I do really wish more Shakespeare was performed in an original accent, as there's an awful lot of rhymes and jokes that don't work in modern pronunciation. Like "hour to hour" being pronounced like "whore to whore", which suddenly makes that line quite a bit funnier.
I do like that he mentioned being asked to perform using his native Welsh accent in the OP's video. Shakespeare was after all the playright for people of every standing, and it feels a bit daft to posh it all up.
> I do really wish more Shakespeare was performed in an original accent, as there's an awful lot of rhymes and jokes that don't work in modern pronunciation. Like "hour to hour" being pronounced like "whore to whore", which suddenly makes that line quite a bit funnier.
Things like this, among others, continue to convince me that reading Shakespeare plays in high school is largely a waste of time. Unless you have an excellent teacher, who explains the puns, the historical context, and other things, it's about as useful as looking at storyboards of a movie instead of watching the movie itself.
I remember the footnotes in one Shakespeare play I read at school saying something like "[2] this is a humourous reference to Christopher Marlowe's contemporaneous play..." which I sort of rolled my eyes at and remarked how that was a bit of a stretch and was anyone really supposed to notice that.
My teacher drew the analogy to Scary Movie (which was relatively new at the time) and how we could all enjoy it just fine without footnotes explaining "this is a humourous reference to contemporaneous horror film Scream..." etc. It suddenly struck me the difference between studying culture historically and actually experiencing it "live". This analogy has only gotten better with time because I probably would need footnotes to get half the jokes in Scary Movie nowadays.
My favorite example of this was actually from my middle school days. We read Romeo and Juliet from our textbook in class, and I hated it.
In the course of getting ready for a test I read over the Cliff Notes on the play as well. Much to my surprise it it described several humorous scenes which were completely gone in the version we read. It turns out they were cut from the middle school version because they were considered too bawdy for us.
In addition, I think it's absurd for your first exposure to any of the plays to be reading it; so much of the dialog only makes sense when being spoken. The homework assignments should never be "read Act I", it should be "watch the first 45 minutes of movie version <blah>". Even a disengaged viewer will get more out of watching it than having their first experience be reading it.
When I was in school we were never assigned reading Shakespeare as homework, it was always done by reading it out loud in class, rotating parts every several lines, with the teacher interjecting whenever something needed to be explained.
Hearing a kid struggling to read Shakespeare is even worst that reading it in your head. Acting is hard. But most kids can't even read out loud a newspaper add decently.
Ben notes in the (second) extended video that perhaps 80% of Elizabethans were illiterate and that plays are to be performed, not read.
He'd prefer that Shakespeare be introduced first by the drama department in early secondary school so that kids as young as 13 or 15 could perform Romeo and Juliet at their intended character ages - thus bringing the work to life.
And that only once they've experienced the energy of performance that later in final years of 16-17 should they study it formally in English Literature classes.
Interesting, that sounds like the perfect solution to above problem.
This reminds me of reading I needed to learn C++ to make games back in the early 2000s, because that was what all games were made with. I probably missed 3-4yrs of programming exposure because I found C++ so impenetrable from the local library books I got on the subject.
Working from appreciation of the subject matter, to a light introduction to the inner workings, to the hairy details of how it was all put together seems to be the ideal approach.
Although this analogy may be a bit more niche and involved, the idea of being forced to read Shakespeare at a young age before being able to really appreciate the plays in production, with all of it's subtleties, seems comparable to attempting to pushing their heads into C++ before they appreciate the basic mechanics of game construction.
This is a reason to read it out loud. Reading difficulties are going undiagnosed because teachers seldom hear students read, especially past the first couple years. Even in the more advanced tracks (ability levels), many students are unable to smoothly read with proper phrasing.
It really is torture to listen to some people read.
That's my point: don't use Shakespeare for that. Use something simple and agreeable, even if you read it in a terrible way. Read video game news, celebrity gossip, science development, sport results, etc.
At my highschool we read all of Shakespeare plays. Not one paragraph a class. Not one play a year. We did a play in a week or two. We also had reading lists for summer and Christmas breaks. We were expected to read constantly. Reading is good. Forcing kids to read something they don't like, or perhaps do not fully understand, is good for them. Being able to sit down and read a hundred pages is the more useful thing anyone can get from school. And it is the thing that is least taught in modern schools.
If your goal is simply to use the plays as a whip the students self-flagellate with until they can tolerate joyless reading, there are probably other texts better suited for the purpose. If your goal is to teach Shakespeare, the students will likely not develop an appreciation or an understanding of the significance of the plays by simply reading them.
The literal "old school" goal was to indoctrinate kids with a standard background in English literature, a common knowledge, to allow them to better communicate amongst peers of similar backgrounds. The start of this is a grounding in words like Shakespeare. In the past it would have also included the bible.
Someone can read a play and not understand it. That happens. But to understand a work you first have to at least read it. Watching can be a poor substitute, but good luck finding any modern production that performs an entire Shakespeare piece. Most everything on modern stages is heavily edited for time.
It's pretty strongly believed that they were cut in Shakespeare's day too. Something to do with limited legal opening hours and other things that had to go in the programme meaning there simply wouldn't have been time.
