William Shakespeare is known for his iconic works, like Julius Caesar, Othello, and Hamlet. Students read his plays and stories all over the world, but some of the world’s most famous writers aren’t quite as fond of his writing. Leo Tolstoy, writer of War and Peace, wrote a 100-page critique of Shakespeare and his plays. The essay was published in 1906 and called Shakespeare’s work “trivial, and positively bad”. Tolstoy said that he first read many of the works, like Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, in school for the first time, and felt repulsed by then. Even at age 75, he said that he re-read the works and felt just as strongly about Shakespeare’s writing.
The Times ranked J.R.R. Tolkien as one of the greatest British authors. Before the days of The Lord of the Rings, a teenaged Tolkien delivered a speech on why Shakespeare’s work didn’t deserve the praise it received, and he later on referred to it as “folly or foolish. Similarly, George Bernard Shaw was a theater critic for a newspaper in London before his own career took off. He said that there was no writer that he disliked as much as he disliked Shakespeare. He reviewed over fifteen of Shakespeare’s works during his three years as a theater critic, calling Othello “melodramatic” and referring to Shakespeare’s writing as incoherent.
Robert Greene was a popular Elizabethan playwright who lived during Shakespeare’s time. He was also one of Shakespeare’s most notable critics. He was displeased that Shakespeare had started off as an actor and dared to switch to writing plays. Several decades later, Samuel Pepys echoed the sentiment. Pepys was a notable diarist in the 1600s and, after attending a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, called the play insipid and ridiculous.