Hello,
Now this thread was a thought I had one day when glancing through some of my work from high school, more specifically, a report on William Shakespeare's "The Tempest". For those who don't know, it's about a wizard who has a slave and a daughter on an island, brings a royal ship to the island, and hijinks ensue. If that premise sounds exciting, it isn't, and hasn't been for hundreds of years in my opinion. I don't know how common this is in places outside the U.S, but they do this in America A LOT. And let me tell you, Shakespeare's work hasn't aged well, the old english might as well be a foreign language at this point because even his "humorous" works have lost all their comedic potential as common speech evolves. There was a "widow ditto" joke in The Tempest that no one understood, and the book we had explained it in a lengthy footnote.
I should probably phrase this thread with a bit more clarity, as some classics I'm actually fine with. Tom Sawyer, for example is recent enough to the point where any english speaker can read it and understand a good 85% of it. But books like Shakespeare that require internet access to decode their meaning constantly are on the chopping block today. What do you all think?
Now this thread was a thought I had one day when glancing through some of my work from high school, more specifically, a report on William Shakespeare's "The Tempest". For those who don't know, it's about a wizard who has a slave and a daughter on an island, brings a royal ship to the island, and hijinks ensue. If that premise sounds exciting, it isn't, and hasn't been for hundreds of years in my opinion. I don't know how common this is in places outside the U.S, but they do this in America A LOT. And let me tell you, Shakespeare's work hasn't aged well, the old english might as well be a foreign language at this point because even his "humorous" works have lost all their comedic potential as common speech evolves. There was a "widow ditto" joke in The Tempest that no one understood, and the book we had explained it in a lengthy footnote.
I should probably phrase this thread with a bit more clarity, as some classics I'm actually fine with. Tom Sawyer, for example is recent enough to the point where any english speaker can read it and understand a good 85% of it. But books like Shakespeare that require internet access to decode their meaning constantly are on the chopping block today. What do you all think?