Do you agree that Shakespeare was a product of his time whose plays have little relevance for an audience today? You should centre you answer on King Lear, but you may also refer to other Shakespeare plays if you wish.

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Literature, Drama and Audience (SS-0116-M)

Supplementary Assessment

UB - 02011477

Do you agree that Shakespeare was a product of his time whose plays have little relevance for an audience today? You should centre you answer on King Lear, but you may also refer to other Shakespeare plays if you wish.

For as long as formal education has existed in Britain it has been a largely standard assumption that teaching the works of William Shakespeare is relevant and necessary.  Perhaps the relevance of his writing is taken for granted, perhaps it is necessary to re-examine the role of Shakespeare for the modern audience. There are indeed many people who question the relevance of this 440 year old playwright to a 21st century audience, taking it even as far as perhaps the greatest heresy of all, questioning the necessity of GCSE pupils learning Shakespeare at all. This “proposed vandalism from the policymakers” (Guardian 09/02/01) is opposed wholesale by supporters of “the Bard” ranging from critics to academics to thespians. However can it be said there is truly grounds for the importance attributed to the works of Shakespeare, or is he, rather like Beefeaters and Ravens at the tower, an anachronistic national obsession really only appreciated in the modern era by history hungry tourists?

The most obvious first point to consider in answering this question is the undeniable fact that the intended audience for Shakespeare’s work was late 16th century Elizabethan England and not early 21st century Blairite Britain. Anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of history would be more than aware that much has changed in society since this time. Taking what is widely acclaimed as Shakespeare’s crowning artistic achievement, King Lear, as an example (as is the intention of the majority of this work), a strong case can perhaps be made to say that much of the intended theme and content is, by and large, irrelevant to a modern audience.

The standard response to any critic of Shakespeare who is daring enough to call into question the relevance of his writing is to reiterate the timeless relevance of the central themes of the plays, facilitated by the metaphorical style, these themes are said to speak to audiences across the ages.

“Each play of Shakespeare is the development of a metaphor or group of metaphors. There is a matrix out of which feeling finds words, emotions take shape and voices become characters. That which is referred to most often- in metaphors, images, allusions and statements- is usually for Shakespeare what is significant”

                                                                        (Rehder 1980 p56)

However simply because the theme is, arguably, not reliant on the context or overall setting, and that this theme is relayed by metaphor and not in descriptive prose, is not perhaps justified cause to say that the theme itself will necessarily be relevant; or indeed that the metaphorical vehicle by which it is conveyed will be relevant or appreciable either. For example one of the more central themes of King Lear, as with all the tragedies, is death. Death as a theme can be said to have starkly contrasting meaning and therefore perhaps relevance for a modern audience as compared to a Shakespearean one. Today death is a rare and terrible tragedy of momentous importance in the life of an individual, in 16th century England with its plagues, starvation, infant mortality and state violence; death was practically an everyday occurrence in the lives of Shakespeare’s original audience (as argued by Schneider 1995).  

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Therefore to take Schneider's wider point further; can death mean the same today as it did in Elizabethan times? And if Shakespearean tragedy is reliant on death as its theme, and the metaphors which convey this theme based on this conception, can that theme be relevant to a modern audience? The behaviour of Shakespeare characters can be said to always relate back to their relationship with the central theme. Therefore it may be that a modern audience would look to the hubris and lack of foresight displayed by Lear and Gloucester throughout the early sections of the play, ...

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