As a kid having to read Shakespeare what was lost on me, because of the language, was the language. Will worked hard to turn a phrase.
"Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once."
"Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them."
"It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
"The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream."
It really is mind blowing how deeply influential his oeuvre has become. For me, one of the most pleasurable parts of reading Shakespeare as an adult have been the umpteen “oooh, so that’s where that comes from” moments (which are totally lost on you when Hamlet is being rammed down your throat in the 11th grade).
I learned that this is actually a bit of a coincidence. English started to in effect be standardized by the publishing of the first English dictionaries shortly after Shakespeare (esp standardizing spelling - which even in Shakespeare is a bit all over the place)
Not totally sure how much that plays into it. Would be curious to hear from someone that knows more
In fairness, I think a lot of that is him writing in a vernacular English that wouldn't have been recorded much in official documents or other writings. So he probably didn't coin it so much as save it for posterity. Otherwise his plays would have been like those fantasy novels whether the author gets slightly too excited about using their made up words for everything.
I agree. There are plenty of words for which the earliest surviving example of it being used is in a work attributed to Shakespeare, but there is no reason to believe that Shakespeare was the first to use any of those words. People don't generally use a new word for the first time in a play or a poem, but published plays and poems is all we have by Shakespeare.
The first use of a new word tends to be in conversation (so the first use is not recorded) or in a non-fiction work, where the meaning of the new word can be explained. Or in fantasy novels, as MrJohz points out. (But what's the earliest example of the sort of fantasy novel that has invented words in it?)
Some (many?) words attributed to Shakespeare follow the ordinary processes for making new words in certain open categories in English, and so you could argue that anybody might make these words as a competent English user, grasping for this specific meaning, has available the tools to make this word for that meaning. This could happen completely independently, even many times. If you need "invulnerable" or "majestic" for example you don't require the services of some specialist word inventor to come up with them, you can just make those yourself since you're a competent user and there are rules.
But Shakespeare used them in a context which people remembered, so that's why it matters, and in the process Shakespeare gets to choose some parameters for these words which are not set by the rules such as their emotional valence - is this a good thing or a bad thing? The rules usually don't dictate that, but usage does and Shakespeare can set the trend.
Most of those words weren't coined by him, his writing was just the earliest source that the dictionary makers could find. He didn't invent the word 'elbow', for instance.
"As a kid having to read Shakespeare what was lost on me,…"
What age was that? I reckon most kids think Shakespeare is difficult at the beginning because of the language, and that brings me back to a point made in the article:
"For me, Richard II is the most dull of the Henriad plays."
I now think so too, but when I was studying the play it was the first one I'd encountered with a solid story to it, so it encouraged me to figure out the language so I could follow the plot by myself.
I was introduced to Shakespeare at age 12 and in that year we studied two plays, As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream and I was bored with both. The language wasn't difficult as our teacher explained everything well but I didn't find the stories interesting, they were a bit of a yawn really.
As I said that changed with Richard II and by then I was 14. Being older helped to understand nuances in the script but that was only part of it, the play simply had more substance to it which made it more interesting and worthy of study. Moreover, by then we had to first read the text without the teacher's help which would only come afterwards in class discussions.
Thus Richard II was the first play where Shakespeare actually made sense to me, it too was the first one where the language made sense without the teacher having to 'translate' every paragraph.
Putting Richard II behind me as an enjoyable experience rather than drudgery was important as it made me prepared for the great plays like Lear. That appreciation may not have happened if the order of introduction to the plays had been different.
It's hard to read the comedies. A lot of the humor is hidden in the way Shakespeare encoded his "stage directions" in the text. (The stage directions as we have them are almost never Shakespeare's own writing. They were added by later editors.)
An egregious example: the big gag in the play-within-a-play of Midsummer is that the "hole" in the wall is between the actor's legs. When they kiss, they're kissing his butt and his crotch. The text is really quite clear about it: "I kiss the wall's hole", "Thy stones with lime and hair".
It's not much to read, but in performance, it's incredibly obvious (and juvenile) humor. (So juvenile that a lot of productions do something else, and the whole scene falls flat.) Reading the footnotes is never going to make it funny to a reader.
The histories and tragedies are much more story-focused, and a lot easier to read. They're still better in performance, where the actors and director have done the "translation", and you can connect more viscerally to the moment.
Reading a play is an advanced skill, and I really wish English teachers wouldn't treat it as if it were readily accessible to high school students. You do have to start somewhere, but a complete, unedited comedy is starting at the summit of a mountain.
"It's hard to read the comedies. A lot of the humor is hidden in the way Shakespeare encoded his "stage directions" in the text."
Agreed, I didn't express what I said well. The comedies make much more sense to me now but are easily lost on 12-year-olds unless carefully introduced and explained well.
At my school it didn't help that anything likely to titillate the minds of 12-year-old boys was expurgated from the text (our school editions were first published in the 1940s/'50s or earlier and had been used by the school for decades so the editing had a sense of prudery about it). Of course that they were censored was never mentioned by the teachers but when I was about 15 I discovered the fact by accident after using one of my father's editions for homework. Not sure of the play now but it wasn't one of the comedies (I think it was Julius C.). This 'naughty' edition was a hit when I took it to school, the kids were rightly annoyed to see large chunks of text missing from their school editions. For example, any part with bastard in it was removed, and that was just for starters.
