Hacker News Reader

Comment by NickRandom | Hacker News Reader

I know this is Heathen Heresy but I never enjoyed Shakespeare. As part of my English studies I have read the following ones - Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Winter’s Tale.

Average grades on them were between A+ to B's but dayamn! that olde timee englishee is hard to parse (even with the crib notes) and made me question the validity of them as an example of 'good English writing'

'Get Thee to a Nunnery!' Indeed.

And don't even get me started on Chaucer <shudder>.

View on HN

I actually like the Elizabethan English in Shakespeare, but it's good to have a text with footnotes that explain some things. One thing we miss in modern times is a lot of Shakespeare's puns. The words he punned on have shifted in pronunciation such that the word play is no longer clear. For example, one play had a pun on raisin and reason, which were pronounced similarly in Shakespeare's day. Some are bawdy puns, such as hour vs. whore. Some groups are putting on productions of his plays in reconstructed "OP" (Original Pronunciation) and I hope to hear one some day.

Indeed. Hence the Nunnery reference I made. That one (being of school age at the time) made me chuckle

Reasons vs raisins caught my interest. I read somewhere that the accent of Shakespeare's time was somewhat closer to what the Irish accent is/was than it is to RP (Received Pronunciation) and I have often heard "reason" spoken as a homophone of "raisin". Indeed a colleague of mine used to say "there are reasons for everything and raisins for cake" when he heard someone using one or t'other. Shakespeare punning on reasons/raisins (in the Irish accent sense) is not all that amazing when one considers that the avon in Stratford on Avon is related to the word abhainn or river in Irish. Ofc, I could be completely wrong about this.

Of course, it is pretty uncommon to enjoy something when it is "required reading".

And about the "good English", come on! The Bard has done a huge amount of work to improve the English language itself, by introducing or popularizing an insane lot of words [1] and idioms [2]. How does that not classify as "good"?

[1] https://nosweatshakespeare.com/resources/words-shakespeare-i...

[2] https://nosweatshakespeare.com/resources/shakespeare-phrases...

Unsurprisingly if you force students to read the same crap for 200+ years some of it sticks. Is it because it's good or because we've subjected generations of students and future English authors to it?

I know how you feel, but it's really not so bad. It's kind of like being used to c-style syntax and then going to some other convention.

To people who are interested, here are a few things that I figured out. A lot of the weird words are actually just contractions. They kind of make sense when you think about it though. So, 'twas is "it was", etc... sometimes these are used to convey the past too.

All the thy, thee, thou kind of stuff can be the next difficulty. If you pay attention though you realize that they all mean some version of "you", and which one is used depends on the meaning. I think it goes sort of like this: Thee is when "you" is the object of some verb, e.g. "He told thee". Thy is like "you" but possessive, e.g. "Mind thy business". And thou is like "you" when it's just the normal subject of a sentence, e.g. "thou are a saucy fellow".

Actually, I didn't get Shakespeare in school at all. Then one day I just picked it up as a joke and started reading it aloud to a friend... 5 min later I'm like, "But wait, like, so what exactly happened to the King? Don't you think it's a bit sus for his Ghost to be haunting the sentinels? Clearly they all see the ghost, so they're not making it up, meaning something sketchy has happened..."

Chaucer is hilariously, laugh out loud funny even after all these centuries.

The syntax makes it a foreign language to the modern ear, but eventually you acclimatise. Of course the naff bits are still naff. But once you have a taste for the poetry, nothing matches it. It's ended up being my supreme form of relaxation.

Hm. I don't really enjoy reading plays. Watching live performances (or films) I do enjoy. And he certainly had an impact on the English language as demonstrated by Kae (née Kate) Tempest: "My Shakespeare":

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i_auc2Z67OM

Ed: see also the "original pronunciation" movement - eg: https://youtu.be/qYiYd9RcK5M

Although if you've studied him at college level, hopefully you already know that Shakespeare can rhyme - despite modern pronunciation.

Chaucer is practically in a different language. Middle English basically needs to be learned separately before you can be thrown into reading the Canterbury Tales in its original text. Any self respecting Chaucer course in a university literature program will begin with a week of just Middle English instruction.

