And getting back to the whole Who-the-heck-is-Shakespeare thing, there's also the point that basically none of the extant copies of the plays were actually "written" - by hand - by their purported author; many were written after Bill died, almost certainly by the actors who played the parts. So if Hamlet doesn't remember Polonius' lines very well... or Nurse doesn't remember Romeo's lines... we certainly can't claim to have 'authoritative' versions. And how could we, anyway? Playwrights at the time didn't publish their plays - they wrote for their company, shaping characters for actors, and having their words regularly changed in rehearsal and performance. The whole idea of a static text would have been foreign; it's quite a modernist idea, as far as I can tell (but don't get me onto Eliot's Wasteland...). And does it matter? Nah. I still get a kick out of Lady Macbeth and the various fools, so who really cares who gets the credit? It's just easier to attribute to a single body...
alexis =]
