Did you read every play of Shakespeare?

Caesar seems relatively well known, I think. It's actually my favourite of his
Rape of Lucrece isn't a tragedy tho
and I haven't read all of them - who tf cares anyway about all of those historical plays he did in collaboration, let's be honest? the disputes about the authorship of some of them also makes it a complicated project

but muh pseud purism!!
the worst part is that probably the people who talk about watching him in theater don't go to theater at all, and they certainly don't know shit about theatrical practices of Shakespeare's or today's time and their profound differences

@14817955
no (You)s for you, faggot

>hitler won
>these women have never even heard of a non-white
>every day after class you and the other lads head down to the river to wrestle and swim
>girls from the girls school rest under the shade of the trees reading, braiding each others hair and making flower chains
>you pin your friend with a new grappling move youve been learning
>you look up and shes watching with interest
>shes heard how your greek translations are the best in the class
>you smile
>she smiles back

decent poet held up by anglo-conspiracy

I really like this image. Tell me more about it or its progenitor

Fair maidens. Would inseminate.

>imagine being this thick
The thing about watching a play is you're not exactly consuming the work itself, you're consuming the work through the lenses of the production. It's a rewarding experience if the production is good, but ultimately you're watchin a production of the play, not the play as it was originally intended.

If the author directs a production of their own play you should watch it. If the production is supposed to be a good one you can watch it. But you should read them.

such a dumb take

Caesar and Titus are less read, but not the most obscure, and I’ve read both. I’ve never read or met met anyone who has read King John or Timon of Athens though

If you have a good imagination, you can stage the plays yourself in your own mind

I can't believe no one has realized this post is bait. Julius Caesar is clearly a well-known tragedy, and the Rape of Lucrece is not even a play.

Caesar is "lesser-known"? >_>

Caesar is not a "tragedy" because killing an usurpating dictator is what the conspirators needed have done to continue on withd emocracy.

I think OP meant might have confused something with Titus Andronicus which centers around the rape of a woman named Lavinia.

Did you actually read Caesar? Caesar's death isn’t the tragedy, it is the usurpers' failure to maintain democracy despite killing Caesar, and their eventual deaths which makes it tragic.

I’ve read Othello, Lear, Macbeth, and the Taming of the Shrew.
Apart from some clever lines here and there, I really don’t understand what is supposed to be so good about Shakespeare. He is melodramatic, simplistic, uses distractingly unrealistic plot points (In Lear, for example, a character can simply put on a “disguise” and other characters, who’ve known them for literally their entire lives, will not be able to recognise them), his villains are unsympathetic, evil for the sake of evil, and seem to be fully knowledgeable of this. I mean it’s just crap.

Reading through this thread, I hope that some of you guys are just trying to get sick b8s and that Yea Forums hasn’t really fallen this far

Reminder that lit is mostly teenagers and invading redditors now

Also going to watch a Shakespeare play is not much better at all. Most Shakespeare actors seem to think every line must be delivered in the loudest voice possible, so that it begins to seem like a two hour shouting competition rather than a performance of the “greatest writer in history”.

>Caesar
>Not well known
Caesar is one of his most famous plays, most of people’s preconceived and historically inaccurate notions of history. Many phrases and idioms are based on it. It is so famous that it is fundamentally ingrained into the definition of how we view the modern West.

read it to take in the language, watch the production to take in the story.

I haven't read a few of them like Antony and Cleopatra and some of the histories

I've read the A and S tier plays, but I can't be bothered to read the lesser comedies. I could be reading moby dick instead of these forgotten plays and get much more out of my time reading.

Sounds like you'd like Tolstoy's thoughts on the matter: gutenberg.org/files/27726/27726-h/27726-h.htm

You’re the thick one here. They were meant to be performed. It’s like saying you should only read screenplays, not see the actual film. Retarded.

At least read Hamlet before you write off shakespeare. It has the best monologues in his ouevre and there's no cartoonish villains like iago. Tempest is also great as it doesn't have an apparent genre.

