Ariel has begun to express an interest in Shakespeare, and Kathleen and I decided to fan the flame of interest before the public school teaching methods of the Bard extinguish it instead. Don’t get me wrong; I’m positive there are teachers out there who are capable of making Shakespeare attractive to young minds. It’s just that I personally never encountered any growing up. All too often, teaching Shakespeare consisted of hearing students essaying the text aloud with often painful consequences, followed by extensive vocabularly quizzes. The result is that the story itself would be utterly lost, except the story was kind of the whole point of the play in the first place.
So last evening we began a three-way reading of “The Tempest.” We divided up the parts, and to make life simple, Ariel is reading every part beginning with the letter “A”…including, naturally, “Ariel.” The hysterical thing is that she made the acting choice of reading “Ariel”–not as a sprite in servitude–but as an annoyed teenager who’s been grounded and is being constantly lectured. When Prospero says, “Dost thou forget from what a torment I did free thee?” Ariel rolled her eyes and groaned in an annoyed here-we-go-again tone, “Noooooo.”
Also of interest is a section of the introduction (unsigned, but presumably written by Penguin edition editor Peter Holland) that, in two paragraphs, puts forward a sweeping argument in the face of all those who claim that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays. Since it’s only a small portion of a much larger essay, I think reproducing it here falls under fair use. But I’m putting it in the extended section so as not to unnecessarily lengthen the blog entry.
In discussing those who put forward the notion that the plays were written by Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere, seventeenth earl of Oxford, Holland writes:
“The Baconians, the Oxfordians, and supporters of other candidates have one trait in common–they are snobs. Every pro-Bacon or pro-Oxford tract sooner or later claims that the historical William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon could not have written the plays because he could not have had the training, the university education, the experience, and indeed the magination or background their author supposedly possessed. Only a learned genius like Bacon or an aristocrat like Oxford could have written such fine plays. (As it happens, lucky male children of the middle class had access to better education than most aristocrats in Elizabethan England–and Oxford was not particularly well educated.) Shakespeare received in the Stratford grammar school a formal education that would daunt many college graduates today; and popular rival playwrights such as the very learned Ben Johnson and George Chapman, both of whom also lacked university training, achieved great artistic success, without being taken as Bacon or Oxford.
“Besides snobbery, one other quality characterizes the authorship controversy: lack of evidence. A great deal of testimony from Shakespeare’s time shows that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays and that his contemporaries recognized them as distinctive and distinctly superior…Since that testimony comes from Shakespeare’s enemies and theatrical competitors as well as from his co-workers and from the Elizabethan equivalent of literary journalists, it seems unlikely that, if any one of these sources had known he was a fraud, they would have failed to record that fact.”
Works for me.
PAD
• 
I always remember liking Shakespeare (my favorite is still Julius Caesar) despite my teachers; that’s probably why I didn’t really become all that interested until I was a few years from having it formally tought.
I think that’s true with all literature though – nothing sucks the joy out of reading more than having it assigned to you. The books I remember enjoying despite their being assigned are, I think without exception books I read BEFORE they were ever assigned.
I don’t know if it’s a fundamental flaw in the way reading is taught or if there’s simply no way around the Catch-22. Or maybe some people have gotten turned on to a writer or book after having it assigned. I just remember finding every English class drudgery and – through considerable effort – managed to get out of them in college, much to my delight.
Wow, an excellent characterization decision! mad props to Ariel… whatever props are…
Ben, you’re dead-on. Personally, I found Shakespear attractive after getting a part a Brutus, and finding out about the plot. The words came quickly once I grasped what was going on. And plays are meant to be staged, so the actions that accompany them bring them to life as much as the words on the page. As PAD indicated, the eyeroll added to the understanding and interpretation. I think that, aside from the “olde” language, having to read but not act or see these plays performed is what really kills them for some people.
Chris
PAD,
When I took a Billy Shakespeare course in college, I developed the following procedure for understanding the play. First, I would read a summary of the story in Masterplots, then I would watch a videotape of the play. Many libraries carry videotapes of Shakespeare productions (in fact, I happened to get a videotape of the Tempest from my local library a few years ago and noted that Nicholas “Spider-Man” Hammond was among the cast).
