"I cannot wait to possess you": Reading 18th century letters for the first time
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
>> My naked weapon is out.
-- IIRC Romeo and Juliet but I forget exactly where. Double entendres are all over the place.
And probably my best proof that absolutely nobody involved understands it is the complete and total obliviousness to the double entendres. If the teachers realized how dirty it was they might think twice about teaching it. If the parents realized it, there would be protests. But nobody realizes it. Nobody has a clue. Nobody understands what is being said at all. They're just all pretending because if you don't Get Shakespeare you're a stupid dum dum who is drooling your stupid all over your stupid face.
But basically nobody at that level does Get Shakespeare and they are just pretending.
This is not only not a good use of educational time, it's actively bad. So many students are going to be inclined to think education is a waste of time under the best of circumstances anyhow... why do we go to such efforts to prove them 100% correct?
But we have to keep teaching it. Because anyone who suggests that we should stop is obviously a stupid dum dum drooling stupid all over their stupid face, and who wants to be seen with a person like that?
But there's no good reason to cover four, or five of them. Just pick one, struggle through it, and then go analyse three or four works of modern theatre, and modern penny theatre.
Half the point of schooling is trying to instill interest in a subject. Nothing instills disinterest in theatre like spending 80% of your mental energy trying to figure out what the hell the words mean.
Shakespeare is meant to be seen. Shakespeare is meant to be parsable with no mental effort by the 16-th century groundlings with the rotten fruit and a strong desire to throw it.
Shakespeare in grade 8-12 English is neither of those things.
My high school covered a lot of classical literature: from Greek Mythology to Shakespeare.
Its all sex and violence. I mean, Oedipus Rex literally murders his father and has sex with his mother.
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In any case, it should be taught because when you go to high-class museums, the naked statues in various mythologies will be staring at you... and unless you studied it you won't know anything.
Its high culture because its high culture. Low-brow sex jokes are bad, but "high-brow" sex jokes, well that's just the classics!!
Anyway, my high school English teachers were pretty explicit about these things. "Read this line. Okay, does everyone understand it? Please come up to the front and explain the meaning of this passage".
Uh huh... etc. etc. (a bunch of bad explanations from various classmates).
Teacher: "Yall are overthinking it. Its a sex joke. Okay, next passage".
Did you cover the Greek in the original Greek?
I actually would be fine with covering Shakespeare in what amount to a translation. The sex and violence does not bother me per se, as they are valid topics for true literature. As you allude to, we do that for many things. The problem is that we pretend Shakespeare is in English and present it to the students that way, but it really isn't anymore. It is at the very least in a very different dialect, and for practical purposes is in a different language.
When I say we shouldn't teach Shakespeare, I mean, in the way we do, not that he should be some sort of verboten topic. We teach it in a way that clearly nobody involved has any clue what is going on. Directly attacking that problem is fine, but first we have to get people to even be willing to admit it's a problem and it doesn't make you a stupid dum dum to say that language has shifted over the past 400+ years to the point that we can't expect to just throw it at modern teenagers and have them understand it even superficially, let alone deeply.
And to be honest, I will hold this point up as a counter to anything anybody else argues. Clearly, nobody involved understands what is going on. What is the point of teaching something the teacher is oblivious to? How hypothetically wonderful it might conceivably be if people more deeply understood it does not a single thing to change what is actually being tought. Until we can admit that what is actually being taught is lightyears from that hypothetical wonderfulness, we can't fix the problem and students will continue to be taught that High Literature is incomprehensible nonsense.
So even back then, Shakespeare's mode of English was weird and exotic. No one, at any point of time, ever talked as Shakespeare did aside from entertainers.
In particular, the Iambic Pentameter rhythm of his words would be roughly the same as saying Eminem's "Lose Yourself" was is how people talked in the early 2000s. Erm... no. Eminem is a singer/rapper who makes rhymes and beats. So was Shakespeare. No one talks like how Eminem talks in rap songs.
Shakespeare's words are weird, exotic, and rhythmic. Like a 1500s version of rap (a different rhythm but a rhythm nonetheless). And that's part of the reason why Shakespeare had to make up so many words: because he needed the rhythm to line up just right. (And then English was forever changed, with people using the made-up words from Shakespeare in everyday language. But definitely not the Iambic Pentameter beat because nobody's got time for that).
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Did your English teacher ever do the "Da daaaa Da Daaaa Da Daaa Da Daaaa" thing to help guide the rhythm of Shakespeare with you?
When we were covering Shakespeare in my English class, we also covered Robert Burns poems (from the 1700s), to remind people how common people talked centuries ago. In all honesty, today's English is closer to Shakespeare than to Robert Burns... despite Shakespeare being 1500s and Robert Burns being 1700s. Its a testament to how incredibly influential Shakespeare was.
Many of us wondered why our English curriculum was so keen on Iambic Pentameter despite the fact that it doesn't really seem to have affected modern English. I say that because it's so hard to recognize, even when using fully modern vocabulary. Apparently the Gravemind in Halo 2 speaks in IP and I'm sure that fact is lost on over 99% of players.
Whereas teaching students about all the words Shakespeare introduced and just how many tropes originate from his plays seems far more valuable to know.
I bring it up because Iambic Pentameter is probably the only crazy thing that's "not done today" that's all over Shakespeares works (as well as the variations of Iambic Pentameter to keep the rhythm spicy).
