Advent Calendar: Day 10

By Circe -

Anyone who has ever taken an English literature class has had Shakespeare crammed into their heads whether they wanted it or not. There's nothing wrong with Shakespeare, mind; he's just been accorded a very strange amount of status for a guy who was basically writing the 16th c. equivalent of Game of Thrones (or The Hangover, for comedies) for the average groundling to watch while drunk.

Because of the exalted position he holds in the academic firmament, people are obsessed with tracking down everything he ever wrote. If we find a laundry list that can be certified as Shakespeare's, it'll be enshrined at Oxford. It's also sparked a variety of entertaining arguments over whether Shakespeare wrote all the plays attributed to Shakespeare (probably yes), or secretly wrote a bunch of stuff attributed to other people (probably no).

Documentation wasn't really a thing in the late 1500s, so when the public wanted a collection of his plays, it was up to a couple of his actors to slap one together like a bootleg DVD set. Any Complete Works of Shakespeare produced in your lifetime has been sourced from the resulting First Folio. Said Folio lacks copies of three plays agreed to be Shakespeare collabs (Pericles, Edward III, and The Two Noble Kinsmen), and omits entirely two plays credited to Shakespeare and held to be lost: Love's Labours Won and Cardenio. It's debated whether LLW is a true sequel to Love's Labours Won or another name for The Taming of the Shew, but Cardenio is well and truly gone.

Possibly. See the video for more.

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