I don’t pay much attention to the titter of the palace guards of High Culture. I never really figured out what’s so high about it anyway, nor why it needed gatekeepers. The fact that the gatekeepers are mostly well-educated, tweed-toting, bookshelf gremlins scuttling about our universities and our libraries and our cultural institutions makes it even more opaque to me. I mean, I get it; you got a degree which lends you no employable skills whatsoever other than wielding your academic lingo and index of obscure quotations like sledgehammers against the plebs in such high-handed fashion that you convince the non-indoctrinated that you have somehow been given the exclusive keys to the gold standard of Fancy[tm]. Sure. Fine.
But sometimes that masquerade really falls fucking flat.
The most obvious examples of such flatfalls come to us distilled off the cultural pages in ye olde timey newspapers. Where the socialites sputter away with their lingo to the sound of gurgled wine and munched cheese. And once upon, these turgid opinions are actually kinda fun. Like this here one; “Stop pretending that soap operas have Shakespearian qualities!” by Johan Croneman. It’s an open letter to his colleagues among the cultural elite of Sweden, begging them to stop confusing entertainment with cultural weight. That just because they’ve found themselves stuck in the couch, watching twenty nubile young women trying to compete for the affection of a 40-year old tech industry nerd’s attention, it doesn’t mean that it’s fucking A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Sophie’s Fucking Choice.
Which is fair. It doesn’t have to be. Things don’t have to be good to be enjoyable. Hell, I love hating on The Room enough that I enjoy watching it. Preferably in good company as a drinking game. But here’s the kicker… what exactly does this Croneman, and his cultural competitors, believe that “Shakespearian” actually means?
Disclaimer: I love Shakespeare. No, not ironically, sarcastically, fancily, stiff-upper-lipily, or any other -ily. Shakespeare’s deserves everyone’s appreciation. His work helped formalize modern English. Not only in his grammar and syntax, but also the sheer vocabulary that he introduced to the written record. Amazement, assassination, auspicious, critic, sanctimonious, dishearten, invulnerable, and obscene are just a few of the some 1700 words that Shakespeare is credited with inscribing into the English language proper. This play-write of 16th century England stands as a revolution in literature, language, and story-telling.
Much of what he wrote is also absolute smut. By both his and our current contemporary standards. We got dirty jokes, we got degenerate comic relief, we got slap-stick, and we got absolutely transparent characters doing their best villain moustache-twirls and do-gooder proclamations. A vast swathe of what Shakespeare wrote has more in common with a late-stage Kevin Smith feature than it does with Homer.
So when I hear this grumble from the top of such a high horse that I can’t even see its rider for the cloud cover, muttering defensively that there’s nothing “Shakespearian” about performative sex, nonsensical story, and pandering production values in our public entertainment media, I quite frankly don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.
/Sebastian Lindberg 18/7-2023
WastedWords 