/lit/ - Literature

>m'lady

>>16912541
>epic post, Morty, burrrp

>>16912541
Shakespeare was writing for midwits for profit. Nothing surprising there.

BTW, 140 IQ is king of midwits. real intelligence comes at 150+.

Do you bite your thumb at us sir?

>>16912541
>>16912581
Hah you faggots, you're barely conscious if you're at 170 IQ

>>16912541
he's the equivalent of a "quotable" TV series like sopranos or simpsons
like you said most of the plots are banal but well written

The only true Genius is the Subgenius.

>>16912541
>83610C85-5C4E-4F94-A176-5(...).jpg
i can't help but laugh at the thought of people using this website on their cell phones

>>16912541
"His insights" are just the insights that you draw from his work. Just because you (a classic midwit) draw mediocre and inane insights from a work of genius, reflects little upon the work itself. Eliot himself said that Dante and Shakespeare divide the world.

>>16912581
Apparently I'm 150 and I feel far too stupid to be called a "genius"

>>16913888
h-holy checked

i'm 152 IQ and i enjoy shakespeare quite a bit, acted in many of his plays in middle school and high school. it's true that a lot of it was composed as mass entertainment, the sopranos/game of thrones of its day, but there are some moments of true depth and beauty. he's also a master stylist of the english language. just read hamlet's mortal coil monologue (a favorite of midwits such as OP). i've found few passages in all of literature that depict the contemplations of the aspiring suicide more momentously.

dubs and i'll rape op

>>16914229
rolling

>>16912541
Joyce, Nabokov and Wilde all admired Shakespeare. You're the midwit here.

>>16914288
Checked

>>16914288
>Joyce, Nabokov and Wilde all admired Shakespeare.
All midwit trash.

>>16914294
Enlighten us with your favorite authors then.

>>16914294
> All midwit trash.

>>16914298
Sally Rooney and John Green

>>16914288
While Orwell, Tolkien and Shaw thought he was overrated. They're peak midwits.

>>16912541
Falstaff is hardly midwit, even if you take the term to mean what it does outside of Cult 4chan, within which it's a self-flattering pejorative for anyone who isn't an aliterate and/or socially inept cretin with delusions of grandeur.

>>16912541
shut the fuck up, bitch.

you gotta consider how amazing this stuff must have been 450 years ago

>>16915058
Its amazing now. Why are idiots like you on this board holy shit.

>>16915058
>i-it was good for it's time, I totally like it but I get why others don't
Just admit you don't understand Shakespeare, no one cares. Quit hiding behind that veneer of aloofness.

I think people make a fundamental mistake when examining Shakespeare. The man was primarily a playwright. You were supposed to WATCH Shakespeare, not read him.

>>16912541
>insights
artlet

>>16914288
nabokov is a midwit but joyce is valid
>>16913888
if you remember what eliot said about the highest form of art youll also understand why shakespeare is not for midwits at all. OP is looking for the "personality" and experience of shakespeare in his work and comparing it to his own, as in "Ive had thoughts like these, they arent special". for a midwit, self expression and the emblem of the poets genius through sharing his personal insights is what makes art good, and shakespeare through this lens obviously isnt amazingly deep or anything. but when you regard art as being more artistic the less narcissitic it is, like eliot does, you see how great shakespeare really is. who knows if he really felt the feelings he depicts, or if he really agreed with or saw any real profundity in the thoughts of his characters. he isnt writing about himself. he is using his experiences and ideas as materials to craft a depersonalised and universal artistic reality and artistic emotions, rather than subjecting us all egotistically to his own. thats why makes him high art, as opposed to cringeokov who is spluttering self therapy in a continuum of nice sounds

The last few days, this board has become unbearably retarded. Time to jump ship.

>>16915392
old /lit/ genuinely called shakespeare overrated shit. this place has always been fucking stupid

>>16912594
HA! 170 IQ? Perhaps if you are of African descent. Anyone possessing an IQ of below 200 has only merely glimpsed at the truth.

>>16912541
Accessibility doesn't make something bad, it makes it targeted

>>16915244
That always struck me as odd. It'd be like reading the script to a film before watching the film. There's still value in reading Shakespeare's plays, but I always watch them before I read them

All this talk of midwits and pseuds and shitting on literary titans to brag about IQ... this is a cult of death. Nothing is sacred here. You retards have somehow found a way to ruin literature

>>16912581
What do you mean, writing for midwits for profit?
The ending of midsummer night's dream was a beautiful 4th wall breaking, not a fed up 210+ IQ dunking on Renaissance Europe so hard they asked him to fuck them harder.
That alone is reason to enjoy Shakespeare

>To be considered a great poet, of the first order, one must speak to the masses and act upon them; only general ideas and sentiments may impress them; everyone loves to find within a poet's hymn a thought of his own.

