What is so good about Shakespeare?

[Tarquelne]

What I have,
I keep because it’s mine
What I lack,
I want for what I dream
Only in loss,
Do I mourn for what it was

 

[Gori the Grey]

Tarq. I think you're creating your own poem based on the passage, no? Or do you intend this as a paraphrase?

 

[Tarquelne]

It's my answer to your question about the passage.

 

[Gori the Grey]

OK, Tarq; thanks, then. It was your shifting from the passage’s “we” to your version’s “I,” (which is more characteristic of lyric poetry), then your lineation, and your introduction of “dreams,” then finally that yours has a suggestiveness of its own, that made me think you were riffing on Shakespeare rather than just paraphrasing him.

Maybe I’m making this harder than it needs to be. As I said, Mise’s response, when I first raised the passage was to say “yeah, I thought they were trying to make Claudio better appreciate Hero by saying she’d died.” That told me two things: 1) that that element of the plot was part of the 25% that Mise felt he took in, and that 2) he understood this passage as communicating essentially that point--that we only appreciate things once they’re gone—because he reported a closer examination of this passage as confirming the rough sense he had when he watched the play. Then Tarquelne’s paraphrase touches on this same aspect of mourning something once it’s lost.

So maybe we could flip it around, because this is what I want to get to anyway: could we list the things in the Shakespeare passage that make it difficult to understand, that make it a thicket of gibberish, that make us feel like its meaning is “hidden”? And could we make it an exhaustive list? For this one Shakeespearean bramble, could detail every thorn?

For a modern reader, what words or phrases in this passage pose a difficulty to comprehension?

 

[Tarquelne]

that made me think you were riffing on Shakespeare rather than just paraphrasing him.

Well, I wouldn't call it a paraphrase, since it departs significantly from the quote. (Or, if it's a paraphrase, it's a bad one.) Though I'd say the gist of each is the same. Depending on exactly what you focus on.

Sorry, I should have taken a moment to explain. Rather than a paraphrasing or the answer to your question, it's my answer to your question. IMO "the" answer is something of a cliche these days, and having been inoculated with an abhorrence for cliche's an impromptu verse was as close as I was willing to get.

For a modern reader, what words or phrases in this passage pose a difficulty to comprehension?

The local U. recently renamed a number of courses. "Oceanography" is now called something like "The Earth's Oceans." "Oceanography" apparently being too difficult a word for oceanography students.

The words seem simple enough, the phrasing isn't standard but hardly seems opaque. However, given the above, I'm not prepared to speculate what a generic "modern reader" has difficulty with.

EDIT: I used the word "propitiate" in a story today. I'm hoping for ancient Roman readers. I'm not going to get comprehension of 100% of the words from modern readers.

 

[Gori the Grey]

'Sall good, Tarq and it means that you're more than half way there. But it may be that interest is waning and nobody will want to hear my speech--so slow have I been about getting to it. Pity. I took great pains to con it and 'tis poetical.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

The local U. recently renamed a number of courses. "Oceanography" is now called something like "The Earth's Oceans." "Oceanography" apparently being too difficult a word for oceanography students.

That's pathetic.

EDIT: I used the word "propitiate" in a story today. I'm hoping for ancient Roman readers. I'm not going to get comprehension of 100% of the words from modern readers.

You may need a time machine, since there haven't been any ancient Romans since 1453 (476 if you mean the Western Empire).

 

[Mise]

OK, Tarq; thanks, then. It was your shifting from the passage’s “we” to your version’s “I,” (which is more characteristic of lyric poetry), then your lineation, and your introduction of “dreams,” then finally that yours has a suggestiveness of its own, that made me think you were riffing on Shakespeare rather than just paraphrasing him.

Maybe I’m making this harder than it needs to be. As I said, Mise’s response, when I first raised the passage was to say “yeah, I thought they were trying to make Claudio better appreciate Hero by saying she’d died.” That told me two things: 1) that that element of the plot was part of the 25% that Mise felt he took in, and that 2) he understood this passage as communicating essentially that point--that we only appreciate things once they’re gone—because he reported a closer examination of this passage as confirming the rough sense he had when he watched the play. Then Tarquelne’s paraphrase touches on this same aspect of mourning something once it’s lost.