But I diverge from my point.
Anyway, I would read the plot summary, then watch the play, so I’d understand, visually, what was happening. Then, I’d read the actual play itself. Doing it that way helped retain information as well as understand better what was happening. Ariel might find that procedure helpful for her as well.
Of course, I’d been exposed to Shakespeare before college. In fact, my sixth grade class performed “MacBeth.”, but hadn’t taken a course devoted to the Bard before that. I remember reading Hamlet in high school, but don’t recall seeing the play at the same time.
I agree that simply reading the text aloud and quizzing students on the vocabulary is not the best way to go. Plays are meant to be seen, not just read.
You might also want to show her the Kenneth Branagh Hamlet and Ian McKellen Richard III movies, both of which were set in the near past (C. 1910s and early 1930s, respectively), to show her that Shakespeare can be done in modern, or near modern, dress. Many people seem to think that since Shakespeare wrote the plays several hundred years ago, all subsequent productions should have the cast dressed in Elizabethan and Jacobean attire. They seem to forget that the original actors dressed that way because they were in contemporary clothing.
Rick
P.S. Perhaps you remember when Mr. Peabody and Sherman visited Shakespeare in the WABAC Machine. Seems our buddy Billy was having some trouble getting started in his career, and among other things, had to contend with an adversary:
Shakespeare: “Bacon!”
Bacon: (throwing food at the Bard) “WIth eggs!”
A few more movies inspired, to one degree or another, by the Bard:
Forbidden Planet (The Tempest)
Ran (King Lear)
Throne of Blood (Macbeth)
Scotland.PA (Macbeth)
(I wish Kurosawa had made a samurai movie based of Richard III. Seems a natural.)
I remember getting into an argument with my ex-wife about how a Shakespear comics adaptation I was reading was, in fact, closer to the actual way Shakespear was meant to be experienced than just reading the plays were. As was usually the case I lost the argument despite the advantage of being, you know, right.
I remember being annoyed with an issue of Next Men where Byrne credited a line from Shakespeare to another writer, because he believed that writer was the true author. Wish I could remember who he credited it to…
MH
Shakespeare was almost ruined for me by my 9th grade teacher, who, upon seeing that I was reading “Hamlet,” promptly began to yell at me, because she had not “shown [me] how to read Shakespeare” yet.
Thankfully, my mom (a theatre major in college and a Shakespeare nut) didn’t let me just put it down to please the old crone who was teaching me english that year; instead, she helped me write my next essay (which was on international drug trade) in iambic pentameter, just to spite my teacher.
After that, my teacher never questioned my ability to read anything ever again.
And I scored an ‘A’ on the essay–the only ‘A’ I got that year. Go figure.
-eD
MACBETH
If only for a hilariously clever (A+) essay written by an acquaintance in high school. Gods, I wish I’d kept a copy. In it, he had a trial whereby the jury wound up acquitting Lady Macbeth and finding someone else (I forget who, exactly) guilty of the King’s murder.
I always hated it when high school teachers would insist in ‘interpreting’ everything to death in Shakespeare’s works.
Once I became tired of it and, on a test, answered a ‘explain the meaning of…’ test question with a two-page rant about people trying to squeeze extra information out of what’s not there. The teacher gave me a B+ for that essay.
I love Shakespeare, and honestly even though I just finished a course here at school on it in which the prof was dreadfully boring and I really didn’t learn anything at all, my opinion hasn’t changed.
However – I’m glad you’re working with her about it in better ways! Shakespeare’s awesome.
The problem they have in schools is that they don’t understand that Shakespeare should be heard rather than read (and I don’t mean in class).
I’ve always like the Zeferrilli interpretations. I’ve also got a tape of Julius Caeser with Marlon Brando as Mark Antony and James Mason as Brutus.
One last film recommendation. “The Complete works of William Shakespeare (abridged).” The more you know, the more you’ll laugh.
shakespeare isnt the only writer with that problem…
i went back and read the Great Gatsby and loved it when i found i could just relax and enjoy it.
tempted to go try “Grapes of Wrath,” but “Sound and the Fury”….well thats NEVER gonna happen.
