History Memes

I disliked him because I was an anti elitist

Frankly, given the way he was eventually embraced as the god of all writing (one of my professors was fond of saying about other Elizabethan playwrights: Their best stuff was better than Shakespeare's worst stuff") and how thoroughly but poorly he's taught, I don't blame you. The language is simply not very accessible and pretending otherwise turns reading Shakespeare into a chore and liking him into a flex, and yes, I'm keenly aware that I'm not immune here. I think there's a place, but I really do tend to think we go too hard and too early with teaching entire plays using the original scripts in middle school or 9th grade.

how anti elitist he was

This is such a tough one for me. On the one hand, he was in some ways making outsider art. Most of the "history" in his plays comes from various middle-brow English books that are full of mistranslations and Tudor propaganda, but then he dives into the psychology of these people in a way that can seem crude to modern ears but was absolutely game-changing for English literature. He finds motivation and humanity even in people who are ultimately irredeemable. He played fast and loose with iambic pentameter, and over the course of his career more and more prose crept in. He wasn't afraid to take down the actual slang on the streets, and even insert it into the mouths of the powerful. While overstated, he absolutely did coin many words and even more famous turns of phrase that never existed before. The work absolutely had low-brow appeal, and it did piss off certain more formally trained writers. Then there's the fact that it's barely controversial to suggest he might have been queer (at least as we understand it), and completely banal to suggest his work often had homoerotic subtexts. It also isn't insane to suggest that he either was a crypto catholic or or at least had sympathies in that direction.

Yet on the other hand, here's a guy who was seeking the approval and even acceptance of powerful people for his entire lifetime. He glommed onto middling nobles and wrote sonnet after sonnet for them, about them, to them. He dedicated his "serious" work to his various patrons. Then, as the acting company took off, they absolutely dived straight into proto-capitalist adventures and sought out higher and higher patrons, until by the end they were literally "The King's Men." Don't even get me started on the potentially cringy -- and definitely historically dubious -- efforts to get his family a proper coat of arms. He knew how the game was played, and he actually played it pretty well, basically retiring early to live in the biggest house in his hometown, getting his favorite daughter married off to a doctor, and having multiple beds to bequeath in his will.