/lit/ - Literature

Did you know some of Shakespeare's greatest works were during a pandemic? So be grateful!

>>17773990
Read Othello

>>17773990
some boring fag who gets shilled by boomers

>>17773990
Affirmative action

>>17773990
it's the metaphors

unironically they needed someone to compensate for cervantes

>>17773990
Did he really wear an earring or even looked like in the pic?

>>17774041
William Shakespeare didn't even exist. He was a pseudonym of, likely, Francis Bacon.
https://archive.org/details/greatestoflitera00ba/

>>17774036
This

>>17774130
Was Francis Bacon a real person?

>>17773990
>Why is William Shakespeare so revered?
Pioneer. Prolific. Popular.
If you have all 3 of these qualities your place in literary history will be cemented.
>What is so great about his work?
Strict adherence to form gets critics off. Critics tell you who's worth reading and who isn't.
Throw in vague philosophical themes and some archetypal plots and you have the recipe for midwits and pseuds championing you for credibility throughout the ages.

spic coping hours then?

>>17774170
He was a statesman and regularly interacted with Queen Elizabeth. He was a public figure in a way Shakespeare was not, with a background befitting the literary quality of the plays and poems that Shakespeare, according to the biographical information, could not have.

>>17773990
Shakespeare's entire legacy is an enormous cope. Only pseuds and midwits think he's anything other than pedestrian swill.

>>17774036
>>17774132
You wish. Maestro is a hack.

>>17774237
Cope

>>17773990
We're not here to do your homework for you, faggot.

>>17774187
ah yes because someone with a middle class education and a consistent and dedicated reading-base couldn't produce verse

>>17774187
De Vere is far more likely. Watch the Jacobi documentary on Amazon Prime or Alexander Waugh youtube channel

>>17773990
You need to compare Shakespeare to other writers of his time to understand his impact. Compare Marlowe's Faust, which was considered a contemporary masterpiece of the time to something like King Leer and you will see how even Shakespeare's closest rivals weren't even in the same galaxy as him in terms of quality. In the former, the plots are much more basic and linear, the humor feels forced and awkward, the characters are more one note, the language is less adventurous, and the whole thing feels much more didactic. There is a real freedom and fluidity of form and content that Shakespeare brought to the table

>>17774036
Con base

>>17774420
Kek

>>17774187
Are you fucking retarded? All the references in Shakespeare can easily come from an Elizabethan grammar school education (which he had). There's plenty of contemporary references to the man himself from the accounts of actors to budding playwrights. No one takes this hypothesis seriously anymore.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baconian_theory_of_Shakespeare_authorship

>>17773990
Unparalleled insight into human emotions and motivations and a masterful way with words.
Watch Hamlet.

>>17774547
Why were his daughters illiterate? Why did others have to write his name for him on legal documents? Why did he never use the name ‘Shake-speare’ or ‘Shakespeare’ in his lifetime? Why did nobody mention him as a writer during his lifetime? Why are you so sure he went to the local grammar school when we know his brothers didn’t? Where did he get his detailed knowledge of Italy, sea voyages, the law, and court politics? Why did nobody mention the death of a great poet when he died? Why did he bequeath no books or letters when he died?

It was De Vere.

>>17773990

Emoji test

>>17774657
>Why did nobody mention the death of a great poet when he died?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_funerary_monument
>Of the tributes that started to come from fellow authors, one—by James Mabbe printed in the First Folio—refers to his relatively early death: "We wondered, Shakespeare, that thou went'st so soon / From the world's stage to the grave's tiring room."[59]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_of_William_Shakespeare

>>17774130
No it was de Vere but de Vere knew Bacon

Being filtered by Shakespeare is the literary equivalent of being filtered by Mozart.

>>17774737
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxfordian_theory_of_Shakespeare_authorship

>>17774754
>both are boring as fuck but you're supposed to like them because... You just have to ok??

>>17774474
That’s correct. How would a commoner have detailed knowledge of the court politics?

>>17774778
>boring
It's actually more like both of them are accused of making 'frivolous' works with great formal style and mass appeal, but no substance or profound meaning. OTOH, your problem appears to be a tin ear.

>>17774793
Books on the subject, or it's just not accurate.

>>17774703
We know the monument was significantly altered decades after Shakespeare’s death - the original had no pen, quill or moustache. The first folio was also published years after Shakespeare’s death...

