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Guardian
Member # 3521
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written Wednesday, April 13 2005 15:17
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Completely agreed in the defense of Shakespeare. Hamlet is just about the best play I've ever read, and although I haven't read many, none of the others even comes close. And although I thoroughly enjoyed "The Great Gatsby," Fitzgerald was seemingly a one-hit wonder. Certainly his body of work pales to insignificance next to Shakespeare's. [ Wednesday, April 13, 2005 15:18: Message edited by: This Glass Is Half Stugie ] -------------------- Stughalf "Delusion arises from anger. The mind is bewildered by delusion. Reasoning is destroyed when the mind is bewildered. One falls down when reasoning is destroyed."- The Bhagavad Gita. Posts: 1798 | Registered: Sunday, October 5 2003 07:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, April 13 2005 15:22
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What's weird is that Shakespeare makes it well up into the non-English-language canon as well. He's very popular in translation. I find this weird because most of what I like in Shakespeare is his language. Of course he has some profoundly memorable characters, but to me it seems that much of what makes them impressive is the way they speak. Evidently I'm giving him too little credit for being a great dramatist as well as a great poet. Maybe it would help if I saw more of his plays performed, instead of just reading them. Ever read or see Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead? It's an absurdist play whose absurdity is lifted straight from Hamlet. I think that's spooky. You just can't get past this guy. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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Bob's Big Date
Member # 3151
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written Wednesday, April 13 2005 17:14
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quote:I don't think he should be the central icon of the language, mostly because I despise closed form and consider it stultifying, and find closed-form prose particularly loathsome. But then, being as how you and Shakespeare share a fetish for a language in which the only thing assigned any poetic merit was form and austerity, I can see where the two of us might disagree on that. [ Wednesday, April 13, 2005 17:16: Message edited by: Bad-Ass Mother Custer ] -------------------- The biggest, the baddest, and the fattest. Posts: 2367 | Registered: Friday, June 27 2003 07:00 |
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Master
Member # 4614
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written Wednesday, April 13 2005 17:31
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My favorite author is Terence Dickinson, an acclaimed astronomy writer (though not really the most acclaimed). Behind that, I've been reading qiute a bit of Brian Jacques lately. -------------------- -ben4808 For those who love to spam: CSM Forums RIFQ Posts: 3360 | Registered: Friday, June 25 2004 07:00 |
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Off With Their Heads
Member # 4045
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written Wednesday, April 13 2005 17:31
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quote:Do you read any Latin? At all? Ever heard of Catullus? Ovid? -------------------- Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens. Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever Posts: 7968 | Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00 |
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E Equals MC What!!!!
Member # 5491
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written Wednesday, April 13 2005 17:42
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I think Shakespeare is held up as 'high art' way too much. Yes, he used clever double meanings and verse and stuff, but his plays were just pure entertainment. I mean, the first scene of Romeo and Juliet is pretty much just dirty jokes. -------------------- Sex is easier than love. Posts: 1861 | Registered: Friday, February 11 2005 08:00 |
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Off With Their Heads
Member # 4045
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written Wednesday, April 13 2005 17:49
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There's a substantial difference between Shakespeare's early plays (Romeo and Juliet being one of the highlights) and his later plays. He went a bit beyond puns once you get past the 1590's. -------------------- Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens. Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever Posts: 7968 | Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, April 13 2005 18:31
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What is 'closed form'? If it includes blank verse, rhyming couplets, and prose, I'm at a loss to imagine what it doesn't include. It's everything but haiku? Anything with punctuation? Anything but "The song that doesn't end"? ? -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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Bob's Big Date
Member # 3151
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written Wednesday, April 13 2005 19:18
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*blink* It's been too long since I've read up on my vocabulary - disregard this one. [ Wednesday, April 13, 2005 19:20: Message edited by: Bad-Ass Mother Custer ] -------------------- The biggest, the baddest, and the fattest. Posts: 2367 | Registered: Friday, June 27 2003 07:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, April 13 2005 20:14
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I don't actually care about the terminology much, I just wonder what it is you find loathsome and despicable about Shakespearian English. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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Shaper
Member # 247
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written Wednesday, April 13 2005 21:11
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I don't like Shakespeare because well he wrote plays. One is meant to watch a play, not read it. Do we read TV transcripts? I would doubt anybody does. -------------------- I stop rubber at 160km/h, five times a week. CANUCKS RESPEK! My Style The Knight Between Posts. Posts: 2395 | Registered: Friday, November 2 2001 08:00 |
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...b10010b...
