At behest! Frolick a gander at
My main man: Leonardo Tolstoyus!
His exposition unmatched:
a deliverance upon thy sacred calf!
Writing Sense - Shakespeare Sucks! by Leo Tolstoy
12-30-2012 03:55 PM
#1
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*** Official Shakespeare sucks thread ***At behest! Frolick a gander at |
12-30-2012 03:59 PM
#2
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12-30-2012 04:02 PM
#3
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12-30-2012 05:22 PM
#4
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AND ANOTHER THREAD IS SINGLE-HANDEDLY DESTROYED | |
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12-30-2012 05:54 PM
#5
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Nary a fool! Resuscitation commence! |
12-30-2012 06:36 PM
#6
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My nigga | |
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12-30-2012 07:00 PM
#7
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I wonder what she's drinking. And what's with the desk right at the front door like that? Embarrassing. | |
12-31-2012 02:10 AM
#8
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I mean, I agree with much of what he says, but I disagree with his conclusion. The thing is that Shakespeare wrote these things back when everything else was inside jokes about how Catholics suck and praises for the Queen and morality plays and, quite frankly, dreadful. One of Shakespeare's biggest contemporaries was Edmond Spenser, who wrote a 6-book series about a Knight going around and killing stuff and saving a princess and slaying symbols of Catholicism and upholding symbols of Queen Elizabeth, and it's just not at all interesting. | |
12-31-2012 05:27 AM
#9
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12-31-2012 06:27 AM
#10
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Just about everything in literature genuinely sucks, or sucks enough for complaint, before ~1980. The best of the best is at best stuff you want to have read not stuff you'll be glad you're reading. | |
Last edited by a500lbgorilla; 12-31-2012 at 06:31 AM. | |
12-31-2012 09:41 AM
#11
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I pretty much agree with the premise here. People talk about how contemporaries "stand on the shoulders" of their predecessors, which is why we should have such a profound appreciation for the classics. But doesn't that also imply that the contemporaries stand with a higher vantage point and that the classics are, in one way or another, below what the contemporaries provide? | |
12-31-2012 09:43 AM
#12
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Conversely, I heard that Shakespeare didn't hold much of The Wire or of Titanic. | |
12-31-2012 10:40 AM
#13
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Have any of you ever acted in a Shakespeare play? I don't think a person could possibly pick up on 1/4 of what he puts into his scripts even given multiple readings as just a reader, whereas putting on the show requires incredible amounts of analysis and unpacking content and meaning. | |
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12-31-2012 12:14 PM
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This conversation reminds me of when I learned why the Beatles music was so cheesy. | |
12-31-2012 01:09 PM
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I don't pretend to catch even close to everything that's awesome in Shakespeare's works. The thing is that there are different types of appreciation of the arts. These nuances still generally lend to something like "Ophelia's underhanded reference to her fanny here would have shocked the audience of their time," or "there's some layered commentary here on the Elizabethan military hierarchy," etc. In other words, they lend to appreciations within historical contexts or lend to appreciations of how Shakespeare can be considered the best writer of all time. | |
12-31-2012 04:00 PM
#16
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Yes he was revolutionary and wrote some stuff quite beautifully, but that doesn't seem to be what is taught about him. He is upheld as some great storyteller and philosopher, but he's neither, yet nobody can see this because nobody forgets what they were told about him and never just reads the texts to see what they really say. |
12-31-2012 04:07 PM
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Titus Andronicus is the shit. | |
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12-31-2012 04:32 PM
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12-31-2012 05:16 PM
#19
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It irritates me that Shakespeare gets so much credit for opening up existentialism. This is only a phenomenal idea to the aristocracy which is used to getting their way so much that they don't even have much human condition to acknowledge in the first place. |
12-31-2012 05:19 PM
#20
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I don't like the "upon the shoulders of giants" idea because I think it's really just "letting real people who live real lives write stories". It's not a coincidence that the more aristocracy-heavy the literature, the more wacky their characterizations and plotting. Deus ex machina is the kind of idea an aristocrat would unwittingly fabricate due to being too isolated from the real world |
12-31-2012 05:24 PM
#21
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what the | |
12-31-2012 05:29 PM
#22
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That's like saying you don't like the idea of "monkey see, monkey do." | |
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12-31-2012 05:44 PM
#23
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It is relevant in many ways, but not necessarily here. It's not like stuff like deus ex machina is a precursor to normal plotting. In fact, it seems that deus ex is more of an artificiality in the first place and the development of normal plotting didn't depend on its existence. |
12-31-2012 05:51 PM
#24
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Last edited by a500lbgorilla; 12-31-2012 at 05:55 PM. | |
12-31-2012 07:27 PM
#25
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A good analogy is music and black people. The most downtrodden, oppressed, and poor people in any modern society were merely allowed to create music and within just a few decades they created better material than the entirety of aristocratic history combined. As great as Beethoven is, his material is still just a niche that will never find the great success of what was created by poor black people. "Standing on the shoulders of giants" is an archaic descriptor; a more apropos one is "opening up the creativity of the masses". Poetry was the dominant form of literature for thousands of years not because it was the best form but because literature was bogged down by a narrow set of authors and audiences. |
01-01-2013 09:23 AM
#26
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In both posts you demonstrate the same mistake, thinking that the giants are members of the aristocracy. The giants are simply those who improved the craft before you. | |
Last edited by a500lbgorilla; 01-01-2013 at 09:27 AM. | |
01-01-2013 09:33 AM
#27
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01-01-2013 01:54 PM
#28
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ikr | |
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