"Zombie Shakespeare" has me fired up (much like Hamlet, Sr.: "My hour is almost come, / When I to sulph’rous and tormenting flames / Must render up myself"...but in a good way!) with ideas about writing and teaching piebald shadings of undeadness, especially through the lens of D&G's BwO, which, as Boyle/Pillai suggest(s), exposes the ghostlier demarcations between the quick and the dead and promises resurrection (if not redemption) via serial afterlives...re- re- re-mediations that form and re-form prosthetic memories and relived experiences of what counts as "Shakespeare-ness"--from the ever-widening gyre of performances of his plays (sheer discontinuous overload of exponential emanations of actors/characters, scenes, speeches, lines, quotable catch-phrases, words...even down to the oscillations of a single actor's pronunciation of a single syllable [e.g., an "O" pronounced woodenly!]...ad infinitum...), to all manner of tourist trappings (reconstructed Stratford, reconstructed Globe; fridge magnets; bobbleheads; etc.), "the man himself." That last one certainly "opens up portals (possibilities) of disorganization": not just documentaries, biographies, portraits, et al., but the very real potential now of ciphering the genetic afterlife of Shakespeare by unburying his DNA...digging the dust enclosed in his grave and cloning the Bard's bones, creating a walking, talking, breathing Shakespeare zombie (“Curs’t be he that moves these bones”). Clearly, Will was already thinking that way (e.g., the emphasis on “immortality” via the relatively new and changing medium of print reiterated throughout the sonnets, plus said pitch-perfect epithet hovering above his bones). I love the silence (once Shatner stops yappin') that fills Boyle/Pillai's montage of Shakespeares etre dans le gaz. The silence eerie and more enlivening than setting the sequence to words or music (like the staticy silence of Peter Brook's LEAR with Paul Scofield)--full of emptiness, a deadness that lives. The silence got me thinking back to the quotes lines that propelled Boyle/Pillai's expansive ruminations... A question of remediation by attention to the medium of poetry, and especially in this case, of performed/spoken poetry. The lines were of course bound to the print medium, imprinted and bound together in the multitudinous print copies/variants of these lines through the past four centuries. But also unbound from the printed page via aural + visual medium of dramatic performance (stage, film, etc.) but also via poetry medium? That is, should we consider the medium-specificity of "poetry" (or, more particularly in this case, "blank verse") as a further form of re-mediating Shakespeare. That is, a working definition of "poetry" as a genre typically more attentive to heightened combinations and collisions of sound and sense. We move from what seems very prosaic dialogue between Hamlet and Hamlet, Sr.'s ghost into seamless blank verse. But even the prose-y back-and-forth between undead father and son scans neatly, though each requires the other to complete the circuit of meter. Poetic rhythm in the lines, the play, Shakespeare's corpus as a "whole" enacting a further call-and-response to the reader/viewer/auditor, performing and re-performing time and again and again the Orphic task of beckoning the other out of the darkness. Poetic rhythm understood here as inarticulate, somatic impulse, evoking parallel movements and affective performance in the “body” (construed as amalgam of physiological pulsings, shiftings, fluidities, overlaps—a form of D&G’s “BwO”) of the reader/auditor/viewer as well as in that of performer speaking (repeating by rote) and enacting (re-enacting) the rhythmic thrall of the written lines. Rhythm as a deadness (inarticulate, ineffable, “sublime” in a verymuchpostKantian sensibility—that is, “sublime” as overwhelming affect that disintegrates borders between subject and outer other, “sublime” as nontranscendent excess) that’s alive (enlivening through its insistent reiterations, its lively impulses). Rhythmic sound undoing, unthinking--viscerally, if momentarily--conscious, "made" sense. Rhythm as "an architecture of absence" (poet Charles Wright), as the music beneath and beyond the words and their meanings: a principle of organization (unrhymed pentameter base), but one that unveils the void of arationality undergirding strict sense, that yields "portals (possibilities) of disorganization." The pentameter thrum of the blank verse structuring said dialogue comes humming along at a somatic level--approximating "HABIT" in Elaine Scarry's understanding. The inarticulate power of the rhythm deeply felt, bodily imprinted, but realized only after the fact. The unconscious force of rhythm-in-the-words, the meter's call to performative affect and interchange between speaker-receiver, is allegorized by the words' content/contexts/meanings, as we work WILLfully, consciously to MARK and RENDER their meanings. What you will. Even if/as my tangential musings misprisioned the point of the post, Boyle's/Pillai's prompt should not suffer. Really fine stuff. Well done!