
Teaching a Different Shakespeare Than the One I Love - samclemens
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/teaching-a-different-shakespeare-than-the-one-i-love.html
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jasode
I don't know why but the well-known scholars of Shakespeare such as the author
of this piece (Stephen Greenblatt) and the "Western Canon" professor (Harold
Bloom @ Yale) always seem to write in a ponderous style.

My tldr would be: I (Stephen) could fully engage with Shakespeare just on the
words alone printed on the page. In contrast, my recent students don't seem to
read the pure text with the same joy. They like interacting with Shakespeare's
work with non-textual media (e.g. films, audio clips of pronunciation, etc).
They'd rather sing a Shakespeare song instead of write an analytical essay
based on close reading.

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mtviewdave
The thing about Shakespeare's plays is that they're plays. Performance pieces.
Written by an actor. Shakespeare wrote with the intent that most people would
engage with his words by hearing them spoken by actors performing on a stage.

That feels like an obvious point. But there's often a tendency, especially
among literature and English professors, to approach Shakespeare with the
belief that most authentic way to engage with the text is by reading it off a
page. Whatever the source of that belief, it isn't grounded in the nature or
history of Shakespeare's work.

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mikeash
I wonder, how often do people study films by reading the scripts? I know it
happens, but it seems pretty rare.

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lawpoop
Certainly film students do this.

But as I pointed out in another comment, Shakespeare's plays are primarily
verses, as opposed to stage direction, props, or scene description. They can
be looked at as poetry, as we do his sonnets.

It's quite a different thing from modern films, which combine acting,
cinematography, scenes, and music into a single art, cinema, that defines its
own category distinct from those that came before it. The point of cinema is
to "Show, don't tell" whereas plays in the tradition of Shakespeare are
completely dialog-driven. In cinema, ideas are presented as a /moving image/,
where in Shakespeare, they are presented in words.

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jrapdx3
What fortunate timing, next week I'm spending a few days in Ashland, OR, and
will enjoy the theater at the world-class Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Parallel to the article's discussion, in college I was interested in science
and only because of requirements took courses in literature. Ironically,
decades later the science "facts" have largely become irrelevant. It's the
poetry and narrative works that are increasingly meaningful to me now.

I came to Shakespeare only well into adulthood but over time my appreciation
of his talent has grown exponentially. Once getting a feel for his expressive
language, it's evident he was a masterful observer of human nature, combined
with his extraordinary sensitivity to sound of words, poetic genius barely
describes the accomplishment.

That Shakespeare speaks to people in diverse regions of the globe might
surprise him, but he's sure be pleased he far exceeded his own ambitions.
Perhaps he'd surely find that development amusing and profound, no doubt would
be thinking it could be source material for a new play...

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cbd1984
Hopefully, the scientific mindset didn't pass you by, as that was the real
point of the courses.

