Working on a post over on Reddit, I just came up with this idea for a game. No, not a #hashtag game, an actual physical game that teachers can use in the classroom:
I call it Death Bingo. Let’s say that you’re studying Hamlet. There are … 21? characters if you count Yorick and the Ghost. So maybe we just do a 4×4 grid. That leaves enough variety that each card will leave a few characters off.
Each grid is randomly populated with character names. If you get Ghost or Yorick, free space! Woe to you if you see names like Voltimand, Cornelius and Reynaldo.
Now start working your way through the play. Every time a character dies, put a big red X through his or her space.
[Spotted in Reddit this morning on the “Boy Meets World” forum because I track all things Shakespeare.]
Was there a single television sitcom that involved high school kids that didn’t do a Shakespeare episode? The Brady Bunch, Cosby, Head of the Class, Welcome Back Kotter and those are just the ones I specifically remember. Even Sanford and Son did one with their all adult cast.
Boy Meets World was just a little after my time, starting in 1993 when I was already out of college. So I think I missed this episode they did on Much Ado About Nothing: [Video removed because it was defaulting to autoplay and driving me crazy!]
[Link here in case the embedding causes trouble, I’m not familiar with the particular service on which I found this clip.]
I always appreciate when a show branched out and did something other than what we’ll call the “high school staples.” It’s almost always Romeo & Juliet or Hamlet for easy name recognition. Or, if you go for the “character has Shakespeare homework” storyline you’d often get Julius Caesar or Macbeth (thank you Dr. Cosby!)
On that note, here’s a clip of Boy Meets World doing Hamlet, because I think the accent is funny.
I just learned that one of the Ancestry.com sites (the UK version) is going to be putting a million documents up online, including William Shakespeare’s.
But … isn’t it already online?
I suppose that what they mean is that this will be a complete scan of the original document. All I can find are pieces, which I assume have either been released over time for press/media purposes or perhaps even created by individuals with access to the document itself? I’m unsure where the original lives right now. There’s a few hundred First Folios in existence, but only one original will.
Is there anything that we can learn from this new version that’s coming online, or is it entirely for the publicity?
When I first heard that Marion Cotillard would replace Natalie Portman as Lady MacBeth in the upcoming Scottish movie, I was disappointed. I don’t really know anything about Ms. Cotillard, and I don’t really care all that much about acting ability(*) – I just think that Natalie Portman’s presence tends to bring a very large young adult male following into the theatres, and I thought Macbeth would be a good place to do that.
Apparently Ms. Cotillard is a big fan of Shakespeare already, and dreamed of playing Lady M — just not in the original text.
“Horrors!” you say, “What’s she want to do, a modern language adaptation? Sacrilege!”
That’s an angle I’ve never imagined. English is not your native language, and yet you still grow up with a love of Shakespeare so strong that you dream of playing his greatest characters. In *your* native tongue, rather than his. As if that’s how they were intended to be played (insert obligatory “heard them in the original Klingon” reference here). How is that different from reading just a plain old modern translation? After all, either you’re reading Shakespeare (or what you’ve always come to think of as Shakespeare), or you’re not. So isn’t the “not” version always just a shallow copy? Does that mean that Ms. Cotillard will be disappointed in the English version of the works?
To read, or not to read…..that is the age old Shakespeare question. I hang out on many Shakespeare forums, and whenever the question comes up about “Which Shakespeare play should I read first?” there’s always somebody quick to jump in with, “They’re not meant to be read, they’re meant to be seen! Go see one!”
Long time readers know that this drives me crazy. The only answer to this question is, “Do both. If you have a chance to see it, by all means see it. But if you want to read it then by all means you get in there and you read it, every chance you get. And then go see it again. Repeat.”
In my continuing quest to put an end to this argument, I used the following analogy with a coworker this morning:
You go to a restaurant, you order a dish. You like the dish. Some time later, you are at a different restaurant, and you see that they offer the same dish. You try it. It’s different. It’s the same dish, but it doesn’t taste the same as the first one. Maybe you like it more, maybe less. Maybe they added something that wasn’t in the first one, or left something out that was.
This cycle repeats. The dish becomes a favorite of yours, and you begin to seek it out at every opportunity. You pay attention to the details, you learn whose version you like and whose you do not, and why. You develop a fine sense for what goes into making the best version of this dish.
Do you know what else you could do? You could get the recipe for the dish and make it yourself.
That’s when you get the true appreciation for the dish, because you understand all the parts that went into making it. You can invent your own interpretations because you see what you have to work with. The next time you visit a restaurant and try the dish you understand immediately what they left out, and why, and you have a strong opinion about whether you feel this was the right decision. You explain to your companions why you’re not crazy about this version of the dish, and what the restaurant one town over does that makes it better.
So, there you go, that’s the new analogy I’m going to start using. Do you have to know how to cook a dish yourself before you go to a restaurant? No, of course not. You’re also unlikely to sit down to cook the recipe for every dish you might encounter in a restaurant. On the other hand, maybe there’s a dish you had once and you can never find it again no matter how hard you try. Maybe there’s a dish that your friend raves about and says you must try, but you never see it on the menu. The analogy works both ways. You can’t just stroll into the theatre district and watch whatever Shakespeare play you want, just like you can’t walk into any restaurant and order any dish you want. You’re restricted by the choices available.
My point is that there is a level of appreciation and understanding beyond just going to experience what other people did with the raw ingredients. You can and you should experience them for yourself by getting your hands and your eyes on the text. If you go down that path, you will be infinitely rewarded.
