My only requirement regarding Shakespeare is that his works be seen and heard -- NOT read. I can't think of a bigger waste of time than forcing students to read The Tempest.
[. . .]
But reading his plays rather than giving yourself over to a live production is, to me, a rather stupid thing to do -- unless you've gathered a group to read a play out loud so you can all hear what's going on.
I agree completely!! I got into so much trouble in high school about this. I argued that reading a play is like reading a description of a painting. It's useless. The artist's medium is the message (thank you Mr. McLuhan!) to separate the words from the actors and the stage is like reading sheet music rather than hearing the music. If Shakespeare had wanted to write a book he would have. He didn't.
Why read The Tempest when you can watch Walter Pidgeon and Leslie Nielson do it (very well I might add) in Forbidden Planet? At the very least watch a good production of the play on screen if you can't see it live. Watch Olivier's films. They're marvelous.
I completely disagree with both of you on this. To take the easiest target first, the answer to Jason's rhetorical question, "Why read
The Tempest when you can watch Walter Pidgeon and Leslie Nielsen [spelling corrected] do it in
Forbidden Planet?" is that the movie is not
The Tempest. It shares with
The Tempest certain elements of plot. But the plots are the least original thing in Shakespeare's plays. Most of them are copied wholesale from other sources. (I think
The Tempest is one of the few of which this is not known to be the case.) Of course, Shakespeare adapted his sources to his own purposes; but so did the makers of
Forbidden Planet with theirs. The difference is that Shakespeare's plays do not gain interest from their relation to their antecedents, in the way that
Forbidden Planet gains interest from its relation to
The Tempest. The movie makers may be said to have interpreted Shakespeare; Shakespeare just stole things. The idea that there is no point in reading
The Tempest if you can see
Forbidden Planet does a disservice to the movie as well as to the play.
Second, Shakespeare wrote plays, which are works of words; he did not write performances (though he gave them). A performance is the work of the performers (and the director and all the others responsible); a play is the work of the writer. A performance may be good or bad: the merit of the play does not stand or fall with it. But a bad performance of a good play may make it seem like a bad play. And a good performance of a not-so-good play may make it seem much better than it is. The only way to form a just appreciation of the merits of a play is from the play itself, not from performances of it. One has to read it.
Third, Shakespeare's writing is extremely difficult for English-speaking people in our time to understand without study. When we watch a good performance, we can generally understand what is going on without understanding every line. That is better than reading -- or, for that matter, viewing -- without comprehension, but if you are going to argue that we miss things by not seeing the plays performed, you must also recognize how much we miss by not reading them. There are jokes, metaphors, plays on words, and just plain wonderful phrases that would have been perfectly intelligible to Shakespeare's audience but that are lost on us unless someone explains to us what they mean. That is not something that you get out of watching a performance. You need to read the text, ponder the lines, read the notes, re-read the text, and so on.
Finally, the analogy with music is a very good one, but I think Jason misinterprets it when he says that "to separate the words from the actors and the stage is like reading sheet music rather than hearing the music." For one thing, people who know how to read music
do hear the music when they read the score. By the same token, people who are good at reading plays
do not "separate the words from the actors and the stage" when they read them -- in the following sense: they separate the words from any
particular performance that they have seen (if they have seen any), but they read the lines the way a skilled music-reader reads a score, hearing and seeing a performance in their heads. That is what it
means to read a play. The main difference (pertinent here) between reading a score and reading a play is that reading scores is a very specific technical skill that takes years to develop -- I mean even to develop to minimal competence -- while reading a play is something that almost any literate person can do in at least a rudimentary way.
Not long ago, people who liked music and wanted to have frequent access to it had to become musicians. Today, thanks to the availability of recordings, most people enjoy music only in a passive capacity: they relegate the task of performing music to people with special skills, whose performances they listen to. We have not yet gotten to the point where people have a similarly passive relation to the written word, but if educators shared your view that reading plays is a waste of time, it would be not be long before they did so.
