With the start of King Lear, I'll admit that I was quite nervous and intimidated by the very hyped up difficulty that is associated with works of Shakespeare. Although I had read Shakespeare previous years in high school, I was preparing myself for nightly "No Fear Shakespeare" summaries that would follow every night's reading and trying to gather enough endurance to muster through the first act without any help. I realized today in class that I, as well as many others I'm sure, tend to view reading Shakespeare with this hyped up expectation and are forgetting to see the value in working with his literature. Sure we might appreciate the writing and understand why it is significant, but I think that when it is viewed with this assumption that you will not understand it, we are actually just making it harder for ourselves.
While it does take a great deal of effort as well as time to understand it fully, I think it can actually open our eyes to a whole new take on a language that we have come to be so comfortable with, which is really interesting. By attaching this "fear" element to Shakespeare, it is scaring many students, including myself, from even wanting to try and understand the original text, which ultimately is defeating the purpose of reading his work in the first place. I have not studied Shakespeare in depth enough to know the specific intentions of his writing, but I don't think that Shakespeare intended people to "fear" his work. As Mr. Heidkamp was saying in class today, his work was not written to be published in a book, but rather to be read aloud in a poetic performance setting. While it's a bit of a stretch to say that his work isn't any more difficult than the average english reading, I think that reading it with this play/performance aspect in mind can make for a more open-minded, not-intimidated attitude and hopefully help us to dispose of this predetermined failure attitude that I think is holding us back from the potential of working with Shakespeare.
I agree that having an aversion to any form of work or experience before actually attempting it can make it so much more difficult to pursue. Finding a way to cast aside this fear will be super duper beneficial to anyone who does so. However, I think the idea of acting out each scene in front of the class is just as intimidating, if not more, to a lot of students in the class who aren't that comfortable with theater or public speaking, myself included. Hopefully we'll see the benefit of acting out the scenes and really have fun with them right away. If not, we'll all have a pretty rough time this unit.
ReplyDeleteI feel the same way about reading Shakespeare. It's daunting to open the book and barely recognize the meaning of the first line I see. Personally, I really have trouble understanding and appreciating the work for what it is. My hope is that this unit I might actually surmise a sense of understanding of Shakespeare, rather than avoiding it and just plowing through. I agree with Tessa, though, that it is not only the text that is daunting, but the performance in class really.
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