Comment by vivekd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vivekd | Hacker News Reader

I always thought Shakespehre was over-rated both as a dramatist and as a poet. I happily read this article thinking someone else was finally going to make the case for Shakespeare's mediocrity. But alas, I had been tricked, it was about something much less interesting.

The article presents some speculative research by scientist Stephen Booth about Shakespeare's effect on the bran under brain scans. It makes strange claims about brain scans showing that the brain focuses and pays attention when listening to Shakespeare. It then reaches the dubious conclusion that this is because of some patterns that Shakespeare, in his genius, put in the verses. Of course, these patterns are semantic rather than syntactical and thus not easily quantifiable and measurable in an objective fashion.

Naturally Booth doesn't even consider the possibility that the brain activity may be attributable to other factors. Like the fact that it could just be the brain reacting to archaic styles of English and realizing that it has to focus and pay closer attention to discern the meaning. . . Or that it may be the verses trigger memories of studying it in high school English classes where focus and close attention was required . . .

No it can't be any of these things, obviously it's because Shakespeare is a genius and put some "genius patterns" in his verses. After all everyone thinks it's true so it must be true.

Speaking of which, why is jealousy a green eyed monster anyways? What do green eyed monsters or even green eyes have to do with jealously anyways? what a terrible analogy!

Also, who says "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day, thou art more lovely and more temperate." Summers days aren't temperate, they're hot!! What is wrong with this guy? Why does everyone think this nonsense is so great, don't they realize that there are other poets and playwrights who wrote in iambic pentameter?

In conclusion, Stephen Booth's research is nonsense, much like Shakespeare.

It's worth noting that the only real criticism you level against Shakespeare here - that "shall I compare thee to a summer's day..." is incoherent - rests on an embarrassing misreading of the sonnet. Far from being a strike against Shakespeare, his point is that summer days are not temperate but hot! Likewise, Autumn is too short, May is too windy, and so on. The subject of the poem, Shakespeare claims, does not suffer any of these flaws. I think this serves as a useful yardstick for the quality of your other claims about Shakespeare.

I remember when I first had Othello and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus in the same semester. While I liked Othello a lot, I felt that Faustus was a much superior piece of literature, both in the lyrical beauty of its prose and the actual plot.

I was also fortunate enough to have a professor who was a huge Marlowe fan. So while most professors obsess too much over Shakespeare, my professor spent a good couple of months on Faustus. Highlight of my academic life.

>Also, who says "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day, thou art more lovely and more temperate." Summers days aren't temperate, they're hot!!

That is literally the exact sentiment Shakespeare is conveying...

"green eyed monster" it's hard to discuss the merits of these old and extremely influential texts. Some texts are so foundational to a language that even their mistakes have gotten imbued with beauty. In my native language, Dutch, that's the case f.i. with our equivalent of the King James bible. There are a lot of phrases in there that don't make sense because they're errors of translation. But still they carry a stately splendour for a lot of people. Perhaps that's also the case with Shakespeare. Basically by now it's beautiful because it's so much like Shakespeare. :-)

I never much appreciated Shakespeare at school. Maybe I was just too young; I'm glad I took another look in later life.

There's a lot of depth in it that doesn't get touched in schools - like how references to "nothing" are sometimes references to female sex-organs, as in Much A-do About Nothing.

At school we _read_ the plays; unless you're familiar with the story and action I can't think of a more surefire way to be put off.

No kidding we get told to read these works for class without really having the tools to appreciate them.

Another example of this is reading The Catcher in the Rye while in high school. The problem with this book for a teen is that theyre as a whole not far enough removed from the angst of Holdon's character to see the bigger picture. To a teen Holdon is this exaggeration of their worst characteristics and, this is extra relevant for the AP and honors students who tend to read Salinger, a literally manifest of their most annoying and disruptive classmates. Getting over this is a lot to ask a teenager.

However removed from a teenage perspective it's much easier to see why the book is well regarded. It depicts a kid broken by the loss of his sister and broken by the abuse handed down to him from his caretakers. Being unlike Holden just makes it so much easier to empathize with him.

There might be something on that. I found The Catcher in the Rye enjoyable and fun to read when I was at high school. However, I really disliked whenever people said that the character was supposed to talk for me or that I was supposed to identify with him. I was not like that at all, most my schoolmates were not like that at all. Non of them actually, we were selective school. He would not get in. Only minority of kids is like him and I considered the implication unfair.

It was well written story of someone who is not like me at all that gave me a bit of inside into his head. That was cool. Essays and teachers and what not assuming or framing it as a book that is supposed to talk for me were not cool.

Or the use of 'nothing' in Lear which is much darker. This is the alternation in Shakespeare from bad, bawdy pun to the abyss and back again

I remember the first time I went to see Shakespeare as an adult. It is still the funniest play I've ever seen and I couldn't even really understand everything they were saying!

But out of the 4 of us attending, 2 of us were enraptured, and the other 2 were bored and left for the pub in the interval.

I wonder if you either connect with his word play, or you don't. A marmite thing. I doesn't help that the english language is different to how it was then.

But I find what we did in school with Shakespeare to be ridiculous. It's the equivalent of trying to explain a joke.

Stephen Booth is a literary scholar, the kind that focuses in the kind of attentive, close reading that would hopefully prevent a practitioner from asserting that he (i.e. Booth) was a scientist.

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