Musings on Shakespeare as an adult

[velvetpage]

In high school, Shakespeare is generally perceived to be dead boring, the purview of the super-smart geeks of the class. It is read in halting voices, without much real attempt to figure out the imagery or the meter. It's a chore. Even most of the smart kids don't really get it. They get glimmerings of it, and they realize that there's more present than they're actually learning from it, but things still have to be pointed out to them and they still read things several times to figure out what's going on.

Since I didn't do any drama or English lit in university, the last two evenings with friends, reading plays, have been one of my first experiences with Shakespeare off the stage, and as an adult. I've seen several plays during that time - Stratford is not a long drive and the tickets are reasonably priced - but seeing it is different from reading it. You're not going to catch all the language by seeing the play performed. There's just too much of it.

Reading it with friends has been a revelation to me. I still want to go back and read the two plays again, paying more attention to them so that I'm not reading line-by-line most of the time. I often find myself reading the words without fully taking in the meaning until I'm finished - an interesting experience in and of itself, since that's what my students are doing half the time. But when I'm getting it, and the people around me are getting it, I can revel in the power of the storytelling, and how very like high school some of it is.

Take A Midsummer Night's Dream. Girl #1 is supposed to be with guy #1, but is actually in love with guy #2; guy #2 was supposed to be with girl #2, but has fallen hard for Girl #1 instead. So Guy #2 and Girl #1 set up an "I think we're alone now" moment in the deep woods at night. She tells Girl #2, who is of course her absolute best friend complete with two-part necklace and massive phone bill. Girl #2 wants Guy #1, and in a moment of high school spite which she tries hard to justify as "the right thing to do," she tells him where his wandering girl #1 has gotten to. Then she follows.

Then Puck comes in and goofs, making both guys fall for Girl #2. Honestly, that's a nice literary device, but two weeks of regular pressure by peers and hormones at high school would have achieved the same effect. Anyhow, they all wake up, both guys are after Girl #2, and she thinks they're mocking her. Girl #1 wakes up, doesn't get it either, and Girl #2 assumes she's in on the joke at her expense. There follows one of the best chick fights in literature, complete with threats of scratching out eyes and, "You may be stronger, but I'm faster!"

Of course Puck, at Oberon's instruction, sorts it out so that everyone's with the right person. That happens by the end of act four. Act five is devoted to watching the worst play they have access to on their wedding night, and mocking it the whole time. Mind you, it's worthy to be mocked. Where else but in very childish productions do you have people announcing, "I'm the Wall! Mommy, mommy, did you see me? I was the Wall!" I sometimes wonder if the parents who come to see Readers' Theatre performances aren't doing the same thing, if only in their heads.

I love Readers' Theatre, whether with the kids or with my friends. It is amusing, however, to take a very adult-seeming script and discover that it would fit perfectly in junior high school.

Note: sassy_fae played Helena and I played Hermia. I got to scratch her eyes out, and she got to taunt me as she ran away. We had a ball with it.

Comments

[catarzyna.livejournal.com]

I'll have you know when I was 11 I decided to read Hamlet and I understood it. I didn't go ask questions of any adults around. I did have a recording, vinyl to listen to after I read it. Hearing the actor’s inflections while reading it is also helpful.

I've actually been to the festival in Stratford when I was in college. That was a long drive!! Both LA and former SO #1 went too but this was before he was a SO.

I started out an English major and I suppose my compromise was being a member of the English club.

Where I live now we have Shakespeare in the Park and I am going to see if I can finally go. Perhaps I can convince brids_owlwoman to go on a date to see The Winter's Tale. :-)

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

We do it less now but a lot of stuff is more interesting when Dan and I read it to each other. We're more in tune with Greek classical plays though. Still, something about reading them to each other brings out something new and exciting for us. For whatever reason, we do it a lot, mostly with me reading.

Oh there is a local band around here called 'untamed shrews'. Wasn't 10 things I hate about you about Taming of the Shrew?

[catarzyna.livejournal.com]

Wasn't 10 things I hate about you about Taming of the Shrew?

Yup! It was an adaptation. It is one of my guilty pleasure movies. :-)

[purplkat.livejournal.com]

A bunch of friends and I used to get together and read Shakespeare. We'd trade off parts. It was lots of fun.

[bandersnitch.livejournal.com]

There is a very funny highschool take on Midsummer Night's dream in a movie with Kirsten Dunst and Martin Short called "Get Over It (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0192071/)".

Short plays the drama teacher who thinks he is on broadway, and they put on an updated Rocking SummerNights Dream play.

The student actors involved are in a similar love triangle as the characters they play on stage. And the list of supporting cast are all funny in their own way (Tom Hanks son Collin is in this movie too)

Music is catchy and a lot of fun, and overall the movie is a hoot. Its one of my guilty pleasures.

[siobhan63.livejournal.com]

In high school, Shakespeare is generally perceived to be dead boring, the purview of the super-smart geeks of the class. It is read in halting voices, without much real attempt to figure out the imagery or the meter.

So true. Even worse in my case, since i attended a French-language high school, it was read in halting voices with a thick franco-Ontarian accent by students who didn't speak regular English very well. Now /that/ was painful!

[urban-homestead.livejournal.com]

I first got Shakespeare in Grade 6, by a teacher who started us off on Romeo and Juliet, by explaining all the dirty jokes and euphemisms for sexual acts in the first class. She had the full rapt attention of the entire class for the remainder of the term. No one wanted to miss another sixteenth century rude word. I would have to say that the whole boring-Shakespeare phenomenon never happened to me, because to this day, I associate Shakespeare with sex. I would bet all my grade six classmates feel the same way.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Wow. If I did that, I'd get fired. Or at least, censored by the union and the principal and whoever else was called in.

I used to promise my grade eights that if they continued taking French after the requisite grade nine, then in grade 10 the teacher would tell them all the swear words. To the best of my knowledge, it didn't work.

[urban-homestead.livejournal.com]

I can imagine. :)

It did make sense as an approach though. It frustrates me that Shakespeare is generally taught as if it were some kind of wholly cerebral performance for intellectuals. It never was! Shakespeare's plays were vulgar entertainment for the masses. If they aren't taught that way, there's almost no point teaching them at all. If the principals and unions want teachers to inflict boring, impenetrably highbrow writing on students, there's always Michael Ondaatje.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

LOL!

I think, having now read Midsummer Night's Dream for the first time (I've seen it a few times before, but never read it) I would like to see one of the tragedies studied early on - probably Julius Caesar - replaced with that. Taught right, it's just a high school melodrama set in ancient Athens. I can picture a few of my too-cool-to-breathe grade eights from a few years ago, making a good go of Hermia and Helena's chick fight.

[urban-homestead.livejournal.com]

As You Like It is similarly teen-friendly and way fun to do as a playreading night. With bonus cross-dressing!

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I did Twelfth Night in grade nine instead of Julius Caesar. I liked it - there was a lot of back-and-forth on the question of, "Do you think he likes me?" Not one of the great plays, but more teen-friendly by far than any of the others I studied.

[hannahmorgan.livejournal.com]

I know I'm way late on ocommenting on this, but what inspired you to pick up a Shakespeare play and just read it?

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

One of the people involved - nottheterritory - has been involved in staging productions of various plays off and on, mostly in university, and actually played Prospero. We're into roleplaying games of the pencil-and-paper variety (think Dungeons and Dragons) but those take a lot of preparation time for the gamemaster, and none of our prospective gamemasters have much time at the moment. This was a way to get some roleplaying in, in a way that involved very little prep for anybody.