Shakespearean English, or "Why is misunderstanding easier than learning?"

[Fiery Diamond]

Little rant incoming.

I'm not the biggest fan of Shakespeare. Don't get me wrong, he was pretty talented and also had an interesting sense of humor, but so many people seem to think he was the biggest theater genius ever and all his works were complete masterpieces to which all other plays must be compared, which is such ridiculous hyperbole that it's kind of a turnoff. But even though I'm not head over heels for his stuff, one thing that has always annoyed me about many people who don't put the guy on a pedestal is the way they treat the language used. Now, if your native language is something other than English, I can understand that his archaic language could be difficult. But the number of native English speakers who act like Shakespearean English is completely impenetrable is excessively high, and I honestly don't get it. Yes, it's different from current English. Yes, it requires you to actually learn a bit. Why is "learning a bit" apparently a complete deal-breaker for so many people? Why do they prefer to throw up their hands and declare Shakespeare's works impossible to understand - or worse, completely misunderstand things because they refuse to learn what words actually mean. I was thinking about this because I was watching a show where there's a theater thing going on, and the supposedly competent character says, "Wherefore art thou, Romeo?" instead of "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" Wherefore does not mean where. That's not even a reasonable assumption to make from context clues even if you didn't know what it meant, but the assumption that wherefore means where is super common for some reason. Ever seen the Bugs Bunny Witch Hazel playwright episode? "Wherefore art thou, Romeo?" "I'm right here, Juliet!" Yes, it's a joke, but it exists because of the common misconception. Nobody thinks that "therefore" means "there," so why would "wherefore" mean "where?"

TL;DR: Why do people prefer willful ignorance, complaining, and obvious misunderstandings over putting forth the effort to learn something? Shakespearean English is the subject of my rant, but the question holds for other things as well.

[Kyberwulf]

Why should I invest time and energy into learning something that is pretty limited in use? It's not like like learning an accent such as Australian, or the harder to understand English accents of today. I use these as an example because my cousin has problems understanding those type of accents. At least you have a wider breadth of usage out of learning those, or heck even learning another language, even enough to get the just of what's going on in their media.

I mean in the first part of your statment.. you acknowledged Shakespeare isn't the end all and be all.. then you go on to wonder why people don't put the effort of learning this stuff in the original language? Why bother to if his works are adapted into modern vernacular.

[Peelee]

Little rant incoming.

I'm not the biggest fan of Shakespeare. Don't get me wrong, he was pretty talented and also had an interesting sense of humor, but so many people seem to think he was the biggest theater genius ever and all his works were complete masterpieces to which all other plays must be compared, which is such ridiculous hyperbole that it's kind of a turnoff. But even though I'm not head over heels for his stuff, one thing that has always annoyed me about many people who don't put the guy on a pedestal is the way they treat the language used. Now, if your native language is something other than English, I can understand that his archaic language could be difficult. But the number of native English speakers who act like Shakespearean English is completely impenetrable is excessively high, and I honestly don't get it. Yes, it's different from current English. Yes, it requires you to actually learn a bit. Why is "learning a bit" apparently a complete deal-breaker for so many people? Why do they prefer to throw up their hands and declare Shakespeare's works impossible to understand - or worse, completely misunderstand things because they refuse to learn what words actually mean. I was thinking about this because I was watching a show where there's a theater thing going on, and the supposedly competent character says, "Wherefore art thou, Romeo?" instead of "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" Wherefore does not mean where. That's not even a reasonable assumption to make from context clues even if you didn't know what it meant, but the assumption that wherefore means where is super common for some reason. Ever seen the Bugs Bunny Witch Hazel playwright episode? "Wherefore art thou, Romeo?" "I'm right here, Juliet!" Yes, it's a joke, but it exists because of the common misconception. Nobody thinks that "therefore" means "there," so why would "wherefore" mean "where?"

TL;DR: Why do people prefer willful ignorance, complaining, and obvious misunderstandings over putting forth the effort to learn something? Shakespearean English is the subject of my rant, but the question holds for other things as well.

I also don't hold any love for Shakespeare (and flat-out loathe Romeo and Juliet in particular), but not for this reason. The language is incredibly outdated, and there is little to no reason to not update it to modern vernacular other than "reverence" for the original. As you point out, it is easy to misconstrue, and as Kyberwolf points out, such misconstructions are easy to occur because Shakespeare's version of English is archaic and largely not used anymore. Shakespeare himself invented new words for his plays, so he clearly didn't hold prescriptivist ideals, which just makes the whole thing just that much sillier.

[The Fury]

...OK, maybe I'm something of a minority here, but I actually do like Shakespeare. Some of his works anyway. Hamlet, King Lear and The Scottish Play are some of my favorites, Julius Caesar was the first of his plays that I actually liked.

I was never that big on Romeo and Juliette, though the annoyance of not putting in a token effort to understand what's being said is one I share. I mean, the "wherefore" example you give is actually explained in annotated versions of the text that are not hard to come by, (the version I read in high school was annotated.)

As for other idiosyncrasies of Shakespearean English... you can pick up most of the meaning through context if you're able to see a production done by a decent theatre company. Reading it from an unannotated text is admittedly pretty tricky. If you think that's hard, try Chaucer. You're in for a fun time!

[Vinyadan]

I also don't hold any love for Shakespeare (and flat-out loathe Romeo and Juliet in particular), but not for this reason. The language is incredibly outdated, and there is little to no reason to not update it to modern vernacular other than "reverence" for the original. As you point out, it is easy to misconstrue, and as Kyberwolf points out, such misconstructions are easy to occur because Shakespeare's version of English is archaic and largely not used anymore. Shakespeare himself invented new words for his plays, so he clearly didn't hold prescriptivist ideals, which just makes the whole thing just that much sillier.

How are you going to do that and keep the metre? Or would you just do away with it?

[Rynjin]

@OP: You really don't understand why people think the word with the word "where" in it means "where"? Really?

I can understand not liking it, but not understanding why is a pretty big failure to understand human nature. We look for simple solutions, and faced with a sentence that contains precisely ZERO words that are used in daily life anymore, people are going to make assumptions that make the sentence readable for them based on the context of their own knowledge. Is it really any more of a stretch to assume wherefore means where than to assume thou means you?


I also don't hold any love for Shakespeare (and flat-out loathe Romeo and Juliet in particular), but not for this reason. The language is incredibly outdated, and there is little to no reason to not update it to modern vernacular other than "reverence" for the original. As you point out, it is easy to misconstrue, and as Kyberwolf points out, such misconstructions are easy to occur because Shakespeare's version of English is archaic and largely not used anymore. Shakespeare himself invented new words for his plays, so he clearly didn't hold prescriptivist ideals, which just makes the whole thing just that much sillier.

There's a really good reason: updating it kills the cadence. All of Shakespeare's plays are written in iambic pentameter; the number of syllables in each line matters IMMENSELY to the performance.

[deltamire]

I think an aspect of Shakespeare that often throws people off is the sheer amount of concepts being thrown around, both from a grammatical and a metaphorical standpoint. That's just how he wrote; the writing is thick with pretty much every joke and wordplay and reference he could manage to cram in, because that was what people enjoyed at the time. The late 1500s and early 1600s were pretty obsessed with philosophical concepts that were hard to summarise even in long form - not to mention the references to political climates that don't even exist anymore. Add in the fact that a good chunk of the words and phrases he used just straight up have new, different meanings, and that makes for a pretty hard read, even with annotations.

(On top of that, an awful lot of the stuff he's using is either a reference to a reference - like a version of a Roman myth that was well-known in the 1600s, but has become less popular these days - or just flat out wrong by today's standards. Like how in Hamlet, there's parts about pelicans feeding their young with blood, chameleons having a diet of only air, and being out in the open being bad for your health.)

Of course, OP is right in that deliberate ignorance of these aspects of the work is really annoying, and does no good for any of us that enjoy Shakespeare's works. But a lot of peoples' first introduction to the texts are probably going to be as mandatory parts of an English curriculum - I'm in that category, at least - so it's reasonable to assume that they're going to be frustrated with the way it's not the easiest to parse.

[Iruka]

@OP: You really don't understand why people think the word with the word "where" in it means "where"? Really?

I can understand not liking it, but not understanding why is a pretty big failure to understand human nature. We look for simple solutions, and faced with a sentence that contains precisely ZERO words that are used in daily life anymore, people are going to make assumptions that make the sentence readable for them based on the context of their own knowledge. Is it really any more of a stretch to assume wherefore means where than to assume thou means you?


Wouldn't be the simple solution that 'wherefore' corresponds to 'therefore'?

[Vinyadan]

By the way, do people try to pronounce Shakespeare's words as they would have been pronounced in that age?

The typical example is with

Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Where symmetry goes with eye.

And one explanation is that in the time of Shakespeare it really did rhyme:

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;

and so Blake got licence from there (this sort of historical rhyme exists in other languages, too), or simply assumed an old-fashioned pronunciation, like the old-fashioned tyger with y (where the old-fashioned writing may actually be a signal of how you were supposed to read y in this poem).

[Peelee]

How are you going to do that and keep the metre? Or would you just do away with it?


There's a really good reason: updating it kills the cadence. All of Shakespeare's plays are written in iambic pentameter; the number of syllables in each line matters IMMENSELY to the performance.

If only academia churned out a glut of post-grads in English struggling to find jobs specifically in their field who would enjoy exactly this sort of challenge. :smalltongue:

[Rynjin]

If only academia churned out a glut of post-grads in English struggling to find jobs specifically in their field who would enjoy exactly this sort of challenge. :smalltongue:

Would anybody who'd thrown their life that deep down the rabbit hole be un-pretentious enough to do so?

[Peelee]

Would anybody who'd thrown their life that deep down the rabbit hole be un-pretentious enough to do so?

Statistics.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

There's a really good reason: updating it kills the cadence. All of Shakespeare's plays are written in iambic pentameter; the number of syllables in each line matters IMMENSELY to the performance.

Isn't iambic pentameter an easy meter in English, with many natural sentences naturally tending towards it anyway? If so, I'd imagine it wouldn't be all that hard to retain the rythm, but update the rhymes to work in modern English and thus restore the original intention of Shakespeare of creating narratives to be enjoyed by the peasants in the cheap seats?

Grey Wolf

[warty goblin]

I very much like Shakespeare. However reading Shakespeare is nearly always a mistake, particularly for a first exposure. It's a play, it should be seen. Having actual actors makes the language much less of a bother, because of all the context clues from the stage direction and performances. The archaic language also stands out less, because of the strange shared act of imagination that watching a stage play requires.

Being spoken also makes the beauty of the writing come alive in a way it just doesn't on a page. In that sense I would say Shakespeare is the opposite of a lot of what's considered good writing today, where it scans ok on the page, but is just a complete hot mess if read aloud. No rhythm or cadence, metaphors that go nowhere and make no sense, just wretched.

[Fiery Diamond]

@OP: You really don't understand why people think the word with the word "where" in it means "where"? Really?

I can understand not liking it, but not understanding why is a pretty big failure to understand human nature. We look for simple solutions, and faced with a sentence that contains precisely ZERO words that are used in daily life anymore, people are going to make assumptions that make the sentence readable for them based on the context of their own knowledge. Is it really any more of a stretch to assume wherefore means where than to assume thou means you?



There's a really good reason: updating it kills the cadence. All of Shakespeare's plays are written in iambic pentameter; the number of syllables in each line matters IMMENSELY to the performance.

Yes, really. Does therefore mean there? It's got "there" in it! Assuming wherefore means where is just as absurd as assuming therefore means there. I mean, they're actually pretty mirrored words: wherefore means why and is a question word, therefore means "because of this" and is an explanation word. Just like why and because, and where and there. Perhaps you're right and I don't understand "human nature," because I was raised in a household where "I don't understand this" was inherently followed by "so let's find out," not "so let's just not bother." If you know what therefore means (and if you're old enough to be studying Shakespeare, you should, it's pretty simple to figure out what wherefore might mean.

[Peelee]

However reading Shakespeare is nearly always a mistake, particularly for a first exposure. It's a play, it should be seen.

I count have sworn I said this, but can't find it anywhere. Anyway. I wholly agree, and that is where most of my dislike of Shakespeare comes from (other than Romeo and Juliet, which is just awful). It's like taking a film appreciation class and reading the scripts. It's not how it was intended to be presented, and it loses a lot for it.

[Fiery Diamond]

I count have sworn I said this, but can't find it anywhere. Anyway. I wholly agree, and that is where most of my dislike of Shakespeare comes from (other than Romeo and Juliet, which is just awful). It's like taking a film appreciation class and reading the scripts. It's not how it was intended to be presented, and it loses a lot for it.

Romeo and Juliet is less bad if you don't take it as a romance or tragedy, but instead a sarcastic comedy: "look at how stupid teenagers are! They jump right into believing they're deeply in love for no real reason and are willing to do incredibly idiotic things as a result, even to the point of death!" I mean, it's still kind of morbid to find that funny, but I'm pretty sure that was the actual intention.

[Rynjin]

Yes, really. Does therefore mean there? It's got "there" in it! Assuming wherefore means where is just as absurd as assuming therefore means there. I mean, they're actually pretty mirrored words: wherefore means why and is a question word, therefore means "because of this" and is an explanation word. Just like why and because, and where and there. Perhaps you're right and I don't understand "human nature," because I was raised in a household where "I don't understand this" was inherently followed by "so let's find out," not "so let's just not bother." If you know what therefore means (and if you're old enough to be studying Shakespeare, you should, it's pretty simple to figure out what wherefore might mean.

No, it really isn't. That only makes sense from two possible perspectives: back-logic (you already know the meaning of the word, so it's "obvious" what it's supposed to mean), or if you're well versed in English language theory, which is not taught at any of the grade levels people will be when they're exposed to the word for the first time; it's all rote memorization and reading comprehension.

[Fiery Diamond]

No, it really isn't. That only makes sense from two possible perspectives: back-logic (you already know the meaning of the word, so it's "obvious" what it's supposed to mean), or if you're well versed in English language theory, which is not taught at any of the grade levels people will be when they're exposed to the word for the first time; it's all rote memorization and reading comprehension.

Like I said, perhaps my upbringing is to blame here, but I never assumed that wherefore meant where - even when I first encountered it. My reaction was "What does that word mean? I can't tell from context. Hey Mom, what does 'wherefore' mean? Oh, it means 'why?' Hey, that makes sense, it's the counterpart to 'therefore!'" Perhaps making that connection without asking/looking it up is harder than I think, but the idea that someone would assume it means 'where' is still absurd to me. I read a lot as a kid. Whenever I encountered a new word, I first tried to use context clues to figure out what it meant. If context clues were insufficient, I would ask someone or look it up. I never went, "that looks vaguely similar to a word I already know. It must be a synonym." Sometimes I went, "that looks like it shares a root with a word I know. Maybe it's related" and used that to inform my thinking, but I would usually look up the word just to find out exactly what it meant. I despise rote memorization as a learning technique, and I think that focusing on it is a major failing of our educational system. In fact, most of the classes where rote memorization is pretty much the only choice are ones I tended to do poorly at: for example, remembering dates of historical events for history class.

And especially in today's society, where the majority of older kids and teens (and many younger kids) have almost constant access to the internet from one source or another, there is no excuse other than willful ignorance for not looking things up.

[CheesePirate]

This thread made me think of a scene from episode 1 of the brilliant TV series Upstart Crow:


Anne: I mean, why doesn't she just say, "Where are you, Romeo?"

Will Shakespeare: Because, my love, it doesn't mean, "Where are you?" It means, "Why are you Romeo?"

Anne: That's a bit weird.

Susanna: Yeah. Romeo is just his name.

Will Shakespeare: Well, exactly. Juliet is saying, "Why are you a member of a family that I hate?"

Anne: People will definitely think you mean, "Romeo, where are you?"

Susanna: That's what I thought it meant.

Mary: Yeah. I did, too.

John: It's bloody obvious.

Anne: I think, to be clear, you're going to have to have Juliet say, "Romeo, Romeo! Why are you called Romeo?"

Susanna: "A member of a family that I hate?"

Anne: That'd do it. Although if I was being really picky, Romeo is just his Christian name, isn't it? And that's not the issue. It's his surname that's the problem.

Will Shakespeare: Well, yes. Actually, I was sort of hoping people wouldn't notice that.

Anne: I think they might.

Susanna: Duh!

Will Shakespeare: So you think she should say, "Montague, Montague! Wherefore art thou Montague?"

Anne: No. Cos that'd sound like she's lost her cat.

I love the archaic language used in Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, I find it fascinating how languages are related and how they gradually evolve. "Wherefore" meaning "why" makes perfect sense to a Scandinavian, because that word is still used in our languages. In Norwegian it's "hvorfor" or "korfor", in Swedish it's "varför", in Danish it's "hvorfor".

I suppose the reason some people prefer to complain instead of putting some effort into learning is simply that they resent being forced to study something they have no interest in and/or feel they'll never have a use for. For me it was Maths, for others it was Shakespearean English.

[Rynjin]

Like I said, perhaps my upbringing is to blame here, but I never assumed that wherefore meant where - even when I first encountered it. My reaction was "What does that word mean? I can't tell from context. Hey Mom, what does 'wherefore' mean? Oh, it means 'why?' Hey, that makes sense, it's the counterpart to 'therefore!'"

Remember that many (most?) people's first exposure is not at home, it's in a classroom. Reading the text aloud. And asking a question in front of 30 other people, of a teacher who may or may not be friendly, that might make you look dumb, at an age where looking dumb is a BIG DEAL TM is a lot different than being at home where you can safely ask a question without consequences.

Hell, it could be even worse. You might not look dumb, but you'll look like you CARE. And caring about class? Super lame.

[Aedilred]

From the start, I should note that I do like Shakespeare. Or at least, there are some of his works I like very much (I'm not a fan of Measure for Measure or Cymbeline, for instance).

Regarding the idea of "updating" the language in the play... I can see an argument for it in terms of accessibility. I think however that that is entirely outweighed by arguments on the basis of artistic merit. The whole point in Shakespeare is the use of language, and if you translate that, it's lost.

Yes, we translate foreign authors to English, but three points come to mind. First, those works still lose something in translation. Second, much of the time, with, say, Tolstoy, the really interesting stuff going on is the plot and the storytelling, which is worth reading for its own sake. That's rarely the case in Shakespeare: his plots are usually pretty stock. Third, the language barrier between an English-speaker and Tolstoy is massive. You'd need to learn Russian pretty much fluently to read it in the native language. With Shakespeare, the language is archaic but still comprehensible with a bit of effort.

I have seen "modern-language" versions of Shakespeare and haven't been taken with them. They're somehow anodyne and banal.

By the way, do people try to pronounce Shakespeare's words as they would have been pronounced in that age?

The typical example is with

Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Where symmetry goes with eye.

And one explanation is that in the time of Shakespeare it really did rhyme:

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;

and so Blake got licence from there (this sort of historical rhyme exists in other languages, too), or simply assumed an old-fashioned pronunciation, like the old-fashioned tyger with y (where the old-fashioned writing may actually be a signal of how you were supposed to read y in this poem).

From that example, though, it's clear that poets are perfectly happy to write rhymes that don't actually rhyme, and Shakespeare was no exception. e.g.

When priests are more in word than matter;
When brewers mar their malt with water;
(King Lear)

"Water" never rhymed with "matter" there - although that hasn't stopped some productions attempting to force it with some cringeworthy results. So we do need to be careful about assuming pronunciation on the basis of apparent rhyme.

Also, Blake was pretty much mad.

With that said, I don't know about the pronunciation angle overall. I'm sure some productions do try it, at least some of the time.


Romeo and Juliet is less bad if you don't take it as a romance or tragedy, but instead a sarcastic comedy: "look at how stupid teenagers are! They jump right into believing they're deeply in love for no real reason and are willing to do incredibly idiotic things as a result, even to the point of death!" I mean, it's still kind of morbid to find that funny, but I'm pretty sure that was the actual intention.

These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder
...
Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.

Advice which the main characters entirely disregard, and ruin everything as a result.

[Peelee]

Regarding the idea of "updating" the language in the play... I can see an argument for it in terms of accessibility. I think however that that is entirely outweighed by arguments on the basis of artistic merit. The whole point in Shakespeare is the use of language, and if you translate that, it's lost.

The whole point in Shakespeare is the use of language, which was modern and accessible to all the people of its day. You'll forgive me if I find the "artistic merit" argument lacking as I sit back and marvel at the artistic merit of his **** jokes and yo-mama jokes, for example. Proponents if Shakespeare tend to be in a catch 22 of wanting to keep Shakespeare popular and accessible yet refusing any attempt to actually make it popular and accessible. They insist on keeping Shakespeare in an ivory tower despite that this would have been abhored by Shakespeare himself.

[Manga Shoggoth]

From that example, though, it's clear that poets are perfectly happy to write rhymes that don't actually rhyme, and Shakespeare was no exception. e.g.

When priests are more in word than matter;
When brewers mar their malt with water;
(King Lear)

"Water" never rhymed with "matter" there - although that hasn't stopped some productions attempting to force it with some cringeworthy results. So we do need to be careful about assuming pronunciation on the basis of apparent rhyme.


I do believe the word you are looking for is Assonance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assonance) - of which rhyme is a special case.

Also, I feel that in the "wherefore" discussion, Bugs Bunny (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fmRjWbxdTI) has it right... yes, as the OP notes, it's a joke.


(Disclaimer: Three years of English Lit concentrating on Julius Caesar was enough to fill me with a profound hatered of the play. I'd probably hate Romeo and Juilet on sight, but really enjoyed the Branagh version of Much Ado about Nothing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Much_Ado_About_Nothing_(1993_film)). Ah, the memories of Richard Briers and BRIAN BLESSED.)

