This month my sophomores have started reading Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare. I introduced this to my students by singing, "It's the most wonderful time of the year!" Many of them rolled their eyes - which I am used to - and let out groans of displeasure. So I feel there is something here that I must clear up: I have not always been in love with Shakespeare. It is not as if I was reciting Shakespeare in kindergarten, far from it. No, I did not fall in love with him until much later in my educational career when I finally understood him. I guess you could say we had been "dating" since high schoo,l but I just did not get him. He was confusing, melodramatic, and old. Really, really old. What made it worse was that all my teachers seemed to think he was the world's greatest writer. I must have been missing something...
Another common misconception of my students is that I got straight As in high school. Not true. I was a teenager that worked very hard for Bs (*Note: I did not use an apostrophe there because then 'B' would be owning something: B's new blog). The reason why I mention this is that when I finally got Shakespeare it was like winning the Superbowl. It was exhilirating and unbelievable. I was so proud of myself - I mean - I had gotten Shakespeare! From then on I chipped away at his plays, with the help of a favorite professor, and slowly but surely began to uncover what so many others had already realized: the man was a genius. He was witty, sarcastic, inappropriate, romantic, evil, hopeful and cynical all at the same time, in the same play. And not just once but dozens of times, in dozens of different kinds of plays! And everything he said then, all the topics he covered, are still applicable today: love, friendship, betrayal, jealousy, scandal and so on.
My goal: to help my students get Shakespeare; to help them have that feeling of pride like I did when they are able to explain a quotation that was written 400 years ago because they truly get it. And maybe they will not fall in love, but at least appreciate why I did.
Hopefully this helps explain the Globe Theatre model, the Shakespearean Insult Gum and the Much Ado About Nothings.
Question: What has your Shakespeare experience been like?
3 comments:
Shakespeare has not been the most exciting part of this year. Im not sure if I get him or not or maybe its just that I dont like his form of writing. I think that he has a very different form of writing that is difficult to analyze, if we didn't read this play in class I probably would have zoned out after the first page.It would be nice to fully understand what he is saying in all of his plays.
~ Just a side note that I was thinking about while writing this but...... why does shakespeare always use so many characters in his plays?
That is a really good question. Wait until we get to Julius Caesar where there are over 30 characters! My guess would be that the purpose is to keep things interesting and confusing so that you have to pay attention.
The strange thing about reading Shakespeare, for me at least, that's unlike reading any other novel is that because the English is so different, I have to read a single line about 8 different times, each with different stressed syllables and emotions and tones and what have you until I finally get the message of what he is saying. Even when you're certain you know what he's saying in one section suddenly he'll catch you by surprise when you realize "Oh. That's a sonnet" or, my favorite, "Oh. That was inappropriate. O.O" There always seems to be more than one meaning to everything Shakespeare writes, and it surely makes reading/discussing his work all the more fun.
The funny thing is that in the movie version of Much Ado About Nothing, the actors were so exaggerative of their emotions as they said their lines that even if you didn't know half the words that they were saying, you could absolutely tell the gist of the plot.
All-in-all, I always look forward to Shakespeare more than other novels during English class. Fire-breathing dragons, magic wands, ICBMs and that stuff is for me and my living room couch, but in all earnesty, I haven't sat down with a storybook in quite a while. But when we're discussing our literature in class Shakespeare always seems to be the most entertaining.
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