06-04-2011, 06:44 AM
The concept of plagiarism (and copyright) simply didn't exist in Shakespeare's day. There was no stigma attached to basically stealing a plot from someone else and adapting it to a play.
Shakespeare didn't steal sonnets either -- he wrote shite ones, but Spenser had already partly adapted the sonnet to poor old rhyme-challenged English (Spenserian interlocking quatrains) and Shakespeare really just took the next, easy step and allowed more rhymes. At the time, sonnets were springing up all over England -- the Earl of Surrey in particular was mad for them, and Shakespeare (desperate to suck up to the aristocracy) could hardly ignore the trend. Sonnets were being written in hexameter, or pentameter with a variety of meters and rhyme schemes. Bill the Bard just wrote 154 of the bloody things so we get stuck with the idea that he was some kind of sonnet god.
As to education, I think we all get a bit hung up on that now that it's compulsory, but plenty of "uneducated" folk became writers throughout history. Learning, when it's not seen as a right, is a privilege treasured and anyone who found a willing patron would of course apply themselves to achieve excellence.
Guaranteed, he wasn't Kit Marlowe. Marlowe was successful in his own right, with quite a distinctive style, and the fact that he's famous mostly for being Shakespeare's contemporary is a little bit sad. Hoffman's desperate desire to paint Marlowe as some Elizabethan gas-station-Elvis is pathetic.
He might, of course, have had quite a bit of help from his clever missus.
Young Will was a playwriting flop
So to get to the cream of the crop
This tights-wearing man
Left the writing to Ann
While he learned to cook, dust and mop
Shakespeare didn't steal sonnets either -- he wrote shite ones, but Spenser had already partly adapted the sonnet to poor old rhyme-challenged English (Spenserian interlocking quatrains) and Shakespeare really just took the next, easy step and allowed more rhymes. At the time, sonnets were springing up all over England -- the Earl of Surrey in particular was mad for them, and Shakespeare (desperate to suck up to the aristocracy) could hardly ignore the trend. Sonnets were being written in hexameter, or pentameter with a variety of meters and rhyme schemes. Bill the Bard just wrote 154 of the bloody things so we get stuck with the idea that he was some kind of sonnet god.
As to education, I think we all get a bit hung up on that now that it's compulsory, but plenty of "uneducated" folk became writers throughout history. Learning, when it's not seen as a right, is a privilege treasured and anyone who found a willing patron would of course apply themselves to achieve excellence.
Guaranteed, he wasn't Kit Marlowe. Marlowe was successful in his own right, with quite a distinctive style, and the fact that he's famous mostly for being Shakespeare's contemporary is a little bit sad. Hoffman's desperate desire to paint Marlowe as some Elizabethan gas-station-Elvis is pathetic.
He might, of course, have had quite a bit of help from his clever missus.
Young Will was a playwriting flop
So to get to the cream of the crop
This tights-wearing man
Left the writing to Ann
While he learned to cook, dust and mop
It could be worse