My ol’ buddy Will

I’ve always felt like Will Shakespeare was a personal friend of mine because he seems to have understood how I feel about situations and circumstances that I, along with most of the rest of the human race, have encountered along life’s winding road. Of course, that is the ultimate reason for studying not just Shakespeare, but literature in general. Viewed correctly, literature assures us that we are not alone in our experiences and emotions and that people have been just as confused as we are about love, hate, romance, war, poverty, power, life, death and all the other things Shakespeare wrote about for hundreds even thousands of years.
It’s just that a very few people in each generation have both the willingness and the necessary intellectual gifts to express those feelings in a way that effectively touches their fellow humans. Shakespeare stands out because, more than any other writer in the English language, he could reach across the years to people of every age and era and express what they, too, have felt and wished they could express in words. If ol’ Will’s language is out of date and a bit difficult to comprehend, you can be assured that our language would be just as incomprehensible to him. I realize that this is small comfort to a high school English student struggling his or her way through MacBeth for the first time.
Which brings up another point. Shakespeare never intended for his work to become required reading, especially not for young people with a limited amount of experience in the world. He was an entertainer. The plays were meant to be seen and listened to. Reading a play is like reading a script which pretty much is what the written play is. Although many plays can stand alone as works of literature, they were meant to be put into the hands of a director and a company of players to be brought to life. As stirring as the St. Crispen’s Day speech from Henry V or Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy may be out of context, they are only part of a whole, and lose something when experienced separately.
Also, plays, or at least most plays, are supposed to be entertaining. In Shakespeare’s day, plays were the popular entertainment of the time. The theaters of Shakespeare’s London like the Rose and the Curtain , and later the Globe, were not the centers of refinement and delicate culture we make them out to be today. They were the equivalent of our multiplex motions picture theaters, complete with refreshment stands.
Everybody went to see plays. The audiences weren’t made up of wealthy upper class people in fancy dress clothes. They were a cross section of the population. Anybody who could get away from their work for a few hours would come to the daylight performances. Couldn’t do it at night. No artificial lighting. The theaters had no roofs. Plays were performed under an open sky and performances had to be cancelled in the event of rain.
And the performances were geared toward a general audience, most of which was illiterate, just as today’s motion pictures are. Special effects were far less sophisticated, but they existed. If someone was stabbed on stage, most likely they had a pig’s bladder full of fresh blood under their costume to provide the necessary bloody mess that the audience expected. Remember, these people knew what it looked like when a living body was punctured. Such sights were part of daily life in the days before public health departments regulated the circumstances under which animals were slaughtered for food.
And the plays themselves usually dealt with stories and events with which the audience was familiar. Most people already knew the story of Romeo and Juliet before Shakespeare ever put it on stage, but it was the way the story was told and the passion with which it was portrayed that has made the play live for 400 years, so far.
Shakespeare is a very unreliable source for historical knowledge since he would change the chronology and the characters in a story to fit the purposes of his plays, the same way Hollywood screenwriters do now. Shakespeare even admitted this, in writing. The prologue to Henry V includes an apology to the audience for miniaturizing great events and people into a time frame and dimensions that could be presented on a small stage.
In conclusion, Shakespeare was a very entertaining fellow and still is when a semester grade isn’t riding on your ability to understand him. I wish teachers had more tools available to them when teaching shakespeare. The actor and director Kenneth Branaugh has done some wonderful interpretations of some of Shakespeare’s plays for the screen. I wish teachers could show their students Hamlet before having them read it. I really think everybody would be happier and better off.