Stone Soup by Jan Eliot for October 04, 2012

If you have kids, Holly, they’ll call J.K. Rowling and/or Stephanie Meyer an antique.

Wait till she finds out about the content of Shakespeare’s plays and stories. That will entice her.

Oh, You did not Forsooth me. Prepare to defend thy self. Foshizzle

Forsooth ! Now I have to look up Stephanie Meyers, just discovered a guy named Lutz

love it! Foshizzle indeed.

You guys seriously need to read The Wednesday Wars. Especially the part where Holling is practicing Caliban’s curses. I still think Romeo and Juliet were idiots, even if Holling did manage to find sense in that play.

What about that play they refuse to let hs students read: “Taming of the Shrew”. “My tongue in your tail? Forsooth, dear Kate, I am a gentleman!”

I say start them off with some of his comedies then move on to the dramas.

Could someone tell me who it was [and why] that decided everything Shakespeare wrote is a classic? I have never really been a Shakespeare fan and I have always wondered.

Shakespeare, Heinlein, Asimov, Dickson, Piper, Anderson. Heavenly literature!!

I once thought Shakespeare was dull too. Now I enjoy his works. I was glad to see my daughter and son reading my Shakespeare books. These days, kids probably find Judy Blume’s novels boring and dumb.

I’m also a firm believer that Shakespeare’s plays are best experienced through performance, not on the printed page. If you see one done by people who know how to do it, you’ll understand the action and (more importantly) the emotion more easily than if you’re slogging through what is admittedly a lot of unfamiliar language.

(That’s another reason why they’ve survived for 400 years; as long as there are actors there’ll be productions of Shakespeare’s plays, because they’re so much fun to perform.)

I hate Othello. Let’s take two perfectly happy people and destroy their lives for no apparent reason. Gack. I suppose that’s why they call it a tragedy.

“Soothsayer, Soothsayer, say unto me the sooth.” -PDQ Bach