[Aedilred]

The whole point in Shakespeare is the use of language, which was modern and accessible to all the people of its day. You'll forgive me if I find the "artistic merit" argument lacking as I sit back and marvel at the artistic merit of his **** jokes and yo-mama jokes, for example. Proponents if Shakespeare tend to be in a catch 22 of wanting to keep Shakespeare popular and accessible yet refusing any attempt to actually make it popular and accessible. They insist on keeping Shakespeare in an ivory tower despite that this would have been abhored by Shakespeare himself.

OK, let me re-posit that statement. If the whole point of Shakespeare is the use of language, then if you rewrite it to make it more accessible, you're removing the whole point of studying/reading/watching it in the first place. It's not by any reasonable definition "Shakespeare" any more. So why bother?

[Peelee]

OK, let me re-posit that statement. If the whole point of Shakespeare is the use of language, then if you rewrite it to make it more accessible, you're removing the whole point of studying/reading/watching it in the first place. It's not by any reasonable definition "Shakespeare" any more. So why bother?

That would hold up (though I would argue that in that case, why not just leave it for upper-level collegiate classes, where the purists can appreciate it for its purism?). However, if there is any other point to Shakespeare besides the language, that argument falls apart. And, considering that he wrote plays (and not books), wrote for all classes of people (especially the lower classes), wrote for entertainment purposes, and that movies and plays adapted from his works include incredibly famous shows such as West Side Story and The Lion King, and other shows of lesser fame or quality such as 10 Things I Hate About You, Just One of the Guys, She's The Man, Get Over It, A Thousand Acres, O, the list goes on and on and none of these replicate the language at all... it seems like a pretty fair statement to say that the language is not the entire point of Shakespeare. You can further estimate this to be the case if any class on Shakespeare focuses on the themes, characterizations, relevance to cultural or historical issues both historical and contemporary etc. etc.

So yeah. The people who say Shakespeare is only worthwhile for the language can certainly continue to read and teach such ideals in their ivory towers, far disconnected from the vulgate. And, interestingly enough, far disconnected from the ideals and beliefs of Shakespeare. But hey, they can preserve "wherefore."

[Aedilred]

That would hold up (though I would argue that in that case, why not just leave it for upper-level collegiate classes, where the purists can appreciate it for its purism?). However, if there is any other point to Shakespeare besides the language, that argument falls apart. And, considering that he wrote plays (and not books), wrote for all classes of people (especially the lower classes), wrote for entertainment purposes, and that movies and plays adapted from his works include incredibly famous shows such as West Side Story and The Lion King, and other shows of lesser fame or quality such as 10 Things I Hate About You, Just One of the Guys, She's The Man, Get Over It, A Thousand Acres, O, the list goes on and on and none of these replicate the language at all... it seems like a pretty fair statement to say that the language is not the entire point of Shakespeare. You can further estimate this to be the case if any class on Shakespeare focuses on the themes, characterizations, relevance to cultural or historical issues both historical and contemporary etc. etc.

So yeah. The people who say Shakespeare is only worthwhile for the language can certainly continue to read and teach such ideals in their ivory towers, far disconnected from the vulgate. And, interestingly enough, far disconnected from the ideals and beliefs of Shakespeare. But hey, they can preserve "wherefore."

Of course there's been a lot based on Shakespeare's plays, but with only a handful of exceptions, none of his plots or stories are really at all original. Of the 39 plays generally attributed to him, around half draw their plots directly from history (as then understood) (the eleven "Histories", plus Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus), or from legend. A couple more, like Othello, borrow their plots entirely from other plays. Most of the remainder are comedies using stock farcical plots which rely heavily on cross-dressing, comical misunderstanding and, yes, knob gags.

From a storytelling perspective, there are probably about five or six which are really interesting original stories - and, with the exception of Macbeth (which I am exempting from the history-lift because it bears no relation to history) - they're not plays which get commonly re-adapted for new media.

In most cases it's fair to say that Shakespeare's plays are really just the best-known versions of stories that were already in circulation. Compare for instance the 1959 Ben-Hur: it's by far the best-known version of the story, but it didn't create that story or those characters, and was in itself a remake of a remake of a book adaptation.

In order for Shakespeare's plays to have become the dominant memetic form of the story, their merit must elsewhere than the story itself. And sure, there are other things going on - characterisation, themes, and so on, but a lot of that lies in the language anyway. The characters are characterised through the vocabulary and the style that they use, which is all part of the language that would inevitably get at the very least altered if not mangled in translation. The themes often rely on wordplay which again would be hard to replicate in translation. The language isn't necessarily the only thing the plays have going for them, but it's what elevates them to the point where they have the reputation they do.



Besides which, as you point out, we already have perfectly serviceable modern adaptations of Shakespeare's work, which are worth watching in their own right. So why mess about with the originals?

I'm not saying that nobody should bother to update Shakespeare to modern English. Indeed, plenty have tried (and that there isn't a standard updated version of any of his plays goes to show how difficult it is to produce worthwhile results doing so). But such versions shouldn't replace the originals, unless they are so good that they do so on merit alone.

As to whether Shakespeare should be taught, and if so at what level... I'm glad I was introduced to it when I was, because I really enjoyed it, but I know a lot of people aren't. Maybe it could be reserved for later in the curriculum, but not so late that you have to be an English-lit major to encounter it at all. I'd never have read any of it, except on an extracurricular basis, and then I'd have struggled to make sense of it. That's only going to make it more elitist and less accessible.

The other thing is that, taken in the round, Shakespeare has been such a massive influence on the subsequent development of English literature that it's difficult to teach English lit to any meaningful extent without including him. And the versions of Shakespeare which had that influence were the originals, not any modern-language versions, so it seems sensible to teach those.

And really? I'm not so taken with the idea that Shakespeare is so impenetrable that nobody can understand it anyway. I've been to his plays all over the place, and I've yet to see more than a handful of empty seats at any performance, even at small am-dram showings. Many of them sell out months in advance. People clearly still want to go to see these plays performed in their original language, so it's hardly for ivory-tower-dwellers only.


There may be an element of the subtitles-versus-dubbing debate in all of this. I know pretty firmly where I stand on that, but I know others differ.

[snowblizz]

This thread made me think of a scene from episode 1 of the brilliant TV series Upstart Crow:


Oh that was awesome. It's like a word by word of my line of thought reading through this thread.


"Wherefore" meaning "why" makes perfect sense to a Scandinavian, because that word is still used in our languages. In Norwegian it's "hvorfor" or "korfor", in Swedish it's "varför", in Danish it's "hvorfor".
I speak Swedish and it wasn't until like 5 seconds before I got to this line I made the connection. More on this later.


I suppose the reason some people prefer to complain instead of putting some effort into learning is simply that they resent being forced to study something they have no interest in and/or feel they'll never have a use for. For me it was Maths, for others it was Shakespearean English.
Context will matter. But trying to cram Shakespear on teens is not going to induce a will to learn more.


Specifically as to the quote brought up by OP. Let me make this clear, for a lot of us the first contact we have with the quote is either 1) devoid of context and 2) especially confusing as the context of the snippet of the scene would lead us to think otherwise.

"Wherefore art thou, Romeo?. It is easy to break down. Where. Are. You. Romeo. The scene is a lovesick young woman running around looking for something and then peering out from a balcony. (If I remember my scene snippets she even *finds* him just after doesn't she?) Bam! Analysis done. We got the correct answer. Hurray, everyone goes home for the day. It all makes sense and only the conspiratorially insane people are going to start looking at the words and tihnk, "gee, maybe they do *not* mean exactly what they look like they mean". There's no need to go looking deeper for most as they have already decoded the scene. It may not have been correct, but it was close enough and we get to live another day on the savannah dodging lions. Most of the deep thinkers got eaten early on.

Heck, blame shakespearian actors? If they didn't make the scene so convincingly look like some searching for a thing maybe people would twig faster. I even suspect most plays set up are using the word incorrectly and thus spreading the confusion.

And probably blame the teachers. This is most likely a thing they should be bringing up in advance. It's a spectacularly bad idea to have kids muddle through literature without clues and then (usually) berate them for not seeing it. Raise your hand if you been asked to read and review a book but was never taught any actual tools to do literary criticism first.

@OP it is not wilful ignorance, this is how people work, they see a pattern that fits good enough and we go with it. It may not be right all the time. But confirmation bias is a thing, we see what we expect to see. It takes considerable effort to get past it.

[Aedilred]

Specifically as to the quote brought up by OP. Let me make this clear, for a lot of us the first contact we have with the quote is either 1) devoid of context and 2) especially confusing as the context of the snippet of the scene would lead us to think otherwise.

I think it's the first of these that causes a lot of the problems. In all the performances I've seen, while it would be possible to interpret it as her physically searching for him, if you're paying any real attention, it's obvious that she's not, and the following lines make that increasingly clear. (It is, of course, possible that the actors I've seen are going out of their way to avoid any misunderstanding).

But as you say, I suspect most people's exposure to it is probably out of context - indeed, it's entirely possible that the first time they encounter it is in the very Bugs Bunny cartoon referenced above.

Indeed it's entirely possible, in fact I'd almost think likely, that the Bugs Bunny writer knew perfectly well that "wherefore" doesn't mean "where" but was just punning either on the similarity or on the popular misconception, the popularity of that then contributing to further misunderstanding.

Related, but not quite the same, the common expression "Lead on, Macduff". This phrase, of course, appears nowhere in Macbeth. The closest we have is "Lay on, Macduff" in Macbeth's final scene, not inviting Macduff to lead him anywhere but to attack him. Nobody's quite sure how this came about. It's unlikely that anyone watching the play would have got that meaning from it, but by no means impossible. And all it takes is one person to mishear, or be drunk, or whatever, and then repeat it to people unfamiliar with the play, and it takes on a memetic life of its own.


Moving away from Shakespeare into the realms of popular sayings, someone with an intuitive grasp of effective metaphor once coined the phrase "snatching victory from the jaws of defeat", it seems at some point in the mid-19th century. This became a popular phrase. More recently, some wit reversed the order, probably for comedic effect: "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory", the reversal of elements while keeping the original metaphorical language in play lending it a touch of the absurd and ridiculous. But people were apparently so taken with this that this in itself has become widely used, often devoid of apparent irony, and possibly even without awareness that it in itself is a parody.


See also more modern pop-culture misquotations like "Beam me up Scotty", "Luke, I am your father" and "Brace yourselves, winter is coming". With the arguable exception of the last one, these don't express a meaning different to the related use seen in the show/film, but it's only been 40-50 years at most, and we've had 400 years for people to make a mess of Shakespeare, so we'll see.

[Fiery Diamond]

Oh that was awesome. It's like a word by word of my line of thought reading through this thread.


I speak Swedish and it wasn't until like 5 seconds before I got to this line I made the connection. More on this later.


Context will matter. But trying to cram Shakespear on teens is not going to induce a will to learn more.


Specifically as to the quote brought up by OP. Let me make this clear, for a lot of us the first contact we have with the quote is either 1) devoid of context and 2) especially confusing as the context of the snippet of the scene would lead us to think otherwise.

"Wherefore art thou, Romeo?. It is easy to break down. Where. Are. You. Romeo. The scene is a lovesick young woman running around looking for something and then peering out from a balcony. (If I remember my scene snippets she even *finds* him just after doesn't she?) Bam! Analysis done. We got the correct answer. Hurray, everyone goes home for the day. It all makes sense and only the conspiratorially insane people are going to start looking at the words and tihnk, "gee, maybe they do *not* mean exactly what they look like they mean". There's no need to go looking deeper for most as they have already decoded the scene. It may not have been correct, but it was close enough and we get to live another day on the savannah dodging lions. Most of the deep thinkers got eaten early on.

Heck, blame shakespearian actors? If they didn't make the scene so convincingly look like some searching for a thing maybe people would twig faster. I even suspect most plays set up are using the word incorrectly and thus spreading the confusion.

And probably blame the teachers. This is most likely a thing they should be bringing up in advance. It's a spectacularly bad idea to have kids muddle through literature without clues and then (usually) berate them for not seeing it. Raise your hand if you been asked to read and review a book but was never taught any actual tools to do literary criticism first.

@OP it is not wilful ignorance, this is how people work, they see a pattern that fits good enough and we go with it. It may not be right all the time. But confirmation bias is a thing, we see what we expect to see. It takes considerable effort to get past it.

Except it's not "Wherefore art thou, Romeo?" It's "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" As you'll recall, that distinction was actually what got me started on my little rant - unless the actor has no idea what it means or is a complete hack, they shouldn't be saying it like the former. And as for context, it's immediately followed by "Deny thy father and refuse thy name," which has nothing to do with searching or location, so if you're going to blame the scene it happens in... I grant you that the line sans context is probably pretty meaningless to people first exposed to it, though. And that there are a lot of hack actors, unfortunately.

Absolutely agree on blaming the teachers. Learning the language is absolutely a thing they should be doing in advance, and I agree with your assertion on how terrible terrible teaching is.

And I'll repeat - perhaps my upbringing is simply different enough from "standard," but... by the time someone is in high school, that "considerable effort" you describe should be second nature. I blame our education system that doesn't teach how to learn, it just presents information and expects students to absorb it somehow.

[Scarlet Knight]

Absolutely agree on blaming the teachers. Learning the language is absolutely a thing they should be doing in advance, and I agree with your assertion on how terrible terrible teaching is...

If anything COVID has taught us it's that teaching WELL is #@%* hard.



I very much like Shakespeare. However reading Shakespeare is nearly always a mistake, particularly for a first exposure. It's a play, it should be seen. Having actual actors makes the language much less of a bother, because of all the context clues from the stage direction and performances. The archaic language also stands out less, because of the strange shared act of imagination that watching a stage play requires…
Being spoken also makes the beauty of the writing come alive in a way it just doesn't on a page. In that sense I would say Shakespeare is the opposite of a lot of what's considered good writing today, where it scans ok on the page, but is just a complete hot mess if read aloud. No rhythm or cadence, metaphors that go nowhere and make no sense, just wretched.
Hear ! Hear!


Specifically as to the quote brought up by OP. Let me make this clear, for a lot of us the first contact we have with the quote is either 1) devoid of context and 2) especially confusing as the context of the snippet of the scene would lead us to think otherwise….
"Wherefore art thou, Romeo?. It is easy to break down. Where. Are. You. Romeo. The scene is a lovesick young woman running around looking for something and then peering out from a balcony. (If I remember my scene snippets she even *finds* him just after doesn't she?) Bam! Analysis done. We got the correct answer. Hurray, everyone goes home for the day. It all makes sense and only the conspiratorially insane people are going to start looking at the words and tihnk, "gee, maybe they do *not* mean exactly what they look like they mean". There's no need to go looking deeper for most as they have already decoded the scene. ..
@OP it is not wilful ignorance, this is how people work, they see a pattern that fits good enough and we go with it. It may not be right all the time. But confirmation bias is a thing, we see what we expect to see. It takes considerable effort to get past it.
Yes!


Context will matter. But trying to cram Shakespear on teens is not going to induce a will to learn more.
Teens NEED Shakespeare because he teaches us about the human condition. About tragic love, miscommunication, poor friends, divided loyalties, thirst for revenge above peace… this is also why it is the best known love story in the history of the human language.

[Murk]

I must say that this thread has been a prime example of why "misunderstanding is easier than learning".

My old-English isn't very good. I had no idea that "wherefore" was supposed to be a counterpart of "therefore", and honestly, I still don't understand. "Why are you Romeo?" seems a ridiculous question.

You are right that this would normally pique my curiosity. What did I do wrong? What is the context? In most situations, I would be off to Google by now.
But then I read this thread.

I learn that reading Shakespeare requires you to think about every word, even if it seems obvious. I learn that Shakespeare should be deciphered, rather than read. I learn that I am stupid and lazy for not knowing the meaning already. I learn that appreciating Shakespeare as text is futile, and that I should actually go to the theatre. I learn that, even in the theatre, I might not be able to appreciate it because it is rooted in an entirely different societal context.
I learn that if I make a mistake, I will be blamed; that if I think "eh, close enough", I will be blamed; and if I come across a passage that makes me think "I'll just skip it", I will be blamed.
Moreover, I learn that despite all of the above I should enjoy it, and if I don't, it's my own fault.

None of which entices me in the slightest to grab some Shakespeare and read it.
It sounds like an awful lot of work, about which I should willingly open myself up to harsh judgement, for very little gain.



I will readily admit I'm a bit lazy and culturally insensitive, but OP, if you want your opening question answered ("why is misunderstanding easier than learning?"), you only need to take a look at this very thread!

[BisectedBrioche]

I also don't hold any love for Shakespeare (and flat-out loathe Romeo and Juliet in particular), but not for this reason. The language is incredibly outdated, and there is little to no reason to not update it to modern vernacular other than "reverence" for the original. As you point out, it is easy to misconstrue, and as Kyberwolf points out, such misconstructions are easy to occur because Shakespeare's version of English is archaic and largely not used anymore. Shakespeare himself invented new words for his plays, so he clearly didn't hold prescriptivist ideals, which just makes the whole thing just that much sillier.

Small note, but a lot of historians actually think he wasn't making words up, as much as using the words that people would use on the street (which weren't used in formal texts which made up the bulk of recorded writings).

Obviously the point about prescriptivism still stands, I just thought it was interesting.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

this is also why it is the best known love story in the history of the human language.
That's a bold claim there. Which I don't buy for a minute. It is, at best, the best known love story in the history of the English language. And even then, Arthur - Guinevere - Lancelot might be in contention.


None of which entices me in the slightest to grab some Shakespeare and read it.
It sounds like an awful lot of work, about which I should willingly open myself up to harsh judgement, for very little gain.

This. As an ESL speaker, it makes me glad I'm under no pressure to read, understand or enjoy Shakespeare.

Grey Wolf

[warty goblin]

I must say that this thread has been a prime example of why "misunderstanding is easier than learning".

My old-English isn't very good. I had no idea that "wherefore" was supposed to be a counterpart of "therefore", and honestly, I still don't understand. "Why are you Romeo?" seems a ridiculous question.

It only seems confusing because people are obsessing over this one single word from half of a single line, devoid of all context. Nothing on Earth ever comes off well when dissected this way, which is why we shouldn't do this.

Add context (the Capulets and Montagues are feuding, which the play straight up says in the prologue) and the entire spoken line (or even the next written line) and it's really not remotely confusing.

O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore are though Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I'll no longer be a Capulet

Juliet is upset because she's falling for a dude that basically her entire family wants to murder. She wishes he would give up his name, or if he wouldn't, she will.



I learn that reading Shakespeare requires you to think about every word, even if it seems obvious. I learn that Shakespeare should be deciphered, rather than read. I learn that I am stupid and lazy for not knowing the meaning already. I learn that appreciating Shakespeare as text is futile, and that I should actually go to the theatre. I learn that, even in the theatre, I might not be able to appreciate it because it is rooted in an entirely different societal context.
I learn that if I make a mistake, I will be blamed; that if I think "eh, close enough", I will be blamed; and if I come across a passage that makes me think "I'll just skip it", I will be blamed.
Moreover, I learn that despite all of the above I should enjoy it, and if I don't, it's my own fault.

Most people engage with movies by watching them, not reading the script, just like they listen to music instead of reading the sheet music to themselves. The idea that a play should be watched is, I don't think, either particularly onerous or strange. For most of the better-known plays there's tons of filmed versions available; either as filmed stage plays or actually produced as movies. I don't think these are as fun* as seeing them live - think of the difference between a studio album, a concert album and actually being in the audience at a concert - but many film versions of Shakespeare are still very good.

Absent that, you can definitely approach Shakespeare as words on a page. I recommend reading it aloud with a partner, taking turns between speakers. This is rather fun if you get into it a bit. Or you can just read it like a book. In which case, yes, it does require some actual thought and effort on the part of the reader. Most modern versions are annotated, which clarifies the meaning of the more arcane vocabulary. It's not exactly a read it for fifteen minutes before bed sort of book, but with a good annotated version we aren't talking something available only to galaxy-brained geniuses with Ph.D.s in drama, history and pretentiousness. It's a read that takes some work, and probably isn't as rewarding as watching the play, but it can still be quite enjoyable.


*And fun really is the word. I go see live Shakespeare every summer, and have never had less than an excellent time; including outdoor performances in hourslong cold drizzle. I've been going since I was like 8 or 9, it really is that accessible if you mentally engage with it at all.

[Murk]

*And fun really is the word. I go see live Shakespeare every summer, and have never had less than an excellent time; including outdoor performances in hourslong cold drizzle. I've been going since I was like 8 or 9, it really is that accessible if you mentally engage with it at all.

See - I think this is the first time in two pages of discussion that someone has said "It is fun!".

That changes the equation a lot. You still present Shakespeare as work, as something that requires my analysis, and that is best enjoyed by going out to theatre or getting someone else to read it with you - as something that requires effort - but at least you offer something in return: fun.

For most of this thread (and my education in general, I guess), that second part of the equation was sorely missing. Shakespeare was only offered as something that required effort, and my effort would be placed under great scrutiny (once again, as this thread illustrates), but it gave nothing in return.

I think people are very willing to learn, but it must give them some enjoyment in return. All these expectations, and pressure, and criticism, and complaints... it doesn't help.

[Aedilred]

I thought it might be helpful to put the line in context, and in performance. So here are two versions scene from probably the two best-known films of the play (Zeffirelli's from 1968, and Luhrmann's from 1996).

