Quote:
Originally Posted by nekokami
Sorry about typing "the name"... didn't think that was the same as speaking it. (And I've been reading too much Harry Potter lately... I bet Dumbledore would say the name out loud!)  |
Yeah he would, but that's Dumbledore, innit? I'm not enough of a theater geek to really buy into the "curse on the play" thing, but I've picked up the habit of not saying it from ... actually, I don't really remember where. And with H.P. in the discussion, the intersection point just screamed out at me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by nekokami
I was not typical as a young reader (and still am not, for that matter). But my kids like Romeo and Juliet just fine. I think it helps a lot to see the plays performed first. In the case of R&J, we also took them to see West Side Story first, and then when they saw R&J, explained that they would probably see some similarities, because WSS had been somewhat based on R&J. It helped make things more relevant to them. My older daughter, aged 16, who only spoke Mandarin until she was 11, easily followed the plot despite the archaic language and cried at the end. (Then my mom had her watch an opera of R&J... my mom is an opera fiend. I understand that went fairly well, too.)
Actually, now that I think about it, possibly part of the reason I enjoyed Shakespeare early on was because my mom had a book called Twisted Tales from Shakespeare that was just amazingly funny and made me want to read the actual plays. I brought it in to school when we were all reading R&J and my English teacher read that entry out loud to the whole class. It was fairly popular all around.
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You've just described what I think would be an
excellent approach to introducing kids to such things, nekokami. At the very minimum, it would be nice to mix up, what did athlonkmf call them? "boring psychotic postwar books written by depressed authors." Quite right, let's mix some non-boring, non-psychotic (they can be post war, that's okay) into the list, so that kids don't get the idea that all literature must fit that description.
My old definition of "classic" was "something that keeps coming back, no matter
how bad it is" -- I believe I was thinking mainly of Hemingway, who definitely fits the psychotic, postwar and depressed, though others may disagree on the boring. There's no accounting for taste, after all.
