norsecoyote:

slatestarscratchpad:

slatestarscratchpad:

How come nobody writes Shakespearean plays anymore?

You know the type. Five acts, set in 15th century Venice or whatever, everyone speaks in iambic pentameter and has names like “Panculio”. Either a tragedy where everyone dies at the end, or a comedy where everyone hilariously misidentifies their lovers somehow.

Everyone agrees these are some the greatest plays ever. So why won’t anyone write them nowadays? Don’t tell me the form has been completely explored. So have superhero movies, and people keep churning out more of those.

Okay, what about this - everyone hates when people “adopt Shakespeare’s play to the modern day”. So what if people adopt modern-day plays to Shakespeare? Death Of A Salesman, only it takes place in Renaissance Italy, the salesman is a Genovese merchant, and they all use 17th-century English.

Okay I’m frustrated enough to reply: I don’t know how many other times this has already been said in other strands of this thread, but honestly, speaking as a teacher but nowhere near a scholar of Shakespeare, both of these questions feel like they’re coming from a place of profound ignorance about “why Shakespeare is good” that’s directly analogous to that one xkcd about physicists.

It’s not the setting, not the plot or dramatic structure, not the verbal rhythms, not even the historical era of the English language, although all of those certainly have their own aesthetic appeals to different audiences. Put simply, it’s that Shakespeare had a mastery over the subtleties of the English language that is not only breathtaking but gets more and more staggering the more you learn about it. 

Shakespeare’s language is fractally complex. 

On the surface, certainly to modern readers but honestly probably to a good chunk of his contemporary audience, it’s tricky to even understand. Every year, I get a few (high school) students who think that the way to Sound Smart is to go through their essay with a thesaurus, replacing words they do know with fancy-sounding ones they don’t. This doesn’t work not just because it completely destroys any sense of a single authorial voice but because the synonyms don’t actually mean the same things. Connotations can be actually pretty tricky to communicate and you ultimately just have to read and write a lot before you get the hang of them – my favorite ever example is the student who explained that, in advance of a big exam, they “took several practices prophylactically.”

Shakespeare is the antithesis of Thesaurus Mouth: his words are chosen with astonishing precision, which often means he’ll use unfamiliar or even brand-new ones if the more familiar words aren’t quite right. Some of them are now archaic, sure, but what’s great is that you can pick literally any word in any play and ask, “why did he choose THIS word and not a synonym?” and find multiple compelling answers. The surface-level complexity is always in service of the broader communicative goal to a degree rarely seen elsewhere – which is also Reason #1 why people don’t Just Write More Shakespeare. 

Below that, there’s the way that different characters are distinguished not just by their personalities but by their language itself. Simple examples are things like his occasional use of prose dialogue as opposed to verse; if iambic pentameter is the “default” for English speech, then breaking out of it either sounds sloppy (as in its most frequent use for commoners and clowns) or stiltedly formal (like Brutus’s funeral oration from Caesar). Different characters use different kinds of imagery, or you’ll see one particular word appear only in very certain contexts – one of my favorite examples of this is how at the beginning of Othello, only Iago uses plant-based imagery, but by the end Othello’s dialogue is full of floral metaphors. This is certainly a type of complexity that you do see a lot more of in modern writing, although again the extent to which Shakespeare employs this sort of linguistic play is kind of staggering.

Even deeper, though – and I certainly can’t claim to know that this is the bottom, but it’s as deep as I’ve been able to yet understand – the rhetoric of Shakespearean characters is itself deeply communicative. I don’t just mean that they talk pretty, I mean that the devices they use, the very structures of their speech patterns, aren’t merely aesthetically attractive but revelatory of their inner psychologies. Examples I can name off the top of my head: 

• Othello’s mental breakdown signaled by the shift of his sentences from complex to compound to fragmentary.
• Whenever one of the central characters in Caesar compares himself to one of the others, their sentences become increasingly chiastic
• Hamlet, he forever of two minds, who spends the first four acts speaking with extensive hendiadys, until he finally returns in Act V resolved in intent and singular in diction.
• In Romeo and Juliet, characters who are certain of themselves speak in metaphor; those who doubt favor simile, preferring its distancing “like”

I’m aware that when I spell them out like that, they seem simple if not simplistic, but a) this list doesn’t even mar the surface, and b) the point is not just that the characters’ psychology is mirrored in their rhetoric but that the latter is how we understand the former. 

This is why I can keep reading and teaching Shakespeare without getting bored: not only is the craft masterful, but the depth of meaning to every single choice he made means that I will probably never run out of new discoveries. Shakespeare is the perfect antidote to “blue curtains” thinking, because you genuinely can find meaning – RELEVANT meaning! – in every little minute aspect of his writing.

…and THAT’S why nobody just “writes Shakespearean plays anymore.”