/lit/ - Literature

We’ll never fucking know. That knowledge is forbidden from us. That is what makes him so special

First of all he was a Catholic unlike most Anglos.

>>15437055
possessed by the devil, unironically

He was French

>>15437219
This may be it

>>15437227
Was he one of those Britons?

>>15437055
bow before him, you peasant

>>15437055
I doubt he wrote it, look at how dumb his eyes are.

>>15437251
Shakes smoked weed you know. Maybe he was blazed in that portrait.

>>15437254
>it's like, to be or not to be
>i'm writing that down

>>15437251
Literally modern scholarship on Shakespeare

>>15437267
But are they wrong?

>>15437281
Whether Shakespeare himself wrote it or not, the idea that some roasty wrote it and then put it under a random dude's name is absolutely ridiculous.

>>15437293
why does it have to be a wamen?

>>15437219
You mean a daemon.

>>15437055
They have seen into the face of death and mocked it.

Took this last week by the globe

>>15437055
>>15437190

>>15437055
You do know that man in the picture isn't really Shakespeare, right? You are literally projecting into that painting you idealization of him.

>>15437267
no serious shakespearean scholar believes this

>>15437342
they managed to make him look like a migrant Arab.

>>15437267
You've got no clue what the scholarly consensus is on Shakespeare you half-brained worm. The vast, vast majority of scholars are staunch Stratfordians, and there are, at best, a handful of fringe people like Alexandre Waugh who believe in Oxfordianism. Why do you people spout off about 'modern scholarship' when you've quite clearly never even stepped through the door of a university building?

>>15438364
Critical consensus says it is, edgeord. But your point is partially true. Not very substantial though. So what?

>>15437055
Italian who stole Middleton's plays and made them his own

>>15439036
BIG if true

>>15437227
Cope harder Frog, your worthless people will never achieve anything of actual value.

Based on the Jonsonian First Folio preface, I'm beginning to see how Bloom comes to identify Shakespeare as a miracle like Mohammad, Mark, and Moses: Shakespeare was POORLY trained (if not completely illiterate), yet, through sheer immersion in his environment (which, surely rich enough, isn't above and beyond a remarkable time for dramatists/poetry/etc.) he was able to take his contemporary's pieces apart, he was able to dissect and expand upon language, develop it for himself, indirectly gouge models and take them up for his own...really, he just had a remarkable strength for imagination, reconceptualization, and abstraction that probably appeared indistinguishable from the creative prowess required to survive as an actor and playwright.

>>15437055
>>15439049

>>15437055
he was talented

>>15439289
>shakspere was illiterate

The man knew latin and had a grammar school education

>>15437055
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dicb2NFI36s

>>15439289
>the man was dumb but actually rly smart
amazing

>>15439599
From the Cambridge Companion:
>To say that is, of course, to return to ‘small Latin and less Greek’: as a reader, Shakespeare was pretty much like most of us who have a reasonable command of a foreign language.
The education is surely more significant comparatively, but by all biographical accounts it doesn't seem nearly substantive enough to carry the weight of his unique poetic inventions (this is the whole point of Jonson's poem--that someone decidedly not a master of classical forms could still have a command of poetry of "all time."). And even this is a guess. There is zero evidence/sweeping confidence that he was educated. Take, for instance, the conflict between the argument that he had Latin (specifically William Lily's, which was standardized at the time, and whose first sections is dedicated to WRITING the Latin alphabet) and his inability to pen his own name legibly. "Scholarly consensus" is a contingency, especially in Shakespeare studies.

>>15439651
Yeah, his only authoritative contemporary, Ben Jonson, thought the same, and, yeah, it was a pretty amazing, hence the preface.

>>15439667
>poor handwriting = illiterate

have you seen some people's handwriting? I'm not convinced on that one. Writing the alphabet is standardised still, with those little trace the dots and writing exercises that kids do. The speed of composition is something you have to consider, Will isn't going to sit there and carefully write out every word, he was often writing extremely quickly and pumped out the plays like a madman.
You ever hear the "smart people have poor handwriting because they think faster than they can write so they rush"? Imagine what a genius like shakspere would be like.

Plus, we know what he was using as sources. Plutarch's lives was the main source for Plays like Julius Caesar, and though he read them in translation, there are also many instances of Him coining anglicised Latin words. Incarnadine comes to mind, from Macbeth

>>15438407
He doesn't look English anyways. Maybe he has some Jew blood from those that lived there before their expulsion. Maybe that's also the secret to his genius.

>>15439738
I think the handwriting thing is just apart of it, anon. Compare it to Marlowe's foul paper copy and see the dramatic difference. Shakespeare's handwriting shows more the businessman from the country who could scratch his initials moreos than it does a man who spent his most formative years under rigorous Latin instruction.

I agree with
>Will isn't going to sit there and carefully write out every word, he was often writing extremely quickly and pumped out the plays like a madman.
His actors basically confirmed this.

>Plus, we know what he was using as sources. Plutarch's lives was the main source for Plays like Julius Caesar, and though he read them in translation, there are also many instances of Him coining anglicised Latin words. Incarnadine comes to mind, from Macbeth
These are popular sources, he very well could've gotten them from a stage as from a book, which seems to be colluded by Jonson's anxiety. In fact, much criticism refers to some of the sources as 'transdiscursive': so ubiquitous that the speaker was often unaware they were operating under its influence.

