Excellence and Shakespeare
Academics and scholars strive for excellence. You proved that today with our dialogue during the rhetorical prompt discussion. I appreciate your willingness to accept (and conquer) a new challenge!
P.S. I'm reading the lit analysis papers right now... and they're good!
P.P.S. So yeah, Shakespeare strived for excellence (most would agree that he succeeded)... I'm curious to know based upon our in-class writing today ("how does The Scarlet Letter define Hawthorne as a writer?") about how many of you use one of Shakespeare's plays to define him? If so, which would it be, and why? If not, why can't a solitary text serve an author's purpose? The more I think about it, unless the author's purposes change (which they very well may), the more I believe that an advanced writer should be able to convey his/her point succinctly in one text. Agree? Disagree? I anxiously await comments (could be in blog form, email form, or paper form).
posted by D. Robin @ 8/28/2006
3 comments
3 Comments:
I kind of agree with Julie, but not completely. Each text conveys a message; we can establish that. However, in order to completely understand this message or the author's purpose, we have to look at several texts where examples are given. Through each example, we learn more of the message and get the idea down. One text gives you a framework; you need the rest of them to establish evidence and support for that message and purpose.
For example, I'll use poetry since it's one of the literary sources I like to use. One poem conveys an author's dissatisfaction with life overall. What is he complaining about though? Politics? Society? Religion? That one poem doesn't give you enough information. You look at other poems of his or hers, of the same time frame and you then comprehend that they hate bland food or something else.
Shakespeare is too hard to narrow down in one work. Romeo and Juliet showed how he likes to write his tragedies, and Julius Caesar and Henry V how he liked to write historical plays. The only thing I can get from each one is that he's stuffy and too willing to please everyone. From reading all of the, I can tell he likes to put humor in the sad and irony into all.
I still stick with my reasoning, although it's a convoluted mess.
I'm not sure I'd agree with the idea of Romeo and Juliet as the most significant of Shakespeare's works, by any definition. I'd consider it more of the most popular because it is mainly pathos and people like pathos. They don't like logos or ethos because it concerns thinking, and no instinct. Because pathos is in the heart, and we all should have one, we can conclude what each person was feeling at the time, and why they did whatever it was they did.
In truth, I don't think Shakespeare is a good author anymore. I'm sure he was excellent in his time and some of his works are classics and I understand why we read them, and I like the fact that we do, but he was a primitive writer. He wrote what he had to in order to survive. Today's authors still need that support, but they don't have to strive so hard to get it with the wide audience available. We're more open, and some of today's authors are much better.
Now, here's the food for thought: would Shakespeare have rewritten his works if he didn't use them to support himself or make him more popular? You can try and deny it, but that's what he did. Otherwise, we wouldn't have those scenes for the underlings, adding their type of lewd humor to the story. What would the endings be like? Would his stories still be defined by comedies or tragedies or histories? WOuld he have rewritten history in his plays, letting his best man win?
Well, after reading all of the other comments, I don't feel like I can add too much, but I'll give it a shot.
I agree with those that say that you cannot use just one piece of literature to define an author because I think, like Joanna, there is a big difference between Shakespeare's message in his tragedies, his comedies, et cetera. However, if you put the messages he puts out in all of his works, including his sonnets, I think then you could start to define his purpose.
There are some authors, such as George Orwell who wrote books to show his own political thoughts, so I suppose in that case it might be possible to define him through Fahrenheit 451 or 1984... But I'm not sure where I stand on that.
Interesting discussion topic either way. :)
~ Emily
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