"The text, that's right, but they never talk about that" (from Whit Stillman's Barcelona).
I recently subbed in a freshman English class. They were - yeah! - reading Shakespeare, but merely "Romeo and Juliet." In any event, we listened to Act II, scenes 4-6 on a CD, which is kinda like speed-reading but better than them trying to read it on their own silently.
Their task was to read a summary of the scenes and "fill in the blanks." As we went through some of the answers I was struck by (a) how quickly students could identify literary elements such as foreshadowing but (b) how ignorant [note: this is not meant in a pejorative way] they were of a simple biblical allusion.
I asked one class, "When Friar Lawrence says, 'The two be one,' what is he referring to?" No one knew. A vague sense that they were getting married but no connection to the Book of Genesis or the Gospels.
Curious.
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