Fanfic - Hamlet - The Secret, 1/1

[fluffy_goddess]

Summary: Hamlet confides in Horatio.

Pairing: None (unless you squint, in which case, Hamlet/Horatio)

Rating: PG-13

Warnings: None

Author's Notes: Takes place sometime between I,v and III,2 in Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Disclaimer: Not my characters. Was once a highschool writing project, but is now repurposed as fanfic.

Comments

[fluffy_goddess]

Romeo and Juliet bugged me because we got it under a truly horrific english teacher who nobody liked, and that kind of ruined it for the class. Also: grade ten, mix of genders, Zeffirelli version on screen. So, you know, that was fun. I always wished we could do more of the comedies, though since very few actually got that Merchant of Venice was a comedy, maybe it's for the best taht they didn't.

a) Also, Mercutio! Who can be played as very, very gay, very, very believably.
b) I can't give you a director, or actors, or any useful details but I'm going to tease you with this anecdote anyway but there's a wonderfully horrendous version of King Lear somewhere out there. If the acting is wooden, the costumes and sets look like bad sixties sci-fi (by which I mean, fake-looking polyester 'velvet' and 'silk' and 'cloth of gold', tinfoil crowns, and styrofoam castles), and the only actors emoting at all are the ones playing Edgar and Edmund (and even then, only at each other), you have found the version they played to my twelfth-grade English Lit class. After we watched it, and after the giggles had died down, I told one of my friends that that version left me wanting to write slash about the half-brothers, which she thought was creepy despite her usual approval of my smut-writing ways; we then went to history class, where the teacher dictated the name of a website to us and she collapsed back into giggles every time he said '/'. As I recall, he was a little too scared to ask her why.

[fluffy_goddess]

Oh god, I remember that version. It was played at one of my friends' birthday parties, and I got so bored and annoyed at the random guns popping up everywhere that I wandered off into the kitchen and chatted with her Mom. (Yes, I was a very weird kid. I also fled when they watched particularly violent movies, or at least movies with 'realistic' violence that depicted suffering. So hey, at least everyone's parents knew who I was.)

Romeo and Juliet bugs me for a lot of reasons -- chiefly being that the entire play is about teenage angst/romance (are the two distinguishable?) run unchecked. To me, it's not so much a great love story as a great story of two idiots swanning about and making bad choices, which then lead them to even worse choices, which lead to a really, really annoying deathscene for both of them.

I mean, spot on for depiction of how serious teenaged relationships feel to teenagers, but gigantic minus on depicting helpful ways of dealing with that.

...

Oh, and ^.^ I aim to amuse.

[fluffy_goddess]

lol That would be an awesome teacher to have. I had a great teacher in grade nine, an awful one for ten and eleven, and then back to the good one for twelve, and for English Lit. She was probably a very smart woman (and for all I know, still teaching), but she had zero classroom management skills, and she was bad at figuring out how to get her class to connect with the plays, so I ended up walking away mostly remembering how pathetically she'd tried to defend the movie versions of R & J and MacBeth we watched, and how bad she was at figuring out what we were seeing as interesting.

But the great teacher was really great. We had The Amazing Shrinking Class for Eng Lit (our class list dropped from eighteen or so to about eight in the first week, but since there'd been enough initial sign ups, they ran it anyway), so on the exam the poetry passage she gave us to analyze was the St. Crispin's Day Speech... "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers". ;)