Shakespeare for All Time

Do you think the Chinese are feeding their children double-condensed versions of the I Ching?

Katherin Schulten of the New York Times says there is now a condensed cartoon version of Shakespeare’s plays, er, I mean a condensed version of the CliffsNotes of Shakespeare’s plays:

If reading CliffsNotes’s “Hamlet” seems to be a pokey, 20th-century way to speed-comprehend Shakespeare, never fear. Now there’s a seven-minute cartoon version, complete with a talking Yorick’s skull. Think of it as CliffsNotes for CliffsNotes.

The goal, says Karen Cahn, general manager of branded experiences at AOL, a CliffsNotes partner, is to create “edutainment” that inspires young people to read the original. Students have used the familiar black-and-yellow CliffsNotes to supplement — or avoid — the reading of great literature since 1958. Though competitors like SparkNotes also have summaries and commentary online, CliffsNotes has animated the stories and translated Elizabethan English into contemporary slang. Romeo is “a total emo” and Julius Caesar dismisses warnings about the Ides of March with a “whatevs.”

Shakespeare coined words like sanctimonius, assassination and fashionable, Ms. Kahn has coined the word “edutainment.”

Oh, how I shake and quiver when I contemplate the future of my country.

Schulten continues. I grow more nauseous:

Does watching irreverent cartoons that “compress large amounts of knowledge into concise, tasty mind nuggets,” as the site describes it, help or hurt appreciation of Shakespeare? You be the judge.

“ROMEO AND JULIET” (Act 2, Scene 2)

Shakespeare says:

JULIET: If that thy bent of love be honourable,
Thy purpose marriage, send me word tomorrow,
By one that I’ll procure to come to thee,
Where and what time thou wilt perform the rite;
And all my fortunes at thy foot I’ll lay
And follow thee my lord throughout the world.

CliffsNotes Films says:

JULIET: OMG, that was like so hot. Let’s totes (per urban dictionary “totes” means totally) get married.
ROMEO: I’ll get a priest.

“HAMLET” (Act 1, Scene 2) 

Shakespeare says:

QUEEN GERTRUDE: Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off,
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
Do not for ever with thy vailed lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust:
Thou know’st ‘tis common; all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity. 

CliffsNotes Films says:

QUEEN GERTRUDE: So turn that frown upside down!

Shakespeare says:

HAMLET: …O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourn’d longer — married with my uncle,
My father’s brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules: within a month:
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!

CliffsNotes Films says:

HAMLET: He’s your brother-in-law! Gross.

This is pornography. Shakespeare is his words and to change them or paraphrase them is no different than penciling a moustache on Mona Lisa’s nether lip or beatboxing Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik.²

I am generally opposed to the death penalty, but for crimes like this I am willing to reconsider.

Footnotes:

¹  CliffsNotes Films has released videos of six often-taught Shakespeare plays, from “Macbeth” to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” co-produced by Mark Burnett (“Survivor,” “Celebrity Apprentice”).  A batch from another writer of classics, not yet announced, is in the works for summer.

²  The missile scientists that came up with this idea probably feigned outrage when Turner Classic Movies aired a colorized version of Citizen Kane.