100 Bookish Things 23

Jan 23, 2016 22:08

In a desperate attempt to get me posting here regularly again I have resurrected an old, incomplete meme. It seems I was going to make 100 bookish posts but didn't get very far, so I'm going to pick it up ( Read more... )

100 things, teaching shakespeare

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natsuko1978 January 25 2016, 09:44:23 UTC
Hamlet was one of the two Shakespeare plays I studied at A Level (the other was King Lear). Our exam board (can't remember which witout raking out my certificates!) allowed us to study Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead and Edward Bond's Lear as companion texts, which was v. interesting! (And also meant we got to watch the Gary Oldman and Tim Roth film of R&G in class!)

Of course, Hamlet in historal context is also SO interesting, with the whole spirits in Limbo/Purgatory, not killing someone while he's saying his prayers and in a state of grace themes, compared with Reformation salvation by faith alone. You know?

I loved the Patrick Stewart (in dual roles) and David Tennant version that was on TV a couple of Christmases ago. (Wish I could get to the theatre more often - or to London AT ALL. :( NT and RSC screenings are even less helpful as the cinema with my back is functionally impossible. I ought to see what is available on DVD, shouldn't I? Always forget about that. Hmm...)

(I got into an argument with an American friend once, when I was explaining that for our Exam Board, at least, all the writers we studied at GCSE and A-Level English Literature were *British* (not American, Canadian, Australian New Zealand etc) and she didn't see how that was possible. How could you do English Lit without Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald or Steinbeck etc?

Really? the Brontes, Dickens, Chaucer, Marlowe, Middleton, Kyd, Gay, Swift, Shakespeare, Lawrence, George Orwell, the Romantic Poets, the Metaphysical Poets, First World War Poets... And we don't have enough writers for Literature Study?)

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clara_posts January 31 2016, 22:28:46 UTC
I loved Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead - I did a speech from it for one of my drama school auditions (maybe why I didn't get in!)

I had to dop Othello too and it's probably one of my least favourite plays - Iago is a great character but Othello is such a bloody idiot!!

David Tennant was a bit too twitchy for me as Hamlet, drove me mad. I haven't seen a really good Hamlet since about 1985 when I saw Roger rees play him. Oddly, it's not as often performed as some of the other tragedies, probably because it's so long!

There's lots of Globe DVDs and also a Globe Player where you can pay to watch the productions. Very good they are too!

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