Stephen King and Tom Clancy are both still alive and writing, so they still have recently-written books on the shelves. But let’s compare older works. How many copies of It sell each year? And how many copies of Hamlet sell each year? Heck, I’ll bet that Titus Andronicus (one of Shakespeare’s worst) outsells It.
Or perhaps you’d prefer to go by dramatic presentations? In the past year, how many people have watched the movie version of It? And how many people have watched Hamlet or Titus?
So, we’re to judge by level of influence on contemporary works? Every single one of Shakespeare’s plays contains lines so often quoted, they’re now considered cliches. A person can hardly go a day without uttering something first said by the Bard. That’s a lot more influence than any other author can claim.
Make no mistake, your professors would absolutely love to hear you saying that Shakespeare is overrated. They don’t want you to blindly agree with them. Any good professor’s goal is for his students to be able to actually think for themselves. But it’s just as much a mistake to blindly disagree with everything as it is to blindly agree with everything. Yes, you’re right, there must be some value in things which are popular. But Shakespeare is popular.
Despite Wissdok’s bitter tone, part of his argument really resonates with me. The potential to derive enjoyment from the works of Shakespeare has been carefully eviscerated from many a poor student’s psyche by bad teaching. You can’t play a violin concerto if your only tools are a sledgehammer and a cuisinart - by the same token many teachers just don’t have the tools to do the Bard justice. I hated Shakespeare for years before I learned to enjoy him. As a matter of fact, I still hate Shakespeare in many ways.
My favorite play in the world is *Julius Caesar * performed by a really gifted group of actors under good direction. The play I hate most in the world, and can’t bear for more than a few minutes without walking out, is *Julius Caesar * performed badly. Especially in that dead-from-the-neck-up ‘Classical British’ style. Even the British hate it done that way. Why must people destroy Shakespeare? Better to not teach his plays at all than destroy them.
Isn’t the elitist argument a bit circular? Smart people love Shakespeare. How do we know they’re smart? Because they love Shakespeare!
I’d say from my own experience of watching his plays performed by good actors with imaginative direction, and reading the texts with helpful glossaries, that Shakespeare was a great Elizabethan dramatist. My experience of Christopher Marlowe’s and Ben Jonson’s writing is scant, but I’ll venture that Shakespeare was the greatest Elizabethan dramatist.
But the greatest writer ever? Shaw, Beckett, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill? All of them had inferior insights into human psychology? Heck, Ed Wood Jr had some pretty interesting insights, and I’ll bet if Eng Lit professors had spent the last 40 years shaming and bullying students into idolizing Wood and picking apart his scripts line by line we’d all be quoting “Plan 9 From Outer Space” and “Glen or Glenda”!
So great writing consists of having superior insight into human psychology? Of course it doesn’t. It invol;ves a supreme mastery over words, an imaginative fluency, an ability to communicate the most intense of emotions: these Shakespeare had more of than all those writers put together, as I’m sure they would agree. (Except perhaps Shaw in one of his iconoclastic moments.)
As for the Stephen King comparison in an earlier post, Shakespeare in just a couple of lines packs more terror than anything King ever penned. (Again, Stephen King loves Shakespeare, as do the vast majority of writers, past and present, and would probably agree.)
The lines are from Julius Caesar.
“The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.”
Man, the imagery of those lines scared the bejeezus out of me the first time I heard them, and I still can’t read or hear them without gfetting the creeps.
Must agree here. The absolute worst production I’ve ever seen was oner of Julius Caesar, performed by the University of Alaska. Bad special effects, weird video projections, bad acting. It was so bad that there were theatre professionals openly mocking it, WHILE it was being performed. (In Alaska’s defense, this was performed a few months after the production had closed, at a college theatre conference in Washington State. Many of the lead roles had been recast (as the orogonals had graduated), and some of the videos were keyed off the original cast. Still - it was horrible.)
What do you mean by “Classical British style”? The British hate bad acting, whether it be in British or American tones. I can’t believe you mean the style of Olivier, Gielgud, Burton, etc. Are you really classing those as people who ‘destroyed’ Shakespeare? Can you give some examples of what you mean by “Classical British”?
