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To: Sherman Logan
There is very little evidence that contemporaries viewed Shakespeare’s plays as great art, or for that matter as tremendously better than the plays of his competitors.
Which just goes to show that sometimes contemporaries are idiots.

You are exactly right, although he was very popular with the masses. Shakespeare became quite rich from his investment in the Globe theatre.

But he fell out of fashion quickly after his death. Classical forms of the theatre came into vogue. By those standards, Shakespeare was quite mediocre, even awful.

So Shakespeare was ignored for 200 years as an inferior playwright until the German Romantics rediscovered him in the early 1800s. The Germans taught the English to appreciate their greatest playwright. And then by 1830 the French caught the fever for Shakespeare as well. So Shakespeare's reputation as a the greatest playwright of all times is only 200 years old.

15 posted on 04/19/2009 10:36:05 PM PDT by stripes1776 ("That if gold rust, what shall iron do?" --Chaucer)
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To: stripes1776

You are absolutely right.

By Aristotelian standards, Shakespeare was an atrocious playwright.

So much the worse for Aristotle.


16 posted on 04/19/2009 10:39:52 PM PDT by Sherman Logan (Everyone has a right to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.)
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To: stripes1776
My, but this is an interesting board tonight (or,rather, this morning)! If I may, I would like to contribute another bit of misunderstood history:

The idea/image that angles are beautiful, fluffy, well, 'angelic', guardian-angle creatures is pure Victorianism.

Before the 19th century, and all the more so the further back you went, angles were no nonsense, somewhat/sometimes vaguely human looking creatures, the though of whom struck dread into the hearts of mortal men. The appearance of an angel was like a firm knock on your front door at 2:30 in the morning -- maybe it's good, but chances are it's bad. That's why on that first Christmas the shepard's were "sore afraid" when the angle(s) appeared with the news.

Angles were, in essence, the Almighty's "enforcers"....with the Almighty himself being a sort of divine Attila the Hun..

22 posted on 04/20/2009 12:07:22 AM PDT by yankeedame ("Oh, I can take it but I'd much rather dish it out.")
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To: stripes1776

“You are exactly right, although he was very popular with the masses. Shakespeare became quite rich from his investment in the Globe theatre.”

I may have to disagree with you about his becoming quite rich.

In his will, he willed his wife his bed. Period.

I need to research this when I have time. But that is what I learned in my Shakespeare classes.


29 posted on 04/20/2009 7:52:22 AM PDT by GatĂșn(CraigIsaMangoTreeLawyer)
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