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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wayside" data-source="post: 2471610" data-attributes="member: 8394">Beat me to it. It's certainly true that Shakespeare played to all the seats, and that he and the rest of the Elizabethans were very interested in spectacle: they were taking their cues from Seneca, but they didn't know that Seneca wrote closet dramas which were meant to be read and not performed; so they did a lot of things on stage that nobody'd ever done before--very "blockbuster," as taky said. But none of this changes the fact that Shakespeare wanted to be a poet first, is still as famous for the sonnets as for the plays, wrote a not incidental number of justly read verses besides, revolutionized English prosody as much as Donne, and crafted some of the greatest poetry in the English language directly into his plays.I don't follow. Resistance to Ulysses was longlasting--it was censored from print in the U. S. (entire printings were destroyed in England) until the mid 30's for being obscene (it has potty humor! Ulysses certainly appeals to the peanut gallery--but the peanut gallery of fin de siecle Dublin was a decidedly more, I don't want to say more intelligent, but certainly more educated, with a finer sense of irony and wit, than our modern lot). You never would have seen Ulysses in the Times Literary Supplement, let's put it that way.It was years before more than a handful of people (generally other avante-garde artists) considered it to be Great Literature (one anecdote from a prominent Canadian Joyce scholar has him smuggling the book in from America, since if you wanted to get a look at the University of Toronto's copy you needed letters from a doctor and a priest. This was coming up on 1950). That, and many, many intelligent people the world over do consider Ulysses to be great fun, far greater fun than Harry Potter in fact. Does Harry Potter have his own holiday?About Great Literature being a recent invention: that's just crap. Besides, the ultimate "I'm smarter than you etc." book is definitely the Wake. Ulysses is not hard to read, that's just a ghost story we tell the undergrads to spook them.</blockquote>

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