feeling listless

Shakespeare was forty years old today four hundred years ago. The Guardian decides to celebrate by bringing him down a peg or two. He was the Sting of theatre you know, attempting to triumph in fading years by collaborating with youngsters:

"About the time he turned 40, the once cockily independent Shakespeare had begun collaborating again. As John Jowett's superb new Oxford edition of Timon of Athens shows, that play was probably written in 1605, and Thomas Middleton wrote about a third of it. After Middleton, Shakespeare collaborated with Wilkins (Pericles), then John Fletcher (Cardenio, All is True, The Two Noble Kinsmen). In each case, an older man who had not had a hit in years teamed up with a young man who had just written a hit play, or several hit plays. Those young men did not need Shakespeare. He needed them. They had the juice. He didn't."

Of course the difference is that Will picked some good writers. Sting chose Craig David. And we're still talking about the bard four hundred years later...