Brush up Your Shakespeare!
Forget the debt. Another problem has been seeping into the American consciousness, limiting our discourse, and generally baffling us: Shakespeare. (Ay me!) In The New Republic, John McWhorter explains:
[M]uch of Shakespeare’s language is impossible to comprehend meaningfully in real time, so much so that most first-time viewers of a Shakespeare play are understanding grievously less of the meaning than they are aware....First, however, I should dispel two possible misimpressions. I am not arguing that Shakespeare’s language can be too “dense” or “poetic,” but that it can be simply incomprehensible because of the passage of time. Also, I am referring to taking in the language through the ear during a live performance, not reading and referring to footnotes.
As his touchstone, McWhorter cites this speech by Touchstone, a character in As You Like It:
A man may, if he were of a fearful heart,
stagger in this attempt; for here we have no temple
but the wood, no assembly but horn-beasts. But what
though? Courage! As horns are odious, they are
necessary. It is said, ‘many a man knows no end of
his goods:’ right; many a man has good horns, and
knows no end of them. Well, that is the dowry of
his wife; ‘tis none of his own getting. Horns?
Even so. Poor men alone? No, no; the noblest deer
hath them as huge as the rascal. Is the single man
therefore blessed? No: as a walled town is more
worthier than a village, so is the forehead of a
married man more honourable than the bare brow of a
bachelor; and by how much defence is better than no
skill, by so much is a horn more precious than to want.
Crystal clear to us! Personally, we own a lot of good horns, plus a noble deer. But for some reason, the meaning isn't so obvious to McWhorter. A solution, however, is. He suggests considering the following idea:
[A]nyone who wants to get a full meal from a Shakespearean evening should read the play beforehand. Seeing Shakespeare cold would seem, in the future, as antique as it is beginning to be to see an opera without supertitles.
In fact, if we accepted that Shakespearean language, while aesthetically beautiful to hear in many ways, must be treated as spoken writing, we would be on our way to becoming what I imagine as a linguistically ideal society.
Sign us up.
But what about those who aren't worried about catching the full meaning, or who enjoy the blur of ambiguity settles in once one hears the word "bodkin"? Those theatergoers are, we suppose, not ideal. To read McWhorter's response to the responses to his piece, click here.