🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mar 3, 11:03 pm, Emungo <pyti...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
> 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.

I don't think I am an amazing iconoclast. I think Shakespeare was
probably a decent scribbler of his own time. But this Cthulhu cult is
simply lunatic. In fact,


>
> 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 don't really think Shakespeare is rubbish. I think Shakespeare
probably was superior to his fellow scribblers, but he was definitely
not the god cultists want him to be.

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.

Now we are getting somewhere. Plots are trivial, language is old-
fashioned and only partly intelligible. Probably a professional
routine writer of decent formulaic entertainment, but a genius?
Really?

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.

This is what I find problematic. The fact is, that Shakespeare's
language is only partly intelligible to a modern reader. Thus, in
order to appreciate his "mot juste" you basically depend on cribs and
guidebooks and commentaries, on a whole interpretative tradition -
which is basically the theology of the Shakespeare cult.

>  I
> realise that my response will be conditioned by the fact that my whole
> linguistic heritage is to a degree shaped by Shakespeare,

Indeed.

>
> 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.

If you dislike the word "cult", let's call it a perfectly legitimate
religion, then. It sure has all the hallmarks of a religion:
theologians, high church, temples, ecstatic mystics.