Marlon Brando's depiction of Stanley Kowalski ended up making Kowalski more sympathetic, even though he was a wife-beating rapist. Williams ended up revising the play to give Kowalski a bigger role and to make him a more complex character.

* Nazi and Neo-Nazi Wagner fans. Wagner was indeed anti-Semitic, but believed that Jews should assimilate culturally and convert to Christianity, not that they should be wiped off the face of the Earth. He had a number of Jewish friends, including conductors of his operas. But the association of Wagner with Nazism has become so ubiquitous that some people who [[Did Not Do the Research]] think Wagner actually ''was'' a Nazi, despite the fact that he died before Hitler was even ''born.'' It doesn't help that Hitler himself saw Wagner's operas as ringing endorsements of Nazism, and that many of Wagner's descendants from that time were close friends of Hitler and approved of his interpretation.

** "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" already suffers from [[Misaimed Fandom]] by ''actual'' Neo-Nazis.

* In [[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]]'s version of ''[[Faust]]'', there's a scene in the restaurant "Auerbach's Cellar" where Faust and Mephistopheles meet a group of drunken students. One of them states "I praise my Leipzig! It's a little Paris and educates its people." Later used verbatim by many fans of the city in Saxony; however, they all forget that the guy saying this is drunken, as said, and also named "Bürger Frosch" (citizen frog), and rather supposed to be a [[Jerkass]] like [[Archie Bunker]]. Oh wait, Bunker actually had the same problem.

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[[Category:Theater]]