From: Cassie Wilson <cwilson2>
Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 23:15:25 -0400

My little blue haired ninth grad English teacher, God rest her soul, used to say that Shakespeare was great in spite of the dirty parts of his plays, not because of them, and dammit, I hate it when she's right. Actually, I think the questionable lapses have little to do with the measure of his genius. It is the substance beneath the speeches and his masterful shaping of the language when most men could hardly speak it that has made him remembered. He recycled old tales and had people act and speak as people really acted and spoke, and there is really little of controversy to be said. Remember, his young adult characters, Romeo and Juliet, did not engage in oral sex, at least not as revealed to us by Shakespeare. And I don't even like to read him, I don't care what kind of icon he might be set up to be.

My point is that, for my taste and that of a number of teens around me, YA literature is too concerned with bleak, cold, pain and the weird and awful. Teens have sunny days too sometimes. Or is that only in their fantasies?

Cassie Wilson
Received on Mon 19 May 2003 10:15:25 PM CDT