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Costanza comments on The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship - Less Wrong
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Are Shakespeare's comedies - containing mainly sexual innuendo, mistaken identities, abuse, and puns, and using the same extremely improbable plot devices repeatedly - really great works of art? They're good, but are they really first-tier?
Do any of Shakespeare's tragedies contain insights into human nature that are as important or as difficult for you to discover on your own as those you would find in a Jhumpa Lahiri novel? I think not. (Honestly, is King Lear deep? No; just dramatic and well-written. Any idiot knows by Act II what will happen.)
We still read Shakespeare today partly because Shakespeare was great when he wrote; but partly because Shakespeare was a master of individual phrases and of style, and literature departments today are dominated by postmodernists who believe there is no such thing as substance, and therefore style is all that matters. (Or perhaps the simpler explanation is that people who make and critique films tend to be more impressed by visual effects than by content; and people who make and critique books tend to be more impressed by verbal effects than by content.)
(Don Quixote, though, is golden. :)
Another reason to be familiar with the canonical works in a culture is precisely because they're canonical. It's like a common currency. By now, English-speaking culture is so rooted in Shakespeare that you'd be missing out if you didn't recognize the references.
We do now! But apparently, the original Elizabethan audiences went in expecting a happy ending -- and were shocked when it turned out to be a tragedy. Tricky fellow, that Willy S.
Yes. Same reason some familiarity with the King James Version of the Bible is culturally useful.
cf Richard Dawkins on his lifelong love of the King James Bible
I didn't mean they would know how it would end - I meant they would know that Lear used shallow indicators to judge character, and Cordelia would turn out to be the faithful daughter.
It looks like audiences since before Shakespeare's time would have gone in knowing the outline of the story. But I'm mostly replying to confess - the same Wikipedia article that I myself quoted makes it clear that there was no really happy ending to King Lear until 1681. I wasn't paying close enough attention.