Today is supposedly the birth and death day of Shakespeare, which makes this topic fitting. The topic of Shakespeare has always provoked a certain type of emotional response. Whether it’s teenagers avidly hating the difficulty of the language to historians arguing about whether or not the works of Shakespeare were really written by Shakespeare. Regardless, the works that we’ve come to all enjoy and love from Romeo and Juliet to Macbeth to Midsummer Night’s Dream — and the list goes on — are, across the entire world, respected by most education systems, especially in the Western culture. Anybody can recognize the lines, “To be or not to be,” or “Wherefore art thou Romeo.” And I don’t think all of these celebrations are wrongly placed. I do think Shakespeare should be praised for eloquent dialogues, precision, clarity, and pioneering in modern (relatively) expressions and language in general. However, as a student who is learning Macbeth currently, Shakespeare being in almost every school literature curriculum, does seem very out of place.
Again, this isn’t an essay talking about how Shakespeare is overrated or how he’s a bad writer who uses cliches to excel at what he does best because it’s not true. The kind of imagery and symbolism he uses in his writing, shouldn’t be denied. But why are we learning about it in literature class; it’s not literature.
To clarify, of course, I am not referring to the very literal definition of literature, meaning almost any sort of writing, but specifically towards the narrative stories we read in school. Shakespeare is the ONLY work of “literature” we read in school, that’s not actually a book, a short story, or an essay. It’s the ONLY work of “literature” that is its own medium. It’s the ONLY work of literature that is simply, and very much so, a script.
Shakespeare never wrote his works to be analyzed, at least not among anyone but play critics and possibly aspiring playwrights. To compare this to the other works, in The Great Gatsby (another work of “literature” in almost every school literature curriculum), every sentence matters. The sentences you read in The Great Gatsby is the end product of what you’re supposed to get. The emotions that are carried through F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words on the page to your brain, provoking an emotional response is the point of that book and any book. For Shakespeare, the word usage, almost didn’t matter. In fact, when you read some of his plays, we simply don’t know some of the words that Shakespeare used in some areas. In the published editions, literary scholars are simply forced to make the best possible educated guess to fill the words that we don’t know, driving further the point that things such as word choice don’t matter as much as we like to believe.
Furthermore, even Shakespeare didn’t care. Hamlet, for example, has four different versions that we’ve found from Shakespeare’s time: “first, through reading of a “basic” text; second, through a study of the three main versions of Shakespeare’s text that have come down to us (the First and Second Quarto and the First Folio); third, through actors’ interpretations of Shakespeare’s creation on stage and on film; and fourth, through other authors’ renditions of the characters and events in the play, both before and after Shakespeare.” There are different versions with different word usage and different lines, and ultimately, Shakespeare didn’t care which way the actors said his lines. He didn’t care if you used the word, “unfortunate,” instead of “miserable.”
Shakespeare’s writings also aren’t meant to be read. What Shakespeare wrote, regardless of high brow language, was simply a template for a play. We don’t read the musical notes, we listen. We don’t read blueprints for houses, we live in them. We don’t read scripts for movies, we watch them. Aaron Sorkin is an acclaimed screenwriter for multiple movies, but his scripts will never be remembered, just his movies.
This is important because there is such an unbelievably HUGE disconnect between scripts and movies. Mad Max: Fury Road has a horrible script, but a great movie. Daniel Radcliffe said that his movie, Victor Frankenstein, had the best script he ever read, but when the movie came out, it was critically bashed, and even Radcliffe changed his statement to express that the script was too weird to translate onto the big screen. The script for the fifth Die Hard movie, A Good Day to Die Hard, wasn’t even done when the filming for the movie began; and this happens all the time. Reshoots happen all the time and editing changes change the movie significantly. The explosive opening of La La Land almost came at the end of the movie, instead of the first. It’s the same with Shakespeare.
There are hundreds of Macbeths, but they’re all differently viewed and reviewed by audiences and critics alike. On Rotten Tomatoes, Macbeth (2015) has 80%, Macbeth (1971) has 86%, Maqbool (2003) has 67%, Throne of Blood (1957) has 98%, Scotland, PA (2001) has 59%, and countless versions of staged Macbeth all also have different responses. But how could it be when they all have the exact same play? It’s because the lighting, music, tone of voice, delivery, stage direction, and costume all change the play and the lines in them.
Words on a page mean nothing in scripts. In Literature, they’re used to effectively describe something to make you feel something — the words are the end product. In scripts, they’re just blueprints — “To be or Not to Be” is a horrible line with the wrong lighting, costume, staging, camera angle, and actor. A terrible script can transform into a good movie, and vice versa.
When we read Hamlet, we aren’t told what to visualize. The readers see what they want to see. They imagine Hamlet dressed the way they want him to be dressed. They imagine the castle as big as they want to see them as. The story plays out the way they want it to play out. Literature isn’t supposed to be play-doh that you play with, mold, and shape into the way you want. Literature (good literature, at least) makes a point that you’ve never thought of before. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn tells you what you’re supposed to see when Huckleberry rips the letter, signifying change in his character from bigoted, naive racist, to courage-earned, more mature, friend. The appropriate emotions and feelings that come as a reaction to that moment, is when literature succeeds as literature. Alan Moore, legendary comic book writer, said, “If the audience knew what they wanted then they wouldn’t be the audience, they would be the artist.” Shakespeare didn’t write the play so you could feel what you want to feel; he wrote it so the play can. It’s time for literature to abandon non-literature. ◼
