/lit/ - Literature

And they learn our language just to understand it. Holy kwab!

>>22285903
He's one of the greats, but he's not the GOAT. There are Roman and Chinese poets that are at least his equal, for instance.

>>22285929
No there are not

>>22285903
>GOAT
Not even close.

>>22285929
Woah you don't seriously believe that do you?

>>22285953
>>22285964
Of course I do. Have you read Li Bai?

anglos get taught in school that Shakespeare is this gigabrain megagenius who literally invented the English language, is solely responsible for the greatness of the British Empire, single-handedly mogged all poets from all other civilizations past and future, and whose works are more important than the bible
and they believe it

>>22285903
just going to leave this here

Why is Shakespeare so praised? Genuine question

>>22285969
>>22285992
He wasn't the GOAT but he was pretty damn good.

>>22285909
>https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-the-english-major
Outsourcing doesn't seem like such a bad idea when the average english major from Harvard is unable to read Hawthorne.

>>22285909
>Learn English to understand Shakespeare
>Still can't understand him
kek

>>22285903
I'm looking to dive into Shakespeare soon, is there a good companion resource for analysis of each work? I'm thinking some kind of lecture is preferable. I want to read each work and then be able to dig into it afterwards.

>>22285903
How the fuck do ESLs cope this?
Think about it this way. You speak one language, you can read Shakespeare in English.
Every ESL person can also read Shakespeare in English, plus:
Dante, Ariosto, Leopardi in Italian.
Nietzsche, Goethe in German.
Proust, Rimbaud, Baudelaire in French.
Borges, Cervantes in Spanish.
Camões, Guimarães Rosa in Portuguese.
>ESL will never understand Shakespeare or Joyce or whatever else
How would you know? You'll die without ever having read a foreign book.
Baffles me how, time after time, Americans share their ignorance with such pride.

>>22285909
>And they learn our language just to understand it.
Nope.
Learned English to communicate on Tibia back in early 2000's. When I first tried reading Shakespeare it was a breeze.

>>22285979
>"Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why."

>>22286133
>Americans
rent free

>>22285903
Wtf are you smoking negro? The God of prose (and slayer of hoes) writes in French

>>22286133
>Baffles me how, time after time, Americans share their ignorance with such pride.
Americans are convinced that being american is the best thing ever and consequently, everyone wants to be one. That's why they think ESL is an insult, because it is for them, and they can't conceive others not being offended by it.

>>22285969
Funny thing is, every year it comes out that Shakespeare didn't actually invent words and phrases that are attributed to him. He not only borrowed his plots, but he borrowed just about everything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dLkX9bUAUE
https://bookriot.com/how-many-words-did-shakespeare-invent/

>>22286459
Really the only reason I use ESL as an insult is because how unbelievably angry it makes third worlders

>>22285903
English bros we just keep winning. God blessed us with Shakespeare and ESL's will NEVER comprehend the transcendence of his writing.

>>22286459
>That's why they think ESL is an insult,
It's an insult because it makes people angry.

>>22286133
>Every ESL person can also read Shakespeare in English, plus:
>Dante, Ariosto, Leopardi in Italian.
>Nietzsche, Goethe in German.
>Proust, Rimbaud, Baudelaire in French.
>Borges, Cervantes in Spanish.
>Camões, Guimarães Rosa in Portuguese.
Every ESL can read Italian, German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese? I had no idea that learning English immediately unlocked all those languages for the random Swedish boy. Tell me, how does that work? I'm American, and every time I've learned a new language, I only learned a single language, I didn't instantly unlock 5 different ones.

>>22285903
i love your cope, mutt

keep seething more for my pleasure

>>22288807
smartest american on /lit/

>>22285903
Only EFLs consider him to be the GOAT though.

>>22288834
>The first page of his I read put me in his debt for a lifetime, and once I had read an entire play, I stood there like a blind man, given the gift of sight by some miraculous healing touch. I sensed my own existence multiplied in a prism – everything was new to me, unfamiliar, and the unwonted light hurt my eyes.
>t. Goethe

wdym? we just learn English and enjoy excellent literature from multiple languages

>>22289277
this is cheating

>>22289220
Deutsch bros, its over...

Imagining thinking that the most influential is the greatest. Not even Newton was that fucking stupid, considering that he was the father of everything bugmen, and a anglo, I guess it makes sense.

This is the greatest one so far.

