part of why they resonate so much is the way their influence shaped later culture and taste.
That’s a good hypothesis. It’s tricky in Shakespeare’s case, because we don’t write at all like Shakespeare now. For instance, the second rule most writers learn is “Show, don’t tell.” Shakespeare always told and never showed. If he wanted to convince you that two people were in love, he’d have them tell you at length how much in love they were, rather than have them do something loving. (There’s even an odd soliloquy in Hamlet where Hamlet complains that other men merely proclaim and act their grief in a way that no viewer can verify, while he, Hamlet, experiences true inner grief. This soliloquy is exactly the kind of proclamation that it complains about.)
Or consider clarity. Writers today, at least the ones people actually read rather than set on their coffee-tables, value clarity of style. Shakespeare deliberately obscured most of what he wrote. He isn’t difficult to understand because he was an Elizabethan. Other Elizabethan works are relatively easy to understand. Shakespeare inverts word order, fills his lines with tongue twisters, makes up words, and writes gigantic run-on sentences in which the verb may be separated from its object by four or five independent clauses and as many metaphors. The writers who do strive to be unclear, like Joyce and Faulkner, I blame on Shakespeare, and on the culture that sprung up after him saying that art must be highly-stylized, and preferably difficult to understand.
I recognize many strengths in Shakespeare, particularly when compared to his often shallow and closed-minded (or close-lipped) contemporaries. But I think much of his reputation relies on the prettiness of his words, and so proclaiming the genius of Shakespeare is really taking the “style over content” side in the style-vs.-content literary debate. I’m firmly in the “content over style” camp.
Shakespeare always told and never showed. If he wanted to convince you that two people were in love, he’d have them tell you at length how much in love they were, rather than have them do something loving.
Um, he was writing plays. The showing part is the director’s job.
No. Plays have stage directions. The director is responsible for interpreting the story, not creating it. If the actions that convince us characters feel what they say they feel aren’t in the script, the writer has failed. Read some movie scripts. Characters do and say things that reveal their feelings, rather than proclaiming their feelings as in Shakespeare, and those things are in the script.
And “showing” can be done in dialogue. The first words spoken in the script for “Apocalypse now” are: “It’s crazy—sugar is up to 200 dollars a ton—sugar!” The fact that the character is talking about sugar prices and war in the same discussion shows you where his true concerns lie.
I recognize many strengths in Shakespeare, particularly when compared to his shallow and closed-minded contemporaries. But I think much of his reputation relies on the prettiness of his words, and so proclaiming the genius of Shakespeare is really taking the “style over content” side in the style-vs.-content literary debate. I’m firmly in the “content over style” camp.
As counter-evidence, Shakespeare has been widely successful in translation. There wouldn’t be Russian ballets and Italian operas based on his work if its appeal was due to the style of the English.
I’m not sure about that. It could be that (1) English people loved Shakespeare because his writing is so pretty, (2) England was powerful and influential, and then (3) non-English people admired Shakespeare for signalling reasons.
A first-rate musical work can be based on a not-so-great text. For instance, many of Schubert’s greatest songs are settings of poems by Wilhelm Müller, and they really aren’t particularly good poems. (At least, they don’t seem so to me and I don’t get the impression that others generally disagree.) So there could be ballets and operas based on Shakespeare’s plays, and they could be really good ballets and operas, even if the plays weren’t very good.
A musical setting of a poem isn’t really about the words, and poems are already not really about their content; I think the relationship between a play and an adaptation of that play is much tighter.
That’s a good hypothesis. It’s tricky in Shakespeare’s case, because we don’t write at all like Shakespeare now. For instance, the second rule most writers learn is “Show, don’t tell.” Shakespeare always told and never showed. If he wanted to convince you that two people were in love, he’d have them tell you at length how much in love they were, rather than have them do something loving. (There’s even an odd soliloquy in Hamlet where Hamlet complains that other men merely proclaim and act their grief in a way that no viewer can verify, while he, Hamlet, experiences true inner grief. This soliloquy is exactly the kind of proclamation that it complains about.)
Or consider clarity. Writers today, at least the ones people actually read rather than set on their coffee-tables, value clarity of style. Shakespeare deliberately obscured most of what he wrote. He isn’t difficult to understand because he was an Elizabethan. Other Elizabethan works are relatively easy to understand. Shakespeare inverts word order, fills his lines with tongue twisters, makes up words, and writes gigantic run-on sentences in which the verb may be separated from its object by four or five independent clauses and as many metaphors. The writers who do strive to be unclear, like Joyce and Faulkner, I blame on Shakespeare, and on the culture that sprung up after him saying that art must be highly-stylized, and preferably difficult to understand.
I recognize many strengths in Shakespeare, particularly when compared to his often shallow and closed-minded (or close-lipped) contemporaries. But I think much of his reputation relies on the prettiness of his words, and so proclaiming the genius of Shakespeare is really taking the “style over content” side in the style-vs.-content literary debate. I’m firmly in the “content over style” camp.
Um, he was writing plays. The showing part is the director’s job.
No. Plays have stage directions. The director is responsible for interpreting the story, not creating it. If the actions that convince us characters feel what they say they feel aren’t in the script, the writer has failed. Read some movie scripts. Characters do and say things that reveal their feelings, rather than proclaiming their feelings as in Shakespeare, and those things are in the script.
And “showing” can be done in dialogue. The first words spoken in the script for “Apocalypse now” are: “It’s crazy—sugar is up to 200 dollars a ton—sugar!” The fact that the character is talking about sugar prices and war in the same discussion shows you where his true concerns lie.
As counter-evidence, Shakespeare has been widely successful in translation. There wouldn’t be Russian ballets and Italian operas based on his work if its appeal was due to the style of the English.
I’m not sure about that. It could be that (1) English people loved Shakespeare because his writing is so pretty, (2) England was powerful and influential, and then (3) non-English people admired Shakespeare for signalling reasons.
A first-rate musical work can be based on a not-so-great text. For instance, many of Schubert’s greatest songs are settings of poems by Wilhelm Müller, and they really aren’t particularly good poems. (At least, they don’t seem so to me and I don’t get the impression that others generally disagree.) So there could be ballets and operas based on Shakespeare’s plays, and they could be really good ballets and operas, even if the plays weren’t very good.
A musical setting of a poem isn’t really about the words, and poems are already not really about their content; I think the relationship between a play and an adaptation of that play is much tighter.