/lit/ - Literature

Shakespeare was written by committee.

>>2900296
It was common for the owner of an acting company to collaborate with others within the company on the work they were going to present.

Oh yeah, Dante the hatchet man, Joyce the fart letter guy, and Tolstoy the anarcho-pacifist? A real gallery of great men, besides great writers.

>>2900311
greater than you, anyway

>>2900311
Ugh. We don't know anything about Shakespeare. What's your point?

>>2900303
wait a sec r u trying to rustle my jimmies

Seriously, though, is that true? I recall Ben Johnson saying that Shakespeare was careless and never crossed out a line he wrote. That's about all I know of his writing methods.

>>2900340
Do we value Joyce or Dante or Tolstoy's work any less because they were utterly weird and strange and awkward people?

No, of fucking course not. This thread is shit. OP is shit in human form.

>>2900348
That's not at all what I meant. We love Shakespeare because he and his plays are complete enigmas. They offer so many possible interpretations and can never really be solved.

What I'm wondering is that if we knew more about Shakespeare, would his works appear less mysterious?

I was prompted to make this thread after reading an essay by Borges called Shakespeare's Enigma. He essentially argues that only Shakespeare could have written the plays ascribed to him because only this unknown man from Stratford had the ability to make his authorial presence completely unknown and enigmatic. It makes for an interesting mirror between his works and his, or lack thereof, of a life.

All the more enigmatic is why he decided to just abandon writing and live his remaining years back home, busying himself with petty bargains.

/r/ing the Joyce fart letter

>>2900348
the thread is completely valid, calm your jimmies

>>2900380
My sweet little whorish Nora I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see that you do like being fucked arseways. Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue came bursting out through your lips and if a gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual, fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.

>>2900418

>JFW

>>2900418

This idea we don't know much about Shakespeare is funny. Where does it come from, besides the misinformed Borges? Or maybe you're misreading what Borges was writing?

Shakespeare's father was an alderman in Stratford upon Avon. He was a 10% shareholder in the Babbage theatre in London, where many of his plays were first put on, and was among the first playwrights to become so powerful as businessmen. He became quite wealthy as a result. He poached the story of Hamlet from an old Danish tale, and Romeo and Juliet from an old Italian tale, and made them his own forever after. Some of his comedies were produced as court entertainment for Elizabeth and company. He was extremely savvy in writing for different social classes, all in the same play, and the theatre then was actually more accessible for everyone than it is now (about 1/5 of an average daily wage). Men played all roles, but prostitution was common in the back/side stage areas. Also, spectatorship was much different back then than it is now, with people socializing and eating through the performance. In fact, this is why the plays are "messy" to the modern mind. The language had to be rich enough to rivet people for short periods of time, but the plots could not be so complex that you would miss something important if you were sharing a bawdy joke with a neighbour. The pyrotechniques of the theatres used squibs, which are a mixture of saltpeter and some animal dung, which produced a lot of smoke, and provided atmospheric special effects for scenes like the weird sisters in Macbeth. Before he wrote plays, he had his own acting troupe, who did performances such as "the play within a play" in Hamlet.

Shakespeare had four sons (I might be remembering this wrong), and had a tempestuous marriage with his wife Anne?

I thought Shakespeare was considered equal to Dante (and Goethe)?

>>2900541
>>2900541
You listed some information about the time, but we don't really know anything of his personal life.

Borges was mainly disproving the arguments that Marlowe or Bacon or Oxford, I don't know, could have written those plays because they all seemed to really put their selves into the works whereas Shakespeare remains apart, able to embody almost any character yet cannot be limited to a single character. Hence Borges calling Shakespeare "everyone and no one."

It's really difficult to find a character(s) that we could say, yes, this is Shakespeare's standin. Tolstoy had them. Joyce had them to an extent. Dante is nothing but Dante.

>>2900578
They're pretty much equals. It's really a matter of nitpicking when you have genius of that size.

Something that Harold Bloom will make a latter career out of reminding us how important it is to remember that Shakespeare > Dante; Shakespeare > Goethe.