Member # 869
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written Wednesday, April 13 2005 23:06
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Actually, I know several people who read scripts from TV shows that aren't on TV where they live. -------------------- My BoE Page Bandwagons are fun! Roots Hunted! Posts: 9973 | Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00 |
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Law Bringer
Member # 2984
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written Thursday, April 14 2005 03:12
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quote:Have you ever watched a Shakespeare play? I have, and trust me, reading it is better. Unless the actors just were crap. They spoke so fast and monotonously that it was impossible to discern anything. I tend to think of Shakespeare's works as more like ballads than plays. In the form they are in, yes, one is meant to read them just as much as watch them. -------------------- The Encyclopaedia Ermariana <-- Now a Wiki! "Polaris leers down from the black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey." --- HP Lovecraft. "I single Aran out due to his nasty temperament, and his superior intellect." --- SupaNik Posts: 8752 | Registered: Wednesday, May 14 2003 07:00 |
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BANNED
Member # 4
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written Thursday, April 14 2005 03:27
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Closed form- ie, adherence to ridiculous poetic standards that took us up until the advent of modernism to do away with. You know, the stuff that made Poet Laureate Tennyson et al twitch with horror- "That noun is inflected! Why, this clause is nothing but an amphibrac!" I'm not sure how it applies to his plays, but it applies to cockwiggler's sonnets very well. See, I dunno. It's not that I deny Shakespeare's influence on the English language- I also don't deny the influence of the Burgundians, and it doesn't mean that either of them are particularly good writers. Shakespeare, to wit, did relatively little (if anything at all) to extend the art of skillful* metaphor, his dramatacism could have been replicated just as easily as if Aristotlian epics had been translated (although I will profess an admiration of Verfremdung), and his work wasn't revolutionary insomuch as it was mediocre in a fallen era- which deserves respect in a historical viewpoint, yeah, but doesn't make him a literary superior. (* operative word) Fitzgerald, on the other hand, wrote four novels (And a bunch of short stories, albeit most of which were generated by debt alone) that were great contributions to modern style, realistic metaphor, broader subjects and a general lack of melodramatic fappery. (No "shakespearean monologue," for instance, when Gatsby is gunned down...) Moreover, he was good. -------------------- 人 た ち を 燃 え る た め に 俺 は か れ ら に 火 を 上 げ る か ら 死 ん だ Posts: 6936 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, April 14 2005 04:35
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De gustibus non disputandum, I guess; but sheesh. I bet that Fitzgerald himself would have been thrilled to be shot by Shakespeare. I still wouldn't mind having a more precise definition of 'closed form', if people are going to keep using the term. All I get from le Martyre's definition is that it means 'bad', but I feel that that meaning is already taken (by 'bad'). [ Thursday, April 14, 2005 04:36: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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BANNED
Member # 4
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written Thursday, April 14 2005 04:45
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I'm not saying that Fitzgerald wouldn't have been thrilled to have been shot by Shakespeare- simultaneously, I doubt he'd mind being shot by anyone. Closed form, as far as I can tell, is any sort of rigid poetic system, be it rhythmic, rhyme-based, syllabic, etc. (Thus my comment- or Tennyson's, rather- about the amphibrac.) -------------------- 人 た ち を 燃 え る た め に 俺 は か れ ら に 火 を 上 げ る か ら 死 ん だ Posts: 6936 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00 |
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Off With Their Heads
Member # 4045
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written Thursday, April 14 2005 05:07
