Posts
Five Happy Endings
Now, see, here’s a better way to do it. I posted that lesson plan about “Plan Romeo and Juliet’s Wedding” and we all tore it apart for just plain wrongness on many levels.
http://community.livejournal.com/quillofferings/131603.html
Instead consider these 5 quick scenes in which the author has taken an existing scene from the play (welllll…..4 out of 5), and then with a twist, changed everything.
I think I like #2 because you’ve still got a story with that one. With #1 there’s no story. #3 and #4, which are basically the same, you get a happy-if-unsatisfying ending.
The author and her commenters mostly like #5 the best, but I like that one the least. If you throw in “here’s what wisdom and maturity would have taught them” then you’re back into the whole area where you’ve so fundamentally changed the point that the story need not ever have been written. It’s almost sanctimonious in its “Well obviously this is the way it would have gone if the characters were smart” argument.
What this continues to prove, however, is that none of us is Shakespeare. It’s fine the way it is, and it’s silly of us to try rewriting it.
1 comment:
What amazes me, is how the mundane and the predictable can be so lauded as "fresh" and "amazing" or "how it should have ended", etc. The pity is that the focus is to transform what Shakespeare wrote into something more comfortable, common, or palatable, without recognizing that he transformed the mundane and hackneyed into high art; something which none of this altering, for all of its praise, comes anywhere near doing.
Post a Comment