By the time I was in high school it often seemed like the only reason the plays were read out-loud was because the teachers were afraid that no-one was reading them at home. Even at Bronx Science, we had a lot of distruptive students.
However, in my senior year, we were given Hamlet. The most creative assignement with it was to go to the public library and research an issue related to a character in the play, as there had been much scholarly publication on characters in Hamlet. It was a good way to understand character movitation in more depth (students presented their findings, if I recall, in addition to handing a paper), and a cool introduction into academic research. Only a good public library or academic library with a large collection would have what we needed, so we were also “forced” to go farther afield than usually to complete the assignment.
And if you’re curious, I picked Polonius and found much to my surprise that most of the sayings he said ((that some modern people only attribute to being “written by” Shakespeare)) were actually a collection of hackneyed saying of the pseudo intelligensa at the time. This was a great object lesson on the matter of checking your secondary sources against each other. Too many people today, will take Shakespearian dialog as something completely brillaint to itself, and not know if Shakespeare was being humorous or satarizing by quoting or para-quoting others.
That said, his meter (poetry), characterization and storytelling were quite excellent and effective. And yes, he didn’t invent the idea of plays, either, or mythology… but as they say at the library of congress — it is the treatment of the idea in a form, not the idea or the form itself that makes a work original or unique.
1. Bravo, Mr Holland! In the end, though I think that Shakespeare (whoever he was) wrote Shakespeare, adn that is all that matters.
2. OK, putting on amateur scenes of Macbeth and Hamlet is rather trite, but it worked for me in high school. My teacher did get me interested, though my professor for Shakespeare in college was so pedantic and pedestrian that he nearly ended that.
3. There is no better place in America to stoke Shakespearean fire than NYC. I saw the final performance of the combined Henry IV with Kevin Kline as Falstaff, and wish I had the cash to see Christopher Plummer as King Lear. But everyone with a morning to spare can see Shakespeare in the Park for free every summer, and that is great way to introduce tweens and teens to the Bard, even if the productions are very erratic.
“The Baconians, the Oxfordians, and supporters of other candidates have one trait in common–they are snobs.”
Ad hominem argument, anyone?
As it happens, Peter Holland is wrong right out of the gate. There are plenty of people on the Oxfordian side of the authorship question who are motivated by anything but snobbery. I’ve seen lots of interesting arguments from both Stratfordians and Oxfordians, and from what I can see, the question is anything but settled.
“I remember being annoyed with an issue of Next Men where Byrne credited a line from Shakespeare to another writer, because he believed that writer was the true author. Wish I could remember who he credited it to…”
Edward DeVere, Earl of Oxford. Byrne’s crediting of DeVere was a tad strange, to put it kindly. That said, there are some very compelling arguments in favor of an Oxfordian point of view when it comes to the authorship question.
Somebody once wrote a version of “Hamlet” where the true murderer was revealed by Scooby-Doo and the gang.
Some columnist ran it when he had a pressing deadline. I’m trying to remember who…. 😉
On a digressive note, anyone who has an affection for (1) Shakespeare’s melancholy Dane (and other characters) and (2) those old text-only computer adventure games just has to take a look at this site:
http://www.robinjohnson.f9.co.uk/adventure/hamlet.html
It is, IMHO, inspired fun.
Good for you!
Realizing that I enjoy Shakespeare in spite of how I was taught, I started thinking about how to get kids more interested in Shakespeare. IMO, the best way would be to start with the comedies, such as Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Teach a bit about the time-period so they can identify the references (Elizabethan and Jacobean court politics are like soap operas anyway) and the period slang so they get the in-jokes and the wordplay. [Any mention of horns (and there are a lot) probably refers to cuckoldry, and Ganymede (the name Rosalind assumes when disguising herself as a boy in As You Like It) is a term meaning “gay man”.] Shakespeare for Dummies is surprisingly good at this.
The other option would be to treat Shakespeare as forbidden fruit — “you’re not old enough to understand this” — and give kids the subversive thrill of self-discovery…
>>Wow, an excellent characterization decision! mad props to Ariel… whatever props are… <<
‘Props’ is short for ‘propers’, a term that goes ( at least ) as far back as Aretha Franklin’s “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” ( ! ) .
