Threaded Order Chronological Order
| Oddly... | |
| Posted by: Whistler 08:48 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
| In reply to: re: Elizabethan/Jacobean Society - Vivian 07:40 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
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| Oddly, people in Shakespeare's time didn't care a lot about reading, and a lot of them simply couldn't. People who were around the court knew about the queen and later the king, so -- as Laura says below -- they didn't need biographies. And paper was expensive, so books were scarce. Reportedly, even Shakespeare borrowed a lot of his. Also, because there were so many versions of the scripts, adapted for so many occasions, it seems playwrights didn't see a profit in publishing. The early quartos were often mangled versions of the scripts, printed illegally. Shakespeare's poems were privately circulated among his friends and frequently condemned for their obscenity. The folios were perhaps homage printed by Shakespeare's friends, years after his death, or perhaps the friends just wanted some money. As for writers today: there's an enormous number of good ones, and some are very well paid. But think of how much TV and film production there is, and how much is produced and published on the Internet, and the handful of writers whose names we immediately know is tiny. And very few people want to read about them. |
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| re: Oddly... | |
| Posted by: ashleylm 01:25 pm EDT 11/01/17 | |
| In reply to: Oddly... - Whistler 08:48 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
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| But think of how much TV and film production there is, and how much is produced and published on the Internet, and the handful of writers whose names we immediately know is tiny. And very few people want to read about them. This, yes, a hundred times. I'm as guilty as any--raving about some episode of The Good Place or The Leftovers or Community and not having a clue who wrote them. In fact, the only show I can recall watching for and remembering each writer was Buffy the Vampire Slayer ... for no show before, or since, have I known (save for the handful which are apparently entirely written by a much-lauded showrunner). It's unlikely that my favourite TV shows are being written by Bill Gates, Caitlyn Jenner, and Princess Gloria Von Thurn und Taxis ... and just as you don't have to invoke conspiracy to explain today's lack of interest in the actual authors, you also don't have to invoke it to imagine the Elizabethans were much the same. Shakespeare's famous now, but back then, he wasn't. Today there's a select group of people who know perfectly well who Steven Lutvak is, but he's hardly Andrew Lloyd Weber or even Pasek and Paul. Maybe a 100 years from now he's be our most celebrated composer, and the internet forums will be abuzz about how little gossip there was about Lutvak in the early 21st century ... |
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