There's nothing wrong with not liking to read Shakespeare. I've read everything he's ever written, with the exceptions of The Rape of Lucrece and Troilus and Cressida, two works I have no question I'll get around to reading, but I've got the background and experience to be able to "stage" them in my head as I read. If that's not something you're able to do, then you probably won't enjoy reading the guy.
He didn't write to be read, he wrote to be performed. A good production of Shakespeare is as good as art gets. Unfortunately a bad production of Shakespeare (and most of them are) is wretched beyond belief.
I have mixed feelings about teaching Shakespeare in high-schools. On the one hand I like the idea of exposing kids to the work, on the other it's so often poorly taught, and a lot of what Shakespeare is doing with language is going to be way above the level that most high-schoolers are capable of dealing with that it could (and often does) just turn kids right off altogether.
Finally, Romeo and Juliet should never be performed in high schools. The actors playing the title characters should always, always end up sleeping together - if they don't the production is doomed to failure.
Anyways to get the thread back on topic, the strangest class I ever enrolled in would have to be Indonesian Shadow-Puppet Theatre. However I did have the good sense to drop the class, twice.
At UVic there was, and might still be, a phenomenal "trap" course called Listening to Music. It's offered by the music department and is a first-year course with no pre-reqs that's open to students from any faculty. So, of course it gets filled with engineers and biologist and psych kids thinking that it'll be an easy 'A'.
In actuality though it's an intensive Music Theory class, requires huge amounts of effort and study and has something like an 80% drop/failure rate.
Foolish scientists, thinking art is easy.
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