Opinion Mute Inglorious Shakespeares

Mute Inglorious Shakespeares
Steve Sailer
October 11, 2023
Taki / Archive

In Michael Lewis’ new biography of Sam Bankman-Fried, Going Infinite, Lewis quotes the accused cryptocurrency embezzler’s rationalist case against Shakespeare:

I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare…but really I shouldn’t need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that. When Shakespeare wrote, almost all Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate—probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren’t very favorable.

Bankman-Fried’s assumption that talent should be proportional to population size is hardly a novel one. For example, in 1964 physicist John H. Fremlin published an influential article about the long-term consequences of unchecked population growth. Fremlin imagined a world covered in 2,000-story buildings. On the bright side, he noted:

One could expect some ten million Shakespeares and rather more Beatles to be alive at any one time, that a good range of television entertainment should be available.

Similarly, feminist novelist Virginia Woolf made a popular argument 94 years ago that the lack of a female Shakespeare proves how oppressed women were:

Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say.

Woolf surmises that Shakespeare’s equally talented sister, Judith, would have killed herself in despair. The 20th-century writer went on to imply that because women make up half the population but less than half the historic literary geniuses, that proves there must be oppressed women of comparable talent:

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.

Indeed, to this day, the most famous playwrights tend to be male. One reason for this is that at least since the Broadway strike of 1919, writers for the stage are vested with property rights allowing them to dictate conditions to anyone mounting their work that writers for the screen can only dream about. One of Hollywood’s oldest jokes is about the blonde starlet who was so dumb she slept with the writer. But, you’ll note, Marilyn Monroe married playwright Arthur Miller.

Woolf was echoing a famous line in Thomas Gray’s poem “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” about the inevitability that only some fraction of all potential talent ever got a chance to flourish, if only because of early death:

Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest

Pundit Richard Hanania, whose book The Origins of Woke I reviewed here recently, then weighed in with “Shakespeare is Fake: When we have objective measures, the past is never better.”

As I mentioned in my review, while I admire his intellect, “Richard needs to watch his ego.” And now we see him declaring:

…I could copy Shakespeare’s style and produce something just as appealing….

To prove it, Hanania emitted what he assumed was a Shakespeare-like rhyming doggerel, not realizing that Shakespeare’s greatest works are written in unrhymed iambic pentameter:

Man so powerful yet so weak. Conqueror of stars yet farts and squeaks. Oh man! An ape we know it is true. Darwin has revealed me and you. Yet we go on, forward still. For if not us, then who will?

Oh, dear…

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

Hanania gets on more solid ground by pointing to sports, where objective performances keep getting better. For example, over the weekend, the latest skinny Kenyan, Kelvin Kiptum, set a new world record in the marathon at two hours, zero minutes, and 35 seconds.

Still, not every sport is improving. Few would argue that American boxing is still as strong as it was in the middle of the 20th century when it was immensely popular. There has been an exodus of talent to other sports. For example, Ken Norton Sr. fought Muhammad Ali three times in the 1970s, winning once and losing twice, all on close decisions. Ken Norton Jr., a similarly impressive individual, played linebacker on three straight winning Super Bowl teams in the 1990s.

Women’s running records at 100m, 200m, 400m, and 800m are all from the 1980s when steroid tests were easy to fool.

Weirdly, horse racing, a sport with vast sums spent on eugenic breeding, isn’t getting all that much faster. The record for each of the three Triple Crown races (Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont) was set by Secretariat fifty years ago.

In many sports, however, there are no stopwatches to allow comparisons across eras. And because conditions keep improving (for example, running times are currently falling due to the introduction of running shoes with carbon fiber plates in 2019), subjective judgments about who was the best are still required. High school boys today run faster than Jesse Owens did in the 1930s, but that doesn’t mean they are greater in a nontrivial sense.

So, I’ve made up a list of the current consensus Greatest of All Time front-runners in various sports and when they flourished. I’m trying to be as uncontroversial as possible in these selections. You may have strong arguments about why, say, Michael Jordan wasn’t the best basketball player ever, but it’s reasonable to say the consensus is that the burden of proof should be on you.

