The radio program On The Media aired a superb program about the appeal of Shakespeare that transcends his English origins and conquered the world.
In the first part of the show, host Brooke Gladstone discussed with James Shapiro, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and author of Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future, about how and why Shakespeare became so central to US literature that America now considers him as their own and how the political, social, and cultural dimensions of his work resonates so widely. Shapiro is a droll speaker and his anecdotes made for riveting listening. (32 minutes)
In the second part, Gladstone talks with Qais Akbar Omar, author of A Night in the Emperor’s Garden, who put on performances of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost in Kabul, Afghanistan in 2005 after obtaining a copy of the play that had been translated into Dari. (19 minutes)
This was the first time a Shakespeare play had been performed in the country in 35 years, at a time when the Taliban were vying to regain control after the US invasion. He spoke about the challenges faced by the female performers and how much the play’s themes resonated with the actors and audience, many of whom who had never encountered Shakespeare before. One person was convinced that Shakespeare was actually the same person as the 13th century Persian poet Rumi, so similar were their poetic styles and themes.
… America now considers him as their own …
Everything is our own!
“Shakespeare became so central to US literature that America now considers him as their own”
You haven’t experienced Shakespeare until you’ve read him in the original Klingon…
@ 2 sonofrojblake
Somewhere years ago, I heard a reading of some Shakespeare done in what linguists think would have been his actual dialect. I could have been in Edinburgh.
There are some nice videos about the original pronunciation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=original+pronunciation+Shakespeare
Dunno about that. First exposure I had to that crap was in school here in Australia, and having to endure it caused me to develop an undying hatred of it. It remains now as strong as it ever was.
(Or: It sure hasn’t conquered me — rather, the opposite)
@ 5 John Morales
A peace is of the nature of a conquest; for then both parties nobly are subdued, and neither party loser.
😉
@5: it didn’t conquer you… It just beat you.
sonofrojblake:
Beaten by not appreciating miserable melodrama, fatuous figurativeness, overwrought orations, and sickly saccharine sonnets, sure.
(I’ll take that any day)
“[Thou art] a knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking knave; a whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch.” (King Lear, 2.2)
Too saccharine?
“Thine face is not worth sunburning.” (Henry V, 5.2)
To such an extent that in Odessa, TX they have a ‘reproduction’ of The Globe (‘scare quotes’ because, though A for effort it’s not very accurate and has a roof so the audience don’t die of heat stroke) AND an Anne Hathaway’s cottage! They also have a Stonehenge which, strangely for Texas, is only 2/3rds the height of the original.
http://www.howlandbolton.com/gallery/images/Odessa1.JPG
http://www.howlandbolton.com/gallery/images/Odessa2.JPG
O’erwrought.
“Thine face is not worth sunburning.”
Sun don’t care.
You have to give Shakespeare credit for starting the whole “Scandi Noir” trend with Hamlet.
John: I eagerly await your pronouncements on Tennyson, Keats, Coleridge, Eliot, etc.
Are there any poets you do like, John? Maybe William McGonagall is more to your taste.
It rhymes, and it’s practical!
John Morales @5:
The problem is that Shakespeare (like mathematics) is almost always very badly taught, and bad teaching can ruin a subject for life. I had the same experience, except that I was interested in theater, and once I started seeing (decent) performances of Shakespeare’s plays (I even acted in one!), I grew to love them. The thing is, they were written to be performed, not to be read like some sort of highbrow literature. They lose a lot if simply read.
Shakespeare was very popular in the USA at all levels of society in the nineteenth century — that is, before anybody tried teaching it in school. Unfortunately, it seems like schools can ruin almost any subject for almost anyone. (I think the reason they didn’t ruin math for me was that I kept reading ahead, so by the time the teacher was misteaching it, I had already taught myself and could just ignore the teacher. The two times in my life when I hadn’t gotten far enough ahead, it took me years to undo the damage.)
Allison @#14
You are correct. Forcing literature on people and teaching it badly is almost a guarantee that young people will not like it. George Bernard Shaw said that he hoped his plays would never become required texts in school because he did not want to become hated like Shakespeare.
I had a teacher who absolutely loved Shakespeare and could quote entire chunks of it from memory. Many decades later, I can still recall him saying “Speak the speech, I pray you, trippingly on the tongue” (an excerpt of the full quote) to impress upon us the need to speak clearly. Unfortunately, our class of smart-aleck adolescent boys wasted the opportunity we were offered to learn.
But I recall being secretly impressed by the fact that the teacher was so admiring of the author and wondered what it was that was so great. This made me start to read and watch Shakespeare’s plays later in life.
#14 Allison
I think you have omitted another possibility: that some people just like different things.