Richard's Poor Almanac by Richard Thompson for January 05, 2024

Scholars have only argued about who wrote the plays for a COUPLE of centuries. During Shakespeare’s lifetime, and for 200 years thereafter, nobody doubted he wrote them.

(PS: I love “Hamlet,” but my favorite quote about the play is from someone who hated it: “‘The Tragedy of Hamlet’ is a coarse and barbarous piece of work which would not be accepted by the basest rabble in France or Italy. One might imagine it the fruit of the imagination of a drunken savage.” — Voltaire)

Fun Fact: Richard Thompson’s wife worked at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. (Perhaps she still does.)

The corpse could be Pyramus, except that would mean Bottom is onstage twice…

Come, tears, confound!

Out, sword, and wound

The pap of Pyramus;

Ay, that left pap,

Where heart doth hop.

Thus die I, thus, thus, thus.

Now am I dead;

Now am I fled;

My soul is in the sky.

Tongue, lose thy light!

Moon, take thy flight!

Now die, die, die, die, die.

When is a gory murder ever inappropriate?

I saw a production of “Dream” at the Globe replica theater in London (I laughed my Bottom off). As in Shakespeare’s day they used no artificial lighting, so it was performed (if not set) in broad daylight.

I like how you can see that the “Oops!” caption is, at a minimum, the second draft. You can just make out the remnants of an erased earlier version under it…

There is a way through the maze…

I’m the prosaic sort who thinks Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, for the most part. Hamlet was a flawed guy from the start, so his fate was Fated. And, yeah, that’s a mighty cheesy “Midsummer Night’s Dream” production; very amateurish!