Hmmm, don’t you see, wissdok doesn’t intend to be convinced. That’s not the point to the discussion. 
True though that may be and if I were to guess I would say **wissdok **probably is (do you get in trouble for acusing someone of being a troll, probably) just looking for a spirited debate. I do feel that this whole discussion has actually been a good one to have for all those who might read with genuinly similar belifes as those claimed by wissdock.
And Shakespeare is a fun topic for discussion, gives me a good excuse to do some research.
<confession>
I used to think as wissdok does. There is even a 12 year old messageboard thread, probably cached somewhere on some unkind corner of the Internet, where I advanced virtually the same argument as him.
</confession>
But I don’t think that way any longer. Yep, it’s not a fantasy - People really do change. But attacking them like this only encourages them to entrench. Spoken from the point of view of someone who’s been there 
Just to suppoert Leviosaurus even more, here’s a fairly famous little essay by Bernard Levin:
Here’s something I don’t quite get about the quote, 'It’s Greek to me." In Julius Caesar, it’s used in a context that implies that it’s a pun; i.e., Shakespeare expected his audience to know that “It’s Greek to me” means “I don’t understand it.” The fact that the character uses that statement to say that he doesn’t understand something said in Greek is a joke. Some folks say that Shakespeare originated the saying, but it seems to me that that would make the statement meaningless in the play.
According to this site, he didn’t originate the phrase, he popularised it:
Shakespeare himself was, apparently, not so good at Greek according to Jonson who said he possessed “little Latin and less Greek”.
I’m a bit disappointed in Cecil’s column.
He’s saying that “characters” bit doesn’t work because it’s ambiguous? Isn’t that just a “whooshed” response to a metaphor that works on more than one level? He’s pooh-poohing it because a contemporary audience wouldn’t have “gotten” all the nuances upon first hearing it on stage. In other words . . . Shakespeare’s works are layered and subtle, and reward effort and exigesis? Not the response I’d expect from Cecil. Perhaps whoever’s writing it nowadays is not of a terribly literary bent?
And I’m more than disappointed–closer to horrified–that “Cecil” would suggest that the best way to be seduced by Shakespeare is read him off a dry, flat page. Come on! If you can’t find a decent live production nearby, find Gielgud’s Lear, or something. (Gielgud’s movie of the Lear–the Feelgood movie of the year! Who says Shakespeare’s dead . . .)
When I first posted a response to Cecil’s answer to the question, I had no idea that I was “throwing stones at a hornets nest.” Shakespeare may be considered by some to be the greatest English language writer ever, but it is rather subjective to what is “great” writing. The quality of literature, like most art, can’t be measure in a laboratory. It can’t be tested by a universal standard. If two independently minded people read something, are they going to get the same results? A running theme in analyzing literature is that we all take the same from writing. Is this true? I admit I don’t enjoy Shakespeare, but it’s not in the style he wrote. I don’t really enjoy most fiction, nor do I enjoy period pieces of a time I am not familiar with. I also have a short attention span, so if I do read fiction… its short stories. This is no commentary on his work, just my own personal taste. If you force me to read Shakespeare I will not enjoy it, just like if you force me to eat spinach I wouldn’t enjoy it either. I don’t think I am alone on this.
I have in my hand a copy of Perrine’s Literature (Text Book) 7th edition, and I have to give them credit for explaining the differences of escape and interpretive literature without a judgment over their value. But, on the other hand, the same book only offers interpretive literature. Is that not an endorsement of one over the other? This is what I was saying about elitism. Somewhere some group had to decide what students are presented. It’s not simply the publishers, because they only reacting to what the high schools and colleges demand. There is an “elite” that puts their values on literature about the views of others. They are not the only elite group, as from time to time, various parent groups try to ban books from the shelves and there is always a public outcry of censorship, which it is. But by the same token, the idea that writing with some underlying symbolism makes good literature is only an opinion. To exclude writing because it doesn’t meet someone’s standards is censorship too. But the problem here is the group that choices the curriculum are on the inside of the education system. You can’t really say Clancy, King, and Rice are bad writers because they are popular. They just serve a different segment of the marketplace as your Shakespeares, your Miltons, and your Faulkners. If we are trying to get something more than the desire to read from students, let them read non-fiction. There are some excellent books out there on Jefferson, Adams, and the other founding fathers that would greatly enhance the understanding of the foundation of our country.
