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[CortJstr]

I don't believe that someone can be taught to analyse a text any better because that text is Macbeth instead of Rent. It's just scared old people demanding that the world be more familiar.

I guess teaching kids how to analyze terrible texts like Rent would be a new way to try things. Maybe it's just the uninteresting subject matter, but I thought that show was horrible.

[jaydub]

Everybody knows girls are dumb when it comes to computers. 

Aw, dang now, JL.  You're gonna make me can you for that?

[wombat]

I don't know that Rent is the best alternative, but it does seem like a particularly cruel form of torture to make people read Shakespeare in high school. I can't imagine what would turn you off to literature faster than something that's written in what's basically a foreign language that's disguised as English. A good, honest actual foreign language would be fairer.

[Golfhaus]

I disliked the idea of taking the mandatory Shakespeare course in college so much that when they allowed us to take an alternative course, I took it - even though the featured author in that class was Milton. I ended up dropping the class two weeks before the final.

I dropped out of college before having to face either Shakespeare or an alternate the whole way through.

[CortJstr]

I have to say that acting made Shakespeare a lot more tolerable. It makes more sense when you see it performed vs reading it. And if you're actually in one of the plays then the director will explain all the lines to you.

[wombat]

And if you're actually in one of the plays then the director will explain all the lines to you.

Right - and the fact that this is necessary is exactly why it's such a bad idea to make students read it.

[AugustWest]

I enjoyed reading Shakespeare in High School.  Guess I had a good teacher.

[V-Adore]

I had a really good Shakespeare class in high school, but I was also a smarty-#####.

[jaydub]

I started enjoying Shakespeare once I realized that just about every damn aphorism in English was coined by him.  The sense of superiority one gets from knowing that "once more unto the breach!" is from Henry V, let alone that it's not "breech" - or that you can be really clever when you storm the bonfire by shouting "Once more onto the beach!" - well.  It makes up for driving a used Pontiac Sunbird in high school is all I'm sayin'.

Supposedly the same is true in German of Goethe.  I should probably figure out who the Spanish equivalent of The Bard is, since that's the only other language I can pretend to be educated in.

[AugustWest]

  I should probably figure out who the Spanish equivalent of The Bard is, since that's the only other language I can pretend to be educated in.

Would it be Cervantes?

[AlohaDawg]

Would it be Cervantes?

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra would even be more-or-less contemporary to Shakespeare.

Almost all of the Spanish Literature I had to do in college (Spanish Major! (Stupid!!)) Was Lorca, Unamuno and that era right around the turn of the 20th Century and the era following the Spanish Civil War.

[jaydub]

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra would even be more-or-less contemporary to Shakespeare.

Is colloquial Spanish (either European or Mexican) loaded with references to his works?  I assume he wrote more than Don Quixote.

[Doc]

In my defense I have never consumed any Rent products, nor do I wish to, I was just making a general point.
For instance, when I was in high school each english teacher taught a different text and we got to choose, some did shakespeare, some did more recent stuff (One flew over the cuckoos nest for example), and I can remember writing analysing both old and new texts in ways I thought was pretty compelling at the time.

[CortJstr]

In my defense I have never consumed any Rent products, nor do I wish to, I was just making a general point.
For instance, when I was in high school each english teacher taught a different text and we got to choose, some did shakespeare, some did more recent stuff (One flew over the cuckoos nest for example), and I can remember writing analysing both old and new texts in ways I thought was pretty compelling at the time.

When I took AP we got to choose one book to write about for ourselves. Of course it had to be approved and most people, me included, picked something by an author we'd already studied. Mainly because we were afraid of wasting our time on a book that the AP test graders wouldn't think was good enough.

[littlefallsmets]

RENT is okay if you are in high school and have the ability to completely and utterly shut off your cynicism circuits for hours at a time. Without that perfect storm, yeah, it is incredibly incredibly INCREDIBLY naive and melodramatic but... y'know... it IS a musical.

Ain't a whole lot of complex emotionally-honest musicals out there, part of the medium is about two-dimensional storytelling so that you can focus on the music and the dance numbers.

Some of the tunes are catchy if you can block out the utter adolescence of the lyrics, I'll give it that.