Don't Read Shakespeare *
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- Опубліковано 8 вер 2024
- *this is a reupload with the music in the beginning restated.
If you are watching this, please share it around so that we can get some traction on it.
The way we teach Shakespeare defies reason. It is full of wonder, beauty, tragedy, and triumph and we destroy the potential for inspiration by shoving down kids throats the wrong way in school.
Very Special thanks to Scroll for the Old English reading!
"Scroll" usually writes about D&D and other roleplaying games at Scroll for Initiative dot com, but in his day job he's an English teacher in the UK (hence the pseudonym). He also specialized in Old and Middle English at Oxford. He recorded the Lord's Prayer for me in Old English because it's a text that exists in every version of English from pre conquest to the present day, and tends to be a text most readers know well already. Obviously the exact pronunciation is impossible to know for sure, but Scroll's version aligns closely with most scholars' best guesses. Cheers, Scroll!
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Thou cap upon thy rizz
Lol
Lol
To repeat my last comment: I love Shakespeare so much more when it's performed because you get the tone, the context, the stage presence of the actor saying the line... it all makes the text make more sense. The words are important, but resonate more when you see it performed.
As an aside, I wrote a script for my D&D group to perform influenced by King Lear and remembered how good it was.
I love Shakespeare! But I loved it because of its language and for the same reason I love poetry. I have aphantasia though, so I never saw pictures in my head and growing up in a small town, only experienced his works in written form. After school I devoured the theatre and movie productions of his work. My daughter is 15 now and they are doing Romeo and Juliet this year, so we have gone to see as many productions and movie adaptations as we can. Our favourite is Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Laura Foot's production of Othello in which se placed the story in the midst of colonialism (absolutely BRILLIANT!). My daughter is now an avid Shakespeare fan, and we chat often about why he has remained relevant.
The reupload is a perfect excuse for me to rewatch this! as well as the beautiful performance of the monologue at the end!
Honestly, never truly saw a shakespeare play myself (don't live in an english speaking country). I did try to read Romeo and Juliet once from the library for english class, and it was so hard to read stage directions without being taught how to, but this video makes me really want to sit down and watch a play performance in full! ~Triss
I often times feel like I don’t like “the arts.” I occasionally stumble across something that inspires awe, something that allows me to live 20 years in 20 minutes. Yet I still feel like I don’t like “the arts.”
Your observation that reading a play is similar to reading sheet music really rang true for me. I don’t dislike “the arts” I just don’t trust anyone who wants to discuss them to not absolutely ruin the art and the moment. I would rather the whole world think I am not impressed by The Notre Dame than suffer a conversation that reminded me of my humanities classes.
The re-upload just gives me the opportunity to say that I think this was a really well-considered piece. I think there is value in going through and reading it more slowly -- but that's after you actually get the flow and basic idea of what is happening.
And for anyone who hasn't heard of it, there is a Canadian dramedy series from the early 2000s that takes place at a Shakespeare Festival. Hilarious and guaranteed to give anyone a better understanding of the plays and the voice.
I know the asterisk is there because of the re-upload. I'm very glad it's there for anyone coming into this the first time completely taken in by the *start-an-argument-in-three-words* title and an assumption that reading is the only way to consume Shakespeare's Content. You may now picture the hottest UA-cam channel of the sixteenth century, Teh_Bard_of_Avon, insisting that "the bell now must you ring for satisfaction, in learning of new notification." (I almost said TikTok, but we all know Marlowe would crush Will on TikTok.)
I salute you, Mark Antony, for such fine orat’ry! Ye hast spoken mine thoughts exactly.
In all seriousness, I first introduced Shakespeare to my kids through Aliki’s illustrated “William Shakespeare and the Globe” about his life and Tudor theatre culture & conventions alongside illustrated adaptations so they can enjoy the feeling and plot behind the plays and understand the context before we start throwing in the Early Modern English and the bawdy humor they are not really ready for.
This rocked so hard the first time and rocked equally, if not more so, the second time.
Dude, this was even better the second time!
I always interpreted that monologue as highly sarcastic when referring to brutus and his men.
