that night>Man I can't bring myself to murder Duncan, this is going to be terrible, oh, I've done it, I can't sleep, I can't be at peace, my sins cry out to Heaventhe next morning>Dude I'm totally going to kill those two grooms at the drop of a hat, it's not even hardWhy did murdering suddenly get so easy for him?
>>24876067Shakespeare is full of bullshit like this. Like the end of the Merchant of Venice has the lines:>There you shall find three of your argosies>Are richly come to harbor suddenly.>You shall not know by what strange accident>I chancèd on this letter.Literally just "oh yeah and actually everything is fine and I somehow got this letter to prove it but I won't tell you how lol" then the play ends like 20 lines later.Just don't overthink it.
>>24876067Killing a king is much different than killing his servants. Don't forget he was killing traitors allied with Norway and Ireland in the beginning of the play.
>>24876067You're now ready for Tolstoy's essay on Shakespeare
>>24876067When you're gonna do something wrong you should still do it right.
>>24876300His essay is just one big seethe in that he’ll never outshine Shakespeare, and that casual normalfags will think of Shakespeare and not Tolstoy when they think of great writers.Honestly a shame too, Tolstoy is an incredible writer, and his essay is a disgusting blog on his legacy.
>>24876067Once you commit one sin, it's easier to keep committing sins.
>>24876067Macbeth had recently cut down swathes of Norwegians in battle. What's more, the grooms were nobodies. Duncan was a king. Regicide has seismic consequences for an entire nation.
Servants don't count as real people.
>>24876725Not only this but I think there‘s a deliberate will to repeat the act directly after as a sort of self-verification that it wasn‘t really that bad. Criminal returns to the scene of the crime type mentality.
>>24876067turned out to be nbd
>>24876706No he's right. Shakespeare's plays were ridiculous as dramas with the character motivations often making no sense and the insincerity is palpable. The default to madness is telling. Yes he's a linguistic genius. No that doesn't cancel out the glaring flaws. The more respectable Shakespeare defenders like Nabokov Joyce and Orwell admit the truth of much of Tolstoy's critique but insist it's worth looking past because of his verbal talent.
>>24876837If Shakespeare was just verbal talent than Bacon and Jonson would be just as famed, but Shakes stands alone because of the strength of his drama. It speaks to all, educated and common, English and foreigners, actors and audience. Nobody else has that.
>>24876779>What's more, the grooms were nobodies. Duncan was a king. Regicide has seismic consequences for an entire nation.It's this, with your modern moral values, even the chuds who claim billions must die have no concept of a society where people are disposable but power has consequences.
>>24876067>>24876232These are entirely secondary to the development of the action and the overarching thread of the drama. Yeah, sorry Shakespeare created some of the greatest dramas and poetry ever made but forgot to make every detail believable like some redditor's idea of good drama.>>24876837It's the complete other way around. Tolstoy was filtered by Shakespeare's language, the Elizabethan tendency for poetic language to be contrived, exaggerated, catachrestic and artificial is what led Tolstoy to believe Shakespeare's dramas were the same. What he could not do was, on the one hand, appreciate this poetic language as a unique style to be judged by its own aesthetic standards, and on the other hand understand this poetic language as an incomparably refined tool in the expression of a naturalistic drama. We even find in the most naturalistic of Shakespeare's dramas, his great tragedies, that there is less of a tendency for unnaturalness and ephemeral flights of fantasy in the language itself. I don't know how you could look at a character like King Lear and regard his remorse towards Cordelia as at all dramatically unnatural:Be your tears wet? yes, 'faith. I pray, weep not:If you have poison for me, I will drink it.I know you do not love me; for your sistersHave, as I do remember, done me wrong:You have some cause, they have not.
>>24876067people internalize gained knowledge or skills during sleep the night after.
>>24876067Characterization was not his strong point. He treated his characters like puppets rather than as humans that would make causally related decisions. But the old=good meme will always exist and so people will defend him on even the most valid criticisms.