I strongly believe in evolution but I have to admit that the acceptance of evolution corresponds with its inclusion in schools just as the decline in creationism corresponds with its removal. The same can be said of French. Forty years ago most high schools offered French, now most offer Spanish. And this was the point I was making on Shakespeare. Those that graduated high school before WWII were very unlikely to have been taught Shakespeare, those after were. If we remove Shakespeare from schools his fame would be diminish and whomever he is replaced him with would increase. This isn’t a commentary on Shakespeare; it’s just a truth. And that corresponds with book sells as well. While I am sure there are many Shakespeare fans, a lot of the Shakespeare books are sold because of school related reasons.
As it has been discuss in this board, Shakespeare isn’t the easiest to digest. The fact that Cliff Notes devotes a whole section of their Website to him says a lot. It might be how it’s presented, I don’t know. I don’t think Shakespeare wrote thinking his audience would be reading his work sitting behind a desk. While I don’t doubt there are high school Shakespeare clubs, I have never seen one. I went to a high school of 1500 with a book club and English club, but no Shakespeare group. I have substituted at several high schools and have still have never seen one. Our nationally acclaimed local theatre group does a play quarterly and doesn’t do Shakespeare. But on the other hand, all the colleges in the area do Shakespeare from time to time, and the communities both north and south of here do one each summer in park. But as this board indicates, Shakespeare has a built in audience. I ask you, is this audience a cross-section of society or mostly students studying Shakespeare and relatives of the performers? According to the National Endowment of the Arts only around 12% of Americans have seen a play in any given year. This isn’t 12% that saw Shakespeare but 12% that saw all non-musicals performances. This number has been consistent for 20 years. To even further complicate this, half of those that did see a play were college graduates. Half also made over $50,000 a year. Is that a fair cross-section of America, when the median income is $21, 587 and less that 25% of the people have a college education? {NEA 2002, U.S. Census 1999}
The fact people might use quotes from Shakespeare doesn’t make him the greatest. People unknowing quote the Bible everyday, does that make everyone Christians? As for religion, most Christians are unaware that most of the knowledge of hell, is Milton’s hell not the biblical hell. Is Milton the greatest? On the other hand, we name Days, the months, and even the planets after mythical gods, does that mean something? At best it means that Shakespeare has had an effect on our culture, not that he is the greatest writer. I am very proud that Shakespeare has had an effect on our culture, just as I am for Milton, Emerson, or Shaw. I personally think it is a good thing that we still look at the paintings of Van Gogh, the pictures of Brady, and the movies of DeMille. It shows that we aren’t all superficial and arrogant, thinking we are better than earlier generations.
This leads back to the question “was Shakespeare the greatest writer in the English Language? It all boils down to what criteria you use and who gets to decide. I do believe that before we give out that “honor” that the people should have some say. While I am glad that some of you have such a keen love for Shakespeare, I don’t think everyone does. Just as most people would have a problem with choosing the greatest singer, musician, or actor…I think they would have with naming a writer. I did find a poll conducted by an English newspaper in which Shakespeare won, but here again the newspaper hired two scholars to pick 10 writers to choose from. The list might not have been the 10 that the voters would have picked.
