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/lit/ - Literature

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12427064 No.12427064 [Reply] [Original]

For those of you from England: What’s the reputation of Shakespeare like in England? Is he taken for granted or do people generally have a close relationship with his work? Around what age generally do schoolchildren start to study him?

>> No.12427146

Schoolchildren study him from about 12 yr. 95% of the population find him incomprehensible and boring. The other 5% of intellectuals and theatre lovers obviously worship him

>> No.12427163

>>12427064
>What’s the reputation of Shakespeare like in England?
Always boasted about. His plays are on all the time, they're made into movies or TV movies and he'll always come in a historical doc about the Tudors really.
>Is he taken for granted or do people generally have a close relationship with his work?
Feel like this one is opinionated, but I'd say taken for granted. That's mainly because of his huge contribution to language so his plays aren't really read or watched outside educational context (in spite of what I said above). You'd more likely get asked "You've never read Harry Potter?" than "You've never seen Hamlet?" There's an interest in modern entertainment over relics of the past as it seems everywhere else, for instance with crime shows/movies/fiction (which I hate), but people come back to Shakespeare, if only for key scenes and quotes.
>Around what age generally do schoolchildren start to study him?
Fifteen going on sixteen, though I haven't kept up with schooling so might be a bit younger.

>> No.12427233

>>12427064
The only english writer outside of JK Rowling that people will reliably have heard of. Secondary school english will likely have you study 2 or 3 of his plays and the occasional adaptaion of one of his comes up but that's really where it ends for most of people.

>> No.12427284

Everyone knows him, most people hate him because they had to study him at school and couldn't understand his writing, but everyone still uses him as the go-to example of a 'great writer'.
Is it like this for Cervantes, Tolstoy, Dante and Melville in their respective countries as well?

>> No.12427321

>>12427284
In Italy it's actually Manzoni,but Dante too.

>> No.12427608

>>12427284
USA it's Stephen King or worse, not Melville

>> No.12427790

Everyone knows him but studying him at school seems to put most people off him for life.
My class studied part of MacBeth when I was about 10 or 11, and we got taken to see A Midsummer Night's Dream in a local theatre about the same time.
My dad knows two or three sonnets off by heart for some reason and I'm not sure why.

>> No.12427970

>>12427321
I'd say Dante is more similar to what the other anon described, especially in being difficult to understand (The Betrothed isn't hard, not even for the average high schooler). Plus we study him for three years, as opposed to just one for Manzoni, do we not?

>> No.12428010

>>12427284
I've only heard online of moby-dick being part of a curriculum
Plurality of authorship has been Shakespeare, and various others, including a fair amount of contemporary "literature"

>> No.12428034

>>12427284
>Cervantes
Yeah pretty much

>> No.12428134

>>12427284
Isn't he becoming the go-to writer to attack for being an old white man, overshadowing "writers of colour," and being imposed upon a "diverse" society that apparently wants to move on from such things? The woke curriculum makers of the near future might remove him altogether.

>> No.12428235

>>12428134
Do you mean Shakespeare specifically, or all white men?

Believe it or not, but even among the left wing academics in the UK he’s still heralded as something of a visionary. A big part of it is the fact that his female characters are no less interesting or powerful than the men- Cleopatra is one of the most well-written women to ever grace the stage.

>> No.12428270

>>12427064
His work is crap and outdated.
We study David Beckham's autobiography at A level now

>> No.12428280

>>12428134
Shut the fuck up faggot. Nobody thinks this

>> No.12428312

>>12428134
Even the common complaint you can levy against others in the canon, that they're for the patrician literate elite only, doesn't stand with Shakey. His plays are and were loved by both the elite and the parsnip-scoffing plebs alike. He transcends.

>> No.12429413

>>12427284
Normies don’t know who Melville is in the United States. The go to answer usually Mark Twain or Hemingway

>> No.12429969

>>12428134
No because he was a secret Catholic and a pederast

>> No.12430640

>>12428134
No, not outside of your bubble, anyway.