Rinser is actually quite popular in many European and Asian countries, just not in the U.S. My favorite “Mitte Des Lebens” - Middle of Life - published as Nina in the U.S. is a million+ seller. I feel that U.S. education can really benefit from more translated literature - particularity those that can startle teenagers’ soul like “Demian” or “The Fruits of the Earth” - so they have something better to relate than vampire romance novels but that’s another story.
Hamlet as the title is an amazingly aesthetic play and its effect on English language art is unique as you described. I agree that Hamlet is “substantial” in that aspect.
But I disagree it as the most powerful representation of modern consciousness. Hamlet’s pain is is within his family. The justice of revenging his father is too narrow, too personal and too simple dimension that I can’t relate myself to his pain. His uncle killed his father to grab the power. Hamlet was very angry and revenged him and accidentally killed or let die everyone in the family. What do I think of that? Who cares of their little family dispute? Character like Nina would cry a bit maybe, and then move on to what she can do for Danes.
Hamlet may is the origin of modern sense of individual psychology but that’s just historical relevance. Even as an “individual” psychology apart from ethics and social justice, it’s pale compare to Camus’ “The Stranger” or Hesse’s “Steppenwolf.” And that’s just natural result of it being written to be played on a stage rather than to be read through sleepless nights. Could you be immersed into Hamlet’s character when you read it as a young adult? I couldn’t possibly be.
Being written to be played on a stage for simple entertainment is the core reason why I think Shakespeare weight on English literature educational canon is too heavy. The BBC Television Shakespeare (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Television_Shakespeare) is amazingly entertaining to watch and that’s how Shakespeare is supposed to be in my opinion, apart from being briefly introduced in a high school English class, slightly covered by college English majors, and researched in depth by a small number of scholars.
Actually, I think it’s questionable whether Hamlet was really written to be played on a stage. I have never seen a good production of it (and I have seen a bunch of productions of it, some with very famous actors and directors). And almost all of those productions did some significant editing of the text to shorten the play. It’s practically unplayable as written.
I really don’t understand the rest of your criticism. That “Hamlet’s pain is within his family” hardly disqualifies it as a representation of modern consciousness; it took another 300 years for general culture to assimilate that insight fully. (Which is why Hamlet is far more popular now than it was in the 100-200 years after it was written.) And at the same time, it hearkens back to some other “family” disputes that have resonated strongly throughout much of civilization as we know it: Especially Clytemnestra and Orestes and Electra, but also Abraham and Isaac, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Leah and Rebecca, Moses and Miriam, David and Jonathan, Menelaus and Helen, Achilles and Briseis and Patroclus, Oedipus and Jocasta and Antigone, Odysseus and Penelope and Telemachus, Arthur and Mordred, Wotan and Brunnhilde. And many other fathers killed, unfaithful mothers, and sons sacrificed to something. But the focus of Hamlet is not Hamlet avenging his father; it’s Hamlet coming to terms with his own indecision, fear, and sense of inadequacy, and trying to act in a way he considers honest.
Which, of course, is why in the past 15 years both Stephen Greenblatt and Harold Bloom – both enormous brand-names in academic literary studies – have each published a book-length monograph on Hamlet, following on Helen Vendler’s – another ginormous brand – book on Shakespeare’s sonnets. Greenblatt, probably the most influential academic of the past 30 years, is primarily a Shakespeare scholar, and has written numerous books about Shakespeare, although recently he has turned to Latin literature. Northrop Frye wrote about Shakespeare. George Steiner. Lionel Trilling. John Hollander. Arguably, you don’t get to be a brand-name literary scholar in the Anglophone world without weighing in on Shakespeare.
Tolstoy didn’t like Shakespeare, for much the same reasons as @SculptorDad .
BBC’s version of Hamlet that I mentioned above is at least nearly complete, and the acting is superb, especially Claudius / Ghost by Patrick Stewart. If you didn’t find it good then perhaps I am too biased as a Star Trek fan. I also love 2011 Macbeth by Patrick Stewart. Anyways, I love the acting and the script as played and don’t think the script itself should be the core mandatory English literary canon.
