According to the website listverse.com, there have been about one million books written about Shakespeare (making him the 8th most famous person ever, just ahead of Newton and Da Vinci, just behind Hitler and St. Paul), which – if true – would amount to roughly 2,500 books per year. It’s not one million, but the World Shakespeare Bibliography boasts 135,902 items on Shakespeare. As of Nov. 2014, the MLA International Bibliography lists 38,804 items about Shakespeare, compared with 10,071 about Joyce; 8,934 about Chaucer; 8,215 about Milton; 6,676 about Dickens; 6,407 about Faulkner; 5,743 about Dante; 5,607 about Beckett; 4,738 about Woolf; 4,058 about Proust; 4,295 about Hemingway; 3,604 about Spenser, and 3,209 about Dostoevsky. It’s a historical fact: we write a lot about Shakespeare. We write a lot about Shakespeare: it’s a historical fact. What is the explanation for this fact? Why do we write so much about Shakespeare? What purpose does it serve?
Clearly, writing about Shakespeare is an extremely popular thing to do, yet there is another, less obvious point to make: writing is an extraordinarily popular and productive way to engage with Shakespeare. In other words, writing about Shakespeare is very popular, sure, but writing about Shakespeare is also very popular. Even as reading and acting remain the basic modes of Shakespearean activity, writing is the way in which we put a stamp on reading and acting, the way in which private, individual experiences with Shakespeare become part of our public, communal discussions about the meaning and value of his works. Something about Shakespeare’s works prompts the desire or even the need to write, whether one is a high school student, a theatre critic, an academic scholar, or a creative writer. Perhaps even more than reading and acting, writing is the way that we as a culture have engaged with and kept alive Shakespeare’s literature. What is it about Shakespeare’s literature that prompts us to write?
To open up a conversation regarding “writing about Shakespeare” is to invoke a series of interrelated yet distinct concerns. There is scholarly writing about Shakespeare, and we can consider the status and stakes of Shakespeare studies as an academic industry, but there is also student writing about Shakespeare, and we can consider the role of Shakespeare in a composition classroom. There is expository writing about Shakespeare, but there is also creative writing about Shakespeare. There is writing about Shakespeare’s plays and poems, but there is also writing about Shakespeare’s life and times. We can consider writing about Shakespeare as a historical phenomenon, and we can ask how we have written about Shakespeare, but we can also consider writing about Shakespeare as also a present concern for students, scholars, critics, and artists alike, and we can ask how we should write about Shakespeare.
No other author is as studied, as written about, by both high school students and professional scholars alike. To be sure, Shakespeare is written about in very different ways: in high school, there is an emphasis on comprehension and the drawing out of “life lessons,” while in academic publishing, there is an emphasis on meaning and historical significance. Yet, one could make the case that the very best Shakespearean scholarship being published today looks quite similar to the ways in which Shakespeare is written about in high school: with the rise of “philosophy and literature” approaches, and the ethical turn in literary studies more generally, historical context is now being consciously, even gleefully eschewed in favor of a deep reading of some pragmatic import for human being – the difference being that the “life lessons” drawn from the text in professional Shakespeare studies are considerably more sophisticated than those in high school papers.
There are connections, I suspect, among (1) the rise of literary criticism as a distinct discourse, much of which took Shakespeare as its subject, beginning in the late seventeenth century; (2) the particular form that literary criticism takes, namely the essay, which allows for and even encourages personal, perspectival, subjective accounts of literary texts, a phenomenon that is heightened in essays on Shakespeare, who methodically refused to demarcate and endorse a “right reading” of his works; and (3) the rise of liberalism as a specifically modern political theory that privileges individual freedom of thought and action, a political theory that provides both a backdrop and anexplanation for the meteoric rise of Shakespeare studies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Don’t go to Sparknotes or No Fear Shakespeare. Those sites necessarily cut and condense the texts, simplifying complexities and ambiguities in the language, which effectively takes away from you the only thing left about Shakespeare that needs to be addressed: the details.
Because of the methodical way in which Shakespeare turns over the meaning of his works to his audiences, you can free yourself from the anxiety that you're getting the text "right" or "wrong," as well as the anxiety that your perspective is “just” your perspective, opinion, subjective experience, and so on. Furthermore, because a situated, subjective perspective is the only perspective available to us, striving for objectivity is both absurd and impossible to achieve. Lastly, the truly immense amount of writing that has been done about Shakespeare makes it entirely possible that the only new things being said – and that is, after all, the point of academic writing, to make an original contribution – are those things which are coming from new perspectives that haven't yet been represented in the academic conversation. In sum, bad writing about Shakespeare emerges when you try to write the paper that you think should write - detached, scholarly, objective, perspectiveless – as opposed to the paper that you can write – invested, situated, personal, perspectival all while being fundamentally argumentative.
