Great Literature


jriggenbach

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JEFF: "there are a handful of works in that genre {fantasy}that do qualify as genuine literary classics of the very first quality. Some of these date from the 19th Century - Ram Stoker's Dracut, Oscar Wild'ss The Picture ofDoreenn Gray, Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. I used to tell my students back in the '90s, when I taught a course in Fantasy and Science Fiction at an art college in San Francisco, that those were the three great works of fantasy of the Victorian Era. (There were several great 19th Century works of science fiction, too, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.)."

Is someone putting something in my coffee? Once again I find myself agreeing with Jeff. But I would add the exquisite fantasy writing of Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales. such as The Nightingale and the Rose and The Happy Prince.

Barbara

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Ted, Phil, et al:

Now that we've run over Homer and the Finns, any suggestions about good translations of

the Aeneid

Horace

Ovid

and the Greek dramatists

(there, that's more than enough fodder to keep this going for another week :) )

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Nor I. I have tried to find an interesting Aneid, and have not pursued the others.

I would recommend the Shakespeare plays and the adaptations in parentheses

King Lear (Olivier BBC)

Macbeth (Polanski)

Richard II (Fiona Shaw)

Richard III (McKellen)

Hamlet (Branagh)

(film only) Titus (Hopkins)

Merchant of Venice (Pacino)

(film only) Romeo and Juliet (Danes/DiCaprio)

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Nor I. I have tried to find an interesting Aneid, and have not pursued the others.

I would recommend the Shakespeare plays and the adaptations in parentheses

King Lear (Olivier BBC)

Macbeth (Polanski)

Richard II (Fiona Shaw)

Richard III (McKellen)

Hamlet (Branagh)

(film only) Titus (Hopkins)

Merchant of Venice (Pacino)

(film only) Romeo and Juliet (Danes/DiCaprio)

My favorite Shakespeare plays are the romances--Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, Tempest.

A few of those adaptations I have never seen--like Branagh's Hamlet. And did someone actually make a film of Titus Andronicus? But I rate his version of Much Ado About Nothing very highly (and not just because Michael Keaton does an excellent turn as Dogberry). And there is Mel Gibson's Hamlet, done years ago, which was excellent not because of Gibson but because of the supporting cast--IIRC, Glenn Close was Gertrude. And DiCaprio as Romeo? Sorry, I saw the Zefferelli film as a teenager and that's been my standard ever since.

Edited by jeffrey smith
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I immensely dislike Romeo and Juliet with its artificial plot twists, people dying because the mail was slow? Hussey is overwrought. At least the DiCaprio version had Claire Danes who lit up the screen in every one of her scenes. She should have gotten an Oscar.

I don't enjoy his comedies at all, while Titus as a movie succeeds as an unintentional visually lush comedy.

I suppose I should but never have read Cymbeline or the Tempest.

Edited by Ted Keer
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So far, I'm closer to Jeffrey than to Ted in terms of preferring Willy's comedies to his tragedies. For why I say "so far", see my next post, coming up . . .

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Subject: Willy and Me

--How Our Relationship Went from Grief, Anger, and Denial to More Than Acceptance. Much More in Fact--

Part 1 - Depressing(and Murky) Windbag

The relationship between the two of us started off inauspiciously and at first showed few signs of any staying power. Willy the Bard of Avon didn't come calling till the last year of Junior High School. Then he paid me a monthlong visit for each of four years. The sequence: Julius Caesar, Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Macbeth. Dubya was an unwelcome, depressing caller at the time. No comedies or lightness for the slapstick, slaphappy teenage soul. Mostly adult fare with plenty of vegetables to teach citizenship. More specifically what happens to rotten apples who murder their kings, hate those from other religions, or try to seize power by killing, are driven insane or into indecisiveness (I could never get clear which about the imbecile I knew as Hammy).

Not that I understood that those were even the moral or point of -any- of those plays. I couldn't follow the stilted and altered "olde" English well enough to know what the plays were about and my teachers were not good enough to teach Shakespeare effectively(not an easy task for an English teacher for many reasons, of which the difficult language...and also strangely long-winded...is only one).

