/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.7019146]

Anyone here think that pic related is very over rated? I've read a lot of classic and modern literature but never got into Shakespeare until a month ago. I dunno if I was expecting too much going in, but Midsummer and Hamlet were both tedious and boring. I didn't get to the end of midsummer, had to put it down halfway and never picked it up.

>tfw reading Othello now. it's also shit

[Anonymous No.7019153]

Do you happen to hate the English language?

[Anonymous No.7019154]

>>>/r/books

[Anonymous No.7019159]

Ehhhhh you're a fucking pleb tbqh.

>uhh is shakespeare overrated? Is it all a ruse?
No

[Anonymous No.7019165]

>>7019153
No. I've read a lot of English books.

>>7019154
Link is not working

[Anonymous No.7019171]

>>7019165
>link not working
This is some next-level newfaggotry

[Anonymous No.7019172]

I sorta agree with OP, but mainly cause the language is too out-dated for a modern reader. Anyone know of any up-to-date translations? I've looked on Penguin but they don't have any

[Anonymous No.7019173]

>>7019165
>No. I've read a lot of English books.

How about poetry?

[Anonymous No.7019178]

>>7019172

[Anonymous No.7019179]

>>7019172
It is actually modernised in most popular editions. Pic related is what it actually looked like.

[Anonymous No.7019181]

>Hamlet
>tedious and boring

O, my offense is rank. It smells to heaven.
It hath the primal eldest curse upon't,
A brother's murder. Pray can I not,
Though inclination be as sharp as will.
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent,
And like a man to double business bound
I stand in pause where I shall first begin,
And both neglect. What if this cursèd hand
Were thicker than itself with brother's blood,
Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens
To wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy
But to confront the visage of offense?
And what's in prayer but this twofold force,
To be forestallèd ere we come to fall,
Or pardoned being down? Then I'll look up.
My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer
Can serve my turn? 'Forgive me my foul murder'?
That cannot be, since I am still possessed
Of those effects for which I did the murder,
My crown, mine own ambition and my queen.
May one be pardoned and retain the offense?
In the corrupted currents of this world
Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law. But 'tis not so above.
There is no shuffling, there the action lies
In his true nature, and we ourselves compelled,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
To give in evidence. What then? What rests?
Try what repentance can. What can it not?
Yet what can it when one cannot repent?
O wretched state! O bosom black as death!
O limèd soul, that struggling to be free
Art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay!
Bow, stubborn knees; and, heart with strings of steel,
Be soft as sinews of the newborn babe.
All may be well.

[Anonymous No.7019182]

>>7019165
>Link is not working
So these are the kind of people who shit on King Shakey-kins then?

[Anonymous No.7019186]

>>7019179
>tfw tried to read Twelfth Night in this gobbledygook
>didn't understand shit
>now I've read Othello and Hamlet in their modernized versions and I'm living life and having a great time

[Anonymous No.7019194]

>>7019179
Whatever character they are using to depict s is really bothering me
I'm sure the "u"s all look like v

[Anonymous No.7019195]

>I'm too dumb to understand this universally recognised work
>instead of humbling myself I'll just say it's "overrated"
>that way I can still act superior to everyone

The pleb mindset, everyone.

[Anonymous No.7019242]

>>7019195
Who are you quoting?

Anyways, it is subjective. I enjoy George Orwell but a friend of mine hates his style of writing. My biggest gripe with his plays is that the characters are boring and not particularly relatable. The plays may have been revolutionary in the Elizabethan times but as a modern reader, everything is very predictable and cliche.


>>7019173
Yes but not as much as prose. I enjoy writing poetry

[Anonymous No.7019254]

I do but I can't say it here without being called an edgy contrarian.

[Anonymous No.7019261]

>>7019181
it's horrible

doesn't flow well at all, so much rambling

[Anonymous No.7019264]

>>7019261
Say it aloud

If you think Shakespeare dosent flow you dont even know what flow is

[Anonymous No.7019269]

>>7019264
you say it aloud

it sounds like an essay, not a speech

[Anonymous No.7019273]

>>7019181

atleast post a good passage, you're helping OP's passage. shit taste

[Anonymous No.7019274]

>>7019269
Just did and fucking hnngd m8

Fix your radar

[Anonymous No.7019287]

The first time I thought Shakespeare wrote beautifully was when I was playing one of those "type as fast as you can" games. Going from instruction manuals and excerpts from Stephen Hawking to Shakespeare was like a completely different world, it felt really good. It just flowed. I'm not a native speaker but I seldom get that from prose in any language so it should count for something, I think.