Inferior to Shakespeare’s? Yes. Each has his own greatness, and each one can do some two or three particular things better than Shakespeare could, just as Jonson and Webster could in Shakespeare’s own day, but Shakespeare is still a Roman candle to their firecrackers, and I believe that all of them (except, perhaps, Shaw, who made something of a second career of complaining about Shakespeare’s preeminence) would admit it.
By the way, if you’re going to bring up the “judgement of the masses”, then Stephen King isn’t even in the running. You want instead to point to Milton Berle, The Beverly Hillbillies, Dallas, That 70’s Show, or The O.C..
A valid point, but bad teaching is an indiscriminate eviscerator of enjoyment (and interest, and confidence). My wife was turned off permanently to math and science by teachers who treated her contemptuously because she was a girl – even though she was one of the brightest students in her school.
You are obviously unfamiliar with the works of P.D.Q. Bach!
There is some truth in it; British Shakespeare still stinks a little of the Lyceum. The famous BBC/Time-Life videos of the 70’s and 80’s are, for the most part, positively soporific, sometimes perversely so. But the New Globe is providing the English with a valuable learning experience (Americans have been working with thrust stages and the like for almost a century), and I hope it will be even more so when the moderately looney Mark Rylance is out of the picture.
On the other hand, there are Americans who want to turn everything by Shakespeare (or anyone else) into “On the Waterfront”, although, as the pre-Boom generation fades away, they are less and less in the picture.
There is considerable bitterness and jealousy on this issue among professionals on both sides of the the Pond.
I think some people here are vastly overestimating the power of professors. I know plenty of Shakespeare fans and none of them say anything like [brainwashed voice] must. love. Shakespeare. Professor told us. All hail professor.[/bv]. In fact, leaving college for high school, I’d say Shakepreare isn’t loved because of teachers, he’s loved in spite of them. While a good teacher can open up a whole new world–as apparently happened to Cecil–a bad one can shut that world out permanently, mainly by appealing to youth’s natural skepticism and rebeliousness by making unjustified assertions and denouncing the books the students are reading. Too many high school English teachers try to bully their students into admiring Shakespeare and other “greats,” instead of letting the appreciation arise on its own.
"How cruelly this operates upon the mind, to have its free conceptions thus cramped and pressed down to the measure of a straitlacing actuality, may be judged from that delightful sensation of freshness, with which we turn to those plays of Shakespeare which have escaped being performed, and to those passages in the acting plays of the same writer which have happily been left out of the performance. How far the very custom of hearing anything spouted, withers and blows upon a fine passage, may be seen in those speeches from Henry the Fifth, etc., which are current in the mouths of school-boys from their being to be found in Enfield Speakers, and such kind of books. I confess myself utterly unable to appreciate that celebrated soliloquy in Hamlet, beginning “To be, or not to be,” or to tell whether it be good, bad, or indifferent, it has been so handled and pawed about by declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from its living place and principle of continuity in the play, till it is become to me a perfect dead member.
It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their distinguished excellence is a reason that they should be so. There is so much in them, which comes not under the province of acting, with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do."
Of course, Lamb is writing for effect here with his tongue firmly in his cheek, as one who has spent far more time reading the plays than watching them in performance I know what he means.
This is probably going to piss you off, Wissdok, but beauty and quality are not equivalent, and popularity doesn’t imply either (or, for that matter, vice-versa). If you can’t think of any examples of things that are positively awful, but nonetheless hugely popular – well, you’re not thinking hard enough. As H. L. Mencken said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” [This is usually quoted as “the taste of the American public” – not quite the same thing, but I agree with both]
As someone else pointed out, if you ask Tom Clancy and Stephen King, I’d be shocked if they didn’t agree with those of us who admire Shakespeare’s writing, and I’d be surprised if they didn’t consider him one of the greatest writers of all time.
Again, you’re confusing popularity with quality. Disco was enormously popular at one time, despite the judgment of most music critics that it was total crap. Why? You could dance to it, and the people who listened to it were attracted by that aspect of it. Was it all total crap? No, there was some that was musically interesting – but most of it sacrificed originality, imagination, inventiveness, and just about every other aspect of art for danceability.
As far as your “influence” argument goes, step back generation by generation and see who each generation was influenced by (hint: the word “previous” occurs in the answer).
