/lit/ - Literature

>>22568540
the far left. the far right is a faggot

all KANGZ of /lit/

>>22568540
F. Gardener

>>22568540
The one true KING

>>22568635
lol

I know this is meant as a joke, but there is a genuine reason why Shakespeare's verse is considered so foundational, so epochal, in the history of English literature.

It's simple.

Seriously. Recite Shakespeare and you'll see what I mean -- it's accessible; it's universal; it's timeless. You don't need to possess heterodox and eccentric Christian views like you need with Milton. You don't need to have the same philosophical inclinations and bizarrely niche ideas as Wordsworth. You don't need to have the same sensitivity as Keats. You don't need to put up with conceit and wit (really that's all there is) as with Pope.

Shakespeare just is. It's just right. Every rhythm is perfect. Nothing is out of place. He never overreaches. He never tries too hard. He never needs to support himself with gimmicks or silly ornaments.

I'll admit that I probably read more Shelley or Wordsworth than I do Shakespeare on average, but Shakespeare is the only constant in my library. He's the only one (along with perhaps Li Bai) that I never manage *not* to read.

The Divine Comedy might be a masterpiece for the ages, but it's the universality and general applicability of Shakespeare that in my mind puts him on top.

>>22568685
this is bretty true for english lit

>>22568685
>He never needs to support himself with gimmicks or silly ornaments.
oh no anon? never??

>>22568540

>>22568685
Romeo and Juliet is just amazing in so many ways. I literally do find it technically, a little boring, just because it's not really my sort of plot, but to be objective, yes it is art, and yes, it is genius.

You forgot someone

>Frank trying again and again to meme himself into being meaningful
Sad.

>>22568635
I like how Gardner is this but unironically.

>>22568831
I remember there being a thread how the character says oy vey hundreds of times in that book.

>>22568685
>Shakespeare just is. It's just right. Every rhythm is perfect. Nothing is out of place. He never overreaches. He never tries too hard. He never needs to support himself with gimmicks or silly ornaments.
"For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and Romeo"
shakespeare just is shit
sorry anon but the exaggeration here alone makes him a tryhard faggot.
going by this quote, is r&j a greater tragedy than hamlet? not to mention likewise faggotry across his entire works
>it's accessible; it's universal; it's timeless.
is common, its cheap, its reddit. that his readership and legacy is fading by the generation is al too fitting. as shakespeare stole from classical and italian sources, future writers will replace and outmode shakespeare, who collapses from his own burdenous flaws, and the general contemporary anglo cultural replacement

>>22569077
The Anglo cultural replacement is so vivid in the language you are typing in

>>22568635
>mein kampf on the shelf behind him
Nice touch, 10/10

>>22569077
>is r&j a greater tragedy than hamlet?
Why would a fictional Prince of Verona know of Hamlet? Which hadn't even been written at the time.

>>22569109
bc its shakespeare talking, retard
and even if it wasnt hamlet, its retarded to boast vs the greek tragedians

>>22569094
das rite. say goodbye to anglo cities and hello to the new world order

>>22569191
Romeo and Juliet is better than the greeks

>>22569210
i agree in the sense of destroying muh euro cultural order, but objectively wrong, and we both know it

>>22569281
Sounds like you have a little growing up to do

>>22569327
no faggot the western world does

>>22569191
What language will this new world order speak?

>>22568794
The only correct choice.

>>22568685
I think the thing with Shakespeare is that it's real, it's showing how these timeless themes could really happen with characters and families and drama, instead of everything happening in an nostalgic dreamworld like Shelley Wordsworth and Milton. I definitely find the latter to be more consistently appealing as well but also more limited.

>>22568685
>He never needs to support himself with gimmicks or silly ornaments.
That's what he does 90% of the time, imbecile.

>>22569539
Somebody tell me if it’s worth it to read The Lusiads

>>22568540

>>22570983
I'd say it's very much worth it. It follows da Gama and the country's history, involving both Christianity and the Graeco-Roman pantheon along the poetic saga. Idk how well it transitions from portuguese to another language, like english, though.

>>22568540
Genuinely Rabelais

>>22569077
>as shakespeare stole from classical and italian sources
How true is this?

>>22571103
I agree, honestly. Nothing has come close to Kreutzer Sonata and Ivan Illyich for me

>>22571327
he riffed and used allusions on things like plutarch's lives and norse myth but not "stole" lmao

>>22571338
some of the plots and sections for his plays are directly stolen from italian works, retard

even measure for measures plot uses a common plot of the time. and plagiarized plots like for the comedy of errors shows shakespeares version isnt even the best of its kind.

not doing homework for you maggots

>>22571355
Can you cite some more examples I’m genuinely curious?

