Teenagers are studying 'dumbed down' version of Shakespeare's plays at school. They are using texts and GCSE revision guides which reduce great works of literature to a series of simplistic cartoons and jokes.

Examples:

MACBETH.
Act Two, Scene One- Macbeth sees a blood-covered dagger

SHAKESPEARE:

Macbeth: Is this a dagger, which I see before me.The handle towards my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not,and yet I see thee still show. False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

REVISION GUIDE VERSION

Macbeth: Oooh! Would you look at that.

ROMEO AND JULIET:
Act one, Scene One -- Confrontation between the Capulets and Montagues

SHAKESPEARE:

Tybalt: What, art thou drawn among these heartless hinds? Turn thee, Benvolio, look upon death.
Benvolio: I do but keep the peace, put up thy sword, Or manage it to part these men with me.

REVISION GUIDE VERSION

Tybalt: Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough.

TWELFTH NIGHT:
Act Three, Scene Four - Malvolio acts strangely

SHAKESPEARE:
Malvolio: Sweet lady, ho ho!
Olivia: Smil'st thou? I sent for thee upon a sad occasion.
Malvolio: Sad lady? I could be sad. This does make some obstuction in the blood, this cross-gartering, but what of that:If it please the eye of one, it is with me as the very true sonnet is: 'Please one, and please all.'

REVISION GUIDE

Malvolio: This cross-gartering's cutting off my circulation, but so what? If you're happy I'm happy.

Hi, Have you seen Beeb's adaptation of Shakespeare's plays 2005 style, the language, the dress was very contemporary, very 21st century. It was not bad, actually. I don't mind confessing I'm not a big fan of his plays. Sorry literature buffs.

In GCSE years (like I am now), you study the original text but you look at newer versions to help you understand. For example, we studied Romeo and Juliet; we read the Shakespeare play and also watched the film starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Claire Danes. I don't think this a good idea because, in the exam, you need to make references to the actual Shakespearean play and, by looking at the newer version, it confuses some people because so much of the story changed when they made the film. I can guarantee that more than one person in their exam has made R&J references that didn't actual happen in the original play, only in the DiCaprio and Danes film.

The biggest problem with Shakespeare is that is was never intended when written to be analyzed and read, but watched as a play.

I and my sister were very lucky in that our parents had us going to watch Shakespeare at a local well known festival in the outdoor grounds of a castle.
This enabled us to get to know the plays before we had to read about them.... making it a lot easier to understand and also discuss.

I believe that anyone studying Shakespeare shouldn't have it dumbed down, but be taken to see a play and watch it before they even open a book!

I also don't have anything against a contemporary setting as long as the text is adhered to!
I've seen a number of plays with contemporary settings - inc. Mandana in Othello - as well as all female casts at The Globe in London - through to RSC productions and even the exceptionally funny - Reduced Shakespeare Company.

I've enjoyed all, with the exception of the production of Othello I saw with Sir Donald Sinden - which I felt was wooden and lacklustre somehow.

I love Shakespeare. I was so peeved to discover I've missed a production locally of Comedy of Errors, which isn't one often seen because it requires two sets of twins!

A little late to add to this but there goes.
I absolutely love Romeo and Juliet.
I did it as my O'level play at school (a very long time ago now!}, but it left a huge impression ...never to be forgotten,
.
I absolutely agree that Shakespeare should NEVER be dumbed down.
I had the privilege of watching R&J performed at the Shakespeare theatre in Stratford, and it was a brilliant and unforgettable experience.

Having done R&J at GCSE, I agree that it shouldn't be dumbed down. I loved the DiCaprio and Danes film, but reading the play got me more hooked than watching the film. I felt myself awaiting the finale of the play more than the film, because I felt the play was more intense and it was a fantastic read. The film kept some intensity but replaced a lot of it with humorous performances from DiCaprio and the other "lads".

From Friday's Indy:

'Bilingual' teens say CUL8R to English

By Ciar Byrne, Media Correspondent

British teenagers have become bilingual, communicating in an online language that at first sight looks to most adults like an unbreakable code. The online community Habbo Hotel, whose users are mostly aged between 12 and 16, has published a glossary of the punctuation symbols, abbreviations and "emoticons" that young people send to one another.

Teenagers combine symbols, letters and numbers to keep in touch with their friends via e-mail, instant messaging and mobile phones. These range from (()):** meaning "hugs and kisses", to P999, or "parent alert", and LMAO BBS - "laughing my arse off and will be back soon". Some terms are relatively obvious, such as Gr8 for "great", others require more deciphering, such as YTTT for "You telling the truth?" N00B for "new user" and IRL for "In real life".

