Here's how Matthew Gibbs from the Australian Stock Exchange sees it in an
article penned for The Daily Telegraph (Australia):
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,22038751-5001031,00.html
If nothing else, the article seems to prove that Shakespeare is still
'wordier' an icon than Gough Whitlam...
Definitively worth/worse/word a read
Eve
Winter of our discontent
By Matthew Gibbs*
July 09, 2007 12:00am
REPORTS of the death of Shakespeare are greatly exaggerated. Education
standards have gone from bard to worse, say many about the teaching of
English in schools.
Supposedly hijacked by ideology and "isms", Shakespearean studies have been
dropped from the classroom faster than a luncheon invitation from Brian
Burke.
But Will is harder to do away with than that. It would be easier to sweeten
the bloodied hands of Lady Macbeth than wash away the influence of the son
of a glover from Stratford-upon-Avon.
This year he knocked off an icon. An ABC Radio National listener survey
rated Shakespeare's rousing St Crispin's Day speech, penned for Henry V
before the battle of Agincourt, a greater speech than Gough Whitlam's words
on the steps of Parliament House on the day of his dismissal.
The more pertinent speech, at least for those tempted by grandiose-sounding
property investments, is the fatherly advice doled out by Polonius in
Hamlet: Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself
and friend.
Where would everyday communication be without the titles of Shakespeare's
plays and their adaptability? He is as we like it, from comedy of terrors
and oils well that ends well, to the taming of the shrewd and much a doo-doo
about dogs.
Shakespeare helps make sense of things. Encounters during last summer's
Ashes cricket series found English batsmen stabbing at leg breaks like
Macbeth at Banquo's ghost. Some who heard a newly elevated Cabinet member
answer his first question in Parliament wished for more matter and less art;
while it was said that nothing in the corporate life of a recently dismissed
gaming industry CEO became him like his leaving it.
When we need the right words, Shakespeare has already coined them.
Following Cardinal George Pell's involvement in the stem cell debate, more
than one NSW parliamentarian was heard muttering line from King John: "This
meddling priest". The Scottish king, Macbeth, has helped report the state's
recent weather: "So foul and fair a day I have not seen."
Another passage from Macbeth rings ever truer as each week passes in Iraq:
"Confusion now hath made his masterpiece."
Even more predictably, when the Prime Minister of Greece visited an Orthodox
school during his tour in May, the newspaper headline trumpeted: It was all
Greek to them, and happily so. Et tu, sub-editor?
All walks of life invoke the work of Shakespeare. Be it fashion's claim that
now is the winter of our dark content; the internet's boast that all the
world's a blog; religions belief that the world is their cloister; or golf's
charge that 'woods by any other name would swing as sweet.
His language has become our language and regardless of his status in the
classroom, all the world's a Shakespearean stage.
* Matthew Gibbs is a corporate relations manager at the Australian Stock
Exchange
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