I've read Crystal's book, and was sorry to have missed "R & J" at the Globe last year, as I'm extremely keen to see one of these productions. And as Dame Fortune--the strumpet--would have it, the matinee of "The Winter's Tale" I was planning to attend on July 7 were cancelled (another story; but as bloody close to anything like that as I ever want to be, 'nuff said). Better luck next time, eh?

Anyway, M. Ted makes the important point above that Shakespeare was a working play*wright*, ie, one who "makes" plays as a livelihood. His job was to produce popular entertainment that would fill the playhouse, "put bums in seats", and please an audience ranging from the penny stinkards in the yard to the aristocrats in the Lords' seats, above and behind the players...affording a relatively poor view of the play, but giving the less fortunate an excellent view of THEM!

The fact that this highly successful commercial playwright also managed to produce what is arguably the most important body of work in the English canon is a testament to an extraordinary genius with an almost unimaginably broad appeal. I would argue (and often have done!) that old WS managed to say just about everything that needs saying about the human condition, and so definitively that many don't realise how often they quote him as an ordinary part of vernacular speech.

I do feel that the misrepresentation/interpretation of Shakespeare as somehow esoteric, highbrow and beyond the intellectual reach of any but some rarefied cognoscenti has done a terrible disservice to potential readers and audiences who, were they to put aside preconceived notions and simply read the text aloud, would find that he was, in fact writing in (early) modern English, and is agood deal more accessible to Joe--or Josephine--Average than, say, William Faulkner!

'O, for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention...!

~D