I was really lucky that in 6th grade, my teacher Ms. Perrotta, was a little crazy but in a good way. She was so enthusiastic about teaching and at the end of the school day would make us act out Shakespeare plays in the front of the room (the only time she was annoyed at me was when I forgot my bedsheet to act as one of the senators in Julius Caesar). We did As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the end of Julius Caesar. Because of her, I always had a love of Shakespeare and really love the themes and meanings in them. When I got to high school, it was exactly what you said in the beginning of the video.
Totally agree with what you say. I've always thought it was a bit strange the way we study plays as texts instead of performances. I think there's a wider issue as well with the way we teach all literature in high school, or at least in my high school.
We were taught how to analyse THIS book, THIS play, THIS poem - not the skills to analyse any book, play or poem. I genuinely thought I was bad at critical analysis, until I finally went to uni to study literature and started getting straight A's. Turns out picking apart Shakespeare and arguing about what he meant is actually really fun 😂
A fantastic video! I love that, instead of simply stating that Shakespeare "wasn't meant to be read", you focus on pedagogy and the fact that performance helps students understand Shakespeare much better. However, I still feel it is necessary to note that, especially in recent years, scholarship has not only begun to endorse seeing Shakespeare's plays as literature to be read once again, but to even consider Shakespeare as actively writing for readers in addition to, or even rather than, a theatrical audience (see Lukas Erne's book 'Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist', an extremely influential recent monograph on the subject). We must remember we do not have "the original script" (whatever the hell that is) of any of Shakespeare's plays, but only editions which were published after performances were over, sometimes decades later in the case of plays only available in the First Folio. These editions were obviously meant to be read rather than performed (it would be a bit difficult to perform from the hefty First Folio as a playtext). For example, we have three texts for Hamlet known as the First Quarto, Second Quarto, and First Folio. The Second Quarto and First Folio are relatively similar, and both are far too long to have ever been performed on stage. This is made worse when some directors insist on conflating these two texts (as Kenneth Branagh did for his film adaptation), making it over 4 HOURS LONG! This is obviously ridiculous. The First Quarto, in contrast, is rarely used because it's much shorter and (in the opinion of most) worse. However, it is also the only edition we have which would have been performable. But even that is still a published playtext primarily meant to be read rather than performed from. TL;DR While performing Shakespeare is super important and vital to understanding the texts, especially for students, we must remember what we have of Shakespeare is not texts which were performed, but published works meant to be read.
I don't have the experience of being forced to read shakespeare but I do have very vivid memories of studying the Jekyll and Hide play. Our english teacher showed us a clip of the first transformation scene and it just came off so different because it wasn't a load of bored teenagers in a room being forced to read out lines, it was an actor with stage production behind him.
There is a part of me that recognises that Midsummer's Night is a funny story, but I will always loathe it because I first had to read and right an essay on it, then was forced to act out my "favourite part" with and in front of students I barely knew.
I had a similar experience at Uni with the poem Howl, but it was for a class that was teaching us the importance of interpretation, and to do that we were presented the poem in various expressions. We heard it recited with and without emotion, we heard it with contextual commentary, we heard it with comments from the author, we watched a film about it... I'm still pretty sure I don't like the poem, but I certainly appreciate it.
A beautiful video with a great point. Thank you for the amazing creative work you do. I'm so glad I found your channel.
That last bit was gorgeously performed. Bravo
I learned to love Shakespeare in college--when my professors were also actors and insisted that we engage with the text as performance and written work simultaneously. We watched performances and critiqued them as interpretations as much as we dissected the layers of wordplay. We also spent a lot of time on film adaptations as modern interpretations of the work. I got so much out of those classes, I was actively disappointed when I'd taken all the options my university offered. So now I don't mind reading Shakespeare, but I don't ever get tired of seeing it performed. Teaching it any other way is a travesty.
Honestly, I have never understood Julius Caeser as well as I have seeing you perform it. Well done.
Gotta say, would love to see you do a video on Wes Anderson after that "They are"
When I read Shakespeare in my current AP lit class I have to say what we all noticed was that even the tragedies had a bit of the absurd to them that made us laugh. Everyone should have wonderful experiences with this author. In order to do that, though, you have to listen to it. Hear it as a play like g(G)od (big and little g) intended.
I have a theater degree and I have felt for a really long time that it is fundamentally wrong headed to teach plays like they're novels.
Plays are not novels! They're a blueprint for actors and costumers and set designers and a host of other performance techs to interpret in order to put on the play.
