Shakespeare Documentary

[Sasha]

Has anyone seen Michael Wood's documentaries on Shakespeare? They were running on PBS for a while... In general I think they were well made, although there was a tendency to assume that everything Shakespeare wrote was autobiographical which was annoying. Any thoughts?

[Dunc]

Autobiographical? So Shakespeare's uncle murdered Shakespeare's father and married his mother, eh? No wonder William invaded France, had it off with Cleopatra and disinherited his third daughter. Shame he was Brutused - just as he was settling down with Portia, too.

Thanks - never thought of it like that. Regards / Dunc

[HowardM2]

The tendency to read Shakespeare as autobiographical developed among the Victorians and was quite widespread in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It led to a number of instances of odd perversity, culminating in the 1920s (if memory serves me) in Caroline Spurgeon's scholarly study Shakepeare's Imagery in which, among other oddities, after an exhaustive discussion of canine imagery in Shakespeare's plays, Spurgeon comes to the profound and valuable conclusion that (are you ready for it?) Shakespeare didn't like dogs.