Oh man, we did, didn't we? I'd somehow forgotten about that... Mostly I remember spending the day carrying around a spade and a rock from the garden that I'd drawn a skull face on with Sharpie; I have no memory of any butchering, luckily for you!
(You know, I'm pretty sure I put the rock back in the garden when I moved out, so it's probably still there, skull face and all! 😂)
Have you read Speak the Speech by Rhona Silverbush and Sami Plotkin? I’m currently plowing my way through it: it’s an absolute doorstop of a book that takes a deep dive into 151 of his monologues with great humour and wit. I’m really getting a lot out of it (as a meter nerd, I occasionally take issue with their scansions, but then that’s true of nearly every book I’ve read that touches on scansion! And even their metrical observations are often incisive - and I’m delighted they recognise the epic caesura, unlike many).
As a teen, I memorised Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”, though I’ve certainly never come close to memorising a whole play! As it happens, I recently bought a quite beautiful pocket sized Hamlet, so I’ll be rereading it very shortly! I actually find a great deal of humour in Hamlet; I think the humour in his “serious” plays is often overlooked.
I have, more recently, memorised his sonnets, which I’m still studying. Spending time with a sonnet in the context of familiarity with the whole cycle can be a very different experience to studying it in isolation! I now find that surface, sentimental interpretations of the sonnets really set my teeth on edge!
That sounds like a FANTASTIC book and I will definitely put it on my to-read list!
Ooh, I hope you have a fun reread.
Yes, the sonnets are so different when you look at them together! (It's harder to be sentimental about them when you remember that one of them is just an extended dick pun)
Did we not also perform the grave diggers’ scene in class before doing the Rep show? Pretty certain I butchered it at the time 😂
Oh man, we did, didn't we? I'd somehow forgotten about that... Mostly I remember spending the day carrying around a spade and a rock from the garden that I'd drawn a skull face on with Sharpie; I have no memory of any butchering, luckily for you!
(You know, I'm pretty sure I put the rock back in the garden when I moved out, so it's probably still there, skull face and all! 😂)
Have you read Speak the Speech by Rhona Silverbush and Sami Plotkin? I’m currently plowing my way through it: it’s an absolute doorstop of a book that takes a deep dive into 151 of his monologues with great humour and wit. I’m really getting a lot out of it (as a meter nerd, I occasionally take issue with their scansions, but then that’s true of nearly every book I’ve read that touches on scansion! And even their metrical observations are often incisive - and I’m delighted they recognise the epic caesura, unlike many).
As a teen, I memorised Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”, though I’ve certainly never come close to memorising a whole play! As it happens, I recently bought a quite beautiful pocket sized Hamlet, so I’ll be rereading it very shortly! I actually find a great deal of humour in Hamlet; I think the humour in his “serious” plays is often overlooked.
I have, more recently, memorised his sonnets, which I’m still studying. Spending time with a sonnet in the context of familiarity with the whole cycle can be a very different experience to studying it in isolation! I now find that surface, sentimental interpretations of the sonnets really set my teeth on edge!
That sounds like a FANTASTIC book and I will definitely put it on my to-read list!
Ooh, I hope you have a fun reread.
Yes, the sonnets are so different when you look at them together! (It's harder to be sentimental about them when you remember that one of them is just an extended dick pun)