Was he really that good? I tried reading his sonnets but they went over my head
>>24759661If you are too stupid to understand him what is the point of answering your question?
>>24759661His sonnets are trash and most of his more spoken of plays are his worst. Pick a story that interest you thats not a popular one.
>>24759721actually will was being very difficult in some of the sonnets
>>24759731Is it true he lost two pinkies and one ring toe before they got him to quit rhyming?
>>24759740this is true
>>24759727>His sonnets are trash and most of his more spoken of plays are his worst.If you don't know anything about poetry, you do not have the right to say some of the most universally lauded works of poetry ever written, the sonnets, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, etc. are 'trash'.
>>24759661He was genuinely that good. When you look closely at the writing in his greatest plays it's almost scary how intricate and brilliant he is (but you don't need that level of attention to find his plays fun, funny, & beautiful). Many of the sonnets are much harder than his average play dialogue. I recommend reading his earlier plays up to like, Macbeth/Antony and Cleopatra, but the late ones like Cymbeline and Coriolanus have extremely difficult moments (Coriolanus consistently gets harder than the sonnets). Try reading some of his plays aloud, and try out a couple of his comedies. Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, and Julius Caesar aren't too hard (and all four are fantastic). If he doesn't click with you yet, it might be best to read more poetry (and read Mary Oliver's "A Poetry Handbook") to get the hang of it.
>>24760281Antony and Cleopatra is a late work of the same period as Coriolanus.
>>24759661He was good but not the greatest writer of all time. He got lucky that english became the western language. If it was spanish you would ask if cervantes was that good ( spoiler: he was)
>>24760288That's fair, but it's certainly not as linguistically difficult
>>24760542Despite Italian's abject irrelevance, Dante is routinely regarded as either coeval with or only marginally inferior to the Bard, even by people like Bloom who are uncomfortable with conservatism and primarily focus on English lit. Of course, Cervantes is of the first rank nonetheless.
His entire works i think are on genius.com with descriptions available for pretty much every line so you dont have to pretend to get it like some of these dweebs
>>24760614I don't understand what you find difficult about Coriolanus. I remember it all being relatively straight forward and intelligible. If anything, Antony and Cleopatra is harder, because of its convoluted and ambiguous use of the metaphor.
>>24759661just watch rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead and then play questions so people think you not only get it, you're unapproachably learned when it comes to willy waggle dagger
>>24759661Low IQ: Shakespeare was a geniusMidwit: actually, Shakespeare is highly overrated, silly, sexist, misogynist, outdated, &cHigh IQ: Shakespeare was a genius
>>24759940Contrarians kill me, man. These simpletons actually think they understand the mind of Shakespeare
>>24761187Nobody with a low IQ considers Shakespeare a genius
>>24761224Low i.q. People appeal to mass authority. If everyone says Shakespeare is the best then they say he is too.
>>24761191This. Although I hate Bloom as a literary critic.
>>24760641It may have been a moment since you've read it then. The average person (and the majority of the above-average) would struggle with passages like this:May these same instruments which you profaneNever sound more! When drums and trumpets shallI' th' field prove flatterers, let courts and cities beMade all of false-faced soothing! When steel growsSoft as the parasite's silk, let him be madeA coverture for th' wars. No more, I say !For that I have not washed my nose that bled,Or foiled some debile wretch, which without noteHere's many else have done, you shout me forthIn acclamations hyperbolical,As if I loved my little should be dietedIn praises sauced with lies.There are the syntactic delays, the unusual forms ("dieted in"), the archaic uses of certain nouns ("parasite" in the social sense, "foil," the metaphorical choice of "coverture" which requires not only rapid recall of an aged word but instant assimilation into a tight metaphor), the words that the reader has in all likelihood not seen in ANY sense before ("debile"), and in places some constructions that would be ludicrous to the average reader even given multiple reads ("For that" to "lies" is a single beautiful spider of a sentence, and its last clause alone is intense). This isn't one of the easier passages in the play, but it illustrates his late style at an intricacy that (like the opening lines of Cymbeline) is certainly challenging. Coriolanus does have an ease advantage over, e.g., some casual moments in Taming of the Shrew and Henry IV, which use fully deceased archaic lowbrow slang, I'll admit. I think Eliot loved Coriolanus because of its linguistic density (and probably the objective correlative being proper or some such). In fairness, it's been maybe a year since I read A&C, but I recall it being a much less stumbling affair, even though my copy may not have had the helpful little gnomes of footnotes, unlike my Coriolanus. I will also yield that Coriolanus doesn't have the dense hendiadys that makes some of Shakes' other stuff more challenging.
>>24761506Maybe I've gotten too used to reading Shakespeare's later plays, but I do think you're partially exaggerating the difficulty. 'dieted in' doesn't strike me as particularly unusual for Shakespeare, nor the archaic use of a noun, and there's usually one or two words a reader has never seen before in each Shakespeare play. I do agree that the language of some of Shakespeare's late plays is much more convoluted, but this convolutedness is something that, once adjusted to, is quite easy to understand and poses no further difficulties. Comparatively, the language of Antony and Cleopatra usually is less convoluted, true, but the ideas conveyed in the language are elliptical and ambiguous:But, if there be, or ever were, one such,It's past the size of dreaming: nature wants stuffTo vie strange forms with fancy; yet, to imagineAn Antony, were nature's piece 'gainst fancy,Condemning shadows quite.Superficially, this excerpt does not seem to pose much interpretive difficulty, it allows itself to be glanced over quickly, but any attempt at exhausting its meaning will make the paradox apparent.
For the past 3 years I've been addicted to reading literature in foreign languages and so I've completely neglected english language literature I want to make Shakespeare my return to English literature as a challenge for 2026, one play each month minimumI've already started reading his sonnets and my first play will be Richard II
>>24759661He's too convoluted and it makes his works a slog, which is obviously antithetical to enjoyment. Some writers I look forward to reading; when I even think of starting a new Shakespeare play I'm overcome with a sense of weariness and tedium.
>>24762013>obviously antithetical to enjoyment>>24761640
>>24762163Tricks are cheap. I like when a writer puts care and emotional depth into their narratives rather than just flashy word associations or comedic nuggets among leaden swaths of incoherent verbiage.
>>24761643That's fair, but I was aiming for OP, who finds the sonnets quite difficult; I think A&C is probably more challenging in terms of its actual content than Coriolanus, but I don't think that would inhibit a new Shakespeare reader's enjoyment the same way (people do, after all, instinctively love A&C). We don't need to get all of Shakes' infinite nuance to love a play, but we do need to muddle our way through the occasional tough passage; and I recall much more of that with one than the other. What would you recommend OP as some approachable Shakespeares? Do you think Love's Labour's Lost is among the easier plays, perhaps?
>>24762425>Do you think Love's Labour's Lost is among the easier playsNTA. Do you really think that a play with the monstrosity of a line that is "light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile" is one of the easier ones? I love the play, it's the one with the densest wordplay I encountered in Shakespeare so far, but I wouldn't call it easy. Pretty sure scholarship agrees with me, but I can't be arsed to look through my Arden rn.I'd probably point to Richard III or Comedy of Errors, maybe Macbeth (it has some dense passages, but they're rather spread apart).
shakespeare is just the collective racial trauma of the anglo man towards their norman masters. when you realize this, there is no more mystery to the man.
>>24762737meant for >>24761191
>>24760624Anon, your style is nauseating and pretentious and you don’t know what the word coeval means.
