GhostOfHeraclitus fan club archive

I happen to like Shakespeare, but I'm fairly certain he's been the victim of altogether too much hype and analysis. I mean, if you think about it, he's in a similar position as MLP in a way. Old Bill just wanted to write some decent plays and earn a bit of money, and then some of the cleverest people in the world over a period of four hundred years invested each line, each character, each subtlety with portentous significance. Faust, blessed be her holy hooves, just wanted to write a decent girls' show and shift some little horse figurines, and then a whole bunch of incredibly clever people (and me, I guess) descended onto what she made and spun a thousand tales from the most minor of features and turned the relatively simple characters into tortured and complex beings, or damn-near-religious symbols of hope and self-sacrifice, or a hundred other things.