For the complaints about WS's writing being difficult to decipher, I hope that this will help to dispel that. The language is poetic, and what we might think of as formal, but aside from "wherefore" I'm not sure there's any archaic vocabulary in there, and it should be perfectly easy to follow.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30LupDzYp4s

Regarding the line in question, the delivery on each occasion is different. In the first, confusion with "where" is perhaps more understandable, given the cadence; in the second, it would be a real stretch. But in either case, given the context and the rest of the scene, even if you don't know what "wherefore" means in isolation it's hard to see how the line's being interpreted as "where are you?" would really make any sense.

As to the question of why use "wherefore" when "why" will do, I think it's straightforwardly about rhythm. The additional syllable allows a maintenance of the iambic meter (WHEREfore ART thou ROMeO" but remove it and replace with "why" and you need to find another syllable from somewhere so that the rest of the phrase falls into place. Otherwise you have too many strong syllables abutting, which sounds awkward, or have "WHY art THOU RomEo" which is all wrong.

[Aedilred]

Apparently I can't put two videos in one post, so here's the second one.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HbvBVhpChI

[Peelee]

Of course there's been a lot based on Shakespeare's plays, but with only a handful of exceptions, none of his plots or stories are really at all original. Of the 39 plays generally attributed to him, around half draw their plots directly from history (as then understood) (the eleven "Histories", plus Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus), or from legend. A couple more, like Othello, borrow their plots entirely from other plays. Most of the remainder are comedies using stock farcical plots which rely heavily on cross-dressing, comical misunderstanding and, yes, knob gags.

From a storytelling perspective, there are probably about five or six which are really interesting original stories - and, with the exception of Macbeth (which I am exempting from the history-lift because it bears no relation to history) - they're not plays which get commonly re-adapted for new media.

In most cases it's fair to say that Shakespeare's plays are really just the best-known versions of stories that were already in circulation. Compare for instance the 1959 Ben-Hur: it's by far the best-known version of the story, but it didn't create that story or those characters, and was in itself a remake of a remake of a book adaptation.

In order for Shakespeare's plays to have become the dominant memetic form of the story, their merit must elsewhere than the story itself. And sure, there are other things going on - characterisation, themes, and so on, but a lot of that lies in the language anyway. The characters are characterised through the vocabulary and the style that they use, which is all part of the language that would inevitably get at the very least altered if not mangled in translation. The themes often rely on wordplay which again would be hard to replicate in translation. The language isn't necessarily the only thing the plays have going for them, but it's what elevates them to the point where they have the reputation they do.



Besides which, as you point out, we already have perfectly serviceable modern adaptations of Shakespeare's work, which are worth watching in their own right. So why mess about with the originals?

I'm not saying that nobody should bother to update Shakespeare to modern English. Indeed, plenty have tried (and that there isn't a standard updated version of any of his plays goes to show how difficult it is to produce worthwhile results doing so). But such versions shouldn't replace the originals, unless they are so good that they do so on merit alone.

As to whether Shakespeare should be taught, and if so at what level... I'm glad I was introduced to it when I was, because I really enjoyed it, but I know a lot of people aren't. Maybe it could be reserved for later in the curriculum, but not so late that you have to be an English-lit major to encounter it at all. I'd never have read any of it, except on an extracurricular basis, and then I'd have struggled to make sense of it. That's only going to make it more elitist and less accessible.

The other thing is that, taken in the round, Shakespeare has been such a massive influence on the subsequent development of English literature that it's difficult to teach English lit to any meaningful extent without including him. And the versions of Shakespeare which had that influence were the originals, not any modern-language versions, so it seems sensible to teach those.

And really? I'm not so taken with the idea that Shakespeare is so impenetrable that nobody can understand it anyway. I've been to his plays all over the place, and I've yet to see more than a handful of empty seats at any performance, even at small am-dram showings. Many of them sell out months in advance. People clearly still want to go to see these plays performed in their original language, so it's hardly for ivory-tower-dwellers only.


There may be an element of the subtitles-versus-dubbing debate in all of this. I know pretty firmly where I stand on that, but I know others differ.

The adaptations are adaptations. Modern translations of the originals would be the originals, better suited to grade school and high school. And un-translated versions of the originals could still be used for college/postgrad programs. Nobody is suggesting that the untranslated versions be banned - I am explicitly in favor of studying the originals. Just at the levels where the actual use of studying the originals would be more effective (don't get me started on grade school and high school English teachers. A necessary evil, I say!).

As for "not messing with originals," do you similarly insist that Beowulf should only be taught in its original text? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/Beowulf_Cotton_MS_Vitellius_A_XV_f._132r.jpg/1280px-Beowulf_Cotton_MS_Vitellius_A_XV_f._132r.jpg

[Scarlet Knight]

That's a bold claim there. Which I don't buy for a minute. It is, at best, the best known love story in the history of the English language. And even then, Arthur - Guinevere - Lancelot might be in contention.


I stand corrected; I meant to say English.

Perhaps David and Bathsheba is better known due to it's head start but it's not a love story. Plus I bet more people know David and Goliath than David and Bathsheba.

While I have no numbers to support me, I truly believe Romeo & Juliet is the first love story most people will think of: before Guinevere - Lancelot , Tristan & Isolde, Anthony and Cleopatra, or Orpheus & Euridice. Before anything written by Tolstoy, Bronte or Austin.

Dare I say: even before ...Wesley & Buttercup! :smallwink:

[InvisibleBison]

As for "not messing with originals," do you similarly insist that Beowulf should only be taught in its original text? After all, it IS written in English.

Beowulf is written in Old English, which is no more the same language as Modern English than Italian is the same language as Latin.

[Vinyadan]

By the way, I took a look at the original spelling in one of the first editions (1597):

Iul: Ah Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?

In this edition there is "ah" instead of "o", which is very expressive (the other editions have a o, however).

But I am surprised at how easy it is to understand this spelling. To make a comparison with Thomas More:

"Kyng Edwarde of that name the fowrth, after that hee hadde lyued fiftie and three yeares, seven monethes, and five dayes, and thereof reygned two and twentye yeres, one moneth, and eighte dayes, dyed at Westmynster..."

[Aedilred]

The adaptations are adaptations. Modern translations of the originals would be the originals, better suited to grade school and high school.
No they wouldn't, any more than a dubbed version of a film uses the original dialogue, or a cover version of a classic track is the original.


And un-translated versions of the originals could still be used for college/postgrad programs. Nobody is suggesting that the untranslated versions be banned - I am explicitly in favor of studying the originals. Just at the levels where the actual use of studying the originals would be more effective (don't get me started on grade school and high school English teachers. A necessary evil, I say!).

Well, like I mentioned before, that would have meant I would probably never have been exposed to Shakespeare in its original language. In fact I'd probably never have taken English Lit to A-Level if it weren't for Shakespeare. And I feel like my life would be the poorer for that.

I also agree with the comment previously along the lines that people have forgotten that education should actually be challenging on some level. There is something about all this which has a scent of "I hated studying this, so nobody should study it except in a lab", which isn't how education is supposed to work.


As for "not messing with originals," do you similarly insist that Beowulf should only be taught in its original text? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/Beowulf_Cotton_MS_Vitellius_A_XV_f._132r.jpg/1280px-Beowulf_Cotton_MS_Vitellius_A_XV_f._132r.jpg

As to Beowulf, it's not a fair analogy because, as InvisibleBison says above, Old English is an ancestral, but different, language to modern English. Shakespeare wrote in modern English, just an older dialect. And for what it's worth, when I was given Beowulf to study (and I gather from my Eng-lit colleagues it was the same for them) I was given the original text. I was given Chaucer at the age of 14 to study in the original Middle English too, for that matter.

There's a much better argument for translating Chaucer than Shakespeare, really, but it's still taught in the original language, sometimes with a side-by-side translation, but never removing the original altogether. Because students can cope with it given decent tuition. Maybe the students would rather not, but I'd have rather not have studied quadratic equations, if we're getting into that.

[Peelee]

No they wouldn't, any more than a dubbed version of a film uses the original dialogue, or a cover version of a classic track is the original.

By this definition I have never read Beowulf, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Morte d'Arthur, Arabian Nights, etc. etc. etc.

I contend that I have.

[Aedilred]

By this definition I have never read Beowulf, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Morte d'Arthur, Arabian Nights, etc. etc. etc.

I contend that I have.
You've read them in translation, but you haven't read the original version.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

I stand corrected; I meant to say English.
Well, that's no fun. But fair enough, if we limit ourselves to English language, it is probably R&J.


Perhaps David and Bathsheba is better known due to it's head start but it's not a love story. Plus I bet more people know David and Goliath than David and Bathsheba.
Samson, though, might be better known quasi-universally. And it is a love tragedy. Still, dangerous terrain to tread. Let's agree to keep religion out of consideration.


While I have no numbers to support me, I truly believe Romeo & Juliet is the first love story most people will think of: before Guinevere - Lancelot , Tristan & Isolde, Anthony and Cleopatra, or Orpheus & Euridice. Before anything written by Tolstoy, Bronte or Austin.

Dare I say: even before ...Wesley & Buttercup! :smallwink:
For English speakers, I'd probably not dispute that. Universally, though, even if it was made famous first in English... I'd say Caesar, Mark Anthony and Cleopatra might have an edge? I heard of them long before I heard of Shakespeare, from a Franco-Belgian source (Asterix). I suspect what we think of as their love story was codified by Shakespeare, but it is an actual historical "romance" that means a lot of people will have heard of them, even if they don't speak a lick of English... and due to cultural osmosis, the version of their story told is pretty much Shakespeare's, rather than the one from, say, Plutarch.

The answer to the "most well known regardless of language" is likely more prosaic, though: with 1.2 and 1.3 billion people, it's almost certainly a love story familiar to both Indian and Chinese speakers. If there is one they share, they've got the rest of the world beat in sheer numbers, despite Hollywood's best efforts.

Grey Wolf

[DavidSh]

You're making me want to watch a Shakespeare play, but the local theaters are all closed. What do you recommend on DVD or Blu-Ray? I have enjoyed the Polanski Macbeth and the Midsummer Night's Dream with Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania, Stanley Tucci as Puck, and Callista Flockhart as one of the four lovers.

[Peelee]

You've read them in translation, but you haven't read the original version.

And behold my great distress at such a loss.

Also because I hit enter too early on that last post:
Well, like I mentioned before, that would have meant I would probably never have been exposed to Shakespeare in its original language. In fact I'd probably never have taken English Lit to A-Level if it weren't for Shakespeare. And I feel like my life would be the poorer for that.
And if I hadn't been exposed to underwater basket weaving using the original fibers of the craproot plant, I wouldn't have gotten interested in underwater looming, and my life would be the poorer for that.

Personal experiences used as evidence that everyone should be exposed to exactly what you were fail to sway me. And if nothing other than Shakespeare would have gotten you interested in taking English Lit to A-Level, that makes me think about the quality of the general English Lit programs in your school, rather than me elevating the value of the purity of Shakespeare. Or just that sometimes, random things get people interested in stuff that enrich their lives, but that is a poor reasoning for teaching everybody every random thing that led to said enrichment.

I also agree with the comment previously along the lines that people have forgotten that education should actually be challenging on some level. There is something about all this which has a scent of "I hated studying this, so nobody should study it except in a lab", which isn't how education is supposed to work.
There is challenging a student, and then there is wasting time doing something a certain way solely because it has always been that way. I do not care terribly much for the latter.

I care about the purity of Shakrespeare exactly as much as I care about the purity of the English language, which is to say, not at all. And, unless you are translating everything you write on this site into Modern English from your native tongue, the archaic dialects of the first versions of modern English, I would recommend that you do as well.

[Vinyadan]

And behold my great distress at such a loss.

So... close...

There are some points in this thread that I liked, like the fact that you can't expect to learn without challenging yourself. The utility of learning a certain subject, that's a different matter. Would not knowing Shakespeare put someone at disadvantage? I'm honestly not sure (although the simple fact that certain people know Sh. requires you to know him to become one of those people)... but I'm aware of the fact that language doesn't change in all its parts at the same speed, and that it tends to keep spare parts. In other words, learning Early Middle English may actually teach you some words you will find in today's English, but are fairly rarely used.

Honestly, I am not completely sure about what the whole fuss is about. The grammar is more or less what you would expect from today, the words are around the same with very few exceptions. It's not that hard, at least in written form. Use a version with notes, if you have trouble with the references.

About the original version, well, yes, it's a bit of a loss. The Anglosphere is pretty closed to outside cultures and many people speak no other language, so they simply cannot see the difference between a text in the OV and one translated. It's not something tragic, but translating is hard, and poetry is almost impossible to translate because of its huge reliance on sound. Of course, not translating means inaccessibility, so it's a good thing that stuff gets translated.

But there is a middle ground, that of "yes, I could read this with some effort, but it's no fun this way because I have to stopping to read the notes instead of flowing with the story". And, in this case, if it's just meant for pleasure, then I have nothing against a translating Shakespeare, or heavily adapting his work to modern audiences.

[Rynjin]

Well, like I mentioned before, that would have meant I would probably never have been exposed to Shakespeare in its original language. In fact I'd probably never have taken English Lit to A-Level if it weren't for Shakespeare. And I feel like my life would be the poorer for that.

As an alternate experience, I also took the equivalent in high school; AP courses for Language and Literature just for fun. I don't feel like my life would be much poorer for not having studied Shakespeare, despite the fond memories I have of playing Mercutio (who I stand by as the only good character in Romeo and Juliet) and Iago.

Hell, I currently make a living off writing, but I would never have considered taking my studies beyond that point; I can't see any value in an English degree.

At the end of the day, they're just entertainment. I enjoyed them more than other stuff I was forced to read (Catcher in the Rye is one of the most singularly unpleasant books I've read to his day) and less than some others (though to be fair, I'd already read Ender's Game twice by the time I had it assigned by a teacher), but I don't feel my life was enriched by them either way.

Of course that's just one person's experience, as is yours.

[Peelee]

So... close...
OK, that got a good laugh out of me.

As an alternate experience, I also took the equivalent in high school; AP courses for Language and Literature just for fun. I don't feel like my life would be much poorer for not having studied Shakespeare, despite the fond memories I have of playing Mercutio (who I stand by as the only good character in Romeo and Juliet) and Iago.
Mercutio and Iago (especially Iago) are the most fun characters in Shakespeare overall, which certainly helps.

I also have fond memories of field trips going to the Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery pretty much every year I can remember. Except for Romeo and Juliet.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

I don't feel like my life would be much poorer for not having studied Shakespeare

Same. When I was studying the various Western European languages, I found Dumas (and of course Verne) far more interesting to read. And if you think they can't be compared to Shakespeare because of the 200+ years between them, I have to say that Cervantes was also better. Heck, some of his female characters are better than many female characters written today (relevant Classics Summarized video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2C--8o3MVE)). Also, I have to say I found his comedy plays to be actually funny, unlike the snooze fest that is Midsummer Night's Dream (admittedly, the Spanish don't seem to worship the language from 400 years ago like some people this thread do, so I read both Don Quijote and watched Cervantes' plays in a language I could fully understand, and I never heard anyone suggest this wasn't the way to do it).

Grey Wolf

[The Glyphstone]

Coincidentally, I was just having a discussion with my father earlier today, who's decided to pick up reading the Complete Annotated Works of Shakespeare. When we got onto the side topic of Shakespeare's accessibility - specificially in his modern reputation versus his place in his age - he bust a gut laughing when I pointed out that Shakespeare plays were, essentially, the Elizabethan equivalent of South Park - cheaply made productions for the common masses, loaded down with puns, dirty jokes, and satirical references to contemporary issues.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

The language is incredibly outdated, and there is little to no reason to not update it to modern vernacular other than "reverence" for the original. As you point out, it is easy to misconstrue, and as Kyberwolf points out, such misconstructions are easy to occur because Shakespeare's version of English is archaic and largely not used anymore. Shakespeare himself invented new words for his plays, so he clearly didn't hold prescriptivist ideals, which just makes the whole thing just that much sillier.

I agree that this is the biggest problem with Shakespeare plays, and also the big problem for Shakespeare plays. The guy wanted nothing more than be the playwright of the people. His plays are full of farts, your mom jokes and lots of stuff that's easy to get but still funny and competently put together. A good amateur rendition of a random Shakespeare play can still be a great night out today. Because it's competently written live theater, and that's enough.

But people have build this image around Shakespeare that it's all high art that you have to study to understand. Romeo and Juliet being the prime example. Yes, it's a tragic love story with beautiful bittersweet moments, but it's also a story about how teenagers always have to make such a drama out of everything, amirite? That entire layer of funny but true social commentary is left out by treating it as the most serious play by the most serious writer ever, which Shakespeare never was or tried to be.

And the original language is absolutely not helping. Yeah, it's cool to see an authentic Shakespearian play with authentic Shakespearian language ones in your life, for like 15 minutes. And then really authentic, with a super thick accent nobody today can place. Not that half baked "throwing a word people don't use anymore in there every now and then and mispronouncing it in the process". But that's like peeking inside a time capsule. You're enjoying the look into the past, the actual play being performed becoming a secondary thing. The play becomes a prop in a historical museum. But perform the play without distracting people with that stuff and they can find more enjoyment in the play itself.

It's fine if you enjoy the original Star Trek the best, but it's not in the interest of your favorite franchise to yell at people for daring to like the stuff coming out today Shakespeare in the slightly stuffy classical "oh his plays are so great" way, but if you want his plays to enjoy popularity you should not look down on it when they're performed the way Shakespeare intended it: using the language of the people, with jokes and social commentary, and not one actor struggling to pronounce the words.


It's funny how this tendency is carried both by the biggest fans and the biggest detractors of the guy.

[CheesePirate]

You're making me want to watch a Shakespeare play, but the local theaters are all closed. What do you recommend on DVD or Blu-Ray?

Much Ado About Nothing (1993, directed by Kenneth Branagh) is fantastic. I also like Branagh's adaptation of Henry V (1989).

I've heard good things about Othello (1995, directed by Oliver Parker), planning to watch that at some point.

[Aedilred]

And behold my great distress at such a loss.
Right, but your suggestion that "a translation is the original" is still wrong, whether you care about not having read the originals or not.


And if I hadn't been exposed to underwater basket weaving using the original fibers of the craproot plant, I wouldn't have gotten interested in underwater looming, and my life would be the poorer for that.
Well, good for you. Except, obviously, that isn't true. If we're at the point of the conversation where we're making up derisive metaphors to rubbish other people's opinions then I don't think there's much point continuing the discussion.


Personal experiences used as evidence that everyone should be exposed to exactly what you were fail to sway me. And if nothing other than Shakespeare would have gotten you interested in taking English Lit to A-Level, that makes me think about the quality of the general English Lit programs in your school, rather than me elevating the value of the purity of Shakespeare. Or just that sometimes, random things get people interested in stuff that enrich their lives, but that is a poor reasoning for teaching everybody every random thing that led to said enrichment.
I don't necessarily think that Shakespeare-in-original should be compulsory. But you seem to be suggesting that it shouldn't be read, studied or performed at all outside college-level-plus Eng-lit courses, and I don't agree with that either.

I care about the purity of Shakrespeare exactly as much as I care about the purity of the English language, which is to say, not at all.
People care about different things, shocker.

And, unless you are translating everything you write on this site into Modern English from your native tongue, the archaic dialects of the first versions of modern English, I would recommend that you do as well.
Again, I'm not sure what you're getting at here? My native tongue isn't "the archaic dialects of the first versions of modern English", obviously, because I'm not 500 years old. But that's no reason to limit myself to my native dialect in terms of what I read or watch, or who I talk to. Hardly anyone does that. If I did, I'd never have read any American literature, watched any American films, or American TV, ditto Irish, and I'd have also cut out quite a lot of British TV/film/literature too. And we wouldn't be able to have this conversation.

Would you suggest that the dialogue in The Wire be dubbed into a standard dialect, with the original dialogue versions shown only for those doing advanced media studies? Because I found a lot of the language in that pretty impenetrable, at least early on, not much less so than Shakesepeare.


You're making me want to watch a Shakespeare play, but the local theaters are all closed. What do you recommend on DVD or Blu-Ray? I have enjoyed the Polanski Macbeth and the Midsummer Night's Dream with Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania, Stanley Tucci as Puck, and Callista Flockhart as one of the four lovers.
The BBC's Hollow Crown series covers seven of his history plays, from Richard II to Richard III. Some great cast (Ben Whishaw, Patrick Stewart, Jeremy Irons, Tom Hiddlestone; Benedict Cumberbatch appears later.) I've only seen the first four but they were all pretty good.

[Themrys]

None of which entices me in the slightest to grab some Shakespeare and read it.
It sounds like an awful lot of work, about which I should willingly open myself up to harsh judgement, for very little gain.


Only if you go to my alma mater and discuss Shakespeare with the professor there who looks like Professor Binns and has the character of Professor Snape, but sleazier.

Harsh judgement for little gain, indeed.

I still maintain that Shakespeare was totally worth it.

Heck, I am not even a native speaker and I managed to understand that sentence with "Wherefore". As others pointed out, it is obvious from context. The misunderstanding seems to be more because of refusing to understand Shakespeare out of principle than true inability.

I also perfectly understand the distinction between you and thou, and when to use thee, but that's because I am not a native speaker.


To be honest, I see no good reason to try and update Shakespeare for a modern audience. It was written for a very specific audience that does not exist like that anymore. There's the lower class people in the story who are there for the comedy, because that's funny, and there's the nobles who are there for the drama, because that's what the upper classes enjoyed (and they didn't like being made fun of).

That's not the kind of audience we have today. Class differences have changed. Society has changed. People are interested in different topics. Some of Shakespeare is timeless, some isn't.

One of the main appeals of reading Shakespeare is finding out how people thought "back then" and what they found funny, et cetera. An "actualized" version would not have that appeal.


