 |
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. -- It might have been a nightclub with patrons enjoying drinks at their tables, applauding a soulful delivery of a torch song, but the performer was a 13-year-old. And in the audience were fifth-graders through seniors in high school -- cheering wildly about William Shakespeare.
Adeeja Anderson performed her rendition of Shakespeare's "Sonnet 43," singing it to music of her own composition and lingering over a sultry low note at the finish. The audience was captivated, cheering and clapping furiously, with a few appreciative whistles and shouts thrown in for the eighth-grader from Pulaski County's Robinson Middle School.
"It does touch people's souls, in the unique way he wrote" the words, Adeeja said afterward. "Some people relate spiritually to that."
The words of a playwright dead nearly 400 years still resonate after all these years, particularly among Arkansas students who packed the recent three-day Shakespeare Scene Festival held at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Shakespeare's plays and sonnets -- and the Elizabethan English in which they were written -- carry a fearsome reputation among many students, but no longer among those who took part in the festival.
Logan Howard, 14, an eighth-grader at Robinson, played a lead role -- Orlando -- in a performance of scenes from the comedy "As You Like It."
"It was like he became Orlando, he was living and breathing it," said Patty Jolliff, director of the Talented And Gifted program -- known as TAG -- at Robinson.
Logan said his conversion from Shakespeare-phobia was a slow process.
"At first I thought, 'Shakespeare -- I don't want to have anything to do with him,"' he recalled. "But then I read his plays."
His immersion in the role of Orlando began soon after he read the script to find out just what he had taken on and found that Shakespeare still has meaning to young people in the 21st century.
"It all fell in place, kind of," Logan said. "I'd never been in a drama before.
"I guess it's his way of writing things -- once you can understand it, it kind of flows," he said. "You have to enunciate slower. I would practice that over and over."
The youngsters' development of an interest in Shakespeare and his works is today's re-enactment of what has been going on for decades, if not centuries.
Roslyn Knutson, an English professor at UALR, has run the Shakespeare Scene Festival since it began in 1998. She isn't sure a recent survey showing that fewer top universities require Shakespeare courses actually reflects any declining interest in Shakespeare. Instead, she said, it could simply reflect the trend at colleges and universities to offer students greater flexibility.
Knutson began teaching a course in Shakespeare more than 25 years ago, she said, because "students could be counted on to take the class when many other upper-level courses in British Literature pre-1800 were under-enrolled."
The depth of Shakespeare's writing was also demonstrated to the students who participated in the festival and who also got to watch youngsters from other schools perform scenes and recite -- or sing -- sonnets.
Logan said his eyes were opened when, before he and his Robinson classmates took the stage, they got to watch fifth-graders from North Little Rock's Belwood Elementary School perform scenes from the same play.
"I got a different thing from their play, even though I'd been practicing (the same) play," he said.