What are the required readings to fully appreciate Shakespeare?

depends if you're into comedy or tragedy OP.
I tend to like the more tragic side of Shakespeare but for comedy go with Twelfth Night and for tradgedy my personal favorite Macbeth. I know it's super passe but Romeo and Juliet is actually really good. Go from there.

sorry dad

Shakespeare also probably read Montaigne's work.

how the hell are you ever going to appreciate Shakespeare without subvocalising?

The Essays in Florio's translation is one of two books he is known to have owned.

You can't. Reading Shakespeare is only useful for understanding later authors owing to the sheer density of early-modern English puns.

the other being Ovid, correct?

>not sub-vocalizing in Original Pronunciation.
how benighted of you

Why are shakesfags so unwilling to admit that their lauded poet is no great artist? He wrote sexual innuendos and fart jokes for the masses(heh), nothing more. Reading Shakespeare is like reading the transcript for an Adult Swim cartoon: ooh, mortality, love, betrayal, wow this is so deep! And then someone cracks(heh) a line about being inside Lady Fortune's vag and awayyyyy we go! He wasn't educated, he was probably black and he's the bottom(heh) of the barrel with regards to literature at the time.

>What are the required readings to fully appreciate Shakespeare
Watching every episode of the Big Bang Theory between 2007 and 2014 should kill off enough braincells for you to unironically enjoy Shakespeare.

>The first thing we do, let's kill all the pseuds

Unironically, this (ironically).

Was Othello about race?

I think I'm too stupid to appreciate Shakespeare. I've tried reading most of his work but it just doesn't seem to gauge my interest or raise much emotion.

That said, I watched Peter Brook's 1971 adaption of King Lear
and enjoyed a lot more than reading the play itself.

What is conjecture?

>He wasn't educated, he was probably black

Whomst are you implying? That kangs weren't educated?

>Lowqualitybait.jpeg
>Too plebian for the white light of truth

Yes. Golding's, I believe.

you couldnt exactly go to B&N and peruse hundreds of cheap paperbacks back then my man

The first thing is that not all of his works are about "sexual innuendos and fart jokes". You yourself admitted that "morality, love and betrayal" are in his works.

And the next thing is that Shakespear indeed was educated, he attended grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon which taught him the elements of classical works which he then incorporated into his own works.

What's important about Shakespeare is that the mortality, love and betrayal motifs are the very essence of human existence and the human condition. So future writers draw on images and themes in Shakespeare's work in order to better convey the message they have.

Why the hell would you say that Shakespeare is "probably" black? Has there ever been a more English person representative speaking than Shakespeare?

>Has there ever been a more English person representative speaking than Shakespeare?

Chaucer and Spenser

...

>English history
Does this include Bede? Because historians are now skeptical about his credibility. For one, archeologists can't find any evidence of the Anglo-Saxon invasion, so some are starting to believe the Anglo-Saxons were just a made-up raace.

Read the sonnets, watch the plays.

Shit
Post

>evidence
Doesn't exist.

Okay, so that means you agree? That there was no Anglo-Saxon invason.