Even at the poorest performances of a stripped down play with nothing to dazzle an audience anywhere, you should still be able to close your eyes, block out everything else, and revel in the writing.īurgess supported this thesis this when he wrote his brilliant novel, Nothing Like the Sun, about Shakespeare’s life. No matter how you dress up a Shakespearean production, what matters most in his work is the words. Anthony Burgess is known to have once opined, “It is assumed by most of us that Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist in the world… but take the poetry and the incredible psychological insight away and you have artificial plots that were not Shakespeare’s own to start with, full of improbable coincidence and carelessly hurried fifth-act denouements.” The most popular dramatist of his day was Christopher Marlowe and the greatest argument for the ascension of one against the waning of the other can be made about the quality of the writing itself. For a writer who passed away four hundred and one years ago, it’s amazing how beloved and relevant the works of William Shakespeare still are for us.
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