What makes him so highly regarded? Why do people say he's still the best? Is it just because he was the first to do it?

What makes him so highly regarded? Why do people say he's still the best? Is it just because he was the first to do it?

Attached: shakespeare.jpg (1943x2489, 2.61M)

Other urls found in this thread:

theguardian.com/world/2002/may/08/humanities.books
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality),
shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/blogs/montaigne-and-tempest/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

He was the first writer to introduce significant aberrations of communication and understanding into narrative art, which had until that point been a completely groupthink endeavor, a mere way to promulgate tradition and authority. And his innovation on the form was so completely binary that it could only be accomplished originally, freshly exactly once, rendering every single piece afterward dependent either on the original forms or his subversion. He's so regarded because anything we register as "interesting" is a clone of his subversion. Even postmodernism. His innovation was that he took the externalized factors of drama and internalized them into (for the very first time) conflicts of spirit and identity. In a sense, Shakespeare invented introspection. And just like the writers of the Bible, the human fathoms of the personal lives of its writers have been corroded by time and death, and so we're left only with what they leave behind, which are keyholes without keys. We've been left for centuries to wrestle in darkness without an actual understanding of our vocabularies; we all, in our public and private lives, have been leading poor copies of Shakespeare's plays. Yes, even gangbangers.

There are a lot of factors. He was very versatile, putting out comedies amongst tragedies, all of which with extremely dramatic plots. He's kind of like nintendo... great games and legacy that are versatile, and one of the first companies to really dominate that field.

Macbeth is fuckin' cool

idk but i remember watching the leonardo dicaprio romeo and juliet movie in school. that movie was so bad its not even funny. then since the teacher was lazy. he immediately put the 60s romeo and juliet movie on after. that one was way better. unrelated i know but maybe i should get a few of his plays and re read them

fpbp

>What makes him so highly regarded?
English naval supremacy, and German romanticism (the same collective delirium that made Goethe put Ossian on the same pedestal as Homer in Werther).
Not to mention more practical matters, such as pretty much everyone being able to read him in the original, but very, very few people being able to read Homer, Virgil, or even Dante in the original.

>Why do people say he's still the best?
Harold Bloom?
T.S. Eliot, Pound, Borges... They all said Dante was the best.
Other might say it's Homer.
A poll by the Norwegian Book Club concluded that the greatest book was D. Quixote (54 famous authors answered the poll): theguardian.com/world/2002/may/08/humanities.books
Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, Shaw and others disliked Shakespeare.

Everyone has their own preferences, I suppose.

>Is it just because he was the first to do it?
He wasn't the first to do anything, at least not anything particularly striking. His plots are stolen. His ideas are mostly recycled Montaigne/popularized Greek philosophy/Bible-stuff. His theatrical form is the same one used by Marlowe and others. A lot of his poetical devices are mere rhetoric, mere adornment.
Shakespeare is a fine wordsmith, of course, but other poets have been fine wordsmiths too.

>highly creative vocabulary; tons of words in his plays that have no prior examples of publication
>character writing that remains as good as any modern writer with the entire canon to learn from
>scripts designed explicitly to be easy for laymen to memorize in a short period of time, making his work eminently quotable
Undoubtedly, there are writers who were better than him in certain facets. Tolstoy probably wrote better characters. CS Lewis was better at weaving his themes deeply into his allegories. And I'd argue that Agatha Christie was the first author to legitimately justify plot as a skillful aspect of plot worth pursuing. But Shakespeare did so much at the highest levels, I think he's the closest we've come to a perfect all-rounder.

Shakespeare created an enormous range of memorable, deeply psychologically drawn and compelling characters who have themselves become archetypes and timeless figures, from the villain to the tortured tragic hero to the buffoon (Hamlet, Falstaff, Iago, King Lear, Macbeth to name a few). As points out he was effectively the first major writer to create introspection as we today conceive of it in literature, especially through his frequent use of soliloquies and how much thought and emotion he crams into them. The modern “stream-of-consciousness technique”, regarded as such a great innovation, is essentially just what Shakespeare did with soliloquies in blank verse hundreds of years ago.

Shakespeare also has an extremely rich and varied poetic texture, as Nabokov pointed out (to the extent that he believed it wasn’t the play that was the main thing in Shakespeare’s works but the poetic texture itself — a characteristically Nabokovian, aesthete’s view and a bit hyperbolic but still a fine point). The massive amount of metaphors, similes, and imagery jammed into as many lines as possible makes Shakespeare’s plays something like hyper-poetic, even more poetic than many poems, and just by beauty of language alone he’s still one of the greatest stylists of the English language.

