How'd he get so good?
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How'd he get so good?
How'd he get so good?
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by being a woman
>you must be 18 to post her
Putin would be doing us a favor by starting nuclear armageddon, as for the thread topic Shakespeare is the greatest genius who ever lived in any field and discipline
>as for the thread topic Shakespeare is the greatest genius who ever lived in any field and discipline
Genuinely curious. Why would you say he is a greater genius than Einstein, Newton, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Michelangelo, Gauss, Von Neumann?
I’m not trying to provoke you or trying to say that you are wrong. I’m just curious as to why Shakespeare’s body of work should be considered a greater display of genius than the achievements of Einstein, for example.
I’m aware that brute intelligence is not the same thing as genius. I would be willing to bet that Von Neumann had a significantly higher IQ that’s Shakespeare, but genius is not simply a matter of raw intelectual capacity, só one can say that Shakespeare’s creative capacity was far more impressive than Von Neumann creative capacity.
Anyway, I would just like to know why do you consider Shakespeare the greatest genius of all fields of human activity.
It's a completely asinine comparison regardless of what position you take. Shut up.
NTA but
let me put it this way. A.I. will be able to replace all of those you listed, the music, the math, the physics... however, the Shakespeare pieces will be the last thing A.I. can do since it is the most challenging, it is the culmination of all of them.
MAH A.I FIXES EVERYTHANGGG
frick off
>greater display of genius than the achievements of Einstein, for example.
NTA but in general, scientific achievements are inevitable. One discovery follows another. At any given time you have dozens (or even hundreds) of intelligent people working on a problem and somebody will eventually be the first to solve it. And then it moves on to the next problem, and so on.
>I’m just curious as to why Shakespeare’s body of work should be considered a greater display of genius than the achievements of Einstein, for example.
The same reason Aristotle argues that specialists (like those who specialize in physics) are natural slaves, whereas those who come closer to universality are more worthy of recognition as free men of excellence. Einstein is a specialist, there is no universality in his comprehension of the world. I don't actually agree that Shakespeare is the "greatest genius", but he's certainly further in that direction than any physicist you can name.
Where does Aristotle say that?
Nicomachean Ethics
By being black. He doesn't hold a candle to a true wordsmith like Kendrick though.
By being a gay lil homie
He's kinda overrated tbh
he was helped out by a team of actors who were fairly good at improvising.
fool
>team of actors who were fairly good at improvisin
That's an interesting idea, anon. I wish I had some actor friends...
this is why theres only been one shakespeare. an extrovert writer apha enough to manhandle the most notoriously difficult people alive
nincompoop.
cope, seethe, dilate. in any order you want
Working for a living, like Bach.
What are the essential Shakespeare that I should read? I only know about Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet. I don't have time nor the patience to read everything he wrote. Give me the best of him.
>Give me the best of him.
you're a demanding and rude little moron, aren't you? homosexual, use google.
>you're a demanding and rude little moron, aren't you? homosexual, use google.
nice self portrait
Give King Henry V, Julius Caesar, and The Tempest a read.
checked.
but be sure to see them performed at the theatre.
I've seen a number of Shakespeare performance in theatre, its just that King Henry and Julius Caesar are performed much less often than his most famous works.
I do, however, actively keep my eye on the local theatre schedules
Reading Shakespeare? Are you kidding me. It is meant to performed. Experienced. Going through the whole body, like full bore electrostasis speakers. There is no "reading" Shakespeare.
You sound extremely like a guy who has never read Shakespeare.
He really does. This take is pretty common and I always found it to be bad advice. Shakespeare's plays work best when you complement your reading of the play with a performance of it, but there's too much that you would miss only watching performances of the plays and never actually reading them
If you're going to recommend him Henry V you might as well recommend the entire Henriad. OP, read the following plays in this order: Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, and Henry V. It's Shakespeare's great epic, filled with incredible characters, including one character so amazing Harold Bloom would spontaneously ejaculate every time he was brought up.
frick yeah. I'll get on reading the whole epic too
what about King Henry VI pt1-3 and King Richard III? Thoughts on those?
