Amph "Not of an age, but for all time" - the William Shakespeare thread

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Simply put, he was, and is, the greatest playwright the English language has ever known. For four hundred years English literature has puzzled over him, conjectured over him, reinterpreted him, censored him, tried to imitate him, tried to usurp him, but Shakespeare endures, beguiling one generation after the next against all the remorseless tides of time. His work and influence ranges from the sublime to the questionable, from the heights of Harold Bloom's hyperbole that Shakespare "invented the human" to the fifty productions of The Merchant of Venice the Nazi regime put on ahead of World War Two. His themes and concerns stride from the specific to the universal.

Shakespeare is forever hidden from us, a silhouette visible only in the shadows of his own plays and poems. To go Good Will hunting is a hard and hungry journey. None of his plays survive written in his own hand, and of the plays we have, his greatest have multiple versions, multiple possible Hamlets and Lears to leave us wondering what his real theme was. We do not know exactly when he was born; there are those who cannot even bear the thought he ever lived in Stratford-upon-Avon. Imposter after imposter has been proposed across the centuries as his true face, and even a brief look at the textual and historical analysis that has gone into trying to nail down his true texts and true intentions staggers the intellect, makes almost a Heisenbergian suggestion that there is a finite limit that we can ever know about Shakespeare, and that finite limit is much lower than one might expect. But for all that, his silhouette remains, indelible: a voice so distinct, so arresting on the mind and heart that to describe something as 'Shakespearean' is to describe truth: you cannot describe it, but you know it when you see it.

A cry of suffering starvation swells, in English literature and beyond, with every new shard of evidentiary flotsam that Good Will wrote more plays than those we hold today. This hunger in part fuels the legends that abound about Shakespeare -- whether he was a Catholic, whether he was a Puritan, whether he was a gnostic, whether he had no religion at all, whether he hated kings, whether he adored them, whether he gazumped one of his fellow actors in bedding a lady first, whether he wrote an entire play just to raise a middle finger to Elizabeth the First.

This thread is where we discuss Shakespeare's plays and poems, and discuss Shakespeare himself.

What are your favourite performances of Shakespeare? What are your favourite plays - performed on film or stage, for as I shall argue later, film has the potency to make Shakespeare even more powerful than he was? Who are your favourite actors playing Shakespearean roles? Who, dare we ask, is your favourite Shakespearean character? What strange and beautiful exegeses have you derived from reading or seeing one of his plays, what little hidden jewels have you found in a turn of phrase from Good Will four hundred years dead? How do you read Shakespeare? How do you play Shakespeare? Here all such questions are welcome, and we'll be turning to them in due course. But, seeing as this is, after all, a prologue, we might leave the last word to the bard himself, in a role the bard, according to legend, is meant to have played:

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend​

The brightest heaven of invention,​

A kingdom for a stage, princes to act​

And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!​

Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,​

Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,​

Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire​

Crouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all,​

The flat unraised spirits that have dared​

On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth​

So great an object: can this cockpit hold​

The vasty fields of France? or may we cram​

Within this wooden O the very casques​

That did affright the air at Agincourt?​

O, pardon! since a crooked figure may​

Attest in little place a million;​

And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,​

On your imaginary forces work.​

Suppose within the girdle of these walls​

Are now confined two mighty monarchies,​

Whose high upreared and abutting fronts​

The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:​

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;​

Into a thousand parts divide on man,​

And make imaginary puissance;​

Think when we talk of horses, that you see them​

Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;​

For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,​

Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,​

Turning the accomplishment of many years​

Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,​

Admit me Chorus to this history;​

Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,​

Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.​

-- Henry V, Prologue.​

 

I like this. I have to go to work now, but I will be back to make an actual contribution.

 

I don't know about favorite performances. My experience has been mostly of the Shakespeare in the Park or Shakespeare in the High School or Shakespeare starring Mel Gibson variety.

The great thing about Shakespeare is that his text almost always upstages the staging. It overwhelms the mediocrity of the people trying to perform it. The parts I love most of Shakespeare are when he reminds us of what he's doing and how good he is at it. Not just the overt "all the world's a stage" lines and the obvious plays within plays, but the more subtle theater tropes: Portia disguised as a judge in Merchant of Venice, a counterfeit jurist staging a flagrant show trial and rendering a fraudulent verdict in a tragic, outrageous miscarriage of due process, straining the quality of mercy quite a bit, yet Shakespeare sells it with such prodigious bravado and magical cynicism that the audience buys it as a shining example of justice.