Had the comedies not been hacked about I'm sure they would have made more sense. Fortunately I don't think that nonsense goes on any longer.
"They're still better in performance, where the actors and director have done the "translation"."
Very true, every once in a while we had a troupe called The Young Shakespeare Players come to the school and perform everything from Lear to Julius Caesar to The Scottish play to the comedies and they performed them in ways that would bring out the best for school kids.
I suppose I'm sensitive to the way Shakespeare is introduced to schools because I'm a techie whose primary interests were technical and science subjects and I was only mediocre at English and languages school, so it would have been easy for me to end up among the group that found Shakespeare a drugery and that was so for some. Their attitude was the words didn't make sense so why bother studying it (the same went for poetry, I recall some kids just giving up on Eliott's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land). Fortunately, I caught the Shakespeare bug and I'm very glad I did.
Incidentally, we had a little textbook just called English Essays, it contained works by Addison, Steele, Bacon, Hazlitt, Lamb and so on. I just fell in love with many of these essays such as Old China,
A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig, On a Sundial, Sir Roger de Coverley and so on—I remember them as if it were yesterday. The language is so beautiful and eloquent yet they lose nothing for being very short. They were very formative, they brought great writing in small digestible amounts to kids like me who would normally prefer to be reading say Scientific American than novels like Thackeray's Vanity Fair, which I recall I struggled to get through. I cannot understand why these wonderful essays seem to have fallen out of favor with educators.
—
Edit: Re stage directions as we have them are almost never Shakespeare's own writing. I have a reprint collection of the earliest folio editions and they are a little too Spartan for me (they're harder to follow).
As a kid I hated reading Shakespeare because he's a playwright: His scripts are supposed to be seen, not read.
Taking certain lines out of context make for great memes, as you just demonstrated, but as a whole I simply didn't enjoy reading them and I promptly forgot it all after my schooling years.
I wonder how many of the classic Shakespeare lines were actually popular idioms of the time rather than novel creations.
I imagine if the works of only one contemporary cliche ridden author survived in 500 years time, they would appear to be a literary genius without the context that shows them to be mediocre.
If that were the case then we'd expect a similar level of wonderful lines in the works of his contemporaries, but he was very clearly a standout wordsmith even compared with other fine writers such as Marlowe, Middleton, Webster and Jonson etc.
It's not that his are the only works to have survived, they're simply the only ones we still speak of in regular conversation.
There's quite a lot of work on this kind of thing; any edition of Shakespeare with good notes will alert you where a line resembles something 'proverbial'. One thing you notice is that although he often alludes to proverbial sayings, he seldom includes them verbatim - more often, it is a glancing, passing suggestion of them, or he uses them with a twist, or as part of some more complex figure of speech he is developing.
edit: there's actually a great example in the article: "No man’s pie is freed from his ambitious finger".
I recently watch "Upstart Crow" which is full of jokes about this - a running gag is Shakespeare claiming he created all these phrases and another character citing exactly the date and author of an earlier reference. Well - it's funnier in execution than I just made it sound...
That was fun to read, even though I would disagree with much of the article. I generally like the comedies least, the OP likes them most, but it's nice to see people talk about Shakespeare in an article linked here. A couple of comments I would make:
* "People will think I’m crazy, but yes, I’m placing Henry IV above Henry V." I doubt many people would think you're crazy, the Henry IVs are generally considered better and for the reason mentioned: Falstaff.
* On performances of Richard III: "I liked two different performances for different reasons. The 1995 major film puts the play in the World Word II era. It’s solid and does well standing alone. The BBC production has linked casting with the three parts of Henry VI, which allows one to enjoy it in full in its broader context. It’s also well-performed, but obviously has less spectacle and a lower budget." -- you really need to watch the 1955 version for Laurence Olivier's performance.
Yeah, I also liked the idea but apparently have pretty different tastes. I was pretty surprised to see Pericles and Othello almost next to each other in the rankings. Pericles is... not at all good. There's this whole build-up of dramatic tension and then in a sudden, bizarre deus ex machina moment, the plot takes a hard turn when pirates appear out of nowhere and kidnap one of the main characters for no clear reason. One production I saw at least try to lampshade the absurdity by giving the pirates eyepatches and parrots, which almost made it tolerable.
Also, maybe unpopular, but I don't love the Branagh Hamlet. It feels pretty overwrought to me, and I like Helena Bonham Carter's Ophelia better than Kate Winslet's.
There have been some really good productions of the comedies, e.g. Emma Thompson's Much Ado About Nothing. But often as I have seen some of them over the years, the mistaken identities/gender swapping/etc. all sort of blend together for me past some point. (Case in point, when I looked up my example, I originally typed in As You Like It.) I definitely remember the tragedies as more distinct entities.
Somehow, Julie Taymor managed to make a masterpiece out of Titus. She embraces the fact that it's a horror story, and treats that horror in a fashion akin to Tarantino: awful and beautiful.
