Why I Hate Shakespeare*

[*Qualification: I don’t really hate Shakespeare. I merely fail to enjoy his work. But who wants to read a post called “Why I fail to enjoy Shakespeare’s work”?]

For about as long as I can remember, I’ve been hearing about how amazingly awesome William Shakespeare is, the greatest writer ever to walk the Earth, etc., etc. I was forced to read some of his plays and poems in high school. I found them meh. I bet a lot of students find him very meh, but they’re afraid to say so due to all the mobs of Shakespeare fans.

I think he’s overrated by a factor of about a million, and I think we should stop teaching him in high school. Even if we keep teaching literature, which we should do a lot less of, Shakespeare still shouldn’t make the cut.

The Good

Admittedly, he has some very quotable turns of phrase. “To be or not to be”, “a rose by any other name”, etc.

Now to what I don’t like about him.

The Meh

The Language

If you wanted to expose students to some literature that they’ll get something out of, it seems to me that it would be important that they at least be able to understand the literal meaning of the sentences in it. I’ve seen Shakespeare performed, and I can’t understand what the hell these people are saying. If I can’t understand it, most students have no hope.

I don’t know if people really talked like that in Britain 400 years ago, but they don’t talk that way today, and normal (modern) English speakers can’t be expected to follow it. It’s a little better than giving students a play written in Chinese and somehow hoping they’ll learn a lot from it.

Admittedly, it’s significantly more comprehensible if you read it off the page rather than hearing the lines delivered verbally.

Objection: Maybe it’s good for students to have the mental exercise of figuring out Shakespeare’s language.

Reply: This is similar to saying we should give students lots of crossword puzzles and Sudoku puzzles. We don’t need to do that, because there are plenty of actually important things they could learn about the world, using the same amount of mental energy.

The Characters

I think this is my main problem: I never liked any of the characters in any Shakespeare play. I couldn’t relate to any of them, and I didn’t care at all what happened to them. I find them shallow and corrupt in a tawdry way, and I don’t enjoy hearing stories about such people. A story can have some tawdry characters, but I need there to be at least one person that I can empathize with. (I also don’t like mafia movies or shows for similar reasons.)

I’ve heard that great literature deals with themes of universal human interest, but I’m a counter-example to that. Most of the putatively great works of literature are about people and things that I can’t relate to.

Maybe this is an idiosyncratic problem. Perhaps most people can relate to Shakespeare’s characters, or they can enjoy a story even without being able to relate to the characters. But if you’re trying to reach students with literature, I think your best bet is to choose works whose characters are more relatable to people in your own current society.

By the way, maybe one of the reasons I have trouble empathizing with Shakespeare’s characters (besides that they’re cheaply corrupt) is that they don’t talk like people who are having the experiences they’re supposed to be having. E.g., this is supposed to be a man deciding whether to kill himself:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them . . .

I find it impossible to imagine this as a suicidal person talking. I’ve heard Shakespeare described as one of the keenest observers of the human condition, but what observer of the human condition thinks that that is how suicidal people talk?

The Stories

I also didn’t find the plays particularly interesting as stories. I’m not impressed with the idea of someone killing a king so that he can become king, people killing themselves and each other by mistake, etc. (But if you do find those really interesting, I don’t have anything more to say.) I’ve heard many, much more interesting stories in contemporary novels. The stories in the Game of Thrones series are way more compelling. There are also much more imaginative and intriguing stories in science fiction authors, such as Dan Simmons or Greg Egan. I find Shakespeare’s stories boring by comparison.

The Ideas

I don’t find Shakespeare to be full of profound insights either. Here is perhaps his most famous poem:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

This poem strikes me as passionless, and I’m not impressed with its central idea either. It’s a shallow and foolish idea. (I also don’t care that this follows an arbitrary set of rules about rhyme scheme and syllable stress patterns that are required to count as a “sonnet”.) That poem obviously doesn’t give life to anyone, since whomever it was written for – if indeed it was actually written for anyone – is not described at all. There’s nothing eternal about that poem either. Every poem, like everything else in the world, will be washed away with time. You think in 10,000 years people are going to be reading that? In 10,000 years, if the human species lasts that long, people won’t even be able to understand those words.

Shakespeare Isn’t for High School Students

I think if we’re going to give students literature to read, we should take at least three seconds to think about what is most likely to reach them. Giving them a bunch of stuff that they can’t relate to and that just bores them doesn’t accomplish anything.

Shakespeare’s plays were written for people living in England in the 1500’s. Contemporary American high school students are a very different audience. So it is prima facie unlikely that those plays would be among the pieces of literature best suited to reach an audience of contemporary American high school students. If you think they really are well-suited, the most likely explanation of your thinking this is that you’re completely out of touch.

There are many other authors that high school students are far more likely to find meaningful, such as J.D. Salinger, Ayn Rand, Hermann Hesse, Richard Bach, Robert M. Pirsig.

I suppose the objection would be, “But Shakespeare is objectively better than those other authors, and we have to expose students to the objectively best work.” I just don’t think that’s true – either part of that. I don’t see what’s so great about Shakespeare. Other than his skill at coming up with turns of phrase that roll off the tongue, I don’t see anything especially great about his work. I don’t know what great thing you’re supposed to get out of him. (Is it that some people get really intense aesthetic pleasure from his work?) Anyway, I also don’t see why students need to read great literature, as opposed to literature that is going to reach them. What is the benefit of being able to say, “Hey, I read Hamlet in high school. I was totally bored by it, and I don’t remember anything other than ‘to be or not to be’, but I read it!”?