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That's my sister Serena's favorite book. She gave me a copy a couple years ago. :-) I love, love, love that last passage you quoted. And the second one. All of them really, but those two especially.

Trumplet

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-sh … oliloquies

fiddlesticks

Shakespeare was very well known when he died. Queen Elizabeth asked him to write her a play with John Falstaff in it -- The Merry Wives of Windsor. There are court records of the actual Shakespeare existing. It's not like he wrote in a dark room with a mask over his face. He was involved in the productions, wrote them, directed them, acted in them. He couldn't have been more obviously RIGHT THERE. The front piece in his later works named him specifically.

Is the theory that some mystery person wrote Shakespeare's plays and gave him the credit for works that were cherished by everyone high to low ? For what purpose? And he or she never came forward, even in death, to claim notoriety, and none of Shakespeare's friends and family ever accidentally slipped and mentioned that he was a complete fraud, and none of the actual writer's family ever left a single trace of proof about the real authorship? And all of this speculation is in response to what? the fact that Shakespeare acted? All the references to Will in his works -- not at all relevant? The staff (speare) he breaks at the end of The Tempest? just planted there to keep us all throughout history thinking the author was Shakespeare? The side characters named William EVERYWHERE in his plays? Absolutely unrelated?

If the point here is that an actor couldn't write the plays, that's frankly silly. Shakespeare wrote of human nature at all levels -- not just royalty. Of course an actor could capture that.

Pirated copies of Shakespeare's work were circulating all over before he died. His friends made his work known because the copies circulating were supplied by actors who attempted to recite everyone's lines in the work (so they could be written in the pirated copies) & often got the lines wrong. They BUTCHERED Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy. That's why there are different versions of Shakespeare's works in circulation to this day. The works published by his friends preserved the more accurate versions. It's likely true that Shakespeare had no idea he'd still be remembered today. He didn't bother updating the stage directions in his plays because he spoke to the actors directly. He probably did want to be known (he wrote all those sonnets) but as a playwright he would have assumed that the play itself was the thing, rather than the script. So yes, absolutely, we owe those friends of Shakespeare's! But not for publishing plays written by a mystery person. For publishing William Shakespeare's plays. (I know you made no such suggestion, njc. Just speaking to all those who believe the conspiracy theories.)

Some say Elizabeth I wrote Shakespeare's plays! And some that Shakespeare was actually Christopher Marlowe -- a claim made solely because Marlowe died when Shakespeare began writing. I've read Marlowe. Not the same man, folks. And really? Elizabeth I? The Virgin Queen made sexual innuendos and challenged the validity of the monarchy?

Occam's razor, people. It's far more logical to suppose that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays than to assume that some enormous and absolutely meaningless mystery fooled all of Renaissance England for YEARS, and that it was NEVER uncovered, and that an actor named William just went along with it and also got to direct all of the plays and no one, upon no one, ever outed him for four hundred years.

Babe

"I write it out in a verse --
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born."

- W.B. Yeats, Easter 1916.

THE LATEST JANE AUSTEN FILM IS COMING! IN MAY!

See the inspiration for Scarlett? Maybe.

I think Austen was nineteen when she wrote this novel. I've read it. QUITE funny. Her earliest works are the funniest ones. She wrote them to entertain her family.

"It is with words as with sunbeams -- the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn." - Robert Southey

Har! That is a Twist! And well played, sir!

"The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." - John Milton

(I'm reading the first couple books of Paradise Lost for a class. This line jumped out.)

It all becomes confusing, you see. Carry on, then.