I would have sworn it was impossible, but she did it. And having done it, I don't feel like it ever needs to be done again.
That said, I've seen moderately successful attempts at other horror-inspired approaches: grand guignol, horror fun-house, even "Titus! The Musical".
Laurence Olivier is a great actor. I've enjoyed several of his films, including his Hamlet adaptation (which he also directed). I have yet to watch Richard III though.
It was my first encounter with Hamlet so I didn't have another frame of reference to judge the performance.
And I had already watched him in other movies such as Rebecca (I didn't like the movie except for the (some of the) end) so maybe I was used to his acting.
I remember the teacher talking up Romeo and Juliet and being fairly unimpressed. But when I read King Lear, I was electrified- that scene with the king ranging around in the field while the fool says smart things is really good IMHO. I saw the Scottish Play put on by my high school theater and it was also great.
Over time I've come to appreciate his fragments: "But soft! what light through yonder window breaks? Tis the east, and Juliet is the sun..."
It came as a big surprise after reading and parsing out whole plays that other kids in my class were just reading some short guide and talking like they understood it.
THe best movie version of the Tempest is Forbidden Planet, which can also just be viewed purely as science fiction.
I had a similar experience. Schools seem absolutely determined to force the most boring parts of Shakespeare on us, then years later when I was almost done with school I ran across Much Ado About Nothing - and that was a good one. I liked that one. That should have been one of the ones used to introduce us to him.
I had Much Ado as one of my first introductions, and I remember it being fun, but not really getting it at the time. I think everyone's first Shakespeare play is hard going, it's not until you get the rhythm of them and start seeing them live that they make more sense.
And Much Ado is a particularly mean one because so much of it is innuendo that you need a guide for, and there's nothing the kills jokes faster than a guide explaining them. I'd love to see a modern translation of Much Ado, but done with the aim of really translating joke for joke, replacing some of the puns that don't work any more with modern versions, making the double entendre a bit more modern, etc.
“Prosperos books” is a brilliant version of the Tempest. Forbidden Planet is a great movie in its own right, but at best “inspired by”. It uses a similar setup, but the story is entirely different.
Not trying to start any debate here with Shakespeare fans, just intend this as a supportive word for those of us who just don’t enjoy Shakespeare
- Voltaire declared Hamlet a ‘vulgar and barbarous play’ and that ‘one would take this work to be the fruit of the inspiration of a drunken savage’
- George Bernard Shaw: ’. “There is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare,” he said. “It would be positively a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.”
- Tolstoy: “I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: “King Lear,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Hamlet” and “Macbeth,” not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium, and doubted as to whether I was senseless in feeling works regarded as the summit of perfection by the whole of the civilized world to be trivial and positively bad, or whether the significance which this civilized world attributes to the works of Shakespeare was itself senseless.”
This Voltaire quote is misleading. He continues: “… one would imagine this piece to be the work of a drunken savage. But amidst all these vulgar irregularities, which to this day make the English drama so absurd and so barbarous, there are to be found in Hamlet, by a bizarrerie still greater, some sublime passages, worthy of the greatest genius. It seems as though nature had mingled in the brain of Shakespeare the greatest conceivable strength and grandeur with whatsoever witless vulgarity can devise that is lowest and most detestable.“
So while he is pointing out the crassness of the work, he does think it’s great. Voltaire was very interested in the English, and pointing out the contrast here was definitely coming more from curiosity or even admiration than from dislike.
Touché, thank you. Regardless I agree with Tolstoy in whole
George Orwell - a fan of Shakespeare - admits the following:
- "Tolstoy is right in saying that Lear is not a very good play, as a play. It is too drawn-out and has too many characters and sub-plots."
- "Shakespeare has a habit of thrusting uncalled-for general reflections into the mouths of his characters. This is a serious fault in a dramatist"
- "Of course, it is not because of the quality of his thought that Shakespeare has survived, and he might not even be remembered as a dramatist if he had not also been a poet."
>Tolstoy: ... "but having read one after the other, ..."
Do not read Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote plays, not books. Shakespeare should be watched, either on stage or on screen.
Reading a Shakespeare play is like deciding to listen to the Beatles by downloading MIDI files and playing them through software. Maybe you get the broad strokes of the song, and maybe you even like it, but you're not listening to the Beatles.
I never enjoyed Shakespeare UNTIL I started reading his plays, and now he’s one of my favorites.
The drama and stories in his work don’t do much for me, I view them more as a vehicle for his poetry (which is some of the greatest ever written). And I enjoy it more on the page than spoken by others.
I know there are at least some others out there like me! Nabokov cleverly said something along the lines of “with Shakespeare, the metaphor is the thing, not the play.”
I also see the plays as vehicles for the poetry; but like a lot of poetry, it's made to be spoken aloud. In particular, it should be spoken as if it were prose - the metre is in the words, and comes through on its own. It's clunky to speak it as lines of verse.
Indeed it should be spoken aloud (or at least 'aloud in your head'). But if it should be spoken as if it were prose, why do you think he took all the trouble to put it in to verse?
I'm neither a poet nor a playwright; I really don't know (but I'm glad he did).
