Shakespeare is grossly overrated

[JCC]

And the continued reading and infatuated wanking over of his material is predicated by habit and a self-perpetuating academic bias which says he is the king of all things literary when he is actually an alright relic whose comedies are no longer funny and whose tragedies are ham-fisted soliloquy monsters nobody in a post-realist world really enjoys all that much.

Yes or no?

(P.S. The views expressed in this thread are not necessarily representative of JCC)

[MissCheyenne]

Ehh, I like Shakespeare. I didn't at school because I was force fed Macbeth, read out by teenagers who were only really interested in smoking down at the bottom of the field and talking about who had shagged who. Reading in that kind of environment is enough to kill anyones love of literature.

[Alan]

Shakespeare is overrated in the same way Plato is.

[Solumina]

While I am not a fan of dry reading of his plays and he isn't my favorite playwright I find that in the hands of a skilled cast they show great depth and eloquence, although some of the lines do need a bit of editing so that they feel timeless instead of outdated. His poetry can at times be boring and stodgy but it can also be quite enjoyable and inspired.

[christmasmacabre]

It's good to challenge English canon, for a variety of reasons: to open the post colonial literatures up to the world, to recognise emerging literary media and multimedia forms, to reflect changing attitudes and styles, language shifts, gender imbalances. It is — more importantly — vital to have your own preference, and not be led by convention or prescriptivism.

Not under any of the above circumstances, however, is Shakespeare grossly overrated. Sorry. He's that fucking good.

[Apathy's_Child]

Of course he's overrated - no one person could possibly deserve the reputation that's been heaped upon as as the last word in lit and the fucking king of language, as though he invented the word itself. A lot of people I knew at school and college were put off by their convulsive resistance to certain of the professors, whose attitude was that if you don't like Shakespeare, you CLEARLY just don't get it. (These were also the guys bemoaning Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet whilst praising Zefferelli's sentimental piece of drywank version, because this shit ain't for you, kids and proles - it's for smart guys like us.)

That doesn't have to mean he's a total hack though, and while I get questioning the hype, I'm also of the mind that when he's good, he's very, very good. (Using the term "he" loosely, given how much of his shit was probably co-written.)

[christmasmacabre]

Yeah, I don't doubt that a very great many people are put off the work by the abuses of ose who hold out their notional superior expertise, but again: you're suggesting that his work is somehow flawed by virtue of the uses it has been made of by others, without any reference to the work itself. My mistake, you seem to infer some greater value to Luhrmann's film—you recognise how faithful to the text this particular version is, I hope?
What says one person can't deserve this much praise? Don't tell me why other people have made him untenable, show me in the work where he's done things badly. Where is it stylistically clumsy? Where does it lack social relevance? Which metaphor doesn't work, lacks economy or elegance. Which word is wrong? And don't slate it because it's Jacobean: what the fuck else would it be? Attacks like that, and "it has nothing to do with life today" are as lame as slating Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon coz "that shit's Chinese!"
Criticise the art, not the after-school-special of people's educations.

Originally Posted by Apathy's_Child

Of course he's overrated - no one person could possibly deserve the reputation that's been heaped upon as as the last word in lit and the fucking king of language, as though he invented the word itself. A lot of people I knew at school and college were put off by their convulsive resistance to certain of the professors, whose attitude was that if you don't like Shakespeare, you CLEARLY just don't get it. (These were also the guys bemoaning Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet whilst praising Zefferelli's sentimental piece of drywank version, because this shit ain't for you, kids and proles - it's for smart guys like us.)

That doesn't have to mean he's a total hack though, and while I get questioning the hype, I'm also of the mind that when he's good, he's very, very good. (Using the term "he" loosely, given how much of his shit was probably co-written.)

[Grausamkeit]

I like him, but I don't think there's anything wrong with other people not liking him. I'm one of those weirdos who honestly liked reading Sophocles'p plays, too. *shrugs* They're just ancient, flowery soap opera's, really.

[KissMeDeadly]

Originally Posted by christmasmacabre

Yeah, I don't doubt that a very great many people are put off the work by the abuses of ose who hold out their notional superior expertise, but again: you're suggesting that his work is somehow flawed by virtue of the uses it has been made of by others, without any reference to the work itself. My mistake, you seem to infer some greater value to Luhrmann's film—you recognise how faithful to the text this particular version is, I hope?
What says one person can't deserve this much praise? Don't tell me why other people have made him untenable, show me in the work where he's done things badly. Where is it stylistically clumsy? Where does it lack social relevance? Which metaphor doesn't work, lacks economy or elegance. Which word is wrong? And don't slate it because it's Jacobean: what the fuck else would it be? Attacks like that, and "it has nothing to do with life today" are as lame as slating Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon coz "that shit's Chinese!"
Criticise the art, not the after-school-special of people's educations.

