What's his best work?

I love reading them aloud, but I always tire out in the beginning of the fourth act. I've seen a couple adaptations and Macbeth on stage. I agree with the difference, and after I've read each play comfortably enough to know them all as well as I know my top 10, then I'll turn to stage recordings or film adaptations. Still, they're good to read.

no he isn't the best of all time at all, He is only so well known because we formalised the English language based off his works, and the fact the British had an empire, so just spread it all over the world.

His plays all have the same kind of arc to them and a lot of the writing is so predictable. becomes tiring fast. Best of his is the first one you read

You misspelled Richard III

O T H E L L O

Comedies or Tragedies bros? Choose wisely.

Regan, Goneril, Ophelia, Rosalind, Portia

Barring Henry VI Part 1, anyone else think the Henry VI cycle + Richard III was a better read overall than the four plays that comprise the Henriad? Mainly I just have scruples over how protracted some parts were in Richard II and Henry IV Part 2, and how Henry V has one or two good speeches but is basically just Anglo propaganda. Henry IV Part 1 is still godlike though

Antony and Cleopatra?
Surely an oversight, surely at least x3.

Histories

literally just finished it for only the second time (was reading it with this thread open) Honestly, it just goes more to show the arbitrariness of ranking him, because hell yes it's damn good. Some of my favorite moments:

>Antony (to Cleopatra): Tonight we'll wander through the streets and note the qualities of people. 1.2.55-6
reminds me of me and my gf
>Cleopatra to Charmian on orders for Antony: If you find him sad, say I am dancing; if in mirth, report That I am sudden sick.
yyyyyup. Especially when Charmian says she might make him angry, and Cleopatra says if not, she will lose him.
>Pompey about learning Menas's plot: "Being done unknown, I should have found it afterwards well done, but must condemn it now. Desist, and drink.

And imagine having quotes with such magnitude on each page. I only touched on the arguably "superficial"

>shakespeare is meant to be acted, and watched, not read
>tfw you will never find the person who started this meme so you can kill him with your bare hands

it is true though

No, it is not.

Sure thing, drama should be watched in performance or in recording, but saying that reading a play is incorrect because "you are not meant to do that"? What the fuck does that even mean? That's completely idiotic. Why do you think the First Folio was printed? Do you think every person who has had contact with Shakespeare had it only and exclusively through performance? Or that one is a more legitimate experience than the other? They aren't, and if you think they are you clearly don't know what you are talking about. Reading the text and watching/listening to a performance are complimentary experiences. And this is true for any other play.

>inb4 but muh scripts! do you also read movie scripts??????????

No I don't, but that's because I don't know where to find them, but it would be a nice way to compare the text and the movie. And in any case, drama and film are different mediums even if they resemble each other a lot. You wouldn't be taking into account that Shakespeare wrote his plays as poetry. Considering that, would you say that poetry is not meant to be read but only and exclusively listened to?

Literally no one who has said "Shakespeare is meant to be watched and performed, not read" never meant DON'T read the scripts...

ever meant*

That's precisely what it means.

that's what the words mean, but that's never anybodies argument. save yourself from some stress, understand that people mean that the plays should be watched and performed over simply being read like books.

Do you also read music scores instead of listening to them? fag

>not doing this

lmao what a pleb

>Henry VI
literally the worst of his histories

is King Lear good or just a meme?

King Lear is beautiful and horrendously tragic.

Read it and find out.

is there a good summary somewhere?

Shut up fag. Shakespeare is the English Homer. He chose his words for the ear.

What said is true. Shakespeare's plays are meant to be acted and heard aloud. Your "No, it is not." is absolutely incorrect. They are plays. And no one said reading a play is incorrect. only said it was a different experience.

Go lick your mother's vagina user.

Drama should be viewed and read (if interesting enough), stop being such extremists lol

>He chose his words for the ear.

Thanks for pointing out the obvious, you blithering idiot. He was a poet, that's what good poets usually do. Comparing Shakespeare to Homer in that sense is superflous. Do you even read Homer in the original?

>only said it was a different experience.

That's basically what I said, but they are also complimentary, not merely "different".

If you can't add anything to the conversation don't even try to post a retort, you imbecile.

That's what I said, but some other idiots can't even understand that (except this user , but he also ended up saying what I had said).

So then it would not be inconsistent to say that his plays are meant to be acted, but are better read.