With your additional explanation, I think perhaps you are right and my criticism was undue and based on my narrow personal taste. I am no expert in neither literature nor English which is my second language.
However, Hamlet was my best example. Shakespeare also includes bunch of literal comedies that are fun, but unbearably light to be considered as canon for general education.
" it took another 300 years for general culture to assimilate that insight fully. "
General culture also advanced so much during that 300 years and produced wealth of great literature that has more literary value to be studied by young people for far greater benefit than Shakespeare, except for historical significance.
“Clytemnestra and Orestes and Electra, but also …”
My sentiment to those are similar to Shakespeare. Great historical significance and good fun, but lacking substantiality that modern literature gives.
“Hamlet coming to terms with his own indecision, fear, and sense of inadequacy”
And I feel that’s really selfish small minded and/or one-sided, single dimensioned for my taste, as a literature. Even as an “individual psychology,” it’s not complex enough as many modern literature are even though it is historically significant.
What Shakespeare demonstrates is that human nature hasn’t changed much from 400-500 years ago. Similarly, Plato’s Dialogues demonstrate that human nature hasn’t changed much from 2400 years ago. The behaviors and motivations discussed in those works are almost exactly the same as behaviors and motivations that apply today . That’s what I found so interesting about them. Human nature is deeply-rooted and not easily changed.
I don’t think you can get a good understanding of Shakespeare, or Plato, unless you study a substantial body of their work. Reading only one or two Shakespeare plays, or only one or two of Plato’s Dialogues, makes it hard to appreciate their deep insight into how humans operate.
“I don’t think you can get a good understanding of Shakespeare, or Plato, unless you study a substantial body of their work.”
Of course you cannot. But should you? Why can’t you try to understand human nature with books other than Shakespeare? “To Kill a Mockingbird” that my 10th grader studied would give more in my opinion. I can definitely respect Atticus Finch. Not because he was righteous, which he was, but because I could feel the depth of his philosophy. With most of great literature I respect and/or feel philosophical depth. With Hamlet, I feel like, boy, grow up.
“Similarly, Plato’s Dialogues demonstrate that human nature hasn’t changed much from 2400 years ago.”
I don’t think Plato deserves to be put in the same level with Shakespeare when it comes to human nature. Although I only read Republic once, that alone taught me the majority of what I know about arguments and gave me the foundation of thinking. It was one of the first philosophy books I read. Alas, Plato is not, as most of thinkers are not, English so that particular author would be out of question. Beside, most people I know found it rather boring. I doubt it will lit a fire into too many young adults. Also we would be crossing into philosophy and no longer talking about literature canon.
At the risk of sounding like an intellectual snob, you really do have to read a fair amount of Shakespeare and Plato to “get them.” It may not be worth the effort for most people, but reading only one or two items of each is like trying to see what’s in a room through a keyhole.
I never meant to imply that all you only had to read Plato and Shakespeare to understand human nature. Rather, I think that they are two authors whose body of work does a better job than anyone else I’ve read at demonstrating human nature.
But is the purpose of an English undergraduate major to understand human nature, or is it to give a solid foundation in the development and breadth of writing in the English language? Or is it fancy law school prep, to give you the tools to read deeply and critically and quickly? I wasn’t an English major so my opinion is probably much less informed than yours. Maybe different institutions can create an English major with different purposes?
juillet, as an older person who has gone back to school to study English, I disagree with some of your opinions on the continuing existence of the canon. I don’t think that a canon has solidified as yet, at any rate, with changes that have happened in the last few decades still rippling out. Different schools and different professors have very different reading lists for the same class, for instance.
And I was not clear on my views on the expansion of the curriculum beyond dead white males. Of course this is an improvement, and I have greatly enjoyed global literature, literature by women and people of color (preferring them to be in the mainstream though, I have a problem with “women’s lit”) and the social history of ordinary people as well (which was not taught in the early 60’s in my experience).
But it isn’t clear, for instance, what books or authors should be read and studied to be an “educated person.” As this thread illustrates.
