Happy birthday to the greatest writer who has ever lived. And Happy St. George’s day.
Thanketh thee f'r reminding me, Sir Original Poster.
>>25228674I've only read his Hamlet because it was required reading at school. Do you have any recommendations?
Thanks, but mine was actually on Monday.
Ironic that this was the day I took Goethe on the train to work instead of my Pelican Shakespeare as I had been the last couple weeks. Buying Guiness to drink on the way home was a conscious decision, however.
>>25228826A PLEASANT Conceited Comedie CALLED, Loues labors loft
>>25228848What?
Love’s labours lost
>>25228674Where should I start with Shakespeare?
>>25228674Soon we will be celebrating 400 years of the Jews being allowed to openly live in England again, Shakespeare taught us to be patient, to love, to accept for hath not a jew eyes my fellow anons?
>Sixteenth century metropolitan male wearing earrings Yeah, right.
>>25228967Macbeth. It’s his shortest play, his most entertaining play, and one of his best plays (top 4). There’s also a shit load of movies adapted from the play since it’s so easy to adapt to the screen.
>>25229029Why not?
>>25228674Tolstoy didn't think much of WS but he was something of an outlier. This thread seems an appropriate place to post a few ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY’s from other writers.. . . .In the early days of the war, when Hitler was threatening to invade England, the authorities blanked out the names on signposts, to confuse German paratroopers. So about a mile from Stratford there was a large sign that read as follows:YOU ARE APPROACHINGXXXXXXXXXUPONXXXXTHEBIRTHPLACEOFWILLIAM SHAKESPEARESome cameraman with an eye for a laugh filmed this, and a year later I sat in an American cinema and listened to the giggles that spread through the audience as they got the point. I wondered then what other sign could provide such amusement. XXXXXXXXXXX the birthplace of the Buddha? Or XXXX the birthplace of Beethoven? We might feel a certain snobbish satisfaction in supplying the missing KAPILAVASTU or BONN; but there would be no joke to share.~ William Golding, ‘Shakespeare’s Birthplace’
>>25228826I didn't like reading him in school but I'm sure my opinion would change now.
>>25229131Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find.~ Samuel Johnson, ‘Preface To Shakespeare’
>>25229183THE CRAFTSMANby Rudyard KiplingOnce, after long-drawn revel at The Mermaid,He to the overbearing BoanergesJonson, uttered (if half of it were liquor,Blessed be the vintage!) Saying how, at an alehouse under Cotswold, He had made sure of his very Cleopatra, Drunk with enormous, salvation-contemningLove for a tinker. How, while he hid from Sir Thomas’s keepers, Crouched in a ditch and drenched by the midnight Dews, he had listened to gipsy JulietRail at the dawning. How at Bankside, a boy drowning kittens Winced at the business; whereupon his sisterLady Macbeth aged seven — thrust ’em under,Sombrely scornful. How on a Sabbath, hushed and compassionateShe being known since her birth to the townsfolkStratford dredged and delivered from AvonDripping Ophelia. So, with a thin third finger marrying Drop to wine-drop domed on the table, Shakespeare opened his heart till the sunriseEntered to hear him. London waked and he, imperturbable, Passed from waking to hurry after shadows...Busied upon shows of no earthly importance?Yes, but he knew it!
>>25228987Yeah dude Cromwell before he banned the theatre was probably massively influenced by The Merchant of Venice you fucking dolt.
