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characterizes
Shakespeare, his interest in everything, the poetic brilliance – the very qualities for which people tend to admire Shakespeare – are precisely the qualities that make him unendurable to Tolstoy, who preached austerity and whose "main aim, in his later years, was to narrow the range of human consciousness. One's interests, one's points of attachment to the physical world and the day-to-day struggle, must be as few and not as many as possible." Since Shakespeare's attitude to life threatens Tolstoy's, Tolstoy is incapable of enjoying Shakespeare and mounts an assault on him in order to try to ensure that others cannot enjoy him either.
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literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion. Artistic theories such as
Tolstoy's are quite worthless, because they not only start out with arbitrary assumptions, but depend on vague terms ('sincere', 'important' and so forth) which can be interpreted in any way one chooses. Properly speaking one cannot
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In conclusion, Orwell mentions how little difference
Tolstoy's thunderous attack on Shakespeare has made. According to Orwell, the only criterion for the merit of a work of art is that it continues to be admired, and hence, the verdict on Shakespeare must be "not guilty", since more than a hundred
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One's first feeling is that in describing
Shakespeare as a bad writer he is saying something demonstrably untrue. But this is not the case. In reality there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any other writer, is 'good' ... Ultimately there is no test of
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After a detailed, itemized analysis aimed to show that a great number of
Tolstoy's arguments are false, dishonest and malicious, Orwell identifies Tolstoy's chief quarrel with Shakespeare as "the quarrel between the religious and the humanist attitude towards life." The exuberance with life that
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in particular. According to Orwell's detailed summary, Tolstoy denounced
Shakespeare as a bad dramatist, not a true artist at all, and declared that Shakespeare's fame was due to propaganda by German professors towards the end of the eighteenth century. Tolstoy claimed that Shakespeare was still
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Tolstoy's attack. The interesting question is: why did he make it? But it should be noticed in passing that he uses many weak or dishonest arguments. Some of them are worth pointing out, not because they invalidate his main charge but because they are, so to speak, evidence of
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could well be due to the curious similarity of his own story to Lear's, and to the fact that he suffered disappointments of the same nature after renouncing his estate, his aristocratic title and his copyrights.
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After having recapitulated
Tolstoy's indictment and Tolstoy's criteria for literary merit, which Shakespeare does not meet, Orwell writes:
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Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 4: In Front of Your Nose (1945–1950)
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Orwell then proceeds to examine
Tolstoy himself and notes that the special hatred Tolstoy reserved for
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admired only because of a sort of mass hypnosis or "epidemic suggestion".
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years after
Tolstoy's pamphlet Shakespeare remains as admired as ever.
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Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels
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44:Orwell analyzes Tolstoy's criticism of
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29:critical essay on Shakespeare
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140:public domain audiobook at
16:1947 essay by George Orwell
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452:Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool
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575:Riding Down from Bangor
27:. It was inspired by a
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232:A Clergyman's Daughter
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329:A Hanging
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