They are, ironically, the "First Tetralogy," because they were written first. The plays I mentioned, the Henriad, form the "Second Tetralogy." I say it's ironic, because, as the names of the kings suggest, the events of the First Tetralogy take place later in time than the events of the Second Tetralogy.
I've heard people say they can take or leave the three parts of Henry VI. But Richard III is notable because the titular Richard is one of Shakespeare's most diabolical villains. He's another example of the "villain protagonist" that Shakespeare also does with Macbeth. Richard III alone is supposed to make the First Tetralogy worth reading, but I've never read it myself so I can't personally confirm it.
Since we're on the topic of notable Shakespeare villains. Could an argument be made that Iago was in fact the protagonist of Othello?
He is by far one of my favorite villains in literature.
He has more lines than Othello, doesn't he? And since it's HIS plot, HIS scheme, one could argue that he's the one driving the action. Othello is one to whom things are done, not one who does things. Other than murdering Desdemona, I suppose.
Other people have said it, but it really is the case that Othello's tragedy is a tragedy of a man of action with no action to take. If Othello had just had somebody to punch, the play would have ended happily. As it stands, he is caught in a net of scheming and plotting and he is totally out of his depth.
There's a comic out there, I don't have it, of Hamlet and Othello switching places and both of them solve each other's major dilemma almost instantly.
>tumblr
What a way to misrepresent the psychology of each character, let alone the actual substance of each play. Othello doesn't even attack anyone for whole scenes, nor does he even do anything. The time it takes for Iago to convince Othello of infidelity spans a good portion of the play.
Hamlet doesn't hum and haw over his actions, either; he certainly schemes for the most part.
hahaha. It's funny because Hamlet is so hesitant to do anything but Othello is too rash! I get these references!
What about The merchant of Venice? I like Shylock’s black magic— making him agreeing to repay the debt by giving a pound of flesh in case the voyage he invested in does not yield any gains.
I'd scratch Henry V and add one of Merchant of Venice, Taming of the Shrew and Anthony and Cleopatra. Also Othello of course but I'm guessing you left that off list accidentally. Henry V is part of a four part saga which is IMO sort of hard to get into compared to his other plays. Some pompous speeches about the kingliness of kings that might just bounce right off.
I agree with your recs as well. Just gave my top three lesser read works.
I did feel like King Henry V was actually easy to fall in on with out reading the precursors, and I felt like Shakespeare demonstrated his knowledge of the military and the sentiments of the soldier so well it almost made me think he was actually in the military. Which is up for historical debate
Coriolanus
Venus and Adonis
>ctrl + 4
>Measure for Measure
>0 results
I knew this board was mostly larp but wow
Read titus andronicus
Nta, but do you think reading a screenplay is the same thing of waching a movie. Do you think that's how the author intended his audience to experience his art?
>Nta, but do you think reading a screenplay is the same thing of waching a movie. Do you think that's how the author intended his audience to experience his art?
Cinema is completely different from drama, especially poetic drama.
In cinema, no matter how well written and even poetic the script is, the image is still the most important element. Dialogue in film is much briefer, leaner, restrained, and generally much more linguistically simple and direct than what you find in Shakespeare's poetic drama. You can take any movie script, even from the most brilliant and ambitious screenwriters (say, the Network script, or the Sweet Smell of Success script), and still the poetry of those scripts is incomparably less complex and metaphorically-dense than Shakespeare's poetry.
With regard to most playwrights in the world, I agree: without staging, their work loses much of its value, because the language of the works is not poetry in its purest and most complex state. Without actors fleshing out the skeleton of the text, the text itself offers little pleasure.
But as far as Shakespeare is concerned, taking your time to read his metaphors and similes, stopping to pay attention to what you are reading, is like reading poetry. It is actually poetry reading, and some of the most glorious poetry ever written. It is a different way of appreciating the work and, for those who appreciate the beauty of language and the beauty of what language is capable of doing, this calm and detailed reading can be more pleasurable and profitable than watching a play in the theater.
