Quote:
Originally Posted by DixieGal
I think the article was full of scat. It is absolutely not necessary to understand every nuance of each word for the casual non-scholar.
I lead newbies to the plays in a specific way. First, forget iambic pentameter, rhyme, poetry, and all, and just read it through as paragraphs, instead of lines of a poem. You can see the lightbulb go on in their faces when it becomes a regular play for them and is suddenly accessible to anyone.
I miss teaching. Sigh.
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Well, I hope you didn't try teach them reading comprehension! The article does not say that have to understand "every nuance of each word."
In fact, here is what it does say:
"After I received my friend's letter, I serendipitously began reading The Selfish Gene, a popular book on genetics by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. As I was grappling with some of the more technical passages that contained words like allele, nucleotide, cistron, and mitosis, I was sometimes tempted to close the book and give up. Yet with a little extra effort, I was able to push through the difficult passages and come away with at least a general understanding of what Dawkins was getting at. And, since I do not aspire to be an expert in the field of biology, a general understanding was all I was hoping to attain.
Then somewhere along the way, a thought struck me: This often frustrating feeling of wrestling with words to wrench out their meaning is what my friend might be experiencing when she picks up a play by William Shakespeare -- and ditto for my community college English students whom I have been known to annoy on occasion by assigning King Lear, Othello, or Twelfth Night. If you cannot understand Shakespeare, how can you enjoy him?
But, as with me and biology, unless you are striving to be a Shakespearean scholar, a general understanding of a play is all that is needed."
He clearly says that unless you intend to be a Shakespearean scholar, you do not need to understand every nuance.
Later in the article he does suggest some reference books that might help you understand words Shakespeare used that have a different meaning today. That is only a suggestion for those who want a deeper understanding of the plays, just as somebody who wanted to be a biologist would get a technical dictionary to understand all the esoteric words in Dawkins' book.
But you are correct about one thing. Because the writer has some ideas that you disagree with, his article is "full of scat." I hope that your students had a more open and tolerant mind than you do when they approached Shakespeare or anything else that they potentially might have found disagreeable.