The Shakespeare Club!

[ZigZag]

Join here for discussion on possibly the greatest writer and play-write of all time: The Bard!

Members
ZigZag
Nevermore
You_Stupid_Boy
Leeny
Qwill
XdayXX11XXdreamX

[nevermore]

memememememememeME!

I want in! :D

[You stupid boy]

Cat wants in too. :D

[ZigZag]

Ok, let's start this discussion. How about telling the class about your first experience with Shakespeare.

[You stupid boy]

Mine was listening to a tape on a long car journey, called "Shakespeare Without the Boring Bits." Basically, it's retellings of Shakespeare for children and teenagers. It was a wonderful, wonderful tape - all the stories were told in a different style. Anthony and Cleopatra was an article in a celebrity magazine; As You Like It was a filmscript; Romeo and Juliet was told entirely from the nurse's point of view; A Midsummer Night's Dream was a long pub song that Bottoms sings; King Lear was a series of letters to Cordelia's mother; and The Winter's Tale was a series of letters to an agony aunt (The Delphic Oracle). So I immediately decided that I loved Shakespeare, and got round to reading my favourite plays from the tape. Simple as that. :)

[ZigZag]

Wow, that's awesome. Normally I hate when people try to dumb down Shakespeare (don't get me started on the load of tripe that is No Fear Shakespeare) but that sounds really, really good!

My first experience was in ninth grade English. We read Romeo and Juliet and I was determined to hate it. I couldn't stand the way people always acted like Romeo and Juliet's love was the ideal (hello? They commit suicide!) and besides, it was Shakespeare. It would surely be archaic and boring.

And then we started to read it. And sure, the language was hard to follow at times but the books we had were positively wonderful at explaining the phrases without dumbing it down for us. And I had a fantastic teacher. She stressed the Shakespeare was never meant to be read in a class room setting and had us act out most of it with as much creativity as we wanted, so long as we kept to the script. She explained it so well to us.

And as for boring? Not a chance! Shakespeare, I found, is interesting. The themes and metaphors presented are so amazing and so much fun for me and my over-analytical self. And it's funny! I never dreamed that some stuffy old book could be funny, but Shakespeare is hilarious! I highly recommend The Tempest, I read it really recently and laughed my butt off.

Plus, romantic? That came in later adaptions. I firmly believe that if Shakespeare was alive today and could see the stupid way most people view Romeo and Juliet (I'm looking at you, Stephenie Meyer) he'd slap them.

Oh, and speaking of funny, I cannot recommend Shakespeare Abridged highly enough. It is, without a doubt, one of the funniest things I've ever seen. The contents are a bit adult but no more adult than Shakespeare is when read the proper way. Basically it's all of Shakespeare's works crammed into a single play. They divide them up and do them separately and make it their own while still staying faithful to the original works. Some examples: they do the histories as a football game and rap out Othello (This is the most adult one but I highly recommend the older members to watch it on Youtube).

The entire second act is devoted to Hamlet which includes Ophelia, played by a man as are all the women's parts (just wait until you see him play Juliet!) running around the stage screaming "I'm crazy, I'm crazy, I'm crazier then you! I'm crazy as a whack-a-doo!" They also plant someone in the audience to scream for them to do and encore when they are done and gets the rest of the audience to scream for it. So they do it again, in five minutes. And after that's done the audience is made to scream for another encore. Which they do in two minutes. And then they have them scream for another encore, but this time backwards. Which they do hilariously. My favorite part of the backwards part is, well, in the regular part when the dead king appears as a sock puppet and screams "boo!" so when they do it backwards he comes out and yells "Oob!"

I first saw it when I was ten and most of the adult parts flew right over my head. My school took us to see it when I was in tenth grade and I could understand it more. I've never laughed so hard in my life. To this day the phrase "Cut the crap Hamlet, my biological clock is ticking, I want babies NOW," which the actors split up into three parts and have the audience chant multiple times, still makes makes giggle.

All versions of Shakespeare Abridged are slightly different, but all of them are completely hilarious.

EDIT: After writing this I had to go watch the RSC perform it. They skip one of the funniest parts of the Romeo and Juliet part. :( When Romeo says to Juliet "Call me but love," in the versions I've seen Juliet responds "Okay, buttlove *giggle*" It's still hilarious though. :)

[nevermore]

Ah.... Mrs. Mickaelson... I forever bite my thumb at thee for nearly ruining Shakespeare for me completely. She was, hands down, one of the worst teachers I've ever had. I don't feel too bad saying this because since then, I've had worse, which is something that makes me shudder to think. She was the most painfully boring teacher... I had her for a class called Humanities which more or less lumped english and history together (which worked quite well, because we'd learn about history then read something fictional from the period). Sixth grade humanities and eighth grade humanities were two of my favorite classes. Why did I loathe seventh grade humanities?

Mrs. Mickaelson.

She could take the most fantastic subjects (japanese history! Come on!) and make you weep with boredom. I will forever sympathize with Hogwarts students stuck with Professor Binns, because in the muggle world, I was dragging myself through Mrs. Mickaelson.