English majors have lots of purposes within the same department. You can be completely focused on the literature itself, and maybe on its traditions, without giving a hoot for any moral lessons or psychological insight it offers (except insofar as offering moral lessons or psychological insight is part of the package of literary tropes a work represents). You can be interested in literature as an especially rich, complex, and well-preserved record of popular or high culture in a specific historical era, and also in the methods used to extract cultural information from literary works. You can be interested in the rhetorical techniques of narrative, poetry, and literary analysis, both for themselves and historically. You can be interested in aesthetic philosophy. You can be completely focused on moral lessons and psychological insight, and other substantive impact literature may have on the world. You can be interested in literature as a subset of something else, like feminism, communism, national identity. You can be interested in the psychology and methodology of reading and interpretation. You can be trying to learn how to write narrative, dialogue, poetry. You can think it’s really fun. You can be trying to get good grades so you get into law school or that consulting firm.
Re canon: I don’t think the canon is quite as dead as some people imply, but it’s a lot harder to see what it is than it was 30 years ago. And there’s a separate question of the “English” canon or the “Anglophone” canon. I think educated people, at least in this country, are expected to have read, or at least to know something about, highlights of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, the Gospels, Psalms, Song of Songs, some of Paul’s letters), the Odyssey, Shakespeare’s major works, Austen, Dickens and Dickenson, Whitman, Moby Dick, and some somewhat shifting set of common 20th Century works, several by people of color. Whether you still need to have read Beowulf, Chaucer, Donne, Spenser, Milton, Pope, Sterne, Wordsworth, Emerson, Keats, Yeats, Tennyson, Browning, Eliot . . . . There are lots of open questions there.
I think the point is that the reason that Shakespeare’s works are considered so important is because of the ways in which they have influenced English literature and the arts throughout history, down to today. The importance and impact of Shakespeare’s work is meaningless unless you can read some of the other works that reference it and were influenced by it. They used Walcott as an example of one, but I don’t think they specifically meant Walcott in and of himself - but works by modern writers that were influenced by Shakespeare’s work.
I think Hamlet is fascinating precisely because of its probing of consciousness and cognition and the disconnect between Hamlet’s thoughts and actions, and I agree that the interesting bits really occur within his mind (and other characters’). I do think it is too much to say that Hamlet is the origin of either modern art or individual psychology. Hamlet itself was based on the Scandinavian legend of Amleth, and philosophers had been opining on the nature of human consciousness far before Hamlet, and it’s likely Shakespeare drew from some of that work himself when developing Hamlet’s nature. Rather, I think it’s better to say that Hamlet had huge, outsized influence on both. It’s true that Hamlet did have a huge influence on psychoanalysis during the early 20th century, as a lot of psychoanalytic scholars analyzed the play and used it to influence their work (Lacan, Freud, Ernest Jones).
Sure, but that’s always been true. The idea of a Western canon of literature has always been amorphous and fuzzy, and professors and teachers have always chosen different works to represent what people “should know” or “should read” in order to be scholars (of English, or just urbane and educated people in general). I do think it’s true, though, that many professors are starting to question the canon far more than they had prior to the 1960s, and are starting to take out old stalwarts that almost everyone teaches and replace them with different works. And part of that is because of the growing recognition of how much the Western literary canon, as previously sort-of defined, left out.
I don’t think any of those purposes are mutually exclusive. I’d argue that the purpose of an English major is all of those things (leaving out the “fancy law school prep” clause - thinking and reading deeply and critically is important in a variety of careers - but you can certainly use it for law school prep!). I mean, English is a humanities field, and the humanities are about studying human society and culture. It’s my personal opinion that it’s not really possible to study English literature for only the writing, reading deeply, and thinking critically parts without the human society and culture parts - because writers don’t write about nothing. They write about people. All of the works of English literature - whether it’s Shakespeare or a romance novel at the grocery store checkout - are about how humans interact with one another, and live out culture and life. So you’re going to get it by accident, even if your original purpose is just the rhetorical bits.
Even if you want to learn about how to write narrative, dialogue, and poetry, or engage with rhetorical technique and analysis, you’re interested in the ways in which writers use language to influence people, change their emotions, impart something to them - possibly with the goal of being able to do that skillfully yourself one day. It’s an enterprise that, in my opinion, is inextricably intertwined with humanity and culture.
Buuuuuuut I’m super biased because I was a psychology major so everything is about people to me
