Shakespeare

[Achebe]

 The constant changes in literature and language make it inevitable that any value judgments away from personal opinion or workshopping end up sounding like ripe old foolishness or ripe old snobbery, and so far this doesn't sound like personal opinion. (but on the other hand, Shakespeare is as peerless as a hawk-eyed falcon -- that is to say, it ain't good to say the inverse, too. And there may have been an admittance to opinion that I have missed, or perhaps it's a key assumption....)

No idea what you said there. Shorter sentences help articulation. You won't get into a good MBA programme with that sort of muddled thinking...

[rollingbrianjones]

Enjoyed the video- thanks for that.

Also got lost somewhere in the above quoted comment ^^ I think I took a little more from it than maybe Achebe did... but not much

Everyone is entitled to an opinion and there are many valid criticisms made by people with a lesser opinion of Shakespeare.
Yet his longevity suggests that criticisms are just that- an opinion, especially as his longevity is largely through academics who you'd assume are well read, think critically and don't just follow trend or accept the teaching of a previous generation (even if that was the case he has survived a lot of generations!). I guess my argument for him relies on logic and common sense rather than my own appreciation of his work (which varies).

[rowens]

Shakespeare laid it on pretty thick, didn't he?

[rollingbrianjones]

On "laying it on thick" (and trying to ignite/continue a discussion on a huge subject that I've always found fascinating and would be interested to read developed opinions already hinted at)...

Going somewhat against my defence of Shakey's abilities thus far, I think he seemingly "laid it on pretty thick" unavoidably- as a good writer that produced such a volume of material often encompassing unoriginal but compelling stories cannot avoid doing just that... I'm nowhere near a good writer but if I write 20 lines, 4 of them will be top notch! So there is a lot of inconsistency amongst his work, especially arguably the stronger "stories" or factual plays.

Saying this, my appreciation of his surely undoubtable ability is the "thickness" is not indicative of his best work- more the theatrical control and progression, characterisation and poetry through both action and language in what I think are his mostly original stories/plays is (the better comedies? Twelfth Night, Much Ado, Midsummer). If those are not original my apologies for my ignorance and pls correct me and direct to the sources

The language and construction of the better comedies/farces in tandem is fantastic, whilst in the tragedies- despite obvious moments of great language- it is often the action that causes effect rather than the writing (obviously strong action makes better writing easier). Exception of Macbeth which I think is fantastically written, and Ophelia/Iago (obv there are other good characters) who I view as perfectly built characters.

Then away from the vaguely/uncertainly historical tragedies, the definite English histories are to me the most inconsistent plays in terms of written quality, where the overall the story dominates the quality of work/writing (perhaps it's no coincidence that the theatrical audience of the time would have already been familiar with and attracted to those English history tales, encouraging productive laziness on his part?).

This just echoes my earlier opinion reading that back - that he is a talented writer who I don't think can be ever easily dismissed or heavily criticised- mainly as when he writes for the sake of writing what he gives us is beautiful, acute, witty and entertaining. Just as he wrote for theatre, for an audience, for a living- and in such a historically unrivaled quantity, there will of course be a lot of weaker plays and writings.

V. interested to hear some further criticism and hopefully learn something through it, as this is a subject I enjoy and have extensively written about but some time ago, but have not for some time found a active platform of informed critics.

RBJ

[Achebe]

I tend to agree with you - the comedies, Roman plays, and some problem plays are the nonpareil insofar as language, poetry, and grace are concerned, then the tragedies, and then the rest. His sonnets and other poems are terrible. Interestingly, the songs in his plays are wonderful - It was a lover and his lass, eg.
And a number of his highly regarded plays fail as plays - King Lear and Measure for Measure come to mind. I mean, the plot in MfM is a bad melodrama.
But reading As You Like It on a sunny day lying down on the grass under a tree with a cockatoo croaking and dogs running after tennis balls is perfection.

[Sparkydashforth]

I didn't read all of the replies on this thread,
but minnows nibbling whales,
never inspires me to do better.

Seriously, are any of his sonnets readable?
For tortured rhyme, one only needs to look at:

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

His plays are fine as far as poetry goes. As drama, only Othello makes the cut. Hamlet makes me want to tear my hair out, while  only Troilus and Cressida is a play for all time.
And let' be clear - anyone can write beautiful poetry without the irritating constraints of standardised grammar or spelling. And by creating words as one goes along.
He did create some memorable characters and some great poetry, but so have others.

The veneration from Shakespeare, I contend, comes from the recency of Britain's cultural dominance. 
When Britain's star rose in the 19th and 20th centuries, the earliest credible writer (Chaucer - ha ha ha, Spenser's body of work was more modest, and let's be realistic - the Faerie Queene doesn't compare to the Commedia) in the English language was put on a pedestal as a way to claim cultural equality with Italy.
The remarkable fact is that the best writing in English - any genre - came after the 19th century and accelerated in the 20th as English became the new Latin.

