The Editors of Saragun Springs (L and D, Seattle and Chicago, USA) share a mutual passion for William Shakespeare. We revere him for the same reason/s that almost everyone who likes him likes him: he’s the greatest single writer in the English language and everything that has been written in English since him has been massively influenced BY HIM, even if that particular writer is not familiar at all (on a personal level) with his work/s.
I could go on and on about Good Will, but I can’t say it any better than Ralph Waldo Emerson did almost two hundred years ago. The following 305-word quote (at the end of this little essay) is NOT a cut-and-paste. This quotation was typed out by hand, from memory, by me; and I checked the text afterward because I knew there would be a few mistakes (there were quite a few mistakes, which I have since corrected).
Anyone who reads, rereads, and studies, this quotation will have their mind stretched in the right kind of way, even if they’ve never heard of Shakespeare.
I was not able to type this thing from memory because I have a photographic memory. I have it memorized because of two things: repetition and concentration (I’ve read it a lot and I always concentrate deeply when I do: it is a form of meditation, and prayer).
Shakespeare cannot compete with the world’s best-selling and most well-known book (BY FAR), the Bible, when it comes to characters: and not even close; and he himself knew this very well.
Adam and Eve, The Serpent (Satan), Yahweh, Cain and Abel, Moses, Noah, David and Goliath, Solomon, Samson, Job, Jonah, Jesus, Mary, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalen, Peter, Judas, Herod, Pontius Pilate, the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son are now and will always be more well-known, globally, than any of Shakespeare’s characters.
(The Bible is the world’s greatest story collection, and I am speaking here of The Bible as literature. I also believe, personally, that the individual authors of the Bible were divinely inspired, very much so, each in their own very individual, very particular, very different ways.)
Some of Shakespeare’s most famous personages are: Hamlet, Falstaff, Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, and Romeo and Juliet (he did not actually invent any of them, which is also true of most of the Bible’s main characters and their authors, just as it is true of Rabelais and Gargantua, Goethe and Faust, Lord Byron and Don Juan, etc. etc. etc….).
I once heard two little kids running around on the sidewalk talking about Romeo and Juliet in Arabic.
I believe R and J are WS’s two most famous characters.
But even they cannot even come close to competing with Jesus and Mary (as characters; I also happen to believe, personally, that each of these were also holy; but my definition of “holy” does not match “the world’s” definition of holy, unless it is the Russian definition of such).
But Shakespeare added something new to the presentation of character that every single writer who has written in English since then, has been influenced by (to say nothing of his influence in other languages as well, like German, where he is, if anything, even better known than in English).
Now that I’ve blathered on for over 600 words, I leave you with the Ralph Waldo Emerson quotation. I would say, pay close attention to the title of this little article and the way it appears in the following quotation. Emerson wrote this quotation when the world thought Shakespeare was just a cheap entertainer. Emerson was among the first to see deeper on this issue (not the first, but among the first, which amounts to the same thing; because there are no “original” ideas):
“Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakespeare valuable that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly as these critics of his dramatic merit, but still think it secondary. He was a full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand…He is like some saint whose history is to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose, into songs and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the occasion which gave the saint’s meaning the form of a conversation, or of a prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial compared with the universality of its application. So it fares with the wise Shakespeare and his book of life. He wrote the airs for all our modern music: he wrote the text of modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of England and Europe; the father of the man in America; he drew the man, and described the day, and what is done in it: he read the hearts of men and women, their probity, and their second thought and wiles; the wiles of innocence, and the transitions by which virtues and vices slide into their contraries: he could divide the mother’s part from the father’s part in the face of the child, or draw the fine demarcations of freedom and of fate: he knew the laws of repression which make the police of nature; and all the sweets and all the terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the landscape lies on the eye. And the importance of this wisdom of life sinks the form, as of Drama or Epic, out of notice.”
Dale Williams Barrigar
Saragun Springs 
So, I guess you sorta’ like Shakespeare huh? I like him too. You’re correct about his literary influence too. I have long been intrigued by the apparent myth that Shakespeare and Jonson and other contemporary writers of that age had a hand in writing the KJV of the Bible. One would think that James I would have had the influence to compel them to participate. Google, however, disagrees, saying that Shakespeare was too busy writing, producing plays and managing a theater to have “wasted” his time at such pursuits. The critics also point to Shakespeare’s elaborate prose as opposed to the more didactic product of Hebrew and Aramaic scholars. They were translators as well. I dunno. Another perfectly serviceable myth exploded, I say. What do you think?
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Hi Bill
I think that, without doubt, a guy named William Tyndale is the single most important author who was responsible for the KJV, even though he was strangled to death at the stake by the English authorities long before the KJV was produced.