If you want a modern play that has lots and lots of layers and hidden meanings, I suggest that you ask J.K. Rowling to write one. She does like her mythology references and puns, and though she could probably not cram as many into a play as Shakespeare did, modern audiences wouldn't understand so many, anyway, so that works.

[Peelee]

Right, but your suggestion that "a translation is the original" is still wrong, whether you care about not having read the originals or not.
Let me put it a better way - if I can still debate Tolstoy with a native-born Russian, then there is no meaningful difference between the original and the translation.

Well, good for you. Except, obviously, that isn't true. If we're at the point of the conversation where we're making up derisive metaphors to rubbish other people's opinions then I don't think there's much point continuing the discussion.
It was an analogy to make a point (that being that personal experience is not a good argument for teaching something). I deliberately made it ridiculous to underscore the point, but in hindsight, I can understand how it came across as insulting instead. I apologize. We can swap the nouns to "learning cursive got me interested in calligraphy which enriched my life, but that doesn't mean that cursive should still be uniformly taught to all students," for a less ridiculous example.

I don't necessarily think that Shakespeare-in-original should be compulsory. But you seem to be suggesting that it shouldn't be read, studied or performed at all outside college-level-plus Eng-lit courses, and I don't agree with that either.
I was trending towards simplification. I'd have no problem with high school AP classes tossing it in, for example, or electives focusing on it. But every English teacher in the country insisting on Shakespeare as it originally was 400 years ago as mandatory is nothing short of a collective grasp at elitism and self-congratulation.

Again, I'm not sure what you're getting at here? My native tongue isn't "the archaic dialects of the first versions of modern English", obviously, because I'm not 500 years old. But that's no reason to limit myself to my native dialect in terms of what I read or watch, or who I talk to. Hardly anyone does that. If I did, I'd never have read any American literature, watched any American films, or American TV, ditto Irish, and I'd have also cut out quite a lot of British TV/film/literature too. And we wouldn't be able to have this conversation.
What I'm getting at is that languages are living constructs that grow and evolve constantly in order to better facilitate understanding, and clinging to specific work from hundreds of years ago remaining needlessly archaic as the only way to truly enjoy it for the purity of the language is anathema to the entire concept of language to begin with. Let alone the English language, which is as pure as the collected rainwater water in a public trash can that hasn't been dumped in months.

Would you suggest that the dialogue in The Wire be dubbed into a standard dialect, with the original dialogue versions shown only for those doing advanced media studies? Because I found a lot of the language in that pretty impenetrable, at least early on, not much less so than Shakesepeare.

I would suggest that if, in 400 years, The Wire was studied in every school in America, it should probably be translated into a more modern form of English more appropriate to the time. Or, if BBC decided to swap in cockney rhyming slang to better bridge the gap, I certainly wouldn't have a problem with that. I say, having never seen the Wire. Or cockney rhyming slang outside of a Guy Ritchie movie.

[SaintRidley]

To Murk's comment about someone finally proposing that fun was a return value, I just want to say that I assume fun to be self-evident as return value for reading things, especially things that are written well. It very probably didn't occur to a lot of folks to have to say that part out loud because it seemed self-evident to them.


Modern translations of the originals would be the originals, better suited to grade school and high school. And un-translated versions of the originals could still be used for college/postgrad programs. Nobody is suggesting that the untranslated versions be banned - I am explicitly in favor of studying the originals. Just at the levels where the actual use of studying the originals would be more effective (don't get me started on grade school and high school English teachers. A necessary evil, I say!).

As for "not messing with originals," do you similarly insist that Beowulf should only be taught in its original text? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/Beowulf_Cotton_MS_Vitellius_A_XV_f._132r.jpg/1280px-Beowulf_Cotton_MS_Vitellius_A_XV_f._132r.jpg

As a translator and person who does Old English, translations are not the originals. They're always an interpretation of the original.

Seamus Heaney's Beowulf is a version of Beowulf, and I love it greatly. But by translating it into his particular brand of Hibernian English, Heaney is also doing interesting things with his language that are not present in the original poem but which potentially bring out something that is latently reflective of the politics of its day. Heaney is appropriating a poem that had been mobilised in the context of nationalism. By putting it in an Irish English he plays off words that survive in that English but are gone from standard English, he gives a one-fingered salute to colonialism, and he activates some of the potential subtext about how the early English may have felt about their ancestors and the then-current situation of Danish rule in the Danelaw (at least around the time the manuscript was written). Meghan Purvis's translation is less word-for-word equivalent than Heaney's (which isn't really anyway) and breaks the idea of a unified narrator over her knee in favor of giving voice to various points of view within the poem. Ray Liuzza's translation aims for a precision of lexical equivalence and provides the clearest example of what the words literally mean (or his best guess, on the words that are very difficult to sort out), but he lacks the poetic verve of a Heaney or Purvis. Loads of prose translations aim for clarity of narrative and smoothing out the language so it's straightforward to understand, but they lose everything of the rich complexity of how the poet was putting things together, the plays on formulaic language, the way that Beowulf the character is marked as equivalent through certain word choices to the monsters he faces (and that last is one that most of the verse translations can't do either because the vocabulary doesn't exist to do it clearly and concisely anymore). Every translation is an interpretation that aims to be as comprehensive as possible. As a result, every translation introduces something to the text, and has the potential to not account for something whether through inability or straight up missing it.

You've read Beowulf. You have not read the original (arguably nobody has, since we know the poem pre-dates the manuscript). And if you cannot deal with the original language of a piece of literature, you cannot meaningfully debate anything deeper than its plot with someone who has access to the original language, because you have no ability to contribute any insights about what it is saying at a deep level. Because getting at any piece of literature at a deep level requires attention to the precise language being used. And that's a good reason to teach Shakespeare in the original all by itself: it maks the student slow down and have to think and ultimately realize that there's a lot going on in language. If you can't read carefully, you can't get to the point of doing interpretive work. Shakespeare's original demands reading carefully these days due to the unfamiliarity. You can do it with more modern texts (I like Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem"), but having the text itself force the slowdown is helpful for teachers who have limited time in the classroom to try and teach these skills.

And comparing the language of Shakespeare, which is only marginally different from modern English to actual Old English is silly.

When I teach Beowulf in a general course, I teach a translation and I stress the translation aspect so the students know they're dealing with a particular translator's idea of Beowulf. They aren't dealing with the original. You teach Beowulf in the original to students who have the necessary grounding in Old English as a language.


As for whether Shakespeare in the original should be taught in high schools? Yes. Is it hard? Yes. Does that mean we should simplify it for high schoolers? I don't think so. I rather think the difficulty is the point for teaching it to high schoolers. Handled well, they ought to learn a lot from it - that we can read surprisingly old stuff fairly easily with little more than a few annotations, that you can pack a lot of dense meaning into a little space in language, that art does not have to be all highbrow but can be full of fart and sex puns, the power of a good metaphor, and more. They'll also learn that language changes over time, learn some historical context about a very important time in English history as England emerged as a world power (and thus set the stage for a lot of other stuff), maybe how fun performance can be, and other stuff.

[Tvtyrant]

Let me put it a better way - if I can still debate Tolstoy with a native-born Russian, then there is no meaningful difference between the original and the translation.

It was an analogy to make a point (that being that personal experience is not a good argument for teaching something). I deliberately made it ridiculous to underscore the point, but in hindsight, I can understand how it came across as insulting instead. I apologize. We can swap the nouns to "learning cursive got me interested in calligraphy which enriched my life, but that doesn't mean that cursive should still be uniformly taught to all students," for a less ridiculous example.

I was trending towards simplification. I'd have no problem with high school AP classes tossing it in, for example, or electives focusing on it. But every English teacher in the country insisting on Shakespeare as it originally was 400 years ago as mandatory is nothing short of a collective grasp at elitism and self-congratulation.

What I'm getting at is that languages are living constructs that grow and evolve constantly in order to better facilitate understanding, and clinging to specific work from hundreds of years ago remaining needlessly archaic as the only way to truly enjoy it for the purity of the language is anathema to the entire concept of language to begin with. Let alone the English language, which is as pure as the collected rainwater water in a public trash can that hasn't been dumped in months.


I would suggest that if, in 400 years, The Wire was studied in every school in America, it should probably be translated into a more modern form of English more appropriate to the time. Or, if BBC decided to swap in cockney rhyming slang to better bridge the gap, I certainly wouldn't have a problem with that. I say, having never seen the Wire. Or cockney rhyming slang outside of a Guy Ritchie movie.
Simplification is bad on the face of it. Human brains act like muscles, the more you force kids to overwork them the better they work in the end. Every child should be forced to struggle in school, whatever their natural intelligence. If that takes arbitrary course work that is fine, it is the struggle that leads to mental flexibility.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

If that takes arbitrary course work that is fine, it is the struggle that leads to mental flexibility.

There are infinite other ways to stretch minds that do not depend on arbitrary coursework, though. For example, you could use the time to teach them a foreign language. I honestly do not understand what it is about Shakespeare that justifies the amount of time spent learning to appreciate him, other than circular arguments of "everyone was taught it is necessary, therefore he must be taught, or else there might be a generation that doesn't think that".

Grey Wolf

[Tvtyrant]

There are infinite other ways to stretch minds that do not depend on arbitrary coursework, though. For example, you could use the time to teach them a foreign language. I honestly do not understand what it is about Shakespeare that justifies the amount of time spent learning to appreciate him, other than circular arguments of "everyone was taught it is necessary, therefore he must be taught, or else there might be a generation that doesn't think that".

Grey Wolf

We all take foreign languages, they aren't mutually exclusive.

Having a canon gives society cultural touchstones. Public education originates from religious learning in New England and homogenizing the multi-ethnic Prussian society under the Fritz'. Shakespeare is useful because it is hard to learn, English, a-political and a-religious. Latin used to take that position but it was abandoned as schools became more universal and the need for national instead of class identity came to the front, and Milton got removed from the canon due to its religious content. The US has deep chasms in its society that any writing from its own history tends to exacerbate, but Shakespeare is sufficiently old timey to not trigger parental outrage.

Cervantes is another example of that kind of story, or Don Quixote. Different parts of the US ban The Scarlet Letter, Clockwork Orange, etc. Shakespeare is totally safe, no one bans Othello. So it fills two niches; the need for arbitrary difficult work for kids, and having a safe cultural touchstone.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

We all take foreign languages,
My understanding of both the US and the UK education is that it does not reliable produce speakers in any language other than English, except for a few that also learn their local languages such as Welsh or Gaelic.


they aren't mutually exclusive.
Yes, yes they are. There is only so many hours in a day. Every hour spent teaching how to read Shakespeare is an hour not spent doing something else.


Having a canon gives society cultural touchstones.
A canon does not require the story to be untranslated. Oedipus Tyrannus still gives insights into Ancient Greek culture even when not read in Ancient Greek.


Shakespeare is useful because it is hard to learn
No, it is not. If "hard to learn" is actually desired, it is useful to learn advanced maths, not 400 year old poetry. And if 400 year old poetry is important, you'd think you'd learn from someone other than this one guy. I hear there were other authors back then? And yet this is the only one that somehow threads the needle to be taught? No, I think it is quite clear the reason is not to teach some random hard thing, it is specifically Shakespeare, and therefore this "make it hard for hardness sake" is not the actual reason.


a-political
What on earth are you talking about. How is Shakespeare, the guy who wrote about how the previous kings where hunchbacked evil murderers, a-political?


Cervantes is another example of that kind of story, or Don Quixote.
As I have already said, no, it is not. When I studied it, it wasn't to provide "a-political society cultural touchstones". It was to examine the political, cultural and societal realities of Spain in the time it was written. There was no pretence that it was anything other than an important product of its time. And yet it is still a better story in its own right than anything I've read from Shakespeare.

Grey Wolf

[Peelee]

As a translator and person who does Old English, translations are not the originals. They're always an interpretation of the original.
And history is littered with examples of ancient texts translated after centuries where the original intent may have been significantly different, making for a poor translation (the ones I can think of offhand are not suitable for discussion here). Updating works to more modern translations on a fairly constant basis, while not perfect, would certainly help alleviate issues like that for future generations, with the addition of being easier to teach for the current generations, while still preserving the original texts which could (and should) still be taught at more appropriate levels. Which, I should note before anyone rebuts, is markedly different than adaptations.

Seamus Heaney's Beowulf is a version of Beowulf, and I love it greatly. But by translating it into his particular brand of Hibernian English, Heaney is also doing interesting things with his language that are not present in the original poem but which potentially bring out something that is latently reflective of the politics of its day. Heaney is appropriating a poem that had been mobilised in the context of nationalism. By putting it in an Irish English he plays off words that survive in that English but are gone from standard English, he gives a one-fingered salute to colonialism, and he activates some of the potential subtext about how the early English may have felt about their ancestors and the then-current situation of Danish rule in the Danelaw (at least around the time the manuscript was written). Meghan Purvis's translation is less word-for-word equivalent than Heaney's (which isn't really anyway) and breaks the idea of a unified narrator over her knee in favor of giving voice to various points of view within the poem. Ray Liuzza's translation aims for a precision of lexical equivalence and provides the clearest example of what the words literally mean (or his best guess, on the words that are very difficult to sort out), but he lacks the poetic verve of a Heaney or Purvis. Loads of prose translations aim for clarity of narrative and smoothing out the language so it's straightforward to understand, but they lose everything of the rich complexity of how the poet was putting things together, the plays on formulaic language, the way that Beowulf the character is marked as equivalent through certain word choices to the monsters he faces (and that last is one that most of the verse translations can't do either because the vocabulary doesn't exist to do it clearly and concisely anymore). Every translation is an interpretation that aims to be as comprehensive as possible. As a result, every translation introduces something to the text, and has the potential to not account for something whether through inability or straight up missing it.

You've read Beowulf. You have not read the original (arguably nobody has, since we know the poem pre-dates the manuscript). And if you cannot deal with the original language of a piece of literature, you cannot meaningfully debate anything deeper than its plot with someone who has access to the original language, because you have no ability to contribute any insights about what it is saying at a deep level. Because getting at any piece of literature at a deep level requires attention to the precise language being used. And that's a good reason to teach Shakespeare in the original all by itself: it maks the student slow down and have to think and ultimately realize that there's a lot going on in language. If you can't read carefully, you can't get to the point of doing interpretive work. Shakespeare's original demands reading carefully these days due to the unfamiliarity. You can do it with more modern texts (I like Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem"), but having the text itself force the slowdown is helpful for teachers who have limited time in the classroom to try and teach these skills.

And comparing the language of Shakespeare, which is only marginally different from modern English to actual Old English is silly.
I will readily admit that it's not a great analogy. There are several better I can think of off the top of my head, but as before, none suitable for discussion here, so that's the one I went with.

As for whether Shakespeare in the original should be taught in high schools? Yes. Is it hard? Yes. Does that mean we should simplify it for high schoolers? I don't think so. I rather think the difficulty is the point for teaching it to high schoolers. Handled well, they ought to learn a lot from it - that we can read surprisingly old stuff fairly easily with little more than a few annotations, that you can pack a lot of dense meaning into a little space in language, that art does not have to be all highbrow but can be full of fart and sex puns, the power of a good metaphor, and more. They'll also learn that language changes over time, learn some historical context about a very important time in English history as England emerged as a world power (and thus set the stage for a lot of other stuff), maybe how fun performance can be, and other stuff.
And no other sources exist that can teach art does not have to be highbrow but can be full of fart and sex puns, the power of a good metaphor, and more? Because this still seems like more of the same "Shakespeare for the sake of Shakespeare" that I've been accusing academia of to begin with, so a brick in that ivory tower effectively taking the exact position I am against does little to sway my opinion. I also want to note that I am not against academia in general; my dad was educated in the Ivy League, taught at some prestigious universities, and ingrained in me a strong respect for the value of good education. I simply consider Shakespeare to not be a necessity (or even a convenient tool) for a good education for the vast majority of high schoolers.

Simplification is bad on the face of it. Human brains act like muscles, the more you force kids to overwork them the better they work in the end. Every child should be forced to struggle in school, whatever their natural intelligence. If that takes arbitrary course work that is fine, it is the struggle that leads to mental flexibility.
Yeah, I often think that fingerpaints in kindergarten should be replaced with teaching the substantive differences between their work and Pollock's, with an emphasis on abstract expressionism vs lyrical abstraction in the post-war avant-garde art world. The struggle will be good for them!

Making students struggle through arbitrary coursework is, quite possibly, the worst approach to education I could imagine.

[Tvtyrant]

My understanding of both the US and the UK education is that it does not reliable produce speakers in any language other than English, except for a few that also learn their local languages such as Welsh or Gaelic.


A canon does not require the story to be untranslated. Oedipus Rex still gives insights into Ancient Greek culture even when not read in Ancient Greek.


No, it is not. If "hard to learn" is actually desired, is is useful to learn advanced maths, not 400 year old poetry. And if 400 year old poetry is important, you'd think you'd learn from someone other than this one guy. I hear there were other authors back then? And yet this is the only one that somehow threads the needle to be taught? No, I think it is quite clear the reason is not to teach some random hard thing, it is specifically Shakespeare, and therefore this "make it hard for hardness sake" is not the actual reason.


What on earth are you talking about. How is Shakespeare, the guy who wrote about how the previous kings where hunchbacked evil murderers, a-political?


As I have already said, no, it is not. When I studied it, it wasn't to provide "a-political society cultural touchstones". It was to examine the political, cultural and societal realities of Spain in the time it was written. There was no pretence that it was anything other than an important product of its time. And yet it is still a better story in its own right than anything I've read from Shakespeare.

Grey Wolf
Yes, because it serves little purpose. The one language most people learn outside English is Spanish, because it gets used regularly. We nearly all take the courses, there just isn't as much utility as there is in other cultures. I took Spanish for 4 years and German another 4, I use basically none of it so it fades out of my head.

{scrubbed}



Yeah, I often think that fingerpaints in kindergarten should be replaced with teaching the substantive differences between their work and Pollock's, with an emphasis on abstract expressionism vs lyrical abstraction in the post-world avant-garde art world. The struggle will be good for them!

Making children struggle for the sake of making them struggle through arbitrary coursework is, quite possibly, the worst approach to education I could possibly imagine.

Complex thinking is hard, humans are lazy. If you don't force people to take complex math, philosophy, psyche, etc. they usually won't. The number of kids who hate learning the most basic history in school is amazing, much less the theory of knowledge works and economics everyone should be taking. That doesn't mean forcing everyone to the hardest possible subject, but everyone should be having a hard time in school based on their own abilities and background.

[Peelee]

Complex thinking is hard, humans are lazy. If you don't force people to take complex math, philosophy, psyche, etc. they usually won't. The number of kids who hate learning the most basic history in school is amazing, much less the theory of knowledge works and economics everyone should be taking. That doesn't mean forcing everyone to the hardest possible subject, but everyone should be having a hard time in school based on their own abilities and background.

Most people aren't forced to take complex math, philosophy, psyche, etc. Those are pretty much collegiate or post-grad areas, which are purely voluntary. Also, nobody should be having a hard time in school. They should be challenged, which is remarkably different than needlessly making a topic harder than it needs to be and using arbitrary work to enforce it. Which, again, is a horrible way to run an education system, and I am exceedingly thankful that, to the best of my knowledge, the education system I am familiar with is largely dissimilar to what you are describing.

[Tvtyrant]

Most people aren't forced to take complex math, philosophy, psyche, etc. Those are pretty much collegiate or post-grad areas, which are purely voluntary. Also, nobody should be having a hard time in school. They should be challenged, which is remarkably different than needlessly making a topic harder than it needs to be and using arbitrary work to enforce it. Which, again, is a horrible way to run an education system, and I am exceedingly thankful that, to the best of my knowledge, the education system I am familiar with is largely dissimilar to what you are describing.

I'm pretty glad I'm on my side of this fence too, so we will have to agree to disagree.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Yes, because it serves little purpose.
You are absolutely wrong. Study after study of bilingual people have shown amazing RoI on everything from cultural expansion to protection from Alzheimers. So it serves far more purpose than Shakespeare, at least.


We nearly all take the courses, there just isn't as much utility as there is in other cultures.
No. There is plenty of utility. You just don't make use of it.


I took Spanish for 4 years and German another 4, I use basically none of it so it fades out of my head.
Clearly, you weren't challenged for challenge's sake enough. Or possibly, that approach was useless. I favor the latter.

And none of this in any way defends your original assertion, that Shakespeare is worth teaching because it is hard.

Grey Wolf

[warty goblin]

I was homeschooled, so my curriculum was probably somewhat unusual. All I can say is that, of things I was required to read by various well meaning adults in my youth, I would put Shakespeare in the the top 10% hands down. Way more fun than a lot of the rest of the canon; there were obvious and often interesting conflicts, things actually happened, and a solid chance if some good old fashioned sex or violence along the way.



But the true literary misery of my younger days was book group. This was run by the father of one of my best friends, who thought a lot of himself intellectually, and sought to blow our tiny little minds with radical ideas. These radical ideas usually came via the medium of award-winning novels that conveyed such revelations as Racism is Bad or Sexism is Bad or Racism is Bad for a change, delivered with the subtlety of a frying pan to the head, characters often possessed of a whole single dimension (racist! not racist! racist!), and prose awkward enough to make early Weis & Hickman look like, well, Shakespeare. He also perpetrated Catcher in the Rye on us, which was even worse.

Later the guy who ran the group ran away with the mother of my other best friend; their affair came out at my sister's wedding. Small towns are weird.

[Scarlet Knight]

...
Having a canon gives society cultural touchstones... Latin used to take that position but it was abandoned as schools became more universal and the need for national instead of class identity came to the front...

