All hail the greatest of all poets

He was a better playwright than a poet

>he fell for the playwright/poet dichotomy

kek

His plays are simple constructions that fail to rise above the form prescribed by the theatrical era he operated in, and therefore can only be appreciated as plays in the context provided by his contemporaries. Read Brecht, Ibsen, Miller, Williams, etc, who, unlike Shakespeare, actually went to great lengths to use the many possibilities of the stage and of the narrative structure itself, and carved out a dramatic identity for themselves with their work, which was less poetic but more dramatically inventive than Shakespeare's.

His poetry, I don't need to mount a defence of. The other posters on this thread have done it for me.

This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say "To-morrow is Saint Crispian."
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say "These wounds I had on Crispin's day."
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words—
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester—
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Shakespeare would be writing Game of Thrones if he were alive

That's not a bad assumption, actually.

His prose would be a fuckton better than Martin's, though.

Brecht's ideology is significantly better than his actual output. I honestly can't even begin to understand why you'd place Ibsen above Shakespeare. Miller is good, but too specific. He lacks the universal appeal of Shakespeare. Williams I could almost see, but he too is too influenced by his own life.

I also think that it's preposterous to claim that Shakespeare didn't carve out a dramatic identity for himself, especially comparing his work to that of his contemporaries and those who came before him.

The one writer you could really place on Shakespeare's level is Goethe. No one else.

Yep. Richmond/Henry Tudor speaking in reference to the Yorkist Richard III... They go on to say that he has no friends and so on, it's grating to hear all of this, especially before the "My Kingdom for a horrrrrse!" yammer. He's wrapped himself up in his errors, and it's really a moment of horror.

I love his falconry metaphors. Shit's fantastic in Taming of the Shrew.

no he wouldn't

Act V, Scene two I think?

Al Pacino did 'Looking For Richard' a few years back, although I'm not certain if the play was captured in full or not. Does anyone know?

I haven't read shakes since highschool. Based off that passage I think I'd enjoy him a hell of a lot more. That's great

Also in Macbeth:

"A falcon, towering in her pride of place,
Was by a mousing owl hawk' day and killed."
(Old Man)

What did you do for him today, Veeky Forums?

I just translated sonnet XVIII into Portuguese. I may also translated some other during the rest of the day.

My Complete Shakespeare is not here with me, unfortunately. I feel like rereading The Tempest.

I just want you to know that if you do not consider John Gielgud's renditions of Shakespeare the best ones ever made then you have problems in the brain and troubles in the soul, because they are.
youtube.com/watch?v=BCyjXJ9oogg

That's not il miglior fabbro

I'm, of course, talking about Ezra Pound, not Dante

Beckett was a better playwright.

fite me irl m8

And yet, at thy last breath, with mindless note
The borough clocks but samely tongued the hour,
The Avon just as always glassed the tower,
Thy age was published on thy passing-bell
But in due rote
With other dwellers' deaths accorded a like knell.

And at the strokes some townsman (met, maybe,
And thereon queried by some squire's good dame
Driving in shopward) may have given thy name,
With, "Yes, a worthy man and well-to-do;
Though, as for me,
I knew him but by just a neighbour's nod, 'tis true.

"I' faith, few knew him much here, save by word,
He having elsewhere led his busier life;
Though to be sure he left with us his wife."
- "Ah, one of the tradesmen's sons, I now recall . . .
Witty, I've heard . . .
We did not know him . . . Well, good-day. Death comes to all."

>All hail the greatest language craftsman of all time.
It sure isn't Gassday today.

The difference is that Shakespeare's more important plays often focus on moral dilemmas, which makes for the highest form of drama. You don't see anything like that in modern TV.

Excellent taste. The Tempest is my favourite play of his.

I'm re-reading Hamlet. I think I didn't really get the play first time round.

>You don't see anything like that in modern TV

You never seen The Wire, The Sopranos?

Cervantes > Shakespeare

Maybe earlier Shakespeare, the guy who wrote Richard III and Titus Andronicus. After that there's really much in common between Hamlet and Macbeth, and Game of Thrones, other than lol violence.

One of the greatest speeches I've ever read

Shakespeare? I seem to know the name.

Those characters don't exist in a moral landscape. Breaking Bad would be a better example.

Actually Friar Lawrence practically is the original Walter White. If he sold a drug to Star-Crossed Lovers, it would quickly become apparent.

But you need a Friar, or a Teacher or some kind, someone who exists in a moral environment, or a High Culture. Individual morality in another context has little meaning.

