171–179 of 179 posts
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Sounds like a more eloquent version of modern stone throwing against popular books. Hang out on r/books and you soon read similar diatribes against Project Hail Mary, The Way of Kings, etc.
Huh, PHM is unpopular? Artemis was fairly boring, but Hail Mary was a wonderful pageturner.
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This Voltaire quote is misleading. He continues: “… one would imagine this piece to be the work of a drunken savage. But amidst all these vulgar irregularities, which to this day make the English drama so absurd and so barbarous, there are to be found in Hamlet, by a bizarrerie still greater, some sublime passages, worthy of the greatest genius. It seems as though nature had mingled in the brain of Shakespeare the gr…
Touché, thank you. Regardless I agree with Tolstoy in whole George Orwell - a fan of Shakespeare - admits the following: - "Tolstoy is right in saying that Lear is not a very good play, as a play. It is too drawn-out and has too many characters and sub-plots." - "Shakespeare has a habit of thrusting uncalled-for general reflections into the mouths of his characters. This is a serious fault in a dramatist" - "Of cours…
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Shakespeare and Tolkien are similar to me. If you ever say you did not like them, you have an army of defenders calling you names about your lack of education and literary maturity, you always get attacked for who you must be as a person. Read both, not impressed.
I don't care for either author. Tried reading The Hobbit in middle school and found it utterly boring. Shakespeare I just can't get anywhere with. The archaic language is too much of a barrier.
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"As a kid having to read Shakespeare what was lost on me,…" What age was that? I reckon most kids think Shakespeare is difficult at the beginning because of the language, and that brings me back to a point made in the article: "For me, Richard II is the most dull of the Henriad plays." I now think so too, but when I was studying the play it was the first one I'd encountered with a solid story to it, so it encouraged…
It's hard to read the comedies. A lot of the humor is hidden in the way Shakespeare encoded his "stage directions" in the text. (The stage directions as we have them are almost never Shakespeare's own writing. They were added by later editors.) An egregious example: the big gag in the play-within-a-play of Midsummer is that the "hole" in the wall is between the actor's legs. When they kiss, they're kissing his butt a…
Agreed, I didn't express what I said well. The comedies make much more sense to me now but are easily lost on 12-year-olds unless carefully introduced and explained well.
At my school it didn't help that anything likely to titillate the minds of 12-year-old boys was expurgated from the text (our school editions were first published in the 1940s/'50s or earlier and had been used by the school for decades so the editing had a sense of prudery about it). Of course that they were censored was never mentioned by the teachers but when I was about 15 I discovered the fact by accident after using one of my father's editions for homework. Not sure of the play now but it wasn't one of the comedies (I think it was Julius C.). This 'naughty' edition was a hit when I took it to school, the kids were rightly annoyed to see large chunks of text missing from their school editions. For example, any part with bastard in it was removed, and that was just for starters.
Had the comedies not been hacked about I'm sure they would have made more sense. Fortunately I don't think that nonsense goes on any longer.
"They're still better in performance, where the actors and director have done the "translation"."
Very true, every once in a while we had a troupe called The Young Shakespeare Players come to the school and perform everything from Lear to Julius Caesar to The Scottish play to the comedies and they performed them in ways that would bring out the best for school kids.
I suppose I'm sensitive to the way Shakespeare is introduced to schools because I'm a techie whose primary interests were technical and science subjects and I was only mediocre at English and languages school, so it would have been easy for me to end up among the group that found Shakespeare a drugery and that was so for some. Their attitude was the words didn't make sense so why bother studying it (the same went for poetry, I recall some kids just giving up on Eliott's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land). Fortunately, I caught the Shakespeare bug and I'm very glad I did.
Incidentally, we had a little textbook just called English Essays, it contained works by Addison, Steele, Bacon, Hazlitt, Lamb and so on. I just fell in love with many of these essays such as Old China, A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig, On a Sundial, Sir Roger de Coverley and so on—I remember them as if it were yesterday. The language is so beautiful and eloquent yet they lose nothing for being very short. They were very formative, they brought great writing in small digestible amounts to kids like me who would normally prefer to be reading say Scientific American than novels like Thackeray's Vanity Fair, which I recall I struggled to get through. I cannot understand why these wonderful essays seem to have fallen out of favor with educators.
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Edit: Re stage directions as we have them are almost never Shakespeare's own writing. I have a reprint collection of the earliest folio editions and they are a little too Spartan for me (they're harder to follow).
As a kid having to read Shakespeare what was lost on me, because of the language, was the language. Will worked hard to turn a phrase. "Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once." "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." "The very substance of the amb…
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I thought he overacted that role. I feel it requires a much lighter touch than most actors give it.
It was my first encounter with Hamlet so I didn't have another frame of reference to judge the performance. And I had already watched him in other movies such as Rebecca (I didn't like the movie except for the (some of the) end) so maybe I was used to his acting.
That was fun to read, even though I would disagree with much of the article. I generally like the comedies least, the OP likes them most, but it's nice to see people talk about Shakespeare in an article linked here. A couple of comments I would make: * "People will think I’m crazy, but yes, I’m placing Henry IV above Henry V." I doubt many people would think you're crazy, the Henry IVs are generally considered better…
I guess the immortal Bard himself was on tenderhooks to find out this overly subjective ranking of his work. The author left out one final work, the most excellent comedie "Two Gentlemen of Lewbowski". https://www.amazon.co.uk/Two-Gentlemen-Lebowski-Excellent-Tr...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/ROSENCRANTZ-GUILDENSTERN-ARE-DEAD-S...
As a kid having to read Shakespeare what was lost on me, because of the language, was the language. Will worked hard to turn a phrase. "Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once." "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." "The very substance of the amb…
meh. he speaks in punchlines. these days many rappers do that all day for hours /s
Not trying to start any debate here with Shakespeare fans, just intend this as a supportive word for those of us who just don’t enjoy Shakespeare - Voltaire declared Hamlet a ‘vulgar and barbarous play’ and that ‘one would take this work to be the fruit of the inspiration of a drunken savage’ - George Bernard Shaw: ’. “There is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I despise so entirely as I despise Shak…
>Tolstoy: ... "but having read one after the other, ..." Do not read Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote plays, not books. Shakespeare should be watched, either on stage or on screen. Reading a Shakespeare play is like deciding to listen to the Beatles by downloading MIDI files and playing them through software. Maybe you get the broad strokes of the song, and maybe you even like it, but you're not listening to the Beatle…