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Add to FavoritesShakespeare is undoubtedly one of the finest authors ever to have been produced in any language. However, his work must be judged for what it is, not what English teachers and literary critics want it to be. Shakespeare's sonnets are not incomprehensible: they are beautiful, but they are not what most people actually know him for. They know him for Romeo and Juliet, for Julius Caesar, for Hamlet, for Macbeth: for his human dramas.
So when we ask about Shakespeare's writing, we must ask primarily about his drama, and we immediately encounter a problem: Shakespeare does not intend for us to simply comprehend his writing, he intends for us to see and hear his writing. We are not meant to recline in our armchair, read Hamlet's soliloquies, and then discuss them critically with friends in a coffee shop. Obviously, his words are incomprehensible in the modern private-reading world where each reader is cast into the dissonant world of their own responses, for they do not have the whole piece of art. They have an outline, an outline which is, in truth, a reconstruction and a direction of what was, in Shakespeare's intention, an artistic whole.
We cannot ignore this fact, that we are not Shakespeare's intended audience, and so the incomprehensibility of Shakespeare is to be expected. Our primary barrier in understanding Shakespeare is not the etymological evolution of five hundred years, but the shift of understanding which makes us read plays instead of see them. When we see Shakespeare on stage, we see what his works truly were: Romeo and Juliet does not so easily become a "tragedy," and Julius Caesar does not so easily become a "history." Hamlet evolves into a deliciously emotive person whose every woe is a roller-coaster for the audience, instead of a narcissistic howler more akin to young Werther than any Danish prince. Yes, when we read Shakespeare, we will fail to comprehend it, unless we have a spectacularly vivid imagination: and that is our own fault. How silly of us to read a play. To understand the play, we must be a member of the collective audience which boos some parts, and cheers others, which enjoys the slapstick and the heroic with equal fervor. We must see all the contradictory reactions in one swift glance around the room, and watch the delicately directed dance of the play unfold in our ears.
Yet even so, as with all the great authors, Shakespeare will finally escape us, because he gave to more than us. We may see the great effects of the play on the audience, we may delight in many parts of the play, but we probably will not enjoy each of Shakespeare's moments; one person cannot form the whole audience within themselves. Only by participation in an audience of understanding can we come to any comprehensible conclusions concerning Shakespeare, and that is a project for a lifetime.
Learn more about this author, Lyman Stone.
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No
To say that Shakespeare's writing is incomprehensible is to say that the English language is incomprehensible. Shakespeare not only wrote his plays in the English language, he invented much of the English language as we know it today. At least one thousand words that we use currently Shakespeare invented. For instance, the word "lonely" appears for the first time in the English language in The Winter's Tale. A word that we use so readily to describe and understand a particularly poignant emotion of alienation came from Shakespeare's inventive genius.
In fact, "invention" is a central term in understanding Shakespeare's craft with language. Often he seems to invent language improvisationally just as he invents human character that endures in literature and life up until today. German romantic critics frequently refer to Shakespeare's genius with language in terms of a "spark," a lightning bolt of insight that enters his plays and changes our language and perception of the world in an instant. In the Renaissance, invention meant discovery as a result of searching or endeavoring. Although today our notion of what "essay" means is dreadfully prosaic, the word has its root in the verb, to essay, meaning to search, to discover, to taste, to try. All of Shakespeare's plays exude the sense of a playwright essaying all aspects of life, and finding, discovering, bending, contextualizing, inventing language to represent the world which he makes both strange and uncanny, while, at the same time and in an uncanny way, Shakespeare's world in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century becomes increasingly our own.
We often forget that the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages did not have a dictionary. There was no dictionary of the English language until Samuel Johnson produced one in the late eighteenth century. Words had not yet been codified and concretized. Language remained available to Shakespeare like a treasure chest of untapped linguistic wealth. It is difficult for us to imagine a world in which there was no printed archive of words and their definitions. As Shakespeare wrote his plays for performance, I imagine him creating language in the same manner in which actors improvise their parts. At the same time he labors as a poet to bring craft and order to his work. We also often forget that Shakespeare uses colloquialisms, jargon and a language that derives from London culture in the late 1500s and early 1600s. A great deal of the language we cannot comprehend in Shakespeare's plays tends to be those words and phrases that have become archaic over the past four hundred years.
Although there is no writer in the history of the English language who used language as complexly as Shakespeare, and, as far as I know, there has been no writer who has used as many unique and meaningful words in ratio to the content on the written page, Shakespeare often criticized and satirized excessive or overdetermined use of language. Love's Labor's Lost, a pure language-fest, pokes fun at people who use language in abstract and incomprehensible ways. Sonnet 130 parodies while it ridicules the outrageous metaphors of Petrarchan poetry, an object of his satire that shows up in many of his plays. In Romeo and Juliet, which frequently ridicules the obfuscation of Petrachan poetry, Shakespeare focuses upon the slippery nature of language. As beautiful as such moments as the sonnet Romeo and Juliet share at the end of Act I, Juliet conducts some of the greatest critiques of the ontological alienation that the gap between word and meaning produces.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo Called,
Retain that dear perfection that he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for thy name-which is no part of thee-
Take all myself (2. 1. 82 - 91).
The great and subversive Falstaff in a manner similar to Juliet warns of the dangers inherent of treating a word with as much reality as the concept it represents in his wise and hilarious catechism concerning "honor." In his magnificent second soliloquy, Hamlet berates himself for many things, including his own penchant for producing a great deal of talk and comitting little action. The same play explores in each act how words can be used as destructively, as weapons, turning King Hamlet's death by poisoning in the ear into a metaphor Shakespeare sustains until the final scene. The destructive nature of language dominates Othello as Iago destroys every character in the play by using only words. In the first act of King Lear, Edmund reinvents his character by twisting his title, "Bastard," into the definition of his role as the villain of the play.
The fact that great leaders throughout history have quoted (and misquoted) Shakespeare testifies to the accessibility of his language. After President Kennedy was assassinated, Robert Kennedy urged the audience in the 1964 Democratic National Convention to think of his brother in the same way Juliet imagined Romeo.
When he shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he shall make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
The poetry may be dense, but Juliet's words of love are breathtaking because they are, at the same time, so simple and so accessible. So are her words of love to Romeo near the end of the "balcony scene," when she seems to cut through the ornate poetry she has been exchanging with him in order to be as simple and clear as possible, almost out of frustration at Romeo's inability to understand her.
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep. The more I give to thee
The more I have, for both are infinite (2. 1. 175 - 177).
There could not be a more clear and comprehensible statement of love in English. It is comprehensible for the very reason that it is our language of love. Through Juliet, Shakespeare has invented that which we recognize as the language of romantic love.
Nothing in literature can be more comprehensible than Shakespeare's language because he created the language and its contexts that we recognize and which defines who we are today, whether we are aware of it or not. To this extent, perhaps one could argue that Shakespeare's language is incomprehensible for the very reason that who we are as human beings remains incomprehensible. In most of his plays, Shakespeare reveals how language is often at odds with itself, that words are frequently inadequate at signifying reality, and that speech can often be dangerous. At the same time, he shows how individuals are at odds with themselves, and that their motivations are mysterious. The roles people play and the language that they use to define those roles can often become incomprehensible, but without words, "the rest is silence."
Learn more about this author, Peter Sinclair.
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