It was really an assumption, based on what I thought they might possibly have been trying to do by faking her death. It was the most plausible explanation I could come up with for them wanting to fake Hero's death. No doubt some passages that I heard contributed to that understanding, but I wouldn't say that I "understood" it ("it" being the play), because what I was understanding was storytelling, human nature, plausibility, the phrase "you don't know what you got til it's gone", and so on, rather than the play itself.

So maybe we could flip it around, because this is what I want to get to anyway: could we list the things in the Shakespeare passage that make it difficult to understand, that make it a thicket of gibberish, that make us feel like its meaning is “hidden”? And could we make it an exhaustive list? For this one Shakeespearean bramble, could detail every thorn?

For a modern reader, what words or phrases in this passage pose a difficulty to comprehension?

"for it so falls out"
the phrasing is odd and I don't know what "falls out" means. I scratched that and replaced it with "happens" mentally. Cognitive load +2

"That what we have we prize not to the worth Whiles we enjoy it,"
much easier to read than the first line, but the random unnecessary "to" in the middle of the sentence adds cognitive load and makes me pause for thought. The "Whiles" also makes me pause for thought. Finally, having to mentally remove the carriage return in the middle of the sentence in order to read it as prose adds more cognitive load. Cognitive Load +3

"but being lack'd and lost, Why, then we rack the value,"
"lack'd" is odd, the commas make me pause too often to read it as a whole, "rack" makes no sense (not even a word) so I mentally replaced it with "rate", and again, the removal of a carriage return is work. Cognitive Load +4

"then we find The virtue that possession would not show us Whiles it was ours."
2 carriage returns again. The final sentence makes much more sense now that I've read it 3 or 4 times; on first reading I found "the virtue that possession would not show us" difficult to parse. Cognitive Load +2

Looking at the sentence as a whole instead, it was not only archaically phrased, but also broken up so much that forming a complete whole requires significant brain power. If we were to paraphrase the sentence, we could convey far more meaning with far less cognitive load. We could just say "you don't know what you got til it's gone", which is a common and well understood phrase in modern times. Indeed, being forced to paraphrase it, rather than simply reading/listening to it and understanding it instantly, is, on the whole, what makes Shakespeare inaccessible to me.

 

[Tarquelne]

You may need a time machine, since there haven't been any ancient Romans since 1453 (476 if you mean the Western Empire).

I'm currently looking for a Lost Valley.

Cognitive load +2

I think that's a good way to put it.

what makes Shakespeare inaccessible to me.

It just struck me how unfortunate it is that the word meaning "difficult to understand" in the artistic sense means "unable to reach" in the material sense. I wonder how many people, hearing a work described as "inaccessible," think something along the lines of "That's, it, I can't do it." rather than "This may require some extra effort."

 

[Gori the Grey]

I think that's a good way to put it.



It just struck me how unfortunate it is that the word meaning "difficult to understand" in the artistic sense means "unable to reach" in the material sense. I wonder how many people, hearing a work described as "inaccessible," think something along the lines of "That's, it, I can't do it." rather than "This may require some extra effort."

It is a good way of putting it.

And, yes, that's why I'm glad we worked our way to gist-get-able and fully comprehensible as the poles.

Longer reply to Mise in an hour or two.

 

[gay_Aleks]

As someone who'll have to study Hamlet in school later on, do you have any tips on reading it?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

As someone who'll have to study Hamlet in school later on, do you have any tips on reading it?

1. Read it out loud, and follow the punctuation. Sentences don't necessarily end at the end of a line.

2. Watch a performance, either live or on TV/Netflix/whatever other method you may have available. Avoid Branagh's version; it's anachronistic (set in the wrong century). Mel Gibson's Hamlet is light-years better in presentation and acting.

 

[Tarquelne]

I don't think Branagh's setting is problematical. Wrong date, but I thought the zeitgeist more than close enough.


Tolini, I echo "reading aloud." For the first time though, I think it may be better than watching a performance. (It was for me.)

I'd advise a little caution with respect with a performance: Accessibility can already be a problem due to the language itself. Get one where the audio is well done, and the direction is such that the words are as clear as possible.

Unfortunately I don't have any specific suggestions. But if you try one and just have trouble clearly hearing what's being said for any reason, you may want to try another.

