/lit/ - Literature

I accidentally discovered an obscure French literary critic who wrote what is, in my view, one of the best analyzes of Shakespeare's verbal art.

The name of the critic is Hippolyte Adolphe Taine.

I will quote excerpts from the author's criticism here, but I strongly suggest that those interested in English literature read the book on Project Gutemberg Project:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61308/61308-h/61308-h.htm

>SECTION II.—Shakespeare's Style—Copiousness—Excesses

Let us then look for the man, and in his style. The style explains the work; whilst showing the principal features of the genius, it infers the rest. When we have once grasped the dominant faculty, we see the whole artist developed like a flower.

Shakespeare imagines with copiousness and excess; he scatters metaphors profusely over all he writes; every instant abstract ideas are changed into images; it is a series of paintings which is unfolded in his mind. He does not seek them, they come of themselves; they crowd within him, covering his arguments; they dim with their brightness the pure light of logic. He does not labor to explain or prove; picture on picture, image on image, he is forever copying the strange and splendid visions which are engendered one after another, and are heaped up within him. Compare to our dull writers this passage, which I take at hazard from a tranquil dialogue:

"The single and peculiar life is bound,
With all the strength and armor of the mind,
To keep itself from noyance; but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depend and rest
The lives of many. The cease of majesty
Dies not alone; but, like a gulf, doth draw
What's near it with it: it is a massy wheel,
Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount,
[Pg 366]To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortised and adjoin'd; which, when it falls,
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh, but with a general groan."[630]

Mix up different writers to create a new writer.

It’s not about citing the real main influences behind a particular writer, but actually some authors that, mostly due to their style and theme, when combined, might result on something similar to that final writer.

I will start:

>Aeschylus + The Arabian Nights + Charles Dickens + Emily Dickinson = William Shakespeare.

>Regardless.

Today is Shakespeare's birthday.

I know that many anons think he is overrated. For that reason I would like to make a thread quoting several different passages from what I consider his most impressive quality: the poetic language of his dramas

Above all other things - he was a poet. And there's no other poet as far as I know that comes even near his greatness.

Name me another writer can write so beautifully in so many different styles, on so many themes, nesting inside so many different brains.

And please, let me know if any other poet has the same number of striking metaphors, at the same time fresh and beautiful, the kind of imagery that one never forgets.

About love, in the exaggerated and melancholy style of Renaissance poets (look for something in Petrarch that is more inventive than this):

For Orpheus' lute was strung with poets' sinews,
Whose golden touch could soften steel and stones,
Make tigers tame and huge leviathans
Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands.

An existential and Dantesque meditation on death and the hereafter:

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling: 'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.

A meditation of complete darkness and devoid of any remnants of Christian hope or any religious support:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
— To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle!
Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing..