A Will to watch

My favorite Shakespeare class ever, this one was. By the end of the eight week workshop, I'm usually ready to fling myself into a chair and lie there, panting. But this time, I miss the kids. They were a lot of fun. I loved hearing their comments and I loved answering their questions and I especially loved, when a split-second blip of Hamlet and Ophelia being INAPPROPRIATE with one another flashed onto the television screen, everyone immediately clapped their hands over their faces when I shrieked, "CLOSE YOUR EYES!!!" like we'd been rehearsing it since the first day of class. I told their mothers later it would have been funny if I hadn't been so mortified. Darn Kenneth Branagh and his use of flashback sequences to explain the back story!

Above are Ellen, Olivia, Joe and Bernadette, four of the twenty-five students who made my first semester workshop such a pleasure from the first class to the last. [And on the screen up there is Derek Jacobi as Claudius in Kenneth Branagh's 1996 production.]