Buy his complete works
He's probably one of the only writers in history where you should read everything he wrote. You're an incredulous moron if you do not.
I personally like some of the comedies like As You Like It or Midsummer Night's Dream. They're not as heady as other suggestions given but they're just a pleasure to read.
because it was a team of Rosucricians lead by De Vere
Ancestral Atlantean DNA unlocking for him visions of pre-human hyperdramas performed atop jade ziggurats.
He started with the Greeks.
Changing his name from Francis Bacon?
I like reading but think theatre is super gay. What does this mean?
It means, no offense intended, that your brain is, at least for the moment, in a state of bovine stupidity. I was literally just thinking about this last night, how it’s a normie meme to pronounce the word “theater” with a comical posh British accent, because obviously theater is now technologically obsolete to some extent and it’s considered pretentious to write or watch actual plays anymore - and there may be a certain amount of truth in that judgment. But the issue is that this gets transformed, in the mysterious crucible of the normie cattle-brain, into the idea that any manifestation of theater, including plays written centuries before the invention of film, somehow retroactively partakes of that same pretentiousness. Just one particularly idiotic quirk of the overall cargo cult-ish revisionism-from-ignorance that has been applied to the arts ever since Rousseau had the bright idea of letting the plebs get their grubby little hands on them. Cf. also the ghettoization of poetry and classical music among large subsets of the general set of people who consider themselves to be seriously intellectually interested in literature and music. The full extent of the phenomenon could furnish matter for a tragicomedy in itself, it comes up so often in so many grotesque forms.
So anyway maybe try thinking about it this way: the text of a Shakespeare play is just a movie script. Find a decent film version and watch that if you are too overwhelmingly heterosexual to read the play (you’ll miss massive swaths of its meaning watching in real time of course but you can always consult the text/annotations afterwards).
The issue with theatre is that all of the ones i've come across is aping television.
>it's X but the protag is black
>it's X but we rewrote it to be about slavery
>it's X but frick white people
>It's X but frick men muh vegana monologues
>it's X but racial hires everywhere
>it's X but muh triangle drama inserted to keep women coming
I don't see how theatregays can stand paying and subjecting themselves to this shit.
If you actually look at how many words he wrote (roughly 8 or so words per line), then you realise he didn't write that much in terms of volume of words. His plays add up to around 12,000 lines. That's shy of 1,000,000 words if you assume there aren't lines with only a few words too frequently.
His poetry wouldn't add much either, as he really only wrote a handful of lengthy narrative poems: Rape of Lucrece (1855 lines), Venus and Adonis (1194), A Lover's Complaint (329), The Phoenix and the Turtle (54). The 154 sonnets only have 14 lines per sonnet (2154 lines overall). This adds around 44,688 words.
For reference, Infinite Jest is almost 600,000 words and that was after cutting good portions of it in editing. The Malazan Book of the Fallen series is already at an approximate 3,325,000 words. Brandon Sanderson passed 4,000,000 words in all his novels around 2016. These people literally shit out three to four times as much as Shakespeare before they're even done writing most of what they want to write.
Novelists never condense what they really mean into a refined, beautiful line. They use too many words to fill in the space and usually create so many strings in the plot that it can't even be all told within even a 800 page novel, nor sometimes in a longwinded "series" of bloated sequels.
If people actually tried to learn from Shakespeare, they would know that brevity is important for meaning and they should never waffle. Write what you mean, and say it quickly.
Damn, I had no idea there was this much variation, interesting image, thanks. I'm reading Hamlet right now, just after finishing Macbeth, it does seem much longer but I didn't know if it was my imagination or not (reading online so no page count).
I guess it makes sense, obviously novels and movies both vary widely in length, I just automatically assumed that the conventional nature of tragic/comic plays, the necessity of hitting the same basic beats, would result in their being roughly the same length.
