Kill the Shakespeare's legacy

I just watched the movie Anonymous and got a little interested in Shakespeare and want to see if you guys can make him irrelevant.

With a POD of 1624 make Shakespeare and his plays vanish into irrelavancy.
 
Perhaps some of the myriad of Romantic poets that died early deaths could live long enough to overshadow Shakespeare's legacy- maybe relegating him to a place equivalent with Chaucer.
 
Some time ago this POD was posted that could have such a side effect.

I was reading up on Restoration and Augustan theatre, 'cause I'm utterly unfamiliar with theatre between the Elizabethan/Jacobean era and the 20th Century, and have discovered the Licensing Act of 1737. Summary: the act gave the British Lord Chamberlain the power to censor any play or stop it from being staged entirely. The act created a massive chilling effect on English language drama that wouldn't be broken for decades, forcing playwrights to avoid serious, political, or controversial topics and instead encouraged them to write relatively frivolous comedies and melodrama at the exact moment they'd started producing serious literature again.

Amongst the effects of this?

1. Many playwrights abandoned the stage for a relatively new artform, the Novel. While there had been notable novelists before 1737, it only developed into the preeminent form of English literature afterward thanks to the sudden flood of talent.

2. With the public generally suspicious of any new plays, assuming they must be propaganda pieces since they were government-approved, the playhouses turned to their library of pre-1737 plays (which didn't need government approval) and staged those instead. Who dominated those libraries? William Shakespeare. While Shakespeare was respected, he wasn't elevated to the level of "Greatest Poet/Playwright/Writer of the English Language" until the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, and that was thanks to the sudden flood of Shakespeare productions post 1737.

Butterflying away either of these could have major, and rather interesting, effects on the development of the English language, English literature, and Anglo-American culture overall. Instead of relatively vanishing, English theatre in the Augustan and Georgian eras could have been as important and studied, if not moreso, than the Elizabethan era. The novel, assuming it developed in at all the same way, may have never grown to become as important and popular a medium as it is today. Shakespeare may be a relatively respected but, like Chaucer, relatively obscure writer and perhaps someone else would be considered the best English language playwright. So many butterflies...!

I'd love to do a timeline on this idea, but I don't think I have the time. What do you guys think of this POD? Does it have potential?
 
Some time ago this POD was posted that could have such a side effect.
Actually, weren't the theatres in Shakespeare's own time already subject to some sort of regulation along those lines as well?

To kill the Shakespeare legacy (without just killing Shakespeare himself at an early age), perhaps have him over-shadowed by a more successful contemporary might work?
 
Actually, weren't the theatres in Shakespeare's own time already subject to some sort of regulation along those lines as well?

To kill the Shakespeare legacy (without just killing Shakespeare himself at an early age), perhaps have him over-shadowed by a more successful contemporary might work?

Perhaps Webster (or another 'bard'?) becomes even more popular post Shakespear's death - and his work is largely forgotten or eclipsed?

The problem is his work is brilliant and there would be lots of people willing to hide copies of his work if they were outlawed!

Hell if the work was outlawed the number of people willing to hoard / hide copies would increase massively!

Also please take into account that this is Britain - there are still records of sheep sales at certain market towns from before his birth!!!
 
The First Folio doesn't get published. Bam.

Remember--Shakespeare is unique among his era's playwrights in that he has most of his works gathered in a single, high-quality work. In Marlowe's case, for example, we are down to bad quartos for several of his works, including Dr. Faustus. If all we had was the bad quarto version of Hamlet...

Well, it'd be a lot less popular.
 
Actually, weren't the theatres in Shakespeare's own time already subject to some sort of regulation along those lines as well?

To kill the Shakespeare legacy (without just killing Shakespeare himself at an early age), perhaps have him over-shadowed by a more successful contemporary might work?

Censorship in Elizabethan and Jacobean England tended to be more inconsistent and unpredictable than in later periods. Decisions about what to censor or permit were not standardized. Instead, there were all kinds of royal decrees, Parliamentary statutes, and such that imposed censorship on certain topics in response to particular events or problems. This kind of situationally-based censorship was actually not very hard to evade. For example, Elizabeth famously prohibited anyone from discussing the matter of who would succeed her, but during her reign many plays and poems (including some of Shakespeare's) took on the subject of royal succession in ways that were pretty obviously actually about Elizabeth, but gave the authors sufficient deniability that no action was taken against them.

