I keep this exact issue of Shakespeare's Complete Works next to my computer. It is beautiful to behold.
Shakespeare was a mastermind. He is the best-known playwright ever to have lived. There is a reason Romeo and Juliet are still the world's most famous couple. The beautiful poetry, the intricately woven plot, make this play a complex work of art. There are perhaps the most renderings of Romeo and Juliet of any other literary work in the world. Ballets, movies, musicals, you name it.
I am firmly of the opinion that William Shakespeare was the brain behind the many plays and sonnets written by who the world knows as Shakespeare. It was definitely not a nobleman, however educated said nobleman may have been. It takes a common man to write out a true understanding of human nature. I would compare Shakespeare to Emily Bronte in this particular situation. She wrote Wuthering Heights when she was only sixteen. That classic novel is a prime example of what people truly are like inside. If a sixteen-year-old girl wrote that, why couldn't a merchant have penned countless plays and sonnets? Think about it.
Nice post! I look forward to seeing you in Antony and Cleopatra this summer, whatever role you get.
ReplyDeleteAh, my naive young one. Everyone knows that the works of the so-called Bard was actually an advertising ploy for the shipping cartel. In a fish and chips culture, this was the only effective way to introduce the English to the joys of exotic trade goods of the Near East. And asps. Don't forget the asps. They were never given their due until the Cartel introduced them in Anthony and Cleopatra.
ReplyDeleteI contend this line of reason is as sound as any other ;-)
Ha-ha. I love you, too, darling father.
ReplyDeleteOh, and by the way, that's *were*, not *was*. :)