As can be ascertained pretty easily by the title of this blog, I'm one of those weird people that actually enjoys Shakespeare. Liking Shakespeare isn't by itself especially unusual. Lots of people do, for lots of reasons. Most of them are scholarly, or at least pretend to be--trying to interpret the nuances every which way, including the people trying to prove that Shakespeare was someone other than Shakespeare. For me personally, I find the mystery surrounding the man himself kind of interesting, but am not otherwise particularly interested in that facet. I don't even really like the sonnets, though they become a whole lot more entertaining to read once you realize that most of them are addressed to another man. Sonnet Eighteen (they're numbered, not titled, and the numbers are completely arbitrary and have nothing at all to do with continuity or chronological order) begins with the famous lines, 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?/Thou art more lovely and more temperate', which is pretty standard formula for a love poem but the subject being addressed is actually a man.
Whatever this means about Shakespeare himself can only be speculated. It would rather appear that he had some fiery romantic blood in his veins just because a huge chunk of his plays, poems, and sonnets are romantic in nature. But the only thing that tells us is that he was comfortable and talented enough to write about it, and write about it really well. As anyone who has spent any time in fanfiction communities knows, you don't actually have to be a gay man to write convincingly well about gay men.
My interest isn't scholarly, though. It'd be nice to know more about him just because he's so fascinating--or would appear to be fascinating, based on the content of his work, but he appears to be an awful lot of contradictory things, gay and straight and romantic and dark and funny and brutal, based on the content of his work. But we probably aren't going to, so I don't think too much about it other than to scoff and roll my eyes at people who try and assert that someone else wrote it all. My interest is purely literary--I just like his shit. I'm a fan of his work just as I'm a fan of other writers; I don't necessarily like everything he ever created, but most of it is enjoyable.
In some ways I think I'm kind of lucky that I have this kind of interest because it makes it so much easier for me to enjoy his work in any form--reading it for fun, watching performances live or on film, seeing various adaptations of the stories in other settings. I'm not at all concerned with interpreting symbolism that might or might not be there in the first place. So it's just a good read for me. And especially, it means it's okay for me to like re-worked versions of the stories.
There are two camps in Shakespeare's 'fandom' when it comes to the plays being reworked and tweaked to having a different setting than the canon. One group thinks it's good fun, because it shows how the material itself--while the language might be arcane and the references and jokes and puns outdated--is still just as relevant and real and accessible and human today as it was four hundred years ago. The other camp views contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare as akin to, like, raping kittens. The kind of fire-breathing, hateful purism that comes from fans whenever any book is adapted to a film is significantly intensified when Shakespeare is involved.
As with so much else, I don't feel very strongly either way. I've seen good adaptations and I've seen bad ones. 'Ten Things I Hate About You' was based on 'Taming of the Shrew', and I used to like it, but I kinda grew out of it. I love 'The Lion King' but don't really feel it owes anything to being a supposed adaptation of 'Hamlet'. But when the adaptations are good, they're really freaking good.
Anyway. About the time I was learning I enjoyed Shakespeare--thanks to Beatrice and Bennedick in 'Much Ado About Nothing'--the BBC released a series of four films based on four of Shakespeare's plays, set in contemporary Britain. 'Taming of the Shrew', 'Much Ado', 'Macbeth', and 'Midsummer Night's Dream'. I think this was part of why I eventually grew into Shakespeare, because these modern adaptations are actually really amazing and do very splendidly show how the plays are still relevant today. They weren't well-received by a lot of the audience, though, because certain changes were made to each play. But that's part of why I loved them.
People get really worked up whenever source material is tampered with. I never understood that. Some things don't translate well from book to film. Some things are outdated. Petruchio's treatment of Katherine is today classified as abuse. There aren't real witches in the world for an adaptation of 'Macbeth'. So they need to be adjusted. And adjusted they were. Very well. At least, I think so. The BBC made Katherine a career woman who becomes Prime Minister while Petruchio becomes a stay-at-home dad who crossdresses. (Seriously.)
My favourite adjustment was that Hero didn't take Claudio back in 'Much Ado'. Hero always struck me as having no personality. And Claudio is an insecure douche--he proves that time and again. When he doesn't get his way he gets really bitchy. THE PRINCE WOOS FOR HIMSELF, OH NO!! It never sat well with me that after humiliating her at her own wedding in front of everyone she knows by calling her a whore, Hero still thought it would be hunky dory to marry Claudio. Oh my god, girl, this is why women turn up hacked to pieces in trunks at the bottom of the ocean!! Instead of taking him back in the BBC's version, she flat-out turns him down. "Get married? Never in a million years."
I don't like everything Shakespeare ever wrote. But I don't like everything any of my favourite writers ever wrote. That's normal. People pretend you can't be a 'real fan' if you don't 100% love everything. But that's silly. I don't really like the tragedies but I don't like ANYBODY'S tragedies. The history plays are 'meh'. And don't even get me started on 'Titus Andronicus'. You've probably never freaking heard of that play before but it is indeed one of Shakespeare's and it is hands-down the most jaw-droppingly fucked up story in the entire world. It makes 'Psycho' look like 'Sesame Street'. Don't read it. You will regret it. Seriously.
Whatever form it takes, Shakespeare's work has earned a special place in my heart. It's still a shame we know so little about him, but we're so lucky to have so much of what he left behind. You really have no idea just how fortunate we are to have most of his plays--Shakespeare's canon accounts for 15% of the surviving plays from Elizabethan and Jacobean England. He left us two thousand new words and phrases we would be pretty lost without.
So. Whomever the 'real' William Shakespeare was, whatever he was like outside the fantastic realm of writing--I, personally, am grateful.
We all should be.
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