Perhaps the reason no one treated Shakespeare as a celebrity lies in the workings of Elizabethan/Jacobean society: writers weren't important. The same way they're unimportant in film, television, theater, and probably any other aspect today. All people wanted was entertainment, and the differences among seeing a play, watching a chained bear kill dogs, or going to a public execution were minimal.
Besides, he was a very busy businessman: those plays didn't write themselves, theaters didn't run themselves, and he was always in rehearsal, learning lines. And he had a couple of affairs, a slightly distant family, and there were those constant plagues. |
