Why is Shakespeare so popular?

[English reader]

As the title says, why is Shakespeare so popular? What is so appealing about Elizabethan plays 400 years old that we continue to study them? Is it the language, the themes, the iambic pentameter, etc. I'm still an undergrad, so those of you in grad school and beyond please forgive me if this question seems so trivial.

[prendrelemick]

In my uneducated view, I think people recognise their deeper selves in Shakespeare's works. He exposes and examines what lies beneath, its like having a reference work on the human experience, or more significantly, your own personal human experience. That's how I value him. The language and the form I find is something to get past in order reveal the insights - but the effort is amply rewarded.

[Lykren]

Your question is not trivial.

At least for me, it's the language that forms the basis of the appeal. Some of his plots are interesting, but not especially so, and so it's the language, powerfully expressive and furiously wrought as it is, that carries the themes.

For example, when Othello is about to kill Desdemona in the dark he says "Put out the light, and put out the light"; the eerie simplicity of which underscores the primeval nature of the action soon to be executed.

On the other hand Shakespeare can be delicately whimsical (though many would rightly argue that he never quite loses that almost insidiously powerful ability to expose the subconscious urge to the bright light of our immediate awareness). From The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

There are, as well, statements so elegantly made they seem to produce meaning where there was none before. Also from The Tempest:

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on, rounded with a little sleep."

Does that help you?

Mick, basically I am saying that the language is not something to get past, but is itself a treasure to be appreciated.

[free]

He wrote about the most important human characteristics, in a nice and simple way he explained how people function in society. There are many Shakespeares, every country has him. Take French Moliere, for instance. The popularity of Shakespeare, I suppose, is because of the popularity of English language which has become the internationally accepted language of communication.

It doesn't amaze me why is he so popular, it amazes me that people, their minds and relations have not changed a bit since those distant times.

[Mohammad Ahmad]

Yet we study Shakespeare plays in our schools and even in our universities, because students have to learn the old English and the Shakespearean period is considered the typical time of dominating the old English letter, yes it is eternal and will stay eternal as we still have bright names of our olden- poets, the time cannot blot them out.
Our contemporary poets still in lack to do the same and when they are going to adorn their verses, they somehow borrowing or quoting some words from the classic poetry.
I myself many times I eagerly return to the Elizabethan period because it is the origin.
Look to the level of nowadays- poetry in general. What do you distinguish? just haphazardly unmeaning verses. No theme and no clarified idea being set forth, otherwise there is good contemporary poetry likely follows the taste of our nowadays people.
I think all the attitudes or all of the motivations which stand as prominent factors beyond writing in general, it must be that there is a matter, the poet previously devoted himself to tackling wit it......
As we recognize that most people of nowadays time neglecting their ecological nature and just have to to follow the new- decorated colorful lifestyle.

[Lykren]

Nice and simple? Shakespeare is anything but. I can't read any language other than English, so my perspective is very limited, but the idea that there are many Shakespeares seems rather odd. However, I do agree that his global popularity could well be due in part to English colonialism. His language can't possibly translate so well as to be equally good in all cultures.

[MorpheusSandman]

If it was possible to easily sum up why Shakespeare is still so popular, I don't think Shakespeare would still be popular. Much of his continuing appeal is due to, in part, how irreducibly rich and complex his oeuvre is. I think I can elucidate a few points:

1. Shakespeare mastered rhetoric, using over 200 forms throughout his plays. This makes his work extremely memorable and endlessly quotable, which is why so many lines stick with us even when those lines contain sentiments that long predate Shakespeare.

2. Shakespeare's gift for language was extraordinary. When I say "a gift for language" I don't mean he simply knew a lot of big, strange words (though he did), but rather he had a real feel for the levels of speech. He could write the richest, purplest descriptive verse to the simplest, idiomatic conversational prose. There was no KIND of speech that was off limits to him. Also, because of his gift for rhetoric, he knew how to combine these levels for maximum impact. So in a play like I Henry IV you go from the ornate refinement of the king's court to the low bawdiness of Falstaff's rabble band.

3. It's partly because of 2. that Shakespeare had such a profound feel for character, as dramatic characters reveal themselves through speech. While Bloom may have overreached in saying Shakespeare "invented the human," there is undoubtedly in his work a diversity and detail of humanity that we rarely get in writing before him. Most drama before Shakespeare dealt more with archetypes and allegories rather than individualized characters. Chaucer was certainly one Shakespearean model, but even in Chaucer characters can tend more towards caricature than realism. Part of Shakespeare's power is that there probably isn't at least one play in which any reader can find a character they can identify with.

