Jesus fucking Christ this essay is trash. Redditor fart sniffing and little else. You just know this guy has an English degree (pejorative).

Arden >>> Norton
Idk why people bother with the Norton editions, the introductions are worse and the notes are vastly inferior
The only thing they have going for them is shoving a bunch of extra material at the back which nobody will actually read
Fuck Norton

>>24524669
I got the Norton simply because it's a complete works in one compact volume, rather cheap, while the Ardens would be a 37 volume problem for my shelf and wallet.
Neither have their ebooks on any shadow libraries; you can find a few Arden PDFs but not most of the plays.

>>24524657 (OP)
Who wrote that essay

>>24524684
Stephen Greenblatt, a Jew, and one of the proud original instigators of academic cultural rot. I didn't even know this when I made the thread

>>24524657 (OP)
To be fair it‘s not like there‘s anything meaningful to say about The Comedy of Errors

>and here they confuse the twins again. Gripping stuff.

>>24524708
a straussian i was reading recently cited greenblatt favorably, are you sure he's a bad guy

i still want a norton complete shakespeare, is it worth still getting the 2nd ed

>>24524744
It is helpful in understanding the text, definitely. Don't even consider the 3rd edition. Perhaps there are better options, in Pelican or others, but I've not compared.

>>24524744
Yeah it's worth getting for $10

Here's another excerpt, this from Shakespeare After All. How can I trust any scholarship about the actual meaningful parts of Shakespeare if I can see here that everyone is just making shit up about a simple farce?

>>24524921
Just read also this chapter in "The Meaning of Shakespeare" and it was completely coherent. Published 1951. No surprise there; that was before the insanity took root in academia.
The schizophrenic analyses in Norton (2008) and SAA (2004) are disheartening.
I will also check Invention of the Human (1998) and report back.

>>24525012
Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom
> It would be absurd to burden The Comedy of Errors with sociopolitical or other current ideological concerns
Yep I'm thinking Bloom is based

>>24525048
Bloom is fun to read on Shakespeare. He has a bunch of character studies as well.

Their Richard III one is bad too

>>24524740
Did you seriously think that was a rebuttal? Fucking straussians giving lip service to a fellow jew?

Buy the antique classics club edition instead, it likely costs even less than the norton edition, probably about twenty dollars for a complete works set like this

Yeah this is a great bullshitter detector. With something like Hamlet it's like, alright maybe there is all this depth you're importing, maybe you're not schizo. But TCoE is so early and so simple that even while the bullshitters can't help themselves, you'll know who they are.

>>24524711
There’s a lot to talk about regarding the development of Shakespeare as a playwright. It shows he started as a plebeian entertainer who was first and foremost a bums-on-seats song-and-dance man ripping off older writers - who learned to graft greater poetic and philosophical depth onto his entertainments. Comedy of Errors still works on stage because of how solid the stagecraft is, the mechanics of all the farcical entrances and exits is still sound. He understood that side of theatre thoroughly, so much so that a play devoid of any of his later poetical genius is still a well made and performable play.
But yeah, pretending it’s deep and meaningful is retarded. But most literature academics don’t know much about theatre practice so write what they do know