This post is much less about carrying something forward, and more just my thoughts on William Shakespeare
Shakespeare is a writer. I guess he's a pretty good writer, but to me the significance sort of ends there. Sure there's a bunch of claims about how he was intelligent or gifted or super-human, but I just consider him a writer; better than most other writers, but not in a category all by himself. So with this mindset it baffles me why so many people dread or fear Shakespeare, I mean I can understand dreading or fearing reading in general because sometimes that can be a hefty task, but the all-too-common irrational fear of Shakespeare doesn't make sense to me. I think my initiation to the world of Sakespeare and his writing helped me surpass the hatred that other people feel for the Bard, but when you get down to it, he's just a writer.
The first time I engaged Shakespeare's writing, it was sort of a "baptism by fire" situation where there wasn't a whole lot of time to get worked up about old English, and tragic story lines, etc. It was more just my eight grade English teacher comin in one day and saying "here's an excerpt from Romeo and Juliet, we'll spend a few days (which turned into weeks) reading and discussing it, and then we'll move on. There was no formal "introduction" and no dumb "effects of Shakespeare in the modern world assignments" (which unfortunately exist abundantly), we just had Shakespeare thrown in our faces the same way every other piece of literature is thrown in our faces. This of all things is probably what I'll carry forward from the "Shakespeare process" (the process people go through to overcome their fears of Will), the way someone's perspective can be completely changed by just portraying him (or anyone for that mather) as insigficant. I didn't really have any preconceived notions about Shakespeare, but if I had I think they'd dissipate after giving Shakespeare a simple title, or rather lack of title. He's a writer! What more do you want? I mean clearly there was something about him that was a little enhanced, or more pronounced than other writers, and the only reason I say this is because of how long his writing has endured. That's one of the few "specialities" that I really appreciate about Shakespeare.
There must be some reason why we're still reading his writing in school today, five hundred years after he died. I mean I guess you could say someone who wrote that many plays and poems was bound to have one meaningful one, but I've never been someone who's impressed by statistics, and more than one of Shakespeare's works has carried popularity through five centuries. I think this can be attributed to the one thing that I credit Shakespeare with being truly magnificent at, which is capturing human thought and emotion. He can convey real thoughts or feelings, that we may or may not experience at some point in our lives, and make them universal for everyone, better than any other author I've read. This is probably one of the main reasons why I don't have a problem with Shakespeare, because his writing, old as it is, speaks to human emotion and holds value and substance even in the modern day. Analyzing Shakespeare's writing has made me realize the things that I look for in "good writing", these being relatability (how well the reader can connect with the writer), life lessons or 'moral of the story', and how well the author can manipulate characters to make them come to life and appear real. Scoring high in those three categories classify someone as a "good writer" by my standards, and Shakespeare is pretty high up there in all aspects of my criteria, so I'm not dreading or fearing King Lear, in fact I have high expectations for it. Hopefully it'll meet these expectations, because it's always good to read some really good writing
October 30, 2011
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