I remember a professor of my said that the dialogue in Shakespeare was not how people actually spoke...

I remember a professor of my said that the dialogue in Shakespeare was not how people actually spoke, and that his characters were "super geniuses".

Do you agree?

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you had professors? lucky bastard. all i've ever had were fucking ketchup packets and a few turtle faced librarians who welcomed me into the YA section even though i was 35 and a half.

He literally invented the human.
Every thought you have could not have been if it weren't for shakespeare.

it's not enough i'll never be a genius, but now there's fucking super geniuses out there floating around? fuck me.

lol

ITT: What is drama?

Easy now, Mr. Bloom.

Prof. Obvious?

I always speak in iambic pentameter desu. All my shitposts are in iambs as well.

when i read shakespeare i am struck with wonder
that such trivial people should muse and thunder
in such lovely language

Your shitpost does confuse me so.
Iambic meter looks this way you see.

It's essentially Infinite Jest.

I have done transcription work and if it only taught me one thing it is that actual people do not speak the way fictional characters speak.

As for being super geniuses, the reason is that the dialogue of fictional characters aren't spontaneous like that or real people, it is premeditated and usually carefully crafted. Naturally then it would appear to be of a higher calibre than actual speech.

Only the elites in his plays spoke in Iambic pentameter.

Yeah he's totally right. You think a fucking brick head veteran like Macbeth could have mused the first existential thoughts on his own?

Basically the elite speak in poetry, and the commoners speak in amazingly quick-witted gab, but not too far divorced from the speech of the day. Think of Joss Whedon dialogue in Buffy, or the repartee on Gilmore Girls or Frasier: it's the way you might speak for a perfect few minutes some night, but not normal. Shakespeare was long before naturalism and realism in theatre!

Frasier is fucking great tqbh

Er, um, y-yeah it is not real dialogue, you know, real dialogue's all messy l-like this, heh.

shakespeare is overrated.

ur overrated

He is like Aeschylus:

Aeschylus was the inventor of the grand style of tragic diction. He was the first, not only to exalt and ennoble the spirit of tragedy, but also to clothe it in a form of suitable magnificence, and to "build up the structure of splended phrases." His language, which we are now to consider, serves as a fitting vehicle for the expression of his mighty conceptions. It is cast in the same majestic mould as his heroes and heroines. In splendour and impressiveness it towers above the level of common speech just as much as his Prometheus and his Clytemnestra surpass in greatness ordinary human nature.

Among the means by which this effect is produced one of the most obvious is the pomp and volume and resonance of the phraseology. His verse is a massive structure, built together with materials of imposing size and strength. Words as "huge as Parnes or Lycabettus" impart a sonorous gravity to the diction. When the resources of existing language are insufficient for his purpose, he uses the licence of genius to create a new poetical vocabulary of his own. Out of the surviving plays and fragments nearly a thousand words have been collected which appear to be the invention of Aeschylus. Long compound adjectives, and nouns and verbs of impressive bulk, are coined with a freedom which could only have been possible in a language of great flexibility, and at an early stage of its literary development. Weighted with materials such as these his diction approaches, in majestic grandeur of expression, the utmost limits of which human speech is capable. In the words of Dionysius, it resembles one of those vast piles of Cyclopean masonry, built of huge and unhewn blocks, before which the smooth and polished workmanship of later buildings sinks into insignificance.

This pomp of language is enlivened throughout by a wealth and brilliance of imagination which has only been equalled, among dramatists, by Shakespeare. Metaphors, similes, figures, and images come streaming from his mind in endless profusion, and without the least appearance of effort. Figurative diction, in his case, is not an acquired habit, but an instinctive mode of expression. His thoughts naturally tend to clothe themselves in concrete form, by means of some flashing image or vivid picture, which stamps them upon the mind. Hence the extraordinary vigour and incisiveness of his style.

theatredatabase.com/ancient/aeschylus_007.html

I don't see that as a negative, a criticism, or a topic worth conversation.
No idea why people are so excited about hearing people stutter and speak like they're at a bar.

>No idea why people are so excited about hearing people stutter and speak like they're at a bar.

This. I for one adore writers like Shakespeare and Aeschylus and Melville and Nabokov, writers who make their characters speak as no human being has ever spoke.

He said nothing of iambic pentameter.

You know, the most striking feature in Shakespeare were not his ideas or his philosophy: regarding these he was completely non-original; his ideas just echoed the long established wisdom and common sense of the common people. He never created any radical and original new ideas: he was quite simplistic in this regard.

The most important characteristic of Shakespeare, what separates him from all other writers (which puts him sitting alone at the top of the mountain while even others literary genius may already be in the snowy zone, but still just climbing its edges) is his verbal inventiveness, especially his ability with metaphor (being metaphor the true meat, marrow and muscle of poetry). Aristotle said in The Poetics that: “the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.”, and Shakespeare was by far the greatest master of metaphor that ever lived.


Other great characteristic of Shakespeare was his ability to create several different characters, most of them totally alien to his personal experience. There was also his apparent lack of any particular philosophical belief and credo: he expresses several different opinions about life according to the characters who spoke the words or the atmosphere of the play. Most writers write they works trying to convey some general idea or moral (and its no shock to perceive that this idea or moral is most of the time their own vision about the world), but Shakespeare didn’t seem to care about that: he was like a chameleon, changing the colors of his mind according to the body which he impregnated at the moment. He had the poetic character that was described by Keats several years before:

>"As to the poetical Character itself (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself - it has no self - it is every thing and nothing - It has no character - it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated - It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity - he is continually in for - and filling some other Body - The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute - the poet has none; no identity - he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's Creatures. If then he has no self, and if I am a Poet, where is the Wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I not at that very instant have been cogitating on the Characters of Saturn and Ops? It is a wretched thing to confess; but is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature - how can it, when I have no nature? When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins so to press upon me that I am in a very little time annihilated - not only among Men; it would be the same in a Nursery of children"

But there also must be noted that Shakespeare characters are always artificial; they don’t sound like normal people: they are colossal, as if their brains were on steroids. 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)

And I thought until this moment that people in Elizabethan England created poetry complete with rhyming schemes in the heat of conversation.

Underrated post.

youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo

>he never created any radical and original new ideas

You got any scholarly sources to back this claim up?

Joe Gould!?

these fucking trips

Actual people repeat themselves a lot, have their own speech patterns, and typically stick to a fairly limited vocabulary.

Gaddis's dialogue in J R Carpenter's Gothic and A Frolic of His Own is pretty naturalistic for the most part.

I have read a fair amount of Shakespeare, but I am no scholar. If someone could correct or else confirm my understanding here, I'd appreciate it.

I am under the impression that while his plays were generally written so as to be entertaining to the masses, something like the plot-driven, explosion-riddled, car chase-happy movies of today, much of the dialogue and many of the jokes were intended to be understood only by the educated elite and would go over the heads of the commoners. In fact, I had someone who is extremely knowledgeable when it comes to Shakespeare's works tell me that the phrase to "go over one's head" is derived from the fact that those educated elite sat higher up in the theater and so the jokes quite literally went "over the heads" of the common people below. I did not find anything to back up or debunk this claim, although I only spent about 5 seconds looking.