Prosody - the musical, rhythmic quality of speech - is emphasised in verse. If a sentence runs over one-and-a-half lines, you can speak it as a normal sentence, with no pause after the first line and a pause in the middle of the second; the song-like quality will still come through, but it becomes easier for an audience to make sense of.
I think this applies to a lot of verse; not just Shakespeare's plays. If you read a sonnet like Ozymandias as a set of distinct lines, it sounds boring and stilted. If you speak it as a tale told by a traveller in a bar, it's much more engaging and exciting. The metre is carried by the words, they don't need help from the speaker.
Some of the best political speeches have that kind of song-like rhythm, although they aren't verse. I'm thinking of e.g. Churchill, or the Gettysburg Address.
Well, I sort of agree. A halting, too-strongly-pushed, stopping-at-the-end-of-every-line reading doesn't exactly let the lines sing. But there is an art to reciting iambic pentameter whereby it can attain the naturalness of speech while still retaining that underlying rhythm. When it's done well, you might not even realise they're doing it - until your ear is attuned enough to pick it up.
I really think this is a dying art, by the way. If you see a Shakespeare production, at least here in the UK, the actors older than about sixty are able to imbue the lines with that underpinning iambic rhythm; the younger actors don't know how or don't bother. For me, that means they don't really catch that song-like quality. I really think those older actors might be the last generation to properly know how to scan.
>Some of the best political speeches have that kind of song-like rhythm, although they aren't verse. I'm thinking of e.g. Churchill, or the Gettysburg Address.
Incidentally, somewhere I came across Arthur Quiller-Couch discussing this. He used as his example this speech of Edmund Burke, which he claimed achieved its power by means of hidden iambic pentameter:
>The calculation of profit in all such wars is false. On balancing the account of such wars, ten thousand hogsheads of sugar are purchased at ten thousand times their price. The blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.
He points out that three fragments are actually iambic lines:
>Are purchased at ten thousand times their price...
>Be shed but to redeem the blood of man...
>The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.
Of course, this was in a time when the audience's ear (though perhaps not conscious mind) would be better attuned to that rhythm.
Well, not really. The written play is the actual Work. Shakespeare put his soul into writing every word in it. They are his instructions, a script for eternity.
It's like saying don't ever read the source, just use the app!
I mean it's like reading Beethoven or Mozart's music sheet. Some people can appreciate its music just from reading that but most people can only know its geniuses when it's played.
Some of his music reviews were pretty good: Arnold Dolmetsch really was a revelation, and surviving recordings suggest that Joseph Joachim playing Bach really was like an attempt to scrape a nutmeg on a boot sole.
But Shaw strikes me a lot like Twitter. He spoke and wrote less because he had something to say than because he wanted people to hear how well he said things, and his reach increased because people enjoyed how well-put his remarks were and how stylishly he put down objections, rather than because of the quality of his opinions.
Sounds like a more eloquent version of modern stone throwing against popular books. Hang out on r/books and you soon read similar diatribes against Project Hail Mary, The Way of Kings, etc.
Dr. Johnson said Shakespeare's output could be obscene, shoddy, lack cohesion and moral instruction, and ignore the classical unities, but that "Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life."
a supportive word for those of us who just don’t enjoy Shakespeare
Speaking as another who loathed Shakespeare at school and worked against that beginning to understand him and eventually revere him, precisely because I (rightly) assumed I was wrong:
You have to frame the dissenters you quote in the context of overwhelming literary consensus that he's the greatest writer who ever lived.
It's not like there's a roughly equal opinion on both sides as to his being good or not.
If you don't enjoy Shakespeare it's absolutely ok, but be in no doubt: it's a you thing.
There is no objective true to claims such as "X is the greatest writer who ever lived". Even if you could objectively determine the best writer for a certain culture and context, there are countless other cultures and contexts. Is Shakespeare greater than Cervantes? Goethe? Dostoevsky? Who knows? Who cares?
The world is not only the anglo world. Other cultures have their own literary giants and you can bet that they value them more than they value Shakespeare.
When I have to force myself to enjoy something, I tend to wonder if the thing is really worth enjoying or if I am instead just trying to acquire a taste that I deem prestigious. To each their own.
When I have to force myself to enjoy something, I tend to wonder if the thing is really worth enjoying or if I am instead just trying to acquire a taste that I deem prestigious
Whereas I would consider myself rather arrogant to assume the general consensus of hundreds of years to be wrong just because I needed to put a little effort in to understand it and thereafter enjoy it.
While filmmaker Akira Kurosawa often adapted from Shakespeare ("Throne of Blood", "The Bad Sleep Well", "Ran"), his frequent collaborator Shinobu Hashimoto was rather lukewarm about his works. Shakespeare's ornate prose didn't resonate with him, nor did he feel that Kurosawa fittingly adapted them into medieval Japan, which lacked the historical weight of English monarchy.
Shakespeare and Tolkien are similar to me. If you ever say you did not like them, you have an army of defenders calling you names about your lack of education and literary maturity, you always get attacked for who you must be as a person. Read both, not impressed.
