The problem with how Shakespeare is usually taught is that the students are told to READ the plays. The plays were not written to be read, they were written to be performed. If, instead of reading the plays first, the students either watched a performance or actually performed it.
We read it out loud in class. I don’t make them read it silently, or at home. It’s all in class reading and discussion. We make parallels to their lives and put it in modern terms, which is surprisingly easy, since Twelfth Night is a good one for that kind of thing. Lots of dirty jokes, drinking, playing pranks, being mean, and gender hijinks. There’s even a gay pirate. I have had lots of students come back to me in 8th grade and tell me how much they liked reading the play, that it was their favorite unit of the year.
Maybe a lot of the Shakespeare hate has to do with how it’s taught. I do my best to give kids a good experience of it. I know I’m not 100% successful, but I’m trying. Ditto for poetry.
It occurs to me that Noir may owe something to Hamlet.
-FrL-
Oh come on. Shakespeare? Agreed that not every play is a gem, but is whoever wrote that even considering that a lot of things we consider cliches were not cliches in Shakespeare’s time? And some of the stuff is really funny! Even 4th and 5th graders find it funny. A couple of years ago my kid’s grade school did a Shakespeare festival and it was great fun to hear a 5th-grade get the timing right in the line “I have a daughter, Kate…” (Either you know the setup or you don’t. This kid got it and delivered the line perfectly in such a way as to say that he had a daughter, Kate–but she was not gentle or fair, or somesuch.)
The Grateful Dead. All right, maybe they are an acquired taste. Over the years I went to concerts I heard them maybe 20 times, they weren’t always wonderful. Once, in particular, Garcia and Weir got into this microscope harmonic guitar noodling thing that would have put the audience to sleep except that many of us were tripping. (Or, possibly, it was fascinating to other people, and nobody in the audience was tripping except me and the folks in my immediate area.) Obviously, mostly the concerts were better or I wouldn’t have gone to 20 of them.
Some people in that thread seem to forget that only mediocre artists are always at their best.
Look - My beef is not with Shakespeare. King Lear, Macbeth, and Richard III through Henry V are all fucking brilliant. His comedies can be some of the funniest things you’ll ever see performed. It’s just I believe that Hamlet is vastly over-rated tripe.
Yeah. You were wrong in the other thread, and you’re wrong here, too.
Speaking generally, the idea that we have some sort of democracy of opinions is one of the worst things about our “free” society. I am welcome to take an opinion on, say, the law of gravity. But if it is based on nothing more than my observation or sensation, then quite frankly, it is pretty uninteresting and should be given little consideration.
Yet for the arts, we have accepted for unfortunate reasons that because art is “subjective”, one person’s view is as valuable as any other’s. As a consequence, we have devoured our own cultural leadership and have cast ourselves adrift. We got exactly what we deserved: a world full of disposable crap on the one hand, and inaccessible art only for other artists’ consumption on the other, and no fucking idea what is good and what is trash. Just as we Americans don’t know how to eat anymore, we don’t know how to read or appreciate art. We enjoy trashing our sacred cows because it is one more blow we can take against the elite, against the establishment, against things that require time and skill to understand. If we keep killing our sacred cows, we are going to run out of milk.
Phooey. Do some Americans eat crap? Yes. Guess what, though? There’s crap to eat everywhere in the world and there are people there eating it right now. Good cooking and the people who enjoy it are alive and well in the US. As for the rest of your rant, some things do take time and effort to understand; and then after you understand them they turn out to still be crap.
My reading of that play (if I remember what I thought twenty years ago) is that the early part does that – when Romeo talks about his old girlfriend, whats-her-name (Rosamunde? Really can’t remember). He uses what sound like conventional poetic cliches; I don’t get the sense that he would have taken great risks to be with her, or that he was really emotionally invested in the relationship (to use our rather bloodless modern terms). But when he meets Juliet, I think she really sparks a new feeling in him; and Shakespeare kicks up the dialogue to a different level, breaking out of the conventional phrases into his own vivid, aerial speech. I don’t know if that’s just Shakespeare showing off to contrast himself with other writers of the day (no doubt churning out tons of unmemorable love poems) or if it’s meant to tell us that Romeo’s really met his soulmate, his match in wit and passion.
Of course, they’re teenagers, so maybe what they have in common is just being in love with the idea of being in love.
Exactly, I keep pointing that out to people too. Five hundred years from now students will be huddled around their computer screens reading The Godfather script and wondering what all the fuss was about.