Some earlier post tried to point out the fallacy of giving popular opinion a say in quality. I really can’t defeat the views of popular culture. I was born a geek, and will die a geek. My television is on the news channels 24/7. I occasionally watch the History Channel or an old movie on TMC or AMC but I haven’t regularly watched the networks in years. I saw something on another board about Depeche Mode and I think they were a band back in the 1980s but I don’t know any of their work. I saw Britney Spear’s first video when there was hype about her being too sexy for her age, and since then all I know is from what I gather from the news…. she has had a baby after a career of “bubble gum” rock, but again I wouldn’t know one of her songs. A typical visit to bookstore for me is to by another reference book or almanac. I make no judgment on those that enjoy Shakespeare anymore than I do on my girlfriend reading Cosmo. And when she ask me to look up from my almanac and take a quiz, I roll my eyes not because of criticism of her choice of reading materials but because of the inevitable fight that the results will bring. So to have me defend what is popular is like asking Eddie Murphy to explain Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
It is the heart of the subject, having someone decide for me, that is my problem. I don’t agree there should be Oscars, Tonys, Grammys or any other award as long as a group that wasn’t approved by the people selects them. I realize I don’t represent the people. But they don’t either. I am a Unitarian Libertarian, which makes me the minority of minority. I understand few share my views, and I have to face the wrath of societies will. But I still don’t want someone deciding my religion, my politics, or my culture by their own opinion especially if it isn’t the majority but a group that has no more claim to righteousness than I do.
Even if we leave it to the “experts,” as some would have it, who are these experts? I can’t speak for the scholars but I did find this from some authors. Absent was the universal praise that some seem to think the modern writers have for Shakespeare. Missing from this list was the interview with poet/writer Charles Bukowski. His comments on Shakespeare:
{Interview magazine 1987} “He’s unreadable and overrated. But people don’t want to hear that. You see, you cannot attack shrines. Shakespeare is embedded through the centuries. You can say “So-and-so is a lousy actor!” But you can’t say Shakespeare is shit. The longer something is around, snobs begin to attach themselves to it, like suckerfish. When snobs feel something is safe…they attach. The moment you tell them the truth, they go wild. They can’t handle it. It’s attacking their own thought process. They disgust me. “
In a later interview on Mickey Mouse’s influence on America imagination.
“Tough. Tough, indeed. I would say that Mickey Mouse had a greater influence on the American public than Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Rabelais, Shostakovich, Lenin, and/or Van Gogh. Which say “What?” about the American public. Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality.”
This doesn’t prove anything but it does show that writers don’t share the same influences. I think it is pretentious to assume that because some believe that Shakespeare was the best, that naturally all good writers would agree. It is also very arrogant to claim that all good writing since Shakespeare benefited from him. The world has had great writers before Shakespeare and the non-English speaking has had since, but the English-speaking world had to have Shakespeare to survive. I don’t buy that and I don’t think the writers of today would universally agree either.
Wissdok, I’m not the type of person to say someone is “The best” at some art form*. For example, while I like Shakespeare a lot, he’s not my favorite author and probably never will be. I wouldn’t try to convince you he was the greatest ever (although I understand those who do believe this.) I will, however, suggest that if you take an uncritical look at Shakespeare - an educated, deep, look - you will probably find him enjoyable, and get a lot more out of it than you would have expected.
In order for this to happen, I expect you’ll have to let go of the memories of Shakespeare being forcibly rammed down your gullet by dim witted and untalented teachers. I understand personally how difficult this can be, and don’t blame you a bit if you can’t get past it. It’s a shame, though. There’s some really good stuff there.
*Except maybe Jimi Hendrix
wissdok I wish your original post had been as clear as your most recent one. Here’s the thing, for me at least, that was causing trouble. You are insisting that there is some universal agreement that Shakespeare is the GREATEST writer in the English language. While there are some people who may undoubtedly say things like this; art is, as you say, subjective. You can’t really declare anyone the GREATEST writer and expect any serious person to take that declaration as anything more than hyperbole. What makes a great writer after all? Who is to say that one writer is the best and ALL others are second rate in comparison. You can’t say this anymore than you can declare a single greatest painter or musician. Its art and therefore doesn’t play by those rules. What you can legitimately make a case for is Shakespeare being the most important writer in the English language. I am not going to say he is, I think the matter is debatable, but I will say he IS probably in the top 10, in terms of importance. All the counter arguments you have been reading in this thread, go toward proving his importance, not his greatness. That is why Shakespeare is studied, because he did so many thing right that we can learn a lot from him. Honestly I think he is one of the few playwrights who’s plays hold up really well several hundred years down the road.