Note that these choices are weighted toward career value over peak value. For example, slugger-pitcher Shohei Ohtani’s last three seasons have been unique in baseball history, but that isn’t long enough to contend for Greatest of All Time. The recent style of baseball seems to put unprecedented strains on the body (see the last few seasons of Mike Trout, Jacob deGrom, or Stephen Strasburg), so it’s less clear than ever who will enjoy two decades of reasonable health like Babe Ruth or Willie Mays did:

Basketball: Michael Jordan, 1980s–1990s
American Football: Tom Brady, 2000s–2010s
Ice Hockey: Wayne Gretzky, 1980s
Baseball: Babe Ruth, 1910s–1930s, or Willie Mays, 1950s–1960s
Cricket: Don Bradman, 1920s–1940s
Golf: Jack Nicklaus, 1960s–1970s, or Tiger Woods, 2000s
Tennis: Roger Federer, 2000s, Rafael Nadal, 2000s–2010s, or Novak Djokovic, 2010s–2020s
Soccer: Pele, 1960s, Diego Maradona, 1980s, or Lionel Messi, 2010s
Horse Racing: Secretariat, 1973
Boxing: Sugar Ray Robinson, 1940s, or Muhammad Ali, 1960s
Sprinting: Usain Bolt, 2010s
Swimming: Michael Phelps, 2000s–2010s
Greco-Roman Wrestling: Aleksandr Karelin, 1990s

I could go on, but that’s a reasonable sample size. Out of these twenty contenders—nineteen of them human—only three (Ruth, Bradman, and Robinson) are from the first half of the 20th century, and eight peaked in this century. So, even using subjective opinions, it’s clear that well-informed sports fans find that athletes have generally been getting better at achieving greatness.

One reason is because modern athletes can afford to play longer. For instance, Olympic sports used to insist upon amateurism, so Jim Thorpe had his gold medals taken away for playing minor league baseball for pay, while Michael Phelps went to five Olympics because he could make a good living for being a gold medalist.

And even pros usually had to have an off-season job. Ruth was able to extend his dominance through his 30s because he was one of the few athletes in the world at the time who was paid enough to hire a personal trainer and work out all winter. (When an early-1930s sportswriter asked why he was paid more than the president, Ruth replied, “I had a better year than Hoover.”)

What about non-sports fields?

Is fame all just who you know?

For example, consider the links between four of the most famous individuals in history: Socrates taught Plato who taught Aristotle who taught Alexander the Great.

Maybe they weren’t so great and they were just drafting off each other’s renown?

Then again, Alexander succeeded at a world-historical level in the extremely competitive field of conquering. And his tutor Aristotle had important things to say about numerous subjects. And have you read any of Plato’s dialogues? For example, in the early pages of The Republic, Plato touches ever so briefly upon economics, yet suggests that he grasped Adam Smith’s theory of the division of labor and perhaps, astonishingly, David Ricardo’s famously nontrivial theory of comparative advantage.

Seriously, though, it’s not impossible that Socrates’ reputation is inflated by the fact that Plato, a definite genius, starred him in his dialogues. After all, we don’t have any text written by Socrates. Socrates also appears in works by his contemporaries Xenophon and Aristophanes, suggesting he was a memorable figure, but without appearing to be one of the greatest philosophers of all time.

Still, the most straightforward explanation is that Athens 2,400 years ago, like London 425 years ago, was one of those rare times and places when the future opens up.

Why? Lots of people have had lots of opinions. For example, in Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, a drunken client suddenly informs detective Philip Marlowe that cultural progress is due to gays:

“The queer is the artistic arbiter of our age, chum.”…

“That so? Always been around, hasn’t he?”…

“Sure, thousands of years. And especially in all the great ages of art. Athens, Rome, the Renaissance, the Elizabethan Age, the Romantic Movement in France—loaded with them.”

I dunno if that’s true, but the point is that many people have been trying to figure out for many years why certain spots and moments are more important than others.

For example, Jann Wenner, who in 1967 founded Rolling Stone magazine to write about the new electric guitar music of the 1960s, was recently canceled from his post at the head of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame because he was unapologetic that he published a book of his interviews with his seven favorite rock musicians and they all turned out to be white men, six of them born in the 1940s. In truth, it was simply easier to pick up an electric guitar in 1965–1971 and do something historically great in rock music than it was fifty-plus years later when it’d all been done before.

