[Yves S L]

I will talk about Johann Sebastian Bach. During my teenage years, I fell asleep listening to his keyboard music. I was not much swayed by the mythology that grew around his genius, as I was not myself socially immersed within the culture of European classical music that might have challenged me to conform to what other people might say (I did not care how I might appear to other people who are socially immersed in that culture). I had not done a comparative study of his peers to judge how much he pushed against the established conventions of his time versus how much he innovated or was simply a better technician: to compress without speaking of any details, the music strongly spoke to my own sense of aesthetics. The talk about Shakespeare is as if someone can mandate that everyone find the same face beautiful, so strongly is the topic settled, and sure enough, the Europeans will choose a European face or similar, and likewise with other cultures.

In the last few years, using subtitles, I watched a historical Korean drama of many episodes which spoke to me emotionally much more than I have ever experienced of the English tradition as expressed through what I have gleaned of Shakespeare. It is obvious in the different music of different religions that different cultures do not express or are touched by similar emotions. The focus on the surface of language does not touch why different works of art evoke different responses in different people. To hint at what I am talking about, the English translation of the drama, and the voices of the English voice actors left me totally cold, and not wanting to dirty my lovely memories of my original experience watching the series (bear in mind I don't know Korean).

Now it might just be that the kind of folk who go deep into academia are such that they intellectualy/emotionally respond to Shakespeare's English. And that is fine.

Addendum: A person's use of English exhibits a person's cognitive/emotional patterns. Call it mental music. What is Shakespeare's mental music, and how does it correspond to the typical mental music of academicians?