This is terribly exciting. I recently read Bill Bryson's short work "Shakespeare" and was amazed to find out how little is known about Shakespeare, & indeed most playwrights from that time.
Turns out one of the 2 images (prior to this) that show Shakespeare's appearance, the bust, was practically destroyed when it was erroneously whitewashed which removed most of the detail. (The caretaker believed the colors were not meant to be part of the bust.)
It's practically miraculous that something new was unearthed now, after people have been hunting for a couple hundred years.
Mysterious. Tragic. Historical. What more could you want?
Shakespeare is perhaps the most over-rated play write ever. Sure he wrote a few good plays - 'Hamlet', 'Othello', a few other tragedies of note. But most of his stuff was pretty mediocre - 'Measure for Measure' for instance - or outright sucked - 'Romeo and Juliet' perhaps being one of the worst plays ever conceived.
Compared to say, Sophocles of old, or, in our time, people like Harold Pinter or Edward Albee, Shakespeare was a hack pulp fiction paperback play write who wrote a small number of adequate plays and a large number of really poor plays. Even his best, 'Hamlet', was itself meandering and hard to decipher - Hamlet is crazy, but one thinks he is just pretending to be crazy, however, after a few viewings (or readings) one figures out he is actually in point of fact crazy (insane). But this point could have been made with more clarity and brevity which is why although the play is a great play, we cannot call its author a particularly great writer - good, to be sure, but not great, again, not compared to the really great ones of our day like Pinter.
The real tragedy is that high school students are forced to suffer through this hack's tortuous and obfuscated attempts at drama and pathos. Now that is a tragedy.
Romeo and Juliet is actually my favorite play to read of his. If you don't get it, it seems like slush. But his point is that adolescent romance is risky and dangerous, and that youth makes bad decisions. It's a critique of slush romance.
Pinter and Sophocles could not write as well as Shakespeare did. The man wrote absolute poetry, line by line. It's difficult stuff, but then, the best art always is. Find an actor capable of reading Shakespeare and the hair on the back of your neck will stand up.
That's not to say Pinter isn't good. (Sophocles isn't at all bad, but his writing dates terribly.) The problem with Pinter is that he doesn't write for aesthetic. A common misbelief is that Shakespeare only wrote in iambic pentameter and used weird language because his stuff is old. That's not the case. People in Shakespeare's day wrote plays that look and feel like normal plays. Shakespeare believed, though, that he could write plays so grandiose that they transcended everyday reality to become timeless. He wrote challenging lines to force people to dedicate themselves to his performances. His stuff is absolute poetry in a way that writing almost never is.
I hated Shakespeare when I was 16. I was lucky enough to get a teacher good enough to explain why Shakespeare is as acclaimed as he is. Since then I haven't said a bad word about him. He's so incredible that it's hard to look at his stuff objectively, so it's easy to criticize him unless you actually look at what he did.
"Shakespeare is perhaps the most over-rated play write ever"
If you want your criticism of master craftsmen of the English language to be taken seriously, perhaps you should start by learning basic English spelling, grammar and punctuation.
Yes, every one-off comment on a social news site should be proofread and edited at least 15 times before actually posting it.
Anyway, this sort of comment seems to be the bulk of most replies to comments that do a lot of criticizing here. It is pretty annoying. Perhaps it would be better for everyone if we just kept this sort of thing to ourselves, realizing that nobody is going to use perfect English for a quick post to HN.
> Yes, every one-off comment on a social news site should be proofread and edited at least 15 times before actually posting it.
Actually, yes, every comment should be proofread. Writing that contains typos, or is just inelegantly written, is harder to read and understand. When I write something on HN, it's likely to be read by a hundred or more people. So if I take 100 seconds to get my post right, and that saves each reader 1 second, it's a win overall.
To to otherwise is to proclaim that one is sloppy and careless, and that one's time is more important than others' time.
and that one's time is more important than others' time
I do think this, though.
And anyway, if it costs you one second of time because someone added a space inside the word "playwright", perhaps you need to work on tuning your error correction algorithm. I knew exactly what the OP meant.
Whether or not every comment should be proof-read is up for discussion.
However, comments making wild claims about the writing ability of a recognised leader in the field should be proof-read for obvious spelling disasters. Otherwise, you get what one could call an "epic fail"..
1) If he was such a hack, why have his plays endured and why has he managed to have such a strong effect on the English language? He coined at least a couple thousand new words, hundreds of which are in everyday use today.
> But this point could have been made with more clarity and brevity which is why although the play is a great play, we cannot call its author a particularly great writer
2) Humans love ambiguity because that's what tickles our evolutionary ATTENTION! sensors. Giving humans what they need to pay deep attention and want to experience something over and over is a sign of masterfulness.
> ... forced to suffer through this hack's tortuous and obfuscated attempts at drama and pathos
3) You're clearly not very in-touch with regular humans, because while you think it torturous and obfuscated, everybody else (for hundreds of years) has found it to be compelling and captivating... because what he captures is not some highfalutin intellectual concept, but everyday human crap. Which everyday humans find endlessly fascinating.
Turns out one of the 2 images (prior to this) that show Shakespeare's appearance, the bust, was practically destroyed when it was erroneously whitewashed which removed most of the detail. (The caretaker believed the colors were not meant to be part of the bust.)
It's practically miraculous that something new was unearthed now, after people have been hunting for a couple hundred years.
Mysterious. Tragic. Historical. What more could you want?