Nathan Wailes - Blog - GitHub - LinkedIn - Patreon - Reddit - Stack Overflow - Twitter - YouTube

Shakespeare

Owned by Nathan Wailes
Last updated: Dec 13, 2020
13 min read

Table of contents

Child pages

What's so great about Shakespeare and his works? / What should a rapper know about why Shakespeare is so famous?

Summary

His reputation is based largely on his plays, which are mostly in prose, rather than on solely his ability as a poet

  • A very important thing to know, that I didn't know for a long time, is that most of Shakespeare's plays are written mostly in prose, not in verse.  (Source) (Source 2)
    • So that suggests that when writing for the English language, it is extremely difficult (perhaps impossible) to tell a complicated story entirely with verse in a reasonable span of time.  Instead you need to do what musicals / operas / Shakespeare's plays do, which is to switch back and forth between prose and verse, using the prose to advance the story and using the verse for emotional emphasis.

His reputation is overblown / He's become overhyped

  • Reddit - r/AskHistorians - Was Shakespeare better than his contemporaries or did his work just survive?
    • Shakespeare wasn't beyond reproach in his own time and afterward, and much of the school of thought that builds Shakespeare up to be the ne plus ultra of Early Modern drama and in fact all theater ever is a later invention of the 18th and 19th centuries. That view of Shakespeare's works turns into a hazy kind of historical revisionism really fast -- there were many other authors besides Shakespeare working during Shakespeare's lifetime and people liked those other authors' works enough to pay to watch them performed. Shakespeare didn't own the game, and there were authors writing challenging and powerful plays in styles very different from Shakespeare's, as well as authors writing semi-predictable comedies and tragedies.

      I like Shakespeare a lot, but I think the popular focus on Shakespeare as the best writer in the English language ever to exist, or the best Early Modern dramatist, distorts the picture. People can be so focused on Shakespeare as the best Early Modern dramatist that other Early Modern English writers get treated like sideshows, or discussed solely in terms of how they compare to Shakespeare. Our expectations regarding Elizabethan drama have been shaped by Shakespeare, but had Shakespeare never existed there would still have been Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson -- and then John Webster, John Ford, Thomas Kyd, George Chapman, and many more. Plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries are still being studied and performed all over the world, and at their best they're really damn good. Whether these works are cumulatively or individually better than Shakespeare's works is a subjective literary judgment, but Shakespeare wasn't the sole great writer rising out of a pile of dross, he was one of many competitive, collaborative individuals working in a particular timeframe.
  • Reddit - r/AskHistorians - When did William Shakespeare become "The best playwright ever"?

    • CheruthCutestory

      • John Dryden attributed to his genius/success the fact that he wrote to nature not the artificial form of theater (i.e. the traditional conventions first dictated by Aristotle). And he noted how realistic his characters were, which he thought placed him above and beyond everyone else. That's a very common refrain first articulated (that I'm aware of) by Dryden. That what set him apart was how real and true his characters are (one I agree with).
  • This is not to say that he was not regarded as great in his time:
    • Penguin Popular Classics (1994 edition) - Hamlet - Introduction
      • There was little playing in 1593 (when he was ~29), for the theatres were shut during a severe outbreak of the plague; but in the autumn of 1594 (when he was ~30), when the plague ceased, the playing companies were reorganized, and Shakespeare became a sharer in the Lord Chamberlain's company who went to play in the Theatre in Shoreditch.  During these months Marlowe and Kyd had died.  Shakespeare was thus for a time without a rival.
      • By the summer of 1598 (when he was 34) Shakespeare was recognized as the greatest of English dramatists.  Booksellers were printing his more popular plays, at times even in pirated or stolen versions, and he received a remarkable tribute from a young writer named Francis Meres, in his book Palladis Tamia.  In a long catalogue of English authors Meres gave Shakespeare more prominence than any other writer, and mentioned by name twelve of his plays.
      • Since 1601 (when he was ~37) Shakespeare had been writing less, and there were now a number of rival dramatists who were introducing new styles of drama, particularly Ben Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Marston, and Beaumont and Fletcher who began to write in 1607.

He based his plays on known-to-be-good Greek tragedies

  • The idea here is that Shakespeare's works are "standing on the shoulders of giants".  So in the same way that Eminem's reputation benefited from the innovations in style that were actually first introduced by others (e.g. Rakim, Nas), Shakespeare's reputation among some people may be benefiting from people associating all of the emotional power of his stories with Shakespeare himself rather than associating some of that emotional power with the earlier Greek stories / playwrights.
  • One possible interpretation of the saying "good artists copy; great artists steal" is that "copying" is when the general public knows that you are not the first artist to introduce an idea, whereas "stealing" is when the general public thinks you are the first to come up with an idea.  Thus you become "great" in the minds of the public because you seem able to come up with lots of never-seen-before ideas.
  • Related: Shakespeare's Hamlet was apparently based on earlier works that covered the same basic plot.
    • Penguin Popular Classics (1994 edition) - Hamlet - Introduction
      • The story of Hamlet in some form is found very early in European literature.  It occurs in the Historia Danica of Saxo Grammaticus, who flourished about A.D. 1250, but the immediate source of the play is in the Histoires Tragiques of Francois de Belleforest, published in Paris in 1570.  Belleforest's story is crude and bloody.  [Description of the plot follows.]  This story was the basis of a play which was produced some time before 1589.  [Description of literary references to a Hamlet play from before Shakespeare's version came out.]  There was therefore a Hamlet play in existence and popular between 1589 and 1596.  (...)  This earlier Hamlet has disappeared, but there is a crude German version known as Bestrafte Brudermord, or Fratricide Punished.
        • The fact that the earlier Hamlet play did not survive through the ages is a good example of how an artist's reputation can grow as his influences are forgotten about.

