Serious question. Has any writer rivaled Shakespeare for mastery of the English language?

Joyce not only mastered english, he mastered language.

Not to mention the immense popularity of the plays with common theatre-goers and the royal court alike.

Shakespeare was also a wizard

Many writers have rivaled Shakespeare in some regard or another. Many a poet since Shakespeare has demonstrated a thorough mastery of the language. But none have had Shakespeare's breadth of vision, his generous and catholic humanity. Succeeding poets have failed to match Shakespeare not because they didn't master the tongue, but because they didn't know men as well as Shakespeare knew them.

You don't even need context for this shit to be beautiful

> This she? No; this is Diomed's Cressida.
If beauty have a soul, this is not she;
If souls guide vows, if vows be sanctimonies,
If sanctimony be the god's delight,
If there be rule in unity itself,
This was not she. O madness of discourse,
That cause sets up with and against itself!
Bifold authority! where reason can revolt
Without perdition, and loss assume all reason
Without revolt: this is, and is not, Cressid.
Within my soul there doth conduce a fight
Of this strange nature, that a thing inseparate
Divides more wider than the sky and earth;
And yet the spacious breadth of this division
Admits no orifex for a point as subtle
As Ariachne's broken woof to enter.
Instance, O instance! strong as Pluto's gates:
Cressid is mine, tied with the bonds of heaven.
Instance, O instance! strong as heaven itself:
The bonds of heaven are slipp'd, dissolv'd, and loos'd;
And with another knot, five-finger-tied,
The fractions of her faith, orts of her love,
The fragments, scraps, the bits, and greasy relics
Of her o'er-eaten faith, are bound to Diomed.

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-siz'd monster of ingratitudes.
Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devour'd
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done. Perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honour bright. To have done is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mock'ry. Take the instant way;
For honour travels in a strait so narrow -
Where one but goes abreast. Keep then the path,
For emulation hath a thousand sons
That one by one pursue; if you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,
Like to an ent'red tide they all rush by
And leave you hindmost;
Or, like a gallant horse fall'n in first rank,
Lie there for pavement to the abject rear,
O'er-run and trampled on. Then what they do in present,
Though less than yours in past, must o'ertop yours;
For Time is like a fashionable host,
That slightly shakes his parting guest by th' hand;
And with his arms out-stretch'd, as he would fly,
Grasps in the corner. The welcome ever smiles,
And farewell goes out sighing. O, let not virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was;
For beauty, wit,
High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating Time.
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin-
That all with one consent praise new-born gawds,
Though they are made and moulded of things past,
And give to dust that is a little gilt
More laud than gilt o'er-dusted.
The present eye praises the present object.
Then marvel not, thou great and complete man,
That all the Greeks begin to worship Ajax,
Since things in motion sooner catch the eye
Than what stirs not. The cry went once on thee,
And still it might, and yet it may again,
If thou wouldst not entomb thyself alive
And case thy reputation in thy tent,
Whose glorious deeds but in these fields of late
Made emulous missions 'mongst the gods themselves,
And drave great Mars to faction.

{currently spamming some of Shakespeare's soliloquies & monologues & bits of poetry)

The specialty of rule hath been neglected;
And look how many Grecian tents do stand
Hollow upon this plain, so many hollow factions.
When that the general is not like the hive,
To whom the foragers shall all repair,
What honey is expected? Degree being vizarded,
Th' unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask.
The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre,
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office, and custom, in all line of order;
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthron'd and spher'd
Amidst the other, whose med'cinable eye
Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,
And posts, like the commandment of a king,
Sans check, to good and bad. But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth,
Commotion in the winds! Frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate,
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixture! O, when degree is shak'd,
Which is the ladder of all high designs,
The enterprise is sick! How could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenity and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows! Each thing melts
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe;
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead;
Force should be right; or, rather, right and wrong-
Between whose endless jar justice resides-
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself. Great Agamemnon,
This chaos, when degree is suffocate,
Follows the choking.
And this neglection of degree it is
That by a pace goes backward, with a purpose
It hath to climb. The general's disdain'd
By him one step below, he by the next,
That next by him beneath; so ever step,
Exampl'd by the first pace that is sick
Of his superior, grows to an envious fever
Of pale and bloodless emulation.
And 'tis this fever that keeps Troy on foot,
Not her own sinews. To end a tale of length,
Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength.

I've never read any Joyce. Is this a meme? I really want to know. Ulysses is in the meme trilogy after all.

