Is Shakespeare Relevant in Our Lives?

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Is Shakespeare relevant in our lives? No. According to the Oxford dictionary, “relevant” means: closely connected or appropriate to what is being done or considered. In this pragmatic light of the 21st century, many of us cannot relate to the stories Shakespeare has written. Besides that, we cannot even understand his language without googling almost every other phrase or sentence. To fully understand his works, we often require deep analysis. No one walks around talking in old English any more. We need to learn current English because that’s how we speak and write it and some people already have enough trouble with writing current English. To learn Old English just to understand Shakespeare’s works, to me, is like learning calculus and physics to work at MacDonald’s your whole life. In the day itself when Shakespeare and his shadow writers were putting up plays in the globe theatre, they actually based most of their stories on Greek tragedy. Those Greek tragedies existed in oral form first and then written form and now they exist today, so he didn’t really bring anything new to the table. Many of us read fiction and non-fiction books and without a doubt I agree that books in general serve as a medium to propagate important values to us and also elicite emotional and social dialgoue. However, Shakespeare’s works in particular do not exactly play that role in today’s society because the things he wrote about cannot be related in today’s modern context. A few examples of such irrelevant works to our lives would be: Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing and The Merchant of Venice. For something to be relevant in our lives, it has to be related mostly to what we do and say quite often. Most of the time, it has to affect our decision-making and actions. On the contrary, I personally feel that Shakespeare’s works do not do so because I don’t

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