Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Shakespeare Rant

Today in my English class we started reading the play "Macbeth" by William Shakespeare. This play is supposedly a classic, and one of the best pieces of literature of all time. Well, yeah, it probably would be, if it made any fucking sense whatsoever. I do not understand how English teachers expect all tenth-graders, including the ones in NON-ADVANCED, NORMAL CLASSES to be able to piece their way through over two hundred pages of Shakespearean bullshit. I'm not trying to say that Shakespeare was a bad playwright; I'm just saying that classical poetry is a lot different from classical music - Today, J.S. Bach's music is still good, and people can still easily appreciate it. People can't easily appreciate Shakespeare anymore. People can't even understand Shakespeare anymore. The English dialect he uses in his plays is so different from the way we talk now that it might as well be a different language. I score in the 99th percentile on the reading comprehension section on standardized tests, and I can still stare at a page of "Macbeth" for half an hour and still have no clue what in the hell is going on. Reading Shakespeare is a lot like learning Latin - it might have been useful if you were born in a different century, but nowadays it's one of the most pointless thinks you do in school, which is saying a lot.