As a britbong I'd prefer to see early modern English performed in English by none Brits (or at least 'regional' English actors)...the grand Lawrence Olivier hammy stuff that pretty much everywhere both alters the tone of the work and the language itself: Shakespeare was from the west midlands and spoke and thought in a flat-vowelled English that was probably more similar to certain traditional accents in the US (Virginia or somewhere where you have an old European population) or the English or the orth of England now. Assonance is a big part of spoken poetry and it changes quickly and significantly enough to obscure the text. The Globe do an 'OP' (original pronunciation) performance that looks amazing).

why can't we ever just talk about the plays themselves

we have nothing to say really

Not that user but I would if I could. The people who can say it is a great experience.

Make a thread about a play, then. This is a thread about Shakespeare's work, and it isn't surprising where it has wandered to.

just finished it. It was damn good. Even in the beginning of his career we're getting memorable lines and callbacks and flashforwards to recurring themes and flashes of Ovid. That being said, this followed by Shrew and both having tons of Ovid influence is something to note. I love the fact that it's not women loving men more when the love isn't requited, but it's rather and more often that men are prone to love something else once they themselves are beloved. Moreover, Silvia was faithful to Valentine.

Can someone please explain what it means for something to be Shakespearean?

Holy shit are you me?

read and you can probably figure this out on your own.

I've read Shakespeare but I don't really know what makes one work Shakespearean or not. Is it when they have monologues and stuff?

language, a similar cosmology of forces that the characters are influenced by, plot and drama, monologues sure...

Good thing that I subvocalize and picture what I read so i don't have to watch his dramas, reading them is enough :)

Diction, recurrent themes, metaphors and symbols, the structure of the dramas, some philosophical, political and sociological preocupations that recur in the works, etc.

The same can be said about other words like that, for example kafkaesque, joycean, etc. It just means that something shows the above things related to an author's work.

I think Shakespearean is almost always used to describe a certain more intense/archaic poetic or prose style, filled with more old-fashioned sentence structure and vibrant language with emphasis on metaphors, particularly digressing from the course of a sentence to flesh out a metaphor. Melville, for instance.

>what should I re-read?

Richard II, LLL, Troilus, Measure for Measure, Coriolanus are all good enough to merit rereads depending on how recently you read them. Especially Richard II

i vibe with this hard

I feel like the entire Henriad is worth a mention as Shakespeare's greatest work, insofar as it can be considered one big story. This may be because I'm biased in favor of Hal. He is my favorite Shakespearean character, and it's not close.

He's only considered the greatest by English speaking fags

oh yeah and who else even comes close? Dante? Goethe? Pushkin? don't make me laugh

the only other writer who might be, MAYBE, in the same category as Shakespeare, is Homer, and even Homer is a distant second

>I think Shakespearean is almost always used to describe a certain more intense/archaic poetic or prose style, filled with more old-fashioned sentence structure and vibrant language
>Shakespearean
>archaic poetic or prose style
>old-fashioned sentence structure

your lack of erudition is showing kid. read Spenser's The Faerie Queene if you want "archaic poetic style" and see how different the language is from Shakespeare

Bloom pls go and stay go

who do u think is better

1: Hamlet

2: No

3: Yes

you need to read Antony and Cleopatra

why does everyone hate Hamlet bros its not fair

>Henry VI
is this like the meme on /mu/ to claim [untitled] is the best track on aeroplane?

King Lear without a doubt

>Why do you think the First Folio was printed?

so that other theatre companies could put on shakespeare plays. that's why it includes stage directions etc- exit pursued by a bear and all that- rather than just details of locations

to indicate the status of the owner. the book was expensive in its time and only 750 were printed. and in common with most books of the time it was supplied just as the paper, people still needed to get it bound to match their libraries

to produce an authoritative version in place of the cheap knockoffs that were floating around at the time

to make money for the printers

the one thing it definitely wasn't printed for was to give shakespeare to a wide readership. that didn't happen for a number of years. and in a time when most people were illiterate the readership wouldn't have been particularly wide anyway. performances were still the way most people experienced shakespeare at the time.

Has anybody here read Cymbeline? I've heard talk about it simultaneously being his most difficult yet worst play. Can anyone attest?

>Hamletmachine

Hamlet may be his best work. Or Lear.
Don't know.
He's the greatest the west has produced, at least, probably the greatest period.

It's more complex than a lot of his plays in terms of multiple plot lines. Definitely not his worst, falls behind the major tragedies though. It's worth reading and you won't have a problem with it if you've read any of his other plays.