>I read Shakespeare directly I have finished writing. When my mind is agape and red-hot. Then it is astonishing. I never yet knew how amazing his stretch and speed and word coining power is, until I felt it utterly outpace and outrace my own, seeming to start equal and then I see him draw ahead and do things I could not in my wildest tumult and utmost press of mind imagine. Even the less known plays are written at a speed that is quicker than anybody else’s quickest; and the words drop so fast one can’t pick them up. Look at this. “Upon a gather’d lily almost wither’d.” (That is a pure accident. I happen to light on it.) Evidently the pliancy of his mind was so complete that he could furbish out any train of thought; and, relaxing, let fall a shower of such unregarded flowers. Why then should anyone else attempt to write? This is not “writing” at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

-Virginia Woolf

great! thank your for this quote. Where did you find it?

It's from her diary.

I've got some more:

John Keats: "Shakespeare led a life of allegory: his works are the comments on it."

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park: "Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution"

Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Now, literature, philosophy and thought are Shakspearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see."

Samuel Johnson: "Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places … by the peculiarities of studies or professions … or by the accidents of temporary fashions or temporary opinions; they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find…. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species."

Harold Clarke Goddard: "Shakespeare is like life. There are almost as many ways of taking him as there are ways of living."

>hawk' day
You mean hawk' at

>Didn't read Hamlet in HS
>Refuse to read it for a few years because it was "too famous" and I wanted to look through some of Shakespeare's less known works
>Finally got around to Hamlet last year

Holy shit, it was so good. i lack the words, really, to give it justice at all.

Nice that you didn't have to read it in hs. A lot of people do and that ruins it forever for them, along with a lot of other literature

>>Refuse to read it for a few years because it was "too famous" and I wanted to look through some of Shakespeare's less known works

W E W

Ceaser might not be his best play, but goddamn is the "Friends, Romans, countrymen" speech by Mark Antony one of the best speeches I've ever read.

Plus, Marlon Brando did it so, so well.

I watched the Royal Shakespeare Company celebration from my local indie cinema.

>couldn't cop tickets :(

Ben Brooks is better

quoting more rare lines from Shakespeare's lesser known works:

For Orpheus' lute was strung with poets' sinews,
Whose golden touch could soften steel and stones,
Make tigers tame and huge leviathans
Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands.

Or, as the snail, whose tender horns being hit,
Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain,
And there, all smother'd up, in shade doth sit,
Long after fearing to creep forth again;
So, at his bloody view, her eyes are fled
Into the deep dark cabins of her head:

Thou art a slave, whom Fortune's tender arm 1945
With favour never clasp'd; but bred a dog.
Hadst thou, like us from our first swath, proceeded
The sweet degrees that this brief world affords
To such as may the passive drugs of it
Freely command, thou wouldst have plunged thyself 1950
In general riot; melted down thy youth
In different beds of lust; and never learn'd
The icy precepts of respect, but follow'd
The sugar'd game before thee. But myself,
Who had the world as my confectionary, 1955
The mouths, the tongues, the eyes and hearts of men
At duty, more than I could frame employment,
That numberless upon me stuck as leaves
Do on the oak, hive with one winter's brush
Fell from their boughs and left me open, bare 1960
For every storm that blows: I, to bear this,
That never knew but better, is some burden:
Thy nature did commence in sufferance, time
Hath made thee hard in't. Why shouldst thou hate men?
They never flatter'd thee:

MARK ANTONY
Cold-hearted toward me?
CLEOPATRA
Ah, dear, if I be so,
From my cold heart let heaven engender hail,
And poison it in the source; and the first stone
Drop in my neck: as it determines, so
Dissolve my life! The next Caesarion smite!
Till by degrees the memory of my womb,
Together with my brave Egyptians all,
By the discandying of this pelleted storm,
Lie graveless, till the flies and gnats of Nile
Have buried them for prey!

Then, since this earth affords no joy to me,
But to command, to cheque, to o'erbear such
As are of better person than myself,
I'll make my heaven to dream upon the crown,
And, whiles I live, to account this world but hell,
Until my mis-shaped trunk that bears this head
Be round impaled with a glorious crown.
And yet I know not how to get the crown,
For many lives stand between me and home:
And I,--like one lost in a thorny wood,
That rends the thorns and is rent with the thorns,
Seeking a way and straying from the way;
Not knowing how to find the open air,
But toiling desperately to find it out,--
Torment myself to catch the English crown:
And from that torment I will free myself,
Or hew my way out with a bloody axe.
Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,
And cry 'Content' to that which grieves my heart,
And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions.
I'll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall;
I'll slay more gazers than the basilisk;
I'll play the orator as well as Nestor,
Deceive more slily than Ulysses could,
And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.
I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.
Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?
Tut, were it farther off, I'll pluck it down.

O, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?
Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast?
Or wallow naked in December snow
By thinking on fantastic summer's heat?
O, no! the apprehension of the good
Gives but the greater feeling to the worse:
Fell sorrow's tooth doth never rankle more
Than when he bites, but lanceth not the sore.