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quote:Yes, the actors you were watching must not have been very good. Watching a Shakespeare play is on equal footing with reading it, and ideally one should do one and then the other. The experience really isn't complete without both. quote:I personally think that poetry lost a lot when most poets decided to give up meter. Poetry lost its music and auditory beauty at that point. You have to hear meter spoken (and spoken well) in order to know why the rules were in place. Most people in this era haven't ever heard good meter spoken. quote:This, again, is spoken out of ignorance. quote:Many of the ancient Greek and Latin tragedies had been translated at that point. That happened in the mid-16th century. Shakespeare wrote plays partly because many people wanted more than what was available in the classical tradition. Shakespeare does a lot that Plautus and Seneca never dreamed of, too. quote:I'm not sure how much it was revolutionary, but it was head-and-shoulders above anything that came before and most things that have come since. Try reading some Kyd, a morality play, and a Senecan tragedy, and then read Hamlet. For the record, Elizabethan drama was far from "fallen," at least in comparison with any previous era since the fall of the Roman Empire. quote:You say this as if it were absolute. I say Shakespeare was a thousand times better than Fitzgerald. What makes either of us right? I do suspect that you aren't familiar enough with Shakespeare's body of work to judge one way or another. He wrote thirty-six plays (excluding those with mixed authorship); how many have you actually read/seen? -------------------- Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens. Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever Posts: 7968 | Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00 |
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By Committee
Member # 4233
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written Thursday, April 14 2005 05:23
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I liked the Comedy of Errors a lot, actually - in its staged form. Posts: 2242 | Registered: Saturday, April 10 2004 07:00 |
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Off With Their Heads
Member # 4045
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written Thursday, April 14 2005 05:36
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Well, yes, it's funny, but I meant in terms of literary merit. The plot is directly Plautine and the language is just about where Kyd and Marlowe were, maybe a bit below. -------------------- Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens. Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever Posts: 7968 | Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00 |
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...b10010b...
Member # 869
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written Thursday, April 14 2005 06:01
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Eww, Marlowe. I mean, really. Of the two famous Fausts, his might make the better scenario, but it sure is the worse play. :P -------------------- My BoE Page Bandwagons are fun! Roots Hunted! Posts: 9973 | Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00 |
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Guardian
Member # 3521
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written Thursday, April 14 2005 08:29
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Regarding poetic form, I agree wholeheartedly with Kel- I detest almost all modern poetry, with its "free verse" which seems merely an excuse to cobble a few dissonant bits of symbolic phrase together with no need for sophisticated arrangement. Good rhyming, metered poetry is a true art, and requires real thought and formulation. I dislike free-form modern poetry for the same reason that I dislike modern abstract art- there just doesn't seem to be much artistic merit or real effort put into the works. I know I go against a legion of former English teachers with this belief, but the use of abstract symbolism in art strikes me too often as a lame attempt to make up for a lack of real skill and talent. Perhaps it's just my own biases talking here- I'm a highly objective, concrete thinker, and most symbolism past the most basic tends to escape me. -------------------- Stughalf "Delusion arises from anger. The mind is bewildered by delusion. Reasoning is destroyed when the mind is bewildered. One falls down when reasoning is destroyed."- The Bhagavad Gita. Posts: 1798 | Registered: Sunday, October 5 2003 07:00 |
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Shaper
Member # 22
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written Thursday, April 14 2005 09:22
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I'm torn on the Shakespeare debate. I adore Shakespeare's works, but I feel the need to differentiate myself from Kel's and Stugie's very 19th century (not to mention inhibiting and stagnating) view of what poetry should be. I believe that the free verse format was ultimately a good thing, but I see no reason why we should ignore the geniuses of poets who were bound to a format, nor ignore the genius of Shakespeare himself. To take a musical example, any comparison between, say, the Beatles and Miles Davis would be utterly meaningless, since they were both adhering to very different musical standards. Language is an evolution, the use of language moreso. Posts: 2862 | Registered: Tuesday, October 2 2001 07:00 |
