Stone Soup by Jan Eliot for October 06, 2012

Heh. The promise of using bad words with impunity will get them every time. Just wait till she discovers Chaucer!

Holly seems to enamoured to the bard….

Whatever gets them to read and do their homework!

I was hooked from the moment I read Hamlet! (anyone see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead?)

Country matters?

Forsooth! Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.

Holly just might have found a pastime to rival basketball. And given she’s already a drama queen, who knows where this might go.

OMG Holly is doing something that requires a little bit of brain power without being forced??

In the book “Babe the Gallant Pig”, which my fourth graders read and loved every year, Fly is referred to as “the collie bitch”. I had to spend fifteen minutes every year explaining that one before we started reading!

I like reading Shakespeare, too.

When I took a class on Chaucer in grad school, we had a teacher who must had Asperger’s or something. He acted very nervous, and spoke so softly that we had to shut the classroom door, sit as close to him as possible, cup our ears, and lean forward. We read some of Chaucer aloud, with as close as possible to the original Middle English accents, and I had to read a passage that nearly gave him the vapors. Chaucer was no slouch when compared to Shakespeare.

Cheer up!It’s not on a job application!

I have a wonderful book I liked to share with my son’s teachers. Can’t remember the exact title offhand, but something like “Insults in Shakespeare.” The kids all got a kick out of various ways to insult each other.

Auld Bill put something raunchy in almost every play he wrote; he knew that he had to be poular with the people in the “cheap seats” as well as the rich folks in the real seats, which were under a roof.Hamlet has a lline about Ophelia: “That’s a fair thought, to lie between maid’s legs.”“Twelfth Night” is fairly raunchy, if you look at it right: a Countess, greiving for her late father and brother, being chased by a Duke; and falling for a women dressed as a man, then getting the cross-dressing girl and her twin brother mixed up, and marrying the male twin. And keep in mind that all the parts, male and female, were played by males back in the day – so the female twin was a guy dressed as a girl, who was disgised as a guy… To quote Neddie Seagoon, “It’s all rather confusing, really.” :)

I agree with Alix on this one!

Oh, yes, he did, didn’t he? And thank you; I’d forgotten the term for the Gallery. Obviously suffering from a lack of strong tea…

I used to like saying “hell” in the Nicene Creed at church when I was a kid, but I’ve noticed that it now says “dead”.

Everyone knows an ass is a donkey. It’s in the Bible,too. I wonder if it’s true William Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I had a little fling? Some cling to this legend.

About 30 odd years ago, Reader’s Digest printed a “modern” version of Romeo and Juliet for teens titled “O, Romeo! Like, wow!”!!

Anything where you can carefreely say “ass” referring to donkeys is always fun.