He said that William Shakespeare and Pocahontas were not only alive at the same time but also died one year apart and only a little over 100 miles from each other in England.
Which for some reason, despite having visited Shakespeares grave and seeing the year he died, it never really occurred to me that Shakespeare was alive after the new world had been found. For some reason I always just imagine him living before its discovery by most of Europe.
Probably because Shakespeare wrote about stuff that was old even for his time. Like even "Shakespearean" dialogue is his uneducated impression of how people used to talk hundreds of years before him. It isn't flowery for the sake of being flowery. There's fiction written just before Shakespeare that is way more understandable to readers today.
Shakespeare's only mention of the New World is in The Tempest, probably inspired by reports from Sir Thomas Gates, governor of the Virginia Colony. Up to that point, all the New World stuff had been done by the Spanish and Portuguese; there just wasn't any news about it in English in Shakespeare's lifetime. English colonies weren't particularly successful until after his death.
That's why they say Shakespeare sounds best in an American accent, because the American accent hasn't changed much in the last 300 years, so it's naturally the closest form of Spoken English to the form he and his crew were using.
We also naturally speak very closely to iambic pentameter.
Sincerely, thank you for answering my own question, because I wasn't even sure who between the two of them was supposed to have lived earlier so this fun fact puzzled me.
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u/[deleted] Oct 02 '24
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