To be or not..?

Here’s an interesting column in today’s New York Times, forwarded to me by a writer-friend.  She thought this was interesting enough to share and so do I.  Money and commerce influence art in good ways.  That seems to be forgotten these days.

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Would The Bard Have Survived The Web?

By SCOTT TUROW, PAUL AIKEN and JAMES SHAPIRO

ARCHAEOLOGISTS finished a remarkable dig last summer in East London. Among their finds were seven earthenware knobs, physical evidence of a near perfect 16th-century experiment into the link between commerce and culture.When William Shakespeare was growing up in rural Stratford-upon-Avon, carpenters at that East London site were erecting the walls of what some consider the first theater built in Europe since antiquity. Other playhouses soon rose around the city. Those who paid could enter and see the play; those who didn’t, couldn’t.

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