Thanks for sharing! [image: image.png] William Shakespeare’s intelligence stands out amongst his peers. “Shakespeare possessed a large vocabulary for his day, having used 29,066 different words in his plays. Today the average English-speaking person uses something like 2,000 words in everyday speech,” . He is a hero because not only is he a great writer but brilliant as well. “Shakespeare’s talent for weaving personal experience with historical events is legendary. An avid reader and expert observer of the world around him, he apparently saw both sides of every situation and could describe the life of a king as accurately as that of a shepherd. His ability to relate to all walks of life and create realistic male and female characters made him immensely popular in his day,” (Shakespeare). He is a hero because he is intelligent and he also has an excellent writing ability.
Preface to Shakespeare by Dr, Johnson represents a totally wholesome commentary upon Shakespeare, in which Shakespeare has been shown as a true genius, but that genius is not emancipated from Faults, a very common characteristic of mankind. Johnson comments, “Shakespeare with his excellences has likewise faults, and faults sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any other merit.” According to Johnson, Shakespeare’s first and foremost defect is that “he sacrifices virtue to convenience.” It seems that Shakespeare writes without any moral purpose. Johnson also points out that Shakespeare does not observe poetic justice. He did not distribute good and evil justly and even his virtuous characters do not express any moral disapproval of the wicked. He carried his characters indiscriminately through right or wrong, and left their fortune in the hands of Chance. Next Johnson turns his attention towards the plots of Shakespeare’s plays. His plots are usually too loosely constructed and very carelessly pursued that it seems he himself did not always apprehend his own design. He always opted for the easy situations, rejecting the grand exhibitions. “His catastrophe is improbably produced or imperfectly represented.” Another defect in Shakespeare’s plays is that in them no distinction of time or place is observed but the customs, opinions and manners of one age or one country are freely attributed to another. As a result, the criteria of like hood and possibility have been shattered. It is very difficult to determine whether Shakespeare represents the real conversation of his age. His jests are usually gross, his pleasantly licentious, and even his gentlemen and ladies have not much delicacy. But, the reign of Elizabeth is commonly supposed to have been a time of stateliness, formality and reserve. Next Johnson reprehends Shakespeare’s style and expression. According to him, there are many passages in the tragedies over which Shakespeare seems to have labored hard, only to ruin his own performance. Narration in dramatic poetry is unanimated and inactive. So, it is tedious and obstructs the progress of the action. Consequently, this narration must be brief and rapid. But, Shakespeare, for his narration, preferred a disproportionate pomp of diction. Shakespeare does not often maintain a reasonable proportion between his words and the things they express. Most of this censure on Shakespeare’s style and expression is exaggerated. He seems cold, weak, and rather frigid when the highest amount of emotional expression was needed. “A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it.” Shakespeare wrote in what historical linguists now designate as Early Modern English (*c.* 1500–*c.* 1660). For most modern readers, Early Modern English poses enough semantic and syntactic difficulties to require editorial annotation—that swift glance to the bottom of the page that informs us that many familiar words, such as *virtue* and *honesty* and *credit*, had different meanings then. Most readers of Shakespeare do not realize how remarkably fortunate the poet was to come of age when English first blossomed as a great literary language. In Shakespeare’s childhood, as the linguist Jonathan Hope pointed out, Latin was still the language of theology and science, and a peculiar form of Anglo-Norman was used in legal contexts. Written English had not yet achieved standardization in spelling, syntax, or grammatical forms. There was no English dictionary of English. By the end of the 16th century, English was ready for transformation into one of the greatest mediums for the representation of thought, emotion, and complex inner states ever created by any society. FOR ENGLAND HE MAY BE AS A SAVIOUR IN THE MODERN TREND ADVANCE; BUT INDIA HAS TOO MANY GENIUSES AND A PROFOUND LITERATURES, UNCOMPARABLE TO SHAKESPEARE. KAMABANA AND KALIDASAN HAD RENDERED LITERATURES UNCOMPARABLE BOTH Prosaically and poetically blending in dramatically. KR IRS 16423//17423 On Sat, 15 Apr 2023 at 21:56, Rangarajan T.N.C. <[email protected]> wrote: > In Iyau, a single vowel has eight different meanings, including mother- > in-law or beloved snake, depending on the pitch! It would be disastrous for > a man to address his mother-in-law without this knowledge! Even > distinguished linguists have not been able to fathom these pitch > distinctions for years which Iyau children utter effortlessly. > https://newstimenow.com/leave-shakespeare-alone/ > https://newstimenow.com/leave-shakespeare-alone/ > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/CAL5XZopUWxat8qft4tARdrJpRUh6NjigvNKFQ3mo59t5wMWmUw%40mail.gmail.com.
