Bruce Farrar's blog

 
Is the Quest
a) Futile?
b) Full of Tears?
c) Full of Laughter?
d) Awesome?
e) All of the above

     Going Bovine / Libba Bray

What would it be like?

We know a lot about William Shakespeare. We have the text of most all of his plays, we have baptismal records, a will, and other legal documents, and we also have attacks, criticism and praise of his works by his contemporary playwrights. We can infer from these much of what he thought about the world. But because what he wrote is spoken by characters in his plays and poems, we have very scant evidence about his own personality. Much scholarly ink is used to interpret his works, especially his sonnets, to find out what sort of person he really was. In addition to the scholarship applied to this task there is also the imaginative works of other authors, who have used him as a character in their own books.