A good performance of Shakespeare is still perfectly understandable even with the vintage language because good performance artists know how to breathe life into the text and connect it to an audience.
Kids need to watch good performances of Shakespeare before they even try to start talking about it as literature.
It's not even fancy! It's the common entertainment of its time, it's got mega fart jokes in it!
If the actors of Shakespeare's time didn't keep people entertained, they would throw stuff at the actors 😂
A play is a living document! Making kids read it in the most boring way possible is drains all the life from it.
My love for Shakespeare began when my class went to see a production of "The Tempest" at the Seattle Children's Theater when I was about eight. I've been lucky enough to see so many of his plays live. When I took a college course on Shakespeare, I would read it aloud to myself in my room. Now we go every summer to free Shakespeare in the park. It is best acted for sure.
I was never a great shakespeare fan. I had watched some movies of the plays, read some plays and read some novelizations and reimaginings, but haddn't felt that they were as good as the hype. Then I watched play and realized that this was the best medium to experience shakespeare. It makes sense. They were written to be plays after all.
Shame you had to reupload this, but hey, it's still a great video!
As maligned as the Romeo + Juliet movie is, there were so many bits i never understood until i saw it
I'm not a native English speaker, my exposure to Shakespeare was through movies. I was very young, still learning the language, and I fell so deeply in love with it, that I could not understand when I started to see characters in movies that were my age saying how much they hated it. I was so envious of having stuff like that in the school curriculum. Once I got around to reading it, I already had the music of it in my head, too.
Wait a minute.... 40 Characteristic Studies for Horn? Are you a brasshole too?!? As a lip buzzer myself, this would explain a lot. Cheers man, another great video.
Loved it the first time and loved it this time too
DUDE you totally called it! Have you heard about the new controversy about Assassins Creed Shadows? It stars Yasuka, the historical black Samurai .... You mentioned that in your People of Color video. Would love to see you do your own deep dive into this, if you have the time.
So when can I see you perform Macbeth on a stage? Because goddamn, the acting in this was superb!
Sharing this around to make sure it regains traction
Honestly slay sis. You ate that monologue, no crumbs. Not cappin rn, drippy rizz.
The only reason I like Shakespeare now even though I was taught it that same way is because I imagined myself performing it as I was reading, and eventually started reading it aloud. I'm gonna put a genius playwright in the city I'm making in a world I'm making with a lot of help from your videos you coolguy. Or maybe that's too on the nose. Just a really famous bard storyteller. I'll name him Gaell Chi-Kim of Avoni
Really liked this video the first time I watched it.
Just watched this after watching your video essay one. I remembered to subscribe this time, and I bet I wouldn't hate you at parties. Probably chat over a board game or something.
Is Legal Kimchi giving me an excuse to watch this again? Yes he is. Should I watch it again? Yes. Yes, I should. :)
Thanks for a heartfelt and well-argued video, though I would expect no less.
tbh as a teen i actually had the stamina and patience to read plays and enjoy them like that, now in my 30s tho i would only read a play after i've seen it
Depends on the parties tbh
We also should start with the comedies (and never Romeo & Juliet, as my school did)
Here to appease the algorithm gods, keep up the good work man!
adding to my 2024 favourites playlist and commenting for tha algo
I love this video
youtube HATES this video for some reason, searched it up with the same name and the asterisk and found a whole lot of nothing. commenting for the algorithm!
Fair point.
Just going by the title: Shakespeare is not a novelist, he wrote plays and his work is best experienced as theater.
YES THANK YOU Shakespeare wasn't an author! He was a playright! The work is meant to be PERFORMED! It's like if we decided that Citizen Kane was literature and thus made teens read the script instead of watching the movie. Like, as someone who has wanted to be a screenwriter forever (but never actually screenwrites lol oops) this has always bugged me- it can be great to read scripts, but it's not the complete project. Well, it's not intended to be the complete project. Most scripts unfortunately never get made :( And in my brain most of them don't even get written haha
I will say, massive shout out to my high school English teacher who made sure to actually read parts of it (animatedly) to us, making sure we understood. Also dang, you can act!
gotta disagree; reading plays is a perfectly valid way to consume those texts
Why the re-upload?
Great excuse to watch again and share but I'm curious
A music company made an incorrect copyright claim on music I bought a license for to use in this video. UA-cam suggested editing the music out, and it did so on the original upload, but it just made the video feel weird.