And of course there's "Brutus is an honorable man," held up as an example of persuasive speech, even though there is no evidence that such a speech could ever persuade anyone, but Shakespeare makes the idea of inciting a mob by turning the tables on an accuser through the deft deployment of biting irony so persuasive and compelling that we allow the Forum scene to serve as a cautionary tale about the fickle nature of popular opinion and how easily weak minds can be controlled, which is not entirely a bad thing, so long as we understand that it's us, the theater audience that's being manipulated. Shakespeare is such a good stage magician that he can bring us behind the curtain, open up his workshop to us, spread out the blueprints and walk us through how the trick works, and then still fool us.

 

Richard III continues to be my favorite. Maybe because I was oldest when I read it or because it was genuinely better than the others, I don't know.

 

he's aight

 

Hamlet was the first play of his that I read and I read it only a couple of years after losing my own father. That really brought the play home to me and, to this day, I argue that it's really a play about grief, as much as it's about any one single thing. People question Hamlet's actions and psychology, but to me, it was (literally) painfully obvious at the time and remains so; he's unhinged by grief. It's still my pick for greatest play ever written.

I'll jump on "Brutus is an honorable man" since it was brought up above. I really think that, even for all the great bits in Hamlet and Lear and Richard III and so many others, if I was going to memorize one speech from Shakespeare, it would be that one. It's just so damned amazing to me.

I find a particularly interesting question to be: is there a Shakespearean play that you just actively dislike? For me, it's The Tempest. I've seen it performed live and read it numerous times; it just . . . doesn't work. I just don't think it's a good play.

 

This is a really interesting take on the trial scene from Merchant, one that I hadn't encountered before and one that might actually take the sting out of, or make more interesting, what is a pretty distasteful play in many respects.

Beginning an epic digression: in answer to Rogue1-and-a-half above, Merchant is probably the one Shakespeare play I can't abide, even though it was the first one I ran into back in high school and most of the implications went above my head at the time. Merchant is an important work because it deflates a lot of bardolatory along the lines that the Bard Can Do No Wrong. It's firmly anti-semitic, so much so that Ron Rosenbaum, in his gorgeous book The Shakespeare Wars, cites some Shakespearean directors who assert The Merchant of Venice is unplayable to a modern audience. Their view is that the play stands in the same category to Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will -- technically accomplished, but causing cringes of revulsion if you ever contemplated watching it or putting it on as written. Again, in a shudderworthy display of Shakespeare's genius, some Jewish scholars point out that Shakespeare manages with Shylock's first line to summon every distasteful stereotype ever applied to a Jew. Three words, especially when played by drawing out the sibilants so that Shylock is almost hissing, as he does through many of his monologues in the play: "Thrrrrreeeee thhhhoussssand duuuucatsssssssss."

I think Shakespeare's genius was such that the play really is a binary experience, that you either play it as written or don't play it at all. Given the way its plot is structured, you simply can't rehabilitate Shylock by cutting a pound of text here or there. As Shakespeare wrote him, he is a pit of motiveless evil in Iago mode, and that evil is tied irrevocably to religious hate: "I hate him for he is a Christian." Rosenbaum proceeds in his book to rip hard the last attempt to rehabilitate Shylock -- Michael Radford's film, starring Al Pacino as Shylock and Jeremy Irons as Antonio -- basically indicating that every change made to Shylock actually makes the anti-semitism of the play worse rather than better, because no matter how hard you try to play Shylock as just a devoted family man with some fatal flaws, Shylock still -- like it or not, representing Judaism as a whole in the play -- deliberately pulls a knife prepatory to cutting a pound of flesh from a bare-chested, Christ-like Antonio in the courtroom scene. Shylock is not Macbeth and Shakespeare has written him such that he will never be so. It's even worse when the film points out that, Shylock having been made anusim, forced to convert to Christianity, the Jewish ghetto in Venice would have refused him entry -- the implication being that Shylock's own fellow Jews are cruel enough to reject him under his tormented circumstances or an even darker implication being left that because his scheme to kill a Christian failed, he's somehow too incompetent to be Jewish. Michael Radford tried to say the film was just about two cultures that don't understand one another, but if so, he still failed miserably because you can't rehabilitate this particular play. It is what it is.

