Comment by paulsutter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulsutter | Hacker News Reader

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Not trying to start any debate here with Shakespeare fans, just intend this as a supportive word for those of us who just don’t enjoy Shakespeare

- 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.”

This Voltaire quote is misleading. He continues: “… one would imagine this piece to be the work of a drunken savage. But amidst all these vulgar irregularities, which to this day make the English drama so absurd and so barbarous, there are to be found in Hamlet, by a bizarrerie still greater, some sublime passages, worthy of the greatest genius. It seems as though nature had mingled in the brain of Shakespeare the greatest conceivable strength and grandeur with whatsoever witless vulgarity can devise that is lowest and most detestable.“

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.

Touché, thank you. Regardless I agree with Tolstoy in whole

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."

https://orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf

>Tolstoy: ... "but having read one after the other, ..."

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.

I never enjoyed Shakespeare UNTIL I started reading his plays, and now he’s one of my favorites.

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.”

Interesting.

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.

Indeed it should be spoken aloud (or at least 'aloud in your head'). But if it should be spoken as if it were prose, why do you think he took all the trouble to put it in to verse?

I'm neither a poet nor a playwright; I really don't know (but I'm glad he did).

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.

Well, I sort of agree. A halting, too-strongly-pushed, stopping-at-the-end-of-every-line reading doesn't exactly let the lines sing. But there is an art to reciting iambic pentameter whereby it can attain the naturalness of speech while still retaining that underlying rhythm. When it's done well, you might not even realise they're doing it - until your ear is attuned enough to pick it up.

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.

Well, not really. The written play is the actual Work. Shakespeare put his soul into writing every word in it. They are his instructions, a script for eternity.

It's like saying don't ever read the source, just use the app!

I mean it's like reading Beethoven or Mozart's music sheet. Some people can appreciate its music just from reading that but most people can only know its geniuses when it's played.

No, what you're saying is "why ever run the app? you have the source code right there!"

You got Tolstoy pretty good there!

I kind of agree with GP, but man did this make me laugh

My wife has English as a second language, but speaks it far better than most native speakers. But she can't handle other dialects very easily.

She likes Shakespeare when it is described, but as a play it is entirely impenetrable to her.

Or, more starkly: "Reading a Shakespeare play is like listening to Beethoven by reading the score."

George Bernard Shaw, as the kids say, said a lot of things. He probably meant some of them, too.

But what is most important is that he was correct about vanishingly few of them.

Some of his music reviews were pretty good: Arnold Dolmetsch really was a revelation, and surviving recordings suggest that Joseph Joachim playing Bach really was like an attempt to scrape a nutmeg on a boot sole.

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.

Sounds like a more eloquent version of modern stone throwing against popular books. Hang out on r/books and you soon read similar diatribes against Project Hail Mary, The Way of Kings, etc.

It's almost as if different people have different tastes!

Huh, PHM is unpopular? Artemis was fairly boring, but Hail Mary was a wonderful pageturner.

It's not unpopular, there are just people who dislike it.

I wouldn't exactly call Artemis boring, but PHM was much better.

>Sounds like a more eloquent version of modern stone throwing against popular books.

Is that a bad thing?

Dr. Johnson said Shakespeare's output could be obscene, shoddy, lack cohesion and moral instruction, and ignore the classical unities, but that "Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life."

He also famously had a fit when he learned how King Lear actually ended (in his era, a bowdlerized version with a happy ending was popular).

a supportive word for those of us who just don’t enjoy Shakespeare

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.

There is no objective true to claims such as "X is the greatest writer who ever lived". Even if you could objectively determine the best writer for a certain culture and context, there are countless other cultures and contexts. Is Shakespeare greater than Cervantes? Goethe? Dostoevsky? Who knows? Who cares?

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.

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

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.

While filmmaker Akira Kurosawa often adapted from Shakespeare ("Throne of Blood", "The Bad Sleep Well", "Ran"), his frequent collaborator Shinobu Hashimoto was rather lukewarm about his works. Shakespeare's ornate prose didn't resonate with him, nor did he feel that Kurosawa fittingly adapted them into medieval Japan, which lacked the historical weight of English monarchy.

Shakespeare and Tolkien are similar to me. If you ever say you did not like them, you have an army of defenders calling you names about your lack of education and literary maturity, you always get attacked for who you must be as a person. Read both, not impressed.

You had me with you until your final two words. I'm not a fan of Lord of the Rings either, but I can't say I'm "not impressed." It's clearly a work of genius, though it doesn't appeal to me personally. And I'll defend anyone's right to dislike Shakespeare, but if you're not impressed, you're not paying attention.

You can use one to deflect the other; Tolkien was so disappointed by the twist in Macbeth that he wrote the Ents.

Ah, I didn't know that. "I guess you are referring to "Burnham Wood is come to Dunsinane"?

Yep. And he also mentioned that the c-section aspect of the other prophecy felt weak, so he used a much simpler method of defeating “no man”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_influence_on_T...

I don't care for either author. Tried reading The Hobbit in middle school and found it utterly boring.

Shakespeare I just can't get anywhere with. The archaic language is too much of a barrier.

I had the opposite reaction when I was that age, but there really is no comparison between The Hobbit and LOTR. The former is a children's book, the latter just the opposite. That doesn't mean any given reader will like LOTR, of course, or that they're wrongheaded if they don't. But readers who give up on Tolkien just because they disliked The Hobbit may find they've shortchanged themselves.

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