Richard II
"Richard is King. A monarch ordained by God to lead his people. But he is also a man of very human weakness. A man whose vanity threatens to divide the great houses of England and drag his people into a dynastic civil war that will last 100 years"--Container.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
4mentions
4people
2020–2026years
25% recommend50% neutral25% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I dunno (I'm being kinda folksy!). It was just arguing and not really qualifying as a refutation, which generally but not always implies proof. (I did look that up to check my suspicion, but in a big dictionary.)
I would be interested in people's experiences, good and bad, with having (not) gone to college, and serious analysis - everyone seems to be trying to shut down any serious discussion and exploration.
I went to college and I've had many times that I wished I'd studied harder. I've also wished at times that I skipped college then and went later in life, when I would benefit far more. I haven't wished that I didn't go; I learned so much that forms my understanding of the world, my thinking skills, etc.; I would be a different person without it. You can't tell me that I didn't benefit greatly from college but I'm just one person. But can you tell anyone that they studied for four years, hard, and didn't learn much? That's a big stretch for anyone; you need to learn enough to pass ~32 classes at various college levels, and that's a minimum.
Many people say here that 'I didn't go and I'm fine'. Fine isn't the question; nobody said we'd die without it, but that's not our standard for our choices. Each path leads to different collections of outcomes, better and worse and completely different, and we have blind spots about what the other path could be like (having no experience of it). Maybe college emphasizes different skills, develops different tools, with different advantages and disadvantages, as an example of how that would work.
I also wonder how much HN readers think of or have experienced STEM only. The humanities is more important (unpopular, I know, and both are essential IMHO); it addresses the most critical issues in the world and life, the ones beyond quantitative understanding, which is most of them.
I watched a bunch of Shakespeare plays recently, fictionalized histories of Rome and England [0]. From them you learn more about our current society and humanity in general, including today's crazy disfuntion, the mis/disinformation and people's responses, than from all the quantitative research combined; art is a mirror that looks into ourselves. And as objects of another human being's creation, they are incredibly inspirational and beautiful. I'm wiser and have grown since a week ago. Would I turn to Shakespeare and get so much from the plays without studying literature in college? I doubt it, though that's just me.
[0] Without knowing the reader's experience with the Bard, let me recommend Julius Caesar especially, also Henry VI Part 2 and Part 3, and of course their sequel, Richard III. Richard II is good too. I'd skip Henry VI Part 1 but read a synopsis as context for Part 2: Part 1 is clearly substandard IMHO and, it turns out, is believed to be mostly written by a collaborator, Christopher Marlowe. It does constrast the difference between an excellent playwright of their day using the same forms and an all-time genius of character and language.
- I'm skeptical of stylometry. There just isn't enough data to make conclusive statements like this. Shakespeare wrote a lot of plays on similar subjects, and it's no surprise that a lot of words overlap.
That doesn't mean it's not interesting. I'm doing Richard II right now, which is unarguably Shakespeare, and Edward III an immediate prequel. It's too bad that more characters don't overlap. Edward and his son are dead, leaving Richard in charge, and the early death of his father (Edward's son) is an important factor in Richard's behavior (which leads to his downfall).
And sadly it's just not a very interesting play. I haven't read it closely, so perhaps there's merit there I'm not seeing, but I've seen it performed and it was just workmanlike. No great speeches, no memorable lines, no engaging characters.
Having an expert (this guy knows a lot more about Shakespeare than I do, and isn't just relying on statistics) endorse it as actual Shakespeare does make it more attractive to me, despite my doubts. Perhaps some day I'll direct it and find something really great there. I've had some great successes with rarely-performed Shakespeare plays. Opinions of his plays vary as tastes change: Coriolanus used to be one of his most popular, and now it's almost never done.
- "As a kid having to read Shakespeare what was lost on me,…"
What age was that? I reckon most kids think Shakespeare is difficult at the beginning because of the language, and that brings me back to a point made in the article:
"For me, Richard II is the most dull of the Henriad plays."
I now think so too, but when I was studying the play it was the first one I'd encountered with a solid story to it, so it encouraged me to figure out the language so I could follow the plot by myself.
I was introduced to Shakespeare at age 12 and in that year we studied two plays, As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream and I was bored with both. The language wasn't difficult as our teacher explained everything well but I didn't find the stories interesting, they were a bit of a yawn really.
As I said that changed with Richard II and by then I was 14. Being older helped to understand nuances in the script but that was only part of it, the play simply had more substance to it which made it more interesting and worthy of study. Moreover, by then we had to first read the text without the teacher's help which would only come afterwards in class discussions.
Thus Richard II was the first play where Shakespeare actually made sense to me, it too was the first one where the language made sense without the teacher having to 'translate' every paragraph.
Putting Richard II behind me as an enjoyable experience rather than drudgery was important as it made me prepared for the great plays like Lear. That appreciation may not have happened if the order of introduction to the plays had been different.
- The interesting point underlying this rather silly discussion:
The genre of "tragedy" is nearly forgotten today, while having been extremely popular throughout history.
In most modern fiction we have a hero which is supposed to be virtuous and sympathetic ("likable"). If they have flaws they will either be insignificant and endearing, or the hero will overcome these flaws through the arc of the story. The villain is the antagonist in the story, and is a bad guy, but is eventually defeated by the hero through the strengths of the personal qualities of the hero. The hero is often a "nobody" in the beginning but achieves some respect and status at the end, while the bad guy gets justly punished for his evil deeds.
A tragedy is a completely different genre. In a tragedy we have a great person which is brought down by destiny and their own flaws. The protagonist of a tragedy is not supposed to an ideal of virtue. The author of the article seem surprised that Hamlet is not idealized but rather acts both stupidly and unfairly. But look at the other tragedy protagonists - Richard II, Richard III, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet. They are all severely flawed and make disastrous mistakes. We are supposed to empathize with these characters, not sympathize.
On the other hand the they are not getting "justly punished" either. Richard III is clearly an evil man, but Othello is the manipulated victim. Romeo and Juliet is not doomed through their own actions but through the destiny of their families which they are not able to escape. And poor Ofelia. A tragedy is not moralistic in the way that everyone get their just desert - destiny can be completely unfair.
So how could anyone designate Hamlet as the "worst villain" compared to someone like Macbeth or Richard III? Probably because the writer thinks Macbeth and Richard III are supposed to be "bad guys" but Hamlet is supposed to be a "good guy", and his flaws therefore are less acceptable. E.g if a bad guy is sexist, we consider it consistent with his badness, but if a good guy is sexist we consider it as if the author condones sexism, which is more problematic. But this is reading Hamlet if it was a Hollywood movie, not a tragedy.
So why have tragedy gone out of fashion to the extend that a person writing about Shakespeare does not understand the genre? Probably because in modern society we believe in meritocracy and the pursuit of happiness. We are supposed to take control over our own destiny, and so cannot believe that we have flaws which cannot be overcome, or in an unfair destiny which we have no say over.