For instance, Shakespeare was clearly the right man at the right place at the right time. The London stage had only become a professional institution about fifteen or thirty years before his arrival. This lag provided Shakespeare with enough time to enter into a mature profession, but also without too much weight of history bearing down upon him.

Note that while Will Shakespeare composed an average of a couple of plays per year, Tom Stoppard has composed barely half as many plays in a career more than twice as long. Stoppard says that while it takes him one year to write a play, he can only come up with an idea worthy of a play every three or four years.

It’s not that Stoppard, an extremely energetic man, is lazy. For example, over about a decade and a half in the 1980s and 1990s, he had a hand in script-doctoring virtually every Steven Spielberg movie. It’s just that in Stoppard’s time, in contrast to Shakespeare’s time, centuries of literary creativity bear down upon the author.

For instance, Stoppard’s greatest play, 1993’s Arcadia, is a knockoff of A.S. Byatt’s 1990 novel Possession about small-souled 20th-century English Lit academics trying to research large-souled 19th-century Romantic geniuses. But most of Stoppard’s plays aren’t quite as obviously awesome as Arcadia, so he felt more impelled to come up with original ideas for them. In contrast, it’s hard to imagine Shakespeare caring about plot originality.

One of the funnier explications of how cultural history bears down upon modern artists is Jorge Luis Borges’ famous comic short story “Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote.” Menard is a fictional early-20th-century French symbolist poet of the highest aesthetic ambition who devotes his life to writing two of the 126 chapters of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which more or less invented the novel 300 years before.

Menard’s self-imposed rule is that while he can initially rewrite Don Quixote anyway he likes, he must eventually get around to crossing out his own lines and, as an authentic 20th-century artist, “sacrifice these variations to the ‘original’ text and reason out this annihilation in an irrefutable manner.”

Not surprisingly, Menard is only 2 percent as productive as Cervantes, but his word-for-word rendition is, in the words of the critic, “almost infinitely richer” because:

To compose the ‘Quixote’ at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable undertaking, necessary and perhaps even unavoidable; at the beginning of the twentieth, it is almost impossible. It is not in vain that three hundred years have gone by, filled with exceedingly complex events. Amongst them, to mention only one, is the ‘Quixote’ itself.”

Borges expounds:

It is no less astounding to consider isolated chapters. For example, let us examine Chapter XXXVIII of the first part, “which treats of the curious discourse of Don Quixote on arms and letters.” It is well known that Don Quixote…decided the debate against letters and in favor of arms. Cervantes was a former soldier: his verdict is understandable. But that Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote—a contemporary of ‘La Trahison des Clercs’ and Bertrand Russell—should fall prey to such nebulous sophistries!

The narrator attributes the new Don Quixote’s post–Great War endorsement of combat to “the influence of Nietzsche.”

Like an electric guitarist in the late 1960s, the contemporaries Cervantes and Shakespeare partook of what Harold Bloom called the “intoxication of unprecedentedness.”​

 

[Coo Coo Bird]

Just as a reminder, Sam Bankman-Fried bragged about literally never reading books:

“Oh, yeah?” says SBF. “I would never read a book.”

I’m not sure what to say. I’ve read a book a week for my entire adult life and have written three of my own.

“I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that,” explains SBF. “I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”

And regularly played League of Legends during meetings, was probably a patsy for Effective Altruism members.

 

[Lemmingwiser]

There is a lot going on here

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

Shakespeare used fat chick jokes.

 

[Autistic Orson Welles]

That SBF who would say such stupid shit is no surprise, but I never fail to be startled by how retarded everything Hanania says is. He must just be trolling. There's no way someone who postures as being "high iq" could fail to understand the 9th grade basics of iambic pentameter, mistake Shakespeare's verse as written in couplets, and not understand line breaks. It should be impossible for him not to recognize the unfathomable arrogance it takes to presume that Orson Welles, Winston Churchill, Thomas Jefferson, and countless others (and many more beyond) were mistaken in their adoration for Shakespeare, and actually just duped into thinking it was good by the archaic language.

I mean literally. I would only expect actual mongoloid retard niggers to try arguing this sincerely.

