11-29-2016, 09:45 PM
(11-29-2016, 08:34 PM)Achebe Wrote: 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.Lol.
To wit: once no one loved Hamlet, few loved Troilus, and all loved his comedies, particularly things like the Taming and the Merchant. Then people started gushing over Hamlet, Henry V, Julius Caesar, while editing King Lear to be less depressing. Then Zeffirelli came along, Luhrmann -- and intellectuals like us prefer Troilus over everything he ever wrote. That is to say, if this discussion is to continue, you'll first have to cop to the fact that when you say "the best writing in English - any genre - came after the 19th century and accelerated in the 20th", you're being absolutely, 100% biased, ignoring the fact that Shakespeare's English isn't even the same English as ours, such that of course it's gonna be the stuff closest to our language that we love, and that not merely the taste but even the ways of thinking in literature change with the ages. I'm sure Britain's late cultural dominance played a part in his popularity, but so too with Greek and Latin literature in Antiquity, or French literature in the Middle Ages, or Italian literature in the "Renaissance"....that is to say, it's a non-factor, when considering quality. Ad hominem, or rather ad historiam, if you will.