Shakespeare, Harry Potter and Me, Gehayi

[gehayi]

I looked over the Shakespeare meme that's going around, but the problem with that is that it presumes that you've seen the plays both on stage and in the movies. I have never seen a Shakespeare play on stage or in the movies. The only adaptation of a Shakespeare play that I know I've seen is West Side Story. I've only ever read two plays for

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[sunnyskywalker]

I got lucky with a high school English teacher who was willing to explain things like Hamlet's "country matters" pun, showed us part of the Reduced Shakespeare Company's version, and had us write our own modern adaptations of scenes. I think he might have played us the Three Minute Hamlet song, too. It was a lot more fun that way. (We did talk about the themes and all the other English class-y things too.) Plus we went to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival in Oregon to see some of the plays, which is pretty good for a field trip

[gehayi]

Well, we didn't study Hamlet. And I didn't know that "country matters" WAS a pun.

What's the Three Minute Hamlet song?

My teacher did have the idea of taking us to a Shakespearean play, but about 90% of the parents--not just mine but everyone else's, too--decreed that that was a waste of time. Sitting in class talking about a play none of us had ever seen = legitimate schoolwork. Going to see a play = entertainment..."and you aren't going to school to be ENTERTAINED!"

I never heard Cymbeline described that way, but boy does it fit!

[sunnyskywalker]

I didn't catch the pun by myself either! I think we were all too busy looking for srs bzns because it's Shakespeare, and it took the grownups to point out the dirty bits to us teenagers. Which sounds totally backwards.

Three Minute Hamlet is a song by Seamus Kennedy which summarizes the play in three minutes. The lyrics are pretty well transcribed here, and I can't check right now to see whether this audio works, but it might. It's probably on YouTube too.

[gehayi]

*laughs* Oh, that's great. And yes, that does summarize the story well. It's a pretty good murder mystery, actually. Granted, you know from the start that Claudius did it and you hope he's not going to get away with it, but you don't know how he's going to get his.

It's just that Shakespeare tends to get treated as OMG SRS BSNSS. Which I think is a bad way to sell it so students, really.

[sunnyskywalker]

It's way more fun this way, which is why I also liked the Complete Works of Shakespeare, Abridged (they do all the histories together as a football game, only with a crown instead of a football, just to give you an idea). And it definitely helped my class get interested when our teacher explained that yes, Shakespeare was making another sex joke, or that yes, Bottom being turned into an ass is exactly as groan-worthy a pun as we think it is