Seriously now, how long will it take for them to recognize social media posts as literature?

>>22285903
The Bible was written in English?

>>22289372
But it is literally an anthology of schizoposts

>>22285903
Dante wrote in Italian.

>>22285969
>anglos get taught in school that Shakespeare is [...]
We don't.
>and they believe it
We don't.

>>22289220
>>22289287
Goethe was a Masonic liberal who hated Germany and nationalism and praised anything foreign. If he were alive today he would be a woke faggot.

>>22289470
Dante didn’t write in Italian.

>>22289220
Why did people back then talk in this ridiculously hyperbolic way

>>22289761
we do a lot more writing today (typing anyway) so our style has become completely casualized
even just 40 years ago written letters were rather "formal" as well. see if you can't find something your grandma wrote or received in her desk

>>22288807
>Every ESL can read Italian, German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese?
I want to call this bad reading comprehension but this feels more like autism.

>>22286493
you borrowed the language you're speaking in right now.

>>22285992
Where Dante expressed the spritual world of a view that is now extinct (more or less) Shakespeare offers a modern look at ‘real’ characters and he gives Greta depth to them and does so with a natural melody and beauty.

It’s the ultimate form where the poetry and rhythm and melody of the word also combine to give a great depth and meaning.

>>22289772
I don't mean the formality. I'm talking about the way he exaggerates it.
Yeah dude I'm sure you pissed and shit in your pants and died and ressurected because you read a Shakespeare play. The same thing happened to me one time when I read a Goosebumps book.

>>22289835
To be fair we are talking about one of the greatest artists. It’s not preposterous to suggest that a man such as him was so sensitive or receptive to another work that he would have such a reaction.

>>22285967
Ikr, I bet these ytoids haven't even heard of Zhe Shichong

>>22285992
Soap opera slop that gets hyped up by every generation

>>22288807
Jesus Christ americans really are subumans.
Brits are cool tho

>>22285903
English literature(this include theater) is massively overrated. I have seen text in French that overflowed with eloquence and beauty, I could legit orgasm just by reading it. It's not about what they describe but way it was written was just sublime.
I have never seen this with english.

>>22289835
people still exaggerate today. did you really roll on the floor laughing? did you even laugh out loud?
did your sides TRULY burst asunder?

>>22290002
>I could legit orgasm just by reading it
what book

>>22290334
The first book I have in mind is a 50s autodidact encyclopedia that has multiple volumes which from science to philosophy any anywhere in between. I remember just opening it the first time and while reading the preface I was orgasming by how well it was written. It wasn't written in any pretentious way, it was concise yet so well written. I have other works in mind but that one marked me the most because it's what opened my eyes to the beauty of the letters.

Shakespeare is probably the GOAT, but why? I think these are the major factors:

- Elizabethan English was unusually hospitable to naturalistic blank verse, and naturalistic blank verse is the highest possible form of English. "Unusually hospitable" in the sense of (1) being syntactically flexible (2) enormously rich in words, because it was a fusion of two utterly different languages.

- A weak State and barbaric degree of personal liberty meant great deeds (of good and evil, extreme in both) were still possible. The conflict between the "realist" and "romantic" impulse was not as stark as it was in the 18th century, let alone today.

- His arisocrats were as eloquent as poets and as ruthless as gangsters. This is ideal for drama, hence the popularity of Mafia films (Mafiosi are the most aristocratic gangsters). But Mafiosi, are always essentially sordid, unlike aristocrats, who may be truly noble.

- He rejected the Aristotelian unities and other artificial conventions. French dramatists, the only major contenders to GOAT status, were stultifyingly mannered by comparison. When Voltaire was writing, a play could depict murder but not suicide.

- The right kind of profit motive is essential for good art. Theater was lucrative and brutally competive; likewise, Shakespeare had to write for aristocrats as well as groundlings, so his plays have sufficiently universal appeal.

IMO, only Homer is plausibly greater than Shakespeare. He likewise has the great deeds, the ruthless but eloquent aristocrats, and a similar tragic sense of life that the French would have called barbaric and distasteful. He also had the right kind of profit-motive, certainly to the extent that "he" was the culmination a tradition of entertainers who performed the Iliad for Greek noblemen over centuries.