[Achebe]

I didn't read all of the replies on this thread,
but minnows nibbling whales,
never inspires me to do better.

We'll cope, I'm sure

[Leanne]

You might. I'm already withering in the deadly shade.

[Brownlie]

Seriously, are any of his sonnets readable?
For tortured rhyme, one only needs to look at:

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

His plays are fine as far as poetry goes. As drama, only Othello makes the cut. Hamlet makes me want to tear my hair out, while  only Troilus and Cressida is a play for all time.
And let' be clear - anyone can write beautiful poetry without the irritating constraints of standardised grammar or spelling. And by creating words as one goes along.
He did create some memorable characters and some great poetry, but so have others.

The veneration from Shakespeare, I contend, comes from the recency of Britain's cultural dominance. 
When Britain's star rose in the 19th and 20th centuries, the earliest credible writer (Chaucer - ha ha ha, Spenser's body of work was more modest, and let's be realistic - the Faerie Queene doesn't compare to the Commedia) in the English language was put on a pedestal as a way to claim cultural equality with Italy.
The remarkable fact is that the best writing in English - any genre - came after the 19th century and accelerated in the 20th as English became the new Latin.

 
I don't know what the best stuff is, but you must be a'glue sniffin' if you think Shakes aint pretty good. That line up there seems pretty good. What about the richard plays or whatever and the Titus andronicus with the Anthony Hopkins (aka the cannibalistic welshman) telling the stones that they are the perfect subjects (and the dinner.)

Spenser Also equal super genius, but his stuff is so xenophobic you'll think you're reciting Arian ballads at a kluxers labor day bbq. Shakespeare's drama is good enough for people to waste time interpreting it. 

[rollingbrianjones]

Sometimes I wish there was a lazy option of a "like" button as I would have used it on every comment since my last and it would be sufficient. Critics be silenced... hah

[RiverNotch]

Reviving this thread while I read/reread him, his critics, and his contemporaries....

It's so weird, but my esteem for Shakespeare has only grown, especially with this present "deep dive". My reading list for this is pretty massive -- I'm not even halfway through -- but so far I'm getting a strong sense of the "Shakespearean difference", as Harold Bloom (kinda pigheadedly) puts it.

On rhyme:
I reiterate that his rhymes are tortured only insofar as the great vowel shift happened -- during his time, they're perfectly natural. If you have any facility with accents, I suggest you learn the accent before reading or rereading him, as it genuinely makes a difference, not only with the rhymes, but also with the puns and, really, the general character of his works: http://www.paulmeier.com/OP.pdf


On "tortured verse":
I'm gonna be following a critical trend that's existed since the Victorians, and continues to be followed by people across both sides of the discussion, which is to look at the works in the context of Shakespeare's life. Oxfordians will be banned (jk).

The early 1590s is evidently when he started his career as a playwright, and the plays he wrote here were kinda bad. Like, it's as Achebe said, with Marlowe being more understandable at this point than Shakespeare: Marlowe started off earlier, and in plays like Titus Andronicus or 1 Henry VI, Shakespeare was clearly imitating Marlowe. The verse being tortured is understandable, though not necessarily excusable.

Marlowe dies. Shakespeare begins to develop his own identity. You have him showing off his potential as a psychoanalyst with Richard III, and as a classicist with The Comedy of Errors, then you get the lyrical plays: Love's Labour's Lost, Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream. For the first two lyrical plays, his verse is definitely "tortured", but in very purposeful ways: Biron and Richard II are narcissists, Armado is a braggart, Holofernes is a pedant, and so on. From this point on, though, Shakespeare simply writes better than Marlowe, with his "tortured" writing being matched by Marlowe's bluster or somewhat pedantic multilingualism (the amount of Latin in Doctor Faustus was kinda annoying, tbh xD).

Then you get the "great" plays. Falstaff, in the Henry IV plays, typically talked in prose, but the prose is so good it's practically poetry. And then, of course, Hamlet (which is generally poetic regardless of form -- "To be or not to be" is in poetry, but "Alas, poor Yorick" is in prose), Troilus and Cressida, King Lear: at around this point, something that occasionally shone through in earlier plays (say, Faulconbridge in King John, or Bushy's speech on grief in Richard II) becomes a habit here. Like Dickinson, the characters in Shakespeare's plays begin thinking, even feeling, in verse. And when their verse gets "tortured", it's not because it's "tortured", it's because they're tortured.