You had me with you until your final two words. I'm not a fan of Lord of the Rings either, but I can't say I'm "not impressed." It's clearly a work of genius, though it doesn't appeal to me personally. And I'll defend anyone's right to dislike Shakespeare, but if you're not impressed, you're not paying attention.
I had the opposite reaction when I was that age, but there really is no comparison between The Hobbit and LOTR. The former is a children's book, the latter just the opposite. That doesn't mean any given reader will like LOTR, of course, or that they're wrongheaded if they don't. But readers who give up on Tolkien just because they disliked The Hobbit may find they've shortchanged themselves.
It's produced by the Royal Shakespeare company and is comprised simply of some of the greatest shakeasperean actors (Judi Dench, Ian McKellan, David Suchet, Patrick Stewart) talking about different elements of how to act shakespare.
I recommend starting with Episode 8, "Exploring a character" if only to see David Suchet utterly outclass (the much more famous) Patrick Stewart in their portrayal of Shylock.
What an amazing series. My favorite bit has to be the Love's Labor's Lost bit at the top of ep. 3, followed by an excerpt from A Bit of Fry and Laurie that makes a joke at the expense of folks like John Barton that he's able to laugh along with.
There's so much about the language of Shakespeare that needs to be vocalized and heard to understand. It took me way too long to realize that not all of his iambic pentameter was "correct' rhythmically, and that those variances _meant_ something. Watching and hearing these actors work through their scenes (and sometimes having their work adjusted live!) was truly eye-opening as to how the language of Shakespeare, arcane though it is, was deliberate, purposeful and useful.
To add to this, I have a much deeper appreciation for all the works of Shakespeare I have seen performed rather than merely read. Even hearing certain soliloquies out loud makes them much more powerful and engaging.
I think Shakespeare is better if you suspend belief a bit in some plot machinations and enjoy the work as performed and written. It's not that you shouldn't analyze the work and think deeply on its themes, but I find that many approach Shakespeare as a philosopher first rather than as a playwright and poet.
> Romeo and Juliet ... A beautiful play, but I just don’t connect with its romantic core.
Anyone who has children understands that this play is 100% a tragedy and is in no way romantic. Two teenage idiots think they're in love and end up killing themselves stupidly to prove it. The adults are also doofuses. The play itself is brilliant, but horrifying.
They are in love. This is what makes it such a tragedy.
Romeo and Juliet are not idiots, they are clearly the most sensible persons in the play. And it is anachronisic to call them teenagers, since the idea of “teenage” as a stage between childhood and adulthood is a 20th century innovation. In the universe of the play, they are adults and of marrying age.
Apparently some teachers try to teach the play as a warning against young love - probably because they are afraid of students emulating the sex and suicide. But if you actually read the play, it is entirely on the side of the young lovers and condemns the parents and society. Radical, even today!
it can be both: clearly the feud is idiotic, but also the framing does go a little out of its way to show how their love is largely young infatuation. it's tragic through the interaction of multiple reasonable and unreasonable elements in all the characters.
>but also the framing does go a little out of its way to show how their love is largely young infatuation.
I'm not sure that Shakespeare really had a concept of beyond young infatuation like we have today, probably the best examples (where the couple still feels like they have anything to do with each other more intimate than running a household) would be Claudius and Gertrude and Macbeth and his wife, neither of which couple had so much to recommend them over Romeo and Juliet.
I'm not sure that Shakespeare really had a concept of beyond young infatuation like we have today
I'm not sure what you mean, but if you mean that he mostly thought of love as childish infatuation, you can see him exploring quite a variety of other types of love in the sonnets.
The love of Romeo and Juliet is certainly more mature than say Othello and Desdemona, or Hamlet and Ophelia, or Antony and Cleopatra. So I think “childish” is coming from prejudice, not from the play itself.
Btw the age of Romeo is never stated. Juliet is very young, but her parents are consistently depicted as much more childish and immature.
Nah - I think they're daft kids and Shakespeare is showing us that. The play begins with Romeo utterly in love with Rosaline - what's that for if not to show us not to take his feelings for Juliet too seriously
And Juliet's 13 - which was very young for marriage even at that time. Certainly not what would have been considered 'adult' then
> The play begins with Romeo utterly in love with Rosaline - what's that for if not to show us not to take his feelings for Juliet too seriously
Rosaline is a nun and therefore pure and unattainable. Shakespeare is lampooning the genre of “courtly love” where the poet is longing but the love never consummated. Romeos “heavy lightness”-poem is a satire of this genre.
This is contrasted with the love for Juliet which is real and physical. Notice how Romeos poetry becomes a lot better when he meets Juliet.
The complaints that Romeo and Juliets love is “not real” (because of physical desire and sex) is really an echo of the ideals of courtly love, which Shakespeare ridicules.
> And Juliet's 13 - which was very young for marriage even at that time. Certainly not what would have been considered 'adult' then
This is specifically adressed in the play. Juliet is consideret of appropriate age for marriage, and is already being set up with Paris before she meets Romeo.
Of course she is just a child by modern standards, but that is irrelevant for understanding a 400-year old play.
I was 13 or 14 and one day with nothing to watch on TV I turned on my local PBS station.
