What is so good about Shakespeare?

[Mise]

@Mise: stipulated: the artistic merit of the gist is orders of magnitude lower than what would warrant the praise S receives.

But I would want to say that the barrier, then, is not exclusivity, maintained by some club of insiders, but just people's lack of interest in doing the follow-up work to get to the things that make for S's artistic merit. (And that's okay, there's beauty all around us of which we don't avail ourselves; that was part of the point of my admission, earlier on, about how late in life I now feel I let myself go before getting to Mozart's Piano Concertos).

I don't think it's maintained in any active, conscious way. Rather, it's a consequence of our natural predilection to form tribes and cliques, insiders and outsiders, and to preferentially allocate resources to those within our clique over those outside of it. This is how racism starts; it's also how families and communities work. Shakespeare acts as a signalling mechanism for tribal membership in the way that headdresses, feudal crests and surnames do/did. Understanding Shakespeare is part of a set of cultural signals that indicate your membership of the elite or the privileged classes. They don't actively or consciously keep out lower classes, because they don't need to: cultural norms, Shakespeare's language, and terrible English teachers do a decent enough job on their own. Indeed, simply by having Shakespeare as a cultural signal acts as a "soft barrier" to people from other cultures. If someone doesn't care about access to the elite, and would rather access, say, punk culture, then they're going to listen to The Ramones instead of investing their time in Shakespeare. More depressingly, if Shakespeare is associated with the elite, then lower classes may believe that they can't understand Shakespeare, because only people with a certain education or cultural background will be able to.

Anyway, these are all ideas I've already floated, and I'm sure you understand them, even if you don't agree with them. Given the rest of your post, I'm happy if you want to put the original argument aside and carry on inducting me into the super secret Shakespeare society

I would also want to say that this is a place where S’s rep is working against him. People have this idea that they’re supposed to fully comprehend Shakespeare, and since they don’t, they think they don’t understand him at all, so they don’t bother with his plays at all. I’ll let you know why I chose MAAN as the play I had you watch. I once watched it in a group with a woman who clearly went into it not wanting to watch it, because of what she expeceted S to be. During the showing, she was enraptured (think all those scenes in Pretty Woman that show how genuinely Julia Roberts is enjoying the opera Richard Gere takes her to). Afterwards she said enthusiastically “That was as good as a movie!” by which I took her to be saying “I enjoyed that as much any Adam Sandler rom com I might go see.” I hate it that people cheat themselves of that much fun because of how they (wrongly, I think) assume they ought to approach Shakespeare.

The only thing that distresses me about your post, though, is that you claim to be willing to accept as a given that S deserves the praise he receives. Proving that was going to be the whole fun of this exercise! And we were just about to that point: proving how beautiful (and more) are these lines we've been looking at (and they're just pedestrian, sententious, plot-point-explainers rather than some searching, grand soliloquy).

By the way, only half of my insterest is in carrying on this debate about how people feel about Shaksepeare (though I’m all in on that issue). The other half of is trying to coach one person who has shown some interest in Shakespeare (well, two, if warpus ever gets his home theater installed) in how I think that person can allow himself to enjoy Shakespeare, coach him past a hang-up that I think needn’t interfere with a level of enjoyment, and will open up the possibility of a second level of enjoyment. When you’re ready to watch another filmed Shakespeare play, let me know. I think I know the one I’ll recommend (and plausibility won’t be a concern). I’m willing to correct people’s bad high-school instruction in Shakespeare one button-holed at a time.

Then by all means please continue; I've already learnt a lot and indeed I similarly enjoyed MAAN more than I anticipated, so go right ahead. I'd much rather believe it than merely accept it.

 

[Traitorfish]

The Ramones really are better than Shakespeare, mind. Write all the plays you like, "Blitzkrieg Bop" is still gonna be "Blitzkrieg Bop".

 

[Gori the Grey]

@Tolni: The director has the actor speaking in whispers because, in this scene, the characters are trying to keep from waking up anybody in Juliet’s household.

If your teachers’ English, or your own, isn’t strong, you’ll have to work in translation. Do I dearly wish I could read Dante’s Italian, so that I could read Dante in the original, rather than in translation? Yes. If I’m going to read him at all, it’s going to be in tranlation. Since I can’t read him in Italian, I’ll settle for assessments of his literary value from those who can.

But your English seems fairly strong, so I’ll hook you up with whatever level your skills and interest rise to.

