Protect me please

摘要

Methinks the world hath suddenly become too protective of our thoughts and emotions recently, but apparently I be mistaken. What we experience now has been building for centuries. Last night, I was attending a performance of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and I was captivated by a scene in which a group of actors were rehearsing their play within the play. The performers determined that their audience would need to be forewarned in a prologue that the swords they planned to use would not be real and that the lion would actually be portrayed by a man, lest the audience become too upset by the play's content culminating in the death of the protagonists. Shakespeare obviously saw humor in the need to qualify the actions of performers in a situation that the audience could not have possibly considered to be authentic.