Online language began to evolve in the late 1990s, when words such as "see" and "be" were reduced to the phonetic consonants, so that "See you later" became CUL8R. Many services aimed at teenagers also feature "emoticons", pictorial symbols - such as love hearts, thumbs up and mobile phones - to help them to express their feelings.

* :rolleyes: The top of the slippery slope leading to the death of language as we know it, i.e. as a means of communication which does not exclude entire sections of the community...! :cry1

Stirwy,
I read this today and thought you might like it! :)
The Times August 28, 2006


Your baby's babble is straight from the textbook of our universal grammar
Science Notebook by Anjana Ahuja

MY FAILURE TO learn another language has always been a personal regret but I had hoped that motherhood would afford me a second chance. Reading that infants have a natural capacity for languages, I decided that my toddler, now 4, and I would acquire a second language together.
Which one would be most useful? Hindi? My extended family speak perfect English. Mandarin or Cantonese? Way too tricky. Spanish? Useful for communicating with a large percentage of the world’s population, and handy for the Canaries. Plus, this was the mother tongue of Dora the Explorer, the slightly simple cartoon character that my daughter had taken a shine to. Bingo!

Now I’ve discovered that we may be four years too late. According to one linguist, babies are born with the capacity to learn any language, but this plasticity withers as they concentrate on their mother tongue. Charles Yang, of the University of Pennysylvania, argues in a new book that babies are born with the templates for all languages in their brains, and that the underused templates are gradually discarded. In The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World, Professor Yang suggests that “nature proposes, and nurture disposes”.

Most intriguing is his observation that seemingly grammatically incorrect baby babble will usually be grammatically correct in another language. Baby babble, he infers, is the infant trying out various templates to see which one “works” (by eliciting claps, hugs and other signs of approval). So a sentence that seems to be a jumble of verbs and nouns when spoken in English, may well be correctly ordered in another language.

Take, for example, the double negative, a favourite grammatical error among very young children. “I don’t want no vegetables”, is a standard cry. It isn’t perfect English, but it is textbook Spanish. Another common, early mistake is dropping the definite article: “I want puppy.” Several languages, including Russian, do not feature articles.

Yang’s theory takes, as its starting point, Noam Chomsky’s enduring idea that there is a universal grammar embedded in the infant brain. Yang suggests that mixed-up baby talk is the toddler tossing out different variations of that universal grammar.

This news means, alas, that the Spanish lessons are on hold. Así es la vida.

* If only my ma and pa had known this!*

Tee hee! Just spotted (by accident!) on the US Open site: "Ticket exchange information for those effected by inclement weather"... :rolleyes:

i walked past a cafe yesterday offering 'breckfast'!

I took a picture of this last week because it's been driving me crazy ever since I saw it. All I could think of was "Panda says, 'No!'" (Those who have read "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" will get the meaning. :) )





It's been that way for over 100 years and it's carved into metal- there's no changing it!


-coolbyrne

oh no, there's nothing worse than misplaced apostrophes!

my english teacher used to proudly boast that she had an apostrophe removed from a sign at the local swimming baths after complaining about it on numerous occasions....i thinkshe was a bit sad!

Coolbyrne, what is wrong with it?

"Here the Canadian Club Movement had it's beginning."


"it's" is a contraction for "it is". So read aloud fully, this would read:

"Here the Canadian Club Movement had it is beginning."


It should read:

"Here the Canadian Club Movement had its beginning."


-coolbyrne

And there doesn't seem to be an apostrophe where there should be:
"Erected by the Women's Canadian Club"

On the subject of Grammar, this report was published last year and my understanding is this is now how schools are generally approaching the subject.

Pupils' grammar lessons "a waste of time"

Schools are wasting their time teaching children the rules of English grammar because there is no evidence that it has any impact on pupils' writing skills, a Government-funded study has concluded.

Ministers should cut back the teaching of formal grammar and let children "learn to write by writing", academics from the University of York said.

The study, which researchers claim is the largest review of existing research on grammar teaching, is likely to embarrass ministers who have put formal grammar teaching at the heart of their drive to raise literacy standards. It recommended that teachers should concentrate on teaching children to combine short sentences into longer ones to improve their writing skills. They found no evidence that teaching the grammar of word order or syntax helped pupils aged from five to 16 to write more fluently or accurately.

Professor Richard Andrews, who coordinated the research, said his team's findings did not mean that teaching formal grammar was "not interesting or useful in its own right." But he continued, "in a pressured curriculum, where the development of literacy is a high priority, there will be better ways of teaching writing.