I have noticed that if you can properly quote Shakespeare in a discussion, and the person you're speaking to recognizes it, your argument gains weight (we can argue how much weight) automatically; if for no other reason than you are perceived as having a good education.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

I have noticed that if you can properly quote Shakespeare in a discussion, and the person you're speaking to recognizes it, your argument gains weight (we can argue how much weight) automatically; if for no other reason than you are perceived as having a good education.

Unless the argument is about the Shakespeare play you are quoting, or it is sufficient analogous to it, no, it doesn't. It merely becomes an appeal to authority fallacy. And I say that as the person that keeps using Pratchett quotes to support their arguments.

Grey Wolf

[Aedilred]

Unless the argument is about the Shakespeare play you are quoting, or it is sufficient analogous to it, no, it doesn't. It merely becomes an appeal to authority fallacy. And I say that as the person that keeps using Pratchett quotes to support their arguments.

Grey Wolf

I don't know. I think a well-deployed quotation (from any source) can add rhetorical weight to a proposition or argument, provided it isn't one of those that's been kicked around so much that it's become a cliché. Using unattributed literary quotes out of context (as is common, and is what I presume Scarlet Knight was principally talking about) isn't an appeal to authority per se, because you're not citing the authority in question. If people recognise the reference, they'll appreciate it; if they don't, they'll just take it as a well-coined phrase.

On the other hand, this is probably exactly the sort of thing that runs the risk of being an elitist circle-jerk and probably gets right up the noses of people who haven't had the benefit of an education that teaches this sort of stuff or resent Shakespeare on general principle.

With that said, that 's the sort of phenomenon that isn't going to be improved by limiting Shakespeare-teaching to a self-selected elite.


I think to an extent both sides in the "snobbishness" issue are to blame, really. Compare classical music, and opera in particular. These days, listening to classical music, and opera in particular, is generally held to be a somewhat elitist interest. But most of this stuff, and opera in particular, was written for mass consumption and only stopped being mass-consumed around 100 years ago (although I gather it remains more popular in some countries than others).

What's happened since is that once opera's audience started to decline (I'm not certain of why, but I'd wager that competition with cinema was at least part of it), the art form has been increasingly criticised as inaccessible, elitist and not for "normal people", with accompanying resentment of those who maintain their interest in it, and indeed opera itself. But the accessibility of the art form hasn't actually changed at all. There's no "archaic language" issue here, because operas are either performed in a foreign language or in modern English, and we have surtitles now so if anything it's become more accessible with time. The music, stripped of context, remains popular (witness any number of film scores, widespread abuse of Nessun Dorma, etc.) Ticket prices may have gone up a little on average, but you can still get them very cheaply and I suspect they retain roughly the same price range as they did 200 years ago. It isn't any less accessible than it ever was.

It may be less populist (although there are plenty of good populist companies around), but that's in part because the prophecy of the detractors has become self-fulfilling, because since opera adherents are being resented anyway, they in turn see no reason not to be snobbish and elitist about it. And round and round it goes, with the sides getting further and further apart and the middle ground getting sparser as new generations are inducted into what's become a class war of sorts.

Shakespeare has been around longer than most of the operatic canon but the same tendencies are noticeable with reference to his stuff and will only be exacerbated the more walls are erected around the material.

[Vinyadan]

With opera, the problem is that theaters are only showing old stuff. This means that no one has any interest in writing opera. So you are left with "oldies", which become increasingly démodé. It's a vicious cycle, and it isn't exclusive to opera; theatre has a similar problem. It's a good way to kill an art form.

On the other side, you have competition: from African-derived music becoming the preferred choice over classical, and also home entertainment vs going to the theater. The blues-jazz-swing-rock-pop-metal thing in particular doesn't just attract listeners, it attracts artists, too, so you have another vicious cycle: fewer artists means fewer listeners means less money means fewer artists...

So theaters are putting much effort into killing themselves, but, even if they weren't, they are also against serious competition.

[A.A.King]

Shakespeare is definitely severely overvalued when it comes to education. The guy may have been severely ahead of its time, maybe he was 400 years ahead of his time, that still means Romeo and Juliet became outdated 24 years ago and frankly I’d argue it was long before then.

I have a particular disdain for the argument that teaching something outdated like Shakespeare is important because it creates a shared culture and just because that argument is usually made by people who refuse to partake in the popular common culture. Yes, we are the failures for not getting your supposedly funny reference to Titus Andronicus but you following our conversation about the latest rose ceremony is perfectly acceptable. It’s weird how often the people who insist on schools teaching a certain cultural cannon are the same people who pride themselves on not owning a TV…

I would argue that the only shared culture that is the direct result of teaching Shakespeare is people’s bad memory of being taught Shakespeare. I don’t think people resent Shakespeare, they resent being forced to read it when they had no interest in it and gained nothing out of it.

Worst of all, your high school English teacher was almost certainly someone who loved reading things like Shakespeare so much that he went to college to get a degree in reading Shakespeare and subsequently failed to get a proper job. Now he is in front of you telling you that you are WRONG for not liking the classics. You don’t get it, you don’t understand it, you’re not smart or cultured enough to appreciate the greatness of Billy Shakespeare. They never stop to consider that maybe, just maybe, we’ve seen what he’s done before and frankly we have seen it better.

You can give credit to the guy all you want, I’m sure he has accomplished something amazing for its time but frankly he hasn’t produced anything new for quite a while and you can only rely on your old repertoire for so long. Eventually people will figure out just exactly what is about your work that it made so great for so long and they’ll use to lessons for their own work. Funnily enough, the more you’re worshipped/studied the likelier it becomes that somebody will figure out your secret. It’s like with Seinfeld. Modern watchers often don’t get why Seinfeld was as groundbreaking of a comedy as it was because a lot of what it did seems pretty standard not realizing that it was them who said that particular standard. It might seem cliché now, it wasn’t back then.

Shakespeare might have been funny or groundbreaking back then but the only groundbreaking material I found in Hamlet when I was in high school were those two gravediggers (and only then in the literal sense of the word).

So now you have a story that frankly isn’t anything special and you add on the fact that even as a native speaker you probably need a translation guide the first (few) time(s) you encounter it? Why bother? Surely the valuable lessons you want to teach through Shakespeare can be thought using a more modern work? If you want your students to really think about a story, to be able to answer difficult questions about themes, motivation and character then wouldn’t a story that is easier to read be better?

Don’t force something upon children just because it was forced upon you. Teaching Shakespeare is the literary equivalent of the cycle of abuse. I think that teaching Shakespeare and other ye olde classics can be directly blamed for many peoples disdain for reading. It's not that there aren't works out there that they could enjoy, it is that the works that very few people actually enjoy are the ones that get shoved down our throats as children.

[Aedilred]

Don’t force something upon children just because it was forced upon you. Teaching Shakespeare is the literary equivalent of the cycle of abuse.
Going by your own assertion that the people teaching Shakespeare are people who loved it, it's less a cycle of abuse, and, at least in principle, the opposite of that. A cycle of enjoyment?

[A.A.King]

Going by your own assertion that the people teaching Shakespeare are people who loved it, it's less a cycle of abuse, and, at least in principle, the opposite of that. A cycle of enjoyment?

Sadly abuse and love are not mutually exclusive...
But that particular point was less about the people who teach it than it was the people who insist that it keeps being taught just because they learned about in high school. Somebody told me it was the greatest work ever so now you have to listen to someone tell you it is the greatest work ever. Because that is our culture.... :smallsigh:

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Using unattributed literary quotes out of context (as is common, and is what I presume Scarlet Knight was principally talking about)

We don't have to presume, they told us: "if for no other reason than you are perceived as having a good education."

If someone thinks an argument is strengthened because they think the person making it "has a good education", it is an appeal to authority fallacy. And I was being generous, since it could be argued it is in fact an appeal to false authority, since the ability to quote random texts on command doesn't in any way indicate good education.

Grey Wolf

[Vinyadan]

About using difficult texts, isn't that how you improve textual understanding? By using texts that aren't immediately understandable, but clearly have some meaning behind them? It's not just Shakespeare, some texts in life are simply badly written or may use officialese.



Worst of all, your high school English teacher was almost certainly someone who loved reading things like Shakespeare so much that he went to college to get a degree in reading Shakespeare and subsequently failed to get a proper job. Now he is in front of you telling you that you are WRONG for not liking the classics.

Are there so few who want to be teachers where you live? Or do you simply consider teaching an improper job?

About TV, I agree that it's very tempting (and wrong) to call stupid everything meant for the masses. It's something you see a bit everywhere, intellectuals fear losing creed and being judged as someone of pedestrian taste by their peers. Metal has something similar with an adoration of black metal and disdain for power metal in the name of trveness.

However, it's also important to realise that TV and pop culture are just the tip of the iceberg. The products in TV come from very learned people who most likely know Shakespeare, although they are focused on production, rather than adoration. There are some exceptions, like sports or the descendants of carnie shows like professional wrestling, but e.g. Hollywood is in love with Aristotle's Poetics.

[CheesePirate]

your high school English teacher (...) failed to get a proper job.

Do you truly think so little of English teachers? Or teachers in general?

[Scarlet Knight]

Why do so many of you get the impression that Shakespeare is only taught because teachers were forced to teach it or were forced to learn it and not because it's actually good to know? I believe it is taught because schools think Shakespeare is beneficial as compared to whatever it would be replaced by... whether Tolkien, Joyce or Baldwin. Otherwise teachers would change if for no other reason than from boredom of teaching the same class year after year.


We don't have to presume, they told us: "if for no other reason than you are perceived as having a good education."

If someone thinks an argument is strengthened because they think the person making it "has a good education", it is an appeal to authority fallacy. And I was being generous, since it could be argued it is in fact an appeal to false authority, since the ability to quote random texts on command doesn't in any way indicate good education.

Grey Wolf

It may not indicate a good education in truth, but it is perceived as true. "Truthy" if you will. Just like being tall doesn't make you a good leader, but people will follow you when you're tall. Which come to think of it, may make you a good leader after all.

I suspect you would not quote Pratchett is there wasn't a benefit to it, justified or not.

[Aedilred]

You can give credit to the guy all you want, I’m sure he has accomplished something amazing for its time but frankly he hasn’t produced anything new for quite a while and you can only rely on your old repertoire for so long. Eventually people will figure out just exactly what is about your work that it made so great for so long and they’ll use to lessons for their own work. Funnily enough, the more you’re worshipped/studied the likelier it becomes that somebody will figure out your secret. It’s like with Seinfeld. Modern watchers often don’t get why Seinfeld was as groundbreaking of a comedy as it was because a lot of what it did seems pretty standard not realizing that it was them who said that particular standard. It might seem cliché now, it wasn’t back then.
But if you actually want to study sitcoms, rather than just laugh at their jokes, you ought to be familiar with Seinfeld.

This is part of the point about "education" that people have been trying to make throughout the thread. While I might (and do) believe that Shakespeare can be entertaining in itself (albeit I acknowledge that being well taught is important) the point in studying English literature isn't just "read some books". Reading some books is a side effect.

Shakespeare is possibly the single most influential author in the history of English literature. Virtually everyone who has written anything worth reading in English since he stopped has been influenced by him in some way, even if it's only to the extent of trying to avoid doing what he does because they don't like him. So if you're trying to build an understanding of English literature, which is the point in studying English literature, it may not be strictly essential to be familiar with Shakespeare, but you'll be missing a big piece of the puzzle if you're not.


Shakespeare might have been funny or groundbreaking back then but the only groundbreaking material I found in Hamlet when I was in high school were those two gravediggers (and only then in the literal sense of the word).
I'm imagining a film studies student. "Do we really have to watch Citizen Kane? Sure, it might have been groundbreaking in its day but it's in black and white, for god's sake! What's Orson Welles made lately anyway?"


So now you have a story that frankly isn’t anything special and you add on the fact that even as a native speaker you probably need a translation guide the first (few) time(s) you encounter it?
I don't really think you do. You might need to look up the occasional word, but it's much less alien than people assume. There are plenty of modern dialects around that are equally incomprehensible, and you get movies and TV made in those that people watch. See my comment about The Wire earlier. That Baltimore dialect and accent was genuinely difficult for me to understand and it took me a while to "tune in" to it. Even when I did there were still several words I wasn't familiar with and had to infer from context. Shakespeare's just the same.

Yes, it is not the easiest stuff to read. It's not something I read when I want to turn my brain off. But nor is Roddy Doyle. Or large chunks of Umberto Eco (even in translation). Or, to be honest, quite a lot of genre fiction, for that matter. That doesn't mean it's not worth reading or that it's not possible to derive enjoyment from it.

[Peelee]

But if you actually want to study sitcoms, rather than just laugh at their jokes, you ought to be familiar with Seinfeld.
[snip]
I'm imagining a film studies student. "Do we really have to watch Citizen Kane? Sure, it might have been groundbreaking in its day but it's in black and white, for god's sake! What's Orson Welles made lately anyway?"

It sounds like we're in complete agreement here. If you want to actually study English, Shakespeare is great. If you're a literature student, absolutely dive deep into Shakespeare. If, however, you're in high school and not specifically focusing on a specific topic but getting a good smattering and grounding of them, then no, I don't much see the point in picking up a print copy of Romeo and Juliet any more than studying the actual script for Citizen Kane.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

It may not indicate a good education in truth, but it is perceived as true. "Truthy" if you will.

Yes. Or, to give it its proper name, a fallacy.


I suspect you would not quote Pratchett is there wasn't a benefit to it, justified or not.
The benefit is never "it makes my argument stronger by making it look like I'm educated".

Grey Wolf

[Vahnavoi]

As someone who is only familiar with Shakespeare through adaptations, but has studied several languages:

False friends in foreign languages are a pain. And yes, old versions and dialects of a language essentially count as foreign.

Beyond certain point of fluency, your mind automatically interpretes certain sounds or letters as specific meanings, without conscious thought. So if a foreign language uses the same sounds or letters to mean something completely different, you'll automatically interpret them wrong, in a way that's about as easy to unlearn as learning to write with your non-dominant hand.

Or at least that's my excuse for not learning estonian.

[Themrys]

Sadly abuse and love are not mutually exclusive...
But that particular point was less about the people who teach it than it was the people who insist that it keeps being taught just because they learned about in high school. Somebody told me it was the greatest work ever so now you have to listen to someone tell you it is the greatest work ever. Because that is our culture.... :smallsigh:

That's now how it is.

I have zero problems with hating stuff that I was told was "our culture". In fact, I hated a good percentage of the books I had to read in high school, and would totally agree that other children should not have to read them.

But I like Shakespeare. Even though it isn't my culture. There's just not many modern authors who are able and willing to write in iambic pentameter and put in so many layers of meanings.

Don't assume just because you don't like something, no one else could possibly like it and that they are inflicting it on others just because it was inflicted on them. You should know at least some people who have a completely outlandish hobby you think is extremely boring - would you assume that they only have that hobby because it was forced on them? That collecting stamps is somehow part of a cycle of abuse?


And about Shakespeare being outdated ... I don't think so. Humans are stupid and never seem to learn, and that feud that is the actual topic of Romeo and Juliet is something you could surely still observe in some countries.


Some books I had to read in school could probably be replaced with better ones, but - and that is interesting - I do not know which.

"Effi Briest" was an absolute torture to read, but I have not seen its criticism of men's treatment of women in any other book that I could imagine being accepted as compulsory school reading.

Okay, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, perhaps? But that's not modern, either, and it is originally written in English, so probably not as suitable for reading in German class.

I would be totally in favour of replacing those books with more modern ones, but it seems there are none, or if there are some, those are not famous enough for me to have heard of them.

There's plenty feminist books by women, but it would be even harder to make boys read those than some book they just think is boring and whose social commentary they do not understand.

So ... perhaps the problem is that privileged male authors just don't write enough groundbreaking stuff to replace the old groundbreaking stuff.


And unlike with opera or theatre, literature certainly has no problem with publishers preferring to re-use the old stuff.


So, if you hate Shakespeare, look at why English teachers make their students read it, and write something that can serve the same purpose.

[A.A.King]

Okay, great, you like Shakespeare (and seem to have a hard on for a particular kind of bad writer that has nothing to do with the subject at hand so don't see why you brought them up, but oh well). Also why am I not surprised that you're perfectly okay with doing away with certain old parts people like for cultural reasons, just not the part that you liked?
Individuals are allowed to like Shakespeare, people are allowed to pursuit pointless pastimes, my problem is with those hobbies being forced upon others. I would argue that writing everything in iambic pentameter is a perfect example of style over substance but it's the flashy trick that impressed you so I guess it payed of for him in the end. That you like him doesn't mean that everybody does, or that most people do. That certainly doesn't mean that everybody who is in favour of the school curriculum staying exactly the same is a card carrying member of the Shakespeare fan club. Most people telling you that "Shakespeare should be taught in our schools because he is the greatest English writer that ever lived" have not gone to one of his plays, have not bought one of his works and certainly hasn't read any of it after their English high school teacher forced them to memorise the line "he is the greatest English writer that ever lived". They objectively got nothing out of that part of their general education but it's part of their culture so damn anyone trying to take it away.

You can teach the dissection of language, story, character, themes and subtext with many many works. It wouldn't be a valuable part of your general education if it wasn't applicable to other works. The universal lessons about stories and language that can be taught by using Shakespeare would be better learned from a work that is more universally enjoyed in modern times. There are plenty of good books, even great ones, that weren't already old when the teacher was still young that could be used for the purpose of literary study. The result of English teachers trying to be gatekeepers about what is and isn't "literature", about what works are and aren't worth asking deeper questions about is NOT students appreciation the "classics" more. No, the result is students caring about "literature analyse" less.

Even if Shakespeare was somehow a superior teaching tool when it comes to all the things I mentioned above (which it certainly isn't) than I would still advocate against it's mandatory inclusion in the High School curriculum. The simple fact that it is a slog to get through, the simple fact that so many people can get things about the language wrong that OP felt the need to complain about people misinterpreting a simple phrase like "wherefor art thou Romeo" means that it's failing to get across the most important lesson of them all:

"Reading can be fun"

I'm not saying that we should replace ye olde english with "YOLO Juliet" (though that particular adaption is still more readable than the original), I'm saying that we should pick modern books for modern people. People are allowed to like Shakespeare but they should atleast accept that they hold the minority view. It is not helping our high school kids.

[Aedilred]

They objectively got nothing out of that part of their general education but it's part of their culture so damn anyone trying to take it away.

But you could make this argument about so many things. I have objectively got nothing out of most parts of my general education. I don't use maths beyond basic arithmetic, I haven't touched any sort of science since the age of 16; two of my GCSE subjects were dead languages one of which I couldn't forget about fast enough.

In fact I'd be willing to wager that if you take a specific topic studied as part of one's "general education" and ask every student who studied it whether they ever consciously used the knowledge that they got from it, the majority would say no.

Now, I'm of the mindset that education is valuable for its own sake independently of whether you use anything you learned as part of it ever again in your daily life. But even if you're not, the variety of things that people are interested in and go on to do mean that it's impossible to tailor a general education precisely to "those things that are going to be useful".

So at some point and whatever your philosophy regarding education as a whole, you have to draw a line around certain things that are worth teaching for their own sake, and where that line goes will be largely subjective and, to an extent, arbitrary.

On that basis, and if we consider "English literature" worth teaching at all, which apparently at least in this country we do since it makes up at minimum 10% of your assessed general secondary education, teaching Shakespeare doesn't seem unreasonable.

It is funny how I never hear this argument used about quadratic equations, or moles (of the molecular variety) or ox-bow lakes. Well, ox-bow lakes a bit. But people don't create threads complaining about how annoying it was to learn about them. All of it does rather lead me to suspect that not only do some people resent Shakespeare, but some people just resent humanities subjects.

The simple fact that it is a slog to get through, the simple fact that so many people can get things about the language wrong that OP felt the need to complain about people misinterpreting a simple phrase like "wherefor art thou Romeo" means that it's failing to get across the most important lesson of them all:

"Reading can be fun"
Honestly, if that lesson hasn't been learned by the time that Shakespeare is being taught, then it's probably not going to sink in anyway.

And while it is important to teach people that reading can be fun, it's arguably more worthwhile to teach them that reading can still be fun even if it's challenging. I find it more fun to read Asterix comics than I do almost anything else, but they don't teach me anything, they don't make me think about anything, and once I've put the book down I pretty much forget about it.

Compare literature which is more of a struggle to get through but which stays with me and ultimately imparts much more lasting value. I'd include Shakespeare in that, although he wouldn't be at the top of the list. But if I hadn't been introduced to that when I was, I might have just assumed anything that it was unreadable and steered clear. I probably wouldn't, because I've been interested in reading for as long as I've meaningfully had a personality, but you never know how many minds are opened up by things they're introduced to at school - or conversely, shut off from certain areas by things that they're not.


People are allowed to like Shakespeare but they should atleast accept that they hold the minority view.
Honestly I'm not even persuaded that we do. We probably do but I have yet to encounter any evidence beyond the individual and anecdotal that indicates relative proportions of people who do or do not like Shakespeare or think he's worth teaching.

And even then, a minority view can still be correct.

[Peelee]

It is funny how I never hear this argument used about quadratic equations

I snipped only this because for the rest, I'm more in agreement with you than A.A. King, but theres a reason this argument isn't made for quadratic equations, for example. STEM is incredibly important, and requires a hefty foundation in math. The people who eventually go into STEM fields need to have those math skills honed before they can proceed to the more specific ones that they need in their field, because it's all built off each other. Even if only 1% of the people who are taught quadratic equations go on to those fields, the 99% who don't will still benefit from their work. And, as it's impossible to tell who will and who won't, we just teach all of them.

