Korean Job Discussion Forums

[BreakfastInBed]

I'm becoming fixated.

[itaewonguy]

A Legend!!
They say he smoked pot! Doesn�t surprise me really how else could you conceive the amount of brilliant characters in your head as he did...

An amazing guy truly gifted...

[Ya-ta Boy]

I voted 'overrated'. Because he is.

[peppermint]

There are others I like as much or more, but none that are as accessible today, nor produced the sheer volume of great work. That's not to say that Shakespeare didn't have a few duds, Cymbeline was slow going at best.

[crusher_of_heads]

On the strength of the sonnets alone, he's The Man.

Jonson and Marlowe are the moons to his Sun.

[MollyBloom]

I agree that he was a genius. The wonderful thing about him is that really not too much is known about his personal life, except his family and his acquaintances with Marlowe and other contemporaries, so critics always have lot of things to write about.

I have to say that I honestly enjoy all of his works, even his sonnets, because there is so much to everything he writes!

Last year I took this class called Shakespeare and Modern Culture. My professor, Marjorie Garber, is one of the world's best Shax scholars out there, and she based the class around how Shax shaped modernity and how modernity shaped Shax. It's amazing when you think about it how often times you will know a quote without realizing it came from Shax. Then you see the play where it is quoted, and you realize," Ah! That's where that came from!" It's worth it to look up Marjorie Garber, so I encourage people who love Shakespeare to do so. If you are looking for a good supplementary guide to all of his plays, Garber wrote a book called Shakespeare After All.

My favorites: Hamlet, King Lear, Measure for Measure, Pericles, The Merchant of Venice, Titus Andronicus, Troilus and Cressida, Richard III, Antony and Cleopatra, Henry V (sorry..hard for me to pick ONE)


Do you prefer Elizabethan or Jacobean Shakespeare?



P.s. I do want to add, thought, that Marlowe's Dr. Faustus was AWESOME.

[BreakfastInBed]

I ordered the Garber book from Amazon last week. That must have been a great class. I'm not to the point that I have a favorite period of Shakespeare. I've been through the complete works once and many of the major plays numerous times. He really does feel inexhaustable. I'm gearing up to start working through them all again with a bit more focus and lots more supplementary material this time.

The big favorites that first spring to mind have to be King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, As You Like It, and the two parts of Henry IV. Can't escape Falstaff.

[the boy next door]

existential Shakespeare at its best, baby...this insignificant thread is sheer testimony to the man / woman's? immotality...

as an undergraduate creative writing major and English drama minor, i performed in a variety of Shakespearean plays in the park... if a native of Montreal and an alumni of McGill U. you may have seen my histronic handsome ass wooing the bilingual masses on a hot summer night's elucidated lawn somewhere in La Belle Province...

anyhoot, i have always bought into the theory that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare but in fact Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford...it's a lengthy tale but only those trusting that The Bard was actually Queen Elizabeth I would disagree...(i also buy into the notion that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford was in reality Queen Elizabeth's illegitimate son but that's another existential Shakespearean thread, n'est-ce pas?)

[Kuros]

[Ya-ta Boy]

[PBRstreetgang21]

I think not all, but a lot of "he is overrated" opinions that crop up trend to originate from fatigue as much as anything else.

I think if someone where to lock all of Shakespeare's works away for a hundered years and then bring them back out with fresh eyes and ears people would probably be in awe.

[Czarjorge]

Make sure to check it all out. The big stuff like MacBeth (which I think is a bit overrated) and Hamlet (which is so good it can never be lauded enough) is worth reading, but so is the 'lesser' stuff. Titus is one of my favorites.

[eamo]

I've enjoyed many other writers more than Shakey, but his prolific output of quality material marks him out as 'The Man'.

[hossenfeffer]

I wrote my master's thesis on Machiavelli's influence on Shakespeare's Henriad (Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Richard II, and Henry V). Saying that Shakespeare is "overrated" is like saying that Mozart is "overrated."

[BreakfastInBed]