What draws you to Shakespeare?

[shaxper]

The man is regarded as the greatest author of all time, but when you ask most scholars WHY he's so legendary, few people can answer.  Quotations from his plays surface endlessly in modern culture, yet they are often misquoted, misattributed, or simply misinterpreted.  We live in an age where Shakespeare is cherished because he is supposed to be cherished, and rarely because people understand and enjoy his work.

Yet, obviously, anyone reading this message is an exception.  Fortunately, there are still people who "get" Shakespeare.  His  works mean enough to you that you've sought out a place to discuss them for the sheer joy of it.  So what brings you here?  What do you love about the Bard's works, and do you feel that his work is over/under appreciated by the cultural mainstream?

[Ganymede]

I like Shakespeare because he was a dirty, dirty man.  And I mean that in the best way.    I like the fact that people think he was so sophisticated and exquisite and untouchable, but he wrote these plays that are dripping with scatological and sexual humor, as well as wit.  There's so much there to find, both for academic and entertainment purposes.  While you can't deny his genius, but equally you can't deny his vulgarity.  When people only recognize his genius and place him on this pedestal, they are really missing out.  I like to think of Shakespeare as this horny guy sitting around in his boxer shorts writing some amazing plays and laughing about what he could get away with.  He was my kind of dude.  

[MsDirector]

It constantly amazes me how, 400 years later, Shakespeare's plays are so very contemporary.   Not the language, specifically, although it is not anywhere near as difficult as people seem to want to make it.  And not the specific situations, of course, because he was writing of times which, to us are historic (English or Roman or Greek history, Italy of the 1500's and earlier, etc.) or fantasies.  But how very like ourselves the characters are - how they feel, how they react, their relationships, their emotions and thoughts and humor and sensuality.  And, yes, Ganymede, his humor is VERY sexual, bawdy and earthy.

And why not?  One of the very best things about Shakespeare is that he wasn't writing for the court as much as he was writing for the people - his audiences.  He wasn't a court poet or a courtier.  He was a man of the people, a storyteller entertaining the masses.  People today treat his plays with such reverence that they often lose sight of the fact that he was, first and foremost, an entertainer, an actor, and a playwright, not a God.  People are so careful about his words, yet many of his words were never written down in any formal way.  His actors were given "sides" with only their own lines and a few cue words written on them.  HE never wrote down his plays in any organized full-length manner.  The published plays we know today were taken from those sides and from writing on the Globe walls, and bits and snatches that actors remembered and were, largely, put together after his death.  And even then the various editions through the years have seen the words drastically altered. So what lives of what he actually wrote?  His beautiful poetry and prose, yes, but even more, his stories, his characters and their wonderful inner lives, and his incredible understanding of human psychology and human emotion.  What a gift to leave us.  

[shaxper]

Wow.  Some thought-provoking ideas there!  MSDirector, please contribute your knowledge to the discussion I've just started in "The Man" forum.  Your thoughts would be very much appreciated  

Wha draws me to Shakespeare?  Where do I start?  I think my favorite thing about Shakespeare has always been his ability to write "humans".  Harold Bloom boldly credits Shakespeare as having invented humanity as we now understand it, and there is at least some truth to what he says.  I've never known another author to portray characters so completely.  With few exceptions, all of Shaky's characters that spend enough time on the stage prove to be highly multi-facited, containing much good, much bad, and much much in between.  Richard II was the first play to open my eyes to this. begining with such an obviously evil ruler and a good, heroic exile, but by the end of the play, the roles reverse.   Merchant of Venice begins with Antonio, the saintly merchant and Shylock, the evil and contemptable jew.  Shylock never proves himself to be a good guy, but when he explains that he's cruel because of the endless ways in which Antonio and Bassanio have abused him (both physically and mentally) and neither correct him, you begin to understand how things work both ways.

It's not just the tragic faults that I refer to; not simply Hamlet's need to delay or Othello's jealousy and pride, but a sense of the whole range of human emotion.  Yes, I love Shakespeare for his wit, for his genius, for his (supposed) subtexts and his amazing usage of language, but it's the well rounded characters that always impress me the most.  To the best of my knowledge, Richard III is the only major Shakespeare character that is given only one dimension.  