Finally, the romances, especially the collaborative ones. The verse in Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen that was definitively Shakespeare's are often tortured, yes, but no longer in a way that's particular to the characters. Indeed, the characters stop being characters the way Desdemona or Rosalind or Juliet are characters; they instead become mouthpieces. Mouthpieces for what? Not for anything ideological, which Shakespeare was never wont to betray, nor for anything rhetorical or theatrical, which is more for his collaborators. Instead, the "tortured" verse they deliver strikes one as a series of experiments, perhaps on the limits of language, a sensibility which is as modern as Titus Andronicus presages the modern slasher film.

So, I kinda agree, and indeed critics that are not professed bardolaters -- say, Samuel Johnson, or Frank Kermode -- have been saying this for years. It's just not a big deal xD


On plays vs. poems:
This is a sentiment that some of the oldest critics actually agree with. Samuel Johnson only edited Shakespeare's plays (or rather, those plays considered to be his plays at the time, to the exclusion of Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Edward III), while Hazlitt had this to say: "Our idolatry of Shakespear (not to say our admiration) ceases with his plays. In his other productions, he was a mere author, though not a common author. It was only be representing others, that he became himself." I'd counter one of the posts in saying that when he writes for the sake of writing, as he does in the sonnets, is when he seems to be at his weakest, largely because his chief constraint, that of "form", is far more nebulous than his usual constraints, those being "character" and "theatricality".

However, some more modern critics, like Harold Goddard, persuade me to think of the poems as more than merely impressive, if only because of the insights they are able to deliver into his plays. Or maybe it's because the sonnets are among the first books of poetry I really read. Though I absolutely love that one of the sharper indictments of the sonnets in this thread is by Leanne (eternal memory), who's written one of my favourite sonnets in general xD


On the plots of the plays:
As Goddard notes, one of the "gifts" Shakespeare evidently didn't have is inventing, as opposed to adapting, plots, so I'd say the man could hardly be blamed for them. When he did invent a plot, such as in A Midsummer Night's Dream, or when he altered it to the point of being original, such as The Comedy of Errors having two pairs of twins over The Menaechmi's one or the Henry-Henry dynamic in 1 Henry IV, it's often an improvement. I'd say, as a student of life, Shakespeare was less invested in imitating what he studied, as opposed to staging it wholesale, which meant preferring to take plots from chronicles, or from other people's narratives understood as chronicles, rather than to make his own.


On cultural bias:
It's definitely something to criticize, but it's also something to just accept -- Shakespeare seems peerless in large part because of imperialism. The fact that I can't speak of non-Western literature on this is probably the big exclamation mark on this, especially when I'm not a Westerner, and have only been physically in the West for a total of six weeks. So, setting the "Global East" aside, who are, conceivably, Shakespeare's peers? I would only really consider, for this, authors who could not have been influenced by Shakespeare, and the likes of Goethe and Austen, not to mention Dostoevsky and Freud, would undoubtedly consider themselves to be his inheritors, not his peers. 

Marlowe? Marlowe died. There's genuine potential in his Edward II, but all we have from him now are caricatures (except, arguably, his Faust, but that's one character in a very short play). Jonson? Again, the issue is variety. In Shakespeare, we have both Hamlet and Prince Hal, we have Rosaline and Rosalind -- tragedy, comedy, history, and romance, all bases covered. Meanwhile, Jonson's Sejanus getting booed off the stage is what led Shakespeare to write Othello. Jonson might be a great author, but perhaps not great enough.

I'd say Shakespeare's peers were more liable to be people he never actually met. I'd say Chaucer, from whom he got The Two Noble Kinsmen and possibly Troilus and Cressida, is up there. Likewise, Cervantes -- the lost Cardenio, as well as a few plays by Shakespeare's reputed dramaturgical heir, John Fletcher. Probably also Montaigne and Rabelais. Maybe even Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. I doubt vernacular poets before these authors ever wrote with the same depth of characterization, while those who wrote in the "proper" languages of Greek and Latin -- i. e., the ancients -- are so far removed from us, that it seems improper to compare even the least among them (Statius?) to the likes of Shakespeare. And maybe the same goes for pre-colonial Eastern writers.

But why do we fixate on Shakespeare, rather than those authors I suggested may be his peers? Well, I bet an article in Italy's version of the Guardian would sing the same sort of praises of Dante, but at the same time, Dante wrote his epic, Chaucer his anthology, Cervantes wrote his novel, while Shakespeare wrote his plays. I think, of all these so-called canonical authors, it's Shakespeare that had the most variety, the most potential to represent every one of us, every aspect of our world. Heck, most of his plays aren't even set in England xD But really: Shakespeare is one of the greats by his talents, yet is a peerless great by pure accident.

[TranquillityBase]

RN,

I'm too far behind the curves to understand many of your points, but it was a delight to read your comments.

I love Shakespeare's language which I read (and have read over the years) in fits and starts, just the big titles, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, maybe Richard the Third, The Tempest, Henry V, King Lear  ( ....hey that's I longer list than I would anticipated).  

