/lit/ - Literature

Best - Taming of the Shrew
Runner up - Hamlet
Worst - As You Like It
Pleb - R&J
Patrician - Othello

King Lear
Julius Caesar
Midsummer
Hamlet
Timon

>>4662676
Agree with all except the last one should be MacBeth.

Best - Much Ado
Runner up - Macbeth
Worst - As You Like it
Pleb - R&J
Patrician - Macbeth

Is it worth reading all the plays that never get discussed? I'm thinking of stuff like Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, Pericles, Cymbeline.

>>4662711
Yes.

Has anyone read Titus Andronicus? I like the band

>>4662683
>>4662708
>Macbeth
>Patrician
But Macbeth is really bland and overall pretty bad.
>inb4 that's the joke

>>4662666

Best play - hamlet
Runner up - idk, lear or probably. or the henriad if that counts.
Worst play - can't say. titus of what i've read but i haven't read all the ones that people say aren't good
Pleb choice - probably macbeth, even though it's great it's what edgy high schoolers like best
Patrician choice - as you like it ;>) (or the henriad)

>>4662749
It's worth a read, but you'll find it very blunt compared to his later plays. Mostly notable for some macabre scenes: a woman with her hands and tongue cut off to prevent her saying anything about who raped her, plus two characters getting baked into a pie which is then served to their mother.

Best play - King Lear
Runner up - Richard II
Worst play - Titus Andronicus
Pleb choice - Macbeth
Patrician choice - The Taming of the Shrew

>>4662749
it's weird as fuck and gross but it's a really fun read

Best - King Lear
Runner up - The Tempest
Worst - Titus Andronicus
Pleb - Romeo & Juliet
Patrician - The Winter's Tale

Best - King Lear/Hamlet
Runner up - Tempest
Worst - Cymbeline
Pleb - Titus Andronicus
Patrician - Antony/Cleopatra

>>4662749
I've read Shakespeare before and I loved the band. So I read the play and, except for certain scenes (Aaron the Moore's monologue is absolutely sinister), the rashness of the characters in the story seem so extreme it's almost farcical, if not for the whole brutal rape of Titus's daughter. It's hard to feel any sympathy for any of these characters because of their actions (if you haven't read it, wait to see how quick Titus is in attacking his son in the first act of the play). Perhaps it's a stern critique of elitist brutality, but it seems more like a play enamored with it's own bloodlust.

Best Play: Hamlet
Runner Up: Henry IV Parts 1&2
Worst Play: Winter's Tale
Pleb Choice: Macbeth
Patrician Choice: Lear

Is King Richard II worth reading?

>>4664187
Very much so.

>>4664187
Yes
tfw I wasted time and now time doth waste me

>>4662749
It has been called underrated so often that it now is kind of massively overrated. It's interesting, but not ultimately that good, but because it's obscure there's certain people who massively overestimate it and I hate them.

Best sonnet- 138
Runner up - 118
Worst sonnet- fuck there's a lot and I haven't read them but I particularly dislike this one that talks about bronze monuments and columns and time and age, can't remember the number though
Pleb choice - 18 for turboplebs, 130 for plebs of normal calibre
Patrician choice - 129

Best: Hamlet
Runner Up: Richard III
Worst: Merry Wives of Windsor
Pleb: Henry V
Patrician: Anthony & Cleopatra
Patrician but overrated: Coriolanus
Pleb but underrated: Romeo and Juliet

Midsummer Night's Dream > all

>>4664255
I <3 fairies too

Best play - Hamlet
Runner-up - King Lear (both are masterpieces)
Worst Play - Henry VIII
Pleb choice - The Merry Wives of Windsor
Patrician choice - Measure for Measure

>>4662708
>>4662676
These faggots can't even into As You Like It

>>4662676
>>4662708
>>4662835

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHoaPLO6Zd8

>>4664340

Are there any productions of Romeo and Juliet where their ages are actually appropriate and the acting isn't typically horrendous child-acting?

>>4664354

No, nothing that's been filmed, that I know of.

It's hard to find a 13-year-old girl possessed of the necessary precocity and imagination to play Juliet appropriately. Just as well.

>>4662678
>Pleb choice - Hamlet

>>4664255
MSND is the only comedy I've read so far that has had me in stitches. Dat based Bottom.

Best: Midsummer Night's Dream
Runner Up: Henry V

Shakespeare is polished excrement.

Homer was the greatest font from which Hellenic culture poured, and yet Plato despised him. Plato saw his countrymen exalting Homer as a deity and being intoxicated his poety, and this was as disgusting to Plato as seeing his daughter seduced by a lowlife womanizer. For Homer's poetry had beautiful language, beautiful enough to woo almost any man and make him lose himself, but Plato saw that what Homer called virtue was often not virtuous, and what Homer called divinity was.often not divine, and Plato could not bear to see people being deceived as to what truly is virtue and what truly is divinity.

Now, I grant that Shakespeare was one of the most seductive wordweavers of all time, like Homer, but this just makes his works all the worse, all the wose, because he woos you with his serpent tongue so that you lose your wits, and then sticks you with his serpent tooth and injects the venom.

I can sum up everything wrong with Shakespeare in a single word ---- "tragicomedy".
Shakespeare was an aesthetic whoremonger, mixing promiscuously what artists of all ages have had the good sense to keep separate.

Consider the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus. It is a perfect whole, one long lament of a tortured person. Every word, phrase, speech serves to complete the dignity of the whole.
Now imagine what the play would be like, if after hearing Prometheus lament his fate of having to endure eternal torture, the play switched abruptly to a pair of falcons doing a zany, comedic back-and-forth on the subject of Prometheus' liver.
And now you know why Shakespeare is in such criminal taste, why the ghost of his reputation ought to be decapitated.

