Wacky Wording: How Wording Can Change the Meaning of a Sentence
From Contexts for Criticism by Donald Keesey:
1) "We may have no documentary evidence about Shakespeare's school days, but we can find out a good deal about what was studied and how in the schools available to someone of his age and station" (10).
2) "Even if we could discover what many or most Elizabethans believed about ghosts, and even if it turned out that they believed much the same things, we still wouldn't necessarily know what Shakespeare thought about the subject or what he might have meant in Hamlet, unless, that is, we were willing to assume that Shakespeare was a typicla Elizabethan or that he expressed only typical beliefs in his plays" (13).
It is incredibly interesting how if you put a point one way it can seem to make sense and if it's put another way, it just seems stupid. The first statement points out the lack of information about Shakespeare but how "we can find out a good deal" about the social conditions at the time and apply it to him because he existed at this time. This explanation seems very linear. It basically says that because they don't know that much about Shakespeare, the best they can do is study when he lived and make educated approximations about him from that. It is put more gently than that though so it is not so obvious that it's all a guess. The second explanation of the same topic, however, seems less effective. It travels around and states it in such a way that reader has to say, "Huh? But that's just silly." It is contradictory to today's culture because we are just assuming, and what did you parents tell you about assumptions? (I don't wanna say it! I don't wanna SAY it!.) Thank you Stewart, but that's enough.
The second way makes the point that you're just making a generalization about the author more apparent and in turn, more disturbing. You can never be sure about what the author (in which there are no records about) actually experienced, thought, or was truly writing about, by just studying the people at the time. That would be like coming to America, going into a McDonald's, and automatically assuming that ALL Americans are fat. It just doesn't work that way.
Go back to see what others had to say!
(P.S.- No hate blogging please. I didn't mean that all people who eat at McDonalds are fat.)
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Angela, I personally like both of the quotes from Keesey that you picked. Basically, both of those quotes are the reasons I disliked Yachnin’s article. In your second quote Keesey highlights the fact that we can’t just assume just that because something was the norm of opinion, it does not mean the author held that belief or wanted to insinuate that it was good. Yet, at the same time, some parts of the historical context are important to consider when considering author intention. For example, the fact that Shakespeare would have intended his plays to be performed orally and not read is obviously important when doing an analysis of one of his plays.