With literature, the few who go on to further study and populate the field largely do not impact the whole, so the two aren't comparable. Which, I should note despite that it should go without saying, is not at all the same as saying the teaching literature is not worthwhile.

[Murk]

Also, "Will I ever use any of this in real life?" is the complaint I heard (and made) most in math class throughout my education.

The argument "this is of no practical use" is absolutely made for other topics than Shakespeare - and not just by moody teenagers. I'm a boring adult with a responsible job and all that, and I'm still of the opinion that a large part of what they taught me in school (or tried to teach) was a complete waste of my time.

[CheesePirate]

I find it more fun to read Asterix comics than I do almost anything else, but they don't teach me anything, they don't make me think about anything, and once I've put the book down I pretty much forget about it.

O Histrionix, Histrionix! Wherefore art thou Histrionix (http://bardfilm.blogspot.com/2014/03/romeo-and-juliet-in-asterix.html)?

[Peelee]

Also, "Will I ever use any of this in real life?" is the complaint I heard (and made) most in math class throughout my education.

The argument "this is of no practical use" is absolutely made for other topics than Shakespeare - and not just by moody teenagers. I'm a boring adult with a responsible job and all that, and I'm still of the opinion that a large part of what they taught me in school (or tried to teach) was a complete waste of my time.Indeed. It was absolutely a waste of your time. And wasting your time is an acceptable tradeoff if your classmate goes into physics or chemistry and win a Nobel prize or invents a new medical technology or genetically engineers wheat to help solve world hunger, where a significant portion of the world's population will benefit. Of course the vast majority of kids will never need to have been introduced to trigonometry, or mitochondria, or the like. The few that do use that inordinately benefit the whole, and that's why those complaints don't matter in any way.

The arts and humanities are valued for helping enjoy our own lives. The maths and sciences are valued for helping improving everyone's lives. That's the difference. Both should be taught. One should be much more emphasized and mandated at all levels until higher ed. And, conveniently enough, that's largely how the system is set up.

Learning algebra is integral to later concepts in math. Learning Shakespeare is not integral to learning later concepts in literature. You could go through all school until college without learning Shakespeare and get a degree in literature without much hassle. You could not go through all education until college having only learned arithmetic and get a chemistry degree without much hassle.

[A.A.King]

The part about STEM not receiving similar complaints has already been adressed, so let me just make this point:


Honestly, if that lesson hasn't been learned by the time that Shakespeare is being taught, then it's probably not going to sink in anyway.

....

but you never know how many minds are opened up by things they're introduced to at school - or conversely, shut off from certain areas by things that they're not.

I feel there is a contradiction between these two parts, on the one hand you contend that if a certain thing hasn't been learned yet at high school age then it is a lesson that probably won't be learned yet at the same time you say minds may be opened by introducing them to things in High School.

In my personal experience high school literature is taught by gatekeepers, by people who believe they have the right to tell you what is and isn't worth reading. You yourself do something similar by dismissing Asterix as something that is just fun. Not something that makes you really think like Shakespeare does. Now I would first argue that Asterix has probably taught more people about Julius Caesar then Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" did and I would secondly argue that the original Asterix comics were cleverly written to the point that it was no less deep than Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" (whose good bits have been ripped of so often that by the time I actually read the Shakespeare version the only new content left was nothing to write home about). Mosy importantly though I would argue:

What is the point of making that distinction?

In this time of TV and movies I can't be the only person who grew up around people and regularly talks to people who proudly claim that they never read books. People who moved from the basic books their parents read them as a child on to binge watching TV (or never even read at home to begin with). People whose only real encounter with books are when the teacher tells them what to read, and what they get told just isn't interesting.

Why make the distinction between high literatutr and low literature, why do so many have a complete disregard for genre fiction and why would you set-up a class to help the kid who already likes reading anyway and not set it up in such a way that the people who never touch a book mighy find something they would enjoy?

I've heard the phrase "I'll wait for the movie to come out" too often to believe that we wouldn't help more children by having a more inclusive education system with regards to literature. Less gatekeeping, more exploring. Not "Class you must now read shakespeare" but instead "If you like that show why not try this book".

[Fiery Diamond]

On that basis, and if we consider "English literature" worth teaching at all, which apparently at least in this country we do since it makes up at minimum 10% of your assessed general secondary education, teaching Shakespeare doesn't seem unreasonable.

...snip...

And while it is important to teach people that reading can be fun, it's arguably more worthwhile to teach them that reading can still be fun even if it's challenging. I find it more fun to read Asterix comics than I do almost anything else, but they don't teach me anything, they don't make me think about anything, and once I've put the book down I pretty much forget about it.

Compare literature which is more of a struggle to get through but which stays with me and ultimately imparts much more lasting value. I'd include Shakespeare in that, although he wouldn't be at the top of the list. But if I hadn't been introduced to that when I was, I might have just assumed anything that it was unreadable and steered clear. I probably wouldn't, because I've been interested in reading for as long as I've meaningfully had a personality, but you never know how many minds are opened up by things they're introduced to at school - or conversely, shut off from certain areas by things that they're not.

And even then, a minority view can still be correct.

Given that I was the one who started this thread complaining about people not bothering to try to learn things and preferring to misunderstand things due to ignorance, with Shakespearean English as my example, what I'm about to say may come as a surprise. (Though probably less of one if you remember that I'm not really a fan of Shakespeare).

I absolutely 100% think that "English Literature" is not worth teaching at all in pre-college education. I love the English language; I find it fascinating, even as a native speaker. I love reading and creative writing. I despised all my English classes throughout my entire education - at least once they evolved from learning the language to doing literature. There are several reasons for this, one of which is the utter snobbery that comes from assigning value to certain works as "literature" compared to other works which don't count as "literature." Another is being forced to read books (and other works) that I hated. Another is that "literary analysis," at least as interpreted/taught/understood by mere high school teachers (as opposed to people for whom that's their actual field of study - though I have my doubts about that, too) is complete nonsense and utterly unimportant.

Another major reason is the very attitude you express in that post-snip part of your post that I quoted. Guess what? I read for fun. If I learn something along the way, or get to thinking about a subject, or have new concepts introduced to me... hey, bonus! But that is never the primary goal when reading on my own time - with the solitary exception of "looking up information." Sometimes reading a book is one of the easiest ways to get exposed to new information, and that's why it does make sense to have some required reading beyond just reading for fun, but the book/text itself being the goal? Crazy. Treating "a struggle to get through" as somehow a good thing is mind-boggling to me, and it seems as though you've assigned correlation between something being challenging to read and it being "meaningful," which is utterly absurd.

As to your last line: yes, a minority view can be correct. A minority preference, on the other hand... cannot. Liking Shakespeare is the latter.



Indeed. It was absolutely a waste of your time. And wasting your time is an acceptable tradeoff if your classmate goes into physics or chemistry and win a Nobel prize or invents a new medical technology or genetically engineers wheat to help solve world hunger, where a significant portion of the world's population will benefit. Of course the vast majority of kids will never need to have been introduced to trigonometry, or mitochondria, or the like. The few that do use that inordinately benefit the whole, and that's why those complaints don't matter in any way.

The arts and humanities are valued for helping enjoy our own lives. The maths and sciences are valued for helping improving everyone's lives. That's the difference. Both should be taught. One should be much more emphasized and mandated at all levels until higher ed. And, conveniently enough, that's largely how the system is set up.

Learning algebra is integral to later concepts in math. Learning Shakespeare is not integral to learning later concepts in literature. You could go through all school until college without learning Shakespeare and get a degree in literature without much hassle. You could not go through all education until college having only learned arithmetic and get a chemistry degree without much hassle.

Well said.


In my personal experience high school literature is taught by gatekeepers, by people who believe they have the right to tell you what is and isn't worth reading. You yourself do something similar by dismissing Asterix as something that is just fun. Not something that makes you really think like Shakespeare does. Now I would first argue that Asterix has probably taught more people about Julius Caesar then Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" did and I would secondly argue that the original Asterix comics were cleverly written to the point that it was no less deep than Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" (whose good bits have been ripped of so often that by the time I actually read the Shakespeare version the only new content left was nothing to write home about). Mosy importantly though I would argue:

What is the point of making that distinction?

In this time of TV and movies I can't be the only person who grew up around people and regularly talks to people who proudly claim that they never read books. People who moved from the basic books their parents read them as a child on to binge watching TV (or never even read at home to begin with). People whose only real encounter with books are when the teacher tells them what to read, and what they get told just isn't interesting.

Why make the distinction between high literatutr and low literature, why do so many have a complete disregard for genre fiction and why would you set-up a class to help the kid who already likes reading anyway and not set it up in such a way that the people who never touch a book mighy find something they would enjoy?

I've heard the phrase "I'll wait for the movie to come out" too often to believe that we wouldn't help more children by having a more inclusive education system with regards to literature. Less gatekeeping, more exploring. Not "Class you must now read shakespeare" but instead "If you like that show why not try this book".

100% agree! Well stated.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

But you could make this argument about so many things. I have objectively got nothing out of most parts of my general education. I don't use maths beyond basic arithmetic, I haven't touched any sort of science since the age of 16

You are living right now in the middle of a pandemic that requires you to understand both the basics of medical language, a subset of science, and enough statistics to understands levels of risk.

Outside of these specifics circumstances, you also live in a country where VAT is applied to sales, you are required to pay taxes, and a huge amount of information about civil life is transmitted in the form of percentages, ratios and statistics. And basic science is required to follow the arguments for everything from personal medical treatments to energy generation and its impact in the environment and yourself.

If you have chosen to not use "maths beyond basic arithmetic" or "any sort of science" you are failing the most basic steps to being a successful, informed citizen. And in these troubled days, you might be undertaking actions that put yourself and others at risk through wilful ignorance. Or possibly, you are actually using what you learnt at school beyond basic arithmetic, and were exaggerating for effect. Hopefully it is the latter and not the former. But in either case, it is not the fault of the schooling, which did its best to provide you with tools crucial to life in the current world.

ETA: oh, and just in case someone is about to try to turn this into an argument against teaching of languages, no, that too has a crucial impact in everyday life, when it comes to communication. The sheer waste of time and resources that has come in my professional life from poorly written emails alone is staggering. I make no distinction between math/science and language education in schooling: both are crucial in adult life. Sure, I hated having to write to essays a week for ten years of my life, but it taught me how to write, a skill I use as much as science and math.

But Shakespeare? No, he doesn't seem to have any actual practical uses in the modern world beyond establishing socio-economic status via education boasting. And I for one believe that we could do without that. Therefore, it is useful for those wanting to learn about the period, and thus is an appropriate topic in university, but is not a necessity in obligatory education.

Grey Wolf

[Marillion]

You are living right now in the middle of a pandemic that requires you to understand both the basics of medical language, a subset of science, and enough statistics to understands levels of risk.


True. It is also true, however, that in the midst of this pandemic, a frightening amount of people are arguing that the human cost of ignoring the pandemic and conducting business as usual is acceptable, perhaps even preferable! After all, they say, it probably won't be them or their families paying the cost. That isn't a STEM issue, that's a humanities issue; they literally don't care if thousands of people they don't know die, as long as they can live their life in the manner they always have. For whatever reason, they haven't learned empathy.

I think literature is an excellent way to introduce and explore philosophical, ethical, and moral concepts. As The Giant himself said, fiction is only worthwhile for what it can tell us about the real world. By giving names and faces to these principles, we become invested in them. By personifying complex ideas, we can learn about them at a much younger age than we could if we simply had ethics lectures instead of literature classes. And when a story affects us, we internalize it and carry a part of it away with us. The humanities don't only give us another way to enjoy our OWN lives, they teach us how to live with and care about OTHERS. That's every bit as valuable to the individual and to the society as math. These last couple weeks, I've been using Avatar: The Last Airbender to help talk to my five year old daughter about complex but very important concepts. She loves Aang's friendliness, she admires Sokka's intelligence, she mimics Katara's confidence, and - more than anything else, I admit - she CHEERS for Appa's ferocity when he swoops in to save the main characters. She's internalizing beautiful values about kindness, curiosity, and courage in a way that can only be equaled by real-life situations, thanks in large part to the help of a bright and silly cartoon.

On that level, Shakespeare is worth teaching in high school because his work shows us that despite the centuries and ocean between us, many aspects of the human condition are timeless and universal. Society may be different now, but humans have always yearned for freedom and love, humans have always been petty and selfish, and humans have always - ALWAYS - loved a good fart joke.

That said, Shakespeare probably shouldn't be emphasized quite as much as he is during general education. In both of the high schools I attended we did 2 or 3 plays each year, with a heaping side dish of his sonnets during my sophomore year. At the time I (and most of my peers) very much enjoyed it, because I was exceptionally lucky to have teachers who loved the material and knew how to show us why they loved it so much. Looking back now though, it does seem rather excessive. Shakespeare masterfully portrayed many elements of the human experience, but there are many more he did not portray. There are more authors than William Shakespeare. Like, at least 3 other authors, probably. Broadening literature lessons would make them more accessible, more relevant, and just plain different. If a student doesn't connect to the Bard, it doesn't mean they're stupid or lazy, it means that it isn't landing right now and they may connect to a different work of art. Teach Shakespeare, but don't make him out to be the pinnacle of literature by which all else is judged. After all, he didn't write Avatar: The Last Airbender.

[Fiery Diamond]

I think literature is an excellent way to introduce and explore philosophical, ethical, and moral concepts. As The Giant himself said, fiction is only worthwhile for what it can tell us about the real world.

First sentence: depends on how you define literature. After all, you go on to talk about a TV show, which English Major Purists will definitely say isn't literature. If you mean fictional media in general, then I agree with your first sentence wholeheartedly. However, that's not what "English Literature" means in the context of education.

Second sentence: The Giant is a good writer, and I enjoy OoTS quite a bit. That doesn't mean I'm forced to agree with his worldviews. I very, very strongly disagree with his statement to the extent that I find that thinking quite poisonous. It reeks of the same kind of attitude that begets the perspective of condemning "badwrongfun" that we sometimes see on these gaming forums. Does he have every right to espouse that opinion? Obviously! But he's not some sort of objective authority on the value of fiction. Quoting him is no more authoritative than quoting that one guy you met on the street that sounded like he had a good point.

[snowblizz]

I find it more fun to read Asterix comics than I do almost anything else, but they don't teach me anything, they don't make me think about anything, and once I've put the book down I pretty much forget about it.

Then you are failing at reading Asterix and should have paid attention in those Shakespear classes on how to read and analyse text.

E.g. Asterix and the Great Divide, apart from also containing Shakespear references, is a sendup up any strongly "two party" or "two block" political system. Asterix's Obelix and Co. album is a cautionary tale about how capitalism at it's worst works. Asterix and the Mansion of the Gods deals with issues of modernity vs for a better word "traditionalism". Asterix and the Goths is a primer on 19th century history and several of the albums sorta doubles as, rather stereotypical, but functioning descriptions of the bordering nations. Not all of it still holds up of course. And that's just mentioning major themes, there's a lot of minor points along the way. In Asterix in Spain we can read a rather sharp retort to modern masstourism. Finally, Asterix the Gaul (the first album) should probably, if it doens't already, form the basis of any introduction to French geography class.

Both Tintin and Lucky Luke similarly contains valuable lessons not apparent on the surface. Lucky Luke contains a lot of accurate information about the old West. The authors made sure historical occurences and persons were largely fact based.

A lot of these deeper themes I can't even go into due to board rules (Tintin covers several politically charged subjects), so if you find Asterix not teaching anything then that's on you.

Sometimes the opposite is true. The socialist book using Donald Duck comics to argue about capitalism was utter bunk. It is possible to read too much into things too. Whoever authored that impressive feat of insanity probably also coulda done with abit more Shakespear and litterary criticism.

[Marillion]

First sentence: depends on how you define literature. After all, you go on to talk about a TV show, which English Major Purists will definitely say isn't literature. If you mean fictional media in general, then I agree with your first sentence wholeheartedly. However, that's not what "English Literature" means in the context of education.
Well, I talked about the TV show more as a rebuttal to what I perceived to be people saying that the humanities weren't a worthwhile subject in general education. ATLA isn't English Literature per se, but it is something that can be analyzed and learned from at a younger age than the literature we're talking about. More on topic, we read Harry Potter and the Sorceror's (yeah, American, sorry) Stone when I was in 3rd grade, about 8 or so. That was decried by purists for many of the same reasons that English Major Purists would condemn ATLA, but my literature teacher used it to great effect in much the same way I'm using Avatar. Beyond the basic plot of a kid learning magic and saving the day, there were lessons in there about abuse, bravery, empathy, etc that were relatively easy for young children to analyze with the help of a teacher. It also showed us as children that reading can be fun, even in a classroom where we had to put effort into thinking about it.


Second sentence: The Giant is a good writer, and I enjoy OoTS quite a bit. That doesn't mean I'm forced to agree with his worldviews. I very, very strongly disagree with his statement to the extent that I find that thinking quite poisonous. It reeks of the same kind of attitude that begets the perspective of condemning "badwrongfun" that we sometimes see on these gaming forums. Does he have every right to espouse that opinion? Obviously! But he's not some sort of objective authority on the value of fiction. Quoting him is no more authoritative than quoting that one guy you met on the street that sounded like he had a good point.

I was very tired when I wrote that, and I didn't include all the thoughts that I intended to. I meant to add that while I don't wholly agree with that statement, it is a position I respect, because fiction does always say something about the real world. That's not the only thing that gives fiction value, but fiction is more valuable because it also teaches us certain things about the time and place it was made in, even if that's completely unintentional by the author.

That, I think, is another reason to study literature; to learn how to analyze information without internalizing it. To learn how to extract meaning and how to support your viewpoints. To learn how writers use words to manipulate the reader into feeling and reacting a certain way. Being exposed to opposing viewpoints, puzzling out why people have the viewpoints they do, and reconciling those conflicts helps the student understand what they personally value and why.

And in that regard, Shakespeare remains a very efficient author to study. His plays are packed with layers of meaning, and students can analyze complex political schemes, crass double entendres, and heartbreaking human tragedy all in the same work, sometimes on the same page. They'll also learn how to work within constrictions while still clearly and effectively expressing their intent; Sonnets, for instance, are a rather restrictive structure, but poets used that structure to their advantage while distilling the essence of what they wanted to convey.

[Scarlet Knight]

I am reminded of an old joke:

" Why do we have to learn Shakespeare? No one ever uses it! Besides, his dialog is nothing but cliches!"

[Willie the Duck]

I am going to take a different tack than the rest, and go back to addressing the original post.

I'm not the biggest fan of Shakespeare. Don't get me wrong, he was pretty talented and also had an interesting sense of humor, but so many people seem to think he was the biggest theater genius ever and all his works were complete masterpieces to which all other plays must be compared, which is such ridiculous hyperbole that it's kind of a turnoff. But even though I'm not head over heels for his stuff, one thing that has always annoyed me about many people who don't put the guy on a pedestal is the way they treat the language used. Now, if your native language is something other than English, I can understand that his archaic language could be difficult. But the number of native English speakers who act like Shakespearean English is completely impenetrable is excessively high, and I honestly don't get it. Yes, it's different from current English. Yes, it requires you to actually learn a bit. Why is "learning a bit" apparently a complete deal-breaker for so many people? Why do they prefer to throw up their hands and declare Shakespeare's works impossible to understand - or worse, completely misunderstand things because they refuse to learn what words actually mean. I was thinking about this because I was watching a show where there's a theater thing going on, and the supposedly competent character says, "Wherefore art thou, Romeo?" instead of "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" Wherefore does not mean where. That's not even a reasonable assumption to make from context clues even if you didn't know what it meant, but the assumption that wherefore means where is super common for some reason. Ever seen the Bugs Bunny Witch Hazel playwright episode? "Wherefore art thou, Romeo?" "I'm right here, Juliet!" Yes, it's a joke, but it exists because of the common misconception. Nobody thinks that "therefore" means "there," so why would "wherefore" mean "where?"

TL;DR: Why do people prefer willful ignorance, complaining, and obvious misunderstandings over putting forth the effort to learn something? Shakespearean English is the subject of my rant, but the question holds for other things as well.

Okay, so who are these 'people who prefer willful ignorance?' First and foremost, do you really know that this is the case? I ask not because I have any knowledge about you, but because I see statements vaguely like this an awful lot (which, I guess, is a case of my 'number of _X_ who act like _Y_ is excessively high' anecdote going up against yours). I am well seated in middle age, beginning to see my parents turn into their parents and people of my generation turning into the same caricatures we laughed at our parents for being. One of the roles that I definitely see a lot of my peers sliding into is that guy who really loves to talk about ‘kids these days.’ How they are disrespectful, or lazy, or immature, and so forth, almost always with no actual background in what ‘kids these days’ really are like. “Why is ‘learning a bit’ apparently a complete deal-breaker for so many people?” seems to slot right in that list of things. Beyond that, I work managing a department of programmers and lawyers who are all “Highly Intelligent™®©.” People who were a really big deal amongst the A-grade-getting students in high school, are still patting themselves on the back for their SAT score (20-30 year on), and kind of are disappointed that they don’t get that kind of accolades in the adult world (except, you know, massively underchallenged and overcompensated lifestyles in a very shiny office building). The number of times I have heard condescending commentary about ‘normal’ people has made me rather suspicious of assertions about the ignorance of the masses. I am trying to explain why I am suspicious of such claims, and since I don’t know you, hopefully you don’t take this personally. However, I would like to know, do you actually know that there are vast swaths of people out there who are mistaking ‘Wherefore art thou’ as an inquiry of location, and doing so out of some form of willful ignorance?