And as far as your question about longevity is concerned – perhaps 50 years is not enough time, but the fact is that music of the great “classical” composers of every era, all the way back to the late Middle Ages, is still played today, and the music of the Baroque through the modern era of “classical” music is played, recorded, and sold at a pace that will probably not be equaled by Elvis or the Beatles when equivalent time has passed.
Finally, you’re quite wrong about Muzak, in two different senses: many, many film scores have been “written” by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and other “classical” composers. “Amadeus” – score by Mozart – was a pretty popular film. And there have been many pop tunes that have been directly influenced by classical compositions. And, as I hinted above, the musicians of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and other eras laid down the basic principles of composition and harmony – to which virtually every scrap of pop music is indebted. Listen to some Muzak sometime, and imagine what it would sound like if there had never been a Bach, Mozart, Schubert, or any of the great “classical” composers. Talk about influence…
Be careful about throwing the label “elitist” around: I consider Shakespeare to be the greatest dramatist, and one of the greatest writers, who ever picked up a pen, but I also read science fiction, most of which isn’t written nearly as well – but that’s not why I read it. I read it for the plots, and for pure entertainment. I seldom read a line in a sci-fi novel and sit back with my eyes closed, just relishing the words I’ve just read, and I can’t think of the last time a science fiction novel moved me to tears the way that Lear does.
I also listen to just about all forms of music, and I consider some pop composer/artists to be at the same level in their art as Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart were in theirs. To pick just two, Jimi Hendrix and Mark Knopfler have written songs of ineffable beauty, and played them with incomparable nuance and sensitivity: if you’re not familiar with “Burning of the Midnight Lamp” or “Brothers in Arms”, you should listen to them. Carefully.
Now, does that make me a pop music elitist? Neither Hendrix nor Dire Straits has sold nearly as many records as many current pop artists who don’t have as much talent in their entire bodies as Hendrix and Knopfler have in their little fingernails.
We can move on to the visual/plastic arts, but I hope you’ve gotten my point: popularity has nothing to do with quality, because most people are looking for something other than pure appreciation of quality, be it entertainment, diversion, danceability, or just peer acceptance.
All of the examples you gave (“X is better than Y”) are – I don’t know if you’re familiar with this term – called “opinions”, and if you think that most people share yours you’re probably right on roughly half of them. You prefer Peanuts to Doonesbury; I don’t compare them, because they’re too dissimilar. You prefer Wizard of Oz to Citizen Kane; again, too dissimilar to compare. You prefer UPN to NPR; er, you really haven’t watched much of either, have you? I’d rather watch the worst program on NPR than the best program on UPN. Norman Rockwell was a competent hack; Dali was a genius, and I’d rather have Guernica on my wall than everything Norman Rockwell painted. And the Porsche 928S was possibly the most beautiful car ever produced; the Mini is a turd by comparison.
OPINION. Not fact. Unrelated, ultimately, to quality, popularity, or anything but personal taste. Unless, of course, you like UPN because it’s cool in your circle of friends to do so, or you hate Doonesbury because it leans left politically, or… My point here is that there are lots of reasons why people like or dislike things, and that very few of them have to do with any notion of intrinsic quality.
So let me see if I understand you: because Hemingway said in an interview that his stories weren’t autobiographical, we are to take that as being authoritative? There’s no possibility that he was lying, or the interviewer had pissed him off for some reason and he was being disagreeable and cantankerous, or that he was drunk, or that he was just yanking the interviewer’s chain for whatever reason? Or just plain wrong?
Writers sometimes (I would say often or usually, but I’m trying to be conservative) take elements of their personal experience and weave, transmute, rearrange, or otherwise incorporate them into their writing. Sometimes this is conscious and deliberate (think Ulysses), but often it’s not.
It has often been said to young writers “Write what you know”, and this is usually good advice. I know that of all my writing, the pieces that spring from my personal experience – whether that would be recognized by anyone else or not – are the best, because there is an emotional charge to them that isn’t present with pure invention. That probably means that I’m not nearly as good a writer, in some senses, as authors who can write outside themselves – but a good writer will do a lot of research even for fiction, and once learned the information they acquire is now part of the totality of their personality.