You mentioned the Bible, same thing. The fact that the bible is used in everyday speech doesn’t prove that Christianity is the superior religion, it proves that the bible has had a tremendous cultural impact on our society, and its sad that our religious differences prevent most of our society from ever actually studying it. (I am Jewish, but I feel that every high school should at least *offer *a bible as literature course, people need to know where their culture comes from.) This is all the same argument. There is no elite society that mandates we must love Shakespeare and that Marlowe was crap, so we study Shakespeare and not Marlowe. We study Shakespeare because he holds up better than Marlowe did, and the one thing Marlowe wrote that still is worth having the average joe read was done better by Goethe a few centuries later.
Which brings me to my next point, on levels of importance, Milton, Dante, and Goethe are all up there (though not all English language writers I know), and should be studied too, but usually aren’t studied. Instead most high school students only get Shakespeare. This is because Shakespeare has one thing they don’t have, Shakespeare can be really fun. If done well Shakespeare should be joyfully, infectiously entertaining. His main goal was to entertain people, all that stuff about great characters and fancy poetry was just a side product. And Shakespeare wrote to entertain the masses, not the elite. There is more sex and violence in your average Shakespeare than in 9 out of ten Hollywood blockbusters. There is more slapstick and “lowbrow humor” than in the three stooges or Benny Hill. This stuff isn’t hidden or hard to find either, its just usually:
a)not done because the people who don’t get the joke
b)not done because the people are trying to do a “serious” production
c)attempted but done so badly it isn’t really recognizable as entertainment anymore
I will admit, I am a theatre geek to the point that I have decided to give up any chance I might have had at being rich in order to pursue a career as a theatrical director. But I do read Shakespeare for fun. I don’t go see every production I can, because I have seen enough bad Shakespeare to know that bad Shakespeare is actually the worst thing in the world, but I do read Shakespeare frequently, and probably see one to two productions a year. And if I had to pick, I wouldn’t chose Shakespeare as my favorite playwright, but he would be up there. But that is a matter of taste, and unimportant. The fact that you don’t like Shakespeare (while as incomprehensible to me as someone saying they don’t like chocolate) is totally fine. Not your thing, you dig the nonfiction. I get that. But that isn’t important either. The point isn’t that you like him, or that you think he is great, but that you recognise that his cultural impact isn’t some sham and that he is worth studying, because if we didn’t study him, we would have huge holes in our cultural knowledge and an awful lot of people would end up having to reinvent the wheel. We study him because in order to understand what so many other artist (particularly but not exclusively playwrights and other writers) did later, you have to understand where they were coming from, and the common denominator for most of them is Shakespeare.
The whole problem here is that you have been unwilling to admit that there might be any merit in studying Shakespeare, and saying really silly unsupportable things trying to defend that position. This got a few people a little riled up, in fact the only reason I didn’t post more is because I make it a rule not to ever post when I am angry, and frequently by the time I had calmed down enough to be lucid something new came along to rile me up. Suffice it to say that this is a hot button issue for me, along with the idea that there is anything inherently elitist about theatre. (I could write a couple of pages on how people should be going to the theater the way they go to the movies, but our society has created a false sense of occasion and instilled the idea that theatre is an activity suited only for the wealthy and intellectual) Anyway, I do hope you come round and give Shakespeare another try. I would be happy to recommend some really good productions you can rent on video if you are interested. If not, oh well, some people don’t like chocolate either.
No, Cecil is quite right. Shakespeare can sometimes be guilty of what Dorothy L. Sayers calls “literary gnosticism”. To the degree that a passage in a play cannot be understood by the intended audience, it is a bad passage. Hidden jokes are a literary vice (and I say that as someone entirely capable of falling into it, myself). We allow Shakespeare to get away with it because he’s so damned good, but it’s still a vice.
He doesn’t say that. It might have been well had he suggested a trip to one’s local Shakespeare Festival (though not everybody has one), but he does not suggest the reverse, either.