By the way, Bloom is not the greatest critic of Shakespeare.

>>2900616

There was lots of "personal" information about Shakespeare in my post. Based on what we know about his relationship with his wife, it's very probable that Shakespeare was like Petruchio in "The Taming of the Shrew."

Plus he was very witty like Mercutio. The Bacon, etc. argument is based on classist assumptions about someone who was not an Oxford chum being capable of the artistry that Shakespeare created.

>>2900622
then who, in your learned opinion, is?

>>2900616

By the by, Bacon did not "put himself" into his work. Have you even read "The New Atlantis?" The only thing that I could conjecture about his personal life from that strange and charming fiction is that he was vaguely anti-semitic. And it's pure conjecture.

>>2900662

And that he liked science, and thought it could do wonders for a technocratic elite that could control everything remotely. Bacon was in some respects the inventor of cybernetics.

ITT: pretension

They don't even know if shakespeare wasn't a bear

come on

Shakespeare's plays were clearly written in 1977 by Frida Lyngstad in the space of one evening. Anyone who claims otherwise is misinformed and/or deluded.

>>2900684

It's too bad the dozens of academic articles I've read on Shakespeare don't agree with you.

>>2900714

Pic related, it's Shakespeare (possibly).
Prove me wrong. You can't.

burden of proof is on you

>>2900742
NO

>>2900645
Contemporary stuff? I'm not sure. Anne Barton, Frank Kermode have more insights than Bloom, at least for myself. Bloom is very, very hit or miss.

I just find it curious that for someone who worships Shakespeare, he doesn't have that much to say about him. Lots of repetition and empty rhetoric. But by the time Bloom wrote his book on Shakespeare he had already entered the realm of pop-literary criticism, so I guess you can't expect much.

>>2900684
You don't find Shakespeare fascinating?

Some of the most interesting stuff in Ulysses is Stephen talking about his Hamlet-Hamnet hypothesis.

Compare Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, a play which I feel is anti-semitic without a doubt and one that needs Shylock as a villain to function, with the claim that after Shakespeare retired to Stratford he sat around loaning people money and then fining them when they were the slightest bit late on their payments.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KTCtYDxzJo

/thread

But what if they were written by more than one writer? What would that do to our heroic ideas of authorship and lone genius?

Or put it this way: Sir William Empson, who was a very well-read and intelligent man, and a good poet, so I won't knock him for being a critic, at the end of his life declared that he had read Marvell's satirical poems "Advice to a Painter" and decided that it was clearly the work of 6 different people. Most professional Marvell scholars thought Empson was just off his trolley (as they say in the UK), and he probably was.

But seriously....what if? We act like geniuses act in isolation, that they owe nothing to other people.....and then suddenly somebody discovers that John Milton plagiarized one of the best phrases in Lycidas from a lousy poem called "Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt"

The phrase, incidentally, describes a writer's desire for fame..."that last infirmity of noble minds".

Did you ever think maybe Joyce realized that people were so obsessed with Shakespeare that they were not prepared to acknowledge another great writer, and so to make them pay attention, he just gave his book the title of the character who has the longest, most boring single speech in Shakespeare's work: Ulysses?

Ulysses, whose father, incidentally, had the same name as Ophelia's brother. Laertes. Nobody mentions this in the National Library chapter of Joyce's novel. It's probably irrelevant. But what if it isn't?

>>2900742

Try the 470, 000, 000 results on google images that include some painters' images of him, some illustrators images of him, etc.

>>2900788

Remember that he's writing for the theatre, which is by its very nature a collaborative enterprise. So of course some of his actors probably added elements that he subsequently wrote into his folios. But, still, we don't wonder the same things about Eugene O'neill or George Bernard Shaw. Something about Shakespeare just lures people into mystification. I think it's bollocks we don't know much about him.

If you're really interested in critiques of the idea of the "individual genius," I'm pretty sure Adorno had some pungent remarks on this topic. I can't remember from where though. Minima Moralia, maybe?

> you will never know about rehearsal shenanigans

: (