It is better to say things out loud than keep them inside

[esmenet]

I am in no way an expert on Shakespeare. I have watched perhaps five of his plays, and read another one or two. I have read an excellent book on them (which, sadly, I cannot at present recall the title of). But here is my opinion, which I for some reason feel the need to share.

I don't think they deserve all the acclaim they have been given.

Not half of it. They are not bad, aside from the standard issues (sexism, racism, ableism, etc) of the period; they are well-phrased, though by no means as well as any number of things I could link you to given half an hour's notice; they are fairly entertaining, but not overly so.

They do not move me as I must assume -- given the amount of passionate discussion I have seen -- they move other people. Not as  春雨 or Adonai or The Journey West or they shall have stars at elbow and foot  or Orhan Pamuk's books do. Perhaps this is because I am so used to novels and the closeness they give to the story and the character; plays are more distant, and I am still unused to that. Perhaps this is because I am so thoroughly modern and not good at dealing with things that aren't. Maybe I'm so jaded I just can't care very much about stories written for white men. Maybe I'm just not a fan.

I do not mean to diminish them. They are great stories; I simply do not think they are terribly good ones. And that's fine. Things don't have to be very good to be great! Look at Harry Potter. Look at Star Wars. Shakespeare's work has had such a huge effect on English -- and by extent Western -- literature and language and popular culture that you can't turn around without running into it. All the world's a stage, is this a knife I see before me, there are more things in heaven and earth. Its greatness is not in the works itself so much as the mark they have left upon the world, all the quotes and references and books written about them.

Like so many other things, I think the true grace of Shakespeare's plays is in their fandom.


(Linkspam thursdays will return eventually. Really.)

Comments

[quadruplify.livejournal.com]

I completely agree; even after having taken a class on Shakespeare in high school, I simply could not "get into" his work, and it's not something I'd read willingly. I think, for me, it's a combination of being ~modern~ (as you said), the fact that his language and turns of phrases hardly thrill me (perhaps because a lot of them have become so overused as to become trite), the fact that I prefer my "great" stories to actually be good (without so much caring for their impact in the world), and that I'm just averse to hype in general. Which, taken together, is probably sufficient evidence that the presentation of Shakespeare as offering forth universal/timeless truths is rather bogus, because how we view the world and ourselves changes over time, and event though there are constant themes in literature, there is so much variation in how they are presented and portrayed between historical periods, and between individual authors, that the process of canonizing "great books" must become inherently problematic. I'm tired of the lionization of Shakespeare -- I'm more interested in learning about in what ways his "timeless truths" don't hold up in the modern era.

OT, but if I wanted to start reading Orhan Pamuk, where should I begin? Even though I already have too many books on my to-read list already. -_-;

[ojuzu.livejournal.com]

It's occurred to me that even though I hype him up so much, I still haven't actually finished any of his books. :D But you should probably start with Other Colors, which is a collection of essays about everything from seaside trips with his daughter to his opinions on literature to his own writing. There's a lovely, lovely discussion of reading in the first essay -- even if you don't read this book first, you should definitely read it.

Or possibly My Name Is Red, which has one of the best opening lines I've ever seen and is about miniaturists in fifteenth-century Istanbul. I haven't read more than a chapter or so, though, in an attempt to finish the books I've already started, so my opinion is perhaps not the greatest. ;)

[quadruplify.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the recs! I'll, uh, get around to them eventually. ^_^;

[childings.livejournal.com]

I'm more interested in learning about in what ways his "timeless truths" don't hold up in the modern era.

I'm having a hard time understanding how anyone could argue that there are constant "truths" in Shakespeare given that his plays are products of the times in which they were made. I guess there are a few things that you could consider relevant to our times, but for the most part, no. I guess that's one of the reasons why I always get irritated when people try to make Shakespeare more "relevant" when adapting it for the stage (by doing stupid stuff like changing costumes or whatever -- like this production of Julius Caesar my sister saw where Caesar was actually a United States president assassinated in a motorcade or something).

Probably the most annoying thing about Shakespeare is how much it dominates high school curricula when students would probably be better served by reading other plays. Even something like The Crucible seems like a better choice than Romeo and Juliet (okay, The Crucible isn't bad, I guess I just put it that way because it's by a white male author... but it invites discussion of how drama can be used as allegory to make a political statement)

[quadruplify.livejournal.com]

I'm having a hard time understanding how anyone could argue that there are constant "truths" in Shakespeare given that his plays are products of the times in which they were made.

I'm not disagreeing with you here, but I think a lot of people hype up Shakespeare so much because of his supposed universality, when as you said, it's really not the case.

And yeah, I agree with you about being annoyed by trying to "modernize" Shakespeare, though I certainly think it's possible, like the film adaptation of Richard III with Ian McKellen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_III_%281995_film%29).

Even something like The Crucible seems like a better choice than Romeo and Juliet

I've never read The Crucible, but I completely agree with this.