This is the thread where you make a case for why you think Shakespeare is overrated

However, when he was 'on' (aa he often was) he was untouchable as a poet and as a creator of memorable characters. In world lit, he's still one of the top three or four. God enough, I ween.

However, for sport you can pick holes. I already put "The Tempest" on the overrated thread. I did that play for "A" Level; I've seen it several times since, and I find it abstract, slippery, undramatic, unfunny. It's the only Shakespeare play I've fallen asleep in. (I did leave "Titus Andronicus" during the second interval, but no one rates that play anyway.)

Talking of unfunniness, have you ever come across that hilarious (not)pair Launcelot and Old Gobbo?

(Launcelot decides that it would be a good joke to pretend to his blind father that he has died.)

Launce: But I pray you, ergo, old man, ergo, I beseech you, talk you of young master Launcelot?

Gob: Of Launcelot, an't please your mastership.

Launce. Ergo, Master Launcelot. Talk not of Master Launcelot, father; for the young gentleman - according to Fates and Destinies, and such odd sayings, the Sisters Three, and such branches of learning - is indeed deceased; or, as you would say in plain terms, gone to heaven.

Gob: Marry, God forbid! The boy was the very staff of my age, my very prop.

Launce: Do I look like a cudgel or a hovel-post, a staff or a prop?

And so forth.

Part of a Launcelot monologue:

Well [looking on his palm]; if any man in Italy have a fairer table which doth offer to swear upon a book, I shall have good fortune! Go to, here's a simple line of life. Here's a small trifle of wives: alas, fifteen wives is nothing, eleven widows and nine maids is a simple coming in for one man. And then to 'scape drowning thrice, and to be in peril of my life with the edge of a featherbed - here are simple 'scapes. Well, if Fortune be a woman, she's a good wench for this gear.

(Te Merchant of Venice.)

First of all, he was a dramatist and a poet. That rules out essays, short stories, and fiction. Therefore he is not in fact universal as a Writer. One can hardly be the best writer in the English language if s/he has only contributed a smattering of forms for consideration.

As for poetry, I suppose nobody beats him at the Elizabethan sonnet. But poetry has had its own evolution and as far as technique and skill are concerned. Anyone can count syllables and lay down rhyme. For The Stage, I think David Mamet, Woody Allen, and Arthur Miller have made significantly more interesting dramatic works that manage to be all things to all people.

Art requires revolution. It has to challenge in order to grow. People who heap praise on Shakespeare and declare him The Best Ever seem to not handle change well.

(no offense to y'all, as the very fact this discussion is taking place demonstrates a willingness to dispute the claims)

The whole idea of clinging to one writer and declaring him the best despite centuries of change in culture and literay form strikes me as sad and elitist. And considering that Shakespeare's work was considered relatively lowbrow at the time, as it was written for the masses and theatre itself was not the somewhat more 'cultured' or 'elitist' pastime many consider it today, this is somewhat ironic.

it's pretty impossible to write something with his thematic scope and *idea* of character these days coz too much in how writing is approached has changed. not only the plot itself but the IDEA of that sort of plot as feasable to be written is set in the past, particularly of an epoch where historical personality loomed larger or rather more completely identified with the notion of state?

hear, hear!!!!!!!!!!!

"First of all, he was a dramatist and a poet. That rules out essays, short stories, and fiction. Therefore he is not in fact universal as a Writer. One can hardly be the best writer in the English language if s/he has only contributed a smattering of forms for consideration."
(from Catty)

So (cough) you're saying that he should've invented the modern novel and the American-style short story and founded, say, the Nation. Ah. Would you also like him to submit a screenplay and a sitcom pilot? See another excerpt from Pete:

"To overrate him would be to say... that he was a magical wizard who lived in another dimension."

like is hamlet a character you could imagine what he thinks about while he's, say, taking a shit? or less crudely, playing a casual game of checkers and just being y'know.. boring about it?

2. In the authorship debate, I'm beginning to towards WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE the modern notion of him as an amalgamation, i.e. a collaboration between a couple people. So in that way, yes, I do think he's overrated in that people give too much credit to a single person.

I think Shakespeare is terrific and not overrated FWIW. I have never enjoyed thinking about him as a writer, though, or reading him as opposed to watching him - performance yes, text no.

I'm not a Shakespeare scholar but my impression is that outside of "Henry VIII", "Pericles", and "Two Noble Kinsmen", that Shakespeare wrote the plays on his own. They certainly read that way to me. Of course, threr are some corrupt plays, like MacBeth or Julius Caesar, where the problem has to do with different editions made up from rolls.

*

As for "The Tempest", yes, it reads better than it plays - I believe it was written for a masque-like event at the court. Even so, the antics of Stephano and Trinculo are irreparably boorish, in my opinion, even on the page.

