Do we need Shakespeare?

I've spent my entire adult life earning most of my income from various creative endeavors. While I'm inclined to believe that my life has been well spent, I also have days where I'm filled with doubt, where my mind minimizes my achievements as half-off, cut-out bin seconds. I wonder if my work, and the things I write and speak about, are good enough to appeal to serious people. Like most other people, I want to be accepted by the academic class, to be considered one of the "smart" people in the room. Lately, however, I'm challenging that wisdom, and am questioning the entire notion of what makes a smart person.

Jonathan Franzen, the highly regarded novelist whose latest, best selling book, "Freedom" ( anointed by Oprah), seems to think here is "no hope" for serious reading and writing. With technology companies "marginalizing" novels with devices such as the Kindle or iPad, Franzen believes people are staying home with the "televisions and computers", and have given up on the heavy lifting of reading important books like..uhh..his.

At the core of his comments is the notion that we should dash back to some kind of idylic, 1950's past, where we all had 3 networks to choose from, a handful of radio stations, and everyone had read Tom Sawyer. Recently the BBC created the "Big Read", a list of great literary works from Shakespeare to Tolkien. The list wheeled about the internet with people proudly posting how many of these listed masterpieces they'd read. Some of the emails I saw had people bragging about having read some of the bigger, more important books two and three times! 

There is a kind of shame for not having completed, or even opened the pages of many of the books featured on this BBC list. We assume that those who have read these books are smarter, they're more academic, and are likely to be more successful. While there is no doubt that reading Shakespeare or Moby Dick will open up the mind to language and ideas, do we need to have read either of those books to be smarter, to know language, or to engage in the world of big ideas?

Are the great works of the past really that important? Do we need great novels? Is there a new "brain" emerging that essentially redefines our ideas of literature, creative thinking, and shared knowledge?

I believe Franzen is simply wrong. He's decrying Gutenberg, while at the same time reaping millions from a market that actually is buying his book. At the core of this argument, it seems to me, is the notion of past is nearly always better than the present. I think it's important that we understand history, that we revel in the works of big thinkers, creative outsiders, and intellectually stimulating writers. At the same time, we might need to get comfortable with a world where there is greater emphasis on what's emerging, rather than what has already been. Shakespeare is certainly a revelation of language and ideas, but what if future generations see Shakespeare as merely a curiousity, or see Tolstoy's works as dense,  irrelavent and unnecessary?

I love my books, and read lots of them. I have a Kindle and an iPad, but still find the tactile experience of turning a page to be more rewarding than pushing a button. I own a full set of the Oxford English Dictionary, and love words as if they were soapstone in my fingertips. Still, I don't think it necessarily matters if young people are following their impulses, reading material that is shorter and more to the point, and are actually spending less and less time sitting in front of a television screen or studying the past.  I think it is more likely that young people will have read parts and pieces of more great works, and will have more knowledge about the world than any previous generation. Perhaps we don't need Shakespeare any more, or maybe any of the other "great" works in human history, be it art or music.

I admit that a world without Shakespeare would be a lessor world indeed...but then again, I'm just a middle aged white guy who still likes paper books and printed pages.

 

 

 

Comments

[Chrissy Atchley]

I have also always had a voracious appetite for the written word. For me the love affair with books began as an escape from a very tense household growing up. Every few years I come across some kind of "list" and resolve to read the ones that I have somehow missed. I ask myself "How could I be in my forties and still not have read______? What the hell was I doing when everyone else was reading it?" And then I remember. I was reading Isaac Asimov. I'm sure he is on someone’s list.
I resisted getting any kind of E-reader for a long time. I thought it would somehow change everything that I love about the reading experience, but now I wonder how I ever functioned without it. Franzen's Freedom is in it, but as yet unread. (I have trashy, sex filled, non-sparkly vampire books to read!) I bought it before it was an Oprah selection because I loved The Corrections. That was the book that he refused to let her use for her book club. I wonder why he has changed his tune.

[Scotty Roberts]

I have lamented the technological age, while at the same time freely participating in its benefits. Accessibility, reach, ease with which one can communicate ideas, whether, personal, business, marketing or social.

As an historian and theologian (albeit ad hoc, at times), I, like you, have a deep love and appreciation for the past. However, living and operating from that vantage point could swiftly translate into virtual irrelevancy. Communication of ideas, as well as transmission of pertinent, potent information in a substantive quality is sometimes lost in translation at the fumbling hands of what we now consider to be lesser forms of communication.

No longer does the current generation write letters and essays of eloquent beauty, laced with rich, colorful language - "Standing beneath this serene sky, the broad fields now reposing from the labors of the waning year, it is with great temerity of heart that I raise my poor pen to ink my heart to you..." Etc, etc, etc.

Rather, we are reduced to text messaging shorthand, sound bytes and time oriented composition, all for the sole purpose of quick, succinct, to-the-point brands of speedy communication; the bastard seed of the co-mingling of instant gratification and technological advance.

I can also (accurately) assume that you enjoy the art of cooking as opposed to boxed, processed foods - also a product of our speedy, technological, no-time-to-waste culture. The end result being a progeny of fat, under-nourished children.

Shakespeare is a fine red wine, mellowed with age for decades, while the iPad and Kindle are the pleasure highs of huffing a can of spray paint in the alley, albeit necessary evils in this current culture. I would dare say that my son would be drawn to read more on a Kindle, due to its similarity to a computer game, than he would be to pick up a volume from my bookshelves. So, in the end, perhaps a useful tool in this modern age. My son abhors reading the classics, as they are wordy and clunky, laced with archaic, out-moded language.

So is it relevant to keep the classics alive in an age where they have lost there meaning? Or is the onus on the new thinkers to create and forward new literature that quantifies the past, yet defines the future?

So, we middle-aged dinosaurs have to continually find and create relevant currencies, while at the same time enjoying words, language and the crisp turn of a page from a cloth-bound book.

[ScottyRoberts]

Pardon my typos.

[carr hagerman]

Nicely said Scott. I don't think Shakespeare will be irrelevant any time soon.

I am more interested in the "currency" of simple conversations, and regard them as the highest resolution of data transfer we have.

While classic works can stand on their own as a piece of history, the younger generation isn't spending much time in the past, and certainly they're not buying traditional books. Franzen seems to think, as many others do, that we're all becoming lazy and illiterate, and that modern technology is part to blame. I don't think it's so bad.. The iPhone might be the new Gutenberg, giving us more context than we've ever had, in real time.

So..read, sing, dance, and tinker...and let the world be damned.

[ScottyRoberts]

Amen, Carr.

[ScottyRoberts]

A thought just occurred to me... a journal such as this one is a definitive outcome of this modern age of communication.

I daresay that it would not take on the form it has, allowing for commentary by friends and readers, if it was written on parchment with a quill pen and stuffed in a drawer of your desk for your descendants to find decades down the road.

Truly interactive communication of ideas in one of its best forms.

[Jim Stone]

I have read Shakespeare, performed Shakespeare on stage, and mined Shakespeare's words for various bits at the Minnesota and Wisconsin Renaissance Faires. That alone should dispel the myth that people become smarter because of their association with The Bard Of Avon!