Month: December 2011

So over the holidays a family member passed away, and my wife and I drove down to attend the funeral.  She was elderly and in failing health, so this was not a surprise.

I wasn’t prepared for the Shakespeare sermon.  When the priest said, “A long time ago, a man named William Shakespeare wrote….” and more than a few heads turned and looked at me :).  I perked up, curious.  Which Shakespeare would he be going with?

He continued, “Marc Antony spoke these words over the body of Julius Caesar…”  Really?  “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.  So let it be with Caesar.” That’s different.  Great Aunt Catherine was not an assassinated potential dictator, after all.  At least, that I know of.

He then went on to focus his sermon on how Shakespeare was wrong, and how the good that you do in your life does live after you, and it’s the bad stuff that should be put to rest.

I get his point. He spotted a line that gave him a launching point for what he wanted to say, and he snipped it out of context. No matter how much the words “Shakespeare was wrong” grate on me, I’m not going to debate with the priest on what Antony’s true feelings were toward Caesar.

That’s what this forum is for. 🙂

I have at least three different questions coming out of that service, and I think it’s only fair to post them separately so that conversations don’t all stomp all over each other.  Look for posts to follow shortly.

Tough day yesterday all around.

I have a habit at my day job of wandering around and juggling when I need to get up from the desk.  So I did so, wandering over to a coworker’s desk as I often do. 

“I’ve seen that trick,” she says. “I feel like you should sing or something while you do that, step up the difficulty.”

“Why would you want to hear me sing? You’ve not wronged me in any way, I wouldn’t want to subject you to that,” I reply.

“Then quote Shakespeare or something.”

I’d like to think that I missed no beats before replying, “When it disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state.  And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries and look upon myself and curse my fate…,” all while still juggling.

“What does bootless mean?” she asks.

“Umm….ah….hmmm…”

“I can’t believe I picked up on the one word you don’t know the definition for.  I’m disappointed.”

And with that, my Shakespeare cred took quite the hit and I looked stupid.

But, damnit, isn’t it missing the point to pick out an individual word and say “Quick! define this out of context!” I’m not even sure what the right answer is to that.  Bootless cries means what, exactly – “my cries that have nothing behind them”?  “My cries that go unheard”?  She wasn’t asking for a translation of the text I’d just spoken, she zeroes in on one word. Besides, isn’t that what the “deaf heaven” part is for?  (The best translation that I’ve found says that I could have said “useless.”  Bootless cries are useless cries, because heaven’s not listening.)

Between losing that cred with my coworkers, and learning that I won’t get to teach the kids, it wasn’t a great day I tell ya.

Just got the phone call that the school principal (who is most definitely NOT my pal) got wind of our Shakespeare project, decided that he too was uncomfortable with the potential content, and that since it is not part of the state curriculum, in short, we can’t do it. Period.

Since my kids have to actually spend a few years in this school system I will limit my opinions on the subject, but I’m sure you all can gather what they may be.

I want to thank everybody who came flocking to my rescue, flooding me with no end of resources on how we might be able to make it work.  We all know that the subject can be taught at this level, many of you have experience doing exactly that.  And we all know that it is a *good* and *positive* thing.  I just happen to have hit a dead end this time.

I’m temporarily down, but I’m very much not out.  Watch this space for future efforts to climb back up that hill.

My teaching debut gets more bowdlerized by the minute! I tried pitching a simplified version of the Mechanicals, and even still I was told “words like ‘lover’ and ‘killed’ are not acceptable, unless we had permission slips from all the parents.” If you can’t have Bottom kill himself, what’s the point?

At this rate, there’s pretty much no performance that we can do from Midsummer.  I’m losing faith in this project rapidly.
With just a week to go before showtime, I don’t even want to attempt getting a different play cleared, I just have to pitch the whole idea of doing any acting out of the text.

I really and truly don’t want to just lecture on the subject, that will be so boring.  I have some puzzles that I can give the kids as takeaways to do on their own, but I desperately need some interactive material or games that we can play. Help!

On a recent episode of Science Friday that had the story of the scientist who claims to have found evidence of the mythical Kraken.  His evidence is patterns found in a “midden”, an undersea pile of bones.  He argues that a creature of some intelligence organized the bones into patterns on purpose.

Debunkers of his evidence point to that bit of our brains that likes to find patterns in things.  When you see a cloud that looks like a kitty, it’s not because some magical being in charge of clouds shaped it like a kitty on purpose, it’s simply because that particular random combination of particles made your brain think, “Kitty!”  It is exactly the same as playing the lottery, watching “1 2 3 4 5 6” come out, and thinking, “Wow! What are the odds?!”  Exactly the same as the numbers coming out 35 17 3 4 22 30, actually.  We just don’t attach any significance to that sequence like we do to the other one.

What’s this got to do with Shakespeare?  Well, what if everything that we’ve read into Shakespeare’s work over the centuries is just that – stuff that we’ve read into it, rather than stuff that he deliberately put there?  What if he was just a guy who was just cranking out whatever got him paid, and he really and truly had no insight into human nature at all?

I often wonder about that. It’s a pretty safe bet that Shakespeare never sat at his quill and thought, “If I write this, people will still be talking about it four hundred years from now.”  But it’s also unlikely that if he was just churning out the first thing that came to his mind that we *would* be talking about him 400 years later.  So the answer is somewhere in the middle.  But at which end?