/lit/ - Literature

What's his best play?

Go read the Saint Crispin's Day Speech.

>>16981256
A ton of Shakespeare's characters are very realistic, though. This is probably Shakespeare's greatest strength as a storyteller, this ability to craft realistic characters in a handful of lines in a play.

Who is the greatest poet in the history of the English language?

Did you reread A Midsummer Night's Dream yesterday, /lit/? It was officially Midsummer, after all.

It's Shakespeare's birthday, /lit/. Say something nice about him!

I keep seeing all these people say that Shakespeare wrote King Lear and Macbeth when he was quarantined during a plague in England. With that in mind, how productive has /lit/ been? Are you writing prose or poetry with all of us stuck at home? What are you working on?

I love Shakespeare so much. Words cannot express how much I adore him. I'll always ride or die with him. Fuck Tolstoy, his stuff isn't THAT good and he wasn't even a real Christian.

The true locus of Shakespeare's genius is the fact that he can make his characters feel like the people you yourself meet in everyday life. This is the most brilliant thing he's capable of and no one can do it like him. At least, not on the scale he does it, with his dozens of fully real characters. His poetry is beautiful and brilliant but it's what he does with his characters that makes him such an incredible genius.

What is your favorite Shakespeare play?

What do you think is the BEST Shakespeare play?

>>13374583
What an awful post. Whoever said that form and meter were restrictive? This is a lie of the Modernists and it's been repeatedly proven wrong. The very limitations of verse and meter generate superior work because they force the poet to think creatively and to consider how he can best make use of the constraints and still get his message across.

The best of the free verse/unrestrained poets are geniuses who would have been every bit as good writing in meter. Wallace Stevens would have written great poetry in iambic pentameter, if that's all he had known.

He was just the greatest genius who's ever picked up a pen, or close to it. There's a reason Harold Bloom wanks off to him so much. Shakespeare literally was just that good.

1. What do you think is Shakespeare's best play?

2. What is your favorite Shakespeare play?

I'm curious to see how everyone answers this, because I don't think the answers to the two questions need to be the same. As for me, I think either Hamlet or Lear is Shakespeare's most excellent play. But if you ask me to pick what I personally enjoy the most, it's going to be either Julius Caesar or A Midsummer Night's Dream.

>>13269507
Exactly. Shakespeare was one of the most famous men in the British Isles by the time of his death. Samuel Johnson was a celebrity. Borges was an international sensation, as was Goethe. Joyce was celebrated by the end of his life, as was Tolkien.

The trick is that it DOES take time for great works of art to be appreciated, but that amount of time is usually not as long as is commonly believed. It's generally a few decades. So, if the artist takes care of himself and doesn't meet with an unfortunate, early demise (like Kafka did), he will usually live to see his work appreciated by the masses. If it's any good, that is.

>>13188616
Doesn't this make Shakespeare even greater? We don't even read and perform his plays like they're supposed to be done, yet he still manages to be powerful and meaningful.