Category: Geeklet Stories

What Makes or Breaks a Romeo and Juliet?

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

I can’t believe it’s taken this long, but this week my oldest is finally seeing an actual live Shakespeare production as part of her studies (i.e. not because I made it happen).  The production in this case is Romeo and Juliet (why is it always Romeo and Juliet?) and I’ve already told her that my assumption is she already knows moRomeo and Julietre about the play going in than anybody else in her class.

Since she’s already seen and read the play on her own, plot and character and all that stuff are out of the way (as has always been the plan).  So what I’d like to do is give her some suggestions to watch out for that will make this particular interpretation different.  In other words, it’s a great opportunity to discuss how everybody gets the same script, but every production is different.

What do you suggest?  For instance, I’m a big fan of watching the minor characters. I think they can really fill out the play when you give them a chance.  How’s Friar Laurence?  Is he just an incompetent adult, or should we see him as more of a villain who brings about all the tragedy because he is overly zealous in his desire to be the one who ends the feud?

Similarly consider Lord Capulet.  Which face is the right one? The one that says Juliet must decide for herself to marry Paris? Or the one that says do what I tell you or get out of my house?  I’ve always thought of him as a bad guy. But I’ve had people defend him, saying he’s merely a man with a temper who doesn’t mean what he says.

Another question I like to ask is how violent is the conflict between the two families in this version?  I don’t like the overly violent interpretation where both sides are always this close to killing each other. I prefer to believe that the grudge is dying out. Both sides now are all talk and bluster but neither is really serious about doing injury to the other. That way, Mercutio’s death is an accident. Even Tybalt is surprised – which makes Romeo’s revenge darker because while Tybalt accidentally killed Mercutio, Romeo deliberately killed Tybalt.

See what I’m talking about? When you see Romeo and Juliet for the umpteenth time, what are you paying close attention to?

Random Shakespeare Sightings

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Sunday night in a house with three kids can be chaos.  The boy is in the tub, the oldest is fretting over a test she has in biology in the morning, and my middle child is curled up in bed with my wife trying to find a show to watch.

“Daddy, come quick! Shakespeare!” they yell.  I’m busy quizzing my daughter on the relationship between apocryphal and deuterocanonical books in the bible, and my son wants to show me a cool bubble experiment he has concocted.  But eventually I break free and make it into the Shakespeare room.

A lady, who I recognize, is talking about Shakespeare.  But oh what is her name? That’s going to drive me crazy. I know I know her.

Then it switches. “Oh, well, I know that guy,” I say, looking past the scruffly beard and mustache and the very recognizable eyes.  “That’s Ralph Fiennes.”

“THOR!” my daughter exclaims.

I’m not sure where she got that.  “Really?  No, he wasn’t in Thor.”  (It just dawned on me writing this that she’s confusing him with Tom Hiddleston.)

“VOLDEMORT!” she tries again.

“There you go.  Yes he was Voldemort.”

Cut back to other lady.  *snap* “I know who that is, that’s Julie Taymor! Duh, obviously.”

My wife and daughter look at each other like Daddy’s gone cuckoo.

I pull myself away from the screen to deal with other children, but make it back to another guy I recognize.  It’s Hugh Bonneville from Downton Abbey, who I actually haven’t seen do much Shakespeare.  I mistakenly associate him with the scientist in the Thor movie, but with a little IMDB help I realize I’m confusing him with Stellan Skarsgard.

Turns out the show was “Shakespeare Uncovered“, season two episode one. I know of the show but haven’t really followed it, so somebody enlighten me – did season two just start, or is that an old re-run we stumbled across?

How Far That Little Candle Throws His Beams

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

I’ve got a question for you.

I’m going to assume, since you’re reading this, that you like Shakespeare.  Maybe you’re a theatre geek in general, or maybe like me you’ve got no particular connection to the theatrical world, you just love Shakespeare’s work.  You’ve probably got a bunch of it memorized, too, if by pure repetition if nothing else.

So here’s my question.  How many friends have you got that you talk about Shakespeare with?  Sure, if you’re in a theatre group in the first place the answer to this question might be obvious.  But what about your friends, your family, your coworkers? If your life is anything like mine, most folks you encounter have little more than a passing high school knowledge of the man and his work. Most will never bother to learn any more than that, because they’re adults now and their time for being told what they have to learn is over.  There’s bills to be paid and fantasy football teams to draft.

Why can’t we change that?

Why can’t we introduce Shakespeare and his work to children from the time that they’re born?  Fine, there’s plenty of stuff in Shakespeare that’s over the head of most college students, let alone toddlers.  Dr. Seuss wrote propaganda cartoons during World War II, too.  But I’ll bet we can all quote Cat in the Hat.

How great would the world be if everybody you ran into on a daily basis was as familiar with “I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, where ox-lips and the nodding violet grows” as they are with “One fish two fish, red fish blue fish?”

“To be or not to be” and “Wherefore art thou” have tipped over into cliche, but wouldn’t you love to hang out with somebody who not only recognized “Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises,” but could complete it with, “sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not?”

Shakespeare is poetry.  Children learn language through rhyme and poetry.

Shakespeare painted pictures with words.  Children learn words through association with images.