Woah woah woah, now, slow your roll.

Ok, relax...and...breath!

1...2...3...

BREATH 1...2...3....

Alright then. Nobody ever said Shakespear wasn't good, they just said that he's overrated, which he is.

[Peter Jackal]

I'm loving this thread. Some truly concise and powerfully stated arguments.

Shakespearean language interests me because it is different and some of it is very beautiful.

There's a line in MacBeth that goes: "Thou sure and firm set earth, hear not my steps which way they walk for fear thy very stones prate of my whereabout."

I think that translates as "Better watch where I'm putting my fucking feet in case the bastards hear me coming."

But I prefer Bill's version.

That said, I do think there is quite a widesread social phenomenon whereby if children are forcibly exposed to cultural material by overzealous teachers, then some of them grow up to revere it far more than it deserves, while others grow to despise it with equally excessive enthusiasm.

Shakespeare's plays are not the only casualty of this developmental divergence of critical opinion. The Old and New Testaments suffer from a similar mix of credulous adulation and scathing vitriol, and to the proponents of either extreme, the beauty and weirdness of those strange and ancient texts is lost.

[Apathy's_Child]

Originally Posted by Peter Jackal

That said, I do think there is quite a widesread social phenomenon whereby if children are forcibly exposed to cultural material by overzealous teachers, then some of them grow up to revere it far more than it deserves, while others grow to despise it with equally excessive enthusiasm.

Shakespeare's plays are not the only casualty of this developmental divergence of critical opinion. The Old and New Testaments suffer from a similar mix of credulous adulation and scathing vitriol, and to the proponents of either extreme, the beauty and weirdness of those strange and ancient texts is lost.

Totally agreed on every point here. The Old Testament is a fucking amazing work of literature.

Originally Posted by christmasmacabre

Yeah, I don't doubt that a very great many people are put off the work by the abuses of ose who hold out their notional superior expertise, but again: you're suggesting that his work is somehow flawed by virtue of the uses it has been made of by others, without any reference to the work itself.

Huh? No, I'm not. I'm merely pointing out what I sometimes see as the snobbery that accompanies many attempts to democratize, update or interpret his work through modern eyes, and acknowledging that this can be offputting. This would be one of the ways in which I see him as being overrated, in this case, by ivory tower academics and elitists.

The following observations are obviously my response to the two movies I mentioned, rather than on the work of Shakespeare himself:

This is a side-issue centred around my own preferences, but I used the Zefferelli/Luhrmann example as it pretty much sums up the issue to me: Z described L's film as a"travesty", dude was so smugly certain that period costume and pretensions were the only way to approach it and offended by such a "low-brow" version. When he looked at L's film, he saw only the modern costumes & music, the attempts to appeal to a younger audience and that dude from Titanic. In his ivory tower snobbery, he totally missed the fact that Luhrmann (IMO) made the superior movie. This traditionalist approach to Shakespeare endures in schools and colleges, and, I believe, puts people off of Shakespeare by basically telling them "Yeah, this couldn't possibly be relevant to you, only smart tweedy types really get it."

Does the Luhrmann film attempt to populrize? Sure. But that's not inherently a bad thing, surely, if it's done with intelligence and skill, as I believe the L film to have been (no great fan of it, or indeed of the play itself, honestly, but as adaptations go I'd consider it a pretty decent one). Z was so obsessed with focusing on the innocence of R & J, that he totally forgot what a couple of dickheads they are, OR the social conditions and violent society in which they were operating. In Z's movie, the first time Romeo appears, he's twiddling a flower; in Luhrmann's, we see him and his buddies playing with guns and talking big about chicks. The play strongly suggests the society in which they live to be a violent one - the marauding gangs of kids and men playing with swords have thrown down so often by the START of the play that the duke (??) threatens Montague & Capulet with DEATH if their mignons stir up any more shit in the streets. Sounds like a pretty volatile place... Makes it a lot easier to trace how so much shit went down. Z's insistence upon the innocence of the major players is, to my mind, unconvicning in light of the text itself.

So how does Z deal with Tybalt? By making him a basically okay kid who dies in what's essentially a swordfighting game gone wrong, and cementing the idea of innocence destroyed with a hackneyed death in a Christlike pose (seriously dude, be more trite).

Originally Posted by christmasmacabre

My mistake, you seem to infer some greater value to Luhrmann's film—you recognise how faithful to the text this particular version is, I hope?

I'm sorry, could you rephrase/expand this? I'm not really sure what your point is.

