Monday, April 29, 2013
Saturday, April 13, 2013
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Shakespeare: poet, playwright, hoarder
Shakespeare: all about the pounds and pence, not the poetry? - latimes.com
EXCERPTS:
"Shakespeare, Mr. “I can raise no money by vile means” [“Julius Caesar”], was in fact a tax dodger, a grain hoarder and a determined debt collector [“Neither a borrower nor a lender be” -- “Hamlet”].
"Nowadays, we’d call him a profiteer and a scofflaw. In Tudor England, where he was investigated for his laconic tax observances and once prosecuted for his hoarding practices, it’s a surprise that he didn’t end up swinging from a gibbet “for daws to peck at” [“Othello”]. No wonder he vigorously wrote, in “Henry VI part 2,” “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
"Researchers turned up archival evidence that for a decade and a half – including some very hungry years for England -- Shakespeare “purchased and stored grain, malt and barley for resale at inflated prices to his neighbors and local tradesmen.” When they couldn’t or wouldn’t pay, Shakespeare went after them full-throatedly, and the profits he did make he used “to further his own money-lending activities.”
"Not all of this is new, but Jayne Archer, one of the researchers, suspects that the fact that so little of this information has made its way into Shakespeare’s public profile may be laid to “willful ignorance on behalf of critics and scholars who … cannot countenance the idea of a creative genius also being motivated by self-interest.”
"There’s evidence that the memorial raised up to him in his hometown not long after his death originally showed him with an image with which his neighbors associated him: a bag of grain, not the writerly accouterments of quill and parchment added later. Four hundred years later, the tourists still make pilgrimages to Stratford because, face it, who’s going to go home with souvenir paperweights and china thimbles commemorating the Tudor equivalent of a commodities trader?
EXCERPTS:
"Shakespeare, Mr. “I can raise no money by vile means” [“Julius Caesar”], was in fact a tax dodger, a grain hoarder and a determined debt collector [“Neither a borrower nor a lender be” -- “Hamlet”].
"Nowadays, we’d call him a profiteer and a scofflaw. In Tudor England, where he was investigated for his laconic tax observances and once prosecuted for his hoarding practices, it’s a surprise that he didn’t end up swinging from a gibbet “for daws to peck at” [“Othello”]. No wonder he vigorously wrote, in “Henry VI part 2,” “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
"Researchers turned up archival evidence that for a decade and a half – including some very hungry years for England -- Shakespeare “purchased and stored grain, malt and barley for resale at inflated prices to his neighbors and local tradesmen.” When they couldn’t or wouldn’t pay, Shakespeare went after them full-throatedly, and the profits he did make he used “to further his own money-lending activities.”
"Not all of this is new, but Jayne Archer, one of the researchers, suspects that the fact that so little of this information has made its way into Shakespeare’s public profile may be laid to “willful ignorance on behalf of critics and scholars who … cannot countenance the idea of a creative genius also being motivated by self-interest.”
"There’s evidence that the memorial raised up to him in his hometown not long after his death originally showed him with an image with which his neighbors associated him: a bag of grain, not the writerly accouterments of quill and parchment added later. Four hundred years later, the tourists still make pilgrimages to Stratford because, face it, who’s going to go home with souvenir paperweights and china thimbles commemorating the Tudor equivalent of a commodities trader?
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