>>17774754
I always had difficulty with Mozart. Obviously he has written indcredible music but to me at least he's not anywhere near Bach. It's just an emotional assessment though I'm not much interested in the technical side of music.

>>17774657
This guy gets it
>>17774757
Sorry but the mediocrely educated don’t make great art.

>>17773990


TO BOLSTER THEIR INCIPIENT BRITISHER SUPREMACISTIC IDENTITY THE ENGLISH NEEDED A LITERARY EMINENCE TO COMPETE AGAINST SPAIN’S MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA, AND BiLLY WiGGLeSLaNCe WAS THE BEST THAT THEY HAD.

>>17774806
>The first folio was also published years after Shakespeare’s death
By people who had met the man

>>17774811
Tell me about Homer's education

>>17774807
Bach is more of a Dante than a Shakespeare if we're continuing the literary comparison. The thing with both Shakespeare and Mozart is exceptional form and style, not interconnectedness of theme (what you might call 'depth'—Bach digs more deeply than any other composer into the possibilities of counterpoint). Not that Mozart couldn't do exceptional counterpoint when he wanted to.

>>17774802
Read Shakespeare by Another Name and Shakespeare Identified

>>17774884
I meant that he could've just got the information from books, or that the information wasn't accurate.

>>17774898
Listen to this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OpFXD07_NYg

>>17774657
>why were his daughters illiterate
Because educating women corrupts them.

>>17774831
Idk but I’m sure it was the best of its time. I know there’s hypotheses he spent lots of time in Egypt or was even Egyptian himself, I’ll have to check that out more.

>>17774811
Holy education cope. Thanks for ousting yourself as a midwit.

>>17774811
>muh edumacation
Nigger

Anglos don't have anything better.

>>17775010
>>17775026
The Stratford man could barely write his name. And education ≠ school, of course many great authors were autodidacts

>>17774831
he went to harvard

>>17774996
>of its time
Literally the dark ages or just after that. Any education then would've been shit, unsurprising considering that there's only one Homer.
The point is that he's the educator for Greece. Someone had to make that first great leap without someone telling them how.
Michael Faraday literally taught himself and he's somewhere among the top 10 natural scientists in history.

>>17775044
He knew latin and greek and while he used Goldings version of Ovid he referenced things that Golding himself had glossed over. I wouldn't be surprised if his latin and greek was better if not the same level as most uni professor's today.

>>17774657
it’s irrelevant desu

>>17774757
>theory founded by a man named Looney
You can't make this shit up.

>>17775084
Pretty coincidental that Golding was de Vere’s uncle and they were living in the same house as Golding was translating the Metamorphoses!

>>17774819
Yes they’d met Oxford... The producer was de Vere’s daughter Susan lmao

>>17774795
>'frivolous' works with great formal style and mass appeal, but no substance or profound meaning.
This is why I like mozart desu. Beethoven sounds tryhard and cringe in comparison

He was such a genius that retards can't integrate him into their worldview for fear of being mogged to death, so they make up absurd theories about it being some OTHER genius (or multiple geniuses) that done it.

>>17774171
kek, based

>>17774207
He's comfy though

>>17774657
I'm intrigued now, but de vere died before King Lear was first performed and first folio was published. Half of Henry VI was attributed to Marlowe, so wouldn't he be more likely?

>>17774171
don't forget some of the best English ever written

>>17775571
>I'm intrigued now, but de vere died before King Lear was first performed and first folio was published.
So what?
> Half of Henry VI was attributed to Marlowe, so wouldn't he be more likely?
No, he died in 1593. And he can quite clearly be identified in the early plays to which he contributed.

There are so so many connections to de Vere. First of all, there’s the cryptographic evidence. Go to Alexander Waugh’s YouTube channel for that. But there are so many clues it shouldn’t be controversial at this point:
>in 1593 we have ‘William Shakespeare’ mentioned for the first time in literature beneath a dedicatory epistle to Henry Wriothesley, who was engaged to Oxford’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth
>his uncle, whom he lived with, translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses - which was the same translation quoted by “Shakespeare”
>the first folio was dedicated to The Earl of Pembroke - husband of de Vere’s other daughter
>he visited Venice and other locations in Italy - the author of the plays clearly knew these locations in some detail
>he was a legal expert in the Lords, which is reflected in the plays (Merchant of Venice)
>one of his ships was wrecked in the Bermuda (The Tempest)
>he was attacked by pirates (Hamlet)
>Polonius’ speech to his son in Hamlet is almost identical to the letter William Cecil sent to his son - de Vere lived in the Cecil house and he was married to Anne Cecil

I could go on

>>17775313
The Golding trans. was the most common one of the day, it would have been in the homes of many literate people. And yes, an Earl is very connected, and his progeny and ancestors had their hands in everything.