And Iambic Pentameter is not so much a hard rule as it is a soft one. Most lines are IP... but when Shakespeare wants to emphasize certain lines, he'll change the rhythm up. So its a way to cue the audience in with a subtle change.
[Snip]
> Hamlet. If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery. Go, farewell. Or if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them. To a nunnery, go; and quickly too. Farewell.
I mean, what do people want with regards to a modern translation? Like, I could say "Hamlet then insults Ophelia by saying she should die as a virgin with a double-entendre also suggesting she's a whore" (Due to a quirk in the language of the 1500s, nunnery is a slang term for whorehouse), but its just not as awesome as the insult Hamlet actually slings in the play.
Its over the top, but you know, that's how theater is supposed to be sometimes. (And doubly so: Hamlet himself is being over-the-top on purpose "in universe").
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In my high school, there were "translation notes" so to speak... to help with the slang of the 1500s, to help you out when terms had a 2nd meaning that'd be lost on today. But the base layer is in fact, quite straightforward.
Its really not hard to understand the words as written, though I can definitely see needing deeper analysis + more reading to fully comprehend the scenes and all layers of the play.
But yeah, its like, almost all sex jokes, double-entendres, incredible insults. Etc. etc. Its probably the most low-brow, base humor just with an air of "Smart people think this is cultural" about it. Its stuff high schoolers should honestly find interesting, if its taught correctly.
That said, a high school English curriculum could do with more scandalous writers simply because teenagers love that stuff. I loved Oscar Wilde back in 10th grade. Absolutely scandalous, scathing, and hilarious writing.
We don't even try to teach what was considered scholarly in 1600, let alone in Latin and French. Those works were also considered archaic back then, too.
Nowadays, I doubt any schoolchild gets exposure to unabridged anything unless they have a parent with archaic book collections.
When your primary form of entertainment and learning is long form reading, it isn't a big surprise.
The language is very informal. Since the guys were paid by word or page, they just wrote whatever was dictated. Hence the informal language. The first letter reads something like: "Your father-in-law greets you your sister greets you your brother I haven't seen since Mrs XXXX has asked news from you please pass my compliments to YYYY his wife alone gives me news from you."
This was possibly a letter from someone who could hardly read anything else than a prayer book (or had eye problems) to someone who couldn't read at all.
The language here is very modern, only a few outdated expressions. I've had much more trouble with professional letters from Napoleonic times, full of abbreviations and references to old social, judicial or political structures and procedures.
You don't consider humour a form of real communication? Are you sure you should be looking down on them
https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/55120/1/20...
The real ones are difficult to spot and may completely be lost among the wannabe-meme-pictures.
By that logic, there's no such thing as a rare [joke/insult/song], because all real [jokes/insults/songs] are already popular by definition.
> The real ones are difficult to spot and may completely be lost
Hold up, that contradicts the sentence before it: Any meme that has that "certain level of distribution" shouldn't be so "difficult to spot."
A meme that fails to attain some sort of popularity doesn't meet the criteria. Like a gene that fails to propagate itself. An evolutionary dead-end.
> Not every picture with text is a meme. To become a meme it requires a certain level of distribution.
becomes
"Not every sequence of amino acids is a gene. To become a gene it requires a certain level of self-replication."
Okay, so that's still a bit shaky, but I what I'm trying to get at is that a "meme" is something that includes its popularity in the definition. It's impossible for me to make a meme that only I see. That's just a photo or whatever.
Jokes, music, and insults can be inside jokes, or a Wu-Tang album, or a dig I only share with one other person. A meme is any of those things that's also popular in the viral sense. It encapsulates a maybe-complexish idea in a simple image.
If I asked you for a meme that demonstrates "wanting what I don't have, even though I have more than enough" you might give me that classic ::guy-looking-over-his-shoulder-at-pretty-girl-walking-by-while-his-girlfriend-gives-him-dagger-eyes:: one.
A gene "self-replicates" in an "emergent property" kind of way, in that it encodes the information necessary for its own future proliferation. A viral strand of DNA/RNA does the same thing, encoding the behaviors and structure of the virus such that it'll proliferate.
You know, like a spicy meme :)
Some memes are timeless.
i love this article. "young people aren't rejecting capitalism entirely, they're just outcompeting everyone else at it."
The same way probably no one in these people's lives knew they wrote love letters like this while they were alive.
Not to mention that "love letter writing" was a form of social obligation, courtship norms, and even PUA-like tactics back then for many people and not always the sincere original poetry modern people like us might think it is.
Its a lot of people lifting phrases and ideas from others to please or even manipulate current or potential lovers. Some of these soldiers had several women back home and wrote many letters to all of them, maximizing their odds of a relationship or sex when they are discharged. While I certainly believe in romantic love, I also think its important to remember people in the past weren't different from us and some of this is disingenuous writing or seen as honest but exaggerated rote obligation, and not often this expression of deep love that suddenly turns a dullard borderline illiterate into a prolific writer of poetic love letters. This is a practiced pretension and artform and our history has always had elaborate courtship ritual just like near any other animal has.
We just don't practice this often today, but if you decided to learn the art of love letters, you'd be just as good as any of these people over time I imagine. You probably won't because that's seen as an out of style courtship ritual, and instead you probably are good at other, more modern, courtship rituals.