Shakespeare Standing Still in 21st Century

Author: Chase Kvasnak

Dimiter Daphinoff's speech on Monday, titled "Shakespeare in the 21st Century," focused on the not-always-recognizable contemporary relevance of Shakespeare's almost five centuries-old works.
Daphinoff said that "Hamlet's wonderful reflection on the waste of human life, compared to Falstaff's quibbly quibbling on the term honor in the face of imminent death, is one of Shakespeare's most prevalent, gripping comments on the folly of war and the intrinsic value of life."
Introduced by former peer of St. Andrews University and Jay Parini, D.E. Axinn professor of creative writing and professor of English, Daphinoff is currently a Professor at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. His specialties include Shakespeare, Jacobean drama, comparative literature and literary theory. Most notable of his works are a translation of Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" to German, and "Hamlet on Screen," which he co-edited.
With a title that perhaps, to some, seemed a portent of yet another post-modern deconstructionist view (at hearing the title I was considering "Shakespeare @afterseptember11th.com" for my own review), Daphinoff's message was unbelievably refreshing.
His inights included,"It is my contention that we do not force upon Shakespeare what is not there," he said. "Distortion only happens, and appropriation for that matter, when the overall effect of a work of art is ignored." And, "When the interplay of text and context, tradition and innovation, character and language, source and poetic transformation is not fully taken into account."
Ultimately, Daphinoff did not relate Shakespeare to events of the 21st century, as the title of his lecture promised, but took more of a universal approach.
Reflecting on his college years in the 1960s, Daphinoff said at the beginning of one of his courses the professor asked what the urgency of studying literature was. And, as Parini asked Daphinoff rhetorically in his introduction, "Shakespeare in the 21st century? I thought Shakespeare lived in the 16th century." To these questions Daphinoff provided resolution in Shakespeare's overall meanings, which have been ignored by modern scholarship and therefore distorted Shakespeare's plays and even made Shakespeare "seem too difficult to teach and considered elitist."
This accounted for, as Daphinoff stated, a steady decline in German and French students electing to take courses in Shakespeare, a fact to which professors of Middlebury agreed about students in the states. Daphinoff also stated that the amount of literature on Shakespeare, which he compared to that of an ocean (he cited the fact that 2,000 books a year are printed on the topic), and the comparatively small amount of students is puzzling.
Two examples Daphinoff provided of what he thought were of "particularly topical importance" to the subject of Shakespeare in our century were Romeo and Juliet's love, which "so moving is less its sacrifice of youth and hopeful mind, but the defiance of death in a love that transcends all boundaries. In a world in which the eloquence conspiring against them, the love of Romeo and Juliet remains the one value that makes even the brief life worth living."
Daphinoff's other example is, of course, Hamlet's soliloquy in Act IV which to all, if I may use Daphinoff's words, "should [be] heed[ed] now that the 21st century begins so ominously."
Shakespeare's famous lines read, "How stand I, / That have a father kill'd and a mother stain'd / Excitements of my reason and my blood, and let all sleep? while to my shame, I see / The imminent death of twenty thousand men, / That, for a fantasy and trick of fame, / Go to their graves like beds; fight for a plot ..."