>The most celebrated verses by poets are usually the most pedestrian. Take, for example, ten of them from Byron when he sings about the torments of love, or the brevity of life, or any other commonplace theme. These shall find more admirers than the strange visions of Jean Paul or Hoffmann: the masses are far more familiar with being in love or falling out of it, and an even greater number are still afraid of dying but only a few have seen, even in dreams, the fantastically dark silhouettes that are invoked by German poets.

>>16915991
the iq posting is just a meme bro

>>16915244
Not exactly. Acting in the Elizabethan times is completely different than acting in modern times. In the 1600s, acting wasn't anything more than reading the script in a near deadpan manner. That's why there's so few action in Shakespeare's plays, and why all the characters are announcing their feelings instead of acting them out. So reading Shakespeare isn't really different from watching Shakespeare the way he intended it to be acted.

My IQ is pretty low and I like Shakespeare

>>16914304
>>16912541
>>16912581
>>16914294
lmfao solid bait

Shakespeare is not exclusively for mid-wits. You claim that his insights are cliche, without making any distinction between the 21st century and Shakespeare’s England. Shakespeare’s insights have become ingrained in our culture, but they certainly were not “cliche” when they were written. Are Galileo’s discoveries banal and cliche because modern children know that the solar system is heliocentric? Shakespeare was such a genius that, centuries after his death, children are still taught his stories and fools know his wisdom to be their own.

I know I'm responding to a bait thread but I want to say this anyway. One of the most interesting things about Shakespeare is in the apocrypha. Who was Shakespeare? Did he actually write anything? If not, who did? There are no definitive answers to any of these questions. What we do know is that Shakespeare's plays are essentially living documents. They present frameworks for stories that work on a universally human level and are almost completely atemporal. The name Shakespeare is essentially a placeholder, a piece of folded paper that can be unfolded and unfolded and unfolded to the point where it spans the globe. It reaches from the catacombs of Paris up to the summit of Olympus. In Shakespeare you can find a kind of encyclopedia of abstractions waiting for implementation and focusing. Shakespeare is the breadth of human experience. Love, loss, hubris, humility, war, life, death, pride, jealousy—it's all there. Nobody is too smart for Shakespeare, but you can absolutely be too arrogant, too ignorant.

>>16912541
140s only catch the surface level of it. At 160 you start to get the intertextual metanarrative. I mean, you dont. But we do. For you, it's not worth the time

>>16916078
pretty based

IQ doesn't mean shit, when you're such a high IQ you will only end up isolating yourself from others. What's valuable is being able to orchestrate people and bending them to your will.
I'd rather have the genius of a military commander than a physicist.

>>16917577
Above a certain point your IQ doesn't really matter that much in terms of what you are capable of, and becomes just a point of dickwaving. And in all cases, your raw intellect is ultimately subservient to your life experiences. In order to recognize patterns, you first have to accumulate enough data from which to draw the comparisons. Crucially, insight seems to be more or less its own standalone quantity rather than being tied explicitly to testable intellect. It certainly interacts with intelligence, but you can have one without the other. We don't value Tolstoy for his ability to pick up on concepts quickly, but because of his deep insights into the human condition and its encircling social structures. He was able to arrive where he was because of the CONFLUENCE of factors composing him rather than a surplus of any particular one of them. /lit/ has always had a really superficial conception of intelligence, but this thread comes close to taking the cake.

>>16917613
this

>>16917577
The stereotype that scientists are isolated weirdos isn't true at all. They have to collaborate with other scientists all the time, work in teams if their research is based on experiments and most of them also have to teach and give lectures.

>>16912541
He is the most verbally creative author of the English language, as well as one of the richest inventors of characters and worlds in all of Western Literature.

And it stops there. I don't think he is comparable to Homer, Dante, Plato, the Bible, and I am not at all sure that he is superior to the Greek, the Spanish and the French dramatists, the Russian novelists, Cervantes etc.
Shakespeare has the advantage of having created a lot - my volume of his collected works is some 2000 pages long - which means he compares rather favorably with authors whose output was on average superior, but considerably smaller or more limited from the point of view of invention, such as, in my opinion, Baudelaire, Petrarch, Horace etc.
If I open a random page from Les Fleurs du Mal or Petrarch's Rime, I am pretty sure I am going to read a great poem; if I open a random page from Shakespeare, I might stumble upon a mediocre wordplay or a Petrarch pastiche as easily as I might upon a beautiful soliloquy. However, the incredible populations that rise out of Shakespeare's pages give his book a richness which those other authors, in their superior perfection, probably do not attain. You need to be highly imperfect if you wish to be numerous - unless, of course, you are Homer, Dante, Plato, or a collection of authors contributing to a sacred book.... These are the ones who were able to preserve both the richness and the perfection, and seem to me to be, therefore, greater authors than Shakespeare.