But I digress. Getting back to Jabba's point that the trial is in fact a show trial, I will have to grit my teeth and look back through the play for some more suggestions that Shakespeare in fact was on Shylock's side or that he was being more equivocal about Christian/Jewish relations than the play first appears. There is a minority of academic views that suggests what Shakespeare was really having a crack at in the play was the religious doctrine of Satisfaction, i.e. that Christ had to die because God's justice had to be satisfied to put it in short terms. Certainly Shylock's Old Testament demands for his pound of flesh as contracted are played up in this way, and it probably is consistent with the trial being a mockery of justice and thus a mockery of the very concept of satisfaction.

 

That's a great exploration of Merchant. It's one that I . . . *gulp* haven't read! I know all the particulars, of course, but as far as just sitting down and reading it, I haven't gotten to it yet.

 

I have yet to actually read Love's Labours Lost, Two Gentlemen of Verona, or Othello. Or several other Shakespeare plays. Please don't hate me, I just love Shakespeare on the synecdoche of what I have read or seen.

 

Aren't there are lot of people that argue Merchant was "fair for its day"? That is, Shakespeare was actually being less anti-Semitic than most of his contemporaries (e.g., humanizing Shylock with the famous "if you prick us, do we not bleed?" line)? It's still ****ing awful in its portrayal of Jewish people, of course. It's just an argument I heard in high school and I didn't really continue my Shakespeare education beyond that so I don't really know if it's taken seriously.

 

Seems to depend who you talk to. Some people put an implication on the lines that it's Shylock being disingenuous in that he really is motiveless in evil and is just using those comparisons to try and get some undeserved sympathy. The speech is one made when one of Antonio's buddies, Salanio, is asking whether Shylock is really going to go through with his demand for a pound of flesh should Antonio's ships founder. (At that point Shylock does not know that the ships are lost and that he can collect on his contract.) Certainly the general thinking is that this quote is intended to try and humanise Shylock somewhat, but it takes a fair amount of negative capability to square that with some of his asides, espeically early in the play. And the lines can be given a cold, remorseless reading -- ironically, consider the (great Shakespearean actor) Christopher Plummer's murderous use of the lines in Star Trek VI, albeit well out of its original context.

There's also that the "prick us, do we not bleed" lines come when Shylock's blood is well up after learning his daughter has run off with a Christian. And right after that speech, the stereotypes start up again, immediately:

SHYLOCK
How now, Tubal! what news from Genoa? hast thou
found my daughter?

TUBAL
I often came where I did hear of her, but cannot find her.

SHYLOCK
Why, there, there, there, there! a diamond gone,
cost me two thousand ducats in Frankfort! The curse
never fell upon our nation till now; I never felt it
till now: two thousand ducats in that; and other
precious, precious jewels. I would my daughter
were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear!
would she were hearsed at my foot, and the ducats in
her coffin! No news of them? Why, so: and I know
not what's spent in the search: why, thou loss upon
loss! the thief gone with so much, and so much to
find the thief; and no satisfaction, no revenge:
nor no in luck stirring but what lights on my
shoulders; no sighs but of my breathing; no tears
but of my shedding.

TUBAL
Yes, other men have ill luck too: Antonio, as I
heard in Genoa,--

SHYLOCK
What, what, what? ill luck, ill luck?

TUBAL
Hath an argosy cast away, coming from Tripolis.

SHYLOCK
I thank God, I thank God. Is't true, is't true?

TUBAL
I spoke with some of the sailors that escaped the wreck.

SHYLOCK
I thank thee, good Tubal: good news, good news!
ha, ha! where? in Genoa?

TUBAL
Your daughter spent in Genoa, as I heard, in one
night fourscore ducats.

SHYLOCK
Thou stickest a dagger in me: I shall never see my
gold again: fourscore ducats at a sitting!
fourscore ducats!

The implications being that Shylock -- and, by implication, all Jews, since Tubal, too, is Jewish and doesn't for a second remonstrate with Shylock for his views -- cares more about the money spent than his own daughter, that he would rather have his daughter dead at his own feet and his money back than the other way round. The news of Shylock's daughter is weaved in with Antonio's misfortunes, it might be noted. Such as that speech humanises Shylock, the rest of the play relentlessly machine-guns that humanity.

