AMERICAN THEATRE: What we’re going to discuss today is the controversial question of Shakespeare’s personality, or Shakespeare’s identity—whether you can possibly reach it through the plays and the poems. Recently there’ve been a number of books, most prominently Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World, that have tried to draw a portrait of Shakespeare, who he was and what he thought.
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I find our obsession with Shakespeare fascinating. So many people have so many opinions about him and most of them lie on two ends of the spectrum of either hating him or loving him. That is why I am always willing to read articles like this because it further points to our society's fascination with Shakespeare. For the most part, I found this article extremely interesting because it asked an essential question about how we separate art from an artist. If it matters how much we know about the artist, what does that information do for us, and how it influences the work? It was extremely interesting to think about, I enjoyed the idea that I might not matter what he was like or what his actual opinion was like, in order to absorb his work. I wonder how well this idea could apply to other artists and I am not 100% sure I would agree with the idea that you can separate the artist from their lives/choices. But nevertheless, it was interesting food for thought. The only part I did not like about this article was when the author said: “he wrote some of the most extraordinary, most genial women characters” I think where some of Shakespeare's faults lie is within his depiction of women in his stories.
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