It is bad enough that in England that church attendance has been plummeting faster than the acute angle of a slippery slope. Yet now the Royal Shakespeare Company is in the words of Matthew Mehan in his article Strangling Shakespeare. I wonder if there is a connection?
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Ouch.
This is one of the reasons I don’t want my students to watch films or attend performances of Shakespeare until after we’ve gone over the plays — and the Renaissance backgrounds — in class. It’s getting more and more difficult to find a film or performance that does Shakespeare’s plays rather than a director’s gimmickry.
I sometimes wonder whether the directors even read the plays. In the infamous BBC version of Macbeth, for example, Malcolm speaks the line (to Macduff), “What, man, ne’er pull your hat upon your brows” — and Macduff isn’t wearing a hat.
Hmm, come to think of it, the problem is similar to some of the liturgical problems we’ve been having, no? No understanding of the text, no understanding of the ideas behind the text, directorial gimmickry the only object….
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