How did he do it?

poop

>you scummy fuck?
75% chance you're a woman, 33% you're a lesbian

1-He was a sensitive, empathetic man who could imagine himself in the shoes of other people.

2-He studied at a Grammar School, the one at Stratford being of great quality. Grammar Schools basically taught nothing but Latin grammar and literature (old Latin and Greek classics, some English writing and Biblical classics), apart from a little Greek, as well as the memorization of excerpts of poetry and prose, not to mention hundreds of figures of speech. Students also had to make their own translations of Latin works and were encouraged to practice the art of imitatio: transforming what they were translating into something new in their own words. Sometimes they got a passage in latin and were instructed to translate it to English in a literal way, and then to take the translation and change it to something original, in their own words. The study of tropes, figures of language, and ancient literature was rigorous – mistakes were punished physically sometimes - and probably most of the boys who graduate on those schools were more gifted at writing poetry than college students at Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge today.

3-He used existing plots and stories from others, not having to spend months and years inventing his own tales (but he knew how to adapt the skeleton of what he stole very well, making it work for his own ends). This saved him time and allowed their production to become more voluminous.

4-He wrote for the theater and had sometimes the pressure of the tastes of the audience and the times breathing on his neck: he need to handle material that might not be interesting to him, but was interesting to others. In face of those "limitations," he didn’t become forever subscribed merely to his own obsessions and preferences (think of most writers who write the same book again and again and again), but forced himself to deal with themes and topics that were perhaps foreign to his own tastes.

cont.

5-He lived in an age where theater writing saw poetic language as good and noble, a time where language like this (this is from the early years of his carrear, it’s from Tamburlaine The Great):

TAMBURLAINE: I will, with engines never exercis’d
Conquer, sack, and utterly consume
Your cities and your golden palaces,
And with the flames that beat against the clouds
Incense the Heavens and make the stars to melt,…
And, till by vision or by speech I hear
Immortal Jove say ‘Cease my Tamburlaine,’
I will persist a terror to the world
Making the meteors (that like armèd men
Are seen to match upon the towers of Heaven,)
Run tilting round about the firmament
And break their burning lances in the air,
For honour of my wond’rous victories.

And this (from the end of his carrear, this from John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi):

DUCHESS: Who am I?
BOSOLA: Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy. What ’s this flesh? a little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste. Our bodies are weaker than those paper-prisons boys use to keep flies in; more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earth-worms. Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body: this world is like her little turf of grass, and the heaven o’er our heads like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison.
wouldn't be accused of pretentious or florid or purple-prosed

6-Theater, which consumed both stories (fiction) and poetry, was a lucrative activity, so that both the artistic vanity and the stomach of a writer's pockets were stimulated. That is: he lived during one of the few times and places in the world history where one form of poetry (in this case dramatic poetry) could generate a loto f money - THAT MAKES A BIG DIFFERENCE, BELIEVE ME

7-He was a poet who loved metaphors above all other poetic techniques and had a natural inclination for it, and metaphor is the heart of poetry, the most impressive of all language techniques. Already Aristotle, who was a very intelligent man, realized this: “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar.”

8-He was he was that rare and happy mix of intelligence, creativity, effort and obsession (and luck, in the matter of right place and right time) that we call genius

>Want to see another Shakespeare? Start a trend for poetic drama on Broadway and make rich people go crazy for it, and use propaganda to make even simple people want to go see plays*

*and propaganda-marketing works: see the success of Hamilton (not saying it’s of the same quality of Shakespeare, but it’s far from the type of entertainment that people would seek out if it weren’t for merchandising)

>Post one excerpt from Shakespeare that even comes close to Tolstoy.
Literally anything lmao