I have also been told that the reason Macbeth is so short is that it was probably transcribed from the working (cut) copy of the play rather than the original draft.
Reading is fine, and reading challenging material is fine, but what pedagogical value are students deriving from binging all of Shakespeare's plays, if there isn't a lot of discussion and contextual explanation to go along with it? Just saying "we read hundreds of pages of words" sounds a lot like "uphill both ways", without that.
I'm also curious as to what else y'all read, given that Shakespeare wrote 30+ plays, and at a rate of one every week or two, that's just about an entire school year spent on nothing else.
Being able to sit down and read a hundred pages is the more useful thing anyone can get from school.
I strongly disagree. A solid base in mathematics, critical thinking, and the ability to say "I'm not getting anything out of this, I should switch to something else" are far more important.
You can't solve problems without knowing stuff. At least, unless you want to reinvent necessary background.
Yes, one can read without doing any critical thinking. But scientific and technical literature invite it. And indeed, require it for real comprehension. Good fiction, too.
A very narrow, specific kind of critical thinking comes from problem solving. Reading critically is a thing, and certainly part of being a well-rounded critical thinker.
> Reading is just consumption. You don't have to do any critical thinking
If that were true, you would believe anything and everything you read. I doubt that, barring Trump tweets, I will read a more ignorant statement all week.
Stop taking such an absurdly uncharitable interpretation of what people are writing. This is HN, don't assume others are idiots and then move on from there.
How the hell are you supposed to gain abilities in math or thinking critically without the ability to sit down and read?
I'm genuinely confused as to the worldview that says that the earlier doesn't come with the later as a necessary cause, unless we're talking absolutely trivial levels of math/critical thinking...
Surely you understand that I'm objecting to the idea of sitting down and forcing yourself to read Shakespeare with the justification that forcing yourself to read is internally a good thing, right?
I mean, it's right there in what I wrote. How you jump to an insane, uncharitable interpretation that I'm advocating not reading is beyond me.
Math and critical thinking are great, but being good at those things is means little if you cannot express yourself or learn from others in your field. That requires reading.
I was forced to read Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte in 4th grade. Luckily I already loved reading, but the experience nearly made me entirely reject the idea of reading for pleasure.
I don't think we ever had reading homework of Shakespeare; I suspect our teachers knew it would never happen. Instead, we read aloud in class, sometimes rotating roles in class to make sure everyone got a turn to speak.
(Naturally, this didn't do any favors for anyone, except when someone got to exclaim "BRING ME MY LONG SWORD, HOE!" in class.)
I remember that exact moment in class. Ms. Zank smirked just a bit because she knew how the student was going to read that line. Then we had a nice class discussion about how it was more similar to a cry of "land ho!" or some such.
Shakespeare is most effectively taught, not just by speaking it, but also with acting - they are plays after all. The poetry suggests action, and I think it really helps to understand a character or scene if you're physically submitting yourself to the emotion of the dialogue.
Yeah but teachers don't have the time to train 30 impatient and still incompetent youngsters to the art of acting in the few hours they get.
Without at least a year of practice (and even then...), the results will be atrocious, humiliating even, and the students will be even less convinced.
You should not study Shakespeare in school, it needs a lot of things to be appreciated, and hence it's a terrible material given the school constraints.
Same here. That's still my favorite adaptation of the work, given the amount of work that went into making it stylistically modern while still fitting the original lines.
Yeah, I remember hating Ruy Blas for the entire year. Then we got forced to see it in a play. It was nice.
When you read it, most people follow the lexical rhythm. It makes not sense. You are supposed to speak naturally, with the emotion and speed matching the context.
But again, I never had any teachers remotely good enough to realize that and do anything about it.
On key problem is that you need to be really good to be a decent teacher, and after sampling 11 schools because of my father's work, probably encountered 2 teachers that had the skills and cared enough.
This is carried over from a pre-AV time when books were the only media you had. The curriculum just needs to be updated (and probably has been, in many places).
The only one I found funny at school was Twelfth Night, and the rest were extremely arduous. I went to college in Stratford Upon Avon and I found his writing so much more interesting once I actually got to spend more time learning about the context and the period.
One of my high school English teachers really went above and beyond when it came to teaching Shakespear. Took the time to explain everything, showed us movie versions and so much more. Also walked us through a bunch of other pretty complex literary works making hen really easy to digest. It’s a shame he died this last year, we really need more teachers like him. I’ve never seen a class where all the students were truly excited to read Devine Comedy.
The Divine Comedy in particular gets a lot more amusing for students once they learn it's self-insert fanfiction with the writer's enemies written into humiliating positions.
You are arguing that people shouldn't be exposed to something if they can't understand all of it, or if they don't have a good enough teacher. First of all, everyone finishes their first reading of Shakespeare with a partial understanding. Second, how sad is that for the people who don't get to read it because they don't have a "great" teacher-- never mind how you decide who that is.
I do agree it is better acted than read, because that is how it was meant to be presented. But a modern audience is going to require explanation regardless of accent.
Oh, I don't know. There is also the very real possibility that it will seem hopelessly obtuse to the student who will never approach it again. IMO, a poor introduction to a subject is worse than neutral.