The true power of someone like Shakespeare is that anyone with an IQ above 75, which excludes Hanania, can pick up his plays and see in them today what Jefferson saw two centuries ago and what the groundlings in London saw over four centuries ago. It takes work. The language can be challenging. The plays are best where it's transparent (such as Antony's monologue following Caesar's assassination), not when it's opaque, contrary to what Hanania's batshit insane tweets argue. But if you put in the effort, you will see a true understanding of what it means to be human.

When I was deeply depressed in college, I read Hamlet and saw myself reflected back at me. I saw suddenly that the truth Shakespeare captured is eternal. Hamlet will never fail to be relevant. The emotions he expresses in English have never been articulated better anywhere in human history. The same is true for every one of his plays, and every character, in (almost) every scene. I've seen college dropout marines read the soldiers' banter in the Henriad and weep for how much it reminds them of what it was like to be in combat. I've seen high school girls swoon at Romeo's language and high school boys be worked into a frenzy by Marc Antony's monologues. These people were not tricked; they were simply open-minded, and they could see what was plainly there before them.

Shakespeare, and the classics more generally, are what remind us that we are human, as our ancestors were, and are truly not special in the ways we think and feel. They are how we speak to the generations that came before us. That someone could read Hamlet and fail to see this is as tragic as any play-ending massacre. Pretending that Shakespeare isn't brilliant and precisely as deep as people say is nothing more than a way to pretend to be smart, which, ironically, reveals oneself as a fucking moron.

Some people won't be able to get into it. Some people will never like Shakespeare. That's fine. I don't really like classical musical. But I don't go around pretending it has no value, because I'm not a braindead faggot. Hanania really does make me MATI like no one else, so I guess his trolling is sublime. I at least take some comfort in knowing that Shakespeare will continue to be relevant eternally, while Hanania is barely remembered in his own age.

 

[Coo Coo Bird]

That SBF who would say such stupid shit is no surprise, but I never fail to be startled by how retarded everything Hanania says is. He must just be trolling.

I think SBF and Richard Hanania are a similar type to JFG and the Lesswrong guy-guys who excel in their academic fields of choice (or at least think they do) and feel that being an expert in one area makes them experts in all areas. Then they deliberately make contrarian statements so they can feel like persecuted geniuses.

What would you call that? High INT, low WIS?

 

[Socrates]

Some people won't be able to get into it. Some people will never like Shakespeare. That's fine. I don't really like classical musical. But I don't go around pretending it has no value, because I'm not a braindead faggot. Hanania really does make me MATI like no one else, so I guess his trolling is sublime. I at least take some comfort in knowing that Shakespeare will continue to be relevant eternally, while Hanania is barely remembered in his own age.

I could actually read through an entire Shakespeare play. This vile faggotry had me tapping out within 3 sentences. It's astounding just how badly written this article is, even if it's satire it has failed in it's attempt to keep me engaged.

 

[Autistic Orson Welles]

What would you call that? High INT, low WIS?

I've never read anything from Hanania that suggests high INT, aside from an ability to lay out novel-length fallacies in language that seems persuasive while wielding jargon like a fencing master. He assures me that he actually has a galaxybrained IQ, and maybe his work in his very narrow field is insightful in some way or another (I'm not familiar enough with it to offer a real critique), but I'm doubtful.

Then they deliberately make contrarian statements so they can feel like persecuted geniuses.

This seems like a spot-on characterization. His writing on COVID and January 6 both feel like this precisely. It's almost like he's deliberately finding the wrong thing to say just so he can feel attacked--that would definitely explain his Shakespeare ravings. I have to hand it to him, it seems to work!

 

[Coo Coo Bird]

maybe his work in his very narrow field is insightful in some way or another (I'm not familiar enough with it to offer a real critique), but I'm doubtful.

I haven't read his works either, but Steve Sailer also wrote an article (The Business of Diversity) referencing his book and summarizing it:

The Origins of Woke draws much from the work of law professor Gail Heriot of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, such as her article “The Roots of Wokeness: Title VII Damage Remedies as Potential Drivers of Attitudes Toward Identity Politics and Free Expression” on the malignant effects of specific provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1991.