De Vere and Bacon have available work which is of basically no interest, so to assume having schooling makes one secretly the greatest writer in the language is not convincing.

>>17775900
It also must've been a massive and nonsensical conspiracy to have so many people in on it only to dissemble the contribution of an otherwise unknown author to the greatest works in the western canon

>>17775040
You don't really need anything better when you have Shakespeare.

>>17775848
>Polonius’ speech to his son in Hamlet
Intentionally a long list of truisms, example of Polonius as failed sensibility. The details Shakespeare knew of Italy etc are mostly incorrect or barely correct, and the sort one could easily come across through casual reading.

A wealthy, connected Earl who is happy to have his name spread is not going to write in a pseudonym, and watch his legacy gifted to a pleb.

>>17774793
jonathan bate and various others have proven his court politics are innaccurate - he could also have learned, if accirate, from being in the company of players to queen elizabeth, who liked plays, or from fellow playwrights such as ben jonson or marlowe who wrote plays that would shown to be court

shakespeare authorship is practically a baseless series of propositions that a middle class man couldnt create beautiful literature and that is an incredibly depressing thought

>>17776009
yup he wasn't a public figure like goethe which is hard for some people to understand

>>17775900
What’s written under de Vere’s name is his juvenilia before he switched to the Shakespeare pseudonym.
>>17775936
He wrote under a pseudonym because writing plays was seen as lowly. And there’s no documentation about the Stratford man being a playwright, rather it all shows he was a regular grain merchant. There is more documentation of de Vere’s playwrighting even though he hid it. Also important to know is that de Vere was friends with John Dee. His interest in hermeticism and encryption must be kept in mind. This is a good primer for everything https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OpFXD07_NYg

>>17775974
>The details Shakespeare knew of Italy etc are mostly incorrect or barely correct, and the sort one could easily come across through casual reading.
Nope, they are incredibly detailed https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Guide-Italy-Retracing-Travels/dp/0062074261

>>17776009
There are tens of books dedicated to Shakespeare’s expertise in law, Bate is wrong.
>shakespeare authorship is practically a baseless series of propositions that a middle class man couldnt create beautiful literature and that is an incredibly depressing thought
This is the crux of the authorship question and why it produces so many emotionally charged responses. The Oxfordian position is the elitist one. De Vere had an insatiable intellect and poured his life into his work, that is what makes great art. The stratfordian narrative tells us Shakespeare was an unremarkable man who simply recorded what he imagined. It says anyone can create great art regardless of their intellect. All that matters is “genuine feeling”. Notice this is no different from what some YA sentimentalist writer would believe. If one is not well read than one cannot write well because they do not know what great writing is.

>>17776297
>It says anyone can create great art regardless of their intellect.
>If one is not well read than one cannot write well because they do not know what great writing is.
Who's saying Shakespeare wasn't well-read and a genius?

>>17773990
>What is so great about his work?
>Thread promptly degenerates into the expected & usual madhouse bickering about his akshual identity & etc.
Psychological realism, for starters.

Imagine if Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, and James Cameron were all one person, and released all their films in like 20 years, constantly dropping new releases. Just constant back-to-back classics that were not only enjoyed by the intellectuals, but also beloved by casual audiences.
Dude literally redefined the English language going forward he was so popular.

>>17776167
Great vid. Never knew how well the Oxfordians made their case.
I'm almost convinced that Shakespeare was in fact de Vere. Also found it interesting that the pen name Shakespeare could be a reference to Athena, the spear shaker

>>17773990
For the English of the day, he was about as popular as the Bible.

>>17773990
He fucked your mom

>>17774831
They'll tell you he didn't exist either

>>17773990
a meme

>>17776474
This. I don't know why I come to this board for literature

Also his language is really, really good. Reading his contemporaries it's evident

>>17774036
I'm halfway through DQ right now and Ive never read Shakespear.. am I retarded?

like he just has a way of putting things, you know?

