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Having just finished a course on Shakespeare where we read 9 of his plays one might think that I would be done with him for a long time. However, I was delightfully surprised with what I found in this class. Instead of the complicated and dry stories that I was expecting I found something new in Shakespeare. The stories are complex but still interesting and the language is easy to get used to, especially with footnotes. Having said this, I will now give you five reasons to read Shakespeare.

• 1. The stories are amazing. My favorites are tragedies such as Hamlet or King Lear. The plots are engaging and entertaining and so dramatic. There are a few inconsistencies in the plots but they add to the style of Shakespeare.
• Shakespeare leaves unanswered questions. In toay's society we demand answers. If a movie ends with unresolved problems people get angry, but Shakespeare's plays are different. In tragedies most of the characters die in the end, in comedies people get married, and romances have a combo of both. These kinds of endings don't always answer all your questions about what happened and how the characters came to die or fall in love.
• The characters are never perfect. Since this is a play you never know everything that the players are thinking. There are no perfect characters in the plays, they all have flaws and they all make mistakes. Some say one line and others have up to 40% of the dialogue in the play but none are portrayed as the perfect being.
• The language is fun to read. Shakespeare rarely says exactly wht's going on. He uses different styles of writing to make his point. The plays contain songs, soliloquies, prose and verse. Some people seem to struggle with the language but if you get a book with footnotes it makes it a lot easier. The footnotes tell you what some words mean that we don't use or that we use in a different context. If you really struggle with his language there are versions of some of his plays in modern language.
• Shakespeare is hilarious! He makes jokes about all kinds of things in his plays. In most of the plays there is a character called 'Clown' whose job is to lighten the story. They are the only characters that can make fun of royalty in the plays with royalty and they often speak in prose with is pretty straightforward. There are also some really funny sexual jokes (particularly in Antony and Cleopatra) that you may or may not catch.

posted by Teens Online at 3:25     1 comment

On Jan 6 at 2:02, midnight summer wrote:
The only difficult thing about Shakespeare is the language. If you have an OK vocabulary, understanding Shakespeare is easy.

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