Julius Caesar
Presents the original text of Shakespeare's play side by side with a modern version, discusses the author and the theater of his time, and provides quizzes and other study activities.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
22mentions
21people
2010–2024years
9% recommend86% neutral5% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I dunno (I'm being kinda folksy!). It was just arguing and not really qualifying as a refutation, which generally but not always implies proof. (I did look that up to check my suspicion, but in a big dictionary.)
I would be interested in people's experiences, good and bad, with having (not) gone to college, and serious analysis - everyone seems to be trying to shut down any serious discussion and exploration.
I went to college and I've had many times that I wished I'd studied harder. I've also wished at times that I skipped college then and went later in life, when I would benefit far more. I haven't wished that I didn't go; I learned so much that forms my understanding of the world, my thinking skills, etc.; I would be a different person without it. You can't tell me that I didn't benefit greatly from college but I'm just one person. But can you tell anyone that they studied for four years, hard, and didn't learn much? That's a big stretch for anyone; you need to learn enough to pass ~32 classes at various college levels, and that's a minimum.
Many people say here that 'I didn't go and I'm fine'. Fine isn't the question; nobody said we'd die without it, but that's not our standard for our choices. Each path leads to different collections of outcomes, better and worse and completely different, and we have blind spots about what the other path could be like (having no experience of it). Maybe college emphasizes different skills, develops different tools, with different advantages and disadvantages, as an example of how that would work.
I also wonder how much HN readers think of or have experienced STEM only. The humanities is more important (unpopular, I know, and both are essential IMHO); it addresses the most critical issues in the world and life, the ones beyond quantitative understanding, which is most of them.
I watched a bunch of Shakespeare plays recently, fictionalized histories of Rome and England [0]. From them you learn more about our current society and humanity in general, including today's crazy disfuntion, the mis/disinformation and people's responses, than from all the quantitative research combined; art is a mirror that looks into ourselves. And as objects of another human being's creation, they are incredibly inspirational and beautiful. I'm wiser and have grown since a week ago. Would I turn to Shakespeare and get so much from the plays without studying literature in college? I doubt it, though that's just me.
[0] Without knowing the reader's experience with the Bard, let me recommend Julius Caesar especially, also Henry VI Part 2 and Part 3, and of course their sequel, Richard III. Richard II is good too. I'd skip Henry VI Part 1 but read a synopsis as context for Part 2: Part 1 is clearly substandard IMHO and, it turns out, is believed to be mostly written by a collaborator, Christopher Marlowe. It does constrast the difference between an excellent playwright of their day using the same forms and an all-time genius of character and language.
- On History: Not textbooks, but if you want an enticing read to relatively recent times, I suggest biographies.
Ron Chernov: Alexander Hamilton. An excellent introduction to the birth of US. As a european US history is not that well covered in our school. There's also the musical version by Lin Manuel Miranda which alone is worth a few books of education alone.
On the birth of modern india: Herman: Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age
On the roman world: Julius Caesar: Gallic wars. This is a surprisingly readable book given that it's a propaganda piece written two thousands years ago. Highly recommended as it gives insight to just how organized-yet-cruel the ancient world was.
General history:
Acemoglu: Why nations fail. This is a must read. It attempts to explain (with great success) how institutions have molded the modern states into the way they are now, and what exactly seems to be at the root of inequality and prosperity.
If I had to recommend two books, "Why nations fail" would always be one on that list.
- “A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.” - Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
- > Like many of you, I had assigned reading for several Shakespeare plays in high school. I loathed these assignments. I wasn’t interested at the time, nor was I mature enough to appreciate the writing. Even revisiting as an adult, the conventional selection — Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, etc. — are not highly ranked on my list. For the next couple of decades I thought that Shakespeare just wasn’t for me.
I feel this. I think trying to teach these things to immature teenagers is a real disservice and forms a lifelong disdain for many of the great works. I was in my late 30s before I tried Shakespeare, Old Man and the Sea, The Count of Monte Cristo, etc. again. I loved them, but I easily could have never touched them again after the hatred I developed during high school.
- "It's hard to read the comedies. A lot of the humor is hidden in the way Shakespeare encoded his "stage directions" in the text."
Agreed, I didn't express what I said well. The comedies make much more sense to me now but are easily lost on 12-year-olds unless carefully introduced and explained well.
At my school it didn't help that anything likely to titillate the minds of 12-year-old boys was expurgated from the text (our school editions were first published in the 1940s/'50s or earlier and had been used by the school for decades so the editing had a sense of prudery about it). Of course that they were censored was never mentioned by the teachers but when I was about 15 I discovered the fact by accident after using one of my father's editions for homework. Not sure of the play now but it wasn't one of the comedies (I think it was Julius C.). This 'naughty' edition was a hit when I took it to school, the kids were rightly annoyed to see large chunks of text missing from their school editions. For example, any part with bastard in it was removed, and that was just for starters.
Had the comedies not been hacked about I'm sure they would have made more sense. Fortunately I don't think that nonsense goes on any longer.
"They're still better in performance, where the actors and director have done the "translation"."
Very true, every once in a while we had a troupe called The Young Shakespeare Players come to the school and perform everything from Lear to Julius Caesar to The Scottish play to the comedies and they performed them in ways that would bring out the best for school kids.
I suppose I'm sensitive to the way Shakespeare is introduced to schools because I'm a techie whose primary interests were technical and science subjects and I was only mediocre at English and languages school, so it would have been easy for me to end up among the group that found Shakespeare a drugery and that was so for some. Their attitude was the words didn't make sense so why bother studying it (the same went for poetry, I recall some kids just giving up on Eliott's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land). Fortunately, I caught the Shakespeare bug and I'm very glad I did.
Incidentally, we had a little textbook just called English Essays, it contained works by Addison, Steele, Bacon, Hazlitt, Lamb and so on. I just fell in love with many of these essays such as Old China, A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig, On a Sundial, Sir Roger de Coverley and so on—I remember them as if it were yesterday. The language is so beautiful and eloquent yet they lose nothing for being very short. They were very formative, they brought great writing in small digestible amounts to kids like me who would normally prefer to be reading say Scientific American than novels like Thackeray's Vanity Fair, which I recall I struggled to get through. I cannot understand why these wonderful essays seem to have fallen out of favor with educators.
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Edit: Re stage directions as we have them are almost never Shakespeare's own writing. I have a reprint collection of the earliest folio editions and they are a little too Spartan for me (they're harder to follow).
- I can see the headline: "Juror Dies Mysteriously in Chambers: Body Bears 11 Distinct Stab Wounds."
"Et tu, Brute?"
- lit. "You too, Brutus?" - from Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, Act 3 Scene 1. The phrase is spoken by the Roman dictator Julius Caesar during his assassination to his friend Marcus Junius Brutus when Caesar realizes Brutus is also one of the assassins.
