Pedant's Return Why the Things You Think Are Wrong Are Right

Chapter One Art and Literature PLAYWRIGHT WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE STOLE HIS PLOTLINES The tradesman's son who, in 1578, left school at the age of fourteen and who married at eighteen (after getting a local girl pregnant) is nowadays regarded as the greatest dramatist of all time. Therefore, as Andrew Dickson writing in The Rough Guide to Shakespeare says, "It can be a surprise to learn how much Shakespeare depended on sources and allegories for his plays and poems." John Michell, author of Who Wrote Shakespeare?, tells us that Shakespearean scholars have always admitted that "Shakespeare borrowed freely from contemporary as well as ancient authors." Said contemporaries of the up-and-coming playwright also noticed this tendency to borrow. One such was Ben Jonson, whom the Encyclopaedia Britannica describes as the "second most important English dramatist" of the time. Jonson authored an epigram called On Poet-Ape that tells of a fellow writer who "would pick and glean, / Buy the reversion of old plays, now grown / To a little wealth, and credit on the scene." Jonson goes on to complain that this unnamed offender "takes up all, makes each man's wit his own, / And told of this, he slights it," adding that "he marks not whose 'twas first, and aftertimes / May judge it to be his." According to Michell, Shakespeare was most probably the subject of Jonson's epigram. Fellow dramatist Robert Greene also harbored a grudge, calling Shakespeare "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers." And well he might, since Michell discloses that A Winter's Tale was based on one of Robert Greene's own works, a 1588 prose narrative entitled Pandosto: The Triumph of Time. Neither was Shakespeare picky about which sources he drew upon. Dickson reveals that the Bard plundered "sensationalist romances to serious tomes such as Holinshed's Chronicles and Plutarch's Lives." Hamlet, Dickson tells us, was an earlier play dubbed the "ur-Hamlet," and King Lear was based on The Chronicle History of King Leir and His Three Daughters. Arthur Brooke's long narrative poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet gave rise to . . . you can probably guess that one. Shakespeare penned just under forty plays, but few have original plots. Love's Labour's Lost, The Merry Wives of Windsor (the only play set wholly in Shakespeare's England), and The Tempest may be original works, but even The Tempest is thought to have been based on a 1609 shipwreck report. It is clear, therefore, that Shakespeare was not an originator of story lines: He was a dramatist. He used established tales to showcase his insightful characterization and sparkling dialogue. It is likely that he probably didn't care who said it first, just who said it best. As twentieth-century poet, critic, and playwright T. S. Eliot confided, "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." Ben Jonson, in a more gracious moment, said of Shakespeare that "he was not of an age, but for all time!" but not everyone had such positive views on the writer's talent. Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw, who didn't hold Shakespeare in quite such high regard as he held himself, suggested that the Bard was "for an afternoon, but not for all time." My own personal views on the matter are that it's much ado about nothing, but all's well that ends well. VIRGINIA WOOLF WROTE ALL OF HER BOOKS STANDING UP Literary icon virginia woolf is famed for being an innovative writer and an early feminist. Quentin Bell, Woolf's nephew and biographer, reveals a surprising fact about her writing habits in his celebrated book Virginia Woolf: "She had a desk standing about three feet six inches high with a sloping top; it was so high that she had to stand to her work." Virginia was said to have explained this working arrangement in various wayBarham, Andrea is the author of 'Pedant's Return Why the Things You Think Are Wrong Are Right', published 2007 under ISBN 9780553384918 and ISBN 0553384910.