“Four hundred years ago yesterday saw the first printing of one of the great wonders of the literary world: Shakespeare’s First Folio. Published in 1623, seven years after he died, it was the first printed edition of the collected plays. Without this achievement, half of Shakespeare’s dramatic work would have been lost.” — Folio 400
Archives for November 2023
The Greatest Poet Was a Great Word Thief
It is widely acknowledged that Shakespeare lacked a university education — there is no record of it — unlike his contemporaries or near-contempories, such as Marlowe, Greene, Jonson, Nashe, Beaumont, Fletcher, so forth. Despite that, he was a greater writer than any of them, and pilfering was part of his toolkit. As Anthony Burgess notes in his biography of Shakespeare, he not only took plots and stories for his plays — this too is widely acknowledged — but also “filched” entire passages (plagiarized them, if you will) and in the process improved them immeasurably.