Richard III
"containing his treacherous plots against his brother Clarence, the pittiefull murther of his innocent nephewes, his tyrannicall usurpation, with the whole course of his detested life and most deserved death" (Subtitle of the 1597 edition.)
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What Hacker News says
- I dunno (I'm being kinda folksy!). It was just arguing and not really qualifying as a refutation, which generally but not always implies proof. (I did look that up to check my suspicion, but in a big dictionary.)
I would be interested in people's experiences, good and bad, with having (not) gone to college, and serious analysis - everyone seems to be trying to shut down any serious discussion and exploration.
I went to college and I've had many times that I wished I'd studied harder. I've also wished at times that I skipped college then and went later in life, when I would benefit far more. I haven't wished that I didn't go; I learned so much that forms my understanding of the world, my thinking skills, etc.; I would be a different person without it. You can't tell me that I didn't benefit greatly from college but I'm just one person. But can you tell anyone that they studied for four years, hard, and didn't learn much? That's a big stretch for anyone; you need to learn enough to pass ~32 classes at various college levels, and that's a minimum.
Many people say here that 'I didn't go and I'm fine'. Fine isn't the question; nobody said we'd die without it, but that's not our standard for our choices. Each path leads to different collections of outcomes, better and worse and completely different, and we have blind spots about what the other path could be like (having no experience of it). Maybe college emphasizes different skills, develops different tools, with different advantages and disadvantages, as an example of how that would work.
I also wonder how much HN readers think of or have experienced STEM only. The humanities is more important (unpopular, I know, and both are essential IMHO); it addresses the most critical issues in the world and life, the ones beyond quantitative understanding, which is most of them.
I watched a bunch of Shakespeare plays recently, fictionalized histories of Rome and England [0]. From them you learn more about our current society and humanity in general, including today's crazy disfuntion, the mis/disinformation and people's responses, than from all the quantitative research combined; art is a mirror that looks into ourselves. And as objects of another human being's creation, they are incredibly inspirational and beautiful. I'm wiser and have grown since a week ago. Would I turn to Shakespeare and get so much from the plays without studying literature in college? I doubt it, though that's just me.
[0] Without knowing the reader's experience with the Bard, let me recommend Julius Caesar especially, also Henry VI Part 2 and Part 3, and of course their sequel, Richard III. Richard II is good too. I'd skip Henry VI Part 1 but read a synopsis as context for Part 2: Part 1 is clearly substandard IMHO and, it turns out, is believed to be mostly written by a collaborator, Christopher Marlowe. It does constrast the difference between an excellent playwright of their day using the same forms and an all-time genius of character and language.
- I had to visit the Shakespeare festival in Ashland, OR many times as a kid. My parents didn’t push attendance on me, but nor did my dad explain why Shakespeare is so great. “It’s classic literature.” “How? What makes it better than Isaac Asimov or the Hardy Boys?” “It’s just great literature.” I found this frustrating and started telling people that Shakespeare should be taught as a second language (a joke one of my college professor friends likes to repeat even now).
Fast forward 35 years. I have come to enjoy reading Shakespeare on my own.
(Why is it great literature? Incredible prose, insane plot lines, and way way underrated comedy. Some of the best comedy I have ever encountered is in Shakespeare’s so-called tragedies, a situation that very much matches my own tragedy-marred life. Reread “Hamlet”, “Richard III”, and “MacBeth” for a barrage of hilariously inappropriate one-liners.)
Anyway, a decade and half ago wife wants to take the kids, ages 7 & 9, to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival. I tell them they don’t have to see any of it. I tell them I didn’t enjoy anything but the comedies as a kid but that the staging and costumes were always good. No pressure at all; they are welcome to hang out in the hotel room with iPads or to watch TV, a luxury they lack at home.
They go see everything, including histories and tragedies. And they totally get it. Apparently my children don’t know they’re not supposed to understand the antiquated English, because halfway through their first play (“Merchant of Venice”) I am sometimes having to ask them what’s going on, and my 7 year-old patiently and correctly gives me the 411. They attend pre-play lectures and, when asked by the lecturer, read better than most actors. We go many more times in the ensuing years and it’s now among my most cherished memories.
To this day they quote Shakespeare accurately and mumble “Exeunt” under their breath when they want to get out of a boring situation.
- Shakespeare's Richard III also inaccurate.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2013-02-07-source-shakespeares-ina...
- Shakespeare wrote about Julius Caesar, Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Henry IV, and so on. How did he learn about these people if there was nothing to read?
- What we get today is the anti-hero. The inheritors of the tragedy are movies like Fight Club, The Godfather, etc. Shakespeare used the anti-hero very well: Richard III, Othello, and Macbeth all resonate very strongly with modern audiences.
I'm not entirely sure I'd put Hamlet in that category, and really points up what you're saying. Hamlet is tragic in the Greek sense, a concept we rarely get today. Hamlet's more heroic than anti-heroic: he's got a body count but he's not vicious about it. He at least wants to be a good person -- not just by his own lights but by what he thinks others expect of him. (Unlike the more vicious anti-heroes, who don't see themselves as evil but aren't averse to having other people see them that way.)
