To think Shakespeare is boring and crap !

[Lardlizard]

Bloody hate it

Yes YABU. Shakespeare wrote loads of different plays. Some of them are a bit boring and crap but a lot of them aren't.

Yeah but, iambic pentameter!
Have you seen the Inside number 9 done in iambic pentameter? Worth a watch!

Massively, massively unreasonable. You’ve obviously never seen a good production. Get yourself off to Stratford when theatres reopen, you’ll soon change your mind.

I agree. Shakespeare was brilliant in the 1500s/1600s because his jokes made sense and what he wrote was easy to understand. Now, we don't live in that society so we don't understand the context of his jokes so they aren't funny to us. Equally, it's very difficult to understand what he's trying to say because of the developments in language. It's interesting from an academic perspective once you have sufficient contextual understanding - otherwise, you may as well be reading computer code. In 500 years time they'll say the same thing about all the things we love too.

I'm sure lots of his stuff is a bitshit but the top plays, top poems, the ones still in our heads after 500 years are stunning.

YABU. Watch the Hollow Crown. Benedict Cumberbatch as Richard III. Spellbinding.

If it's not your thing that's fine. But (to me) it's not boring & crap. I really enjoy watching some of his plays. The Hollow Crown series was really good.

YABU. Sounds like the issue is that you don’t understand his work and therefore proclaim it “boring and crap”.

Speak on, but be not over tedious

Should have listened to,well.. himself.

hahaha I agree I loathe them all. They are super boring and irrelevant to today. I spent years studying them and I have come to the conclusion that I must be a pleb. Chaucer is much more fun.

The OP doth protest too much, methinks

My dc thought that, having been turned off it at school. I took them to see A Comedy of Errors, starring Lenny Henry amongst others. We were all in stitches, it was brilliant.

I think if you can't name a single play which has a good story then you don't really "get" Shakespeare.

If you don’t like it then that’s up to you but to say it’s all boring and crap is just ridiculous . We are actually just going to watch the Globe performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor on the YouTube channel , we went to see it last year and it was excellent .

Are you being made to read it or something?

It has some dull bits, much like the writing of anyone else. I’m not a big fan of the history plays (not sure why) but most of it is entertaining and some of it is unmatched in fabulousness. It really is t like ‘computer code’ as PP put it - some historical knowledge does deepen your enjoyment (as knowing something about the setting of any piece of literature - or film, or tv - does) but he wrote about people. People’s motivations and characters really haven’t changed that much. Neither has the language, really - the word order is sometimes a bit odd, but most of the words are still used and still mean much the same.

You need to try a good murder mystery like Macbeth first to ease you in.

I thought that was a universally accepted truth

That's a very common complaint among people who don't understand Shakespeare.

Chaucer is much more fun.

There are just as many dirty jokes in Shakespeare as there are in Chaucer! :D

Away, you scullion! you rampallion! you fustilarian! I’ll tickle your catastrophe

If you don’t like Shakespeare, I wonder what he’d think of you?

I hate them too.

I read all the time, did A level Eng Lit, and really did not like it. And l find Shakespeare boring, but to think like that is a crime against a national treasure. I had one of the highest reading ages in the school in primary, but Shakespeare was just a killer. Although weirdly l liked Chaucer.

Reading Henry IV was like watching paint dry😴

YABU to claim all of it is crap. Parts, yes. Not all.

a lot of modern stuff on tv etc is boring and crap but many people still watch it.