GOAT?
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You are currently reading a thread in /lit/ - Literature
You are currently reading a thread in /lit/ - Literature
Well?
Was he really the Greatest of All Time?
Yep.
>>8262819
no
even cervantes is better than him, and he is irrelevant nowadays
>>8262872
nah
>>8262819
Dante's Comedy is "the best book we have" to quote Borges.
But Shakespeare & Middleton did churn out a lot of great stuff consistently.
I don't rank writers though.
>>8262872
>he is irrelevant nowadays
Is this some new /lit/ meme i am unaware of?
>>8262872
>basically founded the novel (in western tradition)
>irrelevant
Even John fucking Green shouldn't be read without reading Cervantes.
(Whether he should be read at all is a different question.)
>>8263694
If I'm admiring a building's architecture, do I need to see its foundations?
>>8263704
Yes, preferable by being buried under them.
>>8262819
Shakespeare criticism is by and large an index of things not worth saying about Shakespeare.
He has a massive vocabulary, a command of differing high and low styles, and most importantly there's no biography we have that could "explain" his work away. In other words, he's still a mystery in a way that Dante (who did meet Beatrice and wrote from that inspiration) or Joyce (who did meet Nora and immortalized the day she first gave him a handjob) are not. Because we figure, oh Dante or Joyce did it for a girl they loved and lost or didn't lose, or whatever.
Hence, the authorship debate. Freud thought the plays were written by the Earl of Oxford. Walt Whitman and Mark Twain believed the Bacon theory. HELEN FUCKING KELLER believed the plays were written by Francis Bacon. (See the new book by Shapiro, "Contested Will", if you doubt me.)
You want to know my theory?
One English writer gets to be the most famous writer of all time. His name? Shakespeare (or so they say).
Meanwhile, 400+ years earlier, the only Englishman ever to be elected Pope gets elected as Pope. He promptly uses his powers to give Ireland to the King of England, which says a lot about the Papacy and about Irish Catholics. What was his name?
Well, Pope Adrian IV. The only English Pope. Look it up. His real name was Breakspeare.
Obviously Shakespeare was some kind of pen name. Obviously there is a conspiracy. I just find it hilarious that it's only within the past 10 years or so that people have started to suggest (based on the "Shake-shafte" found in a Catholic recusant household during Shakespeare's lost years) that Shakespeare might have been Catholic. DUH. Joyce noticed this, Antony Burgess noticed this, they both knew about Shakespeare / Breakspeare. They just had better things to write than more fapping over the supposedly greatest writer of all time.
Pic related: It's Hamlet's Uncle, the Roman who conquered Britannia and was deified there.
>>8264499
I hate this copypasta.
>>8262872
Cervantes fills such a small niche you fuckwit
>>8264879
Inventing the novel is a small niche now?
>>8262872
but anon we're talking about the artist who INVENTED MODERNITY