>>22290372
*suicide but not murder

>>22285903
It's mostly due to the intellectual climate of the 19th century, specially the rising Germanic influence over European thought, Romanticism, and the dominance of English as a commercial and later cultural language.
Shakespeare is the one poet who offers, all at once:

1 - natural naiveté, the kind that had already been lost in France since the death of Villon and the start of the Pleiade, and in Italy/Iberia since Petrarch and the first Petrarchists;
2- a skeptical, non-religious but also non-scientific 'world climate' (I wouldn't call it 'worldview' as Shakespeare presents very little 'views' as such), which is quite adequate for post-Enlightenment romantics, and at which they would probably have arrived regardless of Shakespare through the growing influence of the exotic, the primitive, and the fantastic, which is already observable in travelogues and early novels like Persian Letters as well as Galland's Arabian Nights, yet Shakespeare served as an ideal impulse and source;
3 - a rather large body of work, which means you can derive a lot from it;
4 - Anglo influence through the British empire, same reason why everyone nowadays knows conventional and somewhat uninteresting novelists such as Jane Austen, Mark Twain and George Eliot, yet back when France was the global power, and French the most important language, authors such as Constant and Saint-Pierre were considered much more relevant, and more widely read, than almost any or in fact any English novelist, and an Italian playwright such as Metastasio was undoubtedly more famous than Shakespeare;
5 - he is indeed a great writer, specially in his variety of characters and scenes, which he took from other books, his command of his language, and his very high creativity for metaphors and other figures of speech.

His qualities have downsides:
1 - the variety and richness of his oeuvre means that most of it is inadequately finished, or often simply full of fillers, with many of the plays being badly structured, many of the scenes (specially the comic ones) little more than collections of obvious puns and childish action, much of the action insufficiently justified, many of the characters nothing but clichés from chivalry tales and medieval ballads;
2 - his originality also suffers, his 'worldview', so far as he has one, comes from Montaigne, Ecclesiastes, etc., his poetic style is often empty rhetoric, versified prose;
3 - his heavy reliance on figures of speech means he sometimes falls into belletrism, the stuff of school exercises, death can't just end someone's breath, it has to "suck the honey" out of it, there is not enough moderation in his usage, which is part of his naive charm, but also gets tiresome after a while, sometimes even ridiculous and common-place. Is "the honey of thy breath" really justified? Is it not too obvious? It's literally the easiest possible metaphor for sweetness... Once or twice every page is OK, but Shakespeare is full of weak lines like that.

>>22290793
In my personal opinion, you can find both greater and/or better writers than Shakespeare.
Horace, Petrarch, Racine, Molière, Quevedo, Góngora, Villon, Gustave Flaubert, many modern poets like Holderlin, Yeats, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Eliot, Cavafy, some early Medieval troubadours (as well as, quite possibly, non-Western poets like the Arabs, the Chinese and Pushkin, or even, in the West, the Hungarians, all of whom I can't properly claim to have read) are better, in the sense that a random page of theirs is better written, better finished, better structured, quite simply better thought-out and worked upon than a random page of Shakeapeare. If you pointed a gun at my head and forced me to memorize a book, I'd much rather memorize Eliot or Les Fleurs du Mal than Hamlet, I'd be way less bored.
Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Montaigne, Cervantes, Goethe, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Celine, Conrad, possibly Boccaccio and Chekhov seem to me to be greater, in the sense that I'd rather take their Complete Works than Shakespeare's to a desert island.
Homer, Moses, the Greek tragedians, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Leopardi, Chaucer, Joyce, Proust, possibly evens some of the aforementioned (like Plato) and a few others seem to me to be ultimately better and also greater.

It's also important to realize how much limited in our own readings we actually are.
How many of us have read the complete works of Shakespeare? I myself read a lot of it, and must have reread The Tempest (my favorite) quite a few times. Most of you probably read at least ten plays or so.
Now, how many of us have a similar acquaintance with the works of Lope de Vega? Or Calderón de la Barca? Or Ludovico Ariosto? Or the classic Chinese novels? How many of us have read the notebooks of Paul Valery and the very long writings of Casanova, or the memoirs of Saint-Simon, or The Anatomy of Melancholy, or all the lives in Plutarch? How can we know they are not better than Shakespeare at least in their richness and variety, and the fullness of the characters they portray, at least in their best moments? Most of the time we have to trust official literary history, and read excerpts from anthologies, or merely the best-known poems/plays... I am mentioning merely the most famous works. What about Hungarian literature? Or French medieval chroniclers like Froissart? Or Icelandic sagas? Or the whole vast world of Arab literature? How can we Westerners know they do not also have at least one truly great author?