What does this have to do with Shakespeare? Everything. In seventh grade. We're talking twelve year olds--half of them still learning to read big chapter books. And she decided on... not Romeo and Juliet (which, face, it, at age 12, you are absolutely sympathetic with overdramatic teens who threaten to kill themselves if they can't be together)... not Macbeth, about murder and witches. Not even Hamlet about insanity-driven revenge. Nope. Merchant of Venice. Which I have since heard is a fabulous play. I cannot tell you anything about it except that there is a character with my name, and someone wanted to carve off someone's skin. She even picked the most god-awful re-enactments to show the class. Misery all around. I was CONVINCED I hated Shakespeare.

Until about a year later, when something utterly glorious happened. An old woman in my neighborhood had her granddaughter stay with her for a week. Her name was Angel. I am not making this up. She was my gift from god sent to give me another chance with old Will. That was the year Baz Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117509/) came out. Angel and I were inseparable the week she stayed with her grandma, and on one of the last nights, she convinced me to go with her and granny to go see R & J at the movies. And it was, and remains to this day, one of the best films I have ever seen. I have never looked back.

Although to this day, I still can't bring myself to get through the merchant of venice... :(

But a lifetime of shakespeare... almost ruined right out of the gate. *tuts*

[You stupid boy]

Oh Nev! Merchant of Venice is probably my favourite Shakespeare play, I just think you had a case of bad teacher. Like how I don't really like Macbeth, and I think it's cos of bad teacher. *nod*

[Leeny]

Oh, I'd like to join! :D

[Qwill]

I JOINNNNNEEES!
Uh....my first introduction to Shakespeare was very boring during school. We had to read The Taming of the Shrew. Apparently most of our class hated it a lot so our teacher gave us a challenge to go one day without using any of Shakespeare's words. She gave us a very humongous list. I am proud to say I failed, but at least then I started to really like Shakespeare

[ZigZag]

Taming of the Shrew is actually the only Shakespearean play I don't like. It's so horribly misogynistic and it made me so angry!

[nevermore]

oh yeah! Taming of the Shrew. I forgot I read that one. It's kinda hard to remember when you had like... two or three shakespeare classes in Uni... :o
Great, I can't even remember how many Shakespeare classes I took. Niiice. :rolleyes:

I think... two... plus a Renaissance Lit class where we studied Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Milton (Marlow is the only man I might love more than Shakespeare, whom I will one day write and dedicate a novel to, but not until I am VERY famous... rumor has it Marlowe actually faked his death and changed his name to Shakespeare. Food for thought.). I like Milton's Faerie Queene, but I may be one of the only people on the planet who enjoys reading Milton...

Then a Modern English Lit class that started with Shakespeare and moved forward... or was it Classical English Lit that began with Beowulf and ended with Shakespeare? :( Bother. Now I can't remember. :p

Suffice it to say, I've read a crapload of Shakespeare. Haha.

[Leeny]

My first experience was last year in Honors English I. We read Taming of the Shrew. It was terribly fun because our teacher made the boys act out the girls' parts. I will never forget seeing Aaron in a dress. *giggle*

[DayDream]

Can I join?

[YenGurrl43]

Can I join!

I just like Shaksprere as I found Tale of the Shrew (I love that play) and like all Shakspere stuff.

[UndercoverNinja]

We have an annual house shakespeare competition at school and I am in my houses one as witch number 2 in Macbeth!

[You stupid boy]

That's awesome - I was Witch 1 when we did Macbeth. :D Good times.

[Qwill]

The closest I ever got to a Shakespeare play was when we did Midsummer's Night Dream. They found it fitting for me to be Puck. Thank God it was only a class skit

[nevermore]

That's awesome - I was Witch 1 when we did Macbeth. :D Good times.

ooh I was a witch once! I forget which one... :\ It was for my English class my senior year in high school, and I partnered up with four other girls from my class--all from theater. My friend who made the movie has actually finished film school and will probably grow up to be a crazy-famous director, and we were definitely one of her early experiments. She dragged us all out of bed around 4am, threw beautiful wiccan clothes on all of us, and carted us off to... of all places... an elementary school. With creaking swings in the background, and the sun just starting to rise, we drew a pentagram on the blacktop, lit a fire under a cauldron (and prayed the cops wouldn't show up), and proceeded to torch firecrackers and whistling willies (again, praying the cops wouldn't show up) as we threw in whatever magic ingredients we were supposed to throw in (accompanied by things like lunch meat and a vile of dishsoap dyed blood red that poured out thick and murky like old blood). She then set the whole thing to black and white and man... it was pretty flippin' awesome, if I do say so myself.

Yeah, we got an A. :cool: I kind of pitied the kids who opted to just stand at the front of the room and recite a line or two, because I seem to recall we went first that day...

I do wonder what the poor teachers must have thought when they got to school monday and found a huge chalk pentagram on the ground with ashes in the middle. :D Eh. We gave 'em something to talk about that day. Haha