While eating lunch, I couldn’t believe how the kids gleefully turned the conversation…
Daughter: Mom, which Shakespeare play will we do today?
Me: Twelfth Night
Son: What is that one about?
Me: Well, I don’t remember. I was up late last night to prepare the lesson for the book. After I thought I was finished, I realized I had read the wrong play. Instead of reading Twelfth Night, for which we do have a DVD, I read As You Like It. So, I stayed up later to read Twelfth Night, which is quite similar in plot to As You Like It, in that they are both comedies with sets of love stories.
Daughter: Doesn’t As You Like It have the quote, “All the world is a stage and the men are merely players?”
(She remembers that???? From our Shakespeare junior classics version four years ago????)
Son (with great glee): Hey! I wonder if Napoleon was inspired by that quote to conquer Europe?
Daughter (giggling): We should ask Napoleon, “General Bonaparte, did you try to conquer the world because of Shakespeare?”
Yes, my kids now know Napoleon, but I doubt they’d actually ask him that question.
OUR RHETORIC LITERATURE SURVEY OF SHAKESPEARE
Thus began our day’s survey of two more of Shakespeare’s works.
So far we’ve studied Shakespeare’s background, sonnets, Julius Caesar, Henry V, and the madnesses of Richard III and Hamlet, with a Shakespearean interlude at the dentist.
Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter has so infused my thoughts, that my Homeschool Mother’s Weekly Journal featured The Bard.
ANNOTATING THE TEXTS
That afternoon, we annotated the texts of As You Like It and Twelfth Night, while looking at their historical backgrounds.
After all the heavy dramas of historical accounts, today we focused on the similarities of these light-hearted and fast-paced comedies.
Both are set in fantasy locations.
Although we know As You Like It is set in France, we don’t know where the Forest of Arden, the main scene of the action, is located.
For Twelfth Night, it’s said the ancient location of Illyria is on the Balkan Peninsula, whereas others argue England, France, Arcadia, or even the Garden of Eden as the location.
Since we don’t know what year these comedies are set, that is left to the imagination.
As You Like It is about running away, but Twelfth Night is about a shipwreck.
Both plays involve a masquerade of sorts, of a character changing identity.
As You Like It is disputed among scholars as to the merits, although it’s popularly staged.
Written to close out the festive twelve days of Christmas, January 6, Twelfth Night has no specific reference to the Christmas season.
Instead, it’s a warm departure from the cold of bare skeletal trees to a lush island of merry mix-ups located who knows where.