Hooper
Howdy,
Ben sez:
“I don’t know if it’s a fundamental flaw in the way reading is taught or if there’s simply no way around the Catch-22. Or maybe some people have gotten turned on to a writer or book after having it assigned.”
Oddly enough, I was assigned _Catch-22_ in high school to read and absolutely adored it. If anything, I think I enjoyed it less when I re-read it a few years ago. Then again, I think I had particularly good English teachers throughout my formative years, which is why I’m still a reader today.
Anybody here read Jasper Fforde’s _The Eyre Affair_? One of the throwaway bits is that the whole “Did Shakespeare write his own plays?” question is discussed amongst the general populace in the same way and with the same fervor that we reserve for, say, the Kennedy assassination. Fun book in general.
Last thing I want to contribute is a hilarious bit I saw once on _Reading Rainbow_. LeVar Burton walked into a library, where Kermit the Frog was borrowing a bunch of books for “a friend.” All of them were existing books, but with pig-oriented replacements where appropriate (“The Hogs of War,” only much funnier). Finally, Kermit says, “And then we have drama.”
LeVar picks up the next book. “Hamlet.” He flips through it. “I didn’t know you were into Shakespeare.”
Kermit: “Actually, some people say it was Bacon.”
Bwah-hah-hah-hah-hah!
— Ed
Posted by Lis Riba:
Realizing that I enjoy Shakespeare in spite of how I was taught, I started thinking about how to get kids more interested in Shakespeare. IMO, the best way would be to start with the comedies, such as Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Well, that’d certainly be a good approach for some kids. But, remembering my own childhood encounters with the Bard (and those of my then-kid peers,) I think that many Shakespeare comedies can be so lightweight as to be easily dismissed by uninterested kids. A lot of them are fun–absolutely–but there’s not a lot of depth to them than the wacky hilarity of a misunderstanding and mistaken identity.
(The incredibly funny play THE COMPLETE WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE–ABRIDGED irreverently runs through 37 plays in an hour and a half [see http://www.reducedshakespeare.com/shakespeare.html ] and barrels through the comedies, basically contending they have the same plot, summarizing them all by conflating bits from each. Which is amusing, of course, but has a bit of truth to it.)
Whereas with the tragedies (and, to a certain extent, the histories,) you still have the challenges of getting kids past the language, and getting them to visualize goings-on intended for the stage. But at least you can often get to some fundamental situation that’s more viscerally wrenching and therefore pehaps interesting to kids.
“If your dad died, and your mother married your uncle, how’d that make you feel?”
“You’re deeply in love with someone, but that person kills your brother. What do you do?”
“A guy tells you your girlfriend is cheating on you, but she says she isn’t. What would make you believe him more than her?”
“How much do you love your father? Can you put it in words?”
and so on, and so on.
Just a thought. Anyway, surely many thoughtful approaches exist to interest kids in the Bard. I just wouldn’t write off Shakespeare’s non-comedies just because it’s youngsters you’re trying to reach.
You can find the Scooby-Doo/Hamlet crossover here:
http://www.cord.edu/faculty/sprunger/e315/hamlet.html
My favorite Shakespeare memory is a college course on literary analysis, where I wrote a paper pulling from pop culture sources (everything from Belinda Carlisle songs to Claremont’s X-Men) to show that Claudius was not the killer, merely someone who took advantage of the circumstances of the king’s death to promote his own agenda. (Key argument: the “proof” of Claudius’ guilt come, with the exception of one scene, just from the ghost and Hamlet’s crazed mind.) Whatever, I got an “A” on the paper.
“The Baconians, the Oxfordians, and supporters of other candidates have one trait in common–they are snobs.”
Ad hominem argument, anyone?
Oh, I don’t know. I’ve read essays about this subject from time to time over the years, and every one of them seems to get around to dismissing Shakespeare as the author purely based on his more “common” background versus the “nobility” of others, just as Holland claims. Which is not to say automatically that John Byrne is a snob (since someone else brought up his belief in DeVere) but if the hominem fits, ad it.
