🚀 go-pugleaf

On 3 Mar, 19:53, Panu <craoibhi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mar 3, 2:50 pm, Melanie Sands <Melanie_Sa...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Reading Shakespeare aloud is the nicest thing you can do for your
> > lungs and voice, by the way, especially if you have asthma like I do.
>
> This is a neat illustration of cultism and entirely comparable with
> the Hindutva suggestion that learning or reading Sanskrit is good for
> your health. I refuse to take this cult superstition seriously.
>
>
>
> > Maybe you should try it, Panu - that way you could actually get to
> > READ some of Shakespeare's plays...woah, wouldn't that be something,
> > you might end up actually knowing what you're talking about.
>
> I have read his sonnets both in the original and (a couple of them) in
> Irish translations. I have read Hamlet in Stanislaw Baranczak's Polish
> translation, and Macbeth in Irish. I have also read Jan Kott's
> "Szekspir wspólczesny", and we read extensive fragments of "Julius
> Caesar" at school. I staunchly refuse to lose any more of my precious
> time to Shakespeare. Learning Georgian and Albanian is much more
> interesting.
>
>
>
> > Melanie

You seem unaware that bardolatry (in Britain, at any rate) has always
been shadowed by a healthy strain of misobardia - just as Rome knew
more than one Virgiliomastix. So you're not the amazing iconoclast you
seem to think you are.

Furthermore I just don't see how you can pronounce 'Shakespeare is
rubbish' in a group whose name begins with 'sci', as if it were an
assertion capable of proof or disproof. I am a BrEng L1 speaker,
educated to a fairly high level in that language but also fluent in
one other and familiar with several more. I was put through the
Shakespeare mill at school and I agree with an earlier poster that for
the uncommitted and uninterested schoolchild here the natural effect
is far more likely to be alienation than adoration. I am also far from
enamoured of the plays as dramas - many of the plots are trivial and
hardly more captivating than Terence or Plautus; venerable generic
ancestry doesn't make them easier to watch. So I don't understand the
thespians who declare the bard to be a great ambassador for the
relevance and timelessness of drama. Maybe the reality is that I don't
like drama very much. But what I, like many anglophones, find
fantastic about Shakespeare is his use of language. The regularity
with which he uses what seem to me precisely the right words in
precisely the right way in precisely the right context delights me.
Some parts of some of the plays just hit you with fantastic language
selection and deployment time after time, unrelentingly, just as a
great stand-up comedian can leave you reeling with gag after gag. I
realise that my response will be conditioned by the fact that my whole
linguistic heritage is to a degree shaped by Shakespeare, and so there
is an extent to which he will automatically seem the distilled essence
of what others present in diluted form. But I have read and seen
enough other drama of his age, and indeed earlier material in
classical languages, to be able to judge what he does for me against
what others - some of whom were perhaps direct or indirect models for
him - achieve, and I feel he consistently surpasses them.

These pronouncements, like yours, are just my opinions. I could never
demonstrate them by logical argumentation. They are admittedly the
considered, honestly held views of an L1 BrEng speaker and therefore
partly falsify your suggestion that anglophones who love Shakespeare
are victims or perpetrators of a fraud or a cult. Beyond that fact,
however, I am aware that as the opinions of a layman in these matters
they deserve no more respect than anyone else's, and I would be very
careful not to shout them out with the rather extraordinary vehemence
and ferocity you use for yours. Doing so can really make one look like
an loud-mouthed, egocentric ignoramus.