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

Comments

[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.

I think given Horatio's and Hamlet's doubts about the Ghost at first, someone could pull off a production where we really weren't sure if Claudius did it or if it was a trick by some vindictive supernatural thingy. That would be interesting. Probably everyone would still think there's a good possibility of it being true, because royal families do that sort of thing, but it would be a slightly different experience. Or there was a short fic I read where Hamlet Sr. told Hamlet to kill Claudius because he was pissed about Hamlet secretly being Claudius's son, not his, and wanted them all dead. I don't remember whether the poisoning was true in this version or not - could go either way, I suppose.