>meant to be

Or not to be?

luckily mcdonalds has options for the blind and visually impaired

They were meant to be performed in a dirty London theater in the 17th century before a crowd of people that really didn't care all that much for being quiet and paying attention to the subtleties of the art. Performed by actors whose technique was completely different from what we have today in the post-Stanislavsky/Craig age, in an accent that philologists today are trying to reconstruct, with minimal visual stimuli, women parts played by boys, etc...
It's like trying to judge an interpretation of a classical piece (preferably by someone like Gould or Celibidache, considering how standard directorial interventions are today) without hearing any other performances or ever checking the actual fucking notes that the primary author wrote. Nonsense. Playwrights were oftentimes perfectly aware that their works will be read and not just seen live. Aristotle himself stressed the importance of dramas functioning only through the word, without visual aid.
I also very much doubt smartass faggot niggers like you go to the theater especially often.

>Tempest is also great as it doesn't have an apparent genre.

I've read Tempest more times than I would like for various academic and employment reasons and I honestly can't stand it. I'm bringing a little personal animosity into that judgement, but none of the characters have anywhere close to the psychological depth of his other characters (even his comedic characters) and what interesting glimpses of insight we do get are dealt with so briefly that it feels like a complete missed opportunity. I'm sure Ariel's performances could be interesting to watch performed, but reading them in script form is pretty useless too. At least my mental image of Miranda has always been hot.

Also, regarding film - the author of a film is the director and he has oversight of every aspect of the final product, whereas in theater the dramatist has, in fact, not necessarily been the author for the last 100 years. And a film is a much more visual creation that cannot be written down just so like classical theater could. But, of course, why the fuck wouldn't you read screenplays, if they're good? Bergman's are regularly published as standalone texts, for example. Do both, read the screenplay/drama, see the film/production, it's a great way to grasp the potential complexities of a work and its interpretation, instead of mechanically relying on only and absolutely one mode of reception as the correct and proper one, which is what you're arguing for and also twisted the other user's words into.

I haven't read a single one of his plays

Henry IV pt. I is underrated.

Not by Shakespeare scholars necessarily but certainly by your average pleb. Hal is like an alpha version of Hamlet.

Tick question as you seem to be implying that Shakespeare actually wrote the plays herself.

Not every wor of art willwork for everyone. It's notyour fault and it's not Shakespeare's fault.From my part I think his lnaguage is the most beautiful ever written, and Ihave never found any other poet who produced so may great moments. There are things in the Book of Job, in Moby Dick, in Emily Dickinson's poetry, in some random poems and prose excerpts from other writers, but never with the same consistency as in Shakespeare. You open his works at random and you are almost sure to find some metaphor or similes that is more original than anything in the other writers you have been reading.

Agreed, people criticize his philosophy for being too simple and his characters for being too archetypal, but you can't really fault his use language as it's consistently on point.

>thread

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>wrestle the lads
>pin your friend
>greek translations

Subtle and gymnasiumpilled

>The starchild of Jacques and Polonius detected

>you’ll never come close to witnessing the plays as they were originally performed
>might as well just go the whole way and read them instead!
Are you actually dense?

I’ve not cringed so hard in years, what’s wrong with people of colour?

low intelligence

>Every new Shakespeare production near me is a queer genderswapped hip-hopera set in Hogwarts.
Feels bad, man.

They allow us to project our sexual insecurity and failures upon them

didn't read tempest

Nothing, but especially if they grew up in your neighborhood.

Henry IV pt. 1 is probably my fav and Falstaff my favorite Shakespeare character. I’ve never seen a great live production but have a DVD of Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight.

>I could be reading moby dick
Ironically, Melville's favorite Shakespeare play was the generally overlooked Timon of Athens.

I can imagine Melville speaking to his contemporaries "Oh my favorite Shakespeare play? You probably haven't heard of it, it's pretty obscure."

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