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One Shakespeare is the one that the literary establishment love to use as the example of beautiful English -- and perhaps his sonnets etc are this. And they like to point to this as the reason for his lasting popularity.

Then there is the Shakespeare who is translated into so many languages that the beauty I mention above can't possibly be carried across. The one thing I'd like to see before I die is a translation of the Chinese version of Hamlet back into English.

Also, I read, these translated versions sometimes alter the stories a bit. I think Romeo and Juliet was mentioned because the courting customs are often so different.

So is it the language or the plots and stories that have made Shakespeare so popular through the ages as they say.

Any comments?

Weird Jim

"Good reading is the only test of good writing"
Robertson Davies. A voice from the attic 1960

I think it's the stories much more than the language. A story can be modernised or adapted to cultural values without losing any of what makes it appealing, but in either case the first casualty is going to be the 'beautiful English'.

It reminds me of the TV adaptations of works by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. People would have watched them and yet never even picked up a serious literary work. I'd imagine that most people are going to watch, read or otherwise consume these stories because of the characters far more than anything about the language.

Juliet, for example, could be anyone. Imagine her as the daughter of an influential modern-day political family or an alien girl in a first-contact scenario. She could be divided from Romeo by religious or ideological conflict. The things that make her Juliet could survive any of these transformations and she could be instantly recognisable to anyone with even a casual knowledge of Shakespeare. His particular turn of phrase, though? No sign of it.

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Many (most?) of his plays, he stole the plots and storylines; he did not create Romeo and Juliet from scratch. What he did was make them memorable. He wrote for the masses, he created words, he put in jokes, he appealed to multiple levels at once, he used idioms --and any translation or rewriting of Shakespeare that works draws on these same tools.

Besides, you've never heard Shakespeare until you've heard it in the original Klingon.

-- Erin

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"Most" is probably more like it. If you get modern (but unabridged) editions of his plays, the introduction usually mentions the possible inspirations for each play, and in most cases these could be identified with remarkable accuracy.

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It's probably worth mentioning that at the time he was writing, many of the elite considered Shakespeare something less than the epitome of beautiful English. In their eyes, he was crude, vulgar, and borderline illiterate. The works they admired and thought were beautiful were written by classically educated writers in measured verse, with formal Latinate words and grammar, and usually about classical themes.

Classicists ruled for some time, and you'll find a number of essays and critiques basically dissing Will for all the things we love him for now.

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So was Shakespeare his era's equivalent of a 'pulp' author?

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That might be a reasonable comparison, but I don't think the distinction was quite that drastic. Many upperclass people, including Queen Elizabeth, did enjoy and admire the works of Shakespeare and other popular dramatists. Many of the more structured plays were popular with the masses. A more apt comparison might be to someone like Steven Spielburg, whose early movies were dissed by the critics but were later accepted as high-quality work.

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This surprises me.

Apparently, I had a strange education, because in all of the classes where we studied Shakespeare, none of my professors or teachers ever said that he was popular because of his beautiful language. Certainly many of us think his language is beautiful today, but most of my teachers/professors have specifically stated that his popularity was a result of his storytelling ability, as well as his baudiness and ability to connect with a more common audience -- basically all the stuff Erin mentions in her post.

I think the idea of "Two Shakespeares" comes to us because in OUR days, the people who typically read Shakespeare, at least for pleasure, are seen as the educated elite, and the "common masses" for whom Shakespeare originally wrote, don't usually want to try to decipher Middle English. I think that if it were as easy to read as it is to watch an episode of the latest reality show, Shakespeare would be seen less as some kind of high brow poetry accessible only to a snobbish few and more like the type of writer he really was back when he was writing.

So, the audience for Shakespeare's actual plays has changed, but the audience for Shakespeare's stories (in any language) is probably the same. Which means that he has only increased his audience, rather than one of the audiences being "right" and the other being "wrong". I think they are popular today for *both* their language and popularity, and the obscurity/beauty of the language as it is seen today has brought in an audience who, in Shakespeare's day, would have possibly looked down on his works.

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Not to be too nitpicky, but--Shakespeare is Elizabethan, not Middle English. When good actors deliver the lines, the vast majority of the text is perfectly accessible to an average audience. Shakespeare in Love and the 1990's version of Romeo and Juliet would be examples.

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You're right. I was thinking that Middle English was Old English, and got my terms confused.

And I think I was a little over simplistic in my first post. We can't really divide people into just two categories: there is a huge continuum.

That said, my point was that the people who like his stories are not necessarily going to like his language, but that now there are people who like his language, whereas maybe in his day, the stories were a lot more important than the language. I did not mean to say that there were no longer any people who liked him for his stories, just that due to the difference in language, there are people who want to take on that challenge, and who, as a result, love the language for the language, while there are others who love the story and don't care about the language, and still others (possibly the majority) who love the language and the story.

I think one factor contributing to "love of the language" is the fact that it's not modern and is more obscure, and that therefore, there are probably more people now who love it for the language than there were in Shakespeare's time, when the language itself (i.e. Elizabethan) was common to all people.

That's what I was trying to get at anyway.

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Good point.

I think a great deal of Shakespeare's greatness isn't in one or the other, it's in the way he does both so beautifully. And it's not just story, it's also character. Falstaff, Romeo and Juliet, MacBeth and Lady MacBeth, Hamlet, Othello -- something about them seems to speak to something deep inside nearly everybody. He's not just telling stories, he's shining light on the human condition.

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Yes. I completely agree. I was including (in my head) character with story, as in things that will appeal to everyone. And I agree that he does both beautifully, but I know there are some people who are turned off by the writing (well, mostly kids forced to read him in school, but . . .), and there may be some who at least pretend they only care about the language (not really sure on this one: most people I know personally love both, but I'm guessing Weird Jim must know some or he wouldn't have started the thread the way he did.

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