When I was in college, I went with some college friends to the New York City/Joseph Papp Shakespeare-in-the-Park Hamlet. I think the actor playing Hamlet was Stacy Keach.
To me, even then, Hamlet was part of the furniture, something I knew so well that my response was about details and director/actor choices. In the first intermission, I started to say something to one of my friends, an engineering major.
"Don't tell me how it ends!" he said, intensely.
It had never occurred to me that he might not know, that any adult in the English-speaking world didn't know.
And I enjoyed the play much more than I would have otherwise, because I remembered that it was a story, which I keep trying to remember.
I don't know what it is about Shakespeare that makes him last through the ages and speak to so many different times and places. But I think it will still be a long time before he disappears. (This summer, I saw Hamlet: Blood in the Brain, a very stark retelling of a contemporary ghetto Hamlet, performed by Oakland high-school students. It's still real now.
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Date: 2010-09-12 05:33 am (UTC)To me, even then, Hamlet was part of the furniture, something I knew so well that my response was about details and director/actor choices. In the first intermission, I started to say something to one of my friends, an engineering major.
"Don't tell me how it ends!" he said, intensely.
It had never occurred to me that he might not know, that any adult in the English-speaking world didn't know.
And I enjoyed the play much more than I would have otherwise, because I remembered that it was a story, which I keep trying to remember.
I don't know what it is about Shakespeare that makes him last through the ages and speak to so many different times and places. But I think it will still be a long time before he disappears. (This summer, I saw Hamlet: Blood in the Brain, a very stark retelling of a contemporary ghetto Hamlet, performed by Oakland high-school students. It's still real now.