Elizabeth’s Reviews > Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare > Status Update

Fascinating this section about Shakespeare as businessman compared to his fellow playwrights. He was in the top 3 most financially successful because the Lord Chamberlain’s Men was a shared business enterprise, he seems to have been frugal himself, and he made shrewd investments. Reminds me of how concerned Trollope was with how much his novels made. He has a forebear in Shakespeare! Writers gotta live!

“If one bears in mind the method of close reading in which he was trained at school, not to mention his prodigious memory both for the plays he saw or acted in and the other books he devoured and disposed of casually, then there need be no anxiety about the idea of a middle-class provincial grammar-school boy having the intellectual resources to write the plays (156).

So much in this section! The scene ages of man, why the Elizabethans translated Greek works into English, the importance of Ovid in Shakespeare’s works and imagination.