We don't still study Shakespeare because of his mastery at synecdoche and metonymy, regardless of what your last Engllsh quiz tested you on. "Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended" / "Mother, you have my father much offended" might be my favorite line in the entire play for the amount of raw emotion it contains. The "here, play this flute for us" scene is another example of such brilliance. Hamlet does this for the entire play, if you're paying attention. But when Claudius says to Hamlet, "How is it the clouds still hang on you?" and Hamlet says, "I am too much in the sun" then sure maybe your English teacher's going to ask you about metaphor and themes and all this stuff, but it's also a great subtle "Fuck you, you're not my real dad" moment and it's literally Hamlet's second line. I don't expect most modern audiences to understand, without help, what "hoist by his own petard" means or a "bare bodkin" is or who is "fardel" and what's he supposed to be bearing. People need to keep an open mind and be able to say, "Ok well, yeah, that part was confusing, but does this part mean what I think it means?" because pretty often, it does. That doesn't mean that it's *all* like that. It would be a disservice to suggest that it's not difficult, when you really dig into it. And that's not even counting the various words that have become archaic. If you honestly believe that you get all the inside jokes and political commentary that he snuck in 400 years ago and you're not a PhD student in the subject? You probably missed more than a few and only think you got it. Yes, Shakespeare is hard to read and effectively comes across like it's written in a different language. I read his works well before they were assigned to me and out of the Black's Readers The Works of Shakespeare, which had no annotations at all and only a brief glossary at the back, so I often had to use context clues to parse the language.Ī big part of the problem is that people give up too easily. (He quoted poetry from Milton through the mid-Victorian era extensively to illustrate the continuing influence of the stories he was retelling.) That early taste for poetry helped out a great deal when I came to read Shakespeare, especially since I was virtually on my own. It was probably lucky for me that I fell in love at an early age with Bulfinch's Mythology and with poetry through Bulfinch. ![]() Reading poetry and understanding it is where they stumble. It's probably because they're reading them out of annotated editions, so the archaic words aren't an obstacle because they're already defined on the page. Every time I've had someone tell me about a passage they couldn't get, it's invariably been one in which all the words retain their meanings in contemporary English and the only difficulty is the heightened language. ![]() There are a number of other subs that discuss the various theories that someone other than the man from Stratford wrote the works attributed to William Shakespeare. Shakespeare may have been a master at murdering people with words, but as the late, great Chadwick Boseman said, "We don't do that here." Keep it civil, please. ![]() Homework questions that fail to meet these requirements will be removed. Don't just drop the question and come back later looking for the answer. We appreciate when you stick around and get involved in the discussion, also. Please bring your own work to the party, showing us what effort you've already made to answer the question, rather than just copying the question straight from your assignment. If you're here looking for homework help, please flair your question as such. ![]() Please read and respect the rules surrounding homework questions! The Rules From academic takes on iambic pentameter to picking out the dirty jokes, there's always space for you here. Welcome to reddit's premier Shakespearean subreddit! Here we can discuss the Bard, his greatness, his works and his life! A community for Shakespeare enthusiasts the world over, no matter your age, language, or experience level.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |