-- Final grades are in. I have decided to go to Parentland for three weeks, starting tomorrow, and not to read the evals until I get home in January. I think this will be a healthy and sensible thing to do, in contrast to my previous policy of hanging out in Sleepy Southern Town for days with nothing to do except fret about things my students might say.
-- I started my SAA paper, and then I realized I was trying to find Deep Meaning in a song that goes "John for the King has been in many ballads / John for the king down dino / John for the King has eaten many salads / John for the king sings hey ho." At which point I gave up in despair. Oh dear.
-- On a tangentially related note, I bought the big Richard Scarry book of nursery rhymes, because I had vaguely fond memories of it from my childhood and thought it might make a good first birthday present for the Small Nephew. Who knew there were nursery rhymes about how Welshmen are lying thieves and you should break into their houses and beat them up? I bet my brother and sister-in-law are going to have a fun time explaining that one...
-- Should I teach Love's Labour's or Shrew in the spring Shakespeare class? (Alas, there isn't enough time for both.) I happen to like LLL better, as it has smart spirited women who don't get punished, and it ends with the kind of tonal shift that I have a massive soft spot for, and I can show clips from last year's Globe production, which is fabulous. And it would generally be a better play for teaching students about how Shakespearean language and wordplay works. OTOH, Shrew is an easier read, and it would fit better into this year's lineup of texts since it's pretty much straight-up Roman comedy with a few English twists. (We will be starting the course off with Errors and Plautus's Menaechmi, and I've got Titus, Lucrece, and Julius Caesar lined up for later in the semester.) And the Christopher Sly framework would be really good for talking about metatheater, and there are more film versions, including two different stage productions filmed live, so there would be a ton of nice opportunities to talk about performance choices. Damn, they're both so good, only they're good for such different stuff, and I just can't decide.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
Hmm... you've got a lot of Roman-ness going on. Maybe do LLL for a change-up. Although, I think students might have a harder time with it than Shrew. Just my opinion. Then again, I'm not a huge fan of it myself. I can barely stand rhyming couplets, which is probably why I also have a harder time getting through Richard II than any of the other history plays. Rhyming couplets are also the reason that I can't stand the long 18th century's offerings in poetry. Gah.
I, too, prefer LLL, but Shrew alongside Titus would give you a chance to talk about daughters and fathers and suchlike. I've only taught Shrew a couple of times, but I noticed that students come to it with some really clear assumptions (that it's a proto-feminist text, primarily) and watching them work through those assumptions when confronted with an unflinchingly violent and hegemonic text can be kind of amazing.
I heart your syllabus. I was just refusing (to no one in particular) to teach Hamlet, and saying I'd just do a whole semester on Errors and Titus. And I damned well bloody meant it.
Fie -- The Roman-ness is deliberate; I feel like I've been doing a lot of English-ness the last few times I've taught this course, what with all the Henry plays and MWW, and I thought it would be nice to change things up and do a Roman sequence instead.
And yeah, I think they probably will have a tougher time with LLL; it's one of those plays that works fine on stage, but it's a lot harder to read than some of the others...
St. Eph -- Hmm, some interesting points to consider! Thanks!
moria -- Nope, no Hamlet here; this is the Early Shakespeare course. (We will be doing some more canonical stuff -- R3, Twelfth Night, and Much Ado -- but not 'til a bit later in the semester.)
Well, with Shrew you can show the massively awful Burton/Taylor film. Which is so bad it's good, if you know what I mean...
Susan -- I might! Although that would leave less time for the BBC version, which actually is good, and features John Cleese wearing the Silliest Hat Ever.
You lucky devil (and hard worker) to have submitted your final grades already. I am still sifting through huge drifts of papers about - among other things - metatheatre and "Taming". And you get your evals back so quickly! We don't get ours until midway through the next term, just in time for it to disrupt our teacherly confidence entirely mid-stride!
As for the LLL vs. TOTS smackdown: hmm. Fewer of them will have read LLL,which is excellent, but the difficulty of the ending of TOTS is always debate-productive. Can I just say that I know someone (an ardent feminist) who read Kate's speech of submission at her wedding?
But I would say go with LLL, because it intrigues you more, and they will have ample exposure to TOTS later, if they are interested.
Sycorax Pine -- I don't know if we're lucky, so much as rushed; I finish grading early because grades are due early.
All excellent points, thanks! (Of course, now I'm more confused than ever...)
Post a Comment