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Should we bother with Shakespeare these days?
emnmnme
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
It's been a few months since the last thread like this. Let's see if opinions have changed.
Back in high school, we read a Shakespeare play each year. My four were Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar with a few sonnets peppered here and there for good measure. I'm assuming everyone else posting here had a similar high school workload. I didn't enjoy it; it usually felt like we were going through the motions with each play. When I went to college, required readings were better. The Sound and the Fury, The Wasteland, In Cold Blood, a buncha Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller plays for a contemporary American lit class.
The question is is it a good idea to recommend Shakespeare for a syllabus these days? With all the obscure references and outdated vocabularies, is his work still relevant when there are so many other options for a class to go over? I've always had the opinion that we go over the Shakespeare stuff in high school because it's tradition. The book publishers have worked out a good annual routine with the material and the parents are happy because their kids are reading the classics. I don't think the students give a flip about it one way or the other, though.
Is it wrong to cut Shakespeare out of schools? I say no, it would free up some time for contemporary books.
Back in high school, we read a Shakespeare play each year. My four were Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar with a few sonnets peppered here and there for good measure. I'm assuming everyone else posting here had a similar high school workload. I didn't enjoy it; it usually felt like we were going through the motions with each play. When I went to college, required readings were better. The Sound and the Fury, The Wasteland, In Cold Blood, a buncha Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller plays for a contemporary American lit class.
The question is is it a good idea to recommend Shakespeare for a syllabus these days? With all the obscure references and outdated vocabularies, is his work still relevant when there are so many other options for a class to go over? I've always had the opinion that we go over the Shakespeare stuff in high school because it's tradition. The book publishers have worked out a good annual routine with the material and the parents are happy because their kids are reading the classics. I don't think the students give a flip about it one way or the other, though.
Is it wrong to cut Shakespeare out of schools? I say no, it would free up some time for contemporary books.
emnmnme on
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if the only plays you were exposed to were shakespeare, though, that I would say isn't ideal.
Are you serious?
Really?
Everyone should read "Hamlet" and "Merchant of Venice" or any other work of Shakespeare.
All these contemporary authors learned from Shakespeare. It's the root of most literature.
Also, The Sound and The Fury's title (redundant, I know) was taken from Macbeth.
A most recent example would be Dashell Hammett. He's not a terrific writer but if you're going to study dectective books or film noir you pretty much gotta read him to get it.
You mentioned Eliot. Would Eliot have the same impact if you didn't understand (or even sense) the allusions he makes to the authors like Shakespeare before him? Literature, in my estimation, is just as much about looking back at the past as it is criticizing the present and predicting the future. Certainly at this point a lot of people talk about Shakespeare in that 'O,O,O,O, That Shakespearean Rag' sense, but certainly we cannot simply forget about an author who is almost undoubtedly the biggest influence on the formation of the English language?
His works are also a lot more interesting if the teacher can actually cover the texts in a half-decent way.
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If I remember correctly, the word stealth did not exist before Shakespeare.
Shakespeare can be rewarding and interesting if taught well, which makes it pretty much like everything else
Actually, that's a good point. He's really the 17th century version of Michael Bay.
Man what a fucking ocean of over analysis, and I consider myself a pretentious English major
There are earlier instances of 'stealth' but it seems he coined the "intelligent thief" definition of the word. He coined "assassin" as well (or appropriated it from latin), as well. Also, like, 1700 other words including "puking."
you lie!
everyone should see them preformed on a stage.
reading them is far less important.
King Lear.
So yeah. Let's bother.
No watch Mel Gibsons for the subtle hatred of jewish people prevelant. Whatever you do avoid high school performances of Shakespere, over acting is only the beginning of the problem.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Don't start this argument, please. Performing them on the stage requires us to not only see the play through Shakespeare's words, but the bias of the producer. I am all for people watching the actual plays, but Shakespeare was so open on the point of stage productions that you should form your own opinion on the pieces first.
And yes, you study Shakespeare in school because he is the basis of most modern English drama and literature. If you want to learn about modern horror, you should start with Poe. (Or, hell, detective drama.) Same deal here.
I still hate Romeo and Juliet though.
pleasepaypreacher.net
This is because your high school English teacher sucked at teaching Shakespeare.
Take a university-level course on Shakes taught by an expert Shakespearean and you will have an entirely different experience.
Shakespeare's vocabulary is much easier than people make it out to be. Half of the difficulty lies in the fragmentation of the reading experience as people go from footnote to text to footnote to text. If you read through the page and then read the footnotes afterward, it's quite easy to see what's being said. Not only that, but Shakespeare's use of language is brilliant because of the unusual ways he uses words.
The only truly hard part is the wholly cultural stuff - humour, for example. But that's why the tragedies are far more widely read than the comedies.
As for whether it's relevant - the reason Shakespeare is one of the most widely read and translated authors in the history of literature, the reason Hamlet has significantly more material written about it than the Bible, is because he deals with universally human issues. That's the whole point. Hamlet is no less relevant to you than it was to the people watching it when it was first produced. The only barriers are linguistic and cultural, and for many of his plays the cultural barrier is not very large.
With all I said above in mind, Shakespeare isn't for everyone, because it is literature that requires an investment of effort and mental energy beyond the norm, even more so than a contemporary "literary" piece of fiction. Some people just aren't interested in doing that kind of work; they aren't interested in the use of language, or in the historical element, or even in the standard literary aspect. There's nothing wrong with that.
But what is an English class in high school for? It's meant to expose you to literature. Studying contemporary books is all fine and good, but there's a monolithic history of English literature behind that, intimately linked with contemporary stuff, and Shakespeare is the guy who straddles that history and has one of the most enormous influences. I think everybody should read Shakespeare, because he's a vital part of western intellectual culture.
I may be biased because I can't stand Shakespeare.
I don't think high school literature classes should be limited to works originally written in English.
Things like the Epic of Gilgamesh actually have a negligible impact on contemporary American literature. It's not like the work of Homer, in which you can discern a clear chain of influence from ancient Greece to the present day. The Epic of Gilgamesh was lost to English writers for far too much of history to be that important to an English literature education. Even Beowulf, which is written in Old English, arguably has less influence than the Greeks (and, by extension, Shakespeare, because Shakespeare in many ways exemplified Greek-style drama in English).
There is so much sexual/hilarious stuff in shakespeare that gets totally overlooked in english class because it isn't "proper".
It's pretty dry stuff to be honest, and being forced to slog through it in high-school is probably what turns most people off him, or off literature in general.
and you probably put a playwriter from Elizabethan England a little too far up on his pedestal.
Just sayin'.