Poll: Is shakespeare great?

[LHZA]

The problem with Shakespeare is how he's taught in school. He's taught as dry pieces of literature and are read as such, and you have to remember most of his work was meant to be preformed. It makes a difference, plus it makes it more interesting to study when you keep that in mind.

 

[floppylobster]

His plots might not always be the most intricate in comparison to other things (though they're still pretty good), but his characters are often unforgettable, and his poetry is unrivaled, still today. Many years ago I thought I might be able to do better. Many years later I have realised I'll never even come close.

"I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams."

Perhaps when you get older and can appreciate what he's actually doing with his juxtaposition of words and imagery you will be in awe of what the English language is capable of. People write 15,000 word essays on just a few lines of his work. The works are so dense and layered with meaning within their context. And not just anyone - University professors among others. Do you really still think he's overrated?

I'll advise you as you as Kent advised Lear - "See better."

But eh, let's ignore all that and declare him "overrated".

"To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life..."

 

[Ogargd]

I think the main reasons people don't appreciate Shakespeare is because they don't see how out there his ideas, metaphors and writing was for the time period, personally I think he was amazing.

 

[Sexy Devil]

Only ever read Shakespeare for grade 10 English. Even then I was barely paying attention because we didn't have to write about it, we just had to reenact a scene for our assessment. My friends and I used it as an excuse to whale on each other with foam swords in front of the class, while we started saying a bunch of lines from the play to justify it.

We got an A.

 

[DEAD34345]

The sheer arrogance of this board continues to amaze. Its relentless. Shakespeare is the best selling author of all time. Its estimated that over 500 billion of his works have been sold; works that influence every piece of fiction in our culture to this day. Not just plays and books, but games, movies, television, EVERYTHING.

But eh, let's ignore all that and declare him "overrated".

Unbelievable. Absolutely epic.

I don't get it, in what way is not liking Shakespeare as much as others "arrogant"? I don't think anyone here is trying to say they could write better than him, so where's the issue?

OT: I quite liked Richard the third and Macbeth, but I'm generally not into plays as a medium, so I'm not exactly a great fan or anything. There's plenty of things I enjoy a lot more then Shakespeare.

 

[Silverfox99]

Hmm, I'd say Shakespeare wrote pretty banal stories but he wrote them very well, if that makes sense. The fact that you can determine what ending it will have by what genre it is (tradgedy; main characters die in the end, comedy; main characters marry in the end) and that if the tradgedy is named after a character(s), then that's the name of the character that kicks the bucket doesn't make for the most enthralling tales and the characters aren't particularly idiosyncratic or well rounded. But the manner in which he writes is very eloquent and evocative, that ensares and ensconces you, elevating a pretty pedestrian tale into something ensorcelling. Definately overrated, but then again, anything that's widely held up as the zenith of an entire medium is bound not live up to expectations.

This is why Shakespeare is so well respected as a writer. The audiences did know what was going to happen as far as the ending. It was how plays were written. Watching a play wasn't about knowing the ending but in how the play took you there.

Yes Shakespeare had a pop aspect to his work. The commoners like his dirty jokes and all of the violence. If you study his plays you realize that he also deals with more intellectual themes. Both nobility and commoners would watch his plays at the same time so the plays had to be entertaining to both classes. It takes talent to appeal to two very different types of people with the same work.

Add in the fact that Shakespeare was successful with many plays makes him one of the best English writers of all time. Shakespeare has a very high quality to his works and he wrote an obscene amount for the time period. The amount and quality of his writings hasn't been matched since.

That is why Shakespeare is what he is to English classes. The problem to really appreciating him is that you have to know a good amount about what life was like in that time period, be able to read that style of writing, understand what was expected of a play in that time, and be able to see how he is still having a strong influence on us today. It takes time and effort to understand and appreciate him.

 

[malestrithe]

Shakespeare is not the best writer of his time, nor was he the most original. I think that Marlowe had the best writing and Johnson was the most original.

