Not that much dust. It’s mostly cat hair.
Did Harold Bloom explicitly say in his book that all non-European cultures didn’t know what it was like to be human before they were finally exposed to Shakespeare, or was he just oblivious to the racism of his claim?
and for fans of ‘Authorship’ controversies, Shakespeare may not even have been a man…
I get it. It’s basically the same thing some people say about Casablanca or The Wizard of Oz, or for that matter, a DC-3. Shakespeare can seem not all that, because we aren’t grasping that he invented (or at least he was the first one to synthesize) everything we’re comparing him with.
Jim B. may I suggest this 1996 version of Romeo & Juliet which uses Shakespeare’s dialog, but in a contemporary setting. The movie seems digitally sped up to me, but even if you only click on random spots, you might have a better appreciation of the Bard.
Look deeper into Bloom’s work than a post on a message board.
I studied under him thirty-some years ago at Yale, along with the other original Deconstructionists. The man has many failings…personal grooming and hygiene in particular…but racism is not one of them. He was particularly adept with Chinese poetics.
Or the Josh Whedon directed Much Ado About Nothing, which I happened to catch yesterday while channel surfing. I’ve tried to watch other versions of the play before but didn’t have the patience for it. This time it was easier to follow the action. The contemporary setting really gives you a better feel for the dialog.
Love love love this one. I’ve watched it over and over. Branagh has a way of speaking Shakespearean dialogue that makes it sound like contemporary conversation.
I dunno; “nobody can be truly human without Shakespeare” sure strikes me as racist. And absurd on many other grounds, too. How does he account for the fact that in other languages, other authors are the Greatest of All Time? Are Spanish-speaking humans a different species, because they’re shaped by Cervantes instead of Shakespeare?
It’s like Mr. Natural said to the lady in the flower pot hat: “If you don’t know by now, lady, don’t mess with it!”
http://pixdaus.com/mister-natural-by-robert-crumb-beautiful-diddy-wah-diddy-lan/items/view/302192/
When you quoted** Jim B**, you left out the “:):):)” at the end of the OP.
It’s clearly a comical dismissal of Shakespeare as the author of the works attributed to him. It is not meant to be taken seriously.
Look at this superficially nonsensical sentence: “I must say I find his quotes rather flowery and perhaps concise at times.”
Not his writing but his quotes? Rather flowery?? Perhaps concise??? :rolleyes:
I’ll say. Imagine if he had read it in the original Klingon…
I was thinking about this yesterday. Shakespeare really does have a pan-national appeal. Richard Wagner made the whole family sit around and read the plays out loud in the evenings, they are performed in French, Spanish, in the Far East.
You don’t see a lot of English or Americans quoting Moliere or Goethe on a regular basis, but there’s a general feeling around the world that knowing Shakespeare is a Good Thing.
In addition to the other reasons given, Shakespeare was the dividing line between Middle and Modern English. Not saying he caused the shift, he just happens to be the best-known writer from the period when it happened.
He and Richard Burbage were also the first showmen to charge a fixed gate price for admission. Prior to them, admission was free and the players would pass the hat and basically worked as buskers or for tips. The Globe invented the modern practice that allows actors to get fairly and regularly paid. This, according to Bernie Sahlins of Second City.
“Nobody can be truly human without Shakespeare,” is not remotely the same as, “Shakespeare shaped our conception of what it means to be human.”
I’ve only read excerpts from Bloom’s work, and that was a while ago, so I can’t comment directly on his arguments. But the idea that a particular artist or philosopher shaped the popular conception of what it means to be human should not be controversial in general. If you ask your average American “What does it mean to be human,” you’ll likely get something that contains a vague regurgitation of the concept of natural rights. These ideas can be traced back to a few specific writers. It’s fair to say that those writers influenced the concept of what it means to be human, at least in Western culture. If you ask your average Chinese citizen the same question, you probably don’t get as much Thomas Jefferson in the response.
What sets Shakespeare apart is that he’s universal. Sure, Spanish culture was shaped by Cervantes. But it was also shaped by Shakespeare, and arguably to a greater extent than non-Spanish cultures have been shaped by Cervantes. And the same is true for culture after culture - outside of English speaking cultures, Shakespeare is seldom the most important writer, but he’s always an important writer. I don’t know that that necessarily equates to, “Shakespeare shaped the global conception of what it means to be human,” but the basic concept that one person’s ideas can be so powerful and persuasive that they’re adapted by people from every race and culture is pretty much the direct opposite of racist.
in one of the Star Trek movies a Klingon said he liked to read the plays in the original Klingon. 
I think that was movie #6 , the last one with the full original Trek cast.
I just remember that there was some author he was a competitor with at the time that sounded similar to me at least.
I don’t have time to look it up now. Also I will have to wait till I’m on PC, which may not be for a couple of days.
The take from QI needs to be seen:
https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/qi/episodes/2012/1/Upon hearing about how a lot of the authorship “controversy” is about the idea that Shakespeare was not a noble man and not a member of the elite, as if that was a reason to deny that a middle class person could achieve a lot or write so well about nobility, David Mitchell replied:
“[Shakespeare] did go exactly as far up the society as you would expect a mayor writer to be [back then], it is not like if now the best novels are written by the Duke of Westminster…”
I think The Revenger’s Tragedy, attributed to Thomas Middleton, is just as good as anything Willy S. wrote. I have not read or seen any stage/film version of The Changeling, credited to Mr. Middleton and William Rowley, but according to Wikipedia, it is “widely regarded as being among the best tragedies of the English Renaissance…” Based largely on my ignorance, it seems like Mr. Middleton was every bit as talented and prolific as Willy S., though perhaps not as consistently first-rate.
I was in a production of Middleton’s Women Beware Women at the Yale Dramat back in 1980, directed by George Roy Hill (the Hollywood guy who directed Butch Cassidy and The Sting). I didn’t think the play was any great shakes.
I like John Webster, particularly The Duchess of Malfi.