Unit 5: Vocabulary from Readings 2

Misunderstandings and missed communications now come in entirely different flavors. We are all in touch all the time, and the confusions that blossom from that are not quite the ones the Bard guessed at. Autocorrect replaces malapropism.

To make it through his works, high school students are forced to consult books like “No Fear Shakespeare,” which drains all the poetry out in the hopes of making him moderately comprehensible.

“But Shakespeare is beautiful! Shakespeare is life glimpsed through the cut glass of poetry!”

Bardolatry seems infinitely old, but it is of comparatively recent vintage.

The apotheosis was not instant.

The sonnets weren’t in vogue for years.

Shakespeare has only gradually clawed his way up to the pinnacle of English letters, shoving Chaucer and Tennyson and Melville and Dickens down whenever they got grabby and even elbowing Jane Austen from time to time.

He’s an awfully hard man to nail down. As a historical figure, he is proverbially skittish.

Besides, the man was obviously a hack.

Nobody is as prolific as Shakespeare who thinks he’s producing Great Lasting Works of Genius.

Stephen King could learn a thing or two from Shakespeare when it comes to pleasing the groundlings.

Shakespeare offers a roadmap to the human. And he does it in verse—sometimes tightly knotted little ornate gardens of verse like Midsummer Night's Dream, other times vast prosy expanses like Hamlet.

In their proper place, the bright lines that have since sunk into cliche still retain their power to dazzle.

Write what you know? Shakespeare adamantly didn’t.

The British Museum show, which runs through Nov. 25, combines artifacts from Shakespeare’s time—including the only surviving manuscript in the playwright’s handwriting—with recorded readings by actors to evoke an era that seems both familiar and alien.

In Shakespeare’s day, London was just beginning to attract people from around the world, emerging as the center of a nascent empire.

"As the world comes to London in 2012, this Olympic summer, we are going to look at how the world came to London and how London saw the world 400 years ago,” said Jonathan Bate, co- curator of the exhibition.

There’s King Henry V’s jousting helmet, a bear skull excavated from the site of an Elizabethan theater—where bear-baiting went on alongside drama—and an iron “witch’s collar” and metal gag used to punish women accused of sorcery.

There’s King Henry V’s jousting helmet, a bear skull excavated from the site of an Elizabethan theater—where bear-baiting went on alongside drama—and an iron “witch’s collar” and metal gag used to punish women accused of sorcery.

It is hard to nail down the secret of Shakespeare’s genius. It rests on some combination of the exuberance of his language and the resonance of the human predicaments he depicts, from lovers battling family disapproval to kings struggling to live up to the burdens of power.

It is hard to nail down the secret of Shakespeare’s genius. It rests on some combination of the exuberance of his language and the resonance of the human predicaments he depicts, from lovers battling family disapproval to kings struggling to live up to the burdens of power.

It is hard to nail down the secret of Shakespeare’s genius. It rests on some combination of the exuberance of his language and the resonance of the human predicaments he depicts, from lovers battling family disapproval to kings struggling to live up to the burdens of power.

"The great thing about Shakespeare is that he speaks to everyone,” Venkatrathnam said. “Regardless of your political or ideological position, you can find something that speaks directly to you. To me, he is the universal philosopher.”