Behold The Power of Censorship
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Family on Tuesday, February 15, 2011 1:00 PM
The Teti family has taken to reading Shakespeare in the evenings after dinner & rosary.
Come back, it is NOT like that, I assure you.
We noticed our eldest son tunes out family read-alouds…unless he’s doing the reading aloud.
Mr. T. thought it might be fun to try reading some plays together.
Our first attempt was abortive…language too difficult. (I don’t recall Shakespeare being so hard once you get used to it….I think it’s because I grew up on the King James Bible. But I digress.)
We invested in some No Fear Shakespeares and embarked on Macbeth. Murder and duels for the boys and a juicy part for our daughter.
The older kids, sniffing something educational, rolled their eyes and determined not to enjoy it.
The little boys took right to it, but turned that Scottish play into a comedy. The ten-year-old read every part in his Peter Lorre voice and the seven-year-old, while perfectly earnest, was inherently funny. One night he read Malcolm, proclaiming in his innocent First Communicant chirp that no maid in the countryside was safe from his voluptuousness. Comedy gold: though naturally we did not explain to him why.
The big kids softened enough that we dared to try another: Much Ado About Nothing. I smoothed the way by showing Kenneth Branagh’s film version first (fast-forwarding through the maidens bathing scene at the opening, and instructing the kids to look away at the seduction scene). This seemed to backfire at first, since our eldest son proclaimed it (horrors!) an (eeew) romance, and bullied the boys into having no interest.
But then….Dogberry to the rescue! The maladroit constable galloped onto the scene, demanding it be put in the official record that he’d been called an “ass.”
That got the little guys’ attention, boy howdy. They are each in that stage of masculine development where the funniest thing on earth is a flatulence joke, or anything that can be contorted into a synonym for “bum,” and here was Shakespeare using a naughty word.
I tried saying that this was “ass” meaning “donkey,” not “ass” meaning “bum” to no avail. “Ass” is not a word we use in our home. Shakespeare had taken on the frisson of danger and they loved him.
Now they couldn’t wait to read Much Ado, fighting over who would read Dogberry and get to say “ass” over and over again without getting into trouble.
Here’s the beauty part, though. Our youngest has really gotten the bug. He vies for the largest roles when we read aloud and has taken to writing his own plays. He came in as I was folding laundry one evening and asked me to read a scene he’d written with him, which I did. That encouraged more scenes and now he’s filled a composition book with Scenes and Acts.
The attention he got as we read his plays hooked the ten-year-old too, and now off and on for weeks we’ve often found them sitting side-by-side with their books, penning new adventures for the stage.
I’m making no claims for the genius of either my boys or their productions. Their plays are rather repetitive confrontations between good guys and bad guys, replete with smart remarks, weapons I’m sure are disallowed by Just War theory, and illustrations in the margins giving stage notes about the explosions necessary. There are no advanced-for-their-age notions of story arc or character development.
But the word “ass” occurs on a regular basis, by permission of the Bard, and it always sets off a fit of giggles before we can move on to the next line. You know the kind of helpless laughter where the kid can’t catch his breath to speak again?
I would love to be able to say that my kids have such depth of soul that reading Shakespeare engendered a flourish of creative outpouring from their sensitive persons.
But I know it was the “ass.”
Let’s see your clean, normal, ordinary word do that.
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