Shakespeare: an Observation of Life
Shakespeare: An Observation of Life
What is it about Shakespeare’s characters and stories that make us all able to relate in some way or another 400 years after they are written? Maybe it’s his take on inner conflict, or is it how he never portrays a hero as perfect, or a villain as all evil? There is a certain universal truth about the human condition in every story. Whether it is the tragic outcome of unchecked greed and ambition, an unrelenting desire for revenge, or the pursuit of love, his representation of human nature is just as real and as relevant today, as it has been through the centuries. Most of Shakespeare’s characters are complex personalities led into tragedy by their shortcomings (Johnson). Even Shakespeare’s heroes are never just heroes; Shakespeare tends to build his stories through “false heroes” such as Othello, Anthony and Brutus, and “good villains” or “villains with a conscious” like Macbeth (Johnson). It is this type of inner conflict that makes Shakespeare’s stories so insightful and relatable.
People love to identify with the hero. They like to think of themselves as heroes in their own lives and the success of a hero in a story makes them feel better about their chances of success in their own lives. While a hero may be the object of any story, a hero is only as great as the obstacle he can overcome (Pattison). The obstacle can be almost anything, it could be a tornado ripping through a city or a killer great white shark, but it is the human villain that develops and changes as the story unfolds, that is the most relatable, and therefore the most interesting obstacle to overcome. Maybe this is because, unlike other obstacles, villains share commonalities with the average person, but they are perverted by some sort of extremism (Johnson), thus making them easy to hate but is still somehow relatable. Shakespeare does a remarkable job creating relatable villains. Shakespeare’s villains are not horrible people with no sense of humanity,
What is it about Shakespeare’s characters and stories that make us all able to relate in some way or another 400 years after they are written? Maybe it’s his take on inner conflict, or is it how he never portrays a hero as perfect, or a villain as all evil? There is a certain universal truth about the human condition in every story. Whether it is the tragic outcome of unchecked greed and ambition, an unrelenting desire for revenge, or the pursuit of love, his representation of human nature is just as real and as relevant today, as it has been through the centuries. Most of Shakespeare’s characters are complex personalities led into tragedy by their shortcomings (Johnson). Even Shakespeare’s heroes are never just heroes; Shakespeare tends to build his stories through “false heroes” such as Othello, Anthony and Brutus, and “good villains” or “villains with a conscious” like Macbeth (Johnson). It is this type of inner conflict that makes Shakespeare’s stories so insightful and relatable.
People love to identify with the hero. They like to think of themselves as heroes in their own lives and the success of a hero in a story makes them feel better about their chances of success in their own lives. While a hero may be the object of any story, a hero is only as great as the obstacle he can overcome (Pattison). The obstacle can be almost anything, it could be a tornado ripping through a city or a killer great white shark, but it is the human villain that develops and changes as the story unfolds, that is the most relatable, and therefore the most interesting obstacle to overcome. Maybe this is because, unlike other obstacles, villains share commonalities with the average person, but they are perverted by some sort of extremism (Johnson), thus making them easy to hate but is still somehow relatable. Shakespeare does a remarkable job creating relatable villains. Shakespeare’s villains are not horrible people with no sense of humanity,