Two examples. Romeo & Juliet opens with the most stinking exchange of vulgar witticims by a pair of plebs. The play ends with the tragic deaths of a pair of "star crossed" lovers, which unites two noble families after an ancient feud. Now, are we really expected to weep for the lovers and feel glad for the uniting of the families when we have been exposed throughout the play to crudeness? See, Aristotle, the genius, layed out royally how a poetic production ought to be composed for the proper effect: each part serves the a whole, and if a part does not serve the whole then it is an artistic mistake or blunder. So, are we to suspend all reason and judgement as Shakespeare tells us to cry one minute and laugh the next, like some arrogant bastard that demands we conduct our souls to serve his passing whims and fancies? I tell you, that the absurdities at the beginning of the play NULLIFY the tragedy at the end of the play, and you have to be a docile slave to allow this faux-artist Shakespeare to lead you through a web of contradictions offensive to reason and taste. Look at another example in Macbeth: the play builds in suspense from one horrid and ominous image to the next until the unspeakable occurs and the graceful King is betrayed and murdered. And then not soon after we are subjected to the dilly dallying of some oafish messenger. That is an insult to the King, an insult to human life in general; no man of basic morals would profane such profound peaks of life by interjecting them with the most vulgar and the most mundane. Imagine if you were at the funeral of your father and midway through the somber proceedings the priest decided to don a clown nose and twist balloons, while the organist played Benny Hill. You would be shocked and insulted, but that is the same shock and insult that this lauded poet dishes us incessantly.

Finally, I can tell you where "tragicomedy" has lead: it has lead to what is called "absurdism" or "the theater of the absurd". Read Beckett's Godot; every word is simultaneously an expression of tragedy and comedy. The same is seen in Kafka. Shakespeare would rapidly switch between this two separate artistic categories, but the absurdists have managed to blend them into an unholy synthesis such that you can no longer distinguish between what is tragedy, what is comedy; and being unable to decide between tears and laughter you arrive at "the feeling of the absurd", I.e. blank despair, void, nothingness.

These are the crimes of this praised and beloved demon.

Best play - Othello
Runner up - The Merchant of Venice
Worst play - Richard III
Pleb choice - Richard III
Patrician choice (I assume this means tryhard) - Julius Caesar

fite me

>>4664599
shit, scrap RIII, I totally forgot Romeo and Juliette, that's how bad that play is.

Midsummer
Julius ceasar
R&J
R&J
Undecided on the most patrician

>>4664565
>>4664569

This shit is fucking copypasta now?

Best play - R&J
Runner up - Hamlet
Worst play - Midsummer Night's Dream
Pleb choice - Macbeth
Patrician choice - Merchant of Venice

General trend in this thread:

Best - Hamlet
Runner up - King Lear
Worst - Titus Andronicus
Pleb - R&J
Patrician - ???

Is this actually accurate?

>>4662666
ITT: people not seeing the critique of /lit/

>>4664599
>most accessible, intermediate-school play of them all
>patrician
>RIII
>bad

>>4664750
Richard III is more accessible than R&J ?

>>4664737
/lit/ is short for be/lit/tling.

>>4664354
>>4664361
Guise.
Zeffirelli's Juliet was 14. The actress. She was not allowed to attend the debut screening of the film in which she starred due to pizza laws. Come on.

>Ctrl+F "Twelfth Night"
>No results

Best play - King Lear
Runner up - Hamlet
Worst play - Winter's Tale
Pleb choice - Macbeth
Patrician choice - Richard III

>>4662666
what cartoon is that pic from? I could swear I've seen it before.

>>4664632

>Being this high school

Romeo and Juliet
The Rover
King Lear
Macbeth
Romeo and Juliet

>>4664632
I bet you are Canadian.

It's been a while, but I liked Macbeth over Othello, hamlet and r&j because the main characters don't act like total retards.

Please don't tell me there are people in this thread judging plays they haven't seen performed.

Best Play - Hamlet
Runner up - King Lear or Twelfth Night
Worst play - I'm not sure.
Pleb choice - R&J
Patrician choice - Coriolanus

>>4665171
fuck off you retard

Best - Othello
Runner up - Julius Caesar
Worst Play - Not read enough to judge
Pleb choice - R&J
Patrician - Merchant of Venice

At a loss for worst play? Titus Andronicus

>best
King Lear
>runner up
Henry IV or Hamlet
>worst play
Merry Wives of Windsor
>pleb choice
Hamlet/R&J/Midsummer's
>patrician choice
The Tempest

>>4665189

>all these people saying R&J is the pleb choice
I'm sorry your 8th grade English teacher made you read it but that's an absolutely amazing play.

Best play - Macbeth
Runner up - Hamlet
Worst play - Romeo & Juliet
SJW choice - Othello
Patrician choice - Titus Andronicus

>>4662835
>>4662837
>2014
>thinking that the Tempest is one of his best works.

>>4664599
othello and merchant of venice are the best plays objectively

>>4665438
muh revisionism

>>4665331
I don't think anyone denies that R&J is amazing. They say it's a pleb choice because it's a likely sign that the person hasn't read any other play.

>>4665562
there's also a lot of people saying it's the worst play... sometimes the same people saying it's the pleb choice.

>>4665566
Ah, in that case I agree with you.

Is it necessary to read Henry IV to VIII in order? Same with Richard II and III

>>>4664248
>Romeo and Juliet
>not overrated

>>4666266
The sequence is Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, Henry V, Henry VI Parts 1-3, Richard III

No, you do not need to read them in order, they all stand alone just fine.

Best play - Cymbeline
Runner up - Troilus and Cressida
Worst play - Winter's Tale
Pleb choice - Macbeth
Patrician choice - Timon of Athens