/lit/ - Literature

Pericles is pretty shit. We can assume his lost plays were even worse

>>19628363
If a work is 'lost,' it probably wasn't that great or important to begin with.

>>19628363
He didn't even write that

>>19629164
You're retarded and probably only read canonical works. Why do you think what the elites curate will be great on a personal level?

>importance
meaningless term.

>>19629199
lookout, we got a free thinker over here, boys. don't make me sic my man Bloom on ya.

>>19629213
Hopefully that fat turd is rotting in Hell.

>>19629199
Don't really care about the cannons mate, just read what I like, simple as. If a book got lost, it's probably because it was fuckin' shit and nobody liked it. Like when they burned the Library of Alexandria. They did it because everything in there was garbage and they needed to get rid of it.

Has he ever written a single good play? Not popular, actually good.

>>19629227
nah, he's chillin, havin a mojito. you're pretty spiteful, you know.

>>19628363
>>19629164
Have you read Don Qiuxote? I bet Cardenio was a blast.

>>19629245
A Midsummer Night's Dream

>>19629244
Or the culture of the time just didn't appreciate it.

Love's labour's lost is shit and uncomprehensible

>>19629427
its not that bad but it is probably the hardest to gain an appreciation for. read james l calderwood's analysis and you may begin to like it a bit more.

>>19628345
Hamlet is no Titus Andronicus.

>>19628345
I suppose nearly all of his comedies are genuinely bad books, it's not just because they're terribly unfunny, everything from the way the characters behave to the poetry itself is at best "pretty", blandly ornamental, unbearably tame, and their structures are so predictable that one wonders how Elizabethans could have been so stupid as to keep watching them over and over, assuming they did.
I don't think anyone who has actually read plays like the Comedy of Errors or Titus Andronicus can think it's good, unless they have an inherent partiality towards liking Shakespeare (bardolatry). If I told you it was by Philip Massinger or some other such nobody you wouldn't even bother to finish reading the stuff.
But of course, it all depends on what you consider to be "bad". If I had written those plays, I wouldn't have published them, so I suppose I consider them "bad". However, is it worse than what the average dramatist of his day was doing? Almost certainly not, far from it, but then again the same applies to any good author. In that sense, Borges, Kafka, Proust, Flaubert etc. never wrote a bad book either, in fact they probably never even wrote a bad letter or diary entry. They were always above the average writer (which would be someone like Stephen King or worse) in anything they wrote. It's not a great merit, because the average is really shit, all you need is a little bit of good taste and you'll be above it. The prose of this very post is above that of the average contemporary writer, even though I paid no attention to matters of style when writing it. One million books are published every year in the US alone, imagine how bad the average must be. In Shakespeare's time it was much better, but still far from decent.

>>19628345
Proteus and Isolde.

>>19629803
Dude the Simpsons is just another weak as fuck American dad or even family guy. Family guy did it first.

>>19629803
comedy like this is why I keep coming back here, 9/10 good sir

>>19628363
Pericles is only available through a poorly pirated quarto copy, so it's not really fair

>>19629912
My post is correct, you probably haven't read Renaissance poetry widely at enough if you think they're "good", so most of what you probably love in them are actually clichés and ideas stolen from others authors. In themselves, those plays I mentioned are entirely ordinary.
I think Shakespeare wrote great plays and was the best English writer of his generation with the possible exception of Donne, which is saying a lot, but those particular plays are decidedly weak.

>>19629881
I didn't understand your post. What are you trying to suggest?

>>19629803
Wb Cymbeline

>>19629803
>If I told you it was by Philip Massinger or some other such nobody you wouldn't even bother to finish reading the stuff.
I'm an autist, so if you told me X play was Massinger or Peele or Fletcher or Middleton I'd make an effort to read the rest of their stuff too. Timon of Athens been partially ascribed to Middleton warrented me adding all of Middleton's plays to my catalogue.

>Borges, Kafka, Proust, Flaubert etc. never wrote a bad book eithe
Unless you think their established aesthetic is bad.

>bad letter or diary entry
Depends on where you draw the line from art to mere transfer of information.

Good post in general, thanks.

>>19629803
I was sure that there could be no individual cynical enough to not enjoy the sheer liveliness of a midsummer's dream but I stand corrected. You have to be the nist jaded man I have ever seen

>>19629256
Thats shit though