George Orwell was a great fan of Shakespeare, and he wrote an essay[1] in response to Tolstoy's strong dislike of Shakespeare[2]. These quotes are from Orwell, the fan:
- "Tolstoy is right in saying that Lear is not a very good play, as a play. It is too drawn-out and has too many characters and sub-plots."
- "Shakespeare has a habit of thrusting uncalled-for general reflections into the mouths of his characters. This is a serious fault in a dramatist"
- "Of course, it is not because of the quality of his thought that Shakespeare has survived, and he might not even be remembered as a dramatist if he had not also been a poet."
Tolstoy:
- "I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: "King Lear," "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium"
This is one of my favorite essays, it also has a great aside about how the appetite for power is more dangerous than the capacity for violence, which has always stuck with me as a particularly astute observation.
The essay is also particularly good because it recognizes that Shakespeare pre-identified faults in Tolstoy's philosophy, in King Lear.
I've also long thought that a lot of the subtlety of language touched on in this essay would have likely escaped Tolstoy in translation.
Very astute indeed, this is my first time hearing about it.
Copy pasted below:
> The distinction that really matters is not between violence and non-violence, but between having and not having the appetite for power. There are people who are convinced of the wickedness both of armies and of police forces, but who are nevertheless much more intolerant and inquisitorial in outlook than the normal person who believes that it is necessary to use violence in certain circumstances. They will not say to somebody else, ‘Do this, that and the other or you will go to prison’, but they will, if they can, get inside his brain and dictate his thoughts for him in the minutest particulars. Creeds like pacifism and anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics — a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage — surely that proves that you are in the right? And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone else should be bullied into thinking likewise.
My two cents is that the vast majority of people likely have the similar capacities for violence, their expression only changes in different contexts and for different reasons. Orwelles articulates that in the political context, the most likely reason for violence is to attain power, so those who care less for power have less reason and therefore less-seeming capacity for violence.
I quite like how he establishes that the reason for violence comes before the capacity of violence when considering if someone will be violent/express violence.
Great essay (Orwell) takes me back. I remember learning Lear (and the other 'tragedies') at Rutgers in a night class in a basement of one of those impersonal brutalist buildings that sprung up in the 70s to replace 'quonset' huts in central Jersey by the Raritan. Inauspicious looking place to learn Shakespeare but was a class that really stuck with me.
The language and structure of "Lear" spin out of control and loose meaning - so by the end one of the more sympathetic characters becomes speechless after saying something to the effect of - "Is this the promised end/ or the image of that destruction?/ fall and cease". IOW: 'is this the apocalypse? there is nothing more to say or do...'
It doesn't bother me that Tolstoy thought Lear was garbage. I can see his point from his perspective. He had a different mind and different education from anything I could imagine. And he was fundamentally smarter than I am so I respect that. I think though I respect Shakespeare more and part of what he is doing in "Lear" is showing the heartbreaking limits of the mind when facing a reality that no longer makes sense.
I realize even from the relatively privileges perspective of one educated in dank basements of a decent US public university that I know much less about literature and philosophy than a comparably educated compatriot of Tolstoy (and much, much less than Tolstoy himself). Even in my reading he is nto wrong. Lear in the tradition of tragedy is a broken play. I am not sure that makes it bad...
The end of Lear renders everyone in the play dead or shattered, mute. We as the audience, receive that and go on. That gulf is awesome. Much is lost and it is almost magical that we go on. And this fracturing and re-wholing goes on.
An old story - the "Tower of Babel", etc
This gets rewritten - Huidobro, Faulkner, Julio Cortazar, and Beckett come to mind but I am lazy and years away from lit study. Writers that see a epoch passing (for better or worse) and are in the lacunae where meaning is exhausted and we are speechless and exhausted.
Like Beckett ends his trilogy
```
It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don't know, I'll never know: in the silence you don't know.
You must go on.
I can't go on.
I'll go on.
```
There are echos of Lear everywhere.
I hate the weakness of relativism but I feel a humbleness wrt the greats - I reach into the bag of marbles and pull out a Sappho, LaoTze, TSEliot, Hegel and read something out of context and in translation. In the back of my mind I realize there is much I would never understand the gulf of experience. They are all failures: most drunk or unstable, leaving fragments that we puzzle over.
I always thought Shakespehre was over-rated both as a dramatist and as a poet. I happily read this article thinking someone else was finally going to make the case for Shakespeare's mediocrity. But alas, I had been tricked, it was about something much less interesting.
