#I just woke up so idk if this makes much sense alkfjkdjfhskdfgh

[fluentisonus]

this is mostly rambling but. i'm thinking about how I grew up with shakespeare comics, and how my parents would take us to shakespeare plays that our local theater was putting on in the summer and how before it would start we'd sit on our picnic blanket and they'd take out a little book of short prose versions of shakespeare stories and read us the one for the play we were about to see and we'd discuss it so we weren't confused about who was who, and then we'd watch the play and those years of reading the comics and the discussion I'd just had with my parents would come alive in front of my eyes and it was the most wonderful magical thing. and then how I'd go into english class and we'd read those same plays and I could get really into the language and themes and literary analysis because the stories were so ingrained into my heart at that point it came naturally...... and then i'm also thinking about all the poor kids who had to walk into that same class and start reading those plays having never touched shakespeare, or gotten a feel for the plots and language, or had any sort of fondness for it, and how absolutely miserable a lot of them were with reading it, and how little it made sense to them, and idk.

I don't think we should stop teaching shakespeare or other literature either, but I wish people were allowed a more like. natural way of coming to it I guess. I think a lot about how in ancient rome so many of the stories told in literature are rooted in stories that the whole populus would have grown up hearing, in smaller and more simplified versions, over and over again as part of a broader cultural mythos, and so when (if) they read that literature discussing or transforming it it came naturally to them. and obviously the modern day isn't at all the same and modern literature isn't the same but I do think a lot of shakespeare stories are so dear to my heart partially because I got to hear and read and see them told gradually, and grew with them.

and this isn't to say anything like 'oh if only the Youths knew more Great Literature' because I think there's actually a lot of value in questioning how much importance we put on this sort of literature in general, and you it's not like you can make young children be familiar with All Literature Ever even if they wanted to. and likewise there are always going to be completely unfamiliar books we read in a literature class and have a !!!! moment about, so idk really what I'm getting at here; except that I really wish there was a better understanding of reading and literature and stories as like. a whole gradient that involves a huge range of types of consumption & discussion, and how crucial the element of human exchange can be in that, because literature is so much about human interchange, and how environments that cut all of that out can be so hostile to a real understanding of the work. idk