What is your opinion of William Shakespeare?
He didn't exist, and the people who wrote his plays plagiarized them
>>7838708
he only invented the human.
>shakespeare
>2016
>not reading pynchon
>>7838787
>pynchon
>not shitty juvenile genre fiction
>>7838712
it was a black womyn
Shakespear was a neo-nazi.
>>7838798
Wouldn't it be proto-nazi?
overrated as fuck. while he had a couple good plays (Macbeth, Coriolanus), most of his output was generic and meaningless. He's held in high regard due to centuries of cultural inbreeding, where people reference things that reference him. Were it not for the creative wasteland that was England after his death, practically no one would remember him now. Modern callbacks to Shakespeare are a sign not of sophistication, but degeneracy.
>>7838823
toasty pls
>>7838816
Poroto-nazi since iir he was a mexican as well. Dont quote me on this though.
>>7838823
He basically reinvented the english language. Watchu talkin bout, atheist.
>>7838708
I once read a quote that said Shakespeare's actual work is not as important as the studies and commentaries conducted on them. I'm not the biggest fan of his language, but I can respect that many of the narrative and stylistic elements comprising his stories laid the groundwork for modern fiction as we know it.
>Shakespeare, William. Heard of him. Lived in the past. Wrote plays. Language too old for me to understand. Possibly homo. English, if I memory serves.
>>7838708
Hamlet's capacity to sustain a near-infinite amount of interpretive variety is testament to the radical creativity and genius of the artist behind his words. It doesn't even matter if he did exist or not - what does is that we can account for a piece of literature whose protagonist has characterised western modernity in all its complexity.
>>7838823
how's your first year of college going?
>>7839181
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmRe_fK7pbw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Q9JMoLkUzA
>>7838823
>meaningless
hrrrrrghhh kk
It is always something nice to return to in this hectic age. Nice to know that there are masters that transcendent time no matter the interpretation.
juvenile hack
>>7839190
>Shakespeare is just so deep and meaningful
>Titus Andronicus
Pick 1
ITT people who think it's edgy to hate Shakespeare and thinks it makes them cool and mysterious and patrician. Kek.
>>7839321
>cool and mysterious
>mysterious
haha wow, projecting much?
>>7838718
Well Bloom'd
>>7838823
Yeah, modern black womyns make much better plays. Damn whites with their cultural inbreeding.
>>7838787
>2016
>not realizing that shakespeare is essentially a pre-post-modern pynchon
Geoffrey Chaucer ≥ William Shakespeare
>shakespeare is overrated
>chaucer ≥ shakespeare
>shakespeare was an average poet
>shakespeare's plays are predictable
>blahblahblahblah
how many "I'm cool because I don't like shakespeare" posts can we get in this thread?
>>7840857
greater than or equal to
pleb
>>7838833
under-rated post
>>7838708
>Public school forced him down my throat.
>Majority of movie adaptations are shit.
>See lots of stuff like this pic >>7839186
I can't even judge if I like him or not. I'm very biased. If I go into a play wanting to like it in order to counteract my bias then I'm just biased the other way and the opinion I form is no better than my previous one.
>>7840915
How can you be so retarded? I'm actually asking. Are you able to wash your hands? Or dress yourself? How do you get through life?
>>7838835
I'd like to see some evidence for that. Protip: there isn't much. Shakespeare is one of the first people to wrote in English whose entire corpus (or near enough) actually survived long enough to be widely copied, and for that matter one of the first to have his work copied a bunch while he was still working on things, and our records of English before him are spotty. Assuming he invented words and phrases because his works are the oldest ones we have where they show up is a fairly large and unwarranted assumption.
>>7840922
>Having biases towards something you were taught to hate as a kid = so retarded you can't wash your hands.
What? Do you think of people who still have positive associations with kids shows as retards as well?
Maybe you have transcended emotion and are able to look at everything objectively regardless of past experiences, but if someone is not as good as you does that really make them retarded?
It is actually normal to have things that you experienced when you were growing up affect you for the rest of your life.
>>7838823
>creative wasteland that was England after his death
Compared to which countries, exactly?
>>7838708
hack
>>7838708
Circlejerked by people who want to seem "cultured"
He's not awful, but fuck everything about the literature teacher circlejerk for his work.
>>7841960
Where's the meme
I am currently devising a magickal plot to give him back his fleshly clothes so that I can extract his seed and deposit it in my boipvssi, and thereby hopefully inherit some of his artistic skillz.
