I know it's fashionable to hate shakespeare for being a white cis male shitlord but calling his work trashy just displays your ignorance. there are reasons he still gets studied in school hundreds of years later. the man basically invented the english language as we speak it today.
I donât hate Shakespeare.Â
In my opinion, the greatest disservice anyone can do to his work is to elevate it to some kind of highbrow high art literary thing. The reason heâs studied today is that his plays endured (plus or minus some changes in fashion over the centuries), and the reason his plays endured is because they were popular, and the reason his plays were popular is because he crammed them full of stuff that people wanted; i.e., lots of jokes focusing on the less refined features of the human anatomy and the things they get up to.
Perhaps youâve had it explained to you that Hamletâs talk of âcountry mattersâ was an uncouth pun, and his reply in the same conversation of ânothingâ was a similar reference. Did you think that was a one-off thing?Â
If youâre aware that ânothingâ was a euphemism for the vulva in Shakespeareâs England, have you ever stopped to marvel at the sheer audacity, the sheer brass somethings that a man would have to have to name a play Much Ado About Nothing?
Translate that into modern-modern English, and youâd get something like Everybodyâs Up In Arms About Pussy. Though youâd lose the pun on ânothing/notingâ in doing so⌠yes, thatâs how far from highbrow Shakespeare is. He made the title of his play a triple pun.
And yes, Much Ado is not one of the Bardâs more serious works to begin with⌠but then, what is? We divide Shakespeareâs plays up into tragedies and comedies based on the dramatic convention of which ones have a happy ending versus a sad one, but they are all comedies in the modern sense of âthings you go to expecting to laughâ. The country/nothing lines come from Hamlet. Heck, Hamlet is hilarious throughout. Any scene with Polonius in it is guaranteed to be comedy gold.Â
Of course, the people who want to call Shakespeare highbrow are probably the people who quote him in all blustering sincerity when he says âto thine own self be trueâ⌠or funnier still, when they paraphrase him as saying that âbrevity is the soul of witâ.
Of course, hands down, my favorite bit in Hamlet is when heâs giving instructions to the players that basically amount to William Shakespeare pre-emptively bringing up every stereotype of Serious Shakespearean Acting we have today and saying, âThis. This thing. Do not do this thing.â
Anyway, letâs talk about the idea that he âinvented the English languageâ; e.g., he created so many hundreds of new words. Okay, well, first of all, we donât know how many he invented. We just know there are words and usages of words for which the texts of his plays are the earliest surviving example. The thing is, all those words evidently made sense to his audience.
Thereâs a post that goes around Tumblr listing some of the words credited to Shakespeare, and one of them is âelbowâ. The commentary attached to this post basically boggles over the idea that nobody in the English world had a name for âthe bendy part of an armâ until an actor gets up on stage and says âelbowâ, and everybodyâs like, âOh, yeah, thatâs what it is.â
Except it didnât happen like that. The noun elbow isnât what is attributed to Shakespeare; the verb to elbow (as in âelbowing someone asideâ) is. His character took a noun and used it to describe an action. Thatâs not a highbrow creation of language as some sort of received wisdom handed down from authority. Thatâs naturalistic language use.Â
Even if he was the first person to describe the act of âelbowing someoneâ, it caught on because it worked, because it made sense to vernacular speakers of English.Â
So many of his words fit this model: they are butchered foreign words, they are slangy applications of English words, they are colorful metaphors or synecdoches. In short, he was writing in what we call âBuffyspeakâ. If he had an unusual talent for doing it memorably, it still ultimately worked because it reflected the language of the time.
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