I am not a detractor of Shakespeare (of whom I have translated a few sonnets and passages), but I laugh at bardolatry: it is usually Anglo-Germanic, and rarely based on good reasoning. In my view, Shakespeare should be ranked alongside the Russians (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, perhaps Pushkin and Chekhov), who are quite similar to him in their extraordinary capacity to give life to a large number of characters and new psychological situations - they are indeed better than Shakespeare in this aspect, but he compensates with his mastery of the English tongue (I haven't read the Russians in the original, but I am pretty sure their linguistic mastery does not come close to Shakespeare's, except maybe in the case of Pushkin, who was also a poet).

>>16914310
They who? The one's you've listed?
Midwits tend to hate G.B. Shaw. He admired, at the same time, Mussolini and Stalin, besides being a socialist as well as an eugenicist; thus, he tangles the brain of the midwit in a web of dark confusion.

I don't think your average midwit would take this very easily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBZsTf6oLfY

>>16912541
Is Mozart for midwits? I have read the sheet music of all his operas and don't see much more than bad lyrics and very standard musical expressions.

>>16912541
>reading purely for "insights"
No anon you are the midwits

>>16917736
Orwell and Tolkien are certainly midwits. Shaw held many retarded opinions, a few of which you've been kind enough to mention. You're bringing in a moral question, as if holding edgy opinions disqualifies one from being a midwit or being appreciated by midwits. In fact, retarded midwits are attracted to extremes because extremes are simple. Q.E.D.

>>16917744
Mozart is the ultimate filter.

>>16915207
It's really not. I studied it extensively and it's just ok. Ancient Greek plays however are still impressive and worth studying way more than any post-Hellenic play

>>16917744
If anything, hating on Mozart is the midwit stance. No other genius musician has ever hated Mozart or found him overrated. The shit he did was beyond anyone's scope at the time and even nowadays, just learn or read about music theory to understand why

>>16917308
What is this rhetorical device where something is praised and often repeated but never explained?

>>16918069
If you want to ask for clarification on something you didn't understand, maybe we could have a discussion on it.

>>16917213
Now if the teachers had actually just responded with that to my question of the relevance of reading shakespeare in the 21st century, I would have gave a shit.

>>16912541
>M-muh magic number
>Autismos go brrrr

>>16912618
Fuck your cult of pseuds.

>>16913920
Pfff 152. What a shit for brains. My IQ can't even be recorded by modern tests. They made me recite the entire Western Canon from Plato to Hillary Putnam from memory. It took me 12 minuted. They wrote 252+ on the paper and then drew the shrugging emoji. Get off of my board simpleton.

>>16917703
t. Doesn’t read Latin or German

>>16918069
Pseudry

>>16919487
You know you want to, anon ;)

>>16919487
BEGONE, VILE DEMON!!! I COMMAND YOU IN THE NAME OF "BOB!!!"

>>16919499
>Hillary Putnam
>w*men author
>even once

Despicable

>>16917736
being sympathetic to tyrants out of dumb misanthropy is absolutely the thing a midwit would do

what makes him good is his aesthetic value,his way with words is untouchable

>>16912541
>A lot of his insights are fairly cliche and obvious

He originated them...kek

>>16917675
I don't think they're isolated weirdos but I certainly don't think they can work a crowd. Most scientists are midwits and scientific progress is made by a handful of geniuses rather than occupational scientists.

Exsplain Hamlet too me, his motives and the motives of the other charcters, the point of the ghost and i'll accept he's crap. Face it most geniuses of history have seen the craft thats gone into this play.

>>16916078
Shakespeare is the McDonalds of literature: the plebs eat up his out of context one liners like happy meals and think they are well nourished.

>>16919499
That's nothing. I broke the test so hard I'm theorized to hover around 400. They wrote a 200 page paper on how this could even be possible. It consists solely of my answers and 300 pictures of people expressing confusion.

>>16917260
>Are Galileo’s discoveries banal and cliche because modern children know that the solar system is heliocentric?
Galileo didn't discover that.

>>16912541
Shakespeare was a black woman

>>16921141
Hahaha you ugly piece of shit Hillary Putnam is a man.

>>16922567
Holy shit fellow prodigious genius. Wanna project our consciusness out and have a dope conversation about how we understand all of the laws of reality but can't let the ape brains know about it yet?

>>16923289
>IQ is still in the triple digits
>prodigious genius

>>16912541
>lot of his insights are fairly cliche and obvious
They are that way because he first so eloquently pointed them out to mid wits like yourself. Also the IQ back then averaged about 120 today due to a much harder existence and no sub human genes. Shakespeare's IQ was prolly closer to 180 by today's degenerated scale.