He's a genius!

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when i was about thirteen I got hold of the complete works of William Shakespeare

the idea being to read them all and get myself all clued up and clever

i found the writing, quite frankly, little better than gibberish and could barely make my way through an introduction - they were full of 'the duke of this' or 'the king of that' and other royalist titles that meant nothing to me - and the dialogue was worse

Undaunted i took to leaving them open on a book holder i had - one day it would be "Othello" - the Next "Two Gentlemen of Verona" and so on - my mother used to show her friends what I was "reading" - "He's brilliant" they would say

Then in school me and this kid who sat next to me and had a mother who was a teacher in a different school found the tutor answerbook to this new maths scheme they were bringing in - with workbooks and so on - and we basically just filled in all the answers - the proverbial hit the fan when they sent some egghead down from oxford university as they thought they had unearthed a pocket of child prodigies

Any kind of poetry written in the late 16th/early 17th centuries is bound to be difficult for people of today to comprehend.

Having said that, I only read two plays by Shakespeare - "Romeo and Juliet" and "Julius Caesar". I really enjoyed the former, and the latter was just okay for me.

Shakespeare isn't going to save anything. You can read it, quote it, and that's it. What else is it going to do for starving children in Africa?

It's a work of genius, sure, I guess. But most people can't read it anyway. Whether that's due to lack of contextual information or whether if it's any good in the first place is just opinion.

Personally, I enjoy the structure and language of his plays but I abhor all these critics and professors for trying to find out who he is and for making us over analyze his plays to their interpretation.

Don't let some Oxford a**hole tell you what genius is.

It's not so much as reading Shakespeare that makes someone a genius, it's about being ingenius when reading Shakespeare. All the great writers know that to steal, to pretend, to put masks on, to tell others what people can and can't see is how to write. Emulating Shakespeare is the way to go, not labeling him as 'genius' or 'trash' or whatever.

The OP is at fault for lying, repeatedly and with no good reason, not the hapless geezer from Oxenford.

And Shakspar's plays, at least, are meant to be be performed, not read.

It's still very funny.

When I was about seven I had to do an IQ test, and scored so highly they made me do another test just to check I really was that clever. The second test bored me, and I scored so low that they thought I might have cheated on my first test, though they didn't know how. Over the next few months they kept checking my work in school before they put me up two years.

My brother, a year and a half younger than me, also scored very highly, but when asked to resit the test told them he couldn't be bothered, he wanted to play football instead. Guess who's the cleverest of the two of us? I reckon my brother is the genius in our family.

You're saying that your mother, her friends, your school and the people from the university all thought you were a genius, right? Not that you think W. Shakespeare was a genius.

So did you both get into a lot of trouble? Or didn't anyone ever find out you'd both cheated?