An assignment

Thinking about Shakespeare and why we might need to rethink

Given everyone knows Shakespeare but not everyone reads Shakespeare, I’d better read some Shakespeare myself and figure out what happened.

I had a wonderful time in the session of genres of Shakespeare. To some extent, the limitation of genres has been broken. A play divided into comedy in the past maybe a part of tragedy nowadays. The classification of plays might be a stereotype or a limit kill creativity because the content of plays not the type should be the center of reading.

People can also do something new about the ‘genres’ of Shakespeare, such as to rewrite a tragedy into a comedy or to add some technological gadgets into the play to make it modern or even to make it be a sci-fi.

William Shakespeare died almost 400 years ago while his works are still known by nearly everyone and loved by some people which means his plays stand the test of time. I went to the Globe Theatre to watch Measure for Measure which was written by Shakespeare and found that a lot of people choose to watch it. This is one of the reasons why we need to read Shakespeare.

Shakespeare means a lot to the English world. First, Shakespeare is everywhere in English world including his wise-like lines and his self-made words. Second, Shakespeare’s way of manipulating words is examples for writers whatever language they are writing with.

For the purpose of better understanding and adapting, people need to rethink. Reading Shakespeare in English is quite a challenge because his lines were written in classical English while I am a non-English native speaker learning modern English. So do many foreigners. Therefore, thinking only once is not enough for us to understand it. However, to the non-English native speakers, their different backgrounds may provide a new angle to understand Shakespeare and an opportunity to revive it in different place in different time. While to some English speakers, reading Shakespeare might not be easy or interesting because of the difference between that times and modern times. Otherwise, reading Shakespeare would help them learn what their language was like, what people thought and what society was like at that time. What makes Shakespeare be classic? One of the major reason is his understanding of human nature and writing skills to put characters in struggling situation. Reading Shakespeare at people’s different age is a good way to find what your inner-self is at different time. Love may be the young choose to have while family may be the older to protect. That could be a personal witness of ‘growth’.

Shakespeare is something anyone can read, anywhere, anytime.