4. Shakespeare also had a supreme mastery of his craft, from how to use blank verse and prose for maximum effect (This is one of the best studies on Shakespeare and meter ever written), to how to develop images and metaphors over the course of a play to create a sense of coherency and develop that runs parallel to, but subliminally under, the drama itself. So in Macbeth, for example, you can understand much of it just by tracing how Shakespeare repeatedly returns to the metaphor of clothing, how it often does or doesn't fit, how it's been torn to shreds or stolen or stained.

5. Shakespeare was hyper-conscious of his audience, their expectations, and how to toy with this. In this he reminds me of Alfred Hitchcock, another artist with a profound understanding of how humans watched, anticipated, and reacted to art; and an equally perverse delight in subverting those elements. So in Shakespeare we get a revenge tragedy (in Hamlet) in which the revenge is delayed for a kind of introspective, existential pondering, so full of unresolved mystery that the real "tragedy" seems to be that all sense of security and understanding and faith in the world has been lost; or in The Tempest you get this meta-commentary on how art relates to reality, love, ambition, nature, how each shapes the other, what invades and evades that shaping, etc. There always seems to be more going on under the surface of Shakespeare that we can barely sense but not quite reach, not unlike Bruno's desperate reaching through the sewer grate to grasp his lighters near the end of Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train.

6. Except for the archaisms of the language, Shakespeare seems incredibly modern. Whether it was the existentialist philosophy in Hamlet, or the nihilism/atheism of Lear, or the pseudo-postmodernism of A Midsummer Night's Dream, or post-colonialism in The Tempest, or racism in Othello, or anti-semitism in Merchant of Venice, or feminism in Taming of the Shrew, or structuralism of Love's Labor's Lost, or the relationship between reality and fantasy in most of these works; Shakespeare seems to have touched on dramatically so many themes and subjects that weren't going to be written about philosophically and critically for centuries later. The fact that he presents these situations usually without judgement and with an intuitive appreciation of the nuance and complexity behind human nature and interaction is what makes them such great works for interpretation, because, just like life, things are presented as they are and it's up to us to make sense of them. This is contrast with most writers of the time, even great ones, where the morals/themes/messages seem underlined and obvious. Shakespeare gives us life and human thought/action in all its confusion, complexity, nuance, and accuracy; and we'll probably be trying to make sense of it for as long as humans are around.

7. If Shakespeare challenged the limits of drama with his genius, he challenged his genius within the limits of the sonnet, and was equally masterful at both. His sonnets contain an equally diverse range of tone and formal strategies as his plays do, often ranting and raving, often quiet and meditative. They provide one of the most intimate and humane voices ever in lyric poetry, yet they are capable of presenting things on a global and macro scale, such as when they meditate on the relationship between time and beauty, between death and man. Shakespeare broke down and restructured the sonnet form in almost every way it's possible to, and it provides an endless source of inspiration for other poets looking to tackle the form.

[Lokasenna]

I think the diverse range of answers here pretty much sums up why Shakespeare remains so popular - there are so many different things one can get out of his works. For me, Shakespeare is all about the language - regardless of whether he is being serious or whimsical, the man always had the right words. He lived in language like a fish lives in water.

That said, we should be careful of totemising Shakespeare - he is a very great writer, possibly though not uncontestably the greatest in the English language, but nevertheless merely a part of a great and long-lived tradition. As for Elizabethan theatre, I'm sure the adherents of Marlow and Jonson would argue that they are as important to understanding that genre as Shakespeare is.

[Mohammad Ahmad]

Nice and simple? Shakespeare is anything but. I can't read any language other than English, so my perspective is very limited, but the idea that there are many Shakespeares seems rather odd. However, I do agree that his global popularity could well be due in part to English colonialism. His language can't possibly translate so well as to be equally good in all cultures.

No, it can be translated, there are many translated versions to this poem of Shakespeare I set below , moreover, I think the Arabic available translated version looks better than the original script itself.
On earth! What good verses are!
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

[MorpheusSandman]

I wonder how translations handles Shakespeare's form. In that poem, eg, you have the absolute perfect consistency of the iambic pentameter where every line is end-stopped; this is a real rarity in sonnets or in Shakespeare, and, indeed, this linguistic, harmonic perfection exists as a formal equivalent of the subject being described. Does translation catch the repetition of summer, tellingly absent in the second quatrain? Does it get the development of imagery of breath and sight? How about the different levels of time and change (regularity of the seasons VS randomness of chance VS eternity)? Shakespeare's sonnets are so intricate and detailed in their formal devices that I doubt translator's ability to catch all of these, however beautifully they render them.