Shakespeare also has a massive range of stories themselves, in practically all the major tones possible of literature — tragic, comic, dramatic, tragicomic, historical, and magical/fantastic — and in this range, he actually created a vast number of memorable, timeless plots. Admittedly, this was far from being entirely original story-telling and was mainly cribbed from fairy tales, folklore, history and other plays already extant, but it still took a great gift and combinatorial talent to synthesize this material into so many unique and memorable stories. Not only that but as points out he then used these stories as springing boards for “aberrations” practically regarded as necessary for modern literature — innovations of metafiction/self-referentiality (like the play-within-play theme in Hamlet, the characters in Hamlet talking about plays and the best way for the actors to play their roles in the play, etc.), existentialist and absurdist themes (as a modern reader it’s almost as if you can retroactively find influences of Dostoyevsky, Camus, and Sartre in his best plays), and a heavy sense of irony are all still mainstays of modern literature hundreds of years later.

A perfect all-rounder, exactly. The older I get and the more I read, the more I paradoxically turn into a cliched Shakespeare-worshiper. The “sophisticate’s” view may be, “Oh, Shakespeare-worship is just a socio-psychological artifact, there’s nothing that makes him particularly special” but if this is the sophisticate’s view then fine, paint me as unsophisticated.

>He wasn't the first to do anything, at least not anything particularly striking. His plots are stolen. His ideas are mostly recycled Montaigne/popularized Greek philosophy/Bible-stuff. His theatrical form is the same one used by Marlowe and others. A lot of his poetical devices are mere rhetoric, mere adornment.
>Shakespeare is a fine wordsmith, of course, but other poets have been fine wordsmiths too.
I find this similar to saying the invention of the car wasn’t anything particularly revolutionary, it was just a combination of the wheel, rubber tires, the general structure of a carriage, a motor engine, upholstery and glass windows which had already been in invention... sure, the materials and general ideas were already in existence but the synthesis of it and elaborations upon it were themselves the revolution.

Was gonna complain that we have this thread every day but this is a good response

He demonstrated an advanced mastery of the sonnet and the play, while being prolific and incredibly original in his themes and his use of language.

>In a sense, Shakespeare invented introspection.
Do you mean introspection within literature? If not, and you're talking about actually inventing the cognitive process of introspection, I am very skeptical. The idea of the experience of consciousness being different in our ancestors is intriguing (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality), but I don't quite buy it.

Shakespeare is greater than the sum of his parts, in other words. To Eliot, Pound, and Borges, I can counter Coleridge, Pope, Goethe, Melville, Joyce and Nabokov as other figures (many of them literary titans) who greatly praised Shakespeare and gave him a preeminent status in the pantheon of Western literature.

So much vagueness.

>He was the first writer to introduce significant aberrations of communication and understanding into narrative art,
Aberrations of communication? Such a vague term that you could define it in whatever way you wanted. I could argue that many of Plato's dialogues end with the actual impossibility of (truthful) communication, and many of them also show the process of Socrates and others trying to make the very meaning of the words clear, precisely because they cannot grasp at what is actually being said. Not to mention the satirical use of mis(chievous)communication in provençal poetry, among other such examples which have come to my mind in these last 30 seconds, all of which would seem to be to characterize 'aberration' of communication. Or such classical tropes as receiving a prophecy but not really knowing what it means so that you try many interpretations only to eventually find out you were wrong etc. etc. etc.
But of course, it's a vague term, so you can simply redefine it in such a way that the first instance is to be found in Shakespeare.
Not to mention your use of "significant", allowing for a wide margin of interpretation. You can redefine X, I cite another example of pre-Shakespeare X, but then you say "That's not significant''.
Those are a bunch of rhetorical tricks.

>narrative art, which had until that point been a completely groupthink endeavor, a mere way to promulgate tradition and authority
Before Shakespeare, Dante had put words in the mouth of Virgil, Camoens had told Virgil to shut up, and philosophers were already writing their utopias...

>And his innovation on the form
Shakespeare's form is not very innovative, I think.
It is, in fact, typical Elizabethan theater.
Cervantes was more subversive, given that he completely, and explicitly, broke the traditional novelistic form that was available to him.
Dante's own form is somewhat innovative, and not just because of the language he used, but the numerology-based structure. Not to mention other authors like Boccaccio, who mixed (detailed) historical observations (about the plague) with fiction, all of the many experiments mixing prose and poetry, etc. All before Shakespeare.
Form was much slower to change back in those days, but it did change.
Shakespeare is, compared to Cervantes, rather stagnant.
In his lyrical poetry, he's not even at the same level as the troubadours in terms of formal innovation.

>we all, in our public and private lives, have been leading poor copies of Shakespeare's plays

I could say that we are all Ulysses, we are either Quixotes or Panzas, we are forever searching for the Count or the cause of the Trial, we are mere searchers at the Library of Babel, and you are just a poor copy of Aeneas looking for a Rome...
Lots of vague bullshit.

>Shakespeare invented introspection

Who was Augustine?
But again, you will define introspection in such a way that its first instance is to be found in Shakespeare.