@Pangur: No doubt there is a lot of affected delivery of Shakespeare, or bad for one reason or another. I don’t think that reflects on Shakespeare. If a museum hung a Rembrandt in a dark room, it would speak to the curator’s skills (or sanity), but not to the value of the painting.

 

[gay_Aleks]

My modern English skills are good. Elizabethian English? Slightly less so. In fact, I'd wish for a translation from Elizabethian English to, you know, contemporary English, instead of a translation to a native language.

 

[Gori the Grey]

That's called Spark Notes: No Fear Shakespeare

 

[gay_Aleks]

Would there be any loss of content, in this case?

 

[Pangur Bán]

Here for Gori, linguist John McWhorter on the his experience with a top-rate production of Shakespeare and the language of Shakespeare in the New Republic.

He highlights some more of the issues we've all discussed. For example:

The problem is words’ changing meanings. This was especially problematic with Touchstone’s lines. Here he is in his scene with Audrey the goatherd (Act III, Scene III). After some cynical whimsy about the nature of honesty, beauty, “sluttishness,” and the best synergy between them, I fell off a cliff when Touchstone launched into this passage about entering into marriage with Audrey:

A man may, if he were of a fearful heart,
stagger in this attempt; for here we have no temple
but the wood, no assembly but horn-beasts. But what
though? Courage! As horns are odious, they are
necessary. It is said, ‘many a man knows no end of
his goods:’ right; many a man has good horns, and
knows no end of them. Well, that is the dowry of
his wife; ‘tis none of his own getting. Horns?
Even so. Poor men alone? No, no; the noblest deer
hath them as huge as the rascal. Is the single man
therefore blessed? No: as a walled town is more
worthier than a village, so is the forehead of a
married man more honourable than the bare brow of a
bachelor; and by how much defence is better than no
skill, by so much is a horn more precious than to want.​

One may know that horns refer to ****oldry, and even that Elizabethans found ****oldry especially hilarious. Yet I could glean no real meaning from this passage, heard for the first time through the ear. I had to simply enjoy the visual and aural pleasure the actors lent. “Many a man knows no end of his goods?” This is not said in my era, and I could not grasp what it meant in real time—which meant losing the meaning of the rest of that sentence about men who have “good horns.”

nd even if I know about the ****oldry reference, what, prithee, are “good horns”? There was no time to muse, because then we were on to the part about poor men—but why would anyone suppose that poor men’s wives were more likely to be unfaithful? The cultural context that made the answer clear is lost to us. We move on—um, why is a married man’s forehead more honorable than a bachelor’s? And then the final sentence requires us to glean that the “by how much … by so much” construction is equivalent to our “to the extent that” construction.

Sure, I can muse on all of this reading it later at home—and did. But in the theater all of this goes by in less than a minute. Certainly most of the play was not this tough to process in real time—“All the world’s a stage” was crystal clear—but a good deal of it was. It also lost me when, for example, Duke Senior, capping a moving tale of Jaques’ tenderness for a dying deer, commands “Show me to the place: I love to cope him in these sullen fits, for then he’s full of matter.” I couldn’t get what cope or matter meant, especially because my head was still grappling with nailing down who Jaques was at this early stage in the play.

Full article is here:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/put-differently/92750/shakespeare-as-you-like-it-language

 

[Gori the Grey]

Would there be any loss of content, in this case?

Yes, immeasurable. You're going to get a taste of it by watching where I go next with the Much Ado quote Mise and I have been discussing (if you're following our exchange).

OMG, Pangur, that is perfect! Thank you so much. He's using the concepts ("real time," can't ponder this because that is coming next) that I'm trying to get at. S's language is semantically overwhelming. McWhorter just doesn't realize that was true for S's original audience too, so he faults himself (as a modern) for not keeping up.

He even did the next right thing. Slow-mo'd the passages he found interesting.

 

[gay_Aleks]

This is slowly driving me insane. By what I've seen in this thread, to understand Shakespeare, you need to learn Elizabethian English inside and out...which will be annoying and troublesome.

Maybe I should just stick to Classic Russian literature next year...

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Am I slightly going deaf or in both videos the actors speak really silently?

Those videos highlight some of the issues raised by people here. The difficulty of the language for the actors produces stiff and unnatural delivery. It's as if they see Shakespeare recreations as extreme versions of Jane Austen costume dramas, where late 20th century actresses try to pretend they are Victorians and create a bizarre way of talking that never existed outside their own genre of entertainment.

O-kay...

