The Glass Onion

That's the title of an okay-to-decent Beatles tune, but also kind of refers to the project we now find ourselves beginning that looks at this idea of Layers. The song appears on the White Album and refers to a half dozen other Beatles songs; giving it not only an ironic distance, but making it pretty darned layered.

Okay, so not the deepest thing to begin with, but it's the Beatles!

Let's think about this again...and again. Let's complicate things here. What we are talking about here is developing an idea so that it has more layers of meaning than what you see initially.

The example I used in class was Shakespeare who made sure his plays were thick with drama and comedy, but also addressed much heavier issues of life and death. The British playwright Tom Stoppard wrote a terrific play that is centered on two character's from Shakespeare's Hamlet titled "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead". These two characters are in Hamlet only briefly (invited by Hamlet's mother to cheer up the depressed Hamlet) and both characters die offstage later. Stoppard's play takes place backstage of the Shakespeare drama. It's interesting, you see, because there is already a play within the play that occurs when Hamlet has actors put on a play about a king being murdered by his queen. Can you believe the layers here? Anyway, here's a clip from the movie version of Stoppard's play, it is the scene of the play within a play:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkvpDErv8n0&translated=1

You can find anything on YouTube...