Table of contents
...
- The idea here is to answer a slightly different question: "Why do people spend so much time talking about Shakespeare?". And part of the answer to that question may be that a lot of his competition is not focused on as much simply because their works are in other languages and are from other cultures, while the US culture seems to draw mainly from English culture.
- In other words, if we were all speaking Russian right now we might be asking "What's so great about Tolstoy?", or if we were all speaking Chinese we might be asking, "What's so great about Confucius?".
- In still other words: maybe Shakespeare isn't so much more great than many other artists from history, but we focus on him because he's one of the best to have operated in our language.
Speculative: He reached among the highest
...
levels of ability in an environment that was especially conducive to producing excellence
...
- The idea here is: certain skills are passed from person to person, and so certain environments are especially good at producing excellence in that set of skills. For example,
- Examples
- Modern Brazil has a reputation for producing excellent soccer players because the environment is set up to encourage excellence in soccer-playing ability.
- Ancient Greece and Rome produced excellent sculptors.
- Renaissance Europe produced excellent painters.
- Examples
- Likewise, maybe Shakespeare's time was especially focused on producing thought-provoking stories, and so Shakespeare's plays are kind of "standing on the shoulders" of all of the techniques that were developed in that time to produce high-quality stories. This happens in many art forms: many works are produced, but after a few decades only certain works are remembered, and someone in the future may unconsciously be led to heap praise on those works as if those works materialized out of thin air, when in fact they were just iterations on other works that are not remembered.
- And since the communities that support excellence in certain art forms can die out, that would have made it harder for future writers to match the level of quality found in Shakespeare's works.
...
- 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).
- Wikipedia - Shakespeare's writing style
- Dramatic techniques
- http://penandthepad.com/dramatic-techniques-shakespeare-8540495.html
- Monologues and Soliloquies
- Recurring Imagery
- Unexpected Asides
- Dramatic Irony
- http://penandthepad.com/dramatic-techniques-shakespeare-8540495.html
- 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
- 2017.02.24 - YouTube - NativLang - What Shakespeare's English Sounded Like - and how we know
- Towards the end he gives an example of Shakespeare playing around with the ordering of words, where he combines two sentences into one, so that the audience has to untangle them:
- I with death and with
Reward did threaten and encourage him,
Not doing ’t and being done - Translation:
I threatened to kill him if he didn’t and to reward him if he did.
- I with death and with
- Towards the end he gives an example of Shakespeare playing around with the ordering of words, where he combines two sentences into one, so that the audience has to untangle them:
- StackExchange - Literature - Why did Shakespeare write in iambic pentameter?
...