Mail Online: It sounds like the sort of character who would have been deeply unpopular in one of his plays.
William Shakespeare was a 'ruthless businessman' and tax dodger, researchers have claimed.
Although he wrote plays that championed the rights of the poor and the needy, archived documents show the playwright was actually a wealthy landowner repeatedly dragged before the courts and fined for illegally stockpiling food and threatened with jail for evading taxes.
2 comments:
Wow this really makes me rethink shakespeare. It is a cool concept to think that most of his plays had to do with his life. I knew that he had a son Hamnet and so Hamlet was based off his dead son but I had no idea that in fact other plays were based off his life. I think this definitely lays a larger ground work to investigating his life. Maybe Macbeth was a confession of guilt that he was doing illegal activities and was treasonous to the king or even that shakespeare lived in Verona. I think that there defiantly should be more investigation into his life but doing it through the themes and events of his play.
WHAT did I just read? We all know Shakespeare was a dodgy character to begin with, but I wasn't thinking Tax dodgy! But seriously, I think it's funny that his plays were so distant from the real Shakespeare...I think that disqualifies all of high school english. I think that also kind of opens up an opportunity to interpret his plays differently in how we portray the characters; were in the shape of the author or not? Romeo and Juliet is a good example...
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