M.Ted:

Well, as you like it, if you do, that's fine. ;-)

Personally, I simply do not like conspiracy theories, even for "an age of conspiracy" -- we can call it that now because the conspiracies of the time have evarporated over the last half millennium, all the people who had a vested interest in maintaining the conspiracies are long since dead, and we can say with confidence who was plotting against whom and why. The intricate plots have become as transparent as tissue paper in the rain... All except for this one. Do you really think that 500 hundred years of theaters owners and Drama and English teacher have that big a vested interest in maintaining a fiction?

You may very well be correct: that W.S. was not a single man, and/or was not a low-born man. All I have to go on is my Pelican collection of Complete Shakespeare, and after reading (and rereading, in some cases) a sizeable portion of the words printed therein, I, personally, find it easier to believe they were all written by the same person over a lifetime, and that that person spent more time among the lower and middle classes than he did in court.

Whether my conclusion is correct or not certainly won't stop me from enjoying those words in the future, or recommending them to others, so it's all a bit of a moot point.

Kim C. --

Couldn't agree more on your assessment of R&J. Last time I saw it was an outdoor performance under a tent. The production and acting were all fine, but it struck me that there were several holes in the plot you could drive a coach and four through -- The main one being that the friar didn't simply tell Juliet's parents that she was already married to Romeo, and that no man could put them assunder, rather than handing a pre-pubescent girl a vial of poison. Of course, the plot wasn't original to the play W.S. was adapting a renaisance version of a Harlequin novel. The skill level is higher than in earlier plays attributed to him, but it was harldly the peak of its genre.

If it were up to me, and I had to choose one W.S. play to teach for school, this wouldn't be the one. ... If I didn't have to worry about the schoolboard censoring me, I'd go for one of the comedies, with the bawdy jokes to catch the kids' attention. Otherwise, I'd go for Lear. Downright depressing at the end, but supurbly written, with a decent gore factor to make up for the lack of sex, and the whole plot revolves around a father not understanding his kid... which I suspect the kids could relate to.