Re: Shakespeare? who is he anyway?
"This means that mercy cannot be compelled"
The fact that it needs to be explained sort of makes my point...
And my response to your interesting bullet points (thank you, nicely phrased) - a & d, certainly not e.
I believe in the maxim "all knowledge is power". There is nothing that should not be studied, since even the most unpromising and initially apparently useless things can become world-changers with the right imagination and application. However, having been forced to study this gibberish as a schoolboy I very quickly realised that it had no relevance to me, since my idea of communication is the clear and unambiguous conveyance of ideas, and (as my first sentence says) Shakespeare in the modern world signally fails to achieve this.