He is remembered not because of how he was from his time, but because how the 19th century romantics saw him. They chose Shakespeare to heap praises on and the rest of us followed.

He is considered timeless because every generation is allowed to come up with a new reason to like him. Hamlet used to be about trust, then it became about politics, psychosis, and now it about Hamlet being a homosexual.

 

[MasterOfHisOwnDomain]

He was a great writer, but nowadays the Bardolatry is overwhelming - he is an over-rated figure in our society, if only because there are so many other writers who are fantastic and are never widely heard of, even from Shakespeare's period. Jonson, Webster, Marlowe all wrote absolutely terrific stuff ... are they even half as known as Shakespeare?

 

[the Dept of Science]

His plots might not always be the most intricate in comparison to other things (though they're still pretty good), but his characters are often unforgettable, and his poetry is unrivaled, still today. Many years ago I thought I might be able to do better. Many years later I have realised I'll never even come close.

"I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams."

Perhaps when you get older and can appreciate what he's actually doing with his juxtaposition of words and imagery you will be in awe of what the English language is capable of. People write 15,000 word essays on just a few lines of his work. The works are so dense and layered with meaning within their context. And not just anyone - University professors among others. Do you really still think he's overrated?

I'll advise you as you as Kent advised Lear - "See better."

Yea. I'm going to give the arrogant English teacher response to people that don't like him:

If you don't like Shakespeare, you just haven't studied him enough.

I'll also say that if you take the test of time to be a good measure of artistic worth, then its pretty difficult to deny that Shakespeare comes out on top. His works are still the most performed and have been adapted into everything from Disney cartoons to Japanese Noh theatre.

 

[Hexenwolf]

I LOVE Shakespeare. I agree that 'The Greatest Writer Ever' is a silly title to give to someone but for his works to have endured this long, and to have influenced so much, including the English language itself, is a huge achievement. Even his lesser known plays are interesting and well-written. My favourite ever scene from a play/tv show/film is from Richard III when the protagonist (who is also the villain) manages to persuade the widow of a man he's just murdered to marry him. It's an insanely witty but scary scene, where you can see the true depths people will go to in order to gain a bit of power. Scarier still is how relevant a lot of his stuff still is.

I also love the fact that his works can be read on so many levels. For example, his sonnets are held up as some of the most romantic, beautiful poetry ever written and are quoted endlessly in romance novels, romcoms etc. but the majority of them (the first 120) are actually written about a man in drag. If you read them back it's really obvious, and once you know it's really funny to see people in films quoting sonnets to prove their love, when actually all they're doing is repeating a really old joke about a bloke in a dress.

That said, schools tend to do a spectacularly crappy job of teaching his plays. I don't know many people who would say they like Shakespeare, just because trying to read The Merchant of Venice aged 15 is like torture. You'd think that a writer who includes a ridiculous amount of sex, violence, incest, murder, insanity and sticking two fingers up at your parents would be pretty popular with teenagers. Thankfully our teacher was amazing, and once acted out the entire plot of Macbeth through interpretive dance - funniest thing I've ever seen in a classroom and guaranteed to give you fond memories of the Bard.

The presentation is absolutely imperative.

I never read the Merchant of Venice in school, oh no, we did Romeo and Juliet. To death. However, I actually just saw a presentation of the Merchant, and I thought it was brilliant, very funny. A lot of that, however, had to do with the actors. I'm sure if my only experience of the tale had been back in high school, a series of uninterested student readers stumbling over it, I would have been bored to tears.

 

[Arakasi]

I would classify Shakespere as overrated.
Severely.

 

[hazabaza1]

Eh. Never really read his stuff. Saw the modern version of Romeo and Juliet with Leonard Diwhatshisface and hated it, so I've not got the best impression of him.

 

[Flamezdudes]

He isn't that old.

Now... The Odyssey... THAT is old.