If thou didst but consent
To this most cruel act, do but despair;
And if thou want'st a cord, the smallest thread
That ever spider twisted from her womb
Will serve to strangle thee, a rush will be a beam
To hang thee on; or wouldst thou drown thyself,
Put but a little water in a spoon,
And it shall be as all the ocean,
Enough to stifle such a villain up.
I do suspect thee very grievously.

The life, the right and truth of all this realm
Is fled to heaven; and England now is left
To tug and scamble and to part by the teeth
The unowed interest of proud-swelling state.
Now for the bare-pick'd bone of majesty
Doth dogged war bristle his angry crest
And snarleth in the gentle eyes of peace:
Now powers from home and discontents at home
Meet in one line; and vast confusion waits,
As doth a raven on a sick-fall'n beast,
The imminent decay of wrested pomp.

Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself
Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought.

Good morrow, masters; put your torches out:
The wolves have prey'd; and look, the gentle day,
Before the wheels of Phoebus, round about
Dapples the drowsy east with spots of grey.

>"I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: "King Lear," "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium... Several times I read the dramas and the comedies and historical plays, and I invariably underwent the same feelings: repulsion, weariness, and bewilderment. At the present time, before writing this preface, being desirous once more to test myself, I have, as an old man of seventy-five, again read the whole of Shakespeare, including the historical plays, the "Henrys," "Troilus and Cressida," "The Tempest", "Cymbeline", and I have felt, with even greater force, the same feelings,—this time, however, not of bewilderment, but of firm, indubitable conviction that the unquestionable glory of a great genius which Shakespeare enjoys, and which compels writers of our time to imitate him and readers and spectators to discover in him non-existent merits,—thereby distorting their esthetic and ethical understanding,—is a great evil, as is every untruth."
Tolstoy on Shakespeare.

Pretty great.

Fuck off shitspeare

Ben Jonson was his superior in every way.

Macbeth has definitely stuck with me, but the rest sort of rings hollow.

Macbeth is his plebbiest play m8

Milton loves it

did he read Shakespeare in English?

Yes, Tolstoy was a genius. He taught himself Ancient Greek.

Anyway, the reason he couldn't bear Shakespeare is because Tolstoy was a religious moralist and Shakespeare an existentialist nihilist skeptic.

Ha Tolstoy what a fag

Macbeth is fucking great you heathen.

What a joke, Shakespeare is constantly revisiting The Epistle To The Ephesians in his work, that's the whole point of re-introducing Diana as a figure of myth. Shakespeare named both of his daughters after the Catholic apocrypha and appears to have lost much of Ben Jonson's clique for having the wrong associations. He purchased Blackfriars Gatehouse.

There is also some indication that he loathed Elizabeth, and was able to stage better plays after she died.

thank you for this:

got more?

Tolstoy ultimately rejected Christianity, of course, which I think is also partly responsible for his dislike of Shakespeare. Shakespeare doesn't explicitly reaffirm Christian values because he doesn't feel the need to do so. Tolstoy was obsessed with morality, Shakespeare barely treats on it. There are any number of reasons why he doesn't, but it is what it is.

O, no, my dream was lengthen'd after life;
O, then began the tempest to my soul,
Who pass'd, methought, the melancholy flood,
With that grim ferryman which poets write of,
Unto the kingdom of perpetual night.
The first that there did greet my stranger soul,
Was my great father-in-law, renowned Warwick;
Who cried aloud, 'What scourge for perjury
Can this dark monarchy afford false Clarence?'
And so he vanish'd: then came wandering by
A shadow like an angel, with bright hair
Dabbled in blood; and he squeak'd out aloud,
'Clarence is come; false, fleeting, perjured Clarence,
That stabb'd me in the field by Tewksbury;
Seize on him, Furies, take him to your torments!'
With that, methoughts, a legion of foul fiends
Environ'd me about, and howled in mine ears
Such hideous cries, that with the very noise
I trembling waked, and for a season after
Could not believe but that I was in hell,
Such terrible impression made the dream.

Meh. If you want to believe Shakespeare was Catholic you will find the evidence to support that. God knows enough people have claimed he was gay or Italian or the bloody Earl of Oxford too.

I read his complete works in one year, though I never got around to Noble Kinsmen or whatever it's called because I had trouble finding it at the time. He was certainly a genius and no writer from any other time comes close to meeting it. Unfortunately I rarely feel the urge to read the Bard's work these days.

I'm not 'wanting to believe' he was Catholic, but I do want to pin him down somewhat. The record stands open for anyone to read.

