Tag: shakespeare

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Fantastic Tales

Beware the dragons. Watch out for the trolls. And always remember that heroes may be hazardous to your health.

Not your usual prescription, I grant you. But it’s apparently second nature to Graeme Whiting, an English headmaster who made international headlines when he declared that fantasy fiction would rot your child’s mind.

No, I’m not overstating it. Kind of hard to, really.

“Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, and Terry Pratchett, to mention only a few of the modern world’s ‘must-haves’, contain deeply insensitive and addictive material which I am certain encourages difficult behaviour in children,” Whiting wrote as part of a lengthy blog post on his school’s website, “yet they can be bought without a special licence, and can damage the sensitive subconscious brains of young children, many of whom may be added to the current statistics of mentally ill young children.”

You might be surprised to learn that he and I agree on exactly one thing: Parents should pay attention to what their children read. Books do indeed open doors onto many places, and every parent should know where their child is spending their time, whether it’s in the park or in the Shire.

But fantasy can open some wonderful doors indeed.

I’m not writing to disparage the more classic works that Mr. Whiting himself loves and encourages for a growing mind, such as Shakespeare or Dickens, which were also part of my reading. Enough so that I’m a bit amused. After all, Dickens was long considered popular trash by lovers of “proper literature” and as for Master Shakespeare – well, whose life couldn’t use a dose of teen marriage and suicide (Romeo and Juliet), eye-gouging (King Lear), witchcraft (Macbeth), and rape and mutilation (Titus Andronicus), with just a sprinkling of cross-dressing and humiliation of authority (Twelfth Night)?

Sure, they’re wonderful – dare I say magical? – stories. But safe? C.S. Lewis once warned visitors to Narnia that the great Aslan was “not a tame lion” and if a story has any power to it at all, it can never be considered a “safe story.” When books meet brains, anything can happen. Anything at all.

Stories have a power that the great authors of fantasy knew quite well.

“Not the Gandalf who was responsible for so many quiet lads and lasses going off into the Blue for mad adventures?” the hobbit Bilbo Baggins declares in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Tolkien has been my own Gandalf since about third grade, leading my imagination into places both terrifying and wonderful – as have many of the fantasy authors who followed in his wake. My family and I have cheered on Harry Potter, wandered with Taran and Eilonwy, leaped through wrinkles in time, and stumbled through wardrobes into unexpected worlds.

You acquire many things on a quest like that. Beautiful language. Heartbreak and hope. A decidedly quirky strain of humor. And most of all, the realization that evils can not only be survived, they can be overcome.

“Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey,” G.K. Chesterton famously wrote in 1909. “What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”

No, stories aren’t safe. Few things worth having are. But they can be priceless.

So yes, have a hand in your child’s reading. Be careful. Be aware. But be open to wonder as well. And don’t fear the dragons.

After all, that is where the treasure is to be found.

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Spoiled Again

By the time this appears in print, I may actually have seen the new “Star Wars.”

I know, I’m just a little late to the party here. By the time I actually walk into a theater and launch into that galaxy far, far away, the rest of my fellow fans will have purchased enough tickets to paper a small moon. (Or is it a space station?) By now, every last detail has been dissected and analyzed, whether it’s the precise dimensions of the new cross-hilt lightsaber or the dents acquired by the Millennium Falcon since its last run in “Return of the Jedi.”

I can’t wait to join the conversation. But I also can’t wait to discover the movie. And that means I’ve been filtering social media like a riverside gold panner, trying to keep from becoming The Man Who Knew Too Much.

One must be careful. The Spoilers are on the prowl.

“Spoiler culture” is a funny thing. In an older time, it was expected that one would know the crucial points of the great stories of the day. Some even spelled out the entire plot in a quick summary right at the start for those who might not otherwise keep up, such as the opening prologue of Romeo and Juliet. (A friend joked that the Shakespearean narrator should begin that speech with the words “Spoiler alert!”)

But something changed in the last century and a half or so. Partly, I think, it was the rise of plots whose dramatic power depended on hiding information until a certain point. Think of Citizen Kane and the need to identify “Rosebud.” Or the plays and novels of Agatha Christie with their hidden twists. Or even the quests of Frodo Baggins or Harry Potter, where the choice that the hero makes is all-important, but it’s not always clear at the start what choice the hero has to make or what the cost may be.

