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I had the reverse experience. The original word play and the pattern of the original speeches is what makes Shakespeare great.
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I never took theatre. We just read the plays in class and on our own, and watched film versions as well. The films usually helped, because it made it easier to guess context ("Oh, I see, that part was supposed to be funny/cruel/whatever") but I just couldn't get through the language itself. Having the jokes explained did wonders.
I don't think we had what I could call an "English class" until 9th grade. At which point we read Midsummer Night's Dream...
I'm not saying that the plays should be studied only in extremely modern translation, I'm just saying that having an extremely modern translation handy made it much easier to access the Shakespearean language. At some point I really should see if I can find versions for Hamlet and Lear, because I'm sure I missed tons of great stuff in both of them.
Urge to kill....RISING
Seriously, OSF is incredible. That Julius Caesar I was talking about upthread was their production last season. I've never lived closer to OSF than 45 minutes east of Portland, but I make a point of getting down there at least every other year.
However, I got a copy of Julius Caesar that I read during homeroom one day, changed it completely.
This is an extremely cool video, even as someone who hasn't read or studied a whole lot of Shakespeare.
I used to feel that way, but I think they have their place. I've got some limited experience teaching Shakespeare, and I've found that it's helpful for many students to just get the bare bones of the plot out of the way in order to facilitate better discussion and better work. I think about 9/10ths of the frustration with Shakespeare really is just people thinking they need to "get it" all at once, and that's an understandable impulse. Even as a grad student, I've used Sparknotes just be to certain I haven't missed some detail, buried deep, that might later be important.
In the Renaissance, it was absolutely not assumed that the majority of the audience would be picking up on every single beat - but that was also a time of incredibly rapid change for the English language, and playwrights reveled in lingual one-upsmanship. In the audience, to have to use your imagination and piece your way through was not an unusual thing. Compared to the early 17th century, we've gotten used to a hell of a lot more stability, and so to allow and even encourage that kind of supplementary material isn't necessarily so much a concession to lazier students as it is a mercy for readers who simply aren't trained to approach language in quite the same way Shakespeare's audience was. This is to say nothing of the enormous difference between reading a play and hearing a play.
Once you're past the business of fretting over the basic issue of plot comprehension, I think you can feel a bit freer to focus on the nuts and bolts of the language and appreciate what it attempts to do. Which in turn is a nice bit of positive reinforcement for a reader who will feel more empowered not to use the training wheels next time.
Thanks, that was great.
For me, this times a million.
I mean, there's making sure people understand the play and then there's hand holding. Half the point of Shakespeare is the language, compare
To
To me, that second one is a travesty.
Shakespeare would be shit if it were written only in the latter style, but I enjoy and follow the former much more after reading the latter. Which was Edd's point.
Oh it does suck for sure, but there you go. The thing's best function is to encourage its own obsolescence.
My favorite part of the school year is pulling out the students who are behavior problems, who do not have the reading or language skills to even begin to follow Romeo and Juliet, and read through the passages one on one.
Me: "Ratcatcher? What the heck catches rats?"
Student: "...uh a cat?"
Me: "Is there any other words you might call a cat?"
Student: "uhh?"
Me: "Look there, he just got in his face and called him the King of Cats"
Student: "Oh... oooh!"
Me: "Dude! He just got called a man-servant, what sort of filth are they allowing us to teach you, children?"
Student: "hahaha"
Me: "Geez, its almost as if Shakespeare was writing about that fight that got you suspended last week... four hundred years ago... how did all that silly nonsense work out in the end?"
For this I love you.
Right, I mean it's not meant to "update" Shakespeare, it's meant to explain what's going on in case you get lost. I think I benefited a lot from having these when I was first reading Shakespeare; the point was that you were supposed to read what Shakespeare actually wrote and then when you hit a point where you were confused you glanced to the right and there was an explanation, and so you could go "Ah that's what that means". When you're young it's easy to get lost as to what's actually happening.
EDIT: It's worth pointing out that when you're reading it, as opposed to watching it, you don't get the context of the actual set and actors.
http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Slings_Arrows/70153368?trkid=2361637
We were talking about this a little earlier, but what other rad performances have we seen?
I saw more than I can clearly remember in the time I spent in England, but a highlight was certainly McKellen's Lear. That show helped me articulate what it means to do Shakespeare well for a modern audience, because McKellen can do something that many actors cannot: Make poetry sound natural, but no less beautiful for it.
I saw Stewart do his Macbeth, and maybe it was just an off night for him, but he had this sort of halting rhythm that I suppose was meant to make the character seem pensive and natural, but it demolished the poetry. Ironically, it was almost Shatnerian.
Edit: Also! Richard III. With puppets.
I feel there is an energy at a theatre you don't get through film or just reading a play. They all different experiences. I have never watched a famous actor in person doing Shakespeare. It has always been local troops. And I have always found the performances much more enjoyable.
Now this doesn't mean you don't get a lot from the movie or reading. But I think some of the confusion can be cleared up when you see it performed live just due to the back and forth an audience.
Oh most definitely. These plays are absolutely meant to be heard. The grammar predates modern punctuation, and so the plays were written such that much of the meaning was dependent upon the pace and inflection of the actor.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=BBC+Shakespeare
Derek Jacobi plays a fabulous Hamlet.
oh my god
For example, if you like King Lear, try Edward Bond's Lear or The Mirror of Her Dreams by Stephen Donaldson.
I guess the most famous is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. The film with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth is marvellous.
I would go quite far with this: If the students have only one choice, I would rather highschool kids watch a movie (Kenneth Branagh's are all good) than just read the text. And I would watch a shitty local production of a play over reading the text too. Reading Shakespeare is on a par with reading the script of Star Wars or Alien and wondering what all the fuss is about.
Read the poems, sure. But watch the plays, even if it's only Baz Luhrmann. It is drama, for god's sake! Watch it!
It's the worst romance he ever wrote? Compare Romeo and Juliet to MacBeth and Lady MacBeth, to the King and Queen in Midsummer Night's Dream... It honestly reads to me more like a parody than anything else. The relationship has no real nuance, and is nothing but heavy-handed pablum. It's just plain bad, and that it's held up by so many as his greatest work boggles my mind.
Well, it isn't a great romance and people who act like it are silly geese.
Think about it this way, before the play starts and right up until he sees Juliet, Romeo is trying to chat up whats her name, Rosaline, and then sees Juiliet and is smitten like a 'tarded kitten.
They're also teenagers.
While this might not have been what the original intent was, I think there's a reason that the plotline gets co-opted by teen angst dramas and comedies all the time.
It's a really dark comedy when you think about it.
Can we talk about other Early Modern dramatists in here, or is this exclusively for Shakespeare?
well i figure we could make it for any artists who redefined how we look at the world.
Yesssssssssssssss!
AARON. Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day- and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse-
Wherein I did not some notorious ill;
As kill a man, or else devise his death;
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it;
Accuse some innocent, and forswear myself;
Set deadly enmity between two friends;
Make poor men's cattle break their necks;
Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' door
Even when their sorrows almost was forgot,
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters
'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly;
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.
"Money tends to corrupt, and lots of money corrupts lotsely" - Me.
I had a Shakespeare professor in college who directed a production of Titus Andronicus as a Tarantino-style black comedy. It was amazing, and I can never take that play seriously again.
I think my other favourite film adaptation would actually be Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, which is based on Macbeth.