/lit/ - Literature

>excessive admiration of Shakespeare.

This cult of shakespeare is bizarre. The worship is too exaggerated. I feel like everyone has been brainwashed into thinking this guy was some kind of untouchable god of writing.

Shakespeare was exposed by Tolstoy

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tolstoy_on_Shakespeare

Shakespeare was exposed by Tolstoy

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tolstoy_on_Shakespeare

Reminder that Shakespeare was a serial plagiarizer who never wrote 1 original work. Also, every one of the works published under "Shakespeare" is overrated garbage

Which complete works of Shakespeare should I buy? From the reviews on amazon of the Knickerbocker Classics version, it contains no notes on word usage or other useful notes, which seems a shame. Which did you buy?

>Most of the “intellectual depth” is people reading into the folio things that weren’t meant to be part of the narrative to the people that watched the plays at their inception. There’s barely any difference in depth between Romeo and Juliet and “The Fault in Our Stars,” or even “Twilight.” Or Twelfth Night and “Mrs. Doubtfire.” Or “The Tempest” and “Star Trek.” Like post-colonialism isn’t inherent to “The Tempest,” academics found it by looking there. It’s not really any different from Spider-Man as a puberty metaphor or the X-Men as one for racial inequality. Hell, I wrote my senior thesis on the ecological themes of Dead Space 2 and it was really well received. All you and Maher are doing here is gatekeeping to preserve a sense of pretension.

Do you agree with this brutal commentary on Shakespeare?

For those of you from England: What’s the reputation of Shakespeare like in England? Is he taken for granted or do people generally have a close relationship with his work? Around what age generally do schoolchildren start to study him?

Just finished Hamlet, and read Romeo & Juliet before that. I loved both, they were my first two Shakespeares. What would you recommend?

Watching the plays, rather than reading them, is the superior form of consuming Shakespeare. If you disagree, you're wrong. Also, Othello is the best tragedy to flow from this God-like white man's pen. All other opinions are incorrect.

If the entertainment industry has demonstrated anything, it's that your shit doesn't need to have genuine artistic merit in order for it to be consumed by the uneducated masses.

Which is more likely:

1) The most prolific 16th-century dramatist wrote genuinely literary shit unnecessarily.

2) We've gotta be living in some Idiocracy shit if our academics are still wowed by Shakespearean figures of speech that Steve the Shit Shoveler (RIP 1598 after complications following a bad cold) had no trouble grasping?

So what are your /lit/ related goals for 2k19

I just finished RJ, it was my first Shakespeare and I absolutely loved it. What Shakespeare should I read next?