Terralthra wrote:Shakespeare, when writing the romance scenes, drew specifically on contemporaneous sources on what courtship should look like and what sort of language they should use. Romeo's use of metaphor in the masquerade scene, for example, is practically out of a "how to flirt with your noble crush" book.
So, was this considered as trite back then as current teenagers ramblings are today? I know puns were hot shit back in Shakespeare's time, so there's always the period to take into account. I would assume young nobles were much better educated than hicks from Texas.
On the other hand, there is "Ten Things I Hate About You," a Shakespeare remake.
I loved that movie even if I don't like Julia Stiles. And it shows how you can update the setting for a modern audience. But watching the DiCaprio Romeo and Juliet was a huge waste even though I remembered him from Quick and the Dead (and being awesome) and Leguizamo stole the entire fucking movie.
Channel72 wrote:It's difficult to actually assess the usefulness of reading literature from the "Western canon". We've all had to go through it, and to some extent a lot of us resent it because it was difficult and boring at the time. As an adult, I work as a computer programmer, so my familiarity with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Fitzgerald and Salinger is somewhat... um, useless on a daily basis.
For me, it's the overemphasis and smashing my head against the wall because I speed read and doing that with Shakespeare literally gives me headaches (I have the same problem with Tolkien, which is why I never finished LOTR). There were innumerable books we read that I consider myself a "better person" for having read, but they tend to be much more current. Works like Animal Farm, Brave New World, and 1984 to name a few. Also of note was Lord of the Flies and..... shit, it's counter-part (the kids are "good") where they rescue the Buffalo. Damn I'm getting old. Books my wife never got the chance to read because she went to an even shittier ISD than I did.
Hell, I didn't read Art of War until college because it was too controversial for High School. I consider that a disservice. I think English should concern itself more with getting kids to read a large amount of content, even if the testing suffers, rather than focusing on smaller content for better test scores. But that dog won't hunt. Instead we beat on a piece of literature for weeks (forcing students to read slower, so they can pass a test on that section), losing the cohesiveness. At least that's how it worked at my school.
We'd be much better off having kids write up stuff and the teacher ask "did you at least try to understand this work and write a decent paper on it's themes? Good call: A+, let's move on." Not: "Can you remember hark what light through yonder window breaks, it is the sun and I never fucking cared enough to memorize this scene so fuck you."