Most filmed Shakespeare is uneven – much of it, indeed, is pretentious and lifeless, little more than animated waxworks.
*Except maybe Jimi Hendrix
I totally agree with everything (else) you said, but especially this section, which bears repeating:
Personally, I don’t think anyone should be allowed to do The Winter’s Tale unless they actually have a live bear onstage attacking the actors, the way it was originally done.
One glaring error that cries out for correction. Wissdok asserts, almost as if he knew what he were talking about,: " … Those that graduated high school before WWII were very unlikely to have been taught Shakespeare."
Could he give a cite for that? I rather doubt it. Shakespeare has been a staple of the curriculum on both sides of the Atlantic for a long time. (As the lines I quoted from Pope in a previous post bear witness, dated 1734:
Or damn all Shakespeare, like the affected fool
At court, who hates whate’er he read at school.)
Ah, I will simply point out that the recent well-written tract by wissdok is a far cry from his earliest thesis, namely: The Only Reason We Read Shakespeare Is We Get Forced To Do So.
No one ever said you had to like him. But if you don’t like him, it doesn’t mean that most everyone else doesn’t like him, either. 
I tried my luck at Political Science, now here is the History of Public Education in America 101.
When our country was first founded George Washington encouraged the belief that the federal government should start a “department” that funded the arts. Thomas Jefferson encouraged the belief that the government should open a “small” number of schools to guarantee that the U.S. always had a supply of educated people. But the most of the founding fathers did not support these ideas. Our founding fathers, by design, established no role for the federal government in education. {Article 1 of the Constitution) They also forbid the federal government from entering the education business. (The 10th Amendment)
Schools, both elementary and secondary, have always existed in the U.S. but for the most part all were either private schools where students paid or community schools where communities volunteered time, books, etc. The community schools weren’t fix to any government source of income and stayed open only as long as there were donations. Massachusetts was the first to start a public education system in America in 1842. In 1852 they followed that up with the first compulsory attendance law requiring children between the ages of 8 and 14 to attend 12 weeks of school in any give year. But even with that the law, it was not strictly enforced.
Other areas tried to start public school systems over the next 20 years but few with any mandatory law to go with it. New York City is an example. Even after the Civil War education was scares throughout America for the middle and lower classes. We had several Presidents in the 1800s that never attended more than a year of schooling in their life. For the average child of the late 1800s you either worked on a farm, in a factory, or became someone’s apprentice. If you were a woman the avenues of education was even less. If you were Black or Native American your chances of getting an education rested purely on the will of liberal volunteers. I hate to bring up Hollywood but both *Little House on the Prairie *and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are good representation of schools of the late 1800s. In most communities if a school did exist it was at the mercy of the local economy. A teachers pay, if any, was often room and board in most communities. With all that not many professional chose teaching as a career.
By 1900 most states had passed a minimum attendance law for children under 16. But not all states had public schools and even the ones that did, often required you to pay tuition. Because of this most children worked. In the census count of 1900, 20% of the children between 10 and 16 were working in a factory. Twice that number was working in agriculture. Only 15% of U.S. children of school age ever graduated. Even this is misleading, as the minimum school year required less than 18 weeks annually of education for completion.
In the early 1900s the federal government tried to restrict child law. In 1916 Congress passed a law that set the minimum of labor at 14 for non-agricultural jobs. In 1918 the Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional. Congress then passed another law and the court ruled it unconstitutional in 1922. Congress then tried to amend the Constitution in 1924 but failed to get it ratified by the states. Even in the height of the Depression of the 30s, the Supreme Court ruled the National Industrial Recovery Act (with a child labor section) unconstitutional. So throughout the 1920s most America students didn’t get a quality education and those that did get one in the public sector, didn’t get one of the standards of today. Schools got almost all their money locally and if parents are forced to send their kids to work to survive, they aren’t in support of paying for someone else kids education.
Having said all that, we get to the meat of the story, schools prior to World War II were under-funded, under-equipped, and under-educated in general. For most of the nation, they had just instituted universal education and then a Depression hits. Most school boards cut back the already low school budget because of lack of revenue. The school year was shorten, which already was less than 6 months. School funding was slashed which included most non-essential classes. Most schools taught only the 3 Rs.