"If there is little evidence that formal grammar teaching of syntax works, then practices based on theories such as 'you learn to write by writing' need to be given more credence. Whether there is space in the curriculum to teach syntax for its own sake, or for other purposes, remains to be seen."

Formal grammar teaching forms part of the National Literacy Strategy introduced in 1998. Teachers are required to teach children aged from five to seven about nouns, verbs and pronouns. Older primary school pupils are expected to learn the names and functions of all the main parts of speech as well as the grammar of complex sentences. However, an evaluation of the pilot year of the strategy by the schools watchdog Ofsted concluded that while there had been some improvements they "were least in sentence construction, punctuation and paragraphing".

A spokeswoman for the Department for Education and Skills said: "We don't expect teachers will use any single teaching method in isolation. The national strategies give teachers the tools to personalise the teaching according to the purpose of the writing pupils are engaged in."

A friend directed me to this online European journal site, "Underneath The Bunker" It's some kind of a parody or a spoof written tongue-in-cheek but hilarious. I had a good laugh and a pleasant read. So I thought I'd share it with you. Here are two letters written to the editor that I've chosen to post.



Dear Sir,- I have on several occasions in my life had the misfortune of stumbling across barbed wire. Rest assured I did myself less damage on such occasions than I did when stumbling across the online home of your ‘journal’ - Underneath the Bunker. What is this frippery, this drollery, this quackery, this preciosity, this whimsicality, this coxcombery, this charlatanry, this nincompoopery, this drearily disposed literary loam? Your grey background drove me close to suicide. As for this ‘blood-red’ backdrop you are currently experimenting with, I have yet to see blood of that shade outside of a primary school production of Macbeth. Surely you have taken bad design to a new level. I had already thought this to be an astonishingly amateur outfit: now I read (in ‘The Pathenikolides Affair – Part Three’) that you have not even got round to paying one of your contributors (and yet you have the cheek to print his protestations!). Sir, if you have ever gone anywhere, you have gone too far.
Yours with barely concealed malice,

ALDOUS EGG, editor of ‘Knockespotch’ – Europe’s Premier Cultural Journal (no seriously)




Sir,- in her generous review of my work, Heidi Kohlenberg raised the question of what criteria I used when selecting my line-up of Eastern European novelists, querying in particular my inclusion of Fjona Uu who, as is well documented, was brought up in Iceland by African parents, and my rejection of several important Hungarian, Romanian and Ukranian novelists, most notably Vitali Osmuk. In my defence, I must reiterate that my study was never intended to be about Eastern European novelists, but Eastern European novels. As to whether an Eastern European novel has to be written by an Eastern European novelist is no doubt a matter of such tenderness that it may require additional discussion; nevertheless, I believe that Uu’s experiences living in Murmansk and the style in which all of her novels are composed well qualify her work to be included in this study. Often it takes an outsider to draw light on a particular place: Uu is very much that outsider. As to why Vitali Osmuk was left out, great novelist though he may be, I must say that I sense something in his style that betrays major influences from outside of Eastern Europe, despite the fact that he has never travelled beyond the Ukranian capital. I refer in particular to his latest novel ‘Chip Butties and a Nice Cuppa Tea’ (Folksmen Press, 2001)

GROSNOR PADVICONAVIC (Author of ‘The Solidity of Emptiness: The State of Eastern European Literature at the turn of the millennium’)

The dreaded apostrophe is haunting me after I realized I've used it in one post where it was unnecessary. Aargh! Even after reading Coolbryne's easy to follow explanation, I'm not sure I've got the hang of it.
Incidentally, I'm not an English major or minor, not that, that's an excuse. :)

Spotted this a few days ago! It's an advert from a Bath newspaper - for an Indian takeaway.

' Sioux chef required '

I can't decide whether it was placed with tongue in cheek or there has been a serious malfunction on the part of the of the person placing the advert. :rolleyes:

After reading the above hilarious post, helki, here's some more drollery.

{Courtesy of Sporky.net}


Sioux Chef
matt: look to see if there's a cooking class
matt: like a soux chef prep course
matt: *sous
rebecca: Soux Chef!
matt: Sioux Chef!
rebecca: Sioux Chef America!
rebecca: Siouxsie Sioux Chef!
matt: Siouxsie Sioux Sous Chef
rebecca: say that 7 times fast
matt: Siouxsie Sioux: Sous Chef!!!
matt: we need to pitch this to FoodTV
rebecca: okay
rebecca: what does Siouxsie Sioux cook?
matt: food
matt: i think Siouxsie and Martin Yan should have a show together
rebecca: Sioux Can Cook?
matt: you betcha
matt: if yan can cook, sioux can you!
rebecca: oh lord
rebecca: that was baaaad
matt: :-)
rebecca: i hope you're proud of yourself
matt: i am. why do you think i introduced the yan? it was all leading up to that
matt: you should have seen it coming
rebecca: i didn't
rebecca: you got me this time
rebecca: score 1: matt