>>24877155>Characterization was not his strong point. He treated his characters like puppets rather than as humans that would make causally related decisions.How can you have such a glaringly mistaken vision of reality? You could make this argument towards more classically designed drama, but Shakespeare? Moronic. Compare Shakespeare with any of his contemporaries, or with any dramatist in history prior to the emergence of realism in the 19th century, and his superiority in realistic characterisation should be obvious. But the word 'characterisation' could mean anything in this context, it's so vague. Since good characterisation is just as necessary in a drama by Racine as in a drama by Ibsen. Either way, Shakespeare was a master at characterization. You seem to be confusing the mere presence of such things as dramatic unity and structure, which are universal to all good drama, with a lack of realism or definition in the characters.>But the old=good meme will always exist and so people will defend him on even the most valid criticisms.Anon, you really don't belong on /lit/ if you're this uneducated. An intelligent reaction would be to see that the qualities you dislike in Shakespeare (supposing that you haven't just misunderstood Shakespeare to begin with) are not flaws to be criticised but stylistic qualities subject to their own aesthetic standards and written with their own intended effect, which it is YOUR job to understand. Nothing in Shakespeare's mature dramas is poorly made, ill-fitting or egregious in its context, it is all written with the very highest intelligence and genius. You are so ridiculously haughty that you believe, probably with a very meagre knowledge of literature to begin with, you have identified a flaw in Shakespeare's works, and on top of that a flaw that necessarily centuries of critical commentary has missed. But you are not that intelligent. It is not 'old=good' it is 'Western Canon=good' because that canon is the product of centuries
>>24877423>you really don't belong on /lit/ if you're this uneducated.wdym? no one here even reads
>>24877423>Nothing in Shakespeare's mature dramas is poorly made, ill-fitting or egregious in its context, it is all written with the very highest intelligence and genius.Is this GPT?
>>24876067That's just how it is man. Once you get a taste for it killing's as easy as breathing hehe.
>>24877495Honestly this is the most likely explanation, Macbeth goes on to commit a lot more murders and he's increasingly more cavalier about each one.
>>24876923It's not a "detail." The entire play hinges on Antonio's ships being destroyed and then he goes "oh lol nevermind." It's objectively retarded.
>>24876067Lady Macbeth's hot snatch
>>24876837tvth nvke
>>24876837Lmao imagine being this filtered by hamlet and seething for all of eternity
>>24876923None of this has anything to do with why Tolstoy seethed so hard about Shakespeare though. The real reason he was so monumentally butthurt and came up with all this inane criticism as a cope is because he was so thoroughly humiliated by the parallels of King Lear with his own life that it completely buck broke him. In particular when Shakespeare correctly points out that the whole renunciation was not only foolish and unworthy of respect or reward but also inherently rooted in his egoism and desire to feel morally above others - THATS what Tolstoy couldn’t forgive. It’s particularly that last bit that really destroyed in a way few men have ever been destroyed by a work of literature. After all Tolstoy didn’t give a shit about his own works. His entire life and pride were centered on the ‘great renunciation’, so when he got a mirror held up to him he felt cucked out of the one thing he truly cared about.
>>24880122Holy shit that‘s brutal and amazing. I‘ve actually always had a bit of a problem with King Lear on the basis that inheritance disputes and retirement difficulties, while not uncommon, have a hard time establishing themselves among the universality of human experience which goes through most of Shakespeare‘s canon. Seeing it played as deliberate counterpoint to willful passivity makes me more appreciative.
>>24880122In "King Lear" the persons represented are indeed placed externally in opposition to the outward world, and they struggle with it. But their strife does not flow from the natural course of events nor from their own characters, but is quite arbitrarily established by the author, and therefore can not produce on the reader the illusion which represents the essential condition of art.Lear has no necessity or motive for his abdication; also, having lived all his life with his daughters, has no reason to believe the words of the two elders and not the truthful statement of the youngest; yet upon this is built the whole tragedy of his position.Similarly unnatural is the subordinate action: the relation of Gloucester to his sons. The positions of Gloucester and Edgar flow from the circumstance that Gloucester, just like Lear, immediately believes the coarsest untruth and does not even endeavor to inquire of his injured son whether what he is accused of be true, but at once curses and banishes him. The fact that Lear's relations with his daughters are the same as those of Gloucester to his sons makes one feel yet more strongly that in both cases the relations are quite arbitrary, and do not flow from the characters nor the natural course of events. Equally unnatural, and obviously invented, is the fact that all through the tragedy Lear does not recognize his old courtier, Kent, and therefore the relations between Lear and Kent fail to excite the sympathy of the reader or spectator. The same, in a yet greater degree, holds true of the position of Edgar, who, unrecognized by any one, leads his blind father and persuades him that he has leapt off a cliff, when in reality Gloucester jumps on level ground.These positions, into which the characters are placed quite arbitrarily, are so unnatural that the reader or spectator is unable not only to sympathize with their sufferings but even to be interested in what he reads or sees. This in the first place.