Henry V (1989) was on.
I saw some sort of medieval show and thought “knights and castles… cool”. I knew of Shakespeare but really hadn’t given it much thought. I lived in a rural area, not much of that around and I didn’t feel connected to any of that stuff.
The movie really grabbed me, I didn’t understand every word but I didn’t have to. I watched it over and over again. Shakespeare, felt real, and I thought if that did maybe a lot of the arts would?
I feel the same way about the 1996 version of Romeo & Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romeo_%2B_Juliet), which I guess you might call a modern reboot of the play. I thought it was fantastic, really made Shakespeare feel real to my teenage self. My high school English teacher at the time hated it though.
Whenever I see anyone talk about Shakespeare, I always go and see how they describe Romeo and Juliet. The author has little to say:
> Another classic reading assignment that requires no description. A beautiful play, but I just don’t connect with its romantic core.
I do this because so many completely miss the point of this play (as the author appears to). First and foremost, it's not a tale of romance but one of agency. It's one of the few plays that specifically mentions age. Juliet is 13 years old. That's not an accident. Shakespeare did this for a reason.
Some will argue it was just a different time. If so, you're seeing the play through the lens of it being a love story.
Juliet takes back her agency by choosing not to marry Paris, to marry Romeo and ultimately to end her life. Remember this was at a time where a queen (Elizabeth I) ruled in her own right rather than as an extension of her husband's divine right. Women at this time were largely extensions of their father's then their husband's autonomy.
So if you see this purely as a love story (involving a 13 year old no less) I can see you having issue with it or not connecting with it. But look a little deeper and you see Juliet as someone who asserts her autonomy as a person, ultimately to tragic consequences.
A well-known software consultant/writer once told me that his years-long hobby, with his wife, was to watch every film of every Shakespeare play. They were working their way through all the Hamlets, all the Macbeths, all the etc., in chronological sequence—indexed by (play, film date), not (film date, play). That's a lot of Hamlets.
Not sure what they were doing with the Shakespeare movies that got made since they started.
Measure for Measure is one of my favourites and I'm glad they enjoyed it so much. But it's much darker than they imply. The Duke is not necessarily 'soft hearted', more manipulative; and the ending where he informs Isabella he will marry her is not usually played as a happy ending anymore.
The play has the only Shakespearean comic scenes that are still remotely funny. Angelo's struggle with temptation is also fascinating.
Been teaching Shakespeare at the college level for a long time. At the end of the semester I like to ask them which play they'd cut from the syllabus next semester and which they'd insist on keeping for the next group.
Measure for Measure consistently tops the list of keepers year after year.
> The play has the only Shakespearean comic scenes that are still remotely funny.
This seems rather extreme. None of the other comedies make the grade? Not to mention comic scenes in the history plays (for example, pretty much any scene with Falstaff in Henry IV), and even in some of the tragedies (for example, Osric inviting Hamlet to duel with Laertes)?
I ‘studied’ Much Ado About Nothing in school (as the author wished for) but it was lost on me. Probably the issue is not normally the specific choice of play. But there are lots of things that are hard about Shakespeare in school, even ignoring the unfamiliar language. (A friend from another country said they studied some Shakespeare which had been translated into his language so didn’t sound so unfamiliar, but I can’t imagine something like that being done for english-speaking schools).
I feel like The Tempest is lower than I expected. I think it is often liked for not so easily fitting into one of the traditional genres. I feel like I see productions advertised reasonably frequently but I also did this at school so maybe I notice them more for that reason.
I think the OP has the same favourite play as fictional classics professor Jim Lloyd, which is interesting for some, I guess.
The comedies are so much better performed than on the page. I find the humor gets a bit lost in the archaic language, but a good cast is able to bring it for modern audiences.
If you have good enough performers, unfamiliarity with the language won't get in the way.
It might seem a bold assertion, but there's a reason that classically-trained Shakespearian actors are often cast in sci-fi shows (Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen as perhaps the most famous examples). They're trained to convey more information through intonation and gesture so that you don't need to know the words they're saying, which translates well to performances in invented languages.
I tend to agree (Alec Guinness being another great example), though I think it is also about how big a deal live Shakespeare was in Britain in the eras those actors came up. A lot of good British actors were in Hamlet because they were talented and of age.
It'd be extra convincing if there were more non-Brits with Shakespeare backgrounds that became big Sci Fi actors to point to. There are American Shakespeare companies or performances, but it's a much smaller deal.
ETA: another source of great sci-fi actors was Hammer Films, which produced Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Great American sci-fi actors come from more backgrounds because there's more acting jobs in America.
David Tennant (THE Doctor) is performing Macbeth at Donmar Warehouse in London this winter. One show basically ticks three boxes (actor, play, and theatre) for my wife and her Shakespeare fandom. So it's a 10 hour flight for us in December.
Maybe I just didn't encounter any such performance when I was less... to be perfectly honest, I don't think I've ever seen a Shakespearean stage play I've been able to fully follow, even though my English is OK nowadays.
I've always had to use captions and backtrack/pause.
