One of the more memorable prayers I ever heard was one of Gillian’s. We were living in Scarsdale at the time. It was 17 July 1995. We’d asked her to say grace. This is what she said.

“Dear God, thank you for this Sloppy Joe; but I am not going to thank you for these carrots and I am not going to thank you for this salad. Amen.”

No pretense. No pulled punches. One thinks of Edgar and the penultimate lines of King Lear:

The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

If D. H. Lawrence doesn’t convince you that John McWhorter is wrong about Shakespeare, let me chime in. I could list about a dozen false or at least questionable assumptions McWhorter makes in his post, but let me confine myself to two. First, he assumes that difficulty in drama is bad. Second, he assumes that difficulty is a function of linguistic change — of course, he knows that there are other reasons why plays and stories and poems are difficult, but he doesn’t mention any of them. This is a great flaw.

Let’s remember that Shakspeare could write as staightforwardly as anyone when he chose to. Consider this wonderful little moment from Act V of Henry V, when the young victorious king is wooing the daughter of the King of France, encumbered by certain linguistic barriers on both sides:

HENRY. But, Kate, dost thou understand thus much English, canst thou love me?

KATHARINE. I cannot tell.

HENRY. Can any of your neighbours tell, Kate? I’ll ask them.

But then consider this passage from Act II of Troilus and Cressida, in which the woman referred to is Helen:

HECTOR. Brother, she is not worth what she doth cost 
The keeping.

TROILUS. What’s aught but as ‘tis valued?

HECTOR. But value dwells not in particular will: 
It holds his estimate and dignity 
As well wherein ‘tis precious of itself 
As in the prizer. ‘Tis mad idolatry 
To make the service greater than the god, 
And the will dotes that is attributive 
To what infectiously itself affects, 
Without some image of th’ affected merit.

This is not difficult because it is old; it’s difficult because it’s difficult. That is, Troilus and Hector are engaged in a serious philosophical debate about what constitutes worth — it’s a word that turns up repeatedly in the scene — and that’s an extremely complex topic. Shakespeare doesn’t try to simplify it in the least. Does anyone think that the average playgoer in 1601 understood the argument that Hector is making here?

So, McWhorter wants “richly considered [translations], executed by artists equipped to channel Shakespeare to the modern listener with passion, respect and care.” I’d be happy to turn that scene fromTroilus over to any poet who thinks he or she can “channel Shakespeare” and see what comes out. I don’t think it’ll be pretty.

Of course, Troilus is a uniquely thorny play, so let’s take something more famous — clichéd, even:

To die: to sleep; 
No more; and by a sleep to say we end 
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks 
That flesh is heir to. ‘Tis a consummation 
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; 
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; 
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come 
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, 
Must give us pause. There’s the respect 
That makes calamity of so long life; 
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, 
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, 
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, 
The insolence of office and the spurns 
That patient merit of the unworthy takes, 
When he himself might his quietus make 
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear, 
To grunt and sweat under a weary life, 
But that the dread of something after death, 
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn 
No traveller returns, puzzles the will 
And makes us rather bear those ills we have 
Than fly to others that we know not of? 
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; 
And thus the native hue of resolution 
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, 
And enterprises of great pith and moment 
With this regard their currents turn awry, 
And lose the name of action.

You think you can improve on that? Great. Knock yourself out. McWhorter thinks that someone reading that speech in modern French understands more of it than you or I do. Which means that to him the poetry is nothing. Not my view.

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Alan Jacobs, Professor of English at Wheaton College, writing at The American Scene

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see’st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west;

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,

Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

Shakespeare, Sonnet 73

Philosophers often try to write about Shakespeare. Most of the time they are ill-equipped to do so. There is something irresistibly tempting in the depth and the complexity of the plays, and it lures people who respond to that complexity with abstract thought, even if for the most part they are utterly unprepared, emotionally or stylistically, to write about literary experience. Such philosophers see profound thought in Shakespeare, not wrongly. But armed with their standard analytic equipment, they frequently produce accounts that are laughably reductive, contributing little or nothing to philosophy or to the understanding of Shakespeare.

To make any contribution worth caring about, a philosopher’s study of Shakespeare should do three things. First and most centrally, it should really do philosophy, and not just allude to familiar philosophical ideas and positions. It should pursue tough questions and come up with something interesting and subtle—rather than just connecting Shakespeare to this or that idea from Philosophy 101. A philosopher reading Shakespeare should wonder, and ponder, in a genuinely philosophical way. Second, it should illuminate the world of the plays, attending closely enough to language and to texture that the interpretation changes the way we see the work, rather than just uses the work as grist for some argumentative mill. And finally, such a study should offer some account of why philosophical thinking needs to turn to Shakespeare’s plays, or to works like them. Why must the philosopher care about these plays? Do they supply to thought something that a straightforward piece of philosophical prose cannot supply, and if so, what? …

But now we have Tzachi Zamir’s Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama, head and shoulders above its rivals. A first book by a young Israeli philosopher, Double Vision stands comparison with Cavell for philosophical subtlety and insight (though not for a more systematic philosophical contribution), and Zamir is, happily, much more upfront about what the enterprise of doing philosophy by consulting works of literature is all about, and why it might be important. Helpful, too, is the fact that Zamir writes with an evocative grace that shows a deep emotional response to literature and a sense of its complexities and its mysteries. His style itself helps to convince us that Shakespeare is not simply being used as a primer for Philosophy 101, or reduced to an analytic paragraph. Unlike McGinn, Zamir writes as someone capable of being puzzled, capable of delving into the painful or exhilarating depths of certain problems with Shakespeare as his guide rather than his pupil. Double Vision is quite a brilliant book.

from Martha Nussbaum’s review essay here