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busker · 01-27-2026, 05:03 PM

In physics, we don’t study the Principia. Sure, people know of it and study Newtonian mechanics, but not what Newton wrote. In cinema, Orson Welles is studied only by students of cinema and then promptly forgotten. Artists don’t labour over how Leonardo mixed his oils. All those are historical curiosities. Batsmen don’t try to emulate the three W’s. They’re just better these days.

But in literature, we actually read Shakespeare and Milton. Why do we read Shakespeare? His plots are contrived, and theatrical dialogue is the opposite of real life. If we are to read him for the poetry of his plays, as some have argued, then what are we to make of:

It pleased the King his master very late
To strike at me, upon his misconstruction;
When he, compact, and flattering his displeasure,
Tripped me behind; being down, insulted, railed,
And put upon him such a deal of man
That worthied him, got praises of the King
For him attempting who was self-subdued;
And in the fleshment of this ⟨dread⟩ exploit,
Drew on me here again.

It is torturous, long winded yackery. No doubt, being a stage man, this dialogue would’ve done well for the players of his day, but how are we to read it?
How do we read the ancients? Typically, as alien writers from a different planet.
Antigone is more interesting when read sitting in a theatre in Halikarnos than in the library.

How should we read Shakespeare today, then? I personally read Shakespeare for the poetry, and skip over the boring bits. But that brings to mind another question - how many Shakespeares have we not read?

You can listen to salieri and realise that Mozart wasn’t some unique hot house genius who created the only Melodies of their kind. He was a genius, but many of his Melodies were similar to other tunes of the day. Have we heard all of them? No, not even the ones that survive. Perhaps Shakespeare had many peers whose works were simply not collected and published neatly in a folio. I don’t mean Marlowe and Kyd, I mean writers who just weren’t preserved.

wasellajam · 01-27-2026, 06:26 PM

Yep, a world of artists living at any point. In "study" we limit ourselves to those who through cunning or fate have been endlessly reprinted or performed or hung in destination points. Are those artists "better" than the guy next door? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but it's all subjective and temporary anyway. We all know that just because a large group of people believe something that doesn't make it the end all truth.

The poems I love mostly were written more recently, they speak a language that I can easily absorb. But I went through a phase where I bought poetry blindly, thinking within the hundred pages there would be something I'd love. Didn't happen. So, plenty of art for everyone, if you don't limit yourself to other people's taste. I strolled past Mondrian for 50 years before I enjoyed one, had to be in a specific place and time to get swept away by Pollock, art is an opening up to another human's vision, take your pick, nobody can tell you what art to you.

**RiverNotch** · 01-27-2026, 07:04 PM

I finished reading Dante's Comedia last year, after a long pause. I started reading Inferno during the pandemic, finishing Purgatorio just as I ended a sort of quarantine, but then for a couple of years I took the time to learn the language. Instead of reading an English translation while listening to the original Italian, I sounded out the original Italian while reading a modern Italian paraphrase, once I reached Paradiso.

Betwen either part of the Comedia, however, the classics I engaged with were Shakespeare and some of his contemporaries, or at least the first third of his career. I assembled a mostly chronological reading list of the works of the author and his contemporaries, then I read each play. After reading each of Shakespeare's plays, I read some of his critics, with the critics I read being assembled largely from Harold Bloom's "school": besides Bloom himself, through his 1998 The Invention of the Human, there's Samuel Johnson's 1778 annotations, Hazlitt's 1817 Characters of Shakespear's Plays, Goddard's 1951 The Meaning of Shakespeare, Kermode's 2000 Shakespeare's Language, and Garber's 2004 Shakespeare After All.

At the moment, rather than continuing with Shakespeare, I've elected to read some 17th to 18th century translations of the Greco-Roman classics. But whenever I'm not doing anything else, I've also been giving Mozart's late operas a listen, and I suppose the connection is that it's best to consider these greats in context---read about them as much as one reads or hears them, also try to read or hear their contemporaries---and in even rough chronological order, watching carefully how they develop as voices. Early Shakespeare, for instance, is truly crap, more intolerable to read than Kyd or Marlowe (whom he was probably aping).

The list:

But more directly,

"Why do we read Shakespeare? His plots are contrived, and theatrical dialogue is the opposite of real life."

His plots were rarely his own. I believe only A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest weren't based on preexisting texts---Romeo and Juliet, for instance, was based on an Italian novella---so the blame for the plots being contrived probably doesn't rest on himself. But as for the note on "theatrical dialogue", it seems rather paradoxical. Is it so bad a thing that we go to the theatre to listen to an enhanced version of life, instead of sitting there watching someone scroll through Reddit while picking their nose for two hours? At the same time, my memory better serves me with Hamlet or Love's Labour's Lost, where there are instances that are very naturalistic (at least for metered text from four centuries ago):

Ber. Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?

Ros. Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?

Ber. I know you did.

Ros. How needless was it then
To ask the question!

Ber. You must not be so quick.

Ros. 'Tis 'long of you that spur me with such questions.

Ber. Your wit's too hot, it speeds too fast, 'twill tire.

Ros. Not till it leave the rider in the mire.

Or else there are instances where characters spout rather tired poetry, if they spout poetry at all, but it's perfectly in keeping with their character, and thus is very true to life:

Yet here, Laertes! aboard, aboard, for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stay'd for. There; my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell: my blessing season this in thee!

"I personally read Shakespeare for the poetry, and skip over the boring bits. But that brings to mind another question - how many Shakespeares have we not read?"