Larry Borgia post
“The masses,” whoever they are, don’t define beauty for me any more than the professors do. You may have had a bad time in college, wissdok, but don’t take it out on Shakespeare. Or Bach, for that matter.
Please let me introduce you to “the masses.” The masses are the dozens of people in the first twenty rows of books that you past on your way to the “classic” section.They also can be found in next line when you go get your symphony tickets. They are buying tickets for a profitable performance of one of the countless number of modern music concerts, which should make you happy because they help support the unprofitable concerts like symphonies. The masses can also be found going to baseball, football, and basketball games. I note this because, while I am a libertarian that hates government hand-outs, the polls show that “the masses” are divided if taxpayer money should be used to build sports stadiums, but overwhelmingly against funding for new symphony venues. That might be because a single football game has more attendance than a season of most local symphony’s.
But I should also point out that “the masses” are heredity. The masses were around at the time Bach composed in Leipzig. While he had a church as a backdrop, most Germans got the entertainment from street performers. Most never heard of Johann Sebastian Bach. Shakespeare fared no better. Yes, history records that theatre was “all the rage” in Shakespeare’s lifetime. We also know of his Globe Theatre. But we also know that actors and theatres of that time were ripe with shady and sleazy elements. Towns throughout England ban theatres. London restricted them and finally outlawed them not long after Shakespeare death. The theatres had more enemies than friends. Most theatre troupes travel for a reason, to stay ahead of a mob. Only the bravest of souls would attend a performance. And the performances lack costumes, props, and backdrops. I find it hard to believe that people were banging on the door of the Globe Theatre trying to get in. Lastly I should point out that there were many playhouses to choose from within the London area for whatever number of “the masses” that did attend.
The point I am trying to make is that no matter what was popular at the time, it was never these “classics.” As I explained in the original post, yes, I had conflicts with professors in college over what is good art…but I was not alone. For each of you that love Shakespeare I am sure you know a dozen like me. Be it high school or college, the students are told what is art instead of finding out for themselves. I wasn’t offered popular authors like Doyle, Verne, or Wells…but Steinbeck, Dickens, and Faulkner. Thomas Mallory was a big influence on literature, where was his section?
I wrote a paper in college about the role of Mark Twain in literature. Because of his popularity, the critics and scholars never let up on him in his own lifetime. Through marketing and availability his novels made it into rural community schools throughout America, but was never mentioned in any self-respecting prep school. When the educators of private prep schools took the “leads” of public education as universal education swept America after WWI, Twain and his stories were dumped into the secondary reading list and by the end of the century would have long be forgotten if not for events that developed in the late 1940s. When groups throughout America wanted to remove* Huck Finn* and Tom Sawyer from schools because of their racist, sexist, and politically incorrect subject matter… lifetime rural teachers quickly rose to defend Twain, which forced professionally trained educators and scholars to choose…stand with these teachers (and “the masses”) or stand against them. Politically if they chose to be against Twain and lost they would lose power with it. Not very surprising they chose to stand with Twain and now Twain is considered the “greatest” America author. Where was this opinion in 1910 when Twain died? What did these scholars overlook in Twain’s own lifetime? How does one change from being a hack “dime” store novelist to the greatest of all time? Ask the elitist, they set the bar.
To my own critics I must say again beauty is art and beauty is a judgment call of the people. As for popular isn’t necessarily quality, I would say that in the field of art its must be one and the same. We have no Underwriters Laboratories to test “art” for quality. The only fair standard for judging art is by questioning how the public received it. If left alone and never force on students, Shakespeare’s work would be delegated to occasional questions on Jeopardy. As for what Stephen King or Tom Clancy says about Shakespeare…come now do you think it would be wise of them to bad-mouth the one some call “greatest” writer of all time? Ask Gore Vidal, he had no trouble bad-mouthing Truman Capote. To Japastor, I would like to point out that yes, I take Hemingway’s words at face value (I believe the quote was from an interview with George Plimpton) over the opinions of scholars who want to read something into someone else’s work that may never have been there. And yes I see the famously popular stuff I hate, like* Titanic*, Celine Dion, and that god awful song, but who am I to argue with anyone’s taste. The people have spoken.
