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Not trying to start any debate here with Shakespeare fans, just intend this as a supportive word for those of us who just don’t enjoy Shakespeare - Voltaire de
by paulsutter 3y ago
Not trying to start any debate here with Shakespeare fans, just intend this as a supportive word for those of us who just don’t enjoy Shakespeare
- Voltaire declared Hamlet a ‘vulgar and barbarous play’ and that ‘one would take this work to be the fruit of the inspiration of a drunken savage’
- George Bernard Shaw: ’. “There is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare,” he said. “It would be positively a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.”
- Tolstoy: “I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: “King Lear,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Hamlet” and “Macbeth,” not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium, and doubted as to whether I was senseless in feeling works regarded as the summit of perfection by the whole of the civilized world to be trivial and positively bad, or whether the significance which this civilized world attributes to the works of Shakespeare was itself senseless.”
- irrational 3y agoSounds like a more eloquent version of modern stone throwing against popular books. Hang out on r/books and you soon read similar diatribes against Project Hail Mary, The Way of Kings, etc.
- sho_hn 3y agoHuh, PHM is unpopular? Artemis was fairly boring, but Hail Mary was a wonderful pageturner.
- stavros 3y agoIt's not unpopular, there are just people who dislike it.
- themadturk 3y agoI wouldn't exactly call Artemis boring, but PHM was much better.
- stavros 3y agoIt's almost as if different people have different tastes!
- p_j_w 3y ago>Sounds like a more eloquent version of modern stone throwing against popular books. Is that a bad thing?
- jovial_cavalier 3y ago>Tolstoy: ... "but having read one after the other, ..." Do not read Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote plays, not books. Shakespeare should be watched, either on stage or on screen. Reading a Shakespeare play is like deciding to listen to the Beatles by downloading MIDI files and playing them through software. Maybe you get the broad strokes of the song, and maybe you even like it, but you're not listening to the Beatles.
- idlewords 3y agoYou got Tolstoy pretty good there!
- mplanchard 3y agoI kind of agree with GP, but man did this make me laugh
- granfalloon 3y agoI never enjoyed Shakespeare UNTIL I started reading his plays, and now he’s one of my favorites. The drama and stories in his work don’t do much for me, I view them more as a vehicle for his poetry (which is some of the greatest ever written). And I enjoy it more on the page than spoken by others. I know there are at least some others out there like me! Nabokov cleverly said something along the lines of “with Shakespeare, the metaphor is the thing, not the play.”
- denton-scratch 3y agoInteresting. I also see the plays as vehicles for the poetry; but like a lot of poetry, it's made to be spoken aloud. In particular, it should be spoken as if it were prose - the metre is in the words, and comes through on its own. It's clunky to speak it as lines of verse.
- dri_ft 3y agoIndeed it should be spoken aloud (or at least 'aloud in your head'). But if it should be spoken as if it were prose, why do you think he took all the trouble to put it in to verse?
- JasonFruit 3y agoGeorge Bernard Shaw, as the kids say, said a lot of things. He probably meant some of them, too.
- aetimmes 3y agoBut what is most important is that he was correct about vanishingly few of them.
- JasonFruit 3y agoSome of his music reviews were pretty good: Arnold Dolmetsch really was a revelation, and surviving recordings suggest that Joseph Joachim playing Bach really was like an attempt to scrape a nutmeg on a boot sole. But Shaw strikes me a lot like Twitter. He spoke and wrote less because he had something to say than because he wanted people to hear how well he said things, and his reach increased because people enjoyed how well-put his remarks were and how stylishly he put down objections, rather than because of the quality of his opinions.
- bijection 3y agoThis Voltaire quote is misleading. He continues: “… one would imagine this piece to be the work of a drunken savage. But amidst all these vulgar irregularities, which to this day make the English drama so absurd and so barbarous, there are to be found in Hamlet, by a bizarrerie still greater, some sublime passages, worthy of the greatest genius. It seems as though nature had mingled in the brain of Shakespeare the greatest conceivable strength and grandeur with whatsoever witless vulgarity can devise that is lowest and most detestable.“ So while he is pointing out the crassness of the work, he does think it’s great. Voltaire was very interested in the English, and pointing out the contrast here was definitely coming more from curiosity or even admiration than from dislike.
