What I always found infuriating was the unbridled reverence for Shakespeare as this avatar of literary godhood. Shakespeare was a hack. A very good hack, but he was writing plays to pay his rent, not as some otherworldly font of the muse with a mainline connection to the soul of literature. He's got much more in common with Stephen King or Dan Brown, as a writer of popular, mainstream entertainment, than he does with critically acclaimed, popularly ignored capital L Literature.
MacBeth and Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet are great, timeless works, but Shakespeare turned out a lot of historical plays and comedies that are kind of meh. Particularly the comedies are pretty formulaic, if you read two or three of them in succession, and there's nearly as many thinly-veiled (save the archaic language) dick jokes and scatological humor as in a Judd Apatow film. Not to mention the slapstick elements, and foolery that doesn't necessarily show up in the printed stage directions, but undoubtedly played well to the groundlings at the Globe.
Reducing Shakespeare's dramatic productions to just the dusty words on the page does a disservice to the reality.
MacBeth and Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet are great, timeless works, but Shakespeare turned out a lot of historical plays and comedies that are kind of meh. Particularly the comedies are pretty formulaic, if you read two or three of them in succession, and there's nearly as many thinly-veiled (save the archaic language) dick jokes and scatological humor as in a Judd Apatow film. Not to mention the slapstick elements, and foolery that doesn't necessarily show up in the printed stage directions, but undoubtedly played well to the groundlings at the Globe.
Reducing Shakespeare's dramatic productions to just the dusty words on the page does a disservice to the reality.
It's alternate-history fiction, but I enjoyed Harry Turtledove's Ruled Brittania for putting a more human face on Shakespeare http://www.amazon.com/Ruled-Britannia-Harry-Turtledove/dp/04...