In closing, if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then why do universities and public schools tell the youth what beauty is? To paraphrase Justice Stewart, “I’ll know it when I see it.” If you like Bach and Shakespeare more power to you. But why do I, my children, and my children’s children have to stomach the definition of beauty that the minority defined? I’ll pass on Andy Warhol, and just take the Campbell soup. Give me Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor and you can have Out of Africa. Next time I win a free dinner at Red Lobster, Mr Borgia or Japastor you may have it, as I am just as happy at McDonalds where over 99 Billion can’t be wrong.
If you feel the need to responds to this, please explain why quality and/or art should be defined by one group and not the greater population.
Something tells me, Wissdok that you have read (or listened to) very little of what you so roundly condemn. Forget concepts of art and beauty. The fact is there’s a wealth of writing and music out there which you are blind and deaf to. You have impoverished yourself and proclaimed it virtue. You have no idea what you’re missing.
If your husband is bored one night, he might try to rent Renaissance Man with Danny DeVito, a surprisingly watchable film with a rather nice take on the St. Crispin’s Day speech at the end.
So let me get this straight, wissdok. Something is only beautiful if a certain percentage of the people like it? What percentage is that? 50%? 66%? If I find something beautiful that only a few people like, am I wrong? Am I compelled to like Britney Spears and reality TV because lots of other people do? Or am I allowed to think for myself?
Um…I call bullshit, or rather a wild misinterpretation of the facts. That theaters had more enemies than friends is…kind of true. Sort of almost not really. To say that theater tropes traveled to stay ahead of the mob or that only the bravest souls would attend is just flat out wrong. Theater troupes traveled because then, as now, theater wasn’t considered a decent way to make a living. Most towns would have preferred to have whores than actors, at least whores gave something to the community. The reason London outlawed theaters in the city was because of the mobs that the theaters would cause, but these mobs weren’t hunting down the actors. Theater would cause, what I can only assume was the equivalent of a modern soccer riot. But I can’t think of anyone who would say that the English want to get rid of soccer, just the ensuing rioting. More to the point, I don’t think those kind of riots would occur if it wasn’t for the popularity among “the masses”.
It is sad that your schooling was so incomplete. I myself was taught all of these authors, and personally can’t stand either Mallory of Dickens. And correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that Steinbeck was a rather popular author at the time he was publishing.
I violently disagree with you on both these points, but hey thats what makes the world go round.
By this argument Kelly Clarkson is the greatest singer the world has ever known, and Star Wars Episode One is one of the 4 greatest movies of all time. I ask, why must there be any standard for testing “art quality”? By its very nature art is subjective, you, I repeat YOU, are the one trying to force definitions of what is good and bad on it. You are the one who is saying that if it is popular it MUST be good. I am sorry, but I don’t like Kelly Clarkson, so I am not going to listen to her music. I DO like the Beatles, and yeah they were popular too, but that isn’t why I like them. I DON’T like McDonald, but I eat there sometimes because I don’t have a lot of choice, guess that makes me one of the 99 billion that can’t be wrong. As to your point about Hemingway NEVER being autobiographical, read A Movable Feast, and some collections of his personal letters and try to shore up the contradictions.
I would like you to explain why you feel the need to let any group define it at all. You said yourself, I’ll know it when I see it. Shouldn’t these decisions be made on an individual level? Now…follow me here…maybe the professors you hate so much, the “elitists” are simply trying to show you things that they like. Things you might not have seen, or been exposed to in the proper light. The cannon is selected for a reason, and I have never had a professor assign a book and tell me “Man this is a piece of crap, but read it anyway because we are supposed to like it” Citizen Kane is one of my favorite movies. I watched it before I knew it was supposed to be GREAT,and I just happened to find it fascinating. I like Three Days of the Condor too. I LIKE Shakespeare, I read him for fun, in my free time, because I want to. I also read Steven King, for fun. These ideas aren’t mutually exclusive. I go to rock concerts and bang about in the mosh pit, I also go to the ballet and am planning a road trip to San Fransisco to see an Opera. I go to football games (and really wish LA would get a pro team again) and the symphony. I am 22 just out of college, and almost everyone I know is like me in this respect. I don’t feel like an unusual case. I may not be “the masses” but I sure as hell ain’t a minority.