>cliched Shakespeare worshiper

I definitely would've thought this when I was a contrarian adolescent, he was just one of those "things" that was a "thing", an artifact like you say, so I kinda ignored him, just saw him as required reading, took him for granted... but now when I actually read him... it's the language, like you say, the language and the imagination. I'm loath to go along with Bloom's thesis because it sounds outlandish but I don't know how to convincingly argue against it. With anyone else from that long ago it's easy to be conscious of the differences between their sensibilities and ours, but with Shakespeare it's just Shakespeare, it's *his* sensibility, not that of any time. The combination of that fact and the mystery surrounding his life, authorship, etc., just makes him fascinating. Who knows, there was a ton of alchemy and occult shit going on at the time, maybe he struck a deal with the devil, maybe he was summoned rather than born. All I know is I like the product. I read probably more poetry than novels, and I like to think of myself as having "developed" taste and being "eclectic" and all that shit, but nonetheless I cannot deny that Sonnet 65 is and will probably always be my favorite poem.

Anglos suck his dick because that's what the school system told them to do, and they are also too stupid to learn a second language that has better writers

What a pedantic reply.

This. I get so much more mental stimulation, aesthetic, ethos, and SOVL from the Greeks. Bacchae is my favorite.
Shakespeare does not insert HIS voice noticeably or distinguishably into the play. It almost is empty of an author's take and is just an exhibit of events detached from judgement. The Greeks strongly channel you through a framework that you can sense is keenly selected this scene and not that scene for classic concision. It does not have a hamfisted Bible tier moral of the story interpretation for you but you get the sense that the play is crafted for your development into something higher. I get just bleak realism from Shakespeare. It has no ideal. It is cynical lipservice to protestant humor. So many scenes in Shakespeare are slow, tedious, flowery and uninvested of dramatic mirth.

Attached: 1493188454588.jpg (576x400, 80.63K)

He's highly overrated, only shilled by Anglos in the 19th century as their greatest writer. He quite literally ripped off Plutarch and most of the Greek playwrights. If we had their complete works they would utterly mog him.

The main reason for his reputation among writers and readers is the great poetic language he possessed. He said several things that were common knowledge and plain folk-wisdom in a metaphoric-dense verbal web that would be the kind of language Angels used if they existed.

There’s also the fact that he used this great raw material to build several different words and populate it with a lot of distinguished characters. He dealt with many different subjects and lighted a vast nebula of different consciousness. One character might praise military honor with great witticism while other character expose it as a vacuous abstraction with equal mastery. While in the works of many authors you end up seeing for what “team” the writer is rooting for Shakespeare is never obvious. He really tries to nest himself inside the skin of his characters and think as if he had that particular brain (of course, when subject that was being discussed at a certain point made his imagination catch fire he could forget the play and the character and develop a lot of similes and metaphors only for the joying it: language was by far his greatest passion).

And you meet all sorts of people. From philosopher princes and great warriors (which other fiction of the time already exposed) through sex-starved queens, girls who fight to conquer their loved ones or to defeat anyone in mental logic games, politicians, soldiers that look like they came straight from the Terminator movie (Coriolanus)spirits of the woods and the sea, murderers, eunuchs, monks, executioners, beggars, witches, and even pimps, brothel waiters, and even The Underground Man centuries before Dostoevsky created him (Thersites).

And when it came to the voice of those people, they all wanted everything that language could do to be contained in the movement of their tongues. Shakespeare would make his characters spew their entire brains into the reader's face, he would take every little spore of the soul and make it sprout into flowers (many of those flowers covered by bees, butterflies, or frogs, salamanders, and snakes). With him every little tadpole of the soul would be fatten into na anaconda or a whale whale and and forced to bellow his breath of abysses. There is no subtlety, there is no moderation, there is no restriction: it's all extreme. All thoughts and sensations are wrapped in a in a circulatory system that appears to be made of vocal cords.

cont

Shakespeare characters are always artificial; they don’t sound like normal people: they are colossal as if their brains were on steroids. Shakespeare excelled in language and did not mind sacrificing the verisimilitude and reality in favor of the verbal beauty. If an idea grabbed his mind in the middle of a speech and scene, he was determinate to use that idea, to exhibit that metaphor, even if it was not relevant to the plot or faithful to the character that was speaking, and only for the pleasure and pride of modeling beauty into verses. No one ever spoke like Shakespeare's characters: the human race that he modeled is artificial in this respect: they are as human beings who had the brain areas related to language and verbal thinking augmented by some divine touch. Shakespeare makes all humans (even mediocre ones) speak like demigods, as D. H. Lawrence said:

“When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder
That such trivial people should muse and thunder
In such lovely language.”

It even seems that some kind of strange metaphorical-parasite have invaded Shakespeare’s brain, laid a multitude of eggs on its convolutions and wrinkles and usurped the synapses of his neurons, in a way that he only could think through images, through metaphor and similes. The texture of Shakespeare's language is one of the densest in terms of converting concrete things into abstractions, it's a language drenched in metaphors, a language that is constantly doing mental weightlifting and imaginative gymnastics.

