On the Bard’s birthday, is Shakespeare still relevant?
By Alexandra Petri
Whenever I want to depress myself, I make a list of Shakespeare plays and cross out all the ones whose plots would be ruined if any of the characters had a smartphone. What's left is a depressingly short list.
“Romeo and Juliet would obviously text each other about the poison,” audiences would point out. “Why doesn’t Hermia use her GPS when she is lost in the woods?”
Misunderstandings and missed communications now come in entirely different flavors. You don’t leave your fiancee asleep in the woods unless you want to wind up on a “Dateline” special. When your coworker implies that Desdemona is cheating on you with Cassio, you don’t go ballistic demanding handkerchiefs. You just log check her facebook page, hack her email, or read her texts.
And the words. (“Words! Words! Words!” as Hamlet says.) What are we supposed to do with them?
To make it through his works, high school students are forced to consult books like “No Fear Shakespeare,” which drains all the poetry out in the hopes of making him moderately comprehensible.
Here is Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy:
“To be, or not to be? That is the question--
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them? To die, to sleep--
No more—and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished! To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub”
The translation is nothing more than a question, “Is it better to be alive or dead?"
But Shakespeare is beautiful! Shakespeare is life glimpsed through the cut glass of poetry! Ah, but there’s the catch! What’s the point, if the language is so far away that we have to read simple versions of it?
Maybe Shakespeare has nothing to say to us. Nobody else from the early 1600s still sees himself so regularly adapted. There’s a certain level of celebrity occupied by people who are famous primarily because they are famous.
Is Shakespeare one of them? Do we only read him because we’ve seemingly always read him? Why do we keep dragging class after class, kicking and screaming, through the wilds of “Romeo and Juliet”? We don’t even know who the guy was. Why give him this place of honor?
Look at his most famous play. “Hamlet”? A whiny college student, evidently overeducated and underemployed, comes home for break, sees a ghost and dithers. Eventually some pirates show up, but wouldn’t you know, they remain offstage. Shakespeare is one of the few writers in history who, given the option of including pirates in a play, thinks, “Nah, you know what? I’d rather have this dithering hipster talk about mortality some more.”
It seems we’re dragged through the thorns of his work so that we’ll have something to talk about on the other side.