5 ms·

Lovely, but kind of an overwrought interface for what can be found in other places also completely and freely. Also hot take: we need to stop making kids read

Lovely, but kind of an overwrought interface for what can be found in other places also completely and freely. Also hot take: we need to stop making kids read Shakespeare in School. Shakespeare wrote plays. They were meant to be heard and seen. Filled with drama and comedy (lots of poop and sex jokes). Imagine if we forced children to experience Star Wars as a screenplay, read aloud in class? It’s ridiculous. The plays themselves had a runtime of approximately only 2.5 - 3 hours. No need to stretch out Romeo and Juliet for weeks reading through passage by painful passage. Let them watch the movie version and then discuss certain parts or re-enact it themselves. Shakespeare was entertainment. And we now treat him like some kind of biblical text. It’s crazy! edit: and to reinforce that last point, Shakespeare was put his plays in the Globe theater, across the River Thames, which at the time was not considered London proper. He was also not a court playwright and considered at best, midbrow. The “high art” playwright of the time who did play in London proper was Ben Johnson. There is even a theory that Shakespeare was Ben Johnson’s secret identity so he could write freely away from the stuffy conventions of high society and the court. Like, Shakespeare was not high art. We must stop treating him that way and kill the love of literature in children by forcing them dryly read “To be or not to be.”

