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How did Shakespeare come to know so much?

If there are things you do not want to discuss on a public forum, a very good tip would be not to bring them up on a public forum.

And the rhyme scheme? Why the rhyme scheme, if that is the way the author wanted it to be printed?
 
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Everyone knows you can only appreciate the Bard when spoken in it's original Klingon.

So true, as reading the thread shows all too clearly.


You make a funny but there are people who modernize and simplify Shakespeare, for both children and adults.

That seems to suggest much of the power was in characters and situations, as if that can be separated from the clever prose they speak.

It's like updating a pointillist painting with large swaths of primary, no-gradient colors.

Or more recently:


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Much of the writings attributed to Shakespeare were actually written by Queen Elizabeth 1...


As I have posted, is the natural rhythm and intent for the spoken word.

That is for me to know, and others to ponder. Sufficient to say the subject is not open for debate on a public forum.

Do you claim mediumship, Janadele?
 
Shakespeare hearing of the controversary re. his authorship, Thus spake the great Bard

Those who write on ********* walls
Roll up **** in little balls...........

Edited by LashL: 
Edited to properly mask profanity. Please see Rule 10 re: the auto-censor.
 
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Alas! how factoids flung and found among ourselves
And come from others who would never try our mind
Creep about in mornings soberer than when judgment delves
As little insects on a mirror that with care was shined
Little thoughts surround our naked somewhat flustered head
A head soon deep put into the cooler, far-cried sand
When brothers Guilt and Shame adorn out chest with bows of lead
Perhaps to still the voice of pictures from our fairy-land
Why did it speak, to cut its lips from matters living?
Whence came that myth or slightly polished fact?
I shan't impose upon the world this gift to keep on giving
Lest the people think some faculties of thought i lacked!
So I will not speak unless my feet stand firm and mind is clear
Unsourced claims and falsities are too much for man to bear!
 
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As I have posted, is the natural rhythm and intent for the spoken word.

No, the way you have posted would make for an extremely unnatural spoken rhythm as it destroys the rhyme scheme. As for your format being the author's intention (rather than the printer's) and ignoring for the moment how you could possibly know: as far as I know, the first poet to use the English or Shakespearean sonnet form was Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who died before Shakespeare was born and before Elizabeth became queen. His sonnets--Shakespearean, Petrarchan or whatever--are printed as a fourteen-line chunk (sometimes the the concluding couplet is slightly indented for English sonnets). That's just what sonnets look like.
 
:) the printer was not the author.

Maybe he thought the lines looked lonely all scrunched up together on the page. Maybe he was getting paid by the number of pages he printed and wanted to take up more room. Maybe he was really into couplets, rhyming or otherwise. Maybe he thought he knew better than the author.
 
Elizabeth was a leader, not a follower, she wrote as she felt. True creative talent does not follow mob mentality. Nor does it need a set of rules, examples, or instructions from others.
 
Elizabeth was a leader, not a follower, she wrote as she felt. True creative talent does not follow mob mentality. Nor does it need a set of rules, examples, or instructions from others.

Even aside from the lack of evidence that Elizabeth wrote the poem, it seems contradictory to claim the author didn't follow rules, when the poem is clearly written in the restrictive format of a sonnet. That doesn't just happen by luck.

You know what a sonnet is, right?
 
I have not read all of this thread, just noting some of the utter drivel about alternative writers and so forth. It's been a while, but aside from reading all of Shakespeare a few times over I've also read a fair amount of what has been written about his life and education. If you actually read the stuff, you'll find that he knew a certain amount about many things, but was not especially well educated in anything much particular.

In any case, how many Shakespeares have we had in the past five hundred or so years? One? We don't need conspiracy theories or snobbish excuses for why his middle class background was not good enough. Why is it so difficult to accept the idea that Shakespeare was a radical outlier at an opportune time for his genius to register and stick?

To suggest, as Janadele does, that a sonnet that illustrates beautifully the classically strict metric and rhyming and structural style of the Elizabethan sonnet should be rewritten as if it were not is (sorry, folks, there's no other way to put it) utterly, flagrantly ridiculous. If it's not really dumb, then it's doubly ignorant.
 
Elizabeth was a leader, not a follower, she wrote as she felt. True creative talent does not follow mob mentality. Nor does it need a set of rules, examples, or instructions from others.

Ah right, I think I get what you're doing now.
 

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