I agree that Shakespeare can be ruined in the class room, but I've never
seen a performance, however bad, that wasn't worth while -- you can still
hear the words anyway. One of the most memorable productions I can recall
was a semiprofessional troupe's performance of As You Like It in Golden Gate
Park in San Francisco thirty years ago, given free to whoever was around.
Though objectively not all that good, the performers were having fun, and
the audience -- an oddly Elizabethan assortment of young men with long
greasy hair, spacey ladies with babies at their tits, and derelicts viewing
the Forest of Arden with bewildered wonder through their alcholic fog -- was
right with them: during the Ages of Man speech this dubious assemblage
began shouting "Yea Man!" and "All RIGHT!" as if they were at a rock
concert. Hard to imagine such a group reacting like that to the verse of,
say, James Merrill or Ted Hughes.
====
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it
is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.
-- T. S. Eliot
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