[Mark McDonnell]

As far as such subjective things can be quantified, not one of us here is “as good as Shakespeare”. Indeed, every poetry workshop/journal in the world could be sub-headed Not As Good As Shakespeare. But then, Shakespeare probably thought he wasn’t as good as Chaucer…

Sincerely N, and with genuine concern and kindness…what Christine said.

[Roger Slater]

It might help you to be remembered if you'd tell us who you are.

In the meantime, 'Tis Sweet to be Remembered.

[Chris O'Carroll]

Writing in the 16th and 17th centuries, William Shakespeare did not try to sound like a writer from 400 years earlier. That's probably a big part of the reason that he's so well remembered and highly regarded. Just for the exercise, why not explore what thou canst do with the idiom of thine own era.

[N. Matheson]

Then I have to question why he hasn't been replaced with a more contemporary author. It seems to me his version of English is rated superior.

[Yves S L]

N. Matheson,

Wow.

For some reason threads such as this tend to go on much longer and generate more interests than threads about actual poems.

Wringing one's hands about Shakespeare means one does not have to use those same hands to revise one's poems, right?

If you love the old English so much, then why not revise your poems to at least correct syntactic errors? I myself do not know if you recognise the mistakes people have pointed out, because you have not responded. For all I know about archaic syntax, you might be actually be right.

Some folk do not even think the English language is all that compared to what other languages can evoke of emotion and cognition. Some folk do not even think English sounds all that nice. Some folk do not even think Shakespeare is all that.

Wow.

[Roger Slater]

" I have to question why he hasn't been replaced with a more contemporary author. It seems to me his version of English is rated superior."

No, that's silly. His writing is rated superior, not his "version" of English. There were many other writers who wrote in precisely the same "version" of Elizabethan English, but you do not revere these writers. This should be enough to prove that it wasn't the good fortune of capturing the language at its peak moment of development that made Shakespeare a great writer. It was the inner artist, not his mastery of thees and thous.

[N. Matheson]

I'm sorry but I disagree. If this was remotely true we would be reading translations of his texts into Modern English, yet to do so is blasphemy. It's his version of English that helps makes his works superior, a modern translation would be deemed inferior by every metric.

[Mark McDonnell]

"Shakespeare" is used as shorthand for supreme achievement in literature in the same way Michelangelo is used as shorthand for supreme achievement in art and Newton for science. All these figures were products of that incredible, intense flowering of post-medieval forward looking thought that we call the Renaissance, leading into the Enlightenment. They have become totems. But art, and science and literature progress and change. And all these people, were they alive today, would embrace that change, I'm sure.

Shakespeare isn't remembered because his "version of English...helps makes his works superior", whatever that means. Shakespeare wrote in early modern English and in the literary style of his time, but it is the beauty and imaginative reach of his poetry and his psychological complexity, in the plays as much as in the sonnets, that makes him stand out, not the fact that he wrote "thou hast" instead of "you have" and used the auxiliary verb "do" ("rough winds do shake", "as two spent swimmers that do cling together"). Of course modernising Shakespeare is unnecessary but in those examples, I would argue that very little would be lost in modernising "thou hast" to "you have" and the only problem with "rough winds shake" and "as two spent swimmers that cling together" would be in the metre. The genius of Shakespeare doesn't lie in his old-fashioned syntax and vocabulary because he absolutely wasn't old fashioned!! He invented words! If you want to play in the same ballpark as Shakespeare be modern.

And I'll leave it there, I think.

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by Yves S L

Some folk do not even think Shakespeare is all that.

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

[N. Matheson]

Then how do you agree with Orwell and bother writing? If Orwell was right, then we've basically reached the zenith. It's all inferior from here.