>>22290830

I am probably not as well read as you. Of the writers you mention, I have read Tolstoy, Homer, Stendhal (all), Austen (all), George Eliot, Pushkin, some Goethe, Dostoevsky, Cervantes, a great deal of Montaigne & all the philosophers including Leopardi’s Zibaldone. I’ve read the others here and there, but not very seriously. Nevertheless I would prefer to be stuck on a desert island with Shakespeare's collected works, in part because of what you term his "naive charm" than literally any other writer. Shakespeare also has staggering breadth; his happy endings are truly blissful, his tragedies truly awful. Moreover, I enjoy him as "easily" as I enjoy e.g. Miyazaki's (naive?) films – his oeuvre caters to both popular and elite taste, in a way that e.g. Joyce, Flaubert and Eliot don't and e.g. Austen does.

I don't know how much this matters in the final analysis. I approve of elitism. Nevertheless, I get the sense that Shakespeare understood had a more comprehensive or all-embracing perspective on life, for this reason, and this was part of what the Romantics loved about him. Some of his plays, as de Quincey put it, really do seem akin to natural phenomena. And Shakespeare less a man than a force of nature. Or as Hugo, a Frenchman, has to depict him, the great master of the "grotesque"; freely mixing the ridiculous and the sublime against all "good taste", to the horror of e.g. Voltaire, who particularly hated the famous scene with the gravediggers in Hamlet for this reason.

I think, in fact, to cite a third critic, what you call Shakespeare's "naive charm" is related to what Keats called the "negative capability."

> and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

What other author, besides Homer, really equals Shakespeare in this respect?

>>22285903
Is there a chart for Shakespeare?

>>22290830
I don't think you realize that by you even including all these totally different and diverse writers, from philosophers to literature to poets and everything in between, that this shows one of Shakespeares greatest strengths, he's the goat in every subject

>>22290372
>>22291190
Good posts anon. Inspired me to stop browsing this board and get back to writing.

>>22285903
Other languages have authors as well.

>>22289778
It's called busting balls, and the anon he replied to should've used the word "or", or "one of" or some such qualifer to express himself with more accuracy if he didn't want his little Brazil nuts busted.

>>22291286
I am not saying he is equal to all of them put together or anything of the sort. I am ranking them overall, which of course is a futile exercise to begin with (after a certain level of quality, taste really becomes subjective, in literature as in other areas), and stating some of the names whom I think might, and in my taste do, compete with or indeed surpass Shakespeare.
I am not sure there is some aspect in which he is the 'best'. Up until the 19th century I would probably have said "variety of characters", but after Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce... Not so sure. The 19th century was in a way the golden era of literary character, partly because of the sheer amount of space allowed by the novel, as well as the gradual relaxation of censorship laws. If you think the comparison is unfair, then, in terms of concision (being able to present memorable characters in small space under severe constraints), Dante is much superior, as he needs no more than 50 or so lines, sometimes even three or four, to make dozens of characters unforgettable.
Perhaps in terms of metaphorical creativity Shakespeare is the best, but as I said I don't think he handles his metaphors all that well, and James Joyce in the Finnegans Wake goes beyond that anyway, creating not only many metaphors but thousands of words which in themselves are profoundly metaphorical.

>>22291190
>Some of his plays, as de Quincey put it, really do seem akin to natural phenomena. And Shakespeare less a man than a force of nature
The same can be said and was in fact said by the Romantics of books such as Ossian, which are now more or less forgotten, and amounts to nothing but some kind of sentimental exclamation. Read Geothe's Werther on Homer and Ossian for the clearest example. I agree Shakespeare can be profoundly intense and, shall we say, 'crude', 'uncivilized' at times, as if he had a closer contact with the bare matter of life, but this is a characteristic of his naivete, and is typical of such authors. You will find it also in Homer, Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland, many parts of the Bible, Norse sagas, etc. I consider it one of the great charms of such works, just like the well-finished product is a charm of poets like Virgil. It does not necessarily make Shakespeare superior, and in my opinion he is not the most intense representative of it -- I believe Homer, Dante and the Greek tragedians, specially Aeschylus and Euripides, as well as some of the authors in the Bible, are. In more recent times, you also find a similar feeling in Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Conrad, Melville, Celine.

