The Shakespeare thread

[DanaC]

Then watch the talk - because it will make much more sense. Trust me, just give it a go. It's a really interesting talk and he is a really interesting speaker. You don't have to get into Shakespeare to understand why it worked.

Forget everything you thought you knew about Shakespeare - this talk blows it out of the water.

Also:

wrote down tales used by traveling troubadours forever

No - he adapted existing tales for the stage. Or looked to historical events as the basis for plays. Like screenplays take stories and make them breathe on the screen. As much as I love reading Shakespeare - he was never meant to be read as literature. He was a Spielberg, or a Tarantino, or an Oliver Stone. When he adapted a troubadour's tale, he was taking a one dimensional thing and making it multidimensional - filling it out with characters and scenes, and speech and spectacle. You may not like what he wrote - but it's kind of silly to dismiss him for doing what some of our greatest screenwriters and directors still do today.

Also worth remembering that what is 'gobbledegook' to the modern ear would have been readily understood by an audience 400 years ago. It may exist in a highbrow place now, but it was down and dirty for the common man back in the day.

[eta]

Sorry to harp on but there's anther point I want to make: the idea that Shakespeare was somehow not really inventive, or creatively lazy, or 'just' redoing old stories seems to me to be based on modern expectations of storytelling,. But the way we understand stories now, and what we expect of storytellers, would be wholly anachronistic for Shakespeare's time. That kind of inventiveness, where a story is crafted wholly from new cloth, pulled fully from the author's imagination without reference to older tales or traditions is very modern and would have seemed very peculiar 400 years ago - that's not what people expected from storytellers. That kind of storytelling only really started to take place with the development of the novel as a story form.