(There are theater companies, btw, that make a point in making Shakespeare more accessible, emphasizing the acting/staging a bit to help people catch more of what's spoken. And I have absolutely no memory of which ones they are.)

 

[gay_Aleks]

Theoretically, for the reading aloud, I'll be watching movies with subtitles (but that might be a) counter-intuitive and b) useless). And here we run into the problem: translation or original?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I've only ever read and heard it in English, so I have no idea how Shakespeare comes across in other languages.

 

[Gori the Grey]

@ Mise:

Wow. Thanks for this. Not only a listing of what’s hard but actually a rating of what you’re calling the extra “cognitive load” of the various difficulties involved in making sense of the passage. (You’re playing right into my hand with this language, though, I should let you know.)

I’m kicking myself on one count, and that is that I presented the passage as verse, and introduced one needless level of difficulty at this stage, those “carriage returns” you talk about. The verse matters (a lot, I actually think), and we’ll get to it in time. But with my Joni Mitchell quote, I printed it in prose layout, subtracting the line breaks (Don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you got / Til it’s gone. / They paved paradise / To put up a parking lot) and I now wish that at this stage of our analysis I’d done the same for Shakespeare too. Because, even though we’ve moved into this reading stage where we run the quote in slow-mo, or replay or freeze-frame, part of what we’re still trying to do is remember ourselves hearing this in the theater, and one doesn’t hear verse breaks (well, only on the subtlest level; one certainly doesn’t experience anything like a disconcerting carriage return for a line break).

So, in some of what I do, I’m going to downplay the difficulties that you attribute to the carriage returns. Imagine the last line as “Then we find the virtue that possession would not show us whiles it was ours.” It still has other of the challenges you report (and the passage as a whole has plenty of difficulties remaining). But not difficulties that are primarily a matter of page layout.

Even though I feel I bungled things by not converting the passage to prose layout, though, I’m kind of glad I did, because it alerts us to something we’ll deal with in time.

I’m also saving racked, but that’s a “saving the best for last” kind of saving. But it will prove of the utmost significance that you thought about changing the word.

So I’m going to hone in on that last sentence. Is part of the difficulty in parsing that the fact that an abstract noun (possession) is being made to do a concrete thing (show) with another abstraction (virtue)? We wouldn’t have any trouble with it (right?) if it were all concrete actors: we finally saw the bricks that the foreman previously hadn’t shown us.

(Is lack’d difficult because of the spelling, because of the apostrophe? For his rhythms, S sometimes needs words like that to be pronounced as two-syllables, lack-ed, and sometimes as one. This spelling is just telling you it’s one; in other words exactly how we pronounce it today. Or did you figure all that out yet found “lacked” difficult because of its meaning, somehow?)

I might follow this with one of those posts that quickly moves us through some material by answering my own questions, subject, again, to your ratification.

@Tolni, an answer to your question about translation/original coming soon.

 

[Mise]

So I’m going to hone in on that last sentence. Is part of the difficulty in parsing that the fact that an abstract noun (possession) is being made to do a concrete thing (show) with another abstraction (virtue)? We wouldn’t have any trouble with it (right?) if it were all concrete actors: we finally saw the bricks that the foreman previously hadn’t shown us.

I suppose so, yeah. I don't know why exactly, it was just difficult to understand. Let's go with that as the explanation then, seems reasonable enough to me.

EDIT: Another part of it is the order of the sentence. "we finally saw the bricks that the foreman previously hadn't shown us" is still kind of difficult. I have to think about bricks, then I have to think about exactly which bricks ("... that ..."), then I have to think about a person (the foreman), then I have to think about some time period in which the foreman is relevant (previously), then I have to think about why he is relevant (cos he hadn't shown them to us), then I have to unwind all of that back to the bricks, the concrete thing we were talking about to begin with. That's a lot of things that I have to hold in memory. It's as if someone gave you directions but didn't tell you which order to follow them in until right at the end. "You need to turn left and then right, but not before coming to a bridge, which you will find if you take the road to the right just after the traffic lights at the bottom of the hill over there." A simpler way of writing it might be "the foreman hadn't shown me the bricks, but now that he's gone, I can see them."

