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Wordmariah, give this a look.. fwiw. http://snipurl.com/5ewl
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Carpal Tunnel
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In reply to:
I'll give the bare bones plot summary and set Zefferelli upon them.
Don't give too much of the plot away, Wordwind. When the recent-ish version with Claire Daines and Leonardo DiCaprio was in cinemas here in Indonesia, I went to see it with Candi, who only knew that this was supposed to be one of the great love stories of all time. He was absolutely devastated when Juliet didn't wake up in time to forestall Romeo's suicide. He still thinks it would have been better if she had.
Bingley
Bingley
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enthusiast
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Faldage, your suggestion about "Shakespeare in Love" was terrific.
Think that was TEdRem, Wordwind.
"Er, perhaps you should SEE "Shakespeare in Love" before screening it for a bunch of ninth-graders."
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He still thinks it would have been better if she had.
Mebbe he'd prefer the opera version (cain't have no final duet with no dead soprano).
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Wordmariah --seeing this gave me a shock: our dog's name is Mariah. And she does speak (though not in words). He still thinks it would have been better if she had. And I still agree with him. 
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veteran
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He still thinks it would have been better if she had. And I still agree with him.
But then it wouldn't have been a tragedy, but a romantic comedy or some such. I wonder if Dryden rewrote R&J to have a happy ending. He made Lear into a musical with a happy ending. He could do just about anything.
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a romantic comedy or some such
As I am sure it was originally intended to be. I mean, Romeo and Ethel, the Sea Pirate's Daughter?
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GASP! You mean that people over there procreate without clothes on? How unBabtist!
TEd
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Indeed! How unMormon, even!
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In reply to:
If they won't let you do it for the reasons outlined above you can rally spark the kids interest in Shakespeare by explaining that you wanted to do it but the teen-sex and violence made it inappropriate for their tender little minds.
- Faldage
wordminstrel: In one of my posts above, I told Faldage that his idea about Shakespeare in Love was fantastic. What I was driving at was his statement I've quoted above, which essentially was spotting the film as forbidden fruit, hard to resist. So, this particular idea was Faldage's and not Ted R's...yes?
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Pooh-Bah
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I don't know if it's the same now, and the same in the US, as it was when I wert a lad, but we got a kick out of "emulating" speech from Shakespeare's time. How about trying to get your kids addressing each other in 16th/17th century terms - you know, the politeness of speech, like "Good morrow, kind sir!"
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Another objection has occurred to me. Much of the enjoyment of Shakespeare in Love comes from recognizing the lines from his plays being bandied about by people on the street.
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Pooh-Bah
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Faldo, a lot of people who enjoyed Shakespeare in Love had never read one of the bard's plays right through. The plot itself was good enough, if a bit lightweight. I was embarrassed, when I went to see it, to find myself laughing at the script's unscrupulous mispositioning of lines of dialogue - and to find that I was the only one laughing!
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old hand
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For the record, it was Capfka who first mentioned Shakespeare in Love. Not to steal your thunder, F, but.
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About Shakespeare in Love and Faldage and wordminstrel and now fiberb':
I was not thanking Faldage for mentioning Shakespeare in Love. I was thanking Faldage for his idea of telling the kids that I wanted to show it to them, but it was too risque (or graphic...or off-limits) to show to them in school. Faldage's psychology was simply to offer them forbidden fruit and to say, sorry, you cannot have it--which would be a sure-fire way of getting them to see them film.
Lord, lord, we do have to be very, very specific here online, don't we? I will try to specify more specifically in the future, but probably will screw up again as usual and always.
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there, there, Windage; some of us knew what you meant.
-ron obtund
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Pooh-Bah
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I don't know if this will really help or apply to the situation, but here's my two cents as an actor who has appeared in several Shakespeare plays and as an English major...
The best way to learn about Shakespeare and to deeply aprpeciate his works is to act in and produce one of the plays. I learned more from playing a bit part in Macbeth one summer than I did reading the play in my college Shakespeare class. Plus, I got to die on stage in a sword fight, which was cool.
I think the ideal experience would be a class in which, in a single semester, the entire class would pruduce exactly one of his plays. Students would do everything necessary to put the play on. If you had more students than roles (both on-stage and off-stage roles, e.g. stage manager) then you could have understudies/double casting of parts. The time spent immersed in one play leads one invariably to appreciate the subtleties of Shakespeare's genius and incites a self-fueling interest to investigate his other works.
An acceptable compromise might be to produce scenes from the plays, but I think that lacks the sense of accomplishment that comes with tackling a whole play.
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Here's another thing that might be of interest: http://207.70.82.73/pages/descriptions/02/218.htmlIt's a This American Life story about a group of prisoners in a high security prison putting on a production of Hamlet. A story about murder and its consequences done by people who are murderers and understand the consequences.
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Reminds me of Martin Esslin's story in the preface to Theater of the Absurd of a production of Waiting for Godot in San Quentin in the early '60s. The inmates there seemed to get it.
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That's a great undertaking, but the sense of accomplishment would be enormous. The understanding that would come from such a performance would be make it worthwhile.
It would be no small thing for a teacher to keep them on task and focussed.
k
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Pooh-Bah
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Well that's why the whole class is devoted to that, rather than a side project for a class that has a syllabus of several other works of literature to cover.
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