>TAMBURLAINE: I will, with engines never exercis’d
>Conquer, sack, and utterly consume
>Your cities and your golden palaces,
>And with the flames that beat against the clouds
>Incense the Heavens and make the stars to melt,…
>And, till by vision or by speech I hear
>Immortal Jove say ‘Cease my Tamburlaine,’
>I will persist a terror to the world
>Making the meteors (that like armèd men
>Are seen to match upon the towers of Heaven,)
>Run tilting round about the firmament
>And break their burning lances in the air,
>For honour of my wond’rous victories.
>And this (from the end of his carrear, this from John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi):
>DUCHESS: Who am I?
>BOSOLA: Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy. What ’s this flesh? a little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste. Our bodies are weaker than those paper-prisons boys use to keep flies in; more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earth-worms. Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body: this world is like her little turf of grass, and the heaven o’er our heads like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison.

Good poetry

BASED woolf gang

>16th century

Full fathom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange!
>people then
lol wtf is this retard talking about
>people now
OHH MUHH GOD THE ELEGANCE AND TRANQUILITY OF THIS POETRY IS SO ENDEARING! THIS IS WHY I READ POETRY EVERYDAY AND DON'T GO TO PARTIES OR HAVE ANY FRIENDS OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT

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Good post.

Based

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pleb

Reading just these two excerpts shows just how much Shakespeare was far and away beyond his contemporaries.

This.
I read 3 plays by marlowe, and one each by webster and Ben Jonson. None of them were even close to as good as Shakespeare. I was really expecting more from marlowe. People who think marlowe wrote Shakespeare's plays are retarded.

He was an astute observer, whose sense of observation was so acute that the very act of perception was imaginative. As Schopenhauer said about the nature of genius, it consists of overcoming the passion for desire and instead becoming a "mirror of the world" that not only reflects its light, but produces its own self-illumination.

"The mind of genius is among other minds what the carbuncle is among precious stones: it sends forth light of its own, while the others reflect only that which they have received. The relation of the genius to the ordinary mind may also be described as that of an idio-electrical body to one which merely is a conductor of electricity."

"On a closer examination, it seems as though, in the case of a genius, the will to live, which is the spirit of the human species, were conscious of having, by some rare chance, and for a brief period, attained a greater clearness of vision, and were now trying to secure it, or at least the outcome of it, for the whole species, to which the individual genius in his inmost being belongs; so that the light which he sheds about him may pierce the darkness and dullness of ordinary human consciousness and there produce some good effect."

This also a very stimulating culture of competition, cooperation and emulation among writers, a sense of English being worthy of being used like the old Roman used Latin, and the demands of a very diverse audience (plebs and king alike went to the same theaters, only the kings had good seating -and plebs had none at all).

Also, sadly, a culture of hearing discourse that is fading day by day. People went to Shakespeare's representations to hear the dialogue recited as much as to see it performed.
Nowadays visual and auditive effects have taken the effects of rhetoric devices and recitation: you don't expect to be impressed by someone reciting a depiction of a battle when you can watch an HD rendering of the same with 300 actors and as many CGI horses.

Another very important factor: Shakespeare didn't make Shakespeare alone. One big reason he went from popular entertainer esteemed for his variety and wit (a bit like Tarantino now I guess?) in the 16th century to absolute epitome of literary genius in the 19th century (on a par with Homer and Dante) is because he came along at the right time to be recuperated by both England's and Germany's budding nationlitic sentiment, while also offering the French a convincing counter to the decaying corpse of classicism.

>His characters are empty vessels for whatever message he wants to put across.
I don't understand how anyone could believe this. You could write hundreds of pages on the complexity of Prince Hal/Henry V and his relationship with his two father figures.

Post one excerpt of Tolstoy that comes close to Shakespeare. That's the challenge

Literally nothing in Shakespeare comes anywhere near Tolstoy, because Tolstoy is so far beneath Shakespeare that there is no risk of any proximity between them.

Apples to oranges. Shakie didn't write one whit of prose and Tolstoy nary a line of poetics.

Oranges are better than apples. Apples are a shit fruit. Plums are god-tier

Most of Shakespeare's plays contain sections of prose