I believe
that Shakespeare exited from my life for a number of years, his charm unknown
to me until I reached the resplendent wonders of middle school. I attended Oak
Canyon Junior High and there was 'forced' to read a lot of things that, had I
had my druthers, I would never have acknowledged as being in existence. I was,
after all, still contentedly running through my second or third pass of Anne
McCaffery's Dragonriders of Pern
series, the Animorphs serial, and
whatever Spider-Man paperback I'd snatched up from Media Play the last month.
Junior high,
of course, was a time for determining identity, and nothing could do that as
well as Shakespeare.
We were asked
to read Much Ado About Nothing, but
since reading the translation on the opposite page was too much effort--and my
best friend's sister thought the guys in the film version were hot--we ended up
watching the movie and getting nothing out of it except naked bums. In response
to the required project, we took action figures and wiggled them in front of
the camera, quoting some of the lines haltingly from the book.
Certainly
what the son of memory had in mind when he penned the play 400 years ago.
Despite the
valiant and continued attempts of Mrs. Jensen, my exposure to A Midsummer Night's Dream consisted
almost entirely of cringing at the god-awful Micky Roonie cackling as the
world's most maniacal Puck.
This was
ninth grade, and I passed most of the time delivering snarky comments about the
travesty on the screen and drawing zombies in various states of decay and
explosions.
Shakespeare
became black-and-white noise.
But then
Leonardo DiCaprio had to cause controversy with his boyish good looks and Baz
Lehrman's topical attack on gang violence buzzed throughout the school. Had you
heard of Romeo + Juliet? It was edgy,
vibrant, and glamorized violence. It was a Shakespeare play set in gasp the modern day!
Mom wouldn't
let me see it.
I still
remember talking with one of my friends about it. We were equal parts
dismissive (anything that Leonardo
was a part of could sink faster than the Titanic,
so far as we were concerned) and intrigued (they use guns as swords!) by the
premise. Since we couldn't experience it under the puritanical (or Mormonical,
as it happened to be) edict, we had to devise our own version, one written in
modern speech and filled with the hilarious slang of the mid-nineties.
To the
lethargic Macintosh computer my friend owned, his family's copy of The Complete Works tucked under arm, we
hied. With the prodigious mental capacities of two ninth graders, we managed to
parse out a scant dozen lines or so of the play before we became totally lost. We
couldn't figure out, for example, why these guys were busy biting their thumbs
at each other--or why it would lead to the most anemic of stage directions, They fight.
Frustrated,
we turned on music by Live and made fun of our biology teacher.
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