No Magic in William Shakespeare’s Words Essay -- Biography Biographies

No Magic in Shakespeare’s Words A good work of fiction is greater than the sum of words the author invested in it. Shakespeare is a "great" playwright because his plays bear the load of much speculation and creativity from all its interpreters, not because he thought of every possible last detail and symbol and elucidated it clearly. The collaborative flexibility of a play is especially valuable to plays that predate the emphasis on originality and copyright that became more important to writing in the 18th century as authors like Coleridge and the other Romantics began to extol the virtues of imagination and personal creativity. In Shakespeare’s time, one’s work was not one’s own. When a work was sold to a publisher, it belonged to the publisher to be edited and altered how he chose. When writing for a theatre, like Shakespeare, the play was fair game for anyone in the company to edit and "fix." An acting company bought the play just as a publisher would. Plays were also frequently written in teams for speed, since in the late 1580’s and early 1590’s when Shakespeare was starting out, the canon of English drama was less than a decade old, all plays were premiere plays, with new ones being introduced every fortnight. Alterations were made constantly, as overworked actors added or transposed lines from others of the twenty roles they were performing at the same time, scenes were added to allow time for costume changes, or the censors required line or plot changes. The author, or one of the authors who each had written an act or parceled out scenes from the outlines play, or perhaps one of the actors or another playwright was on hand during the rehearsal process to make emendations to the play. The second half of Sha... ... This way, Shakespeare can remain our cultural hero, and what doesn’t work need not be completely cut, but is understood as the detritus of the time period in which he lived remaining in the work. Thus, "it is not so much that Shakespeare appears as a part of Elizabethan culture, but rather that Elizabethan culture appears as a part of Shakespeare"(Shepherd and Womack, 92). Theatre is collaborative in the extreme, and modern attitudes about authorship and originality cannot change that fact. Thus, it is not Shakespeare that preserves Shakespeare’s works as the English language’s greatest works; it is the people that continue to produce his plays. No matter how the work is performed, cut, altered, updated, this is what keeps Shakespeare alive. There is no magic in Shakespeare’s words that his readers did not bestow on it. We create or break a work’s greatness.