Shakespeare

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Child pages

What's so great about Shakespeare?

Books

• Amazon - What's So Special About Shakespeare?

Articles / videos

• 2013.02.10 - YouTube - BBC Earth Lab - What's so great about Shakespeare?
• 2014.03.13 - YouTube - Shakespeare is no longer relevant (Debate)
• 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?
  
  • Related book: Amazon - What's So Special About 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"

Summary of the techniques Shakespeare uses

• 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
  • http://penandthepad.com/dramatic-techniques-shakespeare-8540495.html
    • Monologues and Soliloquies
    • Recurring Imagery
    • Unexpected Asides
    • Dramatic Irony
• 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.