13 thoughts on “Shakespeare Sucks! by Leo Tolstoy

  1. I agree although I didn’t want to. King Lear makes no sense. In college my teachers defended the play by saying the drama was absurdest. Most absurdest drama makes no sense. It’s what I said before about art if it has to be explained then it isn’t art.

  2. I agree with Tolstoy, even though I have to say Shakespeare does have many beautiful quotes and speeches and witty saying in his works. However, neither I did like King Lear much, especially how everyone is killed in the end (” the dragging out by the legs of half a dozen corpses, with which all Shakespeare’s tragedies terminate”). Was it so necessary for, say, Edgar, or Gloucester, or Cordelia, to die? What is the point? That good triumphs evil? No, rather the opposite. Such plays are depressing and disappointing, and even pointless. Shakespeare seems to have been writing for the money. Although the language is very beautiful, as are also many passages, overall I am not a great fan of Shakespeare and would rather agree with Tolstoy (whose “How Much Land Does a Man Need”, for example, has a very good point).

  3. How one can’t notice the swindler cheap of Tolstoy in distorting Lear? How one can believe in Tolstoy saying “Lear has no necessity or motive for his abdication” when it is explained in first scene of play!!?
    Tolstoy is so swindler that it ignores one aspect of Shakespeare’s glory: his poetry. Tolstoy in its laterlife become a moral critic and not a aesthetical critic. Shakespeare to he was an immoral writer, but Shakespeare was a humanist and is where your moral and your thought system must be sought.
    Now Tolstoy is right to say that King Lear is unlikely, let’s face it, what father’s 80 years old disinherit his daughter just because of one word? But notice, without it there would be no story at all. Lear’s improbability is not a defect, Shakespeare writes the story so. Tolstoy is also right to say that Shakespeare has a lot of skill in the construction of scenes (in Lear more than any other play) the development of scenes and characters, the poetry, the effusiveness of his invention, the psychological realism, his politic and philosophic intelect, which Orwell calls excessive vitalicty, is simply the literary perfection! so much that no great critic, even the great philosophers (Nietzsche, Marx, Coleridge) contest it in 400 years.

  4. I find dramas lugubrious to read. My mind just doesn’t seem to have a natural aptitude for it and hasn’t been trained for it. Seeing a play which I have previously read on the page performed on the stage is a revelation for me. Every time. It seems magical to me that anyone could make entertainment out of what’s been written down in dramatic dialogue interspersed with stage directions. I suspect that Tolstoy had a similar impediment. His analysis is stilted, if you ask me. Beside the fact that we’ve lost a huge amount of understanding about Shakespeare’s plays through the passage of time and changes in the cultural assumptions. Shakespeare played to the masses in the cheap seats with great effect. Now one needs an ivory-tower scholar to unwind and explain most of the bawdy jokes and word-play employed to keep the audience’s interest. The distancing of context, temporal and geographic, does damage to that native understanding. And yet much of the writing is so damn superb that even someone as disinterested in dramatic writing as I can quote huge swathes of it. So many of the monologues stand alone as timeless encapsulations of human experience that they buoy all the other faults the writings may have. In spite of myself, I like Willy the Shake.

  5. The Shakespeare plays were written by a young team of writers headed by Francis Bacon, an intellectual genius,but designed to elucidate the masses in the revival of Greek and Latin and Renaissance dramas and comedy. They were never intended for those who considered themselves of high literary command, such as it seems Tolstoy saw himself.
    Plays were written to be seen, not read, and it would seem that Tolstoy never saw them.

  6. This is a wonderfully silly bauble by the great Tolstoy. Adjudging Shakespeare by 19th century narrative standards is a little like saying medieval painting is dreadful because there is no perspective. Shakespeare’s dramatic genius lies in, among other things, his development of character interiority, a character having an interior life, something Tolstoy made brilliant use of in his work. Nobody had done it since the Greeks and nobody not even the Greeks as richly as Shakespeare. Lear’s genius as a play is in, in part, it’s use of madness as a means of self-reflection. The king who is not introspective when “sane” in madness gets a cold sobering look into his own heart on the beach at Dover. Kent & Edgar’s feeble disguises, Gloucester’s easy duping, the older sister’s dissembling all require a suspension of disbelief the Elizabethans would have found as easy as the forth wall is for contemporary audiences (a convention Elizabethans would have found strange). I’m not a fan of King Lear overall but the scene at Dover is, when done right, a scene of devastating harsh beauty and humanity. Finally, the greatest disappointment of Tolstoy’s argument is his tacit insisting on reading but not seeing the plays. Tolstoy’s shallow adjudging of a playwright by the standards of a novelist bespeaks an arrogance of form and a cowardice of consideration.

  7. Things I actually do like and think I should: War and Peace

    Things that I think I should like, but do not like: King Lear

    Things I think that I should not like, but do like: South Park.

    Things I think that I should not like, And do not like: Donald Trump

  8. There was never a better reader of Shakespeare than Tolstoy. He studied his works in russian, german and english. I think Shakespeare would rather have a devoted detractor like Tolstoy than a snob that glorifies him but never read his works.

  9. Hi Everyone,

    Without looking it up, name me just one quote that you remember from even one book by Tolstoy, other than a book title. As for Shakespeare, his quotes role off our tongues, as they were meant to do. He was the playwright of his times. He enriched our lives with literally hundreds of quotes in his plays. Right off the top of my head, Shakespeare’s most famous line comes to mind, “All the World’s a stage and we are mere actors upon it.” So you may know the titles of Tolstoy’s novels, but with Shakespeare you know his words for we use them everyday without realizing it. There is a world of difference between Shakespeare and Tolstoy.

    So I Strongly Disagree with Tolstoy!Yes both were great writers, and it is not all that easy to read novels by Tolstoy than it is to enjoy a play by Shakespeare. Shakespeare never wrote a novel, his plays were meant to be spoken with meaning and performed Live.

    The sad thing about Tolstoy was that strict Greek Orthodox-ism was the state religion,under the TSAR and as Tolstoy got older, he became more intolerant of everyone’s religious beliefs, and he viciously attacked any and all writings opposed to his strict religious beliefs. Many in Russia thought he had gone mad! He even attacked his own earlier novels, such as “Anna Karenina” as being to decadent.

  10. I could never bring myself to read any of Shakespeare’s plays. Drop dead boring although I was continually forced to listen to Macbeth in school. How dreary. He does have fine poetic talent evident in his sonnets and a couple of long poems. He has a great vocabulary. But he is mostly boring and his themes are too worldly. A great poet must think heavenly thoughts, truth and beauty must be the theme.

    Did you know a person can be a great poet, but not be known? A person can also be a famous poet and be depressing. Here is a boast, but not in arrogant pride, I have written better things than Shakespeare, by far.

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