Other movies inspired by Shakespeare films: “West Side Story” (Romeo and Juliet), “Ten Things I Hate About You” (“Taming of the Shrew”), “O” (“Othello.”)
PAD
I believe it was Olivier who had this classic retort to the Baconians:
“No actor in his right mind would ever join the Royal Bacon Company.”
By the way, in February, PBS will be airing a four-part biography of Shakespeare. Next week, the website will launch a page for educators with further resources for teaching Shakespeare in a more engaging manner. [Whether it’ll be useful or not is anyone’s guess.]
Posted by Peter David:
Other movies inspired by Shakespeare films: “West Side Story” (Romeo and Juliet), “Ten Things I Hate About You” (“Taming of the Shrew”), “O” (“Othello.”)
“Get Over It” riffs on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” all over the place.
“Scotland, PA” draws from “Macbeth”
The TV-movie “King of Texas” starring Patrick Stewart was an adaptation of “King Lear”
Gotta be more, even if you exclude straightforward adaptations…
Well, I’ve experienced Romeo and Juliet just about every way possible: reading the script (twice for school — long story), watching a staged production, watching the period movie w/ Olivia Hussey, watching the newer version with Leonardo DiCaprio (the only thing I liked about that was the TV Anchorwoman cast as the Chorus — that was clever), and a handful of re-interpretations without original text, such as West Side Story. I hated it every time. Actually, West Side Story was OK, but I hate the play.
I’ve read other Shakespearean plays, (my favorite of the ones I’ve read is Julius Ceasar), I’ve seen movies from some that I haven’t read (Branagh’s version of Much Ado About Nothing was just a whole mess of fun), and I’ve enjoyed all of it, but I have never liked R&J.
10 Things I Hate About You was an adorable movie, by they way, but it’s nowhere near as entertaining as the Taming of the Shrew episode of Moonlighting.
TAMING OF THE SHREW with Taylor and Burton – one of my favs. Also Olivier’s RICHARD III and OTHELLO. HENRY IV with Branagh, and MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM Michelle Pfeiffer as an incredibly beautiful Titania and Kevin Kline as a heartbreaking Bottom. Marc Singer of BEASTMASTER fame performed in a production of TAMING OF THE SHREW that was televised years ago and exuded sex appeal! And don’t forget one of my favorite musicals also based on TofS – KISS ME KATE. Ahh, Ariel, I envy you your discovery of Shakespeare with two parents who are prepared to let you enjoy him to the fullest.
‘My Own Private Idaho’ is a fascinating adaptation of Henry IV P1- although really, it’s less of an adaptation than variations on some of the themes. It’s worth a look to see what they do with the ideas, and River Phoenix gives a fantastic performance.
And if you can find it, Branagh’s ‘A Midwinter’s Tale’ is one of my all-time favorite movies. Wonderfully funny and genuinely tender, the plot involves a group of crazy actors putting on a Christmas-time production of Hamlet.
Now, if you want bizarre art film adaptations, there’s always Derek Jarman’s ‘Tempest’ and Peter Greenaway’s ‘Prospero’s Books’- I confess I couldn’t sit through either of them, but hey, different strokes…
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve read essays about this subject from time to time over the years, and every one of them seems to get around to dismissing Shakespeare as the author purely based on his more “common” background versus the “nobility” of others, just as Holland claims. Which is not to say automatically that John Byrne is a snob (since someone else brought up his belief in DeVere) but if the hominem fits, ad it.”
Leonard Deming, in his 1995 essay “Invalid Logic and the Slippery Stratfordian,” addresses this issue rather well. While it might be true that many Oxfordians — perhaps even most of them — are influenced by “snobbery”, I’m not sure I see a distinction between their “dismissal” of Shakespeare as the author and the typical Stratfordian impulse to “dismiss” anti-Stratfordians as intellectual dilletantes, snobs, and/or deluded conspiracy theorists.
Look at A.L. Rowse, quoted by Deming as having dismissed anti-Stratfordian Enoch Powell by saying, “He doesn’t qualify to have an opinion. We needn’t worry about what he says at all.” That sounds a tad — dare I say it — snobbish.