>>22571360
what the hell is wrong with you people
i give you leads, tell you to fuck off about homework, and do you go forth on google?
no you beg for more spoonfeeding
oughtta smack the shit outta you nigga

>>22571371
Right, so you were just writing nonsense. Far for me to expect that someone backs up calling the greatest writer of the english language a fraud and a plagiariser with some proof. Inarticulate cunt.

>>22571386
if u dont know things about shakespeares influences u dont deserve to praise him

>>22571355
Look up allusion lil bud

>>22571371
>>22571398
you have the tone of a underage idiiot who really should be on /r/literature
go back

>>22571402
ok retard then its okay to allude to shakespeares work by claiming i wrote his plays

>>22571406
this is what peak literary mastery and insight looks like, get used to it :^)

>>22568540
FRANK!

>>22568540
It’s just hard to compare between Shakespeare and Dante, the ethos and aim are too different. I get more pleasure out of Shakespeare though. But to nominate anyone other than Homer as the greatest seems to me like a misunderstanding. The Greeks are the genuine article, everything else is a copy of a copy of a copy.

>>22571493
>But to nominate anyone other than Homer as the greatest seems to me like a misunderstanding.
things that pseuds say

>>22571468
Ring ring...

>>22571496
It's an extremely obvious choice. If I was trying to look clever I would have picked someone more obscure. I'm just stating what basically amounts to a historical fact about how literature as we know it came to be - Whitehead's "footnotes to Plato" quote can essentially be applied to Homer with respect to the domain of literature. As a discussion topic it's more interesting to go back and forth about later writers because they are on more even footing in terms of the cultural world they inhabit, but it's worth noting that Greek literature is in a class of its own.

>>22571575
>Whitehead's "footnotes to Plato"
whitehead wasted his career chasing ghosts. his offhand comment about phil being footnotes to two dead greeks is nonsense when you take into account a third of aristotle is retarded assumptions about biology, and platos dialogues waste as much time exploring intractable dead ends

i didnt even read the rest of your post bc its clear ur a retarded naive pseud who cant even read in greek

>>22571500
Enough

>>22571575
To put it another way: Homer (add scare quotes around the name if you like, it’s not really relevant to my point) is responsible for the poetry that constitutes the crowning glory of *the* literary culture. He is the birth of literature itself, fully formed like Athena. Greek literature is literature in its natural habitat, and if you attempt to recreate literature elsewhere, as has been attempted so admirably by so many European cultures since, the best you’re going to get is a really great pastiche, something amazing but fundamentally incomplete. This difference in kind will always exist between Homer and any mere genius, totally without regard to any specific qualities

>>22572147
>fundamentally incomplete
greek literature

youre retarded. bring on the next contender

>>22570983
If you aren't portuguese, don't bother
He is great sure, but his work doesn't translate well to other languages (specially non-lation ones) and The Lusiads while his crowning achievement, can never be fully appreciated by people that don't get Portuguese culture
That's the reason why Camões will never be a thing outside luso countries

Fernando Pessoa on the other hands is essentially an English man that just happens to write in portuguese
Which is why he is our most famous writer in anglo countries

>>22568685
I remember reading about a distinction between geniuses, how with some, after reading them, one believes one could have done something similar, and others whose work one immediately understands to be totally out of reach. Now the verbal inventiveness of Shakespeare is a great example of the latter. You're just stunned to find it on a page of text, it seems so supremely unlikely that anyone could have come up with that. And the accessibility you mention is part of it, weirdly enough, because it all concerns life, lived experience, and doesn't waste itself on speculation. Verbal fireworks are easy when discussing something abstract, but with the concrete they need genius. It's like certain blinders and filters just weren't there for him, and the raw stuff of life translated itself into metaphor by itself.

>>22572461
That's simply a weak excuse. By the same logic works such as the Iliad, Odyssey and the Aeneid would "never be a thing" since they wouldn't translate well, nor would they be "fully appreciated" by the people not of its cultures.

>>22572362
This is an obvious and facile attempt at a gotcha and it smacks of extremely bad faith or, at the very least, an irreconcilable difference in what we are prioritizing. Of course the extant remains of Greek literature are incomplete along various dimensions. But they are recognizable as having been *formed* in an environment that enabled them to reach an original "completeness" on a much deeper level than what you're talking about. And of course we cannot experience that directly ourselves, but the experience of even the remains, the ruins, "the shadow of a magnitude", affords us a glimpse at the primitive fullness of literature. Really, your point about the loss of Greek texts only strengthens the point I was actually making, because later literatures were not only based upon trying to imitate the Greeks outside the immediate environment of a complete literary culture, they were also imitating those incomplete remains.