So what does this mean? It means that it would be unlikely that most of that generation would have had the luxury of a literature class, especially teaching Shakespeare which isn’t something you gloss over. Even assuming that a school did teach Shakespeare before the Depression, what is the likelihood that they had the time to teach it in a shorter year. Even if they wanted to, most schools didn’t have teachers trained in classical literature. If you could afford to get a good education you wouldn’t have went into teaching.
It wasn’t till the Fair Standards Labor Act of 1938 that America outlawed working children under 16 in factories and restricting their activities on farms. This time the court didn’t overturn the law. I can’t say I am a fan of FDR but he did make the schools what they are today in more ways than one. Most of the schools used after WWII were built through Federal work programs created by him. By removing children from the workforce, the states HAD to do something with them so states increased funding to schools. Before WWII most states spent more money on prisons than they did on schools, funding for public schools were generally a local matter entirely. With more funding, school years expanded and curriculum were improved. It also allowed schools to hire more educated teachers that once only could be found at private schools. And the greatest thing FDR brought us was the GI Bill that allowed America to have a bigger more educated middle-class, which are the taxpayers that now fund our schools.
FACT: The average US soldier drafted in WWII wasn’t a high school graduate. (US Army 1947) By Vietnam 3 out of 4. (Army 1976)
So, yes I can honest say that I don’t think most Americans were familiar with Shakespeare before WWII. Not even high school graduates. So the quote from Pope doesn’t address that both in America and in Britain, until the 20th Century, we had two parallel education system one for the haves and one for the have nots. If you check your date on that quote, public school education in England did not exist. The timeline for public schools in England aren’t that far from America’s. Even today the best education is something you have to buy, it isn’t for free. At any rate, I am not sure but I believe, England got free public education about the time of the US Civil War around 1860 to 1870.
As for IMDB
IMDB is a wonderful site but we are talking apples and oranges. The original statement (which I already ate crow) was about movies and IMDB includes TV. If you look closely you will find that it includes TV adaptations and those performances that are part of a series. Using that same standard, writers such as Doyle(Sherlock Holmes), Gardner(Perry Mason), and Serling(Twilight Zone) who be unfairly represented. Using this system, the king would have to be John Meston who created Gunsmoke. He wrote 207 television episodes but with an additional 454 adaptations. He also wrote 187 radio episodes with an additional 230 adaptations. And that was just the first person I thought of, there could be others with more credits.
And lastly, yes I included my belief that Shakespeare is forced on students, just read the first three paragraphs. Just because I didn’t use harsh words doesn’t mean I changed my view. It is far more practical to a civil debate not to provoke an emotional argument, and leave it to logical and reason. On that same note, if I am unique then why did Mark from California ask the question? I would assume that if Shakespeare was revered universally then he could have easily found someone locally to explain Shakespeare’s status. It not like he is in my circle of friends as I live 2000 miles away.
Wissdok, your lecture on education is completely beside the point. The fact that more children now study Shakespeare has nothing at all to do with any change in his reputation; it’s simply a consequence of the raising of universal educational standards over the last century.
Capisce?
Note to self: Preview is your friend.
All you are producing is reasons that Shakespeare might not have been familiar to the general public. Unfortunately, there is direct evidence available that says that he was.
You might want to start by Googling “Astor Place Riots”.
Shakespeare was also well known in the Old West. Cowboys like him.: http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues98/aug98/shakes.html
Now we’re jumping into Shakespeare’s head and divining his intentions? How do we know who his intended audience was for a given line or turn of phrase?
Who is considered an audience member? Is it bad (or a “vice”) if I’m improvising a passage of music and the official “audience” doesn’t understand the harmonic implications of what I just did, but my fellow players (another audience) do get it, and derive pleasure or expand their musical understanding, is that bad? What if I’m the only one who gets it? Does that turn it into a vice because my listeners lack the musical experience that I possess?
This strikes me as a sort of reverse-elitism.