I too "studied" Much Ado About Nothing in high school. It was basically an extended exercise in joke dissection as outside of some of Dogberry's lines no one in the class had the slightest clue what was supposed to be funny about it, and it went about as well as dissecting jokes usually does.
Great article. One thing that breaks my heart is that Shakespeare is taught in school by reading the plays. That's a sub-par way to consume the content. Students should watch the plays. Its the acting that brings out the brilliance of the content (and the content is truly brilliant).
Kenneth Branaugh performance of Henry V is my all time favorite. Watching Marlon Brando as Marc Anthony was also amazing. I still go back and watch his eulogy for Caesar on Youtube every so often.
Aside: Dear HN reader, if you are somewhat curious about 'getting into' Shakespeare, I thoroughly recommend it.
During the pandemic, I managed to get into him. It took me ~2 years of reading him, getting used to meter, the phrasing, the ideas, the structure. Yes, ~2 years of ~30 minutes/day on weekdays. About 250 hours total, give or take.
Dear Reader, it is totally worth it.
The depths of English that you reach are just amazing. The feelings and thoughts, so well said. The simple and yet universal themes, the characters, the actors that do him such justice and some that do such injustice, the theater of it all. It is a truly enriching experience for your life. It's tough, no doubt, but my oh my, dear Reader, it is worth it.
Timon of Athens is much better if you view it as a black comedy.
One of the best compliments I ever received was an audience member who said, "Why don't they do this play more often?" Well, it really sucks if you take it seriously.
> Like many collections, they omit The Two Noble Kinsmen due to unclear authorship, and for this reason I’m omitting it from my list as well.
> Also, around 20% of plays credited to Shakespeare were collaborations of some degree, though the collaboration details have been long lost.
Isn't it accepted that The Two Noble Kinsmen was a collaboration?
EDIT:
> [On Hamlet] You’d be hard-pressed to find something that beats the faithful, star-studded 1996 major film adaption.
Personally, I liked the (less faithful) 1948 film.
EDIT2:
I also found it amusing that the play he liked the best is the only Shakespeare play I've actually acted in (before his favorite adaptation came out).
Several are confirmed collaborations, including Pericles and Henry VIII (and 1 Henry VI is almost certainly).
The exclusion of 2NK is a bit arbitrary but you draw the line somewhere. I also excluded it from my quest to do every play.
In the end I did it as a Zoom production, which kinda half counts, as is appropriate. It was actually a good deal better than I expected. I found some very good writing, and the plot was easier to clean up than, say, Two Gents or All's Well.
Shakespeare remains a great example of the network effect in art. His works on their own are good, but not necessarily better than all other options in isolation. However, for various reasons Shakespeare became incredibly famous/popular and so many subsequent works reference Shakespearean works. Now it’s impossible to avoid Shakespeare if you want to fully understand a huge swath of English literature. Meaning people will keep putting on Shakespeare, and and others will continue creating derivative works, continuing the popularity.
If you want an idea of what the plays sounded like at the time they were written, check out the work by David Crystal in his efforts to reconstruct Original Pronunciation (OP). There are YouTube videos of him and his son (Ben Crystal) talking about this and giving sample readings.
They can do this by several methods. You can compare rhymes in the works -- e.g. loved and proved rhymed. You can study what people at the time documenting pronunciation wrote. You can compare existing accents to uncover ways in which pronunciations of words have evolved and diverged. You can apply and reverse sound changes in the words, such as reversing effects of the Great Vowel Shift.
Doing this gives some interesting puns and plays on words that are not readily apparent when reading the plays with modern accents.
The OP accent has elements from other accents, as those have retained some of the historic qualities. For example, OP is a rhotic accent (the Rs are pronounced) which is a feature that is present in several modern accents like Scottish, American, and parts of England.
This is a surprising ranking. I haven't read or seen every play yet, but I've seen or read a majority. The Tempest is one of my favorites! The '79 Trevor Nunn/RSC Macbeth with Judi Dench and Ian McKellen is incredible!
I'd have liked more detail from the OP about all the versions watched, and also which of the plays he'd read.
> Like many of you, I had assigned reading for several Shakespeare plays in high school. I loathed these assignments. I wasn’t interested at the time, nor was I mature enough to appreciate the writing. Even revisiting as an adult, the conventional selection — Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, etc. — are not highly ranked on my list. For the next couple of decades I thought that Shakespeare just wasn’t for me.
I feel this. I think trying to teach these things to immature teenagers is a real disservice and forms a lifelong disdain for many of the great works. I was in my late 30s before I tried Shakespeare, Old Man and the Sea, The Count of Monte Cristo, etc. again. I loved them, but I easily could have never touched them again after the hatred I developed during high school.
We found a local group that does Shakespeare in the park every summer. When our son was about 12, we took him to a couple shows including A Midsummer Night's Dream which he had acted out in class that year.
Seeing it on stage, with actors who know what they are doing, made Shakespeare "click" for him and really for me too. We've probably seen about 10 different performances by now and all of us actually look forward to the next one.
I highly recommend it for anyone who thinks they don't like Shakespeare but is open-minded enough to give it a shot again.
As a kid, I saw the Peter Brook production of AMND at Stratford. It bowled me over. I never saw another Shakespeare production so powerful.