In this case, probably all of them, because the "poetry" cannot exist without the "boring bits" xP Not that I would recommend The Two Gentlemen of Verona to anyone....

And maybe that's my answer to the larger sense of the question, too. Few of us so barely read Shakespeare, we barely consider his works as an organic whole, or his works in the context of other works of the era, or his works as carefully read by others. We read his four hundred year old plays once or twice and think, "Well, I've read him", immediately moving on, if we even bother to read each play in its entirety, so that the question of other Shakespeares ends up reading like an excuse for idleness. Hand over the care for those lost Shakespeares to those who actually know Shakespeare, who in habitually trudging through the boring bits find his poetry all the more poetic: that we can't recognize even our one Shakespeare now means we're not at all equipped to recognize his potential peers. Not that my goal is not to be an idler.

busker · 01-27-2026, 08:33 PM

Thanks for the detailed answer
I envy your life, at least in this area.

I must clarify that I’ve been reading Shakespeare a long time, though I haven’t read the entire canon
I didn’t think that his early plays were crap. I found The Winter’s Tale awful, while I liked Love’s Labour’s Lost. I also enjoyed Two Gentlemen, particularly its famous Sylvia Passage, well before Gwyneth Paltrow made it film-popular. I didn’t care much for Hamlet and never understood the appeal of King Lear, with its over the top melodrama. Macbeth was brilliant, and Othello was the summit, followed by Troilus. I adored JC and Antony and C. And loved the great comedies, not including Midsummers Night in that. I found The Tempest underwhelming and Cymbeline unreadable. I was ambivalent on MfM and haven’t read All’s Well. Nor the Falstaff plays. Nor the histories. And so on.

But that’s just my preferences. Not saying I’m an expert on the matter

Do you feel that your education is automatically Eurocentric as a result of your choices? Or is there a plan to broaden your horizons at some point? Does your Filipino background make it any easier to understand the Egyptians, for instance?

milo · 01-27-2026, 09:02 PM

(01-27-2026, 05:03 PM)busker Wrote: In physics, we don’t study the Principia. Sure, people know of it and study Newtonian mechanics, but not what Newton wrote. In cinema, Orson Welles is studied only by students of cinema and then promptly forgotten. Artists don’t labour over how Leonardo mixed his oils. All those are historical curiosities. Batsmen don’t try to emulate the three W’s. They’re just better these days.

I have already read ahead so I know this is not a great argument - Newton's charm wasn't in his writing. People certainly watch Orson Welles films. Painters may not labor over da Vinci's oil mixing technique (though scholars do ) but I bet they study his use of space, etc . . .

Quote:But in literature, we actually read Shakespeare and Milton. Why do we read Shakespeare? His plots are contrived, and theatrical dialogue is the opposite of real life. If we are to read him for the poetry of his plays, as some have argued, then what are we to make of:

people still view art as well. You are comparing the creation of media to the consumption of media.

Quote: It pleased the King his master very late
To strike at me, upon his misconstruction;
When he, compact, and flattering his displeasure,
Tripped me behind; being down, insulted, railed,
And put upon him such a deal of man
That worthied him, got praises of the King
For him attempting who was self-subdued;
And in the fleshment of this ⟨dread⟩ exploit,
Drew on me here again.

It is torturous, long winded yackery. No doubt, being a stage man, this dialogue would’ve done well for the players of his day, but how are we to read it?
How do we read the ancients? Typically, as alien writers from a different planet.
Antigone is more interesting when read sitting in a theatre in Halikarnos than in the library.

How should we read Shakespeare today, then? I personally read Shakespeare for the poetry, and skip over the boring bits. But that brings to mind another question - how many Shakespeares have we not read?

You can listen to salieri and realise that Mozart wasn’t some unique hot house genius who created the only Melodies of their kind. He was a genius, but many of his Melodies were similar to other tunes of the day. Have we heard all of them? No, not even the ones that survive. Perhaps Shakespeare had many peers whose works were simply not collected and published neatly in a folio. I don’t mean Marlowe and Kyd, I mean writers who just weren’t preserved.

There has been a ton of work and theories dedicated to this kind of concept. He definitely wasn't the only one but he is pretty much accepted as one of the best writers of the Renaissance period.

A lot of it is no longer enjoyable to read to modern readers. I have read what Shakespeare I was required to read and then some highlighted passages. It's a chore. I can still recognize the genius behind it. I recently read an essay by Eliot trashing Hamlet from a time when that would have been considered edgy and cool. Trashing Shakespeare in writing is like trashing the Beatles - there is always somebody who thinks they are being contrary by having taste different from the masses.

Interestingly enough - I knew a writer who was really into Shakespeare's Sonnets which are pretty universally agreed to be mediocre so I have read a couple dozen of those and - honestly - they are better than I expected.

busker · 01-28-2026, 05:50 AM

The Newton example was to illustrate that the Cliffs notes of what a great person did is enough in the case of science. However, it can be very instructive to read how a particular proof was derived. The thought process followed can train our own hypothesis formation skills. It’s just that we don’t do that.

The consumption of art can be for its instructional “how to” value, for its simple enjoyment, for what it teaches us about a former time, or because it establishes a common cultural grammar, like history. There is no conversation without the past or past traditions informing it.

The first I argue has no merit when looking at something done hundreds of years ago.
The second I park.
The third is valid, though of interest only to a minority
The fourth is entirely valid, but for that we don’t need any more than the Cliffs notes

Let us return to the second. This is what I am not certain about. I enjoy reading Shakespeare, for the poetry of his plays. Drama as poetry. But he is a much diminished influence as a result

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