Oh yes, when I was in school we had Julius Caesar, MacBeth, and Romeo and Juliet. Heavy tragedy and history, and we never saw them performed even, just read them out of books. I though Shakespeare sucked.
Then I saw one of the comedies performed on TV, Measure for Measure. OMG, I didn’t know Shakespeare could be funny, with cross dressing, illicit sex, naughty jokes, and so on. I then watched other plays, the funny ones, and got back into the more serious plays, and learned to love Shakespeare.
I think in high school they should include at least one of the silly plays, like Measure for Measure, Twelfth Night, or Much Ado About Nothing.
Are you sure you meant to categorize Measure for Measure as one of the “silly plays”? A guy in a position of power trying to coerce sex from someone by abusing the justice system hardly meets my standard of silliness.
Less than that. Shakespeare was the most popular playwright in the US in the 19th century, and probably well into the 20th. If you went to the theater at all, you saw Shakespeare. It was so common that political cartoonists could draw cartoons with references to Shakespeare that few would get today, with the assurance that his audience would (e.g, when Chester Arthur became president there was a cartoon of him saying to his corrupt political boss, “I know thee not, old man” in the hope he would do so).
Actually Hamlet is kind of the ultimate Stooge. He has all of these plans, and he runs around accomplishing absolutely nothing. Plus, there is some great humor in his exchanges and soliloquies, especially those that express his anger. Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral bak’d meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.
And I just realized another Hamlet reference in Arrested Development: Buster refers to Oscar as “uncle-father” when he is staying with Lucille. And I was always thinking of Michael as being Hamlet, but he’s actually somewhat reluctant Cordelia figure with George Sr. as Lear.
Of course, Angelo is set up by Vinctenio, who both recognizes Angelo’s weaknesses and plots to “rescue” Cladio and woo Isabella. Angelo is at least straightforward in his perfidy; the Duke is utterly creeptastic in his machinations, and his treatment of Lucio is jerkish to say the least, even if Lucio is a total cad. The whole thing is basically a satire of what would now be regarded as “romantic comedy”. But yes, it is a “problem play” that is neither tragedy nor simple comedy, and in my estimation greater for the complexity.
That’s okay; I also recently characterize Gilligan’s Island as being the American equivilent of McGoohan’s The Prisoner. And my position on Casablanca as being not the bittersweet romance that it is commonly held as but rather a cynical film noir of deception and deceit matching anything written by Mamet has endured through much criticism. I maintain that Hamlet is a farce of an ineffectual young prince who is utterly incapable of carrying out the simple assassination of his father’s murderer despite the support that would have doubtless emerged from the court that justice was being served (including by Gertrude, who at least tacitly acknowledged the strong possibility that the “uncle-father” murdered his brother), and instead allowing Denmark to fall into the hands of Fortinbras of Norway, whose father was honorably defeated by King Hamlet. The Marx Brothers couldn’t come up with more absuridty.
The tragedies were popular stuff for the masses too in their day, because they were incredibly violent, fullof sword fights and death. They were their time’s equivalent of todays blockbuster action adventure movie (though with a rather blacker sensibility than most modern action adventures, one that today is mostly to be found in what we call black comedy).
What was so special about Shakespeare originally was that he managed to seamlessly integrate into his plays both lowbrow stuff with mass popular appeal, and clever stuff that the masses would not get, but that spoke to the educated intellectual elite. Unfortunately,with the passage of time, and changes in the language and culture, the mass appeal stuff does not work nearly as well a sit used to (who wants to watch a sword fight when you can watch robots exploding in space?), but the stuff for the intellectual elite has worn much better.
The comparison I was going to make was The West Wing. Shakespeare’s plays weren’t lowbrow but they were aimed for a mass audience - they were considered intelligent popular entertainment.
I’m sure ordinary Elizabethans understood Shakespeare’s words. I doubt any of them, even the nobles and scholars, understood enough history to catch his howlers.
Well, almost none of them.