>>25229200In spite of its Elizabethan ruff, Shakespeare's language is somehow nearer to the vital life of English, still, than anything written down since. One reason for this is that it is a virtuoso development of the poetic instincts of English dialect. Even his famous pincer movement, where he contains an idea with a latinate word on one wing and an Anglo-Saxon on the other, is an innate trick of fluent dialect. The air of wild, home-made poetry which he manages to diffuse through a phenomenally complicated and intellectualized language, and which makes the work of almost any other poet seem artificial, derives also from another dialect instinct, which is the instinct to misuse latinisms, but in an inspired way. This is really a primitive, unconscious but highly accurate punning. A familiar example would be the notorious ‘aggravate’. In its vulgar use, this is means ‘to goad beyond endurance’, which is not merely a Joycean fusion of irritate, anger, exaggerate, but a much deeper short circuit to the concrete Anglo-Saxon ‘gr’ core of growl, grind, eager, grief, grate etc. The word inherits a much more powerful meaning by this wrenching misuse in English than by its precise use in its Latin sense. Shakespeare is doing this, just slightly, constantly, and it is this, as I say, more than anything else, which gives his language the air of being invented in a state of crisis, for a terribly urgent job, a homely spur-of-the-moment improvisation out of whatever verbal scrap happens to be lying around, which is exactly what real speech is. The meaning is not so much narrowly delineated as overwhelmingly suggested, by an inspired signalling and hinting of verbal heads and tails both above and below precision, and by this weirdly expressive underswell of a musical neargibberish, ike a jostling of spirits. The idea is conveyed, but we also receive a musical and imaginative shock, and the satisfaction of that is unfathomable. Just as in real speech, where what is being said is not nearly so important as the exchange of animal music in the voices and expressions. In so far as he is a master of this, Shakespeare’s language is not obsolete so much as futuristic: it enjoys a condition of total and yet immediate expressiveness that we hope sooner or later to get back to, or forward to, without the incidental archaisms.~ Ted Hughes, Introduction to ‘A Choice Of Shakespeare’s Verse’
>>25229210Through torrid entrances, past icy polesA hand moves on the page! Who shall againEngrave such hazards as thy might controls —Conflicting, purposeful yet outcry vainOf all our days, being pilot, — tempest, too!~ Hart Crane, ‘To Shakespeare’
>>25229226Shakespeare would have done well in any generation, because he would have refused to die in a corner; he would have taken the false gods and made them over, he would have taken the current formulae and forced them into something lesser men thought them incapable of. Alive today he would undoubtedly have written and directed motion pictures, plays, and God knows what. Instead of saying “This medium is not good,” he would have used it and made it good. If some people had called some of his work cheap (which some of it is), he wouldn’t have cared a rap, because he would know that without some vulgarity there is no complete man. He would have hated refinement, as such, because it is always a withdrawal, a shrinking, and he was much too tough to shrink from anything.~ Raymond Chandler, Letter, 1949
Reread Hamlet yesterday and completely forgot it was his birthday today.Happy Birthday, and rest in peace. 410 years today, he’s said to have died.
>>25229233This is to be a conversation – certainly not anything so formal as a lecture – and what we’re going to talk about is *Othello*. Shakespeare’s play and the film I made of it. That sounds rather arrogant, doesn’t it, just naming the two in the same sentence? The truth is, of course, that by any real standard of worth, comparison is not merely impossible, it’s absurd. The play is something more than a masterpiece. It stands through the centuries as a great monument to Western civilization. Take an arbitrary figure: twelve. Name twelve plays which could be called great. *Othello* must be one of those twelve. Of that twelve, at least nine (which is another arbitrary figure) are by Shakespeare. That leaves three on our list for all the other writers who ever lived.~ Orson Welles, ‘Filming Othello’
>>25229242I just realized it's a pun.>The remainder is silence>The relaxation is silence
>>25229286I often wonder if he was suicidal at least when writing Hamlet, it’s pretty life denying, at least on the surface.
>>25229301I found this speech life affirming>Not a whit, we defy augury: there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes?
>>25229330Yeah, actually, this is true, and it’s after the gravedigger scene too, which is more memorable for its somewhat pessimistic outlook on death.
>>25229330I wouldn't call that particularly life-affirming. It's stoic / fatalist.
>>25229355>>25229330It’s resolute, and stoic as the anon above me said, but life affirming? It depends, is it his unwavering belief that there must be some divine providence in all his sorrow? And that gives him the courage to face his death with dignity? I suppose one can say at that he’s more alive than he ever was in the play up to that point.
>>25228967Go WATCH Macbeth, Much Ado, Julius Caesar, or Romeo & Juliet. If you don't wanna go outside, find them on YouTube. Read them afterwards.
