🚀 go-pugleaf

Panu <craoibhin66@gmail.com> writes:
> You know perfectly well that Shakespeare is just a minor, obscure
> dramatist from the dark dungeons of literary history writing in an
> English which is only partly intelligible to the speakers of the
> modern language. If he weren't force-fed to millions of poor
> schoolchildren in that benighted part of the world inhabited by
> monolingual speakers of English, he would already have been consigned,
> if not to merciful oblivion, so at least to the limbo that is the fate
> of all linguistically and culturally uninteresting writers meriting
> only second-rate academic interest.

That's a bizarre claim, Panu, as interest in Shakespeare extends far
outside the English-speaking world. Russian poets have long looked to
Shakespeare for inspiration. When visiting the home of an elderly
Romanian, the portion of his library of which he was proudest was a
collection of Shakespeare plays collected with great difficulty during
a time of privation in the country. Kurosawa felt Shakespeare's plays
were so universal in their conception that he localized _King Lear_
for his film "Ran". Sándor Weöres quoted Shakespeare for the epigraph
of at least once collection of poems. The list goes on.

Indeed, I'd say that the obligatory assignment of Shakespeare in the
English-speaking world leaves pupils with a distaste, while in
countries where people encounter him with a bit more liberty, he
arguably invokes more passion.