I was privileged to go to a school that did regular Shakespeare productions (with kids acting all parts, and doing stuff like lighting). The head of English was a good stage director. They did Lear, Henry IV 1&2, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Merchant, 12th Night.
I must say, I've never found a screen production of Shakespeare as gripping as these stage productions featuring my own schoolmates.
Doing Shakespeare readings in class is absolutely the wrong way to do it. It just kills it; no wonder so many kids these days hate Shakespeare.
> More interesting is the historical context behind the play. It’s based loosely on events around the founding of Jamestown, Virginia.
The character of Stephano, is likely based after one of my ancestors, Stephen Hopkins, who led a failed mutiny at Jamestown. Shakespeare wrote the Tempest after reading news and hearing about the Jamestown incident. Interestingly, after Jamestown Stephen Hopkins returned to England and then made the trip a second time, this time on the Mayflower, where he was at the first Thanksgiving.
I can't agree with the description of Macbeth "dropping the ball with the porter scene". It's a darkly hilarious release of the tension in the previous scene. Macbeth is losing his mind in guilt, and then suddenly you're in a comedic relief scene, with a hungover drunkard cracking jokes about whiskey dick.
His initial monologue has perhaps not aged as gracefully, but the humor in this hungover buffoon incorporating the knocking at the gate he's supposed to be tending can be funny enough in its own right.
You're absolutely right. The comedic relief scene is almost necessary to avoid us being stretched too taut after the previous. Thomas de Quincey has a great piece reflecting on the very same: http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/macbeth/knockingatga...
My shrink pointed out in a conversation once as a tangent that Hamlet was not-so-subtly a psychoanalytic masterpiece: Hamlet watches his uncle carry out the Oedipal fantasy of killing his father and marrying his mother, and is haunted by a "ghost" to take action. It is not Shakespeare's only play to feature historical fiction or political machination by a long shot, so one should probe for other reasons to explain why it's proved so enduringly popular.
Hamlet has all the best lines, but by god do you have to slog through so much of the play to get to them, including Ophelia's endless wailing. I've seen it half-a-dozen times and it is never ever not a slog in some way, not with Andrew Scott, nor with Benedict Cumberbatch or Paapa Essiedu.
It's just a bloody long play, or feels like it, and I imagine in Shakespeare's day, audiences wandered in and out of the auditorium casually to stretch and top up on booze + vittles whereas now you're fused into the seat on arrival and too stiff to get out at the interval without a winch.
I’ve had a director argue pretty convincingly that Hamlet is a “built your own adventure” play where you’re supposed to select some scenes and remove others, and that it may have arisen from multiple revisions.
I'm sure it's considered problematic now for various reasons (maybe it always was), but Polanski's Macbeth still holds up for me. Jon Finch (Macbeth) and Terence Bayler (Macduff) were great.
This is great, thanks. For anyone who might take a recommendation, the 1993 "Much Ado" is, indeed, excellent. It's a play filled with joie de vivre and the movie reflects that. Featuring an unexpected Don John. Then the 2012 Much Ado is one of the better things Joss Whedon did.
Whedon's much ado is what got me interested in shakespeare as an adult. I liked how it let the funny parts still be funny but the dramatic parts were allowed to be serious and not played for a laugh.
Attn music lovers: if you're bored by Shakespeare like I am, try some opera adaptions. Often it's a richer and more rewarding experience. Verdi did some. Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi is based on Will's sources and is much better than his play.
I hardly ever hear anyone talk about these history plays but some of them really are incredibly good as that review indicates. Maybe seeing a production rather than just reading them on the page helps (this version was also shortened but honestly it was so good that I suspect if they'd just performed the entire thing I would have still loved it).
I bought a copy of Hamlet with copious footnotes a year ago, and I really enjoyed reading it - but I found the language too taxing for leisure reading. I'd return to my work and find my mental energy had been drained!
I can certainly see the value of reading Shakespeare, but I'd almost need a long vacation to devote to picking up the language.
It makes me wonder how much of my school years I wasted, because I probably could have mastered Shakespeare at the time and still have that tool in my toolbelt today.
Shakespeare may be the closest writing to the Bible that I have read.
There's a bunch of great depth in history in commentary.
I've read half of his works. I would not know how to rank them. I have done textual analysis of them.
I would venture to say that if you do not like reading them, they are actually plays, and they should be seen on the stage. It feels in a lot of the gaps.
I did my best to quote Shakespeare or his idioms in every corporate meeting. People have begun to catch on.
Simon Russell Beale's Falstaff was superb IMO. Hiddleston as a good Hal. Jeremy Irons was, well, Jeremy Irons
I rather enjoyed the first four. the latter three with Benedict Cumberbatch as Richard III were rather weak. Especially when you look at Olivier's film.
I've read all the plays, but haven't seen many of them performed. My ranking would be different than his, but that's just how these types of things go. I appreciate the effort.
There are a fair few that were made into movies in the 60s and 70s that are definitely worth a watch. I saw Taming of the Shrew for the first time in a long time and caught some hysterical jokes that I completely missed as a kid.
