What is so good about Shakespeare?

[Terxpahseyton]

Shakespeare is severely hyped. But does he deserve the hype? To be honest - I doubt it, severely.
He strikes me just as another cultural thing people cherish because it is a cultural thing to cherish it.
He may have been extraordinary for his time or something. But that means at best the person deserves hype nowadays, but not his works,
He may have shaped the English language, invented words and stuff. But his works are not hyped for being so linguistically valuable, are they?

I personally only read Romeo and Juliet - and that in German. Didn't found it very impressive, but I also was rather young and very uninterested and forced to do it and who knows what the translation did to it. But the point is I am not saying I am "right" on this. I am just saying I have this impression.

And what do you think? Have you read Shakespeare? Why it is so extraordinary awesome to you? Why no?

 

[Farm Boy]

It's really pretty good for the most part. The stories are trite in the sense they're timeless issues, often enough. Some of the phrasing is intensely powerful. They're useful to teach reading comprehension since the phrasing is now nonstandard, but it's understandable unlike middle English. I guess I would be unsurprised if it loses something in translation.

 

[Kozmos]

I definitively learned to value it more once my comprehension of English increased and I saw some more adaptations with very good actors. The man had a way with words that makes me envious.

 

[Kyriakos]

Shakespeare is severely hyped. But does he deserve the hype? To be honest - I doubt it, severely.
He strikes me just as another cultural thing people cherish because it is a cultural thing to cherish it.
He may have been extraordinary for his time or something. But that means at best the person deserves hype nowadays, but not his works,
He may have shaped the English language, invented words and stuff. But his works are not hyped for being so linguistically valuable, are they?

I personally only read Romeo and Juliet - and that in German. Didn't found it very impressive, but I also was rather young and very uninterested and forced to do it and who knows what the translation did to it. But the point is I am not saying I am "right" on this. I am just saying I have this impression.

And what do you think? Have you read Shakespeare? Why it is so extraordinary awesome to you? Why no?

He is a lesser dramatist than the classics (Euripides-Aeschylos-Sophocles). Even my own favorite work of his, King Lear, is several leagues below plays such as The Bacchai. It seems to be quite naive as well, and in parts highly absurd (as in: why exactly did Glaucester consider it a good idea to self-blind himself, so as to show how remorseful he was for... not believing the king's daughter? uh...ok. - moreover he and Lear act more as if they were amputated, rather than thrown from power yet still having a chance to take it back).

I suppose Shakespeare's prominence is mostly owned to two reasons:
1) He was English, and widely regarded as the towering figure of the start of English literature.
2) He was supposedly seen as a pan-germanic people's early literary figure.

Also he has way too much 'dead-wood', as noted in that Rowan Atkinson sketch

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Shakespeare is severely hyped. But does he deserve the hype? To be honest - I doubt it, severely.
He strikes me just as another cultural thing people cherish because it is a cultural thing to cherish it.
He may have been extraordinary for his time or something. But that means at best the person deserves hype nowadays, but not his works,
He may have shaped the English language, invented words and stuff. But his works are not hyped for being so linguistically valuable, are they?

I personally only read Romeo and Juliet - and that in German. Didn't found it very impressive, but I also was rather young and very uninterested and forced to do it and who knows what the translation did to it. But the point is I am not saying I am "right" on this. I am just saying I have this impression.

And what do you think? Have you read Shakespeare? Why it is so extraordinary awesome to you? Why no?

I found it interesting in high school while we were just reading the plays in English. But when I was finally able to see it performed live (Twelfth Night), that's when it became awesome (and I don't use that word lightly). These plays were meant to be seen and heard, not merely read.

I've seen Shakespeare movies (Romeo and Juliet - the 1968 Zeferelli version), Henry V (the Branagh version), Much Ado About Nothing (again, Branagh), Hamlet (both Branagh and Gibson), and a few BBC productions. I used to work backstage in the theatre, and one of the plays was A Midsummer Night's Dream. Two others were musicals: Kiss Me, Kate, which is about a group of actors putting on a production of The Taming of the Shrew, and West Side Story, which is Romeo and Juliet adapted as 1950s-era New York street gangs. I've seen live performances of Romeo and Juliet, Winter's Tale, Twelfth Night (2 very different versions), Macbeth, and I've probably forgotten one or two as well.

Shakespeare's themes can easily be adapted for modern audiences (ie. Romeo and Juliet/West Side Story) and there are other modernized versions of others as well. I had a little fun one time on my Cheezeburger site, with the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet:

And here's another person's take on the balcony scene:

So it doesn't have to be Serious All The Time.

 

[Bugfatty300]

1. Reciting Shakespeare to your benighted friends will earn you rep + cred.
2. Cool stories bro.
3. He wrote in English unlike that troll Chaucer who wrote in incomprehensible gibberish.

