You mean that grain merchant from Stratford? He didn't write any plays anyway. The Earl of Oxford did.
Many common English expressions are, in fact, derived from the King James Bible. This link has a list of some of them:
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/bible-phrases-sayings.html
It's totally a parody of standard renaissance romantic comedy. How it should go is the deception works and R doesn't kill himself and they are happily paired up. Both of them actually dying is a complete subversion because up to that point it hits all the points of renaissance comedy
There are lots of unanswered questions about all of the authorship candidates, including Will Shaksper. We have no evidence of Shaksper ever receiving an education, and it's a complete mystery how he would have gained the kind of knowledge of court politics that Shakespeare (i.e. the author) had. Shakespeare wrote tons of plays, sonnets, etc., yet we can't find a single personal letter or manuscript written in Shaksper's own hand. There's also the curious detail that when Shaksper died, his funerary monument in the Stratford church depicted him holding a sack of grain. (This monument would be changed decades later to depict him holding a pen and paper.)
I'm agnostic on the issue actually. Ultimately, though, it doesn't really matter to us whom the author is - "the play's the thing".
You know who else we don't know much about?
Christopher Marlowe.
And Thomas Kyd.
And Ben Johnson.
And John Webster.
And John Ford.
And Thomas Dekker.
And Robert Greene.
And pretty much every other Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Carolingian playwright. And yet, amazingly enough, nobody has thought to deny their authorship. No, it's only Will who has been forced to jump through hoops, to explain his whereabouts, his education, and produce manuscripts. And what makes it worse is that the so-called "mysteries" that prompt this inquiry aren't mysteries at all. They are idiotic games of smoke and mirrors, that require you to ignore actual history and the actual record--which includes a rather bothersome number of contemporaries crediting Will Shakespeare as sole author of the plays--and focus on silly little bits of marginalia. 'Ohhh! A woodcut of the Shakespeare monument before its restoration shows him "holding a bag of grain"! That PROVES it was changed, and he was just a grain merchant!' (Ignoring the painting of the monument made before the restoration that shows it having Will holding a pen on a sheet of paper. And the plaque that credits him as a writer.)
There are no real reasons to question Shakespeare's authorship--those that claim there are proceed from ignorance, and from a desire to satiate their own egos by belonging to an exalted brotherhood that has 'the true knowledge'. Just like every conspiracy theory.
I think that what really helps Shakespeare is that he was first and foremost an entertainer whose job was to put butts in the seats and then tries to work in deeper themes so it isn't just entertainment. I think that really works better than the division we often get in modern times between mindless popular entertainment and modern literary fiction that is so obsessed with symbolism and meaning that it doesn't even bother having a plot. Also all the sex jokes in Romeo and Juliet are freaking hilarious.
This is dead on. The dude wrote for the masses. It's only thought that he wrote for stuffy intellectuals because of all the time that has passed.
I mean, the guy was writing Yo Mama jokes. Think about that for a bit.![]()
Demetrius: Villain, what hast thou done?
Aaron: That which thou canst not undo.
Chiron: Thou hast undone our mother.
Aaron: Villain, I have done thy mother
So... should funnyhat be banned for promoting a conspiracy theory, then?
There are no real reasons to question Shakespeare's authorship--those that claim there are proceed from ignorance, and from a desire to satiate their own egos by belonging to an exalted brotherhood that has 'the true knowledge'. Just like every conspiracy theory.
This reminds me of how the Song of Solomon, which is the dirtiest poem I have ever read, is in the Bible.
We're not taught the good parts of either, is what I'm trying to say.![]()
Apparently, there was a source on Venetian laws Billy Shakespeare had access to. So that's one little quibble neatly solved.If I violated board policy, I apologize. I was being tongue-in-cheek about it "definitely" being Oxford - I don't really know, although I do think it's an interesting topic. For all we know, heck, maybe Shaksper knew the earl of Oxford personally and learned about Italy from him.
To be fair that's from Titus Andronicus and while the quote is great the play as a whole is...not one of Will's best.
To me what makes Shakespeare great is that once you get past the language, the plays themselves are timeless. My wife with zero literary background could sit down and watch Richard III (Kevin Spaceys production came through Singapore a couple of years back) and find it totally compelling once she got used to the language
I'm not even sure, for instance, that any of the state papers of the Roman Republic survived, and very few people were literate enough to transmit writings, important enough to be written about by others, or well-off enough to have a tombstone that survived to this day. In fact, as scant as Will Shakespeare's paper trail is I would speculate that it is better than that of 75% of the people in London in 1600-he had several property interests, was involved in some lawsuits, had regular dealings with the civil bureaucracy in general, and of course was extremely prominent in a major literary and literate circle.
I've never understood these kinds of visceral, almost personal reactions from people in this debate. Why does it affect you personally whom the author of some 400-year-old plays and sonnets was? Unless you work for the Stratford tourism bureau, I'm not quite sure why it should matter that much.
a good chunk of what we "know" about Marlowe comes from a deposition from Kyd wherein he accused the man of atheism, blasphemy, sodomy, and one is left with the impression, would have moved on to bestiality and witchcraft if his questioners had indicated that was wanted.
This reminds me of how the Song of Solomon, which is the dirtiest poem I have ever read, is in the Bible.
We're not taught the good parts of either, is what I'm trying to say.![]()