(Is lack’d difficult because of the spelling, because of the apostrophe? For his rhythms, S sometimes needs words like that to be pronounced as two-syllables, lack-ed, and sometimes as one. This spelling is just telling you it’s one; in other words exactly how we pronounce it today. Or did you figure all that out yet found “lacked” difficult because of its meaning, somehow?)

It was indeed difficult because of the apostrophe. I had to wonder what letter had been omitted, and for what reason. I didn't figure any of that out, so thanks for the explanation.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Remember that one of the key things I’m trying to do is get modern listeners not to have a higher expectation of immediate comprehension than they should, not to imagine that they can achieve full comprehension on a first listen; and thus not to despair of enjoying Shakespeare because they think they don’t achieve an (unrealistic) level of understanding him when they hear his plays in the theatre. In other words, I was perfectly satisfied with you reporting that you understood 25% of MAAN (and with your displaying through your comments that you’d taken all of the key plot points, characters, character relations, etc.)—with your getting what we’ve called the gist.

My grounds for being satisfied with your taking in the gist is that I believe that’s all that Shakespeare’s original audience took in on a first listen as well. Another way of saying this is to say that much of the “cognitive load” is deliberate on Shakespeare’s part: he’s trying to overwhelm the semantic-processing-power of his audience (so they’ll come back to listen to it a second time and try to catch more: butts in seats).

Now there is one difficulty that modern listeners experience that Shakespeare’s audience didn’t, and that has to do with the way the language has changed over the centuries since he wrote his plays.

So, for example “falls out” was a common idiom in his day for, exactly what you converted it to, “happens.” So S’s audience would have had no added cognitive load there. (-2) “Whiles” with an s was a common alternative for “while”; wouldn’t have given them a moment’s pause (but I think that’s a small part of the difficulty you reported here, so -1) They also would not have had, I think, any problem with the [/I]word order[/I] in “we see the virtue that possession would not show us.” (On further thought, I actually think the problem there isn’t word order, it’s taking “would” to mean “had not previously”; I suspect they would have had a marginally easier time making that substitution). (-1 of the +2 you report)

I’m factoring out the “carriage returns” and “lack’d”; they aren’t audible, so they made needless trouble for you when you were reading the passage, trouble that they make for neither the original nor the modern auditor in listening to the passage.

The “to” in "prize not to the worth" would have posed the same difficulty to them as to you (it’s not unnecessary, but the difficulty you register by calling it “unnecessary” is a difficulty they would have experienced as well). (+2) They would have been challenged, same as you, with the abstractions-acting-as concrete things in the possession stretch (and I think that is the main source of difficulty there, so +1.5 of your 2). They would have had one edge over you on “rack” (I’ll elaborate later) but they would have experienced much of the challenge that word poses (so +3 of your 4). The difficulties posed by these matters are all poetic difficulties, rather than difficulties introduced by the dated language.

So by this, accounting (which I know full well has gotten more and more inexact as I’ve used your ratings), of the +11 cognitive load you report, I suspect S’s original audience experienced about +6.5 or +7.

If the +4 that’s due to archaic language is enough to turn you off, I understand that (though the more one listens to Shakespeare, the more easy that part of it becomes, because you pick up those phrasings; I honestly thought “falls out” was still in use as a synonym for “happens”; maybe I’m spending too much time with Shakespeare.)

In the theater, the poetic stuff flows past you (or anyone) faster than our brains can process it. All I’m asking you to do is give yourself a break relative to that component of S’s meaning. For any passage that sounded cool, go dig up the text, put the thing in slow-mo, and do the paraphrase that will help you see and enjoy the poetic effect. But, again on a first listen, set the bar of “accessible” at “gist-get-able” not “fully comprehensible.”

More to say, but this has gotten long, so I'll pause for now.

 

[Pangur Bán]

Avoid Branagh's version; it's anachronistic (set in the wrong century).

The anachronism line of criticism is not one a Shakespeare fan would pragmatically pursue. Shakespeare's plays are the epitome of anachronism.

 

[gay_Aleks]

So.. people read Shakespeare for the anachronism? Like a source of old-timed things in the evil modern times when several thousand organisations are doing the best to preserve you from dying all over the place for some unknown reason?