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This article is a bit clickbaity. Shakespeare's genius is most certainly not nonsense, his corpus of work as a playwright is unparalleled in its size and qualit

• phab 9y ago
  The point is that the article's title is another "unexploded pun", the principle of which is a central theme to the article; it is referring to Booth's analysis of one of the sources of the Bard's greatness: Shakespeare achieves this by weaving incredibly rich networks from the same kinds of “substantive nonsense and nonimporting patterns” that pop up in slang, jokes, songs, and nursery rhymes. Those dense networks of patterns, Booth posits, are “the principal source of the greatness we find in Shakespeare’s work.” edit: formatting
• rspeer 9y ago
  Definitely clickbaity, as the title is intentionally misleading. (Read it as "The literary device named 'nonsense' is something that Shakespeare was genius at".) This is definitely a case where HN should change the title. However, one nonsense claim to watch out for is the claim that Shakespeare invented 1700 new words. Shakespeare is the first recorded use of many words, but that doesn't mean he invented them, it means we care a lot about Shakespeare and preserved his writing better than others'.
  • phab 9y ago
    The whole point of the article is that ambiguity in interpretation is to be celebrated, which is precisely what we see in the title. The title is an accurate reflection of the content of the essay in this regard. That people are so hung up on interpretation, on meaning, is no more than habit. Better to revel in uncertainty.
    • krapp 9y ago
      The purpose of HN's policy in regard to article titles is that ambiguity in the interpretation of titles creates noise which needs to be removed from the signal of comment quality. Many users simply reply to their initial interpretation of a title, and boring/non-clever titles act as a filter against people unwilling to make even the minimal effort of reading the article first by removing that low-hanging fruit. Ambiguity in interpretation may be a wonderful thing in literature, but on the internet and sites like this it can be cancerous. I half-wish HN would replace titles with random hashes, at least for a limited time or for low-karma accounts, in order to force people to have to RTFA to comment. Although then, most comments would just be complaints about that.
      • mbubb 9y ago
        Krapp - as in "Krapps Last tape"?
        • krapp 9y ago
          No - just first initial, last name and a bit of self-deprecation. Although now I'm upset that I never knew about this until today.
  • orf 9y ago
    > However, one nonsense claim to watch out for is the claim that Shakespeare invented 1700 new words. Ahh yes, you are quite right. Lazy googling on my part!
  • mbubb 9y ago
• mbubb 9y ago
  Yes - a genius. If you are thinking and writing in English today, you do so in his shadow. But there is ambivalence. I don't think Shakespeare himself would have thought of himself in that way - and that would nto be false modesty. Taking another example Socrates, who I only know through translation, seems to vacillate on certain ideas. Sometimes life seems incredibly precious to him at other times not really worth much... But that is not a weakness in his thought. He is delineating a very real indetermancy. In another context TS Eliot when asked about "The Waste Land" - which I believe Tolstoy would have seen as just as bad a Shakespeare - referred to it as “the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life… just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.” I don't believe this is just humblebragging. And this goes back to Orwell's point in the essay that Shakespeare was at times a sloppy thinker, a bad punner, a weak dramatist but an incomparable poet. Yes - it fails and the result is a pile of fragments which those who remain use to build up again.