Shakespeare was a taurus…

now if you think that’s bull, follow me around with a shovel. This year is shaping up shakey wise. The Globe workshop kicked butt due to 30 mins onstage to close it off. Granted tour groups kept on interrupting us, but hey everybody wants a piece of the magic.

Here’s a little piece on eloquence by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Eloquence.…
shows the power and possibility of man…
The orator is the physician…
There is no true orator who is not a hero…

No act indicates more universal health than eloquence.
The special ingredients of this force are clear perceptions, memory, power of statement, logic, imagination or the skill to clothe your thought in natural images, passion which is the heat, and then a grand will…
But this power which so fascinates and astonishes and commands, is only the exaggeration of a talent which is universal.
All men are competitors in this art.

Eloquence is as natural as swimming,
– an art which all men might learn, though so few do.
The orator must command the whole scale of language, from the most elegant to the most low and vile.
Everyone has felt how superior in force is the language of the street to that of the academy.
The street must be one of his tools.
Ought not the scholar to be able to convey his meaning in terms as short and strong as the porter or truckman uses to convey his?
The speech of the man in the street is invariably strong, nor can you mend it by making it what you call parliamentary.
The power of his speech is, that it is understood by all… but we must come to the main matter, of power of statement,
– know your fact; hug your fact.
For the essential thing is heat, and heat comes of sincerity.
Speak what you know and believe.

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak

-Ralph Waldo Emerson.