It's late at night, after the party, when the guests have gone home and it's time for sensible people to go to bed. Juliet is still up, because her young teenaged self is still bowled over by her first kiss, and from such a handsome, sensitive boy!

Romeo hasn't gone home yet, and he's equally bowled over by Juliet's beauty and gentleness.

Keep in mind that their families are bitter enemies; they've been feuding for a long time (no, I don't know why), and it would be a Very Bad Thing if Romeo were caught in the garden underneath the balcony outside Juliet's bedroom. It's one thing for Lord Capulet to let him stay at the party - but to whisper together in the garden afterward... nope, not done. Therefore, the kids are quiet.

To be fair, it seemed a bit.. strange. Maybe it's because, that as strange as it might seem, I've never touched to the Great Bard or whatever. Also, the movies show clothing, which overcomplicates it a bit.

Why wouldn't they wear clothing??? People wear clothes at parties, and Juliet hadn't gone to bed yet. Romeo hadn't gone home - of course they are wearing clothes!

(if it makes you feel better, they do take their clothes off when they have sex later in the movie)

I don't think it's maintained in any active, conscious way. Rather, it's a consequence of our natural predilection to form tribes and cliques, insiders and outsiders, and to preferentially allocate resources to those within our clique over those outside of it. This is how racism starts; it's also how families and communities work. Shakespeare acts as a signalling mechanism for tribal membership in the way that headdresses, feudal crests and surnames do/did. Understanding Shakespeare is part of a set of cultural signals that indicate your membership of the elite or the privileged classes. They don't actively or consciously keep out lower classes, because they don't need to: cultural norms, Shakespeare's language, and terrible English teachers do a decent enough job on their own. Indeed, simply by having Shakespeare as a cultural signal acts as a "soft barrier" to people from other cultures. If someone doesn't care about access to the elite, and would rather access, say, punk culture, then they're going to listen to The Ramones instead of investing their time in Shakespeare. More depressingly, if Shakespeare is associated with the elite, then lower classes may believe that they can't understand Shakespeare, because only people with a certain education or cultural background will be able to.

I don't care about "access to the elite" since I've had that (locally) and discovered that far too many are shallow, two-faced liars who are all nose-in-the-air and very ready to use people and then claim it never happened.

I'm into Shakespeare because I enjoy it. Period.

 

[gay_Aleks]

Err. I believe you might have misunderstood me on the clothing bit. I'm just saying, that from a modern perspective, the clothes used in the movie you've linked are ridiculous and anachronistic.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Err. I believe you might have misunderstood me on the clothing bit. I'm just saying, that from a modern perspective, the clothes used in the movie you've linked are ridiculous and anachronistic.

They're perfectly in keeping with the time period the play is set in. They're not anachronistic at all.

 

[Gori the Grey]

This is slowly driving me insane. By what I've seen in this thread, to understand Shakespeare, you need to learn Elizabethian English inside and out...which will be annoying and troublesome.

Maybe I should just stick to Classic Russian literature next year...

Read the version your teachers want you to. Get out of it what they want you to. If they have you read part or all of it in the original, rather than one of the two translation possibilities, tap me for help with that.

(This thread will be running as a serial thread: Ask a Shakespearean High Priest. It will probably be on its third or fourth incarnation, so many questions are there for Shakespearean High Priests.)

If they don’t, it’s because they judge that, for what they want you to get out of it, they don’t need the original. If you want to do more with the original than they ask you to do in your class, tap me.

 

[Hyperborean]

