Yes, it was in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. That quote (“You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon”) was from Chancellor Gorkon (played by David Warner); the character of General Chang (played by Christopher Plummer) quoted Shakespeare throughout the film. Both of the actors regularly performed on stage in Shakespearean plays, which I suspect was part of the humor of it. And, I believe that Plummer and Shatner were contemporaries at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario in the 1950s.
National pride is a powerful force, but sometimes the ideas of some particular member of some particular nationality are simply too good to be ignored by members of other nationalities.
Proud peoples from places other than the Arab world have been using the zero for centuries despite its Arabian origins; proud peoples from places other than China have benefited from the use of paper for, again, centuries; proud people of non-European origin who make (or care about) music have been greatly influenced for three hundred years by the work of the German J.S. Bach and his peers and successors; people from Asia and Africa have embraced the Internet despite not having invented it; and so on.
Greek myths have traveled the world and been massively influential; so have the ideas of Mohandas K Gandhi. Sometimes these things catch on. Racism isn’t really anything to do with it. Is it racist to say that the idea of peaceful resistance being unusually powerful as a change agent, is universal? Ask that guy in Tiananmen Square.
OK, maybe Middleton and Rowley wrote a couple of the best plays of their age. Shakespeare wrote over thirty of them.
Sherrerd @42:. I like the cut of your jib and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Yes, zeroes and paper are good. And Bach took everyone’s clavier and tempered it well.
What’s the big deal about Shakespeare? To paraphrase the late Frank Carson, it’s the way he told 'em. Shakespeare shamelessly borrowed stories from other sources (sometimes multiple sources, real and fictional, stitched together) but told them in language that few have been able to match. One can find earlier versions of the same stories by other authors, but there’s a reason Shakespeare’s versions have stuck and the others have faded into distant memory.
In addition, he was (as noted) the right man at the right time and the right place to achieve a maximum impact on the English language and cultural heritage, and our language is thus filled with words and phrases he coined. In fact there are over 1700 of them, which one could argue is “too much of a good thing”. Including that one.
You don’t have to like Shakespeare, and not everything he wrote was a winner, but the man had a way with words that few in history have matched.
The fact that we’re still putting on Shakespeare’s plays and discussing them over 500 years later says it all. Has there ever been a time when a Shakespeare play wasn’t being produced somewhere?
I would love to bring the man to the modern day, just to see the look on his face when he realized his works were still popular. It would blow him away.
And when you’re talking about works that just “strung a bunch of cliches together” surely you must include Airplane.
Yeah, I’d put Neil Gaiman, staunchly middle-class, or JK Rowling, a product of the working/lower middle class, against any toffs from Oxford (who mainly excel at non-fiction, IMO). Who are the best British upper-class writers of fiction today?
Jilly Cooper? :eek:
The aristos tend to go for non-fiction (see Antonia Fraser and her daughter Flora, for example) in part because they often have unfettered access to private archives for source material and in part because history and biography are much more respectable than fiction.
Do we finally have flying cars?
Shakespeare fans are much like a cult.
(emphasis added) That statement alone is a strong argument for Shakespeare as the GOAT.
Must be, numbers-wise, the largest cult there is.
Shakespeare has only fans embroiled in cults?
I have mention the Isaac Asimov story The Immortal Bard, in which a scientist transports Shakespeare to modern times. He is amazed at the interpretations placed on his work, saying “God ha’ mercy! What cannot be racked from words in five centuries? One could wring, methinks, a flood from a damp clout!” As a final indignity, when he enrolls in a night school class on Shakespeare’s plays
the professor flunks him!
I like to imagine Bill explaining his plays to modern scholars.
“No, that was just a dick joke. Yeah, that one too. Yeah. Dick joke. Another dick joke. That one’s actually about boobs…”
Find some youtube videos on Original Pronunciation for Shakespeare, and you’ll learn that many of his characters were making quite ribald speeches. For example, in As You Like It, there’s a nice speech that these days we think is about time, and it’s really a joke about prostitutes.
An excellent post, Baker, but I would introduce the kids to A Midsummer Night’s Dream as their first exposure to the Bard. They’ll love Puck and the mechanicals, and anyone from sixth-grade on up will sympathize with the young lovers.
I daresay you’re thinking of Christopher Marlowe.
I’ve read a couple of Antonia Fraser’s mysteries. I’m sure her non-fiction is much better, and I’ve never read any.
With the result that nowadays, anyone can drop dick jokes (and pussy jokes; don’t forget about those) into conversation in any context, and make it sound cultured.
That sounds pretty great to me.