My impression of Shakespeare and his work are always very unclear as I have never went to read one of his books or watch his plays. However, I have heard that his book were almost not understandable in the normal English context, and required word by word deciphering to understand it. Thus, I was also afraid to read his books due to my poor English standard. Shakespeare live in the Elizabethan era and there are many differences in the world we are living in now. Firstly, the most obvious difference would be the difference in social classes. There is of course, unarguably social class difference in our society now; however it was still much better than that then. The people of the low social classes can never get to the top no matter how much effort they put in. This is unlike the society now, where anyone can rise to the top if given good education and effort is put in.
Also, the hygiene knowledge then was not good. People did not know that dirt carry germs and the black plague caught the people in that era off-handed as they had no knowledge of how to prevent it from spreading, which was one of the main reasons why it caused that many deaths in the Europe region. Shakespeare lived in a society that is evidently different from us. However, some of his works can be applied to the modern day context. One of the examples would be the Merchant of Venice, where racism between the Jews and Christians were mentioned not only once. This can be related to the skin colour racialism in our society now. Also, phrases such as “love is blind and lovers cannot see” is one of the most common phrases authors and people like us use in our writing and daily conversation.
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