

Portrait of Shakespeare Unveiled, 399 Years Late - robg
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/portrait-of-shakespeare-unveiled-399-years-late/?hp

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ahoyhere
This is terribly exciting. I recently read Bill Bryson's short work
"Shakespeare" and was amazed to find out how little is known about
Shakespeare, & indeed most playwrights from that time.

Turns out one of the 2 images (prior to this) that show Shakespeare's
appearance, the bust, was practically destroyed when it was erroneously
whitewashed which removed most of the detail. (The caretaker believed the
colors were not meant to be part of the bust.)

It's practically miraculous that something new was unearthed now, after people
have been hunting for a couple hundred years.

Mysterious. Tragic. Historical. What more could you want?

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Allocator2008
Shakespeare is perhaps the most over-rated play write ever. Sure he wrote a
few good plays - 'Hamlet', 'Othello', a few other tragedies of note. But most
of his stuff was pretty mediocre - 'Measure for Measure' for instance - or
outright sucked - 'Romeo and Juliet' perhaps being one of the worst plays ever
conceived.

Compared to say, Sophocles of old, or, in our time, people like Harold Pinter
or Edward Albee, Shakespeare was a hack pulp fiction paperback play write who
wrote a small number of adequate plays and a large number of really poor
plays. Even his best, 'Hamlet', was itself meandering and hard to decipher -
Hamlet is crazy, but one thinks he is just pretending to be crazy, however,
after a few viewings (or readings) one figures out he is actually in point of
fact crazy (insane). But this point could have been made with more clarity and
brevity which is why although the play is a great play, we cannot call its
author a particularly great writer - good, to be sure, but not great, again,
not compared to the really great ones of our day like Pinter.

The real tragedy is that high school students are forced to suffer through
this hack's tortuous and obfuscated attempts at drama and pathos. Now _that_
is a tragedy.

~~~
swombat
"Shakespeare is perhaps the most over-rated _play write_ ever"

If you want your criticism of master craftsmen of the English language to be
taken seriously, perhaps you should start by learning basic English spelling,
grammar and punctuation.

~~~
jrockway
Yes, every one-off comment on a social news site should be proofread and
edited at least 15 times before actually posting it.

Anyway, this sort of comment seems to be the bulk of most replies to comments
that do a lot of criticizing here. It is pretty annoying. Perhaps it would be
better for everyone if we just kept this sort of thing to ourselves, realizing
that nobody is going to use perfect English for a quick post to HN.

~~~
cabalamat
> _Yes, every one-off comment on a social news site should be proofread and
> edited at least 15 times before actually posting it._

Actually, yes, every comment should be proofread. Writing that contains typos,
or is just inelegantly written, is harder to read and understand. When I write
something on HN, it's likely to be read by a hundred or more people. So if I
take 100 seconds to get my post right, and that saves each reader 1 second,
it's a win overall.

To to otherwise is to proclaim that one is sloppy and careless, and that one's
time is more important than others' time.

~~~
jrockway
_and that one's time is more important than others' time_

I do think this, though.

And anyway, if it costs you one second of time because someone added a space
inside the word "playwright", perhaps you need to work on tuning your error
correction algorithm. I knew exactly what the OP meant.