EDIT: And on reflection, that scene may well be replete with attempts at really cringeworthy laughs at Shylock's expense (literally and figuratively). Consider Tubal's line "I often came where I did hear of her." Shakespeare is well-known for his double-entendres and innuendo, and Merchant is commonly thought a romantic drama. There's the possibility that Tubal is saying, in a roundabout way, that he's been hearing of Shylock's daughter in Genoa's brothels: "I often came, where I did hear of her." Which throws mud at Tubal for visiting the brothels and arguably Shylock for having a whore for a daughter. It is consistent with how Tubal heard of Antonio's ships foundering: from sailors, who generally were likely to hit up the first brothels they could see when they got to shore. Big belly laugh for the audience, complete with a rimshot (if they had rimshots back then...)

And then consider the last lines: remembering that some philosophies of playing Shakespeare include that you take a brief pause at the end of each line, Shylock's last line is again ramming home that he cares more about his money than his daughter. "Thou stickest a dagger in me: i shall never see my--gold, again!" Rather than any remorse and saying he shall never see his daughter again.

EDIT, ACT I, SCENE II: In fact Tubal may well be coldly indifferent to Shylock's plight; he dismisses Shylock's grief over his money with a "Yes, other men have ill luck too," and then makes with the smartass when Shylock asks "where? In Genoa?" and Tubal hits him with more details about his daughter rather than details about Antonio.

 

Shakespeare was probably just like Michael Bay in that he wanted to entertain people and make some money in the process. But there's a sense with Merchant Shakespeare is playing to the masses while at the same time subverting the proceedings ever so slightly. I'll take Merchant of Venice over Lessing's Nathan Der Weise any day of the week.

Not too long ago I reread Romeo & Juliet to cleanse myself after having rented that awful Hailee Steinfeld adaptation. I was shocked at how deeply anti-young love and anti-youth it is at heart. No movie adaptation to date really seems to have captured the play's essence.

 

Things to think about while reading Shakespeare

Yes, I am double posting here, but these are some notes I picked up from Rosenbaum relating to Shakespeare generally. Let's remember that, for all intents and purposes, we are never going to get back to how Shakesepare truly intended or truly ran his plays. The best historic (some might say archaeological) arguments relating to how Shakespeare "did" his work or "put on" his plays are, ultimately conjecture because even our earliest texts of his plays are reheated recollections issued by his contemporaries or friends, some of which are the Elizabethan equivalent of recording an orchestra on a smuggled-in iPhone for quality or fidelity to the original performance. Every argument about what is the "right" or "wrong" way to play Shakesepare is necessarily conjectural. Having said all of that, these points are worth thinking about when sizing up a Shakespeare play:

1. Unless you're reading an Everyman edition of Shakespeare's works, and even then, you're really reading a translation of the work into contemporary English - with all that entails. As Darth Guy once pointed out to my chagrin, Shakespeare wrote in early modern English. Very early, as it turns out - as in, when "modern" English as we term it was roughly one hundred years old or so. Now, leaving aside that translation into modern terms is fraught with opportunity for error, one of the most significant things about that period of the English language was that word meanings were what textual scholars often call unanchored -- that is, particular words in some cases had not actually achieved a rigid definition, that indeed it was ordinary if not expected for certain words to carry or imply a multiplicity of meanings, particularly on the stage where the use of language was entirely verbal. For example, take our line from Tubal above: "I spoke with some of the sailors that escaped the wreck." Where it gets interesting is that the word wreck could be substituted in the English of the time for the words wreak or rack. Try one of the alternate words in that line and the line itself becomes more than just a statement of where the information came from, it says something of the fierceness of the disaster.

Another more complex and intriguing difference along these lines is the difference in differences spoken by the eponymous character in Richard II. A preface to Henry IV, Richard II is being forced into a position where he must resign the crown in Act IV, Scene I:

Bullingbrooke [Henry Bolingbroke, in other words, i.e. Henry IV who shall be]: Are you contented to resign the crown?
King Richard [II]: Ay, no, no ay; for I must nothing be/Therefore no no, for I resign to thee.

But different versions of the play read:

King Richard: I, no; no, I; for I must nothing be...

