Don Pedro: You embrace your charge too willingly. I think this is your daughter.
Leonato: Her mother hath many times told me so.
Benedick: Were you in doubt, sir, that you asked her?
-From Much Ado About Nothing
My first encounter with Shakespeare was in school at the age of 13. We had the play Julius Caesar for our english course (not summaries, the original work). Julius Caesar in all its english glory was a play that was next to incomprehensible - both in words and historical details - for us not-so-literary children of Jolarpettai. Jolarpettai is a town that grew around a large railway junction - the junction itself was built by the british during colonial times and originally employed a lot of british people, some of the descendents of those english families still live in Jolarpettai. The school was founded to educate the english children and is still called 'Anglo Indian Railway Mixed High School', in memory of its colonial legacy.
Our english teacher was a passionate and unpredictable man whose ambition had been downsized by his circumstances. He used to hide chalk in his copious head hair and would pull them out like a magician in the class. Once he pulled out a cigarette from his hair and surprised us and himself. The book we used was well produced with footnotes for all the archaic phrases and words. Interspersed amisdt the text were illustrations: Caesar in court along with the conspirators, and a few odd scenes. The illustration that caught our attention was that of the naked Colossus, naturally.
Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
Shakespeare's text has a life of its own. For 13 year olds, the above lines were a source of perverted laughter. Roman politics and the ideologial struggles of Caesar's friends were alien ideas that we didn't recognize then. Our teacher tried to educate us, but didn't succeed very much. However, I'd like to think he has posthumously suceeded (he died of a heart-attack while I was still in school). At the very least, one student's mind that was ignited in school is now burning with furious interest after more than two decades.
I reread Julius Caesar again a few months ago. It never ceases to amaze me to find how incredibly complex and rich all Shakespeare's characters are. I grow more passionate, more wise (really) after every encounter with Shakespeare's words. This gushing of mine isn't new. There have been millions who have enriched their lives with Shakespeare and there'll be billions more. Once you've tasted Shakespeare's words, you're hopelessly tethered to your bookshelf. Your only hope of escape lies in reading all his words, and, of course, blogging about it. (I give you fair warning: I've begun to read his plays in earnest and shall quote him at all inopportune moments) After I read Caesar, I read The Tempest (see) , and at present, Much Ado About Nothing (riotous hilarity!).
I've often heard my friends and family say they find it hard to follow Shakespeare's plays because of the archaic english (this book may help). Do not be dissauded so easily. If a Jolarpettai kid can read Shakespeare, you can too. Persist through the first scene of a play and you'll soon march to the rhythms that Shakespeare so efforlessly draws out of human life. Shakespeare shall set you free.
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Hear hear! Usually my interest in posts on Science Blogs varies with the inverse square of the post's relevance to science (or science education or science policy, etc.). But this post is the exception.
This year I decided to re-read the entire Henriad, from Richard II to Richard III during my summer vacation. (Too ambitious for two weeks - I made it only half way or so) I went to the local Barnes & Noble to get paperback copies, and as I put them on the counter the young lady at the register said "Taking a class?". Usually I'm not so dull, but that day the question caught me completely off-guard. "What? No, why do you ask?", to which her reply was a bewildered glance down at the pile of Shakespeare on the counter. My wits caught up with me and I realized that she couldn't fathom anybody reading these plays for any reason other than that they are a required part of a required class in school.
The problems of introducing young people to Shakespeare are at least superficially analogous to science education, I think. They are both baffling and arcane to the uninitiated, ironically so, since they both underpin much of modern life. They are both also only fully appreciated in their native language. Even though you can get the gist of Hamlet by reading a modern retelling, or understand the broad concepts of cosmology by reading popular science books, their elegance and beauty are fully appreciated only when they're understood in their own terms.
I think that's where the analogy ends though, because whereas after a basic understanding of math and science everything seems new, once one reads and understands Shakespeare, nothing is ever new again. I remember reading an account -probably apocryphal- of an older woman finally being persuaded to see Hamlet for the first time: "I don't know what all the fuss is about; it was just one cliche after another."
Have you read Harold Bloom's Shakespeare compendium Shakespeare, the Invention of the Human? That, along with his short book Hamlet, Poem Unlimited is my favorite modern criticism of Shakespeare. A lot of what Professor Bloom writes resonates with me, but especially as regards Shakespeare and his over-arching influence on the entire Western Canon.
Anyway, thanks for the Shakespeare post. I'll be sure to look for more.
(I just read what I wrote above, what a load of self-important fluff! The sentiment was sincere though: Shakespeare good; science good; fire bad!)
Eric, I haven't read Bloom (or the many other excellent critiques). My current shakespearean knowledge probably puts me alongside someone who sat in the front row at Globe when Shakespeare staged his plays, whistling and enjoying the show.
I grew up in the west of Ireland and was lucky enough to have some good English teachers. In my third year of secondary school (high school) we did Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I. The history plays are not regarded as highly as the tragedies, or even the comedies, exept that this play introduced one of the English lit's greatest characters - Sir John Falstaff, the greatest antihero and lovable villain in literature. From then, I was hooked.
Henry IY can be easily read, and moves easily between high and low life like a modern novel might move from boardrooms and cabinet rooms to bars and bedrooms. Prince Hal, Harry Hotspur and the King himself are also roundly drawn as if from life. But Falstaff steals the show - he was so popular that Shakespeare had to bring him back in the sequel, and even give him a play for himself - The Merry Wives of Windsor, with which I am not familiar.
Being Price Hal's alternative father ends badly for Falstaff, and his friends, but you know from the start that Hal is going to go off and become a great king and triumphant warrior. As he does so, he brings about the death or destruction of all his old, low-life buddies. A great story, but only a sub-plot in the sweep of the History plays, where Shakespeare learned his trade and sharpened his mind for the great Tragedies that followed.