As such, when writing about Shakespeare, don’t try to get the text “right” vis a vis the published scholarship or (even worse) internet chatter. Try, instead, to articulate a reading that is meaningful to you. Then, you present that reading to others (i.e., you turn in or publish a paper) and say, effectively, “This is meaningful to me. Is it meaningful to you?” Whether it will be accepted and embraced or not is out of your control: all that you can control is the quality of your thought and articulation.
The voluminous nature of the Shakespeare industry means that all the obvious points have already been made, and they’re readily available, if not on the internet (e.g., Sparknotes), then at the library. What remains to be written are the un-obvious points, those that will come from attention on the quirks and idiosyncrasies of the works.
In general, it would be a terrible idea to write your academic essays like Shakespeare wrote his place. He was a dramatist, not an essayist, and his concern was with the artistic representation of a reality so complex and ambiguous that it would spur each individual audience member to deep personal reflection, which is the opposite of the purpose of academic writing. And essays reader should have no doubt about the position of the author, who should ensure the clear indication of argument.
There are, however, some ways in which Shakespeare – who was, first and foremost, an excellent and successful writer – can serve as a model for the modern essayist.
Shakespeare gave life to his writing by often bucking the conventions of genre and mixing modes – the comic with the tragic, the high with the low. Infuse your own prose with energy by adding comedy and a low style where it is not expected in the grave and high style of expository writing.
It would probably be too much to fill your paper with dick and fart jokes, which Shakespeare might tell you to do, but defied conventions of formality in academic writing can be just as gripping as defied conventions of formality in tragedy.
Shakespeare’s actors once boasted to Ben Jonson that Shakespeare was such a natural genius that “he never blotted out a line,” was such a great writer that he never had to edit or revise his writing. As you go about editing and revising your own papers, keep Jonson’s response in mind: “Would that he had blotted a thousand.”
Academic writing is all about giving a new or different account of something that we thought we knew all about. In that sense, Shakespeare’s plays are an excellent place to practice academic writing because they are both very popular and very complicated, which means that we can often give deeper, more nuanced accounts of something that holds a popular yet surface meaning.
Because Shakespeare’s works are so popular, you are nicely set up for the argumentative move that shifts from a surface, simplistic reading to a deeper, more meaningful argument.
One potentially productive way to approach a Shakespeare essay would be to look at a play next to the Sparknotes study guide or No Fear Shakespeare edition of the play, not to get some idea about what to write about, but to get some ideas about what not to write about. Your Shakespeare essays should be about the details that slip through the cracks of or are glossed over by the likes of Sparknotes and No Fear Shakespeare.
With Shakespeare, you must always consider the negative evidence – i.e., what the text doesn’t say – especially if you’re looking at Shakespeare alongside his sources. Often, the sources include material that privileges a certain viewpoint or judgment while Shakespeare edits out that material, leaving in its place a deafening silence.
We need a way to speak about what Shakespeare was thinking, not what Hamlet is thinking.
The most meaningful unit of the Shakespearean text is the scene: be cautious picking quotes out of their context in a scene.
“Shakespeare's realism” is not an argument. If you are going to make the argument that Romeo and Juliet is a realistic representation of love, you're going to have to include a philosophical statement regarding what love really is, its conceptual structure and operation, which is no easy task. Any argument for Shakespeare's realism is setting up a discussion not only of Shakespeare's concerns and methods but also of reality as such: such a discussion is often beyond the scope of a short paper.
“Shakespeare's ambiguity” is not an argument. It is an accurate reading, but it is also a cliché. Any paper dealing with the complexity, ambiguity, openness, or so forth of Shakespeare's work must also do one or more of the following: (1) locate that quality in a specific scene, character, theme, or the like; (2) explain how and why Shakespeare did it; and (3) explain the audience experience of encountering this quality.
“Shakespeare is better” is not an argument. Because it is almost certainly true, it is not debatable, risky, controversial, or original. The argument that some other text is better than Shakespeare’s however, can be prickly and provocative, although such an argument requires a sage and serious consideration of how we assign value and merit to literary works.
“To make his work more entertaining” is not an argument. Shakespeare was a profound analyst of human behavior, arguably even a moral philosopher in addition to a dramatist and poet. For Shakespeare, entertainment was always a means, not an end: entertainment was the way in which he went about making his points, but it was not his point. If the idea that Shakespeare did something to make his work entertaining is the what aspect of your argument (i.e., what happened), you'll need to include a why clause (i.e., why it happened in the way that it did). You'll also need to consider that “entertaining” can be a very difficult reading to demonstrate on the nuts-and-bolts level of evidence and analysis.