Shakespeare
I'm posting this to remind myself, but if you wish you could appreciate Shakespeare more, it's a good way to orient yourself...
Further thoughts on some of the topics from my ‘Conversation with Tyler’
religion, Dostoevsky, Pluribus, mental illness, reading Shakespeare, overrated, Milton, Bloom and Potter
Henry Oliver
Henry Oliver on Reading Shakespeare
The top comment on MR seems to think that Tyler and I said that “Shakespeare wrote to be read rather than performed.” No. Shakespeare clearly wrote to be performed. But, that is often said as if it means he did not write to be read, and that is not true. He knew he would be read, by a significant audience. He was a strong seller at the bookstalls. Literate elites were an important part of the playhouse audience. Shakespeare’s plays were some of the most frequently printed books in his lifetime. Half of his plays were printed. Plus there were anthologies, and he knew he would be pirated for them. Those speeches that sound like anthology speeches… really are anthology speeches. (Read Ted Tregear’s Anthologising Shakespeare.)
Some of the plays were very popular in print indeed. There were five quartos of Richard II before the Folio in 1623. Between the first performance in 1597 and the publication of the First Folio in 1623, there were seven quarto editions of Henry IV Part I.
The First Folio was only printed seven years after his death, aged 52. The printer’s costs were £250—at the time, a shoemaker could make £4 a year, a goldsmith £5. Inevitably, at fifteen shillings, this was the most expensive playbook ever published, and the previous thirty years had seen many literary folios, including those of Jonson and Montaigne. So the audience for his writing had become fairly strong on the basis of the quartos! Obviously it is nothing like the playhouse audience, but Shakespeare knew the elites were reading him, and would presumably have been less surprised than is often alleged to find his works in folio.
In any case, whatever your views on this subject, it is not determinative. It can be the case that he wrote to be performed but that it is, today, better to read him. “We do not love to see our author performed,” said William Hazlitt.