His works have tremendous variety

  • He sets his works in lots of different places.
  • His plays cover many different aspects of life; he isn't retreading the same idea over and over again.  He made comedies and tragedies, whereas nowadays many directors will just make the same kind of movie over and over again.

He is/was (incorrectly) thought to have invented many words and phrases still in use today

  • It seems this may not be totally true:
    • Merriam-Webster - 10 Words Shakespeare Never Invented
      • Summary: People got the idea that Shakespeare invented lots of these words and phrases because the 1928 Oxford English Dictionary listed Shakespeare as being the first place where lots of these words were known to have appeared.  Now that researchers are going through other documents, we're finding earlier uses of these words in other documents of the time.
    • StackExchange - Literature - How many of Shakespeare's words in his plays were new?
    • Also, common sense would suggest that making up words could make it harder for people to understand what was being said.
      • There is a similar problem in rap with slang and proper nouns: if a rapper uses slang the audience doesn't know the definition to or references a proper noun the audience isn't familiar with, the word loses its impact and the audience may end up confused.  With slang, though, a person can ask a friend afterwards who may know what the word means; but if Shakespeare is just making a new word out of thin air, that avenue to listener comprehension is gone.
      • New phrases may be more easily understood than new words since the words that make up the phrase will be understood by the audience.

Speculative: His works are in English, the language spoken by the people you're listening to who are praising him

  • The idea here is to answer a slightly different question: "Why do (English-speaking) 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.
    • 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.
  • 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.

Speculative: His plays are hard to read, and so you seem smart if you say you enjoy them

  • This is just a guess.

Books

Articles / videos

  • 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?
    • Summary:
      • There are really so many things that make Shakespeare really wonderful to read and to study and to watch and to enjoy, but we're going to focus on four basic things show up in all the Shakespearean plays:
        • Poetic, expressive language
        • Universal themes
        • Fully-rounded characters
        • Effective stagecraft
      • Poetic language
        • Iambic pentameter
        • Strong imagery
        • Language mirrors characters and situations
        • He used a variety of poetic forms within a single play
        • Invented many new words
        • Famous quotations that show insight, discovery, and meaning
      • Fully rounded characters
        • Created dynamic characters who change as a result of the events in the play
        • Very human: Few are all good or all evil
        • Understandable motives and problems
        • Even royalty and historical figures are human and accessible
      • Stagecraft
        • Understood how to please an audience
        • Something for everyone in each play
        • Builds suspense and tension
        • Balanced spectacle and pageantry with introspection and poetry
  • 2016.02.08 - YouTube - PJ Media - The Bard: Why is Shakespeare Great?
    • Summary:
      • Klavan: Shakespeare is, in fact, the greatest writer of the English language.
      • Klavan: Art is a record of the experience of being human.  (...)  He captures not only more of the inner experience of being human with more beautiful language than any other writer before or since, but he captures it at a moment when the human experience is actually changing, it's actually mutating from what it was in not only in the Middle Ages, but from what it was before that in the Classical Ages.
      • Klavan: (Paraphrasing) You can't find examples in earlier literature of a villain who knows what they're doing is evil and chooses that path, which is a very Christian idea.
      • Shakespeare examines things that we're still talking about today; his exploration of race, and what it means to be a different race, and what it means to hate people for their race, and what it means to be what people hate, is unbelievably deep.
      • Klavan: The minute Hamlet walks on stage, we say, "Oh, that's us. That's not Jason and the Argonauts, that's not Achilles, it's not Hector, that's us, that's me."  (...) Shakespeare creates more of that experience, and there are critics who say that he created us, but I think it's more that he predicted us.  He knew what was going to happen.  I can find in Shakespeare all the intellectual trends up to the present moment because he understood what was going to happen once the Church lost control of the monopoly on truth, and how we were going to be different from the classics and how we'd be the same.
      • Whittle: You're right, previously the villains or the forces of tragedy were forces of nature, they were the gods or fate or whatever.
      • Whittle: (Paraphrasing)  Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was considered the classic of the Middle Ages, and it's shockingly bad.  Compared to Shakespeare, there's nothing there.  It's a series of people telling stories, and it's all bawdy.  And there's always a fair princess and a knight and a king.
      • Whittle: (Paraphrasing)  Hamlet is not fundamentally just about this one prince of Denmark.  It's about the underlying themes.
      • Whittle: In the world of the human heart and discovering the commonalities that all of us have, he's unequaled and unlikely to ever be equaled.
      • Whittle: The genius of Shakespeare is that he can take the essence of what it is to be human and set it anywhere.
  • 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"

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
  • 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




Follow me on Twitter