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I was ignorant of that fact. Consider myself educated.

Shakespeare was supposedly anti-Semitic. In Macbeth, he called the Jews blasphemers.

Um, just wondering but how many people weren't racist at Shakespeare's time???

He was also talentless!

*ducks*

While we're all quoting Shakespeare...

Away to heaven, respective lenity/And fire-eyed fury be my conduct now!
(Romeo, upon the death of Mercutio)

There is no way for you to escape hell now, Malcolm.

Why will I go to hell for pointing out what is obvious? It is like saying that a man should go to hell for saying that a one hundred stone pig-person is fat.

well you do if you call em it to their face. Fat people are incredibly strong a lot of the time, and they are experts in causing pain!

They'll eat ya' bones!

Sorry.

I wouldn't think that we are any more tolerant than the people of shakesphere's time. . .I think we tend to sweep the more egerous racists under the rug, if you catch my drift.

I think that every sentinent adult in the world today is a racist. Including everyone in this forums, and yes, including myself.

No, its not OK!! !! !

Shakespeare talentless???

He was a writing/marketing genius. Sure he might have stole some ideas here and there and maybe everywhere. But YOU try writing a play in that given amount of time and putting it on in the Globe. He was a successful writer not just of all time, but of his OWN time and that is often hard to say. He was well-loved while he was still ALIVE. Try writing Hamlet in a matter of a few weeks and putting it on successfully AND have it live on nearly five hundred years after your death.

One might not like his writing style, or think he was a thief, but you still GOTTA admire his success and the short amount of time he wrote those in.

I'd sincerely like to see someone do better.

I hate Shakespeare's plays and I'm not ashamed to say it. I'm sure it blew away the competition in his time period but saying he stands up to any contemporary playwright is ridiculous. I've never had any respect for a writer who needs to dress his writing up with overcomplicated words and nonsensical sentence structures to get anyone to listen to him (he wasn't the last by a long shot, unfortunately). Sure, cramming everything into iambic pentameter must have been one enormous pain in the ass to pull off but that doesn't make it work. Many seem to enjoy reading and performing Shakespeare's tripe, but is it because they enjoy decoding the poorly disguised cliche storylines or are they just too afraid to go against the crowd? I wonder sometimes.

Oh, and all his best work was stolen from others

He sometimes reminds me of a tv soap writer, nose to the grindstone, churning out storylines on a daily basis. I like some of it.

Shakespeare is, in my opinion, good but he was a racist and he mutated the personage of Richard the third from the real, kind king into a hunchbacked monster!

In re: W. Shakespeare

Shakespeare's language can appear flowery, overcomplicated, and numbingly verbose, but it has to be compared to the language of the day. Run-of-the-mill Elizabethan and Jacobean prose was loaded with neologisms and taken over by a Latinate style which is truly horrible to read. Shakespeare looks like Hemingway next to it.

Much the same may be said of Swift, whose language in his own day was relatively clear, clean, and strong.

Granted, Shakespeare stole his plays' plots, but, as with opera, nobody goes for the story. It is the performance that matters. And there are some great moments in Shakespeare which come alive on the stage in a marvelous way in the hands of a great actor.

Shakespeare did treat Richard III badly, but the character's physical deformities are supposed to represent his internal twistedness. Writing for Henry Tudor's descendants, Shakespeare could hardly be expected to say anything nice about Richard (see Braveheart for an even more twisted portrayal of a truly great English king).

As for racism in Macbeth, it is a witch who adds the "liver of blaspheming Jew" to the potion. The witches portrayed in the play are hardly to be seen as arbiters of religious orthodoxy. The Merchant of Venice, despite its portrayal of Shylock as an actual human being (a first for the stage), is indeed antisemitic. I do not think Shakespeare can be given a pass because he had probably not met any Jews; he used a stereotype for his own purposes, much the same way that movie producers do today. It is just as bad artistically and morally, not to mention just plain lazy.

"For he today who sheds his blood with me shall be my brother..." Anybody who wrote the Saint Crispin's Day speech cannot be all bad, can he?