Or consider Stratfordian Samuel Schoenbaum’s attack of an Oxfordian’s promotion of the possibility that DeVere was the
So, if an Oxfordian points out the possibility of DeVere’s authorship based on DeVere living a life more akin to that of the characters who populate the plays (or, in other words, the life of “nobility”), that is snobbery. And yet, if a Stratfordian dismisses DeVere because he was flatulent, that’s …?
Perhaps Holland simply should have made his statement MORE inclusive. Perhaps everyone, on EVERY side of the authorship question, should be labelled as a snob.
(As for “cruelty” and “perversity” being reasons to dismiss DeVere as a possibility, well — as Deming says — perhaps Schoenberg ought to re-read Titus Andronicus?)
Deming’s paper is really quite good. Though it — perhaps inevitably — falls into the same trap of generalization that Holland’s statement in the blog entry does, it’s still quite a fascinating little read. (He should be forgiven a few writing “quirks,” such as his mistake of using “literally” as a means of emphasis in his introduction.)
If nothing else, Deming gives a nice, balanced introductory explanation of the Oxfordian point of view without painting it over with a veneer of “snobbery” that makes it so easy for someone like Holland to dismiss it.
Anyway, here’s a link to it:
http://www.everreader.com/logic.htm
did anyone get to see joe calarco’s “shakespeare’s r&j” when it was in nyc? what a breathtaking adaptation… it’s romeo and juliet with a frame story- 4 young men reading the play in an environment where’s it’s forbidden. gorgeous staging, thrilling interpretations.. watching it was like seeing it for the first time, and realising just how good a play it can be
For those interested, (and able to get to it) the Brooklyn Academy of Music is featuring an all male production of a Mid-Summer’s Night Dream this spring. See:
http://www.bam.org/events/04MIDS/04MIDS.aspx
As for reading, I know I enjoyed Hamlet more (in high school at least) after reading Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. My college reading of Hamlet was ruined by reading as a class: my proffessor was great, but he had a very bland voice, and often ended up reading the major parts for lack of volunteers.
As long as we’re mentioning film adapatations of Shakespeare, let me toss in a plug for Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet. While certainly not for purists, it does the best job of any version I’ve seen in bringing out the emotional intensity of the play. After that first five minutes at the gas station, you believe in the Montague-Capulet feud.
Dav2.718
I’m not sure how to do the links thing, so I’ll just tell y’all. If you go to comics.com, drag down to Liberty Meadows, and go to Jan 3rd, you can get another concise point of view of the Bacon/Shakespeare debate. I just stumbled on it, and it seemed so timely, so I had to mention it.
PS. Hamlet rocks. Except the one played by Mel Gibson. They took the mother/son thing a step (or rather, a make-out) too far.
I rather like Titus Andronicus, in part because it has the trappings of a tragedy, but the structure (whether you credit it to Shakespeare as my high school teachers did, or to a Greek playwright) of a comedy!
Um, not that I think you should read it with Ariel yet.
In high school, a teacher assigned us Shakespeare in London, then gave us a maniacally detailed test on all of the tiny details. Nice way to discourage a lot of students from reading more Shakespeare.
In the community college course I just took (I’m finishing my bachelor’s this year at 33), we were assigned Hamlet. From the start, he recommended grabbing a copy of either the Gibson version or the Branagh version of the play and reading while watching. I’m convinced this is a great, easy way to experience Shakespeare (although you should skip the Gibson play because it cuts out some of the plot).
Peter, can I also recommend grabbing Neil Gaiman’s Sandman story about the Tempest?
Personally, my opinion of Ceasar is the same as Garak’s. “You call that a tragedy? Farce maybe…”
Back in my high school days, my English class was reading Hamlet. It was late spring. On April Fool’s day I pulled the ultimate prank. While the teacher was hall monitoring, I pretended to mess with the chalk, VCR and computer. He went around checking everything during the class and kept asking me ‘Jess, what did you do?’ ‘Jess, what did you do?’ Each time I answered ‘Nothing.’ Finally, he said ‘Funny, word in hallways says you’ve got your yearly prank lined up for this class period.’ I replied: ‘They were wrong.’ The teacher commented how he got the information from my best friend. So I responded: ‘I’m telling you, I didn’t do anything.’ He checked the blackboard, the tv and computer. Everything worked fine.
