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. |