>>25229378I agree it's a moving speech and it's definitely a step forward for Hamlet from the slightly snarky discontent of the first acts. But I don't think it quite constitutes "enthusiastic embrace of life". More just that he's grown up a bit.
>>25229131There is a great article I've read about the reason behind Tolstoy's dislike of Shakespeare. Here: https://www.openculture.com/2026/04/leo-tolstoy-calls-shakespeare-an-insignificant-inartistic-writer.html#google_vignettThe gist of it, is that Shakespeare approached his works with the opposite worldview from that of Tolstoy. And perhaps, knowing about Tolstoy's life, he might have taken the story of king Lear too personaly.
>>25228676My favourite edit of all time. Inspired.
>>25228674Cool. Been wondering: why is Antony and Cleopatra so underrated? I've found it to be one of his most re-readable plays. It's his most sprawling work, centered around a wild doomed romance between people that actually feel larger than life (vs. the adolescents of Romeo and Juliet), and during the peak of his poetry. Cleopatra herself is probably my favorite female character in all of fiction. It's a top 5 of his. Deserves to be known as one of the great tragedies alongside the famous four.
>>25229944It's dramatically a bit dodgy and without excellent actors it doesn't work, so it doesn't get performed much.
>>25229390Read first THEN watch
>>25228674Read Hamlet and King Richard II this week, might continue with the other parts of King Richard (King Henry IV 1-2, and Henry V). Talked to my grandpa for a little bit about Hamlet yesterday. He likes reading and his birthday is the same as shakespeares
>>25229264Our native Muse, heaven knows and heaven be praised, is not exclusive. Whether out of the innocence of a childlike heart to whom all things are pure, or with the serenity of a status so majestic that the mere keeping up of tones and appearances, the suburban wonder as to what the strait-laced Unities might possibly think, or sad sour Probability possibly say, are questions for which she doesn’t because she needn’t, she hasn’t in her lofty maturity any longer, to care a rap, she invites, dear generous-hearted creature that she is, just *tout le monde* to drop in at any time so that her famous, memorable, sought-after evenings present to the speculative eye an ever-shining, never-tarnished proof of her amazing unheard-of power to combine and happily contrast, to make every shade of the social and moral palette contribute to the general richness, of the skill, unapproached and unattempted by Grecian aunt or Gallic sister, with which she can skate full tilt toward the forbidden incoherence and then, in the last split second, on the shuddering edge of the bohemian standardless abyss, effect her breathtaking triumphant turn.~ W. H. Auden, ‘The Sea And The Mirror: Caliban’s Address To The Audience’
>>25229929There might be some truth in Orwell’s idea but it’s a bit hard to say that’s all of it. Most devout Christians have no problem with Shakespeare.Not sure exactly when T. expressed these opinions. He did get very didactic later in life and I can see them coming from that sort of standpoint.
>>25228674Happy Birthday and Death Day Will.
>>25231322O, mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers, — like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert — but that, the further we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident!~ Thomas De Quincey, ‘On The Knocking At The Gate In Macbeth’
His tragedies and some historic dramas are truly classic status. Then he has some good stories and then I don't know what the fuck is going on most of the time.
>>25228848>A PLEASANT Conceited Comedie CALLED, Loues labors loftWere you on drugs here?
>>25231897If English isn’t your first language I’d imagine some of his more linguistically playful material is quite hard to crack, hell, even for those whose first language is English if they haven’t read much of him. Are you a native English speaker or…?
>>25231919No, I’m just really, really autistic and copying the first quarto.
>>25228848Based, I think it's one of Shakespeare's best. Hard to parse, but once you do the language is so playful. Full of wordplay, puns, like a proto-Carroll.I'm really thankful to Mann for introducing it to me (Doctor Faustus).
>>25231923I see.
>>25228674
>>25228674Shakespeare and the plays Shakespeare wrote do us the favor and the remarked upon joy of having happened before victorian moralizing and victorian prose