The very definition of quality over quantity.
The poet behind Shake-speare was the most prolific poet of his age, writing under a staggering quantity of pseudonyms (& allonyms) from the age of 10 on. His translation of Ovid (published under his tutor Golding's name) at the ages of 16 & 17 show that brevity was something he learned after a near lifetime of practice. Transforming the Latin into fourteeners resulted in an immense expansion of the original language (wonderful, but certainly not concise)
the plays of Shake-speare are the culmination of a lifetime of craft. The plays in the Folio are often the final revision of a plays written and performed for private audiences in his youth (especially the romances and comedies). It is unbelievable (because it isn't true) that Shake-speare's first poem would be Venus & Adonis, followed by nothing but bangers for the rest of his career. And then, for some reason, he would retire? And his death would go entirely unnoticed?
Shake-speare was a genius —but not an unpracticed, entirely natural one.
Where did you read this from
read Oxford’s Voices by Robert Prechter
He just copied the Greeks Romans and Italians.
He began a career in theatre at a very young age
He developed a working knowledge of acting and writing
Eventually he became in charge of writing and directing plays and in the collaborative environment of early modern theatre he began to excel
Based on some lines in his plays he was well aware of the different kinds of audiences to his plays and so he pandered to them all
De Vere had a nobleman's education and plenty of excellent connections, including Marlow and Bacon.
I will bump this thread. I will try to make an efforpost later.
I'm too much of a midwit to truly understand some of the language and flourishes this homie uses. Is there a way for a spastic like me to appreciate him?
1) First of all, Shakespeare was as great as he was because of how he used language.
Here’s Shakespeare’s genius in four words
>“The air bites shrewdly”
These four words occur in Act I Scene iii of Hamlet. They’re followed by: “It is very cold.” It’s not a famous soliloquy but in these four words, eight words perhaps, Shakespeare’s genius appears in miniature—a mind that perceived strife, competition and drama animating not just human endeavors but the inanimate. What often goes unmentioned in Shakespeare studies is not just the human drama, but the contest of wills in nature itself, or in Shakespeare’s nature—in the inanimate. There are hundreds of plays within plays that bubble up like quantum particles in the vacuum of the page. Some are almost fully realized while other dramas, like the four word play above, disappear as quickly as they appear. (Shakespeare was born to write drama the way Mozart was born to compose music.)
The first thought that occurred to Shakespeare was the cold, and Shakespeare straight away perceived that not as a condition but as an ongoing struggle between two characters—the speaker and the shrewd and biting air. For a bubbling instant, the air becomes a character, almost like an Elizabethan humor—and having as its humor a shrewd and intelligent aggressiveness—shrewdly biting. How? The four words tell us as much about the speaker as the air. If the air can bite, then the speaker’s clothes, like another character in the play, must be a poor and ineffectual servant. We can guess that there must be holes in the speaker’s clothes, or they’re ill-fitting or too thin. The air doesn’t just bite, but does so shrewdly, with intelligence and cunning. In this little play, the air outwits the speaker’s defenses.
cont
If Einstein’s peculiar genius was to see the world relativistically, Shakespeare’s genius was to perceive world and all its various parts as being in a never ending and creative contention. When Shakespeare wrote that “all the world’s a stage”, he meant it and with a comprehensiveness exceeding what most think he meant. The world isn’t just a stage where we play our parts, but the stage itself is in contention with itself and with us. Where you and I might feel an icy wind and call it a cold day—these being the static and inanimate properties of the elements—Shakespeare might perceive the elements as having intelligence, motive and intention, contending with or against us on the world’s stage. He perceived a different world than most of us do—or at least the adults among us. You could think of Shakespeare as the great animist—whose perception of the world as intelligent, in all its parts, gave to his poetry and drama a vibrancy and life beyond the human characters on stage.
