Shakespeare certainly imagined a future for his work;
he believed in language and the power of language to survive the onslaught of time.
My name is Sonia Massai. I teach Shakespeare studies at King's College London.
Shakespeare's language has a very musical quality to it and this quality often survives in translation,
because translators become fascinated with the sound, the material quality of that language.
Shakespeare for me was an amazing, life-changing discovery.
The first time I heard Shakespeare in English in the Tuscan
countryside in a small provincial town, I was watching Twelfth Night and I just started
to study Shakespeare, so I could only partly understand what the actors were saying on stage.
But listening to the long flowing lines of blank verse, you can
feel the rhythm and the pace and the sheer material quality of those words.
A few lines that are so memorable that audiences literally wait for them to enjoy:
[From Twelfth Night] 'Make me a willow cabin at your gate, / And call upon my soul within the house. /
Write loyal cantons of contemned love / And sing them loud even in the dead of night. /
Halloo thy name to the reverberate hills / And make the bubbling gossip
of the air / Cry out, "Olivia"'. [Ends]. To appreciate the fact that these lines are all about
sound, songs, words... this is Shakespeare's daring you to believe in the power of