Shakespeare is considered by some, the best writer in the history of the English-speaking world.
Forgive me if this sounds naïve. But Why?
:):)
For me it is his utter mastery of language.
It takes a little while to get used to the structure of the sentences and (to our modern ears) unusual choice of words but bloody hell the man could write a powerful line or two.
just a random one from “Romeo and Juliet”
almost clichéd now with overuse but still sublime I think.
If you want to, you can go and see Macbeth performed and watch an exciting play. You’ll be entertained.
If you want to, you can read this:
…and marvel at how Shakespeare really captures in words that utter despair at the thought of how time just passes, in the end we all die and none of it means anything.
If you want to, you can look a little deeper, at how Shakespeare put it all together for an actor to be able to say those words to maximum effect. Here is Ian McKellen discussing the soliloquy, with a beautiful rendition of it at the end. They way the words all fit together, perfectly crafted to create an effect and to discuss that despair.
And then if you still want more, you can think about the candle and the walking shadow and Plato’s prisoners chained up in a cave who only ever saw the shadows on the wall of the cave and that was all the reality they knew, and think about if Shakespeare is perhaps also referring to that. Or just pick any other line and see what you might find there.
Many different reasons. Here are a few:
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He’s not dogmatic in his Plays. He can give equal, or almost equal, feeling and intellect to both sides of an argument or problem. Today Shakespeare’s philosophy is claimed by conservatives, liberals, libertarians, reactionaries, feminists, Jews, anti-zionists, palestinians, imperialists and anti-imperialists. It takes a certain amount of skill(and admittedly Shakespeare’s mystery) to have all these ideologies claiming ownership of you.
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The beauty of his language.
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His knowledge of human psychology was extremely impressive for the time.
Here’s a piece by Bernard Levin. It’s fairly widely known but still worth quoting. Most writers would be satisfied with having one or two of their phrases entering common usage. Shakespeare has hundreds. Here are some:
- If you cannot understand my argument, and declare ``It’s Greek to me’‘, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger; if your wish is farther to the thought; if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool’s paradise -why, be that as it may, the more fool you , for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then - to give the devil his due - if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then - by Jove! O Lord! Tut tut! For goodness’ sake! What the dickens! But me no buts! - it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.*
Bernard Levin
Not every word or every work by Shakespeare is a winner - I have been known to provoke literary types into a lather by suggesting The Tempest is “half a good play” - but even the bad stuff is pretty good for his day, and the good stuff (of which there is an astonishing amount) is transcendent.
Like whatshisname at the beginning of Dead Poets Society I agree that it’s counterproductive to demand that everyone bow at the altar of the Bard without question, so if you’ve seen a good Shakespeare production or two and still don’t like his work that’s certainly your prerogative, but you’re likely to be in the minority.
He took a collection of well-known stories and English history and updated them, introducing the interior dialogue of the characters in a way that hadn’t been done before.
From a writing standpoint, it was as revolutionary as the printing press. It has shaped writing ever since, to the point where we take it for granted.
I don’t like to read plays. But I clearly remember going to a Renaissance Faire, and they had a Shakespeare play on, and the actors were quite good. In five minutes I forgot I was sitting outside on a hard wooden bench and it was hot…I just got lost in the story and the characters. It was just a snippet of a play, too, and it was just amazing.
Have you ever seen a play performed? They are like nothing else and it’s like someone cast a magic spell over you.
What takes Shakespeare at least one step above everyone else is his ability to reach out to everyone in the audience not just a select few at the top like Milton, or Marlowe or at the bottom like, say, Adam Sandler.
Take a play like “Macbeth.” In the scene where (spoiler alert) Macbeth murders King Duncan, you see the human side of Macbeth despite his killing the sleeping monarch. You feel his guilt, and not just for killing his king, but a relative and a person staying in the home of Macbeth. It is gruesome, awful, yet poignant. And in the very next scene we have the Porter rambling on and on with a very funny and risque’ scene. Then in the next scene Mac is back to his murderous ways.
And the witches (the Weird Sisters) in that same play…great! And their predictions, one so good Tolkien was to steal it and use it centuries later. In my mind when Tolkien steals your stuff, you’re pretty good.
And the plays have everything…sword play, ghosts, witches, regicide, homicide, suicide, rational explanations for totally irrational stuff, puzzles, filthy jokes…You name it, he used it if it were around…In Romeo and Juliet he even has a mildly crazy Mercutio talk of a tiny chariot pulled by atomes (atoms…atomic power?).
Shakespeare draws wonderful characters, look at both Portia and Shylock in Merchant of Venice (a woman who can beat a man at his own game and a mean skinflint whose agony we feel, or Brutus and Cassius (anyone could draw Antony, but these two so we both like and dislike them at the same time…) in Julius Caesar. And Banquo and the afore-mentioned Mercutio (who has the best dying line ever!).
