William Shakespeare | The Guardian: He was an actor, as well as the greatest dramatist of all time, but no one has been able to name with certainty a single role that William Shakespeare performed himself. Now a leading scholar has concluded from linguistic analysis that Shakespeare played an obsessively jealous husband in a 1598 drama by fellow playwright Ben Jonson.
2 comments:
Okay, guys, let’s not get too excited. While it would be cool to know for sure some roles Shakespeare has played, I don’t think these small line similarities are necessarily the strongest indicator that this was the case in this particular instance. After all, Shakespeare isn’t exactly squeaky clean on the subject of stealing from other people. His Antony and Cleopatra bears striking resemblances to Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans. Even such a famous title as Romeo and Juliet was based on some other guy’s poem, which was based on some other guy’s translation of some other guy’s story. Not that I necessarily fault him for that; so much of art is imitation, and Shakespeare definitely had a way of making great works later. And this is an interesting theory, and it’s absolutely worth considering the influence of Shakespeare’s life as an actor. But for my part, I wouldn’t call it proven.
I think that this was an interesting read, but perhaps a bit overzealous. I think that when looking back in history, it’s easy to see connections between things and ignore the realities of life on a human plane of existence. While I can understand the logic that was created here, my logic is much simpler. Could these phrases be similar because they were common in modern (for the time) vernacular? Was this just Shakespeare writing his Elizabethan equivalent to “slay” or “adulting” or something like a double negative? People could still talk and exist outside of plays back then, and that, to me, seems to be a far more likely probability of what is being peddled here. It is a constant source of annoyance for me when people get so caught up in the academia and the dissection of things that they forget that people were and will always be people.
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