[Mohammad Ahmad]

Of course in the translation process especially with poetry something of the content will be affected as always we have said the form and the content relation.
As we are translators, and this of course varied according to the translator himself ability,we are obliged to control on one of them or in both of them.
To neglect meanings is more unacceptable than to control on other devices such as the iambic or the rhythm, since the rhyme scheme can be solved.
This is one version of many translated versions to the above poem I mentioned

من ذا يقارن حسنكِ المغري بصيف قد تجلى
وفنون سحرك قد بدت في ناظري أسمى وأغلى
تجني الرياح العاتيات على البراعم وهي جذلى
والصيف يمضي مسرعا اذ عقده المحدود ولى
كم أشرقت عين السماء بحرها تلتهب
ولكم خبأ في وجهها الذهبي نور يغرب
لابد للحسن البهي عن الجميل سيذهب
فـالـدهر تغـير واطـوار الـطـبـيعـة قـلـب
لـكـن صيـفـكِ سرمـدي مـا اعـتراه ذبول
لن يـفـقـد الحسن الذي ملكت فيه بخـيـل
والموت لن يزهـو بـظلكِ في حماه يجول
ستعاصرين الدهر في شعري وفيه أقول:
ما دامت الأنفاس تصعـد والـعيون تحـدق
سيظل شعري خالداً وعليك عمراً يـغـدق

[MorpheusSandman]

I can't read that translation (I only read/speak English, unfortunately).

To neglect meanings is more unacceptable than to control on other devices such as the iambic or the rhythm, since the rhyme scheme can be solved.

See, I would heavily dispute this; art is not philosophy or history, the "meaning" is only one relatively minor aspect in what makes it great. In fact, the same meanings get reiterated constantly in art. So the difference in masterpieces and mediocre are not in what's said, but in how it's said, and how it's said involves things like iambs, rhythms, and rhyme schemes, especially in Shakespeare. I mean, I know translation is a necessary evil of sorts, but I'm very leery when people talk about the translation being "better."

[prendrelemick]

Your question is not trivial.

At least for me, it's the language that forms the basis of the appeal. Some of his plots are interesting, but not especially so, and so it's the language, powerfully expressive and furiously wrought as it is, that carries the themes.

For example, when Othello is about to kill Desdemona in the dark he says "Put out the light, and put out the light"; the eerie simplicity of which underscores the primeval nature of the action soon to be executed.

On the other hand Shakespeare can be delicately whimsical (though many would rightly argue that he never quite loses that almost insidiously powerful ability to expose the subconscious urge to the bright light of our immediate awareness). From The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

There are, as well, statements so elegantly made they seem to produce meaning where there was none before. Also from The Tempest:

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on, rounded with a little sleep."

Does that help you?

Mick, basically I am saying that the language is not something to get past, but is itself a treasure to be appreciated.

I understand. I struggle with the language, but once cracked I'm often amazed at its conciseness - the way he encompasses complex thoughts in so few words. I certainly don't wish it written in any other way.

[Mohammad Ahmad]

O, dear asker
Your questions are legible and lawful
My mother language of course is the Arabic but I had learned rather than the English language, the French and I learned though communication additional languages.
And now let me tell you something:
Firstly without keen desire you hardly can translate even one verse or to understand one poem as the poet himself previously has targeted his aim.
Always they would say poetry is untranslatable because the problem isn't only consisted in the superficial analyse of meaning you had to do but the deep analyse you might be followed and thus what we call the pragmatic meaning.
Yes let me agreeable that some of meanings especially those related to culture are unanswerable and I have discussed this matter many times in this forum though my notices i replied to others.
Yes I feel the word and as someone of our friends in this page previously replied saying; "He lived in language like a fish lives in water"
Of course he meant Shakespeare, but all clever poets are so, and lastly let me draw the following diagram:
True urgent desire and sincerity............acquaintance with poetry ........acquaintance with languages......present of feeling and emotions ...leads to solve the problem.
just I remind you again to understand what I meant by the " form and content relation" i'e. the frame you deal with

[DATo]

MorpheusSandman - It is such a JOY to find myself newly associated with a book forum where opinions and critiques are expressed with such clarity, precision and eloquence. I'm sure your post took thought and time to organize with such precision and I just wanted to say that it is very much appreciated. I have copied your comments to my hard drive with no intention of reproducing elsewhere, but to serve both as an instructional narrative with regard to the subject matter as well as an example of how to present my own opinions in the future.