But Shaw strikes me a lot like Twitter. He spoke and wrote less because he had something to say than because he wanted people to hear how well he said things, and his reach increased because people enjoyed how well-put his remarks were and how stylishly he put down objections, rather than because of the quality of his opinions.
Do not read Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote plays, not books. Shakespeare should be watched, either on stage or on screen.
Reading a Shakespeare play is like deciding to listen to the Beatles by downloading MIDI files and playing them through software. Maybe you get the broad strokes of the song, and maybe you even like it, but you're not listening to the Beatles.
The drama and stories in his work don’t do much for me, I view them more as a vehicle for his poetry (which is some of the greatest ever written). And I enjoy it more on the page than spoken by others.
I know there are at least some others out there like me! Nabokov cleverly said something along the lines of “with Shakespeare, the metaphor is the thing, not the play.”
I also see the plays as vehicles for the poetry; but like a lot of poetry, it's made to be spoken aloud. In particular, it should be spoken as if it were prose - the metre is in the words, and comes through on its own. It's clunky to speak it as lines of verse.
Prosody - the musical, rhythmic quality of speech - is emphasised in verse. If a sentence runs over one-and-a-half lines, you can speak it as a normal sentence, with no pause after the first line and a pause in the middle of the second; the song-like quality will still come through, but it becomes easier for an audience to make sense of.
I think this applies to a lot of verse; not just Shakespeare's plays. If you read a sonnet like Ozymandias as a set of distinct lines, it sounds boring and stilted. If you speak it as a tale told by a traveller in a bar, it's much more engaging and exciting. The metre is carried by the words, they don't need help from the speaker.
Some of the best political speeches have that kind of song-like rhythm, although they aren't verse. I'm thinking of e.g. Churchill, or the Gettysburg Address.
I really think this is a dying art, by the way. If you see a Shakespeare production, at least here in the UK, the actors older than about sixty are able to imbue the lines with that underpinning iambic rhythm; the younger actors don't know how or don't bother. For me, that means they don't really catch that song-like quality. I really think those older actors might be the last generation to properly know how to scan.
>Some of the best political speeches have that kind of song-like rhythm, although they aren't verse. I'm thinking of e.g. Churchill, or the Gettysburg Address.
Incidentally, somewhere I came across Arthur Quiller-Couch discussing this. He used as his example this speech of Edmund Burke, which he claimed achieved its power by means of hidden iambic pentameter:
>The calculation of profit in all such wars is false. On balancing the account of such wars, ten thousand hogsheads of sugar are purchased at ten thousand times their price. The blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.
He points out that three fragments are actually iambic lines:
>Are purchased at ten thousand times their price... >Be shed but to redeem the blood of man... >The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.
Of course, this was in a time when the audience's ear (though perhaps not conscious mind) would be better attuned to that rhythm.
It's like saying don't ever read the source, just use the app!
She likes Shakespeare when it is described, but as a play it is entirely impenetrable to her.
Is that a bad thing?
So while he is pointing out the crassness of the work, he does think it’s great. Voltaire was very interested in the English, and pointing out the contrast here was definitely coming more from curiosity or even admiration than from dislike.
George Orwell - a fan of Shakespeare - admits the following:
- "Tolstoy is right in saying that Lear is not a very good play, as a play. It is too drawn-out and has too many characters and sub-plots."
- "Shakespeare has a habit of thrusting uncalled-for general reflections into the mouths of his characters. This is a serious fault in a dramatist"
- "Of course, it is not because of the quality of his thought that Shakespeare has survived, and he might not even be remembered as a dramatist if he had not also been a poet."
Shakespeare I just can't get anywhere with. The archaic language is too much of a barrier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_influence_on_T...
Speaking as another who loathed Shakespeare at school and worked against that beginning to understand him and eventually revere him, precisely because I (rightly) assumed I was wrong:
You have to frame the dissenters you quote in the context of overwhelming literary consensus that he's the greatest writer who ever lived.
It's not like there's a roughly equal opinion on both sides as to his being good or not.
If you don't enjoy Shakespeare it's absolutely ok, but be in no doubt: it's a you thing.
The world is not only the anglo world. Other cultures have their own literary giants and you can bet that they value them more than they value Shakespeare.
When I have to force myself to enjoy something, I tend to wonder if the thing is really worth enjoying or if I am instead just trying to acquire a taste that I deem prestigious. To each their own.
Whereas I would consider myself rather arrogant to assume the general consensus of hundreds of years to be wrong just because I needed to put a little effort in to understand it and thereafter enjoy it.
- Voltaire declared Hamlet a ‘vulgar and barbarous play’ and that ‘one would take this work to be the fruit of the inspiration of a drunken savage’
- George Bernard Shaw: ’. “There is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare,” he said. “It would be positively a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.”
- Tolstoy: “I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: “King Lear,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Hamlet” and “Macbeth,” not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium, and doubted as to whether I was senseless in feeling works regarded as the summit of perfection by the whole of the civilized world to be trivial and positively bad, or whether the significance which this civilized world attributes to the works of Shakespeare was itself senseless.”