Well, Joyce is 100% honestly the greatest of English writers of the 20th century. In fact he probably outdoes anybody since Shakespeare, though of course you can make an argument for Milton. Joyce considered himself a rival to Shakespeare, too, and not unjustly. The hugeness of Ulysses's vision is essentially Shakespearean (though that might be interpreted as a setback: it is a book striving to be greater than Shakespeare, while still existing in an essentially Shakespearean paradigm). Ulysses is what got me into literature. Reading it for the first time is a life-changing sort of a thing, if you really can stick with it. I believe it to be a book everyone should read.

i pray in this horrifying world you are being genuine. thank you.

Embarrassing, trying way too hard.

He had the best technical skills, he was the greatest virtuoso like Paganini or Liszt. Whether he was also the best composer of English verse isn't as clear, but he's definitely in the running.

Shakespeare understood life, Joyce only studied it. The same's true of the English language. I don't think I read a line of Joyce that was completely sincere, it was always like he was quoting somebody.

wattpad.com/user/MostlyHetero

This guy. If I wore 3D glasses while reading his works I'd be hit in the face by his words as they fly through my screen.

Milton's poetry is better. That said although his prose is based it's... a smidgen on the bloated side.

Only if you don't consider the plays in verse to be poetry (they are)

Dan Schneider by a long shot.

I agree with this

He seemed to have some interesting ideas about writing and some of my opinions of authors (not Shakespeare, but others) overlapped with his, but this is where he lost all credibility for me.

None that I know of

In verse? no. Shakespeare wrote a lot of great prose (all of Falstaff's lines for instance), but he mostly wrote verse.

No

No. Even if I were going to compare a purely prose stylist, it would be someone like Melville, not Joyce. Joyce was just playing autistic word games, Shakespeare was by contrast actually using language to maximum effort to talk about real shit, homie. To describe realm feelings and worldviews

Stephen King

And in turn, unlike some of the others previously mentioned (Joyce comes to mind, tremendous genius he is) Shakespeare was a poor boy who ended up independently almost solely by his ability to command language. In conjunction with his acting, his writing took him to the heights of English society where available. Dude met the queen, yet probably still regularly traded barbs with the penny payers in the cheapseats. So, as far as language in action, he also seems to be winning

>a spy for the Queen
>honorary Master's Degree from Cambridge
>fakes death at 29 with help from British intelligence agencies
>resumes playwriting under a literal penis-pun pen name
>all of London court has to pretend they don't recognize him, and that he had just recently moved there from the countryside

>poor boy

IT WERE ALIENS I TELLS YOU

Elizabethan society WAS fucked up

>le meme xD
kys

Some people have already said James Joyce but it's him.

what's the endgame here?

>Certainly they are more erudite authors

there really aren't

Jane Austen- Emma

>there's something a priori "good" about "sincerity"

lmao kys dfw cuck. literally spooked to death.

hard to say but he resumed work in the 20th century under another pseudonym and adopted the persona of an ivy league educated reclusive author who wrote about rocketry and american pomo, so who knows where he's taking this?

this

This book has solved literature.

Read INFINITE JEST and tremble, bardolaters.

hi jeremy1122

>mastery of the English language?
/thread

Me

>an americuck dictionary
>wasn't even proof-read properly
>mastery of the language of English

ah the amount of political correctness currently in the world today

>>wasn't even proof-read properly

lol what

dord

You could have at least posted Samuel Johnson's dictionary...

Donald Trump's foreign policy speech.

You're kind of a faggot for saying that. Has taking it up the ass on the daily reduced the size of your frontal lobe beneath functioning levels?

Thinking of Shakespeare as a "virtuoso" or a "master" is just wrong. He was more of a trailblazer. He did not attempt to "perfect" or "improve" upon anything. Shakespeare's originality is what makes him a genius. Originality is what makes anyone a genius.

True.

Shakespeare wasn't particularly original either technically or thematically. In his plays and sonnets he mainly followed the conventions of the time. He was just extremely skilled at working within the existing forms, being possibly the greatest of his time (and perhaps one of the greatest of all time). I think he's more similar Bach than he is to Paganini or Liszt in that sense

oh god, the amount of memes in this one post is nauseating.

Joyce is a meme but he really was an excellent writer. He was particularly good at altering his writing style in order to reflect the characters he was focusing on. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man demonstrates this very well as the writing gets deeper and more complicated over the course of the character's mental development. Few, if any, writers could have pulled it off as well as he did, so you should definitely give it a try.

Joyce and Gass come to mind, but there are probably others that no one has ever heard of.

I think you are diminishing Shakespeare too much by saying he followed the conventions of his plays and sonnets, though I do agree with you comparing him to Bach as opposed to the other composers that poster mentioned.

Shakespeare does away with classical formulae for theater (the original plays were just scenes without "acts"). He inverts Petrarchan ideals in the sonnet (his DARK mistress as opposed to FAIR mistress).

Shakespeare was reaching for something new, a new sort of territory. Marlowe was his John the Baptist, pointing out the way.