Regarding the quote from Richard III: “I say, without characters, fame lives long.”
There is a third, more generally accepted, interpretation of this line. 'Without certain aspects of personal character (thus being left with the sins of Vice and Iniquity) a person’s fame may last long. Being a veiled reference to the fact that if Richard himself were to harbor this lack of character(s) and get rid of the prince, then he/his fame would live long.
You know what annoys me about this article? It’s that Cecil suggests ‘holing up with a good critical edition of King Lear–you might as well get Shakespeare with both barrels’. Surely, the best way to ‘getting’ Shakespeare is to experience how it was meant to be experienced - in a theatre (or other performance space), performed by competent actors directed by a good director?
But then I’m one of those people who grokked Shakespeare from the start (plus I’m an actor, so I’m biased). I’ve always thought that a major reason why people find Shakespeare ‘hard’ is that they’ve been told it’s hard. Good critical editions of the plays are important to overcome certain historical differences and to explain the more obscure references, but it’s still in English. If more beginners approached Shakespeare from this point of view, instead of assuming it’s all in some impossible to understand language, I believe they’d find it a lot easier.
OB
Also, in case you hadn’t realised. It’s this article:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/051014.html
OB
Gotta agree with you , OB, but I’d go further and add “…or even semi-competent actors and an half-assed director.” Shakespeare wasn’t MEANT to be read - the literacy rates back then probably were about as low as you can go - but EVERYONE (who physically could) could listen, and hear the meaning. Plus actors tend to bring the word’s to life.
I never have, and still don’t, get Shakespeare. I’ve read Othello, Julius Caesar, and Romeo and Juliet. I tried to watch Titus once, but I was so confused by halfway through the movie that I just turned it off – it didn’t make sense.
I fail to see Richard’s “pun” or “wordplay” that Cecil mentions. Maybe I’m reading it wrong.
I can see how the plots and characters are interesting, but otherwise, I don’t see what the big deal is. The writing is way too flowery for my taste. Cecil didn’t really do much to convince me that it’s worth reading.
Adam
I was certainly a “dolt” about shakespeare, never really got it, until I saw Midsummer nights dream performed live. Now, as a fan of the Simpsons, Family Guy and earlier the Naked Gun/Airplane type movies, it was surprising to find I laughed every bit as hard during the ridiculous “play in a play” scene as I did during any modern entertainment, which really did it for me. Since then Ive seen the Taming of the Shrew, the Tempest, and Romeo and Juliet, and on film Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and Much Ado about Nothing. Most people today wouldnt find a script for the Simpsons anywhere near as funny as the show itself, particularly with all the storyboard/stage direction to distract, so I agree seeing them performed is vastly more effective, and shows the incredible ingenuity of a man who wrote plays 400 years ago.
Hey everyone, Cecil went to Northwestern University! The clue is from his mention of Professor Berger Evans in today’s Shakespeare column.
From http://www.library.northwestern.edu/archives/findingaids/bergen_evans.pdf (Warning: PDF!):
I agree completely. My Shakespeare epiphany happen around my sophomore year in college, when I realized how well the plays spoke to human experience. But, reading them alone doesn’t really give you the true experience. I know I used to read them through so I could use all the footnotes to understand all the outdated references, then go over to the library where they had all the plays on audio tape and listen to them. It was amazing how much easier comprehension was when listening to the lines spoken.
-rainy
Yay! Cecil recommended King Lear! “You might as well get Shakespeare with both barrels.” Yeah, baby! King Lear has been my favorite Shakespeare since I saw Kurosawa’s movies Ran, and then went and read it.
You want Shakespeare with both barrels? How about Anthony Hopkins as Titus Andronicus? I’d give a lot to go back in time to witness his lead in the stage productions (i.e. that led to the 1999 movie).
So much of Shakespeare’s language has endured as colloquialisms…people go around quoting Shakespeare all the time without realizing it.
The plots of Shakespeare’s plays are not germane to this point. They’re not his anyway (I think the Merry Wives of Windsor is the only one that may be original.)
It’s what the guy does with the plots, the words he puts into the mouths of the characters. The metaphor and imagery can be dizzying, he overflowed with invention, nobody before or since has been such an absolute master of language.
Compare the early Elizabethan play King Leir with Shakespeare’s version of a few years later if you wish to see the difference genius makes. (It’s true that Tolstoy preferred the original, but then he was Russian!)
I also agree that watching a good production of a Shakespearean play (on stage or in a movie) is the best way to understand what the fuss is all about. I was a scoffer myself until I started going to see good plays. When performed well, his plays are obscene, tragic, hilarious, and beautiful, not necessarily in that order.
Our local best theater company, NC Stage Company, puts on a Shakespeare play or two every year. The company producer is big into using mummery and pantomime to bring out the bawdy aspects of the plays. It’s pretty fun: there’s all kinds of dirty puns there that I wouldn’t get otherwise.
Daniel
Dude! The guy makes **oral sex jokes **and we get to read them in high school! How cool is that? I giggled my ass off as my prim and proper English teacher blushed her way through Hamlet:
Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
(Sits down at Ophelia’s feet.)
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap?
Ophelia: Ay, my lord.
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?
Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet: That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.
Ophelia: What is, my lord?
Hamlet: Nothing.
Ophelia: You are merry, my lord.
Hamlet: Who, I?
Ophelia: Ay, my lord.
If you don’t get the Richard pun, you can at least get Hamlet’s, right? Probably not when read, but when well acted, “country” and “'cunt’ry” is pretty damn obvious. There’s another one hiding in there which has unfortunately been lost to time, and that’s that the pussy used to be called “nothing”. So he’s saying there’s good snatch between his ex-girlfriend’s legs AND he’s being coy. This is comic gold! And this in one of his most depressing plays!
