If interest in this thread is waning, I’ll answer my own most recent question about “worth,” and use it as the occasion to sign off. I’d hoped we could get through “possession” and (especially) “rack” as well. My case would have been a tiny bit stronger.
The idiom “to the worth” appearing in this context effectively makes the word “worth” mean two things: “value” and “full value.” We ordinarily don’t need that distinction, but in the human reality described here, it is a useful distinction because it is a truism that, after we’ve lost something, we come to realize that the value we’d given it was not its full value. The reason S makes a single word “worth” stand for both of these meanings, though, is that it captures how, while we do have something, we are not aware of any discrepency, so we regard the value we give it as its worth--for all we know (then), its full worth.
I want to stress something I’ve said. “To the worth” was not an idiom current in S’s day. His auditors would have experienced the same cognitive load for this phrase that we experience. To make any sense of it, they would have had to (as well as they could in real time) assign it the kind of meaning that we have assigned it as a result of our laborious literary analysis, and there’s no reason for believing that their minds could do that work any better than ours. Thus one point I’ve been making all along: the added cognitive load that one experiences while listening to Shakespeare is only partly a result of changes in the English language over the past 400 years; it’s mostly a result of how poetically rich and dense his writing is.
For his original audience, then, as for us, part of the experience of seeing a Shakespeare play would have been cognitive overload. They, like us, made sense of the gist and were aware that a superabundance of meaning was rushing past them.
I have tried to make the claim it is relatively common to seek out aesthetic experiences where we know our processing powers are going to be inadequate (rap and SFX movies were my examples). I think S’s audience sought out his plays for just that experience, and returned in order to try to catch a little more, on a second listen, than they had been able to on the first (like a kid who listens to Rap God and the very next thing he wants to do is listen to Rap God again).
In these semantically overwhelming passages, what Shakespeare is doing (as you discover if you put him in slow-mo and freeze frame) is altering the expressive capabilities of the English language itself. Not just using English exceptionally well, but actually making English do more than English can ordinarily do to express meaning. We’ve had to settle for one example: how he makes “worth” have a pair subtlely distinct meanings. I would have liked to give hundreds, so you can see how consistently he does this. Because it is this capacity that I think warrants his being regarded as “so good” (my answer, finally, to Terx’s thread title), even warrants the human investment our culture makes in him: those professors and teachers who devote their lives to his study and to guiding his apprecation by others (who, from another angle of vision could look like a priestly caste guarding the “mysteries” of Shakespeare).
So, if this is to be the end, I leave you with Gori the Grey’s Guide to Experiencing Shakespeare:
Watch the plays first; seeing them in the theatre or in good film adaptations will give you lots of aids to understanding what is going on (and anyway that’s how they’re meant to be experienced).
You may feel as though, on a first viewing, you only get the gist of the plot and the character’s relations to one another. Don’t be discouraged; that’s all Shakespeare’s original audience would have taken in on a first viewing.
In the part that’s not the gist, you may feel like language is flowing past you that exceeds your capacity to process. That’s okay. That’s what Shakespeare wanted you to experience. Just let it flow over you, listening for anything that sounds cool.
After watching the play, track down in a printed version the passages that sounded cool to you. Try to work out what S is saying in the passages. Be aware that S is probably pushing the English language to and past its limits.
Have your own writing benefit from seeing someone push to and past the expressive capacities of a particular language.
Have fun. Above all, he's an entertainer.
