Murasaki Shikibu and William Shakespeare

May 26
07:47

2011

Heather Kraus

Heather Kraus

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It’s hard for modern day writers to imagine a world without laptops where all words were put directly on paper. But William Shakespeare and Murasaki Shikibu were able to expertly convey their genius without the use technology and their works will always live on.

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Coming from two worlds apart,Murasaki Shikibu and William Shakespeare  Articles they set the standards of what a good author ought to be as far as literature in human history is concerned. The two people mentioned here are among the biggest, if not exactly the biggest names in the history of literature. Lady Murasaki Shikibu represents the Asian civilization whose excellence in arts surpassed other standards, representing characters in the world she was fated to exist. William Shakespeare represents the European civilization, representing fictional characters in that particular society featuring a surreal view of what the realities of their immediate environment seemed like.

Imagine if you have a time machine where you could travel back to their era and teach them all about the use of laptop. If that sounds too grotesquely unrealistic, picture both William Shakespeare and Lady Murasaki reincarnated in our contemporary times and become authors as they were always destined to be.

Lady Murasaki was a poet and a story-teller who will be later known as the "world's first novelist". Murasaki Shikibu is a highly educated noblewoman employed in the Imperial Court of Japan during the Heian Era, which dates within 800 to 1000 AD. She has probably dedicated her entire life to her work, writing the tale of fictional Japanese royalties and nobility mirroring the real models of her work in great detail. The characters she created in The Tales of Genji represent the very people of Japan in her time, especially depicting the picturesque reality of the aristocracy.

William Shakespeare is a famous English poet and playwright in the Elizabethan era, where England has once become a beacon of power throughout Europe in her golden age. William William Shakespeare has created characters out of his imagination, and crudely wrote them on parchment. One of them is The Merchant of Venice, a frugal man who equates everything, especially people, with monetary value. Another character is a Moorish African named Othello who has fallen victim to the discrimination of his society, diminishing his self-esteem to such an extent that it resulted to an awful tragedy. So far one of the most unforgettable characters was Macbeth, a decadent Scottish nobleman whose vices and evil has turned against him. Shakespeare has created fascinating characters that embodies the multicultural society of 15th Century England.

Certainly, if they could produce fascinating stories with the kind of technology we may perhaps now consider as atrociously taxing; then it could be frightening how much masterpieces they could write with the kind of technology we have now. We may never really know for sure. Stephen King, JK Rowling and Anne Rice will be totally eclipsed by the accomplishment of William Shakespeare and Lady Murasaki if they were to exist in our time with the same kind of genius they already have. Perhaps having this insightful premise would remind us of our gratitude for the kind of technology that offered us the kind of convenience that we take for granted nowadays. Writers, most of all, could not imagine the immeasurable gratitude for the advancement brought to us by our contemporary machinery.