>negative capability
Even in terms of negative capability, Shakespeare has by now been equalled/surpassed by many of the modernist poets, specially the likes of Mallarmé and Paul Valery, some of the surrealists, etc.
Shakespeare is "down to earth" in comparison. His writing is very clear, often conventional, it just comes dressed in countless figures of speech.

>>22285969
Fun fact, this idea was mostly invented by Germans.

>We just learn English
This is cope. Shakespeare's writing is challenging enough that natives would read it several times over just because of how old it is. Most ESL's can hardly talk about the footy eloquently and I'm to believe they're suddenly able to understand the intricacies of The bard? COPE.

>>22285903
I largely agree with Tolstoy’s views on art and sympathize with his criticism of Shakespeare. Art that is instructional and socially relevant is more important than the kind of universal drama that Shakespeare perfected. I fail to see how a person could benefit more from reading Shakespeare’s plays than Anna Karenina or Crime and Punishment.

>>22290793
>>3 - his heavy reliance on figures of speech means he sometimes falls into belletrism, the stuff of school exercises, death can't just end someone's breath, it has to "suck the honey" out of it
You think this is a *downside*? It's exactly what makes Shakespeare brilliant. I don't know if he's the GOAT but he certainly has far greater depth, variety, originality and power in his imagery and metaphor than any other writer in the English language, certainly more than Eliot.

>>22291970
>Toystory coping that he'll only ever be remembered as 2nd best

>>22291970
>I fail to see how a person could benefit more from reading Shakespeare’s plays than Anna Karenina or Crime and Punishment.
That's because you don't read Shakespeare's plays to "benefit." That's the whole point of the best art, it is sublime and perfect without conferring any material advantages. If you're gaining something from it, then it's more of a distraction or entertainment than art.

>>22291946
>This is cope. Shakespeare's writing is challenging enough that natives would read it several times over just because of how old it is. Most ESL's can hardly talk about the footy eloquently and I'm to believe they're suddenly able to understand the intricacies of The bard? COPE.
Don't you have dole to collect, Callum?

>>22291946
Shakespearean English is closer to modern German than modern English is

>>22286123
Just buy the Arden Editions of the plays. They contain roughly 150 pages of essays that expand upon the plays symbology, criticism, etc. I will never read Shakespeare any other way. I read the play first and then the essays unless I’ve read the play already. They are roughly 10-15 bucks each on Amazon.

>>22289835
Goethe was a poet, you dumb NIGGER. Do you think you're smart, acting so cynical and posting smug/bored frogs, as if you're SO above him?

>>22285967
Who

>>22288807
Anon, I think that's not what he's trying to say. What he's meaning to say is: An ESL is more inclined to learn 2 or more languages for a variety of purposes, proven by the fact that he already learned English as a secondary language. A native English speaker however will most like settle with English as he sees this language as superior to the rest proven by his use of "ESL" as an insult. "ESL" however, is hardly perceived as insulting from the receiving end because for them, it's just another language that is very useful and fun to learn like many others.

>>22286101
>ackshully it's because English isn't progressive enough!
Jesus fucking Christ. I know the article delves into a multitude of reasons why humanities enrollment is falling, but as a current English major myself, I'll say these professors are all deluded. The English department is absolutely choked full of detritus from the social sciences, you enter a course about linguistic studies and spend 90% of the semester talking about imperialism. Go for a class on genre, get one section on Shakespeare and 12 weeks on critical theory, marxism, and feminism.

Liberal arts is up it's own ass, literally. Instead of a study of the arts, teaching students methods of advancing as writers, it's all the study and expansion of leftism itself. Every single semester I thank God that I'm so poor that I don't need to suffer the indignity of actually having to waste my own money paying to waste my time so badly.

>>22285969
Funnily enough Shakespeare was forgotten, the Georgians rediscovered him during the gothic revival.

>>22288807

>>22291995
But Dostoevsky is second best.

>>22288807
>>22292577
"ESL" means "English second language". If you have a second language, that means you need to have a first language. What anon was trying to say is that most of the world's languages that care about literature have their own masterpiece that can't be translated.

>>22285964
Whoa*

>>22292102
Hello, moron!

>>22292569
Li Bai, one of the greatest poets in history.

but he looks like a goat

>>22291970
He obviously never read Shakespeare though. Here is a ton to glean from king Lear , Hamlet and Macbeth alone. Tolstoy is stupid in this regard