Quote from: SciFiAuthor on June 21, 2015, 03:36:14 PM
Sad. But I don't like either approach. One teacher wants to get rid of Shakespeare entirely (and apparently focus on minority writers as though white people don't exist) and the counterpoint wants to "modernize" it. The truth is that both are the wrong answer. Leave it alone and if no one understands it, then leave it for higher classes. Part of Shakespeare is the language, when modernized all the puns and plays on words and the iambic pentameter and all that go away. The intent of the story will come through better, but that's only part of the point. It's putting Shakespeare on life support.
In light of that, I think they should simply stop teaching it altogether in high school. We've moved too far past him in time linguistically and even modern productions of his stories use received pronunciation instead of his original accent which means we've misunderstood Shakespeare for the last two hundred years anyway. If you see the rare one using his reconstructed 16th century London accent, everything changes. The whole tone and character becomes something very different and the haughty play people get all pissy because Richard III suddenly sounds like a pirate. But if you want to catch his puns and plays on words, it's the only way.
It's funny, but I hear quite clearly how American accents derived from this template - much more than with later dialects.
Anyhoo, Shakespeare was also a brilliant poet whose sonnets could be studied on that basis alone. Of course, with the triumph of narcissism, we acknowledge no masters. Everything is about tireless self-expression in that meandering, punctuated blank verse of entirely egocentric view - as boring as it is meaningless. There is no striving to attain deeper meaning or broader humanitarian import in the tempests, nae, slings and arrows of life. No sacrifice, no milk of human kindness, no forgiveness. Expression is now, "Look at my bling and my bitches and watch as I smear my poop on a wall. Yeah, baby, that's Art!"