But Tyndale was the first guy to bring the Bible into English. And, for that, and nothing but that, he was, quite literally, executed for his efforts, in1536 – as in, strangled at the stake.
Much of what passes for the KJV was written by him decades earlier.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the writers who worked on the KJV knew who Shakespeare was (they all knew who he was) and asked him for suggestions as they passed him on the street or ran into him in the pubs. After all, the population of London at that time was only 200,000. The writers (of all stripes) knew each other. Then again, back in those days, they thought of people who wrote plays and love sonnets as hacks. Very much so.
The two greatest literary critics in English of all time are, without any doubt whatsoever, Samuel Johnson, and our own American, recently passed in 2019, Harold Bloom. I learned much of what I learned, and still do learn, from these two.
American academia in general would agree with me about Johnson, but they HATE, hate, hate, hate Harold Bloom. He is a figure of mockery in academia, a strange fate for the greatest or second greatest literary critic (in English) of all time. I.e., like with William Tyndale, they would kill him if they could (even though he’s already dead).
Dale
PS
Tyndale could not and would not have done what he did without Martin Luther…
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Hello Dale
It’s remarkable, all the generations who have come to appreciate the man. How we come, retreat, return again. Always passing, yet he remains the same. I guess the human race will truly be done when people can no longer relate to what he wrote. Whatever will be around then won’t be human.
Thank you!
Leila
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Hi LA
It reminds me of the scene in Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles where the guy stands on Mars looking down toward Earth and reads from Lord Byron and he’s the only one who knows who Lord Byron was. Haunting!
Not that I agree with Musk and think the human race can make it to Mars. The whole house of cards here on Earth will collapse long before that pipe dream happens.
Professor Jiang says we don’t have to worry at all (really) about the world being taken over by robots. What we REALLY have to worry about is all the humans turning into robotic creatures! A much worse fate…(And there will always be room for resistance and meaningful action if you know what you’re doing…)
DB
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‘all the sweets and the terrors of the human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the landscape lies on the eye.’ Wow – Emerson clearly knew not just how to turn a phrase, but more importantly how point to the heart of things. Thank you, Dale.
Always had a soft spot for Emerson, not least because of his friendship with Thoreau and his celebration of Robert Burns. The only book of his I possess is an American paperback, ‘The Portable Emerson’ (portable, but not readily so at 664 pages). It’s got his essay on Thoreau and his Burns Night address on Burns, but no essay on Shakespeare. Could I trouble you to post the reference? apologies, mick
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Mick
I forgot to hit “Reply” when I answered your question, but I answered your question below (or above). THANKS for your commentary!!
Dale
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PS
Mick
I have a little essay about Magic Mushrooms coming out tomorrow in the Springs called “The Psychedelic Renaissance.” If I remember correctly, this is or was a topic you are interested in.
DB
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Hi Mick!
Yes, I came to Emerson through Thoreau, without any doubt whatsoever. Then I discovered that Emerson has one essay after another where EVERY SINGLE SENTENCE can be removed and utilized as a stand-alone quotation. Don’t know any other writer that’s true of: not even Shakespeare!
This quotation today comes from his book REPRESENTATIVE MEN, available for free on the internet (Project Gutenberg, etc.) (He also has equally brilliant, profound, and quotable essays on Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Napolean, and Goethe in that book.)
I also found the essay reprinted in a book called EMERSON’S LITERARY CRITICISM, published by the University of Nebraska Press, 1979 & 1995.
Emerson based his book Representative Men on Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History.
The two men only met in person for a day or two in Scotland, and then remained pen pals for the next forty years.
Emerson also says this: “Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakespeare in us.”
Now that I think of it, that is probably the greatest quotation ever written about Shakespeare.
Thanks Mick!
Dale
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Thanks Dale! Should’ve guessed it would be in good ol’ Project Gutenburg. your kindness is appreciated, mick
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DWB
Great topic on Shakespeare. Most of my experiences are through the movies and the discourse of our language which he so heavily influenced.
Excellent quote.
CJA
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CJA
I think getting most of your Shakespeare from the movies is just fine, especially since the plays were nothing less (and nothing more) than the movies of their time.
Two of my favorite plays for reading are MACBETH and THE TEMPEST.
At just 18,000 and 17,000 words apiece, they are like fast-paced novellas. I found during my teaching career that even “ordinary,” non-English-major freshman could read them quite easily, at least with a little guidance. Not sure that’s true any more, since I stopped officially teaching at the college level 12 years ago, officially kicked out since I officially gave the authorities the official finger, as it were.
But I’m almost positive that the reading skills of the average college freshman have gone straight into the toilet since then.
DWB
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