I remember one female teacher (not one of my English teachers in my adolescence was male, while every one of my history teachers was male and coached the football or basketball teams) going into paroxysms of joy about mercy falleth like gentle drops of rain from heaven. One of the great speeches in the English language, she simply asserted in a very firm voice. But she didn't clearly explain why. Starting with what the point was Portia was trying to make to Shylock might have been nice, knowing that most sadistic teenagers weren't any too clear about the concept of mercy. Or why it was a virtue.

We never saw any of Shakespeare acted out. Plays, shocking as it may seem to some educators, are meant to be -performed-. That's especially true for novices to literature or the young or immature. On top of that, when the language is long and difficult, odd words, and unusual metaphors, switching around of subjects and objects and verbs so the word order is unclear. "Wordplay!" the smiling English teacher says approvingly. "Weird", "murky", "makes no sense", the scowling, head-laying-on-his-desk adolescent thinks silently to himself.

By the time I arrived at college, if I never encountered another Shakespeare play it would have been way too soon. And since everything was 'electives' for the next four years, it certainly seemed as if Willy Boy and I had come to a permanent parting of the ways.

However . . .

Edited by Philip Coates
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Willy and Me -- Transition, Juggling Act, and Dumbshow :) Between Parts 1 and 2:

I'd like to be able to say that as a bright, academically successful adolescent I had some tiny glimmer, [warning: alliteration alert] some sense somewhere from all those four plays that there was - pick one! - beauty and eloquence or wisdom and life lessons in Shakespeare.

Unfortunately, there were other subjects to move -quickly!- on to, and that was simply not the case.

,,,,,,,,

[to be continued]

Edited by Philip Coates
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Ah, yes, High School Shakespeare

We too were subjected to yearly rounds of the Bard beginning in 9th grade> Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, The Tempest. I was in AP level English, so I escaped JC and R&J as read by the regular classes in place of Othello and Tempest. (They read Romeo and Juliet, always in tandem with West Side Story, when we read Othello, and read Julius Caesar when we read Hamlet in 11th grade, and read Hamlet in 12th when we read The Tempest.)

Our teacher made sure we got the basics down about the poetry and dramaturgy, and we got the added benefit of acting scenes from Macbeth in 9th grade, complete with low budget costumes and scenery. I was the Doctor in the sleepwalking scene. So I wasn't put off by Shakespeare, merely not entranced by him. I ended up studying every single play of his during the three terms of my junior year in college (we were on a trimester system).

Oddly enough, my entire thespian career consists of Macbeth: that scene in 9th grade, and a college production my sophomore year of college (not part of a course, just Emory Theater doing its thing.) We did it as an in-the-round production: I was the messenger who comes running in during the first scene to tell Duncan Macbeth won the battle; then I took off the makeup and fake armor and went around as one of the lords in the other scenes. The makeup was extremely gory; I ran up an aisle in the audience to get to the stage; the first night (and several performances thereafter) was full of kids from local high schools sent by their teachers on school sponsored attendance; there was always at least one kid who yelped or screamed when I ran by, because of the makeup.

Speaking of makeup, Banquo's ghost was planned to appear with an elaborate scheme of facial cosmetics. This proved to be too complex to actually work in performance--not enough time between the last appearance of living Banquo and the appearance of ghost Banquo at Macbeth's feast. The makeup was cut down after dress rehearsal, but not enough; so the opening night Banquo's ghost was not ready when his cue came. Led by the actor who played Macbeth, we improvised some very sketchy speeches that fit a banquet scene--and they came out, almost automatically, in blank verse!

My abiding opinion of Hamlet was formed during that eleventh grade study of the play: I think it's a failure on the part of Shakespeare, trying to meld a psychological study of a particular character (Hamlet) onto a dramatic structure (revenge play) that was totally unfit for it.

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Ah, yes, High School Shakespeare

We too were subjected to yearly rounds of the Bard beginning in 9th grade> Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, The Tempest. I was in AP level English, so I escaped JC and R&J as read by the regular classes in place of Othello and Tempest. (They read Romeo and Juliet, always in tandem with West Side Story, when we read Othello, and read Julius Caesar when we read Hamlet in 11th grade, and read Hamlet in 12th when we read The Tempest.)