The article presents some speculative research by scientist Stephen Booth about Shakespeare's effect on the bran under brain scans. It makes strange claims about brain scans showing that the brain focuses and pays attention when listening to Shakespeare. It then reaches the dubious conclusion that this is because of some patterns that Shakespeare, in his genius, put in the verses. Of course, these patterns are semantic rather than syntactical and thus not easily quantifiable and measurable in an objective fashion.
Naturally Booth doesn't even consider the possibility that the brain activity may be attributable to other factors. Like the fact that it could just be the brain reacting to archaic styles of English and realizing that it has to focus and pay closer attention to discern the meaning. . . Or that it may be the verses trigger memories of studying it in high school English classes where focus and close attention was required . . .
No it can't be any of these things, obviously it's because Shakespeare is a genius and put some "genius patterns" in his verses. After all everyone thinks it's true so it must be true.
Speaking of which, why is jealousy a green eyed monster anyways? What do green eyed monsters or even green eyes have to do with jealously anyways? what a terrible analogy!
Also, who says "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day, thou art more lovely and more temperate." Summers days aren't temperate, they're hot!! What is wrong with this guy? Why does everyone think this nonsense is so great, don't they realize that there are other poets and playwrights who wrote in iambic pentameter?
In conclusion, Stephen Booth's research is nonsense, much like Shakespeare.
It's worth noting that the only real criticism you level against Shakespeare here - that "shall I compare thee to a summer's day..." is incoherent - rests on an embarrassing misreading of the sonnet. Far from being a strike against Shakespeare, his point is that summer days are not temperate but hot! Likewise, Autumn is too short, May is too windy, and so on. The subject of the poem, Shakespeare claims, does not suffer any of these flaws. I think this serves as a useful yardstick for the quality of your other claims about Shakespeare.
I remember when I first had Othello and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus in the same semester. While I liked Othello a lot, I felt that Faustus was a much superior piece of literature, both in the lyrical beauty of its prose and the actual plot.
I was also fortunate enough to have a professor who was a huge Marlowe fan. So while most professors obsess too much over Shakespeare, my professor spent a good couple of months on Faustus. Highlight of my academic life.
"green eyed monster" it's hard to discuss the merits of these old and extremely influential texts. Some texts are so foundational to a language that even their mistakes have gotten imbued with beauty. In my native language, Dutch, that's the case f.i. with our equivalent of the King James bible. There are a lot of phrases in there that don't make sense because they're errors of translation. But still they carry a stately splendour for a lot of people.
Perhaps that's also the case with Shakespeare. Basically by now it's beautiful because it's so much like Shakespeare. :-)
There's a lot of depth in it that doesn't get touched in schools - like how references to "nothing" are sometimes references to female sex-organs, as in Much A-do About Nothing.
At school we _read_ the plays; unless you're familiar with the story and action I can't think of a more surefire way to be put off.
No kidding we get told to read these works for class without really having the tools to appreciate them.
Another example of this is reading The Catcher in the Rye while in high school. The problem with this book for a teen is that theyre as a whole not far enough removed from the angst of Holdon's character to see the bigger picture. To a teen Holdon is this exaggeration of their worst characteristics and, this is extra relevant for the AP and honors students who tend to read Salinger, a literally manifest of their most annoying and disruptive classmates. Getting over this is a lot to ask a teenager.
However removed from a teenage perspective it's much easier to see why the book is well regarded. It depicts a kid broken by the loss of his sister and broken by the abuse handed down to him from his caretakers. Being unlike Holden just makes it so much easier to empathize with him.
There might be something on that. I found The Catcher in the Rye enjoyable and fun to read when I was at high school. However, I really disliked whenever people said that the character was supposed to talk for me or that I was supposed to identify with him. I was not like that at all, most my schoolmates were not like that at all. Non of them actually, we were selective school. He would not get in. Only minority of kids is like him and I considered the implication unfair.
It was well written story of someone who is not like me at all that gave me a bit of inside into his head. That was cool. Essays and teachers and what not assuming or framing it as a book that is supposed to talk for me were not cool.
I remember the first time I went to see Shakespeare as an adult. It is still the funniest play I've ever seen and I couldn't even really understand everything they were saying!
But out of the 4 of us attending, 2 of us were enraptured, and the other 2 were bored and left for the pub in the interval.
