Shakespeare and the other great writers- overrated?

bluemoonKY

zoobyshoe,

The main reason that I didn't answer you earlier is that you asked for sample paragraphs of my three favorite writers' best writing. That would require me to go to at least one library, and it would require me to photocopy stated paragraphs or to write them down in a notebook. I won't do all that.

The other reason that I didn't answer you earlier is that I don't think anyone but you would find this the slightest bit interesting. Just to clarify, I think that the greatest writers from the 19th century to today are superior to the writers from antiquity to 1600s or so. If I had to pick the three greatest writers of all time, I would pick Stephen King, Lee Child, and Jack London. The answer to your question: IMHO, the three greatest writers of today are Stephen King, Lee Child, and Lawrence Block.

I think that most or all of the most famous writers of the 20th century and the 19th century were superior to Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dante.

Jobrag

Stephen King et al are writers of entertainment, and there's nothing wrong with that, who will be forgotten in 50 years, probably less, (who reads Alistair MacLean these days?). Shakespear, Dickens etc are writers who entertain, and address timeless human problems, husband with pushy wife (Macbeth), "mixed" love affairs (Romeo and Juliet), sexual jealousy (Othello).
Frankly if you think a trio of contempory thriller writers can compare with some of the greatest wordsmiths of all time you need to start visiting different shelves in your local bookshop, or get a kindle and download some of the classics for free.

zoobyshoe

This pretty much explains your "thesis".

Stephen King is not a great writer. He's a popular novelist, which is no small accomplishment, but he didn't become that by being a great writer. He's merely a pretty good writer with an uncanny eye for current popular taste. He's firmly stuck to one period in American culture that he really knows how to exploit but he won't outlive it. Once the cultural background changes his appeal will be gone.

In addition to what jobrag said about Shakespeare addressing timeless human problems, there's the more important fact he said what he said so well and eloquently. So many of the speeches can be removed from the plays and taken as classic poems, as Marcus alludes to, that say what they say in an especially remarkable way.

atyy

But the ideas from dead languages can still live on. One of my favourite Sumerian texts is about a boy (girl?) who didn't want to go to school, because his teacher had punished him for being late and for his bad handwriting (or something like that). It seems school kids have always been the same!

http://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/primary-sources/408

bluemoonKY

First of all, my thesis is that the famous writers before the 18th century are overrated. Dickens deserves his great reputation as a great writer, but he was a 19th century writer.

Secondly, I could make the same argument for Stephen King. Stephen King is a writer who entertains and addresses timeless human problems, wife with abusive husband (Dolores Claiborne), bullying among children and teenagers (Stand by Me), keeping hope to overcome adversity (Rita Heyworth and the Shawshank Redemption).


I have visited some of the so-called "different shelves" in my local library. I have tried to plow through the classics of antiquity and the classics made during the middle ages and the
1500s and the 1600s, but they're just too darn dull. I can't bear it.

zoobyshoe

The farther back you go in time the more any given author will have been motivated by a moral imperative to ennoble the reader. People wrote to make the reader a better person, to pull them up out of the cheap, sensational kinds of things that Stephen King wallows in with no shame, and get them thinking on a more disciplined level informed by standards of taste and morality. They were not written as entertainment and the criticism that they're not entertaining is about as off as criticizing math for not being entertaining. If you want to judge Milton you have to be up for examining what Milton is about, what he was trying to do in the age that he wrote. That is necessarily going to be intellectual labor, just as it would be to go back and read Euclid.

It's perfectly OK to say that kind of scholarly discipline is too dull for you, but to turn it around and find fault with those authors for not playing to your need for cheap, effortless thrills here in the early 21st century is pretty dumb.

There are people who won't read a book at all. They find it too boring and tedious. They could easily present a "thesis" that reading is over-rated, that the advent of film and TV rendered it moot, and that those who continue to read are just being pretentious and affected. I think they would be righter, by your logic, than you are.

atyy

Surely the sleepwalking scene alone makes Shakespeare a great dramatist?

Or was that a standard cheap thrill of the time, like an operatic mad scene?

The other work of his that is either so great or so stupid is the Tempest. Is it a very subtle work, or a very shallow work? I feel the former, but can only make the case for the latter!