Partly, too, it’s an explosion of novelty and individuality at the same time. The 19th and 20th centuries especially set off an avalanche of stories and plot lines. And while the new mass media could make sure that many of them became community knowledge (is there anyone who doesn’t know how Gone With The Wind goes?), the exact timing would depend on individual choice and budgets and lives. Those who had undergone the shared cultural experience first had an advantage – however temporary – over those who didn’t, and could shape the experience of the “not yets” by what they chose to reveal. (“Don’t tell me the ending!”)

So – you have the spoiler. The information that would reveal a plot’s mysteries and surprises too soon. There’s been a debate over when is “too soon” to put spoiler information out in the open, especially for reviewers: should one wait a week after release? A year? Should the information stay locked away forever, despite all blandishments and temptations?

Some audiences are better at keeping secrets than others – there’s a reason that thrillers like “Deathtrap” retain their power to surprise and startle. And there’s no doubt that some storylines are damaged less than others by a premature revelation. A black-and-white action tale usually has all its cards on the table … and yet, how different is a new viewer’s experience of “The Empire Strikes Back” these days when it’s common knowledge who Darth Vader really is and what he’s after?

Ultimately, it comes down to the individual reader, viewer or listener. It has to. No spoiler law will satisfy everyone or will be perfectly adhered to. Each of us has to decide how much is too much to know, and do what we can to protect our own decision.

And really, isn’t that true with any sort of learning? All the way to the beginning, knowledge has been about choices. What do I need to know? What do I want to know? Sure, some things come in by osmosis (my wife Heather knows any number of movie ‘moments’ that she’s never actually seen), but the best learning is directed learning – making the decisions that will make someone a better student, a better citizen, a better member of society.

Choose well. Choose wisely.

And if you choose to tell me the new Star Wars plot twist before I can get in the theater, then may the Force be with you.

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Belly Up to the Bard

After 20 years, my dream has come true.

No, not the one where I come to school for a test I never studied for and then realize I’m in flagrant violation of the dress code. Different dream.

This one began with a chance purchase of an oddly-titled script in a college bookstore. Now it’s coming to fruition amidst a torrent of sight gags, word play and utter ridiculousness. A tribute, really, to a master of the hilarious and bizarre.

Right, Master Shakespeare?

OK, OK, I know. “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged),” our newest comedy at the Longmont Theatre Company, bears about as much resemblance to the stagecraft of Laurence Olivier as I do to the physique of Arnold Schwarzenegger. That’s the beauty of it, really. This is Shakespeare as it might have been done by Monty Python and the Marx Brothers, with a little Saturday Night Live thrown in for good measure.

It’s irreverent. It’s absurd. It’s three men blasting through the canon with a buzz saw like the hero in a zombie flick, and leaving about as much standing.

And somehow, I think the Bard of Avon would have laughed his head off. Once the migraine cleared up, anyway.

That’s not because the show’s true to the text. (Heavens, no.) But it’s true to the life.

Maybe I should explain.

A lot of times, Shakespeare’s plays get treated like museum pieces: Dust off the icons, admire the filigree and keep everything on a nice, safe pedestal. They’re works to be studied, venerated, stuffed and mounted.

Now mind you, I admire the man’s work. I consider his writing some of the most beautiful in the English language. And the details certainly bear study, if only to discover what “fardels” actually are.

But Shakespeare wasn’t writing for textbooks. Shakespeare was writing for people. Rich people, poor people, anyone who could pay for a seat (or a patronage). And he played to that audience as surely as any modern-day Hollywood schlockmeister.

Bad puns? Check. Blood and gore? Check. Soap operas, mistaken identities and jokes about bodily functions? Check, check, and most definitely check. (Take a fresh read through Macbeth if you don’t believe me on that last one, where a porter hilariously laments how too much wine “provokes the desire but takes away the performance.”)

Yes, he wanted people to think. And part of the way he did that was by also making them laugh, wince, and shudder. Many of his tales had been told before; by adding his own twists, touches, and jokes, he could make his audience really hear them and consider them as something new.

That kind of re-transformation can be vital and not just in Shakespeare. Any time we give something a set-apart status – the Founding Fathers, a sacred work, a loved one, the 1927 New York Yankees – we risk taking them for granted. We memorize a headline, or quote the words without the music. As a minister of mine used to say about the Easter story, we already know the end, and so we lose the fear and apprehension shared by those who didn’t know how all this was going to come out.

We stop understanding and see only what we expect to see.

By shaking up those expectations, we wake up our minds. And maybe even laugh ourselves silly in the process.

Let go. Have fun. And if I’ve got you curious, come on down and see what our warped minds have come up with. ( Show details can be seen at www.longmonttheatre.org.) As Master Shakespeare used to say, the play’s the thing.

What kind of thing? Thereby hangs a tale …