[Anonymous No.7019297]

>>7019287
>"Shakespeare's writing flows better than instruction manuals"
High praise

[Anonymous No.7019307]

>>7019297
I kek'd

[Anonymous No.7019314]

If you listen to anglophone anglophiles shakespeare and maybe joyce are the only real true writers that ever existed on earth, and they're not sure about the latter.

[Anonymous No.7019323]

>>7019297

There were obviously excerpts from real literature as well and while those were easier to transcribe it was a world of difference coming from Hunter S. Thompson going to Shakespeare. What I'm getting at is that transcribing Shakespeare was a diametrically different experience from everything else on there just because of flow. It made english sound beautiful

[Anonymous No.7019343]

>>7019314
I'm an anglo and I think Beowulf and Chaucer are great; Shakespeare overrated and Joyce very overrated.

[Anonymous No.7019345]

>>7019343
kk

[Anonymous No.7019347]

>>7019314
I would think that most serious anglophone readers would rank Milton not far behind Shakespeare, if not in front of him. There have been some truly awesome English poets, but even the likes of Keats and Blake fall some way short of Milton's sublimity and Shakespeare's sumptuousness.

[Profane !!aA0k1/YgCq9 No.7019348]

>>7019297

[Profane !!aA0k1/YgCq9 No.7019352]

>>7019348
Er... This funny picture was supposed to be attached. Ha ha

[Anonymous No.7019365]

>>7019172
5/10

[Anonymous No.7019375]

>>7019242
>who are you quoting
>relatable
>subjective

Delicious delicious bait.

[Anonymous No.7019377]

>>7019352
Haha! I like this picture. Can I save it?

[Anonymous No.7019386]

>>7019375
>I don't have a proper response so I'll just call it bait

[Anonymous No.7019390]

>>7019386
If it's serious then you are fucking retarded mate

[Anonymous No.7019397]

>>7019172
Shakespeare literally writes in modern English you fucktard

[Anonymous No.7019401]

>>7019390
> I don't have a proper response so I'll just call him mate

[Anonymous No.7019410]

>Hamlet
>tedious

Holy shit man you are truly a pleb. Usually people are just memeing in terms of plebbery, but this is truly painful. I hope for the sake of the entire board that this is bait.

Ditto >>701917

[Anonymous No.7019413]

>>7019401
>I don't have a dropper applause so I'll just call him slate

[Anonymous No.7019424]

>>7019194
>whatever character
Don’t you know about the long/medial S anon?

[Anonymous No.7019453]

>>7019377
Yeah of course it's from Jerry Seinfeld show

[Anonymous No.7019459]

>>7019413
Who are you quoting?

[Anonymous No.7019462]

>>7019352
>>7019377
>>7019453

Is /lit/ being invaded by old people?

[Anonymous No.7019481]

>>7019462

it's called irony you dip

[Anonymous No.7019483]

>>7019242
The only reason why you'd think they are "predictable and cliché" is because we live in a post-Shakespearian culture.

[Anonymous No.7019565]

>>7019483
Exactly. Most of Shakespeare's plays have nothing to offer to the modern reader.

[Anonymous No.7019573]

It's okay, OP. I find Shakespeare to be overrated. Then again, I also find Lovecraft to be overrated. Their respect lies in being foundation creators. Their styles have been improved upon.

[Anonymous No.7019586]

Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language, but I do think that people overrate him still.

[Anonymous No.7019616]

>>7019481
>what is poe's law

[Anonymous No.7019623]

>>7019573
>Their respect lies in being foundation creators. Their styles have been improved upon

You summed it up better then I could. Other writers based their style on Shakespeare and improved it.

[ΟΥΤΙΣ No.7019630]

It's impossible to overrate Shakespeare, especially in regard to English literature. If you can't appreciate him, then it's because you can't appreciate reading drama.