If there are a large number of people out there, it would be good to analyze the reasons, and/or what kind of excuses we consider acceptable. What do you think the actual reasons would be? I think Murk raised a good point about people outside the culture feeling absolutely no incentive to invest in this thing that seems like nothing but an excuse for people to mock him for not knowing it already (I have a similar position on chess – it is better for me to say, ‘yeah, I don’t play chess,’ than it would ever be to do anything less than be a grand master at it). Likewise everyone has to turn 14 sometime (or whenever it is we start teaching Shakespeare in school) and make whatever learning pitfalls one makes while learning the matter (and I do not trust anyone here’s memories on what it was like to learn this stuff for the first time. We’ve all omitted the mistakes we made to get to the understandings we’ve had now). Also joke-makers like the Bugs Bunny reference. Is there a specific criteria of people who do not know the truth of the Shakespearian word choice, and which you think to be an unacceptable reason for that ignorance?


Given that I was the one who started this thread complaining about people not bothering to try to learn things and preferring to misunderstand things due to ignorance, with Shakespearean English as my example, what I'm about to say may come as a surprise. (Though probably less of one if you remember that I'm not really a fan of Shakespeare).

I absolutely 100% think that "English Literature" is not worth teaching at all in pre-college education. I love the English language; I find it fascinating, even as a native speaker. I love reading and creative writing. I despised all my English classes throughout my entire education - at least once they evolved from learning the language to doing literature. There are several reasons for this, one of which is the utter snobbery that comes from assigning value to certain works as "literature" compared to other works which don't count as "literature." Another is being forced to read books (and other works) that I hated. Another is that "literary analysis," at least as interpreted/taught/understood by mere high school teachers (as opposed to people for whom that's their actual field of study - though I have my doubts about that, too) is complete nonsense and utterly unimportant.

This certainly does come as a surprise. It's almost like two different people were in control of the keyboard.

[Aedilred]

The part about STEM not receiving similar complaints has already been adressed, so let me just make this point:



I feel there is a contradiction between these two parts, on the one hand you contend that if a certain thing hasn't been learned yet at high school age then it is a lesson that probably won't be learned yet at the same time you say minds may be opened by introducing them to things in High School.
There's no contradiction, because I'm talking about a progression rather than a binary. Anyone who hasn't learned by the point of encountering Shakespeare that reading can be fun probably isn't going to have their minds changed by anything they read at that age. But for those who have learned that lesson, introducing them to things which are more challenging reading than they might otherwise encounter will encourage them to expand their reading beyond their obvious comfort zone.


In my personal experience high school literature is taught by gatekeepers, by people who believe they have the right to tell you what is and isn't worth reading. You yourself do something similar by dismissing Asterix as something that is just fun. Not something that makes you really think like Shakespeare does. Now I would first argue that Asterix has probably taught more people about Julius Caesar then Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" did and I would secondly argue that the original Asterix comics were cleverly written to the point that it was no less deep than Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" (whose good bits have been ripped of so often that by the time I actually read the Shakespeare version the only new content left was nothing to write home about).

It's not about how much you learn about history or whatever from the text you're reading. Heck, most of the Shakespeare histories that aren't completely made up are wrong anyway. I'll put it another way. Asterix has never moved me. Shakespeare has. I've been brought to the verge of tears by King Lear, and left conflicted and agitated by The Merchant of Venice.


Mosy importantly though I would argue:

What is the point of making that distinction?

In this time of TV and movies I can't be the only person who grew up around people and regularly talks to people who proudly claim that they never read books. People who moved from the basic books their parents read them as a child on to binge watching TV (or never even read at home to begin with). People whose only real encounter with books are when the teacher tells them what to read, and what they get told just isn't interesting.

Why make the distinction between high literatutr and low literature, why do so many have a complete disregard for genre fiction and why would you set-up a class to help the kid who already likes reading anyway and not set it up in such a way that the people who never touch a book mighy find something they would enjoy?

I've heard the phrase "I'll wait for the movie to come out" too often to believe that we wouldn't help more children by having a more inclusive education system with regards to literature. Less gatekeeping, more exploring. Not "Class you must now read shakespeare" but instead "If you like that show why not try this book".
I agree that reading anything is better than nothing, but that also doesn't mean that everything you read is as good or as worthwhile as everything else. You could teach nothing but The Very Hungry Caterpillar on the basis that everybody enjoys it and it's not going to challenge anyone, but that feels like a bit of a missed opportunity. You don't want to leave students behind completely, but equally I don't think you should always teach to the lowest common denominator just to be on the safe side.

I agree that people should be encouraged to explore. In fact that's what I'm trying to encourage by promoting the teaching of something that students might otherwise miss out on. I don't think gatekeeping is the right word. Of course, there has to be a curriculum of some sort, because the teachers need to be familiar with the books themselves and there's only so much class time to teach a given text. If everyone just reads what they want that's almost impossible to teach effectively. Though I've never had an English teacher who hasn't encouraged me to read whatever I want in my own time - in some cases to the extent of lending me their own books - so long as I also read the set texts.

As to the "if you liked this, try this!" approach, well sure, but that's just a question of how you introduce a book rather than what books you teach. You can easily do the same with Shakespeare. Find a roughly contemporary film that mirrors one of his plots, show that to the class and then you've got your introduction.

I must admit that I think the first Shakespeare play you're taught does make a difference. Two of the most common ones seem to be A Midsummer Night's Dream, which I have come to like well enough, but I think is a hopeless introductory play. I can understand why Romeo and Juliet is taught but I also suspect that the teenagers it's given to are, if they identify with the central characters, identify with them all too well and thereby miss the actual point.

When I was taught English lit, we were given some snippets of Romeo earlier on, but the first play we were taught properly was the Scottish Play, which is great. The language is relatively straightforward, it's got a great plot, a short and punchy opening scene, an obvious contemporary context that you can make sense of, a couple of great speeches, it's not too long, and the language is relatively accessible. It may not be quite his best work, but as introductory plays go it seemed to me to be about as good as they get.

I'm sure it's not for everyone, though.


You are living right now in the middle of a pandemic that requires you to understand both the basics of medical language, a subset of science, and enough statistics to understands levels of risk.

Outside of these specifics circumstances, you also live in a country where VAT is applied to sales, you are required to pay taxes, and a huge amount of information about civil life is transmitted in the form of percentages, ratios and statistics. And basic science is required to follow the arguments for everything from personal medical treatments to energy generation and its impact in the environment and yourself.

If you have chosen to not use "maths beyond basic arithmetic" or "any sort of science" you are failing the most basic steps to being a successful, informed citizen. And in these troubled days, you might be undertaking actions that put yourself and others at risk through wilful ignorance. Or possibly, you are actually using what you learnt at school beyond basic arithmetic, and were exaggerating for effect. Hopefully it is the latter and not the former. But in either case, it is not the fault of the schooling, which did its best to provide you with tools crucial to life in the current world.

OK, yes, that was too much of an exaggeration, and was a result of taking a point I think I'd made earlier and dashing something off without thinking it through. I do use probabilities day to day, and knowing how to calculate a percentage is useful. Albeit neither of those are essentially arithmetical.

With that said, the way our tax system works, you don't really have to understand it or do any calculations. VAT is quoted inclusively in the retail price, so you don't have to do the calculation exercise that you do in the US. Unless you're self-employed or have a significant capital income, tax is processed automatically and most people never have to file a tax return.

I think I might have used geometry, or tried to use it, once in my adult life. Basic algebra (of the arithmetical variety) yes. Knowing how to draw and interpret a graph is useful. Some understanding of statistics is handy, if only so you know why most the statistics fed to you by the media are misleading (although ironically, actual statistics isn't something I was really taught).

Everything else you mention, yes, you have a point, and although I might take issue with a couple of them I don't want to derail the thread. But I also think my education had covered everything I actually need to know about all of that to function adequately in society by the time I was thirteen. I still had to take those subjects for another two years to GCSE and very little if any of what I learned in those years has been of any real practical application.

That the level of knowledge of those subjects that you need to function in society responsibly is capped at about what we would call Key Stage 3 is probably not a coincidence: I'm willing to bet that that's the highest level the media and government feel comfortable pitching concepts to the public that they consider the majority of people will still understand.

Also probably not a coincidence: the same point that those subjects stopped being practically useful is the same point that in a different classroom we started to be seriously taught Shakespeare.


Then you are failing at reading Asterix and should have paid attention in those Shakespear classes on how to read and analyse text.

E.g. Asterix and the Great Divide, apart from also containing Shakespear references, is a sendup up any strongly "two party" or "two block" political system. Asterix's Obelix and Co. album is a cautionary tale about how capitalism at it's worst works. Asterix and the Mansion of the Gods deals with issues of modernity vs for a better word "traditionalism". Asterix and the Goths is a primer on 19th century history and several of the albums sorta doubles as, rather stereotypical, but functioning descriptions of the bordering nations. Not all of it still holds up of course. And that's just mentioning major themes, there's a lot of minor points along the way. In Asterix in Spain we can read a rather sharp retort to modern masstourism. Finally, Asterix the Gaul (the first album) should probably, if it doens't already, form the basis of any introduction to French geography class.
Honestly, on my most recent re-reads I've been pretty much ignoring the Uderzo-only volumes, with the exception of Black Gold. They just don't quite have "it", somehow.

But I should perhaps have made an exception for Obelix and Co because that is a work of genius.

I probably have learned a bit about French cultural attitudes from it. Indeed, I'm quite taken with a point I saw made a number of years ago about how much you can tell about the French national identity from Asterix comics: he's a Gaul, but he dresses like a Frank; the Romans aren't the real baddies; the affectionate (with one exception) ribbing of their neighbours, and so on.

Nevertheless, I refer to what I said earlier in this post: I thoroughly enjoy Asterix - and its satirical edge is a large part of that - but it hasn't ever provoked an emotional response from me beyond "lol".

[Themrys]

O Histrionix, Histrionix! Wherefore art thou Histrionix (http://bardfilm.blogspot.com/2014/03/romeo-and-juliet-in-asterix.html)?

Good point - it is worth it reading Shakespeare, if only to understand the references to Shakespeare in other works.

There is a number of books that I intend to read someday, for no reason other than the fact that they are referred in the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde.

(It is actually possible this is the sole reason why I read Jane Eyre. I didn't even like Jane Eyre, but it was totally worth it. Frankly, by now, Shakespeare is a bit like {scrubbed}, you might like it or you might not, but after reading it you will at least understand what everyone else is talking about. And where all those figures of speech come from.)


I would argue that writing everything in iambic pentameter is a perfect example of style over substance

... do you ever hear music?

[Fiery Diamond]

I am going to take a different tack than the rest, and go back to addressing the original post.


Okay, so who are these 'people who prefer willful ignorance?' First and foremost, do you really know that this is the case? I ask not because I have any knowledge about you, but because I see statements vaguely like this an awful lot (which, I guess, is a case of my 'number of _X_ who act like _Y_ is excessively high' anecdote going up against yours). I am well seated in middle age, beginning to see my parents turn into their parents and people of my generation turning into the same caricatures we laughed at our parents for being. One of the roles that I definitely see a lot of my peers sliding into is that guy who really loves to talk about ‘kids these days.’ How they are disrespectful, or lazy, or immature, and so forth, almost always with no actual background in what ‘kids these days’ really are like. “Why is ‘learning a bit’ apparently a complete deal-breaker for so many people?” seems to slot right in that list of things. Beyond that, I work managing a department of programmers and lawyers who are all “Highly Intelligent™®©.” People who were a really big deal amongst the A-grade-getting students in high school, are still patting themselves on the back for their SAT score (20-30 year on), and kind of are disappointed that they don’t get that kind of accolades in the adult world (except, you know, massively underchallenged and overcompensated lifestyles in a very shiny office building). The number of times I have heard condescending commentary about ‘normal’ people has made me rather suspicious of assertions about the ignorance of the masses. I am trying to explain why I am suspicious of such claims, and since I don’t know you, hopefully you don’t take this personally. However, I would like to know, do you actually know that there are vast swaths of people out there who are mistaking ‘Wherefore art thou’ as an inquiry of location, and doing so out of some form of willful ignorance?

If there are a large number of people out there, it would be good to analyze the reasons, and/or what kind of excuses we consider acceptable. What do you think the actual reasons would be? I think Murk raised a good point about people outside the culture feeling absolutely no incentive to invest in this thing that seems like nothing but an excuse for people to mock him for not knowing it already (I have a similar position on chess – it is better for me to say, ‘yeah, I don’t play chess,’ than it would ever be to do anything less than be a grand master at it). Likewise everyone has to turn 14 sometime (or whenever it is we start teaching Shakespeare in school) and make whatever learning pitfalls one makes while learning the matter (and I do not trust anyone here’s memories on what it was like to learn this stuff for the first time. We’ve all omitted the mistakes we made to get to the understandings we’ve had now). Also joke-makers like the Bugs Bunny reference. Is there a specific criteria of people who do not know the truth of the Shakespearian word choice, and which you think to be an unacceptable reason for that ignorance?



This certainly does come as a surprise. It's almost like two different people were in control of the keyboard.

It probably comes down to our different sample sets, in all honesty. I live in a part of the United States where (and I'm not making this up) there is a large population of people who are actually proud of being ignorant on certain subjects. As a result, when I encounter people who are ignorant on things that require minimal effort to educate oneself on and I see no reason not to do so if one is going to be exposed to it anyway, I tend to assume they are being willfully ignorant because given my experience, that's what Occam's Razor seems to point to. It's not a "kids these days" attitude, at least for me: I'm 31, and I see this just as much among my peers and people who are older than me. I'm far from being a genius (I did well in school, but that's hardly a reliable indicator of overall intelligence, and to use D&D terms I will openly admit my WIS is much lower than my INT), but the number of "stupid people" around me is astounding. There are two main explanations I can think of for that: either I'm a lot smarter than I think I am, or they aren't actually as stupid as they appear to be to me. The only way the second one could be true (which I figure it probably is) is for the ignorance to be willful. And given that I do encounter a lot of people being very obviously willfully ignorant on certain subjects, that's my go-to assumption for why people are ignorant about easy-to-self-educate-on things. The reasons behind why they would prefer to remain ignorant don't change that it's willful ignorance, and were actually what I was asking the "why" about (which, as you've noted yourself, a couple people have actually provided!). The rant was in frustration, but that doesn't mean "why?!" was purely rhetorical, after all.

With regard to your last line: I hope that wasn't an accusation but rather just an expression of how surprising you found it. I'm the only one with access to either this computer or my account on this website. But perhaps a clarification is in order: force-feeding people specific things stemming from elitist and useless criteria is, in my perspective, a WORLD of a difference from expecting people to be active in self-educating on the things they encounter. The latter is something I think is natural and essential, and those who lack that automatic self-education are assumed to be willfully ignorant by me, because why else would they not self-educate in this day and age of easy access to practically limitless information? The former is appalling to me and a large part of why I hate English Literature classes. Shakespeare, while the subject that dominates this thread, is not specifically the issue I was complaining about; it was merely the example that encountering an instance of recently made me want to rant.

As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I grew up in a family environment where the default to encountering the unknown was to seek understanding, not to dismiss. Just because I think a certain subject isn't worth inflicting on high school students doesn't mean I don't value the purposeful accumulation of knowledge that has no obvious essential practical application.

[CheesePirate]

Good point - it is worth it reading Shakespeare, if only to understand the references to Shakespeare in other works.

For me it certainly was :)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2jMs2Dp2eo

[Themrys]

It probably comes down to our different sample sets, in all honesty. I live in a part of the United States where (and I'm not making this up) there is a large population of people who are actually proud of being ignorant on certain subjects. As a result, when I encounter people who are ignorant on things that require minimal effort to educate oneself on and I see no reason not to do so if one is going to be exposed to it anyway, I tend to assume they are being willfully ignorant because given my experience, that's what Occam's Razor seems to point to. It's not a "kids these days" attitude, at least for me: I'm 31, and I see this just as much among my peers and people who are older than me. I'm far from being a genius (I did well in school, but that's hardly a reliable indicator of overall intelligence, and to use D&D terms I will openly admit my WIS is much lower than my INT), but the number of "stupid people" around me is astounding. There are two main explanations I can think of for that: either I'm a lot smarter than I think I am, or they aren't actually as stupid as they appear to be to me. The only way the second one could be true (which I figure it probably is) is for the ignorance to be willful. And given that I do encounter a lot of people being very obviously willfully ignorant on certain subjects, that's my go-to assumption for why people are ignorant about easy-to-self-educate-on things. The reasons behind why they would prefer to remain ignorant don't change that it's willful ignorance, and were actually what I was asking the "why" about (which, as you've noted yourself, a couple people have actually provided!). The rant was in frustration, but that doesn't mean "why?!" was purely rhetorical, after all.


Oh, willful ignorance definitely is an extremely widespread problem nowadays.

People take pride in and cultivate their ignorance. They choose to believe things that directly contradict not just scientific research but common sense and obvious observation.

The amounts of brain energy invested in maintaining this willful ignorance must be enormous. For in quite a lot of cases, it is maintained even while they have things explained to them again and again. (Though at some point, willfully ignorant people react with aggression to being confronted with the facts which they so passionately ignore - they feel their ignorance threatened and lash out.)

It is a strange phenomenon, and refusing to understand what Shakespeare means with "wherefore" is only the very tip of the iceberg.

[Marillion]

It probably comes down to our different sample sets, in all honesty. I live in a part of the United States where (and I'm not making this up) there is a large population of people who are actually proud of being ignorant on certain subjects. As a result, when I encounter people who are ignorant on things that require minimal effort to educate oneself on and I see no reason not to do so if one is going to be exposed to it anyway, I tend to assume they are being willfully ignorant because given my experience, that's what Occam's Razor seems to point to. It's not a "kids these days" attitude, at least for me: I'm 31, and I see this just as much among my peers and people who are older than me.

Shamefully, same here. I also am in my 30's and I personally see it much less in children than in people my age, though. I think the kids will be alright. Wasn't it Arthur C. Clarke who said something like, "Americans think democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge"?

[Aedilred]

It probably comes down to our different sample sets, in all honesty. I live in a part of the United States where (and I'm not making this up) there is a large population of people who are actually proud of being ignorant on certain subjects. As a result, when I encounter people who are ignorant on things that require minimal effort to educate oneself on and I see no reason not to do so if one is going to be exposed to it anyway, I tend to assume they are being willfully ignorant because given my experience, that's what Occam's Razor seems to point to. It's not a "kids these days" attitude, at least for me: I'm 31, and I see this just as much among my peers and people who are older than me. I'm far from being a genius (I did well in school, but that's hardly a reliable indicator of overall intelligence, and to use D&D terms I will openly admit my WIS is much lower than my INT), but the number of "stupid people" around me is astounding. There are two main explanations I can think of for that: either I'm a lot smarter than I think I am, or they aren't actually as stupid as they appear to be to me. The only way the second one could be true (which I figure it probably is) is for the ignorance to be willful. And given that I do encounter a lot of people being very obviously willfully ignorant on certain subjects, that's my go-to assumption for why people are ignorant about easy-to-self-educate-on things. The reasons behind why they would prefer to remain ignorant don't change that it's willful ignorance, and were actually what I was asking the "why" about (which, as you've noted yourself, a couple people have actually provided!). The rant was in frustration, but that doesn't mean "why?!" was purely rhetorical, after all.

I'm never quite sure about this sort of thing. Obviously, you've put "stupid people" in inverted commas so I presume you're aware of it but I have come to learn that there is a big difference between stupidity and ignorance. Back in my days as a labourer, I encountered a number of people who had no education to speak of and no real knowledge or interest in a lot of things which I might assume were common knowledge, but were still as sharp as a tack. They were clearly clever, not even in a way I might somewhat patronisingly call "cunning", but their whole frame of reference was so different to mine, whether through lack of exposure, opportunity or motivation, that it would have been easy to write them off as "stupid" at first glance. On the other hand I've also encountered a lot of people in other fields where you'd expect a level of intelligence (the professions, principally) who look and talk the part but once you dig a bit deeper are actually quite stupid.

It's also surprising sometimes the gaps you find in the "common knowledge" of otherwise intelligent people. A friend of mine at work, after she got engaged, became concerned that the diamond on her ring would get scratched because she kept bumping it in to things. After he blinked a couple of times, another colleague reassured her that her diamond was much more likely to scratch whatever it bumped into than vice versa. I have no concerns about her intelligence otherwise; that piece of information just somehow passed her by. But if that were the only interaction I had had with her, I might have formed the impression that she was a total dunce.

Of course, on building sites I also met people who were mind-bendingly thick, to the point I marvelled at how they were able to function at all. And this isn't "a different kind of intelligence" or "high-WIS, low-INT" or even "has a mental disability", this was just straightforward, wholesale density of a near-gravitational level. Because of my background, upbringing, education, social circle, etc. I had never met anyone quite like that before - and I suspect there are a lot more of them around than one might suspect.

I'm not sure what my point there was going to be, but... Anyway. It might be you. But it might also not be you. At least some of the time.


One thing that is definitely true is that "young people" are absolutely no worse than older generations in any of the respects we've been talking about in this thread, although they might at times be more irritating. It's one of the reasons that I grind my teeth a bit at well-intentioned but nevertheless condescending attempts to make things "accessible" and "youth-friendly" not just by strewing X-treem Kool Letterz everywhere or dropping clanging references to pop culture du jour (or more commonly d'hier) - or really any Legz Akimbo style shenanigans - but by straightforward dumbing down. There might absolutely be better ways of educating young people than we have previously tried but they shouldn't be underestimated, whether in terms of attention span, motivation, intelligence, openness to new ideas, morality, or whatever, and by doing so, it doesn't do anyone any favours.

[Willie the Duck]

With regard to your last line: I hope that wasn't an accusation but rather just an expression of how surprising you found it.