One point on what I do understand though - "faithful to the text" means little of relevance that I can see since you are now talking about the movies, and that's before I even touch the fact that BOTH guys used Shakespeare's text rather than an updated rewrite. A play's central purpose is to be performed, not read, and the text itself is a fluid point. Have you ever seen a play being directed? Lines are often changed on the spot and scripts can be virtually rewritten in rehearsal. A play is judged by the finished product, not the paper script - ditto a movie adaptation.

Originally Posted by christmasmacabre

What says one person can't deserve this much praise? Don't tell me why other people have made him untenable, show me in the work where he's done things badly. Where is it stylistically clumsy? Where does it lack social relevance? Which metaphor doesn't work, lacks economy or elegance. Which word is wrong?

Shakespeare is awesome. A lot of writers are - THAT'S the point here. I would take Dostoevsky over Shakespeare in a heartbeat. However I do think Shakespeare was a great writer, so I'm kind of baffled as to how you managed to infer that I'm trying to dump on his work by suggesting that he isn't the alpha & omega of literature that our culture and education system holds him up to be. I maintain that no single writer deserves to be considered "the" author of the English language - especially one whose work we can't trace with any real certainty, and was probably overwhelmingly co-written with authors whose names are completely lost to us, yet no one gets pissy on behalf on THOSE guys. In terms of innovation, Shakespeare is way behind other writers. A lot of the plays weren't even based on original stories, but on pre-existing myths. Again, this doesn't mean the writing isn't good., but it does make me question whether he really is THE most important author EVER.

"Which word is wrong?!" is a bullshit argument. However I can tell you which plays I'd consider weak - A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, and Pericles did little for me. We could bitch back & forth about whether I'm wrong if you really want, though honestly, I'd find that kind of arduous.

Oh, and finally, I happen to like the Jacobeans. Spin again.

Originally Posted by christmasmacabre

And don't slate it because it's Jacobean: what the fuck else would it be? Attacks like that, and "it has nothing to do with life today" are as lame as slating Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon coz "that shit's Chinese!"

Cool your jets - although I agree with your point here, no one has done this.

Originally Posted by christmasmacabre

Criticise the art, not the after-school-special of people's educations.

Uhh, the uses of Shakespeare in education are deeply pertinent of the question of whether Shakespeare is overrated. The title wasn't "does Shakespeare suck?". Something can be overrated and still kick ass in its own right.

Also, on a personal note, I'd recommend chilling the fuck out, and responding to the points actually made rather than your own assumptions on reading them.

[Sir Canvas Corpsey]

Hate Shakespeare, probably because I was force fed his work in Highschool surrounded by those equally uninterested in reading his work but a notch less literate in almost every regard.

Line: Never has there been such a tale of woe.
Student A: "Never has... there.... been such a tale... of... woo-ee

Or the ever classic 'Thou' is 'thoo'
"Thou dost protest too much?"
"Thoo does protect too much"

Definitely despised the hype he got because he didn't seem to be doing anything new for me in the readings. Oh, and quite frankly, Romeo and Juliet... Macbeth... really quite boring. I had more fun reading Wuthering Heights and that's saying something considering I stopped halfway through it.

Hebrew Bible/Old Testament makes me fucking cum all over Apathy's face. New Testament is pretty swanky too, but no where near as good as HB/OT.


On the topic of it still being used in schools. If the class realistically stands to gain nothing from any text or the analysis thereof then it has no place in a classroom. If the average student (aged 16) in said class (composing 95% of students present) is struggling to come up with 50 words on the book version of Shrek then Shakespeare shouldn't even be on the horizon.

In contrast is the Literature class I was in where it was 3 students of the actual year level attending and the other 12 were all a year below taking it as an advanced unit, Shakespeare might be an appropriate text. Well, we pretty much told that we disliked Shakespeare and that we were doing R&J in English class, so what does she do for our play fix? Sets us up with Arthur Miller's The Crucible and Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House. We enjoyed those thoroughly.

Subsequent encounters with Arthur Miller with All My Sons and Ibsen with Heddagabbler confirmed the enjoyment. Macbeth confirmed the dislike for Shakespeare.

[Saya]

Oh man, you're breaking my heart. Macbeth was my favourite one. We had a really fun teacher who let us go wild with our final projects. I made a diorama of the three witches, two guys played the fight scene between Macbeth and Macduff from Polanski's movie and added sports commentary, and a friend made her own movie, in fifteen minutes, playing all the roles. It was so hilarious by the end of it we were all doubled over with tears streaming down our faces.

Plus, Macbeth was in Gargoyles, sir! GARGOYLES!