If you're having trouble, I suggest you read with the Henry tetralogy, well annotated, and then watch The Hollow Crown.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmsDfjp3Jh4

[Anonymous No.7019637]

>>7019623
>then I could
Yeah, I think you two dream team geniuses should explicate on who adopted Shakespeare's style and how they improved upon it. I'm curious

[ΟΥΤΙΣ No.7019666]

>>7019623

[Anonymous No.7019681]

>>7019666
> I don't have a proper argument so I'll just post funny meme

[Anonymous No.7019689]

Personally I feel Shakespeare is a just an over glorified mediocre writer. Agree with OP that it is outdated for modern readers. Anyone who reads Shakespeare these days and prefers Hamlet over stuff like A song of Ice and fire series is just a pretentious douche

[ΟΥΤΙΣ No.7019701]

>>7019681
There's nothing to argue against. He's the one who made the ludicrous statement without giving any substantiation. If someone says, "Ya, Bach's good, but many composers improved on his style." What's there to say? No they didn't? Are you to go through every single composer and explain how not a single one "improved on Bach's style"?

[Anonymous No.7019703]

>tfw shitting on Shakespeare
>tfw not realising that Shakespeare never actually existed

[Anonymous No.7019813]

>>7019701
No author will appeal to everyone. Saying "If you can't appreciate Shakespeare, you can't appreciate drama" is a ludicrous statement in itself. No "x book is better then y" is an objective truth.

[ΟΥΤΙΣ No.7019818]

>>7019813
No, it's the damn truth, provided you can read in English. You might enjoy drama or movies, but you sure as hell cannot appreciate it.

[Anonymous No.7019825]

>>7019179
>yare,yare

[Anonymous No.7019833]

>>7019703
Shakespeare was actually Jack the Ripper.

[Anonymous No.7019894]

>>7019818
Is this bait? Objective truth is stuff like "USA dropped the bomb on Hiroshima". Rooted in facts. You really think that "x writer was very good" is an objective truth?

http://www.everywritersresource.com/shakespeare-sucks-by-leo-tolstoy/

Leo Tolstoy is an author whose work I am very familiar with as he wrote in both English and Russian (my mother tongue), he is considered one of the best English authors of all time. The above essay expresses his disdain for Shakespeare and his plays. You really think he was "incapable of appreciating drama" ?

[Anonymous No.7019903]

>>7019146
>Hamlet was boring

[ΟΥΤΙΣ No.7019916]

>>7019894
We're talking about literary criticism, not history, and even the bomb dropping is not an objective fact by natural science standards. By standards of literary criticism, Shakespeare is ringer for all standards of greatness and influence. You can come up with some sort of standard like, "The author must say clown nose ten times a page to be great," but then you're just being a retard and not worth having a discussion with, it would be like trying to discuss classical aesthetics with someone who thought only anime women are beautiful.

I think Tolstoy either couldn't understand early modern English very well, or he couldn't appreciate drama, yes.

[Anonymous No.7019918]

>>7019894
>Leo Tolstoy is an author whose work I am very familiar with as he wrote in both English and Russian (my mother tongue), he is considered one of the best English authors of all time.

What did Tolstoy write in English?

[ΟΥΤΙΣ No.7019922]

>>7019918
That is something I don't know and have never heard before. I do know that regardless, he is not considered "one of the best English authors of all time".

[Anonymous No.7019933]

>>7019689
You need to pracitce you baiting more, anon. This was way too obvious.

[Anonymous No.7019942]

>>7019397
His language is still antiquated to a contemporary reader. "Modern English" merely means "not old enough to be considered a different language". He reads fine, but you can't pretend he doesn't read old as fuck.

>>7019146

He's not so much overrated (different people rate him differently after all) as overhyped (people will namedrop him at every occasion even when that doesn't shed light on the topic at hand or on his writings). Basically "muh Shakespeare" is a big fat meme, and if anything it actually does disservice to the man.

[Anonymous No.7019959]

>>7019146
Eh, those plays are constantly referenced and you can not like them, but I read Hamlet every year and still love it. It's one thing if we were talking about Cymbeline or something boring and derpy like that, but Hamlet and Lear are pretty boss. But Shakes wrote a lot of shit and he shouldn't have his own class in college, etc, etc. Measure for Measure's pretty funny and underrated though.

