I think it would be fair to say that the average man on the street these days would not understand the language of a Shakespeare play. Shakespeare certainly has a reputation as the bane of every schoolchild’s life. I myself tried–really, honestly tried my best–to watch and understand last year’s BBC production Hamlet, but turned it off about half-way through because the only thing I’d understood by that point was “the old king is a ghost”.
But back when the plays were first performed, did your average peasant understand what was going on? It must have been slightly easier for them than us, because they didn’t have to struggle with any obsolete vocabulary, but were they able to decipher the flowery poetry, metaphors and words that Shakespeare just invented?
I’m aware that Shakespeare’s plays were popular with all classes of society. But that doesn’t really answer my question, because these same people would also have gone to church every Sunday and listened to sermons in Latin, which no-one but the highly educated would have understood.
(PS I wasn’t sure if this question should go in GQ or CS. Mods please move it if necessary.)
Latin wouldn’t have been used in the Church sermons in Shakespeare’s time. One of the changes instituted by the Anglican Reformation was that services were to be conducted in the vernacular, as set out in Article XXIV of the Articles of Religion:
Of course, a knowledge of Latin would still be considered essential for the clergy and educated gentlemen of the time, but it wouldn’t have been used for sermons.
I was under the impression that Shakespeare was popular art for the masses. The equivalent of 24, American Pie, Transformers. I’m sure that was what I was taught at school, anyway; and that its target audience was precisely those poor masses you mention.
That’s why most of the jokes are there. Will had to keep the groundlings entertained as well as the nobs. Just because some few people today can’t understand the language of Shakespeare doesn’t mean his butcher couldn’t.
I’ve never had a problem with it, myself. But then, I grew up reading and watching the plays from a very early age.
Off-topic, why on earth would you start with angsty Hamlet? Please try Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Much Ado about Nothing. I’m sure that’s what the common folks liked - comedy and sexuality and young people being silly.
Er…I am not calling you common, just FTR!
Actually, the work of Shakespeare (the comedies, at least) is probably closer to Arrested Development. Seriously, you can find nearly every Shakespearean theme in Arrested Development; mistaken identities, compulsively clever word play, subtle and not so subtle allusions to current references, early setup of later jokes, self-referential and play-within-play plotting, et cetera. With only a very modest amount of mental gymnastics you can also find many of the themes or plot elements of the tragedies (Hamlet, Lear, MacBeth…enough for at least two or three semesters full of comparison/contrast essays).
Shakespeare did write some more high brow work, particularly in the historicals (which assume at least a certain level of literacy and the then-current knowledge of historical events) but the non-“problem play” comedies are almost universally accessible. The modest changes in the use of language may seem to be a barrier, but you’ll actually find very few words that are actually not in modern parlance, and a brief review of annotations provides enough context to understand the jokes. There is certainly little highbrow about The Merry Wives of Windsor, which is why Falstaff fits in so well despite being chronologically out of place.
The biggest difficulty in accessing Shakespeare by a modern audience is understanding the cultural allusions, and the placement in historical context. However, plays like As You Like It or Love’s Labor’s Lost are readily translated into modern contexts (and often filched from shamelessly without attribution for romantic comedies) and Much Ado About Nothing is so lightweight the plot could be plopped into any era without significant modification.
If you don’t enjoy wordplay then Shakespeare probably isn’t your metiér, as the twisting of words is his bread and butter, as self-delusion is for Eugene O’Neill or sublimated family drama is for Checkov. Maybe it just isn’t your thing, but there is nothing in most of Shakespeare that can’t be grasped by anyone with an eighth grade education…which is not to say that there aren’t themes complex enough to confound scholars and enthusiasts for centuries.
Of course they did. If you’re a commercial playwright, you don’t write stuff that’s going to go completely over your audience’s head. (Well, maybe you do if you’re Ben Jonson and you just can’t resist showing off your erudition, but among early modern dramatists, he’s the exception, not the rule.)
Bear in mind that early modern England was an intensely oral culture – people were used to listening to hour-long sermons every Sunday in church, for example, which meant being able to take in complex sentence structure and arguments, rooted in a dense network of Biblical allusions, without getting lost. (Some examples here, if you’re curious.) They were skilled listeners. If they had any education at all (and most men of the middle classes did), they would also have been familiar with classical mythology, and perhaps more importantly, with classical rhetoric. They would have been used to long strings of appositives, heavy use of antithesis, and flexible syntax, which tend to be the elements that trip modern-day readers up.
(Also, Shakespeare isn’t really that difficult, especially when you’ve got good actors to help you along. The real barrier for most modern-day students, in my experience, is anxiety. They think it’s going to be hard to understand, so it is.)
Part of the problem is that for the last 200 years or so (at least), Shakespeare’s plays were viewed exclusively as a highbrow entertainment for the educated cultural elites only. And that’s the way most people are exposed to it - dry and sucked of all life. In school I was actually taught that comedy didn’t mean the same thing it meant today, but was merely meant to distinguish from tragedies. This is total horseshit.
Seeing some of his plays performed by good actors who understand the material will change your perspective on Shakespeare, permanently. The comedies are full of bawdy jokes that lowest brow of the audience no doubt got, and even the dramas and histories are quite watchable if done right.
With actors speaking fast and the old fashioned grammar and vocabulary, The Bard can be tough to understand, if you’re not used to the plays. Not to mention the historical/cultural references that our obscure today. But your average Elizabethan would not have that trouble, assuming he was from the area. Keep in mind that accents were much more diverse back then, so someone from another area of England might struggle more than you or I do today.
Reading at least gives you the chance to slow things down (although it’s less entertaining and might not hold your interest).
If you couldn’t understand Shakespeare, that’s probably a sign that the performance you were watching wasn’t very good. Well-performed Shakespeare is quite accessible to the modern masses.
No, it’s true: “comedy” just means that the play has a happy ending, and does not necessarily imply that it’s funny. Certainly, The Tempest or Measure for Measure would not be classified as “comedies” if they were made today. But that doesn’t change the fact that most of Shakespeare’s comedies, and in fact many of his tragedies as well, are hilarious.
Hamlet, one of the bloodiest if not grimmest of the tragedies (that honor probably belongs to King Lear) is full of humor, some of it in absurdist fashion. Hamlet’s reluctance to kill Cladius during his toliet prayer for fear of sending him to heaven is the height of the titular character’s complete ineptitude; he plays like all three Stooges rolled into a single character, who has the unfortunate (and mostly unintended) effect of getting nearly every other significant character in the story killed, other than friend Horatio and rival young Fortinbras
I don’t think I’d go as far as saying he’s like the Stooges, but there are plenty of funny lines in Hamlet. I think “A little more than kin and less than kind” is funny, and there’s a line where Hamlet refers to Claudius and Gertrude as “my uncle-father and aunt-mother.” It’s the humor of a guy who’s angry and depressed, and it’s funny stuff.
