Comment by grey-area
13 hours ago
Yes it’s an interesting question and applies to many books chosen for teenagers in school.
Technically they can handle the text and it may improve their reading and writing, I assume this is the justification for setting these texts.
Emotionally and socially they are nowhere near ready to deal with Dostoyevsky’s nihilism and angst and Austen’s witty social comedy of manners about a situation young girls no longer find themselves in.
Compared to Dickens or Shakespeare for example though they are unlikely to engage teenagers and very likely to actively put them off reading.
One of the amusing things from reading Wodehouse school stories - the kids were avoiding Latin by hiding Dickens inside their books.
Today kids hide comics inside books to avoid Dickens; someday kids will hide something new inside books to avoid the mandatory comic reading.
Not sure about Shakespeare. We suffered through Shakespeare in both English and Drama classes. I'm not sure that improved my appreciation. Other things did. I had to learn to love Shakespeare otherwise.
I watched "Hamnet" last night, which was okay, but I dread to think what that film would have been like if I was made to watch it at school.
I think Shakespeare might just be a badly chosen set of "classics". Romeo and Juliet is so overdone in pop culture there's nothing interesting there, and the one or two others we had to read were just boring. But then I ran across Much Ado About Nothing (while still in school) and remember it being actually good.
> Romeo and Juliet is so overdone in pop culture there's nothing interesting there
The whole point is to read the actual primary text that has been so done, re-done, overdone. And hopefully to recognize there's some real beauty and drama in there
If it’s taught well I think it can be very entertaining. There are lots of levels to Shakespeare and lots of very basic comedy. Watchman in Macbeth etc. the motives of characters are also explained well.
The only problem is the language.
I haven't read much of Shakespeare, but the lightbulb moment for me personally was the 1996 "Romeo + Juliet" movie with DiCaprio. The modern contextualization makes it so much easier to parse the period dialogue.