I wonder if you either connect with his word play, or you don't. A marmite thing. I doesn't help that the english language is different to how it was then.
But I find what we did in school with Shakespeare to be ridiculous. It's the equivalent of trying to explain a joke.
Stephen Booth is a literary scholar, the kind that focuses in the kind of attentive, close reading that would hopefully prevent a practitioner from asserting that he (i.e. Booth) was a scientist.
This article is a bit clickbaity. Shakespeare's genius is most certainly not nonsense, his corpus of work as a playwright is unparalleled in its size and quality.
Sure, some of his characters may be a bit flakey and some of his stories 'too drawn out', but the man's genius lies only partly there. His ability to pluck words out of thin air to create his narrative (the man invented 1700 new words!) and give them directly to the people influenced the English language in a way that very few, or indeed any, individual people have done before. He is a wordsmith in a very literal sense.
While his comedy night not translate well to other countries or cultures, and some is lost in time, a lot of it is incredibly astute and still very very funny today. He also had a huge influence on the now-classic farce, something that has moved from the stage to the screen still carrying his marks.
My mother has seen every single play performed live, so I was taken to quite a few when I was younger and developed a taste for him. The man was a genius.
The point is that the article's title is another "unexploded pun", the principle of which is a central theme to the article; it is referring to Booth's analysis of one of the sources of the Bard's greatness:
Shakespeare achieves this by weaving incredibly rich networks from the same
kinds of “substantive nonsense and nonimporting patterns” that pop up in slang,
jokes, songs, and nursery rhymes. Those dense networks of patterns, Booth posits,
are “the principal source of the greatness we find in Shakespeare’s work.”
Yes - a genius. If you are thinking and writing in English today, you do so in his shadow.
But there is ambivalence. I don't think Shakespeare himself would have thought of himself in that way - and that would nto be false modesty. Taking another example Socrates, who I only know through translation, seems to vacillate on certain ideas. Sometimes life seems incredibly precious to him at other times not really worth much... But that is not a weakness in his thought. He is delineating a very real indetermancy.
In another context TS Eliot when asked about "The Waste Land" - which I believe Tolstoy would have seen as just as bad a Shakespeare - referred to it as “the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life… just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.”
I don't believe this is just humblebragging. And this goes back to Orwell's point in the essay that Shakespeare was at times a sloppy thinker, a bad punner, a weak dramatist but an incomparable poet.
Yes - it fails and the result is a pile of fragments which those who remain use to build up again.
Definitely clickbaity, as the title is intentionally misleading. (Read it as "The literary device named 'nonsense' is something that Shakespeare was genius at".) This is definitely a case where HN should change the title.
However, one nonsense claim to watch out for is the claim that Shakespeare invented 1700 new words. Shakespeare is the first recorded use of many words, but that doesn't mean he invented them, it means we care a lot about Shakespeare and preserved his writing better than others'.
The whole point of the article is that ambiguity in interpretation is to be celebrated, which is precisely what we see in the title. The title is an accurate reflection of the content of the essay in this regard.
That people are so hung up on interpretation, on meaning, is no more than habit.
Better to revel in uncertainty.
The purpose of HN's policy in regard to article titles is that ambiguity in the interpretation of titles creates noise which needs to be removed from the signal of comment quality. Many users simply reply to their initial interpretation of a title, and boring/non-clever titles act as a filter against people unwilling to make even the minimal effort of reading the article first by removing that low-hanging fruit. Ambiguity in interpretation may be a wonderful thing in literature, but on the internet and sites like this it can be cancerous.
I half-wish HN would replace titles with random hashes, at least for a limited time or for low-karma accounts, in order to force people to have to RTFA to comment. Although then, most comments would just be complaints about that.
Yes and echos the life of certain words through the play - the use of the word 'nothing' which gets batted around until it is hanging in the air above the stage at the end.
A take a little offense with the "clickbaity" accusation thrown willy nilly.
The title translates to something like "Shakespeare's Genius lies in exploiting non-sensical language and sentiment for dramatic effect".
It is a kind of pun, using the same kind of structure as the professor's point out Shakespeare was prone to use to drive their point.
Is it clickbait? That might have played a factor. But decades before the internet was even a thing, when you couldn't see the title of a piece unless you have already bought the magazine/newspaper, journalists still likes to use such puns and clever wording in their stories.