>>17773990
>To the French, as representatives of modern civilisation, Shakespeare, considered seriously, to this day is a monstrosity; and even to the Germans he has remained a subject of constantly renewed investigation, with so little [142] positive result that the most conflicting views and statements are forever cropping up again. Thus has this most bewildering of dramatists—already set down by some as an utterly irresponsible and untamed genius, without one trace of artistic culture—quite recently been credited again with the most systematic tendence of the didactic poet. Goethe, after introducing him in "Wilhelm Meister" as an "admirable writer," kept returning to the problem with increasing caution, and finally decided that here the higher tendence was to be sought, not in the poet, but in the embodied characters he brought before us in immediate action. Yet the closer these figures were inspected, the greater riddle became the artist's method: though the main plan of a piece was easy to perceive, and it was impossible to mistake the consequent development of its plot, for the most part pre-existing in the source selected, yet the marvellous "accidentiæ" in its working out, as also in the bearing of its dramatis personae, were inexplicable on any hypothesis of deliberate artistic scheming. Here we found such drastic individuality, that it often seemed like unaccountable caprice, whose sense we never really fathomed till we closed the book and saw the living drama move before our eyes; then stood before us life's own image, mirrored with resistless truth to nature, and filled us with the lofty terror of a ghostly vision. But how decipher in this magic spell the tokens of an "artwork"? Was the author of these plays a poet?

>What little we know of his life makes answer with outspoken naïvety: he was a play-actor and manager, who wrote for himself and his troop these pieces that in after days amazed and poignantly perplexed our greatest poets; pieces that for the most part would not so much as have come down to us, had the unpretending prompt-books of the Globe Theatre not been rescued from oblivion in the nick of time by the printing-press. Lope de Vega, scarcely less a wonder, wrote his pieces from one day to the next in immediate contact with his actors and the [143] stage; beside Corneille and Racine, the poets of façon, there stands the actor Molière, in whom alone production was alive; and midst his tragedy sublime stood Æschylus, the leader of its chorus.—Not to the Poet, but to the Dramatist must we look, for light upon the Drama's nature; and he stands no nearer to the poet proper than to the mime himself, from whose heart of hearts he must issue if as poet he means to "hold the mirror up to Nature."

>>17779263
>Thus undoubtedly the essence of Dramatic art, as against the Poet's method, at first seems totally irrational; it is not to be seized, without a complete reversal of the beholder's nature. In what this reversal must consist, however, should not be hard to indicate if we recall the natural process in the beginnings of all Art, as plainly shewn to us in improvisation. The poet, mapping out a plan of action for the improvising mime, would stand in much the same relation to him as the author of an operatic text to the musician; his work can claim as yet no atom of artistic value; but this it will gain in the very fullest measure if the poet makes the improvising spirit of the mime his own, and develops his plan entirely in character with that improvisation, so that the mime now enters with all his individuality into the poet's higher reason. This involves, to be sure, a complete transformation of the poetic artwork itself, of which we might form an idea if we imagined the impromptu of some great musician noted down. We have it on the authority of competent witnesses, that nothing could compare with the effect produced by Beethoven when he improvised at length upon the pianoforte to his friends; nor, even in view of the master's greatest works, need we deem excessive the lament that precisely these inventions were not fixed in writing, if we reflect that far inferior musicians, whose penwork was always stiff and stilted, have quite amazed us in their 'free fantasias' by a wholly unsuspected and often very fertile talent for invention.—At anyrate we believe we shall really expedite the solution of an extremely difficult problem, if we define the Shakespearian Drama as [144] a fixed mimetic improvisation of the highest poetic worth. For this explains at once each wondrous accidental in the bearing and discourse of characters alive to but one purpose, to be at this moment all that they are meant to seem to us to be, and to whom accordingly no word can come that lies outside this conjured nature; so that it would be positively laughable to us, upon closer consideration, if one of these figures were suddenly to pose as poet. This last is silent, and remains for us a riddle, such as Shakespeare. But his work is the only veritable Drama; and what that implies, as work of Art, is shewn by our rating its author the profoundest poet of all time.—
- From a lecture by Wagner