:rofl I love it, H, whether it's tongue in cheek or unintentional, therefore born of ignorance. I'd say the latter, since the Sioux are/were not that kind of Indian & I have so little faith in the spelling abilities of many of my compatriots! :rolleyes: Then again, it is spelt correctly (if it was tongue in cheek) & you did say it was Bath... ;) Reminds me a little bit of part of a conversation I overheard on the platform at my local station while waiting for my train to work one morning earlier this year: the guy responsible for the malapropism in question was raving about an Indian restaurant where he'd had dinner the previous evening, but he wasn't at all surprised because it had a ... wait for it... Michigan star! Close... :clap

Michigan star! What's wrong w'that? :lol1 I often wish I could remember half the things I hear, but I just don't have that kind of memory. :rolleyes:

Here's another to delight you, although you may have seen this before.

Interviewer: ' Would it be fair to describe you as a volatile player?'

David Beckham: 'Well, I can play in the centre, on the right and occasionally on the left side.'

* I think he's got it in a nutshell! *

Two excerpts taken from : http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/yvonne...1/post_967.html




It's difficult to imagine a land uninterested in celebrities - but it is possible.
[…….]
Celebrity RIP? If only - but where do the rest of us go from here? Indeed.

.........................

JohnMMorrison : comments: Where do the rest of us go from here? Indeed.
Try going to the dictionary to look up the difference in meaning between 'disinterested' and 'uninterested'.

Here's another little gem from the classified ads of the Leicester Mercury:

' Compsers busts, shopin, warghner, bach, list, £10 ono.' :eek

* Makes you wonder. ( or should that be wunder?)

Actual writings on medical charts in a South African State Hospital (sic)

1. The patient refused autopsy.
2. The patient has no previous history of suicides.
3. Patient has left white blood cells at another hospital.
4. Patient's medical history has been remarkably insignificant with only a 40 pound weight gain in the past three days.
5. She has no rigors or shaking chills, but her husband states she was very hot in bed last night.
6. Patient has chest pain if she lies on her left side for over a year.
7. On the second day the knee was better, and on the third day it disappeared.
8. The patient is tearful and crying constantly. She also appears to be depressed.
9. The patient has been depressed since she began seeing me in 1993.
10. Discharge status: Alive but without my permission.
11. Healthy appearing decrepit 69-year old male, mentally alert but forgetful.
12. Patient had waffles for breakfast and anorexia for lunch.
13. She is numb from her toes down.
14. While in ER, she was examined, x-rated and sent home.
15. The skin was moist and dry.
16. Occasional, constant infrequent headaches.
17. Patient was alert and unresponsive.
18. Rectal examination revealed a normal size thyroid.
19. She stated that she had been constipated for most of her life, until she got a divorce.
20. I saw your patient today, who is still under our car for physical therapy.
21. Both breasts are equal and reactive to light and accommodation.
22. Examination of genitalia reveals that he is circus sized.
23. The lab test indicated abnormal lover function.
24. Skin: somewhat pale but present.
25. The pelvic exam will be done later on the floor.
26. Large brown stool ambulating in the hall.
27. Patient has two teenage children, but no other abnormalities.

:rofl I'm surprised it didn't say "bark"...! :rolleyes: Definitely "wunder"... :lol1

Microsfty, thanks for a good laugh first thing in the morning. :lol:

Just in case you're unaware. :write :bookreader

And to poke fun at the lawyers:

"Do you recall the time that you examined the body?"
"The autopsy started around 8:30 p.m."
"And Mr. Dennington was dead at the time?"
"No, he was sitting on the table wondering why I was doing an autopsy."

* * *

"Doctor, how many autopsies have you performed on dead people?"
"All my autopsies are performed on dead people."

Rumer Willis was taunted by high-school bullies because of her bizarre name. The daughter of former Hollywood couple, Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, hated her name, insisting she "got screwed" by her famous parents' choice. And the actress confesses she was envious of her younger sisters, Scout and Talullah. She tells New York gossip column Page Six, "My sisters, Scout and Talullah, had cute nicknames. "When I was 12 and had crushes on guys, I'd put my first name with their last name, but it never sounded right. Rumer Depp? Nope. In school, kids would sing, 'Rumer, Rumer with a big hairy tumour'."

* Why am I not surprised? What does surprise me is that her sisters, with equally outrageous names like Scout & Talullah, were not similarly bullied! :rolleyes: Cute? I don't think so! :thumbsdown