Not just on cover stories ("Headless body in a topless bar") but in stories and regular columns buried deep deep inside the magazine/newspaper. The same also holds true for many people writing in their blogs. They like a good pun / clever title.
So maybe we should leave the knee-jerk accusation of "clickbait" where it really belongs? "This guy lost 100lbs with a small trick. Doctors hate him!", "You wont believe what Kim said to Kanye!", etc.
It's an interesting article, although I don't know much about Shakespeare. But it kinda confirms my theory that a good art is like a good puzzle - it requires some (decent) mental effort on the part of the audience to "interpret". And humans have rewards for interpreting data, that's why we like art.
Like in a good puzzle, it cannot be too open-ended, because then too many interpretations are possible and there is not enough motivation on the part of casual audience to make something out. On the other hand, it cannot be too straightforward, because then there is only one, obvious interpretation, and that makes the reward for the audience very small.
Good puzzles have a balance between those things
to maximize the reward/effort ratio involved in solving them. The same is true for art, there has to be enough ambiguity for audience to fill in themselves (leading to satisfaction), but also enough stuff to keep the audience interested.
Good article. Booth's Precious Nonsense: The Gettysburg Address, Ben Jonson's Epitaphs on His Children, and Twelfth Night sounds intriguing, too.
"Why do we value literature so? Many would say for the experience it brings us. But what is it about that experience that makes us treasure certain writings above others? Stephen Booth suggests that the greatest appeal of our most valued works may be that they are, in one way or another, nonsensical. He uses three disparate textsthe Gettysburg Address, Ben Jonson's epitaphs on his children, and Shakespeare's Twelfth Nightto demonstrate how poetics triumphs over logic in the invigorating mental activity that enriches our experience of reading. Booth presents his case in a book that is crisply playful while at the same time thoroughly analytical. He demonstrates the lapses in logic and the irrational connections in examples of very different types of literature, showing how they come close to incoherence yet maintain for the reader a reliable order and purpose. Ultimately, Booth argues, literature gives us the capacity to cope effortlessly with, and even to transcend, the complicated and demanding mental experiences it generates for us.
"This book is in part a witty critique of the trendsold and newof literary criticism, written by an accomplished and gifted scholar. But it is also a testimony to the power of the process of reading itself. Precious Nonsense is certain to bring pleasure to anyone interested in language and its beguiling possibilities."
I love the irony of writing an article on how one's main study in life is 'nonsense'. I think Shakespeare would probably enjoy such a take and agree...
I'm not a native English speaker and am very inclined to start reading Shakespeare soon. Any advice on how to get started?
Do I just read his plays first? Any other commentary I should read? Who are the authors whose work in Shakespeare must be read by people like me?
To be honest the best intro may be watching the Romeo and Juliet movie–yes, the one with Leonardo di Caprio.
The text is unchanged, but the setting is contemporary gangs in Florida (or California?). The on-screen action, as well as hearing the text spoken with all the right rhythm and emotion makes it much easier to get the meaning.
As for reading, I believe the Arden Edition are the best-regarded annotations. I somehow ended up playing Macbeth in College and spent hours with the text, but it takes a lot of effort to start enjoying all the nuances, and having to perform may have made it easier to stay motivated.
The movie is called Romeo+Juliet :) And agree it is a great version. I'm pretty sure it is supposed to take place in a fictionalized LA - "Verona Beach" is a clever play on "Venice beach" since it allows the characters to just say "Verona" like in the play.
Also Polansku's Macbeth, Coriolanus with Anthony Hopkins, and King Lear. . I think there's a Richard Briers version which was really excellent, though you may find others. And of course Olivier's famous Richard III.
Don't start by reading the plays, go to a theatre and watch them being performed. Or if that is impractical watch some of the many films of the plays. Hamlet has been adapted at least fifteen times: Olivier, Branagh, Greenaway, Burton, Jacobi, even Mel Gibson, etc.
Watch a Shakespeare movie. The plays are written to be performed by actors, not to be read. My favorite is Henry V in the Branagh version, and it is a good place to start.
Take a scene like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHAAH8PCnMo. Just listen to the rythm and poetry and how the intensity builds, and appreciate how great actors make the text live.
But there are a wealth of great Shakespeare films. Often they are creative in how they stage the story, like Ian McKelleans Richard III, which takes place in a kind of 1930's fascist Britain. This might seem disconcerting at first, but the original plays didn't care a lot for historical or geographical accuracy anyway.
