What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, ...?

Summary 

A US soldier carries Shakespeare
into the war in Vietnam

According to "Will Gompertz reviews Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro" (Gompertz, 2020),  American academic James Shapiro improves our understanding both of Shakespeare and of American history from its foundation as a British colony in 1620 to today under the rule of Donald Trump. Writer Will Gompertz says that Shapiro explains how Shakespeare quickly became America's most honoured poet, genuinely loved by his audience around the world, because his poetry treats issues that have always interested us, from love to murder, from war to sexism and other human prejudices, which are the same issues Americans have fought over for 400 years, with both sides of the battles often calling on Shakespeare's powerful expressions to support their causes: for or against slavery, for or against independence from Britain and so on, until today.

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Response 

Like the ordinary soldier in the photo I added from the BBC article, I'm one of those people who love to read Shakespeare, so the title of Gompertz's article interested me when I saw it. Although I'm Australian, I'm also interested in US politics, law and history, although I'm sure I don't know US history as well as Tung does. When US history, politics and society were combined with Shakespeare, that was irresistible. I wasn't disappointed. I haven't decided whether to buy Shapiro's book yet, but since I have a lot more time to sit around at home than I had been expecting this month, I do need something to do, and reading an analysis by an expert academic of how Shakespeare reflects the development of America, and how America reflects the themes that Shakespeare deals with is attractive. 

My first experience with Shakespeare was Macbeth, which I studied in high school when I was 12. I had mixed feelings about that. The story is great: a greedy noble who is told be  witches that he will become king, an ambitious wife who pushes her husband, the noble, to kill the king when he sleeping at their home as guest, ghosts, battles, and an impressively tragic ending with lots of dead people — I think Shakespeare kills more people in his plays than a John Wick movie does. But the language was not easy. English is a living language, with no dictatorial authority saying what is correct or not, so it is constantly evolving as new users make up new words and change the grammar. Shakespeare is only 400 years old, but his vocabulary and grammar are different enough from modern English to need some help. I sometimes have a similar problem today when chatting with my young nieces and nephews. When they were talking about bogans a few years ago, I had no idea what they meant. I oculd guess from the context that bogans were some sort of people, and that it had a negative connotation. That was enough, and I notice that it's now listed in a couple of standard English dictionaries, including Lexico. It's a cool word, but probably not one you want to use in an academic essay, at least not this year. 

I also liked Gompertz's idea that the really great art, like Shakespeare, continues to be enjoyed. I still like to listen to some of the rock music from when I was a teenager and at university, but that's more for nostalgia than because it's great art. But Shakespeare, along with John Keats, John Donne and a few other English poets endure because their work offers us a way of understanding ourselves and our society in richly memorable language. (Other art forms use different media, but I can't cover everything in one post.) Some of the other literature I've loved for many years that also continues to be widely read, enjoyed and learned from is much older than Shakespeare: there are a few Latin poets whose work I enjoy, and even older is Homer, who tells us the story of Achilles fighting in the battle of Troy against the Trojans, led by Priam, whose Queen Hecuba grieves when the son of Achilles kills her husband in vengeance for her son having the awful hero Achilles. But that is not in Homer's Iliad, it's in the Roman poet Vergil's Aeneid. In Hamlet, Shakespeare reminds us of the great influence that ancient Greek poem, the first great work of literature in Western civilization (in my opinion) has had. When plotting how to discover the truth about his uncle, the King of Denmark, who has murdered Hamlet's father, the previous king, Hamlet learns a lesson about understanding himself from a dramatic performance of  Danish version of a Latin addition to Homer's ancient Greek story. More recently, Brad Pitt starred in Troy, a Hollywood version of Homer. 

 Almost 3,000 years later, Homer's story remains popular. 

You are welcome to experiment with images and videos (YouTube is easiest), but remember that the writing is what's important. 

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Question

Does your culture have old works of literature that are still popular today? 

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Reference

• Gompertz, W. (2020, March 14). Will Gompertz reviews Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-51827357