1 - okay he seems great because he roams over such an array of topics, history science psychology etc etc. BUT. This is because he wrote during the renaissance, when it was possible for one to master the heights of each discourse I mean up even until the victorian era there was a sort of canon of general knowledge that you could master by reading like 50 books. The ability to be a master of all topics reached a peak in shsps time and immediately started declining, this gives the impression he was some sort of mastermind but really he just came about at a certain point relatively soon after the invention of the printing press/liberalisation of the church etc etc thus when information suddenly became widely available but before it went out of control. now people have to specialise because there is so much information so you might get the impression that people since haven't had such an ability to comprehend so much about so many different parts of life, probably not true.

compare him to Chaucer, the way he covers all topics well is pretty similar. Thus Chaucer is a similar 'giant figure' but you can see, can't you, why there aren't gonna be any chaucers or leonardo da vincis or shsps again.

2 - he is so overrated in an emotional sense by some people. like I saw this documentary about 'was he marlowe?' and there was this english woman on it and she was practically crying when someone said shsp wasn't 'godlike' or something! he wrote mediocre works when he started out, had a fairly long working life for his period, was forced to work to earn a living, a combination of circumstances that lead to enough learning and practice to be a good writer, a good expression of his period, plus obviously being a pretty smart guy himself but I mean, there ARE flaws eg

3 - do the people who go over the moon about shsp actually READ his plays all the way through, or do they just read beautiful excerpts and then forget about it and come back later? because the plots of many are intolerably annoying, for example HEAPS of really irritating things where things are just resolved by coincidence, like in the comedies people just 'decide' to forgive each other in the last two paragraphs for no apparent reason but just because he ran out of paper or time or something.

4 - he copied lots of his stuff from other people, i mean swathes of it, i know everyone knows that but THINK ABOUT IT. Most of what he wrote wasn't his. 'All poets are ventriloquized by tradition' - idea of genius is so fucked up.

5 - shsp has become such an accepted text and influenced so many poets who followed that you can't really tell to what extent the language has 'blended into' him, rather than him being the best expression of it? some idea like that.

so that is some ideas about why shsp is overrated. most important point i would say is that all poets are ventriloquized by tradition, everyone is part of the community and it is silly, erroneous and unhelpful to the advancement of literature to see some as 'above' literature.

No, I'd like him to demonstrate some range and versatility in more than two forms before I declare him the best writer in English ever. No other contender for such a title would be judged on so little.

Yeah, this is pretty much what I meant - I mean, there are considerably more and better-realised characters post-Shakespeare. Mostly because if we are to take things on the basis of the text and nothing else, then the novel is a better vehicle for the exploration of character than a play - but at the same time you can't fully remove individual performances from the equation. I can imagine performances of, say, Titus Andronicus where I know *exactly* what Aaron is thinking about while taking a shit, for example (I love that example, btw Spencer!)

Also, literary wise, I completely agree with darling (someone who posted some time back) in saying how horribly annoying some endings are as the comedies rapidly reach an inconclusive and sometime irrealistic ending. Also, like most of you have said, his early work pretty much sucked. THough I do LOVE some of his plays (i.e. Macbeth and Julius Cesar), others simply are stupid. Romeo and Juliet, the perhaps most preposterous story in literature, is an exaggeration of all human emotion as to infatuated teens marry and kill themselves within less that a weeks time. All good fun if you are into the corny romance of it, but I personally will pass.

Other parts, such as the scene when Othello kills his wife (whatever her name was) are just as illogical. For those of you who haven't read it, reading it is actually quite amusing. You get to see the lady keep saying 'kill me in an hour' ... or ... 'kill me tomorrow' as she tries to flirt her way out of it. Didn't work very well though. Othello, besides being an uncommunicative moron, apparently also possesses a sense of never leaving for tomorrow what you can do today, as he thoroughly kills his wife.

As for killing off Mercutio, well, that was necessary from the point of the view of a dramatist, since you can't have your comic relief become the centrepiece for your tragedy.

Re: Authorship

I studied the bard for the last four years pretty much non-stop, and haven't yet run into a single *serious* Shakespeare scholar who gives any creedence at all to the theories that Shakey wasn't the actor from Stratford, and sole author of his work.

As for his brand of cultural scavenging, well, it's something that hip post-modern writers like Julian Barnes do all the time, but for a totally different reason. Book culture and the cult of authorship hadn't really become much of a force in Shakespeare's day; 'stealing' wasn't frowned upon, in fact it was often seen as a selling point. People didn't just go to see King Lear because it was a great play (actually, imho, it's one of Bill's worst), they went to see it because the story had been told a million times and was in vogue that year.

And while I agree that Bloom, much as I love him, toots Shakey's horn a bit too loudly, but at the same time I also agree that it's impossible to read or write in English and remain untouched by him. His contribution to our language alone makes him quite possibly the most powerful individual human being ever in terms of how anglophones can (and do) express themselves, and how they can (and do) perceive themselves.

Shakespeare may not have always gotten there first, as Bloom likes to say, but in five years of serious literary study I have yet to bump into one of those occassions when he hasn't.