In his online 2022 introduction to his interview with Heriot, Hanania summed up his upcoming book’s thesis:

In her 2020 paper [“Title VII Disparate Impact Liability Makes Almost Everything Presumptively Illegal”], [Heriot] frames the issue of disparate impact in a way I hadn’t thought of before. Literally any practice you can think of has a disparate impact…. If everything is potentially illegal, and government does not have the resources to go after everything, then the government basically has arbitrary power to do whatever it wants under civil rights law. People who become civil rights lawyers or EEOC bureaucrats tend to be extremely woke, and it is their interpretations of the law that shape how institutions can behave…. As long as civil rights laws remain as they are, almost any idea coming out of universities, no matter how crazy, can potentially be forced onto local governments and private institutions without having to ever be sanctioned through the democratic process.

He makes the point that civil rights laws are so vague you can literally declare anything a violation of your rights and get legislation passed without it being approved by the electorate. And this causes corporations to institute HR departments and DEI initiatives:

A third of a century ago, the founder of a couple of firms I worked at had a stated policy of only hiring black women as his head of human resources because that inclined the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to harass his companies less. As Hanania explains, the civil rights rules regarding employment are so vague and potentially far-reaching that in the inevitable federal investigations and discrimination lawsuits over firings, the best defense is often to look like you aren’t one of those bad racist companies that must be rooted out and punished. And what better proof that you are Good than making the face of your HR department a black woman? Employers, Hanania says,

are encouraged to find ways to convince bureaucrats, and potentially judges and juries, that they are good people who take discrimination seriously…. “Woke capital,” which often refers to corporations taking left-wing stances on identity-related issues, is a natural response to a system that rewards this kind of virtue signaling.

He also touches on his past drama, and his arrogance:

Last month, the Huffington Post doxed Hanania as having written online 10–12 years ago as Richard Hoste, a tediously strident minor race realist. I would never dox anybody, but I had already looked into the Hanania-Hoste question myself. I saw many similarities, but Hanania was so much better of a thinker and writer than Hoste had been that I decided to remain agnostic on this mystery. How often do individuals improve that much?

It turns out that Hanania used to be a fat high school dropout, but now he has a J.D. from the U. of Chicago and a Ph.D. from UCLA, and has recently become a prominent skinny public intellectual. If he keeps improving at this rate, the sky is the limit.

Still, although he has much to be proud of, Richard needs to watch his ego. His editors at HarperCollins (and congratulations to them for not canceling the book after his doxing) do a good job of keeping it in check on the printed page. But online he’s been boasting like a rapper:

Why didn’t anyone do any of this before?… I don’t think anyone else could have written ‘The Origins of Woke.’

In reality, I have several books on my shelves from as far back as the 1970s that cover much of the same material. It’s a dry topic, however, so conservative intellectuals tend to forget lessons once learned in favor of highbrow speculations about Cultural Marxism and thus need periodic remindings such as The Origins of Woke.

I think Hanania can make good observations if it's about a subject he's interested in and willing to do research about. But he has that classic lolcow trait of being unable to accept criticism, or admit that someone else may have a point.

 

[OrangeJuliusEvola]

He also touches on his past drama, and his arrogance:

It's a thing with Levantine Arab intellectuals. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has the same issue, even though he disagrees with Hanania in just about everything. Both of them are very smart thinkers on their areas of expertise, but have an annoying habit of acting like they know everything else there is to know while having less knowledge and experience than many a well-rounded thinker, and being extremely abrasive and cringe about it on Twitter and in person. Unbridled arrogance, easily bruised egos, lifelong grudges over slights and presumptuousness seem to be racial flaws with Levant Arabs no matter how intelligent they are. With Hanania you can probably throw in a good deal of autism as well. Taleb is neurotypical and cultured enough to know why expressing a contrarian idea on Shakespeare's greatness is beyond stupid. He'd probably do something else like say some obscure Lebanese poet is as great an artist as him rather than try to diminish it.

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

The true power of someone like Shakespeare is that anyone with an IQ above 75, which excludes Hanania, can pick up his plays and see in them today what Jefferson saw two centuries ago and what the groundlings in London saw over four centuries ago. It takes work. The language can be challenging.

