If your argument is "you should also experience Shakespeare plays as plays," then I'm with you. But if your argument is "It was difficult to read Shakespeare and I liked watching the movies," then you might have completely missed the point of studying literature.
Judging by the amount the kids actually learn, doing things the right way is an equal waste of time to just watching the plays on VHS.
> learn the structure of modern drama
IMO, far too few English teachers focus on this aspect of the Bard's plays. Instead, it's nonsense about iambic pentameter or treating R&J as romance instead of farce, black comedy, or tragedy that turns students into STEMlords.
My teacher also showed us a movie adaptation at the end, and watching it as a drama while you understood the nuances of their dialogues actually enhanced the experience.
One option is to use some commentary on a play rather than the whole thing--e.g. Garber's book.
But then you lost me at the 2nd sentence.
Who TF cares what "high art" was then? Or who the groundlings at the Globe were? They apparently had better taste than the people at court. Not the first time.
In the early days of rock 'n' roll or blues or rap or hip-hop or jazz (etc.) only lower-status people were into it.
And your "theory" about Ben Jonson (not "Johnson") has been debated (and debunked) for literally centuries, along with several other possibilities. Are you just now discovering it?
People in every culture of the world always have and continue to love Shakespeare's plays. At the same time, there are children who can't be torn away from their Harry Potter books. If they read at all.
I can vouch for this, I hated reading Shakespeare and just sparknotes'd everything. Maybe I would've loved it if I had watched a funny play instead.
Although if I'm in Ashland and going to see a Shakespeare play, I'll usually read it first. It helps to know what they're talking about. Some characters have three different names in the same play, for example.
Is that not the same thing?
I strongly disagree, though I entirely agree that the plays were meant to be seen, not read. Despite this, they happen to be some of the most profound writings in human history, so only watching and not reading would miss much of high value.
For me, struggling with the language of Shakespeare was one of my childhood joys. I grew up in a very rural state with little guidance and a poor local school system. But I like challenges, so this worked for me.
It worked so well, that I developed a life-long passion for wordplay, etymology, theater, and poetry. Eventually, I graduated at the top of my class at an ivy league school, with a concentration in comparative literature (focusing on Joyce and Nietzsche). I still read Shakespeare almost daily, and he inspired me to write 153 of my own (bad!) sonnets. I am grateful for the time I spent struggling with Shakespeare's language.
Please don't stop making kids read Shakespeare! From my very biased perspective, this is one of the worst things we could do.
Wait, is that ridiculous? I honestly think it's beneficial to let young students get a better sense of how all the media they consume is actually created. Seeing how a screen play differs from a film, discussing how subtle changes in reading a line might influence the interpretation of a scene, understanding the nature of improvisation and just knowing where movies come from sounds like it would be both very interesting and very educational.
The equivalent for video games would be understanding how a PC works and walking through some of the actual code that goes into making a game, maybe building a simple mod. I imagine that would also be a useful class and enjoyed by quite a few HS students.
[0] https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/romeojuliet/ac...
We wouldn't have appreciated the movie and the story so much if we didn't sort of take part in it.
It's like when you go to a dinner party and you have to help cook a little - it makes the meal taste better knowing you had some part in it.
Those theories are bullshit. Shakespeare was Shakespeare.
Otherwise I agree with you. Shakespeares plays was meant to be performed by actors on stage.
But for the intendend theatre audience, the language would be much easier to understand than it is for us today. Reading it with annotations might help us understand more of the meaning.
You need to pick one. The reason there are 300 "Shakespeare was actually person X" conspiracy theories is because people throughout history were horrified with the idea a common person could make such high art.
Also hot take: we need to stop making kids read Shakespeare in School.
Shakespeare wrote plays. They were meant to be heard and seen. Filled with drama and comedy (lots of poop and sex jokes). Imagine if we forced children to experience Star Wars as a screenplay, read aloud in class? It’s ridiculous.
The plays themselves had a runtime of approximately only 2.5 - 3 hours. No need to stretch out Romeo and Juliet for weeks reading through passage by painful passage. Let them watch the movie version and then discuss certain parts or re-enact it themselves. Shakespeare was entertainment. And we now treat him like some kind of biblical text. It’s crazy!
edit: and to reinforce that last point, Shakespeare was put his plays in the Globe theater, across the River Thames, which at the time was not considered London proper. He was also not a court playwright and considered at best, midbrow. The “high art” playwright of the time who did play in London proper was Ben Johnson.
There is even a theory that Shakespeare was Ben Johnson’s secret identity so he could write freely away from the stuffy conventions of high society and the court. Like, Shakespeare was not high art. We must stop treating him that way and kill the love of literature in children by forcing them dryly read “To be or not to be.”