Interesting discussion. It just so happens that I finished reading The Complete Works of William Shakespeare a few days ago. I'm still recovering from that ordeal.
Seriously, I began reading Shakespeare last summer when my computer broke down, and I was without computer for months. I thought I would finish it rather quickly, but after some 200 pages it was like hitting a stone wall. I just couldn't go on. I had to put the book down, and read something else instead.
But, stubborn as I am, I picked it up after a break, and continued to read. The secret to read such a massive work (1433 pages) is to read one play at a time, read some other book for a few days, and then return for the next play. So it took me a while, almost 14 months to be exact. While I was reading this book I read over a dozen other books. There were times when I thought I would never finish it, but I did. I'm too stubborn to quit. The reason why I bothered to read the book to begin with is because I wanted to read the classics, and Shakespeare was on my to-do list. I will never read Shakespeare again.
I mean, I might read some passages here, or some passages there (I have bookmarked some 70-80 pages), but I will never again read a full play. That doesn't mean I hate Shakespeare. I definitely don't. But I do think he's a bit overrated. The stories are, with the exception of the Tempest (and perhaps some other play) not original, but based on older works. The characters are often (but not always!) stereotypical and uninteresting. The structure in five acts is rigid and inflexible, never offering any surprises or twists. If it's a tragedy the protagonist will die, if it's a comedy the protagonist will survive, basically.
I do not like any of Shakespeare's so-called comedies. I think his true strength is in drama. It's only there we see any inkling of character depth and development. My favourite plays are Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, and MacBeth, in that specific order.
What I do like about Shakespeare is his way with words. That is where his skills truly lies. He lets the characters burst out into profound monologues when least expected. My only problem with that is that the moment passes all too soon, and then it's back to some mundane dialogue about this or that, which I don't find very interesting. The Shakespearean monologue has a tendency to meander quite a bit.
Take Shylock in The Merchant of Venice for example. For a minute there it's a great, thought-provoking speech: "If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?", and so on. And after that it's back to some trivial discussion about money and stuff.
I have the same problem with the patriotic speech in King Henry The Fifth: "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for he to-day that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother, be he ne'er so vile"... etcetera. And then they continue to talk. Talk, talk, talk. It feels very anti-climactic, because the endings can never match these great speeches from the middle of the plays.
I guess that's the disadvantage of just reading Shakespeare instead of watching actors perform his plays. But as a reader I'm not particularly entertained. Yes, there are some memorable passages here and there, but as a whole Shakespeare's plays feel rather bland.
The reason why I prefer the three tragedies mentioned above is because I think they have a better pace than the others, and are more straight to the point, without all these meanderings.
So, to answer the question in the OP: - "What is so good about Shakespeare?" - I would say the language. Shakespeare has a way with words, an incredible vocabulary far exceeding any other writer that I know of, and he occasionally writes some very insightful thoughts about the human conditions that makes you ponder and contemplate. Like: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet" (Romeo and Juliet, act two, scene two), or "It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" (MacBeth, act five, scene five).
I believe Shakespeare is telling us something worth remembering in moments like that. It's just a pity that they are so far apart. You could easily make a summary of Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Greatest Hits, if you like, that would not exceed 50 pages. In fact, I'm planning on transcribing every bookmark I've made to a file to really get the best of Shakespeare.
Of course, everything is relative, and what I consider good might not appeal to someone else. For example, I've never been impressed with the oft quoted "Alas, poor Yorick!" speech in Hamlet. If we are talking about Hamlet I prefer: "We go to gain a little patch of ground that hath in it no profit but the name." (Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, act four, scene four). I love the cynicism such a remark provokes in me.
But like I said, such great lines are few and far between. Another line I love is Antony's words in Julius Caesar: "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him." (Julius Ceasar, act three, scene two). Simple, and effective. I wish Shakespeare could write like that more often.
Since I'm in the middle of quoting Shakespeare I will share my absolute favourite line. It's from King Richard The Second, act five, scene five:

"I wasted time, and now doth time waste me."

Say what you will about Shakespeare, everyone has to admit that he's very quotable.

Anyway, to reiterate, I consider Shakespeare to be a genius, but only when it comes to the mastery of words. Shakespeare has obviously a very keen and mobile intellect. He shows it both in what the characters are saying as well in how they are saying it. Shakespeare has excellent rhetorical skills as well as some philosophical insights.
I don't think Shakespeare is the greatest mind who has ever lived, but I think he was better than most of his contemporaries. It does take some skill to tell the audience something about characters merely through their words. Most of the characters may be superficial constructs, but occasionally there appears a character who is willing to share his insights with the audience. I appreciate those moments.
The question whether or not Shakespeare is timeless or not is interesting. He is timeless in the sense that we are still talking about him, and his work, 400 years after his death. But Shakespeare was very much a child of his time. It's possible that he in some aspects may have been more progressive than the society he lived in (many writers are), but in other aspects his views don't go well with a modern audience. I'm talking about his blatant misogyny, of course. The Taming of the Shrew has already been discussed here, but Shakespeare's overall characterisation of women is not very positive. On top of my head I cannot think of a single female main character who doesn't complain about how weak and fragile her sex is. It gets tedious very quickly. And then we have the scene in part one of King Henry the Sixth, where Talbot is defeated in combat by a mere woman, Joan of Arc. Oh, his poor manhood never recovered from that!
Seriously, I was in my early teens when I caught The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, on television, and that film made a lasting impression in me. In fact, it was one of the reasons why I decided to read Shakespeare's Complete Works. I thought that the play would be as great as the film, and I was bitterly disappointed. I really enjoyed watching Elizabeth Taylor throw all kinds of objects on Richard Burton, but this, this play was just a shadow of the greatness of the film. I can summarise the play in two lines:

Petruchio: "No food for you until you behave like a proper woman!"
Katharina: "Never! (48 hours later) Well, okay, then."

