Shakespeare Unchained

I spent the first couple of weeks completely spellbound at the range of brilliance I saw my fellow 473 peers bringing to the discussion table. I'm a junior in the filmmaking program, and I've spent the last three years in the Visual Communications Building that I forgot there was a college outside of it. Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity to get out and explore other classes in other buildings at MSU. This is the second course on Shakespeare's work that I've taken. I took my first course at a small community college in Helena several years ago. Up until then, I had never really openly explored the works written by the Bard of Avon. What surprised me most was how most of his works intertwine with one another with his use of characters, their archetypes and his recurring themes. For example, in just about every single one of Shakespeare's plays, the theme of the "rightful ruler" can be found. From Hamlet to Othello, and from the historical Henry pieces to even The Taming of the Shrew, someone is getting screwed out of a certain power that they believe they're entitled to.  

Fast forward to this class, where I'm tasked with reading the enigmatic works of Ted Hughes and Frederick Turner, and all of a sudden I'm lost at sea. These works are so immense that even the most seasoned readers could find something new every time it's read. While I understood that Hughes was making a point about the way Shakespeare constructed his plays with his vocabulary and the way he constructed sentences, Turner is still very foreign to me. I'm trying to find time go back through some of the earlier blogs and see what everyone else had to say.

One thing I've been wanting to discuss is the way Shakespeare writes his monologues and his overall use of dialogue in his plays. Shakespeare faced a problem in his theater because he had two main audiences to speak to, the aristocracy and the common populace. Since he depended so strongly on these two demographics to support his theater,  "he devised a means of expression that communicated instantly with every level of his audience, but particularly with the two extremes. In other words, he found the common language of the highest and the lowest" (Hughes 18).

Shakespeare's Elizabethan terminology seems out of place in our world today. I mean, after all, why bother saying "good morrow, my good lords and ladies! How fairest thine all today" when you could simply say "what's up dude?" Obviously he was heavily influenced by Elizabethan dialect and communicating to various audiences, but I think it was his way of being different from everyone else. Being an fervent lover of films, the only comparison I can make about the way Shakespeare wrote his plays is to the work of Quentin Tarantino. Both of these writers expressed their characters' personalities through extended scenes of dialog. It's just seems that Shakespeare had more eloquence in his style with phrasing things such as "away, you cut-purse rascal! you filthy bung, away! By this wine, I'll thrust my knife in your mouldy chaps, an you play the saucy cuttle with me. Away you bottle-ale rascal! you basket-hilt stale juggler, you!" (2 Henry IV 2.4. 120-22) As opposed to "English motherfucker! Do you speak it?" While both writers are trying to hit their target audiences in their own unique way, I still think they're just trying to be cool at the same time.

Travis