We might also ask if Shakespeare isn't just for the pretentious "cultural elite" who like to name-drop and wave dainty fans in their faces. Isn't it just so "special" to know something about the "greatest English playwright of all time"?
Yes, there's a lot of baggage that seems to hang over Shakespeare, even if he seems as popular as ever. ("Where are those Cole's notes? I don't understand a word they're saying!") The proper bottom line is: if we give up our fears of Elizabethean language (which is actually quite beautiful) and cultural pretension, does this Renaissance guy have anything meaningwise to say to us? Can he inspire you or I into asking new questions of ourselves, or of offering transcendental images of hopeful spirituality for our lives that sometimes seem like episodes of quiet desperation?
I personally don't know the person or works of Bill Shakespeare real well. Someone I'm learning to know a little, 'ol Ralph Waldo Emerson, thought a lot of him. In fact, he wrote a whole essay on him in his "Representative Men" series. Shakespeare, like Emerson, was a Platonist. That is, he believed, like Plato, that everything in this familiar, material, sensate world we tend to call reality....is really illusion! And that there is a more real world behind "everything" that matters more...and that corresponds - usually paradoxically - with everything we do here on this material plane. It is only through moving through to higher and higher consciousness levels in ourselves do we understand ANYTHING of this mysterious other "Reality".
And Shakespeare was called by Emerson a "man of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity some furlongs forward into Chaos." In other words, Shakespeare through his keen insight into human nature saw deep into what makes us tick, especially why we are so ambigious, enigmatic creatures who live unpredictable yet so predictable lives.
Hamlet, universally called Shakespeare's greatest, is interpreted various ways. A tragedy about the karmic consequences of spiritual procrastination, Oedipal compulsions, real character formation vs illusory madness, coming to terms with suicidal introspection, or murderous revenge as the lesser of two evils. I'm looking forward to discussing what we individually see as its key meaning. At the moment I like the prism of seeing the play developmentally: of becoming aware that there are opposing natures within us..and being forced by circumstances to inwardly struggle and then to choose the courageous over the comfortable, the dignified over the cowardly. Hamlet questions his own motives alot, perhaps to the fault of being passive or remaining falsely tied to illusions. Yet it is through this constant questioning, and checking out his "reality", that he resolves to act despite the outward appearances that he has or soon will lose everything he has! There is something to be learned about personal integrity in this film! I would like to learn more!
A FEW QUESTIONS: