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The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 13.2380  Friday, 06 December 2002

From:           Thomas Larque <thomas.larque@lineone.net>
Date:           Friday, 6 Dec 2002 01:03:03 -0000
Subject:        Shakespeare Blunders

I just found the Amazon.co.uk feature "The Best of the Bard", which
contains a, for the most part bland and inoffensive, if uninformative,
listing of the various Shakespeare films that have appeared
(unsurprisingly with hotlinks to purchase many of them from Amazon).
However, I thought SHAKSPEReans would enjoy the little snippet of
biography, which turns out to be far more ...  ahem ... imaginative than
the rest of the text.

"As the people's poet, William Shakespeare embodied all of us through
his universality. Baptised in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 26, 1564 (and
allegedly born three days previously), Shakespeare arrived in London in
1592, along with pregnant wife Anne Hathaway, and worked his way up to
become the most successful artist of his time. For all of his fame, very
little is actually known about Britain's greatest cultural icon. But if
we accept that "the play's the thing", then perhaps the playwright has
come to live exclusively through his work."

So not only has this author apparently solved the question of exactly
when Shakespeare arrived in London, but he somehow knows that a pregnant
Anne Hathaway was on the back of the horse! - most informative.

Does anybody else have any candidates for the most stupid
misrepresentation of facts about Shakespeare from supposedly respectable
publications / websites (not counting Anti-Stratfordian and related
stupidities, for the sake of our sanity and Hardy's blood-pressure)?

For anybody who is interested, this British Amazon feature appears at
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/34056/qid=1039135898/sr=6-1
/026-2776701-9851635

Thomas Larque.
"Shakespeare and His Critics"
http://shakespearean.org.uk

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