Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Et tu, Mr. Grooms?

Julius Caesar

by William Shakespeare


Classic Flashback #6


Note: I dedicate this humorous review to Mr. Grooms, my 10th grade English teacher who not only taught me how to appreciate Shakespeare but introduced me to the writings of John LeCarre, John Hershey, and Shirley Jackson. But he gets minus points for making me read Silas Marner.

 I read William Shakespeare's  classic play Julius Caesar  in high school as required reading, so my review is delivered in the viewpoint of the ancient high school me...

Our high school English teacher made us read Julius Caesar. I thought I would hate it but it was pretty cool. Lots of fights, knives, and cool speeches. Even the dudes in the local gang thought it was pretty cool. So I decided to read more Shakespeare and chose Romeo and Juliet. Not so cool. Lots of cuddling and no sex. Shakespeare just copied West Side Story which had better fights and cooler dancing. So I told my teacher I wanted a Shakespeare play that had more sex and violence. All he said was go read King Lear.
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1 comment:

  1. Alex HortonSeptember 30, 2015 at 9:36 AM

    The thing that stands out about Julius Caesar for me is the year we studied it in school, we also saw it at the Stratford Festival, thus making it necessary for our class to watch the BBC video of the play so we'd know what to expect when we saw it onstage. After seeing the play, we of course continued to study it in class. By the end, we had gone through it three times in three different media and I had had enough of it for a good long while.

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