And maybe that's okay, too, but high school isn't the only place that many students will get to experience Shakespeare and if it can't be done right there might be more damage than good done.
There is a difference between not exposing a student to something that they cannot understand at first glance and not having a teacher who doesn't understand the matter themselves try to muddle their way through a presentation the material. Making it part of standard curriculum means that we will have a heavy dosage of the latter, whereas making it optional means that only those teachers who truly have a passion for the thing will present it (theoretically, of course).
Then again, I'm in America so our teachers don't have time to teach anything that isn't showing up on a standardized test, and for me this debate is purely academic :)
Students choose to never approach it again at good schools and bad. Should teachers that we don't think are good enough to teach Shakespeare teach Our Town instead?
My education was deficient; I don't understand the Our Town reference :)
But in general, yes - if I were thrown into a classroom as a substitute teacher for a month, I certainly wouldn't teach Shakespeare, because I'm not anywhere near qualified to do so. My wife probably would be - she's the one who enlightened me about a few things in Romeo & Juliet that were completely opaque to me when I read it. But I'd probably focus on the things I felt qualified to teach without reading from a Teacher's Guide To Keeping Students Awake During Hamlet, or whatnot.
This is highly compatible to mathematics education in the US, which is largely taught by uninspired teachers who don’t quite understand what they are teaching.
Second, how sad is that for the people who don't get to read it because they don't have a "great" teacher
It's not sad at all. You don't regret what you don't know you missed. Let them discover it on their own, from a better source, at a later date.
Shakespeare study was one of the worst periods in my education. It's boring, irrelevant, and to this day I don't understand the obsession. I'd rather that any child read the full works of Steinbeck than anything by Shakespeare.
It reminds me of the way we learned geometric proofs in 8th grade. When I finally got into proper algebraic proofs in college it was an indescribable joy.
If you think it is irrelevant there is probably a lot of things going on in contemporary books and plays that are going over your head. Which is fine. But why keep others away from it because you didn't like it?
If you think it is irrelevant there is probably a lot of things going on in contemporary books and plays that are going over your head
I don't watch plays, and I doubt I'm missing many Shakespeare references in modern books. Even if I am, I don't lament what I don't know I'm missing.
But why keep others away from it because you didn't like it?
Because it's an enormous time sink that could be better used on other things. Why turn so many kids off of plays, poetry, and appreciation of literature because of an obsession with one playwright?
> You are arguing that people shouldn't be exposed to something if they can't understand all of it
Sorry, I didn't mean to come off as that extreme. You don't have to understand all of it, but I - and I suspect, so did many of my peers - understood so little of it that the time was effectively wasted. There is other literature available that would likely have served us much better.
> But a modern audience is going to require explanation regardless of accent.
Exactly - and without some explanation, it's very much like reading something in a foreign language.
I know you weren't being that extreme, but I think the point you are making could be made to dumb down a lot education.
Should we not teach kids the best programming languages because most teachers really aren't very good programmers?
Regarding explanation, I have never seen a Shakespeare book without a lot of annotation.
> Should we not teach kids the best programming languages because most teachers really aren't very good programmers?
I would argue that a bad teacher teaching a good language can do a lot more harm to a novice programmer than not learning it at all.
My band conductor was fond of saying that practice doesn't make perfect, it makes permanent. It can be harder to replace bad habits with good habits than to instill good habits from the start.
> First of all, everyone finishes their first reading of Shakespeare with a partial understanding.
At best. I knew people at public school whose major projects were coloring maps with colored pencils. They didn't have to draw the borders, they just had to color the countries correctly. It was literally a complicated color by numbers.
Shakespeare's Globe in London did full OP productions (on the main stage) of Romeo and Juliet (2004, [1]) and Troilus and Cressida (2005, [2]). David and Ben were advisors. Highly recommended if you ever get the chance to see something similar; besides the rhyming/punning issues you mention, it's a lot brisker and more natural-sounding.
Interestingly, the prologue for R+J announces that the play "is now the two hours' traffic of our stage". It's rare for an uncut modern production to clock in much below 3.
Ahh that sounds so amazing! Perhaps Stratford, ON will give that a shot someday.
I can't imagine the original productions clocked in much under four, what with vendors selling pasties between each act and the occasional dancing bear. It points to a different concept of time: a modern Brit wouldn't dare describe a four hour affair as "two hours" but someone from Southern Europe might...
I'm pretty sure intervals weren't a thing in Shakespeare's day; he certainly didn't write with them in mind.
Which isn't to say that nobody was selling pasties, of course. Theatres were very much public spaces back then (and the Globe's yard still feels like one).
I would also recommend that if you want to find a way into enjoying Shakespeare again after it was most likely ruined for you in school, to watch the comedy Upstart Crow, made by the BBC. It's a good-humoured jab at Shakespeare's writing and actually helped get me interested in it again.
Here's another video of the same bloke that I've seen in the past: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
I do like that he mentioned being asked to perform using his native Welsh accent in the OP's video. Shakespeare was after all the playright for people of every standing, and it feels a bit daft to posh it all up.