SF FAN’S ELIZABETHAN ANCESTOR: Ha! Forsooth! Strikes a clock in Caesar’s Rome?! Does the water drip upon the bell?! Doth the sun-dial’s shadow strike upon it?! Ha-Ha! . . . Errmm, well see, good sir, that which we call a clock . . . To Hell with it.
Anyone who went to grammar school at the time would have known Latin and Greek. That probably wasn’t a big percentage, but it’s probably greater a percentage than it is in the US today.
But you don’t need to know any language other than English to understand Shakespeare’s plays.
Somebody else called the lower classes in those days “peasants.” In the countryside, sure. But even illiterate Londoners had a pretty good grasp of what was going on.
In fact, I generally find Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories much funnier than his comedies. The comedies tend to rely on over-broad humor for my tastes - but the tragedies and histories have great, sly moments. Richard Gloucester is funny, in a twisted way - and Edmund’s monologues in King Lear are masterpieces of sardonic wit.
I remember one of my high school English classes we read “Julius Caesar”. Our teacher told us that Shakespeare’s audience was laughing hilariously over lines like the cobbler saying “All that I live by is with the awl”. We were not impressed by what 16th century audiences thought was funny, even when she except what cobblers and awls were.
The best example, IMO, of a Shakespearean play demonstrating that a “comedy” then was not the same thing as now is Merchant of Venice.
It’s best not to play that one for laughs. Contemporary audiences considered Shylock’s forced conversion to Christianity a happy ending.
I don’t think pointing out that *Hamlet *has jokes proves much - it’s hard to think of a modern serious movie that doesn’t have at least some humor in it. That hasn’t changed.
This, IMHO, is the same problem the King James Version of the Bible has, reinforced by newer translations loudly advertising their “modern, easy-to-understand” language. In reality, the KJV isn’t that difficult to read.
I remember my 10th grade English class going to see a production of A Comedy of Errors, and expecting to be bored by outdated jokes we wouldn’t understand. It turned out to be hilarious.
I’ve formally studied Shakespeare at the college level and yes, Shakespeare is pretty much at the level of modern “adult cartoons”. This was, literally, the Simpsons and South Park of the day.
Take a look at one of those “annotated” versions of classic literature sometime. It’s surprising how much pop-culture parody and current events satire is in there.
I was going to scoff but I can see a little bit of a similarity there. But if I was going to draw parallels between Arrested Development and anything in Shakespeare it would be through GOB, who is a textbook example of the kind of pompous buffoon you see in lots of Shakespeare’s comedies, although that kind of character predates Shakesepare. If you really wanted to push your luck you could say Buster is sort a twist on the coward/soldier type, since he is both but is missing the key attribute of being a braggart.
On first blush GOB might seem to be a sort of Falstaff-ian character, but whereas Falstaff is self-assured about his buffoonery GOB is constantly seeking approval and validation.
Mind you, I’m not saying that Arrested Development is drawn directly from any particular Shakespearian plot; merely that there are distinct parallels between its storylines and those in many of Shakespeare’s plays, both comedies and tragedies. (Speaking of Measure for Measure, George Sr.'s use of J. Walter Weatherman is very Vincentio-like, especially in later renditions.) This, of course, highlights how enduring and universal the themes in many of Shakespeare’s plays are, and how accessible they can be when presented with good acting, staging, and direction. If you have problems grasping Shakespeare in the original settings, try the BBC ShakespeaRe-Told series, which resets four of Shakespeare’s popular plays in the modern era and using somewhat modernized dialogue. (I’m personally not a big fan, but if it gets people more interested in the works of The Bard, all the better.)
Richard should be funny; he’s a self-categorized villain of the moustache-twisting variety. His famous opening soliloquy is nothing but boasting about what a dork he is, and how he’ll show everyone. Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days. Richard III could be easily set in any high school with the class geek as the titular character. In fact, I’m surprised Hollywood hasn’t done just that.
Ha! Forsooth! Strikes a clock in Caesar’s Rome?! Does the water drip upon the bell?! Doth the sun-dial’s shadow strike upon it?! Ha-Ha! . . . Errmm, well see, good sir, that which we call a clock . . . To Hell with it.