A colorful photo, eh? That’s the festival scene in the second half of The Winter’s Tale. The first half is terribly depressing. But as stories go, it’s a well-crafted one with a happy ending. I bet you’re wondering how I got such a close picture.
Well, it’s because I must sit right up front or all the birds and helicopters and cars and frisbee players, etc., etc., etc., will distract me and I won’t understand the play. It is Shakespeare, you know. He put his words together quite well, but I can’t listen with just half an ear.
My first memory of Shakespeare is the Zeffirelli version of Romeo and Juliet. I managed to sleep through most of it, waking up in time for the suicide at the end. Special. That was the sum total of my Shakespeare knowledge when I started homeschooling.
And in our homeschool we never did any Shakespeare until we could “watch” it because someone, years ago, like in the ‘94 or ‘95, wrote on a home-ed email list that Shakespeare was written to be acted out and watched, that the Bard never meant for his plays to be read. That made sense to me! So, Shakespeare was not a part of our homeschool curriculum.
Well, it was also because of that bad reputation that Shakespeare has earned over the years due to teachers making students read his stuff for English Literature class. I managed to avoid any teachers like that by always choosing Greek and Latin literature classes in high school and at university. Whew! I avoided any possibility of a chance encounter with boring, snoring Shakespeare like the plague. Or maybe the pox.
But one day, in desperation, when we were on a TV fast and I was starving, I picked up Much Ado About Nothing at the library to watch on video. The cover looked the prettiest of the eight video choices available. I guess that was about 7 or 8 years ago. Much to my surprise, Kenneth Branagh can make Shakespeare quite palatable. Having Michael Keaton, Denzel Washington, Emma Thompson, and Keanu Reeves as cast members also helps. (Now, Robert Sean Leonard and Kate Beckinsale are biggish stars, too.) So, I was all amazed that Shakespeare could be funny. You know, with those “How could I have been such an idiot all these years?” thoughts running through my mind.
So, I made it a point to get to a Shakespeare in the Park event after that. Our first was R&J — a good one for the kids to start with since most kids are already familiar with that. But familiarity or not, we loved it. It wasn’t so much the play as the players that made it good. Or maybe it’s the director who gives those actors their instructions that makes the play so good.
Anyway, so the other day we watched Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. I had avoided it because I thought I didn’t like Hamlet after watching the one with Mel Gibson playing Hamlet. My students didn’t mind that one, which we watched so that we could play The Play’s the Thing game, but it lacked something, I thought. I think Branagh just has the Midas touch when it comes to Shakespeare.
Anyway, Branagh’s Hamlet was really good, as in entertaining. We came into it a little after the beginning and so I was a little lost. I grabbed one of our Shakespeare comic books to catch me up on who was who. Then it was smooth sailing, and I worked on that quilt I mentioned a while back. (No, I never did find my sewing box. I gave up.)
Yeah, so now, what’s my point? I forget. I think I just wanted to share the picture since I ran across it earlier and thought it was so summery-looking. Or maybe it was something like, “I’m glad we homeschool so that we can do Shakespeare any way we want or even not at all.”