[ΟΥΤΙΣ No.7019964]

>>7019942
>"Modern English" merely means "not old enough to be considered a different language".
No, Middle English is not considered a different language, it's considered a dialect of English. Shakespeare is less antiquated than the King James Bible, as far as his English goes

[Anonymous No.7019982]

>>7019959
>he shouldn't have his own class in college
I don't see why not. He has quite a few plays that merit in-depth analysis and spending a few months on such an influential author will help you understand references in later texts. Regardless of whether he was "good" or not, enough works allude to Shakespeare that he's worth reading in depth, imo.

[Anonymous No.7020242]

>>7019916
> I have a better understanding of drama then the author of War and Peace

What a pretentious douche. Also lose the trip, you look like a jackass

[Anonymous No.7020541]

>>7020242
he's not using a trip, retard newfag

[ΟΥΤΙΣ No.7020696]

>>7020242
War and Peace is enormously different from drama

[Anonymous No.7020849]

>>7019894

You clearly are not very well acquainted at all with Tolstoy if you take his criticisms of other writers seriously at all. He condemned them only according to his highly artificial and entirely self-invented theory of aesthetics and morality. It is according to these same principles that Tolstoy also dismissed Baudelaire, Chekhov, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Nietzsche, Wagner, Maeterlinck, Kipling -- virtually everyone except Dickens, Goethe and Beethoven.

Frankly, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Tolstoy's views on Shakespeare are considered to be utterly misguided and ridiculous. Citing them seriously makes you look equally ridiculous to anyone with a clue. Please stop posting.

[Anonymous No.7020877]

>>7020849

[Anonymous No.7020912]

>>7019172
go read LOL ROMEO then ya pleb

[Anonymous No.7020925]

>>7019172
>the language is too out-dated for a modern reader.

Alas, poor /lit/. Where be your patricians now?

[Anonymous No.7020932]

>>7019833
no. consult pinecone

[Anonymous No.7020941]

>>7019146
read 6 of shakespeare's comedies in a semester for english, loved him ever since

[Anonymous No.7020956]

>>7020541
being a namefag is about as worse

[Anonymous No.7020987]

>>7020925
Here

This has always been

[Anonymous No.7021004]

Seven ages of man is the only passage I actually enjoyed, I think

[Anonymous No.7021009]

No, we do not think he is overrated,

We do happen to think that you overrate your own intelligence, however, and we would be glad if you were to stop posting on /lit/ for a while and went to /r/books.

Anyone complaining about the language is a complete idiot who should never be allowed to touch a great book. I am Brazilian, and I learned English on my own at the age of 13. I never had problems reading Shakespeare.

[Anonymous No.7021018]

>>7020849
>Maeterlinck

A god-tier playwright that few people know about. "Intruder" is genius.

[Anonymous No.7021570]

>>7020849
Tolstoy dissed on Goethe and Beethoven too

[Anonymous No.7021836]

I don’t even know why do I post in this semi-troll threads, but let’s go.

Saying that Shakespeare is overrated is the same as saying that Newton or Einstein are overrated (yes, there are people who do that). While it is kind of annoying that people speak about Shakespeare with so much wonder and reverence, the fact is that, if you really read him carefully, if you study his whole corpus (at least the principal tragedies, comedies and histories, the best of every genre), you end up questioning yourself how could a single human being be capable of repeatedly achieving so much excellence. He is one of those few people in history whose achievement is almost inexplicable. Every poet has his main moments, his greatest metaphors and lines. Shakespeare, however, has so many of this great moments that you end up taking it for granted. It’s like a lightning after a lightning after a lightning after a lightning, a non-stop flowing of exuberance. Like Salieri said about Mozart in Amadeus “God was singing throw this little man, unstoppably”.

Just think about this:

>Greatest poetic language of all time;
>Creation of more than 1000 characters;
>Several different atmospheres and themes;
>Great both in tragedy and comedy;
>Sill widely read and performed, and not just a treasure for students and academics (something that happens with most great writers);
>Display of a lot of different philosophies of life and views of the world, more varied than any other writer in history.

