It has been such a very long time since I dusted the proverbial gathering of dirt and grime off my blogging abilities, so this first entry will serve as more of a blogging warm up than a true and actual attempt to analyze and glean information about Shakespeare's works. Nevertheless, through the rust that seems to have corroded my brain over Christmas break, I managed to make some general connections with Hughes introductory essay that strike me as important and consequential.
Hughes pointed out something that I think myself, and many students across the nation who read Shakespeare (forced or otherwise) forget, which is that Shakespeare's plays were designed for entertainment. His livelihood and well being depended on the success of these works and their abilities to draw in crowds, crowds which, as Hughes describes, were a varied collection of the highest educated noblemen in the country and the ignorant, illiterate common men. With such a multifaceted audience to cater to, his success seems all the more astonishing and commendable, and the ways in which he reached this widespread appeal are to be lauded.
Hughes described Shakespeare's process of "finding the common language of the highest and lowest,"going into detail about Shakespeare's ability to bridge the difference between the "high" language and "low language" of the time. It is this ability that interests me most, for it is a talent that seems to have seeped out of modern "highbrow" literature if not all together, than to a drastic amount. I cannot give you statistics or reference actual essays of established literature academics that would agree with me, but what my general sense is on the modern state of fiction literature as a whole, is that there is a startling divide present between the works intended to entertain and works intended to be read as serious and important novels. For example, a book such as
Fifty Shades of Gray, whilst entertaining, does not require the same level of concentration and attentiveness when reading that a Cormac Mccarthy novel demands. It is this disparity between mass entertainment novels and critically acclaimed novels that interests me, for while Shakespeare appealed to the masses and the higher educated with seeming ease, I've found only one genre of modern literature that consistently caters to both the entertainment enthusiast in me while simultaneously satisfying the hypercritical Lit major as well.
It may be considered a travesty by many academics to compare Shakespeare with science fiction writers but that is what I am going to do for the next paragraph or so, and while I wouldn't consider myself widely read in the genre, it is one I will say, as a reader with a nerdy streak, I dabble in quite frequently. What keeps me returning to science fiction is the fascinating interplay between technology, writing technique, and plot. These three threads of science fiction literature get interwoven into fascinating patterns of writing, and at the very best of the genre, produce highly relevant and entertaining works. A good science fiction writer utilizes concepts that are frequently permeated in advanced technology and he or she must explain them in a way that both satisfies the educated yet entertains the masses that read these books for their entertainment and shock value. It is here that I find the similarities between Shakespeare and science fiction writers to lie. Shakespeare had the ability to use language in a way that both satisfied the aristocracy and the common folk, and the best of the science fiction writers wield this power in their hands as well. Science fiction writers create entirely new fantastical concepts that they must somehow connect to the relevant world, just as Shakespeare created new ways of writing English that he had to somehow make relevant to his audience in a way that they would understand.
