What is so good about Shakespeare?

[Borachio]

Wow! You really know your Shakespeare, Mr Grey.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I guess I'm like warpus' high school teachers: I've got a boner for him.

 

[Borachio]

I wouldn't say I find Shakespeare in any way sexually stimulating, myself. (That would be alarming, now I consider it. But I suppose you mean it figuratively.)

I have in the past very much enjoyed watching and reading his work, though.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I think warpus was using it figuratively. Seems a colorful expression. S. himself probably would have liked it, what with all his own boner references. This is a guy who worked penis references into both of his names. Willy? Shake-spear? C'mon man.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

The reason why Pangur Ban and Gori the Grey have argued for so long is that they're both right. Gori is right that there is value in Shakespeare's works; the language is, genuinely, beautiful; the stories are, genuinely, well structured; the characters are, genuinely, compelling. It takes effort to read or watch a Shakespeare play, but there is value in doing so.

But this doesn't make Pangur's point about Shakespeare's role in modern culture any less valid: "appreciating Shakespeare" is indeed one facet of what it means to be "cultured". It is used as an indicator of the level to which you have ascended culturally. If you appreciate Shakespeare, have read his plays, can recite his words, and so on, then this is a marker of your culturedness. It is snobbish and elitist, and Pangur is right that it is also inaccessible to vast swathes of people. It is simply not true that, just because you can buy a ticket to a theatre production of Shakespeare anywhere in the country, there are no barriers to entry. There are countless barriers to entry! For one, how many poor children from Tower Hamlets or Moss Side are going to head down to a theatre to watch Shakespeare talk in a language that is frankly unintelligible? The language requires significant investment to understand; yes, just like baseball, but why would someone choose baseball as a hobby over football, which they already know? That sort of investment would surely be better spent on a more useful educational pursuit; there are only so many hours in the day to learn stuff, and the opportunity cost for poor children (or adults) is much more significant than for rich people. The very fact that Shakespeare is considered "high culture" is a barrier to entry: people are put off by the snobbish attitudes of the elite towards it.

Football is open and accessible. Shakespeare is not. How you fit that into your critical theory is up to you, but to deny that Shakespeare is inaccessible for vast swathes of the population is somewhere between naive and wilfully ignorant.

Ohboy.

Sure, most live Shakespeare performances are accessible by ticket only. But there are also groups that perform it outdoors either for free or for donations. It's on TV a lot. If a kid (or adult) has internet access, there are several on netflix and youtube. And there are lots of modern adaptations. The Flintstones had a Romeo and Juliet episode. Even Gilligan's Island did a musical episode where they put on Hamlet (using the music from Carmen)!

And consider how many words and phrases Shakespeare coined that are in use in our everyday language, that people who use without ever having read even one play or seen one live or on TV/movies.

BTW, football and baseball are baffling to me, so to imply that they're open and understandable to everyone is just not accurate.

As an aside, I find it difficult to watch a Shakespeare play. I can't, as Gori suggests, just "watch" it. I lose track very quickly, and after 10 minutes or so I have no idea what's going on. It really does go in one ear and out the other; it requires more processing power to understand than my brain is capable of, so I take hardly any of it in. I watched Brannagh's Hamlet last summer, and throughout I had to constantly pause, rewind, and read the SparkNotes just to figure out what was going on. It took me two evenings. I'm glad I did, because what I found was quite beautiful, but it was not easy for me. English is my first language, I'm well educated, and I read fairly widely. Shakespeare is not easy to understand.

It's not Hamlet that's too hard to understand; in this case it's Branagh's version that is really annoying. If you made it through to the end, congratulations. I never got to the point where I could force myself to put the second VHS tape in and finish watching it. I loved his Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing, but his interpretation of Hamlet was just awful.

I recommend trying another version of Hamlet: Mel Gibson. I have no respect for the actor's RL antics, but his interpretation of Hamlet is spot-on. And that movie is set in the right century, unlike Branagh's.

What I was referring to earlier when I said that members of the school board here in Ontario all have boners for Shakespeare?

It's the provincial Department of Education that sets the curriculum. I don't know what the current high school English curriculum is in Alberta, but I did one Shakespeare play each year, as did every other high school English class.

I don't think so, warpus. One could have what you call a boner for Shakespeare simply because one regards him as a great literary craftsman.

Pangur Ban's claim (at least partly endorsed by Mise) that there is a cult of Shakespeare is a more complex and far-reaching claim about Shakespeare's status in, and about how he operates in, Anglophone society.

Here's how I understand Pangur's claim. Does the following represent a fair summary and characterization of the arguments you’ve been advancing, Pangur?

