Shakespeare is involved in that process and he’s learning from that. Noting that both Sejanus and Othello were written in 1603 and performed by the same theatre company, the King’s Men – with Richard Burbage, the foremost celebrity actor of the day, in the leading roles – Philo argues that success and failure were part of the creative process: “Sometimes it works, sometimes it goes horribly awry. “I do wonder whether we’ve been reluctant to join the dots because we’re so used to thinking about Shakespeare in relation to success.” We don’t tend to think of Shakespeare in terms of failure or things going wrong. Philo said: “Despite the fact that the cast lists have been known and that we know Sejanus was a flop, we’ve yet to acknowledge the fact that that means Shakespeare himself was heckled and hissed, and that Shakespeare himself was a victim of the early modern audience. One contemporary wrote of being among those who “hissed Sejanus off the stage”. Portrait of William Shakespeare, dated 1609, which was engraved by Droeshout for the 1623 First Folio edition.
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