There is no comparison between Shakespeare's language and that of most other writers (only few others come to mind, and yet they are not as fertile: the poet of the Book of Job, Aeschylus, Melville, and maybe the most Shakespeare-lke of all of them: Emily Dickinson). There are several other writers who create, here and there, pages as drenched in imagery and verbal beauty as Shakespeare, but none remotely as fertile as he, and treating so many different subjects and states of mind with the same obsession with figures of speech.

What I mean by that is that reading Shakespeare's language calmly, paying attention to it, is like reading a huge collection of poems built into a symphonic whole. Instead of a book of poems, instead of a Book of Psalms, you have the psalms being used to build the nerves and bones and ligaments of a story and the minds of the people who live in that story.

In Shakespeare the boldest verbal fantasies and the full-throated voice of metaphor are used to represent human minds.

Shakespeare uses the entire warlike arsenal of language in virtually all of his plays; all characters have verbal rockets and tanks and machine guns; almost all lines have imagistic-grenades in their hands. In other authors you have here and there bursts of linguistic imagination, in Shakespeare you are always hit with nuclear warheads, even if the target is simply an anthill.

cont

Of course, the economic influence of Britain in the world help to establish Shakespeare as a world symbol, but even in translation his poetry still maintains its force.

Metaphors are probably the greatest of all characteristics of poetry (as melody is said to be of music), and no other poet in the world was as inventive and fertile in that department as Shakespeare.

You should also note that, since Shakespeare took many of his plots and characters from other sources, that helped him to curb the tendency to keep writing only about his main interests and obsessions: somehow he forced himself to write about several different topics and worlds, and that accounts for much of the variety of his vision (it helps to build the flesh if you already have the skeleton under it).

Shakespeare accepted any plots, no matter how fantastical and bizarre, provided they were interesting. He did not care to kill important characters without any scruple, and sure he did not bother to set his stories anywhere in the world and at any time in history, without even analyzing the customs of other peoples or epochs: the important thing was to capture the attention of public and find nice opportunities to wrestle beauty out of language.

I like to think on Shakespeare’s brain as a Leviathan who has swallowed the whole Spice Islands and the Oasis of Eden. Spring jumped inside his imagination like a drunken lamb, bumping into and pollinating with its wool every branch, every bush, every hawthorn of hisneurons. Reading him (and some other great writers in their best moments) I sometimes even feel as if I am swimming inside the corneas of some kind of Divinity.

>shakespeare is divine
Good Lord you really shook this spear. Honestly TS Elliot is metaphysically miraculous in lucid almost argumentative phrase.

Do you Anglos ever appreciate a Laconic phrase that was so simple so brief so dense so rewind worthy that it mogs your porous impositions of Angl* Julius Caesar? Tone deaf amorous Brutus display compared to the historical Caesar who was larger than life IN HIS LIFE.

I hate Shakespeare worship so much it is an inquisition. Bah humbug.

Attached: 3ibryn.png (477x349, 87.37K)

>>narrative art, which had until that point been a completely groupthink endeavor, a mere way to promulgate tradition and authority
>Before Shakespeare, Dante had put words in the mouth of Virgil, Camoens had told Virgil to shut up, and philosophers were already writing their utopias...
I think the difference is in Shakespeare’s especial love and exploitation of ambiguity and what we today would retroactively recognize as notes of existentialism and postmodernism in his works as distinguished from, say, the Catholicism of Dante, the mythological/tradition-revering worldview of Virgil and Homer, and so forth. As well as the qualitative distinction from literature as myth/fable/allegory/epic (and with characters therefore decidedly less introspective) to psychological, introspective literature as Shakespeare took it to such a great degree. Homer’s Odysseus has a psyche, absolutely, but not in the same fully-rounded degree that a figure like Hamlet has, who becomes someone realer and deeper than most real people, deeper even than we ourselves are much of the time, and thus was essentially the necessary prelude to portraits of other modern characters we regard as archetypal like Raskolnikov or Stephen Daedalus.

Cervantes is a great comparison to Shakespeare because Cervantes is another justly revered titan of Western literature — and, as you justly point out, he independently was developing the same retroactive notes of postmodernism/metafiction we now found in Shakespeare’s works to an even greater extent in Quixote. The praise of Shakespeare isn’t something, in my opinion, which now means, “You can’t praise other authors who also were great and had notes of these same qualities Shakespeare developed so much in his works,” but rather it’s because he did it in such a well-rounded way through such a huge corpus, so consistently blending all these traits we today consider as being what goes to make up a great work of literature. Cervantes is another giant and my reverence of Shakespeare exists along with my reverence of Cervantes (and Homer, Dante, Virgil, Camoens whomever you will) . I simply add to Shakespeare, these even more fully-rounded gifts — poetic beauty and density of language, the abundance of timeless stories and characters he crafted, the qualities already repeatedly mentioned in this thread.