First, your answer to Terx’s OP question: Shakespeare’s high status in our culture is not warranted. Instead:

1) Shakespeare’s language is difficult for modern readers and viewers to understand.

2) With work, it is true, one can make sense of the passages.

3) When you have put in that effort, what you have done is worked your way to the “hidden meaning” of passage or scene or play in question.

4) Some people, especially high-school teachers and college professors, have invested the work to figure out the hidden meanings of several or all of Shakespeare’s plays.

5) They put students through the exercise of trying to determine this hidden meaning. They incentivize this exercise in part by claiming that Shakespeare is great (and therefore will repay the efforts).

6) This is like the operation of a mystery cult, where a more advanced priesthood gradually admits less advanced initiates into a set of religious mysteries.

7) But since they are paid to do this, teachers and professors have a vested interest in claiming Shakespeare’s plays are great and should not be trusted.

8) In fact, their own commitment to Shakespeare is not primarily (and perhaps not at all) a result of their thinking he is great; rather they’re just trying to protect the investment of time and energy that they have made in coming to understand Shakespeare’s hidden meanings, and the cultural status they have attained as a result.

9) Finally, because the language is difficult, and therefore has the effect of actually obscuring Shakespeare’s hidden meaning, a modernized English version, or a translation into Albanian for Albanian readers, is actually preferable to reading Shakespeare’s own words, preferable in that it gets one more immediately to his meanings.

If this is inaccurate, Pangur, please feel free to correct. If it’s basically accurate, I’ll have tiny follow-up questions on points 1 and 6. I hope you'll stay engaged with this discussion. It's because I know you have a strong case that I want to see if I can make the other side stronger.

Substitute algebra/calculus for Shakespeare in the above list and it would apply to me.

I don't deny that Shakespeare is complex and requires a goodly amount of thinking to appreciate. But so is a lot of other literature. Take C.J. Cherryh's novels Cyteen and Regenesis, for example. Those books are complex, with an incredible attention to the details of creating a future society governed by scientists who are experts in cloning and designing whole societies of people, right down to the ways their descendants are likely to think, feel, and handle various situations and social issues. These books cannot be read casually and get their full impact; they require the reader to think.

I don't foresee any future where C.J. Cherryh's novels will be what the "cultural elite" read, though.

I got the sense that this was happening back in highschool. It seemed as though the teachers responsible believed that their students needed to get through this Shakespeare stuff in order to progress in their understanding of the English language or something, similar to how a Calculus teacher might really want his/her students to understand the behind the scenes of integrals, before moving on to more advanced topics.

There was a sense of genuine appreciation and near worship of the work by the teachers, and it seemed like they really really REALLY wanted us to understand all this stuff and get all the meaning out of it and share in the joy of understanding it all with them... Sort of how.. let's say you see a hilarious obscure movie on TV and are trying to tell your friends about it the next day.. but they're just not getting it, because "you just had to be there". But you really wish they could laugh with you and appreciate what you watched as if they were there. That's how my teachers were acting.

That's sort of what they did with every single book we read, but with this particular author they doubled down, for whatever reason. Big time.

As I said, it sounds like you had bad teachers who didn't really understand themselves what they were attempting to teach.

OTOH, my own English teacher was good at teaching Shakespeare, but in a lot of other areas she pushed religion even though it was a public school.

 

[Mise]

@Valka: I don't think baseball is accessible as it requires a fair amount of equipment and large open spaces - the kind you don't really find in inner cities. Games like football (soccer) and basketball just require a ball and somewhere to kick/throw it. This is part of the reason why most footballers and basketball players come from underprivileged backgrounds. It's a large part of the reason why running -- which requires no equipment whatsoever -- is dominated by people from poor countries and poor people from rich countries.

The other part of it, which I mentioned in passing in my post, is the "cultural expectation" aspect of it: the expectations thrust upon you by society in no small part influence how accessible a particular cultural activity is. If you are a rich white girl in rural England, then you're expected to learn horseriding, netball, piano, listen to Taylor Swift or whatever, etc etc. If you're a poor black kid in the slums of Detroit, you're expected to learn basketball, American football, listen to rap music, etc etc. There are some activities that are more or less accessible based not on the raw facts of ticket prices or availability of equipment, but also because of cultural expectations. If none of your friends, parents or siblings are into Shakespeare -- or indeed will laugh at you for liking it -- then it's going to be much less accessible to you than to a member of the elite, for whom Shakespeare is very much within their cultural realm.