But the only plays I can bear to watch are modernized film versions (Ethan Hawke in Hamlet, Ian McKellan in Richard the III, Baz Luhrman's Romeo+Juliet, and a few others) which are not the plays, but movies.  I can't help it, I'm a TV baby.  And I skipped Shakespeare for the modernists in college.*

The parts about Marlowe/Shakespeare and "his peers of the time" was very interesting....well it was all interesting, but these were places where I went "o yeah".

TqB

__________________________________________________________

*well, I did do Beowulf in OE, and Chaucer.....not sure why I skipped S.  Probably he was out of fashion during my college years.  No one ever hit me on the head with it.  Never heard about the professors....

So anyanyway, it's the language thing for me.  To hear English in all its forms is a gas.

[busker]

I think there's something to be said for a writer who's still read for reading pleasure 400 years after his death (come to think of it...in April of this year, it will be 400 years!)
There are very few who belong in that category, the authors of religious and foundational literature aside.

No one reads Milton anymore, except for the first two books of Paradise Lost and a couple of his sonnets, because he wasn't that good in the grand scheme of things. Milton was within living memory of Shakespeare, so it's not a bad comparison.

Of course, Shakespeare has the advantage in that his works have been preserved. There may have been several talented scribes in Sumeria and Egypt who wrote moving stories about the wages of sinning against Nut and Isis, but we don't have their stone tablets with us to this day.

The reason that Shakespeare appeals to us is that he's the last of the greats that we allow to be ridiculous. Orwell couldn't have gotten away with plots involving cross dressing boys who're really girls who were really played by boys, but we allow Shakespeare that leeway because his age is permitted a certain barbarity and ignorance.

It's the same reason that a modern professor of physics would be held to a higher standard than Michael Faraday.

Now, very little of what I've written above forms a cogent argument for or against anything, but I'm rather liking this declamatory, pulpit-ish style of writing. Bombastic, even. But I'll reply at greater length to your well exposited essay, Rivernotch.

For now, I'll just say that comparing the stalwarts across just three or four traditions, all in Western Europe, doesn't quite make sense anymore. Why, for instance, can't you compare Milton to Mohammed, given that the latter basically composed the Quran? Unless you actually believe it came from up above, in which case there's no reason for you not to say the Shahada, which I assume you haven't.
Or Spenser to David, assuming he wrote his songs, and didn't instead get them written by slaves and scribes on pain of torture? The psalms are amongst the greatest literary creations of the human mind. Nothing Shakespeare wrote comes close.

---

Actually, apart from the KJV bible, there are not that many examples of where English literature bears spiritual fruit

The poetry of Hopkins would be an exception to the rule.
Donne leaves me cold.
Crashaw and Herbert are pedestrian
Vaughan only slightly less so.

Maybe the rude rhymesters pre-Chaucer, and Hopkins.
And then a lot of greats in the 20th century, most of them being non-English voices

Why the anomaly? Probably because the English were a practical, mercantilist race, and the Scotch and the Irish back in the day, far too unlettered for anything other than folk songs, of which they wrote the best.

[TranquillityBase]

For now, I'll just say that comparing the stalwarts across just three or four traditions, all in Western Europe, doesn't quite make sense anymore. Why, for instance, can't you compare Milton to Mohammed, given that the latter basically composed the Quran? Unless you actually believe it came from up above, in which case there's no reason for you not to say the Shahada, which I assume you haven't.

I began the Koran and it didn't make sense to me until I saw that it did come from up above, at least in the mind of the writer.

[RiverNotch]

It still makes sense if, like me, you specify you're looking at a particular canon -- the Western Canon, the Eastern Canon, the Native American Canon. And I did specify. xD

The question could be why someone *should* specify, but then again, why *shouldn't* one? Surely such universal claims are far less defensible than those with a smaller scope, and I'd say that, since we're looking at Shakespeare, the scope is naturally limited to the authors of his time and place. The authors that come after him are much more likely to say they are his heirs, rather than his peers; those authors that come far, far before him, to the point that the language of their works is no longer something people are born with -- and this likely includes the Koran, considering the changes Arabic underwent across the millennium, if Arabic is to be considered a "Western" language, which it perhaps could -- can only be considered as having come from a world completely different from his. And, of course, the Koran and the Psalms and the Torah and the Gospel are all Holy Scripture: society, of which all critics are necessarily members, is bound to view them very, very differently to the likes of Spenser and Shakespeare. Though with the way sayings like "to gild a lily" or "star-cross'd lovers" have infected the English (if not the Western) way of thinking in the same way as "fly in the ointment" or "camel through the needle's eye" is quite the witness, at least for Shakespeare.

---

I have no intention to read the Koran any time soon, btw. I have so many other things to read (and so many other languages to learn, all of them Western xD), and I'm not a Muslim, so....