>>7838823
Protip: a large part of what makes an author great is that other authors and critics consider him or her great. 'Cultural inbreeding' (which is really just an emptily derogatory name for cultural inheritance at large) is what separates a great author - a great artist in general - from a merely skilled one. And Shakespeare is nonetheless great in the truest sense, even if, for example, Joyce helped him to his greatness. Remember: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. You clearly cannot speak meaningfully about literature and literary history, so it is imperative that you stop flapping your mouth until you've done some more serious thinking about it.
God-tier poet. What I wouldn't give to read an epic poem (like Paradise Lost) by Shakespeare.
Mediocre playwright. The theatrical form has evolved so greatly since the 15th century that treating his works as plays in the same vein as--I might catch some flak here--Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams is rather stupid.
>>7841974
So, in summary:
He's shit but people think he's great so he's not shit.
This is basically why literature nerds and a degree in English is mocked.
>>7841974
>whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent
That thereof is really unnecessary.
>>7841982
No, he's not shit, he's very good. If you can't see the greatness in Hamlet's first three soliloquys, or Macbeth's Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, or the construction of Othello taken as a whole, or the brilliant wordplay which runs through almost all of his works, you're a barbarian, plain and simple, and will likely never be able to speak meaningfully about literature. But part of what sets him apart from our other monumental authors is simply that his greatness has infused almost every great aspect of our literature for the past 400 years. Perhaps a thousand years from now Joyce will be as great as Shakespeare. I think he is just as great a stylist as Shakespeare, although of course not as great a dramatist - to be fair, Shakespeare was not as great a novelist as he. But at the moment, it isn't even possible for him to be as great. The pot has to simmer.
Not an English major btw :^)
>>7841983
Eh, I kind of like it. It's just a little bit of rhetorical flourish, even if Wittgenstein would not have acknowledged it as such at the time.
>>7838823
>being underage
>>7839171
Good post.
>>7840915
>>7841029
Haha what the fuck? Just re-read him and form your own opinion. You might have a different perspective than you did as a high school student. Also, why let shit like "YOLO Juliet" bug you? It has absolutely nothing to do with the work itself. If you read only one of his plays (which would be your loss) make it Hamlet.
>>7840915
>public school tried to educate you
>you think this is somehow bad
>>7841981
I dunno, I think it's still nice, at least theoretically, to see his great characters embodied. Of course, actors are almost never up to the task, and I agree that that is in part because it should be treated rather more like recital than acting in the modern sense. And he did write a couple long poems; they're just not as good as his other stuff.
>>7841988
>you're a barbarian, plain and simple, and will likely never be able to speak meaningfully about literature
See:
>This is basically why literature nerds and a degree in English is mocked.
Consider the following: individuals desire different things from authors and it is actually impossible for someone to objectively be the best. I do not care for wordplay or soliloquys, they're pretentiousness at worst and simple requirements of an Elizabethan play at best.
Shakespeare's weakness is in characters. They're not characters. There's no difference between any of the characters in, say, Hamlet save for Horatio, who I'd say is Shakespeare's best written character, hands down, and even then he was painfully threadbare. If you were to read any individual nondescript line from Hamlet, I sincerely doubt I'd be able to place the speaker and that's fucking bad.
I also refuse to engage in the cultural meme that is assigning greatness to Shakespeare. Shakespeare's greatest significance is that of his historical use. They allow an insight into the Elizabethan era. He should be praised by historians, not literary figures. Of course, playing games of "could be, should be, would be" is foolish, because that's not how the dice rolled. It's just a shame that 400 years of self-proposed literary geniuses assigned so much to the wrong place.
English major who refused the call of the meme btw :^)
>>7842017
Modern university education, everybody. Soliloquys are 'pretentious.' And if it is your desire (and, contrary to your view, some aesthetic desires actually are better than others in an intersubjective, if not objective, way) that every line in a play should be immediately assignable to one of the characters, you're simply too much used to the cliched and stereotyped writing of the screenwriter. Naturally there should be holistic differences between characters - and Hamlet and Horatio are ultimately more distinct as whole human beings than I think a screenwriter can make a German pauper and a French aristocrat, regardless of how masterful is his command of cliche - but a coherent writing style is hardly something to censure.
I desperately hope that at least one of these is true: that you are not actually an English major, or that you are not actually serious. The latter being true is basically harmless, it just means I've lost a little time arguing with you; the former being true is sad, but not particularly disturbing, since I would expect, say, an engineer to be similarly asinine about these things; but if neither of them is true, it's a real indictment of the educational system in your country, and since I assume it is America, it's really a personal tragedy for me.
