Favorite Shakespearean movie?

[Tripe]

*cracks knuckles*

Ok I'm from Stratford and the dirty little secret is Basehart is spot on, we really don't know much about Shakes at all.

Eight years is "impossible swiftness"?  And why couldn't he have turned out that much work in that amount of time?  Maybe some of it he had half written when he was still at home with the wife and kids?  Maybe he could churn stuff out like Stephen King?

Doubtful since he went down to London the first time to get away from the wife and kids (and to avoid a nasty punishment for poaching, er probably)

And is it so surprising that we know so little about a commoner at that time until he became famous?  I mean, how much information can be dug up on anyone back then unless they were the type to never leave their farm for a minute?  And even then, do we actually know they were there?

Er Shakespeare really didn't become famous until he'd karked it, at least not for writing plays, amongst his fellow playwrights and avid theatre goers sure, but the theatre was one step above (possibly below) the whore house so he'd have wanted to keep that quite back in Stratford. The reason he's buried in Holy Trinity is because he had a bunch of money (and probably because his daughter married the town doctor)

Are they approaching this thinking that because we think he was a big deal now that people at the time recognized it and therefore kept careful notes about him for history?   Because what are the odds?

Nope we're going on the records of his life in London and Stratford, and the difference between them.we do know a bit about him like his dad being fined for piling dung too high outside their house and the fact he got his older girlfriend knocked up and had to marry her but after that it's a bit prosaic, tax entries and the like. I mean we don't even know for sure he even went to school. I mean we can surmise that since his father was on the town council by the time he was of school age he went tho KES but there's no evidence for it really (and considering how fastidious KES was even then combined with the tendency of KES students to carve their names in the walls, desks and about everything else at the school that can take a stylus impression, this is pretty odd)

Hell, I'll bet if they didn't even go that far back - Edgar Allen Poe, for example - they'll probably find that they can't account for all of his time.  And yet with all of the drugs and drink he's said to have done, no one doubts that he wrote all of what's attributed to him.

Actually that's a good example because his reputation as a meister imbiber has had a reevaluation of late, especially around the time of his death. I think Bryson's book more deals with the history of the image of shakes rather than hard and fast facts.

Shakespeare's reputation as a playwright is owed to perhaps three People(though others obviously helped it along the way):

1) Ben Jonson who not only talked up Will after his death but kicked in the money to publish the First Folio edition of his plays.
2) August Wilhelm Schlegel who saw in Shakespeare a perfect figure for German Romanticism and whose translations into German allowed Shakespeare to be embraced by Expressionists later one
3) Henry Irving who loved playing Shakespeare's protagonists and organized a grand pageant in Stratford celebrating Will, raising his profile in the popular imagination even further. Way to go Dracula! (Anyone who gets that rocks beyond the telling)


And I'm not saying his reputation is undeserved but without that trio, and others, we'd likely not remember him just as few remember Thomas Kyd or Thomas Dekker even Thomas Middleton (he's a little more remembered but he was so prolific and only a handful of his mostly excellent oeuvre are ever performed) or John Ford (I had to break the Thomas chain )

I've mentioned it before (probably in the What are you reading... thread) but if you want a nice accessible history of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical world, this is definitely worth finding:

[Plastic Self-Cleaning Duck]

So, I had to sit through studying "Macbeth" two years in a row (because god-forbid the teachers in my high school ever compared class plans) and all the history of this guy....and it's probably all crap?

Wonderful.

[Tripe]

Well no not really just the specific personal gossipy stuff, the literary stuff and the historical cultural info isn't crap.

Edit: then again i don't know what your teachers told you so, could be.