Of course, inconsistent censorship meant that sometimes people got in severe trouble over writings they didn't expect to provoke such a harsh response, if they happened to offend the wrong powerful person; John Stubbes, who lost his right hand for writing a pamphlet opposing Elizabeth's potential marriage to Alencon, is often considered an example of this.

Another difference between the 16th/early 17th centuries and the 18th century is that in the earlier era, most press licensing was not handled by the government but by the Stationer's Company. The SC was less concerned about controversial content than what we might call intellectual-property matters. SC licensing was about establishing which printers had the right to print which books, to make sure different London printers were not stealing works from each other and undercutting the market for their products.

In light of this, I agree that the 1737 Licensing Act is a major POD for shaping Shakespeare's modern reputation. Some critic once wrote that "between Shakespeare's death and the twentieth century, no Englishman wrote a good play," or something to that effect, and censorship is probably a big reason why. That said, as long as the First Folio exists, it seems very likely that Shakespeare will form a huge influence over later playwrights, even if, in an ATL, an author of the caliber of Shelley, Byron, or Keats writes for the theatre and manages to surpass Shakespeare.
 
Some critic once wrote that "between Shakespeare's death and the twentieth century, no Englishman wrote a good play," or something to that effect, and censorship is probably a big reason why.

John Webster, John Ford and a host of other guys would like to talk to whoever it was that said that.
 
"between Shakespeare's death and the twentieth century, no Englishman wrote a good play,"

I think that guy might have misunderstood the meaning of the word "critic" :rolleyes:

So, maybe printing remains an expensive and esoteric pursuit - Middle or Old English develops a vast array of characters, not on a Chinese level but around fifty or so, with many being superfluous to the representation of actual sounds. This means that only rich people can afford a printing press and the plebs don't get a look in. As a result, theatre is still viewed as a lower-class and 'invalid' art-form while the wealthy educated class continues with epic poetry like they learned at school - Homer, etc. - and people like Spenser become the writers of greatest cachet, while Shakespeare is just a jumped-up actor. Of course, there are knock-on effects: poor people will struggle even more to receive an education and ascend socially; all those pamphlets of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods would be butterflied, allowing Church and King to retain greater moral authority over the masses, so no Civil War. Basically, just think of Confucian China.
 
So, maybe printing remains an expensive and esoteric pursuit - Middle or Old English develops a vast array of characters, not on a Chinese level but around fifty or so, with many being superfluous to the representation of actual sounds.
The specified POD ("after 1624") would be a bit too late for that...
 
Maybe only Thomas Bowdlers 'Family Shakespeare' is performed through the C19th, leading to the infantilism of the Bard and productions being limited in the C20th onwards. Ol' Bill becomes a playwright of the same scope as the Restoration comedy playwrights (Wycherely etc)
 
The specified POD ("after 1624") would be a bit too late for that...

Damn, I was going to suggest the Ruled Britannia TL, except Shakespeare's troupe performs King Philip instead of Boudicca, but the uprising goes ahead anyway and Shakespeare gets murdered and comdemned as a papist collaborator forever.
 

RalofTyr

Banned
How many hows do students spend in school reading Shakespeare that could have been used for something else?
 

libbrit

Banned
We underestimate how important the First Folio, published 10 years after his death, was in keeping the legacy alive.

Stop the First Folio happening when it did, and you kill the legacy. The longer the First Folio goes without publication, the more source material vanishes.
 

libbrit

Banned
RalofTyr;10081039[B said:
]How many hows do students spend in school reading Shakespeare[/B] that could have been used for something else?

Not enough. Luckily thats changing. More attention is being given to Shakespeare in the English school curriculum than ever before.
 
We underestimate how important the First Folio, published 10 years after his death, was in keeping the legacy alive.

Stop the First Folio happening when it did, and you kill the legacy. The longer the First Folio goes without publication, the more source material vanishes.

Yep.

Of course, it's worth noting that Shakespeare is ALONE among his contemporaries in having this sort of attention paid to him--at least, at such a close remove from his life, anyway.
 

jahenders

Banned
Simply sloppy document management, coupled with a fire or flood. Shakespeare loses most of his copies in a fire. Most of the copies with publishers and such are simply overlooked/misplaced. Thus, only a small fragment of his work survives 50 years after his death. That being fairly small, it makes far less of an impression and a 100 or so years later he's largely considered a "One hit wonder" -- with only one of his great plays (and a few lesser ones) surviving
 

Puzzle

Donor
Compelling evidence, whether real or not, that one of the alternate authors actually wrote all of the plays might diminish his legacy in favor of the true author with Shakespeare seen only as a mouth piece.
 
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