- paulsutter 3y agoTouché, thank you. Regardless I agree with Tolstoy in whole George Orwell - a fan of Shakespeare - admits the following: - "Tolstoy is right in saying that Lear is not a very good play, as a play. It is too drawn-out and has too many characters and sub-plots." - "Shakespeare has a habit of thrusting uncalled-for general reflections into the mouths of his characters. This is a serious fault in a dramatist" - "Of course, it is not because of the quality of his thought that Shakespeare has survived, and he might not even be remembered as a dramatist if he had not also been a poet."
- snugbel 3y agohttps://orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf https://orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf
- wudangmonk 3y agoShakespeare and Tolkien are similar to me. If you ever say you did not like them, you have an army of defenders calling you names about your lack of education and literary maturity, you always get attacked for who you must be as a person. Read both, not impressed.
- SoftTalker 3y agoI don't care for either author. Tried reading The Hobbit in middle school and found it utterly boring. Shakespeare I just can't get anywhere with. The archaic language is too much of a barrier.
- themadturk 3y agoI had the opposite reaction when I was that age, but there really is no comparison between The Hobbit and LOTR. The former is a children's book, the latter just the opposite. That doesn't mean any given reader will like LOTR, of course, or that they're wrongheaded if they don't. But readers who give up on Tolkien just because they disliked The Hobbit may find they've shortchanged themselves.
- bombcar 3y agoYou can use one to deflect the other; Tolkien was so disappointed by the twist in Macbeth that he wrote the Ents.
- denton-scratch 3y agoAh, I didn't know that. "I guess you are referring to "Burnham Wood is come to Dunsinane"?
- bombcar 3y agoYep. And he also mentioned that the c-section aspect of the other prophecy felt weak, so he used a much simpler method of defeating “no man”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_influence_on_Tolkien https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_influence_on_T...
- SeenNotHeard 3y agoDr. Johnson said Shakespeare's output could be obscene, shoddy, lack cohesion and moral instruction, and ignore the classical unities, but that "Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life."
- djur 3y agoHe also famously had a fit when he learned how King Lear actually ended (in his era, a bowdlerized version with a happy ending was popular).
- mellosouls 3y agoa supportive word for those of us who just don’t enjoy Shakespeare Speaking as another who loathed Shakespeare at school and worked against that beginning to understand him and eventually revere him, precisely because I (rightly) assumed I was wrong: You have to frame the dissenters you quote in the context of overwhelming literary consensus that he's the greatest writer who ever lived. It's not like there's a roughly equal opinion on both sides as to his being good or not. If you don't enjoy Shakespeare it's absolutely ok, but be in no doubt: it's a you thing.
- telmo 3y agoThere is no objective true to claims such as "X is the greatest writer who ever lived". Even if you could objectively determine the best writer for a certain culture and context, there are countless other cultures and contexts. Is Shakespeare greater than Cervantes? Goethe? Dostoevsky? Who knows? Who cares? The world is not only the anglo world. Other cultures have their own literary giants and you can bet that they value them more than they value Shakespeare. When I have to force myself to enjoy something, I tend to wonder if the thing is really worth enjoying or if I am instead just trying to acquire a taste that I deem prestigious. To each their own.
- mellosouls 3y agoWhen I have to force myself to enjoy something, I tend to wonder if the thing is really worth enjoying or if I am instead just trying to acquire a taste that I deem prestigious Whereas I would consider myself rather arrogant to assume the general consensus of hundreds of years to be wrong just because I needed to put a little effort in to understand it and thereafter enjoy it.
- coolandsmartrr 3y agoWhile filmmaker Akira Kurosawa often adapted from Shakespeare ("Throne of Blood", "The Bad Sleep Well", "Ran"), his frequent collaborator Shinobu Hashimoto was rather lukewarm about his works. Shakespeare's ornate prose didn't resonate with him, nor did he feel that Kurosawa fittingly adapted them into medieval Japan, which lacked the historical weight of English monarchy.