The significance being unanchored language again -- Ay was substitutable for I (and indeed substitutable for eye in some cases). But we have a different cast put on the line. Rosenbaum goes pretty deep into this subject and calls it a meditation on the first person, on the very nature of being - but depending on how you substitute the Ays for the Is you have different readings and different implications in the line. (Let's not get into the fact no is substitutable for know in some readings of the line!) And this, indeed, is one of Shakespeare's most potent talents as a playwright: his capacity for ambiguity, his capacity to leave deeper meanings in his text. Someone once said that the value of a piece of art is in how much it repays attention; Shakespeare does that again and again by devices like this.

As a result, most modern Shakespearean texts are invariably translations -- the writer of the text basically plomping for one particular intepretation or reading in the same way that a potential electromagnetic wavefront collapses to an actual wave when the observer comes into the picture.

2. There's a reason the lines are in verse for the most part. Basically, if you know how a sonnet works, you more or less know how to open up and read Shakespeare's plays. Most of Shakespeare's plays -- with some notable exceptions for effect, like Lady Macbeth's walking nightmare -- are in iambic pentameter: five paired beats with an emphasis on the even beats: daDUM, daDUM, daDUM, daDUM, daDUM. Thus Shakespeare's most famous sonnet, which could be turned into the words of a dance: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate...

This pattern also tells Shakespearen actors where the emphases in the lines are to be placed. Take Richard II's line: I no, no I, for I must nothing be. Therefore, no no, for I resign to thee. And because of the word choices Shakespeare makes, Richard's second line generates a real weariness you can just about hear.

Where it gets interesting is that some of the better Shakespearean directors -- Sir Peter Hall, Trevor Nunn -- also intuited that at the end of each line there should be what they call a 'sense pause' -- a sort of flickering pause when the speaker is represented as thinking up what he's going to say next. Richard's line gives us that cue since Richard follows his odd meditation about nothing with the conclusion: 'therefore, no no, for I resign to thee.' The emphasis on this theory is that the lines are meant to be run over lightly (although not singsong) and thus made more as Shakespeare intended them to be read, more like dialogue - since we do, unconsciously, think up what we're going to say before we say it. Nunn and Hall intuit that there's maybe only fifty or so actors left in the world who actually understand this manner of approach to the text, and that it's a major reason so many Shakespearean plays are mediocre or the players do not rise above their text.

More later, perhaps...

 

Baz Luhrmann? I know his version is controversial, but some people say it catches the spirit if not the letter of the play. What do you feel/think is missing from that one?

 

Last year, I read through my giant complete Shakespeare I had left over from college. It was certainly an experience. I'm not a theater guy at all, but I've seen a couple performances, and more movie adaptations. I enjoyed the recent Richard II from The Hollow Crown, and Branagh's Much Ado was fun and helped me get more out of the play, I think. The old Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet was pretty good, too. Certainly better than Luhrmann's garish pile of ****. Throne of Blood is a great adaptation, too.

Honestly, of the Shakespeare I'd read before I did my big read-through, I didn't enjoy that much. I liked Much Ado and Romeo and Juliet, but Antony and Cleopatra, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, and The Tempest didn't do anything for me. Rereading, though, I've come around on all of them (I guess this is where I defend The Tempest to Rogue . . . what don't you think works?). Except A Midsummer Night's Dream, really -- Shakespeare's comedies still don't quite click with me as much. I think a lot of it is that the conventions of Elizabethan comedy just don't appeal to me much, and a lot of the wordplay and such tends to get obscured by time. They also tend to be Shakespeare's earlier work, and I think his work in other genres just tends to be richer. I don't hate them, I generally enjoy them, even if my appreciation is often more academic, but you're not really going to see me arguing they're great in the same way as the histories and tragedies.

As for favorite plays, I'd have to say Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing rank pretty high. With Romeo and Juliet, I think it's one of Shakespeare's funniest plays, actually, and the way I read it -- much like Jabba, as a play that's skeptical of Romeo and Juliet's youthful foolishness -- I think it's doing really interesting things with the subject matter. Much Ado is just funny, my favorite of his comedies. I like the histories, especially the Lancaster/York plays, my favorite probably being Henry IV. Hamlet is pretty striking, and Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear are all quality tragedies. Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra are pretty good too. I also found Troilus and Cressida pretty interesting.

For least favorite, probably the really early comedies, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and before, just don't have much to recommend them. Titus Andronicus is really pretty lousy. Timon of Athens is limited by not really being finished and having a dramatic structure that doesn't quite work. Pericles, Prince of Tyre is one that didn't move me, either.