Shakespeare requires a lot of "equipment" to get into; it requires significant investment to understand and love. And vast swathes of the population find it less accessible because it is from a culture that is completely alien to them. The accessibility of a thing is not so simplistic as you and Gori are making it out to be. Well, at least Gori hasn't disagreed with my assessment of accessibility.

Anyway I realise that there's no way of convincing you. I'm mostly posting this so maybe other people will agree with me. You don't have to respond if you don't want to; I understand your position from your posts in this thread and in many others. I accept that it's legitimate and not explicitly based on falsehoods -- we merely have a difference of opinion.

@Gori: Yep, I might check it out tonight if I get the time, or hopefully on the weekend.

 

[Borachio]

Branagh's Much Ado is seriously a lot of fun and readily accessible.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

@Valka: I don't think baseball is accessible as it requires a fair amount of equipment and large open spaces - the kind you don't really find in inner cities. Games like football (soccer) and basketball just require a ball and somewhere to kick/throw it. This is part of the reason why most footballers and basketball players come from underprivileged backgrounds. It's a large part of the reason why running -- which requires no equipment whatsoever -- is dominated by people from poor countries and poor people from rich countries.

Fair enough; I've never lived in a city with little or no green space and room to play.

The other part of it, which I mentioned in passing in my post, is the "cultural expectation" aspect of it: the expectations thrust upon you by society in no small part influence how accessible a particular cultural activity is. If you are a rich white girl in rural England, then you're expected to learn horseriding, netball, piano, listen to Taylor Swift or whatever, etc etc. If you're a poor black kid in the slums of Detroit, you're expected to learn basketball, American football, listen to rap music, etc etc. There are some activities that are more or less accessible based not on the raw facts of ticket prices or availability of equipment, but also because of cultural expectations. If none of your friends, parents or siblings are into Shakespeare -- or indeed will laugh at you for liking it -- then it's going to be much less accessible to you than to a member of the elite, for whom Shakespeare is very much within their cultural realm.

What "cultural expectations" do you suppose a teenage girl from the Canadian Prairies had? I recall being expected by my peers to wear blue jeans, listen to the current rock music, be into dating, dances, and parties, and a lot of other things I either loathed or didn't bother with. I didn't come from any "high-brow" background; my family was first/second-generation Swedish farmers who were pleased that I wasn't one of those girls that got into trouble. And yeah, I got laughed at and was considered weird for spending lunch hours and after-school time in the library, and *gasp* reading science books for fun(!).

I did have the advantage of a teacher who knew how to teach Shakespeare, and who also supervised a poetry club I belonged to. We did a lot of poetry interpretation in English as well, and one of the things we learned was that not all lines of poetry actually end on the right side of the page. One reason some people have trouble following Shakespeare is because they mentally put a period at the end of every line instead of where it actually is - which could be in the middle of the line, or might not occur for several lines. If you read it out loud and follow the punctuation, it's easier to understand.

Shakespeare requires a lot of "equipment" to get into; it requires significant investment to understand and love. And vast swathes of the population find it less accessible because it is from a culture that is completely alien to them. The accessibility of a thing is not so simplistic as you and Gori are making it out to be. Well, at least Gori hasn't disagreed with my assessment of accessibility.

It required the books that were part of the yearly textbook rental at the school; the books could be purchased for less than $2 back in 1977. Attending school was required by law, as I was 14 at the time. Looseleaf paper and pens were inexpensive. And thinking was free.

A couple of years later, when I attended the live performance of Twelfth Night, the ticket was $12 (paid for with my earnings from babysitting and working in the school library; my grandparents did not believe in giving allowances). I walked to and from the ticket office downtown, and the theatre was just a couple of blocks from where I lived. I didn't dress up for the show, and neither did most of the audience. Some people did, but in Red Deer it's not uncommon for most of the audience at plays or the symphony to show up in jeans or other casual clothes. The only exception to this is if the event is a high-brow charity event. And even then, I informed the head of my crew that because my job required me to crawl around in the rafters and catwalks and lighting booth above the stage, I would not be wearing a dress that night, thankyouverymuch.

I realize customs differ elsewhere. But my point is that Shakespeare is not by definition inaccessible. If semi- and moderately-literate common people in the 16th and 17th centuries could get it, there's no reason the even more literate people in the 21st century can't figure it out.

Anyway I realise that there's no way of convincing you. I'm mostly posting this so maybe other people will agree with me. You don't have to respond if you don't want to; I understand your position from your posts in this thread and in many others. I accept that it's legitimate and not explicitly based on falsehoods -- we merely have a difference of opinion.

