SHAKESPEARE IS STUPID Options

[P.P.A.]

When I started scanning the D.H.E. World Guidance book three days ago I thought I could fill the time during the scans and between putting on the next page wisely by reading Shakespeare's Sonnets, one at a time. Expecting sweet poetry, I instead read what has got to be some of the least romantic and most offensive bit of writing I have ever read. Example, Sonnet № 6:

Then let not winter's raggèd hand deface
In thee thy summer ere thou be distilled.
Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place
With beauty's treasure ere it be self-killed.
That use is not forbidden usury
Which happies those that pay the willing loan –
That's for thyself to breed another thee,
or ten times happier be it ten for one.
Ten times thyself were happier than thou art,
If ten of thine ten times refigured thee:
Then what could death do if thou shouldst depart,
Leaving thee living in posterity?
 Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair
 To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir.

This is downright insulting! No matter how relatively beautiful (although even the wording is offensive sometimes) the language, the core messages conveyed—“I see you just a temporal vessel for your beauty.”, “You need to make lots of children with me so your beauty can outline you once you're old, wrinkly, and ugly and eventually die!”, “Your own, personal happiness doesn't really matter to me.”, “Did I mention we need to make kids?!”—are simply awful! The rest of (at least the first couple of) the Sonnets are pretty much the same, all revolving around wanting to have sex, and about condemning her for not making children before time catches up with her.
The only response I could think of to any of these would be a slap in the face and yelling at him for daring to address her informally with “thou”.

Romeo and Juliet was also rather unimpressive when I read it. At least Much Ado About Nothing was very entertaining, at least while Beatrice and Benedick were both still tsundere for each other.
I guess I'll withhold judgement until I've also read Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, although my first and second impressions could be much better already—I just hope he's not just as bad and overrated as Goethe.

This post has been edited by P.P.A.: Aug 23 2011, 06:05 PM

[P.P.A.]

Well, that's one of the things I'm criticising—I doubt neither the tremendous influence he had on the English language, nor that he was apparently quite good at appealing to large audiences, but object to his depiction as a timeless genius.
 That said, even bearing in mind that the status of females in the Occident was at a low point in that era, these lines are just tremendously offensive. I might do ill to compare them to the minnesong of the Middle Ages (since courtly women played a much more important role then, actually being able to read and write and thus administer a realm unlike their men—usually too busy warring—, and since the works of that time were often composed in praise of ladies of much higher, unattainable status, or sometimes married, in relation to the writer) but even these pieces are finer and more respectful, not only flowery descriptions of the object's external beauty, but also of the subject's own feelings, relation, and devotion to her—whereas a lot of the Sonnets are really just “Let me fuck you!”, mated with elaborate depictions of decay and death.
 The comparison to how Beatrix started out in Much Ado About Nothing—a loud-mouthed, self-confident, and independent lady—also robs Shakespeare of his excuse of being simply a child of his time. He had apparently little trouble defying the contemporary standards and imagining and worthily depicting such a female character, so this relapse into complete respect- and tastelessness seems all the more bewildering.