>With anyone else from that long ago it's easy to be conscious of the differences between their sensibilities and ours, but with Shakespeare it's just Shakespeare, it's *his* sensibility, not that of any time.
Exactly this is what I was trying to express but didn’t quite know how to in this post >I think the difference is in Shakespeare’s especial love and exploitation of ambiguity and what we today would retroactively recognize as notes of existentialism and postmodernism in his works as distinguished from, say, the Catholicism of Dante, the mythological/tradition-revering worldview of Virgil and Homer, and so forth.

In Shakespeare you don’t get the sense that he’s a strict Christian who could totally and without irony/suspicion adhere to that worldview, nor of the hero-and-god-worship of Ancient Rome or Greece, but rather of a proto-existentialist too fully human, modern, and skeptical to fall into these restrictive pigeonholes. Certainly these notes ARE to be found in prior literature and literature of around the same time as Shakespeare but Shakespeare simply took it the furthest and in the most sophisticated fashion.

Well said. Better than I whined about
I'm sick of skeptics! I'm sick of cynics! I'm sick of realists! I'm sick of too human I want my God I want a hero. I want my longing for a hero and a God to be put on stage for what it is: a fool's errand, a romantic but mortal dream. We've had too much ambiguity we may not survive this ambiguity.

Attached: 1490026766814.jpg (600x400, 31.06K)

>but the synthesis of it and elaborations upon it were themselves the revolution

What revolution?
The troubadours, Cervantes, Whitman, Pound etc. were more revolutionary than Shakespeare, i.e., poetry before Whitman is rather different from poetry after Whitman, same can be said about Baudelaire, Mallarmé, the dadaists, James Joyce etc. But I don't think it can really be said about Shakespeare.
What exactly did Shakespeare revolutionize?
He was an influence on many authors, but so was the Bible, or Aristotle, or the discovery of America, or Isaac Newton. For instance, you'll have 19th century authors modelling their characters on Lear, but they will model some of their characters on Napoleon too.
Virgil was hugely influential too, but he is certainly not innovative, and doesn't represent a 'revolution' in literature.
In specific terms of literary form, I don't think he 'revolutionized' much.

For instance, one of the posters above mentions metafiction as an 'innovation' of Shakespeare.
But even Homer is metafictional, Horace wrote an entire metapoetic poetic treatise which every single educated Renaissance person knew, the play within a play was an old technique by the time of Hamlet...
Sure, it's interesting that Shakespeare also wrote some such lines, but it's not a strong 'innovation'. Perhaps locally, in England, or in English theater it had a strong effect, which is good.
Again, Cervantes is way, way more daring in his metafiction, which puts into question a whole lot of issues regarding: the role of author, the use of literature, the 'many voices' and the 'many levels' of the telling of the tale, the reaction of the character reading his own story in book form, the importance or unimportance of certain devices such as the preface, the appearance of a fiction-inside-the-fiction character into the fiction, and so on.

Everyone is talking about the quality of Shakespeare's work, which is of course the most important thing in evaluating him, but I think the quantity of his work is also important. Shakespeare has around fifteen plays which are considered to be at least great, if not masterpieces. Let's compare that to Shakespeare's contemporaries on the English stage: Marlowe and Jonson each wrote a few plays people still rate highly, Webster wrote two, and everyone else wrote at most one play that's still esteemed. If Shakespeare had only written Hamlet, or if he'd only written Hamlet and his minor plays, I'm sure he'd still be considered one of the finest English playwrights, but would he be the undisputed greatest writer in the history of English literature? I don't think so. As far as I can tell, the number of pieces of great literary merit that Shakespeare produced is unequaled among English writers, and not just playwrights; how many English novelists have that many novels which are still heavily discussed?

>idk but i remember watching the leonardo dicaprio romeo and juliet movie in school. that movie was so bad its not even funny
Shit taste my dude

I always read Quijote waiting for a laugh or a sentimental investment never for my linguistic historical development. I guess it's not a book to enjoy but to orient yourself with for brain building scholasticism. Hrumph. I had fun with Hamlet and was high on Hindu Veda/Purana. Upanishads and Gita is just so much better than anything Western.

>Shakespeare’s especial love and exploitation of ambiguity and what we today would retroactively recognize as notes of existentialism and postmodernism in his works
Common trend of the time, typical also in Spanish authors like Quevedo and specially Calderón de la Barca (La Vida es Sueño), but actually going back to Petrarch's love for the antithesis and Ancient skeptics.
In philosophy, you'll see it in Descartes's doubt, although the skepticism was already present in Montaigne.
In England itself, Francis Bacon was doing works of a similar sort.
Shakespeare, in fact, read Montaigne, and aped him in The Tempest: shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/blogs/montaigne-and-tempest/
Was he a major representative of that trend? Yes, but so were others (Cervantes too).