Well...Shakespeare was actually considered a bit vulgar and not really worthy of serious study until a group of, of all things, German academics started championing his cause at the start of the 19th century.

Most Brits actually tended to think of him as Samuel Pepys (he of the diary fame, 1633-1703) did of Midsummer's Night's Dream...

Monday 29 September 1662

I sent for some dinner and there dined, Mrs. Margaret Pen being by, to whom I had spoke to go along with us to a play this afternoon, and then to the King’s Theatre, where we saw “Midsummer’s Night’s Dream,” which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life. I saw, I confess, some good dancing and some handsome women, which was all my pleasure.

 

[Spunt]

I don't know about other countries, but in the UK the way Shakespeare is taught in schools is enough to produce generations of people that really fucking hate him. I hated Shakespeare because I was forced to study it with other bored, rebellious kids by a stuffy, humourless teacher who forced us to write essays about how great it was even though we barely understood it, let alone liked it. Neither did it help that we had to study Romeo and Juliet despite being too young to understand the emotions the characters are going through, and study Macbeth which is really long and dry, full of medieval politics and is generally a slog, one of his least enjoyable plays imo.

It wasn't until I'd been out of school for a decade that a friend dragged me to a showing of Twelfth Night at some random regional theatre which I wasn't looking forward to at all, that I saw his plays competently performed with proper comic timing and good performances. You know what, those jokes still hold up if you actually act rather than just puff your chest out and bellow all your lines the way most Shakespearean actors do for some fucking reason. After that I realised I was old enough to actually "get" his work and understand the depth of subtext and the unrivalled construction of his characters.

The archaic language is a problem for kids today, and call me a heretic but I'm not opposed to modernising the language a bit to make the actual core of the work more accessible. The brilliance of Shakespeare isn't in the 16th century grammar, it's in the characters, the twisty plots, the relatable emotional content and the deeper themes. Those can get completely lost if you're struggling with the language. It's not considered wrong to translate Goethe into English for people who don't speak German, and with every year that passes Shakespearean English becomes more like a completely foreign language, until at some point it will be like Chaucer and literally require translations for people who don't have academic qualifications in defunct ancestor languages.

 

[Autistic Orson Welles]

German academics started championing his cause at the start of the 19th century.

I'd never heard this claim until I read Orwell's critique of Tolstoy's critique of Shakespeare earlier today and I don't know where it comes from. It's not what you'll be taught in any History of Shakespeare class in drama school, nor in literature departments (which are worthless, but I did spent some time in them).

Shakespeare was immensely popular in his day, if, as you say, not seen as high art, and continued to be popular through to the Civil War and Restoration. He was "rediscovered" in the early 18th century as theater reemerged and received a boost to his reputation, and ever since has remained incredibly popular and highly regarded. You'll find casual references to Falstaff, Hamlet, and Macbeth throughout the writings of people like Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, the Duke of Wellington, and (I would wager) many, many more very upper class people of the 18th century.

Shakespeare has been popular in Germany since the early 19th century, but that's not when he was "discovered" in English. The Pepys quote is pretty funny, though. I've never liked Midsummer.

I hated Shakespeare because I was forced to study it with other bored, rebellious kids by a stuffy, humourless teacher who forced us to write essays about how great it was even though we barely understood it, let alone liked it.

It's the same for most people in the US. Shakespeare really has to be performed to be appreciated, and also performed well, which isn't very conducive to classroom readings. I've always thought I could teach him to 18-year-olds very effectively by being extremely enthusiastic and focusing on the "cunt" puns and other funny bits, but most middle-aged schoolmistresses probably can't manage that sort of thing.

 

[Glad I couldn't help]

It's a thing with Levantine Arab intellectuals. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has the same issue, even though he disagrees with Hanania in just about everything. Both of them are very smart thinkers on their areas of expertise, but have an annoying habit of acting like they know everything else there is to know while having less knowledge and experience than many a well-rounded thinker, and being extremely abrasive and cringe about it on Twitter and in person. Unbridled arrogance, easily bruised egos, lifelong grudges over slights and presumptuousness seem to be racial flaws with Levant Arabs no matter how intelligent they are. With Hanania you can probably throw in a good deal of autism as well. Taleb is neurotypical and cultured enough to know why expressing a contrarian idea on Shakespeare's greatness is beyond stupid. He'd probably do something else like say some obscure Lebanese poet is as great an artist as him rather than try to diminish it.

