Shakespeare's Birth & Valhalla Ride Day...

[motordavid]

April 23, 1564 - April 23, 1616

One of the toughest courses I took in the U, Shakespeare, a third year course for serious English majors and the
naive driven...
His Birth and Death Day, today April 23rd. With all the mystery and intrique and scholarship surrounding and, spent
on this arguably one of the best writers in the English language, we really don't know much about him, or how he
pumped out all his work.

Having been to Stratford-upon-Avon a couple of times, it was interesting to see where he grew up, and seeing
some live Shakespeare at the Old Vic in London is worth the visit, too, even if it was built long after his time.
BR,mD

A snippet of a looonnngggg NY Times Mag article, published 5 years ago, but one of my faves and succint, on ol'Wil...
BR,mD
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Shakespeare's Leap

By STEPHEN GREENBLATT

Published: September 12, 2004

A young man from a small provincial town -- a man without independent wealth, without powerful family connections and without a university education -- moved to London in the late 1580's and, in a remarkably short time, became the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time.

His works appeal to the learned and the unlettered, to urban sophisticates and provincial first-time theatergoers. He makes his audiences laugh and cry; he turns politics into poetry; he recklessly mingles vulgar clowning and philosophical subtlety. He grasps with equal penetration the intimate lives of kings and of beggars; he seems at one moment to have studied law, at another theology, at another ancient history, while at the same time he effortlessly mimics the accents of country bumpkins and takes delight in old wives' tales. Virtually all his rivals in the highly competitive theater business found themselves on the straight road to starvation; this one playwright by contrast made enough money to buy one of the best houses in the hometown to which he retired when he was around 50, the self-made protagonist of an amazing success story that has resisted explanation for 400 years.

How did Shakespeare become Shakespeare?

Apart from the poems and plays themselves, the surviving traces of Shakespeare's life are abundant but thin. The known facts have been rehearsed again and again for several centuries. Already in the 19th century there were fine, richly detailed and well-documented biographies, and each year brings a fresh crop of them, sometimes enhanced with a hard-won crumb or two of new archival findings.

The playwright's father, a glover and occasional wool dealer, held significant civic offices in Stratford-Upon-Avon, including the equivalent of mayor, but for reasons still unclear, he lost his social position, ceasing to attend council meetings and mortgaging much of the family property, including the lands brought to the marriage by his wife, the daughter of a prosperous yeoman farmer.

Their eldest son, William, may at one time have expected to attend nearby Oxford University, but in the wake of the family's decline, he did not. At the age of 18, he married a farmer's daughter, Anne Hathaway, eight years older than he, and before his 21st birthday they had three children. Precisely how he entered the London theater world is not known, but by the early 1590's Shakespeare was evidently doing well as an actor and playwright. For two decades he wrote an average of two plays per year, while also acting (less and less frequently) and helping to manage his theater company, of which he had become part-owner.

He chose never to have his wife and children move to London, but the record of his property transactions -- and he was a prudent businessman -- indicates that he had long planned to return someday to Stratford. The terms of his will -- at first he left his wife of 33 years nothing at all and then belatedly bequeathed her his ''second-best bed'' -- do not suggest that the principal goal of his retirement was to spend more time in her company.

After patiently sifting through most of the available biographical traces, readers rarely feel closer to understanding how the playwright's achievements came about. If anything, Shakespeare often seems a drabber, duller person, and the inward springs of his art seem more obscure than ever.

The work is so astonishing, so luminous, that it seems to have come from a god and not a mortal, let alone a mortal of provincial origins and modest education.

And yet one of the prime characteristics of Shakespeare's art is the touch of the real. Even before a gifted actor makes Shakespeare's words come alive, those words contain the vivid presence of actual, lived experience.

The poet who noticed that the hunted, trembling hare was ''dew-bedabbled'' or who likened his stained reputation to the ''dyer's hand,'' the playwright who has a husband tell his wife that there is a purse ''in the desk/That's covered o'er with Turkish tapestry'' or who has a prince remember that his poor companion owns only two pairs of silk stockings, one of them peach-colored -- this artist was unusually open to the world and discovered the means to allow this world into his works.

To understand how he did this so effectively, it is important to look carefully, as scholars have long done, at his voracious reading and verbal artistry. But to understand who Shakespeare was, it is necessary to follow the verbal traces he left behind into the world to which he was so open.

...Shakespeare's Leap - New York Times

[haigha]

Thanks for the post, mD.

I always find it surprising when people make a fuss about WS not being able to write the plays. I must admit that I'm not that curious about WS the man and more interested in his works.

Do people say the same thing about Mozart and his music? Probably.

How about Epictetus? A slave who became one of the most influential Greek philosophers.

Last year, I read the complete WS plays in, as best we know, chronological order. I had read about a third of them previously. There were some duds and I found some new gems. In general, I don't like the histories. The exception being R III. My parents took me to the Olivier film version when I was about twelve and that stuck with me.

I haven't been to Stratford in England. I went to the Stratford in Ontario numerous times when I lived nearby. A fun series to watch if you think you'd enjoy a little intrigue and behind the scenes at a WS festival is:

Slings and Arrows

Typical Canadian production values and stars Mark "I'm crushing your head" McKinney

[realchef]

Thanks MD,

Really nice post.

We were fortunate to stumble upon the Globe by accident. What an eye opener that turned out to be.

[JCL]

Good post MD, thanks.

We lived 35 minutes from Stratford when we were in the UK. We went down quite a few weekends just to hang out.