Seriously, Elizabeth Taylor's Katharina put up far more of a struggle than Katharina in the book. The character development in Zeffirelli's film made perfect sense, but I didn't get it at all in the book. Maybe that's because Shakespeare doesn't get women.
I don't know. Maybe I don't get women myself. I wonder if even women understand themselves sometimes.
But my point is that Shakespeare is a misogynist. If you read his Sonnets you will notice that he is basically writing love poetry to a young man, and laments that a woman has come between them.
By our standards he's a misogynist, but for his time this attitude was probably perfectly normal.
And that is my point: he is not timeless in the sense that a modern audience can recognise themselves in the characters (I cannot), but he is timeless in the sense that we are still talking about him.
So, as you can tell, my opinion on Shakespeare is rather mixed. I don't consider him to be the greatest play writer at all. I hold Euripides as his superior when it comes to tragedy, and Aristophanes as his superior when it comes to comedies.

I want to apologise for the Shakespearean length of this post, but I really needed to get this out of my chest. Thank you for your time. Don't waste any more of it.

TL;DR Shakespeare is a kind of a genius, except when he isn't.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I have the same problem with the patriotic speech in King Henry The Fifth: "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for he to-day that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother, be he ne'er so vile"... etcetera. And then they continue to talk. Talk, talk, talk. It feels very anti-climactic, because the endings can never match these great speeches from the middle of the plays.

You might enjoy Branagh's Henry V movie. Branagh is wonderful in that role, and there are quite a few supporting actors who are very good as well (Brian Blessed, Derek Jacobi, Judi Dench, and a young Christian Bale).


Link to video.

Of course, everything is relative, and what I consider good might not appeal to someone else. For example, I've never been impressed with the oft quoted "Alas, poor Yorick!" speech in Hamlet.

That line gets a lot of parodying, that's for sure! Even Doctor Who did it in the Tom Baker story Image of the Fendahl, when the Doctor picks up a skull and says, "Alas! Poor skull!"

And then the skull attacks him...


People just can't resist Shakespearean-inspired lols (no, I didn't make this one):

Seriously, I was in my early teens when I caught The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, on television, and that film made a lasting impression in me. In fact, it was one of the reasons why I decided to read Shakespeare's Complete Works. I thought that the play would be as great as the film, and I was bitterly disappointed. I really enjoyed watching Elizabeth Taylor throw all kinds of objects on Richard Burton, but this, this play was just a shadow of the greatness of the film. I can summarise the play in two lines:

Petruchio: "No food for you until you behave like a proper woman!"
Katharina: "Never! (48 hours later) Well, okay, then."

I have to admit that my perceptions of this one are colored by the fact that I never saw it performed in its own right, but only as part of the overall musical Kiss Me, Kate (a play about a group of actors putting on a performance of Taming of the Shrew; things get weird when the thugs sent to collect lead actor Frederick Graham's gambling debt insert themselves into the play to make sure lead actress Lilli Vanessi doesn't walk out on the performance, as the ticket money is needed to pay the thugs' boss).

And that is my point: he is not timeless in the sense that a modern audience can recognise themselves in the characters (I cannot), but he is timeless in the sense that we are still talking about him.

You were never young and crazy over your first teenage love? Granted, Romeo kinda overreacted, but the point is that to the kids this was the most important thing in the world, and their families would never have allowed them to be together.

 

[Mise]

BTW Gori, I've had a think about the "gist" thing. There are actually a lot of situations where getting the "gist" is enough to consider it accessible. E.g. in specific scenes on TV/film, where nobody's talking, and everyone's just giving their reaction. You get the gist of their reactions, but maybe if you watch it a 2nd time, after you've seen how the rest of the story plays out, you see subtleties to their reactions that you missed first time round, which enriches the experience for you. Or a painting, where you literally can't get more than the gist of it ever, but you go back to the gallery/museum/etc again and again because the gist is compelling enough to make you want to look at it again nevertheless.