I personally think that Shakespeare is brilliant, I like a lot of his works and each year my mother, aunt, nan and I go to see a Shakespeare play performed outside during the summer.

Not to mention the effect he had on the English language and literature as a whole.

 

[JoesshittyOs]

Would I call him a bad writer? Absolutely not.

I just think that poetry is a bland and terrible art form in general, so I'm a little biased when it comes to that.

Though strangely, I actually understood Shakespeare better than most people in my class when we were learning about him, and was able to throw up some interesting debates. You're probably all thinking "So what?", but you need to understand that I didn't really excel at much during school.

 

[SpAc3man]

Shakespeare is brilliant. Most people struggle to realise how much of a master of language and story he is until they can honestly say they understand the original text along with a more in-depth knowledge of the English language and how many words and phrases come from Shakespeare's work.

Have a link [http://shakespeare-online.com/biography/wordsinvented.html] to a very small list of examples of the words that Shakespeare crafted.

 

[Joccaren]

Overrated.
Shoot me.
Sure, you can find him amazing if you want, doesn't make him the best author of all time that everybody should watch and love, or else be counted as uneducated and the literature equivalent of CoD players [The group gamers generally scapegoat for anything uneducated, or to do with streamlining and such].
He may be good, but don't expect me to love him. He's boring. He can't hold the attention of most people I know for more than 5 minutes with his works. Other great writers existed in his time, existed since his time, and exist today - and few people worship them as much as some worship Shakespeare.
Personal taste, is all I have to say. Of the few people I know that actually like Shakespeare, most believe he completely transcends personal taste, and is great no matter what you like, and if you don't think you like him, you just don't get it and need to read it again. Seriously, they're like Bioware and the ME3 ending. People like that, who give him the "God of all writing" rating, are the reason I find him overrated. Otherwise, he's just mediocre.

 

[Lethos]

This thread. It's full of English language hipsters D:

 

[the Dept of Science]

The sheer arrogance of this board continues to amaze. Its relentless. Shakespeare is the best selling author of all time. Its estimated that over 500 billion of his works have been sold; works that influence every piece of fiction in our culture to this day. Not just plays and books, but games, movies, television, EVERYTHING.

But eh, let's ignore all that and declare him "overrated".

Unbelievable. Absolutely epic.

I don't get it, in what way is not liking Shakespeare as much as others "arrogant"? I don't think anyone here is trying to say they could write better than him, so where's the issue?

OT: I quite liked Richard the third and Macbeth, but I'm generally not into plays as a medium, so I'm not exactly a great fan or anything. There's plenty of things I enjoy a lot more then Shakespeare.

Perhaps it's arrogant to suggest that an opinion based on the one time you got taught it at school (presumably badly) is valid against centuries of intense scholarly study. To say that he is overrated suggests that you know the value of Shakespeare better than all those people that have studied or performed his works to a high level.
I think that it's legitimate to not enjoy Shakespeare. The old fashioned English requires some effort to understand, lots of the cultural references are lost on us etc. However, most people who don't like Shakespeare seem to take "I didn't enjoy it" as some sort of damning critique. Enjoyment isn't the best measure of artistic worth. I enjoyed reading High Fidelity far more than The Trial or, say, some of Shakespeare's works. Do I consider it a great piece of literature? No... it's just an enjoyable one.

 

[Sixcess]

I think part of the problem is most people get exposed to him first through reading one or other of the plays at school. When I was at school and we read Othello I don't think any of us 'got it' until the teacher brought in a video of a BBC production with Bob Hoskins as Iago.

Genius move. Shakespeare is often seen as lofty, artsy, 'poncy'... but Bob Hoskins was just a regular bloke as well as being a very good and charismatic actor. And he was in The Long Good Friday, so he was cool.

Then we got it.

 

[wintercoat]

Shakespeare was an amazing writer, however the pedestal he's put upon is rather ridiculous.

Were his plays good? Yes.
Do they deserve the almost cult-like following by English teachers and Drama students? No.