A FEW OFFBEAT slants on Shakespeare is a sure way to excite young minds after the summer holidays. The hoary old anecdote about Hamlet always worked: I used to tell them about the old lady who was taken to se the play and when asked what she thought of it, replied that it was okay but too full of quotations.No need for such jokes this year. My sixth years tell me that quotations from Othello could be heard all summer even above the noise of discos. They roll off tongues: "I have done the State some service" (or as the more cynical put it, "I have done the State . . .) "Put money in thy purse".They grasp the concept of "hubris" in ways previous generations never could. Nuala feels certain that the Venetians must surely have got the truth out of Iago at the subsequent inquiry, even though Iago defiantly declared: "Demand me nothing, what you know, you know/ From this time forth I never will speak world."Last year, the sex angle and vulgar language used in Othello kept the class in the kind of thrall they normally reserve for Eastenders and Brookside. I offered the suggestion today that we could study Desdemona as the Venetian equivalent of Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. This proposal caused a minor intellectual disturbance. Some romantic and delicate sensibilities were offended. The post-feminist generation are finicky about their heroines.Then I proposed that Othello's progress in the play resembled a cocksure Leaving Cert student. At the beginning of the play Othello feels he cannot be got at; his parts, his title and his perfect soul, he believed, would see him through. This Indiana Jones of Middle Ages believed he was untouchable.I suggested that we could see Othello as having to pass a number of tests (even a mock exam or two). When put to his first test by his father-in-law, Brabantio, Othello secures an A1. He barely passes a second test in the row in Cyprus in Act 2. Under the malign influence of Iago, the hero earns an "NG"; through the fourth and fifth acts he is "degraded".Just before the end he takes command of himself; he acquires the ultimate form of knowledge - self-knowledge. I asked them what grade they would grade they would give Othello as he utters his final speech: "Soft you, a word or two before you go/I have done the State some serivce . . ."Even John Donne (properly pronounced) has not escaped a contemporary interpretation. In his Hymn to God the Father he puns on his own name: "When thou has done, Thou hast not done. For I have more."Such playful interpretations are intended to whet appetites. There is no way of knowing how Leaving Cert examiners might respond to ideas like this. Back to the Play Safe approach from tomorrow.