alt Hacker NewsIt felt even worse when reading Shakespeare, which is nominally the same language you and I speak, but just barely. Add the fact that it's a play, where the performance carries a lot of the meaning.
The end result was that I - and as far as I could tell, 99% of my classmates - got basically negative value out of sitting in class and reading lines we didn't understand out loud, without even time to try and parse it out because we were too busy just scanning the lines to see when it was our turn to speak.
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A couple years after I graduated college, I came across the 1972 movie of Macbeth. The experience was so drastically different from reading it in high school that it seemed like a completely different play. Suddenly, it all made sense now that I had a visual context.
I remember one of the characters (Macduff?) covered in blood after a battle and grinning about how he had opened up his opponent "from the knave to the chop" with appropriate gestures. I remembered that specific phrase from high school and now, instead of being an abstract comment, it had actual meaning that I could relate to.
I'm of the opinion that most plays simply shouldn't be taught in high school English class. There just isn't enough context to really understand them.
I have heard that Shakespeare is much easier and more enjoyable for non-English speakers, because they get modern translations and we do not
Linguist John McWhorter says that Shakespeare is often an "the Emperor has no clothes" situation. No one wants to admit to themselves or others that they don't understand it, and the people who think they understand it are often misunderstanding a lot of it
> where the performance carries a lot of the meaning
The big one for me is you don't necessarily know Elizabethan slang, but when you see the play performed, the dirty lines get delivered dirty.
Yes, I agree completely with the Shakespeare point.
I was lucky enough to have a close friend (also a teenager!) who really got Shakespeare. She would explain to me what was actually going on, and read it with the correct emphasis so you could mostly actually follow it. She is 100% of the reason that I was ever able to appreciate Shakespeare.
You would hope that most teachers could do this, but in my experience it was only my one friend who had the literary and dramatic talent to explain Shakespeare well to teenagers.
I felt the same way. I think we were on Hamlet, and reading it alone just felt so confusing and lifeless. I couldn't tell when characters were upset, sarcastic, ecstatic, etc. It drained it of all character.
But then later on I saw a play version of it and suddenly it all made sense! Even if the words were identical, the context made it much easier to follow the story. I could piece together what it meant even if it wasn't modern English. You could hear the emotion in the voices and better follow what they're reacting to. I really appreciated it!
It's not like it would have cost the school anything...it was freely available online!
Reading these comments about Shakespeare makes me think that most of you had terrible teachers of Eng. Lit.
Plays, all of them not just Shakespeare, are written to be performed. If your teachers didn't have you perform plays and also watch professional and amateur performances they were derelict in their duties as teachers.
Performance isn't just rote recitation.
Rant: I missed lot of Shakespeare appreciation when they somehow failed to teach that (other) people actually like how iambic pentameter sounds, and this is critical to enjoying it. Nothing about how Shakespeare is voiced has ever registered as sounding particularly pleasant to me. The word choice, sure, but not the meter or stressing.
They taught that Shakespeare used iambic pentameter, and how you're "supposed" to stress it, but it came off to me as "technical curiosity you're supposed to memorize" not "universal experience of enjoyment" that I apparently don't share.
My lighting talk about this: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZUcvP8CWhB/
Non-social media link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G58CMUDf-M4loe3MeEus-9gNA5T...
If not for Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, I'd probably had just completely bounced off Shakespeare's works in high school.
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I had the same experience reading A Midsummer Night's Dream in high school -- I could follow the story, but it was a slog to get through and I didn't understand what was supposed to be so great about it.
Then I saw an actual performance of the play recently, and it all clicked. It was just as understandable as any contemporary film, and easily one of the most fun and entertaining stories I've seen.