Perhaps one of the finest examples of Shakespeare’s animist world bubbling up and becoming a play within the play, like a small morality play, comes from Titania’s speech in Act II, Scene i of the Midsummer Night’s Dream (one of my favorite speeches in all of Shakespeare).
These are the forgeries of jealousy:
And never, since the middle summer’s spring,
Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or in the beached margent of the sea,
To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,
But with thy brawls thou hast disturb’d our sport.
Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have suck’d up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which falling in the land
Have every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents.
The ox hath therefore stretch’d his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard;
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
The nine-men’s-morris is fill’d up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For lack of tread are undistinguishable.
The human mortals want their winter cheer:
No night is now with hymn or carol blest.
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound:
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose;
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown,
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set; the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.
cont
The play within the play begins with “Therefore the winds” that pipe “to us in vain”. The wind is like a character, a musician, whose intention is to entertain, but who pipes “in vain” due to our own contention. This makes the winds vengeful and so they suck the water from the sea to pelt “our lands” with it, and that makes the rivers, now another character in the play, “proud”. Shakespeare perceives the rain and flooding as their own characters in a play—the vengeful wind and the proud rivers suddenly full of water—water like a proud King’s train that topples all where the King strides. The green corn, among those who suffer, rots before it can grow a beard. The moon, who Shakespeare’s imagination makes a governess in the dye of his enlivening imagination, washes the air with “rheumatic disease”. “old Hiems”, meaning winter, is mocked with a crown of “sweet summer buds”. (The frost mocks the air shrewdly bites.) The seasons and angry Winter—because in drama every character’s action has its consequence—are made like confused characters at the close, who “change their wonted liveries”. The worlds elements are full of contention and consequence and with an intelligence of their own—and of which we are an unwitting part. In other words, Shakespeare didn’t see nature as a dumb force to be acted upon with impunity, but as an intelligence having its own course that will contend with us or benefit us. (Shakespeare still has much to teach humanity given our treatment of the natural world.)
Try seeing the world the way Shakespeare saw it—the great poet. When the wind shakes the last leaves today, what does the wind want and what do the leaves take away? Think of the elements as characters in a play—the rain, frost, moon, or the sunlight cannily peering through the rigid trees. Find out the “humor” in the inanimate. See the drama staged around you every day and maybe see the world a little like Shakespeare.
cont
Also, pay attention to this analysis from Helen Vendler book on Shakespeare’s sonnets.
>“What is always unsettling in Shakespeare is
the way that he places only a very permeable osmotic membrane between the compartments holding his separate languages—pictorial description, philosophical analysis, emblematic application, erotic pleading—and lets words “leak ” from one compartment to the other in each direction. Rather than creating “full-fledged” metaphor, this practice creates a constant fluidity of reference, which produces not so much the standard disruptive effect of catachresis (“mixed metaphor”) as an almost unnoticed rejuvenation of diction at each moment. The most famous example of this unexampled fluidity arrives in sonnet 60:
>Nativity, once in the main of light,
>Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,
>Crookèd eclipses ’gainst his glory fight.
>This passage, in which Shakespeare allows free passage of language from compartment to compartment, behaves as though the discourses of astrology, seamanship, astronomy, child development, political theory, deformity, religion, and warfare were (or could be) one. Such freedom of lexical range suggests forcefully an ur-language (occurring in time after the Kristevan chora but before even the imaginary in the Lacanian order of things) in which these discourses were all one, before what Blake would call their fall into division. As Shakespeare performs their resurrection into unity, we recognize most fully that this heady mix of discourses is (as with the peculiar interfusion of spaniels and candy once noticed by Caroline Spurgeon) Shakespeare’s “native language” when his powers of expression are most on their mettle. And yet there is no “ambiguity” in this passage.