[MsDirector]

What about Ophelia?  Of all the wonderfully written, multi-dimensional characters in HAMLET, Ophelia stands alone in being so incompletely written that it is incredibly difficult to create a fully formed character on the stage without using a tremendous amount of imagined backstory and subtext.  It's also the reason why it's so easy to play with the Hamlet/Ophelia relationship - in fact there is almost nothing in the play to validate any interpretation of their actual relationship.  Ophelia has letters professing love from Hamlet, and she claims love on both sides.  But there is nothing in Hamlet's behavior to indicate that he feels the same, nothing in the letters to indicate the kind of love he feels, nothing at all to indicate the history of their relationship - is it physical, is it friendship, is it younger to older, is it mutual or onesided, are they having an affair, is Ophelia misreading Hamlet's intentions, does he love her??  There is absolutely nothing in the text to support any of these.  Which makes it a director's choice.  Which is fun.  But all we are given of Ophelia is that she is Laertes' sister, Polonius' daughter, she loves Hamlet and believes he loves her, she is naive and easily manipulated, and she goes mad after her father is killed.  We don't even know if she killed herself or simply fell in the water and was unable (physically or emotionally) to get out before she drowned.  She is largely a blank slate - and boy do we love to write on her!  

[shaxper]

Excellent point  

For me, the "humanity" in Ophelia is her open-endedness.  Her situation is (at least emotionally) universal: The person that you love and (at least believed) loved you (the fact that you never know whether or not he did makes it feel all the more "true to life") now rejects and denies you, and sticks the sword in the open wound by killing your father.  No, it doesn't literally happen in real life, but the emotional situation is very true.  Betrayal in young love.

I think this is a pattern for many of Shakespere's victimized heroines.  Ophelia, Desdemona, and Cordelia, in particular, reveal very little about themselves, and use most of their time on stage to respond to the words and actions of others.  Regardless of why it may be true (and I'm sure the prescribed roles of women fit into the picture somewhere), these characters offer portals for audience members to enter into the play almost first-hand by relating to the emotional situations these silent women are placed in.  If Ophelia, Desdemona, or Cordelia were to give long soliloquies about how they were done wrong and the pain they felt, we would (perhaps) be more distanced by them.  Their ambiguity keeps them accessible and universal.  Sure, they each differ: Ophelia is silenced by madness, Cordelia is vocal, but not about her emotions, and Desdemona’s tragedy occurs at the end of the play, at which point she is silenced and then murdered (giving her little time to discuss her feelings), but they are all similar, in a way like Lavinia, raped, mutiliated and silenced, so that only our own minds can express their profound pain.

[Bardolph]

I am drawn to be a part of WS's exploration of human emotions.  I am drawn to adopt his vocabulary of the passions as a means of more fully experiencing them.  I am drawn to seek an understanding of people by knowing them from the archetypes that he articulated so well.  I an drawn to recognize and avoid Iago, Richard, Antonio and all his villains.  I am equally drawn to root for Hamlet and all the underdogs of my daily life.  I am drawn to yearn for the hand of Desdamona, to mourn Ophelia, to slap some sense into Gertrude and Leontes, to nurture Miranda, to pray that Olivia finds her Sebastian and that Benedick and Beatrice learn to look at each other in a new way.  I am drawn to WS because I believe that he wrote as much to instruct me as to instruct anyone else.  I do not intend to miss the lessons.    

[Ganymede]

I am drawn to Shakespeare because it is incredibly complicated and lends itself well to intrepretation.  No characters are all good or all bad (if they were, it would be boring and wouldn't reflect reality).  While some characters make very poor choices, we can empathize with them while at the same time reviling them for their actions.  The "good" characters also have flaws as well, which discourage us from putting them on a pedastal.  

Also, Shakespeare displays an incredible mastery over language, which makes him interesting to read or to perform.  And lets not forget all those dirty puns!  I love that he can reach the highest heights, while at the same time telling a dirty joke or two.  

[shaxper]

Agreed, Ganymede.  I think it is that very "wholeness" of Shakespeare's words and characters that have made him the legend that he is.  His words and characters will stand up to an infinite amount of interpretations and therefore speak to an infinite amount of generations.  The plays are not tabula rasas with which you can create anything, but each play allows so many different readings of characters, words, and actions.  It's incredible.

Personally, I've been delighting in reading the Machiavel plays recently.  I find them to be incredibly fascinating characters, specifically because they rarely are as simple and two dimensional as we expect them to be.  Othello will always be a play about betrayal to me.  It will always carry a clear, instructive message about trust and honor.  Yet I find Iago incredibly rich and complex; in many ways moreso than Othello and Desdamona.  That, for me, is the true power of Shakespeare.