It's not a great rarity that a very smart man who was born after the whole map of the world had changed, was very much more skeptical than Dante...
Shakespeare was the same age as Galileo.

>Homer’s Odysseus has a psyche, absolutely, but not in the same fully-rounded degree that a figure like Hamlet has
Plato's Socrates, and Augustine, or the Christ of the Gospels, are very much 'fully-rounded' for me, although of course 'fully-rounded' is a more or less meaningless cliché, which can mean whatever you want it to mean, and you can define it in such a way that Hamlet is more 'fully-rounded' than X or Y.

>who becomes someone realer and deeper than most real people
Vague nonsense.

Was Shakespeare a great author? Yes. Like Sophocles, Horace, Augustine, Chaucer etc. etc.
Was he the greatest? No.
And for every ad hoc reason that you can find for him being the 'greatest', I can find similar ad hoc reason for those other authors, including reasons not present in Shakespeare.
OP is specifically asking for why people say he's ''the best''.
I have no problem with saying he is a 'great' author, if by great we mean someone who excelled at a specific form, was good at using rhetorical technique etc. etc., in other words, a 'master of the craft'.

When it comes to calling someone ''the best'', like that popularizer Harold Bloom does... That's nonsense to me.
Nobody should 'revere' any author.

he wasn’t

I’m a pseud and the only thing I enjoyed during my youth when I actually attempted to read him was Midsummer Night’s Dream
His verse is kinda shit tbqhfamalamadingdong

I should’ve made clear — by “elaborations upon it” I meant rather the quantity of it, the sheer variety of his corpus. You’re right that aspects of metafiction are already to be found in literature before him and during his time and also developed to a much greater extent in figures like Cervantes. But what he mainly revolutionized, I think, was the proto-existentialist worldview (using the works as a springboard for these timeless psychological and philosophical investigations of human nature which go beyond mere moral didacticism or adherence to some socially-bound system of Christian religion, Renaissance humanism, or a mythological worldview of hero-worship), the invention of the fully human literary character, through the introspection/proto-stream-of-consciousness he develops to such a great extent in his works, actually making his characters characters instead of cardboard cut-outs, as well as as mentions the sheer quantity of great works in which he did this, with, on top of this, the consistent and magnificent beauty of language and poetic density. Again, it’s a holistic greatness instead of just one thing you can put your finger on. Even if you were to focus on him for beauty of language alone (Nabokov’s point of view) — then again, just by this alone, he’s one of the greatest in the English language along with others like Milton, Joyce, and the like. He also had the genuine gift for storytelling — even if these were, as you disparagingly mention, lifted from prior sources (as if Homer and Virgil could have existed without the tradition of Greek or Roman history and mythology they were dependent on, Dante and Milton without the Scriptures and Greek and Roman mythology, Cervantes without the tradition of chivalric literature, and so forth?) — Shakespeare’s works are genuine STORIES, and this is an admittedly possibly crude, unsophisticated taste but something I think can also be forgotten by people — that an author can be so skilled and talented but without the penchant for storytelling. And again, the quantity — the quantity of beautiful poetry, and the quantity of timeless characters he created. If you wanted to view Shakespeare as just a psychologist/character-creator alone he’s then yet again still one of the greatest in world literature, up there with a Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.

>Lewis appreciation
Preternaturally Based

Attached: EA641B23-E101-47CE-BFDB-8246949E0ADD.jpg (828x828, 92.19K)

People who praise Shakespeare's for his skeptical worldview should also remember that Dante was quite an innovative linguistic thinker, not to mention a literary critic with ideas of his own about textual interpretation.
The Commedia is, perhaps, the first book, or at any rate one of the first books, written under the sign of a specific literary theory of interpretation.
Was he a Catholic? Sure, but so was almost everyone in Europe before Columbus/Montaigne/rebirth of skepticism.
He also wrote a political book which was banned by the Church more than three centuries after his death.

Kek fair enough. I mean if you’re arguing “You can’t say Shakespeare is the BEST author with 100% certainty and without any caviling or doubts” — you’ve said a tautology. Clearly — any author you choose as the best, counterarguments and counterexamples could be brought up. It’s like asking what the best food is — and of course, ultimately, as the old phrase goes, de gustibus non est disputandum. My intention, I guess, was more to show that the reverence of Shakespeare isn’t UNFOUNDED, than it was to definitively say, “He is the best and you can’t argue against it.” Is it probable there’s elements of an Anglo-literary-worship cult in the traditional reverence of Shakespeare? Yes, entirely so. But is the place he’s given entirely unfounded and simply a socio-literary artifact? This I think goes the opposite way into too much cynicism. Dante, Joyce, Dostoyevsky, Virgil, Milton, Homer, Cervantes — all also writers people could decide are the one they rank on top, and all could be justified for it. Literature at the top isn’t a competition and certainly the idea of Shakespeare exceptionalism can go too far (“Bardolatry” as Shaw called it) but I personally still tend towards Bardolatry even while confessing it can be a matter of taste.