Not sure how to take this. I do hope it's not a roundabout way of saying, "I hope you shut up now because I know what you've said and I don't want to hear it any more, and btw, I won't accuse you of lying confused because we don't agree."

I hope I've misinterpreted your post, because it doesn't strike me as being very friendly to say "you don't have to respond if you don't want to" when you should know me well enough by now to be aware that on topics I'm passionate about, I never shut up.

 

[Mise]

I'm just saying, don't feel obliged to respond, because I understand where you're coming from. I.e. agree to disagree.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Well, at least Gori hasn't disagreed with my assessment of accessibility.


@Gori: Yep, I might check it out tonight if I get the time, or hopefully on the weekend.

Oh, but I'm going to! It's my whole reason for assigning you the video. There will be a quiz afterwards, by the way. Can't wait to have you report back on your experience. It should give me a means for making the claim I've wanted to make in response to Pangur and your view (or maybe just you now, as Pangur hasn't seemed to check in for a while; pity.)

 

[warpus]

I think warpus was using it figuratively. Seems a colorful expression. S. himself probably would have liked it, what with all his own boner references. This is a guy who worked penis references into both of his names. Willy? Shake-spear? C'mon man.

It's the best way I could think of to describe their "position" on Shakespeare. They were all female teachers.

It's the provincial Department of Education that sets the curriculum. I don't know what the current high school English curriculum is in Alberta, but I did one Shakespeare play each year, as did every other high school English class.

I did leave out a bit of information that changes all of this slightly. Up until grade 11, I was in ESL.

I only did real English in grades 11 and 12.. We did much more than just a play a year, we did several a year. And my introduction to Shakespeare was probably messed up a bit in that I did not start with grade 9 as everybody else did - I'm guessing they probably read a couple plays in grades 9 and 10 as well, maybe more introductory stuff.

I shouldn't really have been in ESL, I knew English well enough by grade 10, but I was a shy and quiet kid, and I didn't want to speak up anyway, ESL was way too easy. Screw around for half the day each day.. why not?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I'm just saying, don't feel obliged to respond, because I understand where you're coming from. I.e. agree to disagree.

Agreeing to disagree is one thing, but I would appreciate an explanation of this:

I understand your position from your posts in this thread and in many others. I accept that it's legitimate and not explicitly based on falsehoods...

WTH does that mean?

 

[Mise]

If your post had been based on things that aren't true then I'd have continued to challenge those things. I.e. I wouldn't be able to agree to disagree, because our disagreement is not simply a difference of opinion, but grounded in some demonstrably false premise.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

If your post had been based on things that aren't true then I'd have continued to challenge those things. I.e. I wouldn't be able to agree to disagree, because our disagreement is not simply a difference of opinion, but grounded in some demonstrably false premise.

Your use of the word "falsehood" means there is some implication that I flat-out lied about something. That's not the same thing as a "false premise."

 

[kochman]

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 pretty much unified the English language... pretty important.
While some of it is archaic today, it set the stage.
He (or whoever) also came up with some seriously amazing phrases, etc.

 

[Mise]

Your use of the word "falsehood" means there is some implication that I flat-out lied about something. That's not the same thing as a "false premise."

I said that your position wasn't based on falsehoods.

 

[Wrymouth3]

If semi- and moderately-literate common people in the 16th and 17th centuries could get it, there's no reason the even more literate people in the 21st century can't figure it out.

I think we are forgetting that the thing 21st century people don't understand about Shakespere are based on the fact that people read about these plays in some massive textbook without actually seeing them. 16th century common people understood these plays mostly because it was displayed in front of them, you think if you handed Piers the poor Hereford farmer a copy of Troilus and Cressida he would know what was going on? Most likely not, but that's because people didn't read about these plays in 1578 or whatever, they went to see them. Let's also talk about the fact that if you put on a display of one of Shakespere's history plays, 21st century people aren't going to get it most likely. Hell, I had one of my coworkers ask me what era and what years Game of Thrones took place (!!!!!!).

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Did you tell him that it was set in the years circa 300 AL?

 

[Wrymouth3]

Did you tell him that it was set in the years circa 300 AL?

Unfortunately, I went with the "You do know it's fictional right?" statment. He was for some reason very confused when he heard this. I dunno, I guess since Curb Your Enthusiasm is on HBO and depicts real life actors by their real names and takes place in modern Los Angeles, I assume he thought noted HBO program Game of Thrones also depicted people that existed

 

[Gori the Grey]

Wrymouth gives the reason I have encouraged warpus and Mise to watch a play rather than read it. And once Mise reports back on his experience, I'll have one thing more to say about what I think is involved in appreciating S's verbal artistry.