Shakespeare: is it really a masterpiece or is it overrated high school garbage?
I’ll agree to any extremely high rating, as long as you don’t make me read him again
Shakespear isnt real... He's a lie they made up to sale books.
>>25043987Moby Dick sucks
>>25044024
>>25043987Overrated high school garbage
>>25044049peak
>>25043987actually a masterpiece. you're subhuman if you think he isn't atleast top 10, simple as
>>25044475You're a subhuman and drooling retard if you think he's in top 10.Read more.
>>25044484I seriously struggle with naming even a single writer better than Shakespeare. Milton maybe. Dante sucks in translation, but I can picture him overtaking Shakes if I were to learn Italian.
>>25044484if you can name 10 writers better than Shakespeare right now I'll chop my hand off and mail it to you
>>25043987But it is not enough that Shakespeare's characters are placed in tragic positions which are impossible, do not flow from the course of events, are inappropriate to time and space—these personages, besides this, act in a way which is out of keeping with their definite character, and is quite arbitrary. It is generally asserted that in Shakespeare's dramas the characters are specially well expressed, that, notwithstanding their vividness, they are many-sided, like those of living people; that, while exhibiting the characteristics of a given individual, they at the same time wear the features of man in general; it is usual to say that the delineation of character in Shakespeare is the height of perfection.This is asserted with such confidence and repeated by all as indisputable truth; but however much I endeavored to find confirmation of this in Shakespeare's dramas, I always found the opposite. In reading any of Shakespeare's dramas whatever, I was, from the very first, instantly convinced that he was lacking in the most important, if not the only, means of portraying characters: individuality of language, i.e., the style of speech of every person being natural to his character. This is absent from Shakespeare. All his characters speak, not their own, but always one and the same Shakespearian, pretentious, and unnatural language, in which not only they could not speak, but in which no living man ever has spoken or does speak.
>>25044704No living men could or can say, as Lear says, that he would divorce his wife in the grave should Regan not receive him, or that the heavens would crack with shouting, or that the winds would burst, or that the wind wishes to blow the land into the sea, or that the curled waters wish to flood the shore, as the gentleman describes the storm, or that it is easier to bear one's grief and the soul leaps over many sufferings when grief finds fellowship, or that Lear has become childless while I am fatherless, as Edgar says, or use similar unnatural expressions with which the speeches of all the characters in all Shakespeare's dramas overflow.Again, it is not enough that all the characters speak in a way in which no living men ever did or could speak—they all suffer from a common intemperance of language. Those who are in love, who are preparing for death, who are fighting, who are dying, all alike speak much and unexpectedly about subjects utterly inappropriate to the occasion, being evidently guided rather by consonances and play of words than by thoughts. They speak all alike. Lear raves exactly as does Edgar when feigning madness. Both Kent and the fool speak alike. The words of one of the personages might be placed in the mouth of another, and by the character of the speech it would be impossible to distinguish who speaks. If there is a difference in the speech of Shakespeare's various characters, it lies merely in the different dialogs which are pronounced for these characters—again by Shakespeare and not by themselves.
>>25044711Thus Shakespeare always speaks for kings in one and the same inflated, empty language. Also in one and the same Shakespearian, artificially sentimental language speak all the women who are intended to be poetic: Juliet, Desdemona, Cordelia, Imogen, Marina. In the same way, also, it is Shakespeare alone who speaks for his villains: Richard, Edmund, Iago, Macbeth, expressing for them those vicious feelings which villains never express. Yet more similar are the speeches of the madmen with their horrible words, and those of fools with their mirthless puns. So that in Shakespeare there is no language of living individuals—that language which in the drama is the chief means of setting forth character. If gesticulation be also a means of expressing character, as in ballets, this is only a secondary means. Moreover, if the characters speak at random and in a random way, and all in one and the same diction, as is the case in Shakespeare's work, then even the action of gesticulation is wasted. Therefore, whatever the blind panegyrists of Shakespeare may say, in Shakespeare there is no expression of character. Those personages who, in his dramas, stand out as characters, are characters borrowed by him from former works which have served as the foundation of his dramas, and they are mostly depicted, not by the dramatic method which consists in making each person speak with his own diction, but in the epic method of one person describing the features of another.
>>25044505Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Pushkin, Dante, Rilke, Goethe, Schiller, Homer, Molière. And Vergil, because in the actual Latin he is a much better poet than even Homer but in translation Homer mogs him
>>25044717>And Vergil, because in the actual Latin he is a much better poet than even Homer but in translation Homer mogs himYou can't read either in the original
>>25044717no fr*Nch creature deserves to be on this list
>>25044717no, no, no, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, and no. retard
>>25045223>big famous ones: yes>slightly lesser known one: nowow you must be really smart and definitely able to evaluate the quality of literature as such
>>25044717>French, Russian, Italian, German, Greek and Latin poetsLet’s see their English poetry.
>>25043987Blows everyone else out of the water. Like it's ridiculous how not even close it is. Also it's Oxford
>>25045227>put your bumfuck self published uncle on an all time greats list>n-no you only disagree with his inclusion because he's obscurealthough it's on me for expecting Rimbaud readers to have a functioning mind
>>25044484many writers at their peak are better than the bard but few have such a high quality corpus