A man who has all this medals in his work can’t be overrated. Shakespeare is indeed a genius. But to truly understand his greatness one must have a lot for language, a love for words, and many people on this thread are not of this sort of human beings.

[Anonymous No.7021867]

>>7021836

[Anonymous No.7021925]

>>7021867

No, mister Bond, I expect you to die and have a very cheap funeral.

[Anonymous No.7021932]

>>7019964
Middle English consisted of several dialects, it's more accurate to call it an earlier form of English than a dialect.

[Anonymous No.7021945]

>>7019194
>Whatever character they are using to depict s is really bothering me
That’s ſome next-level plebeianneſs you’ve got there, ſon

[Anonymous No.7022015]

>>7019146
>not going to read the whole thread.

IMO, Shakespeare is just one of those things that has to be experienced in the form it was meant to. Go see a good production of one of his best plays and there's no way you'll think it was boring.

- The language smooths out because people are acting it and speaking to each other, and the hard to understand feels all but disappear.

- Assuming the cast has talent, seeing the words performed is way more interesting than reading them on a page and trying to figure out who's talking to who.

- There are a shit ton of jokes that people miss when they're reading Shakespeare (even in the tragedies). A good director is going to make sure their actors convey them to the audience.

There are a lot of scholars that say Shakespeare is best on paper and like to ooh and ahh over his use of language. I say they're full of shit. He meant those words to be heard and that's exactly what I'm going to do with them.

tl;dr: NEVER read a play without first seeing it performed. (Unless you're in the play, I guess...)

[Anonymous No.7023045]

What's a good edition for someone wanting to read a few (or individually, that would be preferred) of Shakespear's works for the first time?

[Anonymous No.7023119]

>>7021836

this

“Shakespeare is our most underrated poet. It should not be necessary to say that, but it is. We generally acknowledge Shakespeare’s poetic superiority to other candidates for greatest poet in English, but doing that is comparable to saying that King Kong is bigger than other monkeys. The difference between Shakespeare’s abilities with language and those even of Milton, Chaucer, or Ben Jonson is immense.”.

Stephen Booth

[Anonymous No.7023769]

>>7023119
Shakespeare and Milton are both pretty matched as far as language goes. Milton is probably better at meter. He also does interesting things with word positioning.

Ben Jonson is going for a totally different aesthetic than either of those writers, the plain style, so it's a little silly to compare them. He's not as good in terms of accomplishment, but that doesn't have to much to do with his accomplishment as his subjects paired with his style. Shakespeare and Milton are both much more interesting on an ideas level.

Chaucer's story structuring is easily as good as Shakespeare and Milton. Can't really comment on his language because I'm not very fluent in older English.

[Anonymous No.7023773]

>>7023769
"accomplishment in style" I meant to say about Johnson; his aesthetic actually precludes show. He's an amazing plain stylist though.

[Anonymous No.7023783]

>>7023769
:|

[Anonymous No.7023875]

7023769
>Shakespeare and Milton are both pretty matched as far as language goes.

No, not really.

As you say, Milton is probably better at metre than Shakespeare, and is inarguably the greater rhetorician. But Shakespeare's command of metaphor and imagery just blows Milton (and everyone else) out of the water. Shakespeare can stack metaphor on top of metaphor again and again at dizzying speed while keeping the sense of the passage and psychological realism at the highest level. It's absurd and no other poet can even match it.

[Anonymous No.7023966]

>>7023875
>But Shakespeare's command of metaphor and imagery just blows Milton (and everyone else) out of the water. Shakespeare can stack metaphor on top of metaphor again and again at dizzying speed while keeping the sense of the passage and psychological realism at the highest level. It's absurd and no other poet can even match it.

Wow, you are the first poster on /lit/ that presents the same appreciation that I do. There are a lot of Shakespeare fans here, a lot of learned Anons, but they tend to focus more on the philosophy of the plays, or on the characters, or on the stories. You are the first person besides me who spoke about this obvious characteristic of Shakespeare’s work who sets him apart from any other writer.

Nice to find another fan of the metaphor.

[Anonymous No.7023994]

>>7019146
I only enjoyed Hamlet in my second reading, and I hope I enjoy Macbeth in a third one. But try King Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. They are love at the first sight.