The next day, I was used as an educational tool. Someone in class asked the classic question: Is Hamlet Crazy? The teacher’s reply was ‘Were you here yesterday?’ The guy nodded. ‘What did you think of Jess’s prank?’ The poor guy looked confused. Not that I could blame him. The teach looked at me with a wide smile and then turned his head back to the other student and said: ‘Jess was playing with my head. The one type of prank I wouldn’t suspect… from any of you, let alone him. I mean, look at him. He comes to class, sleeps during the journal writing session because he already did it during his math class, then acts like he’s barely paying attention for the rest of class. Then set it up so his best friend would just happen to tell me when his prank was happening. So here I was expecting something to happen… and nothing did. The whole thing was an act. Hamlet was essentially doing the same thing.”
To which I yawned and went back to sleep. The small portion of the class which wasn’t afraid of me somehow gained a new found respect for me. After all, I had managed to pull a prank, get caught, and get off scott free. Not at all like the time I stole all the paper clips from the special ed office and made a four and a half foot long paper clip chain… or the time I flipped half the clocks in one wing of the building upside down….
Hey, there’s a fun Zork-style game here, based on Hamlet. Pretty fun.
http://www.robinjohnson.f9.co.uk/adventure/hamlet.html
I always liked a line I heard once. It described Hamlet as, and I quote:
“The worst Spring Break in History” 🙂
Is there any “safe” way to tell people your not into Shakespeare?
I didn’t hate Shakespear because of high school English, but neither did it make me particularly interested in his works.
It was Gargoyles that did that.
I had difficulty with Shakespeare until college. Not because of the teaching necessarily (although I do think the Columbia English department was superior to the English department in my high school) but because I wasn’t ready. An awful lot of Shakespeare (particularly sonnets) doesn’t make sense until you’ve had your heart broken into little tiny pieces by a brunette from… er, until the reader has had more emotional experience. For references though, BBC radio and Branagh’s Renaissance Theater Company staged a few plays specifically for the radio. The CDs are still available, and I really recommend the Hamlet one.
With regard to the Oxford/Shakespeare debate, the editor of the Folger Shakespeare editions put in a little dig like the one in the Penguin books, to the effect that unlike dentists, geniuses don’t always come with degrees framed on the wall. I’ve always had difficulties with DeVere’s candidacy, if for no other reason than that he was dead for several years before some of the plays were written.
Anybody here read Jasper Fforde’s _The Eyre Affair_? One of the throwaway bits is that the whole “Did Shakespeare write his own plays?” question is discussed amongst the general populace in the same way and with the same fervor that we reserve for, say, the Kennedy assassination. Fun book in general.
The scene I remember is that the Baconian is like a Jehovah’s Witness, knocking on Thursday’s (That’s Thursday Next, the heroine of the story for those who haven’t read it) door.
My favorite Shakespere scene in the book is the Rocky Horror-like production of Richard III
(audience) “When is the Winter of our discontent?”
Reading it aloud is the only way to go — they’re plays, not prose.
One of my fondest memories of HS was covering Julius Caesar sophomore year, precisely because we voiced the whole thing as we discussed it. (It was particular fun given that I got to read for Cassius — ah, to be young and playing scum again…)
Watching performances is even better, assuming you catch good ones. We’ve got a student group at my school which devotes itself to performing “plays read as part of the English curriculum” at the school — so far they’ve done Romeo and Juliet, The Importance of Being Earnest, and No Exit. Marvelous work, if difficult to pull off R&J at an all-girls school.
I’d treat Ariel to Branagh’s Henry V: how anyone can watch it and not be charged up is beyond me.
TWL
Yes! Thank you Greg Weisman!
For Gargoyles that is.
On the topic of authorship, computer wordprint analysis has made some significant advances, and using noncontextual word clues alone can indicate whether a certain author wrote a text to an insanely accurate percentage.
