/lit/ - Literature

joyce certainly embodies modernist aesthetic ideals better than shakey, but shakey was more groundbreaking within his literary context & has survived longer.

>>11713744
well "surviving longer" surely has to do with the fact its impossible for joyce to have survived longer than he already has.

>>11713744
>joyce certainly embodies modernist aesthetic ideals better than shakey,
Well obviously. What kind of comparison is this? Could Shakespeaere have had the possibility of somehow doing the same centuries before modernism?

Poor quality thread...

>>11713744
What the two previous posters have said + there were already Renaissance dramatists similar to Shakespeare that wrote before him, like Marlowe. Very few modernist authors did anything like Joyce.

>>11713769
yes? there are plenty of texts that were retroactively affirmed as great literature after modernist aesthetic ideals became established. much like how aphra behn's work embodies intersectional feminist ideals and as such people are trying to canonize it currently.

>>11713779
>Very few modernist authors did anything like Joyce.

Like write about hog farts? Ok einstein

>>11713779
have you read any of marlowe's plays? what does he actually have in common with shakespeare in your view?? i cant think of very many things at all, marlowe is such a fundmentally different writer, clearly writing for aristocracy and attempting to display himself as a knowledgeable genius with his work, shakespeare definitely feels to me like someone who had a genuine passion for delivering drama, emotions & stories to a common audience.

>>11713791
Then why even bring it up? Joyce did modernist aesthetics better, so what? Shakes doesn't have to do better in that one area to be better overall.

Joyce is smarter but their literary productions are even.

>>11713735
Off the top of my head Shakespeare has taught me: not to get upset when your girlfriend yells, makes you jealous, etc (As You Like it, Ant & Cleo); there is no convincing someone by straight out telling them what happens (Othello, others); talk to your wife about your troubles (Julius Caesar); a smart man will also know how to take care of his body (Julius Caesar); be yourself (shrew).

What Joyce has taught me off the top of my head: Love your girl (The Dead); money in the bank feels good and moving fast means thinking fast, like Aristotle and Nietzsche said (that racecar Dubliners story); Shakespeare is the happy huntingground for minds who have lost their balance (Ulysses); people are different (Ulysses); money isn't the MOST important thing (Ulysses); Everyone is going through their own suffering (Ulysses)...

Honestly the list goes on for either and I can say the same for one that I can for the other.

>>11713811
why bring it up? because when you ask the question "which artist is better" modernist aesthetic ideals are one of the most well-understood measures of literary quality. the whole field of study was an attempt to create a system in which art could be ranked in such a manner.

>>11713819
It's still the measure from a particular artistic zeitgeist. It doesn't hold universal authority. There are writers that have nothing to do or avoid artistic modernism and still hold as much ground as many great modernist.

>>11713842
i do not disagree at all, though i dont think there is a strong argument for joyce being the best writer from any other perspective

>>11713817
>huntingground
>dressinggown
Why does Joyce do this? It's annoying.

>>11713735
Post your favorite Joyce bit and your favorite Shakes bit.

>>11713888
the letetr about hog farts and shakespre beign a fag

>>11713888
'arse full of farts' and 'Exit, pursued by a bear' in particular are their best.

>>11713779
Poor quality post.

>there were already Renaissance dramatists similar to Shakespeare that wrote before him, like Marlowe.

Is the similarity that they all wrote in blank verse? If you’ve actually read Shakespeare’s plays and other Renaissance plays, you can see that Shakespeare is lightyears ahead of them. His density of language and abundance of metaphor far surpasses anything anyone else was writing then, and, instead of making the often fairly shallow morality plays others wrote, he created incredibly complex and sympathetic villains, tortured heroes, antiheroes, and so on. Philosophically, poetically, psychologically, his greatest plays have much much more depth and greatest than the other plays of his day. Other playwrights of the day used the play form and the plots given to them in fairly shallow ways, creating morality plays, entertainments, stuff to show off for the royal court, etc. Shakespeare put all he had into the form and possibilities given to him, writing tragicomedies/plays of ambiguous moral tenor, embellishing them with beautiful rhetorical flourishes and fascinatingly complex characters, and also using them to genuinely ponder on the complexities and ambiguities of life in a way not constricted by any narrow dogma or ideology. His plays include well-done nihilistic rants, existentialistic speeches, pious religious ideas, mystical and superstitious comments, justifications for absolute evil, pacifistic ideas, glorifications of war, odes to the beauty of life, paeans to the shallowness and disgustingness of life, comical outlooks, tragic outlooks, and tragicomic outlooks equally.

Few writers have been so ambiguous and complex, portraying so many worldviews so well and so detachedly that we still can’t tell what their own very worldview was beyond a certain enlightened, lucid, cool and compassionate cynicism concerning life and humanity.

>>11713888
Shakespeare:

O God! Methinks it were a happy life
To be no better than a homely swain,
To sit upon a hill as I do now,
To carve out dials quaintly, point by point,
Thereby to see the minutes how they run:
How many makes the hour full complete,
How many hours brings about the day,
How many days will finish up the year,
How many years a mortal man may live.
When this is known, then to divide the times:
So many hours must I tend my flock,
So many hours must I take my rest,
So many hours must I contemplate,
So many hours must I sport myself,
So many days my ewes have been with young,
So many weeks ere the poor fools will ean,
So many years ere I shall shear the fleece;
So minutes, hours, days, months, and years,
Passed over to the end they were created,
Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave.
Ah, what a life were this! How sweet, how lovely!
Gives not the hawthorn bush a sweeter shade
To shepherds looking on their silly sheep
Than doth a rich embroidered canopy
To kings that fear their subjects’ treachery?
O yes, it doth, a thousandfold it doth.
And to conclude, the shepherd’s homely curds,
His cold thin drink out of his leather bottle,
His wonted sleep under a fresh tree’s shade,
All which secure and sweetly he enjoys,
Is far beyond a prince’s delicates—
His viands sparkling in a golden cup,
His body couchèd in a curious bed—
When care, mistrust, and treason waits on him.

>>11713888
Joyce:
who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so
there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he
said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his
straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my
breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that
was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him
because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I
gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer
first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of
Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all
birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of
the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish
girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and
the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street
and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep
and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts
of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white
and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old
windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops
half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman
going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson
sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the
queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine
and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I
put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me
under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my
eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I
put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes
and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

>>11713807
dif anon
I've read them all but Lust's Dominion, which is probably not his so...
Can't really draw a fair comparison. Both born in 1564 Shakespeare outlived Marlowe by 23 years. At the time of his death Marlowe was well ahead of Shakespeare developmentally, however. No play of Shakespeare's written 1593 or before is as good as Marlowe's Edward ii (for instance). Just a fact.

>>11714590
I'd say Titus Andronicus is up there but Edward II is very good

>>11714590
i really can't stand marlowe, the constant displays of learnedness all over his work make it very hard for me to engage with his writing