Monday, December 03, 2018
Friday Essay: 50 Shades Of Shakespeare--How The Bard Sexed Things Up
The Theatre Times: It’s hard to imagine a more literary or successful author than William Shakespeare, formerly of Stratford-upon-Avon. Around the world, his plays are widely taught and expensively performed. Journalists and scholars look to him for social and political insights. In Washington DC, notionally the capital of the free world, the Folger Shakespeare Library stands near the Capitol building and the Library of Congress as a grand memorial to the Immortal Bard.
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Even though this article chronicles the "cleaning up" of Shakespeare's work from his earlier, more erotic work, there is still a lot lude and sex-based content in Shakespeare's plays. As many people have pointed out, Shakespeare was not a nobleman writing to pass the time, he was a working writer and actor and he had to earn his money somehow. As anyone knows, sex sells. Shakespeare's plays, especially in his early days had to be turned out quickly, which is why many of his plays (especially the comedies) have essentially the same plot structure. It is fascinating to me that Shakespeare is seen as old, respectable, and even boring when the plays are in fact full of sex, brutal violence, and lots of drama and action. I would love to know whether Shakespeare hold the holy spot in our cultural consciousness if his writings had been left untouched with all the bawdy content they originally contained.
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