Shakespeare
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Drama is marked and inspired by the specific social forces at work during its creation, and many plays, while popular and appreciated at the time of their writing, have become antiquated and irrelevant for later audiences. William Shakespeare is a remarkable exception. His plays, despite their arcane language and complex plots, continue to provide a rich tapestry for actors, directors, and audiences, whether presented in traditional productions or vigorously recycled, on which to project modern sensibilities. The characters and themes he chose for his plays, along with much of the poetic language with which he endowed his writings, have remained relevant for more than 400 years. Each succeeding generation has used Shakespeare's writing as a way of better understanding its own challenges. While a modern audience can never hope to experience the Shakespearean canon in its original state, the plays provide a framework for contemporary experiences and insights. Issues and events the playwright could not have foreseen influence the ways in which each new age perceives the plays. Shakespeare's art exists in the fact that successive audiences are each able to find their own understandings of the world in his work. Charles Marowitz observes, "In some ways, one's view of Shakespeare is analogous to one's view of art in general." He describes Shakespeare's writing as a prism, reflecting back the viewer's own image, rather than a set of concrete, unchanging truths to be dis
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e playwright made Oedipal struggles and intellectual torment artistically valid, paving the way for the scientist to articulate the reasons for Hamlet's behavior. As Lamm writes, "Shakespeare . . . made discoveries as important as those made by a scientist . . . As enacted on stage, these aspects of the human condition constitute artistic truths."
This remarkable ability to create work that appears fresh and timely for new audiences is what makes Shakespeare's writing classic, "a work which is able to mean again, and perhaps mean something else." A work may speak eloquently and effectively to a particular time. A writer may be able to capture the tenor of the age in characters, plot, and language that mirror the cultural viewpoint of the era in a way that no other artist has been able to do as well. However, this is no guarantee that the work will endure. Many of Shakespeare's contemporaries, though capable of producing plays and poems that delighted and entertained Elizabethan audiences, have become historical footnotes. Their only lasting claim on the attentions of modern audiences is their proximity to Shakespeare on a timeline. A significant number of the other works created during his age have no power to matter to
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Approximate Word count = 3351
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)
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