Be aware that Shakespeares strong points are not plotting and pacing. Movies and stage version often cut and rearrange a lot to satisfy the modern audience. Also the stories are typically taken from somewhere else, so the genius of Shakespeare is not the overall story, but rather in the poetry and the language and the unique characterizations.
Find annotated text for your early efforts, especially when you tackle the plays. Even for a native English speaker (at least for an American) many of the Elizabethan terms are meaningles--or worse, misunderstood--and a lot of the puns (they are legion) depend on an understanding of the language and culture of England 400-500 years ago.
> If, for instance, a theatre director today put a middle-aged man on stage wearing low-slung jeans, everybody in the audience would know it was both inappropriate and funny. In 50 years time they probably won't understand it at all and the object I'm looking at now carries just such a social meaning, self-evident to an Elizabethan, hard for us to read today. It's an English woollen cap of the 16th century, a sort of flat chocolatey brown beret
[...]
> Our hat unlocks a whole language of social difference and a whole structure of social control, both expressed through clothes and sometimes enforced by law. A Parliamentary statute of 1571 stipulated that every male over the age of six had to wear a woollen cap like this one on Sundays and holidays. The law was a shrewd device for supporting the English wool industry, but it was also designed to reinforce social divisions by making them visible.
> It was not in fact every boy and man that had to wear a cap, noblemen and gentlemen wore hats instead. The 'capped' were the lower echelons of society and for them, not wearing the cap was breaking the law. Shakespeare's Uncle Henry, not quite grand enough to qualify as a gentleman, was fined for not wearing his woollen cap. Everybody in Shakespeare's audience took all this for granted and everybody in this society wore a hat as a badge of social identity. Not to, would suggest that something was seriously amiss.
I'd recommend watching rather than reading his plays. The Royal Shakespeare Company has recordings of many of their stagings on DVD (with english subtitles that will make things a bit easier), and there's several good movie adaptations as well.
There is a fair amount of stuff online that you can listen to (youtube, etc) I think with Shakespeare (and even more so Chaucer who wrote in Middle English) - if you hear it for a while you can read it better.
get one of those annotated texts where the original is on one page and the annotation is on the facing page. read both concurrently. keep google and other references close by.
I've never watched a Shakespeare play but I can't imagine understanding people speaking early modern English if I can't even understand it very well reading it and having the luxury of going over the sentences again and again.
Whether Orwell or Tolstoy is right about Shakespeare's genius, it's impossible to reliably quantify, or even qualify, genius outside of contributions to the hard sciences.
Orwell himself actually talked about this in Politics and the English Language. He discussed the debate about that lasted unnecessarily long about the nautical screw, showing how even a relatively easily provable concept can be difficult to prove.
Looks like even science magazines have fallen prey to clickbait titles a la buzzfeed. Which is quite sad considering that it's actually a quality article.
Surly an essay about the beauty of puns and ambiguity in poetry can still be allowed a modicum of cleverness in its title?
"Clickbait", especially "a la buzzfeed" also usually refers to the original definition: "10 great jokes that Shakespear hid in poetry–No 12 will blow your mind". And considering they have A/B tested their headlines and you consider the article worth reading, isn't the outcome arguably good, anyway?
So called "click bait" titles exist long before Buzzfeed. Aldaily has been running almost 20 years, and its titles often contain some clever puns. "The good, the bad, and the..." keeps showing up in titles of academic reviews in my field. Academic also like to joke around and making fun. I once attended a seminar whose speaker is a top-notch in the field and all of us enjoyed a 5-minute monologue as good as pre-flight rants by southwest.
I'm not convinced that Shakespeare's genius is nonsense. The nonsense poets like Ionesco while really good are not comparable to Shakespeare precisely because there is sense in Shakespeare, even in Shakespeare's "nonsense".
- "Tolstoy is right in saying that Lear is not a very good play, as a play. It is too drawn-out and has too many characters and sub-plots."
- "Shakespeare has a habit of thrusting uncalled-for general reflections into the mouths of his characters. This is a serious fault in a dramatist"
- "Of course, it is not because of the quality of his thought that Shakespeare has survived, and he might not even be remembered as a dramatist if he had not also been a poet."
Tolstoy:
- "I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: "King Lear," "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium"
[1] http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf ("Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool, by George Orwell)
[2] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27726/27726-h/27726-h.htm ("Tolstoy on Shakespeare", by Leo Tolstoy)