he had already said it
"The most popular plays of yesterday are on the level of the worst novels of yesterday. The best plays of today are on the level of magazine stories and fat best-sellers. And the highest form of the dramatic art - tragedy - is at its best a clockwork toy made in Greece that little children wind up on the carpet and then follow on all fours.
(…) There is something I am very positive about and that is that Shakespeare must be produced in toto, without a single syllable missing, or not at all. But from the logical, causal, point of view, that is, from the point of view of modern producers, both Lear and Hamlet are impossibly bad plays, and I dare any contemporary popular theatre to stage them strictly according to the text."
(Nabokov, in The Tragedy of Tragedy, ca 1941)
