Okay so I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the world has the works of the best writer in the English language who ever lived,. Better yet, they're free and easily accessible.
The bad news is that they were written 400 years ago in a style of writing that's just, well, different. 'Whither goest thou?' instead of 'Where are you going?'. Jokes that would have landed at the time that feel off today. Sentences that follow odd rhyming schemes. It's still English, but with a learning curve, written by (presumably) one individual author about which surprisingly little is known personally.
As you probably guessed, the author's name is William Shakespeare.
The struggle to read these great writings was one I faced when I first picked up the Complete Works of William Shakespeare in 2018. Over the years, I'd open the first play, Henry 6th Part 1, stumble through the first page, then close the tome and set it aside. Shakespeare, I had decided, was not for me.
That was until 2024. ChatGPT had been introduced in late 2022. AI was getting better each year. Good enough, it turned out, to be a guide in all things Shakespeare: the language, the context, the characters, the plot, the patterns.
From then on, AI became a lantern with which I could navigate the dim, labyrinthine pages of Shakespeare's writings It was like having an on-demand tutor that knew the entire corpus. It was a Rosetta Stone in my pocket for 16th century verse and prose.
That is when the Bard's works finally clicked for me. The rhythms, the themes, the foreshadowing, the small intricacies that could only be picked out by someone who had a deep understanding of the texts and the world in which they were created.
Yet as I read more of the plays, the paradox of using AI became apparent: the technology seeks to eliminate the vagaries embedded intentionally into the plays and poems, while Shakespeare sought to deepen such elements.
AI will always give you an answer. Sometimes wildly inaccurate, sometimes hallucinating, and sometimes silly, but an answer nonetheless. Shakespeare offers you more questions than answers. It was what John Keats described as 'negative capability', the ability to sit with uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact or reason. This is the core of Shakespeare's writings, as it's core to human nature. It's up to you to decide why a character acts or reacts in a certain way. Their motives. Their hesitations. Their ambition. Their doubts. What's more, Shakespeare seems to embody these elements of human nature and transmutes them onto the page. While AI is great at predicting the next word in an answer, it simply cannot live with the stakes you or I face on a daily basis.
it is from this paradox that we might draw a conclusion: AI will keep getting better, while the human heart will remain the same. The fear, love, ambition, grief, and entire spectrum of human emotion is something that an AI can understand conceptually because it has been trained on the collective corpus of human knowledge which captured such feelings in words. Yet it cannot realize them as we as readers do.
Despite this, I encourage you to let AI to be a keystone in the bridge from ignorance to understanding Shakespeare. Perhaps not the keystone. Maybe just a stone. A scaffold. A helper. The keystone is likely your own lived experience in the context of what Shakespeare wrote. Maybe a horrible boss that resembles some of the traits of Richard 3rd. That friend who acts like Falstaff. A partner who pulls your strings like Lady Macbeth (hopefully not).
No matter what your reasons, you might find reading Shakespeare a rewarding experience. Why? Because there are fundamental truths in his works. And it is up to you to find them.