Naked Science Forum
General Discussion & Feedback => Just Chat! => Topic started by: Jimbee on 07/03/2024 08:05:51
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"Data, you're here to learn about the human condition and there is no better way of doing that than by embracing Shakespeare."
The above quote is by actor Patrick Stewart as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in "The Defector", Star Trek: TNG (originally aired Jan. 1, 1990, season 3, episode 10). The reason why I bring up Mr. Stewart is because his character is based partly on him, especially his love of Shakespeare. (The fictional Captain Picard isn't English you know. He is supposed to be from La Barre, France.) Patrick Stewart studied at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in 1957 before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966.
Why do scholars and intellectuals keep telling us to read Shakespeare? They have been doing that for hundreds of years now. What's the big deal about William Shakespeare?
William Shakespeare himself never went to a university. He studied at a grammar school. Ben Jonson said that Shakespeare had "small Latin and less Greek", which meant he thought Shakespeare's education at the grammar school was inferior to his. I know people say that Shakespeare had a unique insight into human psychology and the human condition. But again what is the big deal about Shakespeare? Why do people think of him as the greatest author of all time in the English language?
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Sadly, many university graduates nowadays seem to know less than previous generations of grammar school pupils. But, like Jonson, they have an unwarranted sense of privilege and superiority.
Shakespeare didn't need fluency in Latin, Greek, or even French to write plays in English, but he was literate and well grounded in history and mythology, and his audiences weren't too concerned with accuracy.
I'm not sure that his grasp of psychology went much deeper than knowing the Seven Deadly Sins, but his skill was in decorating a plot, however absurd, with matchless oratory, and the trick of writing in iambic pentameter makes it all exceptionally easy to remember. So you could read all sorts of turgid Victorian pseudointellectual texts and bore yourself to death with Freud/Jung/Adler's contradictory conceits, or hear a few lines of pithy Shakespearian monologue and realise that this is an ordinary bloke talking about what ordinary blokes think, because it was written by an ordinary bloke with an ear for vocabulary and meter.
"There's a cracking bit of stuff!" "But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?" Same thought, same underlying psychology, audience recognises the situation; but Shakespeare pulls you into Romeo's mind by phrasing it as a question and adding a dimension.
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William Shakespeare himself never went to a university. He studied at a grammar school.
Grammer school is a secondary/senior/10 to 18 ish school. It was probably the only school avaliable for that age range if you where not fantastically rich, university was out of bounds also unless you where rich.
Shakespreare drew on lots of inspitations, it is the wording rather than the content. As a poet he is of the artist group.
If you like it you like it in my opinion horses for courses, like Michalangelo, Homer, beethoven. Your question seems to be why are these artists pushed more than the others, same reason the beatles where big, a narrow media corridor in those days, no internet youtube etc. I do agree though, when the controlling elites get hold of an idea everything else is sidelined. Every now and again something like punk comes along that they dont want.
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Also I was going to add (last thing I think). People who watched Shakespeare's plays were just the common folk. At the Globe Theatre on the outskirts of London. Wealthy people attended too. But the crowd was mostly commoners.
Because he dealt with some pretty heavy topics. Science, math, law, cosmology, justice, evolution (in Hamlet). In "The Tempest" Gonzalo speaks of a commonwealth, or republic, he'd like to rule. Those were pretty deep topics. And for the common man. Is that how they found out about that stuff? Most people were illiterate back then. So they got their "education" thru his plays?
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& a tad bit of Philosophy too...
That which we call a Rose.
By any other word,
Would smell as Sweet!
(watz in a name?)