For example, if you said that he was potentially homosexual, you'd be obliged to admit he was married to a woman, and that he had children -- if you were being intellectually honest! And you'd have to admit there are no homosexual scenes in his work. Shakespeare was not politically intangible, or a knob to hang ultra-modern beliefs upon. He was not you or me, and he wasn't neutral either.

Someone who has read the History Plays is at least obliged to view his characterization of the Wars of The Roses as uneven; the product of a quite partial, and lively observer. At the same time, no reader is obligated to affirm this account.

Let me get this straight.This shakespeare nigger is so stupid he thinks snails have horns?

I'm trying to do a modern adaptation of Macbeth.
What could I swap out for a kingdom?

Please don't.

A company/corporation. Some sort of local government council board. The actual government, be it fed or state. This isn't hard

A billionaire whose like a mayor could own most of a city?

I've thought about it being a company, but I don't know anything about how big companies operate and I'm not sure if I'd be able to film in a big company building.

A Macbeth adaptation about the US government would be amazing, but I definitely can't make that.

This. I'm surprised he never gets attention in Veeky Forums

watch the ethan hawke hamlet

I plan to, but I'm not going to use the original text.

Then there's no point.

Pull a 90's Romeo + Juliet.
I unironically like that one a ton.

No, I don't see the point in adapting and using the original text, it's dumb.
If I was going to use the original text what's the point of modernizing it?
How many times do people want to see the same thing over and over? It's boring.

oh so you're a pleb

gotcha

kill yourself famalam

>>he

>How many times do people want to see the same thing over and over? It's boring.
>About Shakespeare
>About anything timeless
>Needing to modernize something to dumb down your audience

Consider suicide

It's not dumbing down, it's about the fact there's a different setting, different context, etc.
Do you hate The Lion King for not using the original text of Hamlet?

>Needing to modernize something to dumb down your audience

Thats what Shakespeare did though

the metaphor's the thing not the play

shakespeare is not revered for his stories. he's revered for his mastery of language

The problem with Tolstoy and Shakespeare is the huge difference between these two writers. Shakespeare excelled in language, and did not mind sacrificing the verisimilitude and reality in favor of the verbal beauty. If an idea grabbed his mind in the middle of a speech and scene, he was determinate to use that idea, to exhibit that metaphor, even if it was not relevant to the plot or faithful to the character that was speaking, and only for the pleasure and pride of modeling beauty in verses. No one ever spoke like Shakespeare's characters: the human race that he modeled is artificial in this respect: they are as human beings who had took steroids for the mind, who had the brain areas related to language and verbal thinking augmented by some divine touch. Shakespeare makes all humans (even mediocre ones) speak as Gods, as D. H. Lawrence said:

“When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder
That such trivial people should muse and thunder
In such lovely language.”

It even seems that some kind of strange metaphorical-parasite have invaded Shakespeare’s brain, laid a multitude of eggs on his crumbs and usurped the synapses of his neurons, in a way that he only could think thorough images, trough metaphor and similes: every fiber and streamer of thought at birth is already mounted by an image, that rides it. In his plays one metaphor tread on the heels of another who has just broke out of its shell, one simile breaths on the neck of another simile that has just been born.

Moreover, 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 captivate the attention of public (and finding nice opportunities to forge brilliant metaphors and similes)

Tolstoy, however, was a fanatic for realism. He fought hard to make his characters speak realistically, not with an bookish breath and rhetorical exhalation. He also studied deeply the history of the periods and places depicted in his works; in reality, most of the things he portrayed were taken from his own life-experience. It is common to see Tolstoy, when he praises the art of someone, using the words: "very true, very real" - to be close to truth was one of the greatest virtues of an artist in his view.

Also, Shakespeare did not have any particular philosophy or religion: he changed his views and beliefs according to the play he was writing. Tolstoy, however, as he grew older, started to increasingly assert his doctrines, even in his art.

And finally, we cannot forget the literary envy. Tolstoy was a very proud and egocentric men (when he was a teenage student and got bad grades he was so furious with the boldness of the teachers in affronting him, a count, that he look inside his room and cried of rage for some days; he was always calling any man who said something against him for a duel when he was young; he said in his diary that he liked more to read bad books because they made he feel better with himself because good books made him angry and desperate

if that were true you'd be all jizzing over his sonnets and not his plays. but poetry is too difficult for you plebs ain't it.

i love his sonnets faggot speak for yourself

Please, user. b8 harder. Hamlet is the best novel, poem, and play ever written.

William watches you wank

Good posts

I've always thought the crux of the whole Tolstoy/Shakespeare debacle to be found in Lev's having read the plays instead of seeing them performed by competent actors (or at the very least orating it aloud to himself).

Shakespeare comes alive on the tongue, he's half dead in your head.

Maybe that's because I have sex with women.