>>7842017
Ah i see you exemplify why most peoplr consider English a meme degree - its filled with retards
>>7842031
You're the problem I have with the literary world, embodied. You sit there trapped by your own pretentious viewpoints, never considering any other, because any other is asinine to you. Your view is correct, no one else can ever have a view counter to yours and those who do are just uneducated paupers.
For the record, I'd like to correct one thing I said that was incomplete.
>I also refuse to engage in the cultural meme that is assigning greatness to Shakespeare
>I also refuse to engage in the cultural meme that is assigning undeserved greatness to Shakespeare.
Shakespeare's soliloquys are technically fine, I just don't like them because they're requirements for Elizabethans because they were just too stupid back then to go for long without someone directly telling them what the character was thinking.
Also, points (that really only are points to you, since I respect the university less for focusing so hard on Shakespeare and not other authors who are arguably greater than Shakespeare, but viewed as lesser because Shakespeare has 400 years of shitty cultural memes going for him) for the University I went to is that they tried to hammer Shakespeare hard. I just refuse to fall for it. I refuse to acknowledge Shakespeare as the best if only because it's unfair to focus on just one author when there have been tens of billions of human beings since the beginning of human existence, many of which are less celebrated simply because they just happened to not be fucking Shakespeare.
>>7842035
I'd agree with you, I am a retard. I'm a retard for thinking that an English degree would be fun and a place for me to discover new brilliant authors. But nope, I get fucking Shakespeare because you people can't stop sucking his dusty dick.
I'm so fucking sorry that I thought an English degree would involve exploring the English language in all of its uses. If I carry anything over into a next life, I'll be fucking sure to remember to not get an English (or whatever the lingua franca is at that point in time) degree.
>>7842054
Well, excellent, just another bitter contrarian. And obviously your university didn't 'hammer' Shakespeare in the right way, because they should not have given the impression that there was some Shakespeare conspiracy in academe. But then again I'm not convinced that any more positive impressions could even have made their way through to you. It's also funny that you say historians should worship him, when you have such a poor grasp on the history of theater and on the Elizabethan era.
I suppose I am as much a victim of the current age as you are, just in a different way. Of course the way I've been talking is meant to project a certain image, only mostly-true, of the perfect stuffy academic. The absence of stuffy academics in the 21st century makes me feel that I have to fit myself in the role. But that is only a flaw in polemics: the TV age has inflicted your literary appreciation with a substantial flaw. So here is my actual recommendation: try to unlearn the bad impressions of your university, and read Shakespeare again with an open mind. Also, educate yourself on the real circumstances of the Elizabethan theater. And also try reading some good lyrics poets, and see if you can't connect with linguistic beauty itself. You call Hamlet's soliloquys (and soliloquys in general - I can't help but be somewhat offended by such a sweeping statement made about something that I love so much) 'technically' fine. But it goes far beyond technique. They are also poetically fine, and far more more than fine. Again, I do at least partially lay the blame on your university, because they should at least be teaching their English majors how to appreciate poetry.
Finally, of course you're entitled to your opinions. You're just not entitled to my respect for them.
>>7842082
And you just continue with your assertion that I just don't get it.
I guess it's fitting that you have such a hard-on for Shakespeare, your writing style perfectly matches him (though that is very obviously deliberate). Lots of words that ultimately comes together to mean absolutely nothing at all. Devoid of all emotion, devoid of anything interesting, any reason to continue reading. You're like an unnamed relic at a museum. People look at you and they look the plaque and they just glance over it, not really reading the description because they already know everything that needs to be known. They know that all the plaque says is "We're using a lot of words to say 'we don't know what this is or what it was for'".
Enjoy reading Shakespeare over and over until the end of your days, joining the ranks of many thousands of nameless and forgotten scholars who did nothing more but spend their life masturbating. I'm going to go read some actual literature with actual character and intent to it.
to anti-Shakespeare guy: go shoot yourself EFL faggot
>>7842110
I'd think EFLfags would be more appreciative of Shakespeare
That faggot is definitely a native speaker
I just like his fucking words can we all calm the fuck down?
Macbeth says "full of scorpions, is my mind" and calls down "blasts and fogs" upon people.
>>7840857
lost
he's as far above me as the clouds, the angels, or maybe even the stars
>>7842210
the point of that being that I can't appreciate him but that doesn't mean that I don't think he's good; I actually think he's so good that I can't even understand him. the inaccessibility is a consequence of my own shortcomings, not his
>hurr don't dislike things that I like!!!
>>7842057
How are you still in the "edgy contrarian" phase as a college student? What are you, a freshman?
>>7842239
kek
