/lit/ - Literature

>>18629052
Im also a brainlet but if you dont find the way he uses language beautiful and kind of incredible idk what to say m8, it just jumps out at you. Have you read Hamlet, it is probably the most obvious there

>>18629062
I did read Hamlet.
It's hard for me to comprehend the beauty of his language. Like I need to read an annotated version of his play to understand what's going on. When I went to watch a live performance, I remember thinking "damn if I did not study this play beforehand, I would not understand what's going on right now."
It's like somebody handing me a poem in Chinese and saying "this is really beautiful dude." Maybe it is, but I don't speak Chinese so I can't really tell.

>>18629062
Fpbp

Perhaps the best way to simplify it is: people have been seriously and enjoyably arguing about them for over 400 years. Imagine creating a thread whose premise was so good that people posted in it for that long without the core pillar of discussion ever devolving into coomerbait or mindless shitposting.
That, in my opinion, is the big reason. Having a cultural engine with that much inertia is a power in itself. As for what about the texts built that engine, I'd say it's multifaceted.
First, his characters are just way more interesting than his contemporaries. Compare Hamlet to The Spanish Tragedy, it is like holding Tolstoy up to a soap opera. There are so many interesting ways to interpret and play all of the characters. My favorite interpretation of Hamlet's tragic flaw is that he lacks faith in God's justice, but I've seen plenty of performances that were great and totally different.
Second, his use of language deserves its reputation. Character's speak in their own voices, and his prose style shifts so beautifully within monologues from slow subtle phrasing to large bombastic proclamations. Meanwhile, fucking Marlowe sounds like he's just writing everything in caps lock all the time. And then Shakespeare takes it to an even higher level through his word choice and iambic pentameter, and makes the shit relatively easy to memorize. Just picking up a shakespeare monologue takes me max half an hour because its rhythm is so intuitive. I think that's also part of the reason he's so quoted, it's just easy to remember a lot of his lines, and that helps build cultural cachet.
His plots are nothing special, but they're not lacking either, which is important. He's got all the romance, and intrigue, and killing. They're simple, and mostly ripoffs, but they're fun, and he executes them well.

>>18629079
>Like I need to read an annotated version
Then read an annotated version. There is nothing wrong with that. Re-read if necessary.

Also, yes as >>18629135 says a significant part of it is just cultural inertia. At one point Shakespeare was considered a good poet in spite of his "obscure" and "unmusical" language, not because of it. On its face there's isn't that much basis to translate the Pearl poet but not Shakespeare other than tradition, and there's a pretty interesting historical context for why we don't editorialize his works in that way anymore.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/why-we-mostly-stopped-messing-with-shakespeares-language

>Restoration playwrights treated Shakespeare much as he had treated his sources: as fertile soil ripe for tilling. John Crown found “Henry VI” full of “old gather’d Herbs”; he added a dressing of “oyly Words” along with “a little vinegar against the Pope” to pique the taste of his Protestant audience. Shakespeare was seen as an untutored poet of nature who was, as John Milton memorably put it, apt to “warble his native wood-notes wild,” and who lacked the art—and knowledge of classical precedent—to shape his fancy. (The prohibition against ending a sentence with a preposition stems, in part, from Dryden’s attack on this “common fault” in Shakespeare and his contemporaries.) “There are Lines that are stiff and forc’d, and harsh and unmusical,” the playwright John Dennis complained as he tuned up “Coriolanus.” “There are Lines in some Places which are very obscure, and whole Scenes which ought to be alter’d.”
>German Romantics had something to do with it. They rebelled against French neoclassical restraint and cited Shakespeare’s unruliness as a liberating precedent. British critics in the nineteenth century followed suit

>>18629220
>>18629135
So it's a lot like the Mona Lisa. Famous for being famous.
Reading your guys' responses, I think my fluency in Shakespearean English is just not good enough to understand his subtleties. For example, all the characters sound the same to me...

>>18629284
>So it's a lot like the Mona Lisa. Famous for being famous.
The "hype" isn't necessarily unwarranted though, you just need to be aware that everything to do with the composition of the "canon" of any given body of literature is probably going to be tangled in centuries of cultural history. It isn't wrong that Shakespeare's genius doesn't leap out from the page for you, even if it does for others. And yes, that may be it.

>>18629052
I never understood whats so difficult about understanding Shakespeare's language. He uses the archaic pronouns thee and thou (which should have never been fased out in my opinion), theres some rhymes that no longer rhyme because pronunciation has changed in the past four centuries, and a few words here and there that have been forgotten; but otherwise whats so difficult?

t. ESLL

>>18629379
I dont mean to be mean or anything. Genuinely curious.

>>18629379
To be fair, quite a few word definitions have changed, a very large number of the words have fallen out of common parlance, the thees and thous are actually part of a formality system that English has dropped, and there are conjugations that are also no longer used. On top of that, Shakespeare was wont to move words around in uncommon ways for the sake of hitting his meter.

>>18629379
>>18629394
Well, some words are still used but have changed meaning (e.g the famous "bite me"). Jokes and cultural references that would have made sense to an Englishman back then aren't going to make sense to me. I mean, do your grandparents understand 4chan humor or internet memes even if they are fluent in the language they are written in?
Anyway, here is an example of a passage that would give me trouble (don't bother explaining it, I could look it up myself). It would take me a lot of effort to decode what's going on, and at that point, the artistry is gone.

t. OP

>>18629052
The way I see it, Shakespeare was a trailblazer during his time who inspired much of the Western Canon, but he seems unremarkable to us today because we've been reading the augmentations and successors of his work and style, and the reason schools teach it is so we can see the influences in our current media.

>>18629402
Fair points. I made sure to get very comfortable with english language literature before I read Shakespeare.

>>18629425
What trips you up on this? If it were one of the terrible Measure for Measure monologues I'd understand more, but this one seems pretty straightforward

>>18629220
>his "obscure" and "unmusical" language
People unironically said this about Shakespeare?

>>18629425
I see what you mean. When I was getting familiar with english language literature I started with more modern writers like Hemingway and traced my way back to Shakespeare (of course I skipped more than a few). I read the romantic poets before I got to the great bard himself.

>>18629454
The past is a different country

>>18629443
I simply don't understand what it's saying. What is a shaft? I guess it's a person but who is his fellow? Does self-same just mean same? Does more advised watch mean more carefully? What is this "forth" he is trying to find?
I could go on but you get the idea. I think the basic idea is Bassanio expressing his gratitude to Antonio for being friends, but I miss out on the subtleties.

>>18629468
Ah, I see. Shaft means arrow shaft, if you don't pick that up the whole metaphor collapses. He's describing how, as a kid, whenever he lost one of his arrows, he'd try shooting a second one exactly the same way he did the first but watch more closely where it went, so he could find the one he lost. He's advising Antonio to do the same thing with his investments in treasure ships, if I remember the plot correctly.

>>18629476
wow i should really stick to STEM
that's actually a cool metaphor though, thanks

>>18629490
It sounds like you'd be ok if you had more of the vocab at hand. Maybe just read some more stuff from 200 years ago as a transitory period.

>>18629052
He’s just that good. Insane complex works that somehow balance really thoughtful, heady themes with dumb fun wordplay, sex gags, and physical comedy. He moves between emotions and moments so easily, it’s ridiculous. He’s like a band that can whiplash from one genre to an entirely disparate one while still clearly retaining their identity and doing both styles supremely well