Did Tolstoy ever see Shakespeare performed, or was his opinion just based on trying to read the plays?
One argument–which I kind of subscribe to–is that his associate, James Burbage, revolutionized theater by inventing the admissions gate and charging standard fees. Prior to this, players passed the hat after a performance and the audience tipped them whatever they felt; with Burbage’s innovation, theater suddenly had quantifiable worth and was regarded more highly. Shakespeare, whose work Burbage happened to be showing at the time, benefited from the sudden inflation of his critical stock, the way Gone With the Wind benefited from being one of the earliest color feature films. Shakespeare’s merits are a bit exaggerated, but honestly, who among his contemporaries was better?
If Shaw (a better, later writer) had embraced film more eagerly, I bet his reputation might have outstripped Shakespeare’s.
Its the beard.
Plus all the hot lesbian sex scenes.
See the plays, read the plays and poems. They are really, really good. Best evah? Depends on your personal opinion. As for comparing them to other authors, compare them to Marlowe. Marlowe was a very good playwright, but his best are no where near as good as Shakespeare’s best, which is why they are not performed often. Read Faust and Hamlet back to back and it is really apparent that the people who think Marlowe was really Shakespeare are just plain wrong.
Personally I think Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale is every bit as good as anything Shakespeare wrote. But it is much harder to read and not as serious.
Bacon makes everything better.
d&r
I’d say it’s partly an accident of history – among other things, Shakespeare was lucky enough to have lived during the first golden age of the English theater, and to have turned his talents toward plays instead of long poems (you don’t see that many people reading Paradise Lost for fun nowadays, no matter how good Milton is, but plenty of them still watch plays for fun).
But mostly, yeah, he really was that good, and I’d say there are two things that make him that good. One of them is empathy. Shakespeare is amazingly good at telling a complicated story from multiple points of view and making the audience sympathize with them all. (Probably the #1 best place to see this is the second tetralogy of history plays – there’s a cast of hundreds, representing pretty much all levels of society and all political factions, and most of them are really unscrupulous and do terrible things, but the audience gets to see what the world looks like to each of them in turn, and why they do what they do. And that’s not just true for the big players – Richard II, Henry Bolingbroke, Glendower, Hotspur, Prince Hal – but you also hear the voices of the country justice and the prostitute and the common soldier. It’s a hell of an achievement, all the more so because Shakespeare resists the temptation to moralize – he just puts those competing voices and perspectives out there and lets the audience draw their own conclusions.)
The other thing that Shakespeare is really, really good at is playing with tone. Even in the lightest of his comedies, there’s nearly always something weighty at stake – just enough gravity and sadness to heighten the laughter. Ditto with laughter in the tragedies. This is the stuff that makes people care about the characters and makes them human – I’m thinking especially of moments like the soothsayer scene in Antony and Cleopatra, which is funny and bawdy and also ominous, and the fact that we get to know Charmian and Iras as these giddy little butterflies makes it matter a lot more when they grow into women with tragic dignity. (All this for a couple of characters who are pretty much name-only in Plutarch.)
Oh yeah, I guess there’s a third thing – he’s good at creating the illusion of depth, giving the audience a sense that there’s a whole world beyond what they’re seeing on stage. (Like, for example, this speech from R&J – we’re just getting to know the Nurse, and it’s a speech that helps to create her as a character, but we also find out about her dead husband and daughter, and we’re getting a glimpse of a whole web of memories and associations. And the plot would be no different if we didn’t know any of this stuff, but because we do know, it feels like the world of the play has reality and substance.)
Portia and Nerissa do seem a bit more familiar than mistress and maid. No doubt a dirty-minded Tom Stoppard could make much of that…
Stranger
This is very true. In English class quite a while back, we learned that a huge proportion of the common sayings/tropes/expressions/idioms in the English language come from about five sources, these being Shakespeare, Thoreau, Franklin, Twain, and the (English translation of the) Bible.
I’d like to add to comments about the fact that he was writing at the right time, with a broad set of works.
Shakespeare is sometimes referred to, along with Michel de Montaigne, as the first “modern humans.” This is, in part, because both playwright and essayist/philosopher each challenged social convention of the time and wrote in the “voice of the mind” much more intimately than had ever been done in the Western canon. Shakespeare did it under the guise of giving internal voice to his characters and Montaigne did it to give voice to, well, his own internal voice, in an attempt to show how human minds really work - and how that should shape one’s approach to one’s life philosophy (i.e., if I am a stream-of-consciousness-driven, self-absorbed human - I should admit it, nay, revel in it).
