Tolstoy on Shakespeare

Tolstoy on Shakespeare
A Critical Essay on Shakespeare

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(1 Review)
Tolstoy on Shakespeare by graf Tolstoy Leo

Published:

1906

Pages:

118

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2,795

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Tolstoy on Shakespeare
A Critical Essay on Shakespeare

By

1
(1 Review)

Book Excerpt

y bald crown when thou gavest thy golden one away. If I speak like myself in this, let him be whipp'd that first finds it so."

In this manner lengthy conversations go on calling forth in the spectator or reader that wearisome uneasiness which one experiences when listening to jokes which are not witty.

This conversation was interrupted by the approach of Goneril. She demands of her father that he should diminish his retinue; that he should be satisfied with fifty courtiers instead of a hundred. At this suggestion, Lear gets into a strange and unnatural rage, and asks:

"Doth any here know me? This is not Lear: Does Lear walk thus? speak thus? Where are his eyes? Either his notion weakens, his discernings Are lethargied. Ha! 'tis not so. Who is it that can tell me who I am?"

And so forth.

While this goes on the fool does not cease to interpolate his humorless jokes. Goneril's husband then enters and wishes to appease Lear, but Lear curses Goneril, invoking for her either steri

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Kiric78
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You can not blame Tolstoy for his misunderstanding before the greatest writer of all time, Tolstoy was a moralist who tried to judge Shakespeare by their own criteria, today the world is more like Lear than any work of Tolstoy. Just a pamphlet reflecting the prejudices of his time, as Voltaire, Bernard Shaw and Wintgenstein. What are forgotten, but the Bard continues.