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Shakespeare as Language

While Shakespeare isn’t a foreign language in the most literal sense (like French or Latin) it does have its own vernacular and its own subculture, which makes it a language the way physics, computer science, and politics are languages. Although Shakespeare is written in Modern English (almost exactly the same language you speak now), it’s deceptively difficult to attack unless you’ve familiarized yourself with some Shakespearean terminology. If you do this, the payoff is enormous.

Consider XKCD, a much-beloved Web comic strip. Many comics, like this one, make sense to everyone:

This is funny, right? Right.

But many times you get one like this:

…that only makes sense to somebody with a working knowledge of computer programming languages and/or the Web geek subculture. To that person, the latter comic may be hilarious. But the rest of us are missing out.

Does that mean we should turn our backs on XKCD? No, of course not. And we don’t. We keep on reading, hoping for another comic that we understand because we’re sure it’ll be worth the wait.

Learn to Speak Shakespeare

What if you could spend 30 minutes learning about the Web today, like what the “debian-openssl fiasco” is, and if you had even more time, what “fedora core,” “xandros,” “gentoo,” “olpc os,” “slackware,” and “ubuntu” are? Maybe you’d start laughing at more XKCD comics, and wouldn’t that be wonderful? You’d get twice the pleasure from the same old comic strip you’d been reading all along.

This is exactly the kind of mind-improvement that Caliban’s Island encourages and offers. Treating Shakespeare as an acquirable language with its own vernacular, this site will offer you focused, fast, and learnable lesson-chunks that will let you subsequently sit down, read Shakespeare, and enjoy it smoothly. Here are some places to begin:

If you want material that will teach you how to understand Shakespeare’s plays on a macro level—and by that I mean plot comprehension, character exploration, and critical analysis—there are lots of other places better than this one that you should explore, like About.com’s How to Study Shakespeare course. Although you will find some literary exploration and analysis here, it’s not the heart of this site’s purpose.

Caliban’s Island aims to give you the resources and mind-power you need in order to read, analyze, and enjoy Shakespeare yourself.