/lit/ - Literature

What their great Tragedians shewed the decadent Athenians once in sublimely shaped examples, without being able to arrest the frenzied downfall of their nation; what Shakespeare held before a world that vainly thought itself the renaissance of art and man's free intellecta—its heartless blindness striving for a beauty all unfelt,—the wondrous mirror of those dramatic improvisations in which he shewed that world its utter emptiness, its violence and horror, without the bitter undeception being even heeded in his time: these works of the Sufferers shall now be ever present with us, whilst the deeds of the "makers of history" shall in them alone live on. So would the hour of redemption of the great Cassandra of world-history have sounded, of redemption from the curse of finding no one to believe her prophecies. To us shall all these poet-sages once have spoken; to us will they speak afresh.

Which Shakespeare plays have you seen live? I've seen Hamlet and Measure for Measure, and I'm going to Twelfth Night this weekend.

>destroys atheism
>destroys feminism
>destroys materialism
>destroys globalism
Reminder not to let academics 'contextualise' Shakespeare. What he said is true for all time and needs no scare quotes.

Which Shakespeare plays have you seen performed live? I've been to Hamlet and Measure for Measure and I'm going to see Twelfth Night soon.

>destroys atheism
>destroys materialism
>destroys modernity

What's your excuse for not currently studying Him?

>translated into german with absolutely no loss
>in fact gets better

>>20523587
>This titanic dramatist could not really be understood by analogy with any other poet, and for this reason aesthetic judgement of him has remained completely without foundation. His dramas seem to be such a direct copy of the world, that we cannot find in them any artistic mediation in their representation of the idea and more especially we cannot critically demonstrate this mediation, while our great poets, admiring them as the products of a superhuman genius, regarded them as natural wonders and found in them a means to study the laws of their own creation.

>How far Shakespeare was superior to the actual poet, can be seen starkly enough in the uncommon truthfulness of every trait of his representations when the poet, as for example in the quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius (in Julius Caesar), is directly treated as a silly creature; whereas we nowhere encounter the supposed ‘poet’ Shakespeare except in the essential nature of the characters themselves in his dramas. Shakespeare therefore remained incomparable until German genius produced in Beethoven someone who can only be explained by analogy with him. If we sum up the complex of Shakespeare’s characters, as they interreact with uncommon intensity into their total effect on our innermost feeling; and if we place beside this complex that of Beethoven’s motivic world with its irrepressible forcefulness and certainty, then we must be aware that these worlds are congruent in such a way that each is contained within the other even if they appear to inhabit different spheres.

>This titanic dramatist could not really be understood by analogy with any other poet, and for this reason aesthetic judgement of him has remained completely without foundation. His dramas seem to be such a direct copy of the world, that we cannot find in them any artistic mediation in their representation of the idea and more especially we cannot critically demonstrate this mediation, while our great poets, admiring them as the products of a superhuman genius, regarded them as natural wonders and found in them a means to study the laws of their own creation.

>How far Shakespeare was superior to the actual poet, can be seen starkly enough in the uncommon truthfulness of every trait of his representations when the poet, as for example in the quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius (in Julius Caesar), is directly treated as a silly creature; whereas we nowhere encounter the supposed ‘poet’ Shakespeare except in the essential nature of the characters themselves in his dramas. Shakespeare therefore remained incomparable until German genius produced in Beethoven someone who can only be explained by analogy with him. If we sum up the complex of Shakespeare’s characters, as they interreact with uncommon intensity into their total effect on our innermost feeling; and if we place beside this complex that of Beethoven’s motivic world with its irrepressible forcefulness and certainty, then we must be aware that these worlds are congruent in such a way that each is contained within the other even if they appear to inhabit different spheres.

>To the French, as representatives of modern civilisation, Shakespeare, considered seriously, to this day is a monstrosity; and even to the Germans he has remained a subject of constantly renewed investigation, with so little [142] positive result that the most conflicting views and statements are forever cropping up again. Thus has this most bewildering of dramatists—already set down by some as an utterly irresponsible and untamed genius, without one trace of artistic culture—quite recently been credited again with the most systematic tendence of the didactic poet. Goethe, after introducing him in "Wilhelm Meister" as an "admirable writer," kept returning to the problem with increasing caution, and finally decided that here the higher tendence was to be sought, not in the poet, but in the embodied characters he brought before us in immediate action. Yet the closer these figures were inspected, the greater riddle became the artist's method: though the main plan of a piece was easy to perceive, and it was impossible to mistake the consequent development of its plot, for the most part pre-existing in the source selected, yet the marvellous "accidentiæ" in its working out, as also in the bearing of its dramatis personae, were inexplicable on any hypothesis of deliberate artistic scheming. Here we found such drastic individuality, that it often seemed like unaccountable caprice, whose sense we never really fathomed till we closed the book and saw the living drama move before our eyes; then stood before us life's own image, mirrored with resistless truth to nature, and filled us with the lofty terror of a ghostly vision. But how decipher in this magic spell the tokens of an "artwork"? Was the author of these plays a poet?

