It started about here.
Our son was less than a month old when I read Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days to him. Okay, he slept through most of it and failed the quiz, but I was too excited to withhold my love for literature. Bonus: Mary never got tired of giggling at my pronunciation of “Passepartout.”
Eight years later we reread the same cheap translation (sorry, Jules), mapped Phileas Fogg’s circumnavigation of the globe, and that little boy was on stage in a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
I dreaded reading at the primary level and I wanted to spare my children the years of easy readers and dumbed-down everything. But you can’t go from ABCs to Robert Louis Stevenson overnight, right?
Why not? Stevenson’s Treasure Island was my first experiment. We had seen the N.C. Wyeth paintings at Brandywine River Museum of Art many times and what boy doesn’t love a pirate adventure? We picked up the Scribner Storybook Classic edition at our library (Wyeth galore), and trucked through the skeleton of the story directly. Next, we got the audio book, grabbed the unabridged edition, and alternated between reading at home and listening to the story in the car. We’ve gone through Wells’s “The Time Machine” and Stevenson’s “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” in much the same manner. Graphic novels are another great tool we employ.
I was going to work my way back in time towards Shakespeare and Chaucer, but a hitch arose. Delaware Shakespeare was bringing “Pericles, Prince of Tyre” to the people, for free! Sure, our elder son had seen “Twelfth Night” when he was three months old and had delivered a line at the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s passing. Even his younger brother knew that Shakespeare was not just a really cool Lego figure. But Pericles! I’d hardly heard of it and had little time to prep them. I went to Wikipedia and Sparknotes and had small hope of relating this convoluted story line to the boys. Fortunately, Edith Nesbit came to the rescue with her Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare (audio available for free at Librivox). We sat in the parking lot of the senior center and finished up listening to and discussing Nesbit’s retelling and I prayed that these 5- and 7-year-old boys could stay engaged for the full production.
I wasn’t as quick to come to tears then as I am now, but it was the kind of home education win that seemed to be years away. It was nothing short of beautiful as they sat front row and disappeared into the Prince of Tyre’s tumultuous world.
Reading Shakespeare isn’t for everyone. In fact, no child needs to read it in the original (controversies over that word aside). Watching Shakespeare? Experiencing it? Those are for everyone. Delaware Shakespeare’s Community Tours have reached out to the uninitiated in the elderly, imprisoned, homeless, mentally ill, and under-served populations of Delaware and Philadelphia in meaningful ways. We’ve witnessed the magic of Shakespeare touch people who never thought they could penetrate the language. A good production will move you and you may not even know why.
You don’t have a personal passion for literature, or any subject, to encourage appreciation and *gasp* teach it! I look to children as mentors when it comes to curiosity. I try to model my approach to knowledge with the same creative and naive perspective that they naturally embody. We were all that way once, when did we lose it?
God bless,
Jason
p.s. – Maybe we’ll see you at Lantern Theater’s production of The Tempest.