>the quantity of beautiful poetry
Who defines what's beautiful?
Personally, I consider a lot Shakespeare to be mere rhetoric. Stuff like:
"My Lord of Buckingham, if my weak oratory
Can from his mother win the Duke of York,
user expect him here; but if she be obdurate
To mild entreaties, God in heaven forbid
We should infringe the holy privilege
Of blessed sanctuary! not for all this land
Would I be guilty of so deep a sin."

Many of his metaphors strike me as clichés. Death as sleep? The country from where no traveler returns (used by Dante too)? Perchance to dream? Those images were already commonplaces when he wrote them.
Many of them are obvious elaborations on obvious formulas. 'Sea of troubles'? Sea of roses. 'Winter of discontent'? Summer of love.
There are many precious moments, but they don't strike me, personally, as more abundant than those present in Dante or Homer.

>If you wanted to view Shakespeare as just a psychologist/character-creator alone he’s then yet again still one of the greatest in world literature, up there with a Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky
I think he's way worse.
For instance, it is evident how he uses King Lear as a mere 'cardboard' at the first act of the play, where he simply banishes his daughter just because she remained silent, which is highly disproportional nonsense, and we the readers clearly know that the true reason is simply that the story demanded it. The character was merely serving the story as a tool for the plot progression of the older legend.
Borges also pointed out how strange it is that a character as intelligent as Hamlet could believe in some random ghost appearing in a tower at night. Not much skepticism, not much existentialism when it comes to his very wise characters believing in ghosts and witches, I suppose. Hamlet was acting to avenge a ghost, then wondered if death is just a dream... I wouldn't compare him to Tolstoy's characters...
His kings are very kingly. His drunks are very drunk. His characters strike me as obvious literary inventions. His Caesar is the typical Caesar you'd expect.
I agree, however, that the best ones - Falstaff, Hamlet, Macbeth - are done more elaborately, and are given more opportunity to express certain ideas which render them 'deeper' than the average literary character of the day. Nothing close to Levin, Stephen Daedalus, Marcel, or even Dante himself (as character), as well as Augustine and Socrates, though.
But then again, I don't really believe in the cliché distinction between 'characters' and 'cardboard cut-outs'. For every character who people claim to be "fully rounded" you can find many many "faults" which render it completely artificial, because that's what is, an artificial literary invention.

Anyway, this discussion is getting too long already, and, since you seem willing to agree that it's a matter of taste... Have a nice weekend.

Just to make it clear (I feel it is necessary), when I say ''I think he's way worse''... I mean that he's worse if you are using realist standards.
I, being a depraved post-modernist of the worst kind, am allergic to realism myself, and experience great fun in discovering obvious marks of the artificial in characters that people claim to be 'like real human beings'.
Which is why Dante's characters, which are really successions of impressive human allegories, actually interest me a little more than those of Shakespeare, because they fit so well into the structure of the Commedia, and are present just enough to show the 'human' element of the basic 'principles' Dante is walking through in his philosophical journey. They are great statues in his cathedral, and I happen to believe that a literary cathedral can contain nothing but statues. Shakespeare's might be coloured statues, and they look perhaps more realistic for the uncritical eye, and Proust may even have substituted statues for photographs, and someday perhaps an author will give us holograms or full taxidermy, but for me they are just as artificial, only some of them have perhaps a few more details here and there.
I don't think Dante's characters not 'looking human' is a defect, but rather an essential characteristic which makes perfect sense inside his overall allegorical structure, while in the case of Shakespeare, as Borges said when justifying his preference for Dante, one has to ''make concessions'', and I don't think it makes sense for Hamlet to both be so skeptic and 'modern' and at the same time believe in ghosts or be so close to his family (shouldn't he care less about 'avenging the father' and such stupid stuff?), nor do I think it's effective as nonsense (I don't think nonsense was even Shakespeare's goal, I just think he didn't consider Hamlet well enough, or wanted too much to please the audience or himself by playing a ghost), it's just a reflection of who Shakespeare was: a man of a time in which both ghosts and science were coexisting, the beginning of the modern age... But that only goes to show that Hamlet is a mere artificial invention, a statue in Shakespeare's own cathedral.

you can always spot the anglotard bloomfags whenever they say "shakespeare invented le bieng human", such a lack of critical thinking

Say what you will about it him, I find it quite impressive that he's the only author who seems to defy shitposting. Shakespeare discussion threads are always peak Yea Forums

Attached: xlf3lb2pg0x71.jpg (781x716, 29.31K)

The euros seethe more as they are want to do. Except the Germans of course, who know better and have no need to feel inferior

>So much vagueness
If you hadn’t already noticed, we are talking about imaginative literature. Nobody can be a hundred percent exact with their words when the subject of the discussion is as intangible and subjective as literary aesthetics. If you want to be in a more direct discussion go to /sci/, otherwise, suck it up.

based midwit

My friends, if you don't know how to talk about it, then shut up, OK?
What that first poster said is entirely vague, and has no place in literary criticism.
In fact, as has been pointed out, it's Harold Bloom pastiche, and Harold Bloom was notoriously a vague rhetorician who isn't taken seriously by anybody anymore. His only good works were in the 50's-70's, and even then...