>What little we know of his life makes answer with outspoken naïvety: he was a play-actor and manager, who wrote for himself and his troop these pieces that in after days amazed and poignantly perplexed our greatest poets; pieces that for the most part would not so much as have come down to us, had the unpretending prompt-books of the Globe Theatre not been rescued from oblivion in the nick of time by the printing-press. Lope de Vega, scarcely less a wonder, wrote his pieces from one day to the next in immediate contact with his actors and the [143] stage; beside Corneille and Racine, the poets of façon, there stands the actor Molière, in whom alone production was alive; and midst his tragedy sublime stood Æschylus, the leader of its chorus.—Not to the Poet, but to the Dramatist must we look, for light upon the Drama's nature; and he stands no nearer to the poet proper than to the mime himself, from whose heart of hearts he must issue if as poet he means to "hold the mirror up to Nature."

>>19201109
If he was real, he looked nothing like that.

>To the French, as representatives of modern civilisation, Shakespeare, considered seriously, to this day is a monstrosity; and even to the Germans he has remained a subject of constantly renewed investigation, with so little [142] positive result that the most conflicting views and statements are forever cropping up again. Thus has this most bewildering of dramatists—already set down by some as an utterly irresponsible and untamed genius, without one trace of artistic culture—quite recently been credited again with the most systematic tendence of the didactic poet. Goethe, after introducing him in "Wilhelm Meister" as an "admirable writer," kept returning to the problem with increasing caution, and finally decided that here the higher tendence was to be sought, not in the poet, but in the embodied characters he brought before us in immediate action. Yet the closer these figures were inspected, the greater riddle became the artist's method: though the main plan of a piece was easy to perceive, and it was impossible to mistake the consequent development of its plot, for the most part pre-existing in the source selected, yet the marvellous "accidentiæ" in its working out, as also in the bearing of its dramatis personae, were inexplicable on any hypothesis of deliberate artistic scheming. Here we found such drastic individuality, that it often seemed like unaccountable caprice, whose sense we never really fathomed till we closed the book and saw the living drama move before our eyes; then stood before us life's own image, mirrored with resistless truth to nature, and filled us with the lofty terror of a ghostly vision. But how decipher in this magic spell the tokens of an "artwork"? Was the author of these plays a poet?

>What little we know of his life makes answer with outspoken naïvety: he was a play-actor and manager, who wrote for himself and his troop these pieces that in after days amazed and poignantly perplexed our greatest poets; pieces that for the most part would not so much as have come down to us, had the unpretending prompt-books of the Globe Theatre not been rescued from oblivion in the nick of time by the printing-press. Lope de Vega, scarcely less a wonder, wrote his pieces from one day to the next in immediate contact with his actors and the [143] stage; beside Corneille and Racine, the poets of façon, there stands the actor Molière, in whom alone production was alive; and midst his tragedy sublime stood Æschylus, the leader of its chorus.—Not to the Poet, but to the Dramatist must we look, for light upon the Drama's nature; and he stands no nearer to the poet proper than to the mime himself, from whose heart of hearts he must issue if as poet he means to "hold the mirror up to Nature."

Show me a great artist who isn't just giving a meditation on mortality.

>As far as the pronunciation of language is concerned, Shakespeare is closer to Australian than most modern English accents.
Australian bros we're going home.

>>17784721
Most accurate depiction.

>still no nobel prize
Pathetic.

>wrote about 40 plays in under 30 years, most of them masterpieces
>collaborated on many others
>also poetry
>extremely well read
>and was an actor
>would have rehearsed in the morning, performed in the day, and wrote late into the night by candlelight
>also involved in the business and running of his company
>and also had his side businesses
>ALL WITHOUT CAFFEINE

SERIOUSLY, how did this bulbous headed motherfucker do it?

>>17425061
Wrong. We have Milton, Chaucer, Eliot, Auden, Pound, Jefferson, and the entire English Romantic period too.

>"thou hadst small Latine, and lesse Greeke"
Polylinguals btfo'd once again.

>>17116662
>Tolstoy
>Chekhov
>Montaigne
>Moliere
>better than Shakespeare
Not in the slightest. You miss the point, as so many do, that Shakespeare was more or less most likely the greatest dramatist to ever exist. Horace and Cervantes for example, are doing something very different. As for the other key dramatists here, Aeschylus and Sophocles, the argument could be made that they are superior to Shakespeare. But it is so close that a question of superiority becomes almost pointless, except for Shakespeare's technical development above them which as Wagner put it made the chorus unnecessary; but as I said, this does not necessarily say Shakespeare is the superior.

Shakespeare has become the supreme plebfilter for internet art pseuds. If they cannot appreciate him as one of, if not, the greatest, such as those on /tv/ calling film superior to theatre, or retarded Spaniards of a different blood to Cervantes altogether, then they are mere pseuds!

>>17094499
His arguments against Shakespeare are retarded.

>Shakespeare isn't one of the greatest artists to ever live, and arguably the greatest poet and dramatist

People who believe this should be refused any position of literati influence and/or strung up and hung.

It's like they haven't actually read his works.

RYM now has a site for video games how do we get them to do a literature one?

Goodreads is just garbage

What's his best works?