 

[warpus]

When I was in high school the curriculum included way too many Shakespeare plays, so I really got sick of them. Every year we had to go through 2-4 of the things, it was ridiculous.

I got so sick of them that they just all started looking the same to me. The protagonist is always very similar, has similar issues, the characters may or may not be royal family members or upper class people, and at the end everybody dies. I hated it.

It's really too bad I think, because the first couple I read I didn't really mind. It was different, written in a completely different style than what I was used to, and there was probably a lot I could get out of it. I like to read too, so you wouldn't think I would ever have any issues with anything like Shakespeare.. But my school and school district's insistence to have us go through a couple of his plays every year made me hate him. Instead of getting some variety in the books we had to read, it seemed like the same thing over and over and over... A bunch of plays written in a old version of English.. An excellent way to learn the language! (not). It might have been a good way to learn a bit about the history of the language, but not with so many goddamn plays. A couple would have sufficed.

So I think high school ruined Shakespeare for me. Should I sue them?

 

[Gori the Grey]

I may mount a more elaborate defense in time, but for the nonce:

1) you must read Shakespeare in English; much of his value (as with any poet) lies in the minute particulars of his use of language, and that doesn't come through in translation

2) Kyriakos, if you think Gloucester blinds himself, you need to get your nose out of Oedipus Rex and reread King Lear.

 

[dusters]

Hamlet. For a young male who is white, rather rich and who wants to decide whether to sleep with a girl or rule a country or have fun throwing parties, it's pretty entertaining.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

When I was in high school the curriculum included way too many Shakespeare plays, so I really got sick of them. Every year we had to go through 2-4 of the things, it was ridiculous.

I got so sick of them that they just all started looking the same to me. The protagonist is always very similar, has similar issues, the characters may or may not be royal family members or upper class people, and at the end everybody dies. I hated it.

It's really too bad I think, because the first couple I read I didn't really mind. It was different, written in a completely different style than what I was used to, and there was probably a lot I could get out of it. I like to read too, so you wouldn't think I would ever have any issues with anything like Shakespeare.. But my school and school district's insistence to have us go through a couple of his plays every year made me hate him. Instead of getting some variety in the books we had to read, it seemed like the same thing over and over and over... A bunch of plays written in a old version of English.. An excellent way to learn the language! (not). It might have been a good way to learn a bit about the history of the language, but not with so many goddamn plays. A couple would have sufficed.

So I think high school ruined Shakespeare for me. Should I sue them?

You just had the tragedies on your curriculum, didn't you? Much Ado About Nothing is fun, and I don't recall anyone dying in that one.

Besides, who knew Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves could do Shakespeare?

Hamlet. For a young male who is white, rather rich and who wants to decide whether to sleep with a girl or rule a country or have fun throwing parties, it's pretty entertaining.

There's also the minor matter of avenging his father's death, disapproving of his mother having married his uncle, and the famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy... the party was for the purpose of smoking out his father's murderer, not merely having a party.

 

[warpus]

You just had the tragedies on your curriculum, didn't you?

It seems like it. Every single story seemed almost exactly the same. I'm exaggerating a bit, but Canadian or Ontario or London school boards are obsessed with drowning the kids in Shakespeare. I don't think it's doing anyone any favours.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Mr. B. I believe this is your cue.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Romeo and Juliette is very much overrated. It is probably among his worst works.

Its ending is particularly weak, perhaps because it was originally only one of the possible endings as Shakespear used to alternate between making the play a tragedy or a comedy with a happy ending.

Despite so often being called timeless, you really cannot get the full meaning of Shakespeare's text without knowing the way words were pronounced at the time as well as that period's slang. Shakespeare was a master of puns and double entendre (particularly of a sexual nature), which don't come through all that well to those only familiar with more modern English and would almost certainly be lost in translation to German.

Shakespeare was certainly not high culture at the time it was written. It was meant to appeal to the common man, who cared more for the dirty jokes than for the plot.

 

[Formaldehyde]

Shakespeare has been largely removed from the public school education system in the US. His plays used to be studied as pervasively as Warpus describes. But even back when I attended public school, the vast majority of students would study perhaps only one or two plays at the high school or middle school level from a fairly cursory perspective. However, there was a semester-long elective honors class that was taught in the 12th grade which analyzed four significant plays in great depth. But that was limited to perhaps 25 students out of the 700 seniors who attended that school.

 

[Pangur Bán]

Shakespeare is an early modern dramatist -- the equivalent of a screenwriter today -- who made it big and stayed there. His greatness arose by the role assigned to him by later writers in English, and his reputation is protected by the mystery of his language, which is hardly understood by anyone except non-English-speakers reading translations. For English speakers, participating in collective rituals of attending Shakespeare plays and the collective deception of 'understanding' them signals one's [aspiring] membership of the 'educated class'; these are 'difficult' texts, with hidden 'deep' meaning, and by education and work you get to find out about it. When you do, you are committed to Shakespeare's greatness, because if he isn't great, then you wasted all that time and everyone is lying.