IIRC, Taleb's great fault is insisting that he and some Lebanese are "Phoenician" and not "Arab", despite all evdience to the contrary.

 

[Thomas Talus]

The article title reads like a generated filename.

 

[Haramburger]

When I was deeply depressed in college, I read Hamlet and saw myself reflected back at me. I saw suddenly that the truth Shakespeare captured is eternal. Hamlet will never fail to be relevant. The emotions he expresses in English have never been articulated better anywhere in human history.

For me, it's Midsummer Night's Dream, my favorite isekai

 

[frozen_runner]

They haven't dragged this live anti-Semitic cartoon to death behind a truck yet?

 

[OrangeJuliusEvola]

The archaic language is a problem for kids today, and call me a heretic but I'm not opposed to modernising the language a bit to make the actual core of the work more accessible. The brilliance of Shakespeare isn't in the 16th century grammar, it's in the characters, the twisty plots, the relatable emotional content and the deeper themes. Those can get completely lost if you're struggling with the language. It's not considered wrong to translate Goethe into English for people who don't speak German, and with every year that passes Shakespearean English becomes more like a completely foreign language, until at some point it will be like Chaucer and literally require translations for people who don't have academic qualifications in defunct ancestor languages.

I would disagree. Part of the issue is that language has changed so much, that we have already lost a lot of Shakespeare's poetic oomph. He wrote while the Great Vowel Shift in the English language was still on-going, with massive change going on in the way we say words. For example, when he wrote, they still pronounced the "h" in words that are now silent like "hour".
This has massive impacts both in the scansion of his blank verse, turning smoothly rhythmic lines into lumpy stilted prose speech, and rendering so much of his wordplay, double entendres, and puns unseen and unheard.

Instead of modernizing, I say we do the opposite and do what some acting companies did under the guidance of historical linguists, and watch shows done with Original Pronunciation (or OP as it is often called). It takes a bit of getting used to the weird thick accent, but after about 10-15 minutes of it, you mostly acclimate, and the sheer eloquence and brilliance of Shakespeare is revealed in the way he himself spoke the words. Here's a bit of video about it:

IIRC, Taleb's great fault is insisting that he and some Lebanese are "Phoenician" and not "Arab", despite all evdience to the contrary.

Yeah, but that's hardly something sui generis to him, it's a Maronite thing and has been for quite some time. It's funny because sometimes he'll post shit that undermines that whole thesis, like when he posted evidence that most of the ethnic descendants of Crusaders who remained in the Holy Land converted to Sunni Islam with a list of Arabic transliterations of Romance language surnames... but left out the part about Arab Christians with those surnames. The religious history of Lebanon is pretty weird. Most of the Crusaders did convert to Islam, mostly because of where they lived in the country. But it did go both ways.

The Chehab/Shihab Family which goes way back as tribal rulers in Lebanon have both Sunni and Maronite branches. We know that some converted to Christianity because they all derive from the same Hejazi ancestors of the original Islamic invasions. How did that happen? Lebanese politics has never been simple, and the Ottomans basically let the local chiefs run the place as they saw fit, so long as they paid their taxes, because interfering always seemed to make thing worse.

 

[Nate Higgers]

Just as a reminder, Sam Bankman-Fried bragged about literally never reading books:

And regularly played League of Legends during meetings, was probably a patsy for Effective Altruism members.

I want to say I’ve grown out of my antisemitic phase as I’ve reached my 30’s but

The fact that this fat Brillo-pad-haired beady-eyed snaggletoothed amphetamine addicted crypto grifter is not only full of himself but that he’s floated through life due to being born and raised by two wealthy and well-connected Jewish parents (which will make sure he’s never going to face any negative consequences for his misdeeds)

It really makes him infinitesimally more contemptible

 

[Begemot]

Most Anti-Shakespeare people are typically cranks and imbeciles. They are scared of his breadth and huddle in their decaying contrarian stiles. Oxfordians are the worst. The fact that a fool like our old NRX friend Moldbug is a Oxfordian should come as little surprise.