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| Yes | 24% | 296 votes | Total: 1223 votes | |
| No | 76% | 927 votes |
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Add to FavoritesWow, what a question! I suppose Shakespeare is incomprehensible if you are not ready to commit to it. But there is one problem that is inherent with Shakespeare, his writings were not meant not to be read but instead they were meant to be seen and heard. Shakespeare, after all, was a playwright not a novelist.
What that means is that not every needs to read the Bard but perhaps they need to see Shakespeare performed if not live then in movie form. Movies are more accessible to most people than plays and there has been more than enough decent Shakespeare that they could easily draw more people to the Bards' work. Once they get a few movies under their belts they will then have a sense for the humor and sometimes the bawdiness he projects. They'll see that they really aren't too different from movies made today.
Shakespeare writes of violence, action, witches, insanity, sex and so much more. Once people realize that through some of the movies that the dude writes of things familiar to them then well maybe they would find his books more attractive. So my advice would be to see a play or a movie.
One of the biggest handicaps Shakespeare has is the high school English teacher. Schools always do a bad job of introducing students to Big Willie. Schools are wonderful at getting students to hate reading in general but The Bard in particular. The teachers end up doing their students a grave injustice for not finding better ways to introduce Will.
The key to making this great playwright attractive to teens in high school is to hear it read properly. Kids as with adults need to fall in love with the writing and the words. For me the man is all about language and exploring the depth of his words. It's always great to see how his one man has added to the richness of the language, a feat no one else can touch.
In school I hated Shakespeare with a passion. It wasn't until I had seen a couple of movies did I finally get turned on to what the man was doing. In some ways I feel a richer person for having had the experience of enjoying William Shakespeare. I firmly believe that the way he is introduced will always help people comprehend the Bard. Until then he will remain incomprehensible to many people.
Learn more about this author, R.A. Scott.
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No
Were Shakespeare incomprehensible, he'd have been forgotten four hundred years ago. Perhaps, to a modern reader (especially young high-school students), he may seem unintelligible, but we must remember he was writing to a different culture in a different time in what was, in many ways, a different language. There are three major reasons why Shakespeare gets a bad rap from a minority of people: the first is that they have no exposure to the real stage. The second is that they do not understand the culture of the time. The third is that they do not understand Elizabethan English. All of these points are easily dismissed: to an individual cultured in at least one or two of those areas, Shakespeare is accessible.
Shakespea re wrote plays. Reading a play versus acting in or watching a play are far different experiences. To truly grasp Shakespeare, one must act in or watch a play or two of his to see. In a play, it is not so much what the actor says, as how he says it. A script does not capture this; instead a director drives the "how" and the actor delivers it. Many students are bereft of such experiences, and are instead assigned to read "Julius Caesar" or "Romeo and Juliette" as if they were standard prose. To those who don't have the opportunity to see the work live, their ignorance is forgivable.
The culture of Britain of the 17th century was far different. Shakespeare wrote to a pre-industrial audience shortly after the religious Reformation and during late secular Renaissance. Key cultural differences include: a strong Catholic tradition (despite the recent creation of the Anglican church), an audience at least somewhat versed in the Ancient Classics (Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, etc.) Many people were still superstitious, so there was an air of magic in Shakespeare's discussion of Fates and other mythical creatures. In "The Merchant of Venice," we see anti-Semitism as a cultural norm. A modern, casual reader of Shakespeare typically lacks experience in any of these areas. Many average students may not know Plato from Pluto, lack much sense of the magnitude or significance of the Reformation, and have only a cursory understanding of the Renaissance. And Heaven help them if they read of Shylock in "Merchant." Shakespeare spoke to a time of intense social turmoil. We are undergoing a similar time, but for far different reasons, and the reasons behind turmoil are as important as the turmoil itself.
Of course, the language is different. A student who is more than nominally religious will find Shakespeare more accessible, as he wrote in the same period as the King James Bible. Most students are nominally religious (if at all), and those who bother to read Scripture, find themselves wed to more modern translations which lack the verbiage of their classic English predecessor. This may be helpful for religious understanding, but it has harmed the majority's ability to grasp the structure and vocabulary of 17th-century English. "Thee, thou, ye, and thy" are seldom heard, except when parodying Southern preachers on TV or in movies. The sentence structure is different, with Shakespeare using Latinate sentence structures. A good example is Juliet's famous line: What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet;
We might write today: What's in a name? A rose by another name would still smell sweet.
English has become far more efficient and far less poetic in the intervening 400 years.
Shakespeare isn't incomprehensible; our society is on a cultural decline. To grasp Shakespeare and see it is understandable, one must be educated. Fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, Classics were regularly taught, people read the King James Bible and understood it, and plays and acting were regular parts of curriculum. Society changes; Shakespeare remains the same.
Learn more about this author, Ian Hardy.
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