What is it that makes Shakespeare still relevant?
I’m sure that we all remember the groans and sighs of a GCSE English classroom when the whole class was dragged through Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet. Questions like ‘why do we have to study this?’ and ‘isn’t this just pointless?’ were very common, and I felt were often poorly answered by teachers. As an avid Shakespeare fan, I believe his writing is extremely relevant to a modern audience, but others around me haven’t been quite persuaded. So, why do we still study Shakespeare? Why has his work lived on well after his death? And what makes his writing so influential?
His plays feature universal themes that are applicable to a modern audience.
Shakespeare’s writing often features themes that are very much still applicable to today’s life. For example, Othello features racism and infidelity, Macbeth features patriarchal views and a destructive monarchy, and Love’s Labour’s Lost features the ups and downs of the pursuit of love – all of which is still applicable to modern life. These themes don’t just exist in timeless literature such as Shakespeare; they’re present in works that are even earlier, such as Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, written in the 8th or 7th century BCE. These texts have stood the test of time for even longer than Shakespeare’s have, demonstrating how universal themes result in timeless literature that we can still relate to our own modern experiences.
He had a huge impact on the literary world.
Tragedy as a concept was first formed in ancient Greece, with playwrights such as Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles rising to prominence and winning prizes such as the Dionysia for their works. However, the structure of the ‘perfect’ tragedy, which was theorised by ancient philosopher Aristotle, was significantly modified by Shakespeare. While the fundamentals remained similar – such as the play having a ‘tragic hero’, a good person brought down by their ‘hamartia’ or fatal flaw – Shakespeare introduced his own version of tragedy to an English audience who was hugely unfamiliar with the concept. His tragedies featured malicious villains intent on destroying those around them no matter the cost, such as Claudius in Hamlet, Edmund in King Lear, and Iago in Othello. Whereas tragic heroes in Greek literature were often good people brought down by a well-intentioned mistake or small oversight that had grossly large consequences, Shakesperean tragic heroes were brought down by monumental errors, such as Macbeth killing King Duncan and Hamlet killing five characters, while also being indirectly involved in the deaths of both his love interest, Ophelia, and his mother, Gertrude. This alteration to the centuries old tragic structure had a monumental impact on what tragedy was perceived as in subsequent English literature, therefore making Shakespeare still relevant due to the long-term impact it has had.
Shakespeare’s political criticisms are very telling of what Elizabethan and Jacobean life was like.
Often, Shakespeare’s plays are set abroad, in countries England would have viewed as exciting or exotic, such as Venice and Cyprus (Othello), Denmark and Norway (Hamlet) and Greece (Timon of Athens). This gave him the ability to criticise English hierarchy, the royal court, the monarchy, the church, and the patriarchy through the masks of foreign lenses to shield his controversial views from critique, especially because he relied on patronages (money from nobles and the monarch) to produce his plays. This criticism is very important to a modern audience, as it gives us a window into the harsh realities of life in the 16th and 17th century, when poverty was rife in a time of a very strict social hierarchy with limited social mobility. Through Shakespeare’s negative portrayal of these aspects of Elizabethan and Jacobean life, we can gauge that there was a sense of growing discontent, especially in intellectual circles, about these constraints in society, therefore making it relevant in a historical context to modern life.
His history plays tell us a lot about British monarchs.
Alongside tragedies and comedies, Shakespeare also produced historical plays, often about past British monarchs. This included Henry IV, Henry VIII and, most famously, Richard III. Richard III is believed to be an entirely false portrayal of the king – it featured an evil, devious, unforgiving, scheming version of Richard III, who is believed to actually be nothing like this. However, this does still tell us a lot about the monarchy, just not necessarily about Richard III himself. The play was written in 1592-93, when Tudor Queen Elizabeth I was reigning. Her grandfather, Henry VII, had founded the Tudor dynasty after defeating King Richard III in the Wars of the Roses, where Henry competed to get the crown off Richard. Shakespeare skewed history to favour the queen at the time’s family demonstrates how strong the monarch’s influence over society, art, and culture was during Shakesperean England, therefore making Shakespeare’s plays excellent historical sources when analysing the impacts of the monarchy on society, and also very relevant.
Shakespeare’s plays have maintained relevancy in society due to the value they have as historical sources, and the universal themes they explore that are transferable to modern life and still relatable to modern audiences. Whether these themes be racism, patriarchy, class struggle, jealousy, war or infidelity, they give modern audiences the ability to understand the nuances of these timeless plays. I hope this has persuaded you that your GCSE Shakespeare study maybe wasn’t quite so useless – old literature can be a lot more telling about modern society than you might think!
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