cont
>A lesser poet would have clung to one or two chief discourses: “Man, once born onto the earth, crawls to maturity, but at that very moment falls, finding his strength failing him”; or “Our sun, once in its dawn of light, ascends to its zenith, whereupon crooked eclipses obscure it.” The inertial tendency of language to remain within the discourse-category into which it has first launched itself seems grandly abrogated by Shakespeare. Yet we know he was aware of that inertial tendency because he exploited it magisterially; every time a discourse shifts, it is (he lets us know) because the mind has shifted its angle of vision. Unpacked, the three lines above from sonnet 60 show us that the speaker first thinks of a child’s horoscope, cast at birth; then he thinks of dawn as an image for the beginning of human life, because the life-span seems but a day; then he reverts to the biological reality of the crawling infant; then he likens the human being to a king (a dauphin perhaps in adolescence, but crowned when he reaches maturity); then (knowing the necessity of human fate) he leaves the image of a king behind (since the uncrowning of a king is contingent—on, say, a revolution—but death is a necessary event) and returns to the natural world. We assume the speaker will predict, as his emblem of necessity (as he does in 73), the darkness of night overtaking the sun that rose at dawn; but instead, feeling the “wrongness” of death’s striking down a human being just at maturity, the poet shows nature in its “wicked” guise, as the eclipse “wrongfully” obscuring the sun in the “glory” of his noon. Yet, remembering how death is not without struggle, the speaker shows the man being “fought against,” not simply blotted out, by the dark. If we do not see each of these shifts in discourse as evidence of a change of mental direction by the speaker, and seek the motivation for each change of direction, we will not participate in the activity of the poem as its surface instructs us to do.”
cont
B) Great fertility and diversity of characters, atmospheres, themes and philosophical points of view
You should also note that, since Shakespeare took many of his plots and characters from other sources, that helped him to curb the tendency to keep writing only about his main interests and obsessions: somehow he forced himself to write about several different topics and worlds, and that accounts for much of the variety of his vision (it helps to build the flesh if you already have the skeleton under it).
Shakespeare accepted any plots, no matter how fantastical and bizarre, provided they were interesting. He did not care to kill important characters without any scruple, and sure he did not bother to set his stories anywhere in the world and at any time in history, without even analyzing the customs of other peoples or epochs: the important thing was to capture the attention of public and find nice opportunities to wrestle beauty out of language.
So he didn’t had a great gift for creating original plots, but he solved the problem by taking plots from other sources and combining them into new works. By doing that he didn’t need to write always about themes that interested him in particular, and so he forced himself to work out several different themes and philosophies and points of view. Since his poetic gift was so great he could trust that he could inject with life even the most arid and uninteresting subjects. He was very lucky for this way of creating his literature. It takes a lot of time to think in original stories, but since he was always looking – like a radar – for good stories in other places he could end up a play and immediately begin another one, thus creating a vast corpus of works.
He forced himself to create characters that were very different from each other due to the diversity of stories and themes he addressed. In addition, by having to work with different ideas and philosophies, he ended up producing almost a kind of corpus of Platonic dialogues that deal with a greater number of ideas than those that Plato dealt with (since Shakespeare, in addition to his own ideas , he worked mainly on alien ideas, collected from all sorts of sources), and in a poetic language far superior to the language of Plato.
>ripping off folk tales and package them for pseuds
>good
lmao
The dram of eale
Thinking Shakespeare is overrated is the mark of a true midwit
"You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with your uncertainty!
Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!
Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,
Fan you into despair! Have the power still
To banish your defenders; till at length
Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels,
Making not reservation of yourselves,
Still your own foes, deliver you as most
Abated captives to some nation
That won you without blows! Despising,
For you, the city, thus I turn my back:
There is a world elsewhere."
He was born that way, and suffered no undue hindrances. Recently I watched the 1948 version of Hamlet with Olivier, and couldn't stop repeating the sequence in the first act where he gives away his act of madness with a most antic style. Most amazing man who ever lived.
He is my friend. I imagined all men before they were born. We are the darkness. My friend Jesus is the light. When God said he saw light and darkness, he was saying his heart saw gold first. He was not worthy to be my king. (Forgive my insolence twas' just a joke sire!)