[Anonymous No.7024003]

>>7023875
>>7023966

I actually agree that Shakespeare has the greatest command of metaphor and imagery. I just don't agree that it's the most desirable skill a poet can have. I actually think it is systematically overvalued in literature at the moment because people are very good at thinking visually due to us being in the age of photography and television and us also being in an age that develops out of people who worked out symbolism. I value the devices of sound and intricacy of rhetoric as much as intricacy of image.

There's also a lot to be said for Chaucer's narrative structuring skills, and the novelistic skill, which people who are really into poetry neglect, which is also present in Milton.

[Anonymous No.7024009]

>>7023966
Really? That's surprising.

As Nabokov said about Shakes, "the metaphor's the thing"

Anyway, Shakespeare has an unparalleled ability to inhabit the minds of any character in any situation and depict life in all its variety. Whereas Milton's brilliant force is utterly egoistic, e.g. the character of Satan is obviously partly autobiographical. Shakespeare's ego is entirely absent from his plays, you don't feel the playwright intruding anywhere.

As a thinker or man of ideas, Milton is clearly superior on an intellectual level. Shakespeare is the philosopher of common sense, Milton one of high theology. Which I think again makes Shakespeare more universal and timeless.

[Anonymous No.7024068]

>>7024003
Metaphor ain't just about mental images, it's more than that. Humans have a deep inbuilt impulse for seeing patterns everywhere, making associations, finding connections between phenomena and ordering/schematising our experience into predictable categories. I think it's evolutionary, because if humans didn't do this we would quickly go insane when faced with the natural world. Anyway, what the metaphor does is confirm or upset or play with one of the deepest drives of our brain. That's why a good metaphor is incredibly pleasurable and valued so highly.

I think the best example of this is in Homer (arguably greater than Shakespeare) whose epic similies and disputes between the Gods link the animal, human and divine world in a single thread of experience.

Just my theory.

[Anonymous No.7024092]

>>7024009
>Shakespeare's ego is entirely absent from his plays, you don't feel the playwright intruding anywhere

Prospero and the epilogue to The Tempest?

[Anonymous No.7024099]

Like in the soliloquy I posted at the start of the thread >>7019181 I love the two lines at the end:

Bow, stubborn knees; and, heart with strings of steel,
Be soft as sinews of the newborn babe.

Not only is it two metaphors stacked and opposed to each other, but it's also brilliantly sonorous at the same time. The alliteration of strings, steel, soft, sinews and then the harsher born babe to end.

But yeah his plots are shit lmaaao

[Anonymous No.7024145]

>>7024003
>>7024068
Metaphor is the most intimate form of communication. All language is essentially metaphor. Metaphor is concerned with the quality of 'likeness'. We might call something blue and understand what is meant by that, but only because we are able to conjure up a likeness of blue---the sky or an ocean etc.

Poetry without metaphor is verse. Poetry without metre is prose. Prose is a higher form of writing than verse.

[Anonymous No.7024181]

Female authors who look an ugly auld witch

[Anonymous No.7025154]

>>7019242
No, your opinion is subjective; whether or not a piece of literature is good is not subjective.

[Anonymous No.7025190]

>>7024068

Metaphor, of course, isn't bad, but there is also a similarly primal appeal that comes from the cadence of the words, their emotional tone. There's a higher, cerebral one that comes from their precision or ambiguity in the context of the phrase or sentence.

>>7024145
Metaphor isn't inherently "intimate." It can easily become spectacle. The only thing I can thing of that is inherently intimate is allusion. Allusion assumes a shared basis of knowledge, and can end up being totally opaque of the allusion is to an event not in public.

The nature of language is beyond the purview of this medium, really, but there is plenty that isn't based in comparison, but gesture, speech act.

As for ranking the forms of writing, I think that's probably silliness. I also take issue with your definitions. There's a certain density of texture and/or meaning that we recognize as poetic. Verse is the trivial, not the poetic. (We have no light poetry, only light verse.) It's not just the metaphor. There's plenty of poetry that we wouldn't call verse that contains little or no metaphor. (Of course you're speaking axiomatically so you'd probably deny that.)