Nope, definitely the latter. Your follow up posts have seemed very distinct from your initial and early ones, to the point of seeming like a different viewpoint. Also, I should mention, going a long way towards making me feel better about this whole thing.


As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I grew up in a family environment where the default to encountering the unknown was to seek understanding, not to dismiss.

Indeed, you have, and it was the #1 thing pinging my radar towards wondering if this was self-congratulatory back-patting (which, again, your later posts have helped convince me otherwise). This is the kind of thing I have seen brought up by those two groups I mentioned as sensitizing me towards various groups creating in their own minds vast swathes of buffoonish normies to make themselves feel superior. It slots in with giving oneself an 18 Int in a 'what would your attributes be?' type thread, or the person bemoans, 'we used to live in an age when facts and logic and good arguments meant something' after not-successfully convincing others in a debate, as warning signs in online comments towards that suspicion.

I think we've delved perfectly deeply in what was supposed to be a minor side point about my credulity.


perhaps a clarification is in order: force-feeding people specific things stemming from elitist and useless criteria is, in my perspective, a WORLD of a difference from expecting people to be active in self-educating on the things they encounter. The latter is something I think is natural and essential, and those who lack that automatic self-education are assumed to be willfully ignorant by me, because why else would they not self-educate in this day and age of easy access to practically limitless information?

If we don't know why these people do make this decision (or, for that matter, whether they do at all, which again I think oftentimes we do not know), then it is missing data, and we should not be making assumptions about it. Imputation on missing data is a study onto itself, and one that would hopefully be brought to bear upon a statistical analysis of peoples' self-education tendencies.


The former is appalling to me and a large part of why I hate English Literature classes. Shakespeare, while the subject that dominates this thread, is not specifically the issue I was complaining about; it was merely the example that encountering an instance of recently made me want to rant.

I somehow gathered, and I'm sure the nitpicking over the specifics has been frustrating.


Just because I think a certain subject isn't worth inflicting on high school students doesn't mean I don't value the purposeful accumulation of knowledge that has no obvious essential practical application.

I think people have rightly pointed out that the expectation that others will take a significant interest in any specific (English Language) accumulation of knowledge is pretty arbitrary (but as you say, it was just an example). However, I agree that a curiosity about knowledge in general, is a positive trait. If for no other reason than it fosters a capacity (because learning is a skill, which can be enhanced through practice) to learn other things when they do have a practical application. However, I suppose that makes it a practical reason. As far as justification goes, I can think of two reasons why the accumulation of knowledge is a goodly endeavor -- practical application, and personal fulfillment. If there is no practical application (again, if any learning fosters increased ability, then perhaps this cannot be), and a person finds no fulfillment in the learning, I'm not sure I can justify why someone ought to or should be doing any specific learning.

[Knaight]

The arts and humanities are valued for helping enjoy our own lives. The maths and sciences are valued for helping improving everyone's lives. That's the difference. Both should be taught. One should be much more emphasized and mandated at all levels until higher ed. And, conveniently enough, that's largely how the system is set up.
The humanities are absolutely valuable for far more than helping us enjoy our own lives. There's a reason we have that famous quote about those who don't know history being doomed to repeat it - history, and to a lesser extent literature, are both useful to try and understand how the world works broadly, which is absolutely critical when making decisions in those worlds. Both are also frequently used as test grounds for text analysis, source analysis, etc., all of which are valuable skills. A deeper practice of that sort of analysis within a population helps make them more resistant to propoganda, misinformation from dubious news sources, and especially specious predictive arguments for policy outcomes. People are people, and understanding how people have acted in the past is absolutely useful for understanding how people will act in the present.

[Peelee]

The humanities are absolutely valuable for far more than helping us enjoy our own lives. There's a reason we have that famous quote about those who don't know history being doomed to repeat it - history, and to a lesser extent literature, are both useful to try and understand how the world works broadly, which is absolutely critical when making decisions in those worlds. Both are also frequently used as test grounds for text analysis, source analysis, etc., all of which are valuable skills. A deeper practice of that sort of analysis within a population helps make them more resistant to propoganda, misinformation from dubious news sources, and especially specious predictive arguments for policy outcomes. People are people, and understanding how people have acted in the past is absolutely useful for understanding how people will act in the present.

A.) Yes, there is a famous quote about those who don't know history being doomed to repeat it. And yet those with knowledge of history seem to repeat it regardless, throughout history (and sometimes even gleefully)*. A quote being famous is different than a quote being true.
2.) At no point have I knocked the humanities being taught. I have knocked one specific subset of one specific part of the humanities as being needlessly glorified for its own sake and being effectively mandated across all school systems at a level that I believe is not necessarily appropriate.

*I will not be providing examples.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

There's a reason we have that famous quote about those who don't know history being doomed to repeat it

So that's how the trick with the monkeys with typewriters work. They don't know Shakespeare's works, so they're doomed to repeat them.

[Themrys]

So that's how the trick with the monkeys with typewriters work. They don't know Shakespeare's works, so they're doomed to repeat them.

Well now, that is a really convincing argument for not teaching Shakespeare: We might thereby get a second one.


In my experience, young people are just as, or even more enthusiastic about being wilfully ignorant as older people, the only things that change are the things they choose to remain ignorant about.

[Knaight]

2.) At no point have I knocked the humanities being taught. I have knocked one specific subset of one specific part of the humanities as being needlessly glorified for its own sake and being effectively mandated across all school systems at a level that I believe is not necessarily appropriate.

Shakespeare specifically is a largely arbitrary source - it's specifically the claim that humanities are taught for the self that I'm pushing back against here. Critical thinking is broadly useful. Assessment of source reliability and bias is broadly useful. Knowledge of history (especially in terms of deeper historical forces and not just names and dates) are useful - and I'd be happy to cite specifics if they didn't tend to get really political really quickly.

[Peelee]

Shakespeare specifically is a largely arbitrary source - it's specifically the claim that humanities are taught for the self that I'm pushing back against here. Critical thinking is broadly useful. Assessment of source reliability and bias is broadly useful.
Fair. I may have shot from the hip and aimed too wide on that.

Knowledge of history (especially in terms of deeper historical forces and not just names and dates) are useful - and I'd be happy to cite specifics if they didn't tend to get really political really quickly.
Aye, it's no coincidence I pointedly refused to. :smallwink:

[mindstalk]

With opera, the problem is that theaters are only showing old stuff. This means that no one has any interest in writing opera. So you are left with "oldies", which become increasingly démodé. It's a vicious cycle, and it isn't exclusive to opera; theatre has a similar problem. It's a good way to kill an art form.

On the other side, you have competition: from African-derived music becoming the preferred choice over classical, and also home entertainment vs going to the theater. The blues-jazz-swing-rock-pop-metal thing in particular doesn't just attract listeners, it attracts artists, too, so you have another vicious cycle: fewer artists means fewer listeners means less money means fewer artists...

So theaters are putting much effort into killing themselves, but, even if they weren't, they are also against serious competition.

There's also that something like opera is fairly popular, and actively written: musicals, from Broadway (or off it) to billion-dollar Disney films or one-off Buffy episodes.

As for education, I figure that simplistically, primary education is to teach you how to learn and think (read, write, basic math); secondary education expands on that but also exposes you to lots of different topics. Not all of them will be interesting or useful to everyone, but we can at least guarantee *exposure* and the chance of something 'catching'. Native language literature is one of those topics, both for technical analysis (related to the old trivium topic, 'rhetoric') and for getting exposed to the literature and culture itself.

Of course there's a ton of stuff to choose from, so what to use will be somewhat arbitrary. I don't actually have a strong opinion on whether all English-language high schoolers should have Shakespeare, or Shakespeare in the original. Given four years to kill, probably yes, at least seeing a good performance or two. And if high school mandatory English lit includes poetry, he'll probably pop up there too. But maybe not a *ton* of Shakespeare, like a whole 10 week term.

The math sequence is another matter. If we're going for widest citizen usefulness, I would go for arithmetic, algebra, probability, and descriptive statistics (median/mean/mode, how to read graphs, how graphs can deceive you, etc.) The first two are basically literacy -- you can't really get any further in math without being comfortable with algebra -- and probability can be universally useful, even if most people don't use it. Somewhere between arithmetic and algebra you should make sure to cover exponential growth and logarithms, and try for different bases, the difference between numbers and numerals.

Also, proofs, because there's a powerful mental tool, and sometimes fun.

Also, Fermi problems, because they're useful and fun.

The actual academic sequence I'm familiar with is algebra, geometry (with possibly the only exposure to proofs if you have a bad education) (and including both the really useful "area and volumes of things" and the less useful "Euclidean proofs with compass and straightedge"), "algebra II"/trigonometry, pre-calculus (conic sections and ???), calculus if they get that far. Which isn't terrible for STEM track but does end up overkill for a lot of people, and doesn't include probability at all. And if you fall behind, or have a bad teacher, than the whole rest of the sequence can become a mandatory slog of "I hate math" or "I'm bad at math".

If you do go into science or engineering, the big three seem to be linear algebra, differential equations, and inferential statistics. So you need solid algebra, and calculus, and trigonometry because trig functions are everywhere at this level, and some amount of geometry to appreciate the trig functions. But side-angle-side theorems don't matter much. Except maybe for doing the trig proofs, I dunno.

[enderlord99]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Tcmb5nLpfM

BTW, shouldn't this thread technically be in Media Discussions?

[Fiery Diamond]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Tcmb5nLpfM

BTW, shouldn't this thread technically be in Media Discussions?

No, because despite the topic drift, this thread isn't about discussing Shakespeare's works - it's about learning, ignorance, and language.

[snowblizz]

Speaking of. Something struck me while lunchbiking (other than treebranches). It is important to know (w/t)hat you don't know.

As an AI in the Schlock Mercenary universe notes (paraphrasing), "I may have deleted a lot of informaton I knew, but I kept a list of all the things I forgot".


I often get that feeling, I know I should know about something, often that insight lets me find it again based on contextual search. And sometimes it ends up as "I know Isaw this somewhere but damned if I can say where".

Similarly I saw a job advert for an "Excel guru" and thought "gee, only someone who isn't an Excel guru would think they are one". As anyone who knows enough about Excel to be "qualifying" as a guru would know they don't know everything.


This is where we in part get the broad general base of schooling. Being even vaguely aware that you should know about stuff means you don't accept whatever at face value. It probably also causes (and or contributes to) the "lack of intellectual curiosity" problem mentioned earlier. If you don't know there is more to be known you are quite certain to not try and pursue said knowledge. Then again, som people *are* just dumb.

As an (non-English speaking) example of the former, with regards to the Romeo and Juliet thing. It never really occurred to me to question my first interpretation of the scene, which I am not discounting may well come from Bugs Bunny or somethign similar, because I had no other knowledge to fall back on. Nothing told me I wasn't getting the whole picture, which means I am not inclined to investigate further, as clearly I have correctly interpreted it.

[2D8HP]

[...]Ever seen the Bugs Bunny Witch Hazel playwright episode? "Wherefore art thou, Romeo?" "I'm right here, Juliet!" Yes, it's a joke, but it exists because of the common misconception. Nobody thinks that "therefore" means "there," so why would "wherefore" mean "where?"

TL;DR: Why do people prefer willful ignorance, complaining, and obvious misunderstandings over putting forth the effort to learn something? Shakespearean English is the subject of my rant, but the question holds for other things as well.


Speaking of. Something struck me while lunchbiking (other than treebranches). It is important to know (w/t)hat you don't know[...]



+1 to @snowblizz.

How specifically is one to know that there's something extra that one should be "putting forth the effort to learn" when watching or reading one of Shakespeare's plays?

In my case it simply never occurred to me there was a different meaning of "Wherefore".

Was that in an annoted text?

I'd have to know what I was ignorant of (and given the amount of knowledge out there the answer and my minds limits I will always be ignorant of most things).

Back in the '80's I remember a high school English teacher telling us that "Rome" was pronounced like "room" back then so something was a pun, other than that since high school in the '80's I've viewed a few of Shakespeare's plays, and read the text of "Macbeth", and while I remember reading the few footnotes that were in the text I had I don't remember the details, and the plays I viewed didn't come with a lecture or a handout.

Also (sadly) the further I get from being 20 years old (I'm 52 now) the harder it is for me to learn new information, I can remember hundreds of songs from before the '90's and what bands performed them, but when I've heard a good unfamiliar song today trying to keep it in mind long enough to look it up is like trying to grab smoke.

[mindstalk]

In my case it simply never occurred to me there was a different meaning of "Wherefore".

Going by the dictionary, which can be authoritative here because no one uses the word any more, there is only one meaning of 'wherefore'.

It's just that people who don't know the word make a guess based on 'where' being in it more often than they guess based on similarity to 'therefore'. The guess is wrong, and doesn't even make sense if you pay attention to what's being said -- the word is used 5 times in the play.

'How cam'st thou hither, tell me, and wherefore?'

'All this is comfort; wherefore weep I then?'


How specifically is one to know that there's something extra that one should be "putting forth the effort to learn" when watching or reading one of Shakespeare's plays?

Strictly speaking, because "I don't recognize this word, and it would be safer to look it up than just guess."

It's another matter when he uses a word we use, but with a different meaning, but that's not the case here.

[Ortho]

Going by the dictionary, which can be authoritative here because no one uses the word any more, there is only one meaning of 'wherefore'.

It's just that people who don't know the word make a guess based on 'where' being in it more often than they guess based on similarity to 'therefore'. The guess is wrong, and doesn't even make sense if you pay attention to what's being said -- the word is used 5 times in the play.


It's interesting that you bring up the other uses of "wherefore". Even with the word appearing multiple times in the play, let me try to illustrate why so many people make the mistake of translating "wherefore" as "where".

Here're the original lines:


Why, how now, kinsman! wherefore storm you so?
...
O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
...
How camest thou hither, tell me, and wherefore?
...
But, wherefore, villain, didst thou kill my cousin?
...
All this is comfort; wherefore weep I then?



Here's a modern translation:


"Hey there, friend, why are you so angry?"

"Oh, Romeo, why are you Romeo?"

"How'd you get here, and why?"

"But why, villain, did you kill my cousin?"

"This is comforting; why should I cry now?"


And now we have people mistaking "wherefore" for "where":

"Hey there, friend, where are you storming off to?"

"Oh Romeo, where are you, Romeo?"

"How'd you get here, and where?"

"But where, villain, did you kill my cousin?"

"This is comforting; where should I cry now?"

See why the issue occurs? Every single time "wherefore" is used, "where" can be substituted and the line makes just as much sense. Only line #3 sounds strange, but even then, it can be explained away as emphasis.

So it really isn't that unreasonable for people to conclude that "wherefore" means "where".

[mindstalk]

I don't know how you think "where should I cry now" makes sense.

And this also ignores the context around the lines.

[Fiery Diamond]

I don't know how you think "where should I cry now" makes sense.

And this also ignores the context around the lines.

"How'd you get here, and where?" doesn't make any sense to me either.

[Ortho]

I don't know how you think "where should I cry now" makes sense.

And this also ignores the context around the lines.

As in, "I want to go cry somewhere private instead of here." This is Juliet's soliloquy when she just found out her husband got banished for killing her cousin, so I'd say that's not an unwarranted reaction.


I think you've misunderstood my position. I'm not arguing that "where" is the best (or correct) translation of "wherefore". I'm trying to explain why the mistake isn't as unreasonable as it's been made out to be.

[Xuc Xac]

When Juliet asks "wherefore art thou Romeo?" she knows exactly where he is. She's looking at him and talking to him and immediately after that, she starts talking about how he should change his name or she should change hers. If you actually read the words instead of just moving your lips and making sound come out because your English teacher is watching, then it's pretty obvious she's talking about "Why did the man I love have to be from the family that is the enemy of my family? Names aren't that important, are they? Roses, sweet, etc."

[Vinyadan]

I think there are two reasons why that particular verse can be easily misunderstood.

The first one is that I have almost always heard isolated from the rest, so the setting isn't clear.

The second one is that, if you know the story, then the verse itself is a bit confusing. The problem isn't that he's Romeo, it's that he's Montague.

[mindstalk]

When Juliet asks "wherefore art thou Romeo?" she knows exactly where he is.

Sadly not true. He's in the scene, but spying on her so far. She does address him later in the scene:

Jul. How cam'st thou hither, tell me, and wherefore?
The orchard walls are high and hard to climb,
And the place death, considering who thou art,
If any of my kinsmen find thee here.

This could make sense if 'wherefore' meant "where from". But that would make all the other uses even less sensible than "where" makes them. And we have a word for "where from": 'whence'.


The second one is that, if you know the story, then the verse itself is a bit confusing. The problem isn't that he's Romeo, it's that he's Montague.

She sort of clarifies a bit later:

Jul. O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name!
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I'll no longer be a Capulet.

Jul. 'Tis but thy name that is my enemy.
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
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 name would smell as sweet.
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd

Granted a confusing clarification, implicating both 'Montague' and 'Romeo'.

[Vinyadan]

Yea, I think that what she means in that verse is a more general "Why did it have to be you, Romeo?", and later she indicates that the problem isn't him specifically, but what both Romeo and Juliet are part of, i.e. warring families, and that this they could (would) change.

EDIT: Although she does finish with So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd...

[Willie the Duck]

As in, "I want to go cry somewhere private instead of here." This is Juliet's soliloquy when she just found out her husband got banished for killing her cousin, so I'd say that's not an unwarranted reaction.

I think you've misunderstood my position. I'm not arguing that "where" is the best (or correct) translation of "wherefore". I'm trying to explain why the mistake isn't as unreasonable as it's been made out to be.

I would agree that, in most of these cases, these lines seem only slightly off. "Oh Romeo, where are you, Romeo" works vaguely as it could be "where are you now, Romeo?" and is fine, since she is talking to herself (especially since he reveals himself to be right there moments later). Beyond that, I think the issue is context -- Juliet is sitting by herself and talking to herself. Why couldn't she be asking about his location, then wondering if a name change (as mentioned, strangely his first name, which isn't the problematic one) would solve these problems? I think the context is a major issue. If, in among a series of slightly odd sounding dialogue, something sounds like a where term that kinda-sorta might not make perfect sense, are you going to notice that this slightly unusual wording is the one you aren't getting right and wonder what is up enough to go inquire. And that leads back to my primary conjecture -- most of the people who don't go about finding out what wherefore actually means fail to do so because they don't notice the issue, and they don't notice it because they don't care enough. Not some willful ignorance but instead the polar opposite -- benign non-investiture. Considering how many people experience Shakespeare through a class assignment they just want to get through or watching a play in which their child is performing, this seems at least highly plausible as an explanation.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

I would agree that, in most of these cases, these lines seem only slightly off. <snip>

There is also the fact that the line itself is using nonstandard grammar, presumably for artistic/poetic reasons:
"All this is comfort; wherefore weep I then?"

"Wherefore weep I then" is V-S-O (heck, an argument can be made that it is in fact O-V-S, what with the semi-independent "all this comfort" clause before the question). Thus, the problems to the listener do not start and end with correctly interpreting the meaning of "wherefore", it is that the brain, wired as it is to expect S-V-O is now scrambling to re-arrange words to understand the sentence, and only then will it stop to think what "wherefore" means. But this is a play, you don't have the time, the next line is likely being delivered. So the brain takes a shortcut, assumes that "wherefore" is "where", and since it is already modifying the sentence, it assumes that makes some sense ("maybe she has a more austere room for being sad in?"), and keeps going.

That "wherefore" is also practically a false friend is also an issue. Classic example: if a woman tells you in Spanish that she is "embarazada", pro-tip: they aren't embarrassed.

Grey Wolf

[Rynjin]

That "wherefore" is also practically a false friend is also an issue. Classic example: if a woman tells you in Spanish that she is "embarazada", pro-tip: they aren't embarrassed.

Grey Wolf

My high school Spanish teacher had a fun anecdote to go along with her false cognates lesson in this vein.

[Knaight]

That "wherefore" is also practically a false friend is also an issue. Classic example: if a woman tells you in Spanish that she is "embarazada", pro-tip: they aren't embarrassed.

Grey Wolf
Depends. If it's someone who doesn't know Spanish and is trying to rely on cognates (especially in a semipublic situation) they're about to be. Good times.

[snowblizz]

There is also the fact that the line itself is using nonstandard grammar, presumably for artistic/poetic reasons:
"All this is comfort; wherefore weep I then?"

That "wherefore" is also practically a false friend is also an issue

Grey Wolf

That was roughly a point I was also going to mention. "Oh but how could the sentence make any sense if we don't read it the way it was meant?" It's Shakespeare, none of it makes any sense to most people who are experiencing it!
Shakespeare himself didn't even know how to spell his name at the time. He invented new words or for the first time in writing put down words in the a guise that in a couple of centuries only will be familiar to most readers. And the text is already "poetic". It is a bit like reading Norse stuff with kennings.

It is all theses and thouses hastes. So if we already have to shorten and rearrange letters to make words into normal English, an drearrange words into proper sentences why wouldn't we do it here when we have a word that seems like we know what it should be.



I come back to my earlier point about having to know that there is something we should be missing here. I would also like to emphasize that taking the position that everyone who gets it wrong is willfully ignorant and dumb (to bring it to it's point). It may not exactly be what some posters mean exactly, but that is how it tends to read. That's how you really get people's backs up and gets us the position the OP was also puzzled about, the "I don't want to learn am proud of it" problem.

There are 5 pages of discussion with a lot of people agreeing on how it could easily be misunderstood and providing logical chains of thoguht of how we end up from A to C. Please accept that it is a possibility, and has happened often. Often enough to be it's own trope in Bugs Bunny. Where of course half of us heard it in the first place.