It shouldn't be heresy. I think that I could show you what I enjoy about Shakespeare, but there's no reason you have to, any more than any other kind of genre.

I really hate the way we teach Shakespeare. You shouldn't be parsing it at all. That's incredibly hard, and not the point. You should be watching the plays, preferably in a good film version with highly skilled actors. You'll be able to follow the story better for being able to see it and to pick up what they mean from context.

You'll get a chance to hear why people think it's good writing: it just sounds good, the way a song just sounds good. Only then are you in a position to look at the words on a page, and begin to study what makes them sound so good. And yeah, you should be applying the exact same skills to some modern pop songs (including rap songs, which can have some of the same level of creative exuberance).

The stories are really the last of it. I despise the way the entire thing is treated as an exercise in decryption of what are over-long, confusing, and frankly mediocre stories. The language is great, but it's more important that you use that to see how language works. If it also turns out that you enjoy this particular story-teller, fantastic -- but it's asinine that they treat it as if you must enjoy it just because they do.

Chaucer would be worth studying what it shows about language evolution, another advanced skill. It has the advantage that you can do so in reading a very funny and bawdy story, which is at least enjoyable, but not if they're going to shy away from the fucking. There is absolutely no reason to read it if you can't use the word "fucking" in class.

So speaking as a Shakesperean who has done every single Shakespeare play, you have not committed heresy. Heresy was done to you by screwing up these plays. I am so sorry and angry that they did that, because it could have been so worthwhile.

One of my own favorites is "Zounds!" (which has passed into kitschy villain-speak):

It meant "by His wounds" and even hearing that you still might not get it. It was a mild form of blasphemy.

"His" of course was Jesus, and "His wounds" were the wounds of crucifixion. So using that as an expression was sorta like cursing, given that various forms of Christianity were practiced by nearly everyone in England.

"Gadzooks" is similarly a corruption of "God's hooks", referring to the nails on the cross. "(Cor) blimey" = "God blind me", "strewth" = "God's truth", and so on. Lots of garbled/minced profanities of this nature.

I'd never heard that about Gadzooks.

It was probably beyond the pale to say "Jesus Christ!" back then like we do now.

I’ve read almost no Shakespeare, but I have seen several of his plays performed and I liked all of them. I suspect just as some others do that reading a screenplay isn’t nearly as interesting as setting it performed.

Why speculate - just give it a try. It will take only a minute to begin.

I’m not speculating, I have read some Shakespeare.

The dated language is only part of the problem.

The bigger issue in my opinion is that most of his plays are written like poems, intentionally using lyrical rather than natural language.

Consider the lines:

"Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

Which mannerly devotion shows in this;

For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss"

The main barrier to understanding this isn't the word choice; most readers know what these words mean (expect maybe palmer); it's the way the sentences are constructed. Shakespeare's English contemporaries like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke are much easier to decipher, whereas many modern poets are similarly opaque.

It's called "elevated language." That used to be what people expected from plays. It's not a "problem" unless you expect everything to read like David Mamet.

The "problem" is the fact that the commenter, as well as many other readers, find Shakespeare's language difficult to parse and enjoy. Obviously this is subjective. My only point was that the difficulty is more attributable to style than vocabulary.

The lack of context make the quote hard to understand. Why is she talking about hands and why is she calling him a pilgrim? In context it makes much more sense. The verse is an answer to Romeos pick-up line.

The plays aren't written like poems, they are poems, like most plays of the era, and the language was also the literary language of the day. This is the way plays were written in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Team John Webster with lashings of Molière FTW

Tartuffe & The Duchess of Malfi rank with the works of that upstart crow.

It's always sad to me to hear of people reading Shakespeare as "literature". Shakespeare's not meant for reading. (Most plays, indeed, don't read very well.)

Unfortunately, it's also a bit hard to find a well-performed production (even in professional companies), but that's the way to experience Will's works.

I can't remember the last stage performance that didn't leave me wishing the director had paid attention to Hamlet's advice to the players. Even and especially the RSC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com