Dramatick Byrony

A lot of critics dismiss Byron for being 'a snob', but his opinions are often refreshingly honest and admirably immune to the general susceptibility to sentiment or poet-worship.

Here is a letter extract of his on Shakespeare:

"Shakespeare’s name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down. He had no invention as to stories, none whatever. He took all his plots from old novels, and threw their stories into a dramatic shape, at as little expense of thought as you or I could turn his plays back again into prose tales. That he threw over whatever he did write some flashes of genius, nobody can deny: but this was all. Suppose any one to have the dramatic handling for the first time of such ready-made stories as Lear, Macbeth, &c. and he would be a sad fellow, indeed, if he did not make something very grand of them. […] You think, no doubt, that A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse! is Shakespeare’s. Not a syllable of it. You will find it all in the old nameless dramatist. […] [N]ot one of his is or ever has been acted as he wrote it; and what the pit applauded three hundred years past, is five times out of ten not Shakespeare’s, but Cibber’s." And on Keats: "The Edinburgh praises Jack Keats or Ketch, or whatever his names are: why, his is the Onanism of Poetry - something like the pleasure an Italian fiddler extracted out of being suspended daily by a Street Walker in Drury Lane."