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I don't know why but the well-known scholars of Shakespeare such as the author of this piece (Stephen Greenblatt) and the "Western Canon" professor (Harold Bloom @ Yale) always seem to write in a ponderous style.

My tldr would be: I (Stephen) could fully engage with Shakespeare just on the words alone printed on the page. In contrast, my recent students don't seem to read the pure text with the same joy. They like interacting with Shakespeare's work with non-textual media (e.g. films, audio clips of pronunciation, etc). They'd rather sing a Shakespeare song instead of write an analytical essay based on close reading.

The thing about Shakespeare's plays is that they're plays. Performance pieces. Written by an actor. Shakespeare wrote with the intent that most people would engage with his words by hearing them spoken by actors performing on a stage.

That feels like an obvious point. But there's often a tendency, especially among literature and English professors, to approach Shakespeare with the belief that most authentic way to engage with the text is by reading it off a page. Whatever the source of that belief, it isn't grounded in the nature or history of Shakespeare's work.

Keep in mind that Shakespeare wrote a number of Sonnets, so he is regarded also as a poet in addition to a playwright, which puts in squarely in the category of "writer".

Since his plays were written in verse, with very little in the way of stage direction, less in props, and next to nothing in scene descriptions, it's not too far of the mark to think of the plays as poems themselves. When people read, they hear 'silent prosody', or a spoken voice, in their heads, so even when reading, they are hearing the words.

I wonder, how often do people study films by reading the scripts? I know it happens, but it seems pretty rare.
Certainly film students do this.

But as I pointed out in another comment, Shakespeare's plays are primarily verses, as opposed to stage direction, props, or scene description. They can be looked at as poetry, as we do his sonnets.

It's quite a different thing from modern films, which combine acting, cinematography, scenes, and music into a single art, cinema, that defines its own category distinct from those that came before it. The point of cinema is to "Show, don't tell" whereas plays in the tradition of Shakespeare are completely dialog-driven. In cinema, ideas are presented as a /moving image/, where in Shakespeare, they are presented in words.

What I always found infuriating was the unbridled reverence for Shakespeare as this avatar of literary godhood. Shakespeare was a hack. A very good hack, but he was writing plays to pay his rent, not as some otherworldly font of the muse with a mainline connection to the soul of literature. He's got much more in common with Stephen King or Dan Brown, as a writer of popular, mainstream entertainment, than he does with critically acclaimed, popularly ignored capital L Literature.

MacBeth and Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet are great, timeless works, but Shakespeare turned out a lot of historical plays and comedies that are kind of meh. Particularly the comedies are pretty formulaic, if you read two or three of them in succession, and there's nearly as many thinly-veiled (save the archaic language) dick jokes and scatological humor as in a Judd Apatow film. Not to mention the slapstick elements, and foolery that doesn't necessarily show up in the printed stage directions, but undoubtedly played well to the groundlings at the Globe.

Reducing Shakespeare's dramatic productions to just the dusty words on the page does a disservice to the reality.

It's alternate-history fiction, but I enjoyed Harry Turtledove's Ruled Brittania for putting a more human face on Shakespeare http://www.amazon.com/Ruled-Britannia-Harry-Turtledove/dp/04...

> MacBeth and Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet are great, timeless works

Not an original plot among them, by the way; Shakespeare was a great plagiarist.

What fortunate timing, next week I'm spending a few days in Ashland, OR, and will enjoy the theater at the world-class Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Parallel to the article's discussion, in college I was interested in science and only because of requirements took courses in literature. Ironically, decades later the science "facts" have largely become irrelevant. It's the poetry and narrative works that are increasingly meaningful to me now.

I came to Shakespeare only well into adulthood but over time my appreciation of his talent has grown exponentially. Once getting a feel for his expressive language, it's evident he was a masterful observer of human nature, combined with his extraordinary sensitivity to sound of words, poetic genius barely describes the accomplishment.

That Shakespeare speaks to people in diverse regions of the globe might surprise him, but he's sure be pleased he far exceeded his own ambitions. Perhaps he'd surely find that development amusing and profound, no doubt would be thinking it could be source material for a new play...

Hopefully, the scientific mindset didn't pass you by, as that was the real point of the courses.
Hopefully, the scientific mindset didn't pass you by, as that was the real point of the courses.