5 Writers Who Really Hated Shakespeare : William Shakespeare

5 Writers Who Really Hated Shakespeare
1. LEO TOLSTOY
One of Shakespeare’s most notorious critics was War and Peace novelist Leo Tolstoy, whose non-fiction work includes a 100-page critique of Shakespeare’s plays and his reputation as a writer. In the essay, published as On Shakespeare and Drama in 1906, Tolstoy called Shakespeare’s plays “trivial and positively bad,” labeled his enduring popularity “pernicious,” and dismissed Shakespeare himself as “an insignificant, inartistic writer” who was “not only not moral, but immoral.” He also mentioned reading King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth ("works regarded as his best”) for the first time in his youth, but recalled feeling nothing more than “an irresistible repulsion and tedium.”
2. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
In the late 1890s, George Bernard Shaw spent three years as theater critic of the London newspaper Saturday Review. During his tenure, he reviewed 19 Shakespeare works and made his opinions about the Bard perfectly clear: “With the single exception of Homer,” he once wrote, “there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I despise so entirely as I despise Shakespear [sic] when I measure my mind against his.”
3. VOLTAIRE
Shaw’s letter goes on to name-check French writer Voltaire, whose criticisms of Shakespeare “are the more noteworthy,” he explained, “because Voltaire began with an extravagant admiration for Shakespeare, and got more and more bitter against him as he grew older and less disposed to accept artistic merit as a cover for philosophic deficiencies.” However, Voltaire’s opinion worsened as Shakespeare’s popularity in Europe began to grow and the bard was repeatedly lauded over contemporary French writers. “He was a savage … with some imagination,” he wrote in a letter his friend, the lawyer Bernard-Joseph Saurin, in 1765. “He has written many happy lines; but his pieces can please only at London and in Canada. It is not a good sign for the taste of a nation when that which it admires meets with favor only at home.”
4. J.R.R. TOLKIEN
While a member of a school debating society in the early 1900s, a teenage J.R.R. Tolkien reportedly delivered a lengthy speech in which, according to his biographer Humphrey Carpenter, he “poured a sudden flood of unqualified abuse upon Shakespeare, upon his filthy birthplace, his squalid surroundings, and his sordid character.” Opinion is divided over whether or not Tolkien upheld these opinions as an adult, but his letters offer up a number of clues: In one, dated 1944, he dismissed reading and analyzing Shakespeare’s works as “folly,” while in another from 1955, he recalls that he “disliked cordially” studying his work at school.
5. ROBERT GREENE
Predictably, Shakespeare faced his fair share of detractors during his own lifetime—perhaps none more so than the Elizabethan playwright and author Robert Greene. Although he published dozens of poems, plays, short stories, and essays during his lifetime, today Greene is best known for a pamphlet published posthumously in 1592, entitled Greene’s Groats-Worth of Wit, Bought With A Million of Repentance. The book comprises a short moral fable about two brothers, Roberto and Luciano, who drift apart after Roberto finds fame as a successful playwright and Luciano falls in love with a courtesan, Lamilia. Luciano is eventually left penniless when Lamilia walks out on him, while Roberto squanders all his new-found wealth and success until he is left with only one remaining groat. In the conclusion, Roberto implores the reader to learn from his mistakes and to live an honorable life—and finally warns three of his playwright friends to beware of a literary new kid on the block, whom he - describes as:
"an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his 'Tiger’s heart wrapt in a Player’s hide”'supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and … is, in his own conceit, the only shake-scene in the country."
While preparing this research and collecting data I was really impressed by the great writers who criticised Shakespeare and made it clear that he's unworthy and doesn't deserve to be called a poet or a writer. Were they right? Enjoy reading what proves again that Shakespeare is for lifetime.
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Видео 5 Writers Who Really Hated Shakespeare : William Shakespeare канала Theory & Literature On Edge By Prof Mumtaz Ali