In Shakespeare’s plays, you see beyond the stage into what and who we are. Not many can do that.
One minor but important issue was the Shakespeare was writing at a time when plays (in their modern form) were a new phenomenon. Because of this, Shakespeare was able to mold the genre; no one could say “that’s been done before” and much of what he tried to do had never been done. This is typical of new art forms: someone comes along in the early days to show its potential (e.g., D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin for movies; the Beatles for rock).
The bigger reason is that Shakespeare wrote some very good plays on all levels.
Granted you can read the language – and despite being modern English, it still takes a little effort and practice to read 16th Century English like it’s your own language – Shakespeare is far more profound and revealing of the human psyche than Freud or Jung. I remember when I used to read Anne Rice vampire novels, and one vampire tells another (I think Armand to Lestat) that to really understand humans, the best way is to read the entire works of Shakespeare. And I’ve read every Shakespeare work since in that same mindset.
There’s nothing cliche or tired about his prose, even still, after 400 years. He manages to pack a lot of meaning into a small amount of words. He can be suggestive and poetic without being opaque or dull. The fact that a lowborn renaissance hick like Shakespeare can still feel relevant to my 21st century life is amazing. I’ve read 40 year old works that fall flat, so to read something ten times as old that sounds fresh and can still reflect emotions and situations I myself have experienced, I don’t know how that’s possible. Shakespeare must have been magic.
Perhaps we should start at the bottom: Jim B., what has been your exposure to Shakespeare thus far?
Here’s 135 phrases coined by the Bard of Avon.
And that’s just the A’s and some of the B’s.
Because he’s unbelievably good. Once I was done with my dramatic literature classes, Jonson and Sheridan and those godawful melodramas from the 1800s got boxed up and put away, but Shakespeare is right there in the middle of the bookshelf and I find myself picking him up for a week or an afternoon or an hour on the regular.
I was dismissive of him in school but after I graduated and I realized just how often I was returning to him rather than the other writers, I began to grasp why he is The Bard.
Even if you somehow don’t find anything else of great value in Shakespeare, you need him to understand a forest of subsequent literary and cultural references. You aren’t really fluent in English if you are not acquainted with the Bard.
Yeah, nothing but a bunch of famous quotes strung together…
Shakespeare not only wrote phrases that we all know, he invented many words that are now in English. Examples.
Plus, the more you look at Shakespeare the deeper he goes. We watched a set of videos from the BBC featuring the director of the RSC and famous actors who had been part of it - David Suchet, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, many, many more. Their diving down into some scenes was amazing.
I know that some people have trouble getting into the plays, but a while ago I fulfilled a bucket list item by reading all of them, and by the time I had gotten very far I was reading the plays as fast as I could read modern English - and dreaming in blank verse.
This (also mentioned by DrCube) is what I find really striking about Shakespeare. When he’s really in the zone (as in Hamlet or Macbeth), his ability to understand and portray the intricacies of the inner mental dynamics of his characters seems to be almost at a 20th-century level.
Mostly, I think it’s because the previous generation said so who said so because their previous generation said so up to the actual Shakespeare era. Also, back then, there probably wasn’t as big a competition as today. Not that many writers. Not that many published novels & plays. So, he stood out back then. Then he has been praised.
Also, his stories tend to be mainstream. There is no sudden surprise or twist. He just builds up on the stories that anyone can expect but be great with it. It’s like forging a typical mainstream beauty as a masterpiece. There is no kink. In a simple way of saying, cliche is the best stories out there; it is frowned upon if you do it today, but he had no one to frown upon him back then. His stories are great because they are cliche & he has done great works with cliche.
Devil’s advocate here…do we know that these phrases weren’t in common usage at the time, and just appropriated by Shakespeare? For example, The Beatles didn’t coin the term “Let it be”, they just wrote it down and became popularly associated with it.
Are we assuming originality in his turns of phrase and choices of words that may merely be association colored by the distance of time and the scarcity of contemporary comparisons?
I agree with most of what has been said but northporlarbear, I certainly don’t agree that “there is no sudden surprise or twist.” Really? The murder of Desdemona didn’t surprise you? The deaths of Romeo and Juliet didn’t seem like a “twist”?
I also don’t agree that we admire Shakespeare because someone older told us to. That’s more likely to make students dislike someone. And when I was forced to read “Julius Caesar” in High School I didn’t like it. Then someone showed me a film of the play, and I suddenly began to get the drift. Those things may seem like cliches now, but the Bard was there first.
Also, the sonnets. They are beautiful and not really “mainstream”. “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”? Sonnet 130, not mainsteam.