There’s absolutely no reason why somebody can’t take Shakespeare’s poetry and Shakespeare’s pictures and put them in the hands of new parents to read to their children from day one. You know what happens when that happens?  Those kids like it. Those kids ask for it. Those kids want more.
Most importantly, those kids grow up with Miranda and Ariel and Titania and Oberon in their brains right next to Winnie the Pooh and Piglet and the Wild Things and the Lorax and Alice and the Mad Hatter…

Before that little candle can throw its beams, somebody has to light it, and that is precisely what Erin is trying to do.

I know I’ve bugged you all about this already, but her Kickstarter deadline draws near, and she hasn’t hit the goal yet, so she still needs help.  Back this project.  Get this book into existence. I don’t care if you’ve got kids.  Mine aren’t going to read this.  But I backed it. Because I want others to be able to read it. Imagine one day going to the store (if they still have bookstores!) and seeing Shakespeare in the baby book section. Even better imagine buying it and giving something you love as a give to someone you love.

 

Geeklet Studies Romeo and Juliet : Oh, Come On

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

We’ve all heard the tragedy of my daughter’s class not getting to finish Romeo and Juliet. They’re forever stuck in Act 3, with Juliet just having discovered that Romeo is banished.  Never was a story of more woe, than that of my daughter and her eighth grade English class.

My daughter even read that post and told me over dinner, “It’s going to be ok, Daddy. But at graduation if you see my teacher you are *not* to go near him.”

So yesterday she comes home from school and says, “Well, I’m up to Act 5 Scene 4!”

“How’d that happen? You reading it on your own now?  When did you find time to read that much?”

And then I get the rest of the story.

Seems that the school had a lockdown drill today.  I’m not sure the protocol precisely, but it involves the entire class being huddled into a small space like sardines.  I know this because apparently a handful of girls could not stop giggling over it, and a handful of teenage boys saw it as a golden opportunity to grab some teenage girl bottom.

And their teacher lost his mind.  Unable to express to them the seriousness of the situation, once the drill was over and they were back in their seats, he apparently raged beyond anything that they had seen before (he’s a yeller anyway), throwing out insults and curse words with reckless abandon.  Just like you see in the tv shows, they were assigned a mandatory essay, due Friday, on the history of school shooting – anybody that doesn’t complete it does not get to participate in the end of year class activities, including a harbor cruise.

He then cancelled whatever fun activity they had scheduled for the remainder of the day and told them to sit quietly in their seats and read.  What did they read?  You guessed it – Romeo and Juliet.

I could do little but roll my eyes at that.  So is it a punishment at that point?  Or was taking it away in the first place the punishment?  My daughter was all, “Fine, I wanted to read it anyway!”

In the teacher’s defense, I think he was right to be upset and expect that Romeo and Juliet was merely the closest book and held no special significance.  I talked to my daughter about that this morning.  “Somewhere in your lifetime,” I told her, “His job description went from hey try to keep these kids interested long enough to teach them Romeo and Juliet, to Hey you might be called upon to die today to protect these children, and never make it home to see your own.”  So for those children to not respect the gravity of what is a very real situation, when he himself has to imagine his own potential death, yeah, I can see why he was pissed off. (For the record my daughter claims to be innocent of any wrongdoing, and that a specific handful of girls started it – but unfortunately it only takes one to make enough noise for the gunman to find all of you, my darling.)

I may not be happy with the way the Shakespeare situation turned out, but I’m definitely on his side here.

 

Geeklet Studies Romeo & Juliet : The Tragic End

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

In sooth, I know exactly why I am so sad.

On Wednesday, April 6, my daughter told me, “We start Romeo and Juliet next week.”

It’s a moment I’ve been waiting for since she was five years old.

I’ve been keeping you all updated as best I can, from the stories I’ve gotten.  For just about two months I’ve heard about them studying Shakespeare’s life, the sonnets, writing their own sonnets, watching the movies, reading the modern translation, watching the movies, acting it out, watching the movies…

And then yesterday she tells me that the end of the year is upon them and they will not have time to finish the play.

I can’t even really get my head around how that happens.  They are right in the middle – Juliet has just been told that Romeo is banished.  And that is where they will stop.  Just like that, the teacher collected their books and put them back on the shelf. Done.  Interested students don’t even get to keep them for an extra week to read ahead.  He’s moved on to whatever else is left for the rest of the year, which apparently means grading papers.

I was lying awake in bed at 3am last night imagining all the different responses I might have to this.  Is it his fault? Is it just a curriculum thing where the 8th grade in this town says to squeeze in Shakespeare at the end of the year if you have time?    Nope — there are three “teams” of 8th grade students, and the other two finished it.  So, it’s just him.

Oh. Ok, then….ummm….did he just go into such a deep exploration of the text that they fell behind?  So that my kids’ understanding of the first half of the play exceeds the other classes?

Well, no.  I came home one day and my daughter told me they’d watched Gnomeo and Juliet.  You gotta be kidding me.  You couldn’t have squeezed in another act instead of watching that children’s movie that they’d all no doubt seen already since it came out six years ago?

I am very sad about this.  My daughter has been looking forward to it.  She’s at least one student – and probably not the only one – who went to school each morning thinking, “I hope we do Shakespeare today.”  I’m especially sad for any others who did not grow up in a house surrounded by Shakespeare, for whom this was their first experience, who came away thinking, “This is awesome, I want more of this.”  I can’t help those children. That’s his job.  And whether there’s one more of them out there or twenty of them, he’s failed them.

Next week is middle school graduation and there’s at least some possibility that I’ll get to speak with the man. I have no idea what I’ll say.