this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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Well to be fair a lot of historically famous poetry is shit too. Idk maybe they lost a lot in translation, but some don't i like Iliad and Odyssey for example. I find best historical poetry to be ancient Sumerian-Akkadian (and their epigones), they didn't give a fuck about million rules just created clear and easy to follow rhytm with repeating.
To be fair to poetry in general i started to hate it because the Polish romanticist nationalist poetry. There are FUCKTON of it, and they are even worse than all other romanticist poetry because it was the partition time and Poland didn't exist so you can imagine what those shitty chewed off noble druggie losers could write. Well they are some banger fragments like Mickiewicz apparently predicting socialism as saviour of Poland but mostly its shit but every kid in Poland since WW1 ended was tortured with that for years, and sadly PRL wasn't an exception.
Well i meant i like iliad and Odyssey, Polish translations are very good imo.
I'm pretty mid on Shakespeare, he's ok, but my two most liked pieces are actually adaptations and a loose ones at that: Throne of Blood and Titus Andronicus (that with Hopkins). What i find funny about Shakespeare is that where i find quotes form him the most often, is the murican sci-fi slop books, they seem to think he's the absolute pinnacle of entire human culture.
Also fun fact, his name is easily translatable into Polish: Wilhelm Trzęsidzida
Oh come-on, he was more of a Tarantino. Remixer of other more artistic playwrights to make mass culture.
Also equally purient and into the lowbrow. Which is part of why he's notable, he was the first real "pop" culture that was made for all classes, rather than just either aristocracy or peasants/tradesmen (i.e. medieval cycle dramas were for the later, the poetry the former).
Oh yeah the regime propaganda is an issue, and we can never fully "absolve" any artist of the time for their monarchist propaganda.
Of course Dollimore's Radical Tragedy is a good thing to keep in mind here - thanks to the existence of the state censor, the degree one could radically oppose monarchy was circumscribed by the conditions of artistic production. You can do a Richard II and present Bolingbroke as politicking (casting doubt on Tudor and later Stuart ideology about divine right in the process), but unfortunately the peasant uprisings are always dealt as if they are beyond the pale and the most you might get is some good rhetoric from their leaders.
But we can't forget this was all produced under a state censor (indeed we should emphasize it!) since it shows the limits of imagination imposed on Shakespeare, and if you're into his "genius" then you can point to the radical elements he did include in spite of this regime.
However I really don't think he's more than a great mixtape artist, mashing up good bits in pleasing ways. He was an artist for the people, and that's the thing worth celebrating.
I assume you've read Marlowe's Jew of Malta, at once 1000x more horrible but also more radical since it's a tragedy and not a comedy.
And yeah bardolotry is cringe and I feel ppl that actually study Shakey nowadays are way less prone to it (though it's still there). If nothing else, there's a deep Marxist tradition in the academy now that pushes back on great man theory.
Say what you will about the new historicisists, they gave us that at least
This reminds me that the few times I've seen historians earnestly talk about all the "lost epics" of the expanded Iliad poetic universe have been very funny, because at their bluntest they're just sort of hemming and hawing around a point that's basically "so it was all just a big fanfic scene, really, and a lot of it was bad, and it represented a bunch of different contradictory canons, and like every character no one even liked got a spinoff epic about them getting lunch that one time... So really it seems the two books we do have seem to be what were considered the best, and certainly were the most popular of all them which is why any copies survived at all."
Like obviously they'd still be really neat to have, but it's really funny to think about how this big chunk of what's held up as one of the pillars of western literary culture was just like, the contemporary equivalent of a fanfic scene where everyone involved was just kind of making up their own stories about these mythic characters and some of it was popular enough to get repeated down the line and only two stories were popular enough to still be getting copied many centuries later.
Yeah. I still remember learning that when I was in high school and being confused at how there was just so little left of someone I was at the same time being told was so famous and prolific. I think that was one of the formative steps to realizing just how fragmentary even the most famous bits of history really are, because before that point everything I'd seen about antiquity was always presented with a sort of air of completeness and I never realized how often that vague summaries of a place or person or practice genuinely were the sum total of what's actually known about them.
i'd respect him if that's all i knew of him