To quote: “The unity of some of Shakespeare’s plays has also been questioned, but when these plays were subjected to wordprint analysis, no significant variations in wordprint were found within the given plays. An attempt to prove that part or all of Shakespeare’s works were really written by Bacon resulted in what was described by A. Q. Morton as “one of history’s finest examples of serendipity.” A man by the name of William Friendman was hired by a prominent Baconian to unravel the ciphers or code which would reveal the identity of Bacon in the text of Shakespeare. Friendman’s study actually refuted the cipher idea in Shakespeare. But he became intrigued with ciphers and went on to publish some very important papers on decipherment. His work led directly to cracking the Japanese naval code in World War II.”
The refrence: A.Q. Morton, Literary Detection (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979) about page 185
And to butcher a paraphrase of another scholar – …The so called Shakespeare question is quite silly because of course it’s unlikely that a man of his backround could have written such amazing stuff, It would still be astounding even if the most learned of men had produced them.
Jason, you’re quite correct about over-analyzing the plays (or anything else, for that matter).
There a story, probably apochryphal, more’s the pity, about Isaac Asimov and an English professor.
As the story goes, the Good Doctor came upon a group of fans at a convention. A man was speaking to them at length about one of Asimov’s stories going on and on about subtext and allegories and … so forth.
Asimov cuts in and points out that it’s simply a story about (whatever the tale was).
The speaker tut-tuts him and explains how it may SEEM so on the surface but, if one goes between the lines, one can find a richness and depth to the story which would be unsuspected to the untrained reader.
Asimov retorted that the Speaker was full of it. It was a simple, straightforward story about […] nothing more.
Speaker: Sir, I am an English professor who has been teaching literature for years. What makes you think you know more about it than I?
Asimov: Because I, sir, am the story’s author.
Speaker: So? Just because you wrote it, what makes you think you know anything about it?
***
How do you argue with an idiot like that?
My favorite film adaptation of a Shakespeare play is Bob & Doug Mackenzie’s Strange Brew.
Chris
“unlike dentists, geniuses don’t always come with degrees framed on the wall.”
Agreed.
“I’ve always had difficulties with DeVere’s candidacy, if for no other reason than that he was dead for several years before some of the plays were written.”
Except that we don’t know for sure when any of the plays were written.
The thing of it is, years after the fact, historians had this canon of work credited to “William Shakespeare,” so they decided to go back and figure out, who was this guy? Eventually they found a guy from Stratford named Guillaume Shaksper and decided, “Oh, it must have been him.” In spite of the fact that there was no information about Shaksper of Stratford that spoke of him being a playwright, they still decided to plough on ahead and construct a “life of Shakespeare” based on the life of Shaksper. They found out when Guillaume was born and when he died, and — combining that information with other details about his life that they knew of, and with topical references in the plays — they constructed a chronology for when the plays were written.
This has all become canon, and is now used as refutement when people suggest that someone else, say DeVere, was actually the writer of the works of “William Shakespeare.” People can laugh at the perceived “snobbery,” or use such linguistic tricks as saying how foolish people are to think that “Shakespeare didn’t write the works of Shakespeare.” (Somewhat akin to laughing at somebody for saying that Samuel Clemens wrote Huckleberry Finn and saying, “Don’t be ridiculous — Mark Twain wrote the works of Mark Twain!”)
But the fact is, we could just as easily connect the works to DeVere and construct a new chronology for the writing of the plays based on his life and death dates, and it would be just as feasible a possiblity, if not more so.
People like to shift the argument when it comes to debunking anti-Stratfordians, straying from the central point — which is that, other than phonetics, there is nothing to link Shaksper to Shakespeare. They’ll say, “So — what, just because Shaksper was a commoner, he couldn’t have also been a genius?” And then they tear down the straw man. When the real question is — putting genius aside — why is there no reference anywhere to Guillaume Shaksper being a poet or playwright?
“The so called Shakespeare question is quite silly because of course it’s unlikely that a man of his backround could have written such amazing stuff, It would still be astounding even if the most learned of men had produced them.”
Indeed it would. And yet, it would be less astounding to find out that an acknowledged playwright had produced them, as opposed to someone who was never referred to as a writer by anyone, ever.