Tolstoy on Shakespeare: A Critical Essay on Shakespeare

Leo Tolstoy 1906: I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful aesthetic pleasure but having read one after the other works regarded as his best: King Lear Romeo and Juliet Hamlet and Macbeth not only did I feel no delight but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium... Several times I read the dramas and the comedies and historical plays and I invariably underwent the same feelings: repulsion weariness and bewilderment. At the present time before writing this preface being desirous once more to test myself I have as an old man of seventy-five again read the whole of Shakespeare including the historical plays the Henrys Troilus and Cressida The Tempest Cymbeline and I have felt with even greater force the same feelings --this time however not of bewilderment but of firm indubitable conviction that the unquestionable glory of a great genius which Shakespeare enjoys and which compels writers of our time to imitate him and readers and spectators to discover in him non-existent merits --thereby distorting their aesthetic and ethical understanding --is a great evil as is every untruth. Tolstoy on Shakespeare