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Nathan Wailes

Nathan Wailes

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Table of contents

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  • 2013.02.10 - YouTube - BBC Earth Lab - What's so great about Shakespeare?
    • Summary:
      • Shakespeare invented a bunch of words that we still use every day, like "puking".
        • The bloke single-handedly turned the English language on its head and made it the greatest language on Earth.
      • He was a rock-star in his day.
      • He produced a lot of plays and sonnets.
      • He did all this while also having kids, working as an actor, running a theater company, and being a property owner.
      • Tangential: Shakespeare was among the first to benefit from the invention of the printing press, as he would have been able to learn from lots of books that were previously inaccessible.
  • 2014.03.13 - YouTube - Toronto Debating Society - Shakespeare is no longer relevant (Debate)
    • Note that these points were not prepared in advance; this is just a quick off-the-cuff debate.
    • Summary:
      1. Opening argument that Shakespeare and his works are no longer relevant:
        • Most of Shakespeare's stories are based on Greek tragedies.
          • This actually seems like a pretty good point, if it's true.
        • Shakespeare only added some witty repartee to the Greek stories.
        • She suggests that in Shakespeare's time, going to the theater was more about the social experience / interaction, which seems dubious.
        • She suggests that even at that time the audience may not have understood a lot of what the actors were saying, which seems dubious.
      2. Opening argument that Shakespeare is still relevant:
        • The topics Shakespeare addressed are still relevant today.
          • This is pretty much the only thing he says; he just repeats it a bunch of times.
        • He briefly suggests something along the lines that English has been at least partially passed down via Shakespeare's works, which seems dubious.
      3. Response from the first speaker:
        • She re-asserts that the Greek tragedies had already covered these topics.
        • She re-asserts do not have the attention span for Shakespeare's works today.
          • This seems like a bad reason.
  • 2014.10.09 - Nautilus - Shakespeare’s Genius Is Nonsense
    • TODO: Finish summarizing this.
    •  Summary
      • Stephen Booth teaches Shakespeare and is highly regarded by his students.
      • He wrote a famous book, first published in 1977, that compiles Shakespeare's sonnets and "explores the ambiguity and polysemy of Shakespeare’s verse".
      • (... need to summarize this...)

      • Booth follows editorial convention in pointing out the two potential meanings of breese (“light wind” and “gadfly”). Meanwhile, he observes, the second, quieter effect of flies (denoting both “retreating” and “insects”) has been passed over—but not without effect. While both senses of breese or flies pertain, Booth notes that “in calling the effect a pun, we both exaggerate and underestimate its effect”—exaggerate because it’s less self-conscious than a pun, and underestimate because it achieves much more than one. An explicit pun is a momentary flash, and then it’s over. More valuable for Booth are the links that spread out from each word based on “its sound, sounds that resemble it, its sense, its potential senses, their homonyms, their cognates, their synonyms, and their antonyms.” Unexploded puns conserve their energy and preserve these links, creating rich, multilayered, imbricating patterns throughout a work.

        What’s essential to Booth is that for readers and audiences—for everyone but the professional critic—these patterns usually remain below the threshold of our attention. What he calls the “physics” of the verse are available to general readers, but not obtrusive. In his 1998 book Precious Nonsense, Booth argues that the experiences that Shakespeare’s poetic language evokes with such verve and subtlety are intensifications of everyday language experiences. Shakespeare achieves this by weaving incredibly rich networks from the same kinds of “substantive nonsense and nonimporting patterns” that pop up in slang, jokes, songs, and nursery rhymes. Those dense networks of patterns, Booth posits, are “the principal source of the greatness we find in Shakespeare’s work.”

        • I can't say I fully understand what he's saying.
      • ...
  • 2015.10.31 - YouTube - RTHS English with Ms. Brown - What's So Great About Shakespeare, Anyway?
  • 2016.02.08 - YouTube - PJ Media - The Bard: Why is Shakespeare Great?
  • 2016.03.09 - YouTube - Walker Books - What's So Special About Shakespeare?
    • Book by the same guy: Amazon - What's So Special About Shakespeare?
    • Summary:
      • There's no one reason why Shakespeare is so special; there's a whole set of reasons.
      • Watching Shakespeare's plays is like being invited into a house full of amazing rooms...
        • Translation: His plays have tremendous variety.
      • We learn all about the time period through Shakespeare's works.
      • Shakespeare is able to draw us in and make us feel all sorts of different and powerful emotions.
      • Shakespeare has had a massive impact on our language.
      • Shakespeare's writing has become part of our culture.  His words are so familiar that when people try to understand something, or imagine something, or describe it, their minds turn to a scene or character from Shakespeare.
  • 2016.04.28 - YouTube - The Late Show with Stephen Colbert - David Tennant Explains Why Shakespeare Still Matters
    • David Tennant: "Because he has a way of saying things that has never been better; he's got a way of getting to the nub of what it is to be a human being and he says it better than anyone has done since, I think."
    • Colbert: "There are many modern phrases that he invented."
  • 2016.05.13 - YouTube - TEDx - "Why Shakespeare? Because it's 2016"

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  • Related links
    • Wikipedia - Shakespeare's writing style
      • Shakespeare's characters were complex and human in nature.
      • He made the protagonist's character development central to the plot
      • He changed what could be accomplished with drama (by making character development central to the plot).
  • Dramatic techniques
  • He writes lyrics that are open to more than one interpretation / ambiguous / have more than one meaning.
    • The Beatles wrote lyrics that were open to interpretation, but I think in some cases they were just writing nonsense that their listeners would interpret as containing secret meaning.
    • Shakespeare also wrote things that had full double-meanings, like double-entendres.

Misc

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