Writing
Each episode was based around the creation of a single play, and the idea of Shakespeare's real life experiences influencing his writing was used as the central plot device. As there are few known facts about the life of Shakespeare, Mortimer embellished upon known stories or legends about the playwright's life. These included a supposed apprenticeship with Christopher Marlowe and a homoerotic relationship with the Earl of Southampton.
Mortimer also invented a character whom the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets was supposedly based upon. The wife of a judge, she falls in love with Shakespeare after seeing his performance as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, adding a secondary storyline elaborating on class divisions.
Read more about this topic: Will Shakespeare (TV Series)
Famous quotes containing the word writing:
“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it ... and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied ... and it is all one.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (b. 1908)
“That of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best—I’m sure it is the most religious—for I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Such writing is a sort of mental masturbation.... I don’t mean that he is indecent but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state which is neither poetry nor anything else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)