>>24880267There's really no way to disagree with this criticism if you have a brain and actually have read the play (or any of Shakespeare's plays for that matter). Tolstoy's critique is flawed not because it's wrong, but because it neglects or ignores the aspect of Shakespeare's works that most educated people find deeply appealing: His mastery of language and vivid emotional imagery. He was a poet first and foremost, even when he was writing plays. So his plays do not follow dramatic logic; they follow poetic logic. They are passionate, and often derail into flights of fancy and out-of-place speeches and spectacle, but the poetry is done so expertly and so richly that you can't help but be in awe of it.
>>24880267>Lear has no necessity or motive for his abdication; also, having lived all his life with his daughters, has no reason to believe the words of the two elders and not the truthful statement of the youngest; yet upon this is built the whole tragedy of his position.This is utterly moronic. Lear explicitly says that he's old and wants to retire, a foolish notion for a man who still wants to remain king, and the reason that Lear believes the words of the two elder daughters is because they have practiced dissimulation their entire lives, a perfect example, out of endless examples, of Shakespeare's strong moral feelings and castigation of his society. Tolstoy could just as easily pick apart a thousand stories from the Bible and myth for not being believable. Why would the woman pretending to be the mother accept getting half a child, after Solomon orders it to be cut in half? But such a quibble would be to miss the very obvious moral significance behind the tale. Even if the dishonesty of the daughters and credulousness of Lear were not believable, they would still be artistically justified and believable within the world of the play, but in fact they ARE believable. There are many cases throughout history in which fathers have not been aware of the psychopathic intentions of daughters, and how much more distance is there between father and daughter in a royal household. This whole critique is not only very easy to repudiate, it is utterly moronic.>>24881067>There's really no way to disagree with this criticism if you have a brainNo anon, if you wholesale agree with everything Tolstoy's saying you lack a brain and can't think for yourself. I can understand a partial sympathy with Tolstoy's critique, but to swallow it wholesale only demonstrates that you don't get your opinions by thinking but by others convincing you. I suppose the countless great minds throughout history, before and after Tolstoy, have just not had brains when they read and admired Shakespeare. Even Chekhov, when he explicitly disagreed with Tolstoy, he must just have lacked a brain according to you. And I suppose you'll have to swallow wholesale Tolstoy's critique of Aeschylus, Dante and Beethoven as well. All of history amounts to people just not being smart enough to realise that they were enjoying BAD ART. Your philistinism is incorrigible.
>>24881575I don't swallow his critique wholesale. But, I agree with the crux of his argument: Characters in Shakespeare's plays do not think or act the way actual human beings would act when placed in the same situation. They often go on long tirades, monologues, or tangents that are not only completely inappropriate to the situation but also don't even sound like the character's established voice. They forget crucial information they're supposed to know, or inexplicably possess information that they have no way of knowing. Characters who had previously acted sensibly and rationally suddenly engage in bizarre and incoherent behaviors that have no discernible logical or emotional cause.
>>24881620>They often go on long tirades, monologues, or tangentsIn other words the basic nature of drama, because we can't read characters minds it is required that they almost always express their thoughts out loud. Again, with Tolstoy you'll have to throw out the Greek tragedians and most plays written throughout history, just because you couldn't restrain your impulse to philistinism when confronted with a formal artistry you did not understand. I've never seen these soliloquys to be 'inappropriate' to their context and you'll have to point out some that are. Since, after Tolstoy provided his examples of characters in King Lear acting unnatural and irrational, I very clearly demonstrated how he was wrong, which you haven't replied to. It seems like you're incapable of actually justifying your claims in detail.
>>24881637You didn't demonstrate that they're rational or natural, you just made a retroactive justification for irrational behavior, and you said unnaturalness is the standard and should therefore be pardoned. Along with skipping the rest of the critique. The Bible isn't a drama, it presents fables to reinforce the teachings of God. As Tolstoy points out, convincing or genuinely affecting drama requires believability including sensible and consistent characters. He offered convincing arguments for why Shakespeare fails this requirement.