Another work that comes to mind is Mozart's magic flute. I am sure it is the most profound work, yet I know some who think it fluff compared to Wagner.

marcus

That's OK when stuff is great you can get passionately held convictions either way. Did you ever watch the Ingmar Bergman Magic Flute? His 12yearold daughter is there in the audience during the overture when the camera scans over a kind of group portrait of humanity.
Our family has often sung some of the duets, trios. I sing Zarastro in the shower. It's family music, music to live by. You don't have to have a great voice. Will people still love M.F. in 300 years? Amateur home-singers still want to learn the songs?
Oh I guess so. And does it have silly parts? Sure. Bergman knew how to edit, modernize in subtle ways, but still keep it in its period and without tampering with the essence. Not a *spectacle*. It has a homely universal common touch.

atyy

I haven't - didn't even know about it. I shall have to look out for it now. Actually, I think I've never seen a Bergmann movie - maybe scared by their reputation for being rather dark.

marcus

No fear. His M.F. is not typical Bergman.

zoobyshoe

I'd call it psychological insight hundreds of years ahead of its time, and that is one exceptionally well acted performance of that scene. Thanks for the link!

bluemoonKY

You might be right about Milton, Virgil, and Dante, but I strongly doubt you are right about Shakespeare. Did Shakespeare not write to entertain?


I resent your calling my desire to read entertaining writings cheap and effortless.

marcus

I'm curious, Blue, who wrote in the 18th Century, that you like? If there isn't anyone, would your claim be that everybody famous before the 19th is overrated?
Were you reading stuff in translation? The local library may have had dull prosy translations. Or you may have randomly chanced on passages of Homer that only a contemporary Greek could have fully appreciated. So you may (thru no fault) have not given it a fair shot. What books of Chaucer did you read?

But anyway, basically you sound like you are speaking your mind and expressing an honest reaction. So I respect that. You might look back at my posts #2, #9, #14, #15, where I'm trying to do the same thing. Tell you what my experience has been.

Also it sounds like you have a strong preference for NOVELS, and that is a fairly new genre. Early on there are only a few to choose from: there's Defoe (Crusoe), Swift (Gulliver), Austen (Pride&Prejudice)...
Your cutoff date (18th C) seems to correspond to the invention of the novel. It was just getting started. And the examples of modern writers you esteem are all novelists.
Maybe that's the key to it, in which case there is not much to argue about. Your taste runs to novels and all the famous English novelists before the 18th (of which there are zero) do not deserve their reputations. No one can argue against a statement about zero writers.

BTW have you read Pride and Prejudice? Moral clarity, hilarious deadpan humor, perfect expression. Might not be so much to your taste if it runs, say, to modern Gothic, the heart wrenching, the gruesome, the mad, or the supernatural. Jane Austen doesn't do the full spectrum. I think you probably have, but I'm curious to know for sure and what you think.

We must be right around the 200th anniversary of P&P. Doesn't 1812 sound right for Jane Austen?
EDIT: Yes! I checked and Pride and Prejudice was published January 1813.

DaveC426913

Well, the word "entertaining" does have an implication of immediate visceral gratification. That would be distinct from the timelessness of the subtext seen in Shakespeare.

I'm not saying any writing can't be both; simply that they are distinct. If what you value is entertainment, then it's not a surprise that Shakespeare is not at the top of your list like it would be for someone who values timeless stories about the human condition.

zoobyshoe

Entertainment was high on his priorities but still secondary to the moral or lesson. Shakespeare felt he was performing a social/human service: raising people's awareness by showing them themselves. This comes out in Hamlet's direction to the actors he's hired. Hamlet is, on one level, is a play about what plays are about:

I value cheap, effortless novels a lot and read as many as I can find. There's no shame in it for me because I know they're cheap and effortless and I don't mistake them for great writing. I've read a lot of Stephen King. I call your desire to read entertaining novels an indulgence in the cheap and effortless because I know mine is. Check out Preston Douglas. He's my new favorite author: pure entertainment. Much better than Stephen King.

zoobyshoe

Shakespeare's stories, the plots, are not necessarily better than anyone else's. What sets him apart is the eloquence and originality of how he expresses things. Anyone, for example, can conceive of a man spiraling down into complete black depression upon hearing that his wife has died, but the way Shakespeare expresses that man's downward inner fall is, to me, exquisite:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

bluemoonKY

I don't know, but there might be some.

Yes.

I never have read any literature in any language except English.



Only one. I read The Canterbury Tales.



Then the writings of 19th and 20th century writers tend to be more entertaining than the writings of writers before the 18th century because writers before the 18th century did not write novels.



I have read Pride and Prejudice. It was not my cup of tea.