/lit/ - Literature

>>18576090
By the current standards of academia I'm pretty much a Nazi. One I will say here is that I don't think everyone should go to university, and I dont think everyone should go to school past a certain age. I guess that's not really controversial any more. But the overall quality of education could be drastically improved if younger children were apprenticed to people who, unfortunately, no longer exist due to technological advancements. I don't think all races are the same, and believe they have inherent natural strengths and weaknesses. I believe in objective morality.

>>18576096
Does Shakespeare count as one? All of Shakespeare. Paradise Lost. If you want something dark but easier to understand than PL, try Duchess of Malfi. Marlowe's good, try Doctor Faustus, the OG pre-Goethe telling of the myth. The Spanish Tragedy. Bits of The Faerie Queene and Donne's poetry is worth a look. It really is astonishing, staggeringly so, that between 1587 to 1665 England produced Marlowe, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Jonson, and Milton. If you want a general primer on Shakespeare, who remains in my view the greatest writer in the English language, then you can't go wrong with Shapiro's 1599 and Bate's Genius of Shakespeare. In terms of criticism I love AC Bradley, even if his views are dismissed by plenty of academic philistines these days. Personality has to be taken into account when studying Shakespeare. As they say, Hamlet would have seen through Iago in an instant, and Othello would have taken action and killed Claudius straight away. As much as I like Eliot as a poet I do not think him a very good critic of Shakespeare.