I will take issue with one thing though... Shakespeare's plays were for something like a television audience, the mass market. The cheap seats cost about as much as a pint or two of ale. A lot of the audience would have been the illiterate, manual labouring type. They watched the same plays as the classy aristocrats in their box seats. It was a wide audience.
Shakespeare's stories had scandal and swordfighting, to go along with the deeper themes.
A lot of the best stuff is like that. I reckon GRRM a great novelist, personally, with deep contribution to the art. Everyone loves game of thrones. It's a politically driven story with thoughtful bits about gender, and class and about society. But, its not stingy on tits and incest, dragons and duels.
The one caveat was that Shakespeare's audience were all city slickers, and that probably made them all worldlier than the average Englishman who lived in a rural hovel, spoke dialect and rarely left his village.
What is an elitist pursuit is not really Shakespeare, it's watching 450 year old plays.
I will take issue with one thing though... Shakespeare's plays were for something like a television audience, the mass market. The cheap seats cost about as much as a pint or two of ale. A lot of the audience would have been the illiterate, manual labouring type. They watched the same plays as the classy aristocrats in their box seats. It was a wide audience.
Shakespeare's stories had scandal and swordfighting, to go along with the deeper themes.
A lot of the best stuff is like that. I reckon GRRM a great novelist, personally, with deep contribution to the art. Everyone loves game of thrones. It's a politically driven story with thoughtful bits about gender, and class and about society. But, its not stingy on tits and incest, dragons and duels.
The one caveat was that Shakespeare's audience were all city slickers, and that probably made them all worldlier than the average Englishman who lived in a rural hovel, spoke dialect and rarely left his village.
What is an elitist pursuit is not really Shakespeare, it's watching 450 year old plays.