 

I watched 3 versions of R&J with my daughter a few months back to help her get a handle on the play she was reading for English (first year high school). It was great, all three adaptations very different, and all her helping her interpret the plot and nuances of the book.

Also... "How could this have happened? We started out like Romeo and Juliet, but instead it ended in tragedy".

 

The difference between reading R&J in my teens and again in my 40s was a revelation to me about how much I've changed over the course of more than two decades. There was an article in NYT this week about the relationship between increased fear and risk taking in teens, but Shakespeare blew the lid off that 400 years ago, knew that an adult perspective was nearly powerless against the raging energy of youth. He takes this ageless ideal of young love and twists it, but does it again so cleverly that we barely know we've been had. Or it takes us nearly 30 years to figure it out. Or is that just me?

 

It's not just you, and it's not just R+J either: I think it's pretty commonly accepted nobody gets all of the implications from a Shakespeare play the first time round -- if indeed you can get all of the implications over the course of a lifetime, as some of the more esoteric scholars suggest. As it is, Shakespeare wrote plays that arrested and appealed to multiple classes of English society, bottom to top, at once since the Globe had areas for the commons and the gentry to watch a show at the same time. As Peter Bloom said, whatever else you learn about drama, if you lose a section of the audience, you're dead. And Shakespeare didn't get his appeal because he hit the lowest common denominator button every time. You said Shakespeare was a bit like Michael Bay - he wanted to write crowdpleasers and make some money. The terrifying part with Shakespeare is that, with successive readings and viewings, a Shakespeare play tends to go from being a Michael Bay experience to J.J. Abrams to William Goldman to Orson Welles to ****ing Ingmar Bergman and beyond depending on how much you think about or study what he's doing.

 

I still keep my massive Riverside Shakespeare next to the bed and dive into it whenever the mood strikes. I always learn something new. and when I'm not in the mood it easily holds my water glass, my iPhone, my glasses, a book light, my wallet, and scattered loose change.

 

I have never enjoyed a Shakespeare play.


I get that he is a MAJOR influence on literature and storytelling and it is understandable that he be lauded the way he is but I just don't like his work.


I put this down to the god awful way he was taught in my school and any attempt to read his work since has been a futile effort.

 

Is the thread title from Shakespeare?.. Reminds me of the closing words from TCW's last ep: "Not victory in the Clone Wars, but victory for all time".

 

I know a few of you believe that doom n gloom is the sum total of my persona. Hate to feed that, but still... my favorite passage in Shakespeare:

For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been depos’d, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping kill’d,
All murthered—for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with looks;
Infusing him with self and vain conceit
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and, humour’d thus
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores thorough his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence; throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty;
For you have but mistook me all this while.
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends—subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?

It is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about above - a sly call to the playwright's own theatricality, the very purpose of drama, and its process. More than anything it is a soliloqy about how the dramatist earns his living, disguised by this somewhat petulant and wistful rant

 

Had to read King Lear in senior year of high school, that one's probably my favorite of his works that I've read (R+J, Midsummer Night's Dream, Merchant of Venice, Hamlet).

 

How were you so scarred? Serious question, god knows high school (and first year university) put me off all manner of classics, but fortunately Shakespeare wasn't one of them. Can you elucidate further why Shakespeare doesn't seem to work?

TCW ripped off Ben Jonson, then, which perhaps is not such a grievous sin given most of Western literature has been ripping off Shakespeare since he kicked the bucket too. All seriousness, the quote comes from Ben Jonson's preface to the First Folio, a 1623 collection published by two of Shakespeare's friends and fellow actors which included all but two of the plays currently recognised as Shakespeare's. In the preface, Jonson pens a poem in which Shakespeare is hailed as "not of an age, but for all time". This acclamation is significant since during his lifetime Jonson was a significant critic of Shakespeare, that criticism not a little driven by the fact that Jonson was classically educated and trained and sceptical of the masses, while Shakespeare had, as Jonson put it, "small Latine, and lesse Greeke" -- but Jonson eventually bowed to Shakespeare's natural genius nonetheless, and indeed Shakespeare's skill: Yet I must not give Nature all: Thy Art / My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part. History, I would say, has judged: Jonson is still seen as a great dramatist, but as with all other English playwrights, he is still a second -- a distant second -- to Shakespeare.