Sharing Shakespeare

For my local sharing objective, I decided to come up with a brief survey on some common misconceptions about Shakespeare and use it as a talking point. The questions are vague and can be argued either way, so my hope was that some of the people I harassed would challenge the questions and/or what I told them were the "right" answers. It worked pretty well. And I tried to work in my individual play as examples for why questions were true or false. The people who didn't care didn't ask for the answers, but those that did led to some good discussion.

So don't judge my flaky questions, they were conversation starters. Here's the survey and a tally of answers I got:

1. T / F Shakespeare wrote original masterpieces
   True:6  False:3
2. T / F Shakespeare was more concerned with crowd pleasing than making deep comments on society
   True:3  False:6
3. T / F Shakespeare’s plays tend to have a clear protagonist and antagonist
   True:6  False:3
4. T / F The best way to study a Shakespeare play is by renting the movie
   True:0  False:9
5. T / F Shakespeare was subject to the cultural views of his day, including racism and elitism
   True:5  False:4

And, when asked, here's the answers I gave:

1. False. In the Renaissance there was no such thing as copyright. Writers borrowed ideas and stories from each other and whoever wrote it best got credit. For obvious reasons, that tended to be Shakespeare. ex. Hamlet is based off an ancient Scandinavian tale, "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet" by Arthur Brooke was Romeo and Juliet's direct source.
2. True. There's not really a way to know his motives, but I lean towards true. All Shakespeare's play are comments on society, but his main audience was the common man. He brought his plays down to the groundling's level with cheap jokes.
3. False. I used Shylock from my play, The Merchant of Venice, as an example for this. His character's are always more complex than just good or bad. The ones who may seem to be the antagonist tend to have bad motives and there's always that moment where you sympathize with the bad guy.
4. True. Shakespeare never meant for his plays to be read. They weren't published for the first time until 7 years after his death. He intended for his plays to be performed, and it is much easier to get the theme and feel of a play from experiencing it than reading it.
5. False. While Shakespeare included the racial and elitist stereotypes of the day in his plays, he almost always goes against expectations. The clowns and low men always seem to know what's going on while the royalty run around with their heads cut off and kill each other. In Merchant of Venice his Christian audience would have instinctually disliked the Jew. But Shakespeare gives Shylock a famous speech that speaks strongly prejudice. "Hath not a Jew eyes?" "If you prick me I will bleed."

Obviously there are some faults in my questioning. And all the arguments are true, but they don't exactly match up with the questions. The funnest part of this assignment was seeing how many people just took my word for it, and who thought about it a little more and challenged what I told them. There was one guy I met, let's call him Joe, who seemed pretty interested in what I had to say and came up with some awesome comments. I guess I should have seen it coming when I interrupted him reading The Aeneid in the CougarEat. Here's as close as I can remember of what Joe said to my answers:

1. Every author has sources and influences.  The way they put the work together makes it their own original. (A good point, although I would argue that most authors today don't use plagiarism as a literary tool)
2. There are specific things in plays meant for royalty, so it wasn't all for commoners (He did, however, consent that I was right on more general terms)
3. Many of them do, but not all (More of a comment on my questioning skills I guess..)
4. When I explained my reasoning to Joe, he agreed that, other than actually going to a play, watching a movie is the best way to go. (I, in turn, argued that movies are much more convenient and easily available than a production of whatever play you happen to be studying.)
5. He had to be subject to them in some degree because he wrote about them (On this one I think we ended up agreeing that Shakespeare was subject to these views in the sense that he understood them, but was able to look past them enough to invert stereotypes and make a point.)

So there you go! I shared Shakespeare with my community! Talking to people about what I'm learning was actually pretty fun. I got the chance to see just how well I could articulate the ideas that have been forming in my head all semester, and I got to see some other people's perspectives as well. Although I have to say, the hardest part about this was probably just sucking it up and walking up to a stranger to ask for their opinion. But it feels like a good learning experience. And somebody out there knows just a little bit more about Shakespeare because of me.