Our teacher made sure we got the basics down about the poetry and dramaturgy, and we got the added benefit of acting scenes from Macbeth in 9th grade, complete with low budget costumes and scenery. I was the Doctor in the sleepwalking scene. So I wasn't put off by Shakespeare, merely not entranced by him. I ended up studying every single play of his during the three terms of my junior year in college (we were on a trimester system).

Oddly enough, my entire thespian career consists of Macbeth: that scene in 9th grade, and a college production my sophomore year of college (not part of a course, just Emory Theater doing its thing.) We did it as an in-the-round production: I was the messenger who comes running in during the first scene to tell Duncan Macbeth won the battle; then I took off the makeup and fake armor and went around as one of the lords in the other scenes. The makeup was extremely gory; I ran up an aisle in the audience to get to the stage; the first night (and several performances thereafter) was full of kids from local high schools sent by their teachers on school sponsored attendance; there was always at least one kid who yelped or screamed when I ran by, because of the makeup.

Speaking of makeup, Banquo's ghost was planned to appear with an elaborate scheme of facial cosmetics. This proved to be too complex to actually work in performance--not enough time between the last appearance of living Banquo and the appearance of ghost Banquo at Macbeth's feast. The makeup was cut down after dress rehearsal, but not enough; so the opening night Banquo's ghost was not ready when his cue came. Led by the actor who played Macbeth, we improvised some very sketchy speeches that fit a banquet scene--and they came out, almost automatically, in blank verse!

My abiding opinion of Hamlet was formed during that eleventh grade study of the play: I think it's a failure on the part of Shakespeare, trying to meld a psychological study of a particular character (Hamlet) onto a dramatic structure (revenge play) that was totally unfit for it.

We all seem to have started some sort of study of Shakespeare in our freshman year of public high school - 9th grade. I wonder if we're all of similar age. I know Phil and I are no more than about a year and a half apart. I'm 62 - turning 63 in January. I bring this age issue up, because my wife is nine years younger than I, and she never had to read or witness a single Shakespearean play in four years of public high school in Florida. Nor did she ever have to read any of the miscellaneous poetry - the sonnets, for example.

In 9th grade in Texas (greater Houston), we read Julius Caesar, then watched a screening of the 1953 film version of the play, with John Gielgud as Cassius, James Mason as Brutus, and Marlon Brando as Mark Antony. In 10th grade, after reading Hamlet and discussing Freud's reactions to it, we went as a class to see a local production of the play by the Alley Theatre, a professional repertory company. Oddly, I remember very little about that production of Hamlet - what I remember most vividly is talking about George Orwell with my English teacher's husband in the car on the way to the theatre. He was the first person I'd ever met who had actually read Orwell and knew something about him. I was just reading Nineteen Eighty-four at that time and had been swept away by it. Nevertheless, by the time I got to college three years later, I knew that I wanted to undertake more in-depth study of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's language had never posed that much of a problem for me. He wrote in Early Modern English; his language is not all that different from the language we use today, except for a handful of easily learned archaic words. A bigger problem is the poetic license he takes with word order and syntax in order to sustain his commitment to iambic pentameter. (As an aside, I've learned to my sorrow that even people my age, who did have some exposure to Shakespeare in high school, were apparently not taught by even minimally competent teachers and often don't know such basic items of information as that the plays are written, by and large, in blank verse. A very erudite friend of mine once referred in a manuscript to reading Shakespeare as "plowing through Elizabethan prose." Had I not pointed out his error pre-publication, he would probably have gone into print with that howler and publicly embarrassed himself.) But I liked poetry quite a lot in those days and I took this poetic license hurdle in stride as well. After all, if you want to learn to read any of the more important British poets and versifiers of the centuries since Shakespeare, including especially Milton and Browning, you have to be able to deal with such poetic license. And the majesty Shakespeare achieved in his use of language at times - in Macbeth's soliloquy beginning "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," for example - was so stunning, so absolutely astonishingly brilliant, that I could hardly avoid further exposure to his works if I considered myself serious about wanting to be a writer and literary critic. So I took a two-semester course called Shakespeare, in which we read the complete works.

One last bit relating to Shakespeare. The novel Nothing Like the Sun by the 20th Century English writer Anthony Burgess (one of the few English writers of the 20th Century who had a mastery of language even remotely approaching Shakespeare's own) is an amazing portrayal of the circumstances of Shakespeare's life and the reality of English life in the late 16th and early 17th Centuries, as well as a fascinating speculation as to the sources of "the Dark Lady" and "Mr. W.H." in the sonnets.

JR

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Subject: Willy and Me

Part 2 - "Okay, With All his Blabbering, Maybe Something Beautiful Once in a While!"

After college, I spent my twenties in "the Big Apple". Almost every summer, there was free Shakespeare in Central Park. To me, that was like free brocolli. "Literary" girlfriends trying to drag me or browbeat me into going? No friggin' way!

Phil: "Shakespeare is boring, depressing. He made no sense in high school. Why couldn't he have written in English? Plus he's a long-winded gasbag. Even when you can figure out what on earth the slippery goateed dude is talking about, everybody stands around and makes the simplest points in long, flowery speeches. Never one sentence when thirty sentences will do. I mean, -really-! Who DOES that?"

In the 80's, I saw a wonderful movie from the thirties, "The Scarlet Pimpernel". [Warning: spoiler alert - if you don't know the story, skip ahead one sentence]. Leslie Howard, hands tied behind his back and about to be executed by a French firing squad, makes a slow, sad farewell to a freer land than France, to the shores of a land he'd never see again. He recites from memory, with longing and wistfulness and heartbreak, "This other Eden, demi-paradise. This fortress built by nature..against infection and the hand of war . . . This happy breed of men, this little world, this precious stone set in the silver sea."

Walking out of a repertory theater on the Upper West Side, I had only retained some of those broken phrases which I furiously scribbled down once the house lights came up. But I thought they were among the most poignant, most noble, most eloquent, and most beautiful things I had ever heard.

Without the internet, it took me some time to track them down. When I learned that they were from Shakespeare (Richard II), cracks began to appear in the walls between me and Willy the Obscure.

[to be concluded in part iii]

Edited by Philip Coates
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My Mom's Ph.D. in English Literature concerned not language, but staging.

"The Theatre of the English Pageant Wagons, with Particular Attention to the Cycle Plays of Chester and York."

Ruth Brant Gaede

Brandeis University, 1970

She regretted I wasn't around to help her proof it in 1970. I was so happy to hear I had missed the opportunity to be of help.

The professional typist who typed it in Tucson went back to Kentucky or Tennessee when her father died and left her the horse farm. Her horse? Secretariat.

--Brant

near worthless trivia

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Is this of any interest? Should I go ahead and write part three?

For what little it may be worth, I find this of interest.

JR

Me three

Note to Jeff R:

I'm 50, so comparable to your wife. Perhaps a different part of the state?--the school was in Fort Lauderdale. Of course, while part of the public school system, it was meant as an elite school, with kids from all over the county--but I remember kids my age who went to other local schools also reading Shakespeare. (But we did not touch the poetry. I had to wait for college to get that under my belt. Ditto for Shakespeare's contemporaries: Marlowe, Kyd, Webster, Marston, Tourneur, Spenser, Sidney, I all read for the first time in college.)

However, we were the only class that read Chaucer (Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and Miller's Tale), and in the original Middle English, at that. That was twelfth grade. My mother had to sign a permission slip because the Miller's Tale was too bawdy for normal classroom wear and tear. And once you've got the hang of Middle English, Shakespeare's language is a piece of cake.

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One other brief note on my early Shakespeare experience. During my college years (1964-1971), a number of more-or-less celebrated Shakespearean films were released, perhaps most notably the 1967 production of The Taming of the Shrew starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo & Juliet (1968), and Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1971). Then, when I reached Los Angeles (the major difference between me and Phil is that he went to the Big Apple after college, while I went to the Big Orange), I too had access to free Shakespeare in the park. I'm not sure if it was the summer of 1972 or the summer of 1973 when I saw Patrecia Branden as Lady Macbeth in a free production of Macbeth staged in MacArthur Park.

