Nope, Maybe He Isn't Brilliant

T.S. Eliot seems pretty intelligent. A poet, playwrite, literary critic, and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, I am sure he knows his stuff. So, when he says "which Shakespeare did not understand himself" (Hamlet and His Problems), I kind of, sort of, want to jump up and down shouting yes! I am right! All along, I have said that Shakespeare doesn't exactly seem too amazing. Sure, he has some original plays, but so? Barney is pretty original. Who thinks of a singing purple dinosaur that teaches kids life lessons? But does that make the directors of the show honored members of the genius club? I don't think so.

Shakespeare was probably just some ordinary guy who wanted to make his mark on the world, or even more likely, was just trying to earn a bit of money. So, he made up some plays, and viola! He becomes super known and popular.

But does that mean that Shakespeare created a whole bunch of little secrets to put in his plays? Possibly not. It could be that things just happened coincidentally, and all of those literary geeks had to over look the obvious to find the "hidden meaning". For example, if Shakespeare has one character say "the sky is blue", all of a sudden, everyone is going crazy, and "deep reading" the phrase. It could mean that the guy is depressed, oh wait! He is probably in love, oooh! Even better, he is pregnant.

Obviously I am exagerating just a little bit (okay, alot) and I know that there really are very smart people out there, who write stuff with hidden meanings. But what if some of these Literary geniuses actually didn't really mean what everyone deep reads through their pieces? Couldn't there be some that just meant there works to be taken literally? Maybe, maybe not.