6LLvveMx2koXfwn 4y ago
Is there any evidence that reading Shakespeare at school is "kill[ing] the love of literature in children"?
hnhg 4y ago
I don't know, I really enjoyed reading Shakespeare as a kid at school. It stayed with me too. I actually can't remember the other books we read, except Lord of the Flies.
- dcist 4y ago
  It stayed with me as well. I loved reading Shakespeare in school. I think reading Shakespeare can instill a love of language in a young kid.
  - copperx 4y ago
    I loved reading Shakespeare in school too, even as an ESL student. Reading Early Modern English was really fun, and perhaps what made me love the language.
shubhamkrm 4y ago
My school had 'As You Like It' and Animal Farm in its curriculum. I must say, Shakespeare was a lot of fun to read, especially finding so many hidden puns in simple looking passages. My teacher also showed us a movie adaptation at the end, and watching it as a drama while you understood the nuances of their dialogues actually enhanced the experience.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I have somewhat mixed feelings. On the one hand, plays are mostly meant to be seen performed. On the other hand, watching even a relatively accessible play like As You It cold as a high school student is probably a bit toss in the pool's deep end. It's sort of easy to tune out the unfamiliar language at that point. One option is to use some commentary on a play rather than the whole thing--e.g. Garber's book.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
My favorite memory of high school was Sophomore year - reading Othello in class - seeing how terribly we acted it out - and then watching the same scene from the movie. We wouldn't have appreciated the movie and the story so much if we didn't sort of take part in it. It's like when you go to a dinner party and you have to help cook a little - it makes the meal taste better knowing you had some part in it.
AlbertCory 4y ago
You had me for a sentence. Shakespeare is the very essence of "public domain." But then you lost me at the 2nd sentence. Who TF cares what "high art" was then? Or who the groundlings at the Globe were? They apparently had better taste than the people at court. Not the first time. In the early days of rock 'n' roll or blues or rap or hip-hop or jazz (etc.) only lower-status people were into it. And your "theory" about Ben Jonson (not "Johnson") has been debated (and debunked) for literally centuries, along with several other possibilities. Are you just now discovering it? People in every culture of the world always have and continue to love Shakespeare's plays. At the same time, there are children who can't be torn away from their Harry Potter books. If they read at all.
- mgfist 4y ago
  Think you're missing the point about the "high art" comment, which is just that we should introduce people to shakespeare in the way it was intended - as entertaining theater, not boring undecipherable books. I can vouch for this, I hated reading Shakespeare and just sparknotes'd everything. Maybe I would've loved it if I had watched a funny play instead.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    If he just left it at that, I wouldn't have any objection. Although if I'm in Ashland and going to see a Shakespeare play, I'll usually read it first. It helps to know what they're talking about. Some characters have three different names in the same play, for example.
    - mgfist 4y ago
      > Like, Shakespeare was not high art. We must stop treating him that way and kill the love of literature in children by forcing them dryly read “To be or not to be.” Is that not the same thing?
jimbob45 4y ago
SparkNotes has a "translated" version of each play [0] that is more accessible for the modern reader. Yes, purists will tell you that you're missing out on Shakespeare's flowery and playful use of language but you also spend a much smaller fraction of the time parsing through the text than you otherwise would. Also, the original text is right next to the translated version so you can just look over if you want to compare. [0] https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/romeojuliet/act-1-prologue/ https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/romeojuliet/ac...
dingosity 4y ago
Or... we could have kids read Shakespeare in School so they have a fighting chance of understanding the text, experience seminal works of literature in the English language and learn the structure of modern drama. If your argument is "you should also experience Shakespeare plays as plays," then I'm with you. But if your argument is "It was difficult to read Shakespeare and I liked watching the movies," then you might have completely missed the point of studying literature.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  > then you might have completely missed the point of studying literature. Judging by the amount the kids actually learn, doing things the right way is an equal waste of time to just watching the plays on VHS. > learn the structure of modern drama IMO, far too few English teachers focus on this aspect of the Bard's plays. Instead, it's nonsense about iambic pentameter or treating R&J as romance instead of farce, black comedy, or tragedy that turns students into STEMlords.
  - goto11 4y ago
    Regarding the genre of R&J, the confusion is because the genre names have changed meaning over time. "Romance" back then is closer to what we would call "adventure" today. Comedy basically means the characters get married in the end, while tragedy means they lose everything and die. What often confuses readers today is that Shakespeare tragedies can be very funny.
    - dingosity 4y ago
      "Tragedy is when I get hurt. Comedy is when you get hurt."
mbg721 4y ago
Shakespeare is pop-culture. Is understanding old pop-culture important? I think it is. Opera and epic poems work the same way.
time_to_smile 4y ago
> Imagine if we forced children to experience Star Wars as a screenplay, read aloud in class? It’s ridiculous. Wait, is that ridiculous? I honestly think it's beneficial to let young students get a better sense of how all the media they consume is actually created. Seeing how a screen play differs from a film, discussing how subtle changes in reading a line might influence the interpretation of a scene, understanding the nature of improvisation and just knowing where movies come from sounds like it would be both very interesting and very educational. The equivalent for video games would be understanding how a PC works and walking through some of the actual code that goes into making a game, maybe building a simple mod. I imagine that would also be a useful class and enjoyed by quite a few HS students.
- dwringer 4y ago
  I agree there's nothing ridiculous about reading lines from Star Wars in class. I never had that in class but I remember English classes where we'd read parts of the script of other TV shows (an episode of Party of Five, I seem to recall) and I know some Star Trek episodes were used in that way even decades ago.
- themadturk 4y ago
  When I was in my senior year at university (1978) I took a class in dramatic structure, and one of my classmates had somehow gotten hold of a copy of the Star Wars (what we now call A New Hope) shooting script. The instructor (head of the drama department) immediately latched onto it as an example of a screenplay, while all the other reading was plays. George Lucas may not be a great writer, but the Hero's Journey structure of the story made a great study for the class.
Agamus 4y ago
"Also hot take: we need to stop making kids read Shakespeare in School." I strongly disagree, though I entirely agree that the plays were meant to be seen, not read. Despite this, they happen to be some of the most profound writings in human history, so only watching and not reading would miss much of high value. For me, struggling with the language of Shakespeare was one of my childhood joys. I grew up in a very rural state with little guidance and a poor local school system. But I like challenges, so this worked for me. It worked so well, that I developed a life-long passion for wordplay, etymology, theater, and poetry. Eventually, I graduated at the top of my class at an ivy league school, with a concentration in comparative literature (focusing on Joyce and Nietzsche). I still read Shakespeare almost daily, and he inspired me to write 153 of my own (bad!) sonnets. I am grateful for the time I spent struggling with Shakespeare's language. Please don't stop making kids read Shakespeare! From my very biased perspective, this is one of the worst things we could do.
- djur 4y ago
  I would be really surprised if there has been any Shakespeare curriculum in the past 30 years (at minimum) that was solely based on reading the text of the plays without any performance elements. Certainly my experience was that we watched film adaptations, went and saw a stage performance, etc. as well as reading scenes aloud in class.
tclancy 4y ago
>There is even a theory that Shakespeare was Ben Johnson’s secret identity . . . Shakespeare was not high art. You need to pick one. The reason there are 300 "Shakespeare was actually person X" conspiracy theories is because people throughout history were horrified with the idea a common person could make such high art.
bazoom42 4y ago
> There is even a theory that Shakespeare was Ben Johnson’s secret identity Those theories are bullshit. Shakespeare was Shakespeare. Otherwise I agree with you. Shakespeares plays was meant to be performed by actors on stage. But for the intendend theatre audience, the language would be much easier to understand than it is for us today. Reading it with annotations might help us understand more of the meaning.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
goto11 4y ago
Shakespeare's company was literally called "The Kings Men" because they had the patronage of the king.

