SHAKESPEARE? WELL, HE’S NOT ALL HE’S CRACKED UP TO BE, IS HE…?

“The works of William Shakespeare – borrowed as they are and externally, like mosaics, artificially fitted together piecemeal from bits invented for the occasion – have nothing whatever in common with art and poetry.”

(Leo Tolstoy)

“Shakespeare never has six lines together without a fault”

(Samuel Johnson)

 “…inferior and muddled”

(T S Eliot)

 “…a wordsmith rather than a poet”

(Ludwig Wittgenstein)

 “I have striven hard to open English eyes to the emptiness of Shakespeare’s philosophy, to the superficiality and secondhandedness of his morality, to his weakness and incoherence as a thinker, to his snobbery, his vulgar prejudices, his ignorance, his disqualifications of all sorts for the philosophic eminence claimed for him.”

(George Bernard Shaw)

“The divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a patient world”

(Henry James)

 “…forced humour, far fetch’d conceit, and unnatural hyperbole.”

 (Oliver Goldsmith)

 “The great poems [of the past], Shakespeare included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of Democracy”

(Walt Whitman)

 “…the prolixity and repetitiveness in many of the plays, […] the intrusion of vulgarity and waste motion into even major texts (how many of us have ever seen a production of Othello which includes the wretched exchanges with the Clown?) How much there is in the comedies which is rancid and verbally witty rather than funny in any real sense.”

(George Steiner)