 

[Gori the Grey]

@Mise: On your first point: No, I’m by no trying to forclose our discussion of accessibility, just to say that it’s only half of my interest in this conversation, as it has developed. And I not only understand your argument, I willingly concede that Shakespeare operates in our culture as marker of elite status and an attainment open primarily to the privileged, who have the leisure for difficult but non-utilitarian undertakings like Shakespeare, and who can then wear him as a badge of how they had the leisure for a difficult but non-utilitarian undertaking, and maybe the pricey education to help them understand him. But that’s a sociological truth about how Shakespeare operates in our culture; it’s not the fullest truth about what he is, which is a great writer. And it can in its way be as big a barrier to enjoying him as the belief that one can’t understand him: Oh, Shakespeare, he’s just a marker of class; I don’t need to bother with him.

On your second point: Yea, repeated viewings (or viewing followed by reading); that’s what I’m trying to argue for!

@ any who might happen to be following this thread, including the stalwart Hyperborean who plowed his way through S’s whole oeuvre!:

So, we’re finally ready to start saying something about why and how S is a great writer, and I’ll start spinning it out of this passage we’ve been looking at:

for it so falls out that what we have we prize not to the worth while we enjoy it, but being lacked and lost, why, then we rack the value, then we find the virtue that possession would not show us while it was ours.

I want to stress that this passage was not chosen because it is regarded by anybody as a particularly great passage from the play. (Hyperborean might confirm that it’s not going into his Shakespeare anthology). It’s a pretty ordinary passage, actually. To hurry to the good part, I’m going to have another little Socratic exchange with my obliging interlocutor, S.P. Oiler. As usual, if your answers would differ from his in any significant respect, you should say so:

Now that you’ve worked with it a while, can you state the basic meaning of this passage:

Spoiler :

You don’t know what you got til it’s gone.

It’s a truism, like the Mitchell lyrics, expressing something about human nature that is frequently enough true that it has a kind of basic validity: we often don’t fully appreciate what we have while we have it; only once we’ve lost it do we realize how much it meant to us.

Spoiler :

Yes, in fact, it’s pretty much the same truism that Mitchell expresses in her lyrics.

But, like any truism, it borders on being a cliché.

Spoiler :

Yes.

So give it a freshness, a poet has to phrase it in such a way as will re-engage our attention.

Spoiler :

Yes, like the dramatic contrast between merely utilitarian parking lot and the paradise it displaced, even the alliteration on the letter p that underscores that contrast

And these poetic elements can sometimes be figurative, improper phrasings.

Spoiler :

Yes, like how one doesn’t actually “put up” a parking lot.

So, in that spirit, let’s start with the phrase “what we have we prize not to the worth while we enjoy it.” What is sort of improperly phrased about that?

Spoiler :

It’s “to the worth.” What does it mean to prize something “to the worth”?

What does the context almost require that we take this as meaning?

I'd actually written three or four more answers for S.P. Oiler, but even if it will slow things down a little, I instead want to make this last question a actual question. What meaning does the context almost demand that we assign to the (odd) phrase "to the worth"? We don't prize things "to the worth" while we have them?

 

[Mise]

Well, personally, I mentally removed "to the worth" when I read it the first time. "What we have we prize not (i.e. don't prize) while we enjoy it". It just sounded like filler to me. But now that you've asked explicitly what "to the worth" might mean, I guess it means "up to the fullest value; up to its true worth". So if we assign "worth" the value of 100, we prize it at 85 (say) while we enjoy it, and not "to the worth".

 

[Gori the Grey]

Perfect. So, Shakespeare has in effect (by what he does with other words around it) made the word "worth" have a little extra shade of meaning: fullest value. Yes?

So now we in effect have two meanings of “worth”: value and full value. On a purely logical level, there isn’t really any distinction: a thing’s value is its full value. That’s why English speakers have never felt the need for a special word for “full value.” But on a human level, we know that there is a truth here (the one we’ve been dealing with all this while): that we sometimes accord things in our lives a worth that is only 85% of their full value, until we lose them, and then we realize what 100% of their full value, their true worth, was. Shakespeare has driven a wedge in the word “worth” and made it (effectively, just here) mean two things: the word here means 100% value (because of the “to the&#8221, the old word “worth,” the one we always used to use, is by implication being made to mean that 85% value.

But why did just use the word “worth” for this, do you think? Why didn’t he use an expression like “full value,” “true worth”? Is there a meaning advantage, I’m asking, in letting (/making) the word “worth” do this conceptual work, have this second meaning?

 

[ArguCa]

@OP
"What is so good about Shakespeare?"

Simple, he was a european.