For non-anglo anons, how is Shakespeare regarded in your country? Do you read him in school?

For non-anglo anons, how is Shakespeare regarded in your country? Do you read him in school?

The big guy who inspired everyone. Even bigger than Goethe.

Yes, we do read him, but not a lot. Like three plays and one or two sonnets if I recall correctly. I believe it was Macbeth, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet, not sure which sonnets were read back in school.

General attitude ... hmmm ... mostly everyone heard of him, but I think only about 10% read some of his works, and of those 10% about 80% probably only read R&J.

tl;dr: Read in school, still generally unknown but for Romeo and Juliet.

It was an optional author in my highschool. But lot of students chose Poe or Wilde instead. I read most of the tragedies in junior high - in spanish, then pick it up again in college (in english this time) and since then I've read and re-read Hamlet and The Tempest many, many times.

Not even talked about. No one seemed to be interested in him.

Romeo & Juliet in middle school, Hamlet in high school. Theatrefags appreciate him, but in the general public the focus is on the four major tragedies, and they tend to get produced the most. The comedies, histories and the sonnets are completely out of the spotlight if you're not a literature major or an EFL major (top kek), and you probably couldn't get away with quoting a line from any of those and acting like anyone should know what the hell you're talking about.

Probably understandable since for a lot of his plays the beauty may actually be more in the poetry than in the drama itself, and obviously, not reading something in the original language is dumb.

Thomas Dabbs, professor of British literature in Aoyama Gakuin University, states that Shakespeare is "the most well-known foreign author in Japanese schools." However, he, according to Dabbs, "has been imported poorly" for various reason. Dabbs further states that "unless the Shakespeare text is studied in terms of its function as moral education in the West, there cannot be successful encounters with the culture of Shakespeare" (6).

Dabbs, Teaching Shakespeare in Japan

It would be helpful to state what country you're from...

I'm Slovenia.

We had a few lessons about him and his works in our English class, we also had lessons about the works of Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde.

Here in Flanders he's seen as a great writer and a lot of people know his works. We don't really have big writers like Shakespeare in our history.

>our history.
what history
it's just a dutch, austrian or spanish, or even french province

Portugal here
We don't read him in school but obviously his name and his work is recognized

>its function as moral education in the West
wut

I guess my western teachers didn't teach it right either.

Like , I read both Romeo & Juliet and Hamlet translated into Spanish when I went to school in El Salvador. There's plenty of people aware he's the major English writer, what with English sometimes being referred to as "la lengua de Shakespeare" (Shakespeare's tongue).

People here barely read Brazilian literature.

Belgium began in 1830. Are you telling me that in 186 years no history happened on that soil. Do you think that before Belgium was created there wasn't anything there? How can you be on Veeky Forums and be this hard of a pleb concerning basic European history. FUckin ANGLO EDUCATION STRIKES AgAIN, every single dya i have to fucking swallow this dumb shit n this fucking monglian pottery website


REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Thanks for triggering me

Try being born in a real country instead of a buffer state next time.

>""""""""""""""""real"""""""""""""""" country
what might that be the """"""united""""" kingdom or the """"""united"""""" states, m8 all countries are imaginairy borders on a piece of land. These borders can shift as easy as they were drawn. Just take a look at all the countries that were made/united in the 19th century.

Age isn't what makes a country real or not. This is determined by its place in the world and its self-determined identity. "Countries" like Belgium and Ukraine are just useful constructs created by actual powers to simplify the geopolitical landscape.

For all the foreign anons who say "yes but only a few plays/major tragedies/etc." be aware that it's much the same in America.

The vast majority people read ~4 plays tops, one per year of high school. Some districts have middle school shakespeare here and there, and if the sonnets are read at all it's only a handful.

So really you'r enot that far behind, cause American public education is a joke

IDK about the UK

That's the same (or more than) we read in Canada. We have a pretty pathetic education system here, up to high school.

Yep. In my case was in Universal Literature which is an optative subject. We only read Hamlet, and we didn't analize very much the play. Just read it

I can't even begin to imagine reading Shakespeare translated.

I'm a native English speaker. For some time now I've been wanting to read "In Search of Lost Time." However, I've resigned myself to having to learn French first. I just couldn't bear the idea of reading Proust translated.

I feel the same way with somebody having to read Shakespeare translated. I can't imagine how that would work. How do you even begin to translate Shakespeare?

yikes lol this post

Le Ton beau de Marot

>your country
I'm at loss since I don't really know which country is mine. It is true that Shakes is a meme across different languages of Europe and that each of them has a tradition of their own of misreading shakespeare footing on what little could be savored with a hollowheaded snob's English skills at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries (when English was about as relevant as Flandrian or Swedish). As a rule of the thumb it's the tragedies that get all of the love, not the history plays and not the comedies. And commonly each national culture has an important third play of their own taught in schools in English or in Lit classes and which has absolutely got to be neither Romeo and Juliet nor Hamlet. Important sonnets similarly differ from place to place and have about as much to do with the original Shakespeare as his Romeo and Juliet had with the 15th century novella by Masuccio Salernitano (pic related).

lol, that's about as much as I read in Australian education, too.
I did get to see several plays performed live though.

Croat here

Romeo and Juliet can be read by 13 or 14 year old kids if the teacher chooses it. (My didn't.)
He is also read in gymnasiums. (16 year-olds) We read Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream (I also saw a dank staging) and several sonnets.

It's kind of annoying that atm there's almost no Shakey in theaters in the capital. There's only a shitty Othello and Hamlet that has almost nothing to do with Hamlet. And they don't perform AMSND anymore.

>Colombia

Just like other anons, said, people read in average the 3 major tragedies, he is still recognised as one of the most influential english authors of all time.

On another note you made me think that american literature is never subject of study, barely Poe.

And finally I would like to ask for the non-spanish speaking anons, how is Cervantes regarded in your country?

>how is Cervantes regarded in your country?
Croat again
Quite well, I'd say. The first translation of DQ was in the early 20th century and it's really good. A revision by an another good translator is reprinted relatively often.

He's taught at the same time as Shakespeare, we had to read the first and last ~10 chapters of DQ. (I was a nerd and read the whole thing during the summer before we were taught it.) The smarter kids actually liked it...

American here. Cervantes is highly regarded. My sixth grade Spanish teacher was the first to ever mention him, and practically every Spanish teacher since then did as well. DQ is taught in high level Spanish classes in college. After Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, DQ is probably as well known as any other foreign language classic.

fuck off, iq

sup i from da etheeopya n dat stuf doe i in gemuny now doe. he my favrt black man cuh like he wuz a piramid bak in dem ol day an shit. fuk ye we writin al dem play an al dem writin an al dem nowlege. we the best doe cuh him is wat im saying. get munny. $$$

we're a vain and pseudo intellectual people so yes, we love Shakespeare despite not being very intimate with his oeuvre

I think he's trying to say that Shakespeare has to be taught within a Western moral context, which is correct.

I took a class in Tokugawa period literature with a guy who interpreted everything through a strict Catholic lens. He claimed that every character that committed suicide was deeply flawed and reprehensible, because it was a sin. It was horrible.

Don Quixote is widely known in America, but not widely read. Most people just know the gist of it.

it's the same in the UK, we only studied Romeo and Juliet + Macbeth

Dunno. To me it seems the Tokugawa period and the Saudi moral lens will make more sense out of the suicidal misogynist Shakespeare.

In my country he is everything