But yeah - reading it to get the footnotes and then seeing it to get the language is probably the best was to “get” Shakespeare. The exception, I think, is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which my 12 year old just adores. I did give him a quick plot overview before he saw it, but there’s not so much esoteric Elizabethian-era in jokes there. He thinks it hilarious.
So many of Shakespeare’s plays, at least the Great Tragedies (which have the highest reputation), seem to hinge on people doing Really Dumb Things and lots of people dying as a result.
“I think my sweetie’s dead, so (without checking to make sure) I’ll kill myself.”
“I think my wife’s cheating on me, so (without any attempt to probe the matter calmly and rationally) I’ll kill her.”
“I have a daughter who isn’t sufficiently transparently sucking up to me the way my other daughters are, so I’ll disinherit her.”
These are kinda stupid plots, and they make me want to slap some sense into the characters (right after I get done telling the guy in the horror movie to not go down into the cellar alone, you idiot!). This is the kind of behavior that only makes sense if you’re overwhelmed with emotion (and, in some cases, hormones), and a good theatrical performance can make you believe that the characters are indeed overwhelmed by such emotion that their actions are actually believable.
There’s rather a lot more to be said than has been mentioned yet.
I. Shakespeare has a great poetic gift, it’s true. But he is also the first great master of character drawing. Not until Samuel Richardson opened the door to the modern novel was there anyone else to touch him. Hamlet, Falstaff, Lear, Kate, Beatrice, and hundreds of others are real people in a way that no writer of fiction or drama had ever achieved before, and few have achieved since.
II. He also has another trick. It is hard for a modern to appreciate without study, because Shakespeare’s language is four centuries old, but once one has mastered Early Modern English, his ability to write dialog in brilliant verse that nevertheless sounds as though the characters are making it up as they go along is stunning.
III. It is true that Shakespeare is sometimes unclear because he’s trying to communicate something that goes beyond words. But he often succeeds beyond hope.
…My dear lord!
Thou art one o’ the false ones.
– Cymbeline, III, vi
[T]here’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all:
– Hamlet, V, ii
Biron: Our wooing doth not end like an old play;
Jack hath not Jill: these ladies’ courtesy
Might well have made our sport a comedy.
Ferdinand: Come, sir, it wants a twelvemonth and a day,
And then 'twill end.
Biron: …That’s too long for a play.
– Love’s Labor’s Lost, V, ii
Titus: When will this fearful slumber have an end?
Marcus: Now, farewell, flattery: die, Andronicus;
Thou dost not slumber: see, thy two sons’ heads,
Thy warlike hand, thy mangled daughter here:
Thy other banish’d son, with this dear sight
Struck pale and bloodless; and thy brother, I,
Even like a stony image, cold and numb.
Ah, now no more will I control thy griefs:
Rend off thy silver hair, thy other hand
Gnawing with thy teeth; and be this dismal sight
The closing up of our most wretched eyes;
Now is a time to storm; why art thou still?
Titus: Ha, ha, ha!
Marcus: Why dost thou laugh? it fits not with this hour.
Titus: Why, I have not another tear to shed:
– Titus Andronicus, III, i
IV. The plot of The Tempest is generally believed to be original (though he took a great deal of the technical detail from accounts of a real contemporary shipwreck in Bermuda).
V. I strongly recommend Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare. Shakespeare was not deliberately trying to be obscure, or (most of the time) high-brow, but he did assume that people knew the kind of stuff that everybody knows (things like who the Simpsons are and why “Free AOL drinks coaster” is funny), and four hundred years have made great changes in that area. Asimov’s book is full of explanations.
You haven’t heard Shakespeare until you’ve heard it in the original Klingon…
You picked up on that too.
And since we know Evans retired in 1974, and Cecil said he took an intro class, that Cecil coouldn’t be any younger than the Class of '78, which would make him, at the youngest, about 49 years of age.
Now, we also know that Ed began editing Cecil’s column in 1978, after Cecil had eviscerated a couple of other editors.
I claim no link between those two facts.
I recall being taught that one of the main reasons for Shakespeare’s reputation as one of the greats of literature was not only because of his mastery of the language, but because of his mass appeal. His wordplay was able to appeal to both the society types and the teeming masses.
One of his tools was cunning use of puns and multiple meanings of words, many of which included alternate meanings that were quite ribald. Also, many of his play contained veiled topical references current events of the time that appealed to the masses, all done in flowery language that appealed to the sensibilities of the higher classes who likely pretended not to catch the baser references.
The very nature of these techniques, based in wordplay and dated references, also explains why you either need footnotes or and advanced degree in Victorian history and culture to understand Shakespeare completely.
Whether this makes the argument or refutes it, I will leave to others to decide. I merely wanted to add this information as it helped me understand Shakespeare more than anything else did.
Ha! And all these years I’ve been calling Bergen Evans the “proto-Cecil”, since I could see the same attitude and sensibility between The Master’s columns and Evans’ books On the Spoor of Spooks and A Natural History of Nonsense. And now it turns out there is a perfectly good reason for it!
Ha! I say. Vindication!
<SIGH/>
Couldn’t agree more.
I’ve performed quite a bit of Shakespeare over the years, and I think I do a fair job. But I’ve worked with some folks who have a real gift for making the dialogue as natural and comprehensible as today’s everyday speech. These talented individuals have helped many a Shakespeare novice feel right in tune with the action of the play, in a way that footnotes never can.
I was lucky enough to be one of those instant fans, but many of my classmates - intelligent people in their own right - gave up on the Bard very early on. I can’t help but think that the schoolboard treating “Romeo & Juliet” as a book instead of as a script had a lot to do with that.
thwartme