The Renaissance was an emergence of Man as the Measure of things - as we learned how to use observation, hypotheses and data to establish demonstrable prinicples of nature, we also began to turn that gaze inward and explore the mind. Shakespeare’s plays provided the broad canvas where the these truths and insights were laid out - as mentioned, in the language of what was soon to be the broadest-reaching empire…
I was under the impression that the “Shakespeare is cliche” thing has a little more truth to it than most people make out. Weren’t a large amount of his comedies based on at least one famous Italian(/French/Whatever) play or another?
Oh, sure, his plots were mostly derivative. It’s his presentation of them that was original.
As it happens, I’m just reading the Canterbury Tales now (in translation! I don’t think I could cope with Middle English), and I totally agree about the Miller’s Tale, it’s a riot, and actually very readable - a great accomplishment considering it’s 750 years old.
Still, in the Tales it comes just after the Knight’s Tale (an interminable piece of sentimentality containing obvious continuity errors and many long digressions of the sort where you spend half a dozen lines talking about why you’re not going to talk about XYZ) and just before the Reeve’s Tale (a humerous story about two students raping a woman and her daughter to get revenge on the woman’s husband for being a thief). And then there’s the Cooks Tale, which is not only unfinished, but barely gets started. So in general Chaucer gets nowhere near Shakespeare, though he still deserves props for being a pioneer.
Personally I think Dickens is the closest competitor to Shakespeare in terms of amount of output, subtlety and breadth of characterisation, interesting plots and the ability to appeal to a wide range of people. But Dickens had a lot of competition from other good writers of the same era. Shakespeare stands out more, becuse there’s not that much going on around him.
Sorry, but Dickens just sucks. He got paid by the word and it shows. He was enormously talented and I would love him if his leaner moments were used throughout. He gets so verbose that I cannot stand long passages from him.
As for the Miller’s Tale, try it in the original with the translation nearby. You will start to get it. I haven’t read all the tales, but this is the best one. It is as good as anything anybody else has ever written that I am aware of, and it is better in the original language.
I think Twain rivals the Bard, and is for the States what Will is for Merrie Olde.
I took Chaucer in college in the original - it helps to read it aloud.
Good call on Twain.
Marlowe was fantastic in his day, bigger even than Shakespeare. They called it “Marlowe’s mighty line” for a reason.
But.
But, IMO, he too slavishly followed iambic pentameter, and it shows. His verses are great, but stilted, artifical. People just don’t talk like that.
Shakespeare, too, uses iambic pentameter, but he knows when to break the rules, when to insert two stressed feet or whatever. So yes, his characters are still speaking verse, but it flows more naturally and doesn’t become sing-song. Their speech more closely mimics natural speech, but elevated. It’s how we wish we could talk. I think that’s the key to his genius.
A second key is his “low” characters. Few playwrights before him included scenes for any common men at all, yet he includes nurses, gravediggers, common soldiers, merchants, along with all the princes, kings and queens that the audience comes to see. And those common folk in the play speak just like common folk do - they’re earthy and passionate and real. Shakespeare *knows *them and gets them right, just as he gets right the upper echelon of society.
This is why he resonates, I think.
Yes - isn’t that the whole point? He mined the standard set of stories from mythologies, histories, early dramatic works, etc. - but it was his presentation of the interior life/thoughts of the characters that was the difference.
Add to that the fact that his plays were “portable” and because they were plays, enabled regions and later generations to update the interpretations of those inner voices to suit their preferences - and you have a recipe for Shakespeare becoming the “reference book” for stories AND character types AND typical emotional/psychological conflicts…
Some argue quite the opposite… again, Tolstoy says it better than anyone:
Anyways, ever since I grew out of high school I always wondered about English literature being propped up by Shakespeare when, in fact, the history of the novel and the significance of written word in the continental Europe is rooted in Cervantes and Don Quixote (even Shakespeare read Cervantes). And this thread tends to be quite Anglo-centric even though its novelistic significance is somewhat lower on the scale dominated by Russian, German and French literature. But, then, I might be somewhat biased having grown under influence of Mittel-Europe cultural umbrella.
Newcomer: Shakespeare’s plays are not novels and are not meant to be read as such. They are poetry and prose that is meant to be recited by actors. See a production of Hamlet with a good actor as the Prince of Denmark and you will understand why this is one of the supreme works of the English language. and world theatre.
And Tolstoy’s comment about all of his characters using the same language is sheer bullshit. I acted in Henry *VIII *last summer and there is a vast difference in the language of two of my characters, Sir Thomas Lovell and Porter’s Man. Normally, I love Russian literature, but I am beginning to understand why I never cared for Tolstoy.
Markxxx. Writers whose works are read hundreds after their death, especially by the general public, are good, no matter what anyone tells you. Your comparison was very poor, as there are plenty of people still around who watched and liked “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Brady Bunch” when they first came out, some of them too lazy to try to watch something else. I doubt very much that people will still be watching them 100 years from now when the Baby Boomers are dead.