Shakespeare is one of the best instances of recurrent midwittery, as he takes tropes which were once original and *recycles* them for a larger audience, which, if I am not mistaken, has been described by MacDonald as one of the main characteristics of the "midcult" (it's what differentiates a poem by Stevens from a New Yorker story). A lot of Shakespeare is mere vulgarisation of older sources. In the instance I cited above, it's a vulgarisation of Montaigne for "exotic" effects which were popular among audiences accustomed to travel books. He'll do the same with Rome, and so on. His witches are a vulgarisation of genuine folk/ancient poetry.
You take something that was widely original, believed in etc. a long time ago, then you use it for cheap effects. This is the technique of the midcult, from Shakespeare's witches to the way current popstars dress in imitation of old aristocracy.
Not to say Shakespeare doesn't have many original moments, or that other important authors (including Cervantes) don't make concessions for the midcult now and then, but if you want to play the "what a midwit!" game, then at least choose Geoffrey Hill, Beckett, or some other such author who really doesn't allow any of it inside his works, otherwise it will just look as though you haven't read enough.

Shakespeare was black.

>has no place in literary criticism.
You are no authority on what does or doesn't have a place in literary criticism. The rules of the trade have never been clearly defined, quite frankly because the rules of its object, which is literature, has never been clearly defined. What discussions like these come down to is whether or not the hearer can see what is being pointed out in the text. If he can't see it, it's easy to accuse the critic of being vague or inexact. There is no reason to throw this hissy-fit over such genuine and inescapable differences.

And you also have a tendency towards vagueness in the unattractive portraits you keep conjuring up of Shakespeare.

>You are no authority on what does or doesn't have a place in literary criticism
Correct. If you want to be someone who can't make a decent argument, you are free to do so, on any subject.
I should have made myself clearer: blind, non-argumentative ululations have no place in criticism as I personally see it, just like astrology has no place in science as I personally see it.
Whoever wants to use different definitions than mine for the words "criticism" and "science", is free to do so.

>What discussions like these come down to is whether or not the hearer can see what is being pointed out in the text.
So: Shakespeare is worse than Stephen King.
Can you see that?
Now, please don't accuse me of being inexact. It's an easy trick!
What a stupid way of avoiding having to carefully explain your reasons... And it is *very common* among people who praise Shakespeare so much. It's always a load of vague prose that ultimately amounts to "Shakespeare is good because he makes me feel good". Which is great! Good for you.
But it's the level of critical engagement I'd expect from someone who reveres Mr. King.

>There is no reason to throw this hissy-fit over such genuine and inescapable differences.
The genuine difference between you and I is that I see the truth and you don't.
See how easy it is to play such a game?
When you abandon reason in favor of mystery, in favor of not wishing to clarify, you should be responsible to yourself and abandon speech too, or at least declare "This is how I personally feel about this issue, how I personally reacted to Shakespeare, and can't be verified by others through any clear methods".
Is that how you feel? If so, well then. No problems. End of discussion and have a nice day.
Just to recapitulate: OP asked for an explanation of why some consider Shakespeare *the* best, then a guy came with such expressions as "aberration of communication" and a lot of claims about how Shakespeare pioneered this and that. And then? He did not elaborate.
The problem with that, for me, is that it renders discussion useless, because I could say that no, it was Bernardim Ribeiro who invented aberration of communication!
Then it would be just two people arguing nonsense with each other... Good stuff for an absurdist play, but not for a literary discussion where one wishes to explain something to someone else (the OP).

>And you also have a tendency towards vagueness in the unattractive portraits you keep conjuring up of Shakespeare
If I have not been clear, it was either for lack of space (3000 characters limit) or differences in language (my English is not perfect).
I like Shakespeare and have translated some of his poems. If you read my posts, you'll see my picture of Shakespeare is quite an attractive one. I believe he was the best English language poet of his day alongside John Donne, and overall a better author than even Donne.
But I have no reverence. I don't revere any author.

>wittgenstein disliked

how will he survive this

You are making arguments against positions I neither made nor implied.
>Shakespeare is worse than Stephen King
You are quite insufferable. Nobody claimed public opinion was of equal merit to literary criticism. There is a clear objective distinction between bad and good literature. The distinction between great and greatest, however, is not so clear, and must be left to personal taste. Your argumentative pedantry is therefore of no help.

Attached: 6F9D3DF5-3D01-4CF9-A7EB-A33ECCE396B3.png (387x335, 133.82K)