I can’t remember if I heard it for real or as a joke, but someone once said to me “I can’t believe how much Shakespeare relied on clichés!” (the point being that they’re clichés now, having originated in - or at least made coinage by - Shakespeare’s writing)
I’m thinking we need a “right of reply to the right of reply thread.”
Seriously - you’re not totally wrong, but there’s always been crap art and there have always been people who get upset that the masses don’t see the really good stuff. It’s partly a failing of the education system that a lot of kids don’t get Shakespeare, but it’s also because tastes have changed in the last 400 years.
The comment about the laughter being phony was ridiculous. You don’t need to be a hifallutin educated type to laugh at something like the play-within-the-play in Midsummer, which consists mostly of people falling down, mangling their words and actors screwing up.
Right. Because five hundred years ago, all the playwrights were as good as William Shakespeare.
Sorry, but this is utter nonsense. We’re not living in some debased artistic dystopia because we’re unable to recognize an absolute standard of quality. Human culture has always been a morass of crap with a few gems floating in it. There was no period of history in which this wasn’t true: from the heights of classical Athens to the depths of modern Hollywood, humans have produced a metric fuck-ton of useless, mindless drivel, and one or two things that are absolutely brilliant. And the dividing line between “absolutely brilliant” and “mindless drivel” is, and always has been, ultimatly subjective. Art isn’t a chemical reaction. You can’t add two parts Shakespeare to one part human brain and get the same result every time. If you could, it wouldn’t be art. Shakespeare is no better, in an objective sense, than Aaron Spelling. He’s just infinitly more popular.
That being said, anyone who doesn’t laugh at the Rude Mechanical’s play at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is dead inside.
That’s just eerie.
Yeah, as simulposts go, that’s pretty scary.
That may be one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen around here.
ETA: Are you guys, like, twins or something?
Preach it sister. I thought he was boring and pointless as well until I saw the performances (I’m lucky enough to live close to a Shakespearean theater). It’s amazing how words that make absolutely no sense on the page you understand perfectly when it’s acted out. Reading Shakespeare in high school is about like reading about da Vinci’s The Last Supper or in some cases like reading about the works of M.C. Escher, but not having an illustration.
But the arts (especially the performing arts) are subjective. If they were objective, then every single production of any play would be the same.
And, it doesn’t matter who the playwright is, they have all written bad plays. Even Shakespeare.
BTW, I do not think that Hamlet is all crap. It has some great dialog, and one of the best soliloquies[1] ever written[2]. It also started out with such promise. It had intrigue and revenge, but Bill started writing himself into corners. I like to think of Hamlet as the first draft of a great play.
[1] Wow, I spelt that right the first time!
[2] No, not that one. The “Remember thee?” one
If that had been what I actually said, then yes, it would be utter nonsense.
I have an alternative view. I do believe that there are in fact standards for what makes a work a lasting monument of quality or something to be enjoyed for the moment and thrown away. Fortunately for art’s sake, people do not always agree on what those standards are, as this enables a great diversity of creation and dispute across time and place.
At the same time, one opinion about art can be more or less valuable than another opinion. We’ll never know whether our era produced more or less crap until long after we are dead. But I am damned sure that the perceived value in being an expert in artistic matters has declined, and to my mind, that is very unfortunate. Danielle Steel is an inferior novelist to Dumas, and not merely because Dumas’ works have endured longer or because more people have read them. J.S. Bach’s greatness was recognized long, long after his music had sunk into near obscurity. The relationship between popularity and artistic greatness is by no means clear. If it were, well, then perhaps the bestseller genre wouldn’t suck as hard as it does.
My point is, I believe we are losing useful guideposts with respect to what makes things “good” and “bad”. It’s great that art and literature are no longer the province of the elite. But the “cultural elite” or whatever really did serve a valuable function, one that is especially needed as taste further becomes democratized and education in arts and literature is so poor that those who endure it are prone to such spectacular misjudgments.
Agreed. Or is just pretending he can see the naked emperor through his crackerjack-box x-ray glasses instead of just kicking back and admiring his clothes.
Ah, I see how the use of the term “child’s game” would be considered insulting…I had forgotten that had been said in the other thread. I don’t consider sports to be childish games, and I acknowledge the skill and effort of the participants. I don’t understand what people get out of watching them.
I think Otakoluki was agreeing with you.