Who is the Most Famous Poet Ever?

[busker]

how could he by your own volition form an opinion as to how it stood up as a play [what the plot was like] if he could not form a full opinion as to their literary merit?

How could he form an opinion on the plays without reading them in the original?
Drama translates; poetry does not.
Ibsen was a major influence on 20th century English language dramatists including Miller and Tennessee Williams. Did they read him in the original? I think not.
Look at Tolstoy's specific point about the opening scene of King Lear:

...the reader, or spectator, can not conceive that a King, however old and stupid he may be, could believe the words of the vicious daughters, with whom he had passed his whole life, and not believe his favorite daughter, but curse and banish her; and therefore the spectator, or reader, can not share the feelings of the persons participating in this unnatural scene....

which is on the money, corresponding as it does to the King's outburst, which he alludes to specifically:

The barbarous Scythian,

Or he that makes his generation messes
To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
Be as well neighbour'd, pitied, and relieved,
As thou my sometime daughter.

Tolstoy points out later on in the essay, that in the old King Leir, the King's anger had a more rational cause, i.e. his plan was all along to get Cordelia betrothed to a suitor of his choice, and her smart ass answer spoiled it:

In the older drama, Leir abdicates because, having become a widower, he thinks only of saving his soul. He asks his daughters as to their love for him—that, by means of a certain device he has invented, he may retain his favorite daughter on his island. The elder daughters are betrothed, while the youngest does not wish to contract a loveless union with any of the neighboring suitors whom Leir proposes to her, and he is afraid that she may marry some distant potentate.

The device which he has invented, as he informs his courtier, Perillus (Shakespeare's Kent), is this, that when Cordelia tells him that she loves him more than any one or as much as her elder sisters do, he will tell her that she must, in proof of her love, marry the prince he will indicate on his island. All these motives for Lear's conduct are absent in Shakespeare's play. 

Elsewhere in the essay he points out specific instances of what he thinks is wrong with the play, and he provides evidence in support of his arguments. Of course, it is subjective at the end of the day as to whether a passage is 'natural' or not, but the point is that unlike Orwell, Tolstoy doesn't engage in emotional appeals to authority (or popularity). 

Clarification on translation
To be clear, Tolstoy wrote:
...I several times recommenced reading Shakespeare in every possible form, in Russian, in English, in German and in Schlegel's translation, as I was advised....

I take this to mean that he read a simplified English version in addition to the translations, because if we could read the original, he wouldn't read the German and Russian renderings.

The cult of Shakespeare
More on this later. Need to take the dog out for a walk.

BILLY
do you want to move this part of the discussion to a separate thread?