Daily reminder that Shakespeare is underrated because even the most effusive and ornamented praise can only ever amount...

what you just did is just a rough copy of one dog barking at another

>his sonnets are just a rough copy of Petrarch
Shakespeare is anti-Petrarchan.

>can somebody stell me why Hamlet is so fucking good?

>This play has a prophetic truth, which is above that of history. Whoever has become thoughtful and melancholy through his own mishaps or those of others; whoever has borne about with him the clouded brow of reflection, and thought himself ‘too much i’ th’ sun’; whoever has seen the golden lamp of day dimmed by envious mists rising in his own breast, and could find in the world before him only a dull blank with nothing left remarkable in it; whoever has known “the pangs of despised love, the insolence of office, or the spurns which patient merit of the unworthy takes”; he who has felt his mind sink within him, and sadness cling to his heart like a malady, who has had his hopes blighted and his youth staggered by the apparitions of strange things; who cannot be well at ease, while he sees evil hovering near him like a spectre; whose powers of action have been eaten up by thought, he to whom the universe seems infinite, and himself nothing; whose bitterness of soul makes him careless of consequences, and who goes to a play as his best resource to shove off, to a second remove, the evils of life by a mock-presentation of them—this is the true Hamlet.

>Shakespeare is anti-Petrarchan.
no evidence

Sonnet 141

>O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

I'm not nearly qualified to articulate exactly how great Hamlet is, but like someone else said, until you understand the words, you're not going to get it, and that itself is understandable. When I read it first in high school I could only barely grasp onto the plot.

First, I recommend finishing it (you shouldn't be posting on Veeky Forums halfway through reading it, but, instead reading it through in one sitting, even though it's long af). Then, if you still don't have a basic understanding of the major plot points, look up a summary. Once you know the major plot points, go back through and take your time. At that point, you won't be focusing on necessarily what's going to happen next, but what's happening now, and the weight behind every line. If something doesn't make sense, read it until it does. Still doesn't make sense? Well, come back to it later. I've re-read the play five times and I'm still surprised by Shakespeare's magic.

This

>reading it through in one sitting

this is just a meme. Nobody actually does that

Romeo and Juliet, boyo

More like Shitsmeare am I right?

Literally every scenario in which two people 'fall in love' in his plays, AND all the thick, crude irony of his sonnets.

>muh realistic dialog
please

When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutored youth,
Unlearnèd in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
Oh, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told.
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

Literally literally?

Did I fucking stutter?

Sonnet 130

Literally who?

>can't even understand Hamlet
maybe lit isn't for you

Milton isn't the second-greatest writer in the English language though. He was decent, but his influence is overbearing and constricting and most people would be better off not having read much of him.

I think one could make a case for Milton's influence being harmful to some (I'm thinking of Keats), but that has nothing to do with his quality as a writer himself. No-one in English has his elevation, his intensity, his power of rhetoric. Lycidas is the best short poem in English and Satan is, IMO, arguably the greatest character in western literature (with a nod to Shakespeare, as he is heavily indebted to Hamlet and Iago).

But like I said, it's a testament to Shakespeare that #1 blows #2 out of the water like he does. Milton, for all his purity and gravity, has nothing like the astonishing natural variety of image, metaphor, character etc. that Shakespeare possesses, because no-one apart from possibly Homer can touch him in that.

>MIlton
I still don't get it. His stuff just bores the living fuck out of me

O loss of sight, of thee I most complain!
Blind among enemies, O worse then chains,
Dungeon, or beggery, or decrepit age!
Light the prime work of God to me is extinct,
And all her various objects of delight
Annull'd, which might in part my grief have eas'd,
Inferiour to the vilest now become
Of man or worm; the vilest here excel me,
They creep, yet see, I dark in light expos'd
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong,
Within doors, or without, still as a fool,
In power of others, never in my own;
Scarce half I seem to live, dead more then half.
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total Eclipse
Without all hope of day!
O first created Beam, and thou great Word,
Let there be light, and light was over all;
Why am I thus bereav'd thy prime decree?
The Sun to me is dark
And silent as the Moon,
When she deserts the night
Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.
Since light so necessary is to life,
And almost life itself, if it be true
That light is in the Soul,
She all in every part; why was the sight
To such a tender ball as th' eye confin'd?
So obvious and so easie to be quench't,
And not as feeling through all parts diffus'd,
That she might look at will through every pore?
Then had I not been thus exil'd from light;
As in the land of darkness yet in light,
To live a life half dead, a living death,
And buried; but O yet more miserable!
My self, my Sepulcher, a moving Grave,
Buried, yet not exempt
By priviledge of death and burial
From worst of other evils, pains and wrongs,
But made hereby obnoxious more
To all the miseries of life,
Life in captivity
Among inhuman foes.

This is actually the best thing I have seen from him so far, I like this. I still find it hard to concentrate on though, I could just be retarded

can't tell if troll
6/10

Maybe some people do it but its hardly a reasonable expectation

This. It's no biggie RE-reading it all in one sitting, after one has read several Shakespearean plays and is familiar with the language and plot, but it may well have taken me more than 24 hours to read it through the first time (then again, I always try to read things excrutiatingly closely the first time through). Then again, if the language is proving too difficult for you to pick up even the major plot points, perhaps you should either a) go back to studying simpler things if you are not a native English-speaker, or b) simply do something other than reading the classics, because you are probably not intelligent enough for them to do anything for you.

why the earring?

The fact Shakespeare was able to accomplish so much, as a black woman in the 16th century no less, is incredible.

LOL! :) LOL!

Venus and Adonis
Rape of Lucrece
Loads of the sonnets
Romeo and Juliet