Making Curriculum Pop

2 VIDS & A CHAPTER: 'When in Doubt, It’s from Shakespeare...'

I was going through some old files and found my annotated, but now a bit outdated :( copy of 'When in Doubt, It’s from Shakespeare...' from Thomas C. Foster's fairly famous book "How to Read Literature Like a Professor" there is also a kids version that I'd love to check out! Anyway, it is loaded with cool allusions, some totally familiar, some you may have forgotten. For me the best part was a brilliant discusion of the intertextual relationshp between Athol Fugard's play "Master Harold" ... and the Boys and they way it communicates with Henry IV, Part II.


I really enjoied the way he explained intertextuality:

But here’s something you might not have thought of. Shakespeare also provides a figure against whom writers can struggle, a source of texts against which other texts can bounce ideas. Writers find themselves engaged in a relationship with older writers; of course, that relationship plays itself out through the texts, the new one emerging in part through earlier texts that exert influence on the writer in one way or another. This relationship contains considerable potential for struggle, which as we mentioned in the previous chapter is called intertextuality. Naturally, none of this is exclusive to Shakespeare, who just happens to be such a towering figure that a great many writers find themselves influenced by him.



You should read the essay, but he had a few retellings / allusions I had not rememberd or known about ...

Two of interest:
The 'Moolighting' episode called "Atomic Shakespeare" was never a part of my Taming of the Shrew repitore ...

This episode was so popular back in the day I found this 'Atomic Shakespeare': An Oral History of the 'Moonlighting' Classic

Also, I had not known about the Gilligan's Island episode that did some reworking of Hamlet ...

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the chapter - some teacher posted it and I linked to the whole thing.

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