To think Shakespeare is boring and crap !

[Lardlizard]

Bloody hate it

It's not as crap as Mrs Browns boys though.

I love some of shakespeare. When we studied it in school we read it in play format so sometimes you had the flow if people were good at it but sometimes not so. Loved hamlet with David Tennant, also Macbeth with Benedict Cumberbatch. If you look on fb Patrick Stewart has been working his way through the sonnets daily and is amazing!

I cannot understand adults exhibiting such antipathy to a playwright . No one is asking you now to go anywhere near any Shakespeare so why the antagonism?

Please don't pass that attitude on to your DCs when they come to learn it at school : it is so unhelpful (likewise, the 'I hate maths' type attitudes)

I don't like Shakespeare either- it is, imo, bloody boring.

We studied it at school and went to see Macbeth as part of it. Deathly dull.

Shakespeare needs to be seen in performance, not read. I took a friend to an open air performance which he only agreed to attend "because of the ambiance". Afterwards he said he really enjoyed it and was really pleased they'd put it into modern language and included modern jokes. They hadn't.

Obviously it's all about opinion. I read one or 2 Shakespeare plays that I thought were good and some that bored me to tears.
I'm intrigued though how it's been a compulsory element in English at school for everyone....like havent there been any other decent playwrights in the last 500 years...?

@MouthBreathingRage, it's not old English, nor medieval English. It's early Modern. It has much more in common with the language we speak than it does with old English. Still, I think it was obvious what you were saying and I'm not sure quibbling over the names really matters!

@OffThePlanet - I know people love the idea that Shakespeare invented loads of words and phrases, but that is really, really inaccurate.

People list all sorts of nonsense as Shakespeare's coinages, and it's just not true. It's part of the myth that we needed one person (or in some version of the myth, two - Shakespeare and Chaucer) to 'invent' English and be 'fathers of literature'. So literature is represented as a great big masculine genealogy, constructed by 'great minds'. It's utter nonsense and has been used to prop up all sorts of nasty, jingoistic ideas (which is why, aside from linguistic inaccuracies, we ought to be wary about it IMO).

I do (sort of) agree with you sarah but I doubt that's why anyone on this thread declares they don't like Shakespeare!

I actually find the 'you simply must see it performed' thing a bit elitist and distancing. The theatre is sadly a middle class (and tourist) preserve these days and I personally like reading (and reading about) Shakespeare. I find his legacy inspiring. And I LOVE teaching Shakespeare : give me that any day over dry English Language comprehension of arcane early 20th century short stories.

On a side note, read Hamnet. It's wonderful.

I decided a few years ago that my life was too short to see any more Shakespeare ! I now only go see the work of live playwrights (or just dead ones, I like Brian Friel a lot). I can appreciate the genius intellectually, but it leaves me cold, I find it boring -even RIII with Richard Lyndsey, Coriolanus with Fiennes. Whereas Equus and others have stayed with me. It’s fine OP!

TBH I find nearly all lit boring and crap. Shakespeare definitely one of the worst culprits. Really have no idea why they insist in inflicting it upon 21st century schoolchildren.

No need for fiction when the world is full of fascinating fact.

Each to their own. I quite like it myself but it's ok that it's not for everyone.
World would be boring if we all like the same things.

Also may I add that you don't have to be academic to understand it or in fact enjoy it.

Well, isn't that lovely?

No room in your world for imagination and creativity?

In my world, there is room for fact and fiction.

Yet another post and run by the OP. 🤷‍♀️

I'm not a big fan of Shakespeare's plays, although I love his poetry. For me the real magic of Shakespeare is the language - the words and phrases we use every day which were coined by him. Read 'On Quoting Shakespeare' by Bernard Levin - I'm not sure if the link below will work.

www.nosweatshakespeare.com/blog/quoting-shakespeare/

@piggy, I agree with the elitism of 'oh you must go to the theatre, dahling' view of things. I know there are more and less accessible performances, but it can feel a bit thoughtless. Besides which some performances are still totally crap.

I wasn't actually claiming anyone had said they didn't like Shakespeare because they think he coined words, though? I was arguing the opposite point, that defending him by saying 'OMG he coined half the English language' is a bit flawed, and it's an argument that comes up over and over.

FWIW I suspect the early Bible translations had a much, much more deep impact on the English language (and often, words and phrases claimed to be 'by Shakespeare' actually come from those earlier translations of the Bible into English). But I wouldn't go around saying 'well, you must read the Bible in the original fourteenth-century language, it's so worthwhile because masses of the words in it are new coinages'. It would be dull.

Oh dear. @janet1267 - that blog is inaccurate.

There are plenty of things that require imagination and creativity that aren't writing.

Saying that you don’t like Shakespeare’s plays when you’ve only read the script at school and never seen them performed is like saying you hate Mozart because looking at his score is dull, never having heard his music played!
Shakespeare performed well on stage is electric. All of human life and emotion is there, both comedy and tragedy. And his use of language is beautiful - many of the speeches are pure poetry.

As I said, I have room for both. I bet you don't like art either.

sarah, he still deployed more words and a richer variety of language than any other writer ever.

Which to some may be a 'bad thing' , of course!

SarahandQuack I must admit, I didn't read the whole thing, I was just looking for the Bernard Levin piece.

I appreciate the Bernard Levin piece might not be 100% accurate, but there's enough Shakespeare in there to show that even if the plays don't always work for the modern reader/viewer, there is a wealth of language that can be appreciated.

some shakespeare is amazing.

I can't stand the sonnets though.

Ibhad to read goethe (german a-levels). those are painful even for native languae germans

It depends how you're taught it I think. I hated the film version of Macbeth we were shown (sections of the Polanski one), but liked it when we read it out. In earlier years, we combined studying a play with a book either based on it, or that had the play as part of the plot.

I enjoyed it far more when I'd learned about the rhythms he used, and how he altered them sometimes to signify status or a state of mind. It's so much easier to understand when you can put the stress in the right place. We don't generally read many plays, so that's a bit of a problem to begin with - we're used to being told a story, not shown it through interactions - then when the speech patterns seem strange it's even harder to follow.

The problem is many people are introduced to Shakespeare by reading it in English class. And yes that's bloody tedious.

Shakespeare was always meant to be performed, not read. I've seen some excellent performances.
OP maybe you could try the BBCs Shakespeare ReTold series from a few years back. It takes the bare bones of the story and modernises it. Then you might see how universal the stories are.