“Words, words, words”

The Bard turns 450 this year! I find it pretty amazing that after 450 years we are still reading Shakespeare’s work. I used to wonder what all of the fuss with Shakespeare was about, so I signed up for a class my sophomore year of college. Come my first day, Norton anthology in hand, when I looked around the classroom full of seniors who were rattling off all of the plays they had read, I was embarrassed that I even thought I could attempt to understand Shakespeare’s writing and be on par with these older and more experienced students.

In the iconic play Hamlet, Polonius asks Hamlet, “What do you read, my lord?” Hamlet responds with the famous line, “Words, words, words.” That’s all Shakespeare is really made up of—words—but the Bard is still intimidating. While my Shakespeare class was not my easiest that semester, and understanding all of those words was extremely difficult, the time I put into attempting to grasp the meaning behind each work made it the most rewarding class I have taken.

The reason Shakespeare’s work was able to gain my attention was the ability that I had to relate to the themes and hidden moral and philosophical questions that Shakespeare posed. Shakespeare’s plays have themes we can connect to today, 450 years later, which is probably the most amazing thing about his work! Plays about love, loss, jealousy, money, history, forgiveness, and time just skim the surface of his themes that bridge the gap between Early Modern English writing and modern day life.

Not only has he left us with works that apply to all humans at some point in their life, but he left us with some pretty awesome vocabulary as well! We use more phrases and words in modern English that can be attributed to Shakespeare than you may think. Check some of them about below, and see if you can even guess what play they are from!

It doesn’t take an expert on Shakespeare to know that the legacy he left behind is pretty amazing! Newbies to the author and just general fans like me can look at the list of modern adaptations in film, writing, and on the stage and see that after 450 years the Bard is still creating magic.

In many of Shakespeare’s sonnets, especially Sonnet 60, he wrote about how time destroys all things, but art may have the ability to stand the test of time. Shakespeare has definitely accomplished that with his work, and that is what we will be celebrating in our program, “Shakespeare at 450: A Standing Ovation” on 7/15.

Carol Ann Lloyd Stanger, a Tudor and Renaissance scholar and education specialist at the Folger Shakespeare Library, will be with us to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday and to talk about the legacy he has left on our culture! Get your tickets and learn more here.