>>22573762
>to reach an original "completeness"
except they didnt. they didnt even have a concept of personal psychology as it relates to the human, thats where shakespeare comes in, retard

>>22568540
I have only once opened at random an edition of Shakespeare and found something I liked: it was a section of Henry VIII written by someone else.
I genuinely cannot understand the modern Anglo's obsession with him when even his contemporaries did not find him particularly extraordinary. Even the truly great parts that can be found in most of his plays are hidden under hundreds upon hundreds of verses that are middling at best. And in spite of all this he still gets more than a thousand times the attention than all the other great English poets that are superior to him get, like Milton, Spenser, Pope, Dryden or Wordsworth.

>>22573961
Sorry, Anon, but I know for a fact, just by reading your post, that you don't have much of a poetic gift in you. Some of the more obvious aspects of great poetry are invisible to you. You probably feel more confortable with verse that resembles prose than with highly imagistic language, and care more about the themes and messages of poems than with metaphors.

>>22573792
Ahhhhhh so THAT's what you've been so bothered about, you're a Bloom head! I see now why you were so coy about making any substantial arguments, but don't worry I won't bully you, I'm guilty of a certain degree of bardolatry myself and I think dismissing Bloom entirely just because he was a fame whore and a pathological liar is a bit unsporting.

Anyway, to get to the point, I don't think that sort of personal psychological exploration is an essential element of literature. I think it's something we have a thirst for as (modern) humans, and literature can be a very valuable (though repurposed) tool for putting it into practice, but it's impossible to render it actually completely because its potential development in terms of subtlety and sophistication is bottomless. What I meant by completeness, and it's entirely possible I'm missing a better word here, is the quality of being moored in a coherent, whole cultural/mythological/archetypal context which avoids the precise sort of infinite horizons which are opened up by that Shakespearean internality. A traditional culture based on mythology is a relatively closed system and thus capable of a meaningful level of completeness or comprehensiveness, and the Greek traditional culture is obviously the one with the most advanced literature.

>>22574133
>What I meant by completeness, and it's entirely possible I'm missing a better word here, is the quality of being moored in a coherent, whole cultural/mythological/archetypal context
total, in the latin sense
but using the term complete there is retarded
im not a bloom head and not really aware of that line of shakespeare criticism. he doesnt do anything new from what ive heard
im not a bardolater either, i wouldnt care if shakespeare disappeared tomorrow

John Donne is quite impressive to me.

>>22574140
>punctuation? what are you, a fag or something?
>pssh... shakespear? yeah alright, whatever kid
>fricking retarded... don't tell my mom i said that though my cousin is retarded and she gets really mad, she's such a bitch

I'd be absolutely fascinated to hear what "line of shakespeare criticism" you are aware of that says he "doesnt do anything new" ("from what ive heard" in this context is a delectable touch btw, I love it).

If you are interested in sharing with the class about something you *do* like, I'll be happy to listen and then discuss these topics further within that context.

>>22574234
Not quite sure what to think about this as an answer, I still doubt it can really be taken seriously but it's a lot more interesting than I thought at first glance. I've been wanting to revisit him in depth.

not shakespeare

>>22574333
YWNBAW
next time a youngster btfos u irl for acting like a smug faggot remember that i am responsible for it

>>22574370
wow, the bugmanism on display here is so innocent and pure I almost feel compelled to kneel

>>22572560
They really can't be fully appreciated by people that aren't familiar with the culture which spawned those works
I mean the simple fact that most people read the Odyssey should tell - it's meant to be sung out loud, not read

As for never being a thing
Of course it can't be
Portugal only mattered for 1 century, outside of that it always was and always will be the most insignificant country insignificant country in Western Europe
And how could they not?
They're dirt poor, isolated and don't pose any threat to anyone,

>>22574133
... Meanwhile you post walls of text that mean nothing

>>22574378
>>22574402
Just realized I rolled a 33 into a 333, insane. Calchas would tell you plebs that this is incontrovertible evidence that I am right and you are wrong.

>>22574402
Ok I’m sorry, it was wrong of me to be rude. I hope we can move past this together.

>>22574370
All those world-historical literary geniuses lost to farming… like tears in rain… it’s too much bros, I can’t take it

>>22568540
This guy

dante. never read shakespeare outside school because he's a faggot. Read Othello and the only interesting bit was the Jew who fucked with the nigger