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Off With Their Heads
Member # 4045
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written Thursday, April 14 2005 11:04
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quote:Don't get me wrong (or misrepresent me): poets gained certain things by dropping meter, too. I tend to prefer the older forms, but I recognize that as a personal preference, not a judgement of absolute merit. -------------------- Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens. Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever Posts: 7968 | Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00 |
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BANNED
Member # 4
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written Thursday, April 14 2005 12:05
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quote:It takes a pretty vain individual to posit that art exists to be pretty- But thanks anyway, Lord Byron. quote:Tool. Rhythm at the expense of empathy and rhyme at the expense of affect is masochistic at best and toolish on average. quote:Fine. Call me when Shakespeare begins to write in ways that permanently rearrange the dynamics of the market economy's interactions with its subjects. (Now this isn't all or even mostly Fitzgerald's movement, but he was a key player towards said movement's inception.) Now don't get me wrong, I like what Shakespeare does in Marriage of Figaro with regards to class. Doesn't make for as skillful weaving as Eckleburg, the Eggs, usw., though. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Fitzgerald's point-blank characterizations top Shakespeare's as well. Part of this can be chalked up to temporal discrepancies, but that doesn't forgive the romantic assininity (intentional) of the bard's early works, nor do the later works match up half as well. (And so Shakespeare has to be acted- but then we aren't talking about literature, we're talking about theatre. And then you have to compete with Brecht and face loss.) quote:I'm well aware that they actually were translating- I'm just saying that for all their progression thereafter got 'em, they were essentially done at that point (and would remain so on all fronts until anything written after Hegel's Phänomolegie des Geistes, Durkheim's Suicide or Joyce's Dubliners). So yeah- actors didn't wear red to represent evil and weren't tossed into a pit at play's end, but getting past that wasn't Shakespeare's doing. Not sure what makes Shakespeare anything other than linguistically clever and a comparatively good writer in an age of mediocracy. (Maybe he was comparatively great- how the hell should I know? I haven't read anything else from the era to compare it to.) quote:Depends on how you define "things." If you mean Goosebumps, no duh. If you mean the modernist classics, then decist with the manure. If I'm "woefully undereducated" in your forté, might I remind you that you too are uninformed in non-raunchy literary fetishes as well. quote:I contextualize my statements to the here and now. I do not have posters of Hellen of Troy in my room. I do not play ultimate discus. I am not divorced from a sense of artistic perspective by a few centuries. quote:Romeo (patently bad), HIV, Much Ado, Hamlet, and I may have also seen Marriage of Figaro performed, although my memory on that one's a bit hazy. -------------------- 人 た ち を 燃 え る た め に 俺 は か れ ら に 火 を 上 げ る か ら 死 ん だ Posts: 6936 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00 |
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Off With Their Heads
Member # 4045
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written Thursday, April 14 2005 12:19
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You know comically little about Shakespeare to be criticizing him (HIV doesn't stand for any Shakespeare play unless you mean Henry IV, in which case I'd have to ask you if you meant one or both parts, and Marriage of Figaro is a Mozart opera), but then, I forgot that the only thing you care about at all is bemoaning the evils of capitalism. If no artistic work can have merit if it doesn't do that, then I guess you would have trouble appreciating what Shakespeare does. You've also confused metaphor with allegory again. If you want allegory about economic systems, then yes, you're pretty much stuck with twentieth-century writings. But if you want actual metaphor, then Shakespeare does it as well as just about anyone. And your degenerating spelling does even less to recommend you as a literary critic, but hey, who I am to judge. -------------------- Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens. Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever Posts: 7968 | Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00 |