/lit/ - Literature

I recommend reading his sonnets first.

>>4261824
is there any sonnet in particular i should read? im reading to improve my comprehension

>>4261829
His sonnets are collected in one volume if I remember correctly, just get the whole set. It should be <$20.

I don't know if I'd start with Shakespeare to improve reading comprehension though. There are playwrights who're easier to understand and may be more beneficiary to your immediate reading skills. I'd honestly read the /lit/ starter kit first.

>>4261836
alright, thanks.

>>4261848
college frosh

>>4261846
Can I just ask, what's your education as of the moment? I'm not asking this to be a dick or anything, it'd just make things easier when trying to give you a recommendation.

>>4261850
Hm, I thought Hamlet was required in most high schools in the United States and in Great Britain? Nonetheless, I recommend you start out with Mark Twain actually. Get a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and since you're trying to improve your comprehension skills, don't be afraid to use SparkNotes.

>all of his plays for £0.49 (kindle)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/SHAKESPEARE-Illustrated-Shakespeares-Unabridged-Shakespeare-ebook/dp/B004OEIELA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1384195251&sr=8-1&keywords=shakespeare

>all of his sonnets for free (kindle)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Shakespeares-Sonnets-William-Shakespeare-ebook/dp/B004TPEMLK/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1384195251&sr=8-3&keywords=shakespeare

You don't need to know anything before reading Hamlet, except how to read

>>4261854
I read Julius Caesar in high school. thanks for the help again.

Maybe read a couple of his sonnets, but seriously, Shakespeare's best work is his drama and Hamlet is pretty up there. Critics seem to waver between whether Hamlet or King Lear is his master work.

Personally, I like Henry IV Parts I & II the best, but that's just me.

The best thing to do when reading Shakespeare is to read more than once and then watch some adaptations later because, after all, the plays were meant to be seen, not read.

I recommend a cursory reading first where you just try to get the general plot followed by an in-depth reading where you try to appreciate the language and understand all the idiomatic language.

A lot of people recommend starting by watching an adaptation, but I don't like to do this because too much is lost on me that way. Plus you won't appreciate the nuances and liberties that individual directors take with the source material.

The best (or at least most influential) Hamlet film adaptations are Olivier's, Kozintsev's, and Branagh's.

Oh, also, the more Shakespeare you read, the more you will understand his style and the easier it will be for you to get through his plays.

>>4261866
thanks for taking your time to help me out

>>4261866
>>4261871
No problem.

Also, bear in mind that Hamlet is the longest Shakespeare play by far and because of that it can be pretty daunting.

This is why most high schools, I think, will start with Romeo & Juliet or A Midsummer Night's Dream. Short and sweet and sing-songy rhyming couplets and stuff.

Just learn to love language. You don't need anything to understand Shakespeare but a basic ability to appreciate the beauty of words.

Not OP here but this is semi-related since we're both sort of newbs to literature and I don't think this is worthy of its own thread. What are the best Dylan songs to study as poems other than the obvious and is there a comprehensive collection of all his lyrics? Lyrics didn't even have half of them.

>>4261893
Should've made your own thread but Desolation Row is seriously one of the greatest post modernist works ever written.

>>4261819
>reading plays
I bet you read movie scripts, too.

>>4261887

this

>>4262301
I bet you don't even know most versions of Hamlet on stage are truncated heavily, in order to make the play 2 hours long rather than the 3.5 hours it is, played all the way through.

Begone, pleb. You know nothing and your opinions are worthless.

>>4262333
Just watch the Branagh version then. >pleb

>>4262365
>not realizing that there are three different versions of Hamlet and that Branagh conflated them all to make a five hour movie not grounded in any of the three original texts
pleb

>>4262392
Source, please.

>>4262402
I'm not pulling out my Norton Shakespeare just to give you an academic source.

But seriously, last paragraph of the introduction to Hamlet on Wikipedia:

"Three different early versions of the play are extant, the First Quarto (Q1, 1603), the Second Quarto (Q2, 1604), and the First Folio (F1, 1623). Each version includes lines, and even entire scenes, missing from the others."

>>4262407
If anything, the film version has more content.

>>4262301
You aren't supposed to read plays, so that's why Hamlet isn't anthologized in hundreds of world and British Lit collections.

Hamlet is always sold as kind of this timeless tale of revenge and religion and all that, but for me it seems very much rooted in the time in which it was written. All of Shakespeare's plays are basically about Elizabethan England, and the feudal power struggles portrayed in Hamlet are interesting when you consider that, for example, the English Civil War wasn't that far off on the horizon. I could be wrong though.

>>4262420
Whatever you say Stephen Greenblatt

>>4261819
Nah, Hamlet's one of the easier to understand but also excellent. My favirote of Shakespeare's. Also >>4261824 his sonnets are great but I don't see why you would need to read them before Hamlet

>>4262420
http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/editors_pick/1966_08-09_pick.html

Very interesting read on the universality of Hamlet.

>>4261887
>>4262328
>muh prose
plebs

>>4262426
I had to google who that was. I guess I'm a pleb.

>>4261819
You should read Titus Andronicus before Hamlet. It's also a revenge tragedy and is fucking unbelievable.

Finished reading Hamlet last week and have now started reading Macbeth. I'm not an anglo native but it's not too hard to appreciate the beauty of the language once you take your time to get it right. I also read the texts out loud, does anyone else do this too?

>>4262434

Not only muh prose, but also muh blak verse, muh rhyming couplet, muh songs and muh sonnets.

The greatest aspect of Shakespeare's art is his ability with language, particularly his extraordinary fertility for metaphor, similes and imagery. This is, by far, the most important feature of his body of work. No other poet, in any other language, has ever showed even half of Shakespeare's creativity with verbal pyrotechnics. Shakespeare was not a great thinker, not a great philosopher and not a great story teller (he simply took plots from other sources and glued them together to make new plays; sometimes he simply used the same plot identically): he was, above all, a great poet, a master of the written word.

Is like Nabokov said:

>The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays. With Shakespeare it is the metaphor that is the thing, not the play.

If you are not going to read Shakespeare firstly because of his wonderful language, then you are not getting the core and marrow of his greatness, the nucleus and center of his genius.

>>4262432
This is really interesting, thanks. I particulary like trying to explain what a ghost is. "A dead man's shadow." I like that.

>>4262432

Really interesting but I was a bit annoyed at how arrogant some of the natives were. But they had very intriguing ideas about the play though. I especially liked the part about the end where whoever would've won the duel would be poisoned.