Tolstoy hated Shakespeare and thought him wildly overrated. He wrote a long essay about it that’ll probably resonate with you; having located it for you, I find that George Bernard Shaw shared his opinion (his letter is at the end of the book).
Nearly everything in your list of reasons why Shakespeare had to be chosen as Greatest Writer ever fails for the simple reason that Shakespeare was not thought of as the greatest Elizabethan playwright during his life and for a long time after his death. Ben Jonson was more regarded and more famous for most of the 17th century. Beaumont and Fletcher were also more widely known and more frequently performed than Shakespeare. To explain why towards the end of the 17th century Shakespeare emerges as the most regarded playwright in English you need to see how he’s different from Ben Jonson &c., and none of the reasons you gave addresses that. Ben Jonson’s plays also have florid speech &c.
Tolstoy hated Shakespeare and thought him wildly overrated. He wrote a long essay about it that’ll probably resonate with you; having located it for you, I find that George Bernard Shaw shared his opinion (his letter is at the end of the book).
You blew it, Anatoly. You should have waited for Goetz to specify how much dissent is the right amount of dissent about Shakespeare (which I’ve now asked Goetz twice), and then revealed Tolstoy and Shaw.
It seems Tolstoy disliked Shakespeare for being insufficiently Christian. Personally, I dislike Tolstoy for being excessively Christian (or perhaps more accurately being too overt/preachy about it; I understand Dostoyevski was similarly devout, but it didn’t seem to corrupt his work the way it corrupted Tolstoy’s).
Hmmm. Did I offend Christians, or Tolstoy fans? Was I too brief? Or did people just not actually read the Tolstoy essay? On the off chance it was one of the last two, I’ll mention that the essay does, in fact, say that a central part of what’s wrong with Shakespeare is that he’s not Christian enough, though Tolstoy is extremely long-winded and takes forever to get to the point. And a certain narrow-mindedness seems to me to be involved in Tolstoy’s criticisms across the board. Tolstoy assumes he understands people perfectly well, so when something that happens in Shakespeare puzzles him, he assumes it’s because Shakespeare is misrepresenting people, rather than considering that his own insight into humanity may be less than total. It further seems to me that Tolstoy’s confidence in his assumptions about humanity and his confidence in his belief in Christianity are deeply inter-related (and I doubt he would have disputed that point). And, for example, Anna Karenina has always seemed to me to be the work of an author with a supreme and unjustified confidence that he knows exactly how the world works.
Tolstoy hated Shakespeare and thought him wildly overrated. He wrote a long essay about it that’ll probably resonate with you; having located it for you, I find that George Bernard Shaw shared his opinion (his letter is at the end of the book).
Nearly everything in your list of reasons why Shakespeare had to be chosen as Greatest Writer ever fails for the simple reason that Shakespeare was not thought of as the greatest Elizabethan playwright during his life and for a long time after his death. Ben Jonson was more regarded and more famous for most of the 17th century. Beaumont and Fletcher were also more widely known and more frequently performed than Shakespeare. To explain why towards the end of the 17th century Shakespeare emerges as the most regarded playwright in English you need to see how he’s different from Ben Jonson &c., and none of the reasons you gave addresses that. Ben Jonson’s plays also have florid speech &c.
You blew it, Anatoly. You should have waited for Goetz to specify how much dissent is the right amount of dissent about Shakespeare (which I’ve now asked Goetz twice), and then revealed Tolstoy and Shaw.
It seems Tolstoy disliked Shakespeare for being insufficiently Christian. Personally, I dislike Tolstoy for being excessively Christian (or perhaps more accurately being too overt/preachy about it; I understand Dostoyevski was similarly devout, but it didn’t seem to corrupt his work the way it corrupted Tolstoy’s).
Hmmm. Did I offend Christians, or Tolstoy fans? Was I too brief? Or did people just not actually read the Tolstoy essay? On the off chance it was one of the last two, I’ll mention that the essay does, in fact, say that a central part of what’s wrong with Shakespeare is that he’s not Christian enough, though Tolstoy is extremely long-winded and takes forever to get to the point. And a certain narrow-mindedness seems to me to be involved in Tolstoy’s criticisms across the board. Tolstoy assumes he understands people perfectly well, so when something that happens in Shakespeare puzzles him, he assumes it’s because Shakespeare is misrepresenting people, rather than considering that his own insight into humanity may be less than total. It further seems to me that Tolstoy’s confidence in his assumptions about humanity and his confidence in his belief in Christianity are deeply inter-related (and I doubt he would have disputed that point). And, for example, Anna Karenina has always seemed to me to be the work of an author with a supreme and unjustified confidence that he knows exactly how the world works.