 

[Kyriakos]

I may mount a more elaborate defense in time, but for the nonce:

1) you must read Shakespeare in English; much of his value (as with any poet) lies in the minute particulars of his use of language, and that doesn't come through in translation

2) Kyriakos, if you think Gloucester blinds himself, you need to get your nose out of Oedipus Rex and reread King Lear.

Hmmm!..

Politically, both Gloucester and Lear find themselves pushed out of their positions by a younger generation eager to assume power. Regan and Goneril lock their father, Lear, out of the house during a storm. When Gloucester tries to help Lear, Regan and her husband Cornwall, punish Gloucester by stripping him of his political office, blinding him, and finally throwing him out of the castle to wander around helplessly.

I honestly recalled it otherwise Very strange. Read it many years ago, of course (when i was 17), but still, thanks for setting the record straight on this

 

[Formaldehyde]

Shakespeare is an early modern dramatist -- the equivalent of a screenwriter today -- who made it big and stayed there. His greatness arose by the role assigned to him by later writers in English, and his reputation is protected by the mystery of his language, which is hardly understood by anyone except non-English-speakers reading translations. For English speakers, participating in collective rituals of attending Shakespeare plays and the collective deception of 'understanding' them signals one's [aspiring] membership of the 'educated class'; these are 'difficult' texts, with hidden 'deep' meaning, and by education and work you get to find out about it. When you do, you are committed to Shakespeare's greatness, because if he isn't great, then you wasted all that time and everyone is lying.

I can't wait for Albanian scholars to someday share with us what he really meant.

"Me thinks he doth protest too much." Some dead guy.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Shakespeare is an early modern dramatist -- the equivalent of a screenwriter today -- who made it big and stayed there. His greatness arose by the role assigned to him by later writers in English, and his reputation is protected by the mystery of his language, which is hardly understood by anyone except non-English-speakers reading translations. For English speakers, participating in collective rituals of attending Shakespeare plays and the collective deception of 'understanding' them signals one's [aspiring] membership of the 'educated class'; these are 'difficult' texts, with hidden 'deep' meaning, and by education and work you get to find out about it. When you do, you are committed to Shakespeare's greatness, because if he isn't great, then you wasted all that time and everyone is lying.

There's a truth about the dynamics of canonical reproduction in these comments by Pangur Ban, but it's not the whole truth, and one part of it is confusing (why would non-English-speakers understand Shakespeare better?) and one part of it is misleading: namely, while there are difficulties in Shakespeare's language, there is no "mystery" in it. It works just any other language does, and, on-stage in particular, it remains accessible and enjoyable and significant even to contemporary audiences.

To get that across, let me flip around something that happened recently on a different thread. In the Racism and the Politics of Language thread, we got to discussing Shakespeare and rap music. Setting aside for a moment the matter that concerned us there (which of the two was superior), let's just take the comparison and say that Shakespeare was, just as contemporary rappers are, trying to do something impressive with language.

Somebody give me a rap lyric you like (or any use of language you find impressive), and I'll show you how to appreciate Shakespeare. Not give you a Shakespeare quote that’s just a good or better (though I'll do that to), but show you how to find in Shakespeare the kind of think you enjoy in X. Give me any instance of language-use that you regard highly as an instance of language-use, and say a little bit about what you like in it.

 

[warpus]

It works just any other language does, and, on-stage in particular, it remains accessible and enjoyable and significant even to contemporary audiences.

I disagree. In high school I distinctly remember us having a helper book to look through to help us understand what the hell is going on in the story. It had the original text on the left, with a modern English translation on the right.

Maybe it was coles notes? Either way, without that thing or help from the teacher, most of the class was lost, about 80% of the time, from what I remember.

 

[Pangur Bán]

one part of it is confusing (why would non-English-speakers understand Shakespeare better?)

Because it is translated into their language, and thus they have few barriers to understanding the text. I don't think that's a very confusing idea.

and one part of it is misleading: namely, while there are difficulties in Shakespeare's language, there is no "mystery" in it. It works just any other language does, and, on-stage in particular, it remains accessible and enjoyable and significant even to contemporary audiences.

Yes, but it contains constructions, vocabulary and idiom that are not understood at all or accurately except by scholarly research, and not by most of the actors let alone most of the audience (as illustrated by those scenes in Romeo and Juliet where the actress says 'Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo' and gestures to indicate she is looking about.

Thus it is a mystery, like Latin mass was for Romance speakers. Only bits of it comprehensible at first, some education rewards more understanding, and so on. That's how mystery cults, ancient and modern, work; that's how Shakespeare works.