🚀 go-pugleaf

Panu wrote:
> On Mar 3, 11:03 pm, Emungo <pyti...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
>> On 3 Mar, 19:53, Panu <craoibhi...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Mar 3, 2:50 pm, Melanie Sands <Melanie_Sa...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Reading Shakespeare aloud is the nicest thing you can do for your
>>>> lungs and voice, by the way, especially if you have asthma like I do.
>>> This is a neat illustration of cultism and entirely comparable with
>>> the Hindutva suggestion that learning or reading Sanskrit is good for
>>> your health. I refuse to take this cult superstition seriously.
>>>> Maybe you should try it, Panu - that way you could actually get to
>>>> READ some of Shakespeare's plays...woah, wouldn't that be something,
>>>> you might end up actually knowing what you're talking about.
>>> I have read his sonnets both in the original and (a couple of them) in
>>> Irish translations. I have read Hamlet in Stanislaw Baranczak's Polish
>>> translation, and Macbeth in Irish. I have also read Jan Kott's
>>> "Szekspir wspólczesny", and we read extensive fragments of "Julius
>>> Caesar" at school. I staunchly refuse to lose any more of my precious
>>> time to Shakespeare. Learning Georgian and Albanian is much more
>>> interesting.
>>>> Melanie
>> You seem unaware that bardolatry (in Britain, at any rate) has always
>> been shadowed by a healthy strain of misobardia - just as Rome knew
>> more than one Virgiliomastix. So you're not the amazing iconoclast you
>> seem to think you are.
> 
> I don't think I am an amazing iconoclast. I think Shakespeare was
> probably a decent scribbler of his own time. But this Cthulhu cult is
> simply lunatic. In fact,
> 
> 
>> Furthermore I just don't see how you can pronounce 'Shakespeare is
>> rubbish' in a group whose name begins with 'sci', as if it were an
>> assertion capable of proof or disproof.
> 
> I don't really think Shakespeare is rubbish. I think Shakespeare
> probably was superior to his fellow scribblers, but he was definitely
> not the god cultists want him to be.
> 
> I am also far from
>> enamoured of the plays as dramas - many of the plots are trivial and
>> hardly more captivating than Terence or Plautus; venerable generic
>> ancestry doesn't make them easier to watch.
> 
> Now we are getting somewhere. Plots are trivial,

Yes, some of the plots are trivial and most are derivative, but this
misses the point - his genius lay in his language and development of
character.

> language is old-
> fashioned  and only partly intelligible.

Where did you get this from? The back of a box of cereal?

In fact Shakespeare's english is not very different from our own. The
main thing that makes him, for a modern audience, 'hard to understand'
is the complexity of his thought.

> Probably a professional
> routine writer of decent formulaic entertainment, but a genius?
> Really?

Again, you completely miss the point.

> 
> So I don't understand the
>> thespians who declare the bard to be a great ambassador for the
>> relevance and timelessness of drama. Maybe the reality is that I don't
>> like drama very much. But what I, like many anglophones, find
>> fantastic about Shakespeare is his use of language. The regularity
>> with which he uses what seem to me precisely the right words in
>> precisely the right way in precisely the right context delights me.
> 
> This is what I find problematic. The fact is, that Shakespeare's
> language is only partly intelligible to a modern reader. Thus, in
> order to appreciate his "mot juste" you basically depend on cribs and
> guidebooks and commentaries,

So, you think the following is only 'partly intelligible':

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence 'gainst the merchant there.


> on a whole interpretative tradition -
> which is basically the theology of the Shakespeare cult.
> 
>>  I
>> realise that my response will be conditioned by the fact that my whole
>> linguistic heritage is to a degree shaped by Shakespeare,
> 
> Indeed.
> 
>> These pronouncements, like yours, are just my opinions. I could never
>> demonstrate them by logical argumentation. They are admittedly the
>> considered, honestly held views of an L1 BrEng speaker and therefore
>> partly falsify your suggestion that anglophones who love Shakespeare
>> are victims or perpetrators of a fraud or a cult.
> 
> If you dislike the word "cult", let's call it a perfectly legitimate
> religion, then. It sure has all the hallmarks of a religion:
> theologians, high church, temples, ecstatic mystics.

Let's recap your knowledge of Shakespeare:

-sonnets both in the original and (a couple of them) in Irish translations.
-Hamlet in Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak

(Some comments on the quality of that translation: "Recently, Stanisław 
Barańczak has translated some of Shakespeare's works. They are usually 
praised by the actors but criticised by Shakespeare scholars. Anna 
Cetera classifies his translations as a theatre-oriented rewriting, 
marked by a deliberate intervention in reinterpreting the texts (1999: 
116-127). Barańczak's works demonstrate an unusual sense of 
dramaturgical space and movement, but they are often far from the 
original text. In addition, the translator adjusts the texts to modern 
modes of stagings often enough for the price of dispensing with 
time-bound rhetoric and obscure references to Elizabethan reality. He 
also purges the text of stylistic features, which could undermine the 
emotional authenticity of stage elocution. The policy results in the 
creation of a text of remarkable coherence and clarity, but marked by 
strong interpretative bias."
http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/Criticism/shakespearein/poland12.html

-Macbeth in Irish.
-Fragments of "Julius Caesar"

IOW you have basically no knowledge of Shakespeare, having not even 
bothered to read ONE of his PLAYS in FULL in ENGLISH. Yet despite your 
obvious ignorance (which you appear to be quite proud of) you presume to 
tell others who have read and/or seen his works in FULL in ENGLISH that 
he was an average dramatist - anyone who believes otherwise is a 
'cultist'.

Troll.

Ign.




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