6LLvveMx2koXfwn 4y ago

Is there any evidence that reading Shakespeare at school is "kill[ing] the love of literature in children"?

hnhg 4y ago

I don't know, I really enjoyed reading Shakespeare as a kid at school. It stayed with me too. I actually can't remember the other books we read, except Lord of the Flies.

dcist 4y ago
It stayed with me as well. I loved reading Shakespeare in school. I think reading Shakespeare can instill a love of language in a young kid.
- copperx 4y ago
  I loved reading Shakespeare in school too, even as an ESL student. Reading Early Modern English was really fun, and perhaps what made me love the language.

shubhamkrm 4y ago

My school had 'As You Like It' and Animal Farm in its curriculum. I must say, Shakespeare was a lot of fun to read, especially finding so many hidden puns in simple looking passages. My teacher also showed us a movie adaptation at the end, and watching it as a drama while you understood the nuances of their dialogues actually enhanced the experience.

ghaff 4y ago
I have somewhat mixed feelings. On the one hand, plays are mostly meant to be seen performed. On the other hand, watching even a relatively accessible play like As You It cold as a high school student is probably a bit toss in the pool's deep end. It's sort of easy to tune out the unfamiliar language at that point. One option is to use some commentary on a play rather than the whole thing--e.g. Garber's book.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

My favorite memory of high school was Sophomore year - reading Othello in class - seeing how terribly we acted it out - and then watching the same scene from the movie. We wouldn't have appreciated the movie and the story so much if we didn't sort of take part in it. It's like when you go to a dinner party and you have to help cook a little - it makes the meal taste better knowing you had some part in it.

AlbertCory 4y ago

You had me for a sentence. Shakespeare is the very essence of "public domain." But then you lost me at the 2nd sentence. Who TF cares what "high art" was then? Or who the groundlings at the Globe were? They apparently had better taste than the people at court. Not the first time. In the early days of rock 'n' roll or blues or rap or hip-hop or jazz (etc.) only lower-status people were into it. And your "theory" about Ben Jonson (not "Johnson") has been debated (and debunked) for literally centuries, along with several other possibilities. Are you just now discovering it? People in every culture of the world always have and continue to love Shakespeare's plays. At the same time, there are children who can't be torn away from their Harry Potter books. If they read at all.

mgfist 4y ago
Think you're missing the point about the "high art" comment, which is just that we should introduce people to shakespeare in the way it was intended - as entertaining theater, not boring undecipherable books. I can vouch for this, I hated reading Shakespeare and just sparknotes'd everything. Maybe I would've loved it if I had watched a funny play instead.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  If he just left it at that, I wouldn't have any objection. Although if I'm in Ashland and going to see a Shakespeare play, I'll usually read it first. It helps to know what they're talking about. Some characters have three different names in the same play, for example.
  - mgfist 4y ago
    > Like, Shakespeare was not high art. We must stop treating him that way and kill the love of literature in children by forcing them dryly read “To be or not to be.” Is that not the same thing?

jimbob45 4y ago

SparkNotes has a "translated" version of each play [0] that is more accessible for the modern reader. Yes, purists will tell you that you're missing out on Shakespeare's flowery and playful use of language but you also spend a much smaller fraction of the time parsing through the text than you otherwise would. Also, the original text is right next to the translated version so you can just look over if you want to compare. [0] https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/romeojuliet/act-1-prologue/ https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/romeojuliet/ac...

dingosity 4y ago

Or... we could have kids read Shakespeare in School so they have a fighting chance of understanding the text, experience seminal works of literature in the English language and learn the structure of modern drama. If your argument is "you should also experience Shakespeare plays as plays," then I'm with you. But if your argument is "It was difficult to read Shakespeare and I liked watching the movies," then you might have completely missed the point of studying literature.

