Quote:
Originally Posted by Yves S L
Some folk do not even think Shakespeare is all that.
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Voltaire: “France has not insults, fool’s-caps, and pillories enough for such a scoundrel. My blood boils in my own veins while I speak to you about him … And the terrible thing is that … it is I myself who was the first to speak about this Shakespeare [in France]. I was the first who showed to the French a few pearls which I had found in his enormous dunghill.”
Leo Tolstoy: “I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: “King Lear,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Hamlet” and “Macbeth,” not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium, and doubted as to whether I was senseless in feeling works regarded as the summit of perfection by the whole of the civilized world to be trivial and positively bad, or whether the significance which this civilized world attributes to the works of Shakespeare was itself senseless.”
George Bernard Shaw: “There is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare … It would be positively a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.”
Not that I agree with any of this rot, mind you. Orwell makes short work of Tolstoy in an article called “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool”:
https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf