In Praise of Shakespeare

"Shakespeare is about all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life." -Samuel Johnson in his Preface to Shakespeare (page 374 in our book)

Samuel Johnson praised William Shakespeare as being a maker of classics. Even today, we can find this to be true because we're still reading his plays and watching movies that are inspired by his plays. We love Shakespeare, we feed off him, we quote him, we believe him. His works, so ancient, still ring true in our culture today, even if we don't get the same things out of them that Queen Elizabeth did. While Aristotle would have found Shakespeare's plays to be absurd because they don't follow the strict Aristotelian Laws of Unity, Johnson claims that Shakespeare's total disregard for the unities is forgivable: "The necessity of observing the unities of time and place arises from the supposed necessity of making the drama credible" (382 of our textbook).

I've always had trouble with Aristotle because he is so cold. I know he was a physician and therefore was very scientific and calculating, but I never understood why literature and poetry, by Aristotle's standards, has to be so... rigid. Literature and other media, in my opinion, wouldn't be as enjoyable if they were "believable" and if they obeyed the rules set forth by Aristotle. Hamlet, for example, breaks the Unities of Time and Space (Hamlet's travels would take far longer than the time it takes to perform the play; Hamlet's scenes take place mostly in Elsinore, but also at Hamlet's college); Johnson, I think, understood that Hamlet needed to break the Unities in order to provide backstory and suspense. It's become commonplace in today's movies and books to have flashbacks and long breaks in time (e.g: in James Cameron's 1997 movie Titanic, most of the movie takes place 80 years in the past while being interrupted throughout by the present), and this disobedience does nothing but ADD to the story.

 Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet is a classic because it stands the test of time. On the left is a clip from the 1968 version of Romeo & Juliet, performed in the style we always associate with Shakespeare's time and culture. On the right is the 1996 version, which is set in modern day-- even though the movie takes place some 400+ years after the play was written, it still stays faithful to the dialogue and scenes.

Johnson also praises Shakespeare for writing characters who could be any normal person. It's hard to feel sorry for characters like Odysseus or Hercules or even Superman because we can't really relate to them-- their tragedies are not the same as our tragedies. Shakespeare's characters, although they are often in high places in society, could be identified with our next door neighbors, our sisters, our friends, or ourselves. Shakespeare's plays probably wouldn't have become "classics" by Johnson's standards if the characters didn't have qualities that we can all relate to. And, let's face it, even though The Odyssey is considered to be one of the great Classics of all history, it is rare that anyone would feel more for Odysseus than he or she would for Macbeth or Ophelia.