What do people mean when they say Shakespeare invented the human?

>>8617547
that they are meme loving fucks

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Would you believe that there's a book about this? You could read it.

Could somebody please give me an example or two why Shakeyshakes is so revered? I've seen A Midsummer Night's Dream, and studied Hamlet in AP Lit. His verse is clearly intelligent, but where is this depth that makes people apeshit over his greatness?

I suppose I could read>>8617563 's book, but I'm skeptical of a bestselling pop lit thing based on an attention getting claim.

>>8617798
>Could somebody please give me an example or two why Shakeyshakes is so revered?

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space -- were it not that I have bad dreams

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

>>8617805
It's beautiful. I get that Shakespeare could write good verse. I'm talking about the nuances of his characters, the structure of his plays, his themes. Or is it all academic circlejerk?

As always, context matters. I'm not a well-read in literature/plays of the time period but presumably it's because Shakespeare was a few steps above everyone else at the time. It's a mix of Shakespeare's talent + how it compares to others from before/at the same time as him.

Shakespeare had a transcendent understanding of the human condition and the way people act.

Shakespeare's "good" and "bad" characters shaped our existing view of what good and bad means. Shakespeare is the grandfather of modern conservative values.

>>8617871
Sure, that's what it is.

>>8617798

First off: I'd like to dispel the myths that he didn't write his plays. He most certainly did, and there is only partial evidence that he collaborated with others in the King's Men on a couple of his plays.

What makes him remarkable is the SPOKEN language of his texts. When read out loud (notice I said out loud, as they were meant to be spoken, not read) you will find that his work is essentially poetry in play form. Not only that but many of his characters were (and still are) incredibly complex individuals who give room for them to be read in so many different ways.

Read for the poetic texture and the characters

Anything else is spooky stuff

>>8617938
Outloud thing is crazy talk. OP just read them

>>8617956

Either way, it will be a worthwhile experience. However, if you look at the context of the time, most playwrights didn't publish their plays in writing because then anyone could produce them (no copyright laws). So there is strong evidence that Shakespeare's plays might have been written from what people heard, not what was actually said or meant.

Forsooth

Bloom says that it was because he was the first to have characters reason about their status as characters inside a play; a kind of self-reflection that hadn't really been talked about, but with which Shakespeare equipped us.

>>8617899
>why?
>because
You completely avoided the question you dense fuck

>>8617798

And let's please dispel the myths that he didn't write his plays. He most certainly did, and there is only partial evidence that he collaborated with others in the King's Men on a couple of his plays.

What makes him remarkable is the SPOKEN language of his texts. When read out loud (notice I said out loud, as they were meant to be spoken, not read) you will find that his work is essentially poetry in play form. Not only that but many of his characters were (and still are) incredibly complex individuals who give room for them to be read in so many different ways.

>>8617547
They meant to say Marlowe

>>8617798
>I suppose I could read>>8617563 's book, but I'm skeptical of a bestselling pop lit thing based on an attention getting claim.
It is precisely Bloom and his book that made the claim. You seem to want to avoid reading and just have the information handed to you.

His stuff should be updated to current English.

>>8617547
>What do people mean when they say Shakespeare invented the human?

It is a stupid theory invented by a very learned and cultured man who, unfortunelty, was and is quite untalented and uncreative. He wanted to praise Shakespeare with new medals, with more prizes then he already got from several generations of readers. He also had his own pride and wished to forge his own theories, and this is one of them.

There is part of a book introduction that I would like to share with you. It is from this book: “Literary Genius: 25 Classic Writers Who Define English & American Literature” (http://www.amazon.com/Literary-Genius-Classic-American-Literature/dp/1589880358/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375375723&sr=1-1&keywords=literary+genius), a guide written by many essayists, but collected by Joseph Epstein, a very witty man, who also wrote the quotes from the introduction that I am about to quote:

“The occurrence of genius may be a mystery, but that is no good reason to get mystical about it. Harold Bloom, the most famous literary critic of the day, is very generous in assigning literary genius. “I can identify for myself certain writers of palpable genius now among us”, he writes in the introduction to Genius, a book composed with his on essays on writers for whom he claims genius: “the Portuguese novelist José Saramago, the Canadian poet Anne Carson, the English poet Geoffrey Hill, and at least a half-dozen North and Latin American novelists and poets (whom I forebear naming).” But he is considerably less generous in dispensing lucidity on what constitutes literary genius. Genius, he instructs, is “clearly both of and above the age”. He adds: “Fierce originality is one crucial component of literary genius, but this originality itself is always canonical, in that it recognizes and come to terms with precursors”. Genius also turns out to be “the god within”, and genius, “by necessity, invokes the transcendental and the extraordinary, because it is fully conscious of them”. He brings in Emerson and Gnosticism, neither of them great flags signifying clarity ahead, and concludes by stating that his rough but effectual test for the literary genius is: “Does she or he augment our consciousness…has my awareness been intensified, my consciousness widened and clarified?”.

>>8618965

"What widens one consciousness and intensifies one’s awareness, may, of course, not widen and intensify another’s consciousness. Or it may not do so the same consciousness at different times at the life of that consciousness, which is way some writers who swept us away at the age of twenty seem not worth rereading at forty. Nor is professor Bloom very helpful on the crucial matter of how literary genius operates, which is, inevitably, through style.
Style, it needs to be understood, is never ornamentation or a matter of choice of vocabulary or amusing linguistics of mannerisms. Style, in serious writing, is a way of seeing, and literary genius, who see things in vastly different way than the rest of us, usually require a very different style. As Edward Gibbon wrote on style (quote by David Womerseley in his essay): “The style of an author should be the image of his mind”. Thorough this distinctive style something like a distinctive philosophy is expressed, thorough usually not directly: Which is where criticism and plain intelligent reading enter. Henri Bergson holds that understanding a work or body of art “consist essentially in developing in thought what artists want to suggest emotionally.” The style of the literary artist is what allows him powerfully to suggest what he sees.”

>>8618968

This excerpt is wonderful firstly because it shows, with simplicity, one of the main flaws of Harold Bloom’s (that incredibly fool man) criticism: he never says nothing about style, he never analyzes and dissects the viscera of an author’s great work, in other words: he never studies the metrical technics; the metaphor construction; the rhyming abilities; the stressing syllables choices; the simile construction; the tools for creating characters; and all the other secrets that really integrate the flesh and blood of a writer’s work. The only thing that Bloom does is stating, with no prove or evidence (but only assertion), that author A is better than author B, that author C is more important than author D. He’s prose is a soup of strange philosophies names glued together (Scholl or resentment + agnosticism + cabala, and etc.), and he is perpetually forgetting the work of a writer to rant about feminists and minorities invading universities and the classical canon. He is a man that has read a lot, but that learned little about literature.