I subscribe to a service called “SiteMeter” which allows me to see a limited amount of information about my visitors. One thing that I can see is if someone finds my site via a Google search, and what they were searching for.

It’s been a while, but every now and then I check in on what searches people have done to find themselves at Shakespeare Teacher, and to respond to those search terms in the name of fun and public service. All of the following searches brought people to this site in the past week.

Obviously, this depends on how much time you spend reading per day, how quickly you read Shakespeare, and how deeply you want to examine the text. But Macbeth is a play, and is one of Shakespeare’s shorter plays at that. You could probably stage an uncut production in about two and a half hours. A first-time reader should be able to make it through the text in two evenings. Reading it out loud in a group should not take more than four hours, including breaks between acts.

“The Promised End” is the last episode of the Canadian television series Slings & Arrows. As with all Season 3 episodes, the title is taken from King Lear. In the last scene of the play, Lear enters carrying his dead daughter and, in a mixture of delusion and denial, believes it is possible she is still alive. Kent looks at the pathetic scene and laments “Is this the promised end?” After a lifetime of power and majesty, Lear has become an object of pity. And if a king can be reduced to this, what end can the rest of us be promised?

The word analysis makes me think this is a homework assignment, but no matter. Here’s the scene. Othello’s hardly in it, and doesn’t seem all that arrogant to me. Did you mean Iago’s arrogance?

I still get a lot of hits for this. But we should clear up the difference between descendants of the Tudors, and descendants of King Henry VIII. Henry VIII has no known descendants, though the conversation continues. But the Tudor line was founded, not by Henry VIII, but his father, Henry VII. His line continued, not through son Henry, but through daughter Margaret. She was ancestor to all future English monarchs. So there are many, many people descended from the Tudors alive today.

This may be controversial, but I’m not a big fan of teaching King Lear in a K-12 setting. I know there are people who have done wonderful things with it, but I think there are better choices. The themes of the play are really more relevant to more mature audiences. I think kids relate better to young lovers, revenge killings, and battles for power than they do to the strained relationships between aging parents and their adult children. It’s one of the greatest works of literature ever written, but I think it takes some life experience to digest. I’ve only ever taught it once, in an advanced graduate course in Shakespeare, and it was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had teaching Shakespeare.

I admit I could be wrong about this, but I hold this belief firmly. I look forward to one day being convinced otherwise.

This is probably not what you were looking for, but my name is Bill.

I leave the task of responding to the remaining search terms to my readers:

This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 10:10 pm and is filed under Education, Genealogy, Googleplex, History, King Lear, Macbeth, NYU, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare, Slings & Arrows, Teaching Shakespeare, The Tudors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.