Charles Darwin — "I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that i…"
I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
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More from Charles Darwin
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About Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
British naturalist whose On the Origin of Species (1859) established evolution by natural selection — the unifying theory of modern biology. Closely associated with Thomas Henry Huxley (his 'bulldog' public defender) and Alfred Russel Wallace (independent co-discoverer of natural selection). For an intellectual contrast, see William Paley, Anglican theologian and Natural Theology author (1743-1805) — Origin of Species is structurally a 400-page reply to Paley — Darwin admired Paley's watchmaker-argument as an undergraduate at Cambridge and then spent 20 years building the empirical machinery to displace him. The cleanest 'design argument vs natural selection' founding rebuttal in science.
The standard scholarly entry points to Charles Darwin's work: Janet Browne (Harvard, history of science) — Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995) and The Power of Place (2002); Adrian Desmond (UCL, biographer) — Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (1991, with James Moore). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Charles Darwin.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Darwin admits bluntly that reading Shakespeare bores him to the point of disgust. Rather than pretending to appreciate culturally revered literature, he is being brutally honest about his own experience. The quote captures how deep immersion in one mode of thinking — in his case, precise empirical observation — can crowd out aesthetic and imaginative pleasure entirely, leaving a person unable to enjoy art that demands a different kind of attention.
Relevance to Charles Darwin
Darwin wrote candidly in his autobiography about losing his taste for poetry, music, and literature as he aged, calling it a lamentable loss. His mind became finely tuned to evidence, pattern, and mechanism, leaving little room for imaginative narrative. The confession also reveals his characteristic intellectual honesty — he never performed admiration he did not feel, the same directness that let him publish a theory he knew would be explosive.
The era
Victorian England treated Shakespeare as a near-sacred cultural monument — his works were school curricula, the subject of public lectures, and a marker of educated taste. Admitting boredom with him was almost socially improper. Meanwhile, Darwin's era saw scientific rationalism rising sharply against humanistic tradition; his 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species had already shaken religion and culture. This confession sits at that exact fault line.
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