{"id":7491,"date":"2016-05-08T11:46:03","date_gmt":"2016-05-08T18:46:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=7491"},"modified":"2016-05-20T11:48:35","modified_gmt":"2016-05-20T18:48:35","slug":"accidental-shakespeare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2016\/05\/08\/accidental-shakespeare\/","title":{"rendered":"Accidental Shakespeare"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/nypost.com\/2016\/04\/20\/how-shakespeares-works-were-nearly-lost-to-us\/\" target=\"_blank\">from The New York Post<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<h1>Shakespeare died a nobody, then got famous by\u00a0accident<\/h1>\n<p>By\u00a0<a class=\"andrea-mays\" href=\"http:\/\/nypost.com\/author\/andrea-mays\/\" target=\"_blank\">Andrea Mays<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<a class=\"james-l-swanson\" href=\"http:\/\/nypost.com\/author\/james-l-swanson\/\" target=\"_blank\">James L. Swanson<\/a><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/thenypost.files.wordpress.com\/2016\/04\/shutterstock_80645992.jpg\" alt=\"Shakespeare died a nobody, then got famous by\u00a0accident\" width=\"480\" \/>Photo: Shutterstock<\/p>\n<p>April 23 marks the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare. The world will celebrate him as the greatest writer in the history of the English language. But his lasting fame wasn\u2019t inevitable. It almost did not happen.<\/p>\n<p>He was born in 1564 and died in 1616 on his 52nd birthday. A celebrated writer and actor who had performed for Queen Elizabeth and King James, he wrote approximately 39 plays and composed five long poems and 154 sonnets. By the time of his death, he had retired and was considered past his prime.<\/p>\n<p>By the 1620s, his plays were no longer being performed in theaters. On the day he died, no one \u2014 not even Shakespeare himself \u2014 believed that his works would last, that he was a genius or that future generations would hail his writings.<\/p>\n<p>He hadn\u2019t even published his plays \u2014 during his lifetime they were considered ephemeral amusements, not serious literature. Half of them had never been published in any form and the rest had appeared only in unauthorized, pirated versions that corrupted his original language.<\/p>\n<p>Enter John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare\u2019s friends, fellow actors and shareholders in the King\u2019s Men theatrical company. In his will he left them money to buy gold memorial rings to remember him. By about 1620, they conceived a better way to honor him \u2014 one that would make them the two most unsung heroes in the history of English literature. They would do what Shakespeare had never done for himself \u2014 publish a complete, definitive collection of his plays.<\/p>\n<p>Heminges and Condell had up to six types of sources available to them: Shakespeare\u2019s original, handwritten drafts; manuscript \u201cprompt books\u201d copied from the drafts; fragment \u201csides\u201d used by the actors and containing only the lines for their individual parts; printed quartos \u2014 cheap paperbound booklets \u2014 that published unauthorized and often wildly inaccurate versions of half the plays; after-the-fact memorial reconstructions by actors who had performed in the plays and later repeated their lines to a scribe hired by Heminges and Condell; and the editors\u2019 own personal memories.<\/p>\n<p>[ <a href=\"http:\/\/nypost.com\/2016\/04\/20\/how-shakespeares-works-were-nearly-lost-to-us\/\" target=\"_blank\">click to continue reading at NYP<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from The New York Post Shakespeare died a nobody, then got famous by\u00a0accident By\u00a0Andrea Mays\u00a0and\u00a0James L. Swanson Photo: Shutterstock April 23 marks the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare. The world will celebrate him as the greatest writer in the history of the English language. But his lasting fame wasn\u2019t inevitable. It almost [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7491\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}