BeFlatXIII 4y ago
> then you might have completely missed the point of studying literature. Judging by the amount the kids actually learn, doing things the right way is an equal waste of time to just watching the plays on VHS. > learn the structure of modern drama IMO, far too few English teachers focus on this aspect of the Bard's plays. Instead, it's nonsense about iambic pentameter or treating R&J as romance instead of farce, black comedy, or tragedy that turns students into STEMlords.
- goto11 4y ago
  Regarding the genre of R&J, the confusion is because the genre names have changed meaning over time. "Romance" back then is closer to what we would call "adventure" today. Comedy basically means the characters get married in the end, while tragedy means they lose everything and die. What often confuses readers today is that Shakespeare tragedies can be very funny.
  - dingosity 4y ago
    "Tragedy is when I get hurt. Comedy is when you get hurt."

mbg721 4y ago

Shakespeare is pop-culture. Is understanding old pop-culture important? I think it is. Opera and epic poems work the same way.

time_to_smile 4y ago

> Imagine if we forced children to experience Star Wars as a screenplay, read aloud in class? It’s ridiculous. Wait, is that ridiculous? I honestly think it's beneficial to let young students get a better sense of how all the media they consume is actually created. Seeing how a screen play differs from a film, discussing how subtle changes in reading a line might influence the interpretation of a scene, understanding the nature of improvisation and just knowing where movies come from sounds like it would be both very interesting and very educational. The equivalent for video games would be understanding how a PC works and walking through some of the actual code that goes into making a game, maybe building a simple mod. I imagine that would also be a useful class and enjoyed by quite a few HS students.

dwringer 4y ago
I agree there's nothing ridiculous about reading lines from Star Wars in class. I never had that in class but I remember English classes where we'd read parts of the script of other TV shows (an episode of Party of Five, I seem to recall) and I know some Star Trek episodes were used in that way even decades ago.
themadturk 4y ago
When I was in my senior year at university (1978) I took a class in dramatic structure, and one of my classmates had somehow gotten hold of a copy of the Star Wars (what we now call A New Hope) shooting script. The instructor (head of the drama department) immediately latched onto it as an example of a screenplay, while all the other reading was plays. George Lucas may not be a great writer, but the Hero's Journey structure of the story made a great study for the class.

Agamus 4y ago

"Also hot take: we need to stop making kids read Shakespeare in School." I strongly disagree, though I entirely agree that the plays were meant to be seen, not read. Despite this, they happen to be some of the most profound writings in human history, so only watching and not reading would miss much of high value. For me, struggling with the language of Shakespeare was one of my childhood joys. I grew up in a very rural state with little guidance and a poor local school system. But I like challenges, so this worked for me. It worked so well, that I developed a life-long passion for wordplay, etymology, theater, and poetry. Eventually, I graduated at the top of my class at an ivy league school, with a concentration in comparative literature (focusing on Joyce and Nietzsche). I still read Shakespeare almost daily, and he inspired me to write 153 of my own (bad!) sonnets. I am grateful for the time I spent struggling with Shakespeare's language. Please don't stop making kids read Shakespeare! From my very biased perspective, this is one of the worst things we could do.

djur 4y ago
I would be really surprised if there has been any Shakespeare curriculum in the past 30 years (at minimum) that was solely based on reading the text of the plays without any performance elements. Certainly my experience was that we watched film adaptations, went and saw a stage performance, etc. as well as reading scenes aloud in class.

tclancy 4y ago

>There is even a theory that Shakespeare was Ben Johnson’s secret identity . . . Shakespeare was not high art. You need to pick one. The reason there are 300 "Shakespeare was actually person X" conspiracy theories is because people throughout history were horrified with the idea a common person could make such high art.

bazoom42 4y ago

> There is even a theory that Shakespeare was Ben Johnson’s secret identity Those theories are bullshit. Shakespeare was Shakespeare. Otherwise I agree with you. Shakespeares plays was meant to be performed by actors on stage. But for the intendend theatre audience, the language would be much easier to understand than it is for us today. Reading it with annotations might help us understand more of the meaning.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

goto11 4y ago

Shakespeare's company was literally called "The Kings Men" because they had the patronage of the king.