>>15439738
I'm reading Leonard Barkan's essay "What Did Shakespeare Read?' in the Cambridge Companion, available on libgen. Highly recommend it to everyone on here because it fleshes out beyond the obvious texts in the apocryphal "personal library" and gets really specific.

>>15439771
I understand the idea, but I cannot reconcile it with the Shakespeare I know, I would be interested in reading that preface, would you know where it is produced/available?

The point about ubiquitous sources is something I agree with, and certainly as an indication that he may not have actually read a few of his sources. But it is still no indication to me of illiteracy. Even so, he may have read them, who can say, and just not consciously employed them. There are many points in Moby-Dick where Melville is distinctly biblical or echos it, and critics have agreed that the man didn't even realise himself, being so immured in the text, from repeated reading. It could be similar with old William, but transmission through plays is just as likely, I would suggest that perhaps he even obtained the written copies of plays, it seems plausible as he is in the business.

>>15439853
It's just Jonson's poem in the First Folio, and most of the supplementary anecdotes are found on Wikipedia/Folgers.

>I would suggest that perhaps he even obtained the written copies of plays, it seems plausible as he is in the business.
This is something I'm more interested in exploring, because I think another presumption of the "personal library" arguments is that he had access to all this stuff, which I've heard arguments for both sides of.

>>15438503
>Why do you people spout off about 'modern scholarship' when you've quite clearly never even stepped through the door of a university building?
Welcome to /lit/ -- 99% of the posters here have no absolutely clue what they're talking about.

>>15439879
https://shakespeare.lib.uiowa.edu/exhibit/
I don't think this is an exhaustive index but this is a solid list. Lily's Grammar is missing, oddly enough, when, even if he wasn't instructed in it properly, we know he references it directly in a few plays.

>>15439036
He would have been 10 years old during the performance of Shakespeare's early plays.

>>15439667
>his inability to pen his own name legibly
He was on his death bed, asshat. He could have been close to brain-dead when he signed his will.

>>15437055
I love how he makes every toff SEETHE to the point that they come up with conspiracy theories about who really wrote his plays because they simply can't accept that someone who didn't attend Oxford or Cambridge achieved anything of note in life.

>>15439918
There are other examples, and "on his deathbed" he reports perfect health at the age of 52.

>>15439948
>and "on his deathbed" he reports perfect health

>>15439960
You're talking about the will (relative to his death bed, don't forget you're the one who said the wrong thing first "asshat"), at which point in time he was reportedly in perfect health. Just Google it if you think I'm bluffing.

>>15439948
So he had shitty handwriting. What is that supposed to mean, exactly? It was legible enough to his colleagues.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/Sir_Thomas_More_Hand_D.jpg

>>15439880
And why shouldnt they? The board moves quickly, much too quickly in fact for every thread to be filled with exclusively experts, and besides, people browse the board looking for things to say. If they have some knowledge that they figure the average person (not the average lit poster, it should be noted) isnt in possession of, they figure they ought to share it, regardless if they have a bit grasp over the topic.

>>15439985
>He had
is apart of the problem

>>15439986
No, posters here literally invent 'alternative facts' in areas where they lack even rudimentary knowledge. You can have a 'fast-moving board' where people only speak to what they know, and express curiosity toward what they don't. That's obviously not the case on /lit/.

>>15439756
>Maybe he has some Jew blood from those that lived there before their expulsion.
Not only is this pretty unlikely, it'd also be about 300 years back if it were true. Now fuck off Chaim.

>>15439923
Never met a toff that actually thinks that. It's usually some third generation middle class person who thinks they are something more than they are.

>>15437055
>I look into those eyes and shudder?
By several accounts, he was an amiable man.

Have you ever met someone who had their shit together? Who was able to get through life without seeming to really break a sweat, while at the same time being a person of accomplishments?

Well, by every indication, Shakes was this kind of person. Plus touched by genius.

>>15440008
you're on a site that values ironic shitposting where it's not uncommon to see people take an absurd position to argue from for shits and giggles and on boards like /lit/ the resulting discussions are occasionally more interesting than mundane politically correct discussion #5727 on a subject, and while this approach has flaws where you get people failing to grasp the irony or turning light hearted fun into serious politically motivated bullshit that nobody wants to deal with the alternative of pretending everybody but you is stupid shows the same failure of not understanding the board or site culture where the only remedy is to lurk more or return to where you came from (academia), it's quite frankly embarrassing that you fail to understand this and that you got riled up over what was obvious bait when your main complaint was that people don't understand what they're talking about
if you really believe '99% of posters have no clue what they're talking about' and that fast moving boards can have high quality discussions you really aught to re-examine one of those beliefs as it seems patently obvious that most people will get bored of contributing posts that get no replies to threads that will be archived in a few hours

>>15437055
he was an illiterate peasant that didn't write shit; we might never know who the real genius was

>>15440621
Explain jonson

>>15440612
>simping for 4chan this hard
Yikes.

This pleb read translations KEK

>>15440621
Shakespeare's works were written by a freed black slave, Shakespeare could barely write his own name down, much less his plays or sonnets.

Being born a genius and adapting the works of others.

>>15437055
If that is really Shakespeare why does he look like a jew?

>>15441990
Britons come from Anatolia. Anglo-Saxons werent native to Britain (only arrived in 500 AD)