{"id":97640,"date":"2016-06-09T14:43:53","date_gmt":"2016-06-09T14:43:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2016\/06\/09\/i-know-its-fashionable-to-hate-shakespeare-for\/"},"modified":"2016-06-09T14:43:53","modified_gmt":"2016-06-09T14:43:53","slug":"i-know-its-fashionable-to-hate-shakespeare-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2016\/06\/09\/i-know-its-fashionable-to-hate-shakespeare-for\/","title":{"rendered":"I know it’s fashionable to hate shakespeare for being a white cis male shitlord but calling his work trashy just displays your ignorance. there are reasons he still gets studied in school hundreds of years later. the man basically invented the english language as we speak it today."},"content":{"rendered":"

ansiblelesbian<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

blue-author<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I don\u2019t hate Shakespeare.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I love Shakespeare.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In my opinion, the greatest disservice anyone can do to his work is to elevate it to some kind of highbrow high art literary thing. The reason he\u2019s studied today is that his plays endured (plus or minus some changes in fashion over the centuries), and the reason his plays endured is because they were popular<\/i>, and the reason his plays were popular is because he crammed them full of stuff that people wanted; i.e., lots of jokes focusing on the less refined features of the human anatomy and the things they get up to.<\/p>\n

Perhaps you\u2019ve had it explained to you that Hamlet\u2019s talk of\u00a0\u201ccountry matters\u201d was an uncouth pun, and his reply in the same conversation of\u00a0\u201cnothing\u201d was a similar reference. Did you think that was a one-off thing?\u00a0<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re aware that\u00a0\u201cnothing\u201d was a euphemism for the vulva in Shakespeare\u2019s England, have you ever stopped to marvel at the sheer audacity, the sheer brass somethings that a man would have to have to name a play Much Ado About Nothing?<\/i><\/p>\n

Translate that into modern-modern English, and you\u2019d get something like Everybody\u2019s Up In Arms About Pussy<\/i>. Though you\u2019d lose the pun on\u00a0\u201cnothing\/noting\u201d in doing so\u2026 yes, that\u2019s how far from highbrow Shakespeare is. He made the title of his play a triple pun.<\/p>\n

And yes, Much Ado <\/i>is not one of the Bard\u2019s more serious works to begin with\u2026 but then, what is? We divide Shakespeare\u2019s plays up into tragedies and comedies based on the dramatic convention of which ones have a happy ending versus a sad one, but they are all <\/i>comedies in the modern sense of \u201cthings you go to expecting to laugh\u201d. The country\/nothing lines come from Hamlet. Heck, Hamlet is hilarious throughout. Any scene with Polonius in it is guaranteed to be comedy gold.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of course, the people who want to call Shakespeare highbrow are probably the people who quote him in all blustering sincerity when he says\u00a0\u201cto thine own self be true\u201d\u2026 or funnier still, when they paraphrase him as saying that \u201cbrevity is the soul of wit\u201d.<\/p>\n

Of course, hands down, my favorite bit in Hamlet is when he\u2019s giving instructions to the players that basically amount to William Shakespeare pre-emptively bringing up every stereotype of Serious Shakespearean Acting we have today and saying,\u00a0\u201cThis. This thing. Do not do this thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anyway, let\u2019s talk about the idea that he\u00a0\u201cinvented the English language\u201d; e.g., he created so many hundreds of new words. Okay, well, first of all, we don\u2019t know how many he invented<\/i>. We just know there are words and usages of words for which the texts of his plays are the earliest surviving example. The thing is, all those words evidently made sense to his audience.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a post that goes around Tumblr listing some of the words credited to Shakespeare, and one of them is\u00a0\u201celbow\u201d. The commentary attached to this post basically boggles over the idea that nobody in the English world had a name for\u00a0\u201cthe bendy part of an arm\u201d until an actor gets up on stage and says\u00a0\u201celbow\u201d, and everybody\u2019s like,\u00a0\u201cOh, yeah, that\u2019s what it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Except it didn\u2019t happen like that. The noun <\/i>elbow isn\u2019t what is attributed to Shakespeare; the verb<\/i> to elbow\u00a0<\/i>(as in\u00a0\u201celbowing someone aside\u201d) is. His character took a noun and used it to describe an action. That\u2019s not a highbrow creation of language as some sort of received wisdom handed down from authority. That\u2019s naturalistic language use.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even if he was the first person to describe the act of \u201celbowing someone\u201d, it caught on because it worked<\/i>, because it made sense to vernacular speakers of English.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So many of his words fit this model: they are butchered foreign words, they are slangy applications of English words, they are colorful metaphors or synecdoches. In short, he was writing in what we call \u201cBuffyspeak\u201d. If he had an unusual talent for doing it memorably, it still ultimately worked because it reflected the language of the time.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is your daily reminder that \u2018some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them\u2019 is a dick joke.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ansiblelesbian: blue-author: I don\u2019t hate Shakespeare.\u00a0 I love Shakespeare.\u00a0 In my opinion, the greatest disservice anyone can do to his work is to elevate it to some kind of highbrow high art literary thing. The reason he\u2019s studied today is that his plays endured (plus or minus some changes in fashion over the centuries), and … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “I know it’s fashionable to hate shakespeare for being a white cis male shitlord but calling his work trashy just displays your ignorance. there are reasons he still gets studied in school hundreds of years later. the man basically invented the english language as we speak it today.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[446,4],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97640"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}