[Shaun J. Russell]

I also find the question of Marlowe's sexuality making him less able to write well-developed women characters to be odd. I would also suggest that some of Shakespeare's earliest plays (the ones written while Marlowe was still alive) often do a lousy job of depicting women as well. If we're ascribing sexuality to one's inability to write another gender or sexual orientation, I'm guessing there are thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of worthy counterexamples.

Anyhow, I have very strong doubts that Shakespeare was responsible for the order of the poems in the 1609 Quarto. It's a popular game to try to "reconstruct" the order chronologically, but that's even more of a fool's errand than just accepting the current order with the understanding that it may be of Thorpe's design, not Shakespeare's. Either way, while it's tempting to find groupings (some call the first 17 the "procreation sonnets"), I'm not sure how much of value it really adds to their study. Maybe Shakespeare was commissioned. Patronage was an important system for artists back then (hence the various playing companies and their well-to-do patrons), so it's anyone's guess. But then you have to start asking whether the young man of the "procreation sonnets" is the same young man Shakespeare wrote poems like Sonnet 18 to/about (assuming they're at least somewhat biographical). It leads us down a road of inventing biographical context to support theories, and my own perspective is that while that can be fun as idle speculation, it's not great as critical practice.

[N. Matheson]

Maybe I'm the weirdo, but there are some lines in Shakespeare that, even after having them clarified with annotations, stretch the English language to the point they no longer sound natural. But maybe that was just a quick of EME.

[Max Goodman]

Originally Posted by N. Matheson

Maybe I'm the weirdo, but there are some lines in Shakespeare that, even after having them clarified with annotations, stretch the English language to the point they no longer sound natural. But maybe that was just a quick of EME.

Now you're talking sense, N. It doesn't make you a weirdo to find that the work of a genius isn't always perfect. Better yet, share some examples so we can see what you mean.

What's EME?

[N. Matheson]

Early Modern English.

[N. Matheson]

I personally think scholars have spent too much time reading into those sonnets. Frankly, I don't think the Fair Youth or Dark Lady were even real people, but poetic constructs. They existed as archetypes to write poetry about, but I doubt they existed.

[N. Matheson]

There's the scene in Macbeth that involves playful banter between Lady Macbeth and Duncan, joking about generosity. But the joke involves so much thought to get across that by the time you feel you have grasped it, the scene has already moved on. Even a few lines in the scene are so vague in their grammar that modern annotated copies disagree on what they even mean.

[Max Goodman]

Ludwig Wittgenstein, in journals apparently not meant for publication and therefore less specific than would be helpful, remarks that Shakespeare's comparisons are "in the ordinary sense, bad," admitting that they might be "nevertheless good."

It's been speculated that Wittgenstein means Shakespeare's tendency to mix images in ways that can be confusing. James Wood (How Fiction Works) offers the example "the moody frontier of a servant brow" (1 Henry IV; Iiii) because a frontier can't be moody, and it isn't clear in what sense a brow is a frontier.

Wittgenstein also remarks that "no one could say 'Shakespeare's great heart'" as we would say of Beethoven.

[N. Matheson]

Yeah, there are a few that modern scholars haven't figured out because of what they are describing. The Merchant of Venice has a line about a 'fawning publican' which nobody can agree what it means. And the line in King Lear about 'square of sense' has had entire articles written about it by dozens of scholars, each vehemently arguing for their interpretation. We can applaud Shakespeare for his inventiveness in his visual imagery, but that doesn't mean every attempt he made was good, much less perfect. Hell, even in Macbeth, I remember an annotated copy that pointed out how the intro line about two 'spent swimmers who choke their art' was a very contrived image to get across the point.

[Shaun J. Russell]

While I might quibble with some of the specifics, I'm ultimately just glad to see the apparent acceptance that Shakespeare isn't a paragon of literary perfection.

I'll be teaching Macbeth in a couple of different courses this coming semester (Intro to Drama, and Literature and Leadership), and I'll give some thought to the "spent swimmers" line.

[N. Matheson]

No, my opinion on that hasn't changed.