JR

Edited by Jeff Riggenbach
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Note to Jeff R:

I'm 50, so comparable to your wife. Perhaps a different part of the state?--the school was in Fort Lauderdale.

My wife (hereinafter "Suzanne") grew up in Central Florida - Titusville, just across the Indian River from Cape Canaveral. Her father worked for the space program. So did she, some years later, in the 1970s.

Of course, while part of the public school system, it was meant as an elite school, with kids from all over the county--but I remember kids my age who went to other local schools also reading Shakespeare.

Suzanne's high school also drew widely and seems to have been pretty advanced in scientific and technological subject areas. I suspect its proximity to NASA may have tempted it to stress science, math, and technology and downplay the humanities.

(But we did not touch the poetry. I had to wait for college to get that under my belt. Ditto for Shakespeare's contemporaries: Marlowe, Kyd, Webster, Marston, Tourneur, Spenser, Sidney, I all read for the first time in college.)

Marston? Tourneur? Jeffrey, we are getting into seriously obscure names here. We risk seeing our readers' eyes glaze over and watching them fall over onto their sides. But surely you didn't mean to omit Ben Jonson? Or Beaumont & Fletcher?

JR

Edited by Jeff Riggenbach
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(But we did not touch the poetry. I had to wait for college to get that under my belt. Ditto for Shakespeare's contemporaries: Marlowe, Kyd, Webster, Marston, Tourneur, Spenser, Sidney, I all read for the first time in college.)

Marston? Tourneur? Jeffrey, we are getting into seriously obscure names here. We risk seeing our readers' eyes glaze over and watch them fall over onto their sides. But surely you didn't mean to omit Ben Jonson? Or Beaumont & Fletcher?

JR

I knew I was forgetting!

No, I did not mean to omit Ben Jonson. Beaumont and Fletcher, OTOH... :)

Tourneur deserves to be better known. With Kyd he is to grade B movies what Bruckner was to film scores: the essential ancestor.

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Thanks, Brant, Jeff, and Jeffrey. I will write the conclusion of "Willy and Me" today. [sounds like a Michael Moore movie.]

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Subject: Willy and Me

Part 3. Danny De Vito, of All People!!

There have been many who have never overcome a deep hatred for William Shakespeare based on the hand they were dealt in school. Wrong choice or sequence of plays? Poor teachers? Rote memorization instead of understanding? But for me, childe of the universe, the immortal Muse who is a guardian over the less than literarily perceptive decided to cut me a break, as well as shuffle, cut the cards, and redeal.

It seems to have taken till 1994 for light to fully smash through those clouds. In that year a most unlikely Danny DeVito vehicle called "Renaissance Man" came out. An advertising man was sentenced to teach basic English language and literature to the DTD ("Dumber Than Dogshit")held-back class or what the other soldiers lovingly called retards at a military base. Bafflingly, he decided to reach them with Shakespeare. Even more bafflingly, he succeeded.

And the movie shows how (good film for teachers everywhere).

Most bafflingly of all, he made me, the recalcitrant movie watcher -- in a movie not directly about Shakespeare (if it had been I would not have gone to the theater) -- begin to appreciate "Hamlet" because of the way he simplified and made relevant what the detested by me story was really about. Before the movie ended, I was also shown for the first time, by a soldier defiantly reciting it in the rain to a practical-minded drill sergeant skeptical of 'literary fairies', my second effective and inspiring Shakespeare passage, the justly famous St. Crispin's Day speech from "Henry V", rallying the almost defeated and discouraged troops.

Two plays for the price of one movie. More food for thought to add to Leslie Howard from nearly fifteen years earlier.

My diamond-hard Shakespeare phobia was now pretty much shattered. I was now -very- interested in learning more. But I didn't know how. My experience indicated that finding what was eloquent and what I would like in Shakespeare through stretches of wordiness might be like a needle in a haystack of subordinate clauses, adjectives, and pronouns.

But it's said that you never learn something as well as when you teach it. . . And that has been the final breakthrough.

[ok, I lied. Part 3 is -not- the conclusion; stay tuned for Part 4, which is.]

Edited by Philip Coates
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