Comments on: Shakespeare the genius

By: hopkinshughes

hopkinshughes — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 11:28:48 +0000

O wonderful! Here speaks the unmonitored left-brain at full volume! To compare the man who basically created the language we (and most of the rest of the world) now speak to Jasper Johns?! Thank God these "genetically modified, super-scientific, super number-crunching mathematical humans" who are to take over our future are but figments of what wisps of imagination are all that a poor right-brain challenged left-brainer can conjure up. But we shouldn't be too hard on him, if, as seems likely, this Shakespeare critic is still a kid, probably about thirteen or fourteen, one whose right brain was put to sleep in the second grade and hasn't yet been allowed to awaken. If so there's still hope, but only if he gets out of school before the damage becomes permanent.

By: john

john — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 03:33:46 +0000

Shakespeare was not as ingenious as you think. He was not a scientist or mathematician, but a humanist. He excellently describes the “logic” of human behavior in his plays. However, human behavior is pre-scientific and arbitrary, and in many ways irrational. Shakespeare, in describing the human, was describing an irrational entity, albeit in ingenious ways. But, there are vast amounts of scientific, mathematical and artistic insights besides those of Shakespeare. There is nothing like the paintings of Jasper Johns or the music of Bach or Mozart in Shakespeare’s works. There is nothing of the discoveries of hundreds of thousands of scientists and mathematicians in the centuries after Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a genius, yes, but his genius is a few tablespoons of water in the overall ocean of human insight and discovery. No matter how ingenious a thinker, in general, most geniuses only contribute a few fractions of a percent to the overall knowledge pool. In coming decades, as scientists figure out how to reverse engineer the human brain and create genetically modified, super-scientific, super number-crunching mathematical humans, Shakespeare will more and more be viewed as intellectually puny. Remember that just to rationally calculate the movements of the atoms in a single glass of water in a second would require thousands of times more floating point calculations and number crunching than Shakespeare’s brain performed in a lifetime. Shakespeare, for all his genius, would not have been able